The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Call Me Ishmael by Charles Olson
Robert Buckeye

Untitled document

Charles Olson. Call Me Ishmael. New afterword by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997. 158 pp. Paper: $13.95.

In 1938, Charles Olson publishes “Lear and Moby Dick” in Twice-a-Year and months later withdraws from the doctoral program in American studies at Harvard University. During the war years, he works in the Roosevelt administration, but in 1945, he resigns his office and within weeks is at work on Call Me Ishmael. Lewis Mumford and F. O. Matthiessen advised Harcourt, Brace not to publish the Olson book, while T. S. Eliot thought there was little interest in Melville among the British. When it was published in 1947, Mumford thought it a failure, Carl Van Doren a disappointment, Stanley Edgar Hyman half coherent mumbo jumbo. Ostensibly a critical study on Melville in which Olson establishes the influence of Shakespeare and others on the writing of Moby-Dick, particularly Melville’s reading of King Lear between the first version of the novel and the second, the Olson book is, in addition, something more, something else. It is, in the first place, his response to formal academic study, including his own “Lear and Moby Dick,” left unsaid when he left Harvard. It is also his effort to reposition literature in relation to the life of the republic. Finally, it establishes Olson’s own paternity in the line of Melville, which would become increasingly clearer in the years after the publication of Call Me Ishmael, when Olson, like Melville before him, had become “homeless in his land, his society.” Guy Davenport begins his memoir of Olson in his last years with, “In Gloom at Watch-House Point.”

The thing is to be of use, Olson repeated over and over, in whatever context. Literature, its criticism, was a means to address the actual, make contact, put our house in order. Any work was charged with the life, the life with the land, the land with its past. Melville was our original, Olson writes, aboriginal, a dreamer, and thus it was crucial for him to be saved from the resentfully competent, the bean counters. The challenge set down by Olson in 1947 remains, and the reprint of Call Me Ishmael a half century later is a call we need to heed, a reminder of what yet needs to be accomplished. “One is fighting for one’s life,” Robert Creeley says, “and always was.” [Robert Buckeye]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Call Me Ishmael by Charles Olson Robert Buckeye Untitled document Charles Olson. Call Me Ishmael. New afterword by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997. 158 pp. Paper: $13.95. In 1938, Charles Olson publishes “Lear and Moby Dick” in Twice-a-Year and months later withdraws from the doctoral program in American studies at Harvard University. During the war years, he works in the Roosevelt administration, but in 1945, he resigns his office and within weeks is at work on Call Me Ishmael. Lewis Mumford and F. O. Matthiessen advised Harcourt, Brace not to publish the Olson book, while T. S. Eliot thought there was little interest in Melville among the British. When it was published in 1947, Mumford thought it a failure, Carl Van Doren a disappointment, Stanley Edgar Hyman half coherent mumbo jumbo. Ostensibly a critical study on Melville in which Olson establishes the influence of Shakespeare and others on the writing of Moby-Dick, particularly Melville’s reading of King Lear between the first version of the novel and the second, the Olson book is, in addition, something more, something else. It is, in the first place, his response to formal academic study, including his own “Lear and Moby Dick,” left unsaid when he left Harvard. It is also his effort to reposition literature in relation to the life of the republic. Finally, it establishes Olson’s own paternity in the line of Melville, which would become increasingly clearer in the years after the publication of Call Me Ishmael, when Olson, like Melville before him, had become “homeless in his land, his society.” Guy Davenport begins his memoir of Olson in his last years with, “In Gloom at Watch-House Point.” The thing is to be of use, Olson repeated over and over, in whatever context. Literature, its criticism, was a means to address the actual, make contact, put our house in order. Any work was charged with the life, the life with the land, the land with its past. Melville was our original, Olson writes, aboriginal, a dreamer, and thus it was crucial for him to be saved from the resentfully competent, the bean counters. The challenge set down by Olson in 1947 remains, and the reprint of Call Me Ishmael a half century later is a call we need to heed, a reminder of what yet needs to be accomplished. “One is fighting for one’s life,” Robert Creeley says, “and always was.” [Robert Buckeye]

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