Chapter 3

Some time in 1850, towards the close of summer, Herman Melville must have begun to write Moby-Dick; for the book, which is a long one, was finished in the summer of 1851. In back of the actual writing went a considerable amount of preparation; and one does not know how long before the theme of the book had begun to root itself in Melville’s mind. The work itself shows that he had reached out for every book on whaling he could lay hands on, practically every book that had been written, and, in addition, he had made note of every quotation and allusion to the whale he had met in his wide miscellaneous reading. Scholarship as well as personal experience went into this writing: one of the best modern writers upon whaling, Frank Bullen, the author of the Cruise of the Cachalot, confesses he would never have gone further with his own work had he known about the wealth of information and detail that went into Moby-Dick before he set out. Did Melville consciously save the greatest of his ocean experiences for his maturity? Did he wait for Leviathan to develop in his soul? Did he begin another White-Jacket or Typee, and become conscious, in the act of writing, of this deepening of his insight, this integration of his powers, and of the vast fable that was now at his command?

One cannot even make a reasonable conjecture about the matter. All one knows are the actual conditions under which Moby-Dick was written, the reactions of the writing itself upon Melville, and its final result—the story of the White Whale.

Conceive of Melville in his new home, as he embarks upon the most extensive of his spiritual voyages. The furniture has been removed to his new house, the beds put up, the heavier articles shifted and re-shifted, and, by a month’s work outdoors, the woodpile has grown and the hay been stowed into the hayloft. For the moment, all his relations are well poised: Barney is through the period of teething: Elizabeth has help in her housework and the first tension of removal is over; Mr. Duyckinck occasionally, with the most tactful sort of generosity, sends up a case of champagne in a wicker cradle or a fine bundle of cigars, or he suggests a review to be written. He even tries to nourish Melville’s reputation by abetting some one who is writing about him in the papers and who wishes to publish a photograph of the famous author: here alone Melville’s pride rebuffs this rudimentary effort at an art which has become a loathsome sore in our own time: he refuses his picture. “The fact is,” he explains, “almost everybody is having his ‘mug’ engraved nowadays, so that this test of distinction is getting to be reversed; and therefore, to see one’s ‘mug’ in a magazine is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody.... I respectfully decline to be oblivionated....” But when a journeyman painter made the rounds of the neighbourhood Melville sat for him—and the portrait, which slightly resembles Allan’s, remains a just punishment for his vanity.

Below the edge of Melville’s horizon is this new friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, as he raises his eyes from the desk in his second-story chamber and looks through the single small window that faces the north, he sees the wide valley sweeping across to successive ridges of hills, dominated by Mt. Greylock—otherwise called, from the double hump in the ridge, Saddleback. The red clover that incarnadined the summer fields is gone; or rather, its colour has mounted to the crown of the landscape; the maples are a still more glorious red. The spirits caper in the autumn air; there are glowing Byzantine days when the heavens reflect the hues of the October apples, when the sky is so ripe and ruddy it seems there must be harvest home for the angels and that Charles’ Wain is heaped as high as Saddleback with autumn sheaves. The sunrises and the sunsets glow side by side in the woods, and momentarily moult in the falling leaves. Neither the Rhine nor the Moselle produces anything as heady as the landscape of the Berkshires in autumn. Now is the time to begin. When Melville writes his first words, “Call me Ishmael,” he is writing out of his health and ecstasy: he himself is not an outcast, nor is his spirit drooping with the “hypos”: his first touch is a black one because his canvas demands it. He is about to build up a vast pyramid of contrasts, between the whiteness of external evil and the blackness of man’s inner doom; and he faces this drama with his full powers.

The apples are gathered; the autumn ploughing is done; Melville is at work. The mood of creation is upon him: he is ready not for one book but for fifty books: if Mr. Duyckinck would only send him about fifty fast-writing youths with an easy style, not averse to polishing their letters, he might set them all to work. “It is not so much the paucity, as the superabundance of material that seems to incapacitate modern authors,” he had written that summer. In this autumn ferment, Melville has scarcely enough time to think about his future books separately; in lieu of using fifty youths, he must pack as much as possible into one book. Melville scarcely breaks his way through a chapter or two before he realizes that he has found his theme; and the only question is how to quarry this marble, how to get it out. “Youth,” Melville said in another place, “must wholly quit, then, the quarry for a while; and not only go forth and get tools to use in the quarry, but must go and thoroughly discover architecture. Now the quarry discoverer is long before the stone-cutter; and the stone-cutter is long before the architect; and the architect is long before the temple; for the temple is the crown of the world.” His apprenticeship is at last definitely over: he is at work on the temple itself—such a temple as Dante, Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe, Browne, might each in his way have conceived and designed.

The days go by; the leaves fall; the candlelight comes early; the mice creep into the cupboard and make nests for themselves in the woodpile; the wide meadows become as bleak as a grey sea. In this most inland scene, with only the Housatonic to connect him with the watery world, Melville still dreams of the sea: his thought centres on the sea, its creatures, its boats, its fish, its men, its deeper monsters. Oh! for a dash of salt spray! he cries; and as substitute he draws upon experience and memory for the savour. The days grow cold. Snow hems in the roof and chimney of Arrowhead. Melville has a sea-feeling all the more: when he looks out of his little window on rising, he feels as if he were looking out of his port-hole in the midst of the Atlantic: his room seems a ship’s cabin, and at nights, when he wakes up and hears the wind shrieking, he can almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and he had better go up on the roof and rig in the chimney. On a winter morning he rises at eight, helps his horse to his hay and the cow to her pumpkin, stands around to take in the grateful complacency of the cow, she moves her jaws so mildly and with such sanctity; then, with his own breakfast over, he goes to his workroom and lights the fire, runs rapidly through the MS. and starts to work. At half past two a knock comes. He does not answer. Again the knock and again: till he rises from his writing, almost mechanically, and resumes the external round: feed for the horse and cow: then dinner: then he rigs up his sleigh and goes off to the village for the mail, for supplies, for a little friendly chaffer perhaps round the tavern bar. So one day follows another on the surface; but within, there is change and tumult: Melville, like Ahab, finds a creature tearing at his vitals, and that creature the thing he has created.

“How then with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously, my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand. Friends! hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with the outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty volume you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written upon the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

Such intensity of effort, so many hours of writing and reading, are as exhausting as the direction of a battle: but there is no lying up in winter quarters, no delegation of responsibility: the writer does not live outside his book: the world, the familiar, homely world, becomes a weak picture, and his imagination is the body and blood of reality. Taking a book off the brain, Melville exclaims while in the midst of it, “is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel: you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—and even then the painting may not be worth the trouble.” Well, Moby-Dick is worth the trouble; the very writing of it becomes a powerful instrument in his own development: what absorbs so much of his time and life is not the book alone, “but the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting the book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for ... his own private shelf. That it is whose unfathomable cravings drunk his blood; the other only demands ink.”

Melville knows he must not let up on this work; he flogs himself to get his uttermost into it; the application ruins his eyesight. This small aperture and northern light are bad for his eyes: no matter: he writes with one eye closed and the other blinking. By December, in the evening, he is exhausted: he spends the aftermath of the day in a sort of physical trance: but already his mind is anticipating the developments of the next day, and he is up early, and goes back to his task.

Spring comes; but it is no spring for Melville. He will not even be bothered for dinner. Some days he sits at his desk till 4:30 without writing a word; in the spring twilight, when the catkins of the maples glow in the mild sunset and the bluebirds dart about the field like unfettered flowers, he at last comes out and creeps about like an owl. If Melville ploughs and plants, he does it mechanically; his heart is not in it; and he is not nourished by it. In the midst of his writing, his soul reaches a pitch of exaltation, as it does defiantly in a terrible gale, when the hand is firmly on the wheel, and the dangerous seas that wash the decks do not loosen the hold: the letters that he writes to Hawthorne then are prophetic, and deep, and full of proud mastery. In building up his vast symbol of the whale, he strips the universe down to his own ego; like Ahab himself, he says no to all the powers and dominions that lie beyond it. Does not Hawthorne do as much?

“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity,” he writes to Hawthorne, “which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by 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 unencumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity, with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego. Whereas, those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage and damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”

But the soft milky air of June gets the better of Melville’s humours: every breath of the warm earth, the spicy perfume of wild strawberries, the honeyed odour of the locust trees, the dank green fragrance of ferns, the sight of buttercups making the fields sunny even on dull days, or the daisies turning the high grass into the whitish green colour of the ocean when the waves disperse on the beach, the warm feeling of animal contentment that the sun itself pours into a man—all these things renewed his energies and revived his spirits. Melville relaxed and refreshed himself in the sunlight, building an addition to the house, and ploughing and sowing, and watching the green shoots rise. He does not doubt the reality of his black moments: for, as he tells Hawthorne, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious wilderness of the universe, where he and Hawthorne are outposts, there are savage Indians as well as mosquitoes; still, one does not go on fighting them forever. As for the crotchety and overdoleful chimeras, “the like of you and me, and some others, forming a chain of God’s outposts around the world, must be content to encounter now and then, and fight them as best we can.”

Melville goes down to New York to see the first part of Moby-Dick through the press; but the oppressive, humid days in that Babylonish brick-kiln, and the long delays of the printers, disgust him; he comes back to the country, and purposes to end the book, if possible, reclining on the grass, or watching the clouds play on a summer afternoon around old Greylock, from the newly built porch he has added to the north side of the house, where the view lies. The tail of Moby-Dick is not cooked yet; though the hell-fire in which the book was broiled might not unreasonably have charred it before this. Melville’s intention is sane enough, if only he had the leisure to cultivate the calm, grass-growing mood; but no: he must keep on patching and tinkering at his buildings: in July the hay waits for no author to finish his chapter: there are a hundred chores to keep him away from his book, still more from deep questions about the universe and its meaning and evil and truth and all those aspects of reality that need a Hawthorne for perfect communication. There is no help for it; he must go back to New York to finish the book in a third-story room, where there is no cow to milk, no horse to feed, no sister or wife or mother to be a little hurt or concerned by his inattentiveness or moodiness.

These last straining days in New York were not unlike, one might guess, those that Pierre experienced: the book that was begun in health and exuberance in the keen, riotous air of October in the Berkshires was finished in exacerbations and depression and desolation in the humid dog days of a dirty, unkempt city, days of unrelieved sunlight, followed by afternoon thunderstorms that leave the air even heavier than before, the pavements steaming, the waves of warm, unpleasant air, carrying slight odours of putrefaction, wafted upward into even the third story.

“In the earlier progress of the book, he had found some relief in making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfares of the city; and so the utter desolation of his soul might feel itself more intensely against the bodies of the hurrying thousands. Then he began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights than pleasant ones; for then the great thoroughfares were less thronged, and the innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat like schooners’ broad sails in a gale, and the shutters banged like lashed bulwarks; and the slates fell hurtling like displaced ship’s blocks from aloft. Stemming such tempers through the deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark triumphant joy; that while others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he alone defied the storm-admiral, whose most vindictive pelting of hailstones—striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body—melted into soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled off him. By-and-by, of such howling, pelting nights, he began to bend his steps down the narrow side streets, in quest of the more secluded and mysterious taprooms. There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all dripping in a chair, ordering his half pint of ale before him, and drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts from bitterest midnights. But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to him.”

“Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne, “and the malicious devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is upon me.—I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. 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.... But I was talking about the ‘whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he was in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going to take him up by his jaw, however, before long and finish him up in some fashion or another. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter. What reputation H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity as the man who lived among the cannibals. When I speak of posterity in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost.... I shall go down to them in all likelihood.... I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now. My development has all been within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids which, after being three thousand years a seed, and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the utmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”

If it was in a mood of confidence and creative delight that he sounded his depths in Moby-Dick, it was in this other mood, chastened, almost fearful, that his stripped ego rose to the surface after this extreme plunge. He had looked into the abyss: he was dizzy, terrified, appalled. His letters to Hawthorne have this mingled sense of awe and exaltation: they are the mood of the last part of Moby-Dick. Melville’s notes to Mr. Duyckinck are still jocular and robust; they might be the words of the imperturbable Stubb or the jaunty Flask: but that is because Melville gave Mr. Duyckinck only a part of himself, the polite, free-and-easy, effervescent side, meant for appreciative eating and solicitous drinking, the side he doubtless turned to his family and housemates, when weariness did not bury him from their sight—the last people who could share or understand his quest, his insight, his triumph. There is no question of wearing a mask: both sides of Melville are authentic, but the deeper part of him, which would under happier circumstances have served as ballast and made him face the waves more steadily, claimed too much of his inner space: he lost buoyancy: the water crept above the waterline: the ship rode dangerously. Now, however, we are speaking of the consequences of Melville’s writing Moby-Dick. The book itself was published towards the end of 1851 by Bentley, in England, and a little later in the same year by Harper’s in New York.

Whether it was an angel or a devil that Melville had struggled with this long year, he had wrestled magnificently, and the book was done. Before we go further with Melville’s life, we must discuss this great fragment of it—the most important of Melville’s books, and surely one of the most important books of the century.

CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK

Moby-Dick is a story of the sea, and the sea is life, “whose waters of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears.” Moby-Dick is the story of the eternal Narcissus in man, gazing into all rivers and oceans to grasp the unfathomable phantom of life—perishing in the illusive waters. Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale and a presentation of the demonic energies in the universe that harass and frustrate and extinguish the spirit of man. We must gather our own strength together if we are to penetrate Moby-Dick: no other fable, except perhaps Dante’s, demands that we open so many doors and turn so many secret keys; for, finally, Moby-Dick is a labyrinth, and that labyrinth is the universe.

Call me Ishmael, says the teller of the story. Ishmael is lured to a whaling voyage by the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself and of the forbidden seas in which he rolls his inland bulk: when Ishmael grows grim around the mouth and feels damp, drizzly November in his soul, he goes to sea. With his carpet-bag he sets out for New Bedford, and takes refuge in the shaggy comfort of Spouter Inn. His companion and bedfellow in the crowded inn is another Ishmael, a cannibal named Queequeg, who brings into the atmosphere of chowders and tarpaulins a wild odour from another continent of the soul. His harpoon, his idol, his sharp filed teeth, the human head he carries around in a bag, for sale, are for Ishmael hints of that horror in the universe which he is quick to perceive and be social with, since it is well to be on friendly terms with the inmates of the place one lodges in.

When Ishmael takes refuge from the driving sleet and mist, on a Sunday morning, in the Whalemen’s Chapel, he finds reminders of luckless voyages on the memorial tablets around the hall, and Father Mapple, who had been a sailor and harpooner in his youth, delivers a sermon on Jonah! What a preacher, and what a sermon! After ascending to the pulpit by a rope ladder, hand over hand, Father Mapple drags the ladder up after him, to signify his spiritual withdrawal from all outward ties and connections; from that pulpit, shaped like a ship’s bow, he expounds the fable of Jonah, seeming, as he describes Jonah’s sea-storm, to be beaten by a storm himself, his deep chest heaving as with a ground-swell, his tossed arms like the warring elements at work, thunders rolling away from his swarthy brow and light leaping from his eye.

Father Mapple’s words and figures belong to the Bible; but their meaning comes from that bottomless ocean of truth where Moby-Dick plies back and forth. I must quote the words: one can give no proper hint of this work, even in its smallest detail, without quoting the language through which it is expressed: and this is particularly true of Father Mapple’s noble tongue.

“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is sure delight; and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the maintruck 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 inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world goes down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter for 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 patriot to heaven. Delight is to him whom all the waves and 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?”

Humbly participating in Queequeg’s heathenish rites, sharing confidences with him, Ishmael pledges friendship with the cannibal: it is the first and almost the last touch of affection in the whole story: a compact between two strays and outcasts! In Heaven, and presumably in Hell, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage; nor are there all those little mollifications, an eloquent meal or a June garden, which belong to the middle portion of life that has long been domesticated: once Moby-Dick gets under way, the fable itself belongs to Heaven and Hell—all its naturalism, all its accurate detail, are polarized between these two extremes of being, so that everything which would relieve men’s exasperation or take the edge off their lonely delight, disappears, as the land disappears beyond the horizon’s edge. The reason for this is not obscure. In terms of Heaven and Hell this comfortable, understandable, tolerable middle portion of existence—that which we agree to call civilized—is the realm of complete illusion: just as, in terms of immediate animal existence, Heaven and Hell are illusions, and reality belongs to the realm of digestion, tropism, reflex action, muscular movement, tactile and visual adjustments. Melville, as we shall see, comprehended both aspects of existence: but he projected them both on the plane of eternity: domestic life and all it implies is seen through reversed glasses.

On the boat that takes Queequeg and Ishmael to Nantucket, Queequeg performs a daring rescue in the water. The man he brings up is a bumpkin whom he had punished just a little while before for mimicking him: the punishment and the rescue are performed with the indifferent magnanimity of a soft breeze following a cold wreck of tornado. There is the key in which the whole story is set. If we forget it, we shall be disappointed at not finding some continued development of these separate personalities, some further proofs of their friendship and affection. But on the plane of Moby-Dick friendship is a small thing, and heroism a small one, too: the hero is not Ishmael who tells the story, nor Queequeg, who is one of the crew, nor even Captain Ahab who commands the Pequod, on which the two finally embark at Nantucket: the central figure is the whale, and the whale stands for the universe.

The mystery of Captain Ahab and the voyage lies heavy before the sails are set or the anchor lifted. In the dawn, when Ishmael goes aboard, he dimly sees through the mist four or five figures running toward the ship, who completely disappear by the time he gains the decks: the mystery is more vexing because of a cracked old greybeard on the wharf who mutters dreadful hints about Ahab and his voyage, not enough to detain Ishmael, but enough to make him uncomfortable. With a last blessing of the owners, the ship sets out on Christmas Day. The captain remains inviolate in his cabin; and with the crew giving three heavy-hearted cheers, the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.”

Exit the dry, tight, comfortable land: enter wind and weather and sea and whale. We leave behind the landlord of the Spouter Inn and Mrs. Hosea and the old owners, with their humorous mixture of the Bible and worldly stratagem, and Charity, Captain Bildad’s sister, who places a choice copy of Watts’ hymns in each seaman’s berth: these genre pictures in the manner of Teniers, with a dash of Hogarth or Rowlandson, belong to the land and its ways, little ways. Deliberately, Melville widens the frame of his canvas, and alters the plan of his design: magnifying every figure into its ideal proportions. He is about to picture this “mortally intolerable truth; that all deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of the sea; while the wild winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.... Better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety.”

Safety we leave behind: safety and the measures of daily life. The sea is dangerous: the horizon has no bounds: and the fathom-line can never reach the bottom, once land is far astern.