Leviathan or The Whale

undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights…

    By the fireside is a toggle-head harpoon–
    And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

    –and nearby, a battered chest, left behind ‘like a hurried traveller’s trunk’, with a handwritten luggage label, partly erased:
    Our guide thinks Hawthorne was a handsome man, ‘and that was the beginning of the trouble’. And I think of all those minor scenes, commonplace for all their protagonists’ fame, two men smoking their cigars and drinking their brandy and staying up late, talking into the night.
    For now the words descended like the calm of mountains–
–Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish–
    W.H. Auden, ‘Herman Melville’

    As dusk falls, the shutters come down. The doors are locked, and the house stands empty again. Mountains lie between–the mountain on which they met, and the mountain that marked their parting–rocks half covered in firs but bare to the summit, reaching out to the sky and back down to the sea.
    It was the whiteness of the whale which appalled me

    In 1863 Melville gave up trying to farm at Arrowhead and moved back to New York and a house in Gramercy Park. From there he would walk down to the Battery, where he earned four dollars a day as Deputy Inspector No.75 of the Custom Service, ‘as though his occupation were another island.’ In the evening he would work in his study, facing a wall like Bartleby. What did those years add up to but tragedy? In 1866, in the bedroom upstairs, his eighteen-year-old son Malcolm shot himself in the head with a pistol he kept under his pillow. Twenty years later, Stanwix, his other son, died of consumption, alone in a San Francisco hotel, aged thirty-four. As he looked through his window, across the street, Melville could see the terraced houses, mirrors of his own, their stone steps and iron railings a rhythm of urban banality, a view that never changed, unlike the sea.
    His end would be as equivocal as his beginning. Melville was seventy-two years old when he died of a heart attack, just after midnight on a Monday morning in September 1891, before Manhattan had begun its working week. Thirty years had elapsed since his last novel,
The Confidence-Man
, and he had published only poetry since. After his interment in Woodlawns cemetery in the Bronx, Lizzie tidied up her husband’s papers and put the manuscript of
Billy Budd, Sailor
away in a drawer. Glued to the inside of the desk on which he wrote it was a tiny clipping:
    Keep true to the dreams of thy youth

    Outside the city, in a bleak suburb–all the bleaker for a freezing February afternoon when the chill bleeds the colour out of the streets and sky–cars roar along the freeway in a twenty-four-hour race to get in and out of New York. They drive by without an upward glance to where their ancestors lie, having long given up the chase.
    Shiny memorials line these tidy lanes; the names of city worthies are as deep-etched as the day they were set on these sepulchral avenues, suburbs of the dead, a sharp contrast to the simplicity of a Quaker graveyard. Last week’s snow lies grey and gritty like an ice lolly spilt on the pavement. From my pocket I take a piece of slate, found on a Nantucket beach. I lean over to place it on the marble headstone, carved with ivy as if to mimic the living wreath growing around its feet.
    HERMAN MELVILLE
Born August 1, 1819
Died September 28, 1891

    Above the inscription is an extravagantly empty scroll, chosen by the author as his memorial; its blankness seems to mock all the books he did not write. Next to him lies Elizabeth, biding her silence, as ever; and on the other side, smaller memorials to his sons, both dead before their father. It is a sad array, a family reunited on a bare Bronx hill. Kicking at one of the little icebergs of frozen snow, I work up enough powder to shape a white whale on the lifeless grass, an acorn for its eye and a twig for its mouth. It looks childish, a cartoon animal playing over the writer’s whitened bones. I wait to feel something, to commune with the writer’s spirit. But there is nothing here, in this civic facility. The stone and the earth are all as dead as the asphalt over which the traffic hurtles en route for somewhere else.

VIII
Very Like a Whale

    Can he