Herman Melville

20 years ago this week, after some unexpected delays, I moved all my stuff from Westchester to Brooklyn, over two trips on the Metro-North and MTA. I don't think I was pondering the significance of starting my New York City life on Herman Melville's birthday—I was more concerned with finding my first paying job (Kim's Video) and and the movie listing at the now-defunct Pavilion Theater (I saw Jackass Number Two opening weekend). But let's give Melville his due today.

I'd read Moby-Dick for my beloved Ilja Wachs' literature course at Sarah Lawrence the previous year. I felt awestruck by the book and the class discussions, if not quite bold enough to give my own takes (when we were assigned to pick a chapter to talk about in class, I chose "The Cassock." Before you look up what it's about, I'll direct you to John Waters reading it in The Moby-Dick Big Read.) But I kept meaning to reread it, even if not as frequently as Ilja's suggested every five years.

13 years later, I had enjoyed Billy Budd (sorry, Carmela Soprano), Benito Cereno (beautifully honored in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man), The Confidence-Man (cheers, Simon) and Bartleby, the Scrivener (thank you, Dad). I had also paid respects to Melville and his long-suffering wife Elizabeth Shaw at their Woodlawn Cemetery grave. But I hadn't revisited the Pequod since Ilja's classes, or was really giving it much thought in 2019, when I was feverishly concerned my biggest project, a book about Metallica for the (also now-defunct) publishers Rowman & Littlefield.

It had seemed like a good idea to pitch. I loved Metallica, and hadn't found the book I wanted to write about them—one that explored their cultural significance, emphasizing why this band really mattered. I had thrown my heart into a Metallica book proposal for the prestigious 33 1/3 series, submitted it hours before the deadline on New Year's Eve 2008, and felt crushed when it was rejected. I adapted some of those ideas from the proposal into a successful Metallica class for the Morbid Anatomy Museum by 2016, and was inspired to try pitching it one more time. The next year, I had a book deal. 

The book was due December 31, 2018. By summer 2019, it looked further from being done than ever. The editors were, understandably, breathing down my neck and threatening to rescind the book deal and advance. But it wasn't the book I wanted it to be. I'd been saying, again and again, that this wasn't going to be a fact book. How could it be? There were already fact books and biographies about Metallica. Also, people could find just about any Metallica fact already on the internet.

If I was going to do Metallica justice with this book, it needed to be different. It would be like my author hero Rob Sheffield's book Dreaming the Beatles, taking on the biggest subject in its field and somehow coming up with something thoughtful, unique, vibrant, essential. How could I justify the existence of Metallica FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Metal Band of All Time if it were just another fact book?

But here I was. I'm a nerd, and I like facts. I liked knowing that Metallica used the word "hella" in the Master of Puppets liner notes years before it entered the Oxford English Dictionary, or that Jeffrey "the Dude" Lebowski roadied for Metallica on the apocryphal Speed of Sound tour. The more fact-ridden my book got, the further it went from being the book I wanted it to be. The culmination of 30+ years of writing and thinking about music, and 20+ years of loving Metallica, the most complete statement of my life, was going to be a boring fact book.

For August 1, 2019, Herman Melville's bicentennial birthday, I gave Moby-Dick another read. It went by faster this time, on my two-hour work commute, with a copy on my phone's e-reader, my library app (read by Anthony Heald), and a hard copy in my backpack. I loved it even more this time and didn't want it to end. I was taking pictures of passages and sending them to my friends. Almost directly after I finished, I reread and re-listened, this time with the audiobook by William Hootkins. I'd been counting it in my top five books since college, but I think 2019 was the first year I started calling it my favorite.

Moby-Dick also showed me a path forward. My book would be a fact book, sure. But there would also be a religion chapter, a fashion chapter, a performance chapter, chapters on each character and album (again inspired by Dreaming the Beatles, but further empowered by Moby-Dick), and so much more. I set to make Metallica: The $24.95 Book, with its new title and cover, the Moby-Dick of Metallica books. That's probably not what it ended up being, but trying to do so helped me write and complete the book. 

"God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it."

"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Ilja Wachs died in 2022. At his memorial service on campus, his books were organized across a few tables for his friends, peers, and students to take with us. Some of us had traveled over continents to pay our respects. There were a few of Ilja's copies of Moby-Dick, which were going quickly (he definitely reread it more than once every five years), but I found a well-worn, hardbound Library of America edition that included two lesser-read Melvilles (Redburn and White-Jacket), filled with Ilja's notes and underlines. I took it home among five or so of Ilja's books.

I read Ilja's copy over the next few months, enjoying his notations (such as his monosyllabic Edna Krabappel laugh, a staple of our class that I was delighted to see in his notes), and mailed it to a classmate in Alaska when I was finished. 

At the time, I was also working on my next book. I'd signed a book deal in 2021 to write a 33 1/3 volume on Body Count, accepted 13 years after my first pitch. I ended the acknowledgments of Body Count (33 1/3) with a message for Ilja, adapted from Melville's dedication of Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

I'm currently writing my third book, and once again returning to Melville. I don't think I'll ever write another book without rereading Moby-Dick in the process.