Anthony Caleshu has recreated the tangled, obsessive and fascinating story. Or
a story, at least. As well as
Moby Dick, Caleshu uses Melville’s
letters, sources and criticism to create this excavation of obsession, of
creation, of storytelling and fantasy. As he extracts in ‘Wonderfullest Thing’
(a poem of lines from the novel), “Each chapter is another chapter…”. And in
this book, each poem is another poem, the tangents, enthusiasms, and knowledge
diverge, echo and ultimately stack up to make a compulsive response to the
original Whale.
One
of my favourite themes from the original novel, Caleshu returns to, is
Melville’s preoccupation with how whales are represented elsewhere. Caleshu has
several poems discussing the art of whales, unpacking their contents, imagining
relationships and hamming up new stories from them:
“The dialectical struck us: portrait or landscape?
fish or fishmonger? In the white and green, we could see all of our dreams.”
(‘A Very-Large Oil-Painting, Thoroughly Besmoked’)
“anachronistic…
the time: post-war, post-apocalyptic, post-whale” there is time travel a-plenty
here, both in Caleshu’s recasting of himself as a confidente to the Melville
family (there are letters between himself and Maria and Augusta Melville, from
1850), and also in the linguistical play and references (Pulp, ACE grants and The
Writers’ Room photography series from The
Guardian all stand out).
“It’s the first night in a week of nights that we
haven’t had any
Herman
between us.
Not even a letter to his mother.
But now I’m remembering his mother’s letters to
him,
and to me, to whom she was always good to write.”
(‘How I Met Your Mother (with the Help of
Melville’s)’)
And
so, like with my reading of the novel, I became dizzy to where I stood in
relation to events, fuzzy around the edges of reason and rationale. A position
I like, that reminds me of being at sea, at staring too long at an empty
horizon, too long without landed references and familiarity.
The
contemporary letters are joined by Caleshu taking the role of Captain Caleshu,
addressing his son Ishmael Caleshu on his 18th birthday. This
sequence of five prose piece dances between a touching discourse between father
and son, a pastiche of seaman talk, a homage to all things absurdist and a
dalliance with a stream of conscious confessional that leaves us hanging onto
an open end, as if the speaker has just slipped his mooring and is out of
earshot.
“The passage I just read to you is not from the
Oxford Book, but I think you’ll agree that it is engrossing nonetheless. There
is nothing so elemental as water. Water has no past prejudices.” (“’What makes
thee want to go a whaling, eh?’”)
It
works, as the rest of the book works (for me, at least) – best when I don’t
focus too much on meaning, but cock my head at sense and tone, letting odd
sentences latch into memory, but on the whole leave it sloshing a sense of
regret, aspiration, hope, love and uncertainty.
If
the collection was made of such play, I might struggle to engage with its continual
joking, the effect of which being masking, diffidence and remoteness. But it
isn’t. Poems such as ‘The Making of Ahab’, are far more logical, or perhaps
coherent in how they flow forwards from the first descriptive couplet of
absence through how Melville’s novel is as much about the white space as a
poem, to the revelations of the potency, fury and frustration of the captain,
both in the novel and to the reader.
“None of us on board have any reason to question
the nature of the voyage, when all of a sudden
the whiteness of a blank page
rises up from beneath –
the author’s quick turn …”
The
sense of inevitability in this poem is tragic, and mostly unsaid, as the lines
become shorter and shorter, leaving more and more white – again the vast sea,
perhaps?
This
poem ends with a “we” – the reader, the crew, all of us… Elsewhere I enjoyed
this communal narrator was in the farce, ‘Moby-Dick: The Film’ (there is also
reference to a musical). Where the we seems
to be the directors, the film crew, the actors, all struggling to make a film
that attempts to be more faithful than previous but feels more like Eric Sykes
or Tony Hancock are involved than Richard Attenborough.
“The director’s
head is firmly in his hands when someone
accidently triggers the whirlpool.”
Perhaps
it is impossible to make a film
faithful to such a book, just as Caleshu could well be “await[ing] technical
corrections” to this book.
Although
while it has this jokey, throwaway tone that keeps resurfacing in poems, each
are clearly carefully crafted in their balance of tenderness, folly, research
and personal experience. It took me several sittings to be able to step back
from piecing the poems together, from relating them to incidents in the novel
to slip into the eddy that is obsession, spiralling round and round the Whale,
whales, Melville and what it means to create – relationships, art, literature.
Once there, I didn’t want to leave. The collection is a great achievement, a
great honouring of an obsessive book, and offered me a new perspective on the
novel, acting as first mate rather than a sequel.
