Recently, I was asked to name the top five American novels. Let me boil down the list to two: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In some ways, two books could not be different for I believe that in them, we have represented the two broad strokes in which the original American colonists found themselves, what Peter Brooks might call the Holy and the Rough.
Melville’s work takes place aboard the Pequod, which tries to catalogue a multitude of races and religions. In fact, Melville’s first novel Typee is the named pronunciation of the Taipis, a supposedly cannibalistic tribe in the South Pacific where Melville found himself after abandoning ship. So Melville takes up strange “heathen” customs, slavery in Benito Cereno and the South Pacific; however, he makes the Pequod a universal microcosm of the world at large. Yet for all its multifarious races, Moby Dick remains a New Englander’s novel told in Ishmael’s first person narrative. The roots are Puritan, chewing over whether Ahab is “predestinated” for his tragic, vengeful end or whether his own character (instead of God) has “destined” him. The novel segways shortly after “Call me Ishmael” into a weighty sermon. In Melville, we have a respecter of forms, a patient cataloguer, John Adams, a Bacon Essayist, the fiery Oliver Cromwell, a bearded novelist, with a suit, a tie, maybe a frock, we have Plymouth, and names like Providence, Rhode Island.
Twain’s work takes place on an unnamed raft, an escape from the cruel world of austere orthodoxy (Miss Watson, Widow Douglas),quixotic friends who sacrifice slaves for games (Tom Sawyer) cheats and scoundrels (the King and the Duke), horribly abusive, wild-eyed fathers (Pap), and towns in Arkansas where chew-spitting and lighting dogs on fire is a good pasttime, families whose feuds end in death (Grangerfords), and the lynch mobs that dole out Southern justice in merciless fashion. The only saving grace and goodness seems to be in Jim, Miss Watson’s slave, for whom Huck will be sent to Hell merely by contravening society and–Huck believes–the Bible’s dictates. The roots are Cavalier, chewing over a thoroughly pessimistic view of society in which the “least of these” –an uneducated boy and a slave–develop a deep friendship by sharing a lust for freedom. The novel starts off with an address to readers, “You don’t know about me except you read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer…” In Twain, we have a respecter of the unconventional, the starry-eyed wink, Andrew Jackson, a Walter Raleigh adventurer dark from the New World, a mustached poet in a white suit dressing up as a woman at Christmastime, workman’s clothes, smoking a tobacco pipe, recalling the Great River, full of the kind of muscle developed in backwoods of Tennessee or piloting the Mississipi, the name of Hannibal.
Moby Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn do share much of the same: navigating through waters, deeply concerned with sin and conscience, vividly bringing to life the weighty, glory of the deep and the devastating effects of unrepentant vengeance (Ahab’s bringing down the whole ship for personal gain) and vividly bringing to life the raffish, freeing beauty of the rivers and the devastating effects of enslavement (Huck and Jim are the respective slaves to the desires of all others until each finds freedom in the end.)
For their destinations, strangeness, wonderful characters, and deep thematic ponderances of sin and salvation, slavery and freedom, weakness and power, I find no deeper satisfaction than in navigating the waters through the eyes of Ishmael and Huck.
In Daniel Pawley’s “Never the Twain,” there is more discussion of the intersection of these two writers as seen in their observation of the world abroad. And Pawley goes deeper with insights into the two men.
Much more important, however, was the impact of the Middle East on the two acknowledged giants of American letters, Herman Melville and Mark Twain – giants because each contributed one novel which has a lasting place among the greatest novels ever written: Melville’s Moby Dick and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .
As an admirer of geographically vivid literature, I have frequently consulted – for pleasure and instruction – the Middle East accounts left by Melville and Twain: the daily journals of their travels and the published books based on their observations. Read on…
