Seeking Herman Melville, at land and sea

On a recent South Pacific cruise aboard the Star Flyer, a sailing ship somewhat bigger than a 19th century whaler and a lot comfier, I brought along Herman Melville's "Omoo." Melville had launched his writing career while racketing around the Marquesas and the Society Islands in his early 20s. In that languorous climate, he might well have gone the other way -- to seed, like the classic South Pacific remittance man -- but there was no avoiding his gift. "Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life" (1846) and its sequel, "Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas" (1847), made his reputation.

I had spent my senior year at Wellesley on "Moby-Dick," committing some of it to memory and wallowing in pessimistic transcendentalism. In the years since, I've reread it maybe more often than any other living American (or so I like to think), and I still have my ancient Modern Library edition, with its cryptic penciled marginalia:

"His double vision parallels the whale's," "Wham! ambiguities -- irony -- inscrutability" and (oh, dear), "Is welcoming death the most intense form of living?"

My first actual encounter with Melville occurred a few months after graduation. I met some classmates for lunch in Boston's Quincy Market. A lot of wine was drunk, and eventually someone suggested it might be fun to visit Melville's house in Pittsfield, at the other end of the state, so we all jumped in the car and roared down the Mass Pike.

When we got to Pittsfield, we discovered that none of us knew where Melville had lived, but after stopping at a couple of gas stations we were directed to a large yellow farmhouse. Out we fell and Wham! into the house, where we were greeted by a surprised docent. Some instinct had kept me in the rear, and when I stepped across the threshold I was hit with a profound depression. All I could think was, "I'm in Herman Melville's house, and I'm drunk!"

I felt his hand on top of my head, pressing me into the floorboards. I couldn't speak; I could hardly breathe. All I could do was trail my giggling colleagues. This miserable paralysis finally lifted in the upstairs room where he wrote his masterpiece. Through the window beyond his desk, you could see Mt. Greylock, a whale-shaped hump above the trees. Downstairs off the kitchen he had built a railless deck; from it, you looked across rolling meadow. When the baby cried, or his wife nagged, he could escape out here and pace up and down -- as he undoubtedly had on the deck of the whaler Acushnet -- in peace and quiet.