Books

Captain America was introduced in December 1940 by Timely Comics, the forerunner of Marvel. At that time Britain had been at war with Germany for seventeen months. Adolf Hitler’s forces had swept through Europe. The Nazis were setting up concentration camps for Jews, Romani, queer people, academics, political prisoners, and anyone whom the regime considered “degenerate.” Britain was being relentlessly bombed by the Luftwaffe, Germany had invaded France, Belgium, and Holland, and the concentration camp at Auschwitz had opened. America was still a year away from entering the war.

From the beginning Marvel was defined by its superhuman characters set against the background of the coming war. Its first comic book, Marvel Comics #1, had been released by Timely in August 1939 and introduced several characters. There was the Human Torch, the Angel, Namor the Sub-Mariner, the Masked Raider, and a Tarzan-like figure called Ka-Zar. By issue #2, the Angel was shooting down Nazi bombers over Poland. Then in issue #3, Namor was sinking German U-boats. Right from the start Marvel’s characters were responding to real events in the world—and what’s more, they were taking a stand.

At the foundation of the Marvel universe lies something essentially heroic. Almost two years before America entered the war against the Axis powers, Bill Everett was telling stories about a superhuman figure from Atlantis doing battle with the Nazis. Then came Captain America in 1940, a new hero billed as “against those who would conquer the United States” and the “sentinel of our shores.” Readers were encouraged to sign and become one of Captain America’s United States Junior Sentinels. Then they would receive a membership badge and an ID card. The Captain was introduced bedecked in his red, white, and blue stars-and-stripes costume. He carried a kite-shaped shield, which resembled the one on the great seal of the United States, and wore a blue half mask emblazoned with a distinctive white “A” and edged with small wings.

Captain America’s creators, Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) and Joe Simon (Hymie Simon), were sons of Jewish immigrants from Europe and aware of the dangers of the Nazi regime. In The Human Torch #3, released in December 1940, a story by Carl Burgos (Max Finkelstein) already has the Torch battling a Hitler look-alike named “Hiccup.” In one brilliant panel a tendril from the Torch’s fiery wake singes off Hiccup’s Hitler moustache. In that same issue Namor helps the US Navy defeat a surprise seaborne attack by the Germans and is rewarded with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

It’s clear Captain America was introduced for one incredibly urgent purpose: to galvanize American youth against the Nazi regime.

Sophia Amelia Peabody, five years younger than Hawthorne, never suffered from self-absorption or an icy heart, but she had a serious trouble of lier own. A pretty rather than a beautiful woman, with innocent gray eyes set wide apart, a tiptilted nose, and a mischievous smile, she had beaux attending her whenever she appeared in society; the trouble was that she could seldom appear. When Sophia was fifteen, she had begun to suffer from violent headaches. Her possessive mother explained to her that suffering was woman’s peculiar lot, having something to do with the sin of Eve. Her ineffectual father had her treated by half the doctors in Boston, who prescribed, among other remedies, laudanum, mercury, arsenic, hyoscyamus, homeopathy, and hypnotism, but still the headaches continued. Once as a desperate expedient she was sent to Cuba, where she spent two happy years on a plantation while her quiet sister Mary tutored the planter’s children. Now, back in Salem with the family—where her headaches were always worse—she was spending half of each day in bed. Like all the Peabody women, she had a New England conscience and a firm belief in the True, the Beautiful, and the Transcendental. She also had a limited but genuine talent for painting. When she was strong enough, she worked hard at copying pictures—and the copies sold- or at painting romantic landscapes of her own.

Sophia had been cast by her family in a role from which it seemed unlikely that she would ever escape. Just as Elizabeth Peabody was the intellectual sister, already famous as an educational reformer, and Mary was the quiet sister who did most of the household chores, Sophia was the invalid sister, petted like a child and kept in an upstairs room. There were also three brothers, one of them married, but the Peabodys were a matriarchy and a sorority; nobody paid much attention to the Peabody men. It was written that when the mother died, Sophia would become the invalid aunt of her brother’s children; she would support herself by painting lampshades and firescreens, while enduring her headaches with a brave smile. As for Hawthorne, his fate was written too; he would become the cranky New England bachelor, living in solitude and writing more and more nebulous stories about other lonely souls. But they saved each other, those two unhappy children. Each was the other’s refuge, and they groped their way into each other’s arms, where both found strength to face the world.

Aside from exhaustion, the prevailing feeling as we filed out of the whaling museum, clutching our marine-themed goodie bags, was bewilderment. Moby-Dick is a bewildering book, all the more when read in a single sitting. This might be because Melville, with his penchant for turning characters into archetypes and ephemeral moments into eternal principles, is writing to persuade all peoples and all eras at once. He seems to speak directly across the ages to a reader in our own time who has asked him a question. We can imagine the young woman at a meet-the-author event with Melville’s ghost at some swell Manhattan venue: Why, she demands, would any sane person voluntarily risk his life to prowl the world’s oceans in a wooden vessel to find, kill, and disembowel huge man-eating monsters and melt their flesh down into lamp oil? And why would they further pledge their allegiance to an even bigger maniac who had resolved to subdue the world’s single deadliest sea monster or else die in the attempt?

Melville knew that even in 1850, such shots across the bow of cool-headed reason demanded a passionate defence. Even among readers living near Melville’s farmstead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, located multiple days from New Bedford by stagecoach, and only recently connected by rail, the whaling life would have seemed utterly foreign. And so, his narrator sets out to make the irrational inevitable: to convince us that for a man of his time, or indeed of any time, there is no work more honourable or more beautiful than whaling. The most unsettling thing about Moby Dick may be that even after we witness the White Whale massacre and drown of all of Ishmael’s shipmates, we are still forced to admit that he has succeeded. That we (particularly we men) might never have the chance to live as fully or as deeply as Ishmael did.