Nearly a burnt-out case

Would-be artists clinging to the belief that they are in possession of strangely unrecognised genius draw comfort from the thought of Van Gogh. For struggling writers, the biography of Herman Melville is almost equally potent.

In some ways, indeed, it is even more poignant, for it is one of early success; early glamour, after the publication of Typee in 1846, as ‘the man who lived among cannibals’; abundant early promise that, in the eyes of contemporaries, merely fizzled out. He wrote published fiction for only 12 years of his 72 years, to increasingly bad reviews and poor sales: when he died, his last work, Billy Budd: Foretopman, was an unpublished manuscript.

His last novel was published in 1857, when he was only 38, and the rest of his life is sad reading. Melville — almost hyper- active in his youth; joining whalers and warships, and jumping ship; devouring books with the keen, obsessive appetite of a genuine autodidact; revelling in his ability to titillate with highly coloured tales of naked and welcoming Polynesian beauties; linguistically and imaginatively ebullient — seemed to run out of energy.