Why Read Moby-Dick

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    First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

    Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick, 2011
    All rights reserved
    LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
    Philbrick, Nathaniel.
    Why read Moby-Dick? / Nathaniel Philbrick. p. cm.
    ISBN : 978-1-101-54521-8
    1. Melville, Herman, 1819–1891. Moby Dick. 2. Sea stories, American—
History and criticism. I. Title.
PS2384.M62P55 2011
813’.3—dc22
2011019766

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To Melissa

1
    The Gospels in This Century
    E arly in the afternoon of December 16, 1850, Herman Melville looked at his timepiece. He was in the midst of composing the novel we now know as Moby-Dick . At that moment he was writing about how for thousands, even millions of years whales have been filling the atmosphere over the waters of the Pacific with the haze of their spouts—“sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep.” It was then that he decided to record the exact time at which he was writing these words about whale spouts: “fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850.”
    When Moby-Dick was eventually published in November of the following year, the date in this passage was changed from 1850 to 1851. But that is no matter. The fact remains that in this tiny chapter, titled “The Fountain” (the 85th in a novel that would eventually extend to 135 chapters), Melville did something outrageous. He pulled back the fictive curtain and inserted a seemingly irrelevant glimpse of himself in the act of composition.
    I’ve now read Moby-Dick at least a dozen times, and this reference to a specific time and day in December remains my favorite part of the book. Whenever I come upon that sentence, I feel as if I am there, with Melville, as he creates the greatest American novel ever written.
    In December 1850, Melville was just thirty-one years old. A few months earlier he’d decided to move his family from New York City to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, the temporary home of his new literary idol, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville was already the father of a baby boy named Malcolm; in October of the following year his wife, Elizabeth, gave birth to a second son, Stanwix.
    His literary career had begun in spectacular fashion four years before with Typee, a bestseller about his adventures in the South Seas. But Melville quickly learned that success guarantees nothing and in fact turns the future into an endless quest to measure up to the past. As each subsequent book failed to equal Typee ’s sales, and with his financial responsibilities mounting (his household often included his widowed mother and his sisters), Melville began to worry about the future. “Dollars damn me . . . ,”