White Whale

To the Editor:

Carl Safina’s essay in the June 14 issue, “Melville’s Warning,” brought back memories of my graduate school class on American authors. I had never read Melville’s masterpiece; somehow reading about a madman pursuing a great white whale never registered in my consciousness as anywhere near purposeful prose. But the experience of reading the book in college changed me and I think every student in the class. It was not only a timeless philosophical digression from rote urban education but a soulful look at all the complications and complaining of the human condition.

It all still rings as relevant in our present turbulent world: the contagion of suffering, the indifference to racism, the malaise of injustice, the ignorance of what can be satisfied and our own relentless imagination to believe ourselves superior as a species over all things natural.

Susan Altenhofen
Fort Collins, Colo.

♦

To the Editor:

Carl Safina makes a strong case for the supremacy of “Moby-Dick” as a novel in which Herman Melville forewarns of the errors that civilization may make.

In Melville’s last novel, “The Confidence- Man: His Masquerade,” his warnings to the future continue. On April Fools’ Day, a steam-driven ship of fools floats down the Mississippi. A good proportion of its passengers are confidence men; a good proportion, their victims. It is an American steamer on an American voyage — Melville did not set this novel in the South Seas.

Religion, philosophy and the guileless nature of certain passengers are skewered. Melville seemed to be warning future generations of gullibility in the face of greed, of becoming victims of those who strive only for money, control and power. And it is for us, now, to heed the final sentence in Melville’s final novel: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” It certainly has.

John W. Bing
Sante Fe, N.M.

♦

To the Editor:

Carl Safina’s thoughts on Melville and “Moby-Dick” echo C.L.R. James’s 1953 masterpiece “Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.” James, a Marxist theorist and founder of the Pan-African movement, composed the book while in detention on Ellis Island in 1952. James read “Moby-Dick” during his lockdown and found parallels between his Ellis Island detention center and Melville’s Pequod. James regarded “Moby-Dick” as a warning against both the lures and the evils of totalitarianism. It is ironic that a black intellectual American wrote a defining account of a great American novel while incarcerated for expressing his ideas. Safina’s essay is a fine one. But C.L.R. James was there first, nearly 70 years ago. It would be a shame not to remember James and his work, now more than ever.

Bruce K. Riordan
Los Angeles

Story of a Ranger

To the Editor:

As protest marches ramp up across America, one can’t miss seeing the irony in Douglas Brinkley’s June 14 review of Doug J. Swanson’s “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.” How 20th-century America glorified the Rangers in film and story (Zane Grey’s “The Lone Star Ranger”) and overlooked the inglorious dereliction of duty (Ranger Frank Hamer’s leaving a lynching scene) is part of Swanson’s account.

I have one such overlooked story. In 1942, the Rangers dismissed my father, the Rev. Phillip Sarles, from service as their chaplain. I believe the Rangers may have discovered that my father was conducting religious services for the incarcerated Japanese and refugee Germans imprisoned in the internment camp in Seagoville, Texas. Or perhaps the Rangers got wind of my parents’ Sunday dinners with a black minister and his wife at selected hotel restaurants. He was told a different chaplain would better serve religious duties for the Rangers. At least the Rangers did not heed the warning my father was given by at least one confidante: “Don’t you know they will hang you, Phillip.”

David Sarles
Bayville, N.Y.