And so we continue our Writers Recommend - a newish series where we ask writers to, well, you know.. recommend things. Like the books that they've enjoyed. To you. Because who doesn't like being recommended new and interesting books, right?! Think of it as a PSA. Only it's more like an LSA -Literary Service Announcement.
Robert Kloss Recommends Moby-Dick
I will never forget the first and the second times I read Moby-Dick. The first reading came in the
spring of 2003, the first season after I finished college and a few months
before I entered graduate school, that period in my life where I dangled
between worlds and histories— I was then working as a “dietary aide” at a
retirement home, washing dishes, serving food, stocking shelves, etc., and waiting
for the end of the summer when I would be married and on my way to Boston from
Wisconsin, the only state I had ever known.
I was startled by Moby-Dick
the way many new readers are startled. Melville’s book is unlike any other novel
of “classic” literature; in fact, I would argue Moby-Dick is unlike any other novel, save maybe the assembled works
of Melville. No other book combines such modernity and formal strangeness and exuberance
of language with a story and characters and philosophical seriousness so
ancient. I read it in a state of youthful ecstasy. And then the novel concluded
and the fever subsided and I moved to other books and authors, since a writer’s
earlier twenties are the best time to be a writer because you are old enough to
have some sense of what you are interested in, but every style, every voice,
every form and trick and technique is still more or less virgin, unexplored.
(I should mention that in the years to follow whenever the
topic came up I babbled enthusiastically about Moby-Dick, and I often pulled my copy from the shelf and read and
reread the opening pages in a breathless exultant state. And whenever we
crossed paths with Melville’s ghost on trips throughout Massachusetts, I was
lost again in the old awe. I gave copies away as gifts; I thought restlessly about
the ocean; we went on a whale watch. Moby-Dick
was always there, even when it was not.)
I next read Moby-Dick
two years after I finished my MFA program. Here I found, again, all the
greatness of my earlier reading, but a greatness enlarged and illuminated by my
maturity and experience. And I began to understand that Moby-Dick is both a very modern book, because Melville perceived
truths well beyond those of his time, and an ancient book, far older than its
publication date. Melville was of his time and also beyond it and before it. His
slightly older contemporary, Hawthorne, influenced him, yes, and Hawthorne’s stories
helped free Melville from the constraints of experience and fact and allowed
him to enter the realm of imagination. But Melville was insatiable in his
ambition and curiosity, and he took into himself many of the greatest (and
strangest) writers of literary history: Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne,
Rabelais, Byron, Milton, Coleridge, and, most famously, Shakespeare and the
King James Bible. Melville always was a writer outside of his time, and this
was one of his many strengths.
I’ve since read Moby-Dick
another six times. I read it every year, along with Melville’s final novel, The Confidence-Man (if Moby-Dick is my
favorite novel then The Confidence-Man
is my 1B), and Billy Budd. I’ve read
every book he published, whether story collection, novel, or poems, at least
once and often at least twice. I’ve read the books he took as influences, and
many such as the King James Bible and the works of Browne and Rabelais and
Byron and Burton have become admired favorites. Melville as a source and
inspiration is inexhaustible.
I wanted here to explain, as best I could, what Melville
means to me. To say Moby-Dick is my
favorite novel or Melville is my favorite writer simply does not measure to the
truth. Melville’s fame during his lifetime was brief. The period of his
obscurity and shame was far longer, and after he died a note was found pasted
to his desk that read, “Stay
true to the dreams of thy youth.” In the years after my MFA experience
concluded, at a time when much of my ambition and joy and enthusiasm for
writing had gone dormant, when I read books without interest, when I wrote, but
no longer enjoyed writing for the act of writing was cluttered by insecurities
and dread, boredom and self-loathing, then Melville’s example—his rise to
greatness and his life long pursuit of greatness, even after publishers and the
public refused him—as much as his literature, gave me strength and inspiration
and, to some measure, hope for my own literary fate. I couldn’t begin to
conclude where I would be without his example.
Robert Kloss is the author of the novels The Alligators of Abraham and The Revelator. He lives in Colorado.
and Melville loved 'Two Years Before the Mast'....
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