academic conference i ever attended was here on nantucket when susan beagle and west tiffany who used to be at the umass field station organized a steinbeck and the environment conference and i delivered a paper on steinbeck's last novel the winter of our discontent by that time steinbeck. we all associate him with california and great to breath had settled in sag harbor a whaling port. old whaling port in long island and the winter of discontent is about that town meeting the challenges of development of historic town, you know dealing with all that and it's it just resonated and i got into you know, steinbeck's connection to moby--- steinbeck was on nantucket in 1951 for the centennial celebration of moby---. he wrote to his editor. i have never been in a place with so much energy. he would write a significant portion of east of eden while out at sanctity. he was good friends with a bench lease and you know, yeah all this kind of thing and so, you know, so when he was back and sag harbor, he was the honorary chair of the annual old whalers festival which included a floating moby--- powered by motor known as bile -- so i mean hs keeps on going and and you know, we've been talking about moby---, you know, incredible ability to seem increasingly relevant as we move farther and farther away from the circumstances under which it was created. and i mean, this is the year, you know, it's melville's 200th and i was privileged to speak before marathon reading, you know, because a marathon of moby--- are sprouting up everywhere and there was one in january at the newbury library in chicago and newbury is oh if if you're into moby---, it's the northwestern newbury editions that are the the, you know, the additions and it was fantastic to be out there that it's it's a library that is also a museum and they had a exhibit of the rockwell can't lakes. additions and just as a personal thing. my father is now he's 90 and living on the cape. i used to teach summers at mystic. he was a professor at university of pittsburgh. that's why i grew up in that maritime center of the universe and moby--- was his his favorite book and when i was growing up, it was my i hated moby--- because my father thought it was the greatest book and i was a teenager in the 60s and you know, he would wraps eloquently of at dinner about it, you know, the battle scarred novel was on his desk and i just thought it was the stupidest thing ever and then i was an ap english class as a senior and mr. wells told us we had to read moby--- if we were going to graduate and it's when i experience the worst thing a teenager can experience to be proven that your father was right because i started reading mo. -- and i had by that point developed an improbable interest in sailing. i was beginning to race sunfish sailboats of all played things. i had actually participated in the sunfish world championship in martinique that that the previous winter i was the youngest contestant. i was 16 years old. i mean the women were topless. it was just incredible and and you know, it was but once i was at this big inner city high school in pittsburgh, it was i was anonymous and and so i'm reading the first chapter of moby--- call me ishmael. and whether you describes the island of new york manhattos on a sunday in which you know all of these people who spend their their days pent up and lav and plaster make their way to the battery to look out on the harbor and the ocean beyond and what are they in search of that ungraspable phantom of life. oh my god. this was the best friend. i had never met this was ishmael and i was i was not hooked i was harpooned and i know i was the only one of my classmates to really appreciate the fact that i read moby---, but it it just had a lasting impact on me. and what's interesting is what the rockwell kent is. you know, those are iconic illustrations and an interestingly. my father is in the last few years has written the introductions to the lakeside editions of continues of classics. this may be the last year of the lakeside editions because the donnelly press which by the way printed in the heart of the sea, and i had cold college friend who worked there. but they don't allow authors at the press. so he we made the pretend, you know, and so we couldn't tell my editor that i was going because the last thing they want. is an author seeing the book come out and say whoa, you got to change something so they snuck me in and i watched and this was in west virginia, you know huge printing plant. i watched as the first in the heart of the sea came out. it was just an amazing experience and just gave me that of visceral sense of the rockwell can't stuff the making of that book. oh my gosh, and you know and the continued relevance of it melville right writes moby--- and it falls on completely death ears. it's not really until after world war one when society had to go through that incredible collective trauma that the world began to catch up with melville's vision of the universe and people began to read the book and it began to resonate in ways that you know, you melville could never have anticipated but one of his biggest early fans was william faulkner who claimed that of books written by other authors. it was the one book he wished he had written and i was on book tour in oxford, mississippi and got the opportunity to to go to faulkner's home. and and yeah, it's it's it says if it they locked it after he died and it's just the way it was, you know, his his bourbon bottle is still on the refrigerator and there in the living room is rockwell kent. ahab, you know bam, i mean, that's it that's the power of melville and mary kay i have to say i owe so much to mary kay when i was working on in the heart of the sea. i had to go down to mystic seaport. and so i remember we spent quite a long afternoon maybe a little longer than that where mary was just explaining to me how this all worked being on a whale boat rowing throwing the harpoon. it's absolutely essential. and spending time up in the folksville trying to visualize what it was like when a whale because i was writing about the essex the nantucket whale ship, they got rammed by a whale. what was it like when a creature is large as an 85 foot 85 ton sperm whale crashed into the bow and you know, so that was just amazing and then fast forward about 12 years. where in the heart of the sea is looks like it's going to become a movie by that time the charles w. morgan is being restored to former glory and i had the opportunity to have lunch in the captain's cabin with ron howard and the screenwriter peter morgan of the queen and the crown and all that. he was rewriting some of the script and it was like, oh my you know, wow, what's this going and what was fascinating and talking with ron howard, who was who had been introduced to my book through a screenplay then read the book and was you know, just trying to reconcile things what he said he wanted to do visually was to quote moby---. and so if you watch in the heart of the sea, and i think it's gonna be you can watch it at the dreamland. if not today. it's at some point he's doing it and it's it's subtle. it's interesting once again, the power and and you know my father the retired academic said, you know moby--- has has inspired so many it's kind of nice that the story of the essex is being re-inspired by moby--- like, you know, it's the just the continued power of all of that. and so and then mary kay was talking about how incredible that voyage was. i was actually on the charles w morgan when you guys were in the whale boat rowing around this we were off province town and we it was just incredible. we were surrounded by whales leaping into the air and i was so envious of you guys in the whale boat, you know, just up there and i at one point my enthusia. i'm like, you know, it was just like my brains were dribbling out of my ears as i'm watching this and there was a harpoon right here the whale myself like grabbing it i said, no, you know the praised historian arrested for trying to harpoon a whale but but once again the continued power of this story to reinvent and i have to say, you know, i wrote my book. why read moby--- back in 2011. so that's what now eight years ago. and when i wrote it there were things like the the oil spill down in the gulf people were reacting to that in terms of moby--- things were going on with gaddafi all of that, you know, it was just becoming newly relevant and it was you know, popping all around and then i went on to write three books about the revolution and one of them is called valiant ambition which pairs charles george washington with benedict arnold. and i was you know reading about benedict arnold benedict arnold was a great hero before he turned traitor and and i'm trying to get a handle on he was badly injured at the battle of saratoga. his hit one of his legs was basically shot off. and but and the surgeons wanted to amputate it he refused it he would be in a hospital bed for three four months of bone spurs weeping through the wound what they realized. they had to reset it again after all that eventually he would when he emerged from the sick bed the the the his leg would be two inches shorter than the other one and it began a downward spiral in which he would be get increasingly disenchanted with the american cause why am i doing this if you know all of this going on and i can't you know, i kept saying wow. moby--- ahab and and then i began to realize wait a minute. melville's grandmother grandfather was peter gansevord. who was a great hero during the revolution and in command of fort stanwix on the mohawk river. guess who saved peter ganzafort on at from what looked like imminent surrender to the british and a large native component. that was probably they were convinced would lead to a massacre. it was benedict arnold who before the battle of saratoga would lead a group a lightning strike up the mohawk intimidate the british that they the native forces abandoned them and they had to give it up. and so peter gantz fort survived and became the great hero his his uniform i think is at the smithsonian and and melville was very aware of this. he unfortunately for his son. he named him stanwix for for stanwix. and so this was something absolutely embedded in in melville, and then i began to read the chapters about ahab after the injury and what is on where he goes? he's he goes insane. he cannot be contained. they they tie they they lash him to his bunk and as they're going around the -- screaming and you know, he's he's an emerges from that a changed man someone, you know, not visibly insane, but truly insane and and i began to think about well. what happened to arnold? it's very similar and there's even a reference to our specific reference to arnold in moby--- where the the whales are they come across this huge pod of whales and the armada chapter and one of the whales gets a killing a spade attack attached to his his tail and he's going through this pod and the spade is is slashing other whales and maddening them into this great frenzy and he compares that to arnold on the battlefield at saratoga where he went kind of insane went out there and you know was just a whirling dervish on the battlefield and actually turned the battle around for the americans. and so yeah, this is something for me that's been you know, it just i can't believe as i move along it continues to be relevant. and how did he do it? what happened? how did melville create something that seems to just become more and more relevant the farther we get from those circumstances? well, you know, it's in the summer of 1850. he had pretty much come close to finishing. it seems to be a kind of conventional novel about whaling. he had mary kay was talking about he had he had done a red burn and white jacket, you know there they're not rolling necessarily, but they're of a you know, there there the tone and they're they're for them. he and he wrote them tremendously quickly just pump them out and and so he seems to have hit upon a, you know a kind of light-hearted conventional wailing narrative and and then he he decides to take the family to the berkshires from new york. and he meets none other than nathaniel hawthorne nathaniel hawthorne had just published the scarlet letter. i mean, this is for me, you know, just the scarlet letter. he's just published the scarlet letter. yeah, it's selling well and with it and so melville melville meats nathaniel hawthorne, and it's interesting. this is there's some evidence that hawthorne was a very shy man and not the outgoing sort of impulsive sort like melville and there's some evidence that he had sort of instructed his wife to try to make it so that he didn't have to meet melville, but they did meet and and they actually spent some time during a shower of rain and during a literary picnic and it clearly ignited something in melville. he would then write an anonymous review. not of the scarlett letter but of an earlier group of short stories mosses from an old man's that and it's anonymous, but it's it's a love letter to to hawthorne and what it's interesting is you can see his creative process beginning what he's walking on to is, you know, he says you know, we think of hawthorne as this, you know, writing these perfectly distilled crystalline short stories about our colonial past, but no, there's so much more in hawthorne. there is the power of blackness. this is what attracts melville and it's it's you know, that that ability to dive down deep into places that you know, we can't even admit exist because otherwise we've just lose it all and go insane and and that he uses that to trans translate into shakespeare and about all of those figures and how shakespeare i mean shake. why do we read shakespeare? well shakespeare took he you know he's taking stories about kings from an earlier era and really writing about elizabethan england when he's doing it and it's that his ability to bring his own time to life through another that makes gives them those gaps create the ability for it to work beyond his own time, and that's what you see exactly happening with melville at this summer. it's just it's just beginning to to percolate and he's you know, he's he's reading as as mary kay it was talking about. he's reading shakespeare, it's milton. it's the king james bible. it's just it's in him. it's as you know, it's it's much a part of him as anything. he's reading in the newspaper. and what is he reading in the newspaper? well, this this is 1850. and things are happening in america. there has been the passage of the fugitive slave act. and it's it's impossible to overstate the impact of the fugitive slave act the country, you know slavery has been the lie festering at the heart of of america ever since the constitutional convention and it's been a line people have been teetering on for a long time. but with the fugitive slave act, it means that any slave who escapes from the and into the north the northerners are legally bound to return that person no longer. can the northerners say it's a southern problem now, it is a national problem and things are and we there's a mention of melville's father in law justice shaw justice shaw would hear one of the first cases leading to the fugitive slave act shaw hated slavery, but it was his job to uphold the laws of this land. he would he would be, you know, vilified in the press, you know, he saw on he he came on the side of the slave holders and there was a riot in boston. this is going on in the that fall when mel i mean this is what's going on. he's in the midst of a country on the edge of a catastrophe. it's there. it's everywhere and i think that as much as meeting and then meeting hawthorne. he just takes that conventional novel about whaling and begins to rip it apart. i think you see the foundations of that conventional novel in the beginning of moby---, you know, it's begins as a wonderful buddy flick with ishmael and quiquag. you know, it's great. i mean, it's just the tone. it's funny the jokes. i mean, it's you know, johnny carson has nothing on melville when it comes to you know, you know with the the quaker ship owner calling quick quo hog, you know, it's just great and but this it's in this this titanic psychic maelstrom that melville creates ahab. this is the great gift hawthorne gave melville and ahab is as much a thing of the fugitive slave act and slavery and what is happening to? society as it is anything and melville quite impulsively says to his wife, you know. i want to be near hawthorne. we're going to move to the berkshires. i mean, can you imagine this? he's got he's he's got a kid that malcolm stanwick coordinate poorly named stanwix will be out on the way soon. he moves his family to the berkshires they buy a house with loans from friends and family. i mean he can't support this there are very few writers at this time who can support themselves, you know dickens in a few others are about it, and he's basing this on a novel, you know that he's completely reconced about whaling so they move out to arrowhead in the berkshires and it's one of the great literary historical museums, you know, you can go up to his office and look out and see mount greylock and and he begins writing letting and this letters are wonderful at this time. he's you know, he describes he looks out this snow across the fields and it gives him a sea feeling. you know, he's he's he's in it. he's you know just descends into it and he's so he's torn this novel apart and he's just starts. it's like someone taking a old quaker mansion. you know tearing it apart and and getting an architect like gary to start, you know doing new new gables and things that don't fit. it's it's experimental. he's just creating this thing that is much driven by his own psyche as it is the material and he's he's and he's working feverishly. he's you know, he starts in the morning his his family members are instructed to leave his food outside his door his locked door. sometimes it's 4 o clock in the afternoon before he he, you know opens that door. he's working in his subsequent novel pierre. he will which is very auto buy or graphical. he basically describes the process in which he under which he was writing moby--- where he's working. so intensely. he already had weak eyes. it seems to have been a function of his years out there. in the south pacific, but it's his eyes begin to hurt him so much that he can barely open them and you know, it may have been some kind of infection or something like that. and so he's he's he's having to you know, he's barely able to even see the page as he's just writing this stuff and then you know in the evening he's down with his his family members and what he describes in a letter i think to hawthorne in a mesmeric state, you know, he's just he's in it. he's totally in it and he creates moby--- and so you know in it is is not just you know. his source material and he was reading volumously. he's reading all the stuff and it's not just the classics. he's reading natural history a stealing too. i mean, he's just, you know, he's like picasso, you know, you don't you know, yeah, it's not an influence you just steal a hunk of it and then riff with it. i mean, that's what he's doing. yeah, it's just all pieces and it's all coming at him and he's just and he's off and running and finally by the summer of 1851, you know, it's going to the press. he's down in new york. just pushing himself to do the final, uh, final three chapters. you know, what moby the moby--- attacking the whale it's the best action writing ever written. i mean, it's just it's he's just in his own i think bob dylan in his late 20 in his 20s when he was just you know, if an interviews he says, you know, i don't quite know how i did it then it was like he was channeling something melville was doing that. it was just coming through him in this, you know, incredible torrent and so, you know, finally the book is published. and and it has its lost there's no reader about it. i mean what what could they make of this thing? this is a guy you know, who's created a 20th if not 21st century experimental novel. you know and it you know, it's and it's about you know, it's already outdated whaling. yes, we'll go on but it's now that the sea used to be america's frontier, but by this time they discovered gold. it's the west everybody's interested in and so everybody's those are the stories people are devouring whaling, you know, so it falls on deaf ears and then is rediscovered in the 20th century. and so, you know, one of the things i i so i i this this actually last night i was thinking okay. i'm let me return to moby--- and and what how is it resonating with me now, and i'd like to let's see. i hope this i'm going to read a portion. it's not the full chapter. remember this was written in 2010. so a long time ago. i'm going to read a chapter from why read moby---. that all right. okay, the chapter title is anatomy of a demagogue. to be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. ishmael says it best for all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness be sure of this old young ambition. all mortal greatness is but disease in chapter 36 the quarterdeck melville shows us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the conductive power of a great and demented man. at the beginning of the chapter ahab c's with barely contained energy as he paces back and forth across the deck the point of this whale bone leg leaving the wood dented like geological stones stub the second mate observes that the chick that's in him pecks the shell. and then it begins ahab's version of a command performance until this point. he has not revealed the secret purpose of the voyage what he wants to do is illegal. he is not been hired by the pequod's owners to revenge himself on a white whale whoever if he can win the crew and his pliable second and third mates to his purpose. perhaps he can bulldoze the first mate starbuck and to accepting the inevitable. he orders starbuck to send everybody act once the crew has been gathered before him. he continues to pace back and forth only after their curiosity has been suitably aroused does he begin by asking an unexpected question? what do you do when you see a whale man? sing out for him is the immediate reply for a demagogue. it's the oldest trick in the book with each question and response the crowd cannot help but be wooed to the speakers enthusiastic purpose mariners began to gaze curiously at each other ishmael relates as if marveling how it was that they themselves became so excited. it's such seemingly purposeless questions. this is the dynamic of the political rally the kind of rhetorically fueled gathering that melville's older brother gansiford a low-level democratic party operative helped organize during his abbreviated political career. it's also the dynamic of the revival meetings of the second great awakening which swept across america during the first half of the 19th century in which contributed in turn to the growing evangelical fervor of the abolitionist movement in the years prior to the civil war. now that ahab has the ship's crew and his power he brings out a prop a gold doubloon. he then orders starbuck to give him a hammer and as he prepares to nail the coin to the mask he tells them that the first person to see a white whale with a wrinkled brow and cook crooked jaw will get the coin the crowd goes wild huzzah haza cried the semen as with swinging tarpaulins. they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mask then it goes on a little bit. and then finally starbucks begins to question. you know is the only one who's not yet under the spell and begins to question ahab about all of this and start he asks, what will ahab's vengeance get in our nantucket market? it's then to borrow from my favorite movie this is spinal tap. ahab dials his charisma to 11. come closer starbucks. he says that will require us a little lower layer. it's not about the money. he explains. this is personal thumping his chest. he cries out my vengeance will fetch a great premium here. starbuck is quite rightly appalled to him being raged with a dumb thing captain ahab. he sputters seems blasphemous this prompts ahead to reveal the logic such as it is behind his campaign against the white whale according to ahab moby--- is not just a sperm whale he is the tool of an unseen and decidedly evil purpose. evil power all visible objects ahab incess insists are but as pasteboard masks by killing moby---, he will punch through the mask and get at the root cause of all his unhappiness and pain. he then compares the world to a jail cell. how can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? to me the white whale is that wall shoved near to me unlocking the secrets of the universe by killing a whale doesn't make much sense. but what good is rationality to a man possessed by such terrifying and all devouring rage. he tasks me heaps me ahab cries. i see in him outrageous strength with an inscrutable malice sinuing it that inscrutable thing is chiefly what i hate and be the white whale agent or be the white whale principle i will reek that hate upon him talk not to me of blasphemy man. i'd strike the sun if it insulted me. there and finally as we approach the end of this hour i want to just return to melville because what i you know, he publishes moby---. it's not it does not go. well. he then writes pierre and incredible novel, but it's one in which he brings out all the embarrassing skeletons in his family's closet. i mean, it's just you know, what would anyways and and then that summer the summer after publishing moby---? he goes on a road trip with his father-in-law justice shaw, you know, so this is not even a year after the fugitive slave act. and where do they go they go to the island of nantucket along with other? yeah. i think the vineyard and the cape he was you know, he's the justice that moves along. and can you imagine it melville coming to nantucket? less than a year after the publication of moby---. i mean, it's just you can really cannot make this stuff up. he stays at the jared coffin house. captain pollard captain of the essex is in the house basically next door. and in melville's copy of owen chase the first maid of the essex of his account of the essex disaster melville later late in life would write in green crayon because now his eyes that we're already giving him problems are really giving him problems and i'm paraphrasing here sometime in the 1850s went to the island of nantucket met captain pollard who by this way this time not only lost the essex but his next command that two brothers the next year. met captain pollard. to the islanders a nobody but to me the most remarkable man, i have ever met. what he saw in pollard i think was a role model for how he would conduct himself for the rest of his life. because you know he with moby---, you know, he had gone through the one of the great personal and professional disappointments. you know, he could experience he would continue pollard by this time was a night watchman. he dealt he it wasn't as if he refused that the even think of the essex every november 20th. he would lock himself in his room and fast and memory of those who had died on the essex. you know, he he didn't pretend it never happened, but he continued a productive life. melville would do the same and but it's it's poignant. he he misses hawthorne hawthorne by this time has left the berkshires can't i don't think he could handle the intensity of his relationship. with melville, he's back in i think the concord area and and melville during this tour. here's the story of agatha a woman who marries a semen has his child the sailor sales off and does not return for 17 years. melville hears the story and and writes a letter to hawthorne saying i heard this story. this is your kind of story. you should write it. it's a pathetic story. it's a letter. it's the agatha letters. they're known as and he sets the scene on sanctity light here on nantucket. she lives, you know, she's the daughter of a lighthouse keeper describes the erosion you know already, you know, which is just anyways and hot he even goes to hawthorne's place in concord and and they have a meeting hawthorn says no herman you write this he would write a novel that with the title the aisle of the cross. it's been lost it maybe have been burned. there's some mention that he was he mentioned that he was prevented of publishing it. it might have been a fear of a libel a lawsuit because this person was still alive, who knows, but it was yet another great disappointment melville then you know, he continues to write incredible short stories, but it's not going well. his family pays for a trip to the holy land on the way. he meets hawthorne who is then is the the working as in the consulate in liverpool. they have a meeting on the sands of liverpool a hawthorne says, you know melville is still melville. he is the most religious man i've ever met but he cannot yet comfort himself in belief, you know, he's wandering he compares him to wandering these sand shores and then finally, you know, melville returns to new york has to work for 20 years in the customs house a place right with bribery. i mean, it's just he was known as the only honest man working at the customs house, you know humiliating place to be finally some deaths in the family, you know, they get a small inheritance and he can retire continues to write and dies with the great novella billy budd on his on his desk and it was after he died that he had this and i will end with a reading a the end of why i read moby--- on he had this this little writing desk. it was a portable thing and it was open in the bottom, which you could see him lying down in bed and working away. and it was later found that inside. was a a little piece of paper pasted in there with a motto written on it and it said read keep true to the dreams of thy youth. the phrase comes from the german playwright and poet friedrich schiller, but what was its relevance to melville? keep true to the dreams of thy youth late in life. he wrote to his father-in-law at my years and with my disposition or rather constitution one gets to care less and less for everything except downright. good feeling. life is so short and ridiculous and irrational from a certain point of view. that one knows not what to make of it. unless well finish the sentence for yourself. i propose that melville would have finished that sentence with the words taped inside his writing desk. keep true to the dreams of thy youth in the end. melville had found a way back to the view espoused by ishmael and moby---. doubts of all things earthly and intuitions of some things heavenly this combination makes neither believer nor infidel but makes a man who regards them both with equal. this redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope this genial stoicism in the face of a short ridiculous and irrational life is why i read moby---. thank you very much.

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