Herman Melville, author for the ages

An English captain, who lost his arm to Moby Dick, warned Captain Ahab.

“He’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?” – glancing at the ivory leg.

Ahab told the Englishman he planned to pursue the great white whale anyway.

“He is (best left alone). But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet!”

– In Chapter 100 of “Moby-Dick” or “The Whale”

They were reading that great scene from “Moby-Dick” shortly after I quietly entered the Whaling Museum’s San Francisco Room about 6:30 Sunday morning.

Early Sunday mornings, before light has broken over the frigid January harbor, is, I think, the best time to attend the city’s annual Moby-Dick Marathon.

The wanting-to-be-seen crowd that packs the Lagoda Room in the early chapters is long gone. The dreary middle chapters where Melville seemingly deliberately bores the reader with endless pages of cetology have droned away into history. But just before early light on Sunday, the marathon is approaching the great climatic arc of the novel —  that mad chase toward doom that results from Ahab’s obsession with defeating the mindless force of nature that did him wrong.

When you enter the top floor of the museum at this hour, kids in sleeping bags are everywhere. I say kids because they are kids to me but what we are really talking about is college students.

They are young folks who have come face to face with Melville’s great epic sweep for the first time and have fallen wholeheartedly in love with the book. 

They come from all across the country and even the world. Some are at a time of life before they can afford a hotel, and the Whaling Museum generously allows them to do a full monty marathon this way. Asleep on the floor, like Ishmael’s bunkmates in the crowded forecastle, it does not matter whether the kids on this voyage consciously hear every word of the epic as it’s read. Like those aboard the Pequod, they can say they were present for the telling.

“Moby-Dick” is full of every religious and literary allusion Melville could pack into the saga. It’s a tale of Western and Eastern civilization with Shakespeare, Milton, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, pagan and primitive thought all there. They cast into a reverent light the philosophical musings of the young seaman narrator as he confronts man’s tragic flaws and destiny. The great cursed round-the-world voyage that is Moby-Dick’s reach for the stars. 

It is, of course, not just the tale of Ishmael, Starbuck and Ahab as they run after the great leviathan toward their own perdition; it’s everyman’s chase of what most ails him or her, what most drags each of us to our inescapable final and fatal ends.

Two or so decades ago, the birth of the Moby-Dick Marathon marked the revival of New Bedford’s re-embrace of Herman Melville, and it was an inspired one. Twenty-something years on, Mayor Jon Mitchell has now made another inspired proposal — one that you would think New Bedford would have thought of long ago — to build a statue of Melville in its historic district, the part of the city that the first-time seaman aboard The Acushnet made legendary.

Along with that statue, it might also make sense for the city to try to establish itself as more of a center for Melville studies, now that this most intense of scribes has taken his place in the upper echelon of the greatest authors. Melville is the single writer I can think of who is counted both among the greatest American novelists and among the greatest poets. His semi-autobiographical long poem, “Clarel,” is about the struggle to reconcile science and Christian theology. Like “Moby-Dick,” it failed commercially in his lifetime, only to be bestowed with high acclaim several decades after his 1891 death.

Melville’s reach did not stop with the tale of the great whaling voyage or search for religious truth. 

His end-of-life novella about a tragic sailor, “Billy Budd,” is the single best depiction of the struggle between good and evil, law and justice, that I  have read. If he had written nothing else — never mind an epic as great as “Moby-Dick” — I think Melville would have been an author for the ages on Billy Budd’s basis. But there was more. The reputation of Melville’s short stories “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno” are considered almost on a par with his greatest work and hold important places in the American literary canon. 

Not to say that Melville’s writing is easy, and especially for a 21st century reader. It’s 19th century prose, and there was a different cadence to the language then. He’s also often a writer that never met a distraction he didn’t want to pursue. But reading Melville is well worth the ardor; he opens the door to our modern era’s struggle with great ideas and conflict and with a broad scope that few writers even attempt.

Perhaps the most mystical of American writers, Melville certainly deserves high honor for his achievement but from New Bedford residents in particular because we are from the place by the sea that he bestowed such great favor on. “The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all of New England,” as he wrote.

Salem, New Bedford’s most closely related Massachusetts cousin in terms of art, culture, and connection to the ocean, has long had an inspiring statue of that other great mid-19th century American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

The Hawthorne statue, created by the renowned sculptor Bela Lyon Pratt, was installed in 1925 and restored to its bronze splendor just in 2017. Pratt also designed the great whaleman’s statue in front of the downtown New Bedford library with its iconic quote from Ahab, “A dead whale or a stove boat.”

Melville was a failure at his death. Unlike his earlier travel and adventure writing, none of his novels or short stories sold well. Much of his poetry was barely published. It was not until the centennial of his birth that literary critics re-examined him and the great Melville Revival began. So it’s not a wonder that New Bedford did not build the statue in the 1920s the way that Salem did for the native son who wrote “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven Gables.”

I sometimes disagree with some of Mayor Mitchell’s politics, but on matters of preservation and tourism, marketing the city’s history, he mostly gets it right. He’s done a great thing by proposing this Melville statue.

Here’s the description in the mayor’s press release about the importance of “Moby-Dick,” the day before the 2024 Marathon began. 

“New Bedford is the setting for what is arguably the preeminent work of American literature,” he said. “The novel has had a profound influence on artists the world over and on American culture itself.”

There are very few writers who have commanded the attention of the world the way that Melville has. The city’s installation of a statue of him on the streets he made legendary will help us better tell our story to the world that comes here.

We are obliged to honor greatness like Herman Melville’s.

Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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