He leaned toward Hawthorne, wishing urgently to communicate something of the sorceries that had bewitched him at the moment of their meeting, but he could find no words for his feelings. In fact, he imagined that no human language could ever express what he now felt, since it seemed inspired not only by Hawthorne in his person but also by some mystical new alignment in the heavens. Hawthorne seemed the living expression of an idea so well formulated in Herman’s own mind that his only response could be, “Yes, true, what an elegant solution.”
“This cheddar is excellent,” said Hawthorne. He sliced a bite from the hunk in his hand and gave the cheese and knife to Herman, who held them out in front of himself as if they were a shield and a sword. Hawthorne stared out at the downpour.
“I have been thinking all day,” Herman finally croaked out, “about the correspondence between the physical expression of a thing and the truth of the thing, and how one might infer the latter from the former.”
“A thing? Any thing? Like that cheese you’re holding, for instance?”
Hawthorne was fifteen years Herman’s senior, but his face seemed to Herman to defy the laws of earthly decay. So noble did Hawthorne seem that Herman conjectured that some unique mechanism had gradually been transferring his inner beauty touch by touch outward toward his external features with each passing day, so that, even long into the future, when Hawthorne would be much advanced in years, his inward nobility would compensate so fully for his outward decrepitude that his face would become almost ethereal.
“Yes,” said Herman. “Like this cheese.”
“You mean that you have been meditating on whether or not the physical expression of this cheese might imply something even more perfectly cheesy, like its Platonic form? Or do you mean that you have been contemplating the cheese’s ultimate meaning in the way that this particular block of cheese is both itself and a representative of all cheddars and also a representative of the larger class of cheese generally and of all products of man or even all material things in the universe, so that the mystery of this cheddar becomes impossible to solve, either through science or meditation; and since no starting point can be fixed for the universe, other than to propose a creator God who started everything one day on a whim, one must be content with the ambiguity of this hunk of cheddar as both concretely existing and yet having no demonstrable first cause, no matter how well known the cheese itself might be to the touch and the taste?”
“That’s exactly what I meant!” Herman sliced off a hunk of the cheddar and deposited it in his mouth.
“Yes, I see your point.”
“But even more than that,” Herman said. “I have been considering the possibility that the facts that can be ascertained about this cheese fail to satisfy because the facts themselves mask a metaphysical truth that can be known only through the transcendent, poetic expression of the cheddar. That is, though the world itself can never truly be known, one might begin to know some truth about the world through a metaphysical cheese.”
Dudley returned and stood over the two authors, who were gazing intently at the cheese in Herman’s hand. “Caviar?” he said.
Hawthorne ignored Dudley and responded instead to Herman, with a passion that caught Herman off guard. “Yes! In much the same way one might propose that Jesus, while offered to us by the churches as either a physical or a moral fact, should rather be seen as the poetry of mankind, since the facts that can be known about Him obviously matter very little and his moral authority depends solely upon belief.”
Herman said, “You’re saying that Jesus came not to redeem humanity’s original sin but rather to call into question the concept of sin itself through the poetry of a grand gesture? An ultimately Romantic gesture?”
“Yes, but I would not discard the idea of original sin. It’s a fruitful context for meditation, even if it is merely poetical.”
“But would you agree at least that the proper formulation of the problem is poetical first? And that asking the question matters more than finding the answer?”
“It sounds like you are saying,” Hawthorne said, “that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Dudley walked away with his caviar.
Herman said, “Unfortunately, there’s one little thing wrong with that Scripture. It should have read, in the beginning was the Question, and the Question was with God, and the Question was God.” He cut a piece of cheese. Hawthorne took and ate it, and then Herman reached for a bottle of wine near him, and he gave it to Hawthorne, and Hawthorne likewise took the wine and drank.
“The cheese that can be eaten and the wine that can be drunk are not the real cheese and the real wine,” said Herman.
“Unless they are,” said Hawthorne, winking.
Herman felt an acute sensation of relief, a long spiritual exhalation. Hawthorne had a magical effect on him. For the first time in as long as he could remember, a finger of light, like the first ray of dawn, shone into the dark cavern of his soul.
“It seems the end of the brandy is also the end of the storm,” Mathews shouted drunkenly, and he spread his arms wide to indicate the slackening rain all around them. The sun suddenly broke through the clouds, creating a hundred tiny rainbows in the rivulets of water still splashing off the sides of the overhanging rock. Dr. Holmes held up a nearly empty bottle of brandy, from which he drank in a silent toast to the sun and the revelers, and then he passed the bottle. They managed to make the brandy last until every last member of the picnic had had a final sip. Hawthorne took the next-to-last swallow, and Herman thought that he saw Hawthorne’s lips linger on the bottle just a little as his eyes met Herman’s; and when he passed the bottle to Herman, its mouth was still warm with Hawthorne’s slightly drunken kiss.
As the rain gave way completely to mottled sunshine, they packed up their picnic and headed back down the mountain, well lubricated and telling tales. Mathews and Duyckinck cast the rest of the party in roles for a little folderol that they made up as they tramped downhill. Mathews’s alter ego was “Silver Pen” and Melville became “New Neptune”; Hawthorne was “Mr. Noble Melancholy,” Jeanie “Princess Picnic,” and they went on and on making up silly names and creating absurd little nursery rhymes that told of equally absurd situations.
By the time they reached their wagons at the bottom of the mountain, they were happily weary from the walk and the talk and the rhyming, and they clambered into their conveyances, to be borne back to Stockbridge. On the return trip, Jeanie rode in the Fieldses’ carriage, having developed a fondness for Eliza during the picnic, and Sedgwick once again ascended to their driver’s bench, this time impertinently stealing the driver’s white wig for himself. Holmes rode next to Dudley on the bench of Dudley’s wagon, and Herman and Hawthorne sat across from one another in the back, next to Mathews and Duyckinck.
In no time, Mathews and Duyckinck had nodded off, under the influence of the wine and the refreshingly cool air, leaving Hawthorne and Melville to stare at one another in silence. Herman shifted his leg ever so slightly toward Hawthorne’s, so that the fabric of their breeches touched; and the wagon jostled them closer still. Herman felt the warmth of the older author’s calf against his, and Hawthorne neither moved away nor broke Herman’s gaze.
Occasionally, Mathews or Duyckinck would awaken, and Herman would peer nonchalantly over Hawthorne’s shoulder, as if he were merely taking in the rain- and sun-drenched earth; but the moment their fellow passengers nodded off again, he would look back into Hawthorne’s eyes, and Hawthorne continued to stare at him unabashedly, unnervingly. Herman sometimes felt that Hawthorne was laughing at him, so full of ironic humor was his gaze; but the pressure of Hawthorne’s leg against his told him otherwise.
Herman forgot all about his whale manuscript, and he forgot about his debts and even about his wife and son and mother, who were, at that very moment, having tea together in Pittsfield, waiting fo
r him to return. He forgot about himself. The only thing he knew for certain was the radiance of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Chapter 3
Hawthorne and His Mosses
Herman climbed down from the hayloft and walked out of the barn at Broad Hall, his cousin’s bed-and-breakfast. His jacket was covered in golden dust, and bits of hay stuck comically out of his auburn hair. He held the book he had been reading—Mosses from an Old Manse, a story collection that Hawthorne had written several years before—close to his breast.
The picnic at Monument Mountain was a few days behind him, and he had barely slept or eaten. He seemed not to need mere physical sustenance anymore, surviving instead on a spiritual alchemy of memory and desire.
The evening sky was milky with haze; toward the horizon, it became a dull ivory, the color of a tortoise egg. Herman felt as if the whiteness might crack and God himself might hatch into the landscape. The idea of God as an immense tortoise—deliberate, reptilian, silent, and hard shelled—cheered him. Bees buzzed in the meadow, and he took a full breath of the cool air and smelled the bright dusty hay on his coat and the sweet sap of clover at his feet. He felt a wave of optimism lift him up, a renewed faith that the world could deliver unanticipated wonders.
Hawthorne!
No name could be more apt to this man than Hawthorne, Herman thought: the soft ravishments of his beauty had been spun like a web of dreams from the clustered white blossoms of the intoxicatingly sweet hawthorn tree, whose flowers yet hid dangerous thorns. Yes, Hawthorne the man, from hawthorn the tree, the wild haw, whose gossamer veins entwined its scaled and dusky bark with lobed and serrated leaves, a small wonder of symmetry cragged at the trunk and heartbreakingly delicate at the tips of its crown, shooting deep and tangling roots into the soil of Herman’s soul. A whole taxonomy of Hawthorne could be written from his namesake tree, which perfectly embodied the qualities of the man.
He clutched Hawthorne’s book tighter and felt the man’s words bathing his soul, outlining the distinctive hue of every towering hill and far-winding vale in Herman’s heart: it was as if Hawthorne, in his person and through his writing, had mapped Herman’s internal geography before Herman had fully explored it himself. As if he had made an atlas of Herman’s soul that traced every river of love, every freshet and cataract of wonder, every fetid pool of despair, and that, by the celestial mechanisms of this divinely inspired cartographer, the map of his soul was the territory.
He looked up at Broad Hall. His family would have to leave here soon—Robert reminded him daily that they had overstayed their welcome—but the thought had become intolerable! How could he return to that apartment in Manhattan, now that he knew Hawthorne awaited him here? Even Herman’s mother had suggested they move to Pittsfield, as if she had been speaking for the Fates themselves. All Herman had to do was find the means to buy a house in the Berkshires . . . but his literary career seemed to have added up to nothing, just when he needed it most.
He was suddenly aware of voices. Duyckinck and Mathews strolled around the corner of Broad Hall, carrying suitcases. Duyckinck’s black derby hat perched jauntily atop his head, and Mathews wore his oval spectacles on the end of his nose. They looked like a traveling minstrel act.
“Ah, Melville,” Duyckinck said. “Thank you for finishing your review so quickly, but I can’t possibly publish it—at least, not the way it’s written right now.”
When Duyckinck had seen how Melville and Hawthorne had hit it off at the picnic, he had proposed that Herman write an article for the next edition of Literary World magazine, comparing The Scarlet Letter to Thackeray’s latest novel, Pendennis. Duyckinck believed that American readers preferred well-established English authors to relatively unknown Americans, and his new strategy for overcoming this prejudice was to compare local writers favorably to their British counterparts. However, no one had had a copy of The Scarlet Letter on hand, so they had decided that Herman should, instead, write a retrospective about Mosses from an Old Manse—which they had found on Robert’s shelves. Mosses had been a commercial flop, but Duyckinck thought that a new review might excite new interest, especially now that Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter had been condemned from so many pulpits. “Remember,” Duyckinck had told Melville, “mention a well-regarded English author in your review—someone respectable.”
“Did Lizzie not give you the fair copy?” Herman said.
“She did.” Duyckinck opened his valise and withdrew a sheaf of papers. He waved them in Herman’s face. “Look, Melville, when I suggested you compare Hawthorne to a well-regarded Englishman, I meant someone like Dickens or Thackeray or Walter Scott—not Shakespeare!”
Herman brushed hay from his hair. He opened his copy of Mosses from an Old Manse and read aloud: “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.” He looked up. “What do you suppose Hawthorne means by that?”
“Seems obvious,” Mathews said. “Following the simplicity of pure emotion saves one from the complicated thoughts that can lead to damnation.”
“But what about where he says simple emotions, dark or bright? If one felt a simple emotion of malice and followed it, how would that not lead to the infernal regions? He seems to be saying that simplicity is more valuable than morality.”
“Melville,” Duyckinck cried. “This is all gibberish. You simply can’t compare Hawthorne to Shakespeare. And what about this?” He shuffled the pages of Herman’s review until he found a passage that he read aloud. “‘To what infinite height of loving wonder and admiration I may yet be borne, when, by repeatedly banqueting on these Mosses, I shall have thoroughly incorporated their whole stuff into my being—that, I cannot tell. But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul.’ Really? Germinous seeds into your soul?”
“Edit that out, if you don’t like it,” Herman snapped. “Have you read the story called ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’?”
Mathews said, “Is that the one where original sin, as represented by a birthmark on the woman’s face, is the price of human existence?”
“No, that’s a story called ‘The Birth-Mark,’” Herman said sarcastically. “In ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ a man discovers a beautiful girl in a kind of Garden of Eden, but the girl turns out to be poisonous.”
“Garden of Eden?” Mathews said. “Poisonous girl? That’s original sin, too.”
“Original sin is a very commercial idea,” said Duyckinck. “How do you think the Bible stays in print year after year?”
“I thought Jesus sold all those copies.”
Herman ignored them. “What is Hawthorne trying to say? So many of these stories seem to have hidden sexual meanings. For instance, the mark on the woman’s face in ‘The Birth-Mark,’ which the husband, Aylmer, tries desperately to remove, seems a symbol of menstruation. Literally, a birth mark. After all, the mark is red, the color of blood, and Aylmer says it is ‘the only defect’ in his wife’s perfection. And Rappaccini’s poisoned garden is clearly a metaphor for women: everything in the garden is heartbreakingly beautiful but deadly poisonous, including Rappaccini’s daughter, a beautiful flower that you enter through a secret gate and that destroys anything it touches. Does she have syphilis?”
Duyckinck’s face soured. “For God’s sake, Melville, what are you talking about? We have to catch the evening train back to New York.” He put the pages back in his suitcase. “Incidentally, I had a letter from Hawthorne this morning, concerning you. Perhaps you should discuss his views on the flowering of women directly with him.”
“A letter?” Herman said as casually as he could, while his heart nearly leapt out of his mouth.
“He wrote to ask me to send him some books from New York, and he wanted me to ask you if you would be willing to receive them and take them to his cottage. Apparently, the Lenox postmaster is unreliable, and he�
��d heard that the Pittsfield office was better. Would you mind taking some novels to him?”
“Not at all,” said Herman, overjoyed. Hawthorne was engineering their next meeting covertly through Duyckinck! “I’ve never had any problems with the Pittsfield Post Office,” he said nonchalantly.
“Good,” Duyckinck said. “You know, Melville, I’ve known Hawthorne for ten years, and he hasn’t invited me to visit him once, for any reason.”
“That’s right,” Mathews added. “I never even saw Hawthorne’s children until they were talking, and I’ve known him longer than Evert has. He’s a true recluse! But he seemed almost breezy the other day at the picnic, didn’t he, Evert?”
Herman beamed. “Well, send along whatever books he’d like. I’ll ride them over to Lenox straightaway.”
“And when are you and your family returning to Manhattan?” said Duyckinck.
The kitchen door opened, and Lizzie appeared. She was a small woman with a kindly, pale, oval face, a pudgy nose, and black hair parted down the middle; she held Malcolm on her hip. “Would you gentlemen like a morsel to eat on the train?” she said.
“Thank you, but we must be going,” said Duyckinck. He strode over, shook Lizzie’s hand warmly, and thanked her for translating Herman’s nearly illegible review of Mosses from an Old Manse into a readable copy so quickly.
The Whale Page 3
