The literary clique in New York and Boston first patronized, then warned him, then dismissed and ignored him. He'd allowed the reprinting of his first book, Typee, to be ideologically and sexually bowdlerized, but the mighty captains and bloodsuckers never forgot his hints of escapades with naked cannibal girls. When he married Lizzie Shaw, the wedding was small and private, on account of the scandal. Between Omoo and Redburn, his long metaphysical satire Mardi had hinted of strangeness like the subtle darknesses within footprints on white snow. Melville would have been an outcast in either his time or ours.
Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more.
Driving out of Albany nearly 150 winters after he hooked his white whale of words, I sank through sleet rushing and foaming in stinging tunnels that trapped the headlights, rattling against the windshield in speckled lances while other headlights approached like bestial eyes. Sleet exploded like fireworks, enlarging now into winter's grapeshot, winter's bullets whirling at me. In the dark fields, sad snow lay in already dirty patches, cast off, shredded skin of purity, and all the locked churches might as well have been white whales. The car sank horizontally down tunnels of snow. Suddenly, long white lines of snow had conquered the road itself, frosting its blackness grayer and grayer into whiteness.