Song of a Reformed Headhunter

There are two major challenges facing any biographer of Melville, as Delbanco frankly admits. The first is the paucity of surviving documentation such as correspondence and notebooks. Delbanco overcomes this deficit to some extent by sketching in the historical picture, with some nice descriptions of New York City in the 19th century, for instance, and by delineating the debate over slavery in the lead-up to civil war. The other challenge stems directly from Melville's own writing. After the popular success of Typee and Omoo , Melville wrote his masterpiece Moby Dick  in his mid-thirties. Thereafter, his writing went into a steep decline, as beset by financial worries and resenftful of the lukewarm critical reception, he turned out inconsistent puzzling books and magazine hackwork. With the exception of a few short stories like "Bartleby the Scrivener,""Benito Cereno" and "The Encantadas" and the final spurt of inspiration that gave him "Billy ...

This Signet Classics edition collects together "Billy Budd," "The Piazza Tales," and "The Town Ho's Story" from Moby Dick . "Billy Budd" is based on the Harvard edition. There is a helpful "Afterword" by Willard Thorpe that explains Melville's turn to writing short stories for the magazines, after the commercial and critical failures of  Moby Dick  and Pierre . The "Afterword" (1961) also points to the critical controversies over the meanings of the more ambiguous stories, such as "Billy Budd" and "Benito Cereno." I did not enjoy "Billy Budd" as much as I thought I would. The eponymous character is too much a symbol of Adamic innocence, and too little a human being. The interest in the first part of the story lies in the narrator's homo-erotic attraction to Billy, an attraction displaced on to Billy's admiring companions. But since Billy is as blandly exciting as a porn star, the d...

I don't love swimming enough to find a pool in NYC to swim regularly, but I do love swimming. The outdoor pool at Grove Hotel is small and cold. It is also too shallow at one end. Nevertheless, I swam happily for 40 minutes yesterday afternoon. This morning, turning round for another short lap, I remembered that my father taught me to swim, in the public swimming pool next to the Bukit Merah Bus Interchange. That pool, like so many things in Singapore, is gone. Behind locked gates, the empty pools stand like huge scummy cisterns. My father is not a great swimmer, but he knows the basics. School swimming lessons finished my swimming education. When I am swimming, I often imagine myself floating like a fetus in my mother. Since I am thrashing vigorously, and not floating, swimming combines the joy of independent action and the security of a womb.  Before my swim yesterday, TCH and I walked along the beach to the Pines. I love beach walks too, and this one by the Atlantic was especial...

Moby-Dick is not a novel, but a Dramatic Poem. Its sources are Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. Its spirit is not realistic, but idealistic; it sees in the things of earth shadows of things in heaven, or, as Ahab puts it, “Not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.” Its strategies are self-consciously dramatic: dialogues that rival for color and comedy the exchanges between Lear and the Fool; soliloquies that aim for the grandeur of Hamlet; and action that extends its import, as in Homer, through extended metaphors. Where it pauses to catch its breath, it sees analogies everywhere, in the parts of the ship, in the members of the crew, in the stages of killing and boiling down a whale. Ahab, who sets out to kill the White Whale, discovers he is the White Whale, just as Ishmael, who sets out to tell the story of Ahab, finds out, in this obsessive narrative, he is Ahab. * Chapter I Loomings—Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to per...