Nathaniel Philbrick: “Moby Dick” is one of those books that contains so many of the essential details of what it was like to be alive in the 19th century that coming from more than 150 years later, we can get into that world and even recognize portions of our own world in that past time. Jo Reed: That was Nathaniel Philbrick, he's the author of many books including Why Read Moby-Dick and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National endowment for the arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is considered a classic of American literature. It also has the distinction of being a novel we have all heard of and few of us tackled. We all know the barebones of the story: crazed Captain Ahab determined to hunt down --regardless of cost --the great white whale that bit off his leg. We also know that Moby-Dick is a big fat book, rife with symbolism and digressions. Some of us had it stuffed down their throats in high school and never want to pick up Moby-Dick again. Enter Nathaniel Philbrick. Nathaniel Philbrick is a writer based in Nantucket... he's written many books, a number of them about the sea and sailing, including the 2000 National Book Award Winner for non-fiction "In the Heart of the Sea the Tragedy of the Whale ship Essex" which, by the way, recounted  the real-life inspiration Moby-Dick. Philbrick is also an unabashed and well-informed fan of Moby-Dick --the book he calls "our American bible." And he explains his thinking in a short lucid book, aptly named Why Read Moby-Dick. When I spoke with Nathaniel Philbrick I asked him why he would want to write a book about reading Moby-Dick. Nathaniel Philbrick: I’ve always been fascinated with the relationship between Melville and Hawthorne. In fact, I was named for Nathaniel Hawthorne. And that was sort of always the angle I wanted to bring to light because it seemed like-- yeah, everyone knows “Moby Dick,” but if they had some context of the personal and historic side of it that maybe they would return to the novel because I think, there’s a real danger that we’re going to lose, that people are not going to turn to these novels that have so much to offer us and so this little book, my whole hope was if you pick up the novel, even if you read just one paragraph, the mission will have been accomplished. Jo Reed: Well, the mission was certainly accomplished in my case. I am looking for my copy of “Moby Dick” because I know I have it. Nathaniel Philbrick: Well, that’s great to hear. Jo Reed: Well, I’m like a lot of people where at 16 I was handed this book and in that way that we all know there are wonderful teachers who really know how to teach literature and then there are teachers who absolutely murder it and I had a murderous one. Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah, and “Moby Dick” is so susceptible to being murdered. Everyone wants to see the white whale not as a white whale, but as a symbol for something and there’s just no quicker way to lose, I think, a readership, particularly a young readership than to sort of foist a pre-interpretation on an already challenging book. Jo Reed: When did your fascination with “Moby Dick” begin? Nathaniel Philbrick: It really began in a negative way quite early. My father who is now a retired English professor has a specialty in maritime literature and would teach the book just about every year and he would talk endlessly about it and my brother and I just thought this was just awful and by the time I was a teenager, I just already hated the book, even though I hadn’t read a word of it, but then as a senior in high school I was told I had to read it, otherwise I wasn’t going to graduate and I opened the pages and at that first sentence, “Call me Ishmael,” I was harpooned and it just was a transformative experience for me, but it put me in the awkward situation of having to admit that my father had been right. Jo Reed: Can we talk a bit about the narrative voice of Ishmael? Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah. Ishmael for me is what made the novel immediately beguiling when I first read it. He begins with those famous words, “Call me Ishmael,” and they’re so confiding. “Call me Ishmael,” but wait a minute. Ishmael’s not his real name. Who is this guy? It’s just a wonderful combination of intimacy and mystery and he then describes how he’s depressed, “Damp, drizzly November in my soul,” which anyone-- I don’t care. You don’t have to be a teenager to relate to that! [Excerpt from Audiobook.] Nathaniel Philbrick: And he’s wonderfully funny. He meets up with Queequeg, his cannibal buddy. It’s almost like a buddy flick in the beginning as they team up and head out to Nantucket and find the Pequod, but then it moves in very dark direction and you sort of see the flexibility of Ishmael’s point of view. He can be fun loving, but he can face the darkest of realities and he has a whole element of- approach to life that I think is kind of stated wonderfully in the chapter called “The Hyena,” where initially he’s thinking, “Oh, I’m going to go whaling and no one can pierce my immortal soul,” but then he realizes once he gets out there and is almost killed during his first attempt to get a whale that this is really dangerous and he decides to take out his will and he talks about well, there’s certain moments in the midst of the worst perils that when we realize that life is kind of a cruel joke that’s been devised at our expense and what do we do about this and I see there an approach, a way to make sense out of a life that will never make sense, a kind of stoical and good-humored approach to deal with the darkness and so for me, Ishmael is a fundamental part of why “Moby Dick” matters. Jo Reed: Now the book that Melville started writing was more of this whaling adventure story. Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah. I think he was almost finished with a version of a book about whaling that seems to have been from what evidence we have quite a conventional almost picaresque novel that probably would’ve been much better received in his own day, but in August of 1850, just as he was finishing up this first draft, he met the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne who had just published the bestseller, “The Scarlet Letter,” and Melville was prompted to read Hawthorne’s short story collection, “Mosses from an Old Manse” and it just hit him like a two-by-four. Hawthorne’s power of blackness, and he would write an anonymous review of “Mosses” that is like a love letter and it’s almost a treatise on what he is going to do with “Moby Dick.” He uses Hawthorne to dive back into Shakespeare which he had just inhaled a few years before and you can just see the beginnings of what would become the character Ahab. Ahab seems to have been a relatively late invention thanks in large part to Hawthorne and the novel would go in a completely different direction. Jo Reed: But where Hawthorne was a best-selling author, Melville was not. His book didn’t seem to speak to his own time and got very little recognition and it was not a critical success. It was not a financial success. Nathaniel Philbrick: Absolutely. Yeah. I think a lot of the reason why high schoolers and a lot of us have a problem with the book is why it had problems when it was published. It’s not a traditional novel. The plot is something we may all know, but Melville doesn’t seem very concerned in telling it. The story of Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale is just lost at times while he takes a chapter to go off on a completely different topic and do a tangent that seems to have nothing to do with what has gone on beforehand and it’s a very almost postmodern novel and it’s almost experimental and I think for a 19th-century audience it was like- what? Where is this going? And it really took a couple of generations to pass before it became recognized for what it is today. Jo Reed: But Melville, I want to go in so many directions at once because I think of “Billy Budd” or I think of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and there is not one excess word, I think, in either of those two pieces, whereas “Moby Dick” kind of like “War and Peace,” all the ruminating is going on in “War and Peace.” You can love the book and see where it could be cut and really not lose that much, I feel like I’m walking on eggs here, but to me there’s that similarity with “Moby Dick.” Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah. Well, there is a wonderful slapdash quality to the book where you can sort of tell that Melville began with a first draft that he pulled apart, ripped apart the foundations and created Ahab and inserted characters and then characters that just leave. It’s a very messy book. It begins very messily. Yes, there’s “Call me Ishmael,” but then there’s all these collection of quotes about whales that goes on for pages and the book goes in all these different directions and it’s huge. It’s a structure that is purposely disorderly and at one point Ishmael says that in a careful disorder is the true method and that’s what he’s about and that’s very lifelike. I mean that’s how we lead our lives and yes, there are all sorts of wonderfully, perfectly chiseled books, whether it’s a perfectly crafted story and Melville was clearly capable of that and “Billy Budd” is one of those diamonds, but that’s not what “Moby Dick” is about. It’s vast. It’s got nooks and crannies and you can get lost, but you can always find something new to and for me the way that works is that whenever I come back to the novel, whenever I reread it, I always find something new and you inevitably at times can get impatient with where he’s going, but the point of it is that the slower the voyage, the more you get out of it and Melville scatters little chapters like speed bumps to try to slow the plot and then there’s the payoff at the end. Jo Reed: It’s interesting, almost like the sea itself, no? Nathaniel Philbrick: Yes, and it really-- those are the moods to the book and the sea is a wonderful way of looking at the various moods of “Moby Dick” and the various voices of “Moby Dick.” Ishmael’s the narrator, but he transforms himself throughout the book. At one point he’s funny and intimate. At another point it’s oracular and at others it’s very kind of pristine and sharp and the sea, when there’s no wind it is a mirror. When there is a storm its waves that can devour you and that’s the kind of relentless and unpredictable mood that Melville has somehow created in this novel. Jo Reed: What was happening historically in the country at that moment when Melville was writing? Nathaniel Philbrick: We’re talking the fall and winter of 1850 when Melville is working away at this new draft and just at this time, the Fugitive Slave Act had been passed and what this meant was that any slave that had escaped from the southern states into the north, if found, now had to be returned to his or her slave master and this meant for the first time slavery was not just a southern issue. All of the nation was involved and it created a real maelstrom of all sorts of unrest and in the middle of it, while Melville is working on this novel about Ahab pursuing a white whale, Melville’s own father-in-law who’s a judge in Boston, finds himself overseeing the first court case involving slaves that had to be returned now by this new law and riots broke out in Boston. The judge was burned in effigy and ten years before the Civil War, Melville was experiencing firsthand all of the passions and outrage and fear and anger that would ultimately culminate in the Civil War. Jo Reed: And you say we can see those traces in “Moby Dick.” Nathaniel Philbrick: Absolutely, and I think he internalized what was happening in his own day as much as he internalized what he had taken from Hawthorne and Shakespeare and as a result in “Moby Dick” is imprinted all of the passions and strife that had contributed to a revolution almost 100 years before and would culminate in this truly defining moment, the Civil War, and I think it means that whenever we in the 21st century are finding ourselves on the edge of a catastrophe or fearing what the future holds, you can find something in “Moby Dick” that relates to that because that’s exactly the point where Melville was when he wrote this novel. Jo Reed: You also point out, which I thought was really, really interesting, how when people are taking off into the unknown at those times in this country the tendency would be to go west, young man, as opposed to go to the sea. Nathaniel Philbrick: Right, and I think a contributing factor to the fact that “Moby Dick” did not succeed in finding an audience was that the ground had kind of shifted under Melville’s feet in terms of his audience. He had begun just a few years before with a bestseller about his experiences in the South Pacific called “Typee” and at that point the sea was still America’s predominant frontier, wilderness. It wouldn’t be really until the discovery of gold in California in 1848 that America would become infatuated with the west. The whole nation would begin to turn, literally, go in that direction and America became fascinated with stories about its own interior rather than the sea around it and so that Melville’s book about the sea is kind of the primal wilderness that is being eroded in a way by this new interest in the west and I think it meant that that’s what people were thinking about. And it’s all part of the same tendency; that American tendency to go out into the unknown full of danger and promise and resources that can make you rich. [Selection from Audiobook plays.] Jo Reed: Your book “In the Heart of the Sea” actually was about a real-life event that also oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly enough, inspired “Moby Dick.” Talk about the Essex and what part that played in the creation of “Moby Dick.” Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah, yeah. Well, the Essex disaster occurred in 1820, well before “Moby Dick” was written and 20 years before Melville went to sea as a whale man. In 1820, a Nantucket whale ship named the Essex was about 1000 miles to the west of the Galapagos Islands, almost smack-dab on the equator when a giant 85-foot bull sperm whale, a whale about the size of “Moby Dick,” rammed and sunk the vessel. It was the first time in the history of American whaling that this was known to have occurred and inspired the climax of “Moby Dick.” Melville heard the story of the Essex as a whale man and where “Moby Dick” ends is really where the real-life story of the Essex begins. The men took to their three whale boats. They could’ve sailed to the Marquesas Islands to the west with the trade winds, but feared the rumors of cannibals that they had heard and then decided to go against the wind more than 3000 miles to the South America. If everything had gone right, they might’ve made it. Everything went wrong. They were reduced to survival cannibalism in the great horrible irony of the story and a few would survive and tell the tale, but it became big news in America. It was kind of the Donner party of the sea before there was a Donner party. Jo Reed: How did “Moby Dick” get rediscovered? How did that process happen and when did it happen? Nathaniel Philbrick: Well, you know, “Moby Dick” was a book that sort of languished after the publication. Melville lived on for 40 years and died in obscurity. If he was known for anything, it was as the author of “Typee,” his first novel, and then it really wouldn’t be until the 20th century, on the other side of World War I that the novel began to be rediscovered. I have a personal theory that the world had to experience the cataclysm of the Great War and all of that disillusionment that that entailed to reach a point where “Moby Dick” suddenly began to make sense and it was embraced by a whole generation of young writers. Hemingway was very proud that he had read “Moby Dick” in high school unassigned and he and other expats would use the novel as a kind of litmus test if you had the goods in the ‘20s. William Faulkner would say in the late ‘20s that “Moby Dick” was the one novel he had not written that he wished he had written and off it would go and by 1951, on the centennial of its publication, “Moby Dick” was the iconic novel, the great American novel that we see it as today. Jo Reed: Is it also a novel that appeals to people outside of the United States or is it such an American novel? Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah. It is a very American novel, but I am surprised at how international its appeal is. I just was at an event in New Bedford which is the holy ground of “Moby Dick” where a German scholar had come and was the Melville expert in Germany and saying how big Melville is over there and it’s interesting how even if you haven’t read a word of “Moby Dick,” everyone seems to know that story. It’s become such a part of our culture and it’s clear that it goes way beyond America and it’s just the novel, because it is so big and vast and I think the fact that it’s set on the ocean means that there’s a certain accessibility factor when it comes to cultures beyond America. Jo Reed: You write in your book “Why Read Moby Dick?” that as different crises grip the country today, there is something in “Moby Dick” that can speak to what’s going on. Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah. I find it kind of like a survival manual, an existential guide to when we’re all feeling overwhelmed and things seem completely out of control and you’re like Ishmael on the deck of the Pequod hurtling towards that encounter that with the huge white whale that you know is not going to end well. “Moby Dick” is there as kind of okay, so how do you deal with this in almost a philosophical way and I think “Moby Dick” can be helpful when presented with that kind of situation. Jo Reed: Let me ask you. You say that the book is your personal bible. Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah. It is. I think the way a lot of people look to the Bible as a source of spiritual inspiration, of solace when things are bad, that has great stories in it. That for me is what “Moby Dick” is about. I keep a copy on my desk at home and it seems like a fairly regular basis that I will open it up and sort of see where the pages open and find a paragraph and just read that paragraph. And it’s interesting, sometimes I will be sort of trying to figure out how he does it in terms of as a writer. Other times it’s more of the philosophical aspects, what Ishmael is talking about. Sometimes it’s a character because there are all sorts of little characters that are scattered throughout there that you can easily forget because there are so many of them in the book, but so for me it’s a repository rather than a plot thrill ride and, you know, I think in this day and age where I don’t know about you, but in the last ten years I feel like my attention span has just been frittered away by whether it’s the digital stuff, whether it’s the screens everywhere, whether it’s emails constantly coming at us and texting and all this stuff. I just feel like my mind has battery acid leaking through it. “Moby Dick” has become for me and its interesting- relatively recently- it’s become a way to just sort of put out the madness. For me this book can provide that kind of oasis. It takes you from your own time into another time, but inevitably you come back. And, you know, that I think is really a great spiritual exercise. It’s not like you’re living in a fantasy world that you have escaped and you’re trying to run away from things. I think it provides a very interesting kind of perspective on life that you might lose otherwise. Jo Reed: You mentioned you’ve reread "Moby-Dick" many times. Why do you reread books? Nathaniel Philbrick: This was I think it could be close to my 12th time reading it and I think as I mentioned earlier, every time I come to the book it just feels like a different book. and this time reading it, there is the character of Fedallah who is kind of the evil sort of sorcerer who is Ahab’s confidante and sort of like the weird sisters of “Macbeth” has the prophesy of what is going to happen and he’s a very mysterious character that is not onstage a lot and one that’s kind of hard to get any sense of and that’s part of Melville’s point and he hadn’t really made an impression on me up until this time, but reading this and I don’t know if it was given all the dictators we are seeing going down in the Middle East or what it is. This time Fedallah, the one who is always whispering in the dictator of the Pequod’s ear, made a big impression and was someone that I began to realize yeah, he’s not just window dressing. There’s something deep here and I think every time you come back to this book you’ll find that. Jo Reed: Why do you reread? Nathaniel Philbrick: I reread. One of the problems I have is I write nonfiction about history and the problems I have is that 75 percent of my time is in the archives researching, often reading records and newspapers and things like that and then the big challenge is delivering this in a digested form with your own voice and after three years of doing this, I often find myself feeling depleted when it comes to sort of the literary mojo. And I use this book to dip into, to sort of get that mojo going in terms of the wonderful prose, the level of the prose which is really poetry in “Moby Dick” for me is truly transporting and that’s a trite phrase, but it really does and I just try to sort of bask in that reflected glow and for me it just is just a source of not only literary, but real spiritual replenishment. And you find new things, but as a writer I’m always sort of trying to pull up the hood and look at how a writer does it and with Melville, that’s an endless occupation because each chapter is almost a different kind of writing. He’s got parody writing. He’s got almost a natural history writing. He’s got action writing in the final chapter. It’s all there and it’s a wonderful kind of clinic for when it comes to the craft of writing. Jo Reed: What do you think makes some books endure? Nathaniel Philbrick: What I think it is and you really aren’t sure if a book has accomplished it until you’ve moved on to the next generation, but I think it’s the ability to make you feel what it is like to be alive at any time, in a past time, and so many popular books don’t accomplish that. We connect with them because we share the circumstances of those books and see something that appeals to us, but then you move to the next generation and there really isn’t enough information of that deep what it is like to be alive at that moment to transmit into the future. And “Moby Dick” is one of those books that contains so many of the essential details of what it was like to be alive in the 19th century that coming from more than 150 years later, we can get into that world and even recognize portions of our own world in that past time. That is a very hard trick. Jo Reed: You say to write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. That I found very intriguing. Say more. Nathaniel Philbrick: Yeah. Well, and that is really I think kind of the alchemy that was going on during the creation of “Moby Dick.” Here he is. He’s writing a story that on its surface is about a whaling voyage. Clearly a deranged captain out to get the white whale that bit off his leg, but he’s experiencing all of the situation that we’ve just been talking about and so that he is approaching it in the ultimately indirect way and this is a lot the way Shakespeare’s plays are supposedly about let’s say a king of England, but what they’re really about is what’s going on in Elizabethan England as Shakespeare is working on this play and I think it’s this active indirection that kind of contains that sense of what it is to be alive at that time and creates a kind of time machine out of the work of art that makes it accessible to future generations. Jo Reed: As you say, it’s a novel that many people know of and far fewer people have actually tackled. What would your advice be for approaching “Moby Dick”? Nathaniel Philbrick: My advice would be don’t rush into it. If you have reluctance, that’s okay. That’s okay, but my approach is it is a big book, but it is also broken up into a lot of surprisingly brief chapters and to begin slowly with it. The plot is not going to be something that you’re going to hitch on and follow to the end and in fact I think many of us who have been kicked around by life, who sort of have been around the block, begin to see in “Moby Dick” a lot of the kinds of observations that resonate with us and the chapters that are off point in a way when it comes to the plot are often the ones that I find are the most useful and helpful and enlightening and for example, when I was writing this book, I was reading “Moby Dick” and taking notes during a book tour. So I was in the airport all the time and it was amazing to me how conducive reading “Moby Dick” was to the hectic pace of those of us who are trying to get to places or trying to fit something in between, whether it’s work or children or all that kind of thing, and I think this book, if you can just feel free to dip into it for even a paragraph, put it aside and then come back to it, it really will reward that process. Jo Reed: I was speaking with Nathaniel Philbrick about his book Why Read Moby-Dick. William Hootkins read excerpts from Moby-Dick which was produced by Naxos. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. #### End of Nate_Philbrick.mp3 #### Transcript will be available shortly.