Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

This morning I was once again denied access to "Some Psychological Reflections on the Death of Malcolm Melville" in the Winter 1976 issue of Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, so I stared out the window for a while.

So I reread the so-called "Malcolm Letter," written by an exuberant Melville on the occasion of Malcolm's birth--
I think of calling him Barbarossa--Adolphus--Ferdinand--Otho--Grandissimo Hercules--Sampson--Bonaparte--Lambert.

So I electronically consented to my child's remote participation in Freedom from Chemical Dependency Week.

So I ordered more masks, more disinfectant wipes, more birdseed.

So I ordered more dog food and more coffee filters.

So I went to the basemant to move the laundry and watched my husband affix a piece of wood to another piece of wood with screws and glue and the appearance of deep contentment.

So I took out the recycling and then the compost.

So I threw the ball for the dog.

So I compared various translations of a haiku about the cold voice of the autumn wind speaking through a crack in the door.

So I regarded a yellow sticky note on which I had at some point written the name of Melville's brother's clipper ship, Meteor.

So I noticed an anagram--remote.

And another--emoter.

A woman is researching the life of Herman Melville, perhaps to write a biography of him. It is deep within Covid's quarantine, and the work fills up a life that has been in other ways put on pause. She reads articles and blog posts about Melville's life to her husband, who helps her to speculate about the nature of Melville's relationship with his children, his wife, his job. Melville's life seems to have been a difficult one, especially the later years, after the bulk of his literary output. The narrator's life has not been exactly easy; she alludes to a moment in their marriage known only as "The Bad Time." Still, the house seems stable enough, though from time to time she goes looking for him--to share another scrap of what she's learned about Melville--and not found him. Later, he gets sick, and we perhaps expect the worst, but this is not that kind of book; the drama that was visited upon Melville--the death of two sons, the stormy marriage--is enough.

I've never read another book like Dayswork. First off, there's the fact that it's a collaboration between two writers, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, whom I assume are a married couple. The husband is at one point called "Chris," and so I presume, too, that something of the book is autobiographical (though how interesting to choose the point of view of the wife only). Beyond that, there's the ambiguity of genre and form: is it a poem? A biography? A history? A novel? A memoir? Bachelder and Habel weave all these threads together in a way that is virtually seamless. The reader moves, French door-like, from literary analysis Melville's life to the research process to the life of the narrator. From there it expands to  encompass other genres, other historical details; much of the research is actually dedicated to the life of another pair of Melville's admires, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell and Hardwick had a famously tempestuous marriage, as did the Melvilles; research seems to show that Melville was physically abusive to his own wife Elizabeth, as Lowell was cruel to his. Are we meant to read between the lines about the narrator's marriage, too? No, that would be too much, but I think anyone can recognize the way that the grand dramas of the page put the smaller dramas of one's own life into relief.

The climax of Dayswork is stunning in its touching smallness. The husband has been exiled to a downstairs room with Covid. Over the phone from the upstairs room, the wife reads to him from a letter that Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville gushes; he was famously besotted with Hawthorne, in a way that many modern critics have read as romantic, and a few as requited. The text is Melville's, but it's punctuated by small asides from the sick husband, some as minor as interested grunts or sighs. It's a scene that's made up of so little, yet its power is tremendous. Two partners, speaking across the physical divide of sickness and technology, speaking someone else's words, but together. It works especially well because we haven't been sure whether or not the "Bad Time" is over, or the marriage is really healthy or whole, but this scene removes any doubt that these two have reconciled and grown closer together. I was really in awe of it.

And I was in awe of this book. Though I'm not aware of anyone who's ever written anything like it, I have seen many attempts to weave together literary history and the personal in a way that feels similar (Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers comes to mind). And yet, this one works because Bachelder and Habel never force the comparisons. Largely, they get out of the way of the material, and let us make the connections ourselves, though the deliberate and careful structure of the novel clearly guides our understanding. Truly, I learned a great deal about Herman Melville. But more than this, I felt the way that great works of literature radiate through time, ennobling our ordinary lives for a brief time.

Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick

Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country's ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

I got to visit the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford, Massachusetts this week, a church where young Herman Melville attended services before shipping out on his own round-the-world voyage, and which appears as a slightly fictionalized version of itself in Moby-Dick. The walls of the Seamen's Bethel are covered in marble plaques that memorialize those who were lost at sea; Melville must have looked around from his pew in the back--marked today with a much smaller, humbler plaque--and known what a risk he was taking on. As Nathaniel Philbrick notes in his book Why Read Moby-Dick?, New Bedford had surpassed Nantucket as the American capital of the whaling industry by the time Melville wrote his novel, but Melville still Ishmael travel to Nantucket to see the old icons of the whaling industry. Melville had never been to Nantucket when he wrote Moby-Dick, so it might be said that the New Bedford chapel in Moby-Dick is where Ishmael leaves the real world behind, launching off into the world of Melville's rich imagination.

Why Read Moby-Dick? is a series of short essays about what Philbrick, a writer otherwise known for books about sailing like In the Heart of the Sea, finds valuable in Moby-Dick. These essays more or less follow the novel's chronology, beginning in New Bedford and Nantucket, moving through the introduction of Ahab to the grand voyage, and finishing with the dramatic conclusion when the Pequod is destroyed by the infamous White Whale. The essays have brief, explanatory titles like "Queequeg" and "Chowder," and they spend a fair amount of time summarizing the essential points of the novel. As the title suggests, the book might be seen as pitched to people who have not read Moby-Dick, although I can't imagine someone reading a book like this in order to decide whether or not they want the undertaking. More properly, the audience is probably people like me, who have a fondness for the novel but aren't going to re-read it any time soon. Along the way, Philbrick provides a little bit of historical information, about whaling, about Melville's relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc., but for the most part it's a straightforward and not particularly revealing exegesis of the novel.

It's a little funny, I think, the way in which Why Read Moby-Dick? is so opposite to the novel it's about. It's a tiny little book, in form as well as spirit; almost universally I thought the essays were a little short and seemed to stop before they were through. If the spirit of Moby-Dick is to delve into long, digressive passages like "Cetology" that overflow the banks of narrative efficiency; Why Read Moby-Dick? is a no-nonsense operation with little interest in luxuriating alongside the novel's richness--only briefly describing the luxury. The enthusiasm comes through, but the exegesis can be a little stale; I didn't come away with what felt like any new insights. Philbrick's central contention, that the novel contains the seeds of all American history, and that it is in some deep sense about the national pre-Civil War conflict over the slave trade, seemed to me very thinly supported. And it was funny to hear Philbrick, after insisting that the novel points to these ideals and conflicts, say at the end that "The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I."

I hold to the opposite reading, which I think is probably Harold Bloom's: the whale is a symbol, but it's a symbol who points toward too many things, and ends up a kind of maddening blankness--white, the color of all colors. That's the brilliance of Moby-Dick; it points every way you want to look. Presumably, even toward the Fugitive Slave Law, if you were willing to make the case. As for Why Read Moby-Dick?, I think the answer to the question is obvious: because the Cliffs Notes version isn't going to cut it.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Here then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals…

Moby Dick is the book that this blog followed into a black hole. I started it months ago, and finished it weeks ago, but hadn’t the time or energy to write about it. Other things intervened, I suppose, like the advent of the school year—I’m not sure what made me think I could start and finish it in the last two weeks of summer—but I’ll admit that to review such a monster was a daunting prospect.

Weeks later, then, the strongest impression I retain is the Moby Dick’s sheer immensity. Not its length—though it is long—but its size, its capaciousness. The narrative which everyone knows, the story of Ahab chasing the white whale around the world for his revenge, comprises perhaps less than half the novel, nearly crowded out by the narrator Ishmael’s encyclopedic treatises on whales and whale hunting. There are chapters on eating whales, painting whales, whale anatomy (in fact, the sperm whale’s head gets six pages of its own), the historicity of the story of Jonah, and many chapters painstakingly detailing why whalers deserve your reverence. The best of these, I think, are the chapters where Ishmael expounds on the meaning of whiteness:

Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?... And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

The effect of Ishmael/Melville’s towering erudition and knowledge, then, is more than merely to impress. Like the whiteness of the whale, which is made of all colors and therefore seems like none, the great conglomeration of information that is Moby Dick teeters toward meaninglessness. The whale is loaded with so much symbolism that it ceases to symbolize anything.

Moby Dick is an “inscrutable malice” and an “intangible malignity,” not because he is so mysterious but because he is so well-known. In its capaciousness the whale manages to be both the “colourless, all-colour of atheism” and a stand-in for God. In his way Ahab comes to represent man’s vengeance for the fall, to lash out against his maker:

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Ahab is the other lingering impression: Monomaniacal, blood-lusting, and unwavering. He’s named for a Biblical king, and it’s only through him that the novel’s overblown, King-James-cribbed language works, with its “thees” and “thous” and ponderous, circuitous sentences. The back of my copy calls Moby Dick a “hymn to democracy” because it is the “image of a co-operative community at work,” but one might say the same thing of the Peoples Temple. One of my favorite episodes is when the Pequod meets a ship that has been effectively commandeered by a sailor with pretensions as a prophet, but he pales in comparison to Ahab’s religious intensity:

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with theee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”

As great as that is, I found that I didn’t love Moby Dick as much as I hoped it would. I expected it to be life-changing, but the long discursive chapters, serviceable to the themes as they were, never faded away to make room for the heightened intensity to the plot. It overwhelmed me and awed me, but did not—completely—endear itself to me. Mostly, I found myself impatient to get back to Ahab. Is that a criticism of Moby Dick, or a praise of it?

How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom

How to Read and Why is a book that seems to accomplish its goals a little early. I had imagined it as presenting a Grand Unified Theory of Reading, by which I might expand my appreciation of literature as a whole, and in its first section it does something of that, as Bloom presents a set of what he sees as essential principles for reading. Among other things, he puts forth what seems to me the most persuasive and encompassing rationale for reading I have ever encountered:

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of all pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

Terry Eagleton--basically England's Harold Bloom--notes in his remarkably negative review that "[i]t sounds as though Harold is a bit short of mates and reads to make up for it." With all due respect to the achievements of Prof. Eagleton, such a statement reeks of petty snark and, worse yet, of intellectual dishonesty. Loneliness is the undiscussed companion of the human condition and if you do not feel at least a little bit like Prof. Bloom does, then I simply don't understand you.

With the why out of the way, Bloom turns to the how in the 200-odd pages that follow, and it is here that Eagleton's criticisms have some bearing. Bloom divides his book into five sections, one each for short stories, poetry, and drama, and two for the novel, and within each section he briefly treats five to six major authors or works. Each gives the impression of being somewhat less than Bloom has to offer; while the section on Keats may serve as a passable introduction to the poet and enlightens us as to why Bloom treasures "Le Belle Dame sans Merci," it fails to break free from Bloom's solipsism. Despite Bloom's notions that we should be forever reading the best literature available to us, knowing how to read Keats is not the same thing as knowing how to read; knowing how to read Keats exactly like Harold Bloom is more distant still. Furthermore, the meager selections of works suggest no reason for their being included together, and while Bloom tosses superlatives around with impunity (there is no "higher aesthetic achievement by a twentieth-century American writer than As I Lay Dying," no greater book by a living American than Blood Meridian, no greater book by an American black than Invisible Man), their ubiquity drains them of power and it is hard to shake the feeling that the works have been selected, not for their greatness, but by whim.

One notable exception to this piecemeal feeling is the final chapter, on the American novel since Melville, in which Bloom articulates an affinity among seven novels: Moby-Dick, As I Lay Dying, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Crying of Lot 49, Invisible Man, Blood Meridian, and Song of Solomon. These novels all express a "negative sublimity," a horrific transcendence in the tradition of Moby-Dick and a uniquely American and apocalyptic vision:

It is not the function of reading to cheer us up, or to console us prematurely. But I conclude by affirming that all of these American visions of the End of our Time offer us more, much more, than their cleansing negativity... There are survivors among these: Ishmael, Oedipa, Invisible Man. Why read? Because you will be haunted by great visions: of Ishmael, escaped alone to tell us; of Oedipa Maas, cradling the old derelict in her arms, of Invisible Man, preparing to come up again, like Jonah, out of the whale's belly. All of them, on some of the higher frequencies, speak to you and for you.

This, unsurprisingly, does not meet Terry Eagleton's expectations of serious criticism, and though my expectations were quite different it did not quite meet them, either. But to read Bloom is to be in the presence of someone who truly loves reading; I hope that one day I should love my own children as much as Bloom loves books. There is little concrete advice in How to Read and Why, but I do find that it inspires me to find something in books that speaks to me as loudly as these works speak to him. Insofar as the success of How to Read and Why is encountering another soul with its unique passions, a literary fellow traveler, it fails as literary criticism but succeeds as something of sister text to the books it idolizes, alleviating a trace of human loneliness.

Moby Dick; or the Whale by Herman Melville

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran into each other in one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.


So what can a schmuck such as I say about Moby Dick, the great American novel, that hasn't already been said? I really don't suppose much. You know the story, so I shan't split my lungs with blood and thunder with a long summary: A young narrator describes his voyage on the Pequod, a Whaler out of Nantucket. Sperm whales are the target, and the ship's resident monopode, Captain Ahab, has a personal vendetta against the leviathan that mutilated him. The insanity of Ahab's crusade eventually leads to the demise of craft and crew. Moby Dick is one of those stories that everyone knows by the age of 10, it's become a sort of American fairy tale.

What amazed me about Moby Dick was that even though I had foresight of every major plot point, Melville still managed to blow me away through his mastery of the written word. I've read a bunch of classics before and, more often than not, they fail to live up to the hype. For me, Moby Dick lies with Great Expectations as one of the rare examples of a classic that seemed just as good as everyone told me it would be. Choosing the sample passage for this review was a crapshoot. Usually as I read, I mark a passage that strikes me as particularly well-written. By the end, a good book will generally have 4-5 passages I deem noteworthy. My copy* of Moby Dick is so marked up with pen and highlighter that it looks as if I was trying to proofread it. There are so many perfectly constructed sentences and paragraphs that I want to commit to memory.

In discussing the story with a friend the other day, it struck me that Moby Dick is very much a man's book. Not in the sense that woman can't comprehend it as well as men can (even though they do have a brain a third the size of ours, its science). It's that this story and its entirely male cast are so infused with the male ethos that I think a Y-chromosome is necessary to experience the story as Melville intended. The unrelenting fury of Ahab's revenge, the limitless energy it delivers him, Ishmael's wanderer's spirit. It's just... maleness. Maybe that's sexist. I've done everything I could to keep this paragraph from being chauvinistic, but I suppose it is what it is. In the great words of Jay-Z, Ladies is pimps, too. But there are reasons why I like Die Hard and my sister likes Sex and the City. We're just built differently, body and mind.

Like I started the review with, there's very little insight I can make into this novel that hasn't already been made. But I'll say this, if you've never read Moby Dick unabridged, do so. It's a daunting book, with a reputation for befuddlement. It really is, I think, the greatest American novel. Melville can wow you with his prose even in describing the migration patterns of the Pequod's quarry.

Highlights: "Oh, many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend." The first page's descriptions of every man's subconscious draw to the sea, Melville's thoughts on paying and being paid. The entire god damn book.
Lowlights: All of the awesome double-entendre inherent in a book about hunting sperm whales.

* I remember now that it's actually a friend's copy, so I hope they doesn't mind the notations.

Addendum - I'm making it a point, henceforth, to include relevant hip-hop lyrics in the rest of my reviews.