Biography: 'I loved Melville's Moby-Dick," DH Lawrence wrote in 1916, " . . . how splendid [ it] is". He was immensely struck by the novel, which he had read in the Everyman edition, even while conceding that "others cannot bear it".
Lawrence's enthusiasm marked a stage in the revaluation of Moby-Dick, which, more than most works of fiction, presents a striking case of a book, almost totally unappreciated in its own day, going on to acquire a classic status.
But it was a long time before Melville's great white whale ceased to be something of a white elephant.
Herman Melville was just thirty-two when his masterwork was published towards the end of 1851, and already he had a handful of novels to his credit, starting with Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) - both luscious Polynesian adventures featuring garlanded native girls and cannibal cooking pots, which went down well with readers at home and abroad. Despite the blatant embellishments, these works aren't all South Seas ballyhoo; their author had his own experiences on board whaleships and warships in the South Pacific to draw on.
It wasn't entirely by choice that Melville gained a first-hand knowledge of the whaling industry. Of mixed English and Dutch ancestry, he was born in New York in 1819, into a family going down in the world - and after his father's death in 1832, he was put to work as an errand boy and then as a cabin boy: the bitter comment of Ishmael in Moby-Dick - "a whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard" - must have been written from the heart.
Melville's early literary success didn't result in financial well-being, as subsequent novels seemed less and less attuned to the expectations of American readers; and as his income dwindled, his responsibilities increased. His father-in-law, the Boston judge Lemuel Shaw, had to come to the rescue on more than one occasion (he financed a trip through Europe to the Middle East, made by Melville in 1856, in the hope that it would rescue the author from incipient depression: it didn't). And, to balance - or overbalance - the pieces of good fortune in Melville's life (his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example), came an abundance of miseries, frustrations and tragedies. The loss of both his sons must have struck deep - one shot himself in his bedroom at the age of 18, and the other, 20 years later, was found dead in a hotel room (he was 35).
These deaths, indeed, might cause one to wonder about the Melville home life and difficulties in the parents' marriage. There's conflicting evidence on this subject, with some reports convicting Melville of disagreeableness and even domestic violence, while others point to a state of amity existing, and continuing to exist, between husband and wife.
In fact, there are many gaps and obstacles to complete understanding, in the Melville story. When Andrew Delbanco refers to "the usual spotty record of Melville's movements and activities", he's acknowledging the problems facing the biographer of a subject who failed to leave extensive documentation in the form of letters or diaries. (He also acknowledges his debt to the researches of many previous Melville scholars.) But, if Melville remains largely unreclaimable as a social presence, he comes into focus - in his current biographer's phrase - in vivid glimpses and vignettes, "eating with his brother in a Manhattan steakhouse, driving his sleigh in a Berkshire snowstorm, or taking his granddaughter to Madison Square Park to see the tulips . . . ". He is also, to an extent, approachable via his writings, which come in for resolute scrutiny here - just as aspects of 19th-century America are strongly illuminated in these pages.
Placing Melville in the context of his time is an obvious way of getting over the biographical lacunae, but in Delbanco's hands the exercise amounts to a considerable achievement, rich in historical comment and full of insights.
If Melville, willy nilly, was of his time, his best books transcended it.
They point forward to a more expansive, experimental era of literary procedures and resources. Moby-Dick is a great capacious tornado of a book, ornate, discursive and profound. It is also extraordinarily prescient in its implications. (Only the doomed ship, Titanic, has a comparable symbolic resonance.) The vengeful Captain Ahab, hell-bent on destroying the whale that "dismasted" him, has come to stand for every kind of obsessive punitiveness from the anti-abolitionist movement, through the Third Reich and right down to America's hunt for Osama bin Laden. The book strikes a chord with many readers in ways undreamt of by its author, who was so discouraged by its reception that he more or less turned his back on prose fiction thereafter (the manuscript of Billy Budd was found after his death in 1891 and published posthumously). He spent the rest of his life working as a customs officer in Manhattan. It's a chastening story, compellingly recounted, and it illustrates the changes of fortune a great novel may be subject to - with Moby-Dick, the great white whale itself, eventually taking its place among the icons of world literature.
Patricia Craig's biography of Brian Moore is out in paperback. She has edited an anthology devoted to Ulster which will be published by Blackstaff in September
Melville: His World and Work By Andrew Delbanco Picador, 415pp. £25