- The Guardian
Tuesday 30 July 2019 7
animal as an icon of otherness. He
invests cetaceans with their own
intrinsic beauty and in doing so,
he pre-empted our conception
of animals we know to be highly
sentient and entirely matriarchal,
expressing their own culture
through their sonar clicks.
Equally, Melville’s refl ections on
our own species still reverberate.
Days after 9/11, the Palestinian-
American writer Edward Said
compared George W Bush’s pursuit
of Osama bin Laden to Ahab’s
obsessive hunt for the white whale.
The current tenant of the White
House draws comparisons to Ahab’s
crazed mission, too: Trump’s
desire for a wall – an “unnecessary
and expensive ... vengeful folly”,
according to Neil Steinberg in the
Chicago Sun Times – is as irrational a
pursuit as Ahab’s.
You might apply similar
metaphors to the head of our
own shaky ship of state. When
the prime minister’s cabinet was
announced last week, I couldn’t
help but think of Melville’s line :
“Such a crew, so offi cered, seemed
specially picked and packed by some
infernal fatality to help him to his
monomaniac revenge.”
But it is Moby-Dick’s premonitory
brilliance that continues to make
it relevant. Melville predicts mass
extinction and climate breakdown,
and foresees a drowned planet from
which the whale would “spout his
frothed defi ance to the skies”. And
in its worldwide pursuit of a fi nite
resource, the whaling industry is an
augury of our globalised state. It’s no
coincidence that the Pequod’s fi rst
mate, Starbuck, gave his name to a
chain of coff ee shops.It’s a very
queer book
Moby-Dick may be the fi rst work
of western fi ction to feature a
same-sex marriage: Ishmael, the
loner narrator (famous for the
most ambiguous opening line in
literature) gets hitched – in bed – to
the omni-tattooed Pacifi c islander,
Queequeg: “He pressed his forehead
against mine, clasped me round
the waist, and said that henceforth
we were married.” Other scenes are
deeply homoerotic: sailors massage
each others’ hands in a tub of sperm
oil and there is an entire chapter
devoted to foreskins (albeit of the
whalish variety).
Indeed, the whole book is a
love letter (sadly unreciprocated)
from a besotted Melville to his
hero, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to
whom he wrote: “You have sunk
your northern roots down into my
southern soul.”
Faced with such unbridled
fl agrancy, the US establishment has
never been keen to accept the idea
ILLUSTRATIONS: BETTMANN ARCHIVE; ROCKWELL KENT; AFPthat Melville may just possibly haveMoby-Dick
may be the fi rst
work of western
fi ction to feature
a same-sex
marriage
been gay. And it must have rankled
to have the brilliance of his book
pointed out to them by a bunch
of British queer writers. When a
modest Everyman edition appeared
in London 20 years after Melville’s
death in 1891, DH Lawrence declared
it a work of futurism before futurism
had been invented; E M Forster
and W H Auden extolled its queer
nature. Virginia Woolf read it three
times, comparing it to Wuthering
Heights in its strangeness, and noted
in her 1926 diary that no biographerwould believe her work was inspired
by the vision of “a fi n rising on a
wide blank sea”.It is genuinely
subversive
The alluring fi gure of Queequeg
is one of the fi rst persons of
colour in western fi ction, and the
Pequod carries a multicultural
crew of Native Americans, African
Americans and Asians (evocatively
refl ected in the paintings of thecontemporary black American artist
Ellen Gallagher ). It is a metaphor for
a new republic already falling apart,
with the pursuit of the white whale
as a bitter analogy for the slave-
owning states. It is why, in 1952, the
Trinidadian writer C L R James called
Moby-Dick “the greatest portrayal
of despair in literature”, seeing an
indictment of imperialism in Ahab’s
desire for revenge on the whale. (In
fact, Melville hints it wasn’t only
his leg that was bitten off. As Cerys
Matthews asked me : “Shouldn’t it be
called Moby-no-Dick?”)It was born
in Britain
Melville was born in Manhattan on
1 August 1819, in sight of the sea.
As a failed teacher, he signed up for
a whaling voyage in New Bedford- then the richest city in the US,
wealthy on the oil of whales. He
deserted the ship a year later, but
on his return to the US became a
glamorous fi gure, acclaimed for his
sensual books about the “exotic”
inhabitants of the Marquesas
islands. But by 1849, his output had
become increasingly obscure, and
that October, he arrived in London,
seeking inspiration. Installed in
lodgings overlooking the Thames
at Charing Cross , he spent his time
visiting publishers and getting
drunk. Stumbling home,
he saw whales swimming down
Oxford Street. It was if they were
haunting him.
A month later, after a diversion to
Paris, he returned to New York with
a new book he had been given: Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein. Its tale of
perverted nature and overweening
ambition fed into Moby-Dick.
The fi rst version of the book was
published in Britain in 1851, entitled
The Whale. It came out in the US
later that year as Moby-Dick – and
failed, miserably. When Melville
died 40 years later, he and his book
were long forgotten.It has never been
easier (or cheaper)
to get hold ofIf the last 1,400 words haven’t
convinced you (“Oh, Time, Strength,
Cash, and Patience!” as Melville
complained ), you don’t have to
read the book at all. The artist
Angela Cockayne and I have curated
the Moby-Dick Big Read for the
University of Plymouth, featuring
Tilda Swinton, David Attenborough,
Fiona Shaw, Stephen Fry, John
Waters, Benedict Cumberbatch and
130 others who will read it to you,
chapter by chapter, for free. The site
has had 10m hits to date.
A word of caution, though. Once
you do read it, it’s hard to let it
go. I’m still haunted by Melville:
this winter, staying alone in an
18th-century house that he visited
on the island of Nantucket off Cape
Cod, I started to think that he was
coming up the stairs.
This side of the Atlantic, his
anniversary ghost has conjured up
some aptly eccentric events. The
Isle of Man, which lays claim to a
crewman on the Pequod, has
issued a set of commemorative
Moby-Dick stamps , while a
Yorkshire stately home is asking
for the return of bones pilfered
from the only whale mentioned
in Moby-Dick that really did exist- a skeleton assembled at Burton
Constable Hall in 1825, on whose
jaws, Melville joked, the lord of
the manor liked to swing. And if
you happen to be in Paris on
Thursday, you can join us reading
the book aloud in the bookshop
Shakespeare & Co , close to where
Melville stayed in 1849. We
are hoping for a bigger crowd
than his book launch, when the
party consisted of just him and
Hawthorne. Melville was defi ant.
“I have written a blasphemous
book,” he declared, “and I feel
as spotless as the lamb.” The
wickedness lives on. Happy
birthday, Herman.
An illustration
by Rockwell
Kent for a 1930
edition of
Moby-DickCaption here
please caption
here plese
caption
Moby-Dick admirers
Patti Smith,
Tilda Swinton and
Barack Obama;
right, Trump’s
wall – as irrational
a pursuit as
Captain Ahab’soby-Dick is the novel for now
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