[From Ten Novels and Their Authors, Heinemann, 1954, pp. 179, 196, 199-200:]

I have read Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville, Charles Roberts Anderson’s Melville in the South Seas, William Ellery Sedgwick’s Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind, and Newton Arvin’s Melville. I have read them with interest, profited by most of them, and learnt from them a number of facts useful to my modest purpose; but I cannot persuade myself that I know more about Melville, the man, than I knew before.

[…]

Newton Arvin in his painstaking, but to my mind wrong-headed, book in the American Men of Letters Series has given examples of Melville’s coining of words: footmanism, omnitooled, uncatastrophied, domineerings; and appears to think that they add a peculiar excellence to his style. They certainly add to its idiosyncrasy, but surely not to its beauty. If Melville had had an education more catholic, and taste less uncertain, he could have achieved the effects he was presumably aiming at without the distortions of language he affected.

[…]

Professor Stoll* has shown how ridiculous and contradictory are the symbolic interpretations of Moby Dick that have been hurled at the heads of an inoffensive public. He has done it so conclusively that there is no need for me to enlarge upon the topic. In defence of these critics, however, I would say this: the novelist does not copy life, he arranges it to suit his purpose. He disposes of the data given him according to the peculiarity of his own temperament. He draws a coherent pattern, but the pattern he draws varies according to the attitude, interests and idiosyncrasy of the reader. According to your proclivities, you may take a snow-clad Alpine peak, as it rises to the empyrean in radiant majesty, as a symbol of man’s aspiration to union with the Infinite; or since, if you like to believe that, a mountain range may be thrown up by some violent convulsion in the earth’s depths, you may take it as a symbol of the dark and sinister passions of man that lour to destroy him; of, if you want to be in the fashion, you may take it a phallic symbol. Newton Arvin regards Ahab’s ivory leg as “an equivocal symbol both of his impotence and of the independent male principle directed cripplingly against him”, and the white whale as “the archetypal Parent; the father, yes, but the mother also, so far as she becomes a substitute for the father”. For Ellery Sedgwick, who claims that it is its symbolism that makes the book great, Ahab is “Man – Man sentient, speculative, purposive, religious, standing his full stature against the immense mystery of creation. His antagonist, Moby Dick, is that immense mystery. He is not the author of it, but is identical with that galling impartiality in the laws and lawlessness of the universe which Isaiah devoutly fathered on the Creator.” Lewis Mumford takes Moby Dick as a symbol of evil, and Ahab’s conflict with him as the conflict of good and evil in which good is finally vanquished. There is a certain plausibility in this, and it accords well with Melville’s moody pessimism.

But allegories are awkward animals to handle; you can take them by the head or by the tail, and it seems to me that an interpretation quite contrary is equally possible.

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*Elmer E. Stoll, “Symbolism in Moby-Dick”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Jun., 1951), pp. 440-465. Ed.

Arvin likes the word prosaic.

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