1: The Arion Press edition of Moby-Dick was as monumental as the novel, “entirely set by hand” and “printed on dampened handmade paper by a platen letterpress,” the pages a gigantic 15 x 10 inches in size.1 Selling for $1000 (in 1979 dollars), only 265 were ever made. Andrew Hoyem, the project’s mastermind, hired Barry Moser to illustrate the book, but under strict instructions, strictly-enforced:
no dramatic or interpretive scenes would be imposed on the reader’s imagination…the text would be interspersed with informative depictions of subjects mentioned by Melville…New Bedford, whales and harpooning will be shown, but the Pequod, Ahab and Moby-Dick will be described only in Melville’s words.2
Moser came to resent these rules, but Hoyem was right. The question of why one should read a novel when a film version exists has an answer: the film, unlike the book, has to show how the characters look, and that can make a story worse—not because the actor doesn’t match every readers’ vision of a certain character, but because the story draws its power partly from the character being unvisualized, even unvisualizable. If any character is like that, it is Captain Ahab, whom Melville describes, variously, like this:
He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.
Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.
moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Draw that!
The most famous illustrated edition of Moby-Dick—Lakeside Press, 1930—illustrates the point. No matter how powerful Rockwell Kent’s Ahab, too much is lost giving him any definite visual character at all. The larger-than-life becomes merely life-sized:
2: John Bryant, in "Moby Dick as Revolution,"3 recounts the "legend”
that there are two Moby-Dicks. The first would be nothing more than 'a romance of adventure founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries' [as Melville put it to his British publisher].
Melville was mostly finished with this version when he met Nathaniel Hawthorne; a meeting, which, combined with Melville’s “absorption of Shakespeare,” allegedly
triggered a significant reorientation of Moby-Dick. [The original Moby-Dick was to be] a narrative of whaling fact ... [that] would involve Ishmael, Queequeg, and such strange characters as Peleg, Bildad, and Bulkington, but not Ahab. However, sometime after the August encounter with Hawthorne, Melville recast the book entirely to include the Shakespeareanized story of Ahab.
Melville tried to "splice" the new story in with the original, but
the seams still showed, [and] with a deadline to meet and family to feed, Melville surrendered the novel to his printer, telling Hawthorne that all his works were 'botches,' Moby-Dick included.
Regarding this “legend,” Bryant tells us that "there is little concrete evidence, and nothing at all conclusive, to show that Melville radically altered the structure or conception of his book," but even if there were, who cares? The genetic fallacy is a fallacy. Details of the book’s origins may matter to biographers, but if one is judging the story as a story, either it works or it doesn't, however it came to be.
But...the novel is indeed weird, and such speculations are understandable:
one cannot read Moby-Dick without recognizing that the book is structurally problematic. We begin with a comedy: anxious Ishmael and serene Queequeg bed down, get 'married,' and take off on a whaling adventure come-what-may. Then, Enter Ahab (Chapter 29): the captain stumps about, throws his pipe overboard, 'kicks' Stubb below decks; and suddenly the novel is a play with dialogue, speeches, asides, soliloquies, stage direction, and no Ishmael. But in Chapter 41, Ishmael returns transformed; no longer a central character, he becomes the novel's central consciousness and narrative voice, able to report an interior life in Ahab that he cannot possibly witness. Nevertheless, as his role as a character erodes, his life as a lyrical, poetic meditator upon whales and whaling transforms the novel.
If there seems no good aesthetic explanation for the yoking-together of these disparate elements, a genetic explanation might be sought. But only a pre-Modernist sensibility will think the novel's “problematic structure” could not have been intended, and must be an aesthetic flaw. To us post-Moderns, it should ring a bell:
The long, rhythmic lines, the prose poetry, the mixture of genres and multiplicity of voices, the experiments in point of view, symbolism, and psychology, the dramatization of interior life in Ishmael and Ahab, even the novel's tragicomicality—all prefigure the literary sensibilities of James, Joyce, and Faulkner.
3: D. H. Lawrence on Moby Dick: “Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it.”
4: In 1850 Herman Melville moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the western part of the state, far from the ocean and any paraphernalia of the whaling industry. The room where he wrote Moby-Dick sported a view of towering Mt Greylock, which he consulted for inspiration. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived nearby; they visited, and corresponded. Melville would dedicate his book to Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius.”
In Hawthorne Melville had found “the lone intellectual and creative friendship of his life.” Elizabeth Hardwick continues:4 he had found
another struck by the terror of the dark indifference of the universe…Melville’s emotions were not indiscreet; he was animated by a need for a mirror reflecting his own struggle to honor his vision, his experience in the battle witth words, images, paragraphs, structure, pages and pages. He would share the fate of being a writer in America, share his ragged banner: Failure is the test of greatness.
In school I learned to call Hawthorne and Melville the Anti-Transcendentalists. But if the Transcendentalists were many and had their communal farm and whatever, Hawthorne and Melville had only each other. (A more knowledgeable buddy of mine once said: transcendentalism was a movement. Anti-transcendentalism was just two guys.)
If Melville is the American Shakespeare, Shakespeare remains unknowably remote, while there is enough to learn about Melville to inspire love. Unlike the Bard, successful in his time, Melville wrote the Great American novel only to have it ignored and to himself be bankrupted out of the writing profession. The Hawthorne friendship is another sad episode:
[T]here was a disjunction of temperament, an inequality of fervor. Hawthorne is in every way a more plausible man and citizen than Melville, who has about him, even in settled married life, much of the renegade, the scars of knowing, choosing, the bleak underside of life. When Melville sailed on the Acushnet, Hawthorne was long out of Bowdoin College in Maine, where his classmates were Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, later President of the United States. Melville’s mates were drunken, venereal, negligent, brutalized wastrels one would hurry past on the street. … a younger, yearning writer [like Melville] was somehow intrusive, too much there [for Hawthorne to engage with too closely].
When I say there is “enough to learn” I do not say there is much:
The assembled family cannot have had any idea of this reluctant head of the household. Nor can the graduate students with their theses, the annotators, the eyes searching passages marked in his books, the critics, the biographers in long, long efforts and short ones. It must be said about Melville that he earned the mystery of his inner life.
Melville wrote this to Hawthorne in May 1851:
…If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert,—then, O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us,—when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity. Then shall songs be composed as when wars are over; humorous, comic songs,—”Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the world,” or, “Oh, when I toiled and sweated below,” or, “Oh, when I knocked and was knocked in the fight”—yes, let us look forward to such things. Let us swear that, though now we sweat, yet it is because of the dry heat which is indispensable to the nourishment of the vine which is to bear the grapes that are to give us the champagne hereafter….
See also Freaky poetical crypto-zoological musings.
Quotes from “A Note on the California Edition,” which appears in the University of California re-print of the Arion edition.
Hoyem quotation in Schultz, Unpainted to the Last, page 110.
This paper appears in the Cambridge Companion to Melville.
Elizabeth Hardwick, Herman Melville. The title of this essay is from Hardwick’s book.
❤️ anti transcendentalism was just two guys!