Why Read Moby-Dick

him like a thunderbolt, a story about a woman named Agatha Hatch who married a sailor, had his child, and proceeded to live without the sailor for seventeen years. As the lawyer (who happened to be the attorney general of Massachusetts) wrote to Melville, the story of Agatha was “a most striking instance of long continued & uncomplaining submission to wrong and anguish on the part of a wife, which made her in my eyes a heroine.”
    Melville decided that this was just the “skeleton of actual reality” for a novel, especially if it were set on Nantucket, which instead of being a place of boisterous pluck had become by 1852 an island of whalers without whales. What’s more, Agatha would have a George Pollard–like figure for a father: “a man of the sea, but early driven away from it by repeated disasters. Hence, is he subdued & quiet & wise in his life. And now he tends a light house, to warn people from those very perils, from which he himself has suffered.” But then Melville did something pathetic. He wrote up a detailed précis and offered the story to Nathaniel Hawthorne, claiming that his friend would do a better job with it than he would.
    When Hawthorne balked, Melville decided it was a good excuse to travel to Concord, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne and his family had since relocated. Not surprisingly, Hawthorne urged Melville to write the story himself, which he subsequently decided to do. “I invoke your blessing upon my endeavors,” he wrote hopefully; “and breathe a fair wind upon me.” But the wind was anything but fair. The following spring, after completing a novel that seems to have been based on the story of Agatha titled The Isle of the Cross, Melville was “prevented” from publishing it, possibly because the publisher feared that the novel’s similarity to actual events might invite a lawsuit. From then on, Melville (who appears to have destroyed the manuscript) would do his best to disguise what Hawthorne had recognized was his greatest strength: the unflinching portrayal of reality.
    By that time Hawthorne’s former roommate at Bowdoin College, Franklin Pierce, had become president of the United States. After writing Pierce’s campaign biography (which one wag described as “the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote”), Hawthorne received a plum political appointment and was named U.S. consul in Liverpool, England. Melville, once again, would not be so lucky. Even though his family members and friends (including Hawthorne) campaigned heroically for him, he was offered nothing. By 1856, his family had become worried about his sanity and health, and Melville departed, alone, on a tour of Europe and the Holy Land. Soon after arriving in England, he traveled to Liverpool to visit Hawthorne.
    It was November, and the two friends went for a walk on the beach in the windy sunshine. They found a sheltered spot amid the dunes and sat down for a smoke. “Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity,” Hawthorne recorded in his journal, “and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has 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. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. 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.”
    Melville, Hawthorne recognized, was a man condemned to landlessness. There was no harbor for Melville, no refuge from the storm. For one brief year, with Hawthorne’s friendship serving as his insular Tahiti, Melville dove down deeper than even Pip and came up with Moby-Dick . But instead of fame (at least in his own lifetime), Moby-Dick brought only obscurity. Instead of going down in a blaze of glory like Ahab, Melville went about his quiet, unassuming way like Captain Pollard.
    No one knew it then, but Melville had created the literary equivalent of Queequeg’s