The Aspect of Moby Dick

To mark the 170 anniversary of Moby Dick's first publication as The Whale by London publisher Richard Bentley. First written for the NYU literary podcast A Drunken Odyssey.

The Aspect of Moby Dick

John McMahon

An old girlfriend bought me my first copy of Moby Dick from a cluttered, used bookstore in Byron Bay, Australia around 1998 and I was gripped by the writing but, I was surfing all day and daubing water colors to sell at the hippie market while drinking through cases of wine at night so I never got through it. 

Years later I bought a deluxe edition with a print of a stark, heroic looking Ahab standing at the forecastle on the cover which came with a compendium of criticism from the year it was published, 1851. Maybe it was the bad press that put me on Melville’s side, certainly the sheer power of the writing won me over. I know the response he sent to his friend and early editor of the book Nathaniel Hawthorne will stay with me as a kind of Yankee credo of defiance for life.' I have written a wicked book, and feel as innocent as a spotted lamb'.

I've read Moby Dick over 20 times cover to cover and dip into it continuously for inspiration and fortitude. Why is the search for that hippogryph, the great American novel, still discussed when it was written well over 150 years ago? A book that defies all convention. That reads as much as an encyclopedia of whaling as a love letter to the imagination. A raucous tale of adventure and a long quiet meditation on the far reaches of existence. It broke every rule in writing and crossed almost every barrier in society.  

Melville hammered out a cadence in the first extraordinary paragraph of Moby Dick that was picked up and passed along by Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Styron, Kesey, Delillo, McCarthy, Johnson and this is the defiant, pointed rhythm that defined American writing in the last century. The writing that made me a selective reader and which in turn molded my opinions about everything in life. It is that high white sound Hunter Thompson found in Fitzgerald and I found in Hunter. It's what I've come to think of as the left path of art. 

 Across all mediums and within every genre there is a division which separates artists of even equal abilities. Those who seek success on the right and those who seek something beyond that to the left. The left drew me to it. El Greco over Raphael, Rembrandt over Rubens, Braque over Picasso for the same reasons punk rock and skateboarding were appealing over pop music and baseball as a child. 

Of course I didn't always know why I was attracted to that left path, or how it was created but whenever I found it I followed it. So must have Melville and by writing Moby Dick he extorted everything from that displacement possible with words on paper.    

The book is a never ending source of encouragement, a volume of inspiration to power through the tangles of life. The rambling narrative suffers the madness and tragedies of the Peqouod with a philosophical stoicism that pits the lives of its men against the unfathomable depths of the universe and the long, slow process of civilization.  Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg all world wandering misfits moving stubbornly towards fates sealed by a thirst for adventure. 

Always lingering in my mind as I read from Moby Dick is the life of the author. Melville had worked on a whaling ship, was stranded on a tropical island, was tried for mutiny in Hawaii all before the age of 25 when he became a literary star. His first three books sold wildly and he toured the world giving talks and reading for large audiences. He bought his family a farm in Massachusetts and then immersed himself in work. 

The book he labored over essentially ended his career as a writer. Not only because it was deemed unreadable by critics and dumped by his publisher but because he knew that it was the best work he'd ever done and that he couldn't go back to writing books merely for money. Melville reflected on the initial failure of Moby Dick 'That I feel most moved to write, that is banned, it will not pay. Yet altogether write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash and all my books are botches.' This could be the lament of all artists who take that left path. His fortunes fell, his work didn't sell and he ended up as a customs clerk in New York.  

Moby Dick gives license to live outside accepted parameters.  When I left New York City to live in rural Thailand over twenty years ago with little money and no connections, thoughts of Ishmael setting out for the watery parts of the world, as Melville had himself, made the idea seem tame and achievable when all around me were questioning my sanity.  

There are a plethora of observations, insights and declarations in Moby Dick that can be gleaned as a personal motto for world shaking but maybe no better one than this. 'I myself am a savage, owing no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.' 

If you love Moby Dick, liked this article or just want to support my writing for whatever reason try my Novella A Boy From Nantucket, available as an Ebook from Amazon, but much better I still hand make copies that are fully illustrated. Check them and order from mcmahonwrites.com