Leviathan or The Whale

frocks’, than the lookouts would shout,
    There she blows!
    and they would ‘fly away to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again’.
    Ah the world. Oh the world.

VII
The Divine Magnet

    To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
    The Fossil Whale,
Moby-Dick

    Having been halfway round the world, Melville returned to his family in sleepy Lansingburgh in October 1844. He was only twenty-five, yet he had seen more in three years than most people would in a lifetime. He had been away for so long and so far from home that he’d almost forgotten who he was, or who he was supposed to be: hero, or outcast? Encouraged by his sisters, he wrote down the stories he told them of his adventures in the South Seas where, with his ‘remarkably prepossessing’ friend Toby Greene, a black-eyed, curly-haired boy of seventeen, he had deserted the
Acushnet
and lived among naked savages.
    Typee
–the word means man-eater, although Melville feared having his face tattooed with the devil’s blue more than being consumed by his hosts–was a sensation among the men of an American renaissance keen to distinguish itself from British literature. It was a sensual, sometimes idyllic account of life among the natives of the Marquesas Islands, as well as being a critique of the western influences beginning to taint their paradise. Walt Whitman saw it as a ‘strange, graceful, most readable book…to hold in one’s hand and pore dreamily over of a summer’s day’, while Nathaniel Hawthorne admired its ‘freedom of view’ and tolerance of ‘morals that may be little in accordance with our own; a spirit proper enough to a young and adventurous sailor’. It turned Melville into America’s first literary sex symbol–an almost disreputable figure.
    A year later, as if licensed by his literary success, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of his father’s friend, Lemuel Shaw, a wealthy Boston judge. The couple settled at 103 Fourth Avenue, New York, where Melville became part of the circle known as Young America which revolved around the editor Evert Duyckinck and his house on Clinton Street. But the sequels he wrote to
Typee–Omoo, Mardi
and
Redburn
–did not fare as well, being judged degraded, immoral, even grotesque, and late in 1849 Melville left his young wife and baby son, Malcolm, for England, where he hoped to sell his latest book,
White-Jacket
, and, perhaps, finance further travels. He sailed from a wet and rainy New York that October on the liner
Southampton
, and two weeks later arrived at Deal, from where he made his way to London and a fourth-floor room off the Strand, ‘at a guinea & a half per week. Very cheap.’
    Not many people walk down Craven Street now, even though it lies off one of London’s busiest thoroughfares. Hidden behind Charing Cross Station, its blackened brick Georgian houses seem remaindered from the modern city. Number 25 is at the end of the terrace, with a wide bow window at the side. At the top of its winding, uneven staircase are attic rooms, usually the preserve of servants. Their view is restricted now, but before the Thames was embanked and houses still ran down to the river, Melville could look out of his room onto an imperial waterway coursed by boats and barges.

    London was rising in a slew of stone and brick, of movement and noise. Nearby were the recently built Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, while the new Palace of Westminster, still under construction, loomed over the water; the sun seldom shone on its intricate façade, obscured as it was by the fog that both cloaked and sustained the city. Stepping out from his boarding house and into the Strand, the American wore a new green coat, the source of ‘mysterious hints dropped’ on board the
Southampton
. He looked recognizably other, a Yankee in the court of Queen Victoria.
    In his travel journal, one of the few documents that details his life, Melville recorded the ‘dark & cozy’ inns of the City, the Cock Tavern, the Mitre, the Blue Posts, and the Edinburgh Castle, where he drank Scotch ale and ate chops and pancakes–Herman had bad manners, and often spoke with his mouth full–talking metaphysics with Adler, a German scholar whom he had met on the voyage over. He saw the sights, visited the galleries and even attended a public execution; Dickens was among the same crowd. He also touted
White-Jacket
round the publishers, with little success. But as he roamed London,