I read the book a second time on a trip to Nantucket, and dipped into it again when I was invited to participate in a project organized by Philip Hoare, the author of The Whale: a chapter a day, every chapter read by a different person, posted online with art work. Each voice and the enthusiasm of each reader for the assigned chapter kept the story fresh. I read Chapter 6, “The Street,” about New Bedford, whence Ishmael embarks for Nantucket to sign onto the Pequod. Philip Hoare had visited all the sights associated with Melville and his research into the leviathan, sniffing ambergris in one museum, catching the scent of oil that lingered in the reconstructed skeleton of a whale in another, whale-watching off Provincetown. So I decided to follow in his footsteps, stopping in New Bedford to smell the roses on my way to the Cape (“And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses”). Hoare also recreates a picnic on Mount Greylock, in the Berkshires—the moment when Melville met Hawthorne. On a trip to the Berkshires undertaken for purely hedonistic reasons, I made a detour to Arrowhead, the house in Pittsfield where Melville wrote Moby-Dick. Though I did not expect Arrowhead to furnish an immediate answer to my question about that immortal hyphen, stuck like a harpoon in Melville’s famous title, it seemed like as good a place as any to begin my research.
Arrowhead is a big yellow house at 780 Holmes Road, south of Pittsfield, with a blue sign outside in the shape of a sperm whale. A snowy, unplowed driveway led to a muddy parking lot with a view of Mount Greylock. Beyond several Berkshires-style outbuildings—a barn, a shed—I came to a door that opened as if by itself. “Are you here for the exhibition?” a wiry gray-haired woman asked. I looked around. There was a desk with shelves behind it featuring various editions of Moby-Dick and mugs and whale-shaped merchandise and a “Call Me Ishmael” T-shirt on a hanger.
“Isn’t this where Melville’s study is?” I asked.
“Yes, but today we have an exhibit of costumes,” the woman said. “It’s the only reason we’re open.” A boy with thick brown hair jumped up from the ticket desk and said, “It’s closed, but I can take you up there. Since you came especially for that.” He led me through some period rooms with mannequins in velvet dresses to a staircase with a “Closed” sign strung between the railings. The boy, whose name was Will, removed the sign and took me up the stairs. Suddenly I was in Melville’s study.
“It’s not his desk,” Will said. The desk is in downtown Pittsfield, in the Athenaeum, a gorgeous historic building that I had passed on the way. “But it is his chair.” The chair, elaborately carved, was positioned at a table so that its occupant commanded a view of Mount Greylock (named for an Indian chief). A pair of eyeglasses were placed on a manuscript letter on top of the table. “Those are his spectacles,” Will said. “And many of these are his books.” He gestured to a glass-fronted bookcase. “We have his large-print Shakespeare that someone sent him because his eyesight was bad.” Melville had read Shakespeare and the Bible before revising Moby-Dick. “We call this the Hawthorne Room.” Will indicated a spartan bedroom off the study with a narrow bed covered with a counterpane. Hawthorne visited Melville at Arrowhead at least once, and it was after meeting Hawthorne, on Mount Greylock, and reading Shakespeare and the Bible, that Melville took his whaling saga to a deeper level.
A vitrine displayed a few Melville relics: a scrimshaw letter opener with a walrus carved on it, a change purse, a corkscrew. There was a harpoon, but it wasn’t Melville’s, Will admitted: “It’s the right period, but it’s just here for atmosphere.” Leaning against the fireplace was a harpoon-shaped poker that had belonged to Melville.
I asked my guide if I might sit in Melville’s chair. He shook his head. “You can touch it,” he said. “It’s fragile. It was in an attic.” Did that mean it had the original upholstery? Was this the chair that Melville had sat his ass in to write? Will got called downstairs. He trusted me not to sit in the chair, so I stood behind it and looked over Melville’s shoulders at the sun falling on a birch tree outside the wavy-glass window and the snow-covered fields stretching all the way to Mount Greylock. Melville had written of his view that it made him feel as if he were at sea and Greylock were a sperm whale.
Melville was born in New York City. His early books, Typee and Omoo, had been successful, all about native girls and cannibals—he was a kind of literary Gauguin. It was on the strength of those books that he had moved to the Berkshires to write. But Moby-Dick was a failure. Melville had a wife and children to support, and he was in debt to his in-laws, so he swapped his property in Pittsfield for a house on East Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan that one of his in-laws had a mortgage on. He kept writing—Pierre was his next book—but he also took a job at the customs office and commuted downtown for the next twenty years. He never had another literary success. Billy Budd was published posthumously. His widow kept the manuscript in her breadbox.