Leviathan or The Whale

in his own work. In response, and in an extraordinary mixture of arrogance and blasphemy and faith and love, the younger man almost accuses his friend and mentor:
    Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips–lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling…You understood the pervading thought that impelled the book…Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul.

    Even given the exaggerations of Victorian correspondence, these are dramatic words, and we can only imagine Hawthorne’s reply. He may have been grateful he was about to leave Lenox. In Hawthorne, Melville sought refuge from the dark, like Ishmael and Queequeg settling down for their second night together at the Spouter Inn.
    Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! but it’s a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy.

    As his unholy book would be condemned by the good folk of the Berkshires, so he yearned for an eternity that his works, and those of his friend, might provide.
    I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality…The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question–they are
One
.

    It was a plea for fellow feeling that went beyond sex or intellect. It fed on the same unknowing power that drove his work; and as his relationship with Hawthorne could go no further–as he crossed the line of normal behaviour–so Melville never recovered from
Moby-Dick
.
    On its publication, Melville’s book confused and confounded the critics. Was it a gothic sensation, political parable, or a religious tract? Some thrilled to the chase, and the final battle between Ahab and the White Whale–‘he comes up to battle, like an army with banners…The fight is described in letters of blood’–but many were mystified, or even irate. Melville might have expected as much. He was more moved by the newspaper reports of a whale that had stove in a New Bedford ship. ‘Crash! Comes Moby Dick himself, & reminds me of what I have been about for part of the last year or two,’ he wrote to Evert Duyckinck. ‘It is really & truly a surprising coincidence–to say the least…Ye Gods! what a commentator is this
Ann Alexander
whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.’
    Despite its appearance on both sides of the Atlantic (like the White Whale, it could be in two places at the same time), the book prospered in neither. In order to register its copyright, it was first published in London under the title
The Whale
, in three volumes designed to catch the eye of the carriage trade, with bright blue boards and a handsomely embossed gilt whale swimming down each white spine. But just as that was a right whale–and therefore the wrong whale–so the expense of the English edition–which cost a guinea and a half, and which seemed to reflect the lavishness of that year’s Great Exhibition–was undermined by Bentley’s decision to excise the epilogue in which Ishmael survives to tell his tale (as well as sections he considered blasphemous or obscene), an omission that further confused the readers. The ending was restored for the American edition–a much more egalitarian, single volume affair, priced at a dollar fifty (although even this was available in a selection of differently coloured covers)–but Harper and Brothers never sold out of their three thousand copies, the remainder of which perished in a fire in the publisher’s downtown Manhattan warehouse in 1853. It was a judgement, perhaps, to echo Hawthorne’s bonfire of the vanities, and confirmation of its own author’s assessment of his wicked book.
    What made Melville also unmade him; it was the abiding paradox of his life. His adventures had provided him with material for his fiction, but they had ruined him for it, too, making him forever restless. By going to sea, Melville lived the life that would make his books possible; but his escapades also made him unfit for life as a writer. Haunted by the grand hooded phantom, the great whale, he felt dogged by ‘the invisible