"Very Like a Whale"
; or, did Melville really compare the shape of Mount Greylock to a giant whale?
This week we embark on an exercise in fact-checking — myth-busting, you might say — regarding an idea attributed to Melville and frequently cited as an illustration of his blinding obsession with completing Moby-Dick. It’s an idea repeated in newspapers, books, prominent websites and blogs, and even by Melville scholars, yet one which has always struck me as having an air of “truthiness,” something that’s not literally true but nevertheless feels true and eventually becomes accepted as fact.
The question concerns Mount Greylock, the mountain whose silhouette Melville could see from his study window as he wrote Moby-Dick, and whether or not he ever actually said that its shape looked to him like a giant whale. While I don’t quite see it myself, it certainly doesn’t feel too far-fetched that Melville’s imagination, while deep into the anatomical descriptions of whales, conjured up the comparison.
It’s just that even when the idea is presented as a direct quote there’s never so much as a hint of its origins — not “In a letter to so-and-so,” or "… he wrote in his journal,” or even “he supposedly said to a friend.” For someone whose life has been scrutinized to the degree to which Melville’s has, that’s a pretty glaring red flag. All of this made me both suspicious and curious whether I could find a source — legitimate or otherwise.
"A sperm whale rising in the distance"
First, let’s look at some examples.
In several instances, Melville is quoted directly. Peter McLaughlin, a contributor to several regional newspapers in Western Massachusetts and upstate New York, wrote an article for the Buffalo News in May 1994 about his visit to Melville’s Arrowhead estate, now a historic house maintained by the Berkshire County Historical Society. Describing the second-floor study, McLaughlin quotes Melville as saying that Greylock looked "like a sperm whale rising in the distance."
When you step into the room where Herman Melville wrote “Moby Dick,” you expect to see something more… well… nautical. Instead you’re in a distinctly rural place, Shaker-like in simplicity, with a window looking across a vast cornfield to the purple-gray silhouette of Mount Greylock…. [S]tand behind the desk where Melville worked and look out the window. You’ll see the same view that inspired the author 144 years ago. To Melville, Mount Greylock looked “like a sperm whale rising in the distance.”
The relevant line is in quote marks, but there’s no source provided or indicated. McLaughlin repeated the quote a year later in another article about Mount Greylock for The Berkshire Eagle. This time he’s even more clear that the quote came straight from from Melville’s pen.
While Herman Melville sat at his desk in Pittsfield writing Moby Dick, he drew inspiration from the view of Mount Greylock out his study window. He said it looked like “a sperm whale rising in the distance.”
However, I can otherwise find no record of this quote earlier than McLaughlin’s 1994 article, whether attributed to Melville or anyone else. Yet this exact phrasing has been repeated several times online, for example on the blog Mental Floss, which also included it in their 2021 book The Curious Reader: A Literary Miscellany of Novels & Novelists, a collection of “facts about famous authors and novels.”
Others who mention the comparison seem to be less sure of its authenticity. In an article about Mount Greylock for WBUR in 2016, titled “How Western Massachusetts' Mount Greylock Became Inspiration For Literary Legends,” writer Bob Shaffer also discusses how the peak might have influenced Melville. Shaffer talked to Arrowhead’s artist-in-residence/tour guide at the time, Jana Laiz, who offered a similar interpretation of the resemblance to a whale. To her credit, though, Laiz explicitly states that it might not be authentically Melville.
“We're seeing this beautiful field," Berkshire Historical Society's writer-in-residence Jana Laiz says as she looks out at Greylock, "then beyond that are these trees that are colored with fall and then beyond that in the distance is this beautiful mountain that looks like a whale breaching."
"Whether he actually looked at that mountain and saw a whale," Laiz says, "or whether he looked at that mountain and his gaze became unfocused, this is a mesmerizing view and you can just got lost in yourself and your thoughts."
Compare that hesitance, though, to another statement from the Berkshire Historical Society’s Director of Communications Peter Bergman, who told WAMC Northeast Public Radio a year earlier that Melville “found in the view of Mt. Greylock… a persistent view of a white whale emerging from the ocean.” Poetic license, perhaps, but by adding that Greylock was Melville’s “inspiration for Moby-Dick” and even tracing the mountain’s whale-like form it’s easy to see how the public might over-interpret the comment.
“When he got here he was working on his sixth book called The Whale,” Bergman said while standing in what was Melville's writing space. “He found in the view of Mt. Greylock from his study a persistent view of a white whale emerging from the ocean. It was his inspiration for Moby-Dick. He faced it every day.” […]
“When it’s covered in snow it splits into two peaks,” he describes. “The front peak clearly and very plainly resembles the shape of a sperm whale emerging from the water and the high peak behind it is very clearly a white wave, part of that wake of the whale. When the ground out here is snow-covered around 11 in the morning when sun is reaching its apex, mists begin to rise off of the snow and ice and it looks like sea foam. It is the most miraculous view.”
Another strange twist to this idea is a version of the quote as seen on BerkshiresWeek.com, promoting a tour of Arrowhead in November 2023. Here, Melville is quoted as saying that Greylock looked “very like a whale.”
Tour the house, see the window through which Melville saw and contemplated Mt. Greylock, looking to him "very like a whale."
This same quote has even popped up in an essay by Melville scholar Nancy Fredericks, (in a book edited by literary critic and Yale University professor Harold Bloom) about Melville’s decision to build his piazza facing Greylock:
After much deliberation he rejects neighborly advice and chooses to build his piazza on the north side facing the sublime Mount Greylock (the mountain… which he thought “very like a whale.”)
… and in the Melville Society’s Leviathan journal itself in an essay by Elizabeth Schultz describing the Moby-Dick-inspired work of artist Kevin Sprague:
Sprague’s work conjures Melville’s imagination as he might have looked up, while in the process of composing Moby-Dick, to see Mt. Greylock “very like a whale” through his study window
To be sure, this phrase is kind of a quote from Melville in that it does appear in Moby-Dick — but as a quote from Hamlet in which Hamlet and Polonius talk about a cloud which looks first like a camel, then a weasel, and then “very like a whale.”
HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale.
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.
The quote appears in Moby-Dick in the “Extracts” prologue, but it’s so oddly isolated and so stripped of context that one wonders if Melville meant it as a sort of inside joke.
Then there are the many instances in which the comparison of Greylock to a whale is used more poetically to represent Melville’s state of mind as he wrote Moby-Dick. Here, the idea is not necessarily presented as Melville’s, but readers could be forgiven for mistaking it as such and repeating it as fact. In July 2019, for example, the Berkshire Eagle again suggested the connection, though didn’t actually put the words in Melville’s mouth.
It was a winter of heavy snow in 1850 when Herman Melville planted himself at his writing table and churned out the tale of a fearsome white whale…. While he wrote, a snowcapped Mount Greylock, resembling a white whale breaching the surface, was always with him.
In November 2020, Colin Channer published a poem titled “Spumante” in The New Yorker in which he envisions Melville contemplating “the vista from a landlocked house, / hills becoming pods of transmigrating giants: / Greylock. Berkshire range.” Similarly, the Melville Society’s Leviathan journal published a poem by Richard Dey in 2016 titled “At Arrowhead” in which Melville is “taunted” by Greylock’s whaleish “twin-anvil peaks.”
Farmer & sailor, father & son, / husband & writer, Melville at thirty-one / stares / over the meadow, snow-crusted, on which appears / not the ten-point buck / but a two-tiered sail. / Gripping the sash as if a salt-lashed shroud, / he stares toward Greylock, Greylock / whose twin anvil-headed peaks taunt him, haunt . . . / Hast seen the White Whale?
Author Philip Hoare, creator of the Moby-Dick Big Read audiobook project, suggested in his book Leviathan or, the Whale that for Melville the “snowy brow” of Greylock “conjured up the White Whale.”
Clearly, the image is irresistible. Melville is six years returned from his free-wheeling life at sea: land-locked, domesticated, mortgaged. He’s desperate to be back at sea, if only in his imagination, and pours that energy into his book as the gigantic outline of a whale stares him down. Comparing Mount Greylock to a whale seems like something Melville could have said, should have said, and even probably said, but did he actually say it?
Melville in the Berkshires
There’s no question that Melville did love Mount Greylock. After his father died when he was a teenager, Herman spent several summers at his Uncle Thomas’s farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts about 40 miles southeast of his home in Albany. During these visits he helped on the farm but otherwise was free to roam the nearby meadows, woods, and mountains, experiences which “were always among his happiest memories.” According to Melville biographer John Bryant, this countryside where he spent his adolescence was “magical,” inspiring him to “live in the ‘all’ with the universe outside of you and within.”
For Maria’s children, it was magical: hot but not blazing in summer; scarlet and yellow in fall; windy and white in winter. And in June, you could lie on a hillock amid blue gentians, sense the grass growing slowly about you, take yourself to be a sapling with your legs growing roots and your hair becoming leaves, and live in the “all” with the universe outside of you and within. Or at least that is how Melville saw it years later as an adult. The time Herman spent in and around this inland place throughout his adolescence connected him to family and nature. It grounded his creativity. It made Herman want to write—he did not know what. Eventually he would know what, and he would return to the “all feeling” of this Berkshire landscape and compose some of his greatest writings.
After returning from his years at sea and becoming something of a literary sensation with the publication of Typee and Omoo, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw and started a family while living in New York City. But the open air of Western Massachusetts called to him, just as the “pure air of the fore-castle deck” had when he left to go whaling ten years earlier. And so in 1850, already in the early stages of writing Moby-Dick, he bought 160 acres of land adjacent to the farm where he had spent his youth, calling it “Arrowhead” for the carved stones he found while tilling the fields.
In a letter to his friend Evert Duyckinck, dated December 13, 1850, he described his idyllic life in the country.
''Do you want to know how I pass my time? — I rise at eight — thereabouts — and go to my barn — say good-morning to the horse, and give him his breakfast. (It goes to my heart to give him a cold one, but it can't be helped.) Then, pay a visit to my cow — cut up a pumpkin or two for her and stand by to see her eat it — for it's a pleasant sight to see a cow move her jaws — she does it so mildly and with such a sanctity. My own breakfast over, I go to my work-room and light my fire — then spread my M.S.S. on the table — take one business squint at it, and fall to with a will… ''
Melville was most proud of his view of Mount Greylock, choosing a second-story room with a view of the peak as his study, placing his writing desk directly in front of “that little embrasure of a window (you must remember it) which commands so noble a view,” as he wrote to Duyckinck.
In fact, he was so enamored with the view that he built a small porch on the north side of the house (a “piazza,” he winkingly called it) where he could luxuriate in the view of Greylock, writing:
Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza for the convenience of those who might desire to feast upon a view, and take their time and ease about it, seemed as much of an omission as if a picture gallery should have no bench
Thus, with a keen eye fixed on the majesty of Mount Greylock and the most intense period of writing Moby-Dick ahead, it feels almost unavoidable for Melville to draw this connection.
Greylock, His Most Excellent Majesty
So what did Melville actually say about Mount Greylock over the course of his life? And can we find any nugget of truth to him comparing it to a whale?
Most notably, Melville dedicated his novel Pierre: or, the Ambiguities, published just a year after Moby-Dick, to "Greylock's Most Excellent Majesty." Whereas Moby-Dick has a simple, modest inscription to Nathaniel Hawthorne (“In token of my admiration for his genius”), Melville penned a three-paragraph ode to Greylock in Pierre.
While he compares the peak to a “sovereign lord and king” and calls it “The Most Excellent Purple Majesty,” there’s no mention of a whale.
A few years later, Melville again wrote about Greylock in “The Piazza,” a short story paying tribute to his porch, this time promoting the peak from king to Holy Roman Emperor, a “Charlemagne among his peers.” But still it does not take shape as a whale.
Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion in the zenith flashed down his Damocles’ sword to him some starry night, and said, “Build there.” For how, otherwise, could it have entered the builder’s mind, that, upon the clearing being made, such a purple prospect would be his?—nothing less than Greylock, with all his hills about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.
Later in the story, Melville writes of watching storms gathering on the mountaintops “like a Sinai, till one thinks swart Moses must be climbing among the scathed hemlocks there.” An evocative tribute to its transcendent, almost religious significance to Melville — but no mention of a whale.
Another close contender actually came a few years earlier in that letter sent to his Duyckinck in December 1850, not long after moving to Pittsfield. In the letter, Melville tells Duyckinck that looking out the window of his second-floor study where he composed Moby-Dick gave him "a sort of sea-feeling," and that the room “seems a ship’s cabin.”
“I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”
Although this does nearly capture what we’re looking for, on closer inspection not only is there no mention of a whale, it doesn’t even reference the mountain. Melville included a similar sentiment in The Piazza, where he talks about pacing the boards in winter like a “sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn,” and looking out at his undulating fields in summer and being reminded of the sea.
But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel -- nipping cold and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller, bolting by the snow in finest flour -- for then, once more, with frosted beard, I pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.
In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows as a calm upon the Line, but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.
Melville also made several comments in the text of Moby-Dick that are close contenders. At the end of Chapter 1, Ishmael dreams of going whaling, and imagines the white whale as a “grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air,” and uses the same imagery of a “snow-hill” in Chapter 133: “There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” Naturally, the pedant in me has to ask: does Melville compare the mountain to a whale, or the whale to a mountain?
But most provocatively of all, in Chapter 57 Melville writes about the various images of whales seen “In Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.” Here he comes tantalizingly close to spelling it out as he describes how a traveller in mountainous countries might “catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges.”
Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges.
That phrase “amphitheatrical heights” is key here, also appearing in Melville’s description of Greylock in Pierre’s dedication ("in the amphitheater over which his central majesty presides."). The amphitheater he’s likely referring to is what’s known as “The Hopper,” a “multi-pronged glacial valley carved into the western flank of Mount Greylock,” so-called for its resemblance to a grain hopper.
Melville even wrote about the Hopper in a lecture he gave in 1860 titled “Traveling,” comparing the enclosed valley to the provincial, shut-in life lead by most men.
In the isolated cluster of mountains called Greylock, there lies a deep valley named The Hopper, which is a huge sort of verdant dungeon among the hills. Suppose a person should be born there, and know nothing of what lay beyond, and should after a time ascend the mountain, with what delight would he view the landscape from the summit! … Now it is in this very kind of experience that the prime pleasure of travel consists. Every man's home is in a certain sense a "Hopper," which however fair and sheltered, shuts him in from the outer world.
Returning to the passage in Moby-Dick, it seems likely that Melville has Greylock in mind when describing the “profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges,” and we therefore might take this as the answer to whether he ever made the comparison. It’s a rather oblique, coded way of saying it, and not one that’s ever cited directly so far as I’ve seen, but perhaps there’s some truth behind the truthiness after all — you might just have to give it that “business squint” in order to see it.
But there is one last quote worth including here, coming not from Melville but from Nathaniel Hawthorne. In November 1851, the same month that Moby-Dick was published in the U.S., Hawthorne published a children's book titled A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. The book is framed as a story-within-a-story in which a student from the nearby Williams College retells several Greek myths to a group of children. In the final chapter, "The Chimæra," the student recounts the story of Bellerophon taming Pegasus, adding that he wished that Pegasus could fly him around the Berkshires to visit his “brother-authors” including Chester Dewey, George Payne Rainsford James, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The last of these brother-authors is Herman Melville, who he imagines just down the road “shaping out the gigantic conception of his ‘White Whale,’ while the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study-window.”
It still seems to require a bit of connecting the dots to truly get to the original idea, but it does suggest that Melville discussed such an idea with Hawthorne during one of their many conversations as he wrote Moby-Dick. Considered together with the passages from Moby-Dick and connected to his other writings, I think we can reasonably conclude that the comparison was something that occurred to Melville — at least poetically, if not literally — and which he arguably alludes to in several places if not stated outright.
So is this myth busted? Absolutely not! I’d still be a little cautious about over-interpreting these lines and a connection largely based on his use of the word "amphitheater,” but I’ll give the green light to future uses of this (qualified) statement. But that doesn’t mean say that he ever said, specifically, that Greylock looked “like a sperm whale rising in the distance” or that it was “Very like a whale” (beyond quoting Hamlet).
Or maybe I’m wrong on that count as well — if anyone reading this has any information to the contrary, as always, please let me know!
Another much fun post. Loved the pictures too. I am learning lots