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You could forgive the folks at the New Bedford Whaling Museum if they admitted to being a bit fatigued during the final days of December.
Downtown New Bedford is bustling, the museum is entertaining hundreds of visitors and everyone on staff is trying to balance work, life and the pursuit of holiday happiness. And the wind whipping up from the waterfront isn’t exactly a soft ocean breeze.
And, oh, by the way, they are making their final preparations for the area’s most important and successful cultural event of the season, the 30th Moby-Dick Marathon, which will bring together people from almost every state in the union and countries all over the world.
“It’s a challenge, but here’s the deal — we’re staying here on dry land, while Melville was out there on a whaling boat,” said museum Chief Engagement Officer Annalise Conway. “When I’m walking up Johnny Cake Hill and it’s cold and it’s a long day, I’ve found myself saying ‘Well, I’m not Melville getting on a whaling ship in the middle of winter. I think I’ll survive.’”
What has always been a well-run and well-attended event has been building steadily over the years.
For those not in the know, the Moby-Dick Marathon is a live reading of Herman Melville’s classic 1851 novel, which has thick roots in New Bedford history. Over the course of 25 hours, beginning on Saturday, Jan. 3, and ending around 1 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 4, the novel’s 200,000+ words will be spoken aloud by a collection of scholars, local luminaries and folks from far and wide who signed up to handle their own five-minute section.
“We can move many thousands of people through here, and we will over the marathon weekend,” said Amanda McMullen, who will be presiding over her eighth event as museum CEO. “We have a small but mighty team, an incredible group of people who put this together, and we have 200-plus volunteers, some of whom have been doing it for years. It definitely takes a village.”
The signs of this program’s success are clear. The annual Friday night Melville scholars dinner that precedes the marathon — this year featuring a conservationist theme with biologist Joe Roman — is sold out. The live reading slots have long been filled, and the standby list has hundreds of names. Special Saturday events were awarded seating by lottery due to demand. And although it is free, the organizers are requiring folks to register online just so they can get a sense of how many people will be descending on the large museum campus.
Pretty remarkable, in this day and age where technology has us testing the limits of speed, that so many people will come together to celebrate something so slow: a novel that is nearing two centuries old and is not an easy summer read.
Then again, when arguably the most significant American novel starts off right in the heart of little-ol’ New Bedford, it’s worth taking a pause from the future to pay homage to the past. As Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, notes in the first of 135 chapters, “meditation and water are wedded forever.”
“It’s such a lovely way to enter a new year, with quiet togetherness,” said McMullen, who noted that the reading added a quality of warmth and enthusiasm after the return from COVID-era distance. “I think after the stress of the holidays, there’s something comforting about sitting with a group of people and being read to.”
The marathon begins 185 years to the day after Melville set sail from New Bedford on the whaleship Acushnet in 1841, the beginning of a wild journey on the sea that provided material for his writing and led to the publishing of his classic 10 years later.
One of this year’s readers is first-timer Ed Doherty, who retired from a career as a court magistrate and settled in Mattapoisett — where the whaleship Acushnet was built.
“I love Mattapoisett, I live here now and I’ll live here forever,” he said, detailing some of the town’s proud history as a shipbuilding port. “It’s a nice opportunity to be part of the 30th.”
His slot is at 6:40 a.m. Sunday, and although this is new to him, he’s ready for his moment to shine: “I’ve done a lot of public speaking, I was an MC at many events, and I was in a courtroom calling out criminal names for years, so I’ll be ready to go.”
Melville would surely be puzzled to hear that such a thing as this year’s marathon would exist; Moby-Dick was panned and was out of print when he died in 1891.
But it was revived on the centennial of his birth in 1919, gained traction throughout the century, and was buoyed by the 1956 movie starring Gregory Peck. And as its importance in American literary history expanded, so did our area’s desire to claim it as its own.
“We’ve seen a lot of growth,” McMullen said. “The last several years we’ve seen a real range of people and generations. The first 20 years it was tried and true Melville enthusiasts, but I think it’s become more of a bucket list item. Hotels fill up, restaurants sell out — it takes hold.”
The marathon is coordinated by the museum’s director of events, Beatriz Oliveira, who is described in reverential terms for her ability to keep everything together. It begins with the “Stump the Scholars” event on Saturday morning (doors open at 9) and goes through 1 p.m. Sunday, with the museum open until 4.
There are many different programs running concurrently with the reading, including a Portuguese-language reading of the condensed version of Melville’s meandering main text. That program is run by museum associate curator of science and research Bob Rocha, a marathon veteran who used to coordinate the main event.
Now his focus is on the Portuguese version, which has taken hold in all of the Portuguese islands and mainland.
Groups in each area (and time zone) assemble to read the Portuguese text aloud, starting at the same time and finishing roughly four hours later. Here in New Bedford, where it was first read eight years ago, it takes place in the museum’s Cook Theater shortly after the main event begins.
“We’ll connect via Zoom to the other sites, say hi, wish each other well, and then we’ll all begin our readings,” Rocha said. “Hopefully one of the others will be a little slower than we are, so we can tune in to theirs and hear the end.”
He says that non-Portuguese speakers tend to poke their heads in to see what’s happening out of curiosity, “but Melville is hard enough to follow in English, let alone Portuguese.”
It’s a bit hard imagining today’s elementary schoolers transitioning from TikTok to the more ponderous delights of the mid-19th century, so there are efforts afoot to make the marathon as family-friendly as the book sometimes is not.
“Some of the text is pretty hard to get through, so you have to have some fun things to counter,” McMullen said, noting a scavenger hunt and bookmark-making program. “It’s important to us to get kids and family programming in there.”
Considering the arc and momentum of this 30th edition of the Moby-Dick Marathon, it seems overwhelmingly likely that these kids will see a 50th edition, a 75th, dare we say a 100th? The world Melville’s characters inhabit already seems like a different universe — how will people of the 22nd century view it? Will classic literature still be a thing?
These are questions for another day — for now, the appreciation for the past is as strong as it has ever been, and that’s very gratifying for everyone involved.
“Honestly, you don’t know what it’s like until you’re here and you’re seeing it,” McMullen said. “There’s just something about it. It’s like nothing else.”
Jonathan Comey is a decorated newspaper editor and columnist and a contributor to The New Bedford Light. Please send emails to him at jcomey@newbedfordlight.org.