Siding with Ahab

In literature as in life, significant birthdays are occasions for both celebration and reassessment. Herman Melville’s two hundredth birthday happened to just precede the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The house arrest of so many readers for an indeterminate period resulted in many social changes, among them the sudden proliferation of book groups meeting on Zoom. Many of these “pandemic book clubs”—if we are to believe published, and perhaps inflated, reports—embarked on very long books that readers, no longer distracted by the usual claims on their attention (driving the kids hither and yon, eating out, going to the gym), finally had time for, like War and Peace, Bleak House, and Middlemarch.

And, of course, Moby-Dick, which appeared to some readers to have uncanny parallels with the reeling, hunkered-down nation and its mad captain. “Written a decade before the Civil War, Moby-Dick seems to foresee the American ship of state being dashed to pieces because of its internal divisions,” Christopher Frizzelle, founder of the Quarantine Book Club, wrote in The Washington Post. For Paul Daley in The Guardian, the novel resonated with a nation watching its “vainglorious president sacrifice his people in their tens of thousands and plunge America into darkness to sate his self-lust and stop-at-nothing fixation on re-election.”

It’s true that Captain Ahab can seem quite Trumpian, never more so than in the unnerving chapter titled “The Quarter-Deck,” when he persuades the polyglot crew of the Pequod that his own private grievance against Moby Dick—for having “dismasted” him off the coast of Japan—is theirs, and that mere profit in barrels of whale oil pales in comparison to the chance to eliminate the evil White Whale himself. “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance,” says Starbuck, the voice then and now for narrow business interests. To which Ahab replies in his lordly way, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” As Ahab’s unhinged rhetoric escalates, even the reasonable Ishmael, schoolteacher turned sailor, surrenders to the manic mood. “A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me,” he confesses. “Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.”

Works inspired by Melville appear in every season, but our own fraught interlude has proved fertile not only for book clubs but for novelists and scholars as well. “My husband says that I seem to have contracted Melville,” the narrator of Dayswork, a collaborative undertaking by the husband-and-wife team of the novelist Chris Bachelder and the poet Jennifer Habel, reports. “And it’s true that some mornings we find one of my crumpled sticky notes in the sheets like a used tissue.” The novel’s collage-like structure juxtaposes daily pandemic tasks like “disinfecting boxes of frozen waffles” with the narrator’s obsession with Melville, as she researches the tense and claustrophobic domestic scene—a distorting mirror of her own—in which Melville wrote Moby-Dick. It’s easy to forget that this perfectly believable (at least to my ear) woman’s voice, the narrating wife, is the product of two writers who have seemingly adopted the persona of one. There’s something vertigo-inducing about the proceedings, not to mention the fact-versus-fiction questions about Dayswork itself, which seems to track pretty closely with Bachelder’s and Habel’s actual lives, down to the Zillow description of the house they left behind in Amherst.

The nature of the narrator’s Melville project is never specified, unless it is the patchwork novel we’re reading. A poet turning fifty, she is married to a fiction writer and professor of creative writing teaching his courses on Zoom. They used to live in Massachusetts, where the wife was happy. Now they live in Ohio, with their two young daughters and their dog, where she isn’t. As writers and parents they have agreed on certain arrangements to get their “day’s work” done. During their Amherst years each was allotted an hour a day in a shed out back while the spouse watched the two small kids. “Time moved so quickly in one room and so slowly in the other.”

Their marriage has had one major breakdown, the Bad Time, when the husband decided on his own, and for reasons never stated, to move the family to Ohio. “It’s not so much that I hated leaving, though I did,” the wife writes, “it’s that you made the decision all by yourself, in the deep vault of yourself, without me, and perhaps I would have agreed with you but we’ll never really know, will we?” Instead of expanding on this raw moment of conflict, the narrator abruptly shifts her attention to Melville’s “impulsive” decision to uproot his family from New York City and move to a remote farmhouse in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, going severely into debt to do so. The narrator implies a parallel between the two moves: “Having searched for information about Melville’s wife’s reaction to this domestic upheaval, I find only that she was fiscally prudent and that her ‘opinion could hardly have mattered.’”

Melville was thirty-one when he bought the Pittsfield farm and “set out to remake his novel about whale hunting.” He had published five novels in four years. The first two, Typee and Omoo, were based on his adventurous years at sea after signing on, at the age of twenty-one, as an ordinary sailor aboard a whaling vessel out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Melville jumped ship in the Marquesas; his account of “life among the cannibals,” including the exotic charms of the native nymph Fayaway, captured the imaginations of generations of readers, including Robert Louis Stevenson and possibly Emily Dickinson.¹ Melville’s next three novels, sea tales of various kinds, met with less enthusiasm. An encounter with his idol Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Berkshires led to the most important friendship of his life. After the move to Pittsfield he poured out his waning self-confidence to Hawthorne, to whom he later dedicated Moby-Dick: “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.”

The basic rule in the Melville household was that Herman wrote while the women—his wife, mother, and three sisters—did everything else: “They cooked, composed letters, completed chores, cared for [his son] Malcolm, and copied Melville’s pages.”² When his daughters were old enough, they too were conscripted. On one occasion he woke his younger daughter, Frances, at 2:00 AM so that she could help him proofread his immense, 18,000-line epic poem, Clarel. She never forgave him, the narrator notes, though his biographer—“the Biographer,” as the narrator of Dayswork refers to Hershel Parker—did, suggesting that Frances could have taken a nap during the day.

And then there are the “bombshell” letters that first surfaced in 1975, which contained “anecdotal evidence, derived from family stories and letters, that Melville verbally and physically abused his wife,” including on one notorious occasion when Melville came home drunk and allegedly threw her down the stairs. Again, the Biographer testifies for the defense. “Could Herman have brushed Lizzie out of his way as he was going up the stairs and could she have fallen against the wall?” Doubt surrounds much of what happened in Melville’s life, the narrator of Dayswork notes, quoting another biographer, Elizabeth Hardwick: “So much about Melville is seems to be, may have been, and perhaps.” But the question lingers for her: “Would I be turning on my book light to read about Melville in the middle of the night if I knew for certain that he beat his wife?”

The Cornell historian Aaron Sachs is surprisingly bullish on the Melville marriage in Up from the Depths, another pandemic production. Sachs argues that the unequal division of household responsibilities was actually an honor for Elizabeth. Melville, he writes, “was capable of acting as…a solid, faithful husband who shared secrets with his wife about his writing and trusted her as a copier and proofreader of his manuscripts.” In an otherwise strong chapter on Clarel, the poem Lizzie described as a “dreadful incubus” that had “undermined all our happiness,” Sachs again adopts a glass-half-full perspective: “At least there had been some kind of happiness to be undermined.”

The notion that Melville’s work might illuminate a dark time (or a “Bad Time”) like our own is Sachs’s central argument. He notes that the centennial of Melville’s birth in 1919 also happened to coincide with a pandemic, the Great Influenza epidemic, along with the international disarray following the end of World War I. Sachs believes that it was no accident that the so-called Melville Revival, in which Melville’s reputation was resuscitated after a quarter-century of neglect, occurred during these troubled times. Melville, he suggests, offered guidance for a nation that had lost its way.

Sachs’s gamble is to interweave a meditation on Melville’s life and times with one on a minor player in the Melville Revival, the influential social critic Lewis Mumford, best known for conceptually ambitious books such as Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Culture of Cities (1938). Mumford was also the author of an early (and largely forgotten) biography of Melville, published in 1929. Sachs alternates chapters on Melville and Mumford, privileging thematic connections over chronological ones. During his short stint in the navy, “Mumford’s shipmates were much like Ishmael’s.” Melville’s pastoral move to Pittsfield is paired with Mumford’s move to Amenia, New York.

Sachs’s tolerant attitude toward Melville’s marriage is matched by his generally forgiving account of Mumford’s rancid “series of intermittent but passionate affairs” with younger women, including one whom he first met when she was sixteen. He concedes that “Mumford’s sense of male privilege is hard to stomach” and that Mumford’s quest for “spiritual freedom” “sometimes seemed to be antagonistic to the cooperative institution of marriage.” One wonders on what basis he concludes that Mumford’s wife, Sophia, “had learned to enjoy her husband’s attention when she received it and to do without him when he was distracted.”

A disabling feature of the book is that the pairing of Melville and Mumford doesn’t elevate Mumford. In contrast to pretty much anything of Melville’s, Mumford’s writing—with its pompous reflections on the fate of “Modern Man”—feels bloated and out of date. “Man alone,” he proclaims, “lives in a time-world that transcends the limitations of his local environment: the world of the past, the present, and the possible; or, if you will, the real, the realizing, and the realizable.” A windbag with big ideas, Mumford is always trying to identify, with vague abstractions and dogmatic pronouncements, what is ailing modern man, but his conclusions have none of the pithiness of contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, or Willa Cather.

I turned to Cody Marrs’s book hoping that its title, Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies, promised an approach to Melville free of schemes for the uplift of modern man. “I wrote most of this book during a pandemic,” Marrs writes in his preface. “Amidst this devastation I told a friend about this book, and he said out loud something I frequently wondered to myself: Is it appropriate to think about beauty at such an ugly time?” Two of the three essays in the book are given over to Melville’s late poetry, his major preoccupation after the disastrous reception of his final novel, The Confidence-Man, an oblique satire set on a Mississippi steamboat. Marrs explores Melville’s fascination with antique sculpture in his poetry collection Timoleon and flowers in the posthumous Weeds and Wildings. Melville never seems more Victorian than in these late lyrics, with their Ruskinian pathos, as in “Clover”:

The June day dawns, the joy-winds rush,
Your jovial fields are dressed;
Rosier for thee the Dawn’s red flush,
Ruddier the Ruddock’s breast.

But for Marrs, what Melville is really after in such lyrics is, as he puts it, “the varieties and possibilities of non-sovereignty.” Clover may be the “dearest flower of the field,” as Melville calls it elsewhere in Weeds and Wildings, but its real allure is that it has “no fanciful associations egotistic in kind.” From Melville’s perspective, Marrs concludes,

clover’s beauty clues us in to the communal dimensions of being. From beginning to end, Weeds and Wildings is intricately trellised—like so many flower-like growths—around non-selfhood.

This analysis is driven by the wishful claim that Melville is imagining a world free of human intervention and imposed hierarchies. In such a utopian environment, all “sovereignty” has been suppressed and competition replaced by mutual cooperation. Given the dark, conflicted energies of Moby-Dick, this seems more Marrs’s fantasy than Melville’s.

In writing about Melville’s poetry, Marrs is more interested in what Melville has to say about beauty than in the intrinsic aesthetic aspects of Melville’s work—his use of rhyme, say, or enjambment. Similarly, when Marrs turns to Moby-Dick, he is drawn primarily to passages of vivid descriptive writing, as when the White Whale finally appears, very late in the novel:

As they neared him, the ocean…seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam.

With his “dazzling hump” and his “fleecy, greenish foam,” according to Marrs, “we discover that [Moby Dick] is anything but the ugly monster he is reputed to be” and rather “part and parcel of nature’s kaleidoscopic beauty.”

D.H. Lawrence quoted the same passage in his 1923 essay on Moby-Dick, one of the inaugural works of the Melville Revival and still, a hundred years later, one of the very best things ever written about the novel. But Lawrence does so in order to contrast it with the visceral violence of the three-day chase that follows, in which Moby Dick’s apparent malice is everywhere on view. “Melville is a master of violent, chaotic physical motion,” Lawrence remarks.

Ultimately, Marrs’s conclusions track closely with Sachs’s. If only Ahab had experienced love, according to Mumford, it “would have redeemed the universe for Captain Ahab and kept him from his deadly contest with the whale.” If only Ahab had an aesthetic sense, Marrs implies, he would never have embarked on his murderous search for Moby Dick. And don’t we all have “the little Ahab inside of us,” Marrs asks, which we have to keep in remission by cultivating a love of flowers and sunsets? At this point I wanted to summon the little Harold Bloom inside of us, who wrote, “I weary of scholars neighing against Ahab, who is magnificent in his heroism. Would they have him hunt for more blubber?”

My mounting impatience with therapeutic readings of Moby-Dick, in which Ahab is the disease and various remedies (love, beauty, environmentalism, community, democracy) are proposed for treatment, made me particularly receptive to the densely argued chapter on Melville in Jennifer L. Fleissner’s Maladies of the Will. An English professor at Indiana University Bloomington, Fleissner notes, with some impatience, the overwhelming critical tendency—conspicuous in Sachs and Marrs—to view Ahab “as a sort of demon within that the book must manage and finally exorcize.” Sometimes the demon is identified psychologically, as in Marrs’s “little Ahab inside of us.” A long tradition of critics has ventured a political reading instead, with “Ahab as the totalitarian tyrant menacing democratic freedom in the form of…Ishmael.” Fleissner notes, drily, that “very few [readers] have seen fit to align themselves with Ahab.”

And yet, as Fleissner notes, the novel won’t sustain such anti-Ahab readings. For if readers hesitate to align themselves with Ahab, the crew of the Pequod displays no such reluctance. Even Starbuck, “the properly bourgeois first mate…who is most disturbed by Ahab’s bizarre divergence from their stated economic aim,” comes around. The entire crew is on board with Ahab, “the collective’s representative rather than merely its antagonist.”

And Melville himself is on board as well. “Therapeutic readings,” Fleissner argues,

frequently ignore…what seemed powerful about Ahab’s quest not only to Ishmael, and not only to the crew, but, indeed, to Melville himself, who persistently gives his captain the “bold and nervous lofty language” he had learned from Shakespeare, which renders him “a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.”

Not that Ahab isn’t appalling and even, at times, criminal. So is Macbeth; so is Othello. But do we really want our works of the imagination to mirror our own best selves, responsible and even-tempered, doing our small part to make the world a better place? “Melville never quite denounces whaling or extractive violence as we might wish,” writes Jeffrey Insko in his otherwise insightful introduction to the Norton Library’s new edition of Moby-Dick, yet another pandemic-era production. Indeed, he doesn’t. But would the novel be better for it?

Wouldn’t we prefer Moby-Dick exactly as it is, with its violence paired with its pathos, and its baffled wonderment at the workings of the universe? Wouldn’t we prefer to share in the ecstasy of the twenty-five-year-old Sylvia Plath, who, rereading Moby-Dick, felt “whelmed and wondrous at the swimming Biblical & craggy Shakespearean cadences, the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti, ambergris—miracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan”? One of her “few wishes,” Plath added, was to be “aboard a whale ship through the process of turning a monster to light & heat.”