Melville in Love Page 3
Men were jealous. “Enviable Herman!” a reviewer exclaimed in the usually understated literary pages of the London Times, adding, “A happier dog it is impossible to imagine than Herman in the Typee Valley.” Even the cautious Nathaniel Hawthorne was aroused by what he called Melville’s “voluptuously colored” descriptions of “native girls.” And when Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, met the young author he charmed her—as he did many other women—with an air of exotic mystery suggesting forbidden pleasures. “I see Fayaway in his face,” she said. She also liked to call him Mr. Omoo, after his second book on his island exploits, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. Others simply called him Typee.2
In 1846, when Melville was just twenty-six, the publication of Typee gave its author the same thing that Lord Byron achieved when Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage first appeared—overnight literary celebrity. Or, as Byron put it, “I woke up one morning and found myself famous.” Melville’s publisher in England had also been Byron’s, and the connection wasn’t lost on the young American writer. When he received his first written request for an autograph, he was amused at his sudden celebrity and replied to his admirer, “You remember some one woke one morning and found himself famous—And here am I, just come in from hoeing in the garden, writing autographs.”3
It isn’t difficult to understand why the book resonated with so many readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Sexy women and friendly cannibals will always draw a crowd. Typee aroused too much curiosity for the public to resist. It was the kind of book guaranteed to make the Victorians squirm in all the right ways. The islanders were humans like themselves, but different enough to be regarded as creatures of another world where sexual freedom wasn’t unnatural, and eating your enemies was thrillingly repulsive.
Melville’s “peep” into native life was just revealing enough to make his readers shudder, yet keep them reading. One moment he was giving the reader a glimpse of naked flesh, and the next just a peep into the cannibal’s cauldron. “The slight glimpse sufficed,” he wrote; “my eyes fell upon the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging to them here and there!” In sexual matters he knew how to draw the veil just when his contemporaries might lose their nerve and look away. “The varied dances of the Marquesan girls are beautiful in the extreme,” he wrote at the end of an early chapter, “but there is an abandoned voluptuousness in their character which I dare not attempt to describe.”4
This kind of titillation drove some of his more enthusiastic female admirers to distraction. They wanted to share their own adventure with the dashing sailor. He soon became—in the words of a journalist—“one whose name often lingers now in terms of adulation upon many rosy lips.” Through the post, an especially ardent female fan—a married Englishwoman in New York with the impressive name of Mrs. Ellen Astor Oxenham—pleaded with him, “Typee, you dear creature; I want to see you so amazingly.” Among the many women who found Melville’s adventures in his tropical paradise irresistible was America’s most outspoken feminist, Margaret Fuller. In Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune she happily recommended Typee to her readers, saying that “Othello’s hairbreadth ’scapes were nothing to those by this hero . . . and many a Desdemona might seriously incline her ear to the description of the lovely Fayaway.”5
Some of his sympathetic critics were amazed at his ability to get away with so much questionable description without being censored. No one, said a writer in the New York Daily News, “dances the tight-rope of propriety better than Herman Melville. You are always expecting to see him fall off, but he never does. Some of his scenes with the nude nymphs of the Marquesas are so carelessly, and yet so tenderly told, that we trembled when we first read his Typee, but he went clean through the conventional hoop without damaging either himself or the circle.”6
The predictable backlash against the book by moralistic critics only made it more popular with both sexes. There was something tempting about a story that provoked so many overwrought attacks. Melville was called “the shameless herald of his own wantonness,” and was condemned for sharing so candidly his “voluptuous adventures.” Horace Greeley was so confused by the stark contrast between the book’s obvious literary merit and its occasionally racy language that he said it was both brilliant and “unmistakably defective if not positively diseased in moral tone.”7
What was so dangerous about Fayaway was Melville’s unapologetic celebration of her nudity in an age seemingly determined to bury the female figure under various layers of garments. She stood out in the imaginations of so many readers precisely because she was so refreshingly “devoid of corset, skirts, or crinoline,” as a British poet put it. In that respect her “savage” freedom looked much more attractive than the grotesquely bundled bodies of so many women among Melville’s supposedly civilized contemporaries. (In Typee the overdressed ladies parading through the great capitals of the world are described as “moving in whalebone corsets, like so many automatons.”)8
This was the kind of unconventional thinking that would get the author into more and more trouble as his career progressed. In the early going, however, the pure delight in his portrait of a strange but fascinating culture won him more fans than it did detractors. He pulled off a trick that few writers of his time even attempted—he made erotic confession seem almost innocent, as in his surprisingly matter-of-fact remark in Typee: “Bathing in company with troops of girls formed one of my chief amusements.” With every subsequent book there was always a general sigh of regret by his most devoted admirers that he didn’t give them another character like Fayaway.9
Whether or not every word of Typee was true never mattered much to those who loved its story. The book offered a glimpse of a paradise that was radically different from the grim realities of daily life in societies where too many natural freedoms were forbidden or harshly punished. For a young woman like Sarah Morewood, romantic visions of sexual freedom like those in Typee were the stuff of her dreams. She was one of those Desdemonas that Margaret Fuller imagined sitting in their parlors yearning to hear more from Melville.
THOUGH NONE OF HIS SUBSEQUENT BOOKS would enjoy the success of his first, Melville quickly turned out four more in the next four years. The reading public could hardly keep up as the young author gave them variations on his adventures at sea, tales that always seemed to mix fact and fiction, and to add further mystery and intrigue to the life of the exotic voyager. All of his titles sounded odd to his contemporaries, and none seemed self-explanatory—Omoo in 1847, Mardi and Redburn in 1849, and White-Jacket the following year. He wrote the last two at such astonishing speed that he needed only four months to complete both.
Not a few reviewers wondered if the same man could be the author of all these works. Before they accepted that the stories were based on the experiences of a single young man, some critics asked how anyone at that age could write so well and show such courage at sea and in remote lands. It was difficult to believe that Melville the Hero was not only a Pacific castaway, but also the endearing innocent sailing the Atlantic for the first time in Redburn, and the slightly older but more cynical navy man on the warship United States (or “Neversink”) in White-Jacket. Though a large part of all these stories was indeed drawn from his own life, British reviewers were especially dubious, asking whether they were being fooled by episodes created out of nothing by one or more writers hiding behind a false name. Protested one critic, “Herman Melville sounds to us vastly like the harmonious and carefully selected appellation of an imaginary hero of romance.”10
At the height of his celebrity in the late 1840s, the author was such an object of curiosity that even his youthful past in the Berkshires became widely known. During Longfellow’s stay at Broadhall when it was a boardinghouse, he jokingly gave his address as “Melville Hall, Typee Valley Pittsfield.” On her visit in 1849 Sarah couldn’t have avoided hearing about the area’s newest celebrity—Mr. Herman Typee himself—and the fact that the old m
ansion on the outskirts of Pittsfield was a place that he occasionally graced with his presence.11
If Mrs. Morewood wanted to meet the author, then becoming the owner of Broadhall was an extravagant but effective way of drawing him to her door. For a woman desperately wanting a summer romance with a companion who might be steadier than the capricious Alexander Gardiner, Melville must have seemed an immensely attractive choice. The man who could lean back and calmly study Fayaway’s fine features when she had removed her last garment was just the sort of fellow Sarah Morewood was hoping to find. The fact that another woman had already found him and married him was inconvenient, but it wouldn’t stop her.
3
THE JUDGE’S DAUGHTER
In the heart of Boston’s most exclusive district, at the very top of Beacon Hill, is a large townhouse with an enormous arched doorway of heavy stone that looks like an entrance to a jail or a bank vault. In a neighborhood that Henry James called “the solid seat of everything,” this house—Number 49—seems as if it began life as a fortress and only gradually came to resemble the other comfortable but very solid homes on Mount Vernon Street. For two hundred years the rich and powerful have been affirming their success by buying houses in this long thoroughfare that begins near the Charles River and rises all the way to the back of the State House. In Melville’s time there was no more powerful resident of this street than the man who owned Number 49, Lemuel Shaw, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.1
Shaw’s many friends regarded him as the greatest man in Boston. A future United States senator from Massachusetts would recall that Judge Shaw was “venerated as if he were a demi-god.” People saw him as a model of judicial integrity and fairness, a solid defender of the law with a gruff, no-nonsense manner but a soft heart when compassion demanded it. He had no patience for insincerity in his courtroom and wouldn’t hesitate to use his booming voice to silence upstart lawyers trying to sway him with theatrics. When an officious attorney waved a book in front of him, crying, “Look at the statutes, Your Honor, look at the statutes,” the judge thundered, “Look at them yourself, sir.”2
When he was offended, Judge Shaw made an expression not unlike that of an angry bloodhound. Heavy and broad-shouldered, he had a big, jowly face with a prominent nose and shaggy brow. With his spectacles balanced on the tip of his nose, he could glower at an impertinent lawyer and stop him midsentence with a low rumbling of displeasure. One day, an attorney who had frequently been admonished by Shaw was seen walking a large dog on a leash and was asked where he was going. “Down to the Supreme Court,” he replied. “I thought I would show him the Chief Justice so as to teach him to growl.”3
At his home in his spacious brick townhouse, this mighty bulwark of justice could act more like a sleepy, harmless spaniel. An avid reader with a taste for history, he was most at ease in the warm comfort of his second-floor study, with long shelves of books on every wall. He liked the eighteenth century—he was born in 1781—and was fond of his Hogarth engravings and of the evenings he spent playing whist, the fashionable card game of his youth. His second wife—Hope—doted on him and even put aside her religious scruples to play cards with him late at night before Sunday services the next morning. When he had finished with the serious work of the day, his voice rang through the house as he playfully commanded his wife to join him for cards. “Hope, come here and have a game,” he would shout.4
He was especially indulgent toward the only daughter among his four children, Elizabeth. There was a son by his first wife, who had died giving birth to Lizzie—as she was known in the family—and two more sons by his second wife. He was always generous to his daughter. When he gave a coming-out party for her, the very best of Boston society showed up—two hundred in all—and he spared no expense for the proud occasion. He hired musicians, took up the carpets for dancing, and spent lavishly on the food and drink. There was champagne, claret, and sherry, with ham, pâté, and oysters served three ways (scalloped, stewed, and fried), and then cakes, ices, and truffles for dessert. He could afford such extravagance. Before becoming chief justice in 1830, he had been one of New England’s most successful lawyers, and had amassed a tidy fortune of one hundred thousand dollars.
Because of his wealth, his daughter should have had her pick of Boston’s most eligible bachelors, but she was a quiet, unassuming young woman who seemed happy living in her father’s large shadow. Refined and dutiful, with a plain face and a prominent nose too much like her father’s, she didn’t have a reputation for turning heads. She seemed most likely to marry a hardworking but unexceptional lawyer or schoolteacher.
Given his background as a largely self-educated man who had become famous for paddling around a Pacific island with a nude “savage,” Melville wasn’t the logical choice for Judge Shaw’s daughter. But marry her he did in August 1847, at the height of his new fame, and with her father’s fond approval. She was a far cry from the dark romantic maiden that readers of Typee might have expected their author to wed.
FANNY APPLETON LONGFELLOW—a great beauty of Beacon Hill who visited the Berkshires with her husband, the poet—was astounded when she heard of Melville’s marriage. She had read Typee, and as a former neighbor of the Shaw family she knew all about the judge and his daughter. In private she remarked of Herman and Lizzie, “After his flirtations with South Sea beauties it is a peculiar choice (in her).” No doubt many others thought the same. In temperament and intellect, the couple had little in common. Elizabeth was uncomplicated, practical, and straightforward, with few interests beyond friends and family. She wasn’t artistic or literary, didn’t seem to care much for travel, and rarely stood out in a crowd.5
For those who knew little about the bride except her name, the match seemed a fairy tale in the making. Far away on the shores of Lake Michigan, the Chicago Tribune took the news of the marriage as the final proof that the celebrated writer was leading a charmed life. “Five years ago Herman Melville was a sailor before the mast in a South Sea whaler, a fugitive, and a prisoner. Now he is a famous author, ‘the Phoenix of modern voyagers,’ and has just been married to a daughter of the Chief Justice of the State of Massachusetts. The novelist never imagined a series of more romantic adventures than these events of real life.”6
The truth is that the marriage came about largely because the Shaw and Melville families had been connected for many years. In his youth the judge had been in love with one of Melville’s aunts. She had died before they could marry, but he had remained a friend of the family ever since, and had been especially close to Herman’s father, Allan. Like his brother Thomas, Allan was good at losing money faster than he could make it, and he sometimes turned to his friend Lemuel Shaw for legal advice and other assistance. But no one could save Allan from financial disaster.
Urbane, kindhearted, and ambitious, Allan had once been a prosperous merchant in New York, importing goods from France, where he traveled widely. He gave his wife, Maria Gansevoort, and their large family—which grew to include four boys and four girls—a comfortable life in a series of well-furnished Manhattan homes. But with merciless speed his business collapsed under too much debt, and he was forced into bankruptcy. Herman was only ten when his father’s troubles began.
Allan tried to revive his fortunes in Albany, his wife’s hometown, but he continued struggling to pay his bills. Two years later—broken and humiliated—he died after a short illness. He was only forty-nine. The family fell on hard times, Herman left school to work in an Albany bank, and life was never the same. The proud, determined Maria, whose ancestors were Dutch gentry, settled into a long widowhood and did her best to care for her family. “Oh the loneliness,” she would later say, “the emptiness of this world when a woman has buried the husband of her youth & is left alone to bring up their children.”7
A domineering, self-righteous figure in her family, Maria expected her children and other relatives to provide for her. She used her religious faith to instill guilt not only in her children, b
ut also in the heart of her family’s most generous benefactor—Judge Shaw. Pleas to him for help were accompanied by Maria’s reminders that “the sincere prayers of the Widow & Children shall ascend for your repose here & hereafter.” Herman grew up regarding the judge as something of a father figure, so Lizzie Shaw was almost like a cousin, and the two had met long ago.8
It is impossible to gauge the depth of Melville’s feelings for his bride. No letters survive that would provide some glimpse into his heart. He and his family lost or destroyed so many of his letters that only one survives from him to the woman who was his wife for more than forty years, and it is only a routine item of little interest. Any trace of the dreamy, romantic side of the young man who had run off to sea is hard to find in the author who agreed to wed the judge’s daughter. In settling for the unspectacular Lizzie as his wife, the promising new writer was apparently willing to forgo an American Fayaway for the security of a generous father-in-law with influence and high standing in society.
He had already used his connection with the judge to promote Typee. Anticipating that many critics would question the more sensational events in his first book, he drew attention to his relationship with the great man of the law by dedicating the book to him, hoping that the older man’s sterling reputation would lend his tale some credibility. Following the title page, this prominent tribute appeared in the American edition of Typee: “To LEMUEL SHAW, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this little work is gratefully inscribed by the author.” (The British edition substituted “affectionately” for “gratefully.”) The judge was flattered, and presumably Melville penciled this in with Judge Shaw’s permission. Because Shaw cared about language, loved books, and had been kind to the Melville family, it made sense for Herman to seek a little protection behind the judge’s very large shield of integrity. No doubt many readers were impressed, but some of the book’s critics were shocked. “It is a matter of surprise to us,” declared the Christian Parlor Magazine, “that such a work could have obtained the name of LEMUEL SHAW.”9