Thus you can trace a rhumb line from Moby-Dick’s antecedents—Milton’s Satan, Shakespeare’s tragic king, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—through Melville’s novel on up to the monomaniacal monsters of our own era. Small wonder the book continues resonant.
Even the brushstrokes give pause. Just five pages into the novel, Ishmael is breezily speculating that his whaling voyage “formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
‘GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
‘WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
‘BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.’ ”
It would be arresting to have come across those lines for the first time in, say, November 2000 or the months following 9/11. By way of footnote: Melville was born in 1819 just a stone’s throw from Ground Zero, at 6 Pearl Street.
“Call me Ishmael.” The narrator of Moby-Dick gives us the most memorable—and most parodied—first line in all American literature; and for my money, with the finest first paragraph:
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation . . .
As you already knew from that other book on my must-read list, Ishmael takes his name from the illegitimate son of Abraham by the slave girl Hagar. He’s an outcast—though the biblical Ishmael went on to big things as father of the Arab race. Our Ishmael, being a nomad and wanderer, is an ideal American type. His friendship with the extravagantly tattooed South Seas harpooner Queequeg is among the most poignant in any literature. Huck Finn and the runaway slave Jim may be ur-paragons of racial diversity in American literature, but Melville introduced us to Ishmael and Queequeg three and a half decades before Twain gave us Huck and Jim.
Recently, walking into a London pub, I found a menu board on the wall with this written on it in chalk: “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” That, of course, is from the hilarious first meeting of Ishmael and his surprise bunkmate at the Spouter Inn. It was a racy sentiment in 1850s America. I mention it only to point out that Moby-Dick enthusiasts are everywhere, and share their continuing delight, even on crowded menu boards along with the day’s specials.
If Moby-Dick is Ishmael’s story, it is Ahab’s book. Of all the archetypes in American literature—Ichabod Crane, Hester Prynne, Huck, Gatsby, Yossarian, Holden Caulfield—the captain of the Pequod, who “looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,” casts the longest and most formidable shadow across the psychic landscape. One comes across Ahab almost every day, not only in reference to the novel, but also as a signifier of obsessive pursuit: the prosecutor who pursues a president over a thong-wearing intern; a mayor intent on banishing cigarettes and large servings of soda pop; a bearded Islamic fanatic waging holy war from a cave. In his biography, Delbanco amusingly lampoons the introductory “Extracts” in the novel with his own compilation of Melville and Moby-Dick references, including a hilarious and recherché lit-crit riff on Billy Budd from an episode of TV’s The Sopranos.
Ahab is an “embed” in our national consciousness. We met him as the obsessive captain in The Caine Mutiny, rather coolly renamed by Herman Wouk after the first half of Queequeg; we met him as Richard Nixon; as Captain Quint of Jaws; and there he was, reincarnated in none other than Ricardo Montalban—he of the rich Corinthian leather—in a Star Trek movie, hurtling electronic harpoons and snarling death curses taken word for word from the ur-text. Ahab lives.III
I have written a wicked book. In that letter to Hawthorne, whom he befriended while he was writing Moby-Dick, Melville is being only half accurate. In fact, he had written two books: one nonwicked, a conventional, if fantastical, sea chase. Onto that book, he grafted a second one, quite wicked for its day: an ontological epic, a subversive, metaphysical smackdown of the Deity, so unconventional as to expose its author to accusations of sacrilege and even lunacy.
The consensus among Melville scholars is that he set out to write one book but then turned the helm hard over and steered into deeper waters. In 1947, a scholar named Charles Olson published an electric if out-there book under the title Call Me Ishmael. Like many Melvilleans, Olson was obsessed—Moby-Dick has this effect on people. He spent a good part of his life trying to reassemble Melville’s library.
For him, the smoking gun was Melville’s copy of Shakespeare’s plays. Melville’s granddaughter showed him the volumes, which contain Melville’s notes in pencil on the flyleaf. From those jottings Olson concluded with an adamantine, indeed Ahab-like certainty, that Melville had started his book lacking both Ahab and the white whale, and then, having steeped in King Lear and the other tragedies, threw aside that book and began to write Moby-Dick.
It’s exhilarating to read Olson, even though at points you feel that you’ve been collared by Elijah, the raving dockside prophet who accosts Ishmael as he boards the Pequod. Olson is a brilliant illuminator of the mystical aspects of Moby-Dick, but his Shakespearean omphalos hypothesis starts to creak when we confront the fact that Melville’s jottings in his Shakespeare folio are undated: We don’t know when exactly Melville made those notations, so it is speculation that Moby-Dick and Ahab and the whale owe their genesis entirely to King Lear. Nor can we ascertain the facts from the manuscript, which has long since disappeared. (What a find that would be.)
Melville’s biographer Lorie Robertson-Lorant describes another letter from Melville to his friend Hawthorne, this one written in the sweltering third-floor room on Lexington Avenue and Thirty-first Street where Melville was polishing the last chapters, even as the first chapters were coming off the press. He offers to send Hawthorne a “specimen fin” of his whale, but cautions him that the book has been broiled in “hell-fire.” This was a reference that Hawthorne would appreciate—he described his own The Scarlet Letter as a “positively hell-fired story.”
When Melville was getting started with his book, he wrote a very differently toned letter, rather playful, to Richard Henry Dana. He told the author of Two Years Before the Mast that he was well aware of the difficulty inherent in producing a book about whales:
Blubber is blubber you know, tho’ you may get oil out if it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be as ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.
There in two letters, one to America’s most famous novelist, the other to its most famous author of sea nonfiction, Melville limns his book: blubber cooked in hell-fire.
When he finished, Melville wrote to Hawthorne to admit that he knew he had created a Frankenstein monster—a book rather hard to categorize. He had thrown everything into the pot, producing a literary olla podrida. His friend and mentor, Evert Duyckinck, editor of the influential The Literary World, would write a two-part review of the book, by no means a rave, calling it “intellectual chowder.”
That letter to Hawthorne is wrenching to read. It seems to come from the inner depths of Melville’s soul. It verges on self-pity, but concludes in a valiant shrug: “Try to get a living from the Truth, and go to the Soup Societies. . . . Truth is ridiculous to men. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.” You want to reach back through time and give the poor man a hug.
Early reviews seized on the book’s problematic duality. The priggish conservative critic of the London Athenaeum declared that it was an “ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-
fact” amounting to “so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.” Was it any consolation to Melville that if they’re calling you a madman, at least they’re paying attention? More of this was on the way. An American journal called for a “writ of de lunatico” to be taken out against the author. As far as the conventionalists were concerned, Melville had—to put it in contemporary terms—jumped the shark.
Reading these fulminations against the book tempts us to speculate: What if Melville had played it safe? The idea of a vengeful sperm whale was by no means far-fetched. One way or the other, Moby-Dick had its beginnings in the sensational episode of the sinking of the whale ship Essex in 1820 by a very angry pale-hued sperm whale with the Ben and Jerry’s–sounding name of “Mocha Dick.”
Nathaniel Philbrick’s bestseller In the Heart of the Sea relates the story in all its harrowing, cannibalistic detail. Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael gives us the fascinating detail that Melville met Owen Chase, former mate of the Essex, in mid–Pacific Ocean in 1841, not far from where the Essex had met its fate. Stranger still, a few months later, Melville met Owen Chase’s sixteen-year-old son, also at sea. The young Chase showed Melville a copy of his father’s famous account of the disaster. A final detail worth mention: Olson notes the fact that the Essex set out on its fated voyage from Nantucket eleven days after Herman Melville was born. In a way they were coterminous.
So: What if Melville had contented himself with a fictionalized rendering of an Essex-like event? What would the result have been? Moby-Dick lite?
The likeliest answer is: Had Melville played it safe, Moby-Dick would probably not be the classic that it is, and you would not be holding in your hands another fresh edition of a book first published a decade before the start of the U.S. Civil War.
What accounts we have of Melville while he was at work on the book indicate that he knew exactly what he was doing—that he was, to paraphrase the captain of the starship Enterprise, boldly going where no man had gone before. They also show that he had little idea of the ultimate cost.
When he began his book in New York City in the winter of 1850, Herman Melville was a name-brand novelist of sturdy reputation, contentedly married, looking forward to enlarging his family and to living on a pleasant farm with breathtaking views of the Berkshire Mountains, a snug harbor where he could write his ambitious book in peace, far from the noise and clamor of his native Manhattan.
Flash forward a year and a half, to the winter of 1851. The book has been published, on November 1—All Soul’s Day, one notes. We find a very different Herman Melville, who indeed resembles someone who has taken on the cosmos and the Almighty. He is exhausted, spent, hollow-eyed, and stares into the embers of his fireplace. In the opinion of some Melville scholars, Delbanco included, he may be in the grip of what we now call bipolar disorder. Certainly his behavior suggests such a diagnosis: extreme mood swings between mania and depression. In a few years, his family will become so alarmed that they will ask a neighbor, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, to examine him and evaluate his sanity.
But for now, November 1851, his marriage has gone cold. He broods over the reviews and the poor sales. His lifetime earnings from Moby-Dick will amount to $556.37; it will fail to sell out its first printing of three thousand copies. His friend Hawthorne, the only person to whom Melville ever truly opened up, has moved away and deserted him. Hawthorne is dazzled by Moby-Dick, but refrains from saying so publicly. In fairness, Melville has—almost masochistically—asked Hawthorne not to review the book in The Literary World, where Melville had published his own glowing encomium to Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse. Hawthorne accedes to his friend’s wish, perhaps a bit too neatly. But his continued reticence to praise the book, to lift even a finger in its support, leaves one a bit chilled. Hawthorne’s passiveness is all the more frustrating when, as quoted in Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, one finds him writing in his journal, after seeing his old friend for the last time: “He has a very high and noble nature and is better worth immortality than most of us.” Hawthorne’s betrayal is compounded by Evert Duyckinck’s two-part review of the book, the first tepid (“intellectual chowder”), the second adducing sacrilege. All in all, quite a “damp, drizzly November of [the] soul.”
Adding to the disaster, we find Melville working out the plot of a new novel, one that he thinks will appeal to female readers and set his reputation and finances straight again—a novel titled Pierre. In the description of one Melville scholar, it will amount to an act of literary suicide. If you have read Pierre, no further explanation is necessary.
There, then, are the before and after vignettes that bookend Moby-Dick.
After a few more failures, Melville will become a Customs inspector in Manhattan, spending his days walking the docks of the Hudson River, not far from where he was born. His son Malcolm will die a suicide; another, Stanwix, will die alone in a hotel room. Billy Budd, the novella that will do much to burnish his reputation and fuel the Melville revival, will not be published until 1924, thirty-three years after his largely unnoticed death. His granddaughter will retrieve it from the tin bread box where Melville’s wife stored it, and give it to Raymond Weaver, one of Melville’s first biographers.
A tin bread box. The letter to Hawthorne about having written a wicked book ends on a note of mystical triumph. Melville tells his friend that he has cracked at least one major piece of the eternal puzzle. “I feel,” he writes, “that the Godhead is broken like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.” All of Melville’s ontology is contained in that single sentence. W. H. Auden quotes it toward the end of his haunting poem “Herman Melville.”
Not long ago, I found myself in the room where he wrote most of Moby-Dick, a small corner north-facing study on the second floor of Arrowhead, his farmhouse near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
“If they but knew it,” Ishmael tells us at the end of the novel’s first paragraph, “almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.” For anyone who cherishes very nearly the same feelings for Moby-Dick, standing in that room will induce a pilgrim sensation. The kindly, informative docent goes on with his narrative, pointing out this and that detail, but his words fade as the reverential hush descends on you. A quiet but overwhelming feeling rises as you think of all those whom Melville conjured into immortality in this shabby little space: Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, Father Mapple, Elijah, Pip, all them.
You can see the whale through the window over the desk, looking out toward Mount Greylock, with its distinct whalelike hump. The windowpanes have that distorted quality of antique glass, which makes you wonder: Are these the same panes through which Melville stared when he looked up from his epic labor on his wicked book? I don’t know, but I’ll assert here that they are, if only so that, having failed to say anything original, I can at least claim to have been wrong about Moby-Dick in a new way.
—Afterword to the Signet Classics edition, 2013
* * *
I. When the U.S. Senate outlawed flogging in the U.S. Navy, the author of White Jacket could take some credit for the reform, having brought it vividly to the public attention, along with Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840.
II. Bentley rewrote passages that he thought might offend British sensibilities; moved the introductory “Extracts” to the end; and, most ruinously, eliminated the all-important epilogue, leaving British readers to wonder how in hell Ishmael could be narrating the story if he went down with the Pequod. Into the bargain, the spines of the three volumes of The Whale were embossed with drawings of a right whale, rather than a sperm whale. All in all, a disaster. Melville published the book first in Britain in order to protect his copyright, which rights barely existed in the United States then.
III. By way of a very weird QED, after I wrote the paragraph above, I turned to the Times crossword for my daily humiliation and there was the clue: “Grand, un-godly, godlike man” o
f fiction. Four letters.
THE YEAR OF LIVING DYINGLY
Christopher Hitchens began his memoir, Hitch-22, on a note of grim amusement at finding himself described in a British National Portrait Gallery publication as “the late Christopher Hitchens.” He wrote, “So there it is in cold print, the plain unadorned phrase that will one day become unarguably true.”
On June 8, 2010, several days after the memoir was published, he awoke in his New York hotel room “feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.” And so commenced an eighteen-month odyssey through “the land of malady,” culminating in his death from esophageal cancer last December, when the plain unadorned phrase that had prompted him to contemplate his own mortality became, unarguably, true. He was sixty-two.
Mortality is a slender volume—or, to use the mot that he loved to deploy, feuilleton—consisting of the seven dispatches he sent in to Vanity Fair magazine from “Tumorville.” The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard, and brilliant. An eighth and final chapter consists, as the publisher’s note informs us, of unfinished “fragmentary jottings” that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. They’re vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting—messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going:
But Enough About You: Essays Page 32
