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“Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes . . . ,” Melville wrote in his review, “or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,—this, I cannot altogether tell.” “[T]here is something lacking—a good deal lacking,” Melville wrote in February 1851 to Duyckinck, “to the plump sphericity of the man. What is that?—He doesn’t patronise the butcher—he needs roast-beef, done rare.” What Hawthorne needed, more than anything else, was a cannibal friend like Queequeg.
    Late in life, long after Hawthorne’s death at fifty-nine, Melville told his son, Julian, that he believed his father “had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career.” The essential inscrutability of Hawthorne is everywhere in Moby-Dick —in Ahab’s agonizing need to know what is really behind the world’s “pasteboard masks,” in the way the White Whale resonates with fearful and fantastic possibilities and yet ultimately reveals nothing.
    Prior to meeting Hawthorne, Melville had been churning out novels at such a furious rate (he’d penned his most recent two books in a matter of months) that his British publisher advised him to slow down. Under the steadying influence of Hawthorne, Melville paused in the middle of a quite ordinary, picaresque novel about whaling and completely rethought the story in terms of the power of darkness he recognized in Hawthorne’s short stories. Only then did he plunge once again into his whaling material, this time creating the masterpiece for which he will always be remembered.
    Through Ahab, Melville found a way to articulate what he called in his review of Hawthorne “the sane madness of vital truth,” those Tourette’s-like outbursts that no one wants to hear, especially since they happen to be true. If a life amounts only to a senseless death, what is a person to do? Ahab has decided that the best and noblest option available under the circumstances is to attack some substitute for this absurd and ultimately amoral life, such as a white whale, and hurl all his rage and fear and hate at this thing even if he knows, in his heart of hearts, that it will lead not only to his own death but to the deaths of those who follow him.
    One of the reasons Ahab is such a compelling character is that Melville saw much of himself in the captain’s tendency to regard the world symbolically. This is the tendency Melville had to battle throughout his literary career as his metaphysical preoccupations perpetually threatened to overwhelm his unsurpassed ability to find the specific, concrete detail that conveys everything. He also identified with Ahab’s outrageous ambition, for Melville was, he at least hoped, creating a “mighty book.”
    The other breakthrough associated with his invention of Ahab was something he clearly got from Hawthorne: a way to put artistic distance between himself and the very thing he most identified with, thus providing a way to write about the darkest and most frightening aspects of human experience. That was why he could write to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”
    Ultimately, however, Melville had difficulty maintaining Hawthorne’s cool remove from the darkness. As Sophia Hawthorne observed, Melville engaged with life; he also engaged with his characters. In December 1850, as he rebuilt his novel on the blasted, ripped-apart foundations of the first draft, he wrote to Duyckinck about the difficulties of transferring what he had in his head onto the page: “And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due