Imagining Ahab Imagining Ahab Relatives of Frank William "Billy" ...

Relatives of Frank William "Billy" Tyne, who captained the ill-fated Andrea Gail and went down with six of his crew during the brutal 1991 storm off New England, are thundering mad at George Clooney's portrayal of their kin.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fla., against Warner Bros., Tyne's family claims that the movie "falsely depicted" Tyne as "emotionally aloof, reckless, excessively risk-taking, self-absorbed, emasculated, despondent, obsessed and maniacal."

?New York Post, 8/29/00

Next Tuesday, as part of the weekly movie series at Symphony Space, John Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick will be shown in a double bill with The Searchers. The date is Nov. 21, and I keep wondering whether Isaiah Sheffer knew when he made up the program that he was scheduling Moby Dick for the 180th anniversary of the incident that probably inspired it, give or take a few hours: the sinking of a Nantucket whaler by an enraged sperm whale in the South Pacific. The name of the ship was the Essex, and she went down Nov. 20, 1820.

The Essex disaster is the subject of Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which is up for a National Book Award in the category of nonfiction this week. I gather that Philbrick's competition is the great literary critic Jacques Barzun. All the same, it will be a shame in a way if In the Heart of the Sea doesn't win. Not only is it completely riveting and a thumping good read?more so even than your average first-rate humdinger of a sea-disaster story?it's also quite a piece of literary criticism in its own right. In Philbrick's book, everything one has never really understood about Moby Dick?what Ahab was on about, all that stuff about good and evil, paganism and Calvinism, the whole theological element, the incessant jokes about cannibalism, even the footnotes and digressions?is made intelligible through being put in the context of the culture and history of the Nantucket whaling industry.

Most reviews focused on two particular aspects of the story, the sensational and the literary, playing up the first and oversimplifying the second. The crew of the Essex, adrift for three months with food and water enough for only half that time, had to resort to cannibalism, finally, eating the bodies of their dead shipmates, and at one point even sacrificing one of their number, drawing lots to determine who the victim and who his executioner would be. It's a heartbreaking story, but less haunting, in a way, than what Philbrick's book reveals about why the story itself so resonated with people at the time, Melville among them. Reviewers mostly followed the publicity material that accompanied the book in describing the Essex incident as the inspiration for Moby Dick's ending. In fact, Philbrick suggests (if he doesn't come right out and say so) that the Essex story must have been a thematic starting point for the whole novel.

More astounding even than the means by which the men of the Essex sought to survive was the unprecedented phenomenon of a whale attacking a ship, virtually unprovoked. Such a thing had never happened before. Even when whales fought back, moreover, they did so in a time-honored fashion, with their jaws and tail. This whale had rammed the ship with its head?twice?and between times gnashed its teeth "as if distracted with rage and fury," the first mate, Owen Chase, wrote in his account of the ordeal. Chase thought the whale's behavior a result of cool reasoning, that it had attacked the ship in the manner "calculated to do us the most injury," knowing that the combined speeds of two objects would be greatest and therefore most destructive in a head-on collision.

The image of the whale as a thinking, sentient being is, of course, the cornerstone of Moby Dick. It's what lies behind Ahab's impulse toward "vengeance," a thing so obvious it need only be referred to indirectly. ("To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous," says Starbuck, to which Ahab replies, "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.") Ahab regards Moby Dick much as the crew of the Essex seem to have viewed the whale that attacked them, like a human; and one of the fascinating questions that Philbrick raises (if only by implication) is from where so weirdly modern a notion could possibly have come. The Nantucketers who had harvested whales for generations, he points out, saw that vocation as part of the Divine Plan. But to ascribe anger or rage to an object of aggression is to come perilously close to admitting a sense of guilt with regard to it. You cannot, after all, ascribe anger to a being?legitimate or not?unless you also grant it a point of view.

I am on something of a Melville kick just now. It started back in summer when I went to see The Perfect Storm. That put me in a really foul mood and I had to rent the John Huston version of Moby Dick as an antidote. Not that I held any brief for Sebastian Junger's book?I hadn't read it. There are just certain tropes and themes I expect to be moved by (and when I'm not I know I am in the presence of fools): scenes of someone pulling away from land while someone else is left on shore; a chorus of voices singing "For Those in Peril on the Sea"; shots of a wall of names; glimpses of Leonard Craske's famous 1925 bronze commemorating the fisherman of Gloucester?you know the statue, you've seen it 100 times (it figures prominently in Victor Fleming's 1937 movie version of Captains Courageous): a doughty mariner in oilskins and sou'wester piloting his ship, peering out into sea, braced against his wind, a fragment of the 107th Psalm on the pedestal: "They that go down to the sea in ships..."

The Perfect Storm had all of those things, but it was a movie imbued by a sort of Wreck-of-the-Hesperus mentality?the kind of thinking according to which, say, if the young lady found lashed to the mast in the Longfellow poem had not been possessed of a "bosom white as the hawthorne buds that ope in the month of May," the whole thing would have been less interesting or important. This was a movie that thought that in order for us to take an interest in the Gloucester men lost at sea in a 1991 hurricane they had to be played by movie stars like George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Worse, it assumed that in order for their story to be poignant or tragic certain things would have to be established: that this one had a girlfriend and a mother who were going to miss him, that that one had a little boy who would be sad without his daddy, that a third, who never seemed to have much luck with women, had (irony of ironies) just met one with whom things might have worked out.

I couldn't understand. How could you make a sea-disaster story?any sea-disaster story, but particularly one based on a real-life incident?so unutterably boring? "The truth is boring," said a friend, and I had no answer. It was only later that I realized what I ought to have said: "No, the truth is never boring; you're thinking of reality."

The Perfect Storm got me started on Melville, but there were other things. Elizabeth Hardwick's Melville entry in the Penguin Lives series came out, I read the Philbrick book (actually, I read it a couple of times), and a friend whose eyesight is going announced that listening to Moby Dick on a recording is the only way to properly experience it. (She's right, and not just because of the quality of the prose. There's something about the physics and time and sound and memory and imagination and the fact that because things take longer to hear than to read they make more of an impression on you.)

Also, there was Rinde Eckert's intriguing music-theater piece And God Created Great Whales, which swung through New York a couple of times. It concerned a brilliant (but maimed and narcissistic) piano tuner trying to write an opera based on Moby Dick, and was astonishing for the way it heaped ridicule on such a foolish idea and at the same time succeeded in translating into a piece of musical theater the intellectual impulse that Moby Dick is about.

It offered the same juxtaposition of human aspiration with human frailty. Eckert's piano tuner (he sang the role himself) had immortal longings, but he also had a degenerative disease that entailed progressive memory loss. Consequently, he couldn't remember from one moment to the next what he was writing or had written or had been planning to write. He had a great tendency to go off the deep end, so to speak, careening off into some never-never land of passionate philosophical musing or theoretical arcana. Fortunately, he had a muse, half imagined, half remembered?a retired diva he'd once known, who had loved him or whom he had loved?and she usually managed to put him back on track. The whole thing was cyclical?nonlinear, anyway?going back and forth between tape recorded messages the piano tuner had left for himself (reminders about what he was trying to do, instructions on how to deal with his disability) and scenes from the opera that he had actually written.

Part satire, part serious meditation on creation and creative failure, And God Created Great Whales was about a man who threatened his own muse, and whether that was an act of heroism or folly. He was literally ruining Moby Dick in trying to adapt it?not because he didn't understand the novel, but because of the nature of art. Watching Eckert go back and forth between imagining Ahab and impersonating him, we gradually came to understand the tragedy in the composer's predicament: that his nagging fear that what makes something operatic is what makes it trite is true.

This is actually the point that Melville makes time and time again in the digressive sections of the novel (and what comes across when you listen to a recording). The definitions and catalogs and histories and phylogenies that have led students and critics of Melville to wonder if he was quite in his right mind are ultimately all about the impossibility of telling the story, painting an accurate picture of the truth.

There's an extraordinary illustration in Philbrick's book: an 18th-century map of the Island of Nantucket that, Philbrick points out, against all accuracy makes the harbor into the shape of a whale. (Actually, there are two whales in the picture: the island itself forms another.) It's an index of how far Nantucketers allowed the specter of the whale to obsess them?to the point where they recast their own world in its image. They also imitated it themselves, unconsciously. One of Philbrick's most telling insights concerns how the society that whaling created?with its cycles and matriarchal structure and long, long stretches of male absenteeism?perfectly mirrored the natural movements of whales themselves.

Is Moby Dick Ahab's muse or his nemesis? Does the blasphemy consist of making the whale human, or is it the other way around? And God Created Great Whales poked fun at the creative impulse; at the same time, it had a sort of sympathy for its protagonist. It was as though Eckert were saying, "Yeah, wanting to turn Moby Dick into an opera is dumb, maybe. But it's better than not having the urge to turn Moby Dick into an opera." It results in some embarrassingly foolish moments. It also produces moments of great beauty?that may or may not have anything to do with the original.

I've always had a soft spot for John Huston's version of Moby Dick, not least of all because I'm sheepishly aware that most of my favorite bits have precious little to do with Melville. The prophecy ("...At sea one day you'll smell land where there be no land..."), the wonderful exchange between Ahab and the Captain, who begs him to suspend the hunt for Moby Dick to search for his lost son ("God help you, Captain Gardiner!" "God Forgive you, Captain Ahab!"), the scene in which Queequeg comes out of his trance to save Ishmael's life: none of that stuff is in the book. I don't care. I love it.

What I love best, though, is something that is in the book, only in a different form, and that was so totally missing from that silly George Clooney movie that I can't blame the family of the dead lost skipper for taking umbrage and wanting to sue the makers. I think it's understandable. If you read their complaint, you can see that they have a point.

They're saying that the movie turned Billy Tyne into Ahab, only without giving us any sense of the forces driving him on. If you want that, you have to see Huston's movie. It's on the blank, ageless faces of the women who stand on the dock as the Pequod pulls away, and on the face of the ship's carpenter in the scene where, before remembering himself, he briefly turns a rollicking sea-chantey into a mournful, contemplative air: a sense of tragic inevitability.