Well meaning as these comments are, they give a good indication of why Melville so often struggled in his marriage. In her letter, the routine of toiling for nineteen years at the same job without “a single complaint” is a matter of proud achievement, whereas those books and the unfinished literary work in his study are primarily diversions to keep him from being bored. It brings to mind again that moving comment from Melville’s Clarel: “My kin . . . would have me act some routine part. . . . This world clean fails me; still I yearn.” If the world had not so completely failed him, his “honorable” career at the customs house would, in fact, have been filled with complaints. Angry ones at that, from any intelligent readers demanding to know why the author of Moby-Dick was “buried in a government office.” But he didn’t seem willing to fight the battle himself. For his family’s sake, he accepted his fate, and came out on the other end of nineteen years like a prisoner ready to be released on good behavior.
IN RETIREMENT FROM HIS CUSTOMS POST, Melville could be forgiven for thinking his previous career as a professional author belonged to ancient history. He had written about the sea so long ago that he could be excused for thinking it belonged to some vanished dream of authorship. If asked about his days as a famous writer, he would shrug and pretend that it was all so long ago he couldn’t remember much of it. “He seemed to hold his work in small esteem,” recalled an old naval veteran, Peter Toft, who knew him in his last years, and who was one of his most enthusiastic champions. Melville would resist any attempt to discuss his books, telling his friend, “You know more about them than I do. I have forgotten them.” But Peter Toft was not easily fooled by such talk. He was himself a survivor of the same maritime world that Melville had known in the 1840s, and he admired the author’s major books precisely because they captured so vividly the life of that period. A few years after the author’s death, Toft wrote in the New York Times, “Like Melville, I have also in my youth had a brief experience in a merchant ship, a Yankee whaler, and an American man-of-war. As a sailor boy in the maintop of the United States ship Ohio I was fascinated by his Typee, Omoo, White-Jacket, and his weird Moby-Dick.”
With such a man, Melville couldn’t resist discussing old times, but the books were another matter. The subject was too sensitive, not because he had forgotten them, but because the world had. “Melville, I understand, deliberately effaced himself in his latter years,” said Toft, “and was naturally left severely alone, but I accidentally discovered him some years ago during my stay in New York, and, having much in common, we became good friends. Though a delightful talker when in the mood, he was abnormal, as most geniuses are, and had to be handled with care.” One valuable insight that Toft managed to bring away from their talks was a strong sense of the affinity between the “weird romance” of Moby-Dick and the art of J. M. W. Turner. His new friend noted of this connection: “Melville, like Turner, delighted in ‘color,’ and sometimes in lurid color.” At a time when Melville’s work was relegated to the lower ranks of men who had written old-fashioned sea adventures, Toft was making an extraordinarily ambitious claim for his friend’s talent, dropping his name alongside that of the great Turner. It would take at least another generation before anyone would entertain that connection seriously.3
BY THE END OF MELVILLE’S LIFE, the lingering taste of his earlier fame had turned acrid. Told of another writer who had yet to achieve fame, he scoffed, “What of that? He is not the less, but so much the more. . . . The further our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does ‘fame’ become, especially of the literary sort.”4 In his spare time Melville continued to write poetry, and to occasionally publish it in volumes that didn’t sell. His verse epic, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, occupied him for many years after his Mediterranean trip in 1856–57. It has moments of rare beauty, but as one contemporary reviewer pointed out when the poem appeared in 1876, the reader will have to climb over a “mound of sliding stones and gravel in the search for the crystals which here and there sparkle from the mass.” The last of Melville’s books published in his lifetime was a volume of poems in a private edition of twenty-five copies, with the unpromising title Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse.5
One reminder of the loss of Sarah may have found its way into the dense and confusing Clarel when its young hero contemplates at Easter the end of a thwarted romance and the death of the girl he loved, a woman named Ruth. In the wake of her loss everything seems hollow, especially at Easter in the Holy Land as she lies in her grave. She is sorely missed, yet even the cherished memory of her face is beginning to fade. The young man grieves that there is no hope for her return from the “prison” of the grave: “Christ is arisen; / But Ruth, may Ruth so burst the prison?”
AFTER MOVING TO NEW YORK, Melville only occasionally returned to the Berkshires. His association with the area began to disappear from the memories of the locals, except among a few old friends he had shared with Sarah, such as J. E. A. Smith, who always did his best to remind Pittsfield that the author of Typee once roamed among them. Broadhall remained in the Morewood family until around the end of the century. Rowland was a figure of some envy for Herman simply because the scenes of so many happy times still surrounded him at Broadhall. He never remarried, never seemed to take any interest in doing so, and was content to follow the usual twin passions of his life—business and religion.
When Melville sent his toast to Broadhall for the marriage of Anne Rachel, he also included a toast to Rowland. He made a point, not too subtly, of reminding him that Broadhall had once been his own paradise, and now what was left belonged to the widower. In the end Sarah was a bond that united these two very different men. “He ought to be a Happy Man,” Melville’s toast began, “for all he looks on without and within, is like a Paradise: and what is better, he deserves to be!”
So he did his duty in sending his best wishes to Rowland and Anne on her happy day, but he didn’t think his job was complete unless he wrote a “Final & Concluding Toast.” This one was meant for Sarah, whose spirit he guessed must surely be lingering somewhere in Broadhall that day. For a man who was never religious, but certainly spiritual, it was as close to a gesture of faith as he would ever make. Hoping that his words would reach her in the house that had meant so much to them, he tried summoning her spirit. It was a tribute to her enduring presence in his life. He filled it with the lavish praise he so often gave her. Someone was delegated to read his words to the assembled guests: “If there be a Spirit in this Company who seeks the pleasure of others before her own, whose delight is in happy faces about her, who forgets not friends far away, and whom no acquaintance with the world can make worldly or selfish—as one who is distant from the scene now clearly sees there is—at this moment of parting be she now remembered by us all as we drink, from the heart.”6
Not only is the spirit a “she,” but Melville also uses the present tense to make her seem alive, and then interrupts the listing of her virtues to affirm that even though he is “distant” from the wedding he “now clearly sees there is” indeed “a Spirit in this Company.” He answers his own summons, offering the wedding guests a vision of Sarah whether they know to look for her or not.
IN OLD AGE Melville was exercising all the imagination he could bring forth to “clearly see” Sarah. At his death he left behind a poem about it. The setting is the wooded shore of their favorite lake north of Pittsfield, just below Greylock. At one point he thought of calling it simply “The Lake,” but then—with his own eccentric spelling—he gave it the title “Pontoosuce,” adding an e to the real name.
The poem takes place on a brilliant day at “autumnal noon-tide.” The poet stands above the lake and admires its gleaming surface and the rich colors of the woods surrounding it. The more he thinks about the scene, the darker his thoughts become. The dying leaves give him an overwhelming sensation that death conquers everything, and that nothing survives. “The workman dies, and after him, the work,” he
says. Just when he is slipping into a moment of deep despair, convinced that “even truth itself decays,” a vision comes to him of a beautiful woman whose form is bathed in a soft light like “the pale tints of morn.” She is a dryad who emerges from a glade with a song on her lips, and she “floats” toward him with a wreath of pine sprigs to “her brow adorn.” Her message, sung like a hymn, is the same as one of Sarah’s later poems about autumn as a season that holds the promise of rebirth. (“Light, that’s born of our decay,” as Sarah expressed the idea in the work published as a hymn shortly after her death.) In Melville’s poem the woman sings of nature, “Over and over, again and again, / It lives, it dies and it lives again.”
To comfort the poet, she comes closer and hovers near his face to tell him in a soft voice not to shed tears for the dead. They have simply moved into another sphere of life. “All revolves,” she says, “no more ye know.” Then she whispers, “Let go, let go!” Coming even closer, she kisses him, and the “cold” wreath on her brow brushes against his, so that for a second the chaplet—as Melville calls it—seems to crown them both. Then she vanishes as abruptly as she appeared, leaving him feeling a combination of “warmth and chill,” as if “life and death” had just been joined together—or, as he says, “wedded.”7
It is possible to see Sarah in this poem, with its image of a wreath uniting two lovers, and to feel a sense on the poet’s part that they should have been joined together in life and death. After Melville’s career as an author of prose fiction fell apart and he turned to poetry, he rarely achieved the lyric grace and mystical power that he so movingly demonstrates in this poem about the woman who touched his life in ways that will never be fully understood. She was indeed his muse—his “goddess”—and the greatest love of his life, and hardly anyone knew it.
Sarah Morewood gave Melville a sympathetic ear just when he needed it most for the greatest challenge of his life—the writing of Moby-Dick. She was there to crown his success, regardless of what the world said, just as Hawthorne loyally wrote to him before leaving the Berkshires to say how much he admired Moby-Dick. Though the general reader will always think first of Melville’s years at sea whenever the topic of Moby-Dick comes up, the book’s true home is the Berkshires. Without Hawthorne, and without Greylock’s majesty—the mountain as well as the woman—Melville might never have written what stands now beyond dispute as one of the greatest creations of any mind.
25
THE HANGING
The bearded old man returning home from Central Park with his young granddaughter didn’t attract any notice as he walked down Fifth Avenue. He was about seventy, wore a plain blue suit, and moved at a steady pace, though with the help of a cane. Under a soft black hat his keen, watchful eyes studied the crowds who surged past him on the busy street, none of them aware that this quiet, unassuming grandfather was Herman Melville, the once-popular author.
Though people remembered Typee, no one knew much about Moby-Dick. It was a heavy old book from the lost age of sailing ships that told the story of harpooners in small boats sent to kill whales. Now coal and petroleum were fueling America’s rise in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and Moby-Dick was largely forgotten. Even the little girl at his side, Eleanor—his first granddaughter, the child of Frances Melville—didn’t think of him in those days as an author. It wasn’t clear what he did each day in the dark study of the old house at 104 East Twenty-Sixth Street, with its big mahogany desk and sagging shelves of books. “His own room was a place of mystery and awe to me,” she would recall. “There I never ventured unless invited by him.” But she knew early on that his younger years had been full of strange and magical experiences, and that he had roamed far and wide.
On their return from these outings together he would pause in the front hall and stare at an engraving of the Bay of Naples. She never forgot the odd, almost dreamlike way that he would point at it with his cane and say, “See the little boats sailing hither and thither.” Words like thither seemed almost exotic to her when he spoke them, but that was long before she knew that one of his books was called Mardi: And a Voyage Thither. She was spellbound whenever he put her on his lap and told her “wild tales of cannibals and tropic isles.” When he was finished with his storytelling, she liked to tease him by pulling his beard, and he obliged, though she squeezed it hard, finding it “firm and wiry to the grasp.”1
The old fires that used to rage in his heart had subsided. He seemed reasonably at peace, at least on the outside. Occasionally, a young admirer who had stumbled across one of his old books in a dusty shop would show up at East Twenty-Sixth Street to pay homage to the forgotten genius. When he retired from the government in 1886, one of the papers in New York remarked on the news: “The author is generally supposed to be dead. He has, indeed, been buried in a government office.” A reporter paid him a call and found the old man to be “a genial, pleasant fellow, who, after all his wanderings, loves to stay at home.”2
After retiring, Melville had one last chance to add another treasure to his prose works. At his desk in his study, he kept a quotation from Friedrich von Schiller: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.” In his story of the life and death at sea of a simple young British sailor—the short work that would become Billy Budd—Melville set out to explore what it meant to leave behind in life a defining moment of greatness. In Moby-Dick it is the awful wreckage of Ahab’s crazed voyage that takes the breath away. In Billy Budd it is the notion that some acts of sacrifice are so awe-inspiring that whatever the cost—however terrible the wreckage—they are worth it.
Billy goes bravely to his execution for killing a man on his ship who wronged him. Though his victim hated him and plotted to ruin him with false accusations, Billy’s impulsive killing of the man is still murder and—according to the unyielding rules of the British Admiralty—the young man must be put to death. Accordingly, he is hanged from the mainyard, and afterward his body is sewn into his hammock and cast overboard. “The criminal paid the penalty of his crime,” says a fictional naval publication that Melville cites in the aftermath of Billy’s death. It is a severe, though correct, judgment.
Of course, the sailor is essentially an innocent man provoked into defending his honor. He never meant to kill his accuser when he impulsively lashed out and struck him. All the same, the law insists on sacrificing him to maintain its integrity, and the commander of Billy’s ship—Captain Vere—will not do what his name suggests. He will not veer off course from the straight-and-narrow path of the law. It is his duty to hang Billy, and so he does. But whereas Captain Vere fails to rise to the occasion and sacrifice himself to save Billy, the young man proves with grace and dignity that he is better than the law that condemns him. The very simplicity of his character is his chief adornment as he embraces his sacrifice and dies like a hero instead of the criminal he is supposed to be in the eyes of the law.
As this late masterpiece proves, time wasn’t “hanging heavy” on Melville’s hands in retirement, as his wife sometimes feared. He was still wrestling with old questions and was still trying to come to terms with his own sacrifice on the altar of art. The world had condemned him for his supposed failures, and though his fate wasn’t to die by a shot or at the end of a rope, he surely sacrificed his happiness and his family’s happiness to write books that—as far as he could tell in the late 1880s—were mostly unread, and loved by only a few.
If he had learned anything from his career, it was that noble endeavors often suffer neglect and misunderstanding. Whatever whale he had been chasing in the most feverish and tumultuous part of his life, he had long ago lost track of it as it slipped beneath a wave and disappeared. The biggest question was always, Was it worth it? As an imperfect, indirect answer, Billy Budd offers a valiant yes. It is a powerfully imagined story that shows an old master back at work with undiminished powers. The manuscript is full of revisions and alterations, and he wouldn’t have lavished so much care on it if he had not believed that his words still mattered.
It was one last act of faith in a career that most people assumed was dead and buried. There were no more mad voyages to take, just one last story to tell in his best manner.
Uncomplaining and unafraid, Billy may die violently, but the moment of his execution is oddly quiet and peaceful. Instead of the all-consuming vortex swirling downward as it does in Moby-Dick, Melville offers a vision of Billy rising into a brilliant light. The rope that kills him also seems to deliver him into some greater realm. “Watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.” It is not, by any means, a vision of simple deliverance. The light may be there, high overhead, but Billy is still suspended by the neck, a sacrificial victim strangled like an animal. What is significant is that, at his death, he stares into an engulfing, frightening darkness as if it were light. That is his glory, his triumph over an uncomprehending world.
The fictional Billy Budd becomes a sacred hero to sailors. They even seek out relics. The spar from which Billy was hanged is so venerated among sailors that “a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross.” He is no savior, but the sailors do admire his example, knowing that they might face a similar crisis one day, and that their resting place might be at the bottom of a deep ocean far from home. Vulnerable and superstitious, the men on those old sailing ships needed all the comfort they could find in their small keepsakes. Billy’s relics were silent witnesses to courage.
THE MANUSCRIPT OF BILLY BUDD became something of a relic itself before its posthumous publication. When Melville died at home in New York on September 28, 1891—at the age of seventy-two—the story was among his papers, still needing further work but complete enough for publication. It was in such a confusing state that Lizzie wasn’t sure how to deal with it, and at some point it was stored away in an old tin box. After Lizzie died in 1906, the manuscript moved around among family members until it came to rest in an attic of the New Jersey home belonging to his only married daughter, Frances. The box and its contents stayed in that attic for a decade, dust everywhere, and there was not much interest from the outside world in saving the literary remains of one Herman Melville.
Melville in Love Page 20
