An excellent book by Herman Melville, and definitely his easiest story to read. It's a coming of age tale about a boy coming to terms with the harsh realities of life while serving as a cabin boy on board a merchant ship. Very dark ... especially after reading Cooper's "Deerslayer."

Rather tedious. Writing it in first person, in a style not befitting the character, was a mistaken undertaking by the author that alienates the reader. To get through parts of the book I had to think of the main character as a dog to handle the base nature thoughts and views being portrayed. I could add more but that is the gist. Other reviews will fill you in on the praise

Far from the second class work it is sometimes denoted as, Redburn is both a run-up to Moby Dick and a masterpiece in its own regard. If you just looked at it as a travel memoir it would be good enough, but it is more. The narrator’s ruminations and observations add to the fascinating documentation of the lives of sailors and others who find themselves about the sea in the mid 19th century. A delight to read.

deepness

review to come

Rather self-indulgent, and full of Melville's presumably autobiographical and not very interesting digressions, including a random book review (ception!) of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This book basically exemplified the major peril of autofiction: the author's tendency to include an enormous number of things (incidents, observations) that are interesting to them (or were at the time) but aren't to anyone else. This indiscrinateness is a major problem. At times it seems as if Melville is just including random trivia from his own life, such as an extended description of a collection of European and English guidebooks (presumably ones he himself owned), without attempting to work it into any sort of narrative. Characters are introduced, described, then dropped summarily from the narrative, never to be heard from again.

Presently a fishing-boat drew near, and I rushed to get a view of it; but it was a very ordinary looking boat, bobbing up and down, as any other boat would have done; yet, when I considered that the solitary man in it was actually a born native of the land in sight; that in all probability he had never been in America, and knew nothing about my friends at home, I began to think that he looked somewhat strange. He was a very fluent fellow, and as soon as we were within hailing distance, cried out—"Ah, my fine sailors, from Ameriky, ain't ye, my beautiful sailors?" And concluded by calling upon us to stop and heave a rope. Thinking he might have something important to communicate, the mate accordingly backed the main yard, and a rope being thrown, the stranger kept hauling in upon it, and coiling it down, crying, "pay out! pay out, my honeys; ah! but you're noble fellows!" Till at last the mate asked him why he did not come alongside, adding, "Haven't you enough rope yet?" "Sure and I have," replied the fisherman, "and it's time for Pat to cut and run!" and so saying, his knife severed the rope, and with a Kilkenny grin, he sprang to his tiller, put his little craft before the wind, and bowled away from us, with some fifteen fathoms of our tow-line.

So that's where the saying's from! teh moar u no

Among the few docks mentioned above, occur the names of the King's and Queens. At the time, they often reminded me of the two principal streets in the village I came from in America, which streets once rejoiced in the same royal appellations. But they had been christened previous to the Declaration of Independence; and some years after, in a fever of freedom, they were abolished, at an enthusiastic town-meeting, where King George and his lady were solemnly declared unworthy of being immortalized by the village of L—.

Topical! And revelatory of the essential truth--names and monuments change when regimes change. The global push to memory-hole badwhite heroes and erase identitarian icons is nothing less than the symbolic culmination of the Third Worldist fifth column's long war against the West. Our Cultural Revolution is almost complete. The demons have won; the time of the orc has come. And after the conflict, all that remains is the chaos.

I was told that standing rewards are offered for the recovery of persons falling into the docks; so much, if restored to life, and a less amount if irrecoverably drowned. Lured by this, several horrid old men and women are constantly prying about the docks, searching after bodies. I observed them principally early in the morning, when they issued from their dens, on the same principle that the rag-rakers, and rubbish-pickers in the streets, sally out bright and early; for then, the night-harvest has ripened.

This is a great little bit of ghoulery, and a case where his incessant scene-setting is actually interesting.

This is the greatest refutation of old-worlder muttposting I've ever read:

There is something in the contemplation of the mode in which America has been settled, that, in a noble breast, should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes. Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may claim her for their own. You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. Be he Englishman, Frenchman, German, Dane, or Scot; the European who scoffs at an American, calls his own brother Raca, and stands in danger of the judgment. We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality—whose blood has been debased in the attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves. No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother. For who was our father and our mother? Or can we point to any Romulus and Remus for our founders? Our ancestry is lost in the universal paternity; and Caesar and Alfred, St. Paul and Luther, and Homer and Shakespeare are as much ours as Washington, who is as much the world's as our own. We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and people are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearthstone in Eden. The other world beyond this, which was longed for by the devout before Columbus' time, was found in the New; and the deep-sea-lead, that first struck these soundings, brought up the soil of Earth's Paradise. Not a Paradise then, or now; but to be made so, at God's good pleasure, and in the fullness and mellowness of time. The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our children's children, on the world's jubilee morning, shall all go with their sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they shall speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the regions round about; Italians, and Indians, and Moors; there shall appear unto them cloven tongues as of fire.

I truly believe that in the colonial cauldrons of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and South Africa), our (ethnic, not racial) diversity is a strength--we have taken the best of all Europe's cultures and left the old hatreds and squabbles behind. Of course, it goes without saying (and was taken for granted by Melville, at least in this passage, and all Americans from the time of the Founders to the Hart-Celler Act) that this applies only to White immigrants.

And here, I must not omit one thing, that struck me at the time. It was the absence of negroes; who in the large towns in the "free states" of America, almost always form a considerable portion of the destitute. But in these streets, not a negro was to be seen. All were whites; and with the exception of the Irish, were natives of the soil: even Englishmen; as much Englishmen, as the dukes in the House of Lords.

This was in 1839. And this was in Liverpool, Britain foremost hub of the slave-trade, and according to Wikipedia, home to the oldest black community in Britain. So, if I wonder how the Hollywood-BBC-Amazon-Netflix cartel justifies filling up the streets of London, to say nothing of Liverpool, with darkies in period pieces supposedly set in this era (or earlier)?

at first I was surprised that a colored man should be treated as he is in this town; but a little reflection showed that, after all, it was but recognizing his claims to humanity and normal equality; so that, in some things, we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence.

This smacks of the common American (liberal) exceptionalism of presupposing that their racial problems stem from some peculiar evil in White America and it's institutions, when in reality, it's simply a product of them having a large and longstanding non-White population, as other White countries did not (then). "Racism" does not create racial conflict. Racial diversity creates racial conflict, and hence "racism", wherever it exists. Racism is the end-product of multiculturalism, not an obstacle to it, still less something that can be "cured" by it. The only societies free of racism are not multiracial ones, but monoracial ones. It's the same reason why visiting blacks have historically been treated with such awed quasi-reverence here and in Europe and Britain: because they're exotic foreigners (and because of decades of Magical Negro Civil Rights propaganda). If we had lived in close proximity to blacks as Americans have, we would have been disabused of such attitudes very quickly.

It was the day following my Sunday stroll into the country, and when I had been in England four weeks or more, that I made the acquaintance of a handsome, accomplished, but unfortunate youth, young Harry Bolton. He was one of those small, but perfectly formed beings, with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons. His complexion was a mantling brunette, feminine as a girl's; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black, and womanly; and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp.

Well, you can't introduce him like that and expect me not to ship them. Really, Melville!

So in that scene where Harry 'kidnaps' Wellingborough, I thought for sure Harry was taking him either to a brothel, where our innocent Yankee would have to fend off the attentions of women of ill repute, or to some sort of private hotel or club where he'd have to fend off the advances of Harry himself.

They were such pictures as the high-priests, for a bribe, showed to Alexander in the innermost shrine of the white temple in the Libyan oasis: such pictures as the pontiff of the sun strove to hide from Cortez, when, sword in hand, he burst open the sanctorum of the pyramid-fane at Cholula: such pictures as you may still see, perhaps, in the central alcove of the excavated mansion of Pansa, in Pompeii—in that part of it called by Varro the hollow of the house: such pictures as Martial and Seutonius mention as being found in the private cabinet of the Emperor Tiberius: such pictures as are delineated on the bronze medals, to this day dug up on the ancient island of Capreas: such pictures as you might have beheld in an arched recess, leading from the left hand of the secret side-gallery of the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth.

Dirty pictures, I take it?

And, wow, if I thought the introduction to Harry was homoerotic--Carlo!!

In the end not a plug was to be had; and deprived of a solace and a stimulus, on which sailors so much rely while at sea, the crew became absent, moody, and sadly tormented with the hypos. They were something like opium-smokers, suddenly cut off from their drug. They would sit on their chests, forlorn and moping; with a steadfast sadness, eying the forecastle lamp, at which they had lighted so many a pleasant pipe.

Early observation of nicotine withdrawal?

"I can't sing to-night"—sadly said Harry to the Dutchman, who with his watchmates requested him to while away the middle watch with his melody—"I can't sing to-night. But, Wellingborough," he whispered,—and I stooped my ear,— "come you with me under the lee of the long-boat, and there I'll hum you an air."
It was The Banks of the Blue Moselle.

So, I looked up that song. The first verse goes like this:
n  

When the glow-worm gilds the elfin bower,
That clings round the ruin'd shrine,
Where first we met, where first we lov'd,
And I confess'd me thine

n
Need I fucking say more????? (also, how romantic would it have been if Wellingborough had been the one to rescue Harry from the rigging?)

What a sad fucking ending. I'm sad now. Poor Harry. Why the fuck did you leave him, Redburn? It was so obvious he NEEDED you. :(((((

Overall verdict: too wordy, too discursive, removed from the immediacy of the action. The only reason I read this book was to get insight into the lives of sailors and those around them, and in that regard, I have to say, it was only moderately useful. Definitely one of those that would have been at least 37% better if it had just been a straight up m/m romance and forget about all that subtext shit (I kid, I kid--or do I?) However, it was a page-turner, which counts for something.

Postscript: What on earth was Harry Bolton's secret? What was the whole deal in Aladdin's Palace? The only possible justification for including an unresolved mystery like that in a narrative is if that's how it really happened, but I'm not sure even autobiography is justification in this case. Part of fictionalisation, weaving a coherent narrative out of a random sequence of events, is making things more satisfying by tying up such loose ends and answering such gaping questions. But Melville never does. So what was the point of including it in the first place?

Update: Enjoyed it more on the reread, except for a few dull sections.

A novel with a minimal plot. I kept expecting a story line to emerge, but was perpetually disappointed. The book does give the reader a good picture of life aboard an 19th century merchantman, including descriptions of the ship, crew, officers, passengers, food, accommodations, dress, tasks, etc. A stopover in Liverpool offers similar images of city life. This offset the lack of a story so that I had no regrets over the time spent reading the book.

Redburn is returning to the wonder of Herman Melville without having to drag around the epic that is Moby Dick. After I'd attended the Moby Marathon Reading, I absolutely had to read Melville again. And this one just happened to be sitting on my shelf unread.

Redburn is charming. He'd determined to take his first voyage, and boards the Highlander with his hand-me-down hunting coat and no earthly idea what he's getting into. It doesn't take long for him to hate being a sailor. And then he loves it, and then he hates it again.

Yes! yes! give me this glorious ocean life, this salt-sea life, this briny, foamy life, when the sea neighs and snorts, and you breathe the very breath that the great whales respire! Let me roll around the globe, let me rock upon the sea; let me race and pant out my life, with an eternal breeze astern, and an endless sea before!

Miserable dog’s life is this of the sea! command like a slave, and set to work like an ass! vulgar and brutal men lording it over me, as if I were an African in Alabama. Yes, yes, blow on, ye breezes, and make a speedy end to this abominable voyage!

(These are a mere paragraph apart.)

Redburn is based on Melville's experiences, and this edition is littered with footnotes comparing our green sailor to our faithful author. It's about very little, but Redburn's voyage to Liverpool and back, but there's a great deal of development and exploration. Redburn himself is almost embarrassing in the beginning, with his romantic visions and dreams, and he grows little by little as he traverses the ocean. He meets people he would've never met; he experiences things one doesn't experience on land. It's not all positive growth, either, which makes it all the more appealing.

This would be a good intro to Melville, if you're not ready to delve into Moby Dick yet. But I'll warn you—Redburn rambles a lot, and about a lot of things that have nothing to do with anything. But readers of Moby are familiar with that.

Great book to read and get the feel of Atlantic sail passage of that era. Detailed writing of a novice sailor and his experiences. Vivid description of the Port of Liverpool when in England. The truth of immigrants sailing on board the 'Highlander' the hunger and desease in small overcrowded quarters. Overall a great book to read from Herman Melville.

Herman Melville’s Redburn has long been dismissed or misclassified by many a Melville scholar as an immature work in which Melville was still struggling to find his unique voice, one that finally shows through with brilliant translucence in Moby-Dick. This is a shame because—to my mariner’s aesthetic--Redburn remains one of the great and unappreciated American novels of the 18nth century. In fact, it remains the gold standard as far as an account of a young man (teen in this case) making his first maritime voyage amidst a crew that scoffs at his landed-gentry background, albeit a background now embalmed in in the poverty his cast-off, landed-gentry status: Wellingborough Redburn, as the sub-title of the work clearly indicates, is the “Son-of-a-Gentleman,” and not the type of person to choose maritime as a career.

While other novels, particularly Ultramarine* by the English Modernist, Malcolm Lowry, also depict the travails of an educated seaman on his first voyage where the protagonist is hazed by the crew both for being green and being from a good family, Melville did it first with much more humor, along with a keen eye for sociological observations of the era which make Redburn a chronicle of the era, as well as any ship log ever could.

Melville’s first two novels ostensibly describe the true, salacious escapades of a sailor who deserts a whaling ship in the South Pacific, only to find succor with the natives of Tahiti and other islands. The novels were an immediate sensation and made Melville an American celebrity. However, as famous as these novels were in their era, neither depicted the quotidian life of a seafarer. It is only when Melville attempted to incorporate the tale of his inaugural sea voyage voyage, on a merchant ship to Liverpool, that we glimpse so many themes that will mold Moby-Dick. There are the wry, sardonic depictions of life at sea, where even tragedies (plagues and death) are related as if they are but common occurrences. There are the barely veiled, homo-erotic undertones of a fey, British fop, Harry Bolton, whose dainty fingernails and hands are described with erotic tenderness. There is the multinational crew; Melville’s depictions of different races and nationalities never descend to the depths of the prejudices of the 18nth century, many of which—unfortunately—survive until the present day. The observations on the black steward, the Irish steerage passengers and other multinational crew members are perspicacious, but they never stray to the bigoted. Thus, Melville writes with a non-judgmental chronicler’s eye, and his observations are progressive, even—or especially-- by today’s standards. Most surprising, however, is the effusive humor which flows throughout the book.

In an earlier review of Omoo**, I quote at length from the Penguin introduction by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, an associate professor of English at U. Conn, because it is precisely the Melvillian voice—with its humor and wry wit—which also make Redburn such a vital precursor to the Beats:

“Melville’s tone in Omoo is both ironic and comic. Omoo foreshadows a subgenre of American culture that partakes of a sort of irony that does not become part of the widespread vernacular until the 1960s and has since become a staple of popular culture. The lineage of Omoo goes forward to John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and the “cool sneering wit” that characterized the counterculture of the 1960s. The tone of Omoo is much like the tone in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), Kerouac’s On The Road (1957), or Dylan’s laconic interactions with earnest, conventional interviewers, especially as seen in the Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005). In all of these, the central characters are part of a group outside the mainstream whose motto is “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”. . .

It is precisely this “ironic” and “comic” voice that makes Redburn as essential as most of Mark Twain’s writings. And while Melville had not yet gone all metaphysical and Modern à la Moby-Dick, he broaches so much in these “confessions” and “reminiscences” that Redburn remains an essential read for anyone interested in the mercantile maritime world--with essential depictions of steerage, a plague on ship and the condition in the forecastle--and the life of sailors. There are enough allusions to themes that later are the backbone of Moby-Dick to force any reader interested in that Great American novel to take notice; there is even an early use of the word, “monomaniacal.”

While many of Melville’s works are hard to read and border on fantasy (Mardi, which I have not yet read), the works in which Melville specifically describes life at sea remain essential reading. White Jacket, which precedes Moby-Dick, presents life on a navy vessel and shows how little that life has changed for the common sailor up until today. Moby-Dick, remains the quintessential account of whaling in the 18nth century, and—of course—much more. Without a doubt, Melville depicts the life on a merchant ship with more cunning that almost anyone, from Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s Two Years Before the mast to the late John Moynihan’s college project, The Voyage of the Rose City, which is but one of the many books that pallidly imitate the maritime works of the American master novelist.***

While almost any edition of Melvilles suffices, the Newberry edition contains an excellent historical essay by Melville biographer Hershel Parker and was my choice for the reread of Redburn.

*https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
** https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
***Billy Budd is essential, but somewhat atypical and will be addressed later.

Melville though barely trying and rushed, still writes better than 99% of anyone else at their best.

Like all Melville's novels, this is very lightly disguised memoir, this time of a voyage from New York to Liverpool and back in the merchant service.

What’s interesting is how much it feels like the training wheels for Moby-Dick; how it works over so much of the same material - the dreamy, romantic narrator; the injustice and exploitation; the satanic rebel of a sailor with control over the others; the anecdotal, digressive style which gives you all the mechanics of life at sea - but without pulling it together into one grand allegory, one vital message. Looking at this earlier example, you miss the majesty that Shakespeare gave to Melville's language, you miss Hawthorne’s alchemical touch.

One thing Redburn does have over Moby-Dick, though, is a much more powerful sense of the narrator as outcast; as a gentleman exiled from his former world of warmth and privilege, but who doesn’t fit in among the sailors either, and who longs for a lost father-figure. Wellingborough Redburn’s relationship with Harry Bolton isn’t anything like as close as Ishmael and Queequeg’s, but likewise, it ends with the friend being lost and the narrator alone again. Ishmael is so playful and chatty and flippant that it’s easy to miss the anger and pain beneath his words, but when he says ‘call me Ishmael’, he does so meaning every inch of the comparison.

Compared to what Melville can do at his best, i.e. Moby-Dick and everything after, this just doesn’t have the same power and weight. That said, Melville’s company is always an immense pleasure, he couldn’t write a bad sentence, it’s less gay than Moby-Dick but I can’t pretend that Wellingborough doesn’t have a Thing for delicate curly-haired boys, and if you enjoy sailing stories at all then you could do far worse than this.