Leviathan or The Whale

write his book, even as he advised a female friend not to read it. ‘Dont you buy it–dont you read it, when it comes out,’ he warned her. ‘It is not a peice
[sic]
of fine feminine Spitalfields silk–but it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.’ With Mary Shelley’s man-made monster at the back of his head, he conjured images of Ahab’s ship ploughing through stormy seas as ‘the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness’. Only half jokingly, he spoke of his work as though it were some transgression of natural law which ought not to have appeared at all. ‘But I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf,’ he told Evert Duyckinck, ‘–at any rate it is safer from criticism.’ That binding might have been the tattooed skin of the pagan Queequeg; or the book his counter-bible, bound in the ghastly pale hide of the Whale itself. What began as an exercise in propaganda for the American whaling industry ended up as a warning to all mankind of its own evil. Melville had learned Hawthorne’s lessons well.
    It was, ostensibly, a cheery timetable, a rural regime. He rose at eight to give his cow and horse their breakfast before breaking his own, then settled to work till two thirty in the afternoon, when, by arrangement, Lizzie knocked and kept on knocking until her husband answered. After driving out in the countryside, he spent his evening ‘in a sort of mesmeric state, not being able to read–only now & then skimming over some large-printed book’. Such self-imposed isolation seemed to invoke his increasingly strange and wilful voyage.
    I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all cover with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin, and at nights when I wake up and hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.

    Working in the shadow of Mount Greylock, which he could see in the distance, the peak’s blunt and sometimes snowy brow conjured up the White Whale, ‘the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmelehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power.’
    To friends, Melville spoke of the smooth running of his writing, but Lizzie wrote of a terrible time, a book accomplished ‘under unfavourable circumstances–would sit at his desk all day not eating any thing till four or five o’clock–then ride to the village after dark’. Like Hawthorne–who walked around Concord with his head so bowed that he did not recognize buildings that he passed every day when he was shown photographs of them–Melville removed himself from human contact in order to write more forcefully about humanity. The result was a work written and performed in secrecy like a Masonic ritual, underlain with a conspiratorial text, what Melville told Hawthorne to be the secret motto of his book–
    Ego no baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli

    –that is, ‘I do not baptize you in the name of the Father, but in the name of the Devil’.
    The Little Red Inn, Lenox, Western Massachusetts, 14th November, 1851, late afternoon, dreary snow and wind
.
    The chairs scrape over the boards as they draw nearer to the table. For two men to dine together was not usual in a country town. Melville had hired a private room for his publication party for
Moby-Dick
. There was only one guest.
    Melville gave the finished copy to Hawthorne that afternoon. In those few seconds, as the book passed from hand to hand, between leaving go and taking hold, all the effort, all the energy of his life was distilled, the summary of his existence to date.
    Hawthorne opened the book and saw the words inside:

    It was a public declaration, and an infinite demand.
    Hawthorne’s reaction to
Moby-Dick
is one of the great lost letters of literature, but we can see its shape by Melville’s response.
    A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb…

    Hawthorne opened Melville’s eyes to allegories and subtleties he had not seen