Melville, Hawthorne recognized, was a man condemned to landlessness. There was no harbor for Melville, no refuge from the storm. For one brief year, with Hawthorne’s friendship serving as his insular Tahiti, Melville dove down deeper than even Pip and came up with Moby-Dick. But instead of fame (at least in his own lifetime), Moby-Dick brought only obscurity. Instead of going down in a blaze of glory like Ahab, Melville went about his quiet, unassuming way like Captain Pollard.
No one knew it then, but Melville had created the literary equivalent of Queequeg’s coffin life buoy: a book that vanishes into the depths only to explode to the surface just in the nick of time. What Moby-Dick needed, it turned out, was space— the distance required for its themes and images to resonate unfettered by the turmoil and passions that had inspired them. Once free of its own historical moment, Moby-Dick became the seemingly timeless source of meaning that it is today.
But all that was in the distant future. In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Melville, his wife Lizzie, and their four children moved from the Berkshires back to New York City, where Melville worked as a customs inspector for close to two decades. After years of marital unhappiness, he and Lizzie appear to have reached an understanding, and in the 1880s they came into an inheritance. Without a need to work, Melville settled into his dark, book-lined room on Twenty-sixth Street in New York City and, with visits from his granddaughters serving as his chief distraction, continued his lifetime habit of reading and writing. When he died in 1891 at the age of seventy-two, he had completed his second masterpiece, Billy Budd.
After Melville’s death, his family found a possible clue as to how he managed to survive the forty-year backwash left by the creation of Moby-Dick and, indeed, how he came to write that novel in the first place. Atop a table piled high with papers was a portable writing desk. Taped inside the desk, which had no bottom, was a piece of paper with a motto printed on it: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”
The phrase comes from the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, but what was its relevance to Melville? Late in life he wrote to his brother-in-law, “[A]t my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless—well, finish the sentence for yourself.” I propose that Melville would have finished that sentence with the words taped inside his writing desk.
In the end, Melville had found a way back to the view espoused by Ishmael in Moby-Dick: “Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND READINGS
Many thanks to Kevin Doughten at Viking for being the first to ask the question that inspired me to write this book and that became its title. Thanks also to Wendy Wolf and Stuart Krichevsky for their input. I’d also like to thank the friends and family members who read and commented on the manuscript: Peter Gow, Susan Beegel, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Stuart Frank, Michael Hill, Richard Duncan, Thomas and Marianne Philbrick, and Melissa Philbrick. Thanks to Francesca Belanger for the wonderful design, to Jim Tierney for the cover, and to Bruce Giffords and Maggie Riggs for their help as well.
Below is a list of the works I consulted while writing this book. I am especially indebted to Andrew Delbanco’s biography and its insights into the historical and political times in which Melville wrote. I was also deeply influenced by two Melville-related premieres: that of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s brilliant opera Moby-Dick in Dallas, Texas, in late April 2010, and, a week and a half later, that of Ric Burns’s equally distinguished film Into the Deep on PBS’s American Experience.
Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Heflin, Wilson. Herman Melville’s Whaling Years. Edited by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas Farel Heffernan. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.
Hoare, Philip. The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea. New York: Ecco, 2010.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923; New York: Viking, 1964.
Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
Melville, Herman. Correspondence. Edited by Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the New-berry Library, 1993.
———. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” In The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, et al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the New-berry Library, 1987.
———. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. 1851; New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Metcalf, Eleanor Melville. Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953.
Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael. 1947; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. “At Sea in the Tide Pool: The Whaling Town and America in Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent and Travels with Charley.” In Steinbeck and the Environment . Edited by Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney Jr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.
———. “ ‘ Every Wave Is a Fortune’: Nantucket Island and the Making of an American Icon.” New England Quarterly, September 1993.
———. Foreword to Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
———. “Hawthorne, Maria Mitchell, and Melville’s ‘After the Pleasure Party.’ ” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 37, no. 4 (1991).
———. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. New York: Viking, 2000.
———. “A Window on the Prey: The Hunter Sees a Human Face in Hemingway’s ‘After the Storm’ and Melville’s ‘The Grand Armada.’ ” Hemingway Review (Fall 1994).
ALSO BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK
The Last Stand
Mayflower
Sea of Glory
In the Heart of the Sea
Away Off Shore
Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick?
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