Redburn

I recently got around to rereading Redburn, in the yellowing Anchor paperback with the Edward Gorey cover that I picked up last year in Saranac Lake. I can’t say it compares with Moby-Dick, but on its smaller, more intimate scale it is still very satisfying.

I enjoyed rereading the description of the glass model of a ship that helped inspire Redburn to go to sea, and especially the eerie passages in which Redburn in Liverpool, carrying his father’s old map and guidebook, seems to be tracking his father’s spirit through a city that has utterly changed:

At last, when I found myself going down Old Hall-street toward Lord-street, where the hotel was situated, according to my authority; and when, taking out my map, I found that Old Hall-street was marked there, through its whole extent with my father’s pen; a thousand fond, affectionate emotions rushed around my heart.

Yes, in this very street, thought I, nay, on this very flagging my father walked. Then I almost wept, when I looked down on my sorry apparel, and marked how the people regarded me; the men staring at so grotesque a young stranger, and the old ladies, in beaver hats and ruffles, crossing the walk a little to shun me....

But dispelling these dismal reflections as well as I could, I pushed on my way, till I got to Chapel-street, which I crossed; and then, going under a cloister-like arch of stone, whose gloom and narrowness delighted me, and filled my Yankee soul with romantic thoughts of old Abbeys and Minsters, I emerged into the fine quadrangle of the Merchants’ Exchange.

There, leaning against the colonnade, I took out my map, and traced my father right through Chapel-street, and actually through the very arch at my back, into the paved square where I stood.

So vivid was now the impression of his having been here, and so narrow the passage from which he had emerged, that I felt like running on, and overtaking him around the Town Hall adjoining, at the head of Castle-street. But I soon checked myself, when remembering that he had gone whither no son’s search could find him in this world.

One of the curious features of the novel is the contrast between the impressions of the vulnerable young Redburn, the son of a bankrupt merchant, and the more jaded point of view of Redburn the narrator, presumably the veteran of more sea voyages. The chapter titles, for instance, are clearly the work of the older Redburn—like the one from which the passage above is taken, which is headed “With His Prosy Old Guide-Book, He Takes a Prosy Stroll Through the Town.”