simply messing about in books
in the gardens of the de Young museum in Golden Gate park on a sunny afternoon, the buzzing of bees is distinctly audible and the scent of honey is powerful
Pierre Huyghe’s installation Exomind (Deep Water) is distinctly uncanny ; the figure is poised to walk among us.
Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic ; or, Bound for the South Seas
Prologue
This is a crackpot theory with a kernel of truth. It requires some minimal familiarity with the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Herman Melville. It took shape as I re-read Moby-Dick for the first time in decades in January 2016, and I expounded it at the California Antiquarian Book Fair in February 2016, to my friend Bill Reese, a supreme Melville collector and the greatest Americana dealer of his generation. Great reader though Bill was, he had never read any H. P. Lovecraft and so he greeted my geste with a glazed look that means, as any performer will attest, you have lost your audience. On another occasion, an eminent Melville scholar responded with a Jupiterian frostiness. So you have been warned. I performed early versions of it with impromptu embellishments a few times in the interim in bar-rooms and one evening on the patio at Readercon in Quincy, Mass., for Jim Morrow and a few others, in July 2017. This final text was read at Readercon in July 2023. As you will see later, it is necessary to give this chronology.
[All citations from Moby-Dick are to the University of California paperback with the illustrations from the Barry Moser Arion Press edition.]
Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic ; or, Bound for the South Seas
Ernest Hemingway was only half-right : American literature springs from one book, but that book is Moby-Dick (1851).
I
Melville gives for the first time voices to the voiceless, to those who had heretofore been mere furniture of narrative. It is Tashtego, the “unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard” (122), who first names the object of the Pequod’s quest :
“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.” (166)
The cabin boy Pip dances at midnight in the forecastle until a squall arrives and the “jollies” are sent aloft to reef the topsails. “It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t.” (179)
Stubbs berates the elderly Fleece for overcooking his whale-steak and bids him preach to the sharks worrying the carcass alongside the ship. Fleece concludes with a mutter, “I’m bressed if he aint more shark than Massa Shark himself.” (306)
II
Moby-Dick also marks the point where English poetry becomes American literature. To take three examples, here is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” transformed :
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea. (320)
Melville had earlier named Coleridge and the albatross to assert Nature’s precedence over the English poet. (191)
Chapter 93, the episode of Pip’s loss overboard, takes its title from William Cowper’s poem of madness, “The Cast-away”, and its substance from these verses : “We perish’d, each alone: / But I beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.”
By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him [. . .] Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. (424)
And, of course, it is the “Sea-change / Into Something Rich and Strange” from Ariel’s song in The Tempest, that echoes in Ahab’s words :
This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring in it [. . .] when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! (445)
So far so good, nothing extraordinary or particularly new about these citations. They are excellent passages. Moby-Dick is also a great and influential novel of cosmic horror.
III
To go ahead for a moment. The revival of interest in Melville during the 1920s is well documented, including a standard edition of his works, and the discovery of the manuscript of Billy Budd (first published in 1924). In France, Jean Giono read Melville and began a translation of Moby-Dick into French, eventually issued in 1939. When the translation was to be reprinted by Gallimard, Giono declined to write the biography his publishers wanted and instead produced a remarkable fantasia, Pour saluer Melville (Paris: Gallimard, 1941). It is a fictional interlude during Melville’s visit to England in 1849 that bears directly upon the impulse leading Melville to write Moby-Dick. Giono evokes a continual struggle within Melville :
Depuis quinze mois qu’il est dans le large des eaux, il se bat avec l’ange. Il est dans une grande nuit de Jacob et l’aube ne vient pas. Des ailes terriblement dures le frappent, le soulèvent au-dessus du monde, le précipitent, le resaisissent et l’étouffent. Il n’a pas cessé un seul instant d’être obligé à la bataille [. . .] s’il saute dans la balinière, s’il chevauche des orages de fer [. . .] il se bat avec l’ange. (38)
Melville’s unceasing fight with the angel, in the momentous night of Jacob where dawn does not come, is Ahab’s struggle. Ahab can recall the domestic joys and tenderness of fatherhood, but once the Pequod sails he is intent and unwavering in his quest of the supramundane real, that which is beyond the barrier. He tells Starbuck :
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by striking through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. (168).
And elsewhere :
How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; and standing there in thy spite? (480-1).
IV
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a native-born Rhode Islander, a cosmic materialist by philosophical inclination, and a writer of fantastic fiction. He lived for some years in exile in New York City. In August 1925, Lovecraft wrote down the plot outline for a story based on a dream from years before, and recasting an earlier tale.
In early 1925 Lovecraft dwelt in an apartment house in Brooklyn, and a neighbor was George W. Kirk, whom he had known since 1922. Kirk was a bookseller who later owned the Chelsea Book Shop on West 8th street in Manhattan. Sometime in the middle 1920s, Kirk gave a copy of Moby-Dick to Lovecraft, who recorded the gift on the book’s fly leaf, and signed his name: H. P. Lovecraft, Esq., Providence, Rhode-Island.
I have examined that copy at the American Antiquarian Society. It has Lovecraft’s fine fanlight window bookplate and bears a pencil accession note on the pastedown: Purchase S. Clyde King, Jr. Aug 8 ’41. (Lovecraft’s Library was dispersed after his death; King was a Providence bookseller). Moby-Dick was rediscovered at A.A.S. in November 2017 (note that date) during a shelf read in the stacks. The book is otherwise unmarked. And yet, and yet.
“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons.” (483). In this passage from chapter 109 of Moby-Dick, I hear the origins of a phrase in a later story of Lovecraft’s describing terrible events in rural Massachusetts, “The Dunwich Horror” (written 1928 and published 1929): “some day yew folks’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-calling its father’s name on the top of Sentinel Hill” (in Tales. New York: Library of America, 2005, page 375).
The horror in question is one of a pair of twins conceived by Lavinia Whateley in congress with Yog-Sothoth, an interdimensional being. Wilbur Whateley, uncouth and stinking, took after his human parent. The other twin did not.
After his return to Providence in April 1926, Lovecraft eventually completed the story he outlined a year earlier. “The Call of Cthulhu” was published in Weird Tales in early 1928. It is a globe-spanning tale of malign influences, primitive cults, and the resurgence of an ancient extraterrestrial being, Cthulhu (pronounced “khlul’-hloo”). In the subsequent decades, Cthulhu has stepped out of the pages of Lovecraft’s story and, like Mary Shelley’s monster, taken on a life of its own.
V
And so to the next step, the ambiguity of pronouns: “There she blows!” Invariably, throughout Moby-Dick. Elsewhere whales are “he”, grammatically male by default, as buttressed by Melville’s cetology and lore of the sperm whale fishery. And yet.
Moby-Dick is the intrusion of these terrible interdimensional forces into the ordinary. So ordinary cetology does not apply, and the white whale is a she-whale. In his last speech, Ahab proclaims, “Toward thee I roll [. . .] still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!” (574-5).
The fated rendez-vous is a hot date in the South Seas : Cthulhu is the spawn of Ahab and Moby-Dick.
Q.E.D.
Author’s Note:
I had written an early version of this essay in the summer of 2017; and then in December 2017, I learned that the American Antiquarian Society holds H. P. Lovecraft’s copy of Moby-Dick (an edition published in Boston after Melville’s death: the copyright notice is in his widow’s name).
Moby Dick or The White Whale / by Herman Melville author of “Typee,” “Omoo,” “White Jacket,” etc.
Boston : Dana Estes & Company publishers, [1892]. American Antiquarian Society copy has bookplate of H.P. Lovecraft. Inscribed: From George Willard Kirk, Esq. H.P. Lovecraft, Esq., Providence, Rhode-Island. Catalog Record #144128.
https://catalog.mwa.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=144128
They wrote about the discovery:
14 November 2017
Fun fact: AAS has a copy of Moby Dick once owned by H. P. Lovecraft! A source of inspiration for him, perhaps?
Fun fact: AAS has a copy of Moby Dick once owned by H.P. Lovecraft! A source of inspiration for him, perhaps? https://t.co/EvvOFf98mk https://t.co/u0UqBHUJIZ
— American Antiquarian Society (@AmAntiquarian) November 14, 2017
It’s a nice-looking copy too! [with illustrations]
It's a nice-looking copy too! pic.twitter.com/yDbm4xeLmw
— American Antiquarian Society (@AmAntiquarian) November 14, 2017
Jean Giono. Pour saluer Melville. Paris: Gallimard, 1941. The passage cited above is from p. 38:
For the fifteen months since he has been at sea, he has been fighting with the angel. It is for him the momentous night of Jacob and the dawn does not come. Hard terrifying wings strike him, raise him above the world, tumble him, seize him again, and smother him. Not for a single instant has the struggle relinquished him. [. . .] when he jumps in the whale-boat, when he rides iron storms [. . .] he is fighting with the angel.
[This is my own translation; in the fall of 2017 (!) it was issued as a NYRB Classics paperback in an English translation by Paul Eprile.]
For George Kirk, see S. T. Joshi & D. E. Schultz, An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2001; Hippocampus Press, 2004), pp. 137-8.
Moby-Dick was not listed in the first two editions of S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s Library (Necronomicon Press, 1980; Hippocampus, 2002), but is recorded as item 651 in the fourth edition (Hippocampus, 2017), “Gift of George Kirk,” with citations to Lovecraft’s letters and essays.
[This essay was first published in Exacting Clam 12 (Spring 2024). All rights reserved]
— John Crowley. Little, Big, or The Fairies’ Parliament … Art Peter Milton. Afterword Harold Bloom. Incunabula, 2021 [i.e., 2024]. Anniversary edition, copy W of 26 copies, specially bound, inscribed by John Crowley and signed by all. Violet cloth, brown pictorial dust jacket with illustrations after Peter Milton, and with an essay by Elizabeth Hand on the flaps. Pictorial slipcase.
This book has taken a while to reach my shelves : the edition was announced in 2005 and I subscribed for this lettered copy as an immediate reflex ; for Little, Big is, as Tom Disch wrote : “the best fantasy novel I’ve ever read. Period.”
Rhododendron Day
— — —
‘Dosis sola facit venenum’ — Paracelsus
This is the epigraph to K. Groark’s weird and fascinating paper from the Journal of Ethnobiology (1996)
This is one time where I am especially happy to read the anthropological record and not be a participant in the events reported. [via Chris Brown’s Field Notes]
— — —
There will be an exhibition at the Grolier Club this fall, celebrating the centenary of Billy Budd (12 September to 9 November). I have just seen an advance copy of the concise, elegant catalogue, Melville’s Billy Budd at 100.
Mark your calendars.
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as Gothic as it gets
something evil flowed into the man to make him bigger : he seemed to dilate and glow with an increase of personality
— John Masefield, Sard Harker, 1924
— — —
‘let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time’
So what does Shakespeare teach us? Nothing. His tragic theater is not a classroom. It is a fairground wall of death in which the characters are being pushed outward by the centrifugal force of the action but held in place by the friction of the language. It sucks us into its dizzying spin.
— Fintan O’Toole, No Comfort, in New York Review, 6 June 2024
‘among the dust and shadows’
— Mark Valentine. Qx and other pieces. Zagava, 2024.
Collection of 21 fugitive short works at the boundaries of fiction and memoir (3 unpublished). The Blue Mean One — “entirely autobiographical” — is a very tricky (and funny) pub variation on the vanishing magic shop. An elegant and pleasing book to hold in the hand, and in which to read one’s way to unexpected places.
— — —
— Anthony Powell. The Valley of Bones [1964]. The Soldier’s Art [1966]. The Military Philiosophers [1968].
Re-reading The Military Philosophers, in a new light:
The Military Philosophers quotes and riffs on Proust, explicitly and by imitation ; and in the autumn of 1944 Jenkins passes through the decayed Cabourg, the original of Proust’s seaside resort town Balbec. It is, also, hilarious in its descriptions of rank and hierarchy and bureaucratic machination ; allusions range from Wagner to The Prisoner of Zenda by way of hymns and sixteenth or seventeenth century poets ; and yes, a bit dry. But the way the sentences start off in one direction and swerve, wobble, undermine, and mock, to arrive at a thought almost the polar opposite of where it began.
And now, having read Proust, I understand this note (first encountered in May 2011) rather more clearly :
“I’m reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, an hilarious and very good work. The only book I know that takes Proust’s habitual narrative gestures, Anglicizes them, and succeeds in the effort. In fact, Powell is the best critical study of Proust.”
— Guy Davenport. “Fragments from a Correspondence”, ed. Nicholas Kilmer. Arion (Third Series) 13:3 (2006), p. 106.
— — —
— Dwyer Murphy. An Honest Living [2022]. Penguin Books, [2023].
A good New York book and a pretty good rare book McGuffin to send the young lawyer on his chase (just enough to be interesting without getting too detailed or wrong).
— — —
— Zito Madu. The Minotaur at Calle Lanza. Belt Publishing, [2024].
Memoir of Madu’s experiences in Venice during the first months of the pandemic. The chronicle of isolation draws upon his childhood in a Nigerian immigrant family in Detroit, and is painfully honest in his reflections upon his anger towards his father, compounded and complicated by love. And then one evening in Venice a shocking literalization of the metaphor. Concise and wrenching.
On Monday 22 April, I will be reading a couple of poems as part of the Earth Day celebrations at the Elizabeth Street Garden, downtown In NYC. Walk, bike, or take public transportation, and join us there.
https://www.elizabethstreetgarden.com/calendar/2024/4/4/earth-day-celebration
Bookselling and, for that matter, book collecting, are in my blood. Soon after I joined my father at Bertram Rota Ltd. we came across a sophisticated copy of a modern first edition (in fact, first edition sheets removed from a soiled binding and put into an immaculate binding case from a slightly later printing in a crude and misguided attempt to increase the value). Even now, thirty-seven years later, I still remember the intensity of my father’s anger as he explained to me what had happened and why. Speaking perhaps of private rather than institutional collecting, he said that we booksellers made the rules and also acted as referees. If we cheated, everything became meaningless.
— Anthony Rota, on The Texas Forgeries, in : Forged Documents (1990)
— — —
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those for whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
— Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (1964)
— Paul Yoon. The Hive and the Honey. Stories. Marysue Rucci Books, [2024].
Just back from the twentieth annual Story Prize award ceremony honoring the author of a short story collection published in the U.S. in the receding year. It was an excellent literary evening of readings by the three finalists with interviews by director Larry Dark. The winner of the Story Prize this year is Paul Yoon, for The Hive and the Honey. Stories (Marysue Rucci Books, 2023). The other two finalists were Yiyun Li, for Wednesday’s Child. Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); and Bennett Sims, for Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio, 2023).
