Melville in Love

by Michael Shelden

  Like the woman turned to a pillar of salt for looking back longingly at sinful Sodom before it was obliterated, Sarah was refusing to ignore pleasures simply because they violated laws or commandments. She was willing to boast of her defiance at a time when no woman of her standing would ever have dreamed of comparing herself to Lot’s wife. As Ahab says, “Thy right worship is defiance.”6

  Obviously, the new mistress of Broadhall was as unashamedly forward as Hawthorne was reticent and aloof. She didn’t live six miles away from the most handsome man in the neighborhood—she was six minutes away on horseback. Sarah was emboldened by Herman, and her sympathy and understanding inspired him in turn to share her defiance, attacking religion, authority, and civilization itself with far more force and spirit than ever before. It’s partly why he felt that he could make a proud boast of his own to the author of The Scarlet Letter, telling him that the forthcoming Moby-Dick was not only a “wicked” book, but one with a secret motto celebrating baptism in the name of the devil (“in nomine diaboli”). Hawthorne must have thought such talk was mere bluster or a sailor’s rant, but Sarah knew intimately the depth of Melville’s dissatisfaction with the well-ordered, self-satisfied world that would condemn him for loving her, and for wanting to write books undermining its values.7

  In his anger and frustration, Melville wanted both to succeed and to spurn success. He hated debt, but couldn’t escape it. He lived like a ghost in his own cramped home all winter, but burst into life the moment Sarah returned. His wife was pregnant, but he would rather spend the night on a mountain than in bed with Lizzie. Though he needed her father’s money to live, he didn’t like admitting it, and increasingly resented it. All these contradictory urges and circumstances were becoming harder to manage except when he could escape them with Sarah. In the weeks after “that excursion to Greylock,” the couple turned their August night on the mountain into a glowing example of the freedom they craved, the ultimate escape from family burdens and career disappointments. The experience became, said Sarah, a “shrine for memory to return and refresh itself at, when cares and trials make us weary.” To Evert’s brother, George Duyckinck, Sarah reported that she and Melville were still reliving the experience on the mountain: “Greylock is not forgotten here but often recalled in an amusing way—by Mr Herman or myself—In some of our long walks we have taken a spyglass with us so as to bring nearer to us the Tower and its associations.”8

  WITH THAT SPYGLASS tucked under his arm, Melville could indeed think that he had arrived in the Berkshires by sea and was a castaway again, and with Sarah at his side to explore their paradise, rather than Fayaway. Confiding such intimate information to the incorruptible George was part of the fun of being “wicked” together. Just as Sarah liked to tease upright men like Dr. Holmes with her beauty and charm, and to befriend wayward clergymen like Rev. Entler, so she would in the months after Greylock try to captivate poor George.

  It was easy to shock him, and she loved doing it. He was almost too easy to fool. A friend once described him as “meek” and “guileless,” and “detesting wrong & deceit.” One day Sarah made a passionate plea to George to stop shaking her hand limply when they met and to offer “a warmer grasp.” Knowing that even such mild teasing would upset him, she wrote gleefully, “[I] can almost see how shocked you are looking while reading this letter.”9

  At first George seemed to misunderstand the nature of her attentions, responding by sending her religious books for study and stiffly offering them to her in a tortured rhetorical question: “Will Mrs Morewood please accept the accompanying little volumes . . . as a slight memento of Greylock and mark of heartfelt sympathy respect and gratitude [?]” In time he realized that she was trouble, and he did his best to avoid her. “You refused to call on me on Monday,” she wrote indignantly after he kept finding excuses not to see her in New York. Another letter began, “I cannot at all understand the reasons why you treat my letters with Silence and I am deeply pained that you do so.”10

  Dr. Holmes had a theory for why Sarah was so provocative. In the sexist thinking of the time, he concluded that his fictional Elsie Venner was dangerously alluring simply because she couldn’t be otherwise. It was in her nature, as if she had been poisoned at birth by some slow-acting venom. Holmes wanted to hate the sin and love the sinner, turning his heroine into “a proper object of divine pity, and not of divine wrath.” A schoolmistress in his novel says of Elsie, “Women’s love is fierce enough, if it once gets the mastery of them, always; but this poor girl does not know what to do with a passion.” No doubt Sarah would have argued that she was capable of managing her passions, and she tried to prove it in loving Melville. When a sympathetic but innocent male character asks Elsie what he can do to help her, she has a simple answer: “Love me.” Yet in her small town—with all the complications and entanglements of marriage and courtship—it is too much to ask of any man already spoken for.11

  Toying with respectable George may have been a game that both Sarah and Melville enjoyed. George’s oldest friend was William Allen Butler, the man whose bride Herman “kidnapped” the previous summer. Just as Butler was led on a wild chase, so George would find himself pursued to laughable extremes by Sarah. Valiantly he resisted, and not only with her, but with every woman who entered his life. He wouldn’t accept Sarah’s invitations to the Berkshires and played hide-and-seek from her in New York. He wasn’t experienced enough with women to know whether Sarah was playing with him or setting a more serious romantic trap. Everyone knew that his only serious interest was his faith. As a friend once said of George, “Everything about him proclaimed his religion to be life . . . devotion forming an essential part of his disposition.”12

  To deflect attention from her relationship with Melville, Sarah would soon find it convenient—and probably amusing—to pretend with Herman’s sisters that banal George was the only man for her. The credulous sisters and their sanctimonious mother swallowed the bait entirely, and began worrying that she would somehow compromise her honor with young Duyckinck. If nothing else, this ruse shows how completely the family misjudged their own Herman, believing that the spirited Mrs. Morewood saw nothing in him, but everything in a pallid character like George.

  What she really wanted all along from the young man—who was only a month her junior—was his help in getting her poems published in New York. She expected him to take her seriously as a poet and to keep her informed of the latest book news and literary events. He rudely dismissed her early efforts to send him anything. In a letter beginning “My dear Sir,” she responded politely, “I do not send you the verses I wrote you about because you told me not to trouble myself in so doing. It was well you told me in time—else I might have inflicted upon you more reading than would have been agreeable to you.”13

  It was when George responded so coldly to her verses that she began writing to him more warmly, hoping to win over his heart if not his head. Cleverly, she filled her letters with lush descriptions of the natural world to show off her poetic talents even when he wouldn’t look at her actual poetry. When she read Evert’s remark in the Literary World that “we hold every production of the mind to be of interest, like a collection of minerals,” she promptly quoted it back to George and suggested that her letters were worth collecting, too.14

  Nothing could overcome his firm resolve to be good, no matter how many suggestive poems Sarah sent his way. Her letters to him fill a small folder at the New York Public Library, and the tone is at times so literary that they almost sound like rough drafts of a novel. At a time in New York when an enraged husband might choose to thrash his wife’s lover in the street, George must have been stricken with fear when Sarah suddenly sent him a fervent invitation to meet her husband. She made it sound as though they would have an affair, and they would have to inform Rowland. “I shall find very great pleasure in bringing him [Mr. Morewood] to see you. I want you to know him and to understand that I act with his full knowledge and wish and will—a fact which those who kn
ow me ought to know.” Though an affair was the last thing George wanted, Sarah’s letters had to worry him for the damage she might do to his reputation. It would only make sense if he blamed Melville for her unwanted attentions. Herman introduced her to George, and he seemed to be her closest companion in the Berkshires, the one with whom she shared vistas through that spyglass.15

  Whatever the Duyckinck brothers thought of their old friend Herman after “that excursion to Greylock,” it couldn’t have been good. In November, a change in their opinion of Melville seems to have triggered an otherwise inexplicable attack on him in the pages of their influential journal. It would have devastating consequences.

  16

  ALL FOR LOVE

  Throughout that emotionally charged summer and into the early autumn of 1851, Melville couldn’t see enough of Sarah. There was card playing and dancing at Broadhall, and harvest festivities in the neighborhood. On several occasions, they visited one of the larger lakes in the area, Pontoosuc, where they went boating and fishing. The shoreline was bordered on one side by low hills that stretched toward Greylock, and the blue water sparkled in the sunlight. Melville confided that it was fast becoming one of his favorite places in the Berkshires, telling Sarah “that each time he came there he found the place possessing new charms for him.”1

  About a mile from the lake was one of her favorite spots, a pretty grove where a huge limestone boulder sat on a much smaller base of rock, balanced there by nature ages ago but looking as though it might tip over at any moment. Sarah loved it for its dramatic effect. Her guests could always be amused on a trip there when she seemed to defy danger by lying under the overhanging edge of Balance Rock, as it is still called, or by pretending that she could push it over. A friend once described her as rushing up to the boulder “with a merry laugh, declaring she would push the monster from the seat he had kept longer than was right.”2

  Visiting it with Melville and others, she enchanted him by hiding a music box under the rock and acting as if the tune magically flowed from the earth itself. This was the kind of fanciful act that stirred his imagination and set him to thinking of similar wonders in his reading. What came to mind was the story of the Egyptian statue that made a low moaning sound at dawn—a noise almost musical—and was supposedly a monument to an ancient king, Memnon. Listening to Sarah’s music box while their friends picnicked, Melville decided to christen the rock Memnon, and to carve that strange word into a nearby tree filled with the names of couples who had been there before them. In this way the name united them and was a clever substitute for inscribing “Herman” and “Sarah” alongside those other lovers.

  Caught up in so many vivid scenes from day to day, Melville couldn’t help but think of writing about them. This was the greatest story of his life, unfolding before his eyes with both drama and suspense. He could only guess where this story was headed, and he knew that he couldn’t afford to tell everything. Because he’d always drawn from his experiences to create his books, here was a sequence of events in a beautiful location that was a narrative gift impossible to ignore. The trick was to hide identities without ruining the drama.

  With Moby-Dick completed in August, and now awaiting publication in November, Melville could have waited months to start a new book. He wasn’t sure how his whaling saga would be received, and writing books was his only way of making money. Just as Sarah couldn’t wait to write about Greylock, so that memorable night was probably the spark that started Melville writing the Berkshire romance that would become his seventh book in six years—Pierre; or, The Ambiguities.

  HE WROTE PIERRE with white-hot speed not only because he was in his usual hurry to sell a new book, but because he was chasing the events of his story as he lived them, trying to put them on paper even as fresh dramas hurtled toward him. The basics of his novel were taken straight from his life, but with a major twist that was so unusual and controversial that it threw readers off the track of the real story for more than 150 years.

  Without this strange twist, it’s a fairly straightforward tale of an idealistic youth whose life is forever changed by his romance with a dark, mysterious beauty. Isabel is an unconventional young woman who lures the budding author Pierre away from his steady girl, the good-hearted Lucy, the uncomplicated daughter of “an early and most cherished friend of Pierre’s father.” In other words, Lucy is essentially Judge Shaw’s daughter, and Isabel is Sarah. The parallels aren’t exact—they never are in good fiction—but the basic arrangement is there, and so are many of the actual elements of character and setting. For most of the book Pierre is torn between these two women, both of whom are devoted to him, and neither of whom he wants to hurt. The recognizable landscape of the Berkshires is featured in the story, with Greylock, the Balance Rock (called the Memnon Stone), and Broadhall and Pittsfield thinly disguised.

  Then comes the twist—Isabel is not simply the attractive woman who seduces the starry-eyed hero, but someone who calls herself his secret half sister, the supposedly illegitimate daughter of an affair his father—now dead—hid from the family for years. By this alteration of his situation in real life Melville fooled almost everyone, changing one kind of forbidden love—adultery, in his case—to the more sensational and sinister suggestion of incest in the novel. In doing so he added a sexual layer that scandalized his readers beyond anything he anticipated. They could confront adultery, but incest was the great unmentionable.

  It was also a wonderful red herring. Scholars have scattered in all directions trying to establish whether Melville had a secret sister or even an especially amorous cousin, and every lead has hit a dead end. Undeterred, some have suggested that Melville’s mother must have been his forbidden lover or that Isabel is actually a “he”—a Nathaniel Hawthorne in petticoats, disguised in order to hide Melville’s secret love for him. There is no question that Herman yearned for a closer relationship with the older writer, but there is also no evidence that he contemplated having a physical relationship with him. For one thing, Hawthorne couldn’t bear the idea of such a relationship. Advocates of a supposed love affair between the two writers seem not to have read Hawthorne’s tirade in 1851 against men he saw living in close intimacy at a Shaker dormitory that he visited with Melville in the Berkshires. The mere idea of men sharing such close quarters so filled him with horror that he not only recoiled from it but wanted the “disgusting” Shaker men to disappear from the face of the earth. In his journal Hawthorne lashed out at the group: “Their utter and systematic lack of privacy; their close junction of man with man, and supervision of one man over another—it is hateful and disgusting to think of; and the sooner the sect is extinct the better—a consummation which, I am happy to hear, is thought to be not a great many years distant.”3

  Once Sarah’s place is established in Melville’s story, Pierre isn’t much of a mystery. Even filtered through the murky lens of its incest theme, Isabel’s spellbinding effect on Pierre is the same as Sarah’s hold on Melville. The story is like an eruption, a great outpouring of emotion after long delay. At last Melville found a way to explain the transformation in his life that had abruptly caused him to settle in the Berkshires, sent him deeply into debt, strained his marriage, and inspired in Moby-Dick the best book he would ever write.

  REDUCED TO THE ESSENTIALS of its love triangle and its hero’s literary struggles, Pierre brings to life Melville’s mood of desperation and exhilaration in this period. Like him, his hero is haunted by the “beautiful sad-eyed girl” with her “long, dark locks of mournful hair.” The combination of her “dark, regal” bearing and mysterious sensuality have an electric effect. Rising to poetic heights equal to those of Moby-Dick, Melville describes his heroine as a kind of storm rising on the horizon and rapidly engulfing his hero in a burst of overwhelming energy. “She seemed molded from fire and air, and vivified at some Voltaic pile of August thunder-clouds heaped against the sunset.”4

  There was no one like Isabel in the author’s life except Sarah. What Melville says
of Pierre’s literary labors was also true of his: “He seems to have directly plagiarized from his own experiences to fill out the mood of his apparent author-hero.” As Pierre’s emotional life becomes increasingly complicated—with Lucy the “good angel” on the side of right and society, and Isabel the supposedly “bad angel” on the side of love and desire—the ambitious young writer vows “to give the world a book, which the world should hail with surprise and delight.”5

  Three overwhelming problems confront Isabel and Pierre. They can surrender to love, but sex is taboo; they have a secret they relish, but can’t afford to reveal; and they yearn to escape the morality that has so restricted their freedom, but they can’t. Standing in their way is what Sarah had called the “iron rule” that interferes with “our best and purest feelings.” They are trapped whichever way they turn. Secrecy becomes a weapon they can employ to confuse the moralists determined to condemn them. “The deceiving of others” must be done, they agree, “for their and our united good.” Creating an invisible fortress of secrecy around them, Pierre becomes her faithful knight, vowing to “champion Isabel, through all conceivable contingencies of Time and Chance.” Behind this fortress, they allow themselves slowly to test the limits of what is wrong and right.6

  The easy way out for Pierre is to walk away from what is forbidden and accept the safe love of Lucy, the well-bred woman from a respectable family. Though Lucy has her appeal, Isabel shimmers in his eyes with “sparkling electricity” and touches the core of his being. The forbidden nature of their attraction makes it defiant in a way that Pierre finds endlessly thrilling. When Isabel vows not to abide by any “terms from the common world,” there is almost a kind of swoon in the narrative. There aren’t any whales in sight or lashing gales on an open sea, but Melville writes of this moment as though describing the emergence of some mythic creature from the waves. In her proud defiance even Isabel’s hair is “scornful”—“Her changed attitude of beautiful audacity; her long scornful hair, that trailed out a disheveled banner; her wonderful transfigured eyes, in which some meteors seemed playing up; all this now seemed to Pierre the work of an invisible enchanter. Transformed she stood before him; and Pierre, bowing low over to her, owned that irrespective, darting majesty of humanity, which can be majestical and menacing in woman as in man.” As Dr. Henry Murray noted long ago, “Isabel may be roughly correlated with the ‘ungraspable phantom of life’ reflected in the sea; and Lucy with the securities, comforts, and consolations of land.”7