When it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires. All long to possess so many words that using them is a fat charity. To be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own—this is the greatest desire of any writer. Even the deliberate paupers of style—Hemingway, Pavese, late Beckett—have secret longings for riches, and strive to make their reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it: Pavese translated Moby-Dick into Italian. Realists may protest that it is life, not words, that draws them as writers; yet language at rush hour is like a busy city. Language is infinite, but it is also a system, and so it tempts us with the fantasy that it is closed, like a currency or an orchestra. What writer does not dream of touching every word in the lexicon once?

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville nearly touched every word once, or so it seems. Language is pressed and consoled in that book with Shakespearean agility. No other nineteenth-century novelist writing in English lived in the city of words in which Melville lived; they were suburbanites by comparison. No other novelist of that age could swim in the poetry of “the warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days ... .” And so, despite the usual biographical lamentations, despite our knowledge that Moby-Dick went largely unappreciated, that in 1876 only two copies of the novel were bought in the United States, that in 1887 it went out of print with a total sale of 3,180 copies, that these and other neglects narrowed Melville into bitterness and savage daily obedience as a New York customs inspector—despite all this, one says lucky Melville, not poor Melville. For, in writing Moby-Dick, he wrote the novel that is every novelist’s dream of freedom. It is as if he painted a patch of sky for the imprisoned.

It is one of the virtues of Hershel Parker’s huge, puzzling semi-biography (it covers only the years up to Moby-Dick) that this great artistic achievement is always visible. It is a necessary virtue because there is so much else visible in Parker’s account that Melville’s books disappear a little. Parker has spent his life in Melville-devotions. He is not a critic, he is a connoisseur of facts. He tells us in his introduction that he has spent many years working on the New Melville Log, a documentary account of Melville’s movements, and that in writing this biography he simply moved chunks of the Log from one computer file to the other. His biography is a displaced log, complete with coordinates and tides. (Describing Melville’s first whaling voyage, Parker does indeed fill an entire page with little chips of longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates.) “Hershel is a faucet,” repeats Parker from an esteemed predecessor’s note in his papers, apparently in self-congratulation. But he should not congratulate himself. Parker is superstitious about facts and throws them about like salt, apparently hoping that they will drive out the devil of interpretation.

The result is that Melville emerges as a very thick shadow. There is only a dim outline. All the moments in Melville’s early life that might bear a little pressure—his increasing skepticism toward his inherited religion, his joyous discovery of radical metaphysics (an adventure that can be plotted as easily as his first sea-voyage), his growing infatuation with metaphor, an obsession that bursts into the love affair of Moby-Dick—are rubbed back into the mild pastels of “information.” Parker quotes from almost every published contemporary review of Melville’s novels—he fills twelve pages with reviews of Omoo (1847), Melville’s second novel—but almost neglects to describe, let alone to interpret, the novels themselves. It is symptomatic of this book that it leads us to the brink of Moby-Dick, the novel that justifies Melville’s life, and then ends, without describing that book or gathering its meanings. Parker’s volume is in one sense a triumph of biography (it is buttressed by huge primary research, an astonishing amount of labor), but it also acts as argument against the tyranny of the form.

Melville is tied down by Parker’s Lilliputian facts. But this book is at least a fine family chronicle, in which Melville moves and suffers. Parker sees that families wallow in detail—in letters, homes, arrangements, travels. For the Melvill family (as they spelled their name at the time of Herman’s birth in 1819), money was the bulking detail. Herman’s parents were the children of wealth, privilege and revolutionary courage. But Alan Melvill, Herman’s father, was a deluxe Mr. Micawber, apparently importing French dry goods but actually threshing his way through the family inheritance. Parker reckons that, in all, he borrowed $20,000 from his father and from his parents-in-law. Nobody knows what this money satisfied. When he died, abruptly, in 1832 (he seems to have suffered some kind of mental collapse), he left the family deep in debt. Melville was 12. He was removed from school and sent to work in a bank for $150 a year.