Why Read Moby-Dick

a hard time shaking the Ahab out of him. It would take a critical pummeling, the loss of his shy muse, and other disappointments before he came back down to earth again and realized that even after the miracle of Moby-Dick, nothing had really changed. But in early November 1851, within days of the novel’s publication, he still believed in the power of his black art. Not only had his book come from the real world; it controlled that world.
    On November 6, he received a letter from his New York friend Evert Duyckinck informing him of the sinking of the New Bedford whaleship Ann Alexander by a whale. “Your letter received last night had a sort of stunning effect on me,” Melville wrote. “For some days past being engaged in the woods with axe, wedge, & beetle [a mallet], the Whale had almost completely slipped me for the time (& I was the merrier for it) when Crash! comes Moby Dick himself . . . & reminds me of what I have been about for part of the last year or two.... I make no doubt it is Moby Dick himself, for there is no account of his capture after the sad fate of the Pequod about fourteen years ago.” Melville was only half-kidding. After comparing the Ann Alexander whale to the literary critics who were about to bash his book (“What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point”), he let slip a startling admission: “I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”

28
    Neither Believer nor Infidel
    P oor Nathaniel Hawthorne. Back in the summer of 1850 he had hoped to avoid being introduced to Melville. A little over a year later, Melville had dedicated a book to him. What was this timid, withdrawn writer to do? Get out of town, that’s what. But before he and his family beat a hasty retreat from the Berkshires to the suburbs of Boston, he wrote Melville a letter praising Moby-Dick . Hawthorne’s letter no longer exists, but judging from Melville’s response, the words were heartfelt. And, in fact, in the months ahead Hawthorne would write to Duyckinck, “What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones.”
    Whatever Hawthorne wrote, his “joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter” was exactly what Melville needed to hear. “A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment,” he wrote, “on account of your having understood the book.” But even before he finished the letter, “this infinite fraternity of feeling” had begun to fade. “My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms steal into me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad. . . . [T]ruth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.” Even if Moby-Dick was now done and Hawthorne was about to leave him, perhaps what the two of them had shared during the last year would somehow endure. “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 critics (including his friend Duyckinck) were not kind to Moby-Dick, but Melville pushed on, writing Pierre, a very strange novel about a tortured writer and his family that conveys a stupefying sense of spiritual claustrophobia but not much else. Then that summer, in July 1852, Melville traveled with his father-in-law, Judge Shaw, to Nantucket Island.
    Imagine it: a year after writing Moby-Dick, Melville visited the island that served as the launching pad for his great, unappreciated masterpiece. At some point, he met Captain George Pollard, master of the Essex . “To the islanders he was a nobody,” Melville later wrote in the back pages of his Chase narrative; “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.” Now that the excitement of creating Moby-Dick had faded, Melville was most impressed not by an ungodly, godlike Ahab but by a quiet, reserved survivor who had learned to live with disappointment. For someone who has ceased to believe in his own immortality (and as we shall soon see, Melville had reached that point), life isn’t about achieving your dreams; it’s about finding a way to continue on in spite of them.
    And then, during this trip to the islands south of Cape Cod, Melville was told a story by a lawyer friend of his father-in-law’s that hit