Table of Contents
; or, a look back at a year of Melville investigations
Hello and happy holidays to all my readers! I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this newsletter in January, or whether anyone would be interested in going down these bizarre rabbit holes with me. Turns out there are a few more Melville weirdos than I thought! Now with a few dozen posts under my belt, there’s about 150 of you subscribed and another 100-200 of you following these investigations some other way.
The most surprising moment of the year came at the end of October when Substack included my post about Starbucks Korea handing out books on Moby-Dick in their Substack Reads “Weekender” newsletter in October, with more than 1,200 of their readers popping over to check out the post.
So, for all of you who joined the party later on in the year, here’s a Table of Contents for everything I published this year in case there’s anything you missed!
To the surprise of many first-time readers, Moby-Dick doesn’t begin with “Call me Ishmael” but rather with a vignette about a “pale usher” who offers us a quote from Richard Hackluyt, an author and translator from the late 16th century. The mysterious quote seems to thrust us into an argument in media res about the spelling of the word “whale” and the significance of its silent H. In my inaugural post, I look into where the quote actually comes from and what it meant in context, tracing it back through four languages and trying to figure out what Melville meant to suggest by opening his magnum opus with these words.
Starbucks Coffee is undoubtedly the most ubiquitous reference to Moby-Dick on the planet, with more than 35,000 stores in 80 countries. The company has never been shy about copping to its name’s literary origins, but there was something fishy about the story it’s about why the three founders chose to honor the Pequod’s first mate. Their explanations not only changed over time but contradicted one another, and in dozens of interviews going back to the early 1970s the founders never had anything to say about their interest in the book.
With a little digging, I discovered that the story as told in the corporate history was as phony as Ahab’s ivory leg and that a fourth man, a friend and colleague of the founders, was actually responsible for the naming. He was also willing to hop on the phone with me and spill the beans about how his obsession with Moby-Dick while getting a master’s degree in American Literature inadvertently contributed to the success of one of the world’s most valuable companies.
In a follow-up post, I explored a few odds and ends from my research into Starbucks, including the origin of the name Starbuck; a short history on the Starbuck family of Nantucket; and the 19th-century writer William Starbuck Mayo who, in 1849, was threatening to steal Melville’s spotlight with his exotic travelogue novel Kaloolah. I (recklessly) speculate that Melville may have chosen the name Starbuck for his timid, cowardly first mate with just a hint of pettiness.
Regular viewers of Jeopardy! know that questions related to Melville and/or Moby-Dick are a common occurrence, but I was curious to step back and see how these topics have been treated over the years. Thanks to the committed work of j-archive.com, which has catalogued virtually every question ever asked on the show since the start of the Alex Trebek era in 1984, I was able to collect every one of these questions to find trends in the data. In all, I found roughly 450 clues which — to my surprise — went far beyond the most obvious, lowest-common-denominator keywords traced virtually the entirety of Moby-Dick, Melville’s biography, and many other books and stories to boot.
Then, in a follow-up post, I poked around the data to find a few more items of interest, such as the show’s hardest Melville clues (in my opinion) and some facts that the writers got wrong.
As far as the 1950s, Melville scholars have puzzled over a notable oversight in Moby-Dick’s endless detail: which leg was Ahab missing? Ishmael never says specifically, nor gives any straightforward hints that would settle the matter (though several have tried). As a first step toward solving this mystery, I pulled together 100 images of Ahab from book illustrations, film and TV, comic books, theater, cartoons, and other art to see if there was any artistic consensus. It was interesting to see the development of the character’s depiction over the course of a century, if not particularly enlightening on the ‘truth.’
In pursuit of a genuine answer, in Part 2 I looked at previous rationales offered by Melville scholars as well as where they come up short. Then, by using clues dropped all over the book, I put together what I think is the strongest argument yet for Ahab missing one leg over another.
Finally, I wrap up in Part 3 with some loose ends from my investigation, including the ‘second life’ of Ahab’s leg, if you will, as a kind of semiotic model posited by Umberto Eco; some interesting quirks found in non-English versions of Moby-Dick where the translators took it upon themselves to name Ahab’s missing leg as his left or right; and whether we can use statistics about the correlation between hand- and foot-dominance to shed any light on the matter.
You can’t swing a dead porpoise in the land of Melville without running into someone quoting him as saying that Mt. Greylock, the mountain which commanded the view from the room where he wrote Moby-Dick, reminded him of "a sperm whale rising in the distance." It’s been published in books, in journal articles, in newspapers, and even spread by well-meaning docents giving tours of that very room, but never with any hint of where the quote comes from. In this post, I look at everything Melville ever said about Greylock and if there’s any truth to the claim.
The original editions of Moby-Dick, published in London in October 1851 and in New York a month later in November, famously contained some significant differences. Most notably, Ishmael’s explanation in the epilogue of how he survived the wreck had mysteriously vanished. But at the other end of the book, I noticed that Melville’s London publisher had inserted a quote from Paradise Lost on each of the title pages of the three volumes. As I learned, its erasure absence from the later American edition actually provides a key piece of evidence in reconstructing the book’s often-puzzling publishing timeline.
When Ishmael arrives in New Bedford, he finds the The Spouter-Inn and deems it just shabby enough for a few days while he waits for the schooner to Nantucket. “Here,” he says, “was the very spot for cheap lodgings and the best of pea coffee.” Several annotated versions of the book explain that pea coffee was actually made from chickpeas. As I went looking for a recipe to try it out for myself, I discovered that a) Melville was a bit of a coffee freak; and b) there’s good reason to believe that the drink was actually made from the humble green pea.
In Chapter 41: Moby Dick, Ishmael describes Ahab’s psychological torment after losing his leg, describing his outward to state to the “spiked Hotel de Cluny” but with his “larger, darker, deeper part” hidden in “those vast Roman halls of Thermes.” Melville visited these real places, part of the same archaeological complex in Paris dedicated to the city’s early history. In this post, I explore the origins of the ancient thermal baths, the adjacent residence for medieval abbots, and what Melville would have seen when he toured the complex which had recently been repurposed as a museum.
I close by looking at several interpretations of the “Hotel de Cluny” passage, including one argues that Melville’s use of the complex as a psychological metaphor anticipates Sigmund Freud’s own use of Rome's '“highly stratified architectural topography” to illustrate his theory of the mind.
As another exercise in mythbusting, I look at a claim heard ‘round the internet that Moby-Dick is so excruciatingly long because Melville was “paid by the word” and thus padding his pockets. While there’s no question that this idea is false as regards Moby-Dick, is there any truth to the idea? And if so, does it even imply what these rumor-mongers think it does?
Tucked away in the cryptic letters sent by the late 1960s serial murderer known as the “Zodiac Killer,” there are several references made to the ironic and often punny counter-culture buttons which were then all the rage. In fact, the Zodiac Killer was obsessed with having a button made in his honor. One of the buttons he references in his letters was one reading “Melville Eats Blubber” (which he rewrote as “Melvin Eats Blubber”). In this post, I take a look at where these buttons came from, what they meant, and the “Melvin” in the killer’s crosshairs, as well as the question of whether Melville really did eat blubber.
When the Pequod departs Nantucket on a cold December day, the crew hoist the anchor to a sea shanty which, as Ishmael recalls, contained “some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley.” Some sources suggest that the song was likely one called “Haul Away Joe,” but after digging into the evidence and history of these songs, I conclude that another shanty with a similar paean to these Booble Alley girls was actually more likely.
In a second post, I explore the very real “Booble Alley” in mid-19th century Liverpool, part of a ‘red light district’ which Melville saw when he worked aboard the merchant ship St. Lawrence. After taking time to try to locate the actual alley itself, I write about how the squalor and destitution of the area disillusioned the young Melville, who had hoped to recreate the experience of his father’s travel in Liverpool.
Did you know that Beavis and Butthead were fans of Melville? Uh-huhuhuhuhuh. Yup, when they weren’t heckling music videos or setting things on fire, they were — canonically — reading Moby-Dick, as was their classmate Daria Morgendorffer. Moreover, all three of the characters were created by Mike Judge, who also wrote and directed the highly Bartleby-esque movie Office Space. I ask what this all means on behalf of losers in the Judge universe and everywhere.
While reading the Melville-focused meta-fiction Dayswork: A Novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, I came across a line which stated that they could find no image of the bread box in which Melville’s wife had placed his unfinished manuscript for “Billy Budd” after his death. I go straight to the source to correct this oversight so that all can appreciate the most significant tin box in literary history.
In 2012, Google honored Moby-Dick with a “Google Doodle” on their homepage. After puzzling over why they chose that particular year to do so, I look into what else might have been happening in the Melville world at this time to make the 161st anniversary so relevant — including a shout-out from very notable fan of the book who happened to be president at the time.
All around the world you’ll find restaurants, bars, fast food chains, and coffee shops, of course, named after Moby-Dick. I wanted to figure out which was the very first establishment to honor the book, discovering the often strange histories of these places through the decades. To my surprise, I found that the very first spot had a special connection not just to the book but to the “Melville revival” which would influence all the others to come.
In a follow-up post, I go even further in my quest to find the very first thing named after Moby-Dick (beyond bars and restaurants), finding along the way Moby Dick rockets, book stores, whales, and parade floats, eventually going all the way back to the 1850s.
What do Moby-Dick and French existentialist philosophy have to do with one another? A whole lot, apparently! Happening upon an essay which Albert Camus wrote in honor of Melville, I was struck by how deeply he was influenced by Melville's “genius,” elevating him among the ranks of Shakespeare, Hugo, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud. And while he openly modeled his novel The Pest on Moby-Dick, I investigate whether Camus also might have had Ishmael in mind when he wrote his philosophical treatise The Myth of Sisyphus. The idea had previously been discounted by biographers based largely on publication dates of French translations, but in a follow-up post, I discovered that Camus would have had ample opportunity to read Moby-Dick in French — if not in the original English.
As I researched Camus’ love for Melville, I incidentally discovered that Jean-Paul Sartre was also an avid fan, writing a review of a 1941 French translation just months after escaping prison during WWII and joining the resistance to the Nazi occupation of France. In an absurd twist, however, the review he wrote was published in a newspaper collaborating with the Germans.
What do you do when you learn that South Korean Starbucks franchises were handing out a book of essays about Moby-Dick (in Korean) to customers spending a certain amount of money in their stores? Obviously, you reach out to strangers living in Seoul who can snag you a copy and have it shipped back to the United States. After running all 100+ pages through a translator, I summarize each of the five essays and look at differences in how the Great American Novel is presented to potential first-time readers in Korea.
Toward the end of Moby-Dick, Ishmael mentions that Ahab’s beard has been growing increasingly unkempt. Many of us now think of Ahab as having an “Amish” style beard, though by looking at trends in illustrated versions I found that this has only really been the case since Gregory Peck portrayed him in 1956. Going even deeper, I discover that the choice wasn’t purely the invention of the film’s costume designer but was likely influenced by the dedicated, occasionally psychedelic art of Gilbert Wilson.
When John Huston’s film adaptation of Moby-Dick was released in the summer of 1956, the director stated that he wouldn’t hear of it premiering anywhere else but New Bedford. The city responded with such enthusiasm that neither Huston nor its star, Gregory Peck, would ever forget the three days they spent being feted, wined, dined, and paraded as part of the largest celebration of Melville the world has ever seen. In this post, I gather every last detail and photo of the city’s social event of the century, one which still resonates with residents nearly 70 years later.
To get into the holiday spirit (Moby-Dick has a chapter titled “Merry Christmas,” after all), I rounded up some of the most unusual gifts for the Melville fanatic in your life, from plastic scrimshaw kits to replica doubloons to Ahab dolls to quasi-legal slivers of ambergris. The holiday season might be over but it’s always Christmas on the Pequod!
Moby-Dick has inspired untold numbers of acclaimed artists even outside of book illustrations, from Frank Stella to Jackson Pollock to Gilbert Wilson. Among this group is Jean-Michel Basquiat, who created three pieces referencing Moby-Dick toward around 1986-1987, at least one of which was part of his last exhibition before his death in August 1988. Little is known about Basquiat’s interest in Melville or what he intended by these chaotic, bewitching pieces which I detail in turn, but with a little bit of elbow grease I was able to hang a few never-before-published facts on this part of Basquiat’s life and literary interest.