There were some similarities between Melville and Giono. Melville, as a fierce egalitarian, was against the flogging and severe penalties (Billy Budd is executed) so prevalent on the high seas; Giono was a pacifist, ever since witnessing the horrors of World War I, in which he’d served. When he wrote Melville he’d just emerged from prison for the crime of pacifism, which the French state condemned as “defeatism.” He would be briefly imprisoned later, during World War II, for “collaboration” with the Fascists. Actually, his biggest “collaboration” was the reprinting of an old photo, without his permission, in a collaborationist magazine. The real problem was that in the mid-1930s he’d broken definitively with the Stalinists; a Moscow-directed French Communist writers’ union kept Giono from being published in France from right after the war until 1947.

Both Giono and Melville had overbearing mothers. Both were precocious boys. Both had to drop out of school when their fathers died and both, oddly enough, had to go to work in a bank. Giono had written several folkloric novels, which he felt he could manufacture like little buns, just as Melville had written his maritime adventure stories (Typee, Redburn, Omoo, White-Jacket), which seemed to him almost formulaic (Mardi is an exception). Shortly after the war Giono began his Angelo Cycle and wrote an unrelated book, his enigmatic, granitic Un roi sans divertissement (A King Without Diversion, to be published soon by New York Review Books). It was certainly a more ambitious novel than anything he’d penned previously.

Giono had also at this point in his life fallen in love with a married woman, Blanche Meyer, with whom he had an affair for the next thirty-five years. She was Blanche, as her literary double was White (Adelina). Giono and Blanche had a voluminous correspondence. Though they both lived in the same Provençal town of Manosque, they had to be extremely careful about seeing each other. Between 1939 and 1969 he wrote her more than a thousand letters and cards; they are now mostly housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale, but many of them are sealed until a future date. Her letters were burned. She went on to write a tell-nothing memoir about him. Somewhat like F. Scott Fitzgerald with Zelda’s letters, Giono apparently ascribed many passages from Blanche’s letters to Adelina.

Melville, it seems, was quite different from Giono’s portrait. He was infatuated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was fifteen years older. For nearly two years the authors saw each other often and talked deep into the night. Hawthorne’s wife remarked that Melville wanted more from Hawthorne than he could give. Nevertheless, it was an inspiring period for both men, who felt that the conventional novel of the day had become too narrow a form. During that period Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter and Melville wrote Moby-Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne. When Hawthorne wrote Melville a letter praising Moby-Dick (which, in the eyes of many critics, may be the greatest American novel ever written), Melville said, “Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.”