'Wildness, Imagination Escaping Out of Bounds'

I’ve mailed a copy of Moby-Dick to a reader who wants to read Melville’s book but is short of funds. That’s a situation I understand. In thin times over the years I’ve relied exclusively on public libraries for reading matter, which partially explains why I still patronize them – free books, convenience, the thrill of serendipity. I shipped her the University of California’s paperback reprint of the Arion Press edition illustrated by Barry Moser. The first page is rubber-stamped:

Melville and his family lived at Arrowhead in the Berkshires from 1850 to 1863, and there he wrote most of Moby-Dick and all of Pierre, The Confidence-Man, Israel Potter and The Piazza Tales. In my twenty years living in upstate New York, I visited Arrowhead dozens of times. On the second floor you can look north out the window in the room where Melville worked and see Mount Greylock, which in winter reminded him of a great white sperm whale. He dedicated Pierre to “Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty.”

 

Moby-Dick was published in England in October 1851 and a month later in the U.S. It is a famously misunderstood, forgotten and rediscovered book. It went out of print in 1887, four years before Melville’s death. His lifetime earnings from the book totaled $1,260. It was rediscovered by critics and readers near the end of World War I. Among the champions of Moby-Dick was the English writer Viola Meynell (1885-1956). Thanks to her, in 1920 it became the first American novel published in the Oxford World’s Classics series. In the introduction, “A Great Story Teller: Herman Melville,” she writes:

 

“Herman Melville has that rarest quality, rare even in genius, of wildness, imagination escaping out of bounds. But the whale is the cause — this natural object, and its order, and the truth that we know of it, and its laws, are the occasion of his wildness.”

 

I’m reminded of this line from Yvor Winters' poem “To a Portrait of Melville in My Library” (1937): “Wisdom and wilderness are here at poise.” In defiance of conventional critical wisdom, Winters writes in “Herman Melville and the Problems of Moral Navigation” (In Defense of Reason, 1947) that Moby-Dick is:

 

“. . . beyond a cavil one of the most carefully and successfully constructed of all major works of literature; to find it careless, redundant, or in any sense romantic, as even its professed admirers are prone to do, is merely to misread the book and to be ignorant of the history leading up to it.”