Mabbott, Maureen Cobb

English

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Studies in English, New Series Volume 5 Special American Literature Issue, 1984-1987 Article 11 1984 A Book for the Islands Maureen Cobb Mabbott Medford, New Jersey Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new  Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Mabbott, Maureen Cobb (1984) "A Book for the Islands," Studies in English, New Series: Vol. 5 , Article 11. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol5/iss1/11 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Studies in English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in English, New Series by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact egrove@olemiss.edu. A BOOK FOR THE ISLANDSMAUREEN COBB MABBOTTMEDFORD, NEW JERSEYMoby-Dick is a desert island book for me. I often read passages, any pas­sage, at odd moments and, although I have never done so, may one day use it for advice or prophecy as some have used the Bible, as Gabriel Betteredge used Robinson Crusoe in The Moonstone.— “My Last Bookshelf,” Books at Iowa, April 1983.Even more than for the desert island, Moby-Dick is a book for my  “insular city of the Manhattoes.” I have been asked why I am so drawn to this monstrous compendium of phantasy and fact, poetry and prose which, as an early reviewer said, is “a romance, a tragedy,  and a natural history, not without numerous gratuitous suggestions  on psychology, ethics and theology.”1 As is so often the case, there is no answer, only answers, and of the many reasons for my veneration of Melville’s book on whaling, I would like to present two although,  perhaps, they include all the others.As a child I had an intimate sense of the presence of the earth and the air and the sky from my own masthead at the top of an apple tree on a farm in central Missouri. Up high  in  the tree, my arm around a  slender bough, my cheek pressed against its bark, I would stand  and  watch the white cloud castles form and reform in the surrounding blue immensity. In the early spring I would cling to the tree and gaze so long through the  young green  leaves at the moving clouds above me,  feel so warm in the sun brushed by the air, that I could mesmerize myself into a kind of sisterly connection with the natural world.On this city island where I live now and have no apple tree, I cling to Moby-Dick, which has more resources even than a tree and is formed like one being untidy, branching, organic. I turn to this book  not only to renew a  sense  of my relationship to the physical universe,  beneficent or terrifying, but also to keep an edge on my awareness of 1Mabbott: A Book for the IslandsPublished by eGrove, 198770 A BOOK FOR THE ISLANDSthe great struggles of humankind, so perceptively summed up by John Cowper Powys as “our battles with the First Cause, with Nature, with human beings, and our own insanities.”2 In the dailiness of human life, sometimes awash with triviality, I read Moby-Dick and remember  greatness.It was fortunate, I think, that I came to the book on my own after college, never having had a course in American literature, but filled with the resonance of great poems — the work of Chaucer, Shake­speare, Milton, Byron and company — taught by the inspired teachers  of my time at the University of Chicago. Among other things, that Milton assignment to memorize the whole of “Lycidas” was, I am now convinced, no small preparation for the reading of Moby-Dick. I had been permanently touched, too, by my childhood reading of the Bible  and folk tales so that I was excited by the triumphs and tolerant of the failures of literary expression, having already encountered both in these giants. And I was widely enough read to rejoice in Melville’s Olympian ability to connect his scenes with “the past and the distant,  the world of books and the life of experience.”3Nevertheless, from the beginning, Moby-Dick was for me essen­tially a simple story of the humble hero of a folk tale, the young man from the provinces gone out to seek his fortune which is himself. To do  that, he went whaling and even before he shipped on the Pequod, he found himself among immensities. So do we all, of course, all the time.  But Ishmael was aware. It is that  eloquent awareness of the immen ­sity of his experiences, from his encounters with Queequeg and Ahab to the purely whaling routines of manning the masthead and trying out the blubber, that carries the reader into self-discovery, that makes  the real more fantastic than the fantastical,  and  often lifts its expres ­sion into the gravest and most beautiful poetry. Indeed Moby-Dick says to the prospective reader what a poem says: “Read me, Read me again.”At each reading the searching rays of the mind’s intuition play on other and different facets of this many-faceted book. In spite of itsfascinations, I have never isolated the text-book on whaling imbedded in its pages, but I have made a little breviary of Moby-Dick's immensi ­ties, beginning with the description of the Nantucketer who, “out of  sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.” In these descriptions, fired by Ishmael’s awareness, are the “vast herds of wild horses whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and2Studies in English, New Series, Vol. 5 [1987], Art. 11https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol5/iss1/11Maureen Cobb Mabbott 71the Alleghanies”; the Pequod try-works flaming and roaring through the “blackness of darkness”; the gigantic calmness of the ocean viewed from the masthead and at the entrance of the Pacific — the great South Sea with its “wide-rolling watery prairies and Potter’s Fields of all four continents.” Most piercing of all is the psychologicalimmensity of the obsession of the Pequod’s captain who, driven by aforce beyond himself, cries out “Is Ahab, Ahab?” as he pursues the evilhe perceives in the First Cause, embodied for him in the White Whale, Moby Dick, whose “mighty mildness of repose” is “but the vesture of tornadoes.”Again, there are readings of Moby-Dick when what the early critic called its “gratuitous suggestions on psychology, ethics and theol­ogy” pierce the understanding with particular poignancy.4 An old diary records one such reading for me. It was during the war and not by any means my first reading but, I judge, a very telling one:October 19, 1944Now, in the evening of October 19, 1944, I have finished reading Moby-Dick. It stands up and goes out like a prayer as Rilke says a poem should. I keep thinking of a poem. It is more darkly powerful than Whitman, nothing but Paradise Lost can compare with some passages. There, at the end, is one when the  Pequod, sinking, takes along, fastened to the mast, a sky-hawk “and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and hisimperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded  in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan,  would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heavenalong with her, and helmeted herself with it.”Melville is an author who can channel particulars into univer­sal application, indeed, point a moral, without offense. In his novel, whose supreme excitement is the chase, slabs of philos­ophy, excrescences of insight are the precious spermaceti of his  whale-catch.At the end of the chapter on The Line: “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a  philosopher, though seated in the whale boat, you would not feel at heart one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”But there is also ease for the darkest tensions — “if you be a  philosopher.” In The Blanket there is that discussion of the thick skin or blubber of the whale: “It does seem  to me, that herein we  see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness.3Mabbott: A Book for the IslandsPublished by eGrove, 198772 A BOOK FOR THE ISLANDSOh, man! admire and  model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too,  remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this  world without  being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain,  O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”In 1944, during my last stem-to-stern reading of Moby-Dick, I read and marked these passages in my little brown leatherette Modem Library edition, so portable and companionable and, even then, so worn. I have not ceased reading in this novel and, as I say in another  place, the little brown book has been lovingly cremated after sixty years of use.Now, in 1984, I launch myself on the “unshored, harborless immensities” of Moby-Dick better equipped than I have ever been. Added to a long life of reading and experience, I have the definitive text and the clear type-face of the California edition (1981) with its woodcuts of whales and vessels, implements and processes to quicken my perceptions, and no interpretations of events or representations of characters to inhibit my imagination. Not omitting the prefatory quotations, I shall begin with “Call me Ishmael” and read again this greatest of sea adventures, missing no detailed description of tech­niques, tiresome interlude, soaring poem or philosophic aside. It would be hard to imagine with what pleasure I look forward to this enterprise.NOTES1 Anonymous review ascribed to George Ripley, Harpers New  Monthly Magazine, 4 (1851), 137.2 Philosophy of Solitude (New York, 1936), p. 215.3 Evert A Duyckinck, New York Literary World, 22 November  1851, p. 404.4 Ripley, p. 137 [At the time of this writing, I lived on Lexing ­ton Avenue, in New York].4Studies in English, New Series, Vol. 5 [1987], Art. 11https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol5/iss1/11

A Book for the Islands

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A Book for the Islands

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