Backward Through the Wake: On Hunting What Cannot Be Caught

We met in a place that smelled of tar and old rope. A chandlery that had become a bar — or a bar that had been decorated to look like a chandlery, it was hard to tell — on a backstreet in Falmouth, England, where the harbour still carried the salt-and-diesel smell of working water. The sign outside said THE BOSUN’S LOCKER in letters painted to look weathered, though the paint was new. Stevenson found this amusing. London did not notice it at all.

Stevenson had ordered whisky before I arrived. Not Scotch — Madeira, actually, which the barman had to go looking for. He sat near the window with his legs crossed, consumptive and elegant even in the way he held his glass, turning it so the amber caught light from the harbour. He wore a velvet jacket that looked slept-in, which it probably had been. His eyes were too bright — the eyes of a man running a fever or an idea, and with Stevenson it was usually both.

London came in from the rain like a man coming off a watch. He was bigger than I expected, broader in the shoulders, with hands that had done things to them — calluses, old burns, a thumb that had been broken and set slightly wrong. He ordered beer, drank half of it standing, and then sat down across from Stevenson with the air of a man who had somewhere else to be but had decided, for the moment, that this was more important.

“A whale hunt,” I said. “Told backwards.”

“You’re starting with the architecture,” Stevenson said. “This is a mistake. Architecture without character is a shipyard. We have the keel, we have the ribs, but there is no one aboard.”

“There will be. I want to talk about the backwards part first, because it changes everything. The story opens at the end — a man alone, the ship damaged or gone, the whale escaped or killed, and we don’t know which yet. Then we move backward. Each section takes us further from the consequences and closer to the causes.”

London set down his beer. “Why?”

“Because the hunt that moves forward is Melville’s. It’s been done. The obsessive captain driving toward the whale, the crew caught in his wake — that’s Ahab. I can’t outrun that. But if I reverse it, if I start with the wreckage and work back to the launching, the reader experiences something different. They know how it ends before they know why it began. The question isn’t ‘what happens?’ It’s ‘what possessed this man to start?’”

“That’s a philosophical question,” London said. “I don’t write philosophical questions. I write bodies in cold water.”

“You write philosophical questions disguised as bodies in cold water. Every time your characters fight the cold or the sea or the wolf, the real question underneath is whether the fight was worth it. Whether the body’s insistence on surviving is wisdom or stupidity. You just don’t announce it.”

London looked at me for a moment — not angry, exactly, but with the flat appraisal of a man deciding whether to take a statement seriously. “Fine. Go on.”

Stevenson, who had been listening with the patient alertness of a cat watching birds through glass, said: “The reverse structure solves one problem and creates another. It solves the problem of suspense — because the reader already knows the cost, every moment of confidence in the early scenes becomes tragic. When the ship leaves port and the crew is singing and the captain is full of purpose, the reader knows what all of that purpose will buy them. This is powerful. This is what the Greeks understood about fate. But the problem it creates is emotional direction. In a forward-moving story, the emotion builds. Fear accumulates. Dread compounds. In a backward-moving story, you are moving away from the catastrophe, not toward it. The emotion must somehow deepen even as the events become smaller, more ordinary, more innocent.”

“The emotion deepens because understanding deepens,” I said. “Each scene backward reveals another piece of why. The reader watches the captain’s obsession disassemble itself — the wound beneath the purpose, the loss beneath the wound, the ordinary day beneath the loss. By the time we reach the beginning, the reader knows this man completely, and the knowledge is unbearable because the reader also knows what’s coming.”

“What is coming?” London asked.

“Everything we already showed them.”

He drank. “That could work. But the sea has to be real. Not a metaphor, not a symbol, not Melville’s cosmic blankness. Real water. Real weather. A boat that behaves like a boat — that heels when the wind catches it wrong, that ships water over the bow in a following sea, that stinks of old fish and whale oil and the sweat of men who haven’t bathed in weeks. If the sea is real, the philosophy takes care of itself. If the sea is a symbol, the philosophy is just a man talking to himself.”

“We agree on that,” I said.

“We agree on very little else. But on that, yes.”

Stevenson tilted his head. “I want to know about the captain. Not what he wants — every captain in every sea story wants the quarry. I want to know what he’s like to be around. Is he good company? Does he tell stories at the table? Does he play cards? Is he the kind of man you’d want to share a watch with, or the kind you’d want to avoid? Because in a story told backwards, the reader meets this man at his worst — broken, obsessed, perhaps mad — and then must discover, scene by scene, that he was once good. That he was once the best man on the ship. And the reader must feel the loss of that goodness not as a moral lesson but as grief. Real grief, the kind you feel when you watch someone you knew become someone you don’t recognize.”

“You’re describing Jim Hawkins watching Silver,” I said.

“I’m describing something simpler than that. I’m describing a man I sailed with once, off Samoa. He was the master of a trading schooner — a man of about forty-five, red-faced, enormously skilled, with a laugh that could be heard across the anchorage. And over the course of six months I watched him become someone else. Not through villainy — through the ordinary erosion of bad luck and isolation and the thing that happens to men who stay at sea too long, which is that the sea replaces the parts of them that were made for land. His laugh went first. Then his patience. Then his interest in anything that was not the ship. By the time I left him he was competent and empty, like a clock that keeps time but has nothing to tell the time for.”

London was listening now with a different quality of attention — not the appraising look from before but something more engaged. “The sea as attrition. Not as enemy. The difference matters. An enemy you can fight. Attrition you can only endure, and endurance without purpose is just waiting to die.”

“Is endurance without purpose waiting to die?” I asked. “Or is it what you wrote about — the thing your characters do that makes them admirable? They survive because they survive. The body insists. In ‘To Build a Fire,’ the man doesn’t survive. But the effort — the sheer physical effort of trying to light a match with frozen hands — that effort is the story. Not the outcome.”

“The effort is the story when there’s a real fire at stake,” London said. “When the cold is real. When the match breaks and the man’s fingers don’t work and he can feel the numbness climbing his legs. Take the physical reality away and you have parable. I don’t write parables.”

“Neither do I,” Stevenson said. “But I write men who tell themselves stories about what they’re doing, and those stories are sometimes more real to them than the cold or the fire. Long John Silver is not merely a pirate. He is a man who has constructed an entire architecture of self-justification — he is the gentleman of fortune, the practical man, the man who sees things clearly. And the architecture is magnificent. It is so well-built that Jim Hawkins, who is young and impressionable but not stupid, half-believes it. The horror of Silver is not that he is evil. It is that his version of himself is so nearly persuasive that the reader begins to wonder whether the honest men are not, in fact, the fools.”

“The captain of this story,” I said. “He has that architecture. He believes the hunt is righteous — that the whale is his, that he’s earned it through years of smaller catches and patient study, that the sea owes him this one great thing. And the architecture holds. It holds through the first storms, through the crew’s doubts, through the warnings of other ships. It holds even as the ship deteriorates. It holds until — well, I don’t know exactly when it breaks. Or whether it breaks at all. Maybe the architecture holds all the way to ruin. Maybe that’s worse.”

“It is worse,” London said. “A man who loses his illusions is tragic. A man who keeps them while the world falls apart around him is something else. I don’t have a word for it. Pathetic, maybe. Or magnificent. The difference depends on who’s watching.”

“On who survives to tell the story,” Stevenson corrected.

A pause. The harbour outside was darkening — late afternoon turning to the grey-blue that English coastal towns do better than anywhere else, that colour that is not quite dusk and not quite evening but something in between, as if the sky cannot commit to what comes next. A fishing boat was coming in, riding low, its deck cluttered with gear. Through the window I could hear the engine — a diesel thud that was nothing like sail, nothing like the ships we were discussing, but the motion of it on the water was the same motion, the same negotiation with the same indifferent element.

“I want the quarry to be real,” I said. “Not Moby Dick. Not the great white whale as cosmic symbol. A specific whale — a bull sperm whale, maybe, with markings the whalers know, with a history of encounters. A whale that has survived because it is old and smart and large enough that the cost of killing it is always almost too high. The almost is important.”

“The almost is everything,” London said. “The man who turns back at ‘almost’ survives. The man who pushes past it — sometimes he brings home the whale and sometimes he brings home nothing, and the sea doesn’t care which. The sea doesn’t distinguish between triumph and disaster. It responds to physics. Wind, current, pressure, the tensile strength of rope. The whale is physics too. A living thing, yes, but a living thing made of muscle and bone and blubber that obeys the same laws as the water it swims in. When a whale sounds, it dives because its body can withstand the pressure that a man’s body cannot. This is not metaphor. This is anatomy.”

“But we’re not writing a textbook,” Stevenson said, with an edge I hadn’t heard from him before. “Anatomy without desire is a dissection. The captain doesn’t hunt this whale because of physics. He hunts it because something in him requires the hunt — something that was there before the sea got hold of him, something that the sea merely gave a shape to. Call it ambition, call it pride, call it the particular madness of men who measure themselves against things larger than themselves. Whatever it is, it is not physics. It is the thing that makes a man stand on a deck in a gale and refuse to go below. Not because the gale requires his presence — the gale is perfectly capable of blowing without an audience — but because going below would mean admitting that he is smaller than the weather. And this man cannot admit that. It would destroy the architecture.”

London shrugged. “Call it whatever you want. In the end, the body fails or it doesn’t. The story is in the failing.”

“The story is in the refusing,” Stevenson said.

“The refusing and the failing are the same scene,” I said. “That’s the point. This man refuses to turn back, and the refusal is both his greatest quality and the thing that destroys him. The reverse chronology lets the reader see both at once — the destruction in the opening scenes and the nobility in the final ones, which are the earliest ones. By the end of the story, which is the beginning of the voyage, the reader knows exactly what this man’s courage will cost him, and the knowledge is — I don’t know. I don’t have the word either.”

“You don’t need the word,” London said. “You need the scene. Put the man on the deck. Put the whale in the water. Make the rope taut and the wind wrong and the crew exhausted. Let the body do its work.”

“And the mind?” Stevenson asked.

“The mind complicates things. That’s its job.”

Stevenson finished his Madeira and looked at the empty glass as if it had failed to answer a question. “There must be a second man. Not the captain — someone who watches the captain. The first mate, perhaps, or a harpooner. Someone who is close enough to see the captain’s architecture from inside and far enough away to see it cracking. In ‘Treasure Island,’ Jim Hawkins is this figure — the boy who watches Silver and learns from him and is nearly seduced by him and ultimately sees him for what he is. Your captain needs a Jim Hawkins. Not a boy — a man, a competent man, who follows the captain not because he is foolish but because the captain’s vision of the hunt is genuinely compelling. The second man believes because the captain earns belief. And the story of his disillusionment — told backwards, moving from final loyalty to first doubt to the moment before the doubt, when trust was absolute — this is the second spine of the story.”

“Two spines,” I said. “The captain’s obsession, read backwards, becomes the origin of obsession. The mate’s loyalty, read backwards, becomes the origin of trust. And the whale —”

“The whale is the whale,” London said. “Don’t make it anything else. The whale is a hundred thousand pounds of animal that wants to live. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.”

We sat with that for a while. The fishing boat had tied up, and two men were unloading crates onto the quay — quick, practiced movements, the kind of work that looks easy because it has been done a thousand times. I thought about the reverse chronology and where to begin. The end of the story — which is the first thing the reader sees — should be quiet. Not a storm, not a sinking. Something worse: a man alone with what the hunt has left him. And then backward, scene by scene, through the hunting and the losing and the choosing and the setting out, until we arrive at a morning when none of it had happened yet and the sea was just the sea and the man was just a man who wanted something from it.

“One more thing,” Stevenson said. He was standing now, reaching for a coat that looked like it had been to the tropics and back. “The last scene — which is the first day, the departure — must not be innocent. The reader knows too much by then. The departure cannot be a picture of a man before his fall. It must be the fall itself, seen from the other side. The reader must see, in the captain’s eyes as he leaves port, the exact quality of purpose that will destroy him. And the reader must feel, simultaneously, that this purpose is admirable and that it is lethal, and that there is no way to separate the one from the other. This is what I mean by moral complexity in adventure. The adventure is not innocent. It never was. The man who sets out is already the man who will not turn back. He does not become that man at sea. He arrives at sea as that man. The sea merely confirms what was always true.”

London stood too. He left money on the table — too much, which I learned later was a habit, something about having been poor and remembering it in the wrong direction. “Write the water,” he said. “I don’t care about the architecture or the moral complexity or the reverse chronology. Get the water right. The way it sounds against the hull at three in the morning when you’re on watch alone. The way the horizon looks when there’s nothing on it. The way a whale breaches — the size of it, the impossible size of a thing that large leaving the water and hanging in the air for a moment that your mind refuses to process. Get that right and the rest follows.”

“And if I get it wrong?”

“Then you’re writing about something else. And you don’t know it yet.”

They left separately. I stayed at the table and watched the harbour go dark, the water turning from grey to black, the lights of the town coming on one by one like a question asked in stages. I had the shape of the thing now — the backwards unspooling, the captain and his witness, the whale that is only a whale. But underneath the shape there was something I couldn’t quite hold: the feeling of watching someone walk toward something that you know will cost them everything, and recognizing in their stride the exact quality that makes you unable to look away. Stevenson called it moral complexity. London called it the body’s insistence. I think it might be the same thing, seen from two different decks.

The barman asked if I wanted another drink. I said yes, and then sat there without drinking it, thinking about a man standing at the bow of a ship that hasn’t left port yet, looking at water he hasn’t crossed yet, wanting something he hasn’t named yet, and already, already, past saving.