“Has Una walked the entire way from Lenox, then?”
“We hitched a few miles here and there in the back of a wagon,” said Hawthorne. “But Una has the fortitude of a soldier, and marching alongside her in the mud was rather pleasant, after all the snow we’ve had.” Hawthorne wiped his shoes on the porch and picked up his satchel again. “What about those refreshments?”
Una ran in and gave Mary the cook an unsolicited report about her adventures on the road from Lenox. Herman introduced Mary, then knelt down in front of Una and said, “We have water for your thirst, and milk and shortbread for your soul, and birch candy for your dreams. Which would you like first?”
“Birch candy!”
“Dreams first, then. A wise choice.” Herman patted her on the head.
“Mary has gone to let the others know that your guests have arrived,” said Mary.
“I thought your name was Mary,” Hawthorne said.
“The housemaid is also named Mary,” said Mary.
Hawthorne pulled Herman aside and whispered, “Do you mean to tell me, in all seriousness, that you retain a housekeeper and a cook and both are named Mary?”
“I would not say anything in all seriousness, but it’s true. They’re both Irish, as well—it isn’t so unusual.”
Overhearing this, Una said, “Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary. Now I’m a Mary, too.”
“We can all be Marys,” said Herman with a wink. “In our own ways.”
They heard steps on the landing, and soon Mary the maid appeared with Maria, Helen, and Augusta from upstairs, and Lizzie came through the back door with Malcolm, so that the entire company of Melvilles and their servants suddenly stood crowded around Hawthorne and Una in the kitchen. As everyone was being introduced, Malcolm—resting on Lizzie’s hip—swiped at Hawthorne’s hair but missed and ejected a trail of snot down his mouth and chin and onto the floor.
• • •
They drained three bottles of champagne by way of a reception and became so jolly that they even served the Marys a glass each, as well. Una gorged herself on shortbread. Malcolm covered several large rocks of birch candy with slobber before flinging them across the room. Herman then gave Hawthorne a tour of the estate, while Una helped entertain Malcolm.
Nathaniel complimented the design of Arrowhead—“a stately hive compassing a brooding hearth,” as he put it—and Herman welcomed him with great ceremoniousness into his study, where the other members of the household were almost never allowed. He showed Hawthorne the tiny closet of a room that opened off the study, explaining that that was where he slept when his back pain was too bad to allow him to rest peacefully next to Lizzie (he failed to mention that it was also the bed where his fantasies of Hawthorne turned most frequently from his mind to his body), and he proposed stationing Hawthorne and Una there during their visit. Hawthorne said he would be honored to sleep wherever Herman would suffer him to lay his head, a comment Herman found excruciating.
By the time they had returned to the parlor, Una was engaged in a game of checkers with Helen, while the rest of the Melville women stood around them and quizzed Una about her life, which Una enjoyed as if she were a princess holding forth in her own court. Hawthorne smiled broadly and mussed her hair, while she declared, apropos of nothing, “Massachusetts became a state on February 6, 1788.”
“She’s like her mother in that way,” Hawthorne said. “Answering questions that no one has posed.”
Herman led Hawthorne back into the dining area, where Mary the cook was encouraging the hearth fire with a bellows. He took a bottle of brandy and two glasses from the shelf and motioned for Hawthorne to follow him out the back door. The air was bracingly cold, and the setting sun seemed watery and weak, as if it were shining through beveled glass.
“My barn is the most pleasant spot on the property,” Herman said. “I’ll introduce you to Zenobia.”
“Zenobia?”
“My cow.”
“An excellent name.”
“I borrowed it from the queen of Palmyra.”
“I must remember that. Have you used it in a book yet?”
“No, it’s yours,” Herman said. “With my blessings.”
Melville and Hawthorne entered the barn through its huge yellow double doors, and then Herman shut them in. It was quite dim, the loft window letting in only a tiny square of wan daylight. Chickens clucked from their pen in the far corner, and a pig, invisible in the deep darkness, grunted deliberately three times, as if ordering from a menu. They patted Herman’s horse and petted Zenobia, who nuzzled them both affectionately. The sweet smell of hay and the rankness of drying manure mixed pleasantly in the back of their throats. Herman found an oil lamp on a bench and lit it, then produced two cigars from a wooden box.
“Do you often smoke with the animals?” Hawthorne asked.
“Only Zenobia smokes, but the pig likes his liquor.”
They lit their cigars and poured some brandy and drank. Herman directed Hawthorne to a bale of hay, where they sat down; and Herman spread a horse blanket across their legs. A mild but persistent draft produced a constant precipitation of hay dust that mingled with their cigar smoke, creating halos over their heads in the lamplight.
To Herman, the house seemed a thousand miles away, and his body seemed airy and full of light, so happy did he feel to be sitting once again beside this man of such ennobling beauty, who was in such good humor. Hawthorne was the most beautiful creature Herman had ever seen, perhaps the most beautiful creature that had ever existed. He felt like Icarus flying defiantly toward the sun.
“To sunny journeys through stormy lands,” Herman toasted.
Hawthorne clinked his glass. “And vice versa.” He reclined against the bale behind him, and little stalks of hay nestled into his hair, like strands of spun gold in a fairy tale. It required all of Herman’s will not to brush it gently from Hawthorne’s hair. “I have been reading a great deal of Balzac.”
“Balzac?” Herman exclaimed. “Beef and gravy!”
“He does enjoy his own descriptions, doesn’t he? Sometimes, though, I want a good story more than I want a proper moral, and he tells good stories.”
“Good stories are sometimes enough,” said Herman. “Sometimes.”
“I like writers who write very unlike I do,” said Hawthorne. Herman thought he detected a significant look in Hawthorne’s eye, as if he might have been talking about Herman himself. “I enjoy books that I could not possibly have written. Would it not be a relief to give up one’s normal preoccupations with morals and sins?”
“You mean, wouldn’t it be a relief to know all the answers, so as not to have to write stories about the questions?” Herman drained off his brandy and poured himself another.
“Perhaps. But I believe that one inherits one’s preoccupations as much as invents or discovers them. I have a yen for exploring the past, for instance, not because I am fascinated by historical reality, but because I believe the past governs us, in the present, in ways that are subtle, and insidious—one might almost say that the past is a supernatural power. I believe our impulses are handed down to us, even more than our morals.”
“Even the impulse to love another?”
“How can one decide, with the mind, whom to love? And if the lover hasn’t decided love, then it must be inspired by some other agency. Call it Divine Providence, or the collective weight of history, or the supernatural—call it what you will. We individually make choices in reaction to the whole weight of history, which has been created collectively through the power of traditions we never fully understand. That is the true supernatural—the ungovernable complexity of history, stretching infinitely back in time.” Hawthorne gazed past their lamp into the shadow, at the cud-chewing Zenobia.
“I cannot tell if you are an atheist or a true believer,” said Herman.
“I am often unsure myself. But
I have just been meditating anew on the influence of the past in The House of the Seven Gables. It concerns the reactions of people who find themselves influenced by secret histories that they feel in their hearts more than they understand with their minds, and how incomprehensible longings may still compel decent people to act immorally.”
Herman topped up Hawthorne’s brandy and scooted closer to him. He felt the warmth of Nathaniel’s thigh radiating under the blanket.
Hawthorne smiled ruefully. “To be honest with you, Melville, I sometimes don’t have the faintest idea what I’m trying to say with my damned allegories. I feel as if I’m writing with invisible ink.”
Something profound happened to Herman as Hawthorne said this, as if Hawthorne had turned a mystical key and the tumblers of Herman’s soul had aligned. The feeling delighted him; yet, in contemplating what Hawthorne had said, he discerned nothing extraordinarily profound or witty: he simply felt that, in some subtle but critical way beyond the reach of the rest of the world, Hawthorne thought as he thought. It was a divine sympathy. Herman puffed up a great volume of cigar smoke.
“When will your seven-gabled house be erected for us to see?”
“It will be published next month. Fields, my publisher, assures me that it will be a great success. But what else can a publisher say?”
“I’m sure everyone will flock to read it, but you should not give a damn what the public thinks. Even if the world passes it by, you shall have at least one avid reader who will enjoy it immensely. And I am a special reader, you must remember: I can read between the lines on the page and I see invisible ink, as well. Nothing escapes me!”
Hawthorne looked at Herman with something like fear. “Yes, my wife believes you have special powers of discernment.” He took a healthy drink of brandy. “I suppose I do, too.” He looked away and blushed. “But I hope the world does not pass it by, since I have a new baby on the way. You may read the invisible ink and tell me what I meant, after all, but let ten thousand others read the words that appear plainly in black, and pay to do so.”
Herman again raised his glass in a toast. “To the black and the invisible.”
Dimly, at the edge of Herman’s understanding, he heard a woman’s voice yelling. She seemed to be calling the same words over and over. Finally, he tore his attention away from Hawthorne’s beautiful, manly face and understood the words, “Mr. Melville, Mr. Hawthorne, supper.” It was Mary the cook. Herman was mortified that she might start banging a pan with a spoon.
They cast off their blanket and stood, and Herman looked around him and flinched. He and Hawthorne had both finished their cigars, and the window above the loft showed that it was completely dark outside. They had been suspended in time: their conversation seemed to have lasted only a few moments, yet when they emerged from the barn and saw the lights in the house all ablaze, Herman realized that they must have been talking for more than an hour. A few wispy snowflakes were falling as they followed Mary inside.
What is this dream, Herman thought, in which an hour with Hawthorne feels like only an instant and every second away from him feels like an eternity? If the universe were just, it would be the other way around.
• • •
At dinner, Una proved outgoing and entertaining and seemed right in her element. Unlike the skitterish and shy child Herman knew from his visits to Lenox, she lit up with enthusiasm at the Melville ladies’ questions. Herman had never seen a family that flipped so dramatically from one tendency to its opposite so quickly or so often as the Hawthornes did: Sophia with her glib bantering on the one hand and morbid confinement on the other; Una with her shyness at home that turned to carnival barking on a visit; Hawthorne himself, who seemed to flip from dark to light as rapidly as a coin spinning through moonlit air. Only Julian seemed fixed in his character, since he was mindlessly rambunctious at all times and appeared to have no secrets at all.
After they had eaten, they retired to the parlor and pulled their chairs up close around the fireplace. Pleasantly exhausted from her encyclopedic chattering at the table, Una curled up on a pillow at her father’s feet and quickly fell asleep.
Hawthorne said, “Have you heard that the Harper brothers are soliciting stories for their new magazine?”
Herman nodded. “They asked me for something about the South Seas, but they are paying only in prestige.”
Lizzie chimed in. “Has that currency lost its value? I thought if you earned enough of it, you could trade it for dollars.”
“You can,” said Hawthorne. “But the exchange rate is rather poor.”
“A good name is better than great riches,” Lizzie said ironically, quoting one of Herman’s favorite Bible verses directly at him.
“I suppose we should be glad their magazine is a success,” said Herman, ignoring her. “But they have printed six issues now containing almost nothing but pirated English material. Great swaths of Dickens and Trollope.”
“Next to advertisements for vanishing creams and corsets,” said Hawthorne.
“And must everything they produce be called Harper’s?” said Herman. “The only name they can think of is their own.” He made an elaborate presentation of serving port. Hawthorne toasted their health and then turned solicitously to Lizzie.
“I’m afraid, Mrs. Melville, that the Harpers and Duyckincks truly believe they can make Americans fall in love with American authors by printing them alongside English writers that everyone already knows. But I would be more convinced if the strategy did not require outright theft from our English counterparts and virtual theft from us.”
“But how should we fight against it?” said Herman. “We can hardly print and sell books ourselves, and the Harper brothers will never have incentive to pay American authors for their work when they can print Dickens for free. Who will enforce an English copyright on American soil, and if their copyrights cannot be enforced, what value will ours have?”
“The problem, in my opinion, is not the copyright question,” said Lizzie. “The problem lies between the covers of the books. Readers don’t really know or care who earns the money from a book—if an author writes something that people want to read, they will buy it. People buy Thackeray and Dickens because they like the stories they write, not because of some abstract considerations concerning the nationality of the writers or the legal standing of their copyrights. People also buy the novels of Catharine Sedgwick and George Lippard—American authors who sell many thousands of books—because they enjoy their work. If there were enough American authors writing the kinds of stories Americans want to read, the publishers would pay them what they deserve, because the sales would justify the advances. Our own writers could then earn a living, and the courts would sort out the copyright question in due time.”
Herman felt stung by her comments. “Surely you are not saying that all American authors should write in the insipid style of Catharine Sedgwick?”
“Of course not.” Lizzie put her hands together in a gesture of prayer and looked to Hawthorne for help. “I am not speaking of the quality of books as literature. I am talking about sales, which is what you were talking about.”
“I must agree with Mrs. Melville and even take her point a step further,” said Hawthorne. “The problem, when you look at it honestly, is not that publishers will always seek the most profit possible but rather that the sheer number and variety of English authors far outstrips the number of our own writers. Even if every American writer were paid top dollar for every story and novel, our own publishers would still print English novels and still profit by them. We are a tiny militia fighting a great army, and we have not yet recruited enough soldiers to win the war—but we defeated the British once, and we shall do it again.” He lifted his glass to Lizzie.
Herman was unwilling to countenance this allegiance of Hawthorne and his wife against him. “But every American author is not paid top dollar for every novel and story, as you we
ll know, and the copyright issue cuts both ways. Has The Scarlet Letter not been pirated in England? I have lost untold sales in England through unauthorized British reprints, and surely this has nothing to do with the number and variety of English authors available to the public—it is immoral moneygrubbing by the publishers, plain and simple, at the expense of individual authors on both sides of the Atlantic, who have no recourse in the courts.”
Herman suddenly realized that he had been shouting. Hawthorne glanced an apology at Lizzie and Augusta, and Herman felt foolish.
“It is a difficult subject,” said Hawthorne, “as you all know too well.”
Augusta said, “Would it not be better to talk more of the great poetry and beauty of books than their sales? Especially since we have such an accomplished writer as our special guest?”
Augusta asked Hawthorne to read from his own Twice-Told Tales, and Hawthorne surprised them by giving a dramatic reading of “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” performing the voices of each character convincingly and somehow enlivening the dour Puritan tale into a kind of ghost story; and he followed it with the midnight meditation of “The Haunted Mind.” Herman sat in a rocking chair so close to Hawthorne that, when he rocked forward, he occasionally felt the brush of the older man’s sleeve against his hand. He closed his eyes and forgot about the marketplace and his own embarrassing outburst and let Nathaniel’s words bathe his mind and heart and soul.
• • •
When they awoke the next morning, a crusty new glaze of snow covered the ground, and the roads had again become impassable. With the exception of Maria, who stayed inside to look after Malcolm, all of the Melville women joined Una outside, building snowmen and throwing snowballs. Helen, Augusta, and especially Lizzie were thrilled to have an excuse to release some pent-up energy in the fresh air.
Herman was delighted, as well—as long as the snow continued, Hawthorne would be his hostage. He had imagined taking long walks alone with Nathaniel during his visit, but instead, after breakfast, they found themselves returning to the barn for another chat, which was even better than Herman’s fantasies; it was so cozy to sit among the animals nestled into the warmth of the hay that Herman could compare his joy only to the happiness that the swaddled infant Jesus must have inspired around Him, in that manger so far away. It pleased Herman that the analogies he could find for his love for Hawthorne so often seemed religious, since the feeling was as encompassing and mystical as sacred devotion.
The Whale Page 16
