The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (119 page)

The story of whaling, his only untapped resource, was rich in weird and legendary possibilities. On his return from England Melville began writing, and by May 1, 1850, he told his friend Richard Henry Dana that he was halfway through. By the middle of the next year he was calling it
The Whale
(eventually the title of the English edition), and after seventeen months of writing off and on he had finished the book. This seems a short time for a long, intensely researched, and fact-packed work. But it was long enough to admit new influences that shaped
Moby Dick
and put it in a different class from his earlier books. These two influences were Hawthorne and Shakespeare.

In the summer of 1850 Melville with his wife and baby went to stay with
the widow of his uncle Thomas who was then running a summer hotel in their large house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Liking the place and its long family associations, he bought a neighboring house with money advanced by Judge Shaw. There he and his numerous family lived for the next thirteen years. They called it Arrow Head after the Indian relics they had found. And they enjoyed the rural social life of picnics, costume parties, and overnight excursions to mountain summits. The Berkshire Hills, at the time a favorite resort of Henry Ward Beecher, Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, Audubon, and lesser celebrities, pretentiously boasted of being “a jungle of literary lions.” Hawthorne had recently moved to Lenox. A romanticized contemporary account of a picnic outing on August 5, 1850, by a writer who knew both Hawthorne and Melville described the sparking of their sudden intimacy. “One day it chanced that when they were out on a picnic excursion, the two were compelled by a thundershower to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much of each other’s character, and found that they held so much of thought, feeling and opinion in common that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable.” Later Hawthorne, in his
Wonder Book
would recall his meetings with “Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his ‘White Whale,’ while the gigantic shadow of Greylock looms upon him from his study window.”

The shadow of Hawthorne himself would loom across Melville as he wrote his book. And a dark shadow it was. When they first met, Melville hardly knew Hawthorne’s writings, but he now began to read them. About the time of the famous picnic, Melville wrote a long and extravagantly favorable review of Hawthorne’s
Moses from an old Manse
for Duyckinck’s
Literary World
(August 17, 24, 1850). He praised Hawthorne as
the
great American author whose works “should be sold by the hundred-thousand, and read by the million; and admired by every one who is capable of Admiration.” And he explained. “Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne … that so fixes and fascinates me.”

This blackness, too, showed Hawthorne’s kinship with Shakespeare. Melville would “not say that Nathaniel of Salem is a greater than William of Avon, or as great. But the difference between the two is by no means
immeasurable. Not a great deal more, and Nathaniel were verily William.” For the profundity of Shakespeare, too, came from this “mystical blackness” seen in “the dark Characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago.”

The nation, inspired by Emerson and his disciples, was sailing a continent-sea of optimism. In April 1851 Melville gives us a clue to the grand antithesis he sensed in Hawthorne. “He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say
yes
. For all men who say
yes
lie; and all men who say
no
,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego.”

Never before had the troubled self found such a grand oceanic scene or more heroic men and beasts for its struggles. Now, since Hawthorne had shown that American writers could be Shakespearean, Melville would make his own try. Before and during the writing of
Moby Dick
he had been “hypnotized” by reading and rereading Shakespeare, especially
Lear
and
Hamlet
and
Timon of Athens
. Melville adored Shakespeare as “the profoundest of thinkers,” master of “the great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.” What he most revered was not “the great man of tragedy and comedy.… But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality:—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.… Tormented into desperation, Lear the frantic King tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth.”

The mark of Shakespeare on
Moby Dick
is plain, not only in borrowed phrases—the “tiger’s heart” and countless others—but in stage directions for chapters (“Enter Ahab: then all—Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him”), in the soliloquies (Ahab in the manner of Macbeth), and in subtler ways. The Epilogue announces, in Shakespearean style, “The drama’s done.” Some critics have found a structure like the five acts of an Elizabethan play, though others compare its design with the Books of the
Odyssey
or of
The Lusiads
. And the continual interlacing of the slow oceanic narrative with encyclopedic fragments leaves the reader free to find his own pattern.

Melville had industriously researched his subject. “I have swam through libraries,” he recalled, but he also bought books, and finally, in addition to his own experience, he relied on a few of the best-known works in English on whales, whaling, and whaling voyages. He was confident enough of the dramatic appeal of his book to interrupt the story with minitreatises on taxonomic cetology, on the form and dimensions of the whale’s head, tail, and skeleton, on its habits, history, legends, and fossils, along with the craft and technology of harpooners, blacksmiths, and carpenters, and facts on instruments of navigation, the quadrant, compass, the long and line.

He appears to have been aware, too, that the developing science of
psychology was providing a new vocabulary for describing the kind of madness he would depict in Ahab. The pioneer British psychiatrist James C. Prichard (1786–1848) in 1833 introduced into English “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.” Chief Justice Shaw, Melville’s father-in-law-to-be had handed down an opinion in 1844 defining monomania as cases where “the conduct may be in many respects regular, the mind acute” and at the same time there may be insane delusions.… The mind broods over
one idea
and cannot be reasoned out of it.” Melville had used “monomania” in
Mardi
, and in
Moby Dick
he would describe Ahab’s “final monomania.” All of this had helped him set the stage for the manic quest and the climactic encounter with the White Whale.

The book was published in London in October 1851 and the next month in America. Dedicated to Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius,” it was neither a commercial nor a critical success. Because he still owed Harper’s, his New York publisher, seven hundred dollars of unearned advances on his earlier books in April 1851, they had refused to give him a new advance on this one. He was pinched for money, but managed to borrow two thousand dollars from a friend. “Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne in June, “and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.… What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the
other
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”

The book that so dissatisfied Melville and did not charm his contemporaries would have an uncanny appeal to generations in the next century. That appeal came not only from his resonant Shakespearean eloquence and the grandeur of the adventure, but also from the book’s rough-hewn structure and its challenging ambiguity. Melville sensed this, as he concluded one of his longest—and surely his most “systematic”—chapters on cetology.

Melville’s grand sea metaphor—like the exotic settings of
Hamlet, Macbeth
, and
Lear
—was wonderfully suited to allow each future reader to make his own copestone. Three quarters of a century would pass before the common reader discovered this opportunity. Had the whale not been a whale—so
legendary and biblical a beast for the reading public—it might not have been so easy to invent one’s own versions of the book.

Or had Ahab been depicted with more human nuance, in the manner of the realistic novel, Ahab might have been a less apt vehicle for our varied hopes and fears. There was ambiguity, also, in the very name of “Ahab.” In history Ahab, the seventh king of Israel (c.875–853
B.C.
), married Jezebel and, without abandoning Yahweh himself, allowed her idolatrous religion of the Phoenician Baal to be practiced in Israel and encouraged her idolatrous cult. Then in the contest that Elijah arranged between the prophets of Baal and those of Yahweh (I Kings 18:19–46) Yahweh was established as “God in Israel.” And Ahab, a dubious champion in the historic battle between God and the religion of idols, remained a symbol of all our inner uncertainties.

Moby Dick
, it has often been observed, is not really a novel, for it lacks the development and conflict of characters. From the opening sentence the focus is on the troubled self:

There are no women in the story. Despite its abundance of facts, it is not realistic fiction but a poetic or mythic epic. Though Melville had written documentary polemics on the miseries of seamen and the tyranny of their officers, we do not see this in
Moby Dick
, which tells of not one flogging. Qualities that prevent it from being a modern realistic novel actually suit it to be a versatile epic vehicle for the modern self in quest of itself. The name of Ishmael, which he has taken, recalls the not entirely legitimate son of Abraham by an Egyptian concubine, who would be hailed by Muslims as an ancestor of Mohammed and be buried in the Kaaba in Mecca.

The story has a Homeric simplicity—the relentless monomaniac sea captain seeking revenge against a monster. Captain Ahab, who stalks the deck of the
Pequod
with an ivory leg in place of the one that the White Whale has taken from him, never deviates from his one purpose. We know
almost nothing of him except the one earlier consuming misadventure. The cetology and vivid specifics of whales and whaling in the first three quarters of the 135 short chapters of the long book are interrupted only by occasional encounters with passing vessels, to whom Ahab’s one question is “Hast thou seen the White Whale?” Episodes of Ahab’s impatience and rage show him shattering the quadrant that has refused to take him to his quarry, destroying his trusty but unproductive compass, and turning to dead reckoning with log and line. But he also rashly loses the rudimentary log and line needed for calculating speed and position. And there are omens: the cabin boy, Pip, who goes mad after an ordeal afloat alone, the mysterious Saint Elmo’s light that transforms the three masts into incandescent candles. All leading to three climactic days of encounter and chase of the White Whale.

The few personalities described, apart from Ishmael’s self-description, are caricatures: the three mates—prudent and cautious Starbuck, carefree Stubb, obtuse but professional Flask; and the exotic harpooners—Polynesian Queequeg, American Indian Tashtego, and African Daggoo. All play their roles as allegories.

But who really is Ahab? He emerges slowly at the beginning and only occasionally later. Before he appears we are warned of that man who “makes one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.… For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” To Captain Peleg, who knew him, “He’s a grand, ungodly, godlike man.” An earlier whaling encounter gave Ahab reason enough for his morbidness: