 Why I am Reading Moby-DickbyNicki Leone
“Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick.” Nathaniel Philbrick’s admission in his introduction to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of this, the forever leading contender in the category of Great American Novel is one that I suspect many, many people can relate to. The white whale is the bête noir of the high school summer reading list—an impossibly long, incredibly tedious book that was to be endured, rather than savored. Moby-Dick, as every American teenager knows, is the reason God created Cliff’s Notes. My own memories of Moby-Dick are not quite so hostile. Rather, they are a muddied swirl of shipboard flotsam, lost in a morass of other stories and characters from a summer’s reading binge in high school when I attempted to swallow more classics than the white whale had swallowed sea water. The end result of that summer was something like biblio-bulemia—I retained enough of the stories just long enough to pass whatever test and write whatever essay was required on my college applications, and promptly lost the rest. I remembered little about the books. The Great Gatsby was about a guy’s infatuation with a girl. Wuthering Heights was a dark, dim fog of stormy nights on English moors. Moby-Dick, a confused succession of watery chase scenes. Twenty-five years later, I now know that Wuthering Heights is possibly the most furious book ever written. The Great Gatsby the most perfect book ever written. It is pretty clear to me that I didn’t get a single thing out of all that force-fed literature in high school except a few good grades on a few important tests. “Moby-Dick may be well known,” writes Philbrick in his new book Why Read Moby-Dick?,” but of the handful of novels considered American classics, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, it is the most reluctantly read. It is too long and too maddeningly digressive to be properly appreciated by a sleep-deprived adolescent.” We live in a world where people communicate in bursts of 140 characters. It’s crazier than trying to say something meaningful in Morse Code. In such a world, a 600+ page novel about the intricacies of a defunct fishing industry is absurd. So what about Moby-Dick? Why read it? More to the point, why am I reading it now? Moby-Dick was not high up in my to-be-read stack. In fact, it wasn’t even in the stack. At a time of year when people make resolutions about things they are going to lose or give up—weight, television, shopping—a few wags will almost always announce with glee that they resolve not to read Moby-Dick in the coming year. And everyone understands the impulse. My own reading resolutions for the new year didn’t take into consideration the potential of reading or not reading Moby-Dick. As usual, the books I was reading were added to my pile by a mish mash of sources: books publishers had sent me for reviewing, books I had bought because they peaked my interest, books sent to me by authors in the hopes that I might be willing to interview the writer, books given to me by friends and family because, well, it is known that I like books. But despite a general willingness to give all the books on my high school reading list a second chance I had not felt an impulse to revisit Moby-Dick until I was visited myself by one of those strange confluences of circumstance that a laughing universe sometimes feels fit to bestow: Penguin Books sent me, unasked for, a copy of their new deluxe edition of the book. And then not two weeks later, a friend gave me a book she had picked up at some book sale. It was Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick?, his own personal paean to the book he calls (when he is attempting to be restrained rather than effusive) “the greatest American novel ever written.” Plate-o-shrimp, to use a phrase I feel sure Ishmael would wholly understand. I read the latter first. I am perennially fascinated by the things people find fascinating in books. I love to read about reading love-affairs. Or, as in this case, reading obsessions. Most of my adult life—a career bookseller—has been occupied by telling people why they should read a particular book. And like Philbrick, whose book is enthusiastic if somewhat incoherent, my own attempts to convince someone to read something usually tumble into breathless descriptions of favorite scenes, paragraphs and even single sentences, certain that the language in the book was all anyone would need to hear to be convinced. This is how it goes with Philbrick, whose loves Moby-Dick enough not only to read it over and over again himself, but to write a book about why everyone else should do the same. The opening chapter is positively evangelical. Calling Moby-Dick the greatest American novel ever written—as he does, more than once—may seem like hyperbole, but it is at least hyperbole that many others are inclined to share, Faulkner and Hemingway included. (In fact, there is something strange and wonderful about Hemingway writing late in his life and in all of his stripped bare, minimalist style that Melville was the one writer he was still trying to beat). Philbrick lets his wild enthusiasm run free on the ocean waves: Moby-Dick is like Shakespeare, using the scaffolding of a whaling story to reflect back the entire world as we know it. It “deserves to be called our American bible.” Contained in its pages is “nothing less than the genetic code of America.” “As individuals trying to find our way through the darkness,” he writes passionately, “as citizens of a nation trying to live up to the ideals set forth in our constitution, we need, more than ever before, Moby-Dick.” Perhaps we should make the study of it a requirement for holding public office. In other words, the meaning of life you've been looking for? It can be found somewhere in the 600+ pages of Herman Melville’s novel. Philbrick thinks it is in chapter forty-nine, “The Hyena,” when Ishmael writes, after a near-fatal encounter with a whale, that he suspects the universe is a “vast practical joke” at his own expense. It is easy to slip into a kind of snarky, satirical tone when talking about the book, because Moby-Dick is just so overwhelming a story from start to finish it has the effect of capsizing the reader in quick, sudden squalls of words. Even the very first sentence—which is not “Call me Ishmael” but is found in a brief prologue-like section called “Etymology”—feels like an omen: [The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars, it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.] Which is a rather dramatic introduction to what amounts to a list of the terms that mean “whale” in various languages. After the first exuberant chapter, the rest of Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick? is an extended list of all the things that the author truly loves about this remarkable book. Everything from the poetry of its ornate language (“it sometimes takes me five minutes or more to make my way through a single page as I reread the words aloud, feeling the rhythms, the shrewdly hidden rhymes, and the miraculous way he manages consonants and vowels”) to its political analysis, its theological stance, its famous recipe for clam and cod chowder. The organization does not follow any clear pattern but simply meanders. One suspects that Philbrick would randomly open the book at various points, find something he loved, and think “oh yes, I have to write about that.” Mostly, one gets the feeling he can’t help but quote lengthy passages just because they mean so much to him. And it was that enthusiasm, ultimately, that made me set aside every book I had planned to read this month and take up Moby-Dick. Three weeks ago, I had not been interested. Whaling, even in a historical context, is not one of those subjects I cared to explore. I am a child of the late twentieth century, after all. “Whaling” in my world is not an industry but an environmental tragedy perpetuated by evil corporations or lampooned (harpooned?) by Hollywood in science fiction movies. And “Ahab,” he is merely a convenient metaphor for someone who is self-destructive, obsessed, tyrannical, and power-mad. Turn on the news and take your pick of the people you see. But Philbrick’s over-the-top adulation, his apparent inability to reign himself in about this, his very favorite book, proved impossible for me to resist. I am already inventing excuses to other authors for why I’m not done with the their book yet. If my reading life were a ship I am easily blown off course and Why Read Moby-Dick? swept like a gale through my to-be-read stack. I suspect, as I read, I will find that Philbrick’s favorite passages are not always my favorite passages. (I am already wondering how he could write an entire book about the best things in Moby-Dick and not mention the chapter called “The Counterpane.”) I also suspect that we may light upon the same favorite sections for wholly different reasons. But this is in the nature of all great art—we tend to find in it exactly what we are looking for. What’s important, says Philbrick, is that we at least look: Even a sentence, a mere phrase will do. The important thing is to spend some time with the novel, to listen as you read, to feel the prose adapt to the various voices that flowed through Melville during the book’s composition like intermittent ghosts with something urgent and essential to say. Which is a very emphatic, almost desperate way to say “You’ve got to read this!” But Philbrick is justified, because Moby-Dick, I discovered by the end of the second page of the first chapter in a description of the way people stand at the edge of a pier to look out at the sea, is possibly the most beautiful book ever written. I have a feeling that by the time I am done with the novel, I will be telling everyone I know why they should be reading Moby-Dick.
Books mentioned in this column:
Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
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