The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (26 page)

Whereas
Moby-Dick
earned the author only a few hundred dollars, Melville ended up actually owing his publishers close to that amount after the publication of
Pierre
, mainly because, while
Moby-Dick
received somewhat mixed reviews,
Pierre
and its author were positively crucified by the press—one New York journal ran a review beneath the headline “Herman Melville Crazy.” The sentiment was often shared by Melville’s family and friends. A neighbor, Sarah Morewood, wrote, “the recluse life he was leading made his city friends think he was slightly insane.” His wife, Elizabeth, grew increasingly alarmed by his “ugly attacks.” In response to a fellow artist’s suicide, Melville himself remarked that “This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him … For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire.”

The Melvilles’ Manhattan residence was just uptown from the original Bellevue Hospital—one of New York’s longest-running psychiatric institutions, having housed a number of the city’s troubled literary minds, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Eugene O’Neill among them. Given that Melville’s in-laws once conspired to effectively kidnap Elizabeth from his abusive household during this post-
Pierre
darkness, it’s not a stretch to imagine that they might also have considered having him committed.

The evening after my Ambien reaction, I call my mother and tell her what happened. Clearly distressed, she asks if I’ve considered hurting myself.

I tell her the truth.

Early the next morning she calls my therapist and the psychiatrist who prescribed the medication. My therapist is unequivocal: if I pose a danger to myself, I need to be hospitalized. When my mother relays this information, I picture Bellevue looming there on the banks of the East River. Part of me wants it: to give up, check in, change into pajamas. But I also worry that it might make things worse, fuck up my life beyond repair.

My psychiatrist takes the more practical, pharmaceutical approach, although his blunt statement—“For God’s sake, don’t take any more Ambien”—brings his overall competence into question. But while I’m still clenched in the jaws of deep depression and anxiety, dumping the bottle of sleeping pills down the toilet does help me finally get some rest.

T
hough I’ve verbally accepted the job in Portland, I’m far from making up my mind whether or not to actually leave New York. Since the nonprofit job in Oregon doesn’t provide health insurance, I apply for a personal health coverage plan through Blue Cross Blue Shield in Oregon. But because I’m now taking medication for depression, they deny me coverage based on a preexisting-condition clause.

This makes the decision even more agonizing. I want to get out of New York, but it seems almost irresponsible to give up a job with full benefits, especially at this point in my life when I need serious medical care. On the other hand, part of the reason I need this care is the fact that I live in New York.

I call Blue Cross in Oregon to explain the situation—that I’ve been through a traumatic event and the meds are helping me recover. But there’s nothing anyone can do for me.

So along with my laptop and rental car, the Denver gangsters also jacked my insurability.

And then, like a final kick to the gut, in late October thieves break into the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland. They steal the new staff computer and three expensive Mac monitors—and I know it’s because the organization is a captainless ship, in chaos without me.

A
fter mixed critical reception for
Moby-Dick
and outright hostility toward
Pierre
, Melville descended into a period of hopelessness. From the wreckage of his career as a novelist, he escaped to short-form fiction like
Bartleby the Scrivener
, written for
Putnam’s
in 1853.
Bartleby
is a tale of the eponymous young scrivener, hired by a Wall Street lawyer to copy out legal forms in triplicate and quadruplicate, like a human photocopier. He’s a fastidious and productive employee, at least at first.

But as the story progresses, Bartleby begins refusing to carry out simple tasks. Eventually he gives up copying altogether.

I prefer not to
, he says, over and over, a kind of haunting refrain.

Being a Christian man, the employer can’t find it in his heart to fire him, especially once he learns that Bartleby has been spending nights in the viewless office chambers—that he has no home or family—“he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic.”

Though Bartleby does nothing but stare out the window at an opposing brick wall, the lawyer allows him to linger for weeks. His spectral presence disturbs clients and the other scriveners, casting a dark pall over the office and tarnishing the good lawyer’s reputation. After begging him to leave and receiving the same response—
I prefer not to
—the bewildered employer sees no other option than to relocate his offices to a new building, abandoning Bartleby in his gloom.

In one unforgettable final scene, the lawyer returns to his old building, only to find Bartleby “haunting the building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in the entry by night.”

While toiling in the windowless Pit, I can’t help but think of the melancholy plotline in
Bartleby
. And though I don’t say it out loud, the refrain
I prefer not to
plays over and over in my head, especially when asked to edit yet another romance novel. But I’m never so Bartleby-like as when, after trying but failing to leave my job for a solid year, and then finally winning and accepting a new job on the opposite coast, I can’t find the resolve to actually give notice, to pack up my things and send out the obligatory farewell emails.

A few weeks pass like this.

Then a full month.

Then another.

But still I remain, a shadow presence in the Pit, a hazy apparition of my former self, haunting my cubicle.

• Philip Weiss
  , contributing writer for the
  New York Times
  and confirmed Melvillian, who, in his 1996
  Times
  article, describes how after reading Melville’s exalted letters to Hawthorne, he found himself in a sort of
  Melvillian dream
  ; who, in the same article, states
  I had lost my own mind to Melville
  .
  
• Laurie Anderson
  , who claims that
  Moby-Dick
  is the strangest book she ever read; who hails Melville as a
  master of the jump cut
  ; who spent the 1990s creating a two-hour performance art opera entitled
  Songs and Stories from
  Moby-Dick.
  
• Elizabeth Schultz
  , who admits to being obsessed with the novel; who wrote the meticulously researched
  Unpainted to the Last
  : Moby-Dick
  and Twentieth-Century American Art
  , a work that documents the hundreds of American visual artists who have attempted to paint what Melville believed could not be painted.
  
• Junot Díaz
  , who quotes liberally from
  Moby-Dick
  in
  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
  ; whose own literary voice mixes an ecstatic,
  wild style
  vernacular with highbrow sensibilities that can be described as
  Melvillian
  ; who in a 2012 interview with Bill Moyers said,
  I had grown up in a place called Lemon Terrace, New Jersey, where the guy down the street was Uruguayan, the woman across the street was Korean, the person around the corner was Egyptian. There were Dominicans. There were African Americans. There were white folks. And I felt like we were growing up in this tiny little
  Pequod….
  And when I was reading
  Moby-Dick,
  I was like, “Man, this guy really has his finger on the pulse of the America that I came up in
  .”
  
• David Foster Wallace
  , whose father read him
  Moby-Dick
  as a bedtime story; who counted
  Moby-Dick
  as one of his favorite works; who, while struggling with his own mental illness in college, wrote three essays about the “Castaway” section.
  
• Jocko Weyland
  , who spent years writing his memoir
  The Answer Is Never: A Skateboarder’s History of the World;
  who struggled with piecing together so many disparate personal memories, history, inter views, sketches; who was then directed to
  Moby-Dick
  , where he found the answer.
  
• Jackson Pollock
  , who, according to Elizabeth Schultz, spent years in Jungian analysis, where
  its emphasis upon primitive archetype, myth, and symbol, prompted his interest in Moby-Dick
  ; who executed several paintings based on the novel; who, according to Ellen Landau,
  may have been able to associate Ahab’s search for the great white whale with what Jung called the Nekyia, or night sea journey
  .
  
• Sena Jeter Naslund
  , who grew fascinated with the book at age thirteen; who, decades later, spent more than five years researching, writing, and revising the stunning 666-page novel
  Ahab’s Wife
  .
  
• Damion Searls
  , who, after learning of Orion Press’s recent abridgment of
  Moby-Dick
  into a compact edition for the overly busy or impatient reader, decided to trace every item excised by Orion’s anonymous editor, down to the last semicolon, and publish this four-hundred-page demi-book called;
  or the Whale
  in a special edition of the
  Review of Contemporary Fiction
  ; who did this to preserve and celebrate the original novel’s
  digression, texture, and weirdness
  .
  
• Tony Kushner
  , who became obsessed with
  Moby-Dick
  in graduate school; who claims the novel is the single most important influence on his work, including the second act of
  Angels in America
  ; who is quoted in the
  New York Times
  as saying
  One falls in love with him, and I certainly have, completely, as most of the other Melville freaks have
  ; who learned from Melville that
  it’s better to risk total catastrophe than to play it safe as an artist
  .
  
• Frank Stella
  , who spent twelve years creating more than fifteen hundred abstract sculptures, collages, murals, paintings, engravings, and prints, each tit led after
  Moby-Dick
  chapters; who claims that this obsession nearly destroyed him; who felt that abstraction was the most effective way of re-presenting the novel, that it mirrors Melville’s drive to express the raw, ineffable powers of nature.
  
• Salman Rushdie
  , who claims Melville as a literary parent in his
  polyglot family tree
  ; whose novel
  The Enchantress of Florence
  features a seafaring main character and a maximalist narrative style reminiscent of
  Moby-Dick
  .
  
• Orson Welles
  , who played Father Mapple in John Huston’s black-and-white film version of
  Moby-Dick
  ; who wrote and directed a play called
  Moby-Dick Rehearsed
  that was performed in London in 1955; who apparently made a film version of the play that is now lost; who later made another twenty-two-minute film in which he enacts scenes from the production, playing the parts himself—Ishmael and Ahab—while footage of rippling water projects on his face and the wall behind him.
  
• Andrew Delbanco
  , who wrote the definitive biography
  Melville: His World and Work
  ; who claims that
  Moby-Dick was not a book for a particular moment. It is a book for the ages
  ; that
  Melville experienced the great city as every true New Yorker has always experienced it—with a combustible combination of love and hate
  ; that
  Moby-Dick is the story of a young man’s rebirth
  .
  
• Gilbert Wilson
  , who, during the mid-twentieth century created more than three hundred paintings and drawings related to
  Moby-Dick
  ; who became obsessed with the idea that the white whale was a potent symbol for the destructive power of the nuclear bomb; who tried and failed to stage an opera called
  The White Whale
  , which he hoped would promote world peace.
  
• Barry Lopez
  , who read the book three times before college, while living in New York City; who cites
  Moby-Dick
  as one of the main inspirations in his drive to render in writing both the light and dark aspects of the natural world.
  
• Richard Serra
  , who grew up near the shipyards in San Francisco’s Ocean Beach neighborhood; whose monolithic steel sculptures are influenced by the process of shipbuilding; who made a famous piece entitled
  Call Me Ishmael
  ; who said
  Moby-Dick has become America’s central epic poem. We are all influenced by it
  .
  
• Dan Beachy-Quick
  , who created
  A Whaler’s Dictionary
  , a collection of essays about
  Moby-Dick
  , where he writes,
  What follows is the result of the mad task I found within myself after more than a decade spent reading the same novel. I meant not to exhaust
  Moby-Dick
  of meaning, but to exhaust myself of the meaning I found in it
  .
  
• John Updike
  , who was a lifelong admirer of Melville’s novels and stories; who, in a 1982
  New Yorker
  article, explained that despite Melville’s failure as a novelist and a life filled with personal tragedy, he never quit writing, not until his death.
  
• Hershel Parker
  , who apparently wakes up in the middle of the night to pore over Melville’s personal letters; who wrote the seminal two-volume work
  Herman Melville: A Biography
  , each volume weighing in at 941 pages.
  
• Elizabeth Renker
  , who cried as she read from
  Moby-Dick
  at her wedding; who loves Melville’s work but not necessarily Melville the man; who writes openly of his alleged misogyny, alcoholism, and abuse of his wife.
  
• Adrian Villar Rojas
  , who created a life-size, impaled white whale from unfired clay at a
  Moby-Dick
  –themed art show at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.
  
• David Dowling
  , who documents his participation in a twenty-four-hour marathon
  Moby-Dick
  reading in his book
  Chasing the White Whale
  ; who writes,
  If we are up to the challenge of endurance that the novel poses, especially as it is read in the marathon format, great rewards not only of survival but also of exultation are in order
  .
  
• Nathaniel Philbrick
  , who in his book
  Why Read Moby-Dick?
  states that
  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-Dick; that it’s
  the one book that deserves to be called our American bible
  .
  
• David Shields
  , who in
  Reality Hunger
  writes
  The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps
  ; who prizes
  Moby-Dick
  as a prototypical antinovel; who, in
  How Literature Saved My Life
  , lists
  Moby-Dick
  as one of fifty works he swears by.
  
• Matt Kish
  , who on August 5,2009, began making one drawing a day, every day, for all 552 pages of his edition of
  Moby-Dick
  ; whose work was later published in a book entitled
  Moby-Dick in Pictures
  .
  
• Margaret Guroff
  , who created a copiously annotated online version called
  Power Moby-Dick
  .
  
• Nick Flynn
  , who loosely based the structure of his memoir
  Another Bullshit Night in Suck City on Moby-Dick
  ; who writes in the final chapter,
  We know [Ahab] lost his leg, and that that loss became a story, and the story became the obsession that in the end defined, and ended, his life. We have to be careful of the stories we tell about ourselves
  .
  
• Hart Crane
  , who wrote the poem “At Melville’s Tomb”; who ended this poem with the line
  This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps
  ; who later drowned himself in the Gulf of Mexico.