Melville, Just Out of Reach

It’s been a dream of mine to hear Moby-Dick read out loud, from cover to cover, at one of the events held each year to celebrate Herman Melville’s Aug. 1 birthday.

But life keeps interfering.

I think I was a pretty typical student at the Rhode Island high school I attended: Loved the English classes I took, but avoided the one class that would have introduced me to the first Great American Novel: “Moby-Dick, or The Whale.” After all, it was 599 pages long and Melville wasn’t Faulkner, whose work I worshipped, semicolons and all.

It was not until I was in my second go-around in college when I read lengthy passages from the book in an American Lit survey class at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. And like the poor whales pursued and “harvested” in the novel, I was hooked from the start and soon read the entire book, albeit in pieces.

My mother had given me a hardcover copy of Moby-Dick she’d had since college — deliciously musty but otherwise in great shape. I dug it out and read it through, from the beginning, quickly deciding that Chapter 93, “The Castaway,” is the core of the book’s deep, deep philosophy.

But back to the Moby-Dick marathons.

~

Each year, several places around this great diverse nation of ours bring Melville fans together on Aug. 31 to begin the 24-hour process (25 in some places) of reading Moby-Dick out loud, cover to cover, ending midday the next day, Aug. 1 — Herman Melville’s birthday. (He was born in 1819.)

• It happens at the New Bedford, Mass., Whaling Museum (not surprising, as the whaling ship that Melville himself sailed on was The Acushnet, built across the bay from New Bedford, and the novel begins in New Bedford). 
• It happens in San Francisco (not surprising, as that great seafaring mecca was once a capital of West Coast whaling).
• And it happens in Mystic, Conn. (also not surprising, as the last true whaling ship still afloat, the Charles W. Morgan, rests intact and ready to sail at her pier at the Mystic Seaport Museum).

Simply put, I have wished and occasionally planned for the better part of 10 or so years to attend a reading, but some scheduling issue — family matters, work when I was still teaching English at Middlesex Community College, or just poor planning on my part — had always gotten in the way. No, no marathon for me.

In 2024, with an open week near the end of the summer, I decided this was my best opportunity to experience the reading — and maybe even to take part, perhaps reading Chapter 93 in the depth of the night. So I called the Seaport, signed up for the duration, paid my admission fee, and lay back, excited to finally be taking advantage of what I see as a great opportunity to take part in the living, breathing organism that is literature.

I packed a bag with what I imagined I would need for the overnight — a camera, of course; a narrow reporter’s notebook and some pens; my Tascam stereo voice recorder; a gray sweatshirt, in case it grew cold around dawn; various toiletries and a change of clothes; and a flashlight with a red bulb, so as not to interfere with anyone’s night vision. I stowed the bag next to the door, even more excited to hear the book read beginning midday on Wednesday. 

But fate has a way of circling back and catching us at the post inopportune moments.

Tuesday afternoon, I started to sniffle. Tuesday evening, I had a nasty, persistent, dry cough. By Tuesday night, I had a fever. I hoped to sleep it all off, but woke early Wednesday morning drenched in sweat and only semi-coherent. After a few hours of confusion and denial, I called the Seaport and canceled my reservation. I had Covid. I spent the rest of that day delirious and entirely out of touch; it was lost time and I had missed another reading, despite my meticulous planning. 

“Der mentsh trakht un got lakht” goes the Yiddish. “Man plans and god laughs.” I feel a bit like a Red Sox fan of yore, or a New York Islanders fan of recent years, when I say, “There’s always next year,” and a chance for the next reading.

Melville’s birthday isn’t going anywhere. Neither am I. I plan to be there then, and I’ll fill you all in on how fabulous it is — every page of it.

~

For the record, in Chapter 93, one of the ship’s minor characters, known as Pip, jumps for fear out of a speeding whaleboat and is left behind until the ship picks him up later. 

“The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. 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. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.”

I rest my case.