Almost thirty years after he died, his granddaughter Eleanor rescued the forgotten manuscript that would help to bolster Melville’s reputation in the twentieth century. Her mother allowed her to retrieve it from the attic, and to keep it in her possession. In 1919, when Eleanor was thirty-seven, a young scholar from Columbia University—Raymond Weaver—came to her looking for help with a biography he intended to write of the novelist, and she surprised him by revealing that her grandfather had left behind a substantial manuscript. As relics go, it was in good shape, but Weaver found it hard to determine the correct arrangement of the various parts. Though his edition of Billy Budd was far from perfect, its publication in 1924 helped to restore Melville’s reputation, as did Weaver’s biography of the writer, which came out in 1921.
Disillusioned, alienated, bitter—Melville was a genius just right for adoration from the readers of the next two centuries. His reputation has remained high ever since, his works having found a new generation of admirers in the 1920s. Moby-Dick was the great beneficiary of this revival. Survivors of the horrors of the First World War—the “Lost Generation”—didn’t have any trouble understanding how Captain Ahab’s dark battle against a monstrous foe could become an all-consuming descent into madness and destruction.
The Melville revival was a little slow getting off the ground in America, but British readers quickly rallied to the cause, and praise for the forgotten author poured from the London press. In 1927 the British novelist E. M. Forster was among the earliest critics to argue for the brilliance of Billy Budd. In his landmark work Aspects of the Novel, he treated the story as if the author’s genius had always been apparent. “Billy Budd is a remote unearthly episode,” wrote Forster, “but it is a song not without words, and should be read both for its own beauty and as an introduction to more difficult works. . . . Melville—after the initial roughness of his realism—reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from glory.” The glory Melville had sought was finally his. Now the laurel wreath came from one of Britain’s most influential literary voices.3
American writers soon chimed in with their tributes to Melville, including praise from a young author of thirty who was at the very start of his career as a novelist. In July 1927 the Chicago Tribune asked William Faulkner if he could name a book he wished he had written. He chose Moby-Dick and went into flights of fancy about its “Greek-like” beauty, but what he enjoyed most was the evocative quality of Melville’s whale. “There’s magic in the very word, A White Whale,” said Faulkner. “White is a grand word, like a crash of massed trumpets; and leviathan himself has a kind of placid blundering majesty in his name.”4
Though born several years after Melville’s death, Faulkner could hear the author’s music loud and clear. Still resounding, the trumpets of Moby-Dick play on. But all the praise heaped on Melville in the last hundred years came so late that it wasn’t easy to reconstruct the old story of a young author in love. It was much more convenient to assume that Moby-Dick’s origins were forever lost in forgotten yarns of the sea, or in some obscure rage suffered by a writer who would mysteriously decline into a kind of madness. But all the while, as decades came and went, the outlines of Melville’s past in the Berkshires slowly began to take shape. The story of Sarah and Herman has finally emerged from the shadows, thanks to generations of scholars uncovering the detailed information on which this book has been built. Like Moby-Dick itself, the love story stubbornly refused to die.
CODA
On a cold Sunday morning in Elizabeth, New Jersey, an old man stood unsteadily beside a pew at the Christ Episcopal Church, trying to catch his breath. The service had started and all eyes were on the front of the church. Then, there was a loud moan, and every head turned to see the old man fall to the floor. He was carried to the vestibule and efforts were made to revive him. But he was gone, dead of a heart attack at eighty-two.
It had been more than half a century since the English-born John Rowland Morewood had married his young Dutch girl from New Jersey and settled her in the house of her dreams in the Berkshires. Now he lived alone, having retired and moved to Elizabeth, where he had some minor business interests. His fortune of earlier years was much diminished. “He was very wealthy at one time,” the New York World remarked in its report of his death. There was no mention of his wife, who had been gone for forty years and was mostly forgotten. Two children were said to survive him, Mrs. Anne Lathers and Mr. William B. Morewood. A third child—Alfred—had died at home at the young age of thirty-two.1
They buried Rowland under a large white cross in the Pittsfield Cemetery, beside Alfred and Sarah Anne. The passage of time has left all the stones in bad shape, but most especially Sarah’s, which has broken in half so that one part rests against the other, and the name and dates are hard to make out. Meanwhile, Melville and his wife are spending eternity in the Bronx, where they are buried at Woodlawn Cemetery. Messages from admirers often sit on the top of Herman’s headstone, anchored by rocks.
Thanks to history enthusiasts in Pittsfield, Sarah Morewood is no longer an unfamiliar name to many local people. Everyone knows the country club, and the fact that the Morewoods used to own the whole spread on the south side of town is a matter of some curiosity. In 2006 the historical society gave twilight tours of the cemetery, and Sarah’s crumbling grave was one of the stops. About seventy people showed up one summer night to see where—as the local paper put it—“coquettish socialite Morewood” was buried. And, strange to say, the highlight of one of these evenings was an appearance by Sarah herself. Not a ghost saying, “Let go,” to a bearded stranger in the grip of an obsession. Just a local woman named Judy Daly who was wandering the grounds in costume. Someone had the inspiration to send out several actors dressed as departed figures from Pittsfield’s history, each giving a little talk beside the grave of the famous person. How charming. Sarah would have loved it. One last costume party on a summer night in the Berkshires.2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From the earliest stages of this book I have been fortunate to have the wise guidance and support of two remarkable women at the Friedrich Agency in New York, Molly Friedrich and Lucy Carson. This book could not have been written without their kind encouragement and advice.
I’m also grateful for invaluable editorial help from a great team of professionals at Ecco Books—Daniel Halpern, Hilary Redmon, and Emma Janaskie. I deeply appreciate their enthusiasm for this book, and their hard work on its behalf. Many thanks as well to Tom Pitoniak, for helpful suggestions when the book was still in typescript.
The marvelous collection of Melville documents and artifacts at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was essential to my book, and I feel especially fortunate to have worked there with Kathleen M. Reilly, supervisor of the Local History Department. She is a model of efficiency and a great supporter of Melville scholarship. On every visit to the Athenaeum I was encouraged by her warm welcome and generous assistance.
My time at Melville’s old home of Arrowhead was memorable and enormously useful, thanks in large part to the helpful staff from the Berkshire County Historical Society—especially Will Garrison, curator, and Eileen Myers. I want also to thank Wayne Myers, for taking me to see Lake Morewood at what used to be the Broadhall farm. Members of the staff at the Pittsfield Country Club were also kind enough to show me the interior of the old mansion.
For research assistance, I am grateful to Michael Frost, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; Elizabeth E. Fuller, librarian, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia; and Tal Nadan, reference archivist, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. Decades of scholarly research have been enormously helpful to me, especially the admirable labors of Harrison Hayford, Brian Higgins, Lynn Horth, Jay Leyda, Henry A. Murray, Steven Olsen-Smith, Hershel Parker, and Merton M. Sealts Jr.
I also appreciate the support of Gayle Cook; Professor Thomas Derrick; Mary Ann
Duncan; Professor Joseph Fisher and Nancy Fisher; Maria McKinley and Dr. Lee McKinley; Professor Robert Perrin; Lee Pollock; Mary Burch Ratliff and Dr. Wesley Ratliff; June Shelden; Vanessa Shelden; and Sarah Shelden Coplen and Collins Coplen.
The dedication acknowledges imperfectly how much I owe to the love and influence of my wife and my grandparents.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
BA: Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
BCHS: Berkshire County Historical Society, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
HM: Herman Melville.
HMC: Correspondence. Ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1989.
HMCR: Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
HMJ: Journals. Ed. Howard C. Horsford and Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1989.
HMP: Published Poems. Ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical Note by Hershel Parker. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 2009.
HPBio: Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819–1851 and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851–1891. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 2002.
ML: Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951; New York: Gordian Press, 1969.
NYPL: Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library.
Rosenbach: Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
SAM: Sarah Anne Morewood.
Springfield: Lyman and Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History, Springfield, Massachusetts.
Yale: Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Because the major books Melville published in his lifetime are available in so many different editions, I cite only chapter numbers for these works in my notes and don’t abbreviate the titles.
PROLOGUE
1. Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, December 29–30, 1851 (NYPL).
2. SAM to George Duyckinck, [December ?, 1851] (NYPL). Sarah Anne Morewood’s middle name has occasionally appeared in print without the final e, but her gravestone in Pittsfield identifies her as “Sarah Anne,” and she named her only daughter “Anne.” A family record of birth dates lists her as the seventh of nine Huyler children who survived infancy, and gives her date of birth as September 15, 1823 (BCHS). The date is sometimes mistakenly given as 1824, which is the one on her gravestone.
3. See the November 1851 reviews reprinted in HMCR (386, 382, 378, 385, 380).
4. Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, December 29–30, 1851 (NYPL); G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Sales of Melville’s Books,” Harvard Library Bulletin, April 1969, 199.
5. The account of the Christmas dinner is taken from Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, December 29–30, 1851 (NYPL). This letter was first reported in 2002 in HPBio, 2:49. See chapter 18 here for a correction to the text. As a holy day of celebration, Christmas was gaining in popularity in New England, beginning at least in the early 1830s when Boston newspapers called for a “more marked observance of Christmas Day” (Restad, Christmas in America, 34). But celebrating the day was a long-established tradition among Episcopalians like John Rowland Morewood. As an example of SAM’s floral talents, see her awards in “Report on Fancy Work, Drawings, Etc.,” Pittsfield Sun, July 3, 1856.
6. Maria, HM’s mother, refers to him as “very angry” in her letter to Augusta Melville of December 29–30, 1851 (NYPL), where she also describes Sarah’s effort to crown HM: “She stopt before a plate on which lay a beautiful Laurel wreath, which she gently lifted & quickly placed upon his brow, he as quickly removed it to her head saying he would not be crowned.”
7. See the index to Delbanco’s Melville, 405. A fictional affair between Herman and Sarah is imagined in the middle section of Larry Duberstein’s 1998 novel The Handsome Sailor, where a diary is invented to tell the story. (See Jay Parini’s review, “Call Me Herman,” New York Times, June 28, 1998.) Hershel Parker is the only biographer to take a detailed look at the relationship between HM and SAM, but he dismisses any chance of a romance: “The wonder was that Sarah had not focused her attention on Herman in 1850. Nothing survives to indicate that she had done so” (HPBio, 2:44). Also, in the scholarly collection Melville & Women, Laurie Robertson-Lorant concludes, “As far as we know, Herman’s relationship with Sarah Morewood was entirely platonic” (30).
8. Caroline Whitmarsh, “A Representative Woman,” Berkshire County Eagle, October 29, 1863.
9. See HM to SAM, [December 20?,] 1853 (HMC, 252–55); and HM to SAM, September [12 or 19?,] 1851 (HMC, 205–6). The heavily annotated appearance of these letters in HMC may have led some scholarly readers to underestimate their romantic appeal, but seeing the handwritten words at BA left me with little doubt of HM’s passionate exuberance. A recently recovered document at BA is a handwritten reply from “The Ladies of Arrowhead” to “Her Grace of Broadhall,” accepting a dinner invitation in April 1852 from SAM. Though, like HM, the Arrowhead women (HM’s wife, mother, and sisters) could imagine an aristocratic quality to SAM’s reign at Broadhall, their response to “Her Grace” has none of the warmth or elaborate fancy that distinguish HM’s letters to SAM.
10. HM to SAM, [August 29, 1856?] (HMC, 296–97). For SAM’s family history see the Huyler files at BA. As an illustration of the courtly tradition of the laurel crown, see Anthony van Dyck’s painting of Queen Henrietta Maria presenting a wreath to Charles I of England. Engravings and painted copies of this work were widely known in HM’s time.
CHAPTER 1
1. Quoted in the Northwestern/Newberry edition of Moby-Dick, 611. For HM’s memories of his uncle, see Merton M. Sealts Jr., “Thomas Melvill, Jr., in The History of Pittsfield,” Harvard Library Bulletin 35 (1987): 201–17. (In the early 1830s HM, his mother, and siblings adopted the e at the end of the family name.)
2. The WPA Guide to Massachusetts cites Longfellow’s term for what is now generally known as Morewood Lake.
3. Sealts, “Thomas Melvill, Jr., in The History of Pittsfield,” 213, 214.
4. “Private Boarding House,” Pittsfield Sun, August 9, 1849; Longfellow to Charles Sumner, July 23, 1848 (Longfellow, Letters, 3:177–78); Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 2:117–22.
5. SAM to her son William (“Willie”) B. Morewood, [n.d.] (BCHS). Details of Sarah Huyler’s early life are taken from documents at BCHS, including a handwritten “Family Record” preserved among the Morewood papers listing in order the birth dates of her parents and siblings.
6. SAM to George Duyckinck, [December 1851] (NYPL).
7. SAM to her sister-in-law Ann Morewood, October 24, 1848; and SAM to Susannah Perrin, [n.d.] (BCHS).
8. Seager, And Tyler Too, 319, 341.
9. Alexander Gardiner to David Gardiner, September 28, 1849 (Yale). See also HPBio, 2:42–43; and Parker, Melville Biography, 216. It isn’t clear whether the compromising scene took place inside the mansion or elsewhere. Sarah was reportedly staying at another home for at least part of the 1849 visit.
10. SAM to George Duyckinck, July 29, [1856] (NYPL). The clergyman was Robert J. Parvin, who preached his last sermon in Pittsfield on July 20, 1856 (Pittsfield Sun, July 31, 1856).
11. Seager, And Tyler Too, 32.
CHAPTER 2
1. Published in 1851, the song “Fayaway” was written by Maria L. Child (lyrics) and J. F. Duggan (music). The quotation from Typee can be found in chapter 18.
2. HMCR, 44, 23; Wineapple, Hawthorne, 223.
3. HM to William B. Sprague, July 24, 1846 (HMC, 59).
4. Typee, chapters 32 and 2.
5. HPBio, 2:44, and HMC, 796; HMCR, 38–39.
6. “Our Ambrotypes. Herman Melville, Romanticist,” New York Daily News, April 14
, 1856, quoted in Steven Olsen-Smith, “Herman Melville’s Planned Work on Remorse,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, March 1996, 496.
7. HMCR, 157, 137, 130.
8. Quoted in HMP, 379; Typee, chapter 17.
9. Typee, chapter 18.
10. “Pacific Rovings,” Blackwood’s, June 1847 (HMCR, 120).
11. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Charles Sumner, July 23, 1848 (Longfellow, Letters, 3:177).
CHAPTER 3
1. James, The American Scene, 235.
2. Chase, Lemuel Shaw, 289, 282.
3. Ibid., 283.
4. Ibid., 294.
5. Fanny Appleton Longfellow, Mrs. Longfellow, 132.
6. ML, 259.
7. Quoted in Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 53.
8. ML, 59.
9. HMCR, 57.
10. Quoted in HPBio, 1:544.
11. Ibid., 1:554.
12. “After the Pleasure Party,” HMP, 262; ML, 260; Parker, Reading Billy Budd, 45.
13. Wineapple, Hawthorne, 223. In a letter of May 31, 1818, Herman’s father reported that his research in Edinburgh had uncovered the family’s descent from Sir John Melvill of Carnbee, owner of Granton castle on the Firth of Forth (BA). The rock foundations of that castle are still there and overlook one of the great waterways of the world.
14. HM to Lemuel Shaw, October 6, 1849 (HMC, 138).
15. HM to R. H. Dana Jr., May 1, 1850 (HMC, 162).
16. “City Items: The Dog Days,” New York Tribune, July 30, 1850.
CHAPTER 4
Melville in Love Page 21
