Books: Track of the White Whale

THE TRYING-OUT OF MOBY-DICK (400 pp.)—Howard P. Vincent—Houghton Mifflin ($5).

At first, all Herman Melville wanted to do was to write an exciting story. His earlier novels, lively adventure stories of the South Seas, were gobbled up by the public and he was a quick success. In 1850, the cocky young writer set his hand to turning out another brisk and profitable sea tale. But what began as an uncomplicated whaling yarn ended as Moby-Dick, a masterpiece dense with symbolic meanings.

What happened to Melville in 1850? To find out, Professor Howard Vincent has dug through the materials Melville used for Moby-Dick, and produced an ingenious study in literary genetics.

Fate of the Essex. There was a first draft of the book, but Melville was dissatisfied with it by the time it was finished. By then he had struck up an acquaintance with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and had been reading Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse. Melville was so fired by such investigations of the human spirit that he decided to transform his own whaling story into something grander. He would “turn blubber into poetry.”

As Literary Detective Vincent traces Melville’s track, Melville thumbed through a compendium of sea catastrophes (given him by Hawthorne) and recalled the Essex disaster of 1820, in which a whaling ship had been sunk by a giant sperm whale in the Pacific. One report credited the tragedy to the whale “Mocha Dick,” a white killer roaming murderously through the legends of the sea.

Here was a problem to intrigue the metaphysical-minded Melville: Was the white whale an agent of nature repelling man’s attacks? Or was he perhaps a symbol of man’s own rebellious instincts? Melville hardly cared. For him the whale came to represent whatever it is that drives men to self-destroying quests.

Fate of Man. To prevent his whale from swallowing his novel, Melville had to create a hero powerful enough to combat it. Such was Captain Ahab, in the novel’s first draft merely “from Nantucket” but in its final version “from humanity…Fate’s lieutenant.” He seined such old tomes as Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale and Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions for obscure facts.

Seldom has a novelist made his borrowings more his own. Beale’s dry notation that somebody had once tasted whale’s milk and found it rich, Melville turned into “The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries.” From Beale’s remark that “we cannot fail to be impressed with a truly magnificent idea of the profusion of animal life which must necessarily exist in the ocean’s depths,” Melville constructed a passage for those who like philosophical meat on their narrative bones:

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea…

“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return.”