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.”
2 comments:
The joke is not mine, alas, but I heard a discussion once on how a slight change of punctuation, even a single comma, can throw the sense of a book. What if Moby Dick began with the line, "Call me, Ishmael." The first British edition left out the Epilogue in which it is explained that Ishmael was the only member of the Pequod to survive. Thank goodness, then, that someone phoned him when he was in dire straits.
In 1989 or so, I drove out to Arrowhead and arrived shortly after dawn. Mist was rising from the broad fields behind the house. There were no cars in the parking area and no people about.
Out in the second field behind the house, I saw a large grey shape. From my car, it looked like an elephant. I got out and walked closer and saw that it was, indeed, an elephant.
I left and didn't return the place for years. To this day, I don't know why there was a solitary elephant tied to the fence behind Arrowhead that day.
Post a Comment