Melville in Love

by Michael Shelden

  For two mornings in London, Herman Melville was the guest in a house where poetry, painting, angels, vultures, Turner’s career, fame, and ambition could all occupy the same intellectual space in a setting that was a veritable temple of art. The young man would never again be entertained in any place that could compare with Rogers’s house at 22 St. James’s Place. An engraving by Charles Mottram in 1815 shows Byron, Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Turner, and Wordsworth gathered around the very same dining table where Melville was served breakfast in December. This was a heady moment for an American writer with so few years of literary experience behind him. It provided the kind of inspiration that Melville would describe in his Hawthorne essay: “Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”

  The treasures inside Rogers’s home were worth far more than the building itself, but Rogers liked to think of his tall townhouse “as a fitting frame to a beautiful picture, or a precious binding to a rare book.” More than his poetry or his money, this house had brought him the greatest renown in his old age. So many visitors to England longed for a glimpse inside that a London guidebook included a detailed list of its most valuable contents, and then added the discouraging note: “Mode of Admission—A letter of introduction (the only mode).” The information was in a section grandly labeled “Houses of the Principal Nobility and Gentry.” (Besides his just claims as a celebrated author, Melville was also able to supply Rogers with a letter of introduction from Edward Everett, then president of Harvard and a former ambassador to Britain, as well as a friend of Judge Shaw.)11

  AFTER LEAVING THIS HOUSE of artistic wonders and being regaled for hours with stories of great writers and great painters, Melville must have still had his head in the clouds when he sailed for America a few days later. Within weeks of his return to New York, he was hard at work on a story of a “whaling voyage,” and joking with Richard Henry Dana that he was trying to find poetry in “blubber.”

  By the end of the summer, he had found some of that poetry, and he had found love. And now at the end of 1850—looking back at how far he had come since the previous December with Samuel Rogers—he was wondering whether his own progress from brilliant beginnings would end well, or turn into a disaster. He understood both the plight of the everyman caught in the larger designs of others and the exhilaration of the extraordinary hero aspiring to the highest pinnacle. He could write convincingly of both positions, and warn of the dangers facing both. But could he save himself? Or would his failure simply provide another “feast for vultures”?

  13

  THE ELUSIVE NEIGHBOR

  In that long winter in the Berkshires, Melville was not the only one in the neighborhood writing an American classic. Over in Lenox, Hawthorne was working on his novel The House of the Seven Gables, and he was writing at a Melvillean pace. He began the book in August 1850 and finished it at the end of January. Unlike Melville’s marathon with Moby-Dick, this literary sprint of Hawthorne’s was a relatively painless endeavor. In their snug little house Sophia Hawthorne helped to keep everything running smoothly while her husband wrote in the mornings, and when he appeared at lunch, she and their two small children would welcome him like a hero, with “great rejoicing throughout his kingdom,” as Sophia put it.1

  Preoccupied with their books, Hawthorne and Melville saw each other infrequently during the winter. In January, when Melville went to Lenox for a brief visit, he was happy to see that his fellow author was doing well after a storm. “I found him, of course, buried in snow,” Melville wrote to Duyckinck, “& the delightful scenery about him, all wrapped up & tucked away under a napkin, as it were.” After a meal of cold chicken, Melville returned home, but with a promise that Hawthorne would soon visit him at Arrowhead. He was hungry for companionship and yearned to discuss his novel with the older writer over “a bottle of brandy & cigars.” Without Sarah in the neighborhood, he had gone far too long in solitude thinking about art and life.2

  When Hawthorne kept putting off the promised visit because of his work, the weather, and other concerns, Melville grew increasingly impatient. Here he was with those six miles separating him from a great American writer with insights into fiction, fame, darkness, and sin, yet weeks were going by without a word between them. He tried to make it clear that there was some urgency on his part. He wrote, half in jest, “Come—no nonsence. If you don’t—I will send the Constables after you.” A room at Arrowhead was waiting: “Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire.”3

  At last, in mid-March Hawthorne came to Arrowhead for a short stay. The weather was still cold and raw, so the two novelists didn’t venture outdoors much, but took shelter in the barn, where they could talk and smoke to their heart’s content. Hawthorne found a carpenter’s bench to be the best resting place, and there he would sit or lie for hours listening to Melville unload all the many weeks of thoughts he had been holding inside. Occasionally they stepped outside for air, to stretch their legs, and admire “a fine snow-covered prospect of Greylock.” After a couple of days of indulging Melville’s need for a sounding board, Hawthorne felt as if he had been at Arrowhead for a week. Recalling Henry David Thoreau’s recent book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Hawthorne joked as he was leaving that he should follow The House of the Seven Gables with a new volume called “A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn.”4

  His dry wit didn’t offend Melville, who would have kept him as a captive audience for a week if he could have. It was an old habit from his naval days to gather with friends on the foretop of the old warship United States and talk for hours. On dry land in the Berkshires, the carpenter’s bench was the best substitute available for the airy platform high above the ship’s decks. As he recalled in White-Jacket, “the tops of a frigate are quite spacious and cosy. They are railed in behind so as to form a kind of balcony, very pleasant of a tropical night. From twenty to thirty loungers may agreeably recline there, cushioning themselves on old sails and jackets.” In his imagination, Melville must have spent many a day that winter in the foretop, planning and writing his novel as if from a great height, looking down on the Pequod and gazing far away at the sea as his cast of characters sailed along. In truth, it was such a lonely voyage that when Hawthorne finally came to spend a little time with him, he acted like a man who hadn’t seen another soul for months.5

  There were things about his work that he felt Hawthorne could understand especially well, and in an ideal world, Melville could see himself and his friend as brothers living and working side by side, engaged in endless speculations about the universe. In a burst of enthusiasm one day that spring, he wrote to Hawthorne to share his vision of a tropical eternity in which they would drink champagne and talk “in some little shady corner” until the earth is just “a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity.” Such talk was simply too much for a private man like Hawthorne, and in the coming months he began finding more excuses to keep Melville at a comfortable distance. He didn’t crave literary companionship of the kind the younger author sought. An intense and revealing relationship with another writer was the last thing he needed, and it was too much to expect an author of his stature to be anyone else’s sounding board. Nevertheless, that was what Melville tended to want from him. “I know little about you,” wrote Herman, “but something about myself. So I write about myself. . . . Don’t trouble yourself about talking. I will do all the writing and visiting and talking myself.” Soon even Melville feared that he had treated his friend too often as a choir expected to sit patiently through another long sermon. In one letter he apologized to Hawthorne: “I am falling into my old foible—preaching.”6

  It wasn’t really in Melville’s nature to bombard others with his thoughts or to seek closer bonds with writers generally. He was almost as private as Hawthorne, and sometimes even as reserved, but when he found the right person who seemed to share his views or sympathize with his aims, he came to life in an explosion of feeling. Once he
opened his heart to someone, the force of his personality could be overwhelming. Sophia Hawthorne recognized this and responded to it better than did her husband. “He is an incalculable person,” she wrote of Melville, “full of daring & questions, & with all momentous considerations afloat in the crucible of his mind. He tosses them in, & heats his furnace sevenfold & burns & stirs, & waits for the crystalization with a royal indifference as to what may turn up, only eager for truth, without previous prejudice.”7

  In time, Melville came to accept a difficult truth. Much as he admired Hawthorne, their temperaments were too disparate. The author of The House of the Seven Gables was not one who shared Melville’s notion of diving deep. He was never going to join him in a fearless plunge into the most dangerous waters of the soul. He was always going to keep his head above water. So restrained and aloof was Hawthorne that Sophia once said of her husband, “He hates to be touched any more than anyone I ever knew.” As a literary craftsman, he was the jeweler working in the quiet back room, while Melville was the sculptor dangling from the side of a massive stone.8

  Perhaps one reason the sculptor interested Hawthorne is that, on occasion, he wanted to throw caution to the winds himself and take greater risks. A scene in The House of the Seven Gables suggests as much. It takes place at the long window in the old house when a noisy political parade passes by in the street below. Poor Clifford, the sad wreck of a man whom life has treated so unfairly, stands at the window in an agitated state and almost jumps into the middle of the crowd, but his sister and their young cousin Phoebe restrain him. Sounding very much like Melville, Hawthorne says in his narrative voice that Clifford might have been better off to jump. What he has in mind is more in keeping with Melville’s metaphorical diving than the real thing: “He needed a shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the world and to himself.” But, of course, Clifford does not take that plunge. Such dives belong in Melville’s work, not in The House of the Seven Gables, and the best Hawthorne can offer is the recognition that—for those brave enough, and reckless enough—the result might be worth the risk. Then again, Hawthorne adds with his typical good sense, it might simply result in “the great final remedy—death!”9

  WHEN, IN APRIL, MELVILLE WROTE to Hawthorne about The House of the Seven Gables, which had just been published, he began by praising the book generally, then singled out Clifford’s aborted jump as one of the best scenes in the book. It struck a chord with him, as Hawthorne must have known it would. Melville didn’t try to interpret it or turn it into a commentary on Hawthorne himself. The book was selling well and getting good reviews, so there wasn’t much that Melville could add—except to seize the chance to plead once again for a greater friendship between them. Perhaps thinking of his long separation from the woman he loved, Melville was struck by the fact that his elusive neighbor was so aloof that he might as well be in England. He felt it was necessary to remind Hawthorne that “the architect of the Gables resides only six miles off, and not three thousand miles away, in England, say.”10

  Such reminders had little effect. Hawthorne was not going to be William Wordsworth to Melville’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge in an American Lake District. He was already thinking that a year in the Berkshires was too much. He was anxious to move. He missed the sea, didn’t care much for the snow, hated the bitter cold, and no doubt believed that six miles was too close for comfort with a demanding friend like Melville, who was never subtle in his approach. Melville ended his letter about Hawthorne’s new novel with another blunt order: “Walk down one of these mornings and see me. No nonsense; come.”11

  It took a while, but Melville began to get the hint that his fellow author preferred to be friendly at a distance. At first he tried to cover his disappointment by pretending that Hawthorne wasn’t the only one who could stand aloof. Suddenly he was too busy and too tired to travel even the short distance to Lenox. “I feel completely done up, as the phrase is,” wrote Melville, “and incapable of the long jolting to get to your house and back.” Soon he changed his tone again, going from feigned weariness to wounded indifference. “Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life.” This strain between the two doesn’t fit the usual narrative of their friendship as something so close it was like a love affair. There was a good reason why Melville was finally able to tell Hawthorne to come or to forget it. By the time he wrote that remark, Sarah Morewood had come home from England. The real love affair in his life could finally resume where it had left off.12

  IT WOULD TAKE the rest of the spring and part of the summer to finish The Whale, as he was then calling his novel, and he was feeling the pressure not only to get the book out, but to collect some money for his labors. It wasn’t going to do any good to have Sarah near him again if he couldn’t afford the financial burden of being her neighbor. On April 25, 1851, one week before she returned to America, he wrote to his publisher in New York—Harper & Brothers—asking for an advance on the new work. Lacking any strong sense of the book’s prospects, the firm said no, causing a desperate Melville to make his problems worse by going even deeper into debt. On May 1, he quietly borrowed $2,050 from an old family friend, neglecting to tell his wife or father-in-law about it.

  Melville spent part of the money on improvements to Arrowhead. A few changes to the house were necessary, but at least one was totally to please his fancy. Unable to afford his tower with a grand lookout toward Broadhall and Greylock, he paid instead to have a covered porch built at the side of his house with a view in the same direction. It would at least give him a place to sit when the weather turned warmer, though some visitors would wonder why he built it facing north. If he couldn’t have a castle top for his perch, Melville could at least fancy himself on some Italian hillside watching the clouds drift by from a place he insisted on calling his “piazza.” A modern visitor can sit there in shadows now and question why anyone would call it by such a name. It’s just a porch, with a sloping roof, a narrow floor, and a few wooden steps leading up to it, but Melville was making an effort to cast a more romantic light over his poor substitute for Broadhall, his only foothold in the neighborhood.

  In the long period of Sarah’s absence, Melville’s dreams of her return didn’t keep him from taking some comfort in Lizzie’s arms. However unhappy their relationship, and however unromantic their overcrowded house, they continued having sex, and—as winter came to a close—Lizzie discovered she was pregnant. For months afterward, the family spoke little of it. With so much debt hanging over him, Melville couldn’t have been overjoyed to have another mouth to feed. “Dollars damn me,” he told Hawthorne near the end of his work on Moby-Dick. “The malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.” Like Ahab, he was in a race, impatient to overcome all obstacles and capture the greatest prize. What he was after would prove every bit as elusive as the white whale.13

  ART INSERT

  Herman Melville

  Sarah Morewood

  Broadhall in 1900

  Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with Pittsfield in the center, Lenox below, and Lake Pontoosuc and Greylock above

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  A drawing of Arrowhead by Herman Melville

  The view from Melville’s room at Arrowhead in 2015

  Mary Butler, the bride Melville “kidnapped” in 1850

  The copy of Dryden’s poems that Melville gave to Sarah Morewood

  The agreement between Melville and Harper & Brothers for The Whale, with the last-minute addition of its final title

  At the summit of Mount Greylock

  Evert Duyckinck

  George Duyckinck

  Rev. John Todd, Pittsfield’s most famous defender of moral values

  The children of Herman and Lizzie Melville (from left to right: Malcolm, Elizab
eth, Frances, and Stanwix)

  Sarah Morewood in her mid-thirties with her children (from left to right: Alfred, William, and Anne Rachel)

  Lizzie and Herman Melville in their later years

  14

  TO GREYLOCK

  The picnics, costume parties, fishing trips, and galloping rides over the countryside began again in earnest soon after Sarah returned to Broadhall in 1851. For a few weeks in the late spring she was in and out of New York, recovering from a stormy return voyage on the Atlantic in April, and organizing her move to the mansion that now sat vacant awaiting her arrival. Thirty-five years after Uncle Thomas had settled at Broadhall, the last of Melville’s cousins had left the place and turned over the keys.

  For the six months of Sarah’s absence, Melville had stayed close to his desk and rarely ventured beyond Pittsfield. When spring arrived, he felt like a creature who had been in hibernation or one who came to life only after dark. His eyes were so strained from overwork that he seemed to be squinting at everything. “Like an owl,” he wrote, “I steal abroad by twilight, owing to the twilight of my eyes.” With the news of Sarah’s return to America in the first week of May, he came to life and announced to his family that he must make a quick trip to New York. He was still trying to finish his novel, and had half a dozen chores to occupy him at Arrowhead, yet he dropped everything and raced away on a mad dash to the city by train, returning three days later. It’s possible that he wanted to drop off part of his manuscript so that the long printing process could begin, but that simple task didn’t demand such haste and expense. Whatever excuse he offered his family, it seems more likely that Sarah’s presence in New York prompted this abrupt break in his routine, and the resulting speed of his “flying visit,” as one of his sisters later called it.1