"Why Read Moby-Dick?" by Nathaniel Philbrick

I was excited to come across this book a few weeks ago, which speaks to one of America’s most beloved novels. Perhaps it is age, but I find comfort in re-reading books I have enjoyed. Estimates are that between 500,000 and a million books are published each year through traditional publishers, which means that we can only read a small fraction of each year’s annual output. Yet there are authors that have stood the test of time – Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Trollope, Wharton, Wodehouse, E.B White, and Melville, just to name a few – that deserve a re-reading. Every year I try to re-read a few and am always glad I did. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Why Read Moby-Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick

October 26, 2024

 

“‘Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this

combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards

them both with equal eye.’ This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial

stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick.”

                                                                                        Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick

 

Like many, I read Moby-Dick in my youth. I read it as a sea adventure about half-mad captain Ahab chasing the white whale that had cost him a leg. I read it again about ten years ago and found the story had improved with (my) age – what happens when man interferes with nature, and the harsh realities of a crazed person seeking redemption. In Nantucket about a month ago, my wife and I visited the Nantucket Shipwreck and Lifesaving Museum. There, I came across this short (127 pages) book by Nathaniel Philbrick, published in 2011.  Philbrick is the author of several histories, best known for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. 

 

The book is a tribute to Herman Melville’s classic. It is a series of essays, each independent, though collectively cohesive – a mixture of re-telling the story and biographical sketches. It begins with Melville in the Berkshires, his difficulty in putting on paper the story he wanted to tell, and his mentee-like friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, a man within whose stories expressed “…truths so profound and disturbing they ranked with anything written in the English language.” We are told of how Melville, ten years before the 1851 publication of his novel, shipped out on the whaler Acushnet from Fairhaven, Massachusetts; so had familiarity with his fictional whaling ship Pequod. He compares Ishmael, the narrator of Melville’s story, to Holden Caulfield, as an “engaging…vulnerable wiseass who invites us to join him on a quest…” We learn that Ahab’s search for Moby-Dick mimicked Melville’s search for an explanation of being.

 

As Philbrick writes, it took almost seventy years for Moby-Dick to be recognized as the classic it is. He reminds us of how, in the intervening years, the United States had changed: A Civil War had been fought to end slavery, the westward push altered the contours of the United States, and industrialization ended the nation’s rural origins. The story is part of our past. In the final chapter, “Neither Believer nor Infidel,” Philbrick quotes Hawthorne, from his 1856 journal, of Melville’s quest for eternal truth: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” Moby-Dick is fiction, but it is also part autobiography.

 

Like the well-known opening sentences in Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Tolstoy’ Anna Karenina, and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the three-word first sentence of Moby-Dick is one you will not forget: “Call Me Ishmael.” You will want to read the second, third, and fourth…until you finish the book.

 

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Reading Philbrick’s book has prompted me to read Moby-Dick once again. The copy I bought is a hard-cover from Sea Wolf Press, with the cover and illustrations by Mead Schaeffer taken from the 1923 Dodd, Mead & Co. edition.