Melville in Love

by Michael Shelden

  The judge must have had a few misgivings about handing his daughter over to a man with no steady job and a vagabond past. If he had been more objective, Shaw might have used his sharp legal mind to question how a pampered young lady of Beacon Hill with ordinary looks and no special talents could please the extraordinary hero of Typee. Lizzie seems to have had her own doubts, because one of her great fears before the marriage was that the church would be overrun by all the envious women who yearned to be Melville’s Fayaway. In the end she insisted that the wedding take place at her home in Mount Vernon Street instead of at the family’s church.

  They were married in the late morning of August 4, 1847. Lizzie was twenty-five and Melville had just turned twenty-eight. What would endure in the bride’s memory was “a vision of Herman by my side, a confused crowd of rustling dresses, a row of boots, and [the Reverend] Mr. Young in full canonicals standing before me, giving utterance to the solemn words of obligation.”10

  AS A FIRST TOKEN of his generosity to the couple, Judge Shaw helped them to acquire a twenty-one-year leasehold on a house in Manhattan large enough to accommodate not only the newlyweds but also Melville’s mother, a younger brother and his wife, and—as if that weren’t enough—all four of Herman’s grown, but unmarried sisters. It was a good first step in putting his mother and siblings back where they had started as a respectable family living well in New York in earlier times, and he couldn’t have done it without the judge’s help.

  The house was in a decent neighborhood on Fourth Avenue behind the recently constructed Grace Church. The Melvilles would be one big family under one roof—as though Lizzie had always been among them, like an adopted daughter. Most newlyweds would have sought a more private love nest than this crowded house, but Lizzie acquiesced to the arrangement and wrote reassuringly to her family in Boston that she was enjoying her new life, though she had never been to New York before. “I’m afraid no place will ever seem to me like dear old crooked Boston,” she told them, “but with Herman with me always, I can be happy and contented anywhere.”11

  At the outset, there was certainly affection and warmth in this relationship, but no sign of any great passion. As Melville would lament in one of his later poems, “few matching halves here meet and mate.” One of his cousins thought the feelings between the couple were more “ethereal” than physical. Many decades later, after both were gone, the couple’s granddaughter Eleanor Metcalf would tell an early biographer, “You say, in your Nation article, that Melville was happily married. He wasn’t.”12

  For three years Herman did his best to make it all work, to keep Lizzie and the rest of his family happy. In less than two years he became a father. His son Malcolm was born in February 1849. Proud of this new addition to the family line, he gave him a name that paid tribute not to his mother’s Dutch background, but to his father’s Scottish roots. He boasted that he was “of noble lineage—of the Lords of Melville & Leven.” And, in fact, in Elizabethan times one of Herman’s ancestors held a knighthood and a small castle by the edge of the sea near Edinburgh. (In America the family had been spelling the name without the final e, but after the death of Herman’s father his class-conscious mother decided a change was needed. So the widow and her brood abandoned “Melvill” for what was then considered the more distinguished “Melville.”)13

  While Lizzie cared for her new infant, her husband scribbled away upstairs. His oldest sister—Helen Maria—helped out by making fair copies of his manuscripts, keeping pace with her brother page by page. Grimly diligent, he went to his desk each day as though to a barn to do chores. Needing to produce something sufficiently commercial, he reported to Judge Shaw that he felt compelled to keep writing “as other men are to sawing wood.”14

  Then, after a brief time abroad in England at the end of 1849, he began trying to write a different kind of story—something that might please both the reading public and himself. His literary efforts weren’t earning him enough money to support his large household, and he needed a breakthrough book that would not only match Typee’s success but also reach an even larger audience. He had made moves in this direction with Mardi, but its added layers of allegory, philosophy, satire, and social criticism make an uneven fit with its basic tale of the sea, and the book did not do well. By July he was well into a story that drew on his old whaling experiences, a big book in theme and scope about a nautical world that he was uniquely qualified to explain. It was still missing something “to cook the thing up,” as Melville put it. “One must needs throw in a little fancy.”15

  In the next year “a little” would turn into a lot, with his novel of the Whale increasingly elevated through “fancy” into a more lyrical and mythic tale. In his daily life, however, Melville needed a change of scenery first. As the temperatures rose that summer, he didn’t find it easy working in New York. With so many people living in his house, the noise and heat became increasingly hard to bear. The weather turned so bad that the newspapers warned of the city reaching its “melting point.” There was no relief from the burning sun, the Tribune observed, “unless one was able to sit all day eating ice-creams, with his feet in a tub of water, and the lightest possible clothing on his back.” Before the city became too oppressive Herman Melville was gone. One day in the middle of July 1850 he packed a bag and left on his own for what he thought would be a short escape to the cool heights of the Berkshires.16

  4

  THE FIRST STEP

  It was early in the summer of 1850 that Sarah Morewood arrived in Pittsfield for her second season in the Berkshires. Rowland accompanied her there from New York by train, and not long after he had negotiated his purchase of Broadhall, he returned to the city, coming back for weekends when his work allowed. It was a pattern that he would follow for years, and Sarah would dutifully tell his relatives in England how much she regretted “that my husband is with me so little.” Broadhall and the Berkshires were her playground, and Rowland acknowledged that fact by staying out of the way as much as possible. For the sake of his family’s business in the city, he couldn’t do otherwise. The firm was called George B. Morewood & Company, and it was located in lower Manhattan, where it specialized in selling galvanized spikes, bolts, wires, and lightning rods. Nothing could be less poetic, and Sarah rarely mentioned the business. Her own parents had little money, so every penny she spent in her beloved Berkshires, Rowland had to earn in a brick warehouse at 14 Beaver Street.1

  Making Sarah happy seemed to make Rowland happy. She was the only touch of magic in his otherwise routine life. He wasn’t handsome, just wealthy. His face was round and plain, with small, soft eyes that seemed to disappear in the back of his head under a heavy brow. In later years he grew stout, his beard turned white, and he lost most of his hair. There was almost nothing he wouldn’t do for her. Broadhall didn’t have a piano, so he had one shipped from Albany for Sarah to use just for the summer. If she needed more carriages to take friends to a picnic, she hired whatever was required in town. Though Broadhall continued to operate as a boardinghouse for the rest of the season, Sarah acted as if the mansion belonged to her even before the sale was finalized. She was treated as the owner in all but name and brought her own servants for the summer. (Whenever Rowland was at the house that year, he gave his address as “J.R. Morewood, At the Melvill Place, Pittsfield.”)2

  It may be that Melville’s cousin was desperate to be rid of the costly mansion, or that Rowland was too clever for him, but the purchase price was a steal. A similar farm in the neighborhood sold a few years later for $18,500, and the house on that land was not nearly as impressive as Broadhall. Yet the Morewoods were able to acquire their magnificent summer place for the absurdly low price of $6,500. Rowland had the advantage of being able to pay cash, and because the deal was sealed in private, without any notice to the general public that the place was for sale, there were no competing offers to consider. The rock-bottom price must have delighted Sarah, who wanted to make some improvements. Whatever money was saved on the purch
ase would be used later that year for renovating the kitchen and other rooms.3

  When Herman Melville happened to show up at the old familiar mansion in mid-July 1850 to visit his cousin, he walked into a house that may have looked the same but was suddenly filled with a fresh air of excitement and purpose. Sarah was full of big ideas for her future in the Berkshires, and was busy inviting various members of her New Jersey family to come and see her new house. She was eager to throw large parties, organize elaborate picnics and dinners, launch extensive tours of the region, and make every summer at Broadhall unforgettable.

  The Berkshire landscape was the perfect backdrop for her. It seemed to draw out her good looks and bring her best qualities to the forefront. Her dark, enigmatic face was all the more seductive against the background of a natural world so rich and colorful in summer and autumn. One of her best friends—the journalist Caroline Whitmarsh—said that Sarah “gloried in the beautiful scenery” of the region and eventually became one of its most knowledgeable guides. Any bright spot in the landscape would arrest her attention and produce a cry of pleasure. “She was never so happy as when pointing out [its] beauty to others,” wrote Whitmarsh of Sarah and the Berkshires, “dipping her hands in the stream, bending over the flowers, looking up through leaves at the sky, or dreaming across the lake, with a true lover’s love.”4

  There is no way to know how much Melville had learned about Mrs. Morewood before he arrived, or how much her plans depended on meeting him. Once he returned to this Berkshire version of Typee Valley, he slowed work on the whaling book while Sarah captured more and more of his attention. If he resented her ownership of Broadhall or worried over her character because of anything his cousin Robert might have told him, it never showed.5

  EVER SINCE HIS RETURN FROM THE PACIFIC, Melville had been leading a relatively quiet life. Unlike Alexander Gardiner, he had no reputation as a man who liked to party or chase women in the big city. Only his books told of his more liberated and indulgent self. Family life seemed to tame him, but on the sea or among the maidens of the Pacific, there had been a different Melville who relished adventure, pleasure, and danger—and boasted of it. Under Sarah’s influence his bolder self emerged once again. He returned to enjoy a summer devoted to activities that he had rarely or never undertaken in mixed company before—champagne picnics in green meadows, costume parties, late-night dinners, and long, lazy afternoons boating or fishing at a wooded lake.

  Lizzie Melville—and others from her New York household—came to Broadhall that summer to join Herman, but she and her in-laws are rarely mentioned in the various accounts of that period by visitors and neighbors, and seem to fade into the background. As an escape from New York, what Lizzie enjoyed most was the safe, predictable life at her father’s home on Beacon Hill. In Manhattan she had made little impression on anyone, and was content to avoid the literary spotlight that was sometimes turned on her husband. She was convinced that he was now essentially a homebody, too. “Herman is not fond of parties,” she had declared from their new place in New York soon after their marriage, “and I don’t care anything about them here.”6

  When Lizzie arrived in the Berkshires for the family holiday, she was in for a surprise. Suddenly Herman couldn’t resist parties and pleasure excursions—if Sarah had anything to do with them. Mrs. Morewood was the center of his attention, and he showed no interest in returning to New York that summer as long as she was at Broadhall.

  When two of his city friends—the editor Evert Duyckinck and the poet Cornelius Mathews—visited him for a few days, the one woman who stood out for both of them was Sarah. They barely noticed Lizzie. To Mathews, Mrs. Morewood was indisputably “the sorceress of the scene,” dominating and directing every activity wherever she appeared. Duyckinck was similarly impressed. Watching her crack a whip as she drove a pair of horses down a country lane, he remarked with sudden wonder, “There’s a woman with a snapper.” To his wife in New York, he commented that Sarah would soon be the “owner” of Broadhall, and he promised, “I must tell you more about her.”7

  On a long carriage excursion one afternoon to Pontoosuc—a large lake on the other end of town—Melville first experienced Sarah’s ability to command attention and shine against the Berkshire backdrop, and he quickly fell in with her festive plans. In a procession of carriages, Sarah treated Melville and his friends to a lively tour of the surrounding countryside, springing up in her seat every so often to stand on tiptoe and point out various natural wonders “hid away in the distance.” Cornelius Mathews was so charmed by her spirited commentary and shapely figure that he quickly adopted the view of so many of her admirers—that she couldn’t be entirely human. Soon he was babbling away about mountain fairies in storybooks, and how Mrs. Morewood must be an actual fairy sent down to weave a spell around visitors like him. (Fanciful but homely, Mathews never had much luck with women, and even his male colleagues tended to mock his looks. James Russell Lowell called him “a small man in glasses.”) Even among old-time residents Sarah was often the first to notice an overlooked area of beauty. Perhaps as a result of his rambles with her, Melville remarked in August, “It is curious, how a man may travel along a country road, and yet miss the grandest or sweetest of prospects, by reason of an intervening hedge, so like all other hedges, as in no way to hint of the wide landscape beyond.”8

  In the Berkshires that summer it seemed that Sarah Morewood was everywhere. She was up early and often dashed across the horizon on horseback or at the front of a carriage with a cloud of dust trailing behind her. An accomplished rider, she thought of her horses as friends and loved the freedom they gave her to go anywhere she wanted at a moment’s notice. By the end of the season, one of Melville’s vivid memories would be of the “sprightly” Sarah on the back of a horse, “patting his neck & lovingly talking to him.” Among her horses in later years, there was “a fine filly” that she named—of course—Fayaway.9

  CORNELIUS MATHEWS THOUGHT that his stay with Melville in the Berkshires was like a voyage to a romantic land, and it would appear that Sarah did much to create that impression for him. After his holiday at Broadhall was over, he declared himself one of her devoted well-wishers when he inscribed his latest book to her, and he explained to the readers of Duyckinck’s Literary World that he had spent part of his summer “sailing” in the Berkshires: “We launched out, on our first entrance into the new region, like mariners upon an unknown ocean, ready to make the most of every current and islet on our course.”10

  Melville had a similar feeling. Writing two years later in the novel heavily influenced by his Berkshire experiences—Pierre; or, The Ambiguities—he rhapsodizes over the countryside with the same passion and fond attention to detail that he gives to the sea in his other books, finding that the dark forests recall the beginnings of time and nature’s supremacy in the same way that “the eternal ocean” does. Just as his impending voyage on a whaling ship awakens Ishmael in Moby-Dick to the majesty of the natural world (“the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open”), so the young hero of Pierre surveys a landscape like that surrounding Broadhall and asks hopefully, “Is it possible, after all, that . . . this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?”11

  It is a young woman with long, dark hair and penetrating eyes—a beauty of “intense and fearful love for him”—who inspires Pierre to see the natural world with fresh eyes. He concludes that she has emerged from “the wonder-world” to show him a new life full of mystery and magic. He is one kind of man before he meets her, and then she turns his world upside down, shattering his previous sense of dull routine and turning him into an impassioned creature barely recognizable to those who knew him before. Powerless to resist her, he describes her as “so beautiful, so mystical, so bewilderingly alluring.”12

  A quick look, a touch of her hand, her upturned face in a doorway, her music
al voice, a vision of her by lamplight—in every aspect of her appearance and character Pierre finds something to stir his heart, and he soon believes that he has discovered at last the kind of love he has only previously known in books. He imagines that he and the young woman are like two figures in a courtly romance. Vowing to be her knight, her champion, he regards her as his Lady, and addresses her in the same archaic, stylized language of all those courtly letters that Sarah would save from Melville.

  Because the author spent the first weeks of his Berkshire holiday under the same roof with Sarah, they probably didn’t exchange letters while they stayed at Broadhall. But, as a future chapter will show, Pierre is so close to the known facts of their lives that it can reveal much of the behind-the-scenes drama. The novel is a love letter both to the woman who changed his life and to the world of Broadhall that served as an inspiration to each of them.

  AS A COMPANION PIECE TO MOBY-DICK—the backstory to the creation of the whaling saga—Pierre will be easier to understand later in the story of Herman and Sarah. For now, however, there is one clue worth considering that has managed to withstand the passage of time, yet can still speak eloquently to the emotions of the couple’s early days. For the past half century this clue has sat on a shelf in a redbrick townhouse on a quiet street in an old neighborhood of Philadelphia. On the third floor of the little Rosenbach Museum and Library, there is an expensively bound volume published in 1854 with the following words written inside in black ink: “H. Melville Pittsfield Mass. Presented to Mrs JR. Morewood.” There is no note to indicate when he gave it to her, but the time was probably toward the end of the 1850s, when illnesses and other setbacks had cast a shadow over their lives. Melville, it seems, wanted to recall better days with an apt quotation hidden in plain sight in the pages of this book.13