Why Read Moby-Dick?

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  26

  Ahab’s Last Stand

  Before we continue, I need to make something perfectly clear. The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I. He has a crooked jaw, a humped back, and a wiggle-waggle when he’s really moving fast. He is a thing of blubber, blood, muscle, and bone—a creation of the natural world that transcends any fiction. So forget about trying to figure out what the White Whale signifies. As Melville has already shown in chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” in which just about every member of the Pequod’s crew provides his own interpretation of what is stamped on the gold coin nailed to the mast, in the end a doubloon is just a doubloon. So don’t fall into the Ahab trap of seeing Moby Dick as a stand-in for some paltry human complaint. In the end he is just a huge, battle-scarred albino sperm whale, and that is more than enough.

  This is the fundamental reason we continue to read this or any other literary classic. It’s not the dazzling technique of the author; it’s his or her ability to deliver reality on the page.

  Which leads us to yet another blessing provided by Melville’s reengagement with the Essex narrative in the spring of 1851. In Chase’s unforgettable firsthand account, he told of what it was like to be aboard a ship that had become the target of a giant whale’s wrath. With Chase’s words fresh in his memory, Melville launched into a series of scenes that conveyed an unmatched sense of immediacy even as they nimbly gathered together the many strands of the novel’s narrative.

  In chapter 133, “The Chase—First Day,” Melville divides our introduction to Moby Dick into three parts. We first see him from a distance, moving leisurely across the surface of the sea as the Pequod’s whaleboats, led by Ahab, approach. “As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam.... A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale.... [N]ot Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.” This is Moby Dick as aesthetic object: a slithering snowhill projecting circles of glorious calm.

  Then the whale starts to dive, and we realize that there is more to this big white creature than at first met the eye. “But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.” And we wait. For an hour. The tension builds, and then in a scene that inverts even as it anticipates the black vortex that will soon consume the Pequod, Ahab stares into the endless watery blue and sees Moby Dick. Note the cinematic nature of how we are there with Ahab as he looks down into the aquamarine void: “[S]uddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.”

  Ahab somehow escapes the White Whale’s first attempt to capture the boat in his jaws, but not the second. Moby Dick rolls onto his back like an attacking shark and seizes the boat in his mouth “so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air.... The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s head.... In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the uttermost stern.”

  Fedallah may be sitting there like a diabolical Yoda, but not Ahab. “[T]hen it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.” In our age, we all love whales and wish them nothing but the best, but you’ve got to hand it to this castrated, one-legged, fifty-eight-year-old lapsed Quaker; he doesn’t mess around. Like Melville with his Whale, he has the audacity to take Moby Dick by the jaw. “As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.”

  Now that Ahab is in the water, Moby Dick sticks his head up into the air and starts revolving like a lighthouse beacon so that he can see what’s around him. (As Melville points out in a footnote, this is a common behavior among sperm whales. No matter how fantastic it may seem, everything in these last three chapters could have happened.) What Moby Dick sees, it turns out, is Ahab, who quickly finds himself at the center of a wild maelstrom of whale-induced foam. Luckily, the Pequod isn’t too far away. “Sail on the whale!—Drive him off!” Ahab shouts.

  The ship succeeds in pushing back Moby Dick, and Ahab is hauled into Stubb’s whaleboat, where he lies “all crushed in the bottom . . . like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants.” Instead of a man, Ahab is a piece of topography, a fractured continent echoing hurt and pain. “Far inland, nameless wails came from him,” Ishmael tells us, “as desolate sounds from out ravines.”

  On Day Two of the encounter, Moby Dick bashes Stubb’s and Flask’s whaleboats to bits before diving below the surface. In the swirling wake of the White Whale’s leave-taking, the second and third mates and their crews cling desperately to whatever is close at hand as “the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.” Thanks to Melville’s letter to Hawthorne, we know how personal this scene is to him. “My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,” Melville wrote. “I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the . . . nutmeg.” In the destruction of two whaleboats, Melville is also portraying the disintegration of his talent.

  Day Three dawns clear and fresh, and the narrative takes a breather. “What a lovely day again!” Ahab marvels. “[W]ere it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world.” He then lapses into a soliloquy that echoes Melville’s complaint to Hawthorne that he has rarely known the quiet circumstances required to produce proper creative writing. “Thinking is, or ought to be,” Ahab says, “a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.” Here Melville touches on that dynamic tension between active and passive engagement. If the author simply sits back like God and casts judgment, the verdict is inevitably less than persuasive. What makes for good writing is when the author somehow achieves perspective within the tumult of the moment, and this is exactly what Melville accomplishes in Moby-Dick.

  But back to Ahab, who happens to have good reason to be agitated. Amid the chaotic furor of the previous day’s action, Fedallah mysteriously disappeared. What makes this particularly ominous is that the harpooneer had prophesied that he must die and then reappear before Ahab could be killed. Instead of dwelling on this Macbeth-like riddle, Ahab soon finds himself rowing through a sea of ravenous sharks that, like the nutmeg grater, chew the blades of his oars into fragments.

  It all comes together like Fate’s well-oiled machine: Fedallah’s lifeless body appears among the snarl of harpoon lines crisscrossing the White Whale’s humped back; as Fedallah also predicted, Moby Dick then transforms the Pequod into a vast, American-built hearse when the whale bashes into her bow with his mammoth head. As the ship sinks into the sea, Ahab hurls his harpoon only to have the line wrap around his neck and whisk hi
m to his death in the wake of the creature he despised above all else. Lastly, there is the Wampanoag harpooneer Tashtego at the masthead, valiantly fulfilling Ahab’s order to nail his bloodred flag to the top of the spar even as a savage sky hawk attempts to steal away the flag. The sky hawk’s wing becomes caught between the masthead and Tashtego’s hammer (one wonders whether Melville came up with this astonishing conclusion as he hammered away at his house that spring) and is pulled down with the Pequod, “which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.”

  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.

  27

  Evil Art

  Melville 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.”

  28

  Neither Believer nor Infidel

  Poor 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 Haw
thorne 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.”