Why Read Moby-Dick? Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - The Gospels in This Century

  Chapter 2 - Landlessness

  Chapter 3 - Desperado Philosophy

  Chapter 4 - Nantucket

  Chapter 5 - Chowder

  Chapter 6 - The Pequod

  Chapter 7 - Ahab

  Chapter 8 - The Anatomy of a Demagogue

  Chapter 9 - Hawthorne

  Chapter 10 - The View from the Masthead

  Chapter 11 - The Sea

  Chapter 12 - Is There a Heaven?

  Chapter 13 - A Mighty, Messy Book

  Chapter 14 - Unflinching Reality

  Chapter 15 - Poetry

  Chapter 16 - Sharks

  Chapter 17 - The Enchanted Calm

  Chapter 18 - Pip

  Chapter 19 - The Squeeze

  Chapter 20 - The Left Wing

  Chapter 21 - So Remorseless a Havoc

  Chapter 22 - Queequeg

  Chapter 23 - Pulling Dictatorship Out of a Hat

  Chapter 24 - Essex Redux

  Chapter 25 - The Inmost Leaf

  Chapter 26 - Ahab’s Last Stand

  Chapter 27 - Evil Art

  Chapter 28 - Neither Believer nor Infidel

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

  ALSO BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

  The Last Stand

  Mayflower

  Sea of Glory

  In the Heart of the Sea

  Away Off Shore

  VIKING

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  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick, 2011

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Philbrick, Nathaniel.

  Why read Moby-Dick? / Nathaniel Philbrick. p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54521-8

  1. Melville, Herman, 1819–1891. Moby Dick. 2. Sea stories, American—

  History and criticism. I. Title.

  PS2384.M62P55 2011

  813’.3—dc22

  2011019766

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  To Melissa

  1

  The Gospels in This Century

  Early in the afternoon of December 16, 1850, Herman Melville looked at his timepiece. He was in the midst of composing the novel we now know as Moby-Dick. At that moment he was writing about how for thousands, even millions of years whales have been filling the atmosphere over the waters of the Pacific with the haze of their spouts—“sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep.” It was then that he decided to record the exact time at which he was writing these words about whale spouts: “fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850.”

  When Moby-Dick was eventually published in November of the following year, the date in this passage was changed from 1850 to 1851. But that is no matter. The fact remains that in this tiny chapter, titled “The Fountain” (the 85th in a novel that would eventually extend to 135 chapters), Melville did something outrageous. He pulled back the fictive curtain and inserted a seemingly irrelevant glimpse of himself in the act of composition.

  I’ve now read Moby-Dick at least a dozen times, and this reference to a specific time and day in December remains my favorite part of the book. Whenever I come upon that sentence, I feel as if I am there, with Melville, as he creates the greatest American novel ever written.

  In December 1850, Melville was just thirty-one years old. A few months earlier he’d decided to move his family from New York City to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, the temporary home of his new literary idol, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville was already the father of a baby boy named Malcolm; in October of the following year his wife, Elizabeth, gave birth to a second son, Stanwix.

  His literary career had begun in spectacular fashion four years before with Typee, a bestseller about his adventures in the South Seas. But Melville quickly learned that success guarantees nothing and in fact turns the future into an endless quest to measure up to the past. As each subsequent book failed to equal Typee’s sales, and with his financial responsibilities mounting (his household often included his widowed mother and his sisters), Melville began to worry about the future. “Dollars damn me . . . ,” he confided to Hawthorne. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.”

  From the second-floor study of the farmhouse he purchased and renovated with loans from his father-in-law and a family friend, he could see nearby Mount Greylock. When the snow blanketed the surrounding fields that winter, Melville claimed to enjoy “a sort of sea-feeling.” But as he worked with an increasing, Ahab-like frenzy on his book about the maimed captain and his pursuit of the White Whale, the omnipresent sea-feeling was anything but a comfort. “My room seems a ship’s cabin,” he wrote to a literary friend, “& at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”

  Once seated at his desk each morning, he was literally consumed by his story, sometimes working past four o’clock in the afternoon without pausing to eat. When exhaustion finally forced him to stop, he spent the evening sitting listlessly amid his extended family in what he described as “a sort of mesmeric state.” Not only was he drawing upon his own experiences in the Pacific, he was also immersing himself in scientific treatises and narratives associated with the whale fishery. Most important, his recent and omnivorous reading of Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, and others meant that the voices of these writers were as fresh and accessible to him as anything he might read in a newspaper or magazine.

  In 1850 the United States was in the midst of pushing its way west across the full three-thousand-mile breadth of the North American continent. Railroads had begun to knit together the interior of the
nation into an iron tracery of ceaseless, smoke-belching movement. Steamboats ventured up once-inaccessible rivers. With the winning of the Mexican War in 1848, America’s future as a bicoastal nation was sealed. When word reached the East Coast that gold had been discovered earlier that year in California, thousands upon thousands of prospectors quickly made that future an accomplished fact.

  But there was a problem with this juggernaut: a lie festered at the ideological core of the then-thirty states of America. Even though its founders had promised liberty and freedom for all, the southern half of the country was economically dependent on African slavery. Ever since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the issue had been gnawing at the heart of America, and now, after decades of avoidance and evasion, it was becoming clear that the nation was headed for a crisis. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which required that escaped slaves found anywhere in the United States be handed over to the authorities, slavery was no longer just a Southern problem. All Americans, both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line, were now legally bound to the institution of slavery. Antagonisms that had lain dormant for decades could no longer be contained, and an eruption of terrible violence appeared inevitable. Despite all its brilliant successes, America was on the verge of a cataclysm.

  To be an American writer in 1850 was to be part of a young, still tentative literary tradition. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were approaching the ends of their careers, while the poet William Cullen Bryant was one of the most influential literary figures of the time, thanks, in large part, to his position as editor of a leading New York City newspaper. Before his death in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe had pronounced the now-forgotten Southern novelist William Gilmore Simms “immeasurably the best writer of fiction in America.” In the meantime, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was well on his way to becoming the most popular and best-paid author in America.

  But it was British writers such as Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (known primarily today for beginning one of his novels with the immortal phrase “It was a dark and stormy night”) who were the most widely read in the United States. Cooper and Irving had managed to support themselves (sometimes just barely) through their writing, but they were very much the exceptions to the rule. The popular essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson relied on his lecture fees to keep body and soul together, and even Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Scarlet Letter had been selling briskly since its appearance in March of that year, had been employed, until just recently, as a surveyor at the customs house in Salem, Massachusetts. By purchasing a home in the wilds of western Massachusetts with the intention of supporting himself and his family on the income derived from a novel about, of all things, whaling, Melville was embarking on a quest as audacious and doomed as anything dreamed up by the captain of the Pequod.

  To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare’s startlingly original insights into Elizabethan England are what allow his work to speak to us today. Reading Shakespeare, we know what it is like, in any age, to be alive. So it is with Moby-Dick, a novel about a whaling voyage to the Pacific that is also about America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War and so much more. Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country’s ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

  The irony is that when Moby-Dick was first published in the fall of 1851, virtually no one, except for the author to whom the novel was dedicated, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his wife, Sophia, seems to have taken much notice. By the time of Melville’s death in 1891, Moby-Dick had sold a grand total of 3,715 copies. (As a point of comparison, Typee sold 16,320 copies.) It wasn’t until after World War I that what had begun as a few belated plaudits by some Canadian and English readers had become a virtual tidal wave of praise. There were still some naysayers (Joseph Conrad ridiculed Moby-Dick for its romantic, overblown prose), but the vast majority of writers who encountered this improbable book in the first half of the twentieth century were stunned and deeply influenced by how Melville conveyed the specifics of a past world even as he luxuriated in the flagrant and erratic impulses of his own creative process. In its willful refusal to follow the usual conventions of nineteenth-century fiction, Moby-Dick possessed the experimental swagger that so many authors were attempting to capture in the years after World War I.

  Among the expatriates in Paris in the 1920s, Moby-Dick became what one writer described as “a sort of cunning test by which the genuineness of another man’s response to literature could be proved.” In 1927, William Faulkner, who would later hang a framed print of Rockwell Kent’s Captain Ahab in his living room in Oxford, Mississippi, claimed that Moby-Dick was the one novel by another author that he wished he had written. In 1949, the ever-competitive Ernest Hemingway wrote to his publisher Charles Scribner that as he approached the end of his career, Melville was one of the handful of writers he was still trying to beat.

  By 1951, when the centennial of the novel’s publication was celebrated throughout the world, Melville’s masterpiece had succeeded in becoming more than a literary sensation; it was part of the popular culture. Despite being the author of that most landlocked of American novels, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck had a house in the former whaling port of Sag Harbor on Long Island, and in the 1960s he was the honorary chairman of the Old Whalers Festival, which featured a floating, propeller-driven version of the White Whale known as “Mobile Dick.” The novel has inspired plays, films, operas, comic books, a television miniseries, and even a pop-up book. Those who have never read a word of it know the story of Ahab and the White Whale.

  Moby-Dick may be well known, but of the handful of novels considered American classics, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, it is the most reluctantly read. It is too long and too maddeningly digressive to be properly appreciated by a sleep-deprived adolescent, particularly in this age of digital distractions. I know that as a high school senior in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1974, I had expected to be bored to death by the book. But then came that three-word first sentence—“Call me Ishmael”—and I was hooked.

  But I had my own reasons for almost instantly falling in love with Moby-Dick. On the first page, Ishmael describes the city of New York on a Sunday afternoon, its cooped-up inhabitants lingering on the waterfront, looking out longingly toward the sea in search of the “ungraspable phantom of life.” For me, a city kid who had developed an unlikely infatuation with sailing, this scene spoke with a direct, almost overwhelming power. Many of my classmates, however, did not share my enthusiasm, and looking back, I can hardly blame them.

  But the novel, like all great works of art, grows on you. Instead of being a page-turner, the book is a repository not only of American history and culture but also of the essentials of Western literature. It has a voice that is one of the most nuanced in all of literature: at once confiding, funny, and oracular—an outpouring of irrepressible eloquence that soars into the stratosphere even as it remains rooted to the ground. The book is so encyclopedic and detailed that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  In the more than 150 years since the novel’s publication, we have become those space aliens, the inhabitants of a planet so altered by our profligate presence that we are living on
a different Earth from the one Melville knew. And yet the more our world changes, the more relevant the novel seems to be. If Moby-Dick should, like so many works of literature, fall by the wayside, we will have lost the one book that deserves to be called our American bible. As individuals trying to find our way through the darkness, as citizens of a nation trying to live up to the ideals set forth in our constitution, we need, more than ever before, Moby-Dick.

  I am not one of those purists who insist on reading the entire untruncated text at all costs. Moby-Dick is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase, will do. The important thing is to spend some time with the novel, to listen as you read, to feel the prose adapt to the various voices that flowed through Melville during the book’s composition like intermittent ghosts with something urgent and essential to say.

  What follows is my idiosyncratic answer to the question that serves as this little book’s title. As a resident of Nantucket Island, the holy ground of Moby-Dick, and the author of a book about the real-life nautical disaster that inspired the conclusion of the novel, I have my own prejudices and point of view. Perhaps because my parents named me for the author who served as Melville’s muse, Nathaniel Hawthorne, I am as intrigued by the events that made possible the book’s composition as I am by the book itself. I am also interested in how the novel continued to haunt Melville in the months and years after its publication. Most of all, however, I am interested in getting you—yes, you—to read, whether it be for the first time or the twelfth time, Moby-Dick.

  2

  Landlessness

  In January 1841, Herman Melville shipped out on the Acush - net from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, just across the river from the whaling port of New Bedford. His father, a well-liked but ineffectual merchant, had died when Herman was twelve, plunging the family into humiliating poverty. In the eight years since, everything Melville tried, from working as a clerk at a law firm to teaching school to making his fortune in what was then the American wilderness of Illinois and Missouri, had failed. With the economy sunk in depression and with no job prospects, Melville did what the narrator, Ishmael, decides to do at the beginning of Moby-Dick; he went to sea.