Moby Dick: The Happy Ending

This is FASCINATING.

One of the problems with reconstructing Melville’s creative process and earlier drafts:

The paucity of primary sources derives in large part from the downward trajectory of Melville’s career. When Typee came out in 1846, he was only 27 years old. A best seller in its day, the book “made him as famous as he would ever be when he was alive,” says Samuel Otter, an associate professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Melville’s Anatomies (University of California Press, 1999).

“The name died before the man,” Mr. Olsen-Smith says. “Compare Melville to Mark Twain, for instance — a man who remained beloved throughout his life and after, up to the present. People saved every scrap. … It’s a different story with Melville.”

I have a book called Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems: only real Plath fans would EVER want to read this book – but I just tear it UP. It looks at all of the drafts of her final poems – and analyzes them – taking clues from them as to her thinking process, and how she worked as a writer. The book is also a bit of a restoration job on her image as the mad genius poet, burning herself up in the flames of her own madness and creative output. That’s the legend that has lasted. This book wants to set the record straight. If you look at each of the drafts – you see that there was a HIGHLY conscious artist at work there. Each of those mad genius poems that made up her last book seemed to flow effortlessly from her pen – She wrote one poem a day for 3 months – poems that would make her name – Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Fever 103, Bee Meeting – I mean, the list goes on. These are major MAJOR poems. But the book I have shows all of her meticulous drafts – she labeled each one – You get images of them, you see what she took out, what she left in … whole verses in the scrap heap – genius verses, jagged and startling language – but she decided not right for the poem, or what have you. AWESOME book – I still love Plath’s poems, just flat out as good poems – but it is really interseting to get in really close to her process. I’m a writer, too. This stuff interests me.

It’s exciting. To hover over Melville’s scribbled marginilia – to try to understand which way he wanted to go with the book that would, years after his death, assure him of his immortality.. how cool!

Listen:

Melville’s copy of Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale is hardly a new find. It surfaced in the 1930s, by which time someone already had erased Melville’s check marks, underlinings, and scribbles. The volume has been in the possession of Harvard University’s Houghton Library since 1960.

Its influence on the author of Moby-Dick has also long been recognized. Dennis C. Marnon is administrative officer of the Houghton Library and a Melville enthusiast who has assisted several scholars, including Mr. Olsen-Smith, in the hunt for Melville’s missing library. The Beale, he says, “puts us pretty close to Melville composing Moby-Dick. He’s reading it at the time, and some of the marginalia not only find their way into the actual text … but all the passages that are incorporated freely or in a modified way … are also marked in this copy.”

Scholars had assumed those markings, once erased, were lost for good. “None of them realized that the marginalia was as recoverable as it is,” Mr. Olsen-Smith says. “It’s been quite common to write about Melville’s use of Beale without consulting the book.”

It was in 1998 that he realized that at least some of Melville’s markings were recoverable.

And check this out, check out the kind of stuff they are recovering:

On page 182 of the Beale book, for instance, in a chapter called “Chase and Capture of the Sperm Whale,” Melville jotted this simile alongside a detailed description of the death throes of a harpooned whale: “As when the water issuing … off from a fountain … [word unrecoverable] & slowly lowers … so the dying spout of the whale.” In Moby-Dick the image is reworked and amplified: “As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground — so the last long dying spout of the whale.”

Shivers!!

Whole article about the restoration process and what it all might mean here. It’s a long read, but worth it.