It was quite easy for me to share my passion for Moby-Dick with Lucien Jacques. A few evenings spent pulling away on our pipes by the fire while I translated certain passages, clumsily but with enthusiasm, were enough to convince him. From this point onward, the book became our mutual dream, one we soon wanted to share with others. The matter was settled when we realized that Melville himself was handing us the principles that would guide our work. “There are some enterprises,” he says, “in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.” This statement corresponded so exactly with our own natures and with the substance of his book, that everything seemed to be settled in advance, and there was nothing left to do but let things take their course. As is said many times in Moby-Dick, and far more eloquently than you could ever say it yourself: When the whale has been harpooned, you have no choice but to go after it; when it sounds, you have to wait for it; and when it breaches, you have to go after it again. And so it was accomplished.

A Melvillean sentence is simultaneously a torrent, a mountain, a sea, and, I would have said, a whale, if Melville himself hadn’t demonstrated, in peremptory fashion, that it’s perfectly possible to comprehend the architectonics of the whale. But like the mountain, the torrent, or the sea, one of his sentences rolls, lifts, and falls in complete mystery. It transports you; it drowns you. It reveals the realm of images in the blue-green depths, where the reader moves like a slimy piece of seaweed; or else it encircles you with mirages and echoes off deserted, airless peaks. It presents you with a beauty that resists analysis but strikes with violence.

We persisted in trying to reproduce its depths, its chasms, its abysses and its summits, its rockslides, its forests, its darkened valleys, its precipices, and the heavy mortar compounded from it all.

—J. G.

*Lucien Jacques (1891–1961), an accomplished painter and poet, was Giono’s first literary champion, a fellow pacifist, and a lifelong friend.

IN 1849, when Melville returned to America after a short stay in England, he had a strange item in his baggage. It was an embalmed head . . . but it was his own. He was familiar with the customs of the South Sea Island cannibals, and to keep company with a head severed from its rightful owner wouldn’t have surprised or frightened him. This time, however, it was his own head. He had every reason to spend his days and nights savoring it, detached as it was from his heavyset sailor’s body and filled with a scented balm sweeter than a May morning at sea, a May morning on the hills, a May morning anywhere at all; in short, filled with an indefinable and everlasting perfume.

In reality, he’d set out for England with the sole aim of consulting his publishers. By now, he’d already written almost all of his books. Well, from his point of view, he had already written them all. He felt rid of them.