Leviathan or The Whale

rather wordy and dull to me. Our old-fashioned, veneered black and white television, with its grainy 405 lines, did little to convey the subtle effect that the cinematographer, Oswald Morris, had devised to emulate nineteenth-century whaling scenes, combining two sets of negatives–one monochrome, the other Technicolor–to suggest ‘that this story was filmed in 1843 when it was supposed to have taken place’. I did not appreciate the deftness of Ray Bradbury’s screenplay, for which he read the book nine times and wrote fifteen hundred pages of script to reach a final one hundred and fifty: ‘I found myself plagued with a vast depression,’ said Bradbury. ‘I felt I had the weight, the burden of Melville on my back.’ Any analogies between the nineteenth century’s thirst for whale oil and the post-war desire for petroleum escaped me, too.
    Nor was I impressed by Orson Welles’s bravura cameo role as Father Mapple, performing histrionically from his pulpit-prow–in Shepperton. (Welles would stage his own version of
Moby-Dick
in 1955–claiming it was the best thing he had ever done–at the Hackney Empire, in London’s East End.) I may have recognized Richard Basehart as Ishmael, but only because he played the submarine captain in
A Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
, battling a giant squid; as with Disney’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, both whale and squid were Cold War monsters, subaquatic versions of science fiction aliens, the threat the world faced from within. And although the sight of another savage other, Queequeg and his tattooed face and his long red drawers, was terrifying enough, when a whale finally appeared on screen, it was difficult to tell if it were alive or not–not least because Huston had recreated Moby Dick as a life-size model. (At one point during the filming, part of the White Whale’ broke loose while being towed off Fishguard in rough seas, causing coastguards to alert shipping to a ‘possible hazard to navigation’, and the Royal Air Force to send out a flying-boat in search of the errant prop.)
    Roped to this ersatz whale, Gregory Peck nearly drowned as Huston insisted on take after take of Ahab’s final moments. But it is only now, watching the movie again, that I see something shockingly real in these scenes. Intercut with sequences acted out in a studio tank–betrayed by the wrong-sized waves and an atomically lurid, back-projected sky which turns Gregory Peck’s Ahab into a kind of pantomime demon king–Huston inserts footage of sperm whales being hunted off Madeira. Here his film comes closest to the truth, in the mortal spout of dying whales, the gushing crimson fountains. It is an unforgettable, Hemingway-like gesture; only instead of a dying bull, it is the world’s greatest predator that perishes, publicly, as advertised, on screen.
    In 1958, the year in which I was born, Ernest Hemingway told the
Paris Review
that he had hunted a school of fifty sperm whales, and harpooned one ‘nearly sixty feet in length and lost him’. His was a forlorn boast of a heroic American past. Whaling was now the province of other countries, and their efforts would do far more to bring whales to the brink than the Yankee fleets ever did. In fact, it was within my lifetime that whaling reached its all-time peak. In 1951 alone–one hundred years after Melville’s book appeared–more whales were killed worldwide than New Bedford’s whale-ships took in a century and a half of whaling.
    In my
Illustrated Animal Encylopædia
, edited by curators from the American Museum of Natural History and illustrated with photographs of the museum’s dusty dioramas–although not, I’m glad to say, with its positively horrifying set-piece of a life-size sperm whale doing battle with a giant squid–the limits of 1950s cetology were acknowledged. As if in response to Ishmael’s question, ‘Does the Whale Diminish?’, the authors issued a tardy reply. ‘We cannot hope for much success until we know more about these deep-sea mammals. We are seriously endeavouring to get this information.’
    The book bears witness to a pre-ecological age. A section entitled ‘MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT FROM THE Whale’ states that ‘One recent whaling season in the Antarctic produced 2,158,173 barrels of oil’, but under another headline, ‘THE WHALE IN DANGER’, it reports that ‘whalers took 6,158 blue whales, 17,989 finback whales, 2,108 humpback whales, and 2,566 sperm whales in a