Looking Into Melville's Eyes: Moby Dick, New York, and 9/11

Stuart Mitchner

Early on in Andrew Delbanco's Melville: His World and Work (Knopf $30) we learn that one of Herman Melville's childhood homes was "on Courtlandt Street (on the future site of the World Trade Center)."

Given the inventive means Delbanco uses to make readers aware of how Melville and his masterpiece Moby Dick haunt contemporary American culture, it seems almost over-subtle to casually tuck that piece of information into parentheses. Delbanco begins his portrait of the artist with a series of pertinent quotations in the style of the "Extracts" with which Melville prefaces Moby Dick (extracts "supplied by a sub-sub-librarian ... who has gone through the long Vaticans and street stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book"). Among Delbanco's extracts illustrating Melville's presence in our time is an exchange from an episode of The Sopranos wherein Billy Budd is discussed over dinner in Columbia student Meadow Soprano's Manhattan apartment. Other quotations bring Moby Dick into the context of the first Gulf War (as America "like Ahab" prepares to "take after an imputed evil"); the 2000 election where the BBC has Al Gore clinging to the wreckage "with the ferocity of a Captain Ahab;" and the reaction to 9/11 (the CIA's Richard Clarke relating how he admitted to Condoleezza Rice that maybe he was "becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the white whale"). The last extract is from a May 2005 New York Times editorial headed "Manhattan's Mayor Ahab" about Mayor Bloomberg's obsession with building a football stadium on the West Side: "Since Lower Manhattan is where Melville began the saga of Moby Dick, it seems appropriate to wonder whether Mr. Bloomberg is turning into a modern-day Ahab, pursuing his great white elephant of a stadium as the former World Trade Center site sinks into trouble." (The Melville show goes on in today's New York Times where a columnist discussing the tenacity of special prosecutors notes that the job can turn "a reasonable lawyer into an inquisitor with the zeal of Captain Ahab").

Delbanco might also have mentioned that the first five years of the 21st century have been pervasively and compellingly accompanied by the compositions of a musician named Moby (born Richard Melville Hall) whose dark, sea-haunted lyrics reflect the same qualities in a musical mix that often, deliberately or not, evokes the dark, oceanic sweep of his ancestor's greatest work.

What could a man whose life-span fell just short of the 20th century have to do with an attack on lower Manhattan some 110 years after his death? For one thing, Melville was a true New Yorker: he was born there and he died there after working for the last 25 years of his life as a customs inspector a stone's throw from what would become Ground Zero. Although he produced all his fiction except for the posthumous Billy Budd in a span of 12 years, between 1845 and 1857, he also produced a great deal of important poetry after 1857. Keeping what happened to New York on September 11, 2001 in mind, it's chilling to read a poem like "The House-Top" from his extraordinary collection of Civil War poetry, Battle Pieces. Responding to the bloody draft riots of July 1863 where the new conscription laws sent white mobs through the city in a murderous, racist rampage, Melville subtitles the poem "A Night Piece" and writes of how "civil charms and priestly spells which late held hearts in awe ... like a dream dissolve, /And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature." He makes us hear "the low dull rumble, dull and dead, /And ponderous drag that jars the wall" and in the last lines writes of "the grimy slur on the Republic's faith." As Delbanco points out, Melville's vision of the war stressed "the futility of heroic gestures in the face of massive force." Unlike Whitman, "who saw people fighting, dying for their own idea," Melville, in Delbanco's words, "saw a people led to slaughter by a fate over which they had no control."

More important, Delbanco points out that when Melville wrote that poem, he was in Massachusetts imagining an embattled New York based on news reports of the riots while creating a night mood of universal significance that still seems relevant to the fall of the Trade Towers a century later.

More than a decade before he wrote his "Night Piece," Melville was in a Fourth Avenue room in New York finishing Moby Dick in the sultry summer of 1851. Another of Delbanco's prefatory extracts reinforces our sense of the magnitude of what he created. From Howard P. Vincent's The Trying-Out of Moby Dick, published in 1949: "Readers of Moby Dick know that he swims the world unconquered, that he is ubiquitous in time and place. Yesterday he sank the Pequod; within the past two years he has breached five times; from a New Mexico desert, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most recently, at Bikini atoll." And still more recently at the World Trade Center and Iraq.

You can get a hint of Melville's dark vision just by looking into the eyes of the man pictured on the cover of Anthony Delbanco's unconventional biography. Here is the writer who was speaking for himself when he cited "the power of blackness" in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who said "NO in thunder and the Devil himself cannot make him say yes." The photograph was taken in 1861, ten years after Melville wrote those words and ten years after the publication of Moby Dick. Although he was only 41 at the time, his eyes are old, old, old, beyond mere disillusionment like that which he suffered when his masterwork was misunderstood and mocked and dismissed as a species of madness by what passed for the literary culture of his time. You have no doubt that Melville's eyes in this photograph are those of the man who exhausted himself and his spirit in the act of conceiving the ever-surfacing, undying destructive force Howard Vincent would compare to the impact of the atomic bomb a century later.

The truth is, Melville would probably have looked no less distant and detached in 1861 even had he been hailed in his own time as the author of the Great American Novel, a title Moby Dick would win hands down if such a question were ever asked of writers and readers in today's book world, even among the lowest levels of bookchatdom. If only we had a photo of the author taken in the summer of 1851 when he was on fire with Moby Dick, taken at the moment when an adventure story that began so buoyantly and playfully (surely one of the most engaging openings in all literature) was becoming something "rich and strange," an act of imagination of Shakespearean proportions, a city of words with something like the "merciless multiplicity" Henry James had in mind when he wrote of Manhattan in The American Scene. The difference between the face of the man possessed of that vision and the man bereft of all but the ashes of it would be terrible but fascinating to see. In fact, "bereft" is too weak a word for the face of the man who, a few years before this picture was taken, told his lapsed soulmate Hawthorne he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated."

One of the highlights of Delbanco's <i>Melville</i> is its exploration of the impact the street-life ambience of Manhattan had on the flowering and free-flowing style that transformed Moby Dick. The impact of other writers is obvious and easily documented — Shakespeare, in particular, and Hawthorne as an inspiration (Melville dedicated the book to him) — but the wonder of Moby Dick is the way it opens out into seemingly infinite possibilities. The wild flow of associations, the tributaries and diversions, reflect metropolitan excitement and the sea itself. Delbanco says it well:

"Before his move to New York, Melville's prose had stayed pretty much within the limits of conventional narrative; but as he immersed himself in the city, his books became eclectic miscellanies, with innumerable tangents spoking out from the spine of the story, each one reaching for some new analogy that diverts our attention to some novel sensation, or topic, or fact."

Delbanco goes on to compare "moving clause by clause through Melville's New York prose" to "strolling, or browsing, on a city street." He also gives the city credit for breaking open Melville's style as well as opening his mind "to the cosmopolitan idea of a nation to which one belongs not by virtue of some blood lineage that leads back into the past, but by consent to the as-yet-unrealized ideal of a nation comprehending all peoples ... in a future of universal freedom."

But as Delbanco's Melville makes clear, that future "comprehending all peoples" was also large enough to comprehend the huge cloud erupting from the collapse of the World Trade Center and the forms and faces of people fleeing from it. Look closely and you can imagine Herman Melville's eyes watching it all, beyond sadness, beyond tragedy, perhaps even beyond annihilation.