What does Melville’s career tell us of the creative imagination but that it lies at the mercy of earthly circumstances? Melville wrote, in his dozen productive years, with extraordinary intensity, spending such long hours at his writing table that his health and sanity were feared for and his eyes became, in his words, “tender as young sparrows.” Yet his youth held few hints of precocity or of literary concern; in 1850 he told Hawthorne, “Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then & now, that I have not unfolded within myself.” The pre-Typee silence of this, in his father’s words, “amiable and docile” youth—compare Poe and Hawthorne and Bryant, all scribbling and published by their very early twenties—foreshadows the eventual return to silence when, at thirty-eight, after the publication of The Confidence-Man, Melville again succumbed to fatalism and intellectual passivity.

At the age of twenty-five, however, he found himself brimming with the exotic material of his recent adventures in the South Seas, and sensed a public eager for the kind of adventure tale that he could provide. “The book is certainly calculated for popular reading, or for none at all,” he wrote the publisher of Typee. The English edition coming first, he permitted the American text to be bowdlerized of “all passages … which offer violence to the feelings of any large class of readers.” These included not only “indelicate” sexual passages quite appropriate to the Polynesian setting, but unflattering accounts of the South Seas missionaries: “I have rejected every thing, in revising the book, which refers to the missionaries,” Melville assured his publisher. “So far as the wide & permanent popularity of the book is concerned, their exclusion will certainly be beneficial.”

A certain Walter Whitman, reviewing the book in the Brooklyn Eagle, praised it as summer reading: “A strange, graceful, most readable book this …. As a book to hold in one’s hand and pore dreamily over of a summer day, it is unsurpassed.” Its successor, Omoo, was even more consciously shaped to avoid offending the prejudices of a large audience, and to at least one reader, the wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, seemed “very inferior to Typee, being written not so much for its own sake as to make another book apparently.” In writing Mardi, Melville himself began to chafe against the requirements of making yet another book. Writing his English publisher, John Murray, he confessed, “Proceeding in my narrative of facts I began to feel an incurable distaste for the same; & a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, & felt irked, cramped & fettered by plodding along with dull common places.”

Chastened by the self-indulgent book’s failure, he returned to facts and commonplaces in Redburn and White-Jacket, but with a good deal of resentment and bitterness and self-scorn. He wrote his father-in-law that the books were “two jobs, which I have…