THE GREATEST BOOK IN THE WORLD?
Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab in the 1956 John Huston production of Moby Dick; a fine version of the tale with a script by Ray Bradbury, and the more recent attempt starring Patrick Stewart comes a close second.
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hen Herman Melville finished creating the splendid Moby-Dickin 1851 he wrote: ‘I have written a blasphemous book and I feel as spotless as the lamb’. It seems surprising to me that our lacklustre toff of a Prime Minister, David Cameron, could read any chapter of such a deeply subversive work as Moby-Dick, but he will, probably in mid-October, read Chapter 30, The Pipe. It’s only 5 short paragraphs, contains no politics, but he can rest assured that it has a cosy health and safety message about the dangers of tobacco, because it features the scene where Captain Ahab finally gives up smoking and tosses his pipe overboard. No doubt in a modern version of the yarn, Ahab would have lost his leg due to 50 years of smoking Virginia’s finest – although in the mid-19th century it wouldn’t have contained the alleged 1000+ chemicals the tobacco industry now contaminates its products with to ensure addiction. Still, as a cigar smoker, I’d better retreat to the fo’c’sle and shut up. For me, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible – and as such, Plymouth University’s fabulous decision to have the complete 135 chapters, each read out by a different celebrity over the next 4 months is truly laudable in our dumbed-down world. I am particularly looking forward to Simon Callow reading Chapter 9, The Sermon, because Father Mapple’s stately voice needs the gravitas Orson Welles gave it in the 1956 John Huston movie version , and as Welles’s supreme biographer, Callow must be delighted to have an opportunity to tread in the same oratorical footsteps as his (and my) hero.
There is so much delight in every line of Melville’s masterpiece, which I have carried around with me everywhere since I first stepped on board my first ship in the Merchant Navy on my 16th birthday on April 1 1959. Only Dickens and the Bard come close; here are a couple of favourite passages. God grants such semantic skills to only a chosen few. Would that I had been among them.
1. LOOMINGS
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
51. THE SPIRIT-SPOUT
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There she blows!" Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.
