On the weekend that “Moby-Dick” went live on the Web—a chapter a day read by a different person, each chapter accompanied by an original work of art—I was at a ukulele festival in Provincetown, where there are now whale-watching boats instead of a whaling industry, thank God. I’m not actually that into the ukulele, but I’ve fallen in with people who play it, and it was through one of them—Mary J. Martin Schaefer, the proprietor of the White Horse Inn, who organized the fifth annual Frank’s Ukulele Bash and Revival—that I was invited to participate in the “Moby-Dick Big Read.” Ishmael does not, to my knowledge, mention anyone aboard the Pequod plucking a small, highly portable four-stringed instrument, but an ancestor of the ukulele, the Madeiran braguinha, was carried all over the world by Portuguese seafarers (it caught on in Hawaii). Is it possible that a chapter on ukuleles was the one digression that Melville resisted?
The “Moby-Dick Big Read” is the brainchild of Philip Hoare, the author of “Leviathan, or The Whale,” and the artist Angela Cockayne, both of Great Britain. Philip Hoare (rhymes with Moore) lives in Southampton, England, and is an artist-in-residence at the Marine Institute of the University of Plymouth, but while he was researching his book he often stayed at the White Horse Inn. “The Whale,” as the American edition is called, resembles “Moby-Dick” in its thoroughness: besides being about Philip’s own lifelong fascination with cetaceans, the book takes the reader behind the scenes, in a genial scholarly way, examining Melville’s primary sources on whaling, re-creating a picnic with Hawthorne on Mt. Greylock, and relishing the latent homoerotic content in such titles as “Redburn,” “White Jacket,” and “Billy Budd.” At a museum in England, the author handles a bit of ambergris, and its ineffable odor lingers on his fingertips.
Philip didn’t know that I had read Melville’s classic twice—in Cleveland, the summer after I graduated from college, and again on vacation in Nantucket—or that I have a Moby-Dick Room in my bungalow in Rockaway. (Melville mentions Rockaway Beach in the first chapter, when he describes people’s longing for the sea—“Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.”) He just needed some American voices. Many fine English actors signed on to the project. The first chapter, “Loomings,” which Mary and I listened to at the inn on the night of Sunday, September 16th, after the ukuleles had been put away, was read by the Scottish actress Tilda Swinton (“Call me Ishmael”). Nigel Williamson read Chapter 3, “The Spouter Inn,” in which Ishmael beds down warily with the tattooed heathen Queequeg. Simon Callow read Chapter 9, “The Sermon,” in which, as Father Mapple (“Shipmates!”), he retells the story of Jonah and the whale. (Callow wrote a three-volume biography of Orson Welles, who played Father Mapple in the 1956 John Huston movie, and he does a perfect American accent.) Stephen Fry, in Chapter 10, “A Bosom Friend,” delivers Melville’s hilarious description of Queequeg’s head: “It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”
One of the Americans on board is Nathaniel Philbrick, the author of “In the Heart of the Sea,” which is about the incident in which a whaleboat called the Essex was stove by a huge sperm whale (the historical incident that inspired Melville). Philbrick recorded Chapter 14, “Nantucket,” on Nantucket (where he lives); it will go up this Saturday, September 28th (Friday, if you stay up late). John Waters recorded Chapter 95, “The Cassock,” in Provincetown, where he spends the summer: something to look forward to around the shortest day of the year. Mary Martin Schaefer, who is actually Canadian—a bluenose from Halifax, Nova Scotia, another big fishing town—chose Chapter 119, “The Candles.” Each chapter features an original art work, commissioned by Cockayne. Having a fresh voice and image for each succeeding chapter brings ever renewed enthusiasm to a story that I can’t imagine anyone finding boring for a single word. Even Chapter 32, “Cetology,” which lists the different kinds of whales on the way to one of the finest lines in all of literature: “Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”
I got to read Chapter 6: “The Street,” a description of New Bedford by day. It is full of hard-to-pronounce, possibly made-up words (Pannangians, Brighggians), designating South Sea Islanders come to New Bedford, the whaling capital of the world, to find a ship. I had been to New Bedford once, and visited the Seamen’s Bethel, or Whalemen’s Chapel, with its ancient wall plaques commemorating sailors lost at sea and its pulpit shaped like the prow of a ship (a detail that Melville invented and that the chapel then had to build to satisfy fans of the movie). I stopped in New Bedford again on the way to Provincetown in my capacity as roadie to the ukulele crowd. Shipmates—I mean, passengers—included my acupuncturist (who rebuilt an old Montgomery-Ward ukulele and carries it in a handmade cardboard case), his wife (an ardent fan), and Uke Goldberg, a performer who would be making his solo début in Provincetown. Uke Goldberg ran through his act in the passenger seat on the way up I-95 and served as our navigator in New Bedford, directing us to a Portuguese restaurant called Antonio’s for lunch and then down to the harbor.
New Bedford was all torn up, its streets blocked by construction, cobblestones heaped along the curbs. It is still the biggest fishing port on the East Coast, and still trying to ride the whale—there are whales everywhere, painted on the fronts of museums, theatres, coffee shops, and even surrounding a portrait of Frederick Douglass on a mural devoted to civic pride—but it is much too scrappy a town to submit to the Disney treatment. We did not visit the Whaling Museum, which has a whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling, choosing instead to circumambulate the historic district, looking for the mansions, built with whale money, that Melville describes as having been “harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.” Some of the mansions were in mint condition, with elaborate wrought-iron fences; others were run-down, their classic lines disfigured by protruding air-conditioners. We looked in vain for “the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts” that, “candelabra-wise”—in one of Melville’s more purple passages—“proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms.” Ishmael describes the terrain surrounding New Bedford as “bony,” but rhapsodizes over the “bright terraces of flowers” that have been induced to bloom there. And that is the one thing that I can report about New Bedford, besides its continuing dominance in the fishing industry, that hasn’t changed since Melville’s time: roses bloom there in abundance, in formal gardens and in patchy side yards, and it is not hard to imagine their fragrance reaching a grateful sailor on an offshore breeze.
Oil painting by Timothy Woodman/Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown.
