Melville in Love

by Michael Shelden

  As it turned out, perhaps predictably, much of American literary society was still too provincial and small-minded to acknowledge what Melville had accomplished. All his brilliance seemed as if it had made his life only worse. He had tried to reach the stars, and now he seemed in free fall. As he would write of his hero in Pierre, “He seemed gifted with loftiness, merely that it might be dragged down to the mud.”12

  AS HIS SECOND WINTER in the Berkshires began to close in around him, Melville grew increasingly desperate and angry. More than ever, he needed money. In addition to all his debts, he now had a new mouth to feed. In October Lizzie had given birth to a son. Melville decided to name him Stanwix. It was a tribute to his mother’s father, an old war hero long dead, General Gansevoort, whose great victory against the British in 1777 at Fort Stanwix in upstate New York was such a revered memory in the family. It was a remarkable choice for a boy’s name—awkward but heartfelt—but it seems to have been influenced by the hope that fresh glory would soon come to the family. At the time of the birth, the glow of promise still attended Moby-Dick, which had yet to be published in America. Anticipating success for the new novel, Melville may have thought the name was a good omen—a sign that his own literary battle would turn out well.

  Instead things would take a rapid turn for the worse. The commercial collapse of Moby-Dick created a vortex for Melville like the one that swallowed his whaling ship. This one was about to swallow his career and leave him floating at the edge like Ishmael, his head barely above water.

  18

  SONS AND LOVERS

  With a little knowledge of Melville’s life, a detailed command of his work, and the intuition of a great novelist, D. H. Lawrence reached a few conclusions about the author of Moby-Dick when the book was enjoying its revival in the 1920s. In his own unique stream-of-consciousness style of criticism, Lawrence offered this general overview:

  A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture box. A wife: a thing with clay feet. Life: a sort of disgrace. Fame: another disgrace, being patronized by common snobs who just know how to read.

  The whole shameful business just making a man writhe.

  Melville writhed for eighty years.

  In his soul he was proud and savage. But in his mind and will he wanted the perfect fulfillment of love.

  Lawrence wasn’t far off. Home became a kind of prison for Melville. His relationships with his wife and mother were swirling with tensions, and when they all occupied the same house, it must have been torture to balance their needs against his.1

  When he wrote Pierre, the domestic arrangements at Arrowhead were in such upheaval that no one bothered to check Stanwix’s birth record and correct the stupendous error of having Herman and Maria G. Melville listed as the boy’s parents. No one can now explain how the name of Herman’s own mother managed to be substituted for Lizzie’s when the birth was recorded by the local authorities in January 1852. It wasn’t a simple mistake. Someone correctly entered Maria’s information—including her place of birth—despite the fact that she didn’t even belong in the record. The only logical conclusion is that Herman or another family member made a curious error or that a clerk was given the impression that the leading woman of Arrowhead was Maria G. Melville.2

  She was certainly the woman in charge when the birth was recorded, for her daughter-in-law spent all of December 1851 and January 1852 away from Pittsfield. With her newborn in her arms, Lizzie left after Thanksgiving for Beacon Hill, seeking medical treatment for a breast infection. After she was better, she showed no sign of wanting to hurry home, and Melville didn’t seem anxious to have her back or to pay her even a brief visit. He was in a dark mood, and it was getting darker by the day as he worked on Pierre in a Berkshire winter as snowy and as bitterly cold as the last. With Christmas approaching, he was back to his solitary ways, retreating to his desk to try once again to write a book that would save his career. Now he was more alone than ever, with Hawthorne far away and Evert Duyckinck unwelcome. By Christmas Eve there was no one at home except his mother, a couple of his sisters, and his son Malcolm.

  D. H. Lawrence was right when he said that Melville longed for “the perfect fulfillment of love,” but Lawrence assumed that no American woman in the author’s circle would have been able to cope with such a “proud and savage” man. “A mountain lion doesn’t mate with a Persian cat,” joked Lawrence; “and when a grizzly bear roars after a mate, it is a she-grizzly he roars after—not after a silky sheep.” But, then, Lawrence never knew of Sarah Morewood, a woman who could climb a mountain and ride a colt named Black Quake, and would never purr tamely like a Persian cat. When so many people seemed to be retreating from the “proud and savage” author of Moby-Dick—publishers, literary friends, many of the “serious” readers of Pittsfield, and not a few critics—Sarah made a mad dash in a snowstorm from New York to Pittsfield so that she could be with Melville on Christmas. It wasn’t easy for her to do this. Any Christmas dinner at Broadhall would mean inviting not only Herman, but also the rest of his Arrowhead household, and she could barely tolerate the bossy Maria Melville, who made no secret of her disapproval of nearly everything Sarah did. There was nothing Sarah hated more than being judged, yet Maria loved nothing better than judging those around her and finding fault. (“A more ungallant man it would be difficult to find,” she had complained of Herman earlier that year when he rushed back home to his work rather than spending an hour waiting with her for a train at the Pittsfield station. She accused him of “dumping me & my trunks out so unceremoniously at the Depot.”)3

  In the days leading up to Christmas, Sarah was amusing herself in New York, shopping, going to lectures, and pestering George Duyckinck. For many weeks after the Literary World published Evert’s damning remarks about Moby-Dick, Melville fumed over them and silently considered his future with the Duyckincks as he waited for more reviews to come in. To anyone but Melville, the negative aspects of Evert’s review would have seemed less damaging when set against its carefully selected praise. As far as Sarah knew in December, George was still an innocent lamb worth poking and prodding for attention, but he was proving so elusive that she waited until the day before Christmas to abandon the chase, and to face Melville’s mother in Pittsfield.

  Without Sarah, the author would have spent the first Christmas after Moby-Dick’s publication in “a torture box,” as Lawrence put it, eating dinner with his mother and sisters. He was so desperate to see Sarah that when news came of her arrival in Pittsfield on Christmas Eve, he wanted to race up to Broadhall immediately. Despite the raging snowstorm and the darkness, he brought the family sleigh to the door of Arrowhead and waited for the others to accompany him. His mother refused to budge, complaining that she wasn’t going to jump up at the last minute just to accommodate Sarah’s whimsical schedule. She insisted on waiting for a proper invitation to come to Broadhall for dinner the next day.

  It says everything worth knowing about the pathos of Melville’s life at this moment that he couldn’t go see his lover because his mother wouldn’t let him. She didn’t have a clue that her son was in love with a married woman. It would have killed her to know that. So how did she explain why he was so eager to brave a snowstorm just to drink a toast at Broadhall on Christmas Eve? To her daughter Augusta, who was in New York, she dismissed his eagerness with the blithe explanation that Herman “loves to go out in such wild weather.” As one of Melville’s characters in his long poem Clarel would later poignantly complain, “My kin . . . would have me act some routine part. . . . This world clean fails me; still I yearn.”

  The scene couldn’t have been more dramatic when, on the next day, Melville walked into Broadhall, stepped ahead of Rowland, took Sarah by the arm, and led her into the dining room where the laurel wreath was waiting on the plate. Actions usually speak louder than words, and Sarah’s effort to crown her lover that day should have struck everyone in that room like a thunderbolt. Instead, Sarah’s well-placed hints that her heart belonged to George were enough to
bamboozle Maria. “What a strange woman she is,” Maria later wrote of Sarah, again in a letter to Augusta. “I rather think Mister George would have felt jealous could he have seen the devoted attention paid to the author by our hostess, as he led her into the dining room, she stopt before a plate on which lay a beautiful Laurel wreath, which she gently lifted & quickly placed upon his brow.”4

  Maria knew George Duyckinck only slightly and had no idea that he would be far from jealous. Indeed, had he been present, he might have been the first to see the sacrilege in these actions at Christmas and denounce them. Sarah was pleased that difficult Maria hadn’t raised any objections, and she was trying her best to get along with her. “I am strangely and strongly attracted to her and her family now that I know them so well as I do,” she told George. But Maria thought that Sarah put on too many airs, and she resented her ownership of Broadhall. Whereas Herman enjoyed celebrating Sarah as the “Lady of Southmount,” Maria scornfully referred to her as “the lady” and “Madame.”

  What neither George nor Maria would have known was that this dinner ceremony to crown Herman was inspired by a scene in a book. Sarah had made a point of privately sharing that book with Melville earlier in the year. It was a romance with an exotic title—Zanoni, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a friend of Charles Dickens. In an early chapter—only a dozen or so pages into the story—an opera composer of genius sees his neglected masterpiece performed at last, and at a dinner to celebrate the event, his proud wife “suddenly” steps forward and places “on the artist’s temples a laurel wreath, which she had woven beforehand in fond anticipation” of his success. The episode stands out in the story as proof of the composer’s triumph not only in art, but also in love. Like Moby-Dick, the opera deals in part with the mysteries of the sea. The climatic moment features a Siren queen emerging from her ocean cave.

  Earlier in the summer of 1851, when Melville was putting the finishing touches on Moby-Dick, Sarah read Zanoni and was eager to share it with him. It is the story of a profound romantic attraction between an artistic young woman and a mysterious older man in the days of the French Revolution. Instead of sharing Zanoni with Melville in a stolen moment together, Sarah did something more daring. She packed it in a box containing a second book (Harriet Martineau’s The Hour and the Man), then added “two flasks of Cologne” and sent the whole thing off to Melville as a surprise gift. It was an astonishingly provocative gesture. The typical married woman of the time wouldn’t even dare to dream of sending such things to another woman’s husband, but, of course, Sarah wasn’t typical, and Melville didn’t discourage her. He welcomed the gifts as “nourishment for both body & soul,” replying with a letter of thanks and calling her “the most considerate of all the delicate roses that diffuse their blessed perfume among men.”

  This was high praise indeed from a man who considered roses the finest of all flowers, a “voucher of Paradise,” as he once called them because they grew so profusely around Eve in the Garden of Eden. His reply contained the promise to read the two books as soon as he could find the time. Meanwhile, he wrote affectionately, “I shall regard them as my Paradise in store, & Mrs. Morewood the goddess from whom it comes.”5

  FOUR DAYS AFTER the Christmas dinner at Broadhall, when Mr. and Mrs. Morewood came to Arrowhead for a visit, Herman wasn’t there, and the simmering tensions in the households bubbled over. In Sarah’s view, his mother did the unforgivable—she began judging her. Sarah recounted a mild version of their clash to George. “Mrs [Maria] Melville tells me that I have some good in me—she also says that my real character is not yet formed—that I have in fact no fixed purpose in Life—So she judges me—little knowing my real feelings—So you must not judge me—for I mean to acquire a real decided character.” Such was Maria’s imposing demeanor—her “gorgon” look, as D. H. Lawrence would have said—that few in her circle would have dared to stand up to her. But Sarah did.6

  Afterward, a ruffled Maria gave Augusta the details, warning her not to let Melville’s brother Allan see the account.

  Her mind was in an excited state & from all accounts must have been so all day, she express’d ungrateful feelings towards Mrs Brittan [Sarah’s older sister], who has done more to make Broadhall comfortable in the past two weeks than the lady has done in the past year. She said many things to her “liege lord” [Rowland] which even his long patient forbearance could not let pass. Altogether so much more was said that I requested her to take some thing to quiet her nerves, as She did not seem to like this, I at last told her that her conversation affected her Husband very painfully & I wished her to change the subject. She said she felt rebuked, but she must speak out when she felt so full [of emotion] & she could not help it. She also said the Bible was not written by inspiration etc.7

  The mere words on the pages of Maria’s letter can’t convey the explosive force of this encounter. Young Dutch girls from New Jersey didn’t talk back this way to dignified Maria Melville of the grand old Gansevoort family of Albany, New York. And how dare she have the nerve to say to Maria—good Christian woman as she was—that the Bible wasn’t divinely inspired? Or to show disrespect to the man joined to her in holy matrimony as her lord and master?

  There was no reason for the Lady of Broadhall to cross swords with Maria unless she felt that more was at stake than simply a neighbor woman’s opinion of her. This wasn’t about holiday jitters or housekeeping or the Bible. It was Sarah finally lashing out at a narrow-minded, self-centered woman who couldn’t recognize what a burden she and her daughters had become for Herman. As far as Sarah could see, they didn’t understand or appreciate his genius. They had no idea of his secret life with a woman Maria judged as impious and morally weak. It is a wonder that Sarah didn’t blurt out the truth of their affair while she was at it.

  Even this brief glimpse into the real Mrs. Morewood—edgy, provocative, passionate—wasn’t enough to awaken Maria to the possibility that her son might find such a woman irresistible, and far preferable to Judge Shaw’s daughter. For Sarah, however, this turbulent holiday week did seem to have a sobering effect. The tone of her letters to George became less playful, and she made a point of explaining how much she valued Herman’s friendship. “He is a pleasant companion at all times,” she wrote of Melville, “and I like him very much.” This sounds harmless to modern ears, but it was exactly the kind of thing that unnerved George. He knew how dangerous it was for a married woman to speak of any man other than her husband as a “pleasant companion at all times.” What he couldn’t have known was how much she was hiding even when she appeared to be writing in earnest.

  To win George’s sympathy—and by extension the goodwill of the Literary World journal—she often tried to seem like a conventionally religious woman who was searching for answers to needs and desires that godly men like the Duyckincks might help her to reconcile with her faith. Melville was anything but godly, so Sarah acted as if that aspect of his character concerned her. Of course, as she had revealed to Maria, she was herself breathtakingly irreverent for a woman of her station. “It is a pity,” she solemnly informed George, “that Mr Melville so often in conversation uses irreverent language—he will not be popular in society here on that very account—but this will not trouble him—I think he cares very little as to what others may think of him or his books so long as they sell well.” If George had been able to see Sarah doing battle with Maria, he would have known that the author of Moby-Dick was not the only fearlessly irreverent voice in Pittsfield.8

  IN FEBRUARY 1852 Melville decided that he couldn’t accept what the Duyckincks had done to him in the pages of the Literary World. The journal’s criticism of Moby-Dick was more than he could take. He stopped his subscription with a cold and blunt demand to “discontinue” sending the Literary World to “H Melville at Pittsfield.” For the next few years he would have nothing to do with the brothers. Accordingly, Sarah’s own efforts to win George’s favor dwindled to sporadic letters, and they had relatively little contact. Sarah didn’t fail
Melville, but she couldn’t rescue him from the deep hole that he had created for himself. He wouldn’t have wanted her to rescue him—even if she could. He was too proud for that, and he was so talented that he continued hoping his art could somehow save him. With Pierre, he had one more chance, though it was risky on so many levels, especially given its revealing look at his secret life.9

  THINGS CONTINUED TO SPIN DOWNWARD. By Christmas he must have known that there was one good reason for Sarah to be a little edgier than usual. Four years after giving birth to her first child she was pregnant again. She had conceived at some point in September, a few weeks after the Greylock excursion. That was the period when her husband was rarely in Pittsfield, and she was spending a lot of time with Melville wandering the beautiful countryside with his spyglass, and giving him romantic books and cologne as presents. On some of those occasions they were joined by others, but the trail connecting their homes made it easy for them to be together whenever they chose during those mild late summer days. Sarah was alone with Rowland for six months in England but didn’t become pregnant again until she spent her first full summer at Broadhall with Melville as her neighbor and lover.

  It may not be possible to prove anything one way or the other at this late date, but the emotional fireworks over the holidays would make a great deal more sense if Sarah had known then that she was going to have Melville’s child. It would also help to explain why she was even willing for a time to take a more charitable view of Herman’s family, saying that she was “strangely and strongly attracted” to them. It would explain why, on Christmas Day, Melville made a point of leading Sarah into dinner as if they were the master and mistress of Broadhall. Most of all, it would help to explain why the often charming love story in the first half of Pierre turns so dark and desperate and guilt-ridden in the second half of the book. In fact, the novel became what the Harvard critic F. O. Matthiessen called “about the most desperate in our literature.” (And Francis Otto Matthiessen knew something about desperation. One morning in 1950 he ended his life with a twelfth-floor leap from the window of a Boston hotel.)10