Herman Melville was born 200 years ago today. I have friends who have read considerably more of Melville than I, but I have read Moby Dick, and it’s still worth talking about.
It’s a slow, giant, weird, sprawling novel that I ended up enjoying, though it took me quite a while to get into it. I ground down the first time when I was almost a hundred pages into the book, when the protagonist spent a page describing a painting he could barely see in a dim bar, and I realized it was going to be another hundred pages before he actually got on the ship. A bit later I picked it up again, reading a chapter a night before bed, and finally got through it that way.
It’s easy to see why modern readers find it such a hard slog. The plot develops very slowly, and the book packs in multichapter digressions on whales and whaling technique. (“It occurs to me that the lengthy digression of the last chapter requires an equally long digression in this chapter…”) For me, the book started to pick up when I realized, right after Stubb instructed the old black cook to preach a sermon to the sharks, that each and every crewman on the Pequod was completely and utterly insane.
But the plot does slowly but surely assert itself, and by the time you reach the climax, the three day chase after Moby Dick himself, you’re right there.
The true first edition of Moby Dick was as The Whale, a British triple-decker published by Richard Bentley in a first edition of 500 copies in October, 1851. The first state binding depicts a downward swimming whale on the spine of all three volumes:
There’s also a remainder state purple binding. The one-volume American edition (titled Moby Dick, or The Whale) followed from Harper & Brothers a month later, in a variety of binding states.
And there’s a blog dedicated to collecting various editions of Moby Dick, though it hasn’t been updated since 2015.
Also worth noting: Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s movie adaptation, and also wrote a novel, Green Shadows, White Whale on the experience of writing the screenplay. I own first editions of both, with Green Shadows, White Whale signed, and I also have a signed copy of the audio cassette version of the book. (I also have a signed first of Green Shadows, White Whale for sale through Lame Excuse Books.)
Tags: Books, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Ray Bradbury