Sarah would seem to have been prepared for what used to be called a love child. When the writer Margaret Fuller (whose full name was Sarah Margaret Fuller) returned to America in 1850 from a long stay in Italy, carrying an infant that many thought was born out of wedlock, her ship ran aground off Long Island, and she and her child were drowned. The whole episode made a lasting impression on Sarah. At the end of the month in which she became pregnant, she wrote, “I remember reading with pain an account of the shipwreck—and my thoughts at the time that it was one of life’s deep romances.” It was odd to think of romance in response to such a tragedy, but perhaps not for Sarah as the crucial month of September 1851 was coming to an end.11
Proper American ladies took a different, and much harsher, view of that famous shipwreck. Hearing the news of Fuller’s drowning, the otherwise kindly Sophia Hawthorne thought that, given the questionable circumstances of the baby’s birth, and the character of the young Italian man Margaret had brought home as her new husband, the lady was better off dead. (The husband also shared that sad fate.) “I am really glad she died,” wrote the wife of the author of The Scarlet Letter. “[T]here was no other peace or rest to be found for her—especially if her husband was a person so wanting in force & availability.”12
Yes, Professor Matthiessen grasped exactly how desperate Melville’s mood turned in the closing chapters of his most autobiographical work. Even if Sarah’s child wasn’t his, the suspicion was enough to make Maria Melville’s son dwell on some very dark thoughts indeed in the coming winter months. The worst thought wasn’t any worry about how Pittsfield might react to his secret life. It was what Beacon Hill might say that was most troubling. Judge Shaw’s grim, jowly visage must have floated many times over Melville’s view of Greylock as he sat at his desk. After giving the judge two grandsons, how would he explain Mrs. Morewood if the truth came out? It was a good thing he had experience jumping ship in the middle of the Pacific. If he shamed the judge’s good name in Boston, there wouldn’t be any place too remote for him to hide.
PART III
THE VOYAGE OUT
She vanished, leaving fragrant breath
And warmth and chill of wedded life and death.
—HERMAN MELVILLE
19
“STEEL, FLINT & ASBESTOS”
Under the headline A FATAL OCCURRENCE, a New York satirical paper—the Lantern—published a bogus news item in 1852 about the dangers of reading Herman Melville. Pierre had just been published in the summer by Harper & Brothers and reviewers agreed that Mr. Melville had lost his mind. The joke behind the little news story in the Lantern was that the author’s supposed madness was so consuming it might be infectious: “About ten o’clock yesterday, an intelligent young man was observed to enter the store of Stringer and Townsend, the well-known publishers, and deliberately purchase a copy of Herman Melville’s last work. He has, of course, not since been heard of.”1
That’s it, that’s all there was to the story. And that’s all there needed to be. The reception of the book was so bad that the New York Evening Mirror said Melville should feel ashamed for having written it. The stylized, archaic dialogue, the “unwholesome” theme of incest, and the vague complications of the love story left one reviewer feeling that Melville was suffering from a bad case of food poisoning. The book was “one long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity . . . the dream of a distempered stomach, disordered by a hasty supper on half-cooked pork chops.” Whatever malady was troubling Melville, said a New York critic, the author had succeeded in accomplishing at least one thing with his latest work: “The highest literary reputation ever achieved would be demolished by the publication of a few volumes of such trash as this Pierre—a novel, the plot of which is monstrous, the characters unnatural, and the style a kind of prose run mad.”2
The idea that Melville must have suffered some sort of mental collapse soon caught on, and in September a New York headline appeared with the words “Herman Melville Crazy.” The article made the false charge “that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink.” It didn’t help that Melville decided to dedicate the book to “Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty.” Some reviewers assumed that anyone dedicating a novel to a mountain must be crazy. It would have been more appropriate, said a southern newspaper, “if he had dedicated it to the Lunatic Asylum.”3
The reviews were especially harsh in Boston, which must have been profoundly humiliating for Judge Shaw and his family. “Utter trash,” said the Boston Post in August, calling the novel “the craziest fiction extant.” The Boston Daily Times proclaimed that Melville’s worst passages were some “of the absurdest and most ridiculous things that ever ink and paper were wasted on.” And the city’s Evening Traveller said the novel was not only “extremely disagreeable,” but also “unnatural and improbable.” The criticism that Melville must be insane started, in fact, in Boston with the Post’s review. The last part of that article was a devastatingly personal attack on the man of Pittsfield: “What the book means, we know not. . . . It might be supposed to emanate from a lunatic hospital rather than from the quiet retreats of Berkshire. We say it with grief—it is too bad for Mr. Melville to abuse his really fine talents as he does. A hundred times better if he kept them in a napkin all his natural life. A thousand times better, had he dropped authorship with Typee. . . . As it is, he has produced more and sadder trash than any other man of undoubted ability among us.”4
The character Pierre’s publisher—a firm like Harper & Brothers that Melville’s caustic wit turns into “Steel, Flint & Asbestos”—accused the young writer of wasting the company’s time with a book that is “a blasphemous rhapsody.” Isabel and Lucy pull at his heart until he feels that he is about to disappear into “a black, bottomless gulf of guilt.” And, like Ahab chasing the whale, Pierre sees himself standing on the quarterdeck of a grand vessel on the verge of cracking up: “His soul’s ship foresaw the inevitable rocks, but resolved to sail on, and make a courageous wreck.”5
All the usual qualifications can be endlessly rehearsed for fiction as something that can’t be reduced to mere autobiography. Melville may have wanted to use fiction to transcend the painful reality of his life, but the problem that sank Pierre was that the novelist raised the white flag and surrendered any pretense that he was writing fiction. Though his contemporaries still couldn’t understand the exact nature of his problem because he couldn’t give specifics, they quickly jumped to the conclusion that it was deeply personal, throwing out charges of insanity almost from the start. Modern critics have been able to see that Melville was laboring to reveal something about himself and his recent struggles, and have tried to guess the problem, but have never sought to link it with Sarah. About two-thirds of the way into his strange love story, all the romance of a young man falling for a mysterious beauty crumbles under the weight of an author trying to explain what is really happening to his life. In essence, he admits that no novel can do justice to his story. The incest plot wears thin, the Gothic trappings fall away, and what is left at the end is a young author with a story he longs to tell, but can’t. The truth would hurt too many people, the passion he feels for his forbidden lover would cause a scandal, and his remaining friends would turn on him. So Melville’s hero folds personal failures into the larger context of a corrupt civilization and an indifferent cosmos, and in time young Pierre begins to sound a lot like old Ahab, cursing creation and lamenting “the everlasting elusiveness of Truth.”
IN PIERRE, Melville comes face-to-face with the darkest questions of the last two years. What was the good of finding love when you can’t have it? What was the good of writing a brilliant book that no one will read? As Pierre sits in his “shivering room,” he thinks that his efforts at greatness have only been self-defeating. “At last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and the profounder he should grow
, the more and the more he lessened the chances for bread, that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel . . . then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation and cash.”6
Like Melville, Pierre is ready to endure a grueling routine in solitude to produce a masterpiece. In the isolation of his room the only sound is “the long lonely scratch of his pen.” Pierre raises a troubling thought taken straight from Melville’s own bitter response to the failure of Moby-Dick. “In the heart of such silence, surely something is at work. Is it creation, or destruction? Builds Pierre the noble world of a new book? Or does the Pale Haggardness unbuild the lungs and the life in him?—Unutterable, that a man should be thus!” Profoundly discouraged, Pierre confronts the hard fact that he can’t create the book he wants because the world prefers pretty lies to harsh truths. Perhaps the most moving lines in all of Melville’s work are those in which Pierre admits that what he is most eager to tell will never be written in ink. “Two books are being writ,” he confesses, “of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre’s own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink.”7
In the process of writing his novel, which stretched from the late summer of 1851 to the spring of 1852, Melville—like his protagonist—watched his world in the Berkshires go from an idyllic dream of love and nature to a nightmare of domestic turmoil, professional failure, crippling debt, possible scandal, and emotional despair. When he finished the book in April, Sarah was seven months pregnant, and he must have assumed the world would soon collapse around him. The truth of his affair would come out, his family would disown him, and Lizzie’s family would hound him into the grave.
That is the kind of scenario he creates for Pierre, whose mother disinherits him after he runs off with Isabel, and whose life is threatened by Lucy’s brother. So strong was Melville’s sense of impending doom that he paused near the end of his novel to write a searing epitaph for anyone anxiously awaiting a moment of public disgrace. “Not the gibbering of ghosts in any old haunted house; no sulphurous and portentous sign at night beheld in heaven, will so make the hair to stand, as when a proud and honorable man is revolving in his soul the possibilities of some gross public and corporeal disgrace. It is not fear; it is a pride-horror, which is more terrible than any fear.”8
Readers of Pierre are always surprised when suddenly Melville invests his hero with a recently acquired literary celebrity on the basis of some highly acclaimed verses. When he is falling in love, Pierre is just a carefree youth, but when romance becomes complicated and fraught with danger, he acquires as if from the blue a full-fledged literary career. He must have one—however implausible it may seem—because Melville can’t get close enough to describing his own predicament without it. So the bedazzled lover in the Berkshires, the hero of the early chapters of the book, becomes in the later chapters an increasingly embattled author like Melville, whose best days are behind him, and who yearns to explain himself to a world preparing to bury him with recriminations and ridicule. But the question of a “public disgrace” awaiting Pierre never seems a real threat for his literary sins. The only thing that would cause such a debacle would be the revelation of his love for a woman claiming to be his half sister. “Unnatural” is the condemnation that would destroy him. His public profile isn’t so great, and his vice is too unmentionable, for the press to trumpet his fall.
It was different in Melville’s own case. More than any other passage in his book the one on disgrace sounds like the novelist speaking for himself. The degree of public humiliation he was facing couldn’t be exaggerated. It would have to be the stuff of large and scathing headlines about Mr. Typee, the judge’s daughter, and the rich man’s wife. As it was, in the dark isolation of his fears and guilt, living with the household of women he was betraying, and seeing the woman he loved pregnant, he decided to turn his book into a note declaring his professional suicide. If he had to fail, the failure would be monumental and complete.
HE WENT AFTER THE HARPERS, mocking their literary pretensions and their tight-fisted greed in the unforgettable “Steel, Flint & Asbestos,” and he took aim at his critics in general and the Duyckincks in particular. As revenge against Evert calling the views in Moby-Dick “piratical,” he satirized the Literary World as the “Captain Kidd Monthly.” As for the plot itself, he sent it into a maelstrom of destruction, creating a final death scene like that in an Elizabethan tragedy, with the bodies of the dead lovers crumpled in the agony of their heartbreak and suicide. The scene fades out with Isabel’s body slumped over Pierre’s, and the final image is a bower of death. “Her long hair ran over him, and arbored him in ebon vines.”9
When the novel was published in midsummer 1852, the Duyckincks were so appalled by Pierre that they questioned whether Herman had been abducted by some devil using “necromancy” and replaced by a pale ghost of the novelist who wrote Typee. Now the “piratical” Ahab and crew seemed almost tame against the “leering demoniacal” face of Pierre. Though the brothers knew that Melville’s private life was questionable, they weren’t prepared for the ferocity of the new novel, and “the stagnant pool” of its moral view, as it seemed to them.
In the Literary World’s review they treated the man who had been their host in the Berkshires as a kind of literary outlaw writing books that attacked the foundations of everything sacred. Either he had gone insane or he was now one of the most dangerous writers in America. “The most immoral moral of the story,” the review charged, “if it has any moral at all, seems to be the impracticability of virtue. . . . Ordinary novel readers will never unkennel this loathsome suggestion.” Though they couldn’t understand the reason why, they were right about this “suggestion.” If society tells Pierre that loving Isabel is wrong, yet it seems the best thing that ever happened to him, how is he to love her and be virtuous? The novel doesn’t really treat the “impracticability of virtue” as a suggestion. It treats it as a fact, and the Duyckincks couldn’t fathom such a thing, no matter how sweetly Sarah wrote to George or how generous Herman was to Evert.10
Pierre’s world is one that Melville had hoped Hawthorne would help him explore—a puritanical sphere aflame with sin and punishment, where good women like Hester or more daring women like Sarah can’t be anything but bad. What Melville had discovered was that although Hawthorne knew some of the mysteries of that sphere, he didn’t know what it was like to be immersed in it. Herman was immersed in it, right up to his neck, and Pierre is his agonizing view of the guilt and fear infecting what started out as simply a pleasure.
While Melville was hard at work on the book, Sarah had gently teased him about the strain on his mind, and he had lightly dismissed the subject: “I laughed at him somewhat and told him that the recluse life he was leading made his city friends think that he was slightly insane—he replied that long ago he came to the same conclusion himself.” But the disaster of Pierre was no joke. Under a barrage of negative publicity, the book simply stopped selling. Over a period of six months after publication Harper & Brothers would manage to sell fewer than three hundred copies.11
This was the catastrophe that Melville dreaded, the “courageous wreck” of a career and a life that he had come to view with such bitter disillusionment. And, of course, he had brought much of it on himself, out of anger and frustration. To outsiders, the collapse was inexplicable. The only answer was that the author must have lost his mind. But he didn’t lose his mind—he lost his nerve. He was young, impulsive, and still something of the “proud and savage” sailor who had taken his chances on the run as a castaway in the Pacific. This time, when he went overboard, he had good reason to expect that he wouldn’t resurface.
HE JUMPED TOO SOON. Sarah had her baby in June—a boy she named Alfred. Her husband didn’t make a fuss, and must have assumed the child was his. The women at Arrowhead didn’t seem any the wiser, and there w
as no general outbreak of gossip beyond the knowing glances of astute observers like Dr. Holmes. Alfred grew up at Broadhall, and though he bore a little resemblance to Melville’s sons by Lizzie, it wasn’t close enough to stir suspicion.
Instead of a shattering explosion that summer there was only a long sigh of regret from friends and admirers who couldn’t understand what had driven their young novelist over the edge. Readers have been wondering the same thing ever since. “How is one to account for the transformation of this apparently normal young man into the savage pessimist who wrote Pierre?” asked the novelist Somerset Maugham in the twentieth century. “What turned the commonplace undistinguished writer of Typee into the darkly imaginative, powerful, inspired and eloquent author of Moby-Dick?”
The short answer is falling in love. Maugham guessed as much, though he didn’t have Sarah’s name, and didn’t know how or why the author strayed from his wife. “I think it is probable,” he conjectured with old-fashioned politeness, “that Melville was impatient with the marriage tie; it may be that his wife gave him less than he had hoped.” Well, yes, a lot “less.” Mountains’ worth of “less.” And that’s a clue that there was some method to what critics thought was madness in Pierre.12
Melville in Love Page 16
