When Ishmael ships aboard the Pequod, his own quotidian search becomes inexorably joined to the darker quest, in which the captain of the doomed whaler, "monomaniacal Ahab", sets out to revenge himself on the great white whale that has bitten off his leg. It is a literary performance that is exhilarating, extraordinary, sometimes exasperating and, towards its apocalyptic climax, unputdownable. What follows is profoundly modern yet essentially Victorian, spanning 135 chapters. From its celebrated opening line ("Call me Ishmael") it plunges the reader into the narrator's quest for meaning "in the damp, drizzly November of my soul". Moby-Dick is – among some fierce contenders which will appear later in this series – the great American novel whose genius was only recognised long after its author was dead. Moby-Dick is a book you come back to, again and again, to find new treasures and delights, a storehouse of language, incident and strange wisdom. I first read it, inspired by my sixth-form English teacher, Lionel Bruce, aged about 15, and it's stayed with me ever since.
All we can say for certain is that, after climbing Monument Mountain, Melville adopted Hawthorne's idea of the "romance" as a mixed-genre, symbolic kind of fiction, and found his creative genius somehow released in the making of his new book.Īnd that is everything, because Moby-Dick is, for me, the supreme American novel, the source and the inspiration of everything that follows in the American literary canon. So how homoerotic was this friendship? No one will ever know it remains one of the mysteries of American letters. All we have is Melville's ecstatic response ("Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's."), and, subsequently, a dedicatory declaration of Melville's admiration for Hawthorne's "genius" at the front of Moby-Dick (the first edition hyphenated the whale's name). After an early reading of the manuscript, Hawthorne acclaimed it in a letter that remains, tantalisingly, lost. Thus liberated, fulfilled, and inspired to say "NO! in thunder, to Christianity", he completed Moby-Dick or, The Whale, in the spring of 1851. Melville, indeed, became so infatuated that he moved with his wife and family to become Hawthorne's neighbour. Both writers had hovered on the edge of insolvency and each was a kind of outsider.Ī fervent correspondence ensued.
Melville was a ragged, voluble, romantic New Yorker from mercantile stock. Hawthorne, from an old New England family, was careful, cultivated and inward, a "dark angel", according to one.
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