Herman Melville - Redburn (1849)

Herman Melville had quickly achieved renown as a writer with his first novel Typee in 1846. Just over three years later, his success as a novelist hit a brick wall when his attempt at a more ambitious project (his third novel, Mardi) was a resounding flop, critically and financially. Once it was clear to Melville that his glorious experiment was a failure, he quickly produced another book to recapture his public. Written in a style that had more in common with Typee and Omoo, Melville's fourth novel achieved little notice. In fact, Melville would never again enjoy even modest success as a writer.

This is unfortunate, because Redburn is his best book to this point. Although his writing returns to the crisp style employed for his South Sea adventure tales, the focus has shifted to recount his experiences as a greenhorn sailor on a ship going from New York harbor to Liverpool and returning with a cargo of immigrants. Like Typee, Melville uses the story to alternately entertain, inform, and communicate a particular point. Unlike his colorful first novel, however, Redburn is much darker in tone.

The protagonist, Wellingborough Redburn, is a young man of good birth who, due to reduced fortune, has decided to ship as a sailor. Redburn's sometimes florid expectations regarding etiquette, as well as his lack of experience with the sea, make him the perfect narrator for a modern reader who likely knows as little as he does. Melville's knowledge of sailing ships helps him set the stage as he shows how even in words, a greenhorn can get into trouble, and this also tinges the story with a realism that is bracing. I found myself very engaged with Redburn as a person, for he is easily Melville's most fully realized character to this point. Even when I could see poor Redburn was making a big mistake, I could relate to him as he tried to make the best of his situation. I keenly felt his homesickness, his loneliness, and especially his joy at the end of his voyage.

Melville also does a good job depicting an array of secondary characters which really come alive as people. There's the pretentious Captain Riga, ill-fated Harry Bolton, the sinister Jackson, and a romantically sketched Italian immigrant named Carlo. This helps color the tapestry of experiences Redburn meets on his voyage, including learning how to get by as a greenhorn, the rampant poverty he finds in Liverpool, seeing an Indian vessel, and the realities of immigration at this time. This last is most interesting as an eye-opening dose of reality about what it took for many of our ancestors to come to America. Not a pretty picture at all.

Melville has several themes that he explores in the pages of Redburn although he does so without sacrificing his plot or without resorting to the pompous overwriting that sank Mardi. First, there is the painful consciousness Redburn has of his former station in life and his current poverty. This flows easily into his experiences with the poor of Liverpool and the exploitation of immigrants. He is also sympathetic to the sailor's life, with some hair-raising episodes relating to the drinking and dissipation that overtakes many of them. Lastly, there is the coming of age of Redburn himself. At the start of the voyage, he is as green as green can be and a bit of a snob. By the end, he has a lot more common sense and is even a guide for his friend Harry. One definitely feels Redburn has learned from and even is glad of his adventures and that he will meet his situation in life with more success because of his sea voyage.

Altogether, Redburn is Melville's tightest and most rewarding book yet. The darker tone does not depress or overwhelm the material, but rather renders the narrative more true-to-life and thereby enhances the dramatic tension of the story. Unfortunately, Melville couldn't appreciate his own creation and only reluctantly retreated from the pretenses of Mardi. In his letters, he was quite open about how he only wrote Redburn to make money.

This suggests to me that Melville's weakness as a writer was that he had no sense that simply written prose does not equate to simple-minded prose. Instead, he apparently linked pretentious, ornate text with art. If only he had realized the soul of a book is more important that the words it's wrapped in, he might never have ruined his career with Mardi and maybe he could have better appreciated the excellent book he created with Redburn.