Here are a few basic background notes to Melville and Moby Dick before we get started. (Some of these we’ll look at in much greater detail later on.) Melville was born on August 1, 1819 in Manhattan. His father was from a Boston based family, his mother from a well-established Hudson Valley, New York, Dutch clan. Melville’s father was largely unsuccessful at business and died when the boy was 12. Herman was an intelligent child, but had spotty schooling. In 1839, to help support himself, Melville went to sea for the first time, and bit later, at age 21 he signed on to a whaling ship, the Acushnet, for an extended voyage. He stayed on board until the middle of 1842, when he deserted and lived for a time in the islands of the South Pacific. He hitched on to various ships and made his way back to Boston where he began to write. He turned out two well-received novels, based on his sailing experiences (Typee and Omoo), and then hit a bit of a dry spell.
During the time of his initial success Melville married and bought a house on Holmes Rd. in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Named “Arrowhead”, the house became Melville’s home for 13 years, and he farmed the surrounding land and began writing the book that would become Moby Dick in Pittsfield. During this period Melville also struck up a friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Lenox.
Completed and published in 1851, Moby Dick was not met with overwhelming praise – the book’s reception can best be described as “lukewarm”. Melville would continue to attempt to write, with diminishing success, until 1857, when he largely retired from writing to become a lecturer and later a customs agent in New York. He died in 1891, a respected man but not a literary superstar. Melville remained largely a secondary figure in American literature until the 1920’s when his works went through a revival amongst academics and critics. It was during this period that Moby Dick really entered the pantheon of great American books.
The bones of the plot were set out in the first blog entry – a narrator (Ishmael) describes the events of his life leading up to and including his service on the whaling ship Pequod. This ship is commanded by the obsessed Captain Ahab, who seeks after the near legendary white whale known as “Moby Dick” (the full title of the book is “Moby Dick, or The Whale”). The consequences of Ahab’s quest, both on himself and the other crew members, together with a detailed description of the logistics of a life on board a whaler, make up the bulk of the book. Or, at least, that’s what I’m told. We’ll see. I’ve also been told the book is boring, fascinating, thrilling, an adventure story, a morality tale, a fable, a myth, an odyssey, a hero’s quest, a villain’s saga and the first environmental novel. As I said, we’ll see.
Oh – and first of all – how about this book being written in Pittsfield! For those of you who think of Massachusetts as “The Bay State” and picture Cape Cod, the Boston seafront, Nantucket, Gloucester, Plymouth Rock and the other oceanic sites associated with the Commonwealth – let me assure you, you are not thinking of Pittsfield. The city of Pittsfield is about as far inland as you can get and still be in Massachusetts. It’s in the Housatonic River Valley, nestled amongst the Berkshire Hills – about 150 miles from the ocean.
The part of Pittsfield where Melville lived is well known to me. My grandmother and aunts lived on Holmes Road for a few years, a couple of miles from Melville’s Arrowhead. The stretch of Holmes Road where Arrowhead sits (it is now a museum) is rural even to this day. It overlooks fields and forests and a large stream runs nearby. In Melville’s time it must have been even more out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but fields.
This is important to remember, for there likely would have been fewer, not more, forests back in Melville’s day. That’s sometimes hard to grasp because we think of the woods as things that are constantly being cut back. But, in truth, when farming was much more important in the pre-industrial/early industrial age there were many more cleared fields in the areas around New England than there are now. This becomes very apparent if you ever spend much time in the woods around the Berkshires – you’ll be walking along through the trees and suddenly trip across a line of stones. These are the remnants of the rock walls that crisscrossed the fields all through the area. Since about 1900 the woods have actually been creeping back into and reclaiming much of the New England landscape. If you drive the Mass Turnpike from Springfield to the New York border you go through miles and miles of woodland. Almost none of it is old growth forest – it was all fields given over to planting or grazing at one point or another. It was this deforested landscape that Melville looked over – until – off in the distance – he would see one large, rounded greyish-white shape. That was Mount Greylock, and rumor has it that it was the inspiration for Moby-Dick. Greylock looks like a whale rising from the waves, and (as noted in this Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Greylock), it was what made Melville think of the stories he had heard about ferocious white whales during his travels on the sea.
So Moby-Dick, perhaps the greatest ocean-going novel ever written, was inspired by a mountain that sits in the farthest inland reaches of Massachusetts, from whose summit you can see perhaps five states (and maybe two countries – I’m not sure if Canada is visible on a good day) – but not a glimpse of the sea.
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