MELVILLE'S "MOBY DICK" FROM 2YD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 371, 2 August 1946, Page 8

MELVILLE'S "MOBY DICK" FROM 2YD

Charles Laughton as Captain Ahab

adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick will be broadcast from 2YD at 9.2 p.m. on. Wednesday, August 7, with Charles Laughton playing the part of Captain Ahab. Moby Dick was written in 1850 and 1851, and based on its author’s adventures during a whaling voyage he had made ten years before, after which he left the sea for good. Near the farmhouse in which Melville wrote miost of the book lived another famous American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a letter from Melville to Hawthorne provides a glimpsé of the state of mind in which he wrote: "If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by oursefves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won't believe in a temperance: Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is for ever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring A RECORDING of a 30-minute

in concert-then, O my dear fellowmortal, how shall we pleasantly dis‘course of all the things manifold which now so distress us-when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity. But I was talking about. the Whale. ‘As the fishermen say, ‘He’s in his flurry, when'I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter." "As Wide as the World" Louis Untermeyer, American poet and critic, wrote an introduction to the present recording, and the following is an extract from it: "Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever produced in this country. It.is American in background, universal in scope, a work as wide as the world. ‘It is conceived, from first to last, on a vast scale,’ wrote Clifton Fadiman. ‘It shakes hands with prairie seas and great distances ... {t will remain, I think, America’s unarguable contribution to world-litera-ture.’ Viola Meynell declared, ‘To read Moby Dick, and absorb. it is the crown of one’s reading life.’ Yet when Herman Melville finished his masterpiece almost 100 years ago, he heard no such enthusiastic acclaim. The critics were baffled by the breathlessness of the subject and the vehemence of the style. The reviews were unrewarding. Melville’s publishers refused to give him an advance on any further work. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to get a consular appointment, tried to" support himself by lecturing, and spent twenty years of his life as a customs inspector on a New York wharf. The author of the most challenging and eloquent book of the century, died a silenced and unknown man. Symbolic Narrative "What, then, is the reason for Moby Dick’s re-discovery, for its continuing and ever-growing appeal? Not merely because it is a heroic epic, a gigantic sea-story, a huge panorama in which the ‘towering elements are actors. Moby Dick catches hold of the imagination and fas-

tens upon the mind because it seems so many different things to so many different people. On the level of sheer story-telling it is an adventure in excitement, the terrifying hunt for a white whale, a long and violent conflict between Captain Ahab, whose leg has been severed, and the monster who is the the cause not only of Ahab’s hate, but his death. But the implications are deeper, deep as the ocean which is the setting of the saga. Moby Dick is a symbolic narrative, a mighty fable; it is not only a prolonged act of revenge but a projection of man’s endless battle against malicious fate. It is a myth in terms of action, a myth which, according to Fadiman, ‘is a disguised method of expressing mankind’s deepest terrors and longings.’ "One thing assures the permanence of Moby Dick. It is written in an ecstatic prose which is always bursting into poetry; it is, in fact, an extended prosepoem. Moby Dick might well be read as one long magnificent soliloquy. It is in this spirit that Charles Laughton delivers Melville’s resounding lines. Captain Ahab takes on the proportions of a Hamlet or an Othello-those self-driven, self-doomed strugglers — as Laughton’s voice rises with many-voiced pasion and orchestral sonority."