I sat up quickly, put my legs down, my feet to the floor, arose, walked to the mirror over my typewriter and announced: "I am Herman Melville!"
And sat down, still staring at myself to fix my self-portrait in place, and began to type, half the time not watching my fingers, keeping that young man old in a night in focus, in place, I did not want him to escape.
Believing that, I sat at the typewriter, and in the next seven hours wrote and rewrote the last third of the screenplay plus portions of the middle. I did not eat until late afternoon, when I had a sandwich sent up, and which I devoured while typing. I was fearful of answering the telephone, dreading the loss of focus if I did so. I had never typed so long, so hard, so fast, in all the years before that day and all the years since. If I wasn"t Herman Melville I was at least, oh G.o.d, his Ouija board, and he was moving my planchette. Or his literary force, compressed all these months, was spouting out my fingertips as if I had twisted the faucets. I mumbled and muttered and mourned and yelled through the morning, all through noon, and leaning into my usual naptime. But there was no tiredness, only the fierce, steady, joyful, and triumphant banging away at my machine with the pages littering the floor- Ahab crying destruction over my right shoulder, Melville bawling construction over the left.
At last the metaphors were falling together, meeting up, touching, and fusing. The tiny ones with the small ones, the smaller with the larger, and the larger with the immense. Episodes separated by scenes and pages were rearranging themselves like a series of Chinese cups, collapsing and then expanding to hold more water, or in this case, by G.o.d, wine from Melville"s cellar. In some cases I borrowed paragraphs or entire chapters from back of the book to move front, or scenes from the middle to the half-rear or scenes tending toward midway to be saved for finales to larger scenes.
What nailed it fast was hammering the Spanish gold ounce to the mast. If I hadn"t fastened on that for starters, the other metaphors, like pilot fish and minnows and shark followers and sharks, might not have surfaced to swim in the bleached shadow of the Whale. Capture the big metaphor first, the rest will rise to follow. Don"t bother with the sardines when Leviathan looms. He will suction them in by the billions once he is yours.
Well, the gold coin, small as it seems, is a very large symbol. It embodies all that the seamen want, along with what Ahab insanely desires above all. He wants the men"s souls, and while his soul is dedicated to the destruction of Moby d.i.c.k, he is wildly wise to know and use the gold ounce as summons and reward. Therefore, the ship"s maul and the pounded nail and the bright sun-symbol of power and reward banged to the mast with the promise that gold will pour from Moby d.i.c.k"s wounds into their outreached cupping hands. Their religious fervor for minted gold runs in the invisible traces of Ahab"s equally religious fervor for the true wounds and the true blood of the Beast.
The men do not know it, but the sound they hear of the maul striking the coin"s fastening nail is their sea-coffin lid being hammered flat shut.
When Ahab shouts that the first man up who spies the Whale will earn this ounce, a man scrambles to obey.
No sooner up than he falls into the sea.
No sooner fallen than his body is eaten by the tide, which is to say, he returns not. The sea is hungry. And the sea is owned by the White Whale. You cannot buy or beggar it.
No sooner is the man lost than the tides are becalmed, the sails fall like the loose skin of a dying elephant. The ship is fastened to the hot sea like the gold coin forever nailed to the mast.
In the calm, the men began to fade and die. Exhausted with waiting, with the gold coin on the mast beating on them like a true solar presence, the morale of the ship disintegrates.
In the long and terrible quiet of many days, Queequeg throws the bones that tell his death and goes to have a coffin built. So in the long silences of heat and waiting we hear his coffin being sawed and nailed and the whisper as the shavings fall from the proud feather that is the symbol of his tribal power on the shaven lid.
Queequeg says goodbye to his friend and spells himself into a death trance. How to save him? How to bring him out of his terrible catatonic state?
Melville offers no solution.
One moment Queequeg is frozen and lost by his own secret will, the next he is up and about.
Only one thing, I reasoned, could break the spell. Love. That ba.n.a.l thing: friendship. If Ishmael were threatened with death, would not Queequeg, from the depths of his own inner hiding places, spring forth, summoned by possible murder? It seemed the strong, and thus the proper, solution. Let the men then, in the first case, threaten dying Queequeg. Ishmael intervenes when he sees a sailor cutting a new tattoo in Queequeg"s stolid flesh with a knife. Thus Ishmael proves his love, his friendship. Now, when the sailor turns on Ishmael and would cut his throat, what"s more reasonable than to a.s.sume that Queequeg, having secretly seen their friendship proven by Ishmael not a minute before, would shake himself free from his self-suiciding trance and thrust between murderer and his bedmate? The answer is a resounding Yes.
And in the moment of Queequeg"s seizing the sailor to bend him across his knee and murder him, why then, would this not be a perfect time for, at last, oh, my Lord, yes, at last, the arrival of the White Whale!?
Again, yes.
And the whale is sighted and shouted to view. Moby d.i.c.k heaves in sight, as Ahab pounds across the deck and the men gather at the rail to stare at the great white wonder, and Queequeg, in this moment of delivery, cannot possibly return to his self-nailed coffin, as Ahab cries to the men to row, row, and row again, out of his silence, this stillness, this d.a.m.ned and becalmed sea.
The men row out, following Moby d.i.c.k, and they row into a wind!
Good Grief, the lovely wind.
And I had rowed there, all in a single day.
Starting with the coin on the mast and the wind at last in the high limp sails and Moby d.i.c.k leading them off across around the world.
What followed, as metaphor, seemed inevitable in that single day of writing.
Ahab dares to row out of the calm.
So? The typhoon arrives to punish him for his sin!
And with it the certain destruction of the Pequod, and Saint Elmo"s fires, which ignite the masts and Ahab"s harpoon. "It but lights our way to Moby d.i.c.k!" cries the captain.
Ahab defies the storm and thrusts his fist down along the harpoon, shouting, "Thus, I put out the fire!"
The Saint Elmo"s fires are destroyed and the storm dies.
And the stage is set for the final lowerings for Moby d.i.c.k.
So I kept hammering away with the sailor falling from the mast, the sea becalmed, the arrival of the Whale, the almost-deaths of Queequeg and Ishmael, the lowering, the pursuit, the harpooning, the roping of Ahab to the Beast, the plunge, the death, and Ahab arisen, dead, beckoning from the side of the Whale for his men to follow, follow . . . into the deep. And all the while hungry and bursting with the need to bound off to the bathroom and back quickly phoning for sandwiches and, at last, six, seven hours later, midafternoon, falling back in my chair with my hands over my eyes, sensing I was being watched and looking up at last to see old Herman still there but exhausted, fading to a ghost and gone and then I telephoned John and asked could I come out?
"But," said John, "you sound funny. Doesn"t sound like you."
"It"s not. It"s him."
"Who?"
"Never mind. It"s over."
"What"s over?"
"Tell you when I get there."
"Move your a.s.s, kid, move your a.s.s."
An hour later I threw the forty new pages in his lap.
"Who was that on the phone?" he joked.
"Not me," I said. "Read."
"Go out and chase the bull around the field."
"If I did I"d kill him, I feel so good."
"Go have a drink, then."
I did.
Half an hour later, John came into the study with a bewildered look, as if he had been kicked in the face.
"Jesus," he said. "You were right. It"s finished. When do we start shooting?"
"Tell me, John," I said.
"Did old Herman whisper in your ear?"
"Shouted."
"I hear the echoes," John said. "G.o.dd.a.m.n."
"By the way," he said, as an afterthought. "About our trip to London?"
"Yes?" I stiffened, eyes shut.
"Take the ferryboat," said John.
33.
Half a year older, I came into Finn"s a day later, with rain bringing me to the door and rain waiting to take me away.
I set my luggage down by the bar, where Finn leaned over to blink at it, as did Doone and Mike and all the rest.
"Is it going away you are?" said Finn.
"Yes."
The inhabitants of Finn"s turned and did not drink from their gla.s.ses, large or small.
"A remarkable thing happened," I said. "It was a surprise."
"The sort of thing that is always welcome here." Finn laid out a Guinness. "Let us in on it?"
"After all these hours and days and weeks and months, I got out of bed yesterday morning," I said, "walked to the mirror, stood there and looked at myself, ran to my typewriter and typed steadily for the next seven hours. At last, at four in the afternoon, I wrote "Finis" and called Courtown House and said it"s over, it"s through, it"s finished. And found a taxi and came out to throw the forty pages in himself s lap. And we opened a bottle of champagne."
"Here"s another," said Finn, and popped a cork.
He poured it for all and filled my gla.s.s.
"At this very moment," Doone asked, as everyone waited, "are you that one who moved your hand and did the scenes?"
"Am I Herman Melville?"
"That"s the one."
"No," I said. "He was waiting to visit and could not stay. I was gathering him up all those days and months, reading and rereading, to make sure he got into my bloodstream or nerves or behind my eyes or whatever. He came because I called. Spirits like that don"t stay. They give of themselves and go."
"It must have been quite a feeling," said Doone.
"No way to describe it. You"ll see it on the screen someday."
"G.o.d willing," said Finn.
"Yes," I said, nodding. "G.o.d willing."
"Well, here"s to Herman Melville inside or out of this young man," said Doone.
"Herman Melville," said all.
"Well, now," said Finn, "it"s goodbye?"
"Will you ever come back?" asked Doone.
"No," I said.
"A realist,"said Finn.
"It"s just," I explained, "I live so far off and I don"t fly. And chances are I"ll never work in Ireland again. And if too much time pa.s.ses, I wouldn"t want to come back."
"Aye," said Timulty, "and all of us old or dead or both and no sight worth seeing."
"It has been," I said, nursing a final gla.s.s, "the greatest time of my life."
"You have improved the weather around here," said Doone, tenderly, wiping his nose.
"And for the h.e.l.l of it," said Mike, "let"s pretend that someday you"ll return, and by that time, think of the stuff we"ll have saved up to tell, and you the richer for it."
"Aye," said all.
"That"s most tempting." I smiled. "Dare I say I will miss all of you?"
"Aw, the h.e.l.l," said Finn quietly.
"d.a.m.n," said some others, looking at me like a son.
"Before you go," said Finn. "On the Irish, now. Have you crossed our T"s and dotted our I"s? How would you best describe . . . ?"
"Imagination," I said quietly.
Silence. They waited.
"Imagination," I went on. "Great G.o.d, everything"s wrong.
Where are you? On a flyspeck isle nine thousand miles north of nowhere!! What wealth is there? None! What natural resources? Only one: the resourceful genius, the golden mind, of everyone I"ve met! The mind that looks out the eyes, the words that roll off the tongue in response to events no bigger than the eye of a needle! From so little you glean so much; squeeze the last ounce of life from a flower with one petal, a night with no stars, a day with no sun, a theater haunted by old films, a b.u.mp on the head that in America would have been treated with a Band-Aid. Here and everywhere in Ireland, it goes on. Someone picks up a string, someone else ties a knot in it, a third one adds a bow, and by morn you"ve got a rug on the floor, a drape at the window, a harp-thread tapestry singing on the wall, all starting from that string! The Church puts her on her knees, the weather drowns her, politics all but buries her . . . but Ireland still sprints for that far exit. And do you know, by G.o.d, I think she"ll make it!"
I finished my champagne and then went about shaking each hand and buffing each arm with a gentle fist. "Goodbye, Timulty." "Lad."
"So long, Hannahan." "Boy."
"Mr. Kelly, Mr. O"Brien, Mr. Bannion." "Lad." "Yank." "Boyo." "Mr. Doone, keep sprinting." "I"m on me toes." "Mr. Finn, keep pouring." "The well will never run dry."