The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Melville's Neglected Masterpiece Martha's Vineyard, Mass. It was a little more than a century ago, according to Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, that...
...He even gives specific injunctions as to which chapters are must reading and which may be lightly disregarded...
...I would by no means advise the reader to skip chapters 7 to 9, the story of Father Mapple's chapel...
...It can be bought in paper covers for half a dollar...
...In one short article, he gives the essentials of Melville's life and the story of the book...
...I have been talking to men and women named Coffin and Starbuck and Macy...
...From the middle of the last century until well into the present one, Americans were turned away from the sea...
...I realize that my associations during the past few weeks may lead me to oversell my point of view...
...On only one point do I differ with him...
...But, though there are frequent passages of complicated thought and poetic language, the framework of the tale is made of clear and earthy stuff like Mark Twain or the prose passages of Shakespeare...
...It will not be presented on Martha's Vineyard until after I have left this charming isle...
...The greatest work of the literary imagination produced on this continent has lain neglected and forgotten except for praise and analysis in recent years by a select circle of the intelligentsia...
...Many of them, one hopes, will be lured from the film to the book...
...And always I have prodded my mind helplessly to discover the causes of its neglect...
...I hope that the obvious rise of interest in this masterpiece is not exclusively due to the success of the movie recently made from it...
...In a recent number of Life, Samuel Eliot Morison has done a manful job of bolstering the courage and interest of the unliterary and the unseamanlike in tackling a work which the professional literary chaps have made seem a rather formidable assignment...
...Then there is Melville's linguistic and intellectual range...
...For the humor, like Mark Twain's, is not of the obvious and fabricated sort...
...The first hundred pages are of this sort...
...Men like Captain Ahab became aliens...
...I have even had one conversation with a man who served as harpooner on one of the last of the genuine whaling ships...
...His story takes in all the world...
...Millions of moviegoers will be pleasantly introduced to a story that will be as new to them as if it had been written in 1951 rather than 1351...
...I can think of several obviously inadequate reasons...
...I have been living among the island people of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket...
...And then he can trust his own instincts rather than depend on any literary tutelage...
...Then he encourages readers to go at this story as they would any other—disrespectfully skipping what happens not to suit their taste...
...It was a little more than a century ago, according to Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, that Captain Ahab and his ship the Pequod sank below the slowly rolling waters of the Pacific...
...Here you have two things which arc supposed to be sure-fire guarantees of popular success: There are sea adventures far beyond anything produced by Conrad and passages of plain folk humor equal to the best in Mark Twain...
...And there are chapters of poetry and drama which suggest the richness and humanity of Shakespeare...
...To me...
...As the old Captain says, visible objects are but pasteboard masks...
...it depends on character, situation, and a rich and human texture of speech...
...Any English-speaking person of average education and intelligence will read this introductory section and many others down to the end with pleasure and amusement...
...If the new reader follows his natural tendency, be will do no skipping until he gets well beyond the first hundred pages...
...The language of sailors became a foreign tongue to us...
...And for near a hundred years we left him on the library shelves...
...I regret that I have not yet seen the picture and, therefore, cannot discuss it...
...But the professional critics and the island people who have seen it unite in its praise...
...Now and then, he uses a colorful American word which has since gone out of use...
...It was but little later that Melville's book was engulfed by the slowly moving billows of American taste and habit...
...To these people, the ways and language of the sea are the ordinary stuff of life and the notion that Moby Dick is difficult and strange is a little hard to take...
...We were conquering the prairies and developing our industries...
...His globe includes the depths of the sea with all the strange creatures existing therein, the stretches of the sky with every sort of condition discoverable at its utmost heights, and all the nations of the earth without regard to their color or tongue or way of life...
...as has been emphasized again and again, every man, every object, every incident has symbolic values...
...I have read the book many times during this period when it was overlooked and disregarded...
...In trying to put across his meanings, Melville often employs references to the ancient histories and literatures of Europe and Asia...
...they are both amusing and deeply significant of what is to follow...
...It is not too much to say that Melville is, within his range, our best approach to Shakespeare...
...The premiere took place, appropriately, at New Bedford...
Vol. 39 • August 1956 • No. 32
