‘Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times’
By Aaron Sachs
Princeton University Press, 472 pages

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) won the 1961 National Book Award for “The City in History,” the culmination of decades-long studies of urban civilization and technology. His 1929 biography of Herman Melville also has its honored place in the revival of an author who became the literary touchstone of the modernist generation.

Like his contemporaries, Mumford turned to Melville because the “Moby Dick” author’s work presaged the impending industrialization of nature that threatened to imprison people in an economy that deprived them of their individuality — and, in extreme cases, robbed them of all hope. Thus Bartleby’s famous declination: “I prefer not to.”

Mumford saw in Melville an exquisite sense of the past and present, of the newly impinging world of Wall Street in “Bartleby” and the receding past of whaling in “Moby Dick.” Ahab’s crew become cogs in his relentless quest to subdue the leviathan that is foretold in Melville’s reading of Hobbes. The conquest of nature devolves into the subjugation of the self. 

In Aaron Sachs’s dual biography, Melville and Mumford move along parallel tracks, oscillating from the country (Melville’s homestead in upstate New York, and Mumford’s farmhouse in Amenia, New York) to Manhattan. Although both writers have been depicted as providing grim  portrayals of the modern industrial city, Mr. Sachs believes their lives and works provide some measure of hope.

His Melville is a more sociable figure, more dedicated to his family. Even in “Moby Dick,” Mr. Sachs sees him displaying an affectionate view of humanity that is not so often stressed in other biographies, though John Bryant’s biography, a work in progress, is rectifying the more dour accounts of Melville. 

Mumford, like Melville, was sustained by a loyal and resourceful wife. Sophia Mumford and Elizabeth Melville are the pillars of this biography, the former putting up with her husband’s infidelities that paradoxically eventuated his renewed commitment to her, and the latter preserving and promoting her husband’s writing, making every effort to find the right biographer to tell the full story of his life and career.

Not many books show the synergy between biographers and their subjects — redeeming the lives of these men and their loved ones and illustrating why biography matters. The works and days of the biographer and his subject cohere in the powerful humanity of the biographical quest that has so often been derided by critics such as Janet Malcolm in “The Silent Woman.” 

Toward the end of “Up From the Depths,” Mr. Sachs presents what is almost a parable about the fate of biography. When Donald Miller published his biography of Mumford, Sophia was at first outraged because she believed the biographer had not done full justice to her husband’s humanity and dwelled too much on his faults. 

I know firsthand what Mr. Miller experienced. Marriages that last are often built on a mythology of togetherness that each partner dearly treasures and that can never be replicated in a biography, and I discovered as much when I outraged husband Michael Foot’s amour-propre in “To Be A Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie,” by revealing the ways he let her down.

Mr. Miller was more fortunate than biographers of my ilk, in that Sophia survived her husband by many years and, gradually, began to see the justice of Mr. Miller’s narrative. Sometimes, the truth of a biography only becomes apparent as it slowly gets absorbed into the sensibility of a culture and into the work of subsequent biographers like Mr. Sachs.

So, Mr. Sachs has written a sort of palimpsest of biography itself, showing how, generation by generation, we begin to see through the traffic between past and present that leads to the rediscovery of figures like Melville and Mumford, who wanted for themselves and their progeny (which includes us) a recognition that going backward can also be a way of going forward. 

Mr. Rollyson co-authored with his wife, Lisa Paddock, “Herman Melville A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work.”