Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  …that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing vapour…

  –as if he were suddenly able to see beyond himself and into the whale, in an out-of-body experience even as he moved towards it. Like Ishmael, he felt reborn. ‘Until I was twenty-five I had no development at all,’ he told Hawthorne. ‘From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.’ Something fused into one headlong effort, as great as his quarry, as great as the industry it commemorated. With sprawling ambition and an utter lack of convention, Melville crossed latitudes of time and space, blurring them as he did so, constantly reiterating, ‘All this is not without its meaning’, laying meaning upon meaning, drawing himself on, writing and re-writing obsessively, creating a kind of exclusion zone to which his own wife Lizzie could only gain admittance by knocking incessantly on his door until he deigned to answer.

  He had recreated the conditions on board ship inside his study and in his mind, and in the process Moby-Dick changed from a romance to a fearful, fated work. Parts of the book seem to be written automatically, as if possessed by the spirit of the White Whale, the Shaker God incarnate. There was something forbidden about his subject, named for a mythic Mocha Dick but which also elided with the name of his fellow deserter, the dark and prepossessing friend whom he had thought dead but had met again in Rochester, New York. ‘I have seen Toby, have his darguerrotype [sic]–a lock of the ebon curls.’

  Melville almost dared not to write his book, even as he advised a female friend not to read it. ‘Dont you buy it–dont you read it, when it comes out,’ he warned her. ‘It is not a peice [sic] of fine feminine Spitalfields silk–but it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.’ With Mary Shelley’s man-made monster at the back of his head, he conjured images of Ahab’s ship ploughing through stormy seas as ‘the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness’. Only half jokingly, he spoke of his work as though it were some transgression of natural law which ought not to have appeared at all. ‘But I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf,’ he told Evert Duyckinck, ‘–at any rate it is safer from criticism.’ That binding might have been the tattooed skin of the pagan Queequeg; or the book his counter-bible, bound in the ghastly pale hide of the Whale itself. What began as an exercise in propaganda for the American whaling industry ended up as a warning to all mankind of its own evil. Melville had learned Hawthorne’s lessons well.

  It was, ostensibly, a cheery timetable, a rural regime. He rose at eight to give his cow and horse their breakfast before breaking his own, then settled to work till two thirty in the afternoon, when, by arrangement, Lizzie knocked and kept on knocking until her husband answered. After driving out in the countryside, he spent his evening ‘in a sort of mesmeric state, not being able to read–only now & then skimming over some large-printed book’. Such self-imposed isolation seemed to invoke his increasingly strange and wilful voyage.

  I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all cover with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin, and at nights when I wake up and hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.

  Working in the shadow of Mount Greylock, which he could see in the distance, the peak’s blunt and sometimes snowy brow conjured up the White Whale, ‘the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmelehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power.’

  To friends, Melville spoke of the smooth running of his writing, but Lizzie wrote of a terrible time, a book accomplished ‘under unfavourable circumstances–would sit at his desk all day not eating any thing till four or five o’clock–then ride to the village after dark’. Like Hawthorne–who walked around Concord with his head so bowed that he did not recognize buildings that he passed every day when he was shown photographs of them–Melville removed himself from human contact in order to write more forcefully about humanity. The result was a work written and performed in secrecy like a Masonic ritual, underlain with a conspiratorial text, what Melville told Hawthorne to be the secret motto of his book–

  Ego no baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli

  –that is, ‘I do not baptize you in the name of the Father, but in the name of the Devil’.

  The Little Red Inn, Lenox, Western Massachusetts, 14th November, 1851, late afternoon, dreary snow and wind.

  The chairs scrape over the boards as they draw nearer to the table. For two men to dine together was not usual in a country town. Melville had hired a private room for his publication party for Moby-Dick. There was only one guest.

  Melville gave the finished copy to Hawthorne that afternoon. In those few seconds, as the book passed from hand to hand, between leaving go and taking hold, all the effort, all the energy of his life was distilled, the summary of his existence to date.

  Hawthorne opened the book and saw the words inside:

  It was a public declaration, and an infinite demand.

  Hawthorne’s reaction to Moby-Dick is one of the great lost letters of literature, but we can see its shape by Melville’s response.

  A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb…

  Hawthorne opened Melville’s eyes to allegories and subtleties he had not seen in his own work. In response, and in an extraordinary mixture of arrogance and blasphemy and faith and love, the younger man almost accuses his friend and mentor:

  Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips–lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling…You understood the pervading thought that impelled the book…Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul.

  Even given the exaggerations of Victorian correspondence, these are dramatic words, and we can only imagine Hawthorne’s reply. He may have been grateful he was about to leave Lenox. In Hawthorne, Melville sought refuge from the dark, like Ishmael and Queequeg settling down for their second night together at the Spouter Inn.

  Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! but it’s a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy.

  As his unholy book would be condemned by the good folk of the Berkshires, so he yearned for an eternity that his works, and those of his friend, might provide.

  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 divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question–they are One.

  It was a plea for fellow feeling that went beyond sex or intellect. It fed on the same unknowing power that drove his work; and as his relationship with Hawthorne could go no further–as he crossed the line of normal behaviour–so Melville never recovered from Moby-Dick.

  On its publication, Melville’s book confused and confounded the critics. Was it a gothic sensation, political parable, or a religious tract? Some thrilled to the chase, and the final battle between Ahab and the White Whale–‘he comes up to battle, like an army with banners…The fight is described in letters of blood’–but many were mystified, or even irate. Melville might have expected as much. He was more moved by the newspaper reports of a whale that had stove in a New Bedford ship. ‘Crash! Comes Moby
Dick himself, & reminds me of what I have been about for part of the last year or two,’ he wrote to Evert Duyckinck. ‘It is really & truly a surprising coincidence–to say the least…Ye Gods! what a commentator is this Ann Alexander whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.’

  Despite its appearance on both sides of the Atlantic (like the White Whale, it could be in two places at the same time), the book prospered in neither. In order to register its copyright, it was first published in London under the title The Whale, in three volumes designed to catch the eye of the carriage trade, with bright blue boards and a handsomely embossed gilt whale swimming down each white spine. But just as that was a right whale–and therefore the wrong whale–so the expense of the English edition–which cost a guinea and a half, and which seemed to reflect the lavishness of that year’s Great Exhibition–was undermined by Bentley’s decision to excise the epilogue in which Ishmael survives to tell his tale (as well as sections he considered blasphemous or obscene), an omission that further confused the readers. The ending was restored for the American edition–a much more egalitarian, single volume affair, priced at a dollar fifty (although even this was available in a selection of differently coloured covers)–but Harper and Brothers never sold out of their three thousand copies, the remainder of which perished in a fire in the publisher’s downtown Manhattan warehouse in 1853. It was a judgement, perhaps, to echo Hawthorne’s bonfire of the vanities, and confirmation of its own author’s assessment of his wicked book.

  What made Melville also unmade him; it was the abiding paradox of his life. His adventures had provided him with material for his fiction, but they had ruined him for it, too, making him forever restless. By going to sea, Melville lived the life that would make his books possible; but his escapades also made him unfit for life as a writer. Haunted by the grand hooded phantom, the great whale, he felt dogged by ‘the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me…and influences me in some unaccountable way’.

  Even as Moby-Dick was being published, Melville was at work on the decidedly land-locked Pierre, Or The Ambiguities, an autobiographical novel about a celebrated New York author who at one point is pursued down the street by a cameraman wanting to take his photograph, just as his alter ego had run from the Typees for fear their tattooists would take his face away. (‘I respectfully decline being oblivionated by a Daguerretype,’ Melville told another friend, ‘what a devel of an unspellable word!’) But his increasingly dark vision met with depressingly decreasing returns and a dwindling readership; and so in October 1856, despite suffering severe rheumatism, he embarked on what was to be his last great adventure.

  ‘Mr Melville much needs this relaxation from his severe literary labours of several years past,’ noted the Berkshire County Eagle, ‘and we doubt not that he will return with renovated health and a new store of those observations of travel which he works so charmingly.’ With him he carried his latest manuscript, The Confidence-Man, hoping to sell it in London. His ship arrived in Glasgow, where Melville marvelled at the shipyards and women with faces like cattle. At Edinburgh, he stopped to get his laundry done–

  9 Shirts

  1 Night shirt

  7 Handkerchiefs

  2 Pair stockings

  Drawers & under shirt

  –then proceeded, via Lancaster and York, to Liverpool, with its memories of his first sea voyage. Lodging at the White Bear on Dale Street, the next day he walked out in the rain ‘to find Mr Hawthorne’, but the address was out of date and his journey futile. The following morning he called at the consulate, and found Nathaniel.

  Hawthorne had spent the last four years as American consul in Liverpool, living with his family in nearby Southport; he was now in his fifties, and balding. Melville too looked ‘a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder’. Learning of his friend’s ill health, Hawthorne diagnosed ‘too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success’, and a ‘morbid state of mind…I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labour and domestic life, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was.’

  The two men took the afternoon train to Southport, a faded resort once patronized by Louis Napoleon, now a shadow of its former splendour. The next day they walked on the beach, blown along by the wind, and sat in a hollow in the dunes to smoke cigars. Melville began to talk of Providence and futurity, ‘and of everything that lies beyond human ken’. He told Hawthorne that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; like Ishmael leaving Manhattan, he seemed to advance a death-wish.

  ‘It is strange how he persists–and had 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,’ Hawthorne wrote in his journal. ‘He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief…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.’

  This was a high tribute from Hawthorne; a mirror, in its way, of the faith Melville had placed in him–as if only now he realized it and felt guilty for not having done more. But who could have saved Melville from himself? A few days later, he sailed from Liverpool for the Holy Land, leaving his trunk behind at Hawthorne’s consulate, taking only a carpet-bag with him. The two men never met again.

  Arrowhead is set close to the road, sheltered by trees. The rain washes the light out of the sky, the clouds rolling inky-black over the ochre house. Minutes later the sun is sharpening the clapboard, picking out acid orange day-lilies along the picket fence. Everything seems green and lush. Inside, the place feels uninhabited. Its wooden floors smell warm in the summer afternoon, but the rooms echo only to hushed voices. In the upstairs study, through the wavy, watery window, I can just make out the locked grey lump of Mount Greylock on the horizon, masked by trees.

  …here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights…

  By the fireside is a toggle-head harpoon–

  And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

  –and nearby, a battered chest, left behind ‘like a hurried traveller’s trunk’, with a handwritten luggage label, partly erased:

  Our guide thinks Hawthorne was a handsome man, ‘and that was the beginning of the trouble’. And I think of all those minor scenes, commonplace for all their protagonists’ fame, two men smoking their cigars and drinking their brandy and staying up late, talking into the night.

  For now the words descended like the calm of mountains–

  –Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish–

  W.H. Auden, ‘Herman Melville’

  As dusk falls, the shutters come down. The doors are locked, and the house stands empty again. Mountains lie between–the mountain on which they met, and the mountain that marked their parting–rocks half covered in firs but bare to the summit, reaching out to the sky and back down to the sea.

  It was the whiteness of the whale which appalled me

  In 1863 Melville gave up trying to farm at Arrowhead and moved back to New York and a house in Gramercy Park. From there he would walk down to the Battery, where he earned four dollars a day as Deputy Inspector No.75 of the Custom Service, ‘as though his occupation were another island.’ In the evening he would work in his study, facing a wall like Bartleby. What did those years add up to but tragedy? In 1866, in the bedroom upstairs, his eighteen-year-old son Malcolm shot himself in the head with a pistol he kept under his pillow. Twenty years later, Stanwix, his other son, died of consumption, alone in a San Fra
ncisco hotel, aged thirty-four. As he looked through his window, across the street, Melville could see the terraced houses, mirrors of his own, their stone steps and iron railings a rhythm of urban banality, a view that never changed, unlike the sea.

  His end would be as equivocal as his beginning. Melville was seventy-two years old when he died of a heart attack, just after midnight on a Monday morning in September 1891, before Manhattan had begun its working week. Thirty years had elapsed since his last novel, The Confidence-Man, and he had published only poetry since. After his interment in Woodlawns cemetery in the Bronx, Lizzie tidied up her husband’s papers and put the manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor away in a drawer. Glued to the inside of the desk on which he wrote it was a tiny clipping:

  Keep true to the dreams of thy youth

  Outside the city, in a bleak suburb–all the bleaker for a freezing February afternoon when the chill bleeds the colour out of the streets and sky–cars roar along the freeway in a twenty-four-hour race to get in and out of New York. They drive by without an upward glance to where their ancestors lie, having long given up the chase.

  Shiny memorials line these tidy lanes; the names of city worthies are as deep-etched as the day they were set on these sepulchral avenues, suburbs of the dead, a sharp contrast to the simplicity of a Quaker graveyard. Last week’s snow lies grey and gritty like an ice lolly spilt on the pavement. From my pocket I take a piece of slate, found on a Nantucket beach. I lean over to place it on the marble headstone, carved with ivy as if to mimic the living wreath growing around its feet.

  HERMAN MELVILLE