Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono

He made her come to life, no longer as a woman sitting beside a man on the top deck of the Bristol mail but as an absolute ruler of the weather; he made her come alive in her own domain. She could plainly feel that he was granting her his own world. She realized that when he was mute and unable to move (as he was yesterday), when he was apart from her (yesterday, for example, when she didn't know him yet, when he was keeping quiet up there, and she was all alone down below in the coupe), when he wasn't in touch with anyone else, he still saw the world in the same way he was seeing it and naming it now. He could summon the rain for himself alone.

Now he'd summoned the rain for himself and for her. He was enabling her to share his private world, which, in a completely natural way, became her world. Her own world, so private to her that she often blushed at everything this man seemed to know about her: the whole of her secret life. She remembered rash impulses, from her girlhood, that had never escaped the confines of her heart, and here, he--a man unknown to her yesterday--was talking to her about them.

While working on the first French translation of Moby-Dick, the writer Jean Giono wrote a fictional narrative of Melville's life. Intended at first to be an introduction to the translation, Melville: A Novel seems to have taken on a life of its own: Giono imagines the the writer in London, dropping off the proofs for his novel White Jacket, and cripplingly bored. On a whim, he hops on a mail coach to the country, which he turns out to share with an Irish revolutionary named Adelina White. They fall in love, if that's a sufficient term for it; their brief meeting illuminates both of their lives.

Giono's account of Melville seeks to answer the question: how did a writer of middlebrow seafaring adventures end up writing what might be the 19th century's greatest novel? The first half of Melville finds its protagonist wrestling with a literal angel, a constant companion who is urging Melville to take on the greater challenge of writing Moby-Dick: "While he's been hunched over his manuscript, alone in his writing room, the angel has often leapt onto his shoulders from behind and grabbed hold of him. Grabbed hold of him with the terrible kind of grip that suddenly twists your neck with a merciless sort of cruelty."

But it's Adelina that gives this Melville a reason to actually write the novel. During their few days together, Melville shows her the English countryside in a way she's never seen. He shows her a break in the clouds the shape and color of a bay leaf, and then the leaf itself, and with his words he shows her what 19th century thinkers would have called the sublime, a recognition of the size and grandeur in the natural world that expands the ego that is capable of seeing it. Adelina's work is opposite of Melville's: radicalized by the Irish famine, manufactured by the English, she must live her life in praxis. But through her Melville comes to understand that his purpose is to continue illuminating the world for others; it's for her that he writes Moby-Dick.

This whole story is completely invented, of course. It's funny; Melville is almost like fan fiction: Giono was clearly so enamored with the Melville he'd invented while reading Moby-Dick that he had to put him on the page. The real Melville, as far as I understand, was more Bartleby than Billy Budd; the swaggering, barrel-chested Melville of this novel captures the spirit of his writing more than it does the man. And even that version reads to me more like Whitman--obsessed with the intersection of the soul and the natural world, ecumenical and dogmatically democratic--than it does the Melville of Moby-Dick. On top of that, situating Melville in the undramatic landscape of the English countryside clearly reflects Giono's perspective on the natural world and not Melville's. But it's hard not to feel enamored with Giono's lively and spirited Melville, accurate or not. Like the best fan fiction, Melville stands alone.