“To the islanders he was a nobody,” Melville would later record, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming even humble—that I ever encountered.”

In the years to come, Melville’s professional life as a novelist would go the way of Pollard’s whaling career. Having lost a readership for his books, he would be forced to take a job as a customs inspector on the wharves of New York City. As if mocked by Ishmael’s vision of domestic bliss in “The Grand Armada,” Melville’s family life proved difficult. There are indications that he drank too much, that he may have physically abused his wife; one of his sons would die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Finally, in 1885, a small inheritance allowed Melville to retire from the customs office at the age of sixty-six. After years of composing arid, intellectually complex poetry, he wrote what many regard today as one of the greatest novellas ever written, Billy Budd, about an incident; aboard a British man-of-war. Pasted to the side of his wooden writing desk was a simple slogan: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”

What these words meant to Melville can only be guessed. But what unites his two masterworks, Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, is the watery wilderness in which Melville came of age: the sea. It is one of the ironies of history that 150 years after Moby-Dick’s publication, the frontier that most Americans associate with our national identity, the West, has long since been civilized beyond recognition. The sea, on the other hand, has never been tamed, and it is the sea that, with Melville’s help, we are beginning to rediscover. He is, in the end, one of our greatest literary survivors.

—Nathaniel Philbrick

INTRODUCTION

Not many years ago, at an elite northeastern university, a prominent English literary critic was asked which was the greatest English novel. The room was paneled and lit by a chandelier, the windows heavily draped, the bookshelves lined with leatherbound classics—furnishings all carefully assembled to replicate an Old World atmosphere. There was not a whiff of sea air in that room. With the combination of eagerness and resentment that sometimes greets the proclamation of a standard, the students leaned forward to hear from their eminent guest. “Middlemarch would be my candidate,” he said tentatively, “unless by English novel you mean novel in English, in which case it would, of course, be Moby-Dick.”

That Moby-Dick, this sea monster of a book, could be declared self-evidently the greatest work of fiction in the language by an arbiter of literary taste would have amazed Herman Melville—not because he did not believe it to be true, but because he doubted the palatability of his truth. Melville was an artist of the highest ambition, but he thought of himself as a writer whose insolence and candor would never become the currency of genteel common rooms. “A whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” he wrote in Moby-Dick, which is a book full of wild and untamable characters—“mongrel renegades, and castaways,” Melville called them—and written in frank contempt for the genteel life:

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality;…With all her might she crowds all sail off shore…seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

These lines about the fatality of coziness and comfort bear Melville’s unmistakable stylistic signature. No one in America had ever written prose of such compressed intensity (“the lashed sea’s landlessness”) and taunting contradictions (“for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril”). As anyone encountering Moby-Dick for the first time will discover, it is a book that struggles to maintain its narrative drive against the impulse to digress and meditate and play. One reason for this is that Melville was indefatigably alert to what might be called the stages of a word’s career—as in his use of “pitiful,” a word that vibrates between its old meaning (full of pity) and the more modern meaning it was acquiring in Melville’s time: pathetic, exhausted, impotent. Melville does not employ words in Moby-Dick; he savors them.

A noisy book written in a braggart’s voice (“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!”), Moby-Dick is also a book of exquisite refinement. With all its sprawl and bluster, it can suddenly subside into the mood of “mowers…sleeping among the new-mown hay” and evoke the “snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds…the gentle thoughts of the feminine air.” Even its most dramatic chapters rarely end in crescendo but tend to resolve themselves into a reflective quiet that chastens like the sound of strings after brass.

Despite its patent beauties, Melville’s novel was, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a “language experiment” that struck many of its, first readers as overwrought and bewildering. “Not worth the money asked for it, either as a literary work or as a mass of printed paper” was the judgment of the Boston Post, and although other reviewers appreciated its “easy, rollicking freedom of language and structure,” Moby-Dick was regarded at best as a curiosity and at worst a botch. In some moods Melville claimed to be unhurt by the public rebuke; he was, he wrote to Hawthorne, “content to have our paper allegories ill comprehended.” But in other moods he was devastated that he had failed to touch the nerve of the American public. That Melville was disappointed is hardly surprising, but that he was bitterly shocked is a sign of what was at stake. He wrote Moby-Dick in a messianic fervor because he wanted to save his country from itself.

 

One way to approach Melville’s forbidding text is to regard it as part of his lifelong meditation on America. The country into which Melville was born in 1819 was a nation where the vestiges of aristocracy were fading, and where anyone who defended the idea of inherited privilege ran the risk of being charged with treason. National politics, the conduct of which had once been handed back and forth between New England blue bloods and Virginia gentry, was becoming the scene of feisty combat among populist heroes like Andrew Jackson and political professionals like Martin Van Buren. But even as the disfranchised Melville chafed in this vulgar country, he relished its impatience with pretension and the liberation it promised from the burdens of the past. In Pierre: or the Ambiguities, the novel he wrote just after Moby-Dick, he remarked that

in countries like America, where there is no distinct hereditary caste of gentlemen, whose order is factitiously perpetuated as race-horses and lords are in kingly lands; and especially, in those agricultural districts, where, of a hundred hands that drop a ballot for the Presidency, ninety-nine shall be of the brownest and the brawniest; in such districts, this daintiness of the fingers, when united with a generally manly aspect, assumes a remarkableness unknown in European nations.

Melville’s early years were spent in an effort to come to terms with his own “remarkableness.” It was a strenuous effort, in which the young man struggled against an insurgent biliousness that he disliked in himself.