NATURE: Brian Dillonreviews Leviathan, or The WhaleBy Philip Hoare, Fourth Estate, 453pp. £18.99
I WAS FIRST taken by Philip Hoare's writing as a teenager in the mid-1980s. Into the pages of Blitz, a London style magazine, he had somehow insinuated an elegant profile of the dandy Stephen Tennant, a bright and brittle young thing of the 1920s who was then best remembered, if at all, as the subject of a dazzlingly futuristic photograph by Cecil Beaton.
By the time Hoare tracked him to his aristocratic lair in Wiltshire, Tennant was bloated and bedridden, still running turquoise-ringed fingers through hennaed hair and hoping to complete (in jewelled inks) his sole novel, Lascar. In photographs taken shortly before his death in 1987, he somewhat resembles a beached whale: albeit one rouged and ready for its close-up.
Hoare went on to write acclaimed biographies of Tennant and Noël Coward, followed by Wilde's Last Stand, a wider-ranging study of the decadent post-Oscar party crowd of the early decades of the 20th century.
But if the fragile surface of aestheticism was his first subject, it soon became clear that Hoare's conception of "creative non-fiction" (to use a publisher's parlance) possessed altogether more depth than it first appeared. Or rather - because Hoare would rightly dispute the assertion of dandyism's slender meaning - his real theme now seemed to be the very profundity beneath seemingly insignificant historical motifs. In Spike Island, he essayed a detailed history of a military hospital near Southampton; in England's Lost Eden, a study of the transatlantic drift of forgotten Victorian spiritualist communities.
With Leviathan - a cultural, personal and natural history of whales and whaling, richly stocked with whale lore and written with admirable intensity and élan - Hoare might be said to have literalised his interest in surface and depth.
The image of the whale - be it via touristic glimpses of the cetacean in situ, anthropomorphic mawk like Free Willy, or the kitschy New Age lullaby of whale "song" - is now so bound up with populist environmental pieties that the reality of what we have done to these animals (and what they have done for us) is all but obscured.
The whale today is an emblem of absolute innocence: a kind of oversized aquatic infant floating in the depths of our fondest reveries about ecological reparation. To do right by the whale is metaphorically to do right by the planet. If the creature reminds us of ourselves, it has also always looked, says Hoare, like a world unto itself: an alien but oddly familiar allegory (as Hobbes and Herman Melville had it) for the possibility of our being together.
Hoare's, in fact, is partly a history of communities. For centuries, extensive settlements have survived solely to chase and destroy the whale, then process and disperse its carcass. (In the heyday of this savage industry, the main raw materials were the right whale - its food-filtering baleen or "whalebone" being used to make umbrellas, corsets and Venetian blinds - and the sperm whale, whose oil lit the modern world until the advent of gas and electricity.) The former whaling stations of Cape Cod still seem places apart: their shifting sands were once paved with oyster shells, their buildings braced with huge bones. Distance from urban centres was usually a prerequisite: New England towns like Nantucket were essentially machines for rendering vast tonnages of flesh, and the stench was insupportable. The whaling ship too was a sort of commonwealth or city-state in miniature: a harshly regulated floating fortress set adrift for months or years at a time.
It was his experiences on board one such vessel that famously inspired Melville to write adventures such as Typee and White Jacket, and later to expand the metaphorical scope of the whaling story in Moby-Dick. The latter is a book, notes Hoare, that "stands outside itself from the start".
Its opening pages of whale-lore quotations - comprising, no doubt, one of the least-read prefaces in literary history - are a clue to the novel's monstrous make-up.
Having resolved on the narrative (which he borrowed from the tale of the Essex, sunk by a whale in the Pacific) he was then diverted by his reading - Shakespeare, Carlyle, Frankenstein, The Anatomy of Melancholy - into stranger waters, teeming with obscure knowledge, antique phrasings and countless smaller, parasitic, anecdotes. Moby-Dick reads as if its author has hunted and harpooned his stories, gutted or butchered whole libraries.
This intimacy between the literary and the fleshly is often left out of interpretations of Melville's novel: in the rush to see the white whale as wholly symbolic (of Man, God, America, the monstrous phallus or the pallid void), the sheer physical weirdness of Moby-Dick is elided.
If Hoare is an excellent guide to the more outré incidents in the book - the descent of a sailor into the whale's head, to be messily "born" from the other side; another's cutting armholes in the animal's foreskin and wearing it like a cassock - it is because he has himself a keen sense of the creaturely distance from and proximity to the human that the whale embodies. Early in the book, he dreams of whales greyly circling his ninth-floor flat; later, he looks them in the eye, swims alongside them and admits to a curious, almost sexual, urge to cross over and immerse himself in their world.
Leviathan, however, despite its author's obsessive relationship with his subject, proposes in no sense a sentimentalised or over-invested view of the whale. Hoare fills the story of his fascination with too much historical and scientific knowledge for that, allowing mere statistical ballast and straight reportage to convince us of the currently perilous state of whale populations.
Albeit reduced, hunting continues on hulking Japanese factory ships; whales are disoriented and beached by military sonar and oil surveys; a scurf of waste plastic fouls the jaws of unwitting beasts. But Hoare remains too much of a dandy not to couch his own encounters with sea creatures in sometimes archly distanced and aesthetic terms.
Some passing squid, for example, seem to him like "ghostly Victorian brides in ectoplasmic crinolines".
At such moments, shuttling between inhuman actuality and anthropomorphism, Hoare breaches the surface of his subject in the most profound fashion.
• Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture based in New York. He is the author of a memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005), and is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, to be published next year