Why Read Moby-Dick

mine,” he exults. What Ahab does not hear as he savors “his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence” is Starbuck’s murmured “God keep me!—keep us all!” as well as the flap of the sails as the wind suddenly vanishes and, most disturbing of all, “the low laugh from the hold” of Fedallah.
    Once the grog has been passed around and the harpooneers have sworn their allegiance with a toast drunk from their harpoon sockets, Ahab retires to his cabin, where he watches the sun set outside the stern windows and reflects on what transpired on the quarterdeck. “’Twas not so hard a task,” he soliloquizes. “I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve.... What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!”

9
    Hawthorne
    S o where did it come from, this darkness, this witchy voodoo of the void? As it turns out, Melville’s incomparable ability to humanize evil came from a most unlikely, late-breaking source: a shy, soft-spoken writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom Melville didn’t meet until he was almost done with the first draft. The story of their friendship and especially the letters from Melville that it produced are reason enough to read Moby-Dick, a novel that is as much about the microclimates of intimate human relations as it is about the great, uncontrollable gales that push and pull all of us.
    In the late summer of 1850, Melville thought he was finished with his whaling novel, a book that apparently hadn’t a whiff of Ahab in it. In early August, Melville’s guest in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Evert Duyckinck, reported to his wife that his host was “mostly done” with “a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery.” Then, on August 5, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne.
    At forty-six, Hawthorne was fifteen years Melville’s senior. He’d recently completed The Scarlet Letter and was now working on The House of the Seven Gables in a rented farmhouse in nearby Lenox, where he lived with his wife, Sophia, and their two children, Julian and Una. During a picnic atop Monument Mountain, the two writers had a chance to talk for the first time. Soon after, Melville read Hawthorne’s story collection Mosses from an Old Manse . A week later, Melville gave Duyckinck the essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” for publication in the Literary World .
    At that time, Hawthorne enjoyed a reputation as a mild-mannered recluse penning well-crafted stories about New England’s quaint colonial past. This, Melville insisted, was missing the point. Instead of a “harmless” stylist, Hawthorne was an unappreciated genius possessed by “this great power of blackness.” Hidden beneath his stories’ lapidarian surfaces were truths so profound and disturbing that they ranked with anything written in the English language.
    Melville then turned his attention in the review to Shakespeare. “[I]t is those deep far-away things in him,” Melville declared, “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.” Moreover, it was through his “dark characters,” such as Hamlet, Lear, and Iago, that Shakespeare “craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them!” In writing about Hawthorne, Melville, via Shakespeare, was laying the groundwork for Ahab.
    During the fall of 1850, Melville and Hawthorne got to know each other. Temperamentally, the two men could not have been more different. Melville, Sophia Hawthorne wrote, was a “man . . . with life to his finger-tips.” Hawthorne, on the other hand, preferred to keep life at a distance. In fact, Sophia confessed in a letter to her mother that prior to meeting Melville on Monument Mountain, her “shy dear” of a husband had specifically requested not to be introduced to the young and enthusiastic writer. Even in friendship, Hawthorne remained remote and detached while Melville was always crowding in. “Nothing