LEVIATHAN
or,
The Whale
Philip Hoare
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Fourth Estate
Copyright © Philip Hoare 2008
Philip Hoare asserts the moral right o be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007230143
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007340910 Version: 2017-01-04
For Theresa
Contents
There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, on the deep Stretch’d like a promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, quoted in title page to the first, English edition of Moby-Dick
For thou didst cast me into the deep,
Into the heart of the seas, And the flood was round about me; All thy waves and billows passed over me.
Jonah 2:3
Perhaps it is because I was nearly born underwater.
A day or so before my mother was due to give birth to me, she and my father visited Portsmouth’s naval dockyard, where they were taken on a tour of a submarine. As she climbed down into its interior, my mother began to feel labour pains. For a moment, it seemed as though I was about to appear below the waterline; but it was back in our Victorian semi-detached house in Southampton, with its servants’ bell-pulls still in place and its dark teak staircase turning on itself, that I was born.
I have always been afraid of deep water. Even bathtime had its terrors for me (although I was by no means a timid child) when I thought of the stories my mother told of her own childhood, and how my grandfather had painted a whale on the outside of their enamel bathtub. It was an image bound up in other childish fears and fascinations, ready to emerge out of the depths like the giant squid in the film of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with its bug-eyed Nautilus, Kirk Douglas’s tousled blond locks and stripy T-shirt, and its futuristic divers