A few months later, he’ll tell Hawthorne, “Yes, I’m working.” He must have written the same to Adelina, and it must have been in the flush of embarking on a project. He was intoxicated with the new story. She received an epic sort of letter and wrote back, “In my eyes, with your superhuman strength, you’re the very image of struggle and victory.”

Later on, she’ll say to him, “I now have such a keen sense of you that, even from afar, I can guess from your letters—their rhythm, their composition, your handwriting—whether you’re in the throes of your work or taking a little break.” The breaks are hikes, which he now takes on his own, at full tilt across the hills, his pockets stuffed with paper and pencils, seeing nothing around him but the sea, the sea, the sea, and then, at the bottom of the valley, his house, which looms out, and toward which he quickly bends his course, so as to return and write.

“This unattainable thing, do you understand,” he says one day to Hawthorne, “this unattainable thing that stands in the way of my life.”

“What is it, then, that you want to talk about?” asks Hawthorne.

“Is there anything I’ve said I want to talk about, other than that white whale?”

“Of course not,” says Hawthorne. “But each time, there’s an inward-sounding tone to your words. You seem to be wrapped up in a private passion.”

“No,” says Herman, after a moment. “Let’s put it the other way around: I’m wrapped up in a kind of general passion. Should we have anything to fight against,” he says, smiling, “but the gods who oppose us? Well, what do you think, Hawthorne? Isn’t it true? Imagine somebody who eventually takes up the sword, or the harpoon, to start a fight against God himself.”

“It’s better not to believe.”

“In whom?”

“In God.”

“On the contrary. Because then, where would the value be?”

“Or the madness.”

“Or the madness, if you like. No, I’m thinking, on the contrary, about someone who could see God as clearly as he sees his own nose in the middle of his own face, so to speak, as clearly as the white whale up above the waters. Someone who, seeing the whale in all its glory, and being at the same time acquainted with all of its mystery, and knowing to what lengths it can go in the frenzy of its power (but never, ever forgetting the wounds with which this God has disfigured him), would, even so, hurl himself toward him and launch the harpoon.”

“I think you’re writing a beautiful book,” says Hawthorne, after a pause.

It’s Moby-Dick, which was finished at the beginning of 1851 and appeared the same year. Dublin University Magazine said, “This is an incomparable book.” William P. Trent, in A History of American Literature, said, “This is Melville’s masterpiece. Never have we had, in this way, in a book, the breathing of the seas, the passion of the winds, the suction of the depths. The most indifferent reader ends up being drawn into the demoniacal pursuit of Captain Ahab, and the invincible whale is one of the most wonderful creations of a great poet.” John Masefield said, “Here are to be found the secrets of the sea. This book stands alone among all the books I know. Nothing else comes close to it.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of December 1851 said, in the course of an article that was ten pages long, “It is written in letters of blood. . . . You feel the grandeur of the oceans . . . the magnificent savagery of a Macbeth of the seas . . . lifted up by his poetic genius, like the winds of the main.” John Freeman said, “This is a creation as pure as Paradise Lost.”