By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
I’ll call her by name because she deserves to be remembered and she deserves to be praised: Millicent. Her colleagues going back for a decade in my life were other dauntless women, Elizabeth, Nancy, Alice, Rita. I don’t know how I learned their first names because we called them all “Mrs.” or “Miss.” If we knew them at all, we learned them on the playground or by rumor and we thought they were hilarious, because we were kids and these were our English teachers. They didn’t even have real lives for us, much less real names. We had some vague sense that they disappeared in a puff of smoke when the bell rang and we all went home.
But it was Millicent, anyway, whose husband taught Latin in another building and who had pale blue eyes filled with laughter, who force-marched us through Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a sprawling 19th century work about the whaling trade tailor-made for people who were not us and never would be. We were teenagers by then and even the serious ones (guilty as charged) found this work to be mystifying. Millicent assured us it was worth our attention anyway. It’s a good teacher who invites her students to be confused.
I hit it again in college, sideways, while reading a work called Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita is a good book too, it had the imprimatur of coolness about it for whatever reason college kids thought things were cool back then (I’m sure that’s all changed), and I learned with some surprise that Nabokov had thought highly of Melville. In particular he mined the prose of Moby Dick for random samples of iambic meter, that he mashed together into a sonnet of his own devise (“those timid warrior whalemen, those bashful bears…”). So I read Moby Dick again and came away mystified again.
The years came and went and the big sea that Melville wrote about stayed where it had always been, off the New England coast, and as his hero Ishmael writes about the feeling of November in his soul, I soon linked this book to autumn and I would find myself reading it accordingly every few years. Autumn is New England’s season, after all. Halloween is rightly ours and ours alone; we let others play with it. Ditto with Thanksgiving, which not even modern capitalism has been able to break.
Nabokov was right about the language, anyway; it’s the most Shakespearean story that ever arose from these shores. Every page is studded with gems and I’ve reached the point of taking it line by line, letting each accidental quatrain hit the sun on its own. That hunt never ends and I’ve never managed to read the same book twice. Each time I read it, I see new things.
Everyone knows Ahab, but few remember Pip, never mind Bildad. If they’re savvy they might recall Queequeg, because that’s a funny name, but they’ll let slip Dagoo and Tashtego. Starbuck is ubiquitous around the globe these days, but Stubb and Flask can walk down the street without getting a glance. And the most beautiful thing of all about this book: it still makes no sense to me. Melville wrote about the deep sea, after all; and he wrote about it truthfully.
It used to be a good way to learn about a country: study its books. Nobody could ever pretend to understand Russia, for instance, without Tolstoy at hand, and Dostoevsky, Chekhov,Turgenev, and Ilf and Petrov. For France, it was Moliere, Sartre, Celine, and Simenon. For Britain: Dickens.
Reading Melville does no such thing for you. Say what you want for Twain or Steinbeck; our country is too different today from what it once was for Melville to still chart in that fashion. I could try to mine him for political relevance, I imagine that academics have a field day with his views on race, I could wax poetic if I needed to when it comes to his love of democracy and the common man. But in the end I don’t recognize his New Bedford, nor his Nantucket, nor his Quakers and his sailors and his savages and his fish. They are a million mile away from us and that’s by design.
Reading Melville merely puts you in a November frame of mind; then it casts you into the sea, and you float. That must have been what Millicent wanted for us kids. Smart woman.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.