In pursuit of teaching, he went to Japan, where he taught English in Hiroshima, and started his career as a writer by publishing articles of travel and reporting.
[2] Weaver first taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, then was hired by Columbia to replace a socialist professor who had been fired because of his peace activities.
[3] Carl Van Doren, then an editor of The Nation magazine, had discovered the works of Melville and was impressed by Weaver's "ability to deal with a speculative subject."
[2] Weaver's article for The Nation said that Moby-Dick was "born in hell-fire, and baptized in an unspeakable name" and that it "reads like a great opium dream," but contains "some of the most finished comedy in the language.
"[4] Preparing that article led to a realization that a biography was needed, and his decision to fill that gap made Weaver the key player in the "Melville revival" which had been gathering momentum.
Weaver presents Melville as a disappointed and disillusioned genius who rebelled against social convention and paid the price: "His whole history is the record of an attempt to escape from an inexorable and intolerable world of reality."
Later scholars also hold Weaver partly responsible for the idea that Melville withdrew from literature; it is now more widely held that he turned to poetry, a genre in which he is now recognized as a leader.
He compared Billy Budd with Pierre, saying that each "ends in disaster and death" and that "each is a tragedy (as was Melville's life)...." Tragedy, Weaver went on, was not the representation of human misery," but" the representation of human goodness or nobility," for only when "worldly disaster has worked its utmost can we realize that there remains something in man's soul which is for ever beyond the grasp of the accidents of existence, with power in its own right to make life beautiful.
[6] The reviewer in The New York Times called it a "strange novel" and compared it to E.M. Forster's 1924 A Passage to India in their doubts about the superiority of the West over the East.
The novel pictured the "sincere but wasted effort of a community of evangelical Christians engaged in a sort of spiritual shadow boxing, raiding the heathen for an occasional convert and, when off-duty, indulging in a good deal of spiteful and narrow gossip....." The plot revolves around a bigoted missionary, his dying wife, their son, who has fallen in love with a Japanese girl, and an older woman whose almost sexual doting on the son turns to revulsion when she sees him in the arms of the Japanese girl.
Weaver, known to his friends as "Buck," was a leading member of this group, which included Mark Van Doren (with whom he shared an office), Irwin Edman, and Mortimer J. Adler, among others.
"[10] [11] Another student recalled Weaver's sang–froid after a heavy snow-storm knocked out power to the upper west side of New York and left others without water.
Weaver used the phrase the "Long Quietus" to envision Melville's three decades of "prolific poetic production as an extended period of failing artistic power that amounted to nothing but silence."