Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  I cannot recall how many times I have taught Moby-Dick. Though I keep rereading it, I have most of it by heart, and that possession alters my perception of many other books. With Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, it is for me a kind of American Scripture. One does not want to lose perspective. Whitman and Melville are the two titans of American literature. Neither of them is Isaiah of Jerusalem or Dante. Homer and the Athenian tragic dramatists, Plato and Pindar, Lucretius and Virgil, are also larger on the scale of the Sublime. Very old age plays its tricks upon even a mind passionate for the survival of aesthetic and cognitive values. I read Walt Whitman and he places his hand upon me and says he wants me to be his poem. I go back to the first chapter of Moby-Dick, “Loomings,” and become Ishmael:

  Call me Ishmael. 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. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

  Ishmael, whose name means “the Almighty listens,” was Abraham’s firstborn son by his Egyptian concubine, Hagar. In Islam, Ishmael is the ancestor of Muhammad and founded the shrine at Mecca. After a dispute between Sarah and Hagar, the Egyptian woman fled to the desert and bore Ishmael, archetype of all wanderers.

  Melville’s Ishmael is a pilgrim and a survivor. Only he will survive the wreck of the Pequod, Ahab’s whaler. My friend Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., wrote a book called Ishmael’s White World (1965) founded on J. H. Van Den Berg’s The Changing Nature of Man (1961). Van Den Berg argued against Freud that psychology had to be historical, that miracles could happen in one age but not in another, and that the self was as mutable and metamorphic as Ovid and Shakespeare took it to be. Brodtkorb’s Ahab is a High Romantic in the mode of Milton’s Satan, Shelley’s Prometheus, Byron’s Byron. Ahab belongs to the middle of the nineteenth century. He is an American, a Quaker, and a Jobean rebel. But, then, Walt Whitman is an American, a Hicksite Quaker, and another rebel against Leviathan, the tyranny of nature over women and men as ordained by a Blakean Nobodaddy who calls himself Yahweh.

  Shakespeare is the dominant influence on Moby-Dick. The poet-seer Charles Olson, with whom I had several conversations during the 1960s, pioneered in studying that influence in his book Call Me Ishmael (1947). Olson was a giant of a man, six foot seven or so, but I found his manner gentle and engaging, though we could not agree on the poetry of Ezra Pound, who more than Melville sparked Olson’s own “projective verse.”

  This is the essence of Olson on Moby-Dick:

  Melville isolates Ahab in “a Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness.” He is captain of the Pequod because of “that certain sultanism of his brain.” He is proud and morbid, willful, vengeful. He wears a “hollow crown,” not Richard’s. It is the Iron Crown of Lombardy which Napoleon wore. Its jagged edge, formed from a nail of the Crucifixion, galls him. He worships fire and swears to strike the sun.

  OVER ALL, hate—huge and fixed upon the imperceptible. Not man but all the hidden forces that terrorize man is assailed by the American Timon. That HATE, extra-human, involves his Crew, and Moby-Dick drags them to their death as well as Ahab to his, a collapse of a hero through solipsism which brings down a world.

  At the end of the book, in the heart of the White Whale’s destruction, the Crew and Pip and Bulkington and Ahab lie down together.

  All scatt’red in the bottom of the sea.

  Ishmael is the one survivor. I wonder what Melville made of The Tempest. Most of his Shakespearean allusions are to the High Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. I disagreed with Olson and still do as to Ahab’s “solipsism.” Captain Ahab is well aware of what Emily Dickinson called “Neighbors and the Sun.” He plays upon his crew like a master conductor leading a small orchestra. Little Pip, crazed by a dangerous immersion in the sea, becomes the Fool to Ahab’s Lear. Starbuck, the heroic first mate, yields to Ahab’s monomania because he cannot resist authentic authority.

  Ishmael gives us the first intimation of the eternal Moby-Dick:

  By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

  Though Melville’s sources included several accounts of a White Whale, Moby-Dick has a white forehead and a white hump. The rest of the great Leviathan is striated, yet in Ishmael’s imagination the whiteness of the whale is paramount. There are many puzzles to Melville’s epic.

  * * *

  —

  No one in this vast volume ever refers to Ishmael by that assumed name or indeed by any other. Ishmael is and is not Herman Melville. Only at times is he the narrator. And yet it is his book as much as it is Ahab’s. As the only survivor of the Pequod, Ishmael strangely and powerfully speaks “this six-inch chapter” as memorial for Bulkington’s stoneless grave.

  Before proceeding to Nantucket with Queequeg, Ishmael unaccompanied goes to the whalemen’s chapel in New Bedford to hear a sermon by the extraordinary preacher Father Mapple, who closes in an eloquent rhapsody:

  He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”

  Superbly delivered by Orson Welles in John Huston’s film, this both exalts me and makes me wonder. It is surely more Melvillean than Christian. Mortal or immortal we die, but what is the lifetime of Father Mapple’s God? And which God is this? Is it the spirit of delight, or is it the God of Job, Jonah, Jeremiah?

  The spirit of delight certainly attends the marriage of Ishmael and Queequeg:

  If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally
and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those rules would not apply.

  After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper fire-board. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.

  Ishmael complies and joins his mates in worshipping the little idol. The happiest moment in Moby-Dick follows:

  How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.

  Queequeg gifts Ishmael with the story of his life, dominated by a desire to behold all the horizons of the world:

  By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he might not consider his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,—as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a harpooner of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.

  After Ishmael and Queequeg have signed to join the crew of the Pequod, Ishmael inquires about the captain:

  “And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art shipped.”

  “Yes, but I should like to see him.”

  “But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either. Any how, young man, he won’t always see me, so I don’t suppose he will see thee. He’s a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!”

  “And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?”

  “Come hither to me—hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance in his eye that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself. ’Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It’s a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is—a good man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man—something like me—only there’s a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee—and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child; hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”

  Melville’s skill speaks through Peleg and intimates more than it says. Ahab is in his late fifties, old for a whaler, but he cannot rest until his metaphysical quest to avenge himself upon Moby-Dick is accomplished. “He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab.” One could say precisely the same of Herman Melville. But Ahab’s wife is now a “sweet, resigned girl.” She has their child for company, and doubtless still Ahab’s love, but his leg and manhood have been lost to Moby-Dick. Before that catastrophe, he had been in every sense a complete man, college-educated, fierce in battle against men as against whales, and a king among men.

  An excursus on Ahab’s name seems in order. In the stories of Elijah and his disciple Elisha in 1 Kings 17 to 2 Kings, King Ahab and his wife, Queen Jezebel, are the villains, a kind of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Elijah is abrupt and semi-divine, as indicated by his name, which fuses “El,” “the almighty,” and “Yahweh.” After Elijah overcomes the priests of Baal, he flees the vengeance of Jezebel. So terrified is King Ahab of Elijah that he will not execute him, but both Ahab and Jezebel fulfill Elijah’s prophecy. After Ahab is killed in battle, his blood is licked by dogs, Jezebel is tossed out of the window, and most of her remains are devoured by the dogs. I have no reason to believe that either Ahab or Jezebel was in any way wicked: Kings is religious propaganda. Still, Melville exploits this when a vagabond sailor calling himself Elijah accosts Ishmael and Queequeg:

  “Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”

  “Anything down there about your souls?”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I know many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”

  “What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.

  “He’s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the word he.

  “Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he’s talking about something and somebody we don’t know.”

  “Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old Thunder yet, have ye?”

  “Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his manner.

  “Captain Ahab.”

  “What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”

  “Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav’n’t seen him yet, have ye?”

  “No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be all right again before long.”

  “All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm
of mine will be all right; not before.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “What did they tell you about him? Say that!”

  “They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that he’s a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.”

  “That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the word with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, that every one knows a’most—I mean they know he’s only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off.”

  Ishmael shrugs off this Elijah, though we do not. But why does Melville give us this foreboding? To answer that, I must turn to Job and to Jonah. The first five “Extracts,” supposedly supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian, that lead off Moby-Dick begin to tell us:

  “And God created great whales.”

  Genesis.

  “Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;

  One would think the deep to be hoary.”

  Job.

  “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”