Moby-Dick

What Melville took from his own voyage

The Acushnet was a new ship of 359 tons, built in 1840. Under Captain Pease she sailed from Fairhaven on 3 January 1841 and came home in May 1845 with 850 barrels of sperm oil. Melville was not aboard for the return. He had deserted her in the Marquesas Islands, the story he told in his first book, Typee.

The biographer Raymond Weaver noticed how Melville changed the details. The real ship left Fairhaven, across the river from New Bedford, a few days into January. The Pequod leaves Nantucket on Christmas Day. Weaver also found that the Acushnet was wrecked on St. Lawrence Island on 31 August 1851, within a month of the time Melville finished the novel.

One book, two first editions and two titles

The American edition was set in type straight from Melville's manuscript, but it could not come out first. A book by a foreign author had to be published first in Britain to be protected by copyright there. So the proofs went to Richard Bentley in London, whose editors cut passages they thought too blasphemous or too bawdy.

Bentley brought the book out in three volumes as The Whale on 18 October 1851, in an edition of only 500 copies. Harper & Brothers published it in New York as Moby-Dick on 14 November 1851, in 2,915 copies. Harper's premises burned in 1853. Partly for that reason, small new printings followed in 1855, 1863 and 1871. In the forty years before Melville died, only one British and one American edition appeared.

Few people read it. The New Bedford Daily Mercury called the American edition "a bulky, queer looking volume, in some respects 'very like a whale' even in outward appearance." Hawthorne was one reader who understood it. He wrote to praise the book, and Melville answered from Pittsfield: "A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book."

In the same letter Melville wrote, "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." Hawthorne's own letter does not survive.

How the book came back

When Melville died in 1891, the obituaries were surprised mainly that he had still been alive. The next year his literary executor, Arthur Stedman, reissued Moby-Dick. Other editions followed in 1899 and in the Everyman's Library series.

In 1923 D. H. Lawrence gave the book a chapter in Studies in Classic American Literature. He found it tiresome in places and said so. Then he called it "a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written."

In 1930 the Lakeside Press published a three-volume edition with 280 drawings by Rockwell Kent, in an aluminium slipcase. Random House brought out a one-volume version the same year. Kent's drawings, with their brawny, craggy Ahab, became the best-known pictures of the book.

In 1956 Warner Bros. released John Huston's film, written by Ray Bradbury and Huston, with Gregory Peck as Ahab and Orson Welles as Father Mapple. The harbour town of Youghal in Ireland stood in for New Bedford. The film opened in New Bedford itself on 27 June 1956.

Moby-Dick and Paris

Melville spent about eight days in Paris in late 1849, the year before he started work on the novel. He could not speak French and was often lonely. His journal records one building he loved, the Hôtel de Cluny. He called it "the house just the house I'd like to live in."

The house turns up in Chapter XLI, the chapter that explains Ahab. The narrator says the reader has only seen the upper rooms of Ahab's mind. He tells the reader to leave "this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand" and go down to "those vast Roman halls of Thermes" underneath. There, he says, sits a buried king, the real core of the man.

The standard French translation was made in Provence and published in Paris. Gallimard issued it in 1941, translated by Lucien Jacques, Joan Smith and the novelist Jean Giono. The same year Gallimard published Giono's own short book about Melville, Pour saluer Melville. A Gallimard printing of 1951 is already marked the 121st. A second French translation, by Armel Guerne, came out from Le Sagittaire in Paris in 1955.