Chapter 4 - Reception

Summary

“A howling cheese”: so Robert Louis Stevenson described Herman Melville in an 1888 letter written aboard a schooner bound for the South Seas. Stevenson's unusual epithet may seem derogatory but his figurative expression is actually quite flattering. It means something similar to the proverbial phrase, “to take the cake.” When it came to authors who wrote about the South Seas, Stevenson was saying, Melville took the cake. He was first rate, the real thing, tops – in short – a howling cheese. Elsewhere, Stevenson was less cryptic in his praise of Melville. In one magazine article, he asserted that there are “but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard.” Overrating Stoddard, Stevenson was paying debt to an important influence. When the two had met in San Francisco earlier, Stoddard presented him with copies of Typee and Omoo, which Stevenson took with him to the South Seas. Recalling their fond conversations, Stevenson observed, “It was in such talks, which we were both eager to repeat, that I first heard the names – first fell under the spell – of the islands; and it was from one of the first of them that I returned (a happy man) with Omoo under one arm, and my friend's own adventures under the other.”