I first read Moby Dick fourteen years ago when I was getting an MFA in creative writing. My main memory of Moby Dick was the maniacal Captain Ahab and his obsessive search for the white whale that had taken his leg. But the novel was in large part devoted to the life of the whaling ship with descriptions about harpooning whales and cutting up their blubber to turn it into whale oil. I confess I didn’t emerge as a great proponent of Moby Dick.
Several years ago, I recommended to my book group “Green Shadows White Whale,” written by Ray Bradbury about his year in Ireland writing a screenplay of Moby Dick under the watchful eye of the American director, John Houston. He and Houston did as much sparring as Ahab looking for the whale, which attracted me to the book. Bradbury’s scenes of Irish country shenanigans were a bonus.
After reading the book, I decided to watch the movie based on the screenplay that Ray Bradbury wrote. If you’ve ever seen “To Kill a Mockingbird” with Atticus Finch played by Gregory Peck with utmost rectitude as a country lawyer, raising two young children by himself who becomes a champion of a black man accused of a crime he didn’t commit, you will be floored to see the same actor playing Captain Ahab.
The two characters are barely recognizable, which I suppose is why they call it “acting.”
I watched 20 minutes of the film before the first scene of the whaling boat harpooning a whale. As the blood began to spurt from an injured whale to the whoops of the thrilled sailors, I had to turn it off. I simply couldn’t stomach a movie about slaughtering whales.
The legacy of Moby Dick is still alive, however, as demonstrated in the book, “Wild and Distant Shores, by Tara Karr Roberts. The premise is the story of a woman named Evangeline Hussey, who ran a chowder restaurant on Nantucket. She was referred to briefly in Moby Dick, when Ishmael and Queegueg lodge with her waiting for the Pequod to be ready to sail. In the novel, Evangeline has a brief affair with Ishmael before he heads out to sea, which results in a daughter Rachel. Once Rachel learns that Ishmael is her father, she becomes obsessed with finding him. The novel is devoted to a multi-generational search for Ishmael, which echoes the search for Moby Dick.
The name Ishmael comes from a Biblical story about illegitimacy, engineering an heir, and the intervention of God. Ishmael was the illegitimate son of Abraham, engineered by his wife Sarah who wasn’t able to have children. She handed Abraham her handmaiden, Hagar, and Ishmael was born. After some divine intervention, Sarah then had a son, Isaac, and she and Abraham were faced with a dilemma. The first born Ishmael had to be discarded in favor of the rightful heir Isaac. Sarah sent Hagar out into the desert with her young son Ishmael with only enough water to get them where they would surely die of thirst. God arrived and provided water. Ishmael became the father of the Muslim nation. Abraham is the progenitor in both the Bible and the Koran. The name Ishmael sets up expectations that things are going to be dramatic and involve perilous engineering of outcomes.
Unlike Captain Ahab, who hunted down Moby Dick for revenge, Rachel’s search for Ishmael involves mystery. How would finding her father change Rachel’s reality, her sense of identity? She grows up believing that Hosea Hussey, Evangeline’s husband who died at sea two years before her birth, was her father, in a sort of community amnesia. When she learns the truth, she leaves Nantucket, using her powers to will her mother to forget her, in search of the man whose tales of whaling life have been printed in a Boston newspaper.
I too was confronted by a mystery about my father, leading to a search through DNA for my “real” father. My parents had four children, of which I was the eldest. Their blood types were RH positive and negative, which led to a blood anemia that killed my second brother Danny and required a full transfusion at birth for my third brother, Steve. When I investigated the syndrome, I learned that when the first baby (me) crosses the placenta, the mother develops a blood allergy that will kill the next babies without intervention. But the second baby, my brother Peter, was born healthy. I concluded that either I or Peter was not the child of my father. I had to unravel the mystery. I hoped the answer would explain a lot of other mysteries about my family.
My parents are both dead. I worried that sharing my fears with my brother might upset him (Wrong. He was unconcerned.) So why was I so determined to uncover the truth? In a convoluted 23-and-me research project that involved a cousin on my father’s side, and then my brother’s niece, I learned that we were all my father’s children. The explanation appears to be that my parents contributed one of their pair of genes to each of us. One of us (the first RH baby) got two negative genes. The other must have gotten a positive, and therefore dominant, one. My family had its fair share of dysfunction, but our identity was clear.
Rachel, her daughter Mara, and her granddaughter Annie are all imbued with psychic powers. Sometimes it’s the ability to see where someone has been. Sometimes it’s the ability to read their mind or predict the future. But it gives the women an intuition that feels like the power of whales.
One of the most beautiful parts of “Wild and Distant Shores” are lyrical pieces Roberts sprinkles in her book about the life of families of whales, including mothers, daughters and granddaughters, which mirrors, the mother, daughter and granddaughter in the novel.
The daughter skims her mother’s side, pleading. The mother swoops, flipping so her mottled belly gleams. The daughter dives, her slim jaws scraping skin as she gulps thick braids of white milk. Satisfied, she leaves to greet her grandmother, to prod her cousin into a chase, to bask in the warmth of the sunlit sea, to watch while her mother dives deep, her form fading into the cloudy blue far below.
This reverence for whales would have turned the crew of Moby Dick into cold-hearted killers. My sensibility in turning off the film, and Roberts’ beautiful writing about the life of whales, could never have been done when Ray Bradbury’s screen play was filmed, when whales were a commodity to be killed and harvested, not intelligent sentient beings.
Drama, intrigue, mystery, and the life of the sea all swirl beautifully in this new book, which shows the legacy of Moby Dick can be transformed for today.
fantastic! vivian shipley