Leviathan or The Whale

police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me…and influences me in some unaccountable way’.
    Even as
Moby-Dick
was being published, Melville was at work on the decidedly land-locked
Pierre, Or The Ambiguities
, an autobiographical novel about a celebrated New York author who at one point is pursued down the street by a cameraman wanting to take his photograph, just as his alter ego had run from the Typees for fear their tattooists would take his face away. (‘I respectfully decline being
oblivionated
by a Daguerretype,’ Melville told another friend, ‘what a devel of an unspellable word!’) But his increasingly dark vision met with depressingly decreasing returns and a dwindling readership; and so in October 1856, despite suffering severe rheumatism, he embarked on what was to be his last great adventure.
    ‘Mr Melville much needs this relaxation from his severe literary labours of several years past,’ noted the
Berkshire County Eagle
, ‘and we doubt not that he will return with renovated health and a new store of those observations of travel which he works so charmingly.’ With him he carried his latest manuscript,
The Confidence-Man
, hoping to sell it in London. His ship arrived in Glasgow, where Melville marvelled at the shipyards and women with faces like cattle. At Edinburgh, he stopped to get his laundry done–
9 Shirts
1 Night shirt
7 Handkerchiefs
2 Pair stockings
Drawers & under shirt
    –then proceeded, via Lancaster and York, to Liverpool, with its memories of his first sea voyage. Lodging at the White Bear on Dale Street, the next day he walked out in the rain ‘to find Mr Hawthorne’, but the address was out of date and his journey futile. The following morning he called at the consulate, and found Nathaniel.
    Hawthorne had spent the last four years as American consul in Liverpool, living with his family in nearby Southport; he was now in his fifties, and balding. Melville too looked ‘a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder’. Learning of his friend’s ill health, Hawthorne diagnosed ‘too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success’, and a ‘morbid state of mind…I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labour and domestic life, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was.’
    The two men took the afternoon train to Southport, a faded resort once patronized by Louis Napoleon, now a shadow of its former splendour. The next day they walked on the beach, blown along by the wind, and sat in a hollow in the dunes to smoke cigars. Melville began to talk of Providence and futurity, ‘and of everything that lies beyond human ken’. He told Hawthorne that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; like Ishmael leaving Manhattan, he seemed to advance a death-wish.
    ‘It is strange how he persists–and had persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before–in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting,’ Hawthorne wrote in his journal. ‘He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief…If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.’
    This was a high tribute from Hawthorne; a mirror, in its way, of the faith Melville had placed in him–as if only now he realized it and felt guilty for not having done more. But who could have saved Melville from himself? A few days later, he sailed from Liverpool for the Holy Land, leaving his trunk behind at Hawthorne’s consulate, taking only a carpet-bag with him. The two men never met again.
    Arrowhead is set close to the road, sheltered by trees. The rain washes the light out of the sky, the clouds rolling inky-black over the ochre house. Minutes later the sun is sharpening the clapboard, picking out acid orange day-lilies along the picket fence. Everything seems green and lush. Inside, the place feels uninhabited. Its wooden floors smell warm in the summer afternoon, but the rooms echo only to hushed voices. In the upstairs study, through the wavy, watery window, I can just make out the locked grey lump of Mount Greylock on the horizon, masked by trees.
    …here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the