Up from the depths Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and rediscovery in dark times

Aaron Sachs

Book - 2022

Up from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American history-the novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (1895-1990). Deftly cutting back and forth between the writers, Aaron Sachs reveals the surprising resonances between their lives, work, and troubled times-and their uncanny relevance in our own age of crisis. The author of Moby-Dick was largely forgotten for several decades after his death, but Mumford helped spearhead Melville's revival in the aftermath of World War I and the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, when American culture needed a forebear with a suitably dark vision. As Mumford's career t...ook off and he wrote books responding to the machine age, urban decay, world war, and environmental degradation, it was looking back to Melville's confrontation with crises such as industrialization, slavery, and the Civil War that helped Mumford to see his own era clearly. Mumford remained obsessed with Melville, ultimately helping to canonize him as America's greatest tragedian. But largely forgotten today is one of Mumford's key insights--that Melville's darkness was balanced by an inspiring determination to endure. Amid today's foreboding over global warming, racism, technology, pandemics, and other crises, Melville and Mumford remind us that we've been in this struggle for a long time. To rediscover these writers today is to rediscover how history can offer hope in dark times.

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
Princeton : Princeton University Press [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Aaron Sachs (author)
Physical Description
xx, 450 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-431) and index.
ISBN
9780691215419
9780691236940
  • List of Illustrations
  • Preface, Melville, Mumford, Modernity
  • Chapter 1. Loomings (1927-29)
  • Chapter 2. The Whiteness of the Page (1856-65)
  • Chapter 3. Bitter Morning (1918-19)
  • Chapter 4. Fragments of War and Peace (1865-67)
  • Chapter 5. Reconstruction (1930-31)
  • Chapter 6. The Golden Day (1846-50)
  • Chapter 7. Retrospective (1956-82)
  • Chapter 8. A Bosom Friend (1850-51)
  • Chapter 9. Amor Threatening (1930-35)
  • Chapter 10. Cetology (1851-52)
  • Chapter 11. Neotechnics (1932-34)
  • Chapter 12. The Ambiguities (1852)
  • Chapter 13. Spiritual Freedom (1935-38)
  • Chapter 14. The Happy Failure (1853-55)
  • Chapter 15. Reconnaissance (1899-1925)
  • Chapter 16. Disenchantment (1853-55)
  • Chapter 17. Counterpoint (1938)
  • Chapter 18. Redburn (1839-55)
  • Chapter 19. Radburn (1923-39)
  • Chapter 20. Revolutions (1848-55)
  • Chapter 21. Misgivings and Preparatives (1938-39)
  • Chapter 22. The Piazza (1856-57)
  • Chapter 23. Faith (1940-43)
  • Chapter 24. The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating (1856-57)
  • Chapter 25. The Darkness of the Present Day (1944)
  • Chapter 26. More Gloom, and the Light of That Gloom (1856-76)
  • Chapter 27. Survival (1944-47)
  • Chapter 28. The Warmth and Chill of Wedded Life and Death (1876-91)
  • Chapter 29. Chronometricals and Horologicals (1944-51)
  • Chapter 30. The Life-Buoy (1891; 1924-29)
  • Chapter 31. Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1951-62)
  • Chapter 32. Revival (1919-62)
  • Chapter 33. Call Me Jonah (1962-82)
  • Chapter 34. Lizzie (1891-1906)
  • Chapter 35. Sophia (1982-97)
  • Chapter 36. Rediscovery (2019)
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Illustration Credits
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

This fascinating book explores the connection between two American writers, novelist Herman Melville (1819--91) and Lewis Mumford (1895--1990), the novelist's biographer. In brief, lively, and engaging chapters, Sachs (history and American studies, Cornell) alternates back and forth between the two men, detailing many correspondences in their lives and work despite the years that separated them. For example, both were troubled by events in their eras: Melville by the division leading up to and including the Civil War, Mumford by the cultural aftershocks in the years following WW I. The central idea that fuses their stories is the relationship between modernity and trauma, and a significant subtext is the historiography of canon formation. What were the conditions that led to the Melville revival? Why have scholars like Mumford (and like Sachs) been drawn to Melville? Sachs provides sensitive analysis of text and context, offers a wealth of resources in his bibliography, and models how historians and critics can pose questions that continue to matter. Any reader interested in either writer would profit from this book, but students in undergraduate programs in history and literature have the most to gain. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Jeffrey W. Miller, Gonzaga University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Herman Melville biographer Lewis Mumford (1895--1990) lived a life inextricable from his subject according to this fascinating account. Sachs (The Humboldt Current), a Cornell history professor, argues that the "juxtaposed resonances" between the Melville and Mumford's lives are just as crucial to understanding them as their own "chronological arc." For instance, he notes how Melville's novel Redburn, with its vision of Liverpool, England, that balanced "misery and exhilaration," influenced Lewis's thinking about pre--New Deal planned "garden cities" and his writing on urban architecture. In another case, after having argued that Melville was sexually repressed, Mumford began having extramarital affairs to "avoid what he saw as Melville's tragedy" and at one point told a lover,"Yillah is your right name," a reference to the "damsel" from Melville's Mardi. In shining a light on Mumford's efforts during the "Melville Revival" of the mid-1900s, Sachs makes a strong case for the rediscovery of Mumford's own writing: "Both Melville and Mumford, in their obsession with seeing the past in the present, remind us of the communal obligation to endure." The result is a well-executed literary history. (June)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An incisive homage to the continuing relevance of two towering writers. Sachs, a professor of history and American studies at Cornell, interweaves the life of urban theorist, cultural critic, and social philosopher Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) with that of novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), pointing out correspondences not only with their views, but between their times and ours. As we face cultural, environmental, and societal traumas, writes Sachs, it is illuminating "to rediscover the struggles of our forebears." The forebears to whom Mumford was indebted included Whitman, Emerson, and Scottish sociologist Sir Patrick Geddes, but as Sachs argues persuasively, Melville exerted lifelong influence. "Like Melville," he writes, Mumford was dispirited about inheriting "a culture dominated by individualism." Both shared a "distrust of revolutions," and both, in their efforts to awaken their readership, felt that they wore the "mantle of a prophet." Melville's fame diminished precipitously after his death, but between 1919, the centenary of his birth, and 1951, the centennial of the publication of Moby-Dick, a new biography, reprints of his books, and renewed critical attention elevated him as a canonical American author. Mumford, who published a biography of Melville in 1929, saw him as a "brother spirit" whose perspectives on 19th-century crises--the "fast-paced world of railroads and con artistry and racial violence"--afforded insight into 20th-century crises: the 1918 flu pandemic, wars, economic depression, unfettered capitalism, the rise of fascism, and a proliferation of dehumanizing urban landscapes. Sachs creates sympathetic portraits of both men, who faced profound personal losses and besetting demons. He deals evenhandedly with the serial infidelities, selfishness, and sense of entitlement that threatened Mumford's marriage, and he offers thorough readings of their prolific works. Just as Mumford underscored Melville's significance for 20th-century readers, Sachs makes a case for a revival of interest in Mumford, once a widely acclaimed public intellectual, who has regrettably faded from prominence. A well-informed, thoughtful dual biography. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.