Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Aug. 2, 2010

Thar she blows! And blows ... and blows

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It is the first week of August, which is celebrated all the way from Nantucket to Gloucester as National Herman Melville Week. For those unfamiliar with Herman Melville, you need to know that he did not have a wife named Lily, a son named Eddie, or a Grandpa who hung upside down from the rafters and kept a Transylvanian bat as a pet. That was Herman Munster. Herman Melville was the author of the novel “Moby Dick,” which became famous when it was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck and a monstrous synthetic white whale made from Styrofoam and rubber by dozens of Hollywood special effects guys.

If you were to ask any former college freshman about the novel “Moby Dick,” he would tell you that it was the very best book he ever tried to read. He would tell you that because his American Literature 101 professor described it as a classic. He would also admit that he gave up on it after fifty pages or so and simply bought the Cliff’s Notes version.

Because it dealt with a great white whale, the novel was immense, and if you purchased the paperback version, with tiny, microscopic print, it still had over 900 pages. If it had been about Captain Ahab chasing a tiny yellow perch around a pond somewhere in Wisconsin, the novel would have been every bit as good, and used up only sixteen pages, including a snapshot. But that was not good enough for Herman Melville. No, he had to have a white whale the size of a football stadium, a ship almost as large, and both major oceans, from Nantucket down around Cape Horn up to the equatorial Pacific.

As I remember it, “Moby Dick” was just chock full of page after page of valuable information about 19th Century whaling ships and whaling terminology, all of which were vitally important to a college freshman who had wasted much of his youth looking forward to a career which involved nothing even remotely related to the International Blubber Industry, but only girls and beer.

Of course I never absorbed any of those whaling details. Those were the parts everybody skipped over. They were like the “begatting” chapters in the Old Testament, where after a dozen verses of “and Bildad verily ungirded his loins and begat Nabob, who was large, and Nabob begat Uf, who begat Shemp, who begat ...” you decided to put your Bible down and go back to your comic books.

Suffice it to say that if you’ve never read “Moby Dick,” watch the movie instead. No, the scene where Captain Ahab’s leg is bitten off by the whale is not in the movie. But then again there are lots of very good scenes where Gregory Peck stumps around the deck on his wooden leg, ranting and shaking his fist at the raging seas and throwing very realistic looking harpoons at very realistic looking great white whale parts which are being dragged by cables behind large barges just out of camera range. Most of the boring stuff about what you can make out of ambergris, and the dimensions of the ice chest you store whale meat in, are thankfully left out.
 
But I digress. We celebrate the first week of August as National Herman Melville Week because he was born on August 1, 1819. And on August 2, 1819, and August 3, and so on and so forth until the 7th. That was when he finally emerged, thirty pounds of wet, squalling, fledgling Great American Novelist, complete with a mouth full of teeth, a writing quill, a Prologue in front and an Epilogue dangling behind. The doctor who delivered him said little Herman was jotting down notes so as not to miss any important details. After the birth, his mother was taken to a sanitarium. Melville wrote all about it in his first book, “My Birth as I Remember It,” which he retitled ‘Moby Herman” when he was four.

While in his twenties, Melville made a few sea voyages. He even sailed on a couple of whaling ships, so as to gather information which he could use to accomplish his lifelong dream of making up a “whopping good fish story of extraordinary length.” But contrary to what he wrote in his autobiographical novel “Moby Horsefeathers,” Melville was never strapped to the back of a harpooned sperm whale “for sport,” or “keelhauled and drowned twice” near Honolulu, or caught and eaten by Typee cannibals on the Marquesas Islands in 1842. (We know this because as Melville lay on what he claimed was his death bed a few years later, he wrote a short retraction for that novel. The retraction was792 pages long, not counting footnotes.)

Herman Melville wrote several novels, each and every one of which contained the word “Moby” somewhere in the title. There were the sequels, “Moby Dick II” “Moby Dick III,” “Son of Moby Dick,” and his last novel called “Son of Moby vs. Son of Ahab” which was later made into a movie starring Orson Welles in a dual role.

Melville’s final years saw his literary career in shambles. His wife found a job for him as a customs inspector for the City of New York, during which time he wrote poetry which didn’t really catch on because nobody was interested in reading an epic poem consisting of 120 thousand lines that didn’t rhyme and dealt mainly with things like whale oil and baleen. Melville did have moderate success with a poem called “Ode to a Black Bass,” due to the fact that it contained only two lines, one of which ended with a word that rhymed perfectly with “bass.”

Herman Melville died in 1891, when his wife Ramona “accidentally” strangled him with her whalebone corset. His death did a lot to revive his literary career, so that today he is considered, pound for pound, one America’s greatest novelists. If he’d only died earlier, there’s no telling what he might have accomplished.

One of these days I plan to re-read “Moby Dick.” Or at least the Cliff’s Notes version.