—LESLIE FIEDLER, 1952
If you had met the three of us along the road you would have seen a peculiar sight: we looked like two sardines guiding an unsteady Moby Dick into port.
—FRED ALLEN DESCRIBING HIMSELF AND HIS BROTHER, IN 1910, FLANKING HIS FATHER ON THEIR WAY HOME FROM SUNDAY DINNER IN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, FROM MUCH ADO ABOUT ME, 1956
He goes to getting ready for bed, pulling off his clothes. The shorts under his work pants are coal black satin covered with big white whales with red eyes. He grins when he sees I’m looking at the shorts. “From a co-ed at Oregon State, Chief, a Literary major.” He snaps the elastic with his thumb. “She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol.”
—KEN KESEY, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, 1962
There was ease in Ahab’s manner as he stepped into his place,
There was pride in Ahab’s bearing and a smile on Ahab’s face;
The cheers, the wildest shoutings, did not him overwhelm,
No man in all that crowd could doubt, ’twas Ahab at the helm.
And now the white-fleshed monster came a hurtling through the air,
While Ahab stood despising it in haughty grandeur there!
Close by the sturdy harpooner the Whale unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style,” said Ahab. “Strike! Strike!” Good Starbuck said.
With a smile of Christian charity great Ahab’s visage shone,
He stilled the rising tumult and he bade the Chase go on.
He signalled to the White Whale, and again old Moby flew.
But still Ahab ignored it. Ishmael cried, “Strike! Strike, Man!” too.
The sneer is gone from Ahab’s lips, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his harpoon upon his pate.
And now old Moby gathers power, and now he lets it go.
And now the air is shattered by the force of Ahab’s blow!
Oh, somewhere on the Seven Seas, the sun is shining bright,
The hornpipe plays yet somewhere and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere teachers laugh and sign, and somewhere scholars shout.
But there is no joy in Melville—mighty Ahab has Struck Out.
—RAY BRADBURY, “AHAB AT THE HELM,” 1964
“Future Broadway Musicals Based on Famous Literary Classics,” MAD Magazine, January 1966
(MAD #100 © 1966 E. C. Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.) (list of illustrations fm1.1)
Call me, Ishmael. Feel absolutely free to. Call me any hour of the day or night at the office or at home and I’ll be glad to give you the latest quotation with price-earnings ratio and estimated dividend of any security traded in those tirelessly tossing, deceptively shaded waters in which we pursue the elusive whale of Wealth, but from which we come away at last content to have hooked the twitching bluegill, solvency. And having got me call me anything you want, Ish baby. Tickled to death to be of service.
—PETER DE VRIES OPENING LINES OF THE VALE OF LAUGHTER, 1967
Melville, it happened, was Bech’s favorite American author, in whom he felt united the strengths that were later to go the separate ways of Dreiser and James. Throughout dinner, back at the hotel, he lectured Petrescu about him. “No one,” Bech said—he had ordered a full bottle of white Rumanian wine, and his tongue felt agile as a butterfly—“more courageously faced our native terror. He went for it right between its wide-set little pig eyes, and it shattered his genius like a lance.” He poured himself more wine. The hotel chanteuse, who Bech now noticed had buck teeth as well as gawky legs, stalked to their table, untangled her feet from the microphone wire, and favored them with a French version of “Some Enchanted Evening.”
“You do not consider,” Petrescu said, “that Hawthorne also went between the eyes? And the laconic Ambrose Bierce?”
“Quelque soir enchanté,” the woman sang, her eyes and teeth and earrings glittering like the facets of a chandelier.
“Hawthorne blinked,” Bech pronounced, “and Bierce squinted.”
—JOHN UPDIKE, BECH: A BOOK, 1970
“Call me Smitty.”
—PHILIP ROTH, OPENING SENTENCE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, 1973
Why write? Where does writing come from?… These are questions to ask yourself … The writing professor this fall is stressing the Power of the Imagination. Which means he doesn’t want long descriptive stories about your camping trip last July. He wants you to start in a realistic context but then to alter it …
Tell your roommate your great idea, your great exercise of imaginative power: a transformation of Melville to contemporary life. It will be about monomania and the fish-eat-fish world of life insurance in Rochester, New York. The first line will be “Call me Fishmeal,” and it will feature a menopausal suburban husband named Richard, who because he is so depressed all the time is called “Mopey Dick” by his witty wife Elaine. Say to your roommate: “Mopey Dick, get it?” Your roommate looks at you, her face blank as a large Kleenex. She comes up to you, like a buddy, and puts an arm around your burdened shoulders. “Listen, Francie,” she says, slow as speech therapy. “Let’s go out and get a big beer.”
—LORRIE MOORE, “HOW TO BECOME A WRITER,” 1984
Anyone who has read Moby-Dick would find it irresistible now to extrapolate from that great novel to the real world, to see the American empire preparing once again, like Ahab, to take after an imputed evil.
—EDWARD SAID, JANUARY 12, 1991, IN THE GUARDIAN, ON AMERICAN PREPARATIONS FOR THE FIRST GULF WAR
You’d have to be Melville to transmit the full strength of Stanley’s will.
—MICHAEL HERR, SPEAKING OF STANLEY KUBRICK, 1999
As we now know, Al Gore was on his way to make his concession speech when an aide’s pager went off telling him that the Bush margin of victory was collapsing by the minute in Florida as the final votes came in. Al Gore clung to the wreckage with the ferocity of a Captain Ahab. He phoned George Bush to say that he was not conceding after all.
—BBC NEWS, NOVEMBER 13, 2000
Herman Melville, who was born on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, had a pivotal moment as a young man, according to papers shown to this column by an unpublished Melville biographer. A neighborhood store owner overcharged him by mistake. When he discovered the error, the shopkeeper, who happened to be Jewish, apologized and said, “Call me a schlemiel.”
Melville was enchanted by that sentence. But he was unfamiliar with Yiddish, and didn’t quite get it right when he used it years later for the opening line of Moby-Dick.
—CLYDE HABERMAN, NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY 3, 2001
(At the dinner table at Meadow’s apartment)
FINN: Did you like Billy Budd?
A.J.: It was OK. My teacher says it’s a gay book.
CARMELA: … Oh, that is ridiculous!… I’m sorry, but Billy Budd is not a homosexual book.
MEADOW: Actually, it is, Mother.
CARMELA: I saw the movie, Meadow, with Terence Stamp.
COLIN (MEADOW’S ROOMMATE): Terence Stamp was in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
CARMELA: I don’t know about that. But Billy Budd is the story of an innocent sailor being picked on by an evil boss—
MEADOW: —who’s picking on him out of self-loathing, caused by homosexual feelings in a military context.
CARMELA: Oh, please!
ALEX: Actually, Mrs. Soprano, there is a passage in the book where Melville compares Billy to a nude statue of Adam before the fall.
A.J.: Really?
TONY: I thought you read it.
CARMELA: So it’s a Biblical reference. Does that make it gay?
…
TONY: Must be a gay book. Billy Budd’s the ship’s florist, right? (Laughter)
MEADOW: Leslie Fiedler has written extensively on gay themes in literature since the early 60s—Billy Budd in particular.
CARMELA: Well, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
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MEADOW: She’s a he, Mother, and he’s lectured at Columbia, as a matter of fact.
CARMELA: Well, maybe he’s gay, you ever thought of that?
—THE SOPRANOS, SEASON FOUR, EPISODE 12, DECEMBER 1, 2002
I’ve been thinking about “Bartleby” lately.… The mess in Iraq presents two seemingly unacceptable possibilities: stay and having our soldiers killed daily, or leaving and ushering in chaos.… In today’s world of bleak alternatives … Bartleby’s story is a sobering reminder that what life requires is remaining engaged—preferring, and acting on those preferences.
—ADAM COHEN, NEW YORK TIMES, AUGUST 29, 2003
Adam Cohen’s “Bartleby” isn’t mine. “I would prefer not to” is good existential philosophy. President Bush should have employed it in Iraq.
—GUS FRANZA, LETTER TO THE EDITOR, NEW YORK TIMES, AUGUST 30, 2003
“Maybe I’m becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the white whale. Maybe you need someone less obsessive about it.”
—RICHARD CLARKE TO CONDOLEEZZA RICE, AS RECALLED IN CLARKE’S BOOK, AGAINST ALL ENEMIES, 2004
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s obsession with building a football stadium on the Far West Side of Manhattan is in danger of leaving other development projects in its shadow—including the rebuilding of ground zero. Since Lower Manhattan is where Melville began the saga of Moby-Dick, it seems appropriate to wonder whether Mr. Bloomberg is turning into a modern-day Ahab, pursuing his great white elephant of a stadium as the former World Trade Center site sinks into trouble.
—NEW YORK TIMES, LEAD EDITORIAL (“MANHATTAN’S MAYOR AHAB”), MAY 2, 2005
Few novels … captured the imagination of hedge-fund managers quite like Moby-Dick … says Mr. Reiferson of Americus Capital, because money managers like to give the impression that they are being Ahab-like in “maniacally pursuing their goals.” Mr. Reiferson says he planned to name his fund after Bildad, a character who helped finance the whaling expeditions. But in the end, he felt the reference as “too obscure, unless I could raise money from Melville scholars.”
—THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 16, 2006
PREFACE
Why write about a writer’s life? For me, the reason has to do with a feeling that we all live by some unknowable combination of free will and fate. This feeling tends to grow as one gets older, and so there is a certain comfort in watching someone make something beautiful and enduring out of the recalcitrance and fleetingness of life.
There is a problem, though, with bringing this motive to bear on Herman Melville. As he said about the title character of his haunting story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” who responds alike with maddening silence to compassion or coercion, “no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man.” Only about three hundred Melville letters, many of them perfunctory, have survived, as compared, say, to twelve thousand letters by Henry James. As for letters received, he was in the “vile habit” (as he called it) of destroying them, and most of his manuscripts, left behind in 1863 when he moved out of his Berkshire home, probably went up in flames in a housecleaning bonfire set by the new owners. His journals were brief and few, and since he was not famous for long in his own time, no Boswell followed him into the taverns to write down his table talk.
The “business” of the biographer, Henry James says, is “detail,” and so any conventional biography of Melville is a business bound to fail. The incidents of his daily life—his flirtations and quarrels, his jokes and rants at the family table—have slipped beyond the reach of even informed conjecture, and most attempts to tell his life are notable for the discrepancy between the vividness of what he wrote and the vagueness of the figure who appears in writings about him. Today, despite the immense surge in his prestige, he remains so murky that when a photograph was discovered a few years ago showing a heavily bearded man with top hat standing on a Staten Island pier that Melville was thought to have visited, there was great excitement that it might be him, even though the photo shows little more than a featureless silhouette.
Now and then, thanks to some friend or relative who mentions him in a letter, this “fabulous shadow,” as Hart Crane called him, comes into focus. We see him eating with his brother in a Manhattan steakhouse, driving his sleigh in a Berkshire snowstorm, or taking his granddaughter to Madison Square Park to see the tulips and then, after sitting on a bench for a while, walking back to his house alone, having forgotten her. But these faint trails lead only to the edge of his inner life. When (or if) he left the child and walked out of the park, was he distracted by a pleasant daydream or lost in an old man’s confusion? Or did the incident take place at all?
Herman Melville [?] on Staten Island (list of illustrations prf.1)
It is impossible to know, and sooner or later the question arises whether one should even try. Melville once wrote that “on a personal interview, no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader,” and since biography ought to be a kind of interview, this comment contains an admonition to leave him in his self-concealment. He wrote, after all, with special sympathy about “isolatoes” who barricade themselves against the gadding world and live alone with their demons and dreams—as when he described, in Moby-Dick, how the thundering minister Father Mapple climbs into his pulpit by means of a rope ladder, then leans over the rail “deliberately [to] drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.” Melville, too, withdrew, especially in later life, when he would sometimes hang a towel over the doorknob inside his study so that no one could see him through the keyhole. He ensured that the man whom we barely glimpse in the historical record will always be incommensurate with the genius whom we meet in the works.
A few summers ago, I had an experience that left me feeling hesitant to invade his posthumous privacy. I was in the reading room of the Houghton Library, holding in my hands a note from a former shipmate who had written to Melville to tell him he had named his son after him, and to beg him for a visit or a keepsake. Turning the pages of this letter that Melville himself had once removed in surprised anticipation from an envelope bearing the name of a friend from whom he had not heard in years, I felt that I was eavesdropping, like a tourist in a church who comes upon a worshipper kneeling in prayer.
In trying to find a right relation with this figure whom one might call Melville the Problem (he once likened his eminent friend Nathaniel Hawthorne to a closed “black-letter volume in golden clasps, entitled ‘Hawthorne: A Problem’ ”), I owe an enormous debt to the biographical researches of many scholars. My own chief aim, however, has not been to add to the store of facts about Melville’s life; and though I hope here and there to have done so, my emphasis is on his writing, and on its complex connections to the intellectual and political context in which he lived and worked. There is, therefore, a good deal in this book about what was going on in the United States during his lifetime. My hope is that the reader might thereby gain what Hawthorne called a “home-feeling with the past”—with, that is, the past that Melville experienced as the present.
Finally, I take seriously D. H. Lawrence’s remark that Melville “wrote from a sort of dream-self, so that events which he relates as actual fact have indeed a far deeper reference to his own soul, his own inner life.” Since the route to that inner life can only be through his own words, this book is above all an attempt to reconstruct that virgin moment when, long before we knew anything about whether Melville was a gentle or harsh husband, an opponent or proponent of this or that idea, it was his words that seized and dazzled us. The critic Richard Poirier reminds us of what can happen when we drift away from the words:
Most of us, when we are away from the text, tend to maunder on in a clubbable way about inexactly remembered scenes or characters or bits of phrasing … when we remember good ol’ Proust he becomes not in any important way different from good ol’ Tolstoy, even though the two could never have been mistaken for each other when we first met them
in their writings.
Anyone who reads Melville’s words will know what Emerson meant when he wrote in his journal that, while reading Shakespeare, “I actually shade my eyes.” My hope for this book is that it will convey something of the tone and texture of Melville’s time while giving some sense of why, in our time, the glare of his genius remains undimmed.
ANDREW DELBANCO
NEW YORK CITY, MAY 2005
It had always been one of the lesser ambitions of Pierre, to sport a flowing beard, which he deemed the most noble corporeal badge of the man, not to speak of the illustrious author.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, PIERRE, OR THE AMBIGUITIES, BOOK 17
c. 1846/47. Oil painting by Asa Twitchell (list of illustrations fm2.1)
1860 (list of illustrations fm2.2)
1861 (list of illustrations fm2.3)
1868 (list of illustrations fm2.4)
1870. Oil painting by Joseph Eaton (list of illustrations fm2.5)
1885 (list of illustrations fm2.6)
INTRODUCTION
MELVILLE:
FROM HIS TIME TO OURS
1.
When Melville was born in 1819 in New York City, it was a town of about a hundred thousand people with streets lit dimly by oil lamps as if by so many lightning bugs. The best way of sending a message was via a wax-sealed letter carried by a messenger on a horse. Such giants of the revolutionary generation as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were still alive, while the political institutions they had invented remained fragile and, according to many putatively sage observers, unlikely to endure.
Melville: His World and Work Page 2