Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
For twenty years towards the end of his life, Herman Melville (1819–91), a resident of New York, was stuck in a desperately boring job working for the Custom Service. Every day, he caught a tram down Broadway and then walked along the docks on the Hudson River to reach an office (really a draughty shed) that he shared with other wage slaves, people whose tedious work was sometimes compensated by the bribes they were able to take from importers.
Melville does not seem to have resorted to such dishonesty. His duties involved making endless inventories of goods that had come to the country by sea, the small trophies of America’s expanding consumerism. Melville was required to check that correct duties had been paid. From the time he started, in 1866, he almost always wore the same clothes, turning up punctually each morning in a coat resembling that of a naval captain.
The scenario is a sad parody of the turbulent relationship with the sea and everything on it that Melville had explored in Moby-Dick, one of the most energetic and unruly novels ever written. Moby-Dick is a raw study of nature in conflict with itself: it is the story of the obsessive hunt by Ahab, captain of the Pequod, for revenge on the great white whale that on a previous voyage humiliated him and cost his leg. ‘It was Moby-Dick that dismasted me; Moby-Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now,’ cries Ahab to his crew in one of many passages that suggest that the ship and its captain have melded into one being. Ahab has a hole drilled in the deck so he can secure his wooden leg, a bit like a café umbrella, and not be dislodged by the elements. He is the spiritual godfather of the overblown despots who turned modern history into a bloodbath.
The novel is itself no stranger to blood: it is a relic of a time, before the invention of the harpoon cannon, when whaling was hand-to-hand combat, every bit as gruesome as a bayonet charge. This is not to suggest that whaling was later sanitised. Tim Winton (see Chapter 4) has written memorably of witnessing as a child the physical horror of whaling in the West Australian town of Albany as late as the 1960s.
Melville is enthralled by the monster of Ahab’s ego, a creature as frightening as the great white whale. Ahab seduces his crew with a mixture of fear, mysticism and intoxicating vision. But everything is focussed on him. He can’t cope with anything he can’t control. The whale is beyond his grasp. Ahab is not just the prototype of Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Imelda Marcos and a good number of other destructive individuals, far too many to list. He is also the prototype of everyone who can’t let go of an injury, no matter what agony that means inflicting on the world and others. It is curious that Ahab’s mate Starbuck has given his name to a coffee chain whose range of standardised products is more reminiscent of the custom house than the ocean. But Starbuck is the accessory of every tyrant: the helpful, efficient, compliant and presentable deputy.
Ahab’s name, like so much else in Moby-Dick, is biblical. It was the name of one of the kings of Israel, a man who could not stick to the law but had to make himself the big boss. The novel’s narrator, Ishmael, who is entranced into joining the crew, gets his name from the founder of the Arabic race, the illegitimate child who Abraham had with the slave girl Hagar. Melville invests enormous resources in the spiritual explorations of Moby-Dick. He does not do this as some kind of Christian apologist. On the contrary, Moby-Dick gets its colossal power largely from the ambivalence Melville felt about absolutely everything, including God, the world and the capacity of the rational mind. He constantly rocks back and forth between belief and despair: ‘Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.’
One of the few close friends Melville made was the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Shortly before Hawthorne died, in 1856, Melville visited him in England. One of the last entries Hawthorne made in his journal was about his old friend and sparring partner. He said that Melville:
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 from 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.
The phrase ‘he can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief’ describes many people. Melville is a wonderful resource for anyone unable to find a simple way to live in a complex world.
Melville married Lizzie Shaw and the couple had four children. We don’t get too many glimpses of this relationship but what we do see suggests that it was far from plain sailing. Anyone who has encountered the delicious homoeroticism of many parts of Moby-Dick, especially the scene in which Ishmael shares a room with the islander Queequeg, will feel a pang of bafflement on the couple’s behalf.
Moby-Dick is full of extraordinary detail about whales and ships and the ocean, material that could have been made to read like inventories for Melville’s last paid job. The novel is also febrile and obsessive. There is no shallow water in it and no safe harbour. It takes the reader to unsafe places in every sense of the word. It is a work whose sexuality, spirituality, psychology and philosophy are all untamed. Moby-Dick was published in 1851. By 1866, Melville was marooned on shore in the custom house, a place where the traffic of the ocean is reduced to lists of numbers, where every debt has a value in dollars and cents. What happened?
In some ways, Melville was ransacked by his own genius. He was never the same after Moby-Dick appeared. It was a book that tore the façade off every pretence in the world, including those Melville needed to preserve his own wellbeing. Nearly all the great works of literature deal with the smallness of being human. But Moby-Dick makes a banquet of this theme. It is at war with the human ego.
Melville had plenty of experience of being small. His early books, Typee and Omoo, were rollicking tales of the Pacific with an erotic tinge, and sold reasonably well. Moby-Dick was a bad career move. It did a belly flop, so much so that when most of the first edition was burnt in a warehouse fire at the publisher’s, there was not much fuss. Not any, in fact.
Melville’s personal life was likewise an experience of being a feather on an ocean. His father went bankrupt when Melville was a child, an event which always made Melville sceptical about the American myth of prosperity. His eldest son, Malcolm, a veteran of the Civil War who wore his uniform even in peacetime, committed suicide with a revolver and was discovered dead upstairs in the family home. His second son, Stanwix, died alone in a hotel room in San Francisco on the other side of the country. And on it went. The man trudging to work was like an Old Testament prophet. He had seen too much. He had dared to speak of what he saw. Those lists of imported goods were nothing like the language he knew was needed to account for reality.
He did labour unsuccessfully at poetry during the evenings after he came home from the office. Then, suddenly, after twenty years, the clouds cleared and Melville wrote Billy Budd, a late-life masterpiece not published until 1924. Billy Budd is again about tyranny and deceit. But it has an existential clarity. It still doesn’t trust the human ego, yet it charts a return to innocence. Like Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (see Chapter 26), it is a conscious act of letting go by an old writer who once had much to say but who now chooses to celebrate the possibilities of a final scene. Closure is a silly idea, useful for shop trading hours but not for dealing with grief or loss. Billy Budd grieves for the innocent and abused young man at its heart. It needs openness, not closure, in order to do so.