"Melville's Withdrawal"

From Updike's Essay, "Melville's Withdrawal" from Hugging the Shore:

No writer, not even Dickens, invents from whole cloth; but Melville was especially an embroiderer, who needed the ready-made fabric of either his own recalled adventures or an account of someone else's to get his needle flying. His sense of truth held him stubbornly close to the actual; he was, in a style we can recognize as modern, both bookish and autobiographical. Though such a writer can never run out of other men's books, he can run out of autobiography. (93)

By bowing to that organic fall, and abstaining from a forced productivity, and turning to public silence and private poetry, Melville preserved his communion with greatness, and enhanced with the dignity of a measured abstention the communion we enjoy with him. (105).