From the Mast-Head

From the Mast-Head S ome years ago—well, really quite a few—I found myself in college on the Southside of Chicago employed in the Dickensian role of “stacks rat.” At the time, the University’s library was crammed into a block of interconnected, turn-of-the-century buildings with spacious gothic reading rooms and with its millions of volumes stored on various sub-sub-basement levels that seemed to go “all the way down,” like the layers of tortoises holding up the world. My job was to return books to their proper place on the shelves, which I did diligently, pushing a metal “truck” loaded with books destined for specific worlds called the HT’s or PS’s, depending upon the Library of Congress designation. And like the good scurrying stacks rat I was supposed to be, I shelved and shelved, unless I happened to find myself in a remote nook reading one of the book’s I was supposed to shelve, for a spell, or two. One sophomore day, I stumbled upon a book on whose spine were printed the words, “Waruto Hoittoman,” which I found enticing. That year, I was beginning to immerse myself in all things having to do with American literature, and since I was in a sub-level having to do with Asia, I was that day being the best of stacks rats, shelving books right and left, some in the right places. But Waruto Hoittoman caught my eye as it seemed English, though not quite and yet readable nevertheless. I cracked open the book and discovered with glee that Waruto was Walter and Hoittoman was Whitman, and squatted on the translucent flooring of the stacks to finish my hour of work thumbing through this book length critical study of Walt Whitman by a Japanese scholar of the early twentieth-century. I loved the delightful transliteration of Whitman’s name into Japanese, and I continue to whisper “Waruto” to myself when I think of Walt, but I have no other recollection of the encounter—what the book said or who its author was—but something was unbolted in my mind. America and Japan shared not only the bloody recent past of clashing empires; it shared Whitman and writing: poetry—I knew the haiku, of course—but also the floating world of fiction. I was at the time young enough still the following year, when I took a year long course in what was then called “Far Eastern Civilization,” to marvel that the Japanese wrote Jamesean novels well before Defoe. Switch now to three years ago, June 2003. Now a man yet still a boy, I found myself at the Fourth International Melville Conference, in Maui, C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 3 F R O M T H E M A S T - H E A D convening (or was it cavorting) on beaches, mountains, and conference rooms with friends from around the world to share ideas about Melville and the Pacific. Some climbed Haleakala, some got tattoos, some snorkeled, some did all three; and we all heard remarkable papers. Chief among those in attendance was a contingent from Japan who favored us with their united presence and independent perspectives. At the end of the conference, Melville Society Executive Secretary Jill Barnum and I put our heads together; we hoped there would be a book of essays coming out of the conference, and Jill was planning that: she and co-editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Sten would put together “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Pacific (now just released by Kent State University Press). But we also wanted to honor our long and rich association with Japan’s leading scholars in Melville Studies by showcasing the work they had presented at the conference. And that would mean a special issue of Leviathan that would coincide with the publication of Whole Oceans Away. That very issue, the one before you—“Melville...