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BOOK MARKS/WISCONSIN
PURSUING MELVILLE 1940-
1980: CHAPTERS AND ESSAYS
by Merton M. Sealts, Jr.; University
of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wis.,
1982. 419 pp. $27.50.
By Peter A. Fritzell
In more ways than one, Sealts's Pur-
suing Melville is a testimonial vol-
ume. On the part of the University
of Wisconsin Press, it is a testimonial
publication to a job well done and a
retirement well deserved. On the part
of its author, it is a testimony to what
he has stood (and stands) for in a
lifetime's study of the life and works
of one Herman Melville-sometime
dreamer, reader, author, philoso-
phizer-haunter of bookstores and
libraries-father and husband-ex-
emplary nineteenth-century Ameri-
can, Westerner, and quite human
being. Finally, on the parts of both
author and publisher, the book is tes-
timony to a generation or more of
teachers, scholars, and knowing read-
ers who have been engaged in the
often thankless-one is tempted to say
nigh impossible-task of increasing
America's historical and cultural self-
consciousness.
  Fittingly, both for its subject and
its occasion (Sealts's retirement from
over thirty years of Wisconsin teach-
ing and scholarship), Pursuing Mel-
ville contains both solid, impersonal
science (in the classical meaning of
the term) and bits of personal remi-
niscence, if not occasional self-justi-
fications, and ultimately a firm sense
of personal satisfaction. Most of its
"Chapters and Essays"-twenty in
all, arranged by date of composition
or publication-have been previously
published, many as scholarly articles,
and a few as chapters in books (either
Sealts's own or Festschrifts to others
specializing in American literary
studies), though all have been up-
dated, where necessary, to adjust to
changing systems of notation or to
account for recent discoveries about
Melville and his works. The four
pieces "new" with this volume are a
section of a graduate school seminar
paper ("The World of Mind: Mel-
ville's Theory of Knowledge [1940]"),
a chapter from Sealts's doctoral dis-
sertation ("Melville and the Philos-
ophers [1942]"), an essay written es-
pecially for this occasion ("Melville
and the Platonic Tradition [1980]"),
and "A Letter to Henry A. Murray"
which acts as personal postscript both
to the book and to its author's career.
The remaining essays and chapters-
including a good part of the some-
times affectionate, sometimes frus-
trated record of twenty-five years'
correspondence with Charles Ol-
son-have appeared elsewhere and
are reasonably accessible to others
concerned, as Sealts has been, with
Melville's reading, the chronology of
his short fiction, the sources of his
philosophizing, or the connections be-
tween episodes and figures in his own
life and his narrators' symbolic chim-
neys.
  The justification and explanation
for the republication here of some
sixteen items from Sealts's scholarly
career is less, then, to provide a single
source for the best of his work than
it is to demonstrate, in Sealts's own
far too-modest words, "one scholar's
contribution to his century's knowl-
edge and understanding of Herman
Melville." As the personal preludes
to the essays and chapters demon-
strate, as the correspondence with
Olson and Murray confirms, and as
these bits of a scholar's career avow,
Pursuing Melville is a memoir in dis-
guise, a kind of disguise and a kind
of memoir Melville himself would
much appreciate, a somepart per-
sonal memoir of course, but a com-
munal memoir as well, a memoir that
exemplifies a half-century's effort and
commitment by two (and now three)
generations of students and scholars
not simply to legitimize American lit-
erary study but to pass on what has
been passed on "with the thought that
American literary study-if the hu-
manities survive at all-is still to come
fully into its own in the years ahead."
As Sealts himself says, "There's a
gamble involved here, and perhaps
some errors of choice or emphasis as
well... ." There are miscues. There
is frustration, frustration occasioned
not least by one's own and one's coun-
trymen's American impatience with
the solidly and systematically fac-
tual, with the established and foun-
dational. There is excitement, the ex-
citement of plumbing the depths of
consciousness or rising like fiery Al-
debarans to the Melvillean occasion.
But there is risk as well, and not only
the risk of losing touch with the or-
dinary-the risk, too, of getting
caught in the easy clarity of the mun-
dane and purely factual. And, finally,
there is irony, the irony implicit in
the fairly large crew of critical and
historical sailors pursuing the mys-
June 1983/Wisconsin Academy Review/43