Yet Melville persisted, publishing the extraordinary "Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land" (1876), a theological meditation reflecting his Manichean view of God and conceived during a tour of the Middle East. Other less exemplary volumes followed.
Meanwhile, Melville evolved into a stoic of the underground, shunning friends and shopping in the secondhand stores of Manhattan for provisions. "Melville was living a hidden life," Parker concludes, "what journalists a decade or so later would begin calling a buried life, away from his old literary associates, almost lost to fame." When he died at 72, only one newspaper wrote a meaningful obituary.
By the time he had reached 30, an ethereal muse had consumed Melville, and he remained strangely untouched by the literary conventions of his time. Abandoning the commercial success of his early works, Melville had become a dedicated sufferer for art. As a craftsman of what he called the "inside narrative," he surpassed Hawthorne and went on to challenge Shakespeare, falling just short. Carl Jung, in "The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature" (1967), rightfully deemed "Moby-Dick" the "greatest American novel" and explained why Melville's entire literary oeuvre offered "the richest opportunities for psychological elucidation." There was something ghostly or otherworldly about Melville's prose and poetry, which upon reading often conjured a hallucinogenic effect.