Read: Moby Dick, A Love Story, by Jim Jasper

Jim Jasper, The Spouter-Inn, 2019, ink, pencil, inkjet print and watercolor on paper, 15×11 inches

I first met Herman Melville when I was in high school. I had not come out, would not for a few years, and I had been reading anything that felt like a road map. The authors I discovered, like Burroughs and Genet, were exciting in an underground way. But Melville was breezy, salty, simultaneously half-hidden and completely open, funny and serious. And very sexy. I was certain at the time that the secret of Moby-Dick, that Ishmael and Queequeg were lovers, was something only I had managed to decode. Their love was tangible to me and very reassuring. I read Moby-Dick as a queer love story. Decades later, having left New York for the Berkshires, as Melville did when he was working on Moby-Dick, I decided to make a drawing for each chapter of the book. 

Moby-Dick has 135 chapters and they are varied. Not all of them advance the plot, which lopes along for several chapters before it is interrupted by some natural history, or art criticism, or a discussion of whaling culture, law, technique. And the point of view changes, too. After about 40 chapters Ishmael is no longer the limited first-person I. He is omniscient. He moves into the future to tell another story, or steps aside altogether and lets the novel become a play. He is still the narrator, but he may no longer be Ishmael.

Before all of that happens, though, we have the simple history of Ishmael and Queequeg, which is a romance. This is how it goes.

We start out in Manhattan. It is the mid 1800s. Our narrator, Ishmael, is feeling “grim about the mouth” so he decides to go to sea. Not as a passenger. He’s broke, and anyway, he prefers to rough it. He will ship as a sailor on a whaler out of Nantucket. New Bedford is by now the epicenter of American whaling but Nantucket is its origin and mythical heart, and our Ishmael is a romantic.

On the way to Nantucket, Ishmael is stranded in New Bedford. It’s a cold, snowy night. He looks at a couple of inns but none of them seem to be the right sort for him. Too jolly. Too expensive. Heading down to the rougher part of town, near the docks, he finds the Spouter Inn. It is a lowdown place. Unaccountably, there is a Turner in the vestibule and some sailors are examining and discussing scrimshaw at the tables. The bar fills up with rowdy, drunken sailors, new in port. One in particular, the dashing Bulkington, catches Ishmael’s eye, but Bulkington slips out. Later, Bulkington ships on the Pequod, but he doesn’t figure in the plot, except that Melville/Ishmael inscrutably reminds us of him and gives him an apotheosis.

As it happens, all of the rooms at the Spouter Inn are occupied, so the proprietor, Peter Coffin, suggests that Ishmael share a bed with a harpooner. It’s Queegueg. He happens to be out at the moment selling his last embalmed New Zealand head. Never mind, it’s a big bed, in which Coffin himself, he says, enjoyed his wedding night. Ishmael undresses, hops in this matrimonial bed, and starts to doze. After some time he wakes up. The harpooner is back. Ishmael pretends to be asleep, and spies on Queequeg as he undresses. Ishmael is impressed with Queequeg’s—well, his ethnicity. His skin is a “yellowish purple” and he is covered with tattoos.

Soon enough, there is a misunderstanding when Queequeg finds Ishmael in his bed. Peter Coffin intercedes, sets it right, and they sleep.

Ishmael wakes up the next day in an intimate tangle with Queequeg, who holds him as if he were his wife, Ishmael says. Seeing Queequeg’s tattooed hand against the counterpane sets off a flashback for Ishmael, a dream-memory of sleeping as a child, and a phantom hand. Hands are an erotic trigger for Ishmael in Moby-Dick. Later, on the Pequod, a group of sailors together put their hands in a barrel of spermaceti to squeeze out the lumps. Ishmael goes wild, squeezing the other sailors’ hands through the sperm in a sort of ecstatic brotherly love.

Jim Jasper, The Lee Shore, 2019, ink on paper, 11×15 inches

Back to New Bedford. It is Sunday morning. Ishmael watches Queequeg dress. At breakfast, he compares the sailors’ tans. The paler sailors have been in port longer. Ishmael and Queequeg go to church together but Queequeg leaves before the service is over. After church, Ishmael heads back to the Inn and finds Queequeg with a book. This cements their friendship, and Ishmael begins to hold Queequeg in some esteem. Queequeg’s profile reminds him of George Washington, he says. Queequeg asks if they will sleep together again. Yes. They read the book for a while. They share a smoke. “. . . and when the smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married. . . .”

Jim Jasper, Nightgown, 2019, ink, pencil and inkjet print on paper, 15×11 inches

Then supper, more smoking, back to the room, where Queequeg gives Ishmael half of his money. They go to bed. They talk. They are not sleepy. After a while they share Queequeg’s pipe, and Queequeg tells Ishmael his life story.

The next morning it’s time to head to Nantucket. The ferries are running. They put their things in a wheelbarrow and head down to the port. On the boat, people titter to see them together. They get bashed, in a manner of speaking, because they are intimate with each other and because one of them is not white. One of the locals mocks Queequeg, who decks him. Later, the same guy falls overboard and Quequeeg strips down, dives in to the water, and saves him. This is the first of three times Queequeg saves a life.

Ismael and Queequeg arrive at Nantucket. They find a place to stay, and eat a lot of seafood chowder. Ishmael finds a ship for them, the Pequod. He gets a pretty poor contract. Queequeg, who turns out to be an ace harpooner, does a little better, though it’s clear that the Quaker shipowners are exploiting the workers as well as the whales. Ishmael, we learn, has progressive, even radical politics. 

Queequeg disappears for a long time, so Ishmael spies on him through the keyhole of their room. It turns out that Queequeg is meditating.

Once they are on the ship, the romance is interrupted. There is no privacy. As a harpooner, Queequeg is in a higher social class. And the narrative now has mostly to do with Ahab, the crazy captain, and his quest. But Ishmael and Queequeg still manage to grab some moments together. They weave a mat. And when a whale is brought alongside the ship, Ishmael holds a monkey-rope from which Queequeg is suspended, naked except for a kind of skirt-harness, working on the whale. Ishmael revels that this naked, upside-down view shows Queequeg off to advantage.

Jim Jasper, The Lee Shore, 2019, ink on paper, 11×15 inches

After a while, one of the harpooners is working inside a whale’s head suspended from the yardarm and there’s an accident. The head sinks with the man inside. Queequeg strips again, dives again, and saves the sailor from drowning. Rescue two of three.

As they enter the Pacific Ocean, Queequeg falls ill and commissions a coffin. He recovers, and the coffin is lidded and caulked to serve as a replacement for the lifebuoy, which, like most of the navigational and safety equipment on the Pequod, has been broken or abandoned by Ahab.

Eventually, the Pequod sinks, as you know, and all souls perish except Ishmael, who floats to safety on Queequeg’s coffin. This is Queequeg’s third rescue, and so ends the story.

My drawings for Moby-Dick are inspired by sources that would have been familiar to Melville—Turner engravings, which he collected; captain’s log books and seaman’s journals, of which the New Bedford Whaling Museum has a marvelous collection; natural history textbooks; whaling scenes; the sailors’ church in the town of New Bedford, Massachussetts. They are drawn on Somerset Velvet paper with black and white ink, pencil, watercolor, and chalk. Some of them have collage paper shapes. The full set of 140 drawings can be seen at www.jimjasper.com.

Jim Jasper, Stubb Kills a Whale, 2019, ink, pencil,  inkjet print and watercolor on paper, 15×11 inches