Herman Melville

by CLIFTON FADIMAN

1

SOME twenty-odd years ago, on May 18, 1921, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, then eighty, in a letter to his lifelong friend, Sir Frederick Pollock, wrote: “Did I mention Moby Dick, by Herman Melville? I remember him in my youth. It seemed to me a great book — as ten years later may some of George Borrow’s things, possibly influenced by him — but I should think a much greater man. It shook me up a good deal. It is wonderful already that a book published in 1851 doesn’t seem thin, now. Hawthorne did when last I read The Scarlet Letter. Not so Moby Dick.”

Holmes, a man given to wide and impartial decisions, made no judicial error here. By common consent — but, interestingly enough, a consent given only during the last two decades — Moby Dick is one of the great books of the world. It does not “seem thin, now” any more than in 1921 it seemed thin to the lucky Balboas and Columbuses who then rediscovered its Pacific rhythms and Atlantic rages.

A minor proof of its greatness lies in the circumstance (always true of masterpieces) that, while there seems nothing new to say about it, wc are forever trying our hands at further commentary. 1 n the case of a minor work, no matter how interesting, critics sooner or later, happily, have their say, the river of annotation dribbles off, and the position of the work is more or less firmly established. But men and women will always attempt the seemingly impossible task of writing something new about Shakespeare and Dante—and Melville. That is, of course, because the meaning of a good minor work is clear and single while the meaning of a great major work is multiplex.

The greatest books rise from a profound level of wonder and terror, a level common to all humanity in all times and climes, but a level so deep that wre are only at times aware of it. From time to time a man — Cervantes or Dostoevski or Melville — lets down into this deep well the glorious, pitiful bucket of his genius, and he brings up a book, and then wc read it, and dimly we perceive its source, and know that source to be something profound and permanent in the human imagination.

The mysterious liquid drawn from this well is never crystalline. Bather does each man, looking into it, see mirrored a different set of images, rellcctions, points of light, and layers of shadow. Alt great books are symbolical myths, overlaid like palimpsests with the meanings that men at various times assign to them.

Mob]/ Dick is a book about Evil. Melville, with his characteristic irony, said oi il, “I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb.” At no time in his life was Melville ever notably happy, but at thirty-two, when he sat down to the composition of his masterpiece, he was notably miserable, a sick, worried, and unhappily married man. Some of the poison of his personal life was undoubtedly discharged, veiled in symbols, into the book. But if this were the only impulse behind Moby Dick, it would be but a subjective work of the second order, like Childe Harold. Melville’s despair was metaphysical as well as personal; his awareness of evil goes beyond his own constricted circumstances. His book is not a lament but a vision.

Yet wc must not lose ourselves in generalities, but remember always the kind of man Melville was a magnificent Gloomy Gus, unquestionably ill at ease in his time and place, a romantic metaphysician whose affinities were with the Elizabethans rather than with his perky nineteenth-century contemporaries. He was by nature a solitary — not a halfand-half solitary like Thoreau, but a simon-pure one, akin to a Thebaid ascetic. It must have been hard to live with Melville. Perhaps such men as he should be excused from the amenities of ordinary intercourse.

He was not a “literary man” in the sleek professional sense. His work was forced out of him; it is a kind of overflow of his vast interior silence, “ Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.” Again he says, “This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught.”

A pessimism as profound as Melville’s, if it is not pathological, — and his is not, — can exist only in a man who, whatever his gifts, does not possess that of humor. There is much pessimism in Shakespeare but with it goes a certain sweetness, a kind of radiance. His bad men — Macbeth, Iago — may be irretrievable, but the world itself is not irretrievable. This sense of balance comes from the fact that Shakespeare has humor, even in the plays of bis later period. Melville had none. For proof, reread Chapter 100, a labored, shrill, and inept attempt at laughter. Perhaps I should qualify these strictures, for there is a kind of vast, grinning, unjolly, sardonic humor in him at times — Ishmael’s first encounter with Queequeg is an example. But this humor is bilious, not sanguine, and has no power to uplift the heart.

I said that Moby Dick was a book about Evil; and so it is. It is the nearest thing we have to an unChristian (though not, an anti-Christian) epic. It is the other face of the Divine Comedy — the product of unfaith, as Dante’s opic was the product of faith. But to believe in Evil’s reality is not to espouse it. Melville is as far removed from a pure champion of evil, like Hitler, as he is from a pure champion of good, like St. Francis. Ahab knows that Good exists in t he world, he even has his own moments of softening of the heart, but basically he is mesmerized by what is negative and disastrous. He cannot turn his mind away from Moby Dick.

2

THE relationship between Ahab and the White Whale forms the central line of the story. Superficially this relationship is the same as that which animates any number of bloody Elizabethan tragedies of revenge. Ahab’s leg has been torn off by Moby Dick; therefore he hates the whale; he pursues it to the death and is dragged down, in the very middle of his vengeance, to his own destruction: a sufficiently familiar pattern. But any grown-up reader of Moby Dick understands at once that this pattern is a mere blind, a concession to the brute fact that at bottom we still have no better way of portraying the storms of the soul than by means of physical action.

The subsurface meaning of the Ahab-Moby Dick relationship is that the two are one. Moby Dick is a monster thrashing about in the Pacific of Ahab’s brain. It is as much a part of him as is his leg of ivory. The struggle that takes place on the vast marine or at the ends of a hundred harpoons is but Melville’s method of exteriorizing the combat in the arena of Ahab’s own chiaroscuro spirit.

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of ail those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they arc left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; — Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; hut deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, be pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, lie burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Like his cousins, Faust and Hamlet, Ahab is a divided man, at odds with his own mortality, at odds with all the grief in the world, at odds with his own incapacity to enjoy the world’s fair show, and therewith be content. The whole complex narrative of Moby Dick, with all its eetology and its digressions, is but the cunningly disguised soliloquy of a man in direst pain — pain which can cease only with suicide. And suicide is the true end of Moby Dick, the whale and the man, being one, turning upon each other simultaneously. There are certain men who are artists in suicide, who carve out for themselves, over many years, careers which have as their goal self-destruction. Ahab is such a man, and all his adventures, rages, conversations, soliloquies are but the joists and floorings of an immense structure of self-ruin.

If there is one grand type of character Melville knows to the last fiber and droplet of blood, it is the type self-dedicated to disaster. This self-dedication is a convoluted thing, never direct, never simple. Hamlet needs five acts and hundreds of lines of anguished poetry to achieve it. Ahab, in whom masochism is a complex art, cannot kill himself save in a roundabout manner, through the instrumentality of the White Whale. If there were no Moby Dick, it would be necessary for Ahab to invent one. In a sense, he is an invention, a white floating cancer in Ahab’s own mind.

In the same way, to make sure that he will never deviate from this road, however curving, to disaster, Ahab strips himself of all associations that might waylay him into joy. He throws away his pipe in fury because it might bring him pleasure. Gifted, as he bitterly reflects, “with the high perception,” he lacks “the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise.”

Just why he lacks “the low, enjoying power” Melville never tells us. He presents us with a fixed type; the causes of its fixity do not concern him. To give a certain surface rondure of motivation to Ahab’s pessimism, he offers us the amputated leg, but we are not taken in by it; we know that this lightning-scared soul was deep in hell even in the days when he stood upon two feet of living bone. Moby Dick is a pretext, or, as Melville would say, a symbol.

Why do Ins men fear Ahab? Compare their emotion with that felt by the sailors toward Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf. In Jack London’s novel the men are afraid of Larsen, another man, another creature; and therefore their fear is overcomable. But no one on the Pequod, however brave he be, can overcome his fear of Ahab, because the fear is seated in himself. His Ahab-fear is a fear of himself, or rather of the pit of blackness, the central dark mother-lode of despair which every man at times knows to be within him. But we are afraid to confess this primordial horror. When we come upon one who, like Ahab, docs confess it, exulting in his confession, we shrink back, as if we had looked in the mirror and seen there the horrid head of the Gorgon. It is this selffear that explains Ahab’s unholy domination of his crew. It explains too the desperate joy with which the men pursue Moby Dick, as if they felt that, by killing the monster, they could exorcise the fear and dispel with their puny harpoons the gathered and oppressive malice of the world.

3

IT IS generally recognized that the canons of the ordinary novel do not apply to Moby Dick. If we applied them wo should be forced to put it down as an inept, occasionally powerful, but on the whole puzzling affair. This was the conventional opinion up to two decades ago. During those decades we have discovered Moby Dick to be a masterpiece. What caused this shift in perspective? To put it simply, we discovered how Moby Dick should be read. We must read it not as if it were a novel but as if it were a myth. A novel is a talc. A myth is a disguised method of expressing mankind’s deepest terrors and longings. The myth uses the narrative form, and is often mistaken for true narrative. Once we feel the truth of this distinction, the greatness of Moby Dick becomes manifest: we have learned how to read it.

Moby Dick is a myth of Evil and Tragedy, as the Christian epic is a myth of Good and Salvation. “Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy,” thinks Ahab; and this central brooding conviction threads every page of the story, even when it seems most concerned with try-pots, harpoons, and sperm oil.

The note is struck in the very opening sentence — surely the most magical first sentence in literature. “Call me Ishmael.” Who is Ishmael? He is the narrator, but he is also Ahab (as all the characters of the book are partially Ahab) and he is also you and I, considered as eternal outcasts, which we are, the experience of birth being in a sense the castingoff of the moorings that attach us quite literally to mankind.

The Pequod seems a crowded world. Indeed it is a microcosm, with its philosophers, its men of action, its lunatics, its African savages and Polynesian cannibals. Yet, for all the shapes that man its boats or raise its sails, the Pequod is a heaving hell of lonely and grief-touched souls, whose solitudes are gatherer! up and made manifest in the figure of Ahab. Melville underlines this perception in the very abode of community itself, in the Whaleman’s Chapel, where “each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.”

The symbolic values of the book are not allegorically plain. as in The Pilgrim’s Progress, for Melville does not have Bunyan’s Protestant certitude. They waver, shadow-like, at times emerging into the world of reality, at times descending into the subterranea of myth. For instance, Fedallah and his Malays do not merely “represent” the evil spirits conjured up by Ahab’s necromantic power. They arc in truth these very spirits. Yet at the same time they fulfill a solid and specific function aboard the Pequod. They are at one and the same time part of a whaling cruise and of Hell. It is this extraordinary ambiguity that gives Moby Dick its special murky atmosphere and which may have been responsible for the lack of understanding that was its portion for so many years.

Yet there should have been no misunderstanding, for Melville in a dozen passages reiterates that his story is not to be taken literally. The symbolism is not simple, no mere system of correspondences. It is rather the subtle atmosphere the whole story breathes. It is not imposed (except occasionally, and then the effect is creaky). “All visible objects,” says Ahab, “are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.”

The poet is one, it has been said, who sees resemblances. Then Melville is all poet, for he sees little else, the world being for him a shadow-show, a whale-line but the halter round all men’s necks, the very earth itself but the “insular Tahiti,” in the soul of man, encompassed by the “appalling ocean” of “the horrors of the half-known life.”

This vivid sense of an extra, invisible dimension in all things makes it possible for Melville’s alembicating mind to mix such incongruities as angels and spermaceti, and distill an essence of beauty.

Finally, Moby Dick is America’s most unparochial great book, less delivered over to a time and place than the work of even our freest minds, Emerson and Whitman. It is conceived on a vast scale, it shakes hands with prairie seas and great distances, it invades with its conquistador prose “the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world.” It has towering faults of taste, it is often willful and obscure, but it will remain America’s unarguable contribution to world literature, so many-leveled is it, so wide-ranging in that nether world which is (he defiant but secretly terror-stricken soul of man, alone and appalled by his aloneness.