A double portrait of two of America’s most influential writers that reveals the surprising connections between them―and their uncanny relevance to our age of crisis.
The trajectory that took Melville from youthful celebrity to total obscurity to, finally, posthumous renown as the author of the greatest of all American novels has become the stuff of legend, a parable about the mercurial ways of literary fortune...What remains unclear, though, is the lesson that ought to be drawn from it. Is it the bitter tale of a visionary doomed to go unappreciated in his time?...This ambiguity speaks to something profound about Melville’s life and work and serves as the crucial theme of Aaron Sachs’s Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, which emphasizes the 'offsetting forces' of disenchantment and optimism, of failure and grandeur...Up From the Depths takes up the dialectic method so central to Melville’s writing for its unique investigation of parallel lives...Mumford is a fitting counterpart to Melville, both as his biographer and as an avid disciple who found in his subject the guidance to navigate his own tragedies and disappointments...At the core of the exploration is the question of how technology has shaped or deformed human behavior...Fittingly, Mr. Sachs’s chapters interweave periods of the two men’s lives, creating a dappled effect of shared shadows and light...Certain biographical overlaps are particularly striking...Both men, too, were hounded by depression—what Mumford called 'a bleak, Melvillean feeling of despair'—and while Mumford enjoyed more critical favor than Melville, he couldn’t shake a similar sense of futility...Up From the Depths is on firmer ground—or rather, over deeper waters—when it returns to the subjects of renewal and rediscovery...
Sachs, a professor of history and American studies at Cornell, interweaves the life of urban theorist, cultural critic, and social philosopher Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) with that of novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), pointing out correspondences not only with their views, but between their times and ours...Melville’s fame diminished precipitously after his death, but between 1919, the centenary of his birth, and 1951, the centennial of the publication of Moby-Dick, a new biography, reprints of his books, and renewed critical attention elevated him as a canonical American author...Mumford, who published a biography of Melville in 1929, saw him as a 'brother spirit' whose perspectives on 19th-century crises—the 'fast-paced world of railroads and con artistry and racial violence'—afforded insight into 20th-century crises: the 1918 flu pandemic, wars, economic depression, unfettered capitalism, the rise of fascism, and a proliferation of dehumanizing urban landscapes...Sachs creates sympathetic portraits of both men, who faced profound personal losses and besetting demons...Sachs makes a case for a revival of interest in Mumford, once a widely acclaimed public intellectual, who has regrettably faded from prominence...A well-informed, thoughtful dual biography.
Sachs, a Cornell history professor, argues that the 'juxtaposed resonances' between the Melville and Mumford’s lives are just as crucial to understanding them as their own 'chronological arc[s]'...For instance, he notes how Melville’s novel Redburn, with its vision of Liverpool, England, that balanced 'misery and exhilaration,' influenced Lewis’s thinking about pre–New Deal planned 'garden cities' and his writing on urban architecture...In another case, after having argued that Melville was sexually repressed, Mumford began having extramarital affairs to 'avoid what he saw as Melville’s tragedy'...In shining a light on Mumford’s efforts during the 'Melville Revival' of the mid-1900s, Sachs makes a strong case for the rediscovery of Mumford’s own writing: 'Both Melville and Mumford, in their obsession with seeing the past in the present, remind us of the communal obligation to endure'...The result is a well-executed literary history.
