I am currently about a third of the way into Eric Jay Dolin’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (2007), and it has quite naturally gotten me reflecting upon a reference source that has already been cited throughout its pages on a number of occasions: Herman Melville’s 1851 novel of cetology and madness, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Those of my readers who know me personally have likely heard me cite Melville’s tome as my all-time favorite book. Most of you, regardless of closeness to me, probably don’t know why I hold it in such elevated esteem.
It certainly isn’t because Moby-Dick makes for especially fleet-footed reading. It is a novel that wears its length heavily; though it’s not insanely overextended by some measures (the copy I most recently owned, an unabridged hardcover, ran 479 pages), it feels a good deal longer, thanks largely to Melville’s penchant for ornate language and extended passages detailing the history, biology, and mythology of the near-impossible sea beasts his characters pursue and slaughter. For many, this sprawling atmosphere, combined with the book’s forbidding, polysyllabic prose, gives them pause. Indeed, I can think of few other great books that so many of my friends have begun reading...and never finished.
Perhaps it’s an act of deliberate contrarianism or perversity on my part, but one of the reasons I love Moby-Dick is because of this obscurantist language and tone. This is not a work with the plush, enveloping warmth of Jane Austen, or the ebullient, warts-and-all humanity of Dickens. It is a dense, monolithic, almost punishing piece of writing, and this style is utterly suited to the narrative Melville has seized upon as his own. A play that takes as its stage the vast expanses of the earth’s oceans should not feel too sprightly or light on its heels. This is a book about the cold, unfeeling certainty of the watery depths, a tale of blood and saltwater, pain and filthy lucre, and its shrouded, near-humorless tone is perfectly wedded to its task.
Captain Ahab, the dismasted, madness-maddened sea warrior at the heart of Melville’s story, is arguably the least approachable of the great figures of American literature. He is not an enterprising scamp like Huckleberry Finn, a red-blooded battler like Natty Bumppo, or a spoiled, selfish, but lovable steel-spined Southern belle like Scarlett O’Hara. He is a man who the ill hand of fate, or the corrective cudgel of an overweening god, has maimed, sullied, and whittled down into a frigid, compact core that feeds only on vengeance. This vengeance has made him a thing of legend, whispered about in dark whaleman’s taverns, a cautionary figure brandished by mad dockside prophets. So great is his myth, so much does it overhang the narrative, that Melville doesn’t even need to bring him onstage for over a hundred pages. Present or not, Ahab is clearly the compass guiding this tale to the most untrue north imaginable.
Melville permits him just enough flickers of bare humanity to engage one’s interest, if not sympathy; a late-in-the-book recollection of a seldom-seen family reminds us that Ahab’s madness stems from the loss of more than just a leg. It’s also because of the settled, stable life that the seaman’s lot has cruelly wrested from him. That, to me, is what Moby-Dick, above all, represents. The freedom to rove and roll and ramble, much like the ocean does over all the earth, that Ahab forsook forever when he lashed himself to the rigging of the life he chose. It’s a crucial moment of vulnerable pain from the main character in a book with little in the way of conventional heroics.
Ahab is also a relatable figure to me, in that I too have spent much of my life in sometimes bloody-minded pursuit of particular dreams and ambitions, some of which seemed at times perhaps like the white whale himself...unassailable, unapproachable talismans that existed only to torment and brutalize me. I have ultimately stood up better under the tempest-tossing roilings than Ahab has...but perhaps that’s only because, unlike him, I can still stand without the aid of a carved bone leg. But Moby-Dick is pitiless in its depiction of a particular strain of single-minded American obsession, born perhaps of that cherished and cursed fairy tale that anyone can be anything if they only set their mind to it. All Ahab has to do is will it, and he can destroy the greatest fiend to haunt the earth’s oceans. And he believes it to his dying breath, even though he stumps his way about the Pequod’s foredeck borne up by vivid proof of the lie of that sentiment.
That’s not the only American dream Melville is torpedoing here. For while Ahab is a sea-borne prisoner, he is one with the luxury of lording it over his fellow inmates. A whaleship captain in the 1820s, when the book takes place, was the nearest thing to an autonomous god on earth, and Moby-Dick is, along with all the other riches it contains, a eulogy of sorts for the soul of the American working class, the countless men and women and muscles and gallons of sweat that have greased, and been broken upon, the ever-grinding wheel of Capital. Moby-Dick isn’t often recognized for this aspect of its dramaturgy, but I find that in its unsparing depictions of the brutal, sorry wages of life as a whaler, it is as potent a piece of pro-labor fiction, in its way, as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and with a far surer dramatical hand than Sinclair’s at the tiller.
Many would disagree, however, citing the chapters that do nothing but teach us the anatomy of a right whale, or the proper ways to interpret the wind, or what each and every piece of equipment in a whaling vessel is, and just what it does. Most find these passages superfluous, and I have more than one friend who confessed to skipping them entirely. But I find the very presence of this material to be one of the novel’s great glories, for they show us the folly of man’s attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible. Many of us feel our lives are futile unless we can truly break down and articulate the workings of those things that give us meaning...whether it’s an ideal we strive for, or a nightmare from which we flee. By digging as deeply as the book does into the engine of the cetacean, it is as if Ishmael (our narrator), Ahab, perhaps even Melville himself, are grasping at the proof of their mastery over the ineffable creature that guides all their attentions. For some of us, it’s something we’ve chosen to call God. For others, it’s artistic greatness, or athletic prowess, or the blissful nirvana we seek through drugs or sex. But the ultimate failure of the book’s attempts to define and confine the nature of the whale reminds us that if we ever do indeed succeed in attaining this life’s purpose...said life will cease to hold any value. The journey is the destination, indeed.
Frankly, I love Moby-Dick for its portentousness, its grandiose pronouncements, its never-defined and all-pervasive symbolic devices, its mood of stark, snowy gloom. (I think my early encounter with this book is one of the reasons for my affection for both wintry weather and water. Many of my favorite paintings are seascapes; my favorite piece of classical music, Debussy’s La Mer.) And as someone who spent much of his life attempting to hack out an artistic identity in an “industry” that often finds that very concept abhorrent, there is something I admire greatly about Melville’s overwhelming refusal to pander, to spoon-feed his readers, to make anything easy. You have to earn the wonders of Moby-Dick, and some people simply aren’t willing to put in the work. But you could say the same thing about professional fulfillment of any kind. Or about spiritual enlightenment, or about love. Moby-Dick, in its often operatic but never melodramatic way (melodrama frequently doesn’t earn its impact honestly), is about all of these things and more. It may be one of the artworks that, like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life or Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, is at the end of the day, about nothing less than everything. That’s why virtually every cinematic adaptation of the book has ultimately failed. They transform Melville’s epic of human striving, sin, and failure into a seafaring boys’ adventure tale. It would be like saying the Bible is a story about a carpenter and his trip to Jerusalem.
One thing I have noticed, though, about my now-decades-long relationship with the greatest book ever written. Though I love it, and feel it has taught me much and has much to teach others, I don’t recommend it to many people. Because, like many of the finest works of art, I understand that it’s not for everyone. Many people read to escape...not to be trapped on a cramped old whaling scow with no way out except death. Of all of the great works of literature, it does not rank high on the list of “Most Fun to Read.” Melville was not even successful in his own time, when books of this style and tone were more common; he is another of a great string of creative giants, like Van Gogh and Mahler, whose audience didn’t truly find him until after his death.
And find Melville you must. Because for whatever reason, since it was published in 1851, Moby-Dick has waited for us, low in the waves just offshore. Its bulk and heft bespeak truths about desire, capitalism, brotherly love, madness, nature, time, death, America. It waits, patiently, coldly. Looming.
And then we notice its waiting...
FACTORY ROLL CALL
JED JOHNSON (1948-1996)
Jed Johnson (and his twin brother Jay) were born in Alexandria, Minnesota, into a family that would ultimately include six children. The Johnson twins moved to New York City in 1967, where they were forced to scramble for work after a mugging cost them their last $200. Picking up a job as a telegram delivery boy, Johnson brought a message to 33 Union Square West, which was then being renovated, under the supervision of director Paul Morrissey, to serve as the new headquarters of Andy Warhol’s art and filmmaking enterprises. Like many a Warhol superstar of the past, Johnson was originally hired to sweep up around the office. But he soon showed an aptitude for editing, and assisted Morrissey in the cutting of several of the films he directed under Warhol’s imprimatur, including 1973’s L’Amour and the following year’s Blood for Dracula.
Johnson also made a major impression upon Warhol himself, and would soon become the longest known romantic connection of Warhol’s life. He would be instrumental in helping Warhol select the Upper East Side townhouse on 66th Street that would be the artist’s home for the final 13 years of his life. Johnson would move in with Warhol (his bedroom was on the third floor), and was put in charge of decorating the new home, commencing what would be his life’s true calling as an interior designer. Johnson also decorated and supervised the design of the offices of Warhol’s Interview Magazine, where he was thought of quite warmly by the staff. Among his other contributions to Warhol’s work, Johnson is among those who have been postulated (along with Jay Johnson and Morrissey’s muse, physique icon Joe Dallesandro) as the possible subject of Warhol’s legendary groin-focused cover for the Rolling Stones’ 1971 album Sticky Fingers.
As the ‘70s wore on, Johnson and Warhol’s relationship began to become strained. In a perhaps misguided effort to keep him engaged and meaningfully occupied, Warhol let Johnson take the director’s chair for 1977’s Bad, the last film Warhol would produce during his lifetime. Johnson’s insecurity and inexperience behind the camera made for a tremendously difficult shoot, and the tensions between the two were exacerbated by Warhol’s increasingly alcohol-and-drug-inflected nightlife, not to mention his porn-adjacent photo shoots with Halston paramour / aspiring artist Victor Hugo.
Johnson and Warhol formally ended things just before Christmas in 1980, but by that time, the artist had already begun a tentative courtship of then West Coast-based Paramount executive Jon Gould (who, in a strange coincidence, also had a twin brother named Jay). Johnson’s reputation as an interior designer had grown considerably by this time, and in 1982, he opened his own office in collaboration with architect Alan Wanzenberg, who would also become his romantic partner. Johnson would supervise designs and interiors for a number of high-profile clients, including Richard Gere and Mick Jagger. He and Warhol would remain in guarded but cordial contact throughout the rest of Warhol’s life.
In 1996, the same year Interior Design Magazine named him to its Hall of Fame, Jed Johnson was one of the passengers on TWA Flight 800, which, on July 17, exploded 12 minutes after taking off from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. All 230 people aboard the aircraft were killed, including Johnson. To this day, it is the third deadliest accident in U.S. aviation history.
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