Melville statue recognizes greatness that came out of New Bedford

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“If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne writing after a meeting with Herman Melville

Who we are doesn’t always belong to just ourselves. Our reputation in the world is a funny thing, changeable over time, both during and after our lifetimes.

Herman Melville, a great man unrecognized for that greatness during his lifetime, will now be immortalized by a breathtakingly heroic statue in the city he made famous. 

I’m not sure that the statue, unveiled by Mayor Jon Mitchell a few weeks ago, captures all the essence of the real Melville but it certainly captures the heroic spirit of what it took him to write “Moby-Dick.”

“Moby-Dick or The Whale” is, of course, Melville’s epic masterpiece. It is not infrequently recognized as the greatest novel in the English language. At least for a time in the late 20th and early 21st centuries it has been thought so.

New Bedford, seeking to immortalize, and no doubt also to monetize, its own links to Melville and his masterpiece, is finally on the verge of realizing a statue that might be just the thing for tourism and branding. It is just under 175 years since “Moby-Dick” hit the presses.

Credit Mayor Mitchell for finally realizing this dream. Salem built its statue to Melville’s close contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, just about 100 years ago. Hawthorne’s reputation, of course, during his lifetime and immediately afterwards was more exalted than Melville’s. It has taken a bit longer to make the latter into a hero for the ages.

For all his obsession with the grandest of themes, Melville, during his own days on earth, was not a man who looked for his image to be revered.

“He hated photographs,” Melville historian Robert K. Wallace told me. “He didn’t want to be glamorized. He wanted to be judged for what he wrote.”

Melville’s prickly standards may have hurt him during his era as the time of celebrity and journalism was just starting, Wallace said. The longtime American literature scholar punctuated all that has been said about Melville and the battles he had with mid-19th century critics, critics who could not comprehend a Melvillean sensibility that is more 20th century-like than of his own era.

This past year, Wallace sat on the city’s 12-person advisory committee that conducted a search for an artist to create the overdue Melville statue. He says a strong consensus settled on Stefanie Rocknak’s striking design of a bronze sculpture of an older Melville rising from the waves and from a whale’s ribs, like Jonah.

The Biblical Jonah being swallowed by a great fish was, of course, the subject of Father Mapple’s sermon in the Seaman’s Bethel in whose garden Melville’s likeness will now reside. The distinctive creation will tie together the Bethel and the Whaling Museum across the street in a way that will undoubtedly make the annual Moby-Dick Marathon grow by even greater leaps than it already is.

In the words of the mayor, this statue was also designed to make New Bedford, a city that in recent decades has struggled with a negative self-image, better aware of its defining connection to one of the greatest figures in American literature, Herman Melville. The same could be said of New Bedford’s other great leader of national stature, African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Thanks to the determined work of the New Bedford Historical Society, his statue became a reality two years ago and is said to have inspired the one for Melville. 

“We shouldn’t be selling ourselves short,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell made the final decision on the Melville design after the advisory committee’s recommendation but he was already on board with the Rocknak vision. He did say he believes this statue, unlike the contemporary style, should be somewhat elevated on a base to convey its importance. He mentioned 18 inches but I think it may need to be higher. I agree that you want to elevate Melville, but I also worry that those protruding ribs could be vulnerable to vandalism.

Philosophically, you can go any number of ways with a statue, Mitchell said. You can create a work that prioritizes reality or you can create a work that is meant to convey a bigger message.

“I think the latter approach leads you to do a grander representation. And that’s kind of what I wanted,” he said.

Rocknak’s sculpture includes the full beard that Melville wore later in life, not the chin beard that was more like the one he probably wore when he arrived in New Bedford as the alter-ego of Ishmael. Although Wallace notes that Melville’s brother Gansvoort wrote that his brother shaved both his locks and beard before heading to sea.

Sculptor Susan Luery, one of the other finalists for the New Bedford statue, submitted a fine design of a younger Melville, complete with a bindle of his belongings on a stick, the wanderer who tells the story of Moby-Dick.

While it’s a good sculpture, it does not have the voice-of-the-gods power that Rocknack’s design has. Rocknak took the waves from the novel, and the ribs from Father Mapple’s sermon and combined them with the later-in-life Melville image that has come to be universally associated with the author. She evidently wanted there to be no doubt it’s Melville and she wanted to convey he had surmounted enormous trials to tell the tale of the great whale. I think the city has made the right choice.

“It’s wrapping a lot of his story together,” said Wallace of the chosen design. “I think it’s visually dynamic and attractive to the person who doesn’t know about ‘Moby-Dick’. You just want to walk up and look at it more closely. It’s inviting.”

Does it capture Melville?

Melville was by all accounts a troubled man. An intense, driven character who struggled mightily with issues of good and evil and the legitimacy of the dominant values of Western culture. All of it is manifestly on display in “Moby-Dick” and his other works. He was an early voice in defense of the practices and beliefs of non-Western peoples that the dominant society of his day, and sometimes our own, have dismissed as savage or uncivilized.

Wallace talks about Melville’s attitudes toward the French who he said had burned down the Marquesas islanders’ bamboo villages near to the time he was there. “He was very severe on the missionaries,” he said. “He thought they (the natives) had a communal system of living which he admired and that the missionaries were eradicating.”

Melville’s first and most successful book, “Typee,” was a travel and adventure story about the Marquesas after he had jumped ship from a whaling voyage in the South Pacific. In that book, he shocked much of the world by his non-judgmental attitude towards a people Westerners saw as cannibals with licentious sexual practices.

About a quarter to a third of the story was eliminated by the book’s New York publisher, Wallace said, including everything about American imperialism, the work of the missionaries and anything sexual. “Everything that criticized American society had to be taken out.”

Melville, Wallace believes, eventually resorted to saying what he had to say in fiction. And you certainly can see the Typee themes in “Moby-Dick,” “Benito Cereno,” “Billy Budd” and others of his works.

“That was an incredible crisis for him,” Wallace said of the publisher’s attitude toward “Typee.” “So he had to find a way in ‘Moby-Dick’ to more indirectly convey his critique of certain elements of our culture.”

Melville thought “Moby-Dick” was a monumental tale of adventure that would appeal to the popular taste. It didn’t. It is long and in many parts boring and off point. It is epic and has the breadth and depth of epic. Not an easy read and the 19th century public and critics did not take to it.

Melville was undeterred.

A failure and without financial prospects, he nevertheless continued to write and produce other stories like “The Confidence-Man” and the epic poem “Clarel” that have also stood the test of time. Today he is recognized as both a great novelist and a great poet.

But nothing Melville wrote after “Typee” and “Omoo” sold. He eventually humbled himself and took a job as a New York City Customs Office clerk, where he was said to have been the single honest clerk. He eked out a living there supporting his family for 19 years, writing in the evenings and spare time. When Melville died in 1891, the disordered parts of his very great novella, “Billy Budd,” were scattered among his effects.

My favorite image of Herman Melville is a photograph taken in 1861. A decade after “Moby-Dick” but five years before he took the job in the Custom House, Melville’s arms are folded tightly around himself as if in self defense. He peers out at you with a look that seems to convey both intensity and insecurity at the same time.

Rocknak’s image has Melville rising out of the waves with his chin up and his beard blowing in the wind like a sea captain. But Herman Melville was not a sea captain, he was a writer — a novelist, short story writer and poet.

Rocknak and Mitchell, I think, are not wrong to want to portray Melville as triumphant. Melville did, in fact, triumph over the literary and social conventions of the 19th century, but he did it at very great cost to himself and to his family by all accounts.

I’d like to see a little bit more of the metaphysical Melville’s triumph in the Rocknak sculpture if possible as he rises above those waves. Yes, Melville’s reputation in history doesn’t belong solely to himself but maybe at least partly it could.

Melville’s body of work stares straight at us and asks “Can you accept reality as it is? Can you speak up and say that Queequeg, the supposed cannibal, was a better man than Ahab, the captain of the ship? Can you realize that the brooding Ishmael, floating on Queequeg’s coffin after Ahab brought to ruin his ship and crew, was the real hero of the story?”

Maybe Melville’s chin doesn’t need to be quite so up and his beard doesn’t need to blow quite so resolutely in the wind in order to convey triumph. He could convey it with the intense and insecure look of the writer, writing his tale right before our eyes.

Post Script: I would like to convey my gratitude to Dr. Robert K. Wallace of Northern Kentucky University, who knowing me little, granted me an enormous amount of time as I worked out my thoughts for this column. Wallace is the author of “Douglass and Melville Anchored Together in Neighborly Style,” and knows more about Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass than I could ever hope to. He has been a longtime member of the Melville Society and is a very great asset to the city of New Bedford.

Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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