"WE ARE all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," quipped Oscar Wilde.

The Irish novelist and playwright was certainly right about Herman Melville. The author of Moby Dick was something of an amateur astronomer. And he used that knowledge in several novels, says Brett Zimmerman.

Zimmerman, an English and humanities professor, has just published a book on the writer's use of things astronomical called, Herman Melville: Stargazer. It systematically charts Melville's star knowledge, an aspect of his writing only a few academics have commented on and one that nobody - until now - has written about.

As a York graduate student, Zimmerman fell in love with American literature which was where he first read a lesser-known Melville novel, Mardi (1849).

"Mardi literally explodes with references to astronomy," says Zimmerman. "Stargazing was popular at the time. The planet Neptune had just been discovered in 1846 by a US woman astronomer - just three years before Mardi was published. So astronomy was in the news. And I think Melville saw this as a chance to combine literary and scientific traditions."

Although there's no conclusive evidence, Zimmerman suspects Melville came by his knowledge of the constellations experientially. "He went to sea for a few years and didn't start writing until after he came back," says Zimmerman.

"All the stars he mentions are navigational ones. You can see them with the naked eye. My feeling is he wanted Mardi to be a popular novel [it never was], so he brought in popular science."

Twinkle Illustration: Celia Calle