On the Origins of Moby-Dick

Matthew Stevenson writes about Herman Melville's famous work for the Critical Flame.

From the essay...

Nothing in the room captures the frenzy in which Melville wrote his books. He said to a friend: “I go to my workroom & light my fire—then spread my M.S.S. on the table—take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will.” One of his biographers, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, describes how he approached his craft: “By writing, Melville could fill the white spaces with his own meanings. He could recapture and communicate his moments of great insight, happiness, and fear: daydreaming and pondering the mysteries of the universe from a perch high in the rigging, listening to songs and stories with companions of his watch, dallying in the shade of a breadfruit tree with a beautiful native girl, seeing blood spurt cut from the welts in the backs of fellow sailors by the vicious ‘cat,’ and sighing with relief that, once more, he had managed to escape the lash.”

In this room, Melville finished Moby-Dick, and then wrote Pierre, Mardi, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Benito Cereno. These later books explore the internal oceans of psychological tension, but what his readers were hoping for was another yarn of the South Seas. A few reviewers even speculated that Melville was losing his mind. One review had the headline: “Herman Melville Crazy.” Not until the 1920s was Melville universally acclaimed in the United States, although throughout the nineteenth century his books always had a small, but devoted, following in England.

By some accounts, the first draft of Moby-Dick was a conventional sea story. Hawthorne encouraged him to develop such transcendent themes as obsession, anger, revenge, and lust. “Ah, God!” Melville writes in Moby-Dick, “What trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.” Presumably such passages were missing from the first draft, which was heavy with chapters that read like a textbook on cetology or a history of the whaling industry. The critic Leon Howard has written that the “excitement and enthusiasm aroused in him by Hawthorne belonged entirely to the period in which he was reworking Moby-Dick.” Hawthorne’s influence, late in the book, may also explain why the novel has the feel of two books in one: the conventional passages about the whaling industry, and the psychological drama of Ahab’s self-destruction.