There’s something perfect about Melville being a Pittsfielder. The little city sits adrift from a major highway in the Berkshire mountains, an obscurity to its own commonwealth and too frequently a lazy punchline. Devastated by the impact of industry – both from pollution in its air, water, and soil and the gaping economic void left behind by its departure – Pittsfield is continually rebuilding itself in the 21st century, constantly facing existential questions about what it is, what it used to be, what it could be. Framing the story within the major industry of the era was prescient in ways the author never could have predicted 175 years after its publication. Long after it pulled out of Pittsfield, the ghost of General Electric – the titanic multinational conglomerate that brought the city to its golden age as well as its lowest ebb – continues to haunt the grounds it filled with cancerous forever chemicals.
Much as Melville’s doomed whalers pondering life’s greatest questions inside the Pequod in the depths of the ocean, growing up in Pittsfield felt purgatorial and remote, especially in long, bitter winters with little in the way of distraction.
Like Pittsfield, Melville knew ceaseless struggle. He lost sons, failed professionally, faced rejection and dismissal, and most perverse of all, never lived to see his crowning achievement celebrated as the landmark it has become.
“Moby-Dick” bears many fingerprints of a Pittsfielder. It’s a moody, introspective work, veering into cosmic horror and incredible gallows humor, permeated by an overwhelming sense of dread for the human condition. The narrator, with his self-applied sobriquet Ishmael, watches the “ungodly, god-like” Captain Ahab tear down everything around him on an insane, all-consuming quest that puts Don Quixote to shame.
The beauty of Arrowhead’s take on the read-a-thon is that it’s entirely temporal. Like the crew of the Pequod, the corps of readers don’t know where fate will lead them. A bell rings at the end of each 15-minute shift, and whoever is next on the docket picks up where their predecessor leaves off. I much prefer that to a succession of polished recitations. There’s something rougher, more honest, and texturally compelling about hearing people dive head first into the dense prose of Melville in a barn behind the house where he wrote the book.
As I took to the lectern at noon on Thursday, I picked up “Moby-Dick” in the middle of Chapter 9, making my way through the end of Chapter 11 over my quarter-hour read. I feel like I lucked out, because the segment really highlights the best of Melville’s ability to capture a fully realized character like Ishmael. As he contemplates and grows to love the Polynesian harpooner Queequeg in Chapter 10, “A Bosom Friend,” the narrator untangles his own reactive xenophobia in real time:
“Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple, honest heart, and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and had never had a creditor, whether it was too that his head being shaved, his forms being drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I would not venture to decide.”
The ridiculousness of his superficial observations is hilarious:
“But certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long, regularly grating, retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington, cannibalistically developed.”
But that assessment quickly deepens as Ishmael widens his own lens of perception:
“Here was a man, some 20,000 miles from home, by way of the Cape Horn, that is, which was the only way he could get there, thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter, and yet he seemed entirely at his ease, preserving the utmost serenity, content with his own companionship, always equal to himself.”
After a good hang by the fire, a chat, and some pipe smoking, the otherness Ishmael initially uses to distance himself from Queequeg melts into a liberation from Ishmael’s own, repressed self conception:
“If there lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the pagan's breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had soon thawed it out and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him, and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around the waist, and said that henceforth we were married, meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends, he would gladly die for me if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be distrusted. But in this simple savage, those old rules would not apply.”
What follows that night as Queequeg asks Ishmael to join him in prayer before bed results in another monumental step forward for the narrator’s self-perception and ability to change:
“By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him. But well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise. I was a good Christian, born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then can I unite with this wild idolater in worshiping his piece of wood? But what is worship, thought I? Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth, pagans and all included, can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible. But what is worship to do the will of God? That is worship. And what is the will of God? To do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me. That is the will of God. Now Queequeg is my fellow man, and what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him and his. Ergo, I must turn idolater.”
Melville’s skull measuring, kneejerk narrowminded protagonist has by the end of the day seen what is possible beyond cultural differences, redefining his own upbringing, spirituality, and identity from a provincial one to a vast, spiritually involved one.
That night, the pair can hardly sleep in the glow of their “hearts’ honeymoon” as they lie in bed and lay bare their souls.
In Chapter 11, “Nightgown,” Ishmael and Queequeg continue to bond in bed, the latter “affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mind.” As the two share intimacies while naked in the cold night, Melville deepens the previous chapter’s themes of universality by putting them in clear, material terms:
“Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness, you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason, the sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then you lie there like the one warm spark in the heart of an Arctic crystal.”
Finally, as the chapter draws to a close, Ishmael refuses to let his newfound friendship be hindered by concerns about money or arbitrary rules. They’ve found something together more meaningful than those ideas could possible understand.
“Though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them, for now I like nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be so full of such serene household joy. Then I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed, confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the tomahawk from one to the other till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new lit lamp.”
What a picture Melville paints. It’s an incredible journey over just a sliver of the epic novel: a white, Christian American man realizes he is something more than what he was born with, and finds an intuitive ability to flex to the world’s rich array of ideas and beliefs once he makes a friend from a different upbringing. It doesn’t flinch from bias, but underscores how shallow and useless that defense mechanism is as it highlights a greater glory: feeling loved and cared for and no longer alone in the cold.
The 10th-annual “Moby-Dick” read-a-thon at Arrowhead continues through Sunday. Experiencing Pittsfield’s greatest contribution to the world as read by fellow Pittsfielders at the place it was conceived is a memory I will treasure for the rest of my life.
