Herman Melville & Friend

Pittsfield/Mount Greylock
Massachusetts
May  2014

Herman Melville was the author of the big fish story called Moby Dick. One of the stops on our drive from Mount Greylock, the high point of Massachusetts, is a home in Pittsfield.  It’s called Arrowhead and this is where Herman Melville, the writer, lived.

We briefly tour a small part of the 45-acre grounds of the Melville homestead.  Behold the back yard…

These characters are “scarecrow statues” created by artist Michael Melle.  This exhibit is called Checking In For Work and is part of the Berkshire Historical Society’s Art and Industry workshop themed with creating statues out of natural materials.  Melle created all the characters except for the Lisa figure.

Let’s talk about Herman Melville, the famous writer of the big fish story.  Melville’s life, which started out great, ended up in the toilet.  By his 30th birthday, he had written five books, married a babe, traveled the world, owned a delightful country farmhouse and spent time rubbing elbows with a number of the day’s literary hotshots.  He published a 135-chapter book he called The Whale.  Just before publication however, he changed the name to Moby-Dick.  And that was that.

After Melville published this, his greatest work, at the age of 32, his career and his health started a steep decline.  Nothing he published thereafter gained much notice and soon he developed recurrent attacks of eye pain, disabling low back pain and possibly, bipolar affective disorder and alcoholism, although that’s not what we called those maladies at the time.  Biographers have suggested that these ailments were psychosomatic, but his doctors reported abnormally rigid posture, loss of almost an inch and a half of height between the ages of 30 and 37, and possibly what we now categorize as ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory disease that can cause some of the vertebrae to fuse together.  There were other distressing symptoms.  And yet, with all this, folks who knew him quietly suggested to each other that Melville had simply gone batshit crazy.

However, before he began to slip the bonds of sanity, there was this book, this masterpiece.  Upon publishing, it did not sell very well.  In fact, the critics ravaged it.  And yet…

Moby-Dick has since been called the greatest sea story ever told, but not while poor Herman was alive.  It tells the story of a sea captain, likely insane, and his obsessive quest for vengeance on an immense white whale that had previously dined on his leg.  In a larger sense, it is a story of humanity’s struggle in a universe of moral ambiguity.  Moby Dick;  you might have heard of it.  It’s the one that begins, “Call me Ishmael.”  At the time, regular people just weren’t ready for it.

Melville’s knowledge of whales and whaling came from his days on seagoing expeditions when he was in his 20s.  There were loads of fish stories out on the seas, of course, and the most impressive of the whale stories Melville heard concerned a behemoth named Mocha Dick, rumored to have attacked one hundred vessels and sunk twenty of them.  Bit off a few legs himself, don’t ya know.

When Lisa and I were in the farm land of Indiana, adding Hoosier Hill to our list of high points, she suggested that areas with boring landscapes such as we were in, are fertile ground for illusions and chimeras to emerge.  People in these areas begin to see crop circles and signs of alien visitation.  Anything for some kind of stimulation.

Suppose you are a guy on a boat with a bunch of other guys for a long, long time, like a bad frat party.  Nothing but endless waves of ocean in every direction.  You are stuck here, inexorably.  After a while you begin to see what you have longed to see deep in your gut, what you desperately miss:  a woman.  Since it’s your imagination, you can conjure her up, and create her in any style you choose.  In your mind, you create a superior babe, looks-wise.  Of course.  But the water and the relentless waves and the endless bouncing around and the suspicious food all contribute to an altered consciousness.  Ta-da!  Here’s your woman, born from the sea, right before your eyes.  Woman on top and fish on the bottom.  Like Daryl Hannah.  Not too shabby for a fish.

Or, you could imagine one of your great fears:  a killer whale.

Melville’s first works were adventure stories, light, fun, easy to read.  The Whale was conceived in such a style as well.  But his excellent friend Nathaniel Hawthorne convinced him to rewrite the story, less for entertainment and more imbued with a serious message.  “Put some soul into it, boy,” Hawthorne may have said.  “Your whale is more than just a fish,” he might have added.  Hence, the real Moby-Dick was born.

Herman had a residence near Pittsfield in western Massachusetts.  From his side porch, the view presented a mountain that in the winter, shows a snowy profile.  The shape and color of the snow-covered mountain brought forth in his sea-bored mind the image of a whale breaking the surface of the water.

Is it a mountain?  Is it a great white whale?  For the heck of it, let’s compare…

Based on the number of thinkers and literary masters who were attracted to this area, this impressive geological feature must be a special mountain.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant and Henry David Thoreau all spent time here in western Massachusetts.

The mountain?  It is, of course, Mount Greylock, the highest land mass in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Greylock is a monadnock, an isolated feature rising steeply above it’s surroundings.  All the more impressive.

Melville dedicated his next novel, Pierre to “Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty.”  He called Greylock, “…my own… sovereign lord and king.”

Lisa says, “I may just have to read that book.”