Downstairs, I stocked up on souvenirs of Arrowhead. I had just lent a friend my Viking-Penguin edition of Moby-Dick, with its scholarly apparatus, and so I bought the Modern Library edition, from 1930, with woodcuts by Rockwell Kent, and no ponderous foreword or footnotes (except those written by Melville himself) or glossary of ship’s parts—nothing to get between me and the text. The editors even resisted the hyphen in “Moby Dick.” I also bought a ruler that says on it “Herman Melville’s ARROWHEAD” and has a reproduction of a twenty-cent postage stamp with Melville’s portrait and a quotation: “It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation” (Melville’s comma).
I drove home, thinking of Melville and how, in 1863, he had moved back to New York in a spirit of defeat. Often I have sat in my car in front of a plaque marking the site of Melville’s house, waiting for the street sweeper between seven-thirty and eight on Tuesday and Friday mornings, observing alternate-side-parking rules, and watching as aged beef and fresh linens were delivered to the freight entrance of the boutique hotel across the street. Melville’s block is alternate-side-parking gold. There used to be a Staples where his house stood, which wasn’t entirely inappropriate, but it moved a few blocks south and downsized, and the space is now occupied by a Spanish brasserie and a bank branch.
In the car, while trying to redeem time spent claiming a parking spot, I continued my pursuit of the hyphen in the white whale. There are a few huge biographies of Melville, and I chose one by Andrew Delbanco—Melville: His World and Work—to get a sense of Melville’s life in publishing. There is no manuscript extant of Moby-Dick. Delbanco writes that Melville, so protective of his text, personally delivered the manuscript to the printer, on Fulton Street, and did his own proofreading. This was in August of 1851. Meanwhile, his brother Allan was negotiating on his behalf with a publisher in London. Allan Melville sent the London firm of Bentley a letter explaining that his brother had added a dedication (to Nathaniel Hawthorne) and changed the title from The Whale to Moby-Dick, who was, after all, the hero. The name Moby Dick was inspired by a real-life white whale known as Mocha Dick, who makes a cameo appearance in White-Jacket. The brother added, in an early, unsuccessful stab at marketing, “It is thought here that the new title will be a better selling title—.” In his note, Allan Melville used the hyphen.
It was too late to change the title of the British edition. In September of 1851, two months before the American edition came out, the novel appeared in England under the title The Whale. The English publisher made many changes in the text, most of them traceable to prudery, religious scruple, or nationalism, and left off the end, with Ishmael afloat, in italics, on Quee-queg’s coffin. Somewhere along the line, Herman Melville gave up. Delbanco quotes from Pierre to describe the author’s probable attitude while proofreading Moby-Dick: “The proofs . . . were replete with errors, but . . . he became impatient of such minute, gnat-like torments; he randomly corrected the worst, and let the rest go; jeering with himself at the rich harvest thus furnished to the entomological critics.”
The biography led this entomological critic to remarks by G. Thomas Tanselle on nineteenth-century punctuation conventions: “Commas were sometimes used expressively to suggest the movements of voice, and capitals were sometimes meant to give significances to a word beyond those it might have in its uncapitalized form.” Multiple editions of Moby-Dick later, the Library of America edition, using the Northwestern-Newberry edition, yielded up the information I was looking for, in a note by Tanselle buried on page 1428: In his letter Allan spells “Moby-Dick” with the hyphen, as it also appears on the title page and divisional title page of the American edition; but only one of the many occurrences of the name in the text includes the hyphen. The Northwestern-Newberry editors retain the hyphen in the title, arguing that hyphenated titles were conventional in mid-nineteenth-century America. As a result, the hyphenated form refers to the book, the unhyphenated to the whale.
It was a copy editor who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick.
Chapter 7
A DASH, A SEMICOLON, AND A COLON WALK INTO A BAR