Melville in Love Page 2

  PART I

  A SAILOR IN THE BERKSHIRES

  I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

  —MOBY-DICK

  1

  A SUMMER PLACE

  The old mansion won his heart first, long before he met Sarah. He was just a boy on the verge of manhood, and in those days he could imagine that the house might one day be his when he was rich and successful. It is only one of the many strange twists in the story of Herman and Sarah that, decades before she acquired the place and named it Broadhall, the mansion and its 250 acres were the home of Melville’s favorite uncle, his father’s brother, who lived in it for more than twenty years as one of Pittsfield’s most prominent citizens.

  Young Herman was devoted to his uncle Thomas, whose warm heart and lively spirit touched him deeply. Looking back in later years to the times when he visited Thomas in summers, he recalled his uncle as “a cherished inmate” of his youth, “kindly and urbane—one to whom, for the manifestations of his heart, I owe unalloyed gratitude.” The two would work alongside each other in the summer fields, raking hay in the warm sun. In their time together the boy came to know the land intimately, and the family joke was that his uncle’s farm was Herman’s “first love.”1

  Even then he thought it was a paradise. The fields sloped gently away from the house, with a patch of woods here and there full of maple and aspen, and then great clumps of wildflowers and raspberry bushes where the land flattened into a broad meadow. At the end of the property there was a wide view of the Housatonic River meandering through the valley, and high above on summer days the sky was a brilliant blue with occasional masses of white clouds drifting by.

  The great jewel of the farm was its lake. Spring-fed and beautifully clear near the shore, it covered about five acres and was so deep in the middle that neighbors swore it was impossible to find the bottom. In the shallows there was a long bed of water lilies with blossoms in various colors depending on the time of year—pink, yellow, or white. For a while the lake was popularly known as the Lily Bowl. Visiting the Berkshires one summer, the poet Longfellow gazed at its shimmering surface and described it as the “Tear of Heaven.”2

  Uncle Thomas gave Herman not only an idyllic country escape, but also the inspiration to make his mark in the larger world. The old farmer had once been a man of great ambition himself, a young American banker in Paris, no less. Long ago, in the 1790s, Thomas had left his native Boston and spent almost twenty years trying to make his fortune in France. He won and lost great sums, met Lafayette, saw Napoleon, and discussed politics with James Monroe. His star seemed on the rise when he married a beautiful young woman who was born in Spain and brought up in France. She had connections in high places and wore her long dark hair in the stylish ringlets of Juliette Récamier, in whose glamorous circle she moved. But when his banking career collapsed in the last years of Napoleon’s empire, Uncle Thomas moved back home and settled his French family in the Berkshires. His wife didn’t survive the move, dying in her early thirties in Pittsfield, her fashionable life in Paris far behind her.

  Having studied her portrait after listening to his uncle’s many recollections of his old life in France, young Herman was inclined to romanticize her death, and would later write that Thomas’s “foreign wife paled and withered a transplanted flower.” He never forgot the wistful look on his uncle’s face when memories of that lost life of love and glory in Paris would now and then brighten the old man’s imagination. In boyhood, at the kitchen hearth of the mansion, Herman used to watch with fascination as his uncle sat “just before early bed time, gazing into the embers, his face plainly expressing to a sympathetic observer, that his heart—thawed to the core under the influence of the genial flame—carried him far away over the ocean to the gay Boulevards.”3

  The house became a magnet in Herman’s life, drawing him back even after he had seen so much more of the world. Isolated and provincial though the area was, his uncle’s stories made it resound with echoes of grand endeavors “far away over the ocean.” The place was always a reminder not only of his uncle’s joy at diving deep into a foreign life and relishing every minute of it, but also of his sorrow at losing that life and the woman who had graced it until misfortune uprooted them from France.

  THOUGH MELVILLE SPENT most of his early life in New York State—first in Manhattan, where he was born on August 1, 1819, and later in the Albany area—the Pittsfield farm was in many ways his true home. At an impressionable age its quiet beauty enchanted him, and in those long summer days spent at his uncle’s side, his grandest dreams of worldly adventure and fame first took flight.

  When Sarah Morewood lifted her wreath to his head in 1851, both of them were keenly aware of his long history in the house, and both understood why he would not wear that crown. The dreams born under its roof were in danger of disappearing, and Melville was afraid that he had already lost his best chance for success. If Moby-Dick couldn’t take his career to the loftiest heights, what could?

  It’s still possible to follow Melville’s footsteps into the very heart of that dramatic scene with Sarah, for the mansion remains standing in the twenty-first century. Changes and additions have been made at various times, but in the great hall its stately elegance still evokes a slower time when the loudest sounds were the ticking of a clock or the sound of boots on the stair. The double parlors haven’t changed much. There is still a rambling grandeur to the maze of old rooms upstairs, and the distant view from the side porch is very much as it would have been long ago, with Mount Greylock—the highest point in Massachusetts—a rugged mass on the horizon.

  That so much of the past remains is surprising given that the mansion is now the Country Club of Pittsfield, and the farm has been replaced by a golf course, but the employees haven’t forgotten the mansion’s connection to Melville, and at least one of the veterans is convinced that the place is haunted by various ghosts from its long history. On winter nights, when the course is covered in snow and most of the town is asleep, the house can indeed look ghostly in the moonlight.

  Old Uncle Thomas is not among those who died there. Like that of many in Herman’s family, his habit of squandering money was so bad that he was forced late in life to seek a new fortune far from New England. Toward the end of the 1830s he settled near the Mississippi River at Galena, Illinois, and died there a few years later without succeeding at anything he tried in his last home. His son Robert returned to Pittsfield and made a final effort to keep the treasured mansion in the family.

  Around 1848 the Berkshire newspapers began featuring advertisements for a “private boarding house” to accommodate summer guests. “The rooms are very large,” Robert boasted, “with many conveniences not usually found in ordinary boarding houses, and the situation is unrivalled either for the beauty of its scenery or the salubrity of the air.” The new arrangement attracted a steady stream of guests—some of them famous, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who quickly spread the word to friends that he and his family had found a pretty hideaway in the Berkshires worth visiting. “We are lodged here better than our imaginations dared conceived,” he wrote his friend Charles Sumner, the Boston lawyer and future United States senator. “It is a grand old mansion which you should not fail to sleep in.” He loved the “echoing hall,” the views from the wide porch, the elms and sycamores lining the drive, the “delightful deep shadows, and far-off gleams of sunshine flecking the landscape,” and picnic lunches on the “pebbly shore” of the little lake. When the summer came to an end, the poet hated to go, though he found the place so peaceful that he had been unable to do any serious writing there. “Farewell the sleepy summer,” he wrote on the last day of his stay.4

  AS ROBERT AND HIS WIFE, Susan, soon discovered, their deluxe boardinghouse was expensive to run, and it would never make much money. But the guests kept coming, including in July 1850 the Morewoods of New York. As much as Longfellow enjoyed his stay, Sarah would enjoy hers even more, and by the end of the summer the
whole place would belong to her. Unhappy with city life, she wanted to be free to ride and walk in a healthy environment where she could feel close to nature, and where she could do as she pleased. So she talked her husband into buying the mansion and 250 acres of farmland from Robert’s family.

  All her friends and family had heard some version of her frequent complaint, “A life in the City is very dull to me.” She had grown up in a large Dutch family just across the Hudson in what was then a rural area of New Jersey. Shortly after marrying her in April 1845, Rowland Morewood tried to make the former Sarah Huyler comfortable in a pleasant house in Washington Heights, but even that leafy area of old Manhattan was too close to urban life for her tastes.5

  She would always be restless and dreamy, a bright woman with endless curiosity searching for an elusive happiness. Born September 15, 1823, in what is now Passaic, New Jersey, she was the seventh of nine children. Close to her mother and sisters, she was on more distant terms with her three brothers and her father, who was a man of modest means. From an early age she was aware of being different from most people in her little Dutch community. She wanted something grander from the world and spent much of her time imagining in solitude an escape to a more romantic time and place. “I have been alone so many years of my life,” she wrote at twenty-eight, “and have missed very much[,] which if known earlier and enjoyed[,] would have been of benefit to me now and I therefore have need to seize upon that which yields me happiness so long as I do not in so doing injure the feelings of those who understand and know me. Those who do not and will not [understand me] may act and feel as they like & judge me as they like too—”6

  The key for Sarah was always to be understood, not judged. But, of course, the world prefers to judge first, and she came to take some satisfaction from shocking those who refused to understand her. Fearing she had wasted too much of her life waiting for better things to happen, she was eager to “seize” pleasures wherever she found them, and before they could vanish. Health problems also made her worry that her time might be short. A difficult pregnancy in late 1847, when she was twenty-four, left her so weak that she struggled to regain strength for months afterward. As she complained to a sister-in-law, she lost a great deal of weight after her son William was born. “I am very slim to use a yankee word,” she wrote, “and all my dresses are too large for me.”

  What restored her health was her first long stay in the Berkshires, in 1849, and she couldn’t wait to return. The air itself was like a tonic to her. The whole area, she said, was “as lovely as nature can make it.” And because so many other interesting people were discovering its charms at the same time, she looked forward to sharing the experience in 1850 with more adventurous companions than her conventional husband.7

  Her wide reading in romantic books had filled her mind with images of lovers being swept away by strong passions, and poor Rowland Morewood couldn’t rise to those heights. His passions were limited to making money and serving his fellow Episcopalians. In New York he was not only a warden at his church but also its treasurer. Over time he would come to appreciate the Berkshires, but initially he went there simply to help his wife improve her health.

  Yet, even on that first visit to the area, Sarah had wasted little time before commencing a summer romance. The man who caught her eye then was a handsome young lawyer whose family was politically well connected. He was Alexander Gardiner, clerk of the United States Circuit Court of New York. His sister, Julia, was one of the most famous women in America. Only five years earlier, at twenty-four, she had briefly served as the First Lady of the United States after marrying President John Tyler, who was more than twice her age.

  When Tyler left the White House, he depended heavily on his brother-in-law for legal and financial advice. Alexander Gardiner was his appointed biographer and close friend, and everyone assumed that the young man would one day become an important political figure on the national stage—if he didn’t allow scandal to ruin his career first. It was no secret that he had a weakness for liquor and late nights in the company of pretty women at wild parties. At one raucous affair in Washington, he boasted that the drink flowed so freely that “the floor drank as much champagne as the guests.” Witty and outgoing, and in no hurry to marry, he “toyed with women as he played the stock market, acquiring and disencumbering himself of them as the situation demanded.”8

  In his brief fling with Sarah, the situation became so demanding that he fled from her in fear. Even in his worldly estimation, she was far too open and free with her affections to be “toyed with.” One false step and he was sure that a major scandal would engulf him before he could escape the Berkshires. He was a public figure with a government job, and the last thing he wanted was a charge of adultery hanging around his neck.

  He didn’t worry that Sarah or her husband would make a fuss. What concerned him was that the proprietors of the boardinghouse in Pittsfield would spread damaging gossip. Servants had apparently told Melville’s relations at Broadhall* of some compromising scene “respecting Mrs M[orewood] and myself,” as Alexander Gardiner later put it. Worse, Melville’s cousin Robert was already talking of it within his “circle” of friends and neighbors. If such gossip went beyond Pittsfield, there could be “very unfortunate consequences”—or so the young lawyer acknowledged to his brother in an anxious letter. “Very unfortunate” was a lawyer’s polite language in the nineteenth century for a catastrophe. It suggests that what the servants saw was something much more revealing than a kiss or an embrace.

  Guiltily, young Alexander confessed to his brother that he had been “very indiscreet and imprudent.” Given his reputation for womanizing, he probably did little to discourage Sarah’s attentions until they became a problem for him, but he pretended that the trouble was mostly Mrs. Morewood’s fault. “I have apprehended sometimes that Mrs M’s familiarity with me might lead to such a result and have done everything in my power to avoid it.”9

  Whoever was at fault, it was a dangerous game, but the remarkable thing is that neither Sarah nor Rowland seemed to understand how dangerous it could be. A powerful New York lawyer with a former president as his friend could ably defend himself against scandal. The Morewoods were small fish in comparison to sharks like Gardiner. Yet it was he who couldn’t wait to clear out of Pittsfield as soon as he sensed real trouble.

  There was always a disarming touch of innocence to Sarah’s character. She didn’t like to take no for an answer and resented the suggestion that she could ever do anything wrong. Once, when neighbors began gossiping about a clergyman who was spending too much time as a guest in the Morewood home, she wrote that she couldn’t understand why anyone would doubt her good intentions. As always, she hated being judged by those who had no wish to adopt her larger point of view. “Slander,” she remarked, “is an evil which no one can bear without great suffering let their innocence be ever so clear in their friends’ minds.”10

  It is something of a miracle that Alexander Gardiner’s hastily scrawled letter to his brother has survived. He lived only sixteen months after he left Sarah and the Berkshires, and his fondness for partying apparently hastened his death. After coming home drunk for three nights in a row, he fell ill and died of a ruptured appendix. His letter to his brother is now held in the neo-Gothic splendor of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library among a vast range of other documents from John Tyler’s family. If it weren’t for the Gardiner connection to an American president, the letter might well have disappeared long ago.

  Domestic intrigues and romances were common in the fashionable boardinghouses of the time. Alexander Gardiner’s own mother had warned him against them, urging caution in his dealings with ladies who happened to be sharing a roof with him for even a brief spell. “A very general and rather distant politeness is all that is necessary until you find them out,” she had said of the ladies, “and then very likely you will wish to be still more distant.”11

  Undaunted by Gardiner’s quick retreat, and the Pittsfield gossip, Sara
h was thrilled to return to the Berkshires in 1850, and she had a foolproof method of avoiding more trouble from cousin Robert at Broadhall. With Rowland at her side, she would offer to buy him out and turn the place once again into a private home where she could come and go as she pleased. But it would take some time to complete the sale. Meanwhile, perhaps not by accident, she would find herself that summer living for more than a month under the same roof with the man whose emotional investment in Broadhall was beyond measure—Herman Melville.

  2

  “CORSET, SKIRTS, OR CRINOLINE”

  In the years just before Herman met Sarah, one of the most celebrated characters in American literature was a nude Polynesian beauty. An English racehorse was named after her, a racing yacht carried her name on its hull, and a popular song was written about her (“The tender light of her blue eyes / Was mild and deep as moonlight skies”). Men dreamed about her, and imagined themselves locked in her embrace. She was the star of the most erotic scene in any major American book of the time, a vivid moment when she stood nude at the front of a canoe using her only garment as a sail and floating along like a South Seas Venus, free and unashamed. This was, of course, the lovely Fayaway in Melville’s first book, Typee, where he coyly remarks of her classic figure, “We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a prettier little mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.”1

  For most of his career, Melville was known first and foremost as the “American Robinson Crusoe,” a daring castaway who had lived among cannibals, frolicked with native girls, and then returned to share his beguiling tales with a curious public. At twenty-one he had sailed from New England on a whaling ship, enduring eighteen months aboard until abandoning the vessel in the Marquesas Islands, on the other side of the world. For the next two years he was an Ishmael of sorts, a wanderer in search of adventure, slowly finding his way home after visiting Tahiti, Hawaii, and South America. Part fiction, part fact, Typee allowed him to embellish the most dramatic of his experiences among islanders whose exotic culture both frightened and delighted him. But for almost every admirer of Typee, what mattered most was the author’s discovery of one island native in particular—Fayaway. Before his Whale caught on in the twentieth century, Melville’s name was kept alive by his fond portrait of life with this slender young woman.