Relatives of Frank William “Billy” Tyne, who captained the ill-fated Andrea Gail and went down with six of his crew during the brutal 1991 storm off New England, are thundering mad at George Clooney’s portrayal of their kin.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fla., against Warner Bros., Tyne’s family claims that the movie “falsely depicted” Tyne as “emotionally aloof, reckless, excessively risk-taking, self-absorbed, emasculated, despondent, obsessed and maniacal.” (New York Post, August 29, 2000)
Next Tuesday, as part of a weekly movie series at Symphony Space, John Huston’s 1956 film version of Moby Dick will be shown in a double bill with John Ford’s The Searchers. The date is November 21, and I keep wondering whether Isaiah Sheffer, the artistic director of Symphony Space, knew when he made up the program that he was scheduling Moby Dick for the 180th anniversary of the incident that probably inspired it, give or take a few hours: the sinking of a Nantucket whaler by an enraged sperm whale in the South Pacific. The name of the ship was the Essex, and she went down on November 20, 1820.
The Essex disaster is the subject of Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, up for a National Book Award this week. I gather that Philbrick’s competition in the category of nonfiction is the great literary critic Jacques Barzun. All the same, it will be a shame if In the Heart of the Sea doesn’t win. Not only is it a thumping good read, more so even than your average first-rate humdinger of a sea-disaster story; it’s also an interesting piece of cultural criticism. In Philbrick’s book, everything one has never really understood about Moby Dick—why Ahab was kicking up such a rumpus, all that stuff about good and evil, and Calvinism and paganism, the incessant jokes about cannibals, even the footnotes and digressions—is all made intelligible through being put in the context of the Nantucket whaling industry.
Reviews of the book largely focused on two elements of the story, playing up the sensational aspect and oversimplifying a literary point. In order to survive, the crew of the Essex, adrift for three months with only food and water enough for half that time, had been forced to resort to cannibalism, actually eating the bodies of their dead shipmates. Worse still, they had, at one point, gone so far as to sacrifice one of their number, drawing lots to determine who the victim and his executioner would be. It’s a haunting, horrifying tale; but almost more compelling than the story itself are Philbrick’s insights into why it so resonated with people at the time, Melville among them.
The publicity material that accompanies the book describes the Essex incident as the inspiration for the ending of Moby Dick. In fact, Philbrick suggests (if he doesn’t come right out and say so) that the Essex story must have been a thematic starting point for the whole novel. More shocking even than the means by which the men of the Essex sought to survive was the unprecedented phenomenon of a whale attacking a ship. Such a thing had never happened before. Nantucketers went after whales, not the other way around. That was how it was supposed to be.
Even when whales did fight back, moreover, they did so in a predictable, time-honored fashion—with their jaws and tails. But this whale had rammed the ship with its head—not once but twice—and had gnashed its teeth “as if distracted with rage and fury,” as first mate Owen Chase wrote in his account of the ordeal. Chase thought the whale’s behavior a result of cool reasoning, that it had attacked the ship in the manner “calculated to do us the most injury,” knowing that the combined speeds of two objects would be greatest in a head-on collision and the impact therefore most destructive.
The image of the enraged, vengeful whale is the cornerstone of Moby Dick, of course. It’s what lies behind Ahab’s quest and his obsession, a point so obvious that it only needs to be made in passing. (“To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous,” says Starbuck, but mostly so that Ahab can answer, “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”) Ahab regards Moby Dick much as the crew of the Essex seem to have viewed the whale that attacked them, as a creature capable of rational action.
One of the fascinating questions Philbrick raises, though, if only by implication, is where so weirdly modern a notion could possibly have come from. The Nantucketers who had harvested whales for generations, he points out, saw their vocation as part of the Divine Plan. But to ascribe rage to an object of one’s own aggression is to come perilously close to admitting a sense of guilt. You cannot, after all, discern anger or moral outrage in a fellow being unless you also grant it a point of view.
Iam on something of a Melville kick just now. It started back in the summer when I went to see A Perfect Storm. That put me in a really foul mood, and I had to rent the Huston Moby Dick as an antidote. Not that I held any brief for Sebastian Junger’s book—I hadn’t read it. There are just certain themes and tropes that I expect to be moved by, and when I’m not, I know I am in the presence of fools: scenes of someone pulling away from land while someone else is left on shore; a chorus of voices singing “For Those in Peril on the Sea”; shots of a wall of names; glimpses of Leonard Craske’s famous statue commemorating the fisherman of Gloucester. You know the one: doughty mariner at the wheel, braced against the wind and peering out into sea above a fragment of the 107th Psalm (“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in the great waters; These see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep….”).
A Perfect Storm had all of those elements, but it was imbued by a sort of “Wreck-of-the-Hesperus” mentality—the kind of thinking according to which, say, if the young lady lashed to the mast in the Longfellow poem had not been possessed of “a bosom white as the hawthorne buds that ope in the month of May,” the whole incident would have been somehow less worthy of our attention.
This was a movie that thought the Gloucester men lost at sea in a 1991 hurricane had to be played by movie stars like George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in order for us to take an interest in them. It assumed that in order for their story to be tragic or poignant it would have to be established that one of them had a girlfriend and a mother who were going to miss him, that another one had a little boy who would be sad without his daddy, that a third, who never seemed to have much luck with women, had (irony of ironies) just met one with whom things might have worked out.
I couldn’t understand it. How could you make a sea-disaster story so unutterably boring—particularly one based on a real-life incident? “Truth is boring,” said a friend, and I had no answer. It was only later that I realized what I ought to have said: “Truth is never boring; that’s reality you’re thinking of.”
APerfect Storm got me started on Melville, but there were other things. I read the Philbrick book. Then Elizabeth Hardwick’s Melville entry in the Penguin Lives series came out, and a friend whose eyesight is going and who was listening to a recording of Moby Dick suggested that listening to the novel was actually the best way to experience it. So I did, and I found that she was right: that because it takes longer to hear things than it does to read them, images and phrases linger on in the mind, making more of an impression, so that you’re in a better position to see connections and confluences. It has something to do with the physics of time, sound, memory, and imagination.
Finally, there was Rinde Eckert’s intriguing music-theater piece And God Created Great Whales, which swung through New York a couple of times. It concerned a brilliant but maimed and narcissistic piano tuner trying to write an opera based on Moby Dick, and it was striking for the way it heaped ridicule on such a foolish idea and at the same time succeeded in translating the intellectual impulse that Moby Dick is about into a piece of musical theater. It offered the same juxtaposition of human aspiration with human frailty.
Eckert’s piano tuner (he sang the role himself) had immortal longings, but he also had a degenerative disease that entailed progressive memory loss. Consequently, he couldn’t remember from one moment to the next what he was writing, had written, or had been planning to write. He had a tendency to go off the deep end, so to speak, careening off into some never-never land of passionate philosophical musing or theoretical arcana. Fortunately, he had a muse, half imagined, half remembered—a retired diva he’d once known, who had perhaps loved him or whom he perhaps had loved—and she usually managed to put him back on track. The whole thing was cyclical, or nonlinear anyway, going back and forth between tape recorded messages the composer had left for himself and scenes from the opera that he was trying to write.
And God Created Great Whales was part satire and part serious meditation on creation and creative failure. It was about a man who threatened his own muse, and it asked whether this is an act of heroism or folly. Eckert’s composer was destroying Moby Dick in trying to adapt it—not because he didn’t understand the novel but because of the nature of art. And watching Eckert go back and forth between imagining Ahab and impersonating him, one gradually understood the tragedy in the composer-hero’s predicament: his nagging fear that what makes something operatic is also what makes it trite.
This is actually the point that Melville makes time and time again in the digressive sections of the novel (and what comes across when you listen to a recording). The definitions and catalogs and histories and phylogenies that have led students and critics of Melville to wonder if he was quite in his right mind are ultimately all about the impossibility of telling the story, of painting an accurate picture of the truth.
There’s an extraordinary illustration in Philbrick’s book: an 18th-century map of the Island of Nantucket that, Philbrick points out, against all accuracy makes the harbor into the shape of a whale. Actually, there are two whales in the picture: the island itself forms another. It’s an index of how far Nantucketers allowed the specter of the whale to obsess them—they literally recast their own world in its image. They also imitated it themselves, unconsciously. One of Philbrick’s most telling insights concerns the way in which the society that whaling created—with its cycles, its matriarchal structure, and its long, long stretches of male absenteeism—perfectly mirrored the natural movements of whales themselves.
Is Moby Dick Ahab’s muse or his nemesis? Does the blasphemy consist in making the whale human, or is it the other way around? And God Created Great Whales pokes fun at creative impulses; at the same time, it has great sympathy for its protagonist. It’s as though Eckert were saying, “Yeah, trying to turn Moby Dick into an opera is dumb, maybe. But it’s better than not having the urge to turn Moby Dick into an opera.” The attempt results in some foolish moments; it also produces moments of great beauty that may or may not owe anything to Melville.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the John Huston version of Moby Dick. Most of my favorite bits never occur in the book at all: the prophecy, the wonderful scene where another captain begs Ahab to suspend the hunt and help search for his lost son instead, the scene where Queequeg comes out of his trance because someone is threatening Ishmael. None of that stuff is in the book. I don’t care. I love it.
What I love best, though, is something that is in the book, only in a different form. It’s what was lacking in that silly George Clooney movie—so much so that one can understand Billy Tyne’s family wanting to sue the filmmakers. They’re absolutley right. They’re saying the movie version of A Perfect Storm turned Billy Tyne into Ahab, but without giving us any inkling of the forces driving him on. For that you have to go to the John Huston film. You see it on the face of an old sailor with a concertina, playing a few notes of a wistful air, and on the faces of the women standing on the dock as the Pequod pulls away—a sense of tragic inevitability.
New York Press, November 21, 2000
