Moby-Dick: Introduction by Larzer Ziff [Hardcover]

 

As a revelation of human destiny it is too deep even for sorrow , was how D.H. Lawrence characterized MOBY-DICK. Published in the same five-year span asThe Scarlet Letter,Walden, andLeaves of Grass, this great adventure of the sea and the life of the soul is the ultimate achievement of that stunning period in American letters.

Elizabeth Hardwick(1916–2007) is the author of many books and essays, includingHerman Melville(Penguin Lives),American Fictions,andSeduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature.Call me Ishmael. This resonant opening ofMoby-Dick,the greatest novel in American literature, announces the narrator, Herman Melville, as he with a measure of slyness thought of himself. In the Scriptures Ishmael, a wild man sired by the overwhelming patriarch Abraham, was nevertheless the bastard son of a serving girl Hagar. The author himself was the offspring of two distinguished American families, the Melvilles of Boston and the Gansevoorts of Albany.

Melville's father cast something of a blight on the family escutcheon by his tendency to bankruptcy which passed down to his son. Dollars damn me, the son was to say over and over. When he sat down in the green landscape of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to composeMoby-Dickhe was in debt, the father of one son, and another to be born a few days after the publication of the novel in England.

Melville had published five novels previous toMoby-Dick;the first two did well, and then with the capriciousness of the public the subsequent novels failed to please. He was a known literary figure with a fading reputation. How he came upon the courage to undertake the challenging creation of the epical battle between a sea creature, a white whale called Moby Dick, and an old captain from Nantucket by the name of Ahab is one of literature's triumphant mysteries. Add to that, as one reads, that he was only thirty-two years old.