“Call me Steelkilt.”
So begins the new book “You Should Have Seen Us Howling: When Buffalo Ruled the Inland Seas.” Herman Melville himself would approve.
This extraordinary graphic history is illustrated by Scott A. Wood and written by Jeff Z. Klein. Their middle initials go from A to Z – and so does their highly entertaining account of Buffalo’s maritime history.
The story is told through the voice of Steelkilt, a minor character in “Moby-Dick” who is, in Melville’s words, “a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.” The conceit is a masterstroke: Our true history as told by a voice from famous fiction.
Klein’s opening line, of course, harks back to “Call me Ishmael” – the best first line in all of literature. (Don’t take my word for it: American Book Review placed it No. 1 in its list of the Top 100.) The difference is that Ishmael, famously, was an unreliable narrator – while Steelkilt is a fully reliable one.
That’s thanks to the scholarship of Klein, who is one of our foremost authorities on local history. (He produces WBFO Radio’s Heritage Moments.) When he had the idea to write a book on our sinful past as a brawling port city, he began to find fascinating facts he hadn’t known before.
“It dawned on me there’s this tremendous maritime history in Buffalo that is completely forgotten,” he says. “And I read more and more about it, and I decided to write a book about it. But it’s hard to write a book, you know. And I thought it would work best as a graphic history.”
But that wasn’t possible without the right illustrator, and Klein didn’t know where to find one. At last, he approached John Montague, an artist who founded the Buffalo Maritime Center; he did not have time to work on the project, but suggested that Klein speak to Wood, whose Buffalo-based business designs exhibits for museums.
“We hit it off immediately,” Klein says.
He soon found that writing for a graphic book was far different from writing for the New York Times. (He was the newspaper’s hockey writer until 2014, when he left to come back to Buffalo.) Klein learned to work with storyboards and to write shorter, punchier sentences.
“I give him a lot of credit,” Wood says. “Jeff had to distill down what he needed to say to fit into bubbles.”
The project took two years to complete. The eureka moment – choosing Steelkilt as their narrator – came halfway through.
“That was all Jeff,” Wood says. “No, I can’t say that. Jeff had the idea, but when he saw how much I liked it, we collectively decided to make Steelkilt the narrator.”
That meant going back and making multiple revisions, which they happily did.
“As we got more invested in the project, I had more opinions about his writing, and he had more opinions about my illustrations,” Wood says. “By the end of it, it was a true collaboration. And it was really cool.”
What’s the balance of the book about? Steelkilt himself tells us on the first page:
“I’m here in these pages because I am a Buffalonian and although Herman (Melville) had me growing up in the early days of the Erie Canal, I’m going to tell you the entire story of my hometown as a port city, from its shadowy origins, through its bustling heyday, all the way to its sad end … several lifetimes’ worth of shipwrecks, rescues, whoring, high adventure, songs, conflict and glory.”
Melville was 20 when he visited Buffalo, in 1840. He came to town by way of the Erie Canal and left on a passenger steamer bound for Detroit. But while here he spent time on our notorious Canal Street – then called Rock Street – and perhaps the rough-and-tumble he saw there inspired him to create the character of Steelkilt, the two-fisted lakeman in “Moby-Dick” who leads a mutiny and breaks the jaw of the domineering first mate of the ship Town-Ho.
“You Should Have Seen Us Howling” is a triumph. I’m buying a bushel. (Good thing most of my family doesn’t read these columns, or they’d know what they’re getting for Christmas.) It’s available on Amazon. Better yet, get it at Talking Leaves, the independent Buffalo bookstore.
Or, best of all, go see Klein and Wood talk about their new book at “Buffalo, Books & Beer,” the barroom reading series, at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Buffalo Bar & Grille, the historic Old First Ward tavern at 307 Louisiana St. The talk is free, and Talking Leaves will have copies of the book for sale. Wood and Klein will be glad to sign them.
Where else would they rather be? The bar is only steps from the waterfront where much of the forgotten history in their book was made.
Look deeply into the dark that night and you just might make out an apparition of Melville’s desperado from Buffalo, brought back to life by a new book that also brings back our rousing nautical past.
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Erik Brady
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