One becomes uneasier, however, when reading back involves discovering the ‘true’, private Melville through his novels. Delbanco, mercifully, is far more circumspect here than many of the flamboyantly Freudian and overtly homosexual critics who boil down the corpse of Moby-Dick. Melville has been claimed by the gay community (‘every positive depiction of sexuality in Melville is a depiction of male masturbation’): what, indeed, is really going on in the spermaceti-squeezing scene aboard the Pequod?

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me... Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did that avocation beget.
Delbanco, however, does observe that the passage ‘is less freighted with sexual meaning in its 19th-century idiom than it might seem today’, and wonders ‘whether this attribution of homosexual feeling is an overdue acknowledgment of something of which Melville was aware or a projection on the part of gay readers’.

Still, this is a small clearing in the wild jungle of interpretation, and Delbanco lets a few tendrils of speculation snake in. Almost anything, of course, can be described as sexual, from the listeners who ‘droop’ after Father Mapple’s sermon (which is, apparently, ‘like post-coital exhaustion, his audience having been gratefully violated by his words’), through some ‘phallic’ chimneys, to a girl’s ear, which is firmly labelled ‘vaginal’.

In general, Delbanco shuns the wilder shores of Freudianism. And through the last sections of the biography, the ‘tornadoed Atlantic’ of Melville’s despair does flicker into life: exhausted, obsessive, as Hawthorne described him, ‘wandering to-and-fro over the deserts’ of ‘dismal and monotonous’ theological speculation. Hawthorne, surely, offers the most succinct summing up of Melville: ‘He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to do one or the other.’

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