- The Guardian
6 Tuesday 30 July 2019
T hursday marks the
200th birthday of Herman Melville
- author of the greatest unread
novel in the English language. I’ve
lost count of the number of times
I’ve seen eyes glaze over when I
ask people if they have conquered
Moby-Dick. It is the Mount Everest
of literature: huge and apparently
insurmountable, its snowy peak as
elusive as the tail of the great white
whale himself.
Having grown up loving whales
as a boy – in the era of the Save the
Whale campaigns of the 1970s – I
was underwhelmed when I watched
John Huston’s grandiose 1956 fi lm,
Moby Dick. Perhaps it was because
I saw it on a tiny black-and-white
TV, but the whole story seemed
impenetrable to me. And there
weren’t enough whales. I would
have been even less keen had I
known that the whale footage
Huston did include had been
specially shot off Madeira, where
they were still being hunted. For
the Hemingwayesque director,
there was none of that fi nal-credit
nonsense : “No animals were harmed
in the making of this fi lm.” Because
they very much were.
Forty years later, I saw my
fi rst whales in the wild , off
Provincetown, a former whaling
port on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
It was there, in New England, that I
fi nally fi nished the book. What had
seemed to be a heroic tale of the
high seas proved to be something
much darker and more sublime.
I realised its secret. Not only is it
very funny and very subversive,
but it maps out the modern world
as if Melville had lived his life in
the future and was only waiting
Two centuries
after the birth of
its author Herman
Melville, the novel
that predicted
the climate crisis
is more relevant
than ever, says
Philip Hoare
for us to catch up. I fell in love with
Melville as much as I had fallen in
love with the whales. My own fi ve-
year-long voyage searching for these
magnifi cent creatures produced my
own book, Leviathan or, The Whale
and a subsequent fi lm, The Hunt for
Moby-Dick. But even now, having
read it a dozen times, I’m still not
sure I can tell you what Moby-Dick is
all about. Yes, it’s the tale of Captain
Ahab, who sails his ship, the Pequod,
in search of a white whale that had
bitten off his leg. But it’s also a wildly
digressive attempt to comprehend
the animals themselves. And despite
the author’s rather unhelpful
conclusion, after 650 pages, about
the whale, “I know him not, and
never will”, here are some very good
reasons why you need to read his
crazily wonderful book.It is adored by the
great and the good
It is precisely Moby-Dick’s
forbidding reputation that has
inspired artists, writers, performers
and fi lm-makers from Frank Stella
to Jackson Pollock, Led Zeppelin
to Laurie Anderson, Orson Welles,
Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kubrick and
Lynne Ramsay , as well as the makers
of Tom and Jerry, and even
The Simpsons. The musician
Moby claims direct descent
from Melville (although he
admitted to me that he wasn’t
so sure it was true at all). There
are many who hold it as one of
their favourite books: Barack
Obama , Joyce Carol Oates ,
Patti Smith , Nile Rodgers and Bob
Dylan (who cribbed it for his Nobel
speech ) among them.It is so prophetic
It’s a tribute to Melville’s imagination
that his book remains so strongly
in ours. He may have done for the
whale what Peter Benchley’s Jaws
did for the shark – recreating theMoby-Dick – a
metaphor for
our own shaky
ship of state?Philip Hoare
stands outside
the London
house where
Melville
lived in 1849Queer, subversive, terrifying – M
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