Herman Melville (1819–1891) was a prolific novelist and poet, but he is known today as the author of a single book. This is not altogether unjust, for Moby-Dick (1851) is the most extraordinary novel in English. It is extraordinary in all its parts, from the black-hearted majesty of its theme to the versatility of its startling prose. It is direct and unadorned when plain speaking and rough-edged humor are called for, yet shot through with Shakespearean lightning when high tragic solemnity sets the scene ablaze. Melville expounds with encyclopedic authority upon everything you might ever care (or not care) to know about whales and whaling. He showcases both the sheer cosmopolitan variety of American society and the riveting exploits of a few remarkable men, ruthless seekers after the supernatural amid the beauty and the terror of the natural world.

Melville had to endure seeing his masterpiece sell a few thousand copies and go out of print. He had not always been a commercial failure, or a critical one. Success came early to him with the publication of his first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), a loosely autobiographical yarn based on his desertion from a whaleship and his sojourn on a South Pacific island among natives who, in the novel at least, eat human flesh. He became known, much to his displeasure, as the man who lived among the cannibals. That kind of sensationalism was too easy for him, he declared. By his own admission, he wanted to write the sort of books that don’t sell. And if that was what he was really after, the public was all too ready to oblige. After writing ten weighty novels in twelve frenetic years, he turned in 1857 to writing poetry instead, an activity that did not delude him with the hope of thereby earning a living.

Arrowhead—the handsome estate he had purchased in the Berkshires in 1850 with the help of his prosperous father-in-law, Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw—became a persistent drain on his pocket and his spirit. He missed mortgage payments (the lender was forgiving), had to sell off half his land, and buried himself deeper and deeper in debt. Eventually he would trade Arrowhead for his brother’s house in New York. These were the years in which he wrote one of his most famous minor works, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (1853), about a drudge who sits in a law office copying documents all day…until he simply decides to stop. His quiet signature demurral, “I would prefer not to,” is often construed by liberal admirers as the browbeaten wage slave’s rebellious last-ditch assertion of heroic manhood. But to a less enchanted reader, Bartleby’s decision to waste relentlessly away suggests that charity and philanthropy will not save a man determined to destroy himself.

A miniature self-portrait, perhaps. Poverty undermined what was left of Melville’s well-being. His tendency to depression became a near-irrevocable despondency; rumor (not entirely spurious) had it that he had gone insane. A granddaughter of his would later report that he had laid violent hands on his wife, who consequently stated her quite reasonable intention to leave him. She hung on, just barely, and a reprieve finally came: in 1866, Melville managed to secure a patronage job as a customs inspector on the Manhattan docks. But tragedy continued to dog him. In 1867 his eldest son, Malcolm, 18 years old, shot himself in bed. Nineteen years later, Malcolm’s younger brother, Stanwix, died alone in a San Francisco hotel room at 35, having failed at everything he had ever undertaken. No further information was available.

Bleakness of Vision

Melville bore these premature deaths as well as anyone could. America’s foremost literary genius kept to his appointed bureaucratic routine on the Hudson River waterfront for 19 years, six days a week for four dollars a day, until his wife came into a liberating inheritance. Free of financial peril for a change, Melville doted on his grandchildren (his daughters were more durable than his sons) and on the roses he grew in his garden. He happily spent his newfound money on books and on prints of whaling ships.

Yet from the rocky start to the placid finish of his career, Melville’s bleakness of vision remained his most striking quality. This is apparent in “Billy Budd,” his last work of prose fiction (posthumously published in 1924). It is a pointed fable: a repugnant superior conspires to ensnare the gleamingly virtuous title character in a false accusation; Billy strikes back and unintentionally kills his persecutor. This breach in the moral order proscribed onboard must be punished, however patently unjust the demands of the law. To the last, the condition of mankind struck Melville as a kind of tragedy.

Nature, he could certainly concede, was often wondrously sublime. But man was, for the most part, a blight upon it. “Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, more than Melville did,” wrote D.H. Lawrence. “And never was a man so passionately filled with the sense of vastness and mystery of life which is non-human…. He was not wrong in hating the world. Delenda est Chicago.” What Melville and Lawrence both hated was specifically the white man’s world, which they felt had committed the unpardonable sin of corrupting the simple and contented lives of the Pacific islanders. Lawrence had in mind Typee and its sequel Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). In each, the perversions of the “civilized” are at least as savage as those of the “primitive” natives.

In Omoo, the Tahitians’ clean and simple life is blackened by the imported sorrows of drunkenness, smallpox, and the disease too foul for Melville to name—syphilis, “which now taints the blood of at least two-thirds of the common people of the island.” Typee, by contrast, presents a native culture unspoiled by Western contact, on the island of Nukuheva. Tommo, Melville’s alter-ego, goggles at the physical excellence of the Typee, markedly superior in beauty and power to scrawny American specimens. The delectable erotic idyll he enjoys with the lovely Fayaway could never be equaled in pleasure by any American romance.

Yet Melville is too canny a pessimist not to acknowledge that primitive societies indulge in their own forms of grotesquerie: the Typee, it turns out, are the most congenial cannibals going. Tommo tries but fails to overcome his revulsion at this local custom. One day he happens upon the leavings of an unholy feast—“the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging to them here and there!” The gruesome sight, so vividly rendered in its macabre brutality, is enough to send him fleeing to the embrace of the very civilization he has so thoroughly maligned.

There is plenty of abomination to go around, in other words. On balance, though, civilized men have devised the worst forms of evil—and none more ghastly than slavery. In Mardi: And, a Voyage Thither (1849), a fantastic voyage round an imaginary Pacific archipelago in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, Melville conjures the nation of Vivenza. Its blowhard citizens never tire of trumpeting their equality and freedom, but the southern provinces live off the agricultural labor of slaves. Melville’s revulsion at this hateful practice is unstinting: “a blot, foul as the crater-pool of hell; it puts out the sun at noon; it parches all fertility.”

Melville would feel the injustice of slavery burning close to home all his life: in 1850 his father-in-law played a key role in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, ordering slaves escaped to Boston returned to their owners. In Melville: His World and Work (2005), Columbia Professor Andrew Delbanco ably renders the attendant ethical imbroglio: “As Lincoln later wrote, ‘I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, but I bite my lip and keep quiet.’ In Boston, the chief lip-biter was Judge Lemuel Shaw.” His son-in-law, fulminating so powerfully against those who would treat men as chattel, must have felt tainted by the familial connection.

Melville’s most famous cry of moral pain at the monstrosity of the slave trade comes in Benito Cereno, the 1855 novella about a Spanish slave ship taken over by the slaves in a bloody uprising and then restored to the status quo by a passing American ship. The captain remains deathly downcast even after being saved. When the American asks the Spaniard what has cast such a shadow upon him, Cereno replies succinctly, “The negro.” The evil done by slavery, Melville intimates, corrodes the well-being of all whom it touches—all who are compelled even just to think about it.

In 1850, Melville began a lasting friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, 15 years his senior and famous especially for his novel of that year, The Scarlet Letter. Days after they first met, Melville wrote the essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” nominally a review of a short story collection but really a cold plunge into the depths of Hawthorne’s psyche—and Melville’s own. “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black.” As D.H. Lawrence recognized his soul’s likeness to Melville’s, so Melville honored his own intimate connection to Hawthorne. “Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me.” These reflections came to Melville as he was engaged in writing his own darkest and most penetrating work, his world-historical masterpiece. Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale traverses vast metaphysical expanses and forces its human characters into confrontations with the divine and hellish powers that lurk just beyond our ken.

Gods and Demons

The narrator, Ishmael, has a nearly fatal introduction to his savage Pacific islander bedfellow, the harpooner Queequeg. Lying in bed at a dockside inn, Ishmael sees his late-arriving roommate take from the pocket of his overcoat “a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a three days’ old Congo baby.” It is the idol Queequeg prays to. His oblations finished, Queequeg finds this stranger in his bed and threatens to kill him; the two men frighten each other, and the landlord enters the room just in time to avert mayhem. On waking the next morning, Ishmael finds Queequeg embracing him “in the most loving and affectionate manner.” The “strangeness” of the “pagan arm thrown round [him]” provokes the memory of a “supernatural hand” placed in his own when he was a small boy sent to bed early for misbehavior. An unearthly presence seals the tender encounter of future shipmates and fast friends, who represent the best of humanity from opposite sides of the globe.

Ishmael is susceptible to intimations of the invisible world. As he studies the marble tablets in the New Bedford Whaleman’s Chapel, memorializing those lost at sea, immortal longings invert the customary rank order of reality.

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

In the chapel, Ishmael and Queequeg listen to the redoubtable Father Mapple preach a rapturous sermon on the Biblical text of Jonah and the whale. Yet, when Ishmael and Queequeg return to the inn, the “wild idolator” coaxes the devotee of “the infallible Presbyterian Church” to join him in paying homage to his little wooden deity. Ishmael hesitates but gives in. He invokes the Golden Rule as definitive evidence of the will of God in this matter: as Ishmael had wished Queequeg would join him in sound Protestant observance, it is only right that Ishmael join Queequeg in his worship. “So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.” All available gods and demons have their moment in Melville’s universe. Depending on the fervor and the direction of the reader’s belief, Ishmael’s idolatry comes off as either the most admirable ecumenical brotherliness or the most preposterous multicultural grab-ass.

There is nothing preposterous, however, about Ishmael’s fundamental politico-theological belief—in “that abounding dignity” with which our Creator has endowed ordinary mankind.

Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!

This commingled faith in God and the common man, familiar to all from the Declaration of Independence, is the foundation of American spiritual excellence.

Nevertheless, this hopeful faith shall be put to the most severe trial by the mad fury of Captain Ahab, who is animated by soul-ravaging hatred for the white whale that took his leg and contemptuous of ordinary men who feel no such ungodly passion. As Ishmael reflects, “crazy Ahab” has gathered in his tortured soul the colossal sum of “all the general rage and hate” that mankind has felt since Adam’s fall, and he has aimed the totality of that hatred at Moby Dick. It is not “a dumb brute” on which Ahab vows revenge, but rather “some unknown but still reasoning thing” behind the “pasteboard mask” of apparent innocent brutishness. “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

As Ahab presents a steaming brew for all the crew to drink, pledging their fealty and joining his insane mission to destroy Moby Dick, he flaunts his own diabolism: “‘Short draughts—long swallows, men; ‘tis hot as Satan’s hoof.’” Ahab is a tragic figure as willful and deluded as Oedipus or Lear. He flashes with that flawed magnificence of heroic soul which earlier tragedians bestowed on kings and demi-gods. Melville’s modern innovation is to bring this superb spiritual aristocrat, and dangerous madman, into an out-and-out clash with the expectations of democratic normalcy. The ultimate outcome—the death of all hands but Ishmael aboard the Pequod and her whaleboats, as the enraged Moby Dick annihilates his enemies—has the primordial epic flavor of cosmic justice, or at least retribution. Here is an ancient theme revived in an astonishingly modern setting: inhuman nature exacting an almost human vengeance.

The significance of the whole is perhaps best expressed by “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew,” the “poor little negro” Pip. A series of whaling mishaps either disorders his mind, or sanctifies it beyond ordinary human reckoning: “He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic.” When Ishmael numbers the terrifying manifestations of whiteness that the whale recalls—“the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics,” the albino man “more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion,” “the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters,” “the white depths of the milky way,” “a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink”—he does not mention the terror and hatred the slave-master’s skin inspires in the slave. But, in the sufferings of Pip, Melville draws attention to the most urgent moral and political matter in America at that time.

“I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.” So Melville wrote in November 1851 to Hawthorne, whose appreciation for Moby-Dick its author joyously accepted as his “glorious gratuity.” At 72 he died at home of a worn-out heart. His two-line bare-bones obituary in Harper’s Magazine was squeezed between the somewhat longer death notices for a superintendent of public schools and a Belgian general. No mention of Moby-Dick or any books at all. Yet Hawthorne—his fellow dark genius, his bosom friend—understood what he had done. He heard Melville invoking the mysterious powers of creation and destruction in human and inhuman nature, which contrived the deaths of a crew of ordinary sailors and their demon-ridden commander. Before anyone else recognized it as the masterpiece it is, Hawthorne saw the terrifying grandeur of Moby-Dick—Melville’s vision of a nation wracked by ancestral guilt, straining fanatically toward violent redemption, hoping against hope to do battle with history and nature and emerge purified. It is the most fearsome, the most beautiful, the most irresistible image of America ever painted. It is an image of Herman Melville’s soul, and of ours.