Up From the Depths

May 9, 2022
Herman Melville biographer Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) lived a life inextricable from his subject according to this fascinating account. Sachs (The Humboldt Current), 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.” 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” and at one point told a lover,“Yillah is your right name,” a reference to the “damsel” from Melville’s Mardi. 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.

Starred review from April 15, 2022
An incisive homage to the continuing relevance of two towering writers. 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. As we face cultural, environmental, and societal traumas, writes Sachs, it is illuminating "to rediscover the struggles of our forebears." The forebears to whom Mumford was indebted included Whitman, Emerson, and Scottish sociologist Sir Patrick Geddes, but as Sachs argues persuasively, Melville exerted lifelong influence. "Like Melville," he writes, Mumford was dispirited about inheriting "a culture dominated by individualism." Both shared a "distrust of revolutions," and both, in their efforts to awaken their readership, felt that they wore the "mantle of a prophet." 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. He deals evenhandedly with the serial infidelities, selfishness, and sense of entitlement that threatened Mumford's marriage, and he offers thorough readings of their prolific works. Just as Mumford underscored Melville's significance for 20th-century readers, 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.

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