Herman Melville - 
What Classics?

Touching none-too-briefly on why high school books 
are the worst books  (no offense, Herman)

 And side-swiping related topics along the way, including video games, science fiction and why I won't call anyone "Ishmael"

     My high-school reading regimen included three sci-fi books a week and stacks of comic books from six subscriptions, which left me little time to read the assigned "classics." After time and a university education, I've often gone back  to see what literary rewards my youthful defiance had denied me. There were a few gems in there, though little to speak of. And that's what I'll be speaking of now.

     High school reading is a kind of literary purgatory:  A mess of  material that is supposed to haul students to a higher level of awareness, but which still has to be short and simple enough to provide a kind of play-doh for shaping quick, vacuous book-reports. It all seems to work around spotting elementary "themes." If you don't get the "theme" and the "symbol," you don't get the story, and even if you do find Waldo, you won't enjoy the story anymore after the autopsy. 

     That's how high school reading was set up for me. Something always represents something else, and all the student has to do is grab the Cliffs Notes or watch the movie to figure out these themes, since they don't correspond to anything in adolescent life, and the writing that hides them is consistently unenjoyable.

     So we have a no-mans-land of texts that students hate to read (and because of which they acquire a distaste for all reading), and that adults have never read because of the sour memories from school. A perfect circle of illiteracy, or a-literacy. Thanks to the efficiency of the education system, we not only anesthetize all our youth at an early age against the pleasures of  reading, we manage to toss a lot of authors into the pit they dread most -- "textbookization."

     Before I lay into Melville -- wasn't it Mark Twain who, having puffed endless cigars, shot countless games of pool. and downed many a whiskey over the ten years of sporadic work on his half-serious book Huckleberry Finn, sarcastically warned on the frontispiece that "anyone who finds a plot in this book should be shot"? The reason he said that -- which English teachers today would not grasp -- is that "youth" books of the time were meant to provide guidance, but he just wanted to spin a yarn.  Louisa May Alcott, author of the unread (thank God) Little Women, dumped on his book as worthless because it lacked any role model for youth (Tom Sawyer had a sort-of role model, but the story is thin as air. It is still on the lists because it is short and simple, and is written by a master better known for other things too hard to read. Well, close enough).

     Twain was just trying to have fun, but he always tossed in a serious bit here and there, and after that we have have left it to the makers of textbooks and reading lists to tell us the rest, after they have excised the book from the body of "pleasure reading" through a sterile bibliodectomy .

     What my teachers did not tell us is that Twain got textbookized in spite of himself. He hated prescribed reading. And -- as an aside -- although Huckleberry Finn was criticized at the time for having a leading black character (honestly and condescendingly referred to in the regional jargon of the setting as a "nigger"), now only the worrisome "stereotyping" remains, in a strange reversal of opinion about the same black caricature -- and the fact that "nigger" has taken on a horrible racial weight over 120 years. But this is another subject -- "not grasping the context." To grasp this would require students to compare historical and literary settings, but "history" is another unrelated class, probably involved pointlessly in learning about the Smoot-Hawley Act. Hence the pathetic reliance on "themes" in English classes.

     Incidentally, I have in my home a huge bound collection of Harpers magazines from the 1850s to the 1870s. Each one has an appalling feature page of ethnic jokes that make Twain look quite progressive by comparison. Students could never make that comparison -- and neither could teachers, for that matter, jumping straight from Tom Sawyer to "The Old Man and the Sea" -- or Melville -- who shall appear shortly, I promise.

     Most of Twain's books were published through a company that only sold through door-to-door subscription, for chrissakes. They had garish pictures on every other page. He hardly had a classic in mind with Huck Finn. My detached high school impression was that classics were written as such from beginning to end by some humorless administrative body. If the Henry Higgins books are deemed classics and force-fed in school, kids will hate them, and only the "scholars" will go near them.

     But this bit is supposed to be about Herman Melville, so let me lay into the old guy: Of all the tired, so-called classics that are still automatically scribbled on reading lists year after year, the works of Herman Melville take the prize for fame out of all proportion to actual worth (although "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Pearl" come in a close second -- but no one outside of high school teachers takes such fluff seriously as literature). Melville is all scholarship and no readership.

    Herman was a failure in his time as an author. Any literature anthology or critic's article will ascribe this to his being so far ahead of his time. I can only accept this if his time did actually come later on -- which it did not. Plenty of failed writers were ahead of their time -- Whitman, for example, or even Lovecraft. Readers rejected Melville's stuff in the 19th century and have rejected it consistently till today. Nevertheless, Herman eventually became a regular on the "classics" lists, and always got great press with the lit historians, but never, never caught an audience. Teachers do not recommend him to their students because they think he's good, only because they know he's considered good. This kind of unquestioning ass-kissing in literature really has to stop, because it leads to the making of "canons" -- which is a bugbear for another time.

    I think it's very safe to say you have never read through Moby Dick (I've never encountered a soul who had), although the various "white whale" and "Captain Ahab" references are no doubt familiar -- probably through cartoons more than anything else.

    And God knows why, but many high schools or colleges prescribe Herman's  novelette, "Billy Budd." What was that about, anyway? There is nothing engaging in the story, but we could wrap the earth a couple times around with fatuous student essays written about the various "symbols" it supposedly contains. It may have just been me at the time, but if I had wanted Christ symbols, I'd read the Gospels (which I had already been led through ad nauseum in private school) or just find them on my own in more interesting places.

   Any common reader today finds Melville's strained, old-fashioned language impenetrable, and his drawn-out plots completely unrewarding -- but remember that the readers of his time didn't get it either -- supposedly because he was ahead of his time. So somewhere between our two times there should have been a common period when people did get it. But there really wasn't, as I said. 

I Tried to Read Melville, Really

    Once, while visiting my brother's extremely primitive dwelling in Hawaii (no electricity, no plumbing) I ended up with only two books to read. One was a coverless, mold-eaten King James Bible and one was the collected stories of Herman Melville. The Bible I had already perused enough times (by the way, "peruse" means "read intently", not "browse", so watch your language) and I had often tried to start a Melville story now and then. I figured that given the semi-tropical environment and nothing else to do, I would have the mental acuity to finally enjoy Melville. I failed.

     Another time I was living in northern Czechoslovakia. It was the dead of winter. My entire library consisted of ten selected books, which I had read over and over (more about these books later). The city library had only about half a dozen novels in English, and one of them was Moby Dick. With a good stretch of time in front of me until the snow let up, I gave Moby a shot. I actually dug in as far as the "wall" -- the encyclopedic part about whales wedged somewhere in the middle. Up to that point, I found the book only moderately interesting, no better than anything else I had read, but maybe a little too obvious in its symbols (all of which I forget).

No, I Won't Call You 'Ishmael'

     Herman was one of those fascinating adventurous types who could probably keep you spellbound with stories of his life, but who made the all-too-common mistake of trying to fictionalize everything and ended up being known as an author instead of an adventurer. Joseph Conrad did the same thing, but it usually worked. In thinking about these things, we shouldn't forget the thousands of adventurers who turned author and totally failed. A lot of them never even got published, but the rules for getting published were a bit less rigorous in Melville's time -- and let's not even go into the editing.  

    The life of Melville -- now that was a story. After very little formal schooling, the man gave up teaching school (at 19) and sailed off, ending up visiting the South Pacific, getting imprisoned a couple times by cannibals (who turned out to be nice people) and being exposed to the early effects of Western Civ on the Tahitian natives. He was well-read, he visited Europe and the Middle East and he also went all over America. He was a deep thinker and an honestly nice guy.

     If Herman had not tried to reshape everything into a fictional form, he might have come up with a magnificent autobiography or personal sketches. It would be first-rate stuff. And it would have doomed him to obscurity: Autobiographies never make it to the front line of reading lists, and most of them drop out of print. They're usually old hardbound books called "My Life and Travels" or "European Sketches" or somesuch. Pulled off the "fiction" shelves and put over in "true adventure" with stories about mountain climbers and Dave Barry travel jokes. I don't know why schools abhor good autobiographies, but they do.

     Every time I tried to read one of Melville's short stories, written in stale, unengaging prose, I kept turning my thoughts to Herman the man, so vividly described in the book's introduction. And after giving up each story after five pages, I felt a kind of remorse -- not only because others were actually coerced into reading Melville until they learned to thoroughly dislike him, but that his fascinating life deserved so much more.

Whaling as a Metaphor for Life? No.

     Assuming we know what Moby Dick is about without any of us actually reading it -- a white whale, a pegleg captain chasing it at all costs, a character or setting here or there to represent some religious theme -- we ought to go back and peel off what the scholars have told us and see what Melville really wanted to say about whales. He had a lot to say about them. Way, way too much, in fact.

     The screenplay for the old film Moby Dick was written by Ray Bradbury and John Huston. I heard Ray Bradbury tell how neither one of them had read the book (for the reasons I'm about to go into), but quickly ran over the plot as they understood it and wrote up a good story. The lesson learned here is that there is a good story -- or a movie plot, at least -- in Moby, but do not expect the movie to come to a grinding halt in the middle for a one-hour documentary narrative about all the different types of whales in the world.

     But that's what the book does. It continually barrages you with facts about whales, whaling, and the tremendous importance of whaling. Page after tedious page, which not even the most die-hard appreciators of Moby can follow with honest interest. I can't see any reason for this monomania, except that Melville is convinced that whaling is a metaphor for life. Today we just recall his "white whale," but Herman wouldn't want us stop there. It's all whales, all details of all whales -- and none of it possessing any allegorical value except what you might eventually distill from the unceasing barrage of detail ("Okay, okay -- whales are all-important, everlasting, powerful and givers of all that is good, and whalers are even more important as conquerors. Now what happened to the story?")

     Other lasting writers have chosen timeless metaphors for life -- "the journey", "the seeking of something lost", "the powerless man in a huge world", and of course, horses, ships and houses. Melville chose whaling. Right off the bat, our 21st-century sensibilities tell us this is an obsolete metaphor. None of us have ever met a whaler; we have never used a whale product. The nearest thing we have is "Save the Whales," which is a notion directly contrary to Melville's whaling-as-life set-up and only makes the reading harder. Because we are at such a loss to understand anything about whaling, we skip all that and put it down to some kind of avant-garde literary trick ahead of its time or maybe having a hidden meaning. But really, the whale isn't presented just as a symbol of eternal strength, but as the object of Moby's overriding metaphor -- whale hunting -- and not just the white one.

     Sadly (for Melville), the big deal of commercial whaling just kind of petered out, almost in his lifetime. There was still whaling, but it was up there with buffalo skinning and butter churning in social necessity. Whales were killed to make lamp oil, mostly. And margarine and soap. Substitute ingredients were easily developed long ago. As soon as kerosene (not to mention electricity) came along, whale oil was out. . Should I even bring up the drop in demand for whalebone corsets, blubber and scrimshaw knickknacks? On top of all this, these great whales Herman played up as eternal also almost petered out with little effort on our part.

     Really, it is hard to think of a more dated theme. At least the whale works in the biblical "Jonah and the Whale" story, and they don't fuss about describing the whale -- it's just a "big fish." Plus the tale is flexible enough to be either a fun kid's story or a hellfire-and-damnation sermon -- and the whole thing is wrapped up in just a couple of pages. Timeless and full of "themes." Not taught in school, of course. Church and state. Only in America would myths about people being swallowed by whales be controversial.

     Whaling may have been all the rage in Melville's time, but its irrelevance to anyone today lands his blown-out metaphor in the historical curiosity file and -- in my opinion -- severely damages Moby's "timelessness." Now, whaling as a passing futility, disappearing in its course like so many human enterprises before it -- that might have been a workable theme, but that's not what we get.

Some Unexpected Homage to Melville

     Melville was a deeper, more rounded person than you or me, and his writing did often break out of the mold of the times. And he probably didn't deserve anonymity. But now he has gotten acclaim for all the wrong reasons, and we're only flogging his reputation by feigning interest in Billy Budd or Moby Dick.

     As mentioned before, Melville could probably spin your head with stories around the campfire. But it stands to reason that any of his sailor buddies could do the same or better, and that his books are just the result of his labor in writing them up. It's only statistical luck that he was one of the few who did write them, and wrote them first.

     Along the same lines: Another writer, Jack Kerouac, has been hustled up to high heaven for On the Road, although millions of others in his time or ours (myself included) have outdone his little road trips a hundred times better, but just never turned experiences into books. It is really all very random -- how one person's experience can become a grand archetype for life when it pales beside the experiences of so many others.

Go, and Sin No More

     Thinking about what books should or shouldn't be put on reading lists is a subject for another time. Thinking why they should or shouldn't is an even better topic, because it leads us to wonder what it is we even want young people to get out of reading at all in this digital, illiterate nation. And if none of this works, if the whole English class idea is a failure, why do teachers have to keep doing it? If the desired skill is plucking out the routine "themes," then at least the books ought to be compelling reading. Ray Bradbury can pack a dozen more and clearer themes into one book than Melville ever could. And what's the sense of tiptoeing around "biblical" symbols in fiction when no one even knows the original stories they're alluding to? Any Isaac Asimov book does a better job of managing these things than most "classics," because the setting is usually in the future -- and he certainly requires a lot more thought.

     No teacher ever asked me (and they probably still wouldn't, I don't know) if I could find a book that not only arranged universal themes in a better and more captivating way, but that was actually good, inspired writing -- rich in style and vocabulary. Something that made me want to read more. Something like Edgar Rice Burrough's Synthetic Men of Mars, for example, or even the latest issue of Captain America. Or the Earthsea trilogy, the Wounded Earth trilogy or Lord of the Rings, for that matter. I and my group of "C" and "B-" friends used to check the bookstore weekly for the next book in any of the trilogies we were reading. From Katherine Kurtz's Camber and Deryni series, I not only learned some basic Latin, I was accidentally exposed to European history and the traditions of the Catholic Church, even though the books were set in a fantasy world of psychics and inquisitors (Plus they were very well written, but my teachers pushing Billy Budd knew nothing of that. We never caught our English teacher in the bookstore, and we knew that we were volumes ahead of her in good books). We knew about Ringworld and Riverworld and some of the mind-blowing stuff of Arthur C. Clarke. Cities in space, the quandaries of robots living in human society, the tortured thoughts of people enslaved by interstellar pirates. Talk about themes....

     And forget that "psuedo-sci-fi" crap teachers try to pass off ("A Wrinkle in Time" and all that), but the good Nebula Award-winning brain food. And comic books. Lots and lots of comic books and Mad magazine (well, not as it exists anymore). I learned more about history and literature from comic books and reading the historical summaries from the instructions for model airplanes than I ever did from a textbook. In my ideal high school, students would only read sci-fi and fantasy of their choosing (or anything else of their choosing, for that matter). The constant internal references in sci-fi to greater books would lead readers on naturally to "real" classics. At least it has for countless others.

     I know the distractions and amusements of our times may void my idea, but listen -- most young people, if they're exposed to unprescribed books, will develop a literary sense of their own that will mature over time. While that happens, they are exposed to all the syntactical and lexical richness of English. Their imaginations are developed, their instinct to seek pleasure in books is fixed. When the class had to read some lackluster 30-page story like "The Pearl," we already knew which of Piers Anthony's books was the best, or whether we liked him at all compared, say, to Steven R. Donaldson. We knew Anthony was too silly and had unrealistic characters. We knew that Donaldson had a great setting but kept getting sidelined into detracting situations.

    We also debated whether we could accept the latest characters from a new trilogy about a tribe that discovers a lost world that turns out to be America, covered over in forest centuries after WWIII. We argued about this while playing video games and taking our bikes over makeshift motocross jumps. And whichever of us hadn't read the book in question had to suffer typical peer shame (in all honesty it wasn't only books -- it was high scores in Ms. Pac Man and various strike-outs at after-game dances, not to mention too much TV). So finally, about 200 pages into the final book of Camber of Culdi, we reluctantly took 15 minutes to skim through "Billy Budd" or "The Pearl" for "themes," which we guessed at, got  B-'s on our papers, and then headed off to the bookstore to see if the next Piers Anthony book was out yet. Then we headed across the street to 7-11 for video games and comic books.

     We had no idea how literate we were -- until we went to college and found that the best and brightest had been bred on sci-fi and had always dodged the high school "classics." And that those poor souls who wanted to be English teachers knew nothing of that rich fantasy world, and were honestly ready, Cliffs Notes "themes" in hand, to pass "Billy Budd" and "The Old Man and the Sea" off on yet another generation. 

     But throughout it all, I scratched out my routine book reports on my routinely unread books, kept my love of reading intact because I knew nothing of "literature," and eventually came back to my old book lists. I still pick up a sci-fi book now and again, but find them mostly vapid and predictable. I rarely play video games at 7-11 (although I did sink a few quarters on Galaga at Fishermen's Wharf only a year ago). At one crucial time, though, science fiction and comic books filled my head with living characters and deep thoughts on the world and the future. And thank God they were unassigned.

    And if Herman Melville had grown up with me, I know he'd feel the same.