Raymond M. Weaver (1888–1948)

[From Ten Novels and Their Authors, Heinemann, 1954, pp. 179, 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.

[…]

It is true that Melville was of a “pondering” turn and, as he grew older, he became absorbed in metaphysics, which Raymond Weaver, strangely enough, states is “but misery dissolved in thought”. That is a narrow view: there is no subject to which a man can more fitly give his attention, for it deals with the greatest problems that confront his soul. Melville’s approach to them was not intellectual, but emotional; he thought as he did because he felt as he did; but this does not prevent many of his reflections from being memorable. I should have thought that deliberately to write an allegory required an intellectual detachment of which Melville was incapable.… (meer)