Why Read Moby-Dick? (11 page)

The chapter concludes by reaching back to Noah even as it anticipates America's blood-soaked day of reckoning to come: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surfbeat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

After the titanic fury of the final three chapters, the epilogue comes as an immense relief. Ishmael, it turns out, was the one who replaced Fedallah in Ahab's whaleboat. Luckily, he and several others were tossed from the boat prior to the captain's death and watched the final scene from the edges of the fray. Once the ship sank and the ensuing vortex began to drag all of them under, Queequeg's coffin life buoy popped up out of the water, and Ishmael became the
Pequod
's only survivor. “Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.” Magically preserved in the predator-free zone of “The Grand Armada,” Ishmael is rescued by the
Rachel,
still in search of her captain's missing son. This means that instead of elation, Ishmael brings only disappointment to his rescuers. “It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” And so Melville ends his masterpiece with a tender presentiment of his own abandonment by both his audience and the man to whom he would dedicate the novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

M
elville had a hard time shaking the Ahab out of him. It would take a critical pummeling, the loss of his shy muse, and other disappointments before he came back down to earth again and realized that even after the miracle of
Moby-Dick,
nothing had really changed. But in early November 1851, within days of the novel's publication, he still believed in the power of his black art. Not only had his book come from the real world; it controlled that world.

On November 6, he received a letter from his New York friend Evert Duyckinck informing him of the sinking of the New Bedford whaleship
Ann Alexander
by a whale. “Your letter received last night had a sort of stunning effect on me,” Melville wrote. “For some days past being engaged in the woods with axe, wedge, & beetle [a mallet], the Whale had almost completely slipped me for the time (& I was the merrier for it) when Crash! comes Moby Dick himself . . . & reminds me of what I have been about for part of the last year or two.... I make no doubt it
is
Moby Dick himself, for there is no account of his capture after the sad fate of the Pequod about fourteen years ago.” Melville was only half-kidding. After comparing the
Ann Alexander
whale to the literary critics who were about to bash his book (“What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point”), he let slip a startling admission: “I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”

P
oor Nathaniel Hawthorne. Back in the summer of 1850 he had hoped to avoid being introduced to Melville. A little over a year later, Melville had dedicated a book to him. What was this timid, withdrawn writer to do? Get out of town, that's what. But before he and his family beat a hasty retreat from the Berkshires to the suburbs of Boston, he wrote Melville a letter praising
Moby-Dick
. Hawthorne's letter no longer exists, but judging from Melville's response, the words were heartfelt. And, in fact, in the months ahead Hawthorne would write to Duyckinck, “What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones.”

Whatever Hawthorne wrote, his “joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter” was exactly what Melville needed to hear. “A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment,” he wrote, “on account of your having understood the book.” But even before he finished the letter, “this infinite fraternity of feeling” had begun to fade. “My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms steal into me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad. . . . [T]ruth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.” Even if
Moby-Dick
was now done and Hawthorne was about to leave him, perhaps what the two of them had shared during the last year would somehow endure. “I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.”

The critics (including his friend Duyckinck) were not kind to
Moby-Dick,
but Melville pushed on, writing
Pierre,
a very strange novel about a tortured writer and his family that conveys a stupefying sense of spiritual claustrophobia but not much else. Then that summer, in July 1852, Melville traveled with his father-in-law, Judge Shaw, to Nantucket Island.

Imagine it: a year after writing
Moby-Dick,
Melville visited the island that served as the launching pad for his great, unappreciated masterpiece. At some point, he met Captain George Pollard, master of the
Essex
. “To the islanders he was a nobody,” Melville later wrote in the back pages of his Chase narrative; “to me, the most impressive man, tho' wholly unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.” Now that the excitement of creating
Moby-Dick
had faded, Melville was most impressed not by an ungodly, godlike Ahab but by a quiet, reserved survivor who had learned to live with disappointment. For someone who has ceased to believe in his own immortality (and as we shall soon see, Melville had reached that point), life isn't about achieving your dreams; it's about finding a way to continue on in spite of them.

And then, during this trip to the islands south of Cape Cod, Melville was told a story by a lawyer friend of his father-in-law's that hit him like a thunderbolt, a story about a woman named Agatha Hatch who married a sailor, had his child, and proceeded to live without the sailor for seventeen years. As the lawyer (who happened to be the attorney general of Massachusetts) wrote to Melville, the story of Agatha was “a most striking instance of long continued & uncomplaining submission to wrong and anguish on the part of a wife, which made her in my eyes a heroine.”

Melville decided that this was just the “skeleton of actual reality” for a novel, especially if it were set on Nantucket, which instead of being a place of boisterous pluck had become by 1852 an island of whalers without whales. What's more, Agatha would have a George Pollard–like figure for a father: “a man of the sea, but early driven away from it by repeated disasters. Hence, is he subdued & quiet & wise in his life. And now he tends a light house, to warn people from those very perils, from which he himself has suffered.” But then Melville did something pathetic. He wrote up a detailed précis and offered the story to Nathaniel Hawthorne, claiming that his friend would do a better job with it than he would.

When Hawthorne balked, Melville decided it was a good excuse to travel to Concord, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne and his family had since relocated. Not surprisingly, Hawthorne urged Melville to write the story himself, which he subsequently decided to do. “I invoke your blessing upon my endeavors,” he wrote hopefully; “and breathe a fair wind upon me.” But the wind was anything but fair. The following spring, after completing a novel that seems to have been based on the story of Agatha titled
The Isle of the Cross,
Melville was “prevented” from publishing it, possibly because the publisher feared that the novel's similarity to actual events might invite a lawsuit. From then on, Melville (who appears to have destroyed the manuscript) would do his best to disguise what Hawthorne had recognized was his greatest strength: the unflinching portrayal of reality.

By that time Hawthorne's former roommate at Bowdoin College, Franklin Pierce, had become president of the United States. After writing Pierce's campaign biography (which one wag described as “the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote”), Hawthorne received a plum political appointment and was named U.S. consul in Liverpool, England. Melville, once again, would not be so lucky. Even though his family members and friends (including Hawthorne) campaigned heroically for him, he was offered nothing. By 1856, his family had become worried about his sanity and health, and Melville departed, alone, on a tour of Europe and the Holy Land. Soon after arriving in England, he traveled to Liverpool to visit Hawthorne.

It was November, and the two friends went for a walk on the beach in the windy sunshine. They found a sheltered spot amid the dunes and sat down for a smoke. “Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity,” Hawthorne recorded in his journal, “and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated'; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

Melville, Hawthorne recognized, was a man condemned to landlessness. There was no harbor for Melville, no refuge from the storm. For one brief year, with Hawthorne's friendship serving as his insular Tahiti, Melville dove down deeper than even Pip and came up with
Moby-Dick
. But instead of fame (at least in his own lifetime),
Moby-Dick
brought only obscurity. Instead of going down in a blaze of glory like Ahab, Melville went about his quiet, unassuming way like Captain Pollard.

No one knew it then, but Melville had created the literary equivalent of Queequeg's coffin life buoy: a book that vanishes into the depths only to explode to the surface just in the nick of time. What
Moby-Dick
needed, it turned out, was space— the distance required for its themes and images to resonate unfettered by the turmoil and passions that had inspired them. Once free of its own historical moment,
Moby-Dick
became the seemingly timeless source of meaning that it is today.

But all that was in the distant future. In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Melville, his wife Lizzie, and their four children moved from the Berkshires back to New York City, where Melville worked as a customs inspector for close to two decades. After years of marital unhappiness, he and Lizzie appear to have reached an understanding, and in the 1880s they came into an inheritance. Without a need to work, Melville settled into his dark, book-lined room on Twenty-sixth Street in New York City and, with visits from his granddaughters serving as his chief distraction, continued his lifetime habit of reading and writing. When he died in 1891 at the age of seventy-two, he had completed his second masterpiece,
Billy Budd
.

After Melville's death, his family found a possible clue as to how he managed to survive the forty-year backwash left by the creation of
Moby-Dick
and, indeed, how he came to write that novel in the first place. Atop a table piled high with papers was a portable writing desk. Taped inside the desk, which had no bottom, was a piece of paper with a motto printed on it: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”

The phrase comes from the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, but what was its relevance to Melville? Late in life he wrote to his brother-in-law, “[A]t my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless—well, finish the sentence for yourself.” I propose that Melville would have finished that sentence with the words taped inside his writing desk.

In the end, Melville had found a way back to the view espoused by Ishmael in
Moby-Dick:
“Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read
Moby-Dick
.

 

M
any thanks to Kevin Doughten at Viking for being the first to ask the question that inspired me to write this book and that became its title. Thanks also to Wendy Wolf and Stuart Krichevsky for their input. I'd also like to thank the friends and family members who read and commented on the manuscript: Peter Gow, Susan Beegel, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Stuart Frank, Michael Hill, Richard Duncan, Thomas and Marianne Philbrick, and Melissa Philbrick. Thanks to Francesca Belanger for the wonderful design, to Jim Tierney for the cover, and to Bruce Giffords and Maggie Riggs for their help as well.