Leviathan or The Whale

junction of man with man’ which Hawthorne professed to find ‘hateful and disgusting’. Ishmael and Queequeg may have seen it differently.
    At Lenox, the two men would sit in the Hawthornes’ parlour smoking cigars normally forbidden in the house, talking ‘about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next…and all possible and impossible matters,
that lasted pretty deep into the night’
(a phrase that Sophia inked out when editing her husband’s journal for publication). They did not agree on all subjects: on slavery, for instance, for whose victims Hawthorne had not ‘the slightest sympathy…or, at least, not half as much for the labouring whites, who, I believe, as a general thing, are ten times worse off. For all Melville felt for Hawthorne, it seemed he wanted more than his friend could give.
    Melville’s book–which he described to Evert Duyckinck as ‘a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery’–was almost finished when he came to the Berkshires. Meeting Hawthorne changed all that. The younger man had complained of being restrained from writing ‘the kind of book I would wish to’. Now he was compelled to see the significance of his experiences, and as if to set them in context, he began to read rapaciously, as though he had never read before: books brought back from London, such as Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, or ones borrowed from the New York library, such as William Scoresby’s
An Account of the Arctic Regions;
Robert Burton’s eccentric and digressive
Anatomy of Melancholy;
essays by Emerson in which God was revealed in nature; and Thomas Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
, imbued with dreams, dæmonic possession and self-sacrificing love.
    Then he found a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays in print large enough to overcome his weak eyes. ‘I would to God Shakespeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway,’ he fantasized. But he would also fill his own book with earthy asides and euphemisms; jokes about chowder and bar-room quips with which Ishmael wryly undermines his creator’s high-flown words, declaring at one point that he regards the whole dangerous voyage of the
Pequod-
and life itself–as a ‘vast practical joke’, and informs Queequeg that he ‘might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will’, with his friend as his lawyer, executor, and legatee.
    Melville was liberated by America, a place where he could write about anything and everything, and where he was perfectly aware of the double meaning of his words, even as Starbuck exhorted his crew: ‘Pull my boys! Sperm, sperm’s the play!’ There was a new urgency to his work which almost seemed to set him apart from what he was doing, time-coding his words–
    …that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing vapour…

    –as if he were suddenly able to see beyond himself and into the whale, in an out-of-body experience even as he moved towards it. Like Ishmael, he felt reborn. ‘Until I was twenty-five I had no development at all,’ he told Hawthorne. ‘From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.’ Something fused into one headlong effort, as great as his quarry, as great as the industry it commemorated. With sprawling ambition and an utter lack of convention, Melville crossed latitudes of time and space, blurring them as he did so, constantly reiterating, ‘All this is not without its meaning’, laying meaning upon meaning, drawing himself on, writing and re-writing obsessively, creating a kind of exclusion zone to which his own wife Lizzie could only gain admittance by knocking incessantly on his door until he deigned to answer.
    He had recreated the conditions on board ship inside his study and in his mind, and in the process
Moby-Dick
changed from a romance to a fearful, fated work. Parts of the book seem to be written automatically, as if possessed by the spirit of the White Whale, the Shaker God incarnate. There was something forbidden about his subject, named for a mythic Mocha Dick but which also elided with the name of his fellow deserter, the dark and prepossessing friend whom he had thought dead but had met again in Rochester, New York. ‘I have seen Toby, have his darguerrotype
[sic]
–a lock of the ebon curls.’
    Melville almost dared not to