Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  Melville was recalling here an incident from his time aboard the Acushnet, when a young black sailor named Backus had leapt overboard during a chase. Now he turned the event into what must surely be the most terrifying image of human loneliness conceived by an American artist until the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a very Melvillean film) in which the doomed astronaut clutches at his severed air hose while tumbling into the blackness of space. Alone in the open ocean, Pip watches his “ringed horizon … expand around him” as the whaleboats pursue their prey, leaving him to bob in the ocean’s “heartless immensity.” It is an image of abandonment that makes Poe’s caves and dungeons seem childish contrivances, and its horror—“the intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?”—is so far beyond imagining that Melville comes at the experience obliquely, through a contrasting image that makes us feel the terror of being cut loose into the indifferent infinite. “Mark,” he says, “how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.”

  By the time the ship happens to sail by and pick up Pip “by merest chance,” the ocean has “jeeringly kept his finite body up” but has “drowned the infinite of his soul.” Pip has lost himself. He has come to feel “indifferent as his God” (Melville had been reading in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus about the “centre of indifference” as a stage to wisdom), and “from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot,” or “such, at least they said he was.” Pip stands before the gold doubloon that Ahab has nailed to the mast and, to the puzzlement of his shipmates (“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar!”), he conjugates the verb “to look”: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.” He has been emptied of self-consciousness, and protected by his evident idiocy against his white masters—whom he calls, knowing their propensity to rage, “white squalls”—he speaks the candid truth that they all see the world as a reflection of themselves. Even to the most explosive of them, Ahab, he dares to say: “Will ye do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long.” As for Ahab, touched for the first time by the suffering of another human being, he questions Pip gently in an exchange worthy of Lear and his Fool:

  “Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?”

  “Astern there, sir, astern Lo! lo!”

  “And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! That man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou boy?”

  In answer, Pip can only parrot the language of an advertisement for the return of a fugitive slave:

  “Pip! Pip! Pip! Reward for Pip! One hundred pounds of clay—five feet high—looks cowardly—quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip the coward?”

  It was one hundred years before the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man that Melville made this touching portrait of an invisible boy who, in the “strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes.” Moby-Dick is a book filled with hate and ugliness, but it offers glimpses as well of a beautiful alternative world in which Pip, having once been disposed of as a nuisance, comes back to sing from his heart, and softens the roughest men with his song. Echoing Lear’s deference to his Fool (“In, boy; go first, You houseless poverty,— / Nay, get thee in”), Ahab says to Pip in a fatherly moment, “Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”

  4.

  With these allusions to what was and what might have been in the America of 1850, Moby-Dick became in the broadest sense a political novel. Melville made of the Pequod a mirror of America rushing westward, poisoning itself by eating up a continent, “a cannibal of a craft … tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies,” its bulwarks lined with whale teeth in place of wooden pins. Unlike their British counterparts, American whaleships carried the equipment needed for boiling, or “trying out,” whale blubber while at sea, and in “The Try-Works” chapter, the Pequod becomes a floating factory, lighting up the “darkness … licked up by the fierce flames” from her stone furnace in which the bodies of her victims are consumed while the “spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire.”* Melville imagines the ship as a version of Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” driven on Walpurgisnacht by a crew of scorched devils who pitch chunks of whale blubber into the pots and, when the fire slackens, toss pieces of fat and flesh directly into the flames.

  This burning whaleship is an image beside which the smoking lime kiln in Hawthorne’s story “Ethan Brand” or the railroad in Thoreau’s Walden (an “iron horse … breathing fire … from his nostrils”) seem pallid and banal:

  With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.… Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

  But who was this “monomaniac commander”? From what dark corner of Melville’s imagination did he come, swaying and swooning to the sound of his own eloquence as he urges on his savage crew?

  In the early chapters, before Ahab makes his first appearance, Melville dropped some hints. As the ship makes ready to sail, the docks come alive with talk about “moody stricken” Ahab—a “grand, ungodly, god-like man,” Peleg tells Ishmael, who has “been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals,” and is “used to deeper wonders than the waves.” Shortly after receiving this report, while walking on the wharf with Queequeg, Ishmael is accosted by a shuffling stranger portentously named for the Old Testament prophet Elijah, with a withered arm and a face so pitted by smallpox that it looks like the “ribbed bed of a torrent” after the water has dried up. This unnerving fellow wants to know if Ishmael and his cannibal friend have yet laid eyes on the master (“Old Thunder,” he calls him) of the ship on which they are about to embark. “No, we hav’n’t,” Ishmael admits. “He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be all right again before long.” Ishmael’s reply strikes Elijah as the funniest thing he has heard in a while: “All right again before long! When captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be all right, not before.”

  In New York and on his London trip, Melville had gotten into a theater- and operagoing habit, and in preparing the stage for Ahab his method was essentially theatrical. Subsidiary actors report rumors about Ahab as, one by one, his rivals (Peleg, Bulkington) drop away, until, at last, “Old Thunder” himself climbs up from his hideaway onto the stage—peg-legged and hideously marked by a “lividly whitish” scar that runs down his face and neck and continues under his clothes down his body like a lightning wound on a tree trunk. Something in Ahab’s deformity provokes both sympathy and fear; he seems seared and torn, a frightful survivor of some unsurvivable blast. And even before Ahab begins to speak, Melville conveys the crew’s amazement in a three-word phrase: “Reality out
ran apprehension.”

  With his powerful intellect and wasted body, Ahab bore an evident resemblance to John C. Calhoun. Like Calhoun, he has a heart as immovable as his mind is nimble; and like “erect” and “nervous” Ahab, Calhoun was known to his enemies as a monomaniac whose brain, as Melville’s friend George W. Curtis was to write during the Civil War, “was the huge reservoir of rebellion” from which the South drew its venom. When the captain of a passing ship begs for help in searching for his son, who has fallen overboard, Ahab stands unmoved “like an anvil, receiving every shock but without the least quivering of his own,” and replies, “I will not do it. Even now, I lose time.” The notoriously cold Calhoun could not have done better—or worse.

  It was natural for Melville to have this fearsome public figure in mind as he approached the writing of Moby-Dick. When the great South Carolinian died on March 31, 1850, Melville was still living in New York, where the local papers ran obituaries ranging from hagiography to grudging admiration to good riddance. News of Calhoun’s death gave retrospective authority to his own warning that all efforts had failed “to prevent excitement and preserve quiet” between the northern and southern wings of the Democratic Party, which was known throughout the nation as the “American Democracy.” Virtually everyone in the Duyckinck circle was a Democrat (in 1848, Melville’s brother Allan had run unsuccessfully for State Assembly on the Democratic ticket), and thus vexed by the question of whether Young America could reconcile itself with the American Democracy, of which Calhoun had been chief architect, exponent, and symbol. Two years earlier, open conflict had broken out between northern and southern factions of the party when a renegade group of New York Democrats called “Barnburners,” to whom Melville referred in Mardi as a “violently agitated” and “clamorous crowd,” bolted over the slavery issue, helping to give the White House to the Whigs under their war hero candidate, Zack Taylor. By the early 1850s, once fervent Democrats were referring to their party as “the so-called democratic party,” which “years of ardent contest have nursed … into hatreds [that] partake of the virulence of the odium Theologicum.”

  Melville was aware that the Whigs, despite their electoral victory in 1848, were also coming apart. Their longtime leader in the South, Henry Clay, known as “the Great Conciliator,” was still vital and canny enough to help secure the 1850 compromise but clearly was approaching the end of his career. In the North, the party was splitting between “Cotton Whigs” friendly to the South and “Conscience Whigs” appalled at the nomination of the slaveowning Taylor and increasingly uneasy about making common cause with any defender of slavery. In short, both parties in the two-party system were disintegrating, in what many Americans feared was a preview of what was about to happen to the nation.

  As the American political system went to pieces before his eyes, Melville saw in Calhoun one model for his haunted captain; but more than that, he turned the Pequod into a sort of Democratic Party death convention—a ship of political fools sailing headlong for disaster. To the metaphysics, formal experiments, and maritime realism of Moby-Dick he added a layer of political satire: when Peleg and Bildad set up a wigwam on deck for the purpose of signing up new recruits, Melville’s readers would have recognized their Indian-style tent as the symbol of the Democrats’ New York headquarters, Tammany Hall. When Ishmael calls Bildad “an incorrigible old hunks,” he was identifying him as a member of the “Hunker” faction (the pejorative name given by Barnburners to their old-guard opponents). And when the wood of Ahab’s harpoon is said to be “hickory, with the bark still investing it,” Melville’s New York friends would have thought of the ceremonial hickory pole held aloft by party stalwarts at political parades, the symbol of continuity from Andrew Jackson (“Old Hickory”) to James K. Polk (“Young Hickory”). By deploying these freighted political symbols, Melville introduced into Moby-Dick a critique of the expansionist policy of the American Democracy—a party still held in the death grip of Calhoun, and still, despite its internal dissensions and Taylor’s victory, the most powerful organized political force in the nation.

  As they splintered along the same sectional and ideological divide, the Whigs, too, found a place in the political allegory of Moby-Dick. When Father Mapple praises the man who “destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges,” he sounded like the increasingly vociferous critics of Webster and Shaw, who, having come out in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law, were being denounced as trimmers by anti-slavery members of their own party. And when Mapple celebrates the “top-gallant delight” felt by any man “who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven,” he was echoing New York’s Whig senator William H. Seward, who had delivered a notorious speech in that oratorical March of 1850 urging opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law to follow the “higher law” of God and conscience and to refuse to sell out to the Slave Power.

  In spite of its author’s relative political aloofness, Moby-Dick became a book about politics—or at least a book that lent itself to political interpretation. Writing in 1856, the black abolitionist James McCune Smith thought he recognized in Mr. Stubb the “boatsteerer” of the Whig Party, Horace Greeley. A century later, one resourceful scholar reached deep into, if not to the bottom of, the political barrel and pulled out Massachusetts Whig Robert C. Winthrop as a likely model for Mr. Starbuck. Even Bulkington has earned a place in the roster of contemporary political figures that Melville may have intended to include in Moby-Dick, having been plausibly identified as Thomas Hart Benton, the senator from Missouri and opponent of Calhoun who, when he was voted out of office in late 1850, took with him the last chance to stave off the rupture of the Democratic Party. Since Melville left no glossary, all such alignments between actual historical figures and their fictional counterparts in Moby-Dick are disputable; but it is beyond dispute that as he reworked his story of the fatal hunt, he was increasingly preoccupied by the several “Senators and Judges” who were leading the nation toward civil war.

  And what of the man at the helm? Ahab has proven to be a prophetic mirror in which every generation of new readers has seen reflected the political demagogues of its own times—as when, in the 1940s, Ahab seemed to predict Adolf Hitler’s monomaniacal rantings against the Jews, or, more recently, he is invoked as anticipating George W. Bush’s obsession with hunting down first Osama bin Laden, then Saddam Hussein. Some readers who prefer to study Melville in relation to his own times have seen in Ahab a portrait of Calhoun, while others see his opposite, William Lloyd Garrison, who had led a raucous anti-slavery convention in New York just before Melville left town. As one scholar puts it, Ahab was Melville’s “distortion of the ‘political Messiah’ ” that he had celebrated in White-Jacket. He was, in other words, the American dreamer gone mad.

  However historically or prophetically one prefers to read him, Ahab is a brilliant personification of the very essence of fanaticism, and therefore too grand a conception to be confined to any one exemplar of it. Like the whale itself, he was “comprehensive, combining, and subtle,” a composite, as Richard Chase has written, of “many myths and many men”—some drawn from the ominous present or recent past, others from fiction (Shakespeare’s Lear, Milton’s Satan) and painting (Melville may have seen John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, which depicted a shark attack that left a young boy with one leg so mangled that it had to be amputated), still others from further back in history, including, notably, Napoleon, that “man of stone and iron,” as Emerson described him in 1850 (in an essay that Melville likely read), “pitiless … not embarrassed by any scruples,” who, “in the fury of assault … no more spared himself” and “went to the edge of his possibility.”†

  5.

  Whoever was his instigating original, Ahab was simultaneously the most inward of Melville’s “isolatoes” and a man of “out-reaching comprehensiveness.” His presence transforms everyone and everything around him. Such an “original character,” Melville was l
ater to write in The Confidence-Man, “… is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things.”

  The new beginning that Ahab effects aboard the Pequod is to turn what had been scheduled as just another business trip into a voyage of personal vengeance. Before shoving off in the pilot’s boat, Bildad, co-owner of the Pequod, had urged the mates to “be careful in the hunt” and warned the harpooneers not to “stave the boats needlessly,” since “good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent, within the year.” But there is nothing careful about Ahab’s hunt. His voyage is not about bringing back whale oil, but about revenge against the great white whale “athirst for human blood” that, years before, had wrecked his boat and nearly killed him:

  His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; [Ahab], seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale.… And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.

  For this part of the story, too, Melville had in mind actual historical events. In 1820, while cruising south of the equator near the Galapagos Islands under the command of Captain George Pollard, the Nantucket whaleship Essex was busy killing amid a shoal of whales when a large sperm whale, with every appearance of intent, swam directly at the vessel and struck it with such force that it opened a gash in the hull. The bilge pumps could not keep up with the rising water, and while preparations were being made to abandon ship, the whale struck again. This horror story (subsequent events were even more horrible, as the starving survivors resorted to murder and cannibalism) was well known among seafaring men and, with the publication in 1821 of a narrative by the second mate of the Essex, Owen Chase, it became known to the general public. Melville first learned about the fate of the Essex while aboard the Acushnet in 1841. Ten years later, while writing Moby-Dick, he annotated his own copy of Chase’s narrative, calling it a “wondrous story” that, when he first heard it “upon the landless sea & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck,” had “had a surprising effect upon me.”