We asked some of our brilliant authors for books they’d like to give- or get – for Christmas. The next installment of our Christmas wishlist series is from Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan.

I’d give Jeremy Mynott’s beautifully compendious Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience (Princeton University Press) to my friend Dennis Minsky, naturalist extraordinaire on Cape Cod, because I’d like him to stop correcting my Anglo-centric spelling of bird names.

I’d give Hal Whitehead’s Sperm whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (University of Chicago Press) to everyone I know.  It’s an eye-opening, life-changing account of the world’s largest predators; animals possessed of the biggest brain ever known, yet whose nature remains vastly misunderstood.  Dr Whitehead’s book is the Moby-Dick for our times.  His final chapter, which posits the idea that sperm whales may have evolved their own religion, is truly astounding.

Dr Whitehead’s book would be aptly partnered in my present-giving with John Burton’s Ta-ra, Johnny Boy: Boy whaler to Rainbow Warrior, a self-published memoir which is a salutary lesson in the way our relationship with whales has (thankfully) moved from whale hunting to whale watching.  Burton’s account of the eyes of a harpooned and dying sperm whale looking up at its assailants will haunt me for the rest of my life.

On another note, I’m eagerly awaiting the lustrous new catalogue to this year’s Tate St Ives’ The Dark Monarch (Tate publishing) exhibition, because it sums up all that I find fascinating in artists as (ostensibly) disparate as Derek Jarman and Cecil Collins.  The British neo-romantic period of painting is one of my favourites – a lost England, as evoked in the films of Michael Powell and the writing of Denton Welch.

But the one book I really can’t wait to get my hands on is John Waters’ forthcoming ‘memoir-in-homage’, Role Models (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux).  Waters is one of the greatest ironists America has produced, and in this new volume, he promises to spill the beans on his muses.  We’re promised chapters on Rei Kawabo, high priestess of Japanese minimalism and creator of Comme des Garcons (for whom the filmmaker occasionally models), as well as less ‘tasteful’  essays on Charles Manson.  But then, what you expect from a man who, as a teenager, re-enacted the Kennedy assassination his parents’ front lawn in Baltimore?

Leviathan is the story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.

Leviathan is also the winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize. Get your copy here.

Click here to read other author’s wishlists.

For years, Moby-Dick defeated me. I think I was put off the book as a child when I watched the 1956 John Huston film — made two years before I was born – on our tiny, old-fashioned black and white television. Seeing it on the ghostly cathode ray tube, housed in a veneered cabinet, was more like viewing some Edwardian or Victorian apparatus for contacting the departed spirits.

Huston’s film promised so much; the rearing White Whale, the monster of my deepest imaginings. But it merely delivered a wordy worthiness. It took me thirty years to discover that this was, in itself, a genuflection towards the greatest American novel — a book which, to some people, is as much unreadable as it is unfilmable.

It still seems strange to me that such a great work of literature should begin with such a famously terse and concise opening line – ‘Call me Ishmael’ — only to follow it with 135 chapters of allegory, digression, fantasy and, sometimes wilful detail.

I’ve since realised that the mistake is to try and read Moby-Dick too young. It is the kind of book you have to be ready to read. You can’t pick it up lightly — its 600 pages tell you that much. Its true power lies in wait, ready to reveal itself.

It wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I discovered the wonder, and subversion, of Melville’s novel. ‘I have written a wicked book’, Herman told his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, himself a writer obsessed with the abiding nature of evil, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’.

I would carry about with me a tiny, Oxford’s World Classics edition of Moby-Dick, anonymously bound in blue cloth, to be studied chapter by chapter as I sat on the Tube or on an aeroplane. Through its pages, I submersed myself in a world of men without women in pursuit of the whale, an epic designed to reflect America’s first imperial venture – the getting of the oil which lit and lubricated the western world.

At first Melville intended his book to be a rip-roaring romance of the high seas. But his meeting with Hawthorne — on the peak of Monument Mountain, in the land-locked Berkshires of Western Massachusetts — completely altered the course of the book. That meeting of minds, and souls, turned Melville’s book from an adventure story into what he called his ‘counter Bible’. It was as if he and Hawthorne had taken flight like birds of prey wheeling about the summit of the mountain, following the updrafts and the hand of God, rather than the directions of gravity-bound humans below.

During a difficult personal time, Melville’s writing became, for me, a kind of solace. I read Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby. Their power stayed with me too, but it was Moby-Dick to which I returned, again and again. The utter involvement it required — yet the fragmentary quality which allowed one to read it almost like a daily sermon — provided something more than mere escape.

My interest in whales had meanwhile became an obsession. On my visits to Provincetown in Cape Cod, I saw whales in the wild for the first time, and found myself returning there again and again. My friend, the film director John Waters, was soon accusing me of spending more time with whales than with humans, of circulating ‘whale porn’ when I showed him my latest cetacean snaps, and of generally being a ‘whale-stalker’.

To me, the 85 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises, in all their infinite variety, became a kind of living bubble-gum card set, to be collected and admired. Off the coast of New England, I saw humpbacks breaching and feeding co-operatively, blowing bubble-nets below the surface to trap their prey of tiny sand eels.

I saw fin whales, the second largest animal on Earth, and so fast that they were once known as the greyhounds of the sea. And I saw the most endangered of all whales, the north Atlantic right whale — so-called because its thick blubber meant that it floated when dead, and was therefore the ‘right’ whale to hunt. Fewer than 400 of these whales remain, and their species may well be extinct by the end of the century.

I saw white-sided dolphin racing off the bows of our ship; pilot whales swimming in great schools; and minke and sei whales. Each had their own discrete beauty. It seemed extraordinary to me that, within my own lifetime, humans had hunted these animals; or that, in the Southern Ocean and in the sub-Arctic, the Japanese and Norwegians still do.

Nor were we British innocent. Even as I was a boy in the 1960s, British fleets were still joining those of Russia, Norway, Japan, South Africa and Australia, hunting the whale. Indeed, this was the peak of worldwide whaling, when more whales were killed in a single year than in 150 years of American whaling.

Melville’s book is perhaps the greatest guide we have to the heyday of Yankee whaling. His fascination with the techniques of catching whales — the product of his own whaling voyage, begun in New Bedford in 1841 and ended, rather ignominously, in desertion in the South Pacific — certainly cater to what is perceived as a peculiarly male taste for facts and figures.

Yet I also know plenty of women who delight in the book and who have discovered its humanity and its humour. Melville’s uncertain narrator, for instance, is entirely inconstant, wry and sarcastic, satirising and denying, even, his creator’s attempt at cohesion and his attempts to keep the story moving along.

No sooner will the author get into his swing — sending Ahab off towards his ultimate target, of revenge against the beast which scythed off his leg and dismasted him — than the sly Ishmael will take the reader aside to supply some arcane cetological detail. How the whale supplies the oil for the coronation service of the British monarch; or how, once butchered, its foreskin is worn by a chosen sailor as a kind of sacerdotal guise which Ishmael punningly refers to as a ‘archbishoprick’. (I note that the new ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’ exhibition in London boasts a whale’s foreskin).

Moby-Dick boasts one of the most extraordinary passages of homoeroticism in Victorian literature: the extended scene in which Ishmael shares a bed with a naked tattooed cannibal, Queequeg, and over a shared pipe the morning after, declares himself and the native to be man and wife. In another chapter, ‘A Squeeze of the Hand’, Ishmael and his fellow whalers sit around a vat of spermaceti, smoothing out the lumps and occasionally caressing each other’s hands in what one modern critic has described as a ‘circle jerk’:

Yet just as Melville’s passion for Hawthorne went beyond sex or intellect — ‘Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality’, Herman told Nathaniel – so its product transcends any kind of limit or definition we attempt to place upon it. It is comparable only to another idiosyncratic work of genius with which it is contemporary — Wuthering Heights.

In Emily Brontë’s gothic creation, published five years before, in 1847, the monster is the wild heath — almost a living thing in itself. For Melville, living through an age of questioned faith in God, Nature becomes itself a kind of challenge. To the new republic of which he was the literary product and ambivalent champion, the enemy was the wilderness. Old Europe was still fighting amongst its states and principalities; for the new world, the great swathe of unconquerable land, even as the unchallenged ocean lay around it.

For the new United States, there were no border enemies: only the wilderness itself, its peoples and its animals — which were quickly being pushed to extinction, be they the buffalo or the Sioux. It is an abiding paradox that huge stretches of America do remain unconquered, untamed – a sensibility evoked both in last lines of Melville’s final chapter, ‘then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago’.

It is clear to me that F. Scott Fitzgerald was echoing Melville in the famous, near-mythic ending of The Great Gatsby, in which ‘the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night…So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.’ In my mind, Moby-Dick was equivalent to time-travel — just as the White Whale itself is deemed immortal, able to be present in two places at the same time.

Melville’s book was also a political allegory (not least on the issue of slavery which was even then provoking internecine war), religious metaphor (signifying Melville’s struggle with his inherited Calvinist guilt and his romantic adult persona), and literary masterpiece. But when it was published in 1851, it met with largely antipathetic reviews. ‘So much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature’ said the Atheneum; ‘rhapsody run mad’, said The Spectator. The first edition of 3,000 copies never sold out, the remainder being consumed in a publishers’ fire in 1853.

Melville, who had been lionised for his sensual, sexy travel books, with their accounts of dusky natives in the South Seas, found that the book which he knew to be his masterpiece had no audience. Rejection made him an exile in his own country. For the last half of his life, he met literary obscurity with ever more obscure verse, written whilst working as Deputy Inspector No. 75 of the US Customs Office in Manhattan.

When he died, in his Gramercy Park house in 1891, writers such as Edith Wharton confessed that they had had no idea that the man was still alive. Glued to the inside of his writing desk, where the manuscript of the unpublished Billy Budd, Sailor lay, was a clipping: ‘Keep true to the dreams of thy youth’.

It would take another generation to discover the power of Moby-Dick. When it was republished in England in the 1920s, D.H. Lawrence declared Melville to be ‘a futurist long before futurism found paint…a mystic and an idealist’, author of ‘one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism’. E. M. Forster called it a ‘prophetic song….It lies outside words’. Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden joined in the hymn of belated praise. Soon the book had taken its place within western culture, to the extent that it is now as much shorthand for impossible ambition as it is for the whale.

To contemporary readers, Moby-Dick seems startlingly modern, not only in the way it was written, but in its subject matter, too. Ahab’s wanton chase has been evoked in the ‘war on terror’ — as the west attempts to pursue an uncatchable foe.

Only a few days after the 9/11 attacks, Said wrote, ‘Collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time…’ And if you had any doubt about its presicence, just read the last page of the first chapter, in which Ishmael satirises his own self-importance in mock newspaper headlines:

‘Grand contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.’
‘WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL’
‘BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN’

American literature and the great American novel remain measured by Moby-Dick, and Melville still continues to fascinate other writers. I’ve just read, and can recommend, Sheridan Hay’s new novel, The Secret of Lost Things, (HarperPerennial) in which her modern-day heroine, working in a thinly-disguised version of the famous New York secondhand bookstore, Strand Books, becomes obsessed not only with Moby-Dick but also with the relationship between Melville and Hawthorne.

Ironically, the book which failed its author in his lifetime succeeded in exporting American culture around the world, just as the Yankee whale-ships took America to the furthest corners of the globe. In the same way, the influence of Melville’s book is transcultural, going beyond history and literature.

Where would we be without fish and chip shops called ‘Moby Dick’s’; without Starbuck’s, named after Ahab’s recalcitrant first mate; without the music of Richard Melville Hall, better known as Moby and a distant relation of Melville himself, whom I met in his lower Eastside tea shop, and who directed me to ‘Herman Melville Place’, the street named after Manhattan’s sometime resident?

We would be without the literary incarnation of the whale, something so huge it seems beyond description; an entity which haunted Melville as it did Ishmael, and which continues to haunt our collective imaginations:

…the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose…there floated into my inmost mind, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

Arena: The Hunt for Moby-Dick, written and presented by Philip Hoare and directed by Adam Low, airs on Saturday 20 September. See www.thehuntformobydick.com.

Sunday 21 September, is Whale Night on BBC 4, featuring classic whale films from the Natural History Unit, and four new short films on whales from Arena.

You find the source notes to Phillip Hoare’s book at www.harpercollins.co.uk/leviathan as well as photographs of whales taken by Phillip during his research.

On Saturday 20 September, the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich is presenting a ‘Whale Day’, including lectures from Philip Hoare, Nick Selby on Moby-Dick; Richard Sabin on the National Cetacea Collection at the Natural History Museum; Janet West on Scrimshaw; and Elizabeth Evans-Jones of the Natural History Museum on the Cetacean Strandings programme. See www.nmm.ac.uk
Thursday 2 October at National Oceanographic Centre, Southampton, Philip Hoare will be giving an illustrated talk on Leviathan or, The Whale, 7.30, free. See www.noc.soton.ac.uk/nocs/marinetalks.php