Melville in Love Page 5

  Simply as an object, The Poetical Works of John Dryden—a Victorian collection of the Restoration poet’s work—is exquisite, with crisp, gilded pages, beautiful illustrations, and sharp print. Back and forth, over the years, as Herman and Sarah would exchange such gifts, some of those around them seem to have assumed that they were merely two book lovers sharing a passion for the written word in fine editions meant to last. But, as they were quick to realize, books are wonderful places for hiding secrets.

  Dryden wasn’t really Melville’s kind of poet, nor Sarah’s, and the pages seem relatively untouched, especially in the first half of the book, where most of the famous poems appear. In the very back, with its less familiar titles, a few things stand out in an otherwise smooth sea of white margins. Melville, who had a lifelong habit of leaving penciled marks in his books whenever a line or passage caught his interest, singled out some passages for Sarah’s attention. The most noticeable one occurs in Dryden’s highly erotic “Sigismonda and Guiscardo,” an adaptation of Boccaccio’s tale of a secret love affair between a princess and a young man at court. Closely watched by her possessive father, Princess Sigismonda must conceal her passion and communicate with her lover through hidden messages and furtive looks. Desperate to be alone with Guiscardo, she arranges a meeting in a secret cavern where they make love with such violent intensity that they forget everything in the outside world. “ ’Twas restless rage, and tempest all the night,” writes Dryden. “Love rioted secure.”

  With a check mark in the margin, Melville highlighted the passage where the eager young man announces his arrival at the cavern for his night of pleasure, and the princess races forward to embrace him. In one of the most romantic lines of the poem, Dryden writes of the young man, “And the first step he made was in her arms.” It is specifically this line that Melville checked.

  No married man in the 1850s would have pointed out to another man’s wife a poem as obscure, and as erotically charged, as Dryden’s tale unless he knew she would welcome it, and understand its significance. But this was part of a fanciful, romantic world that both Herman and Sarah found appealing, this dreamy realm of lovesick heroes and heroines. A few lines, most of them faint, appear in two other romantic poems by Dryden—both dealing with love at first sight, and both also near the back of the volume. Some of these lines look as if they were erased, but overall what the marks seem to suggest is that Melville was searching for just the right passages to share with Sarah. If the passage with the check beside it is intended to serve as a reminder of their earliest encounters, its larger context is certainly in keeping with Melville’s celebration of her in his letters as “Thou Lady of All Delight”:

  He came, and knocking thrice without delay,

  The longing lady heard, and turn’d the key;

  At once invaded him with all her charms,

  And the first step he made was in her arms.

  5

  THE YOUNG TURK

  Young Herman Melville liked showing off, and as his first summer with Sarah progressed, he found a promising opportunity to prove how daring he could be in the right circumstances. It was on a Friday in August 1850, when Sarah was excitedly preparing for her first costume party at Broadhall.

  The morning began with an exuberant search for old clothing to create costumes for the evening. Sarah led a group of friends through the cellar and the barn to dig out big hats, boots, and fancy jackets from storage, relics of the days when Uncle Thomas was the town dandy. In anticipation of becoming the owner of a late-eighteenth-century mansion, she wanted to appear at her party as an extravagant lady of the era, with all the fashionable trimmings she could find for her outfit.

  The first shock of the day was her decision to dress not as a typical aristocratic socialite, but as one of the bawdiest characters in eighteenth-century fiction—Aunt Tabitha from Tobias Smollett’s picaresque novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Sex-obsessed, and incorrigibly flirtatious, Tabitha was hailed by Sir Walter Scott as one of Smollett’s most memorable characters, but she was notorious for her carelessly obscene language. Smollett portrays her as a wealthy, middle-aged woman who has spent her whole life chasing men with little result. “She has left no stone unturned to avoid the reproachful epithet of old maid,” says her nephew. She is determined to find a husband who will not only satisfy her ravenous appetite for love, but will also tolerate her habit of writing so hastily that she often litters her correspondence with unintentionally hilarious sexual puns. She says that a man “beshits me on his bended knees” (she means beseeched); demands that a mattress be “well haired”; and tells her female servants that her “fervent prayer” is to see the family’s new footman—Humphry Clinker—“penetrate and instill his goodness, even into your most inward parts.” She sends a reminder home “to have the gate shit every evening,” and complains that troubles with a man named Roger have caused her to be “rogered.” Perhaps the most infamous of her malapropisms is her written reminder to her household “to keep accunt of . . . the buttermilk.”1

  This eighteenth-century humor was still part of the comic banter of sailors in the nineteenth century, and Melville had heard it all in his years at sea. (Smollett himself was a naval man, having served on a British warship as a surgeon’s second mate, and later achieving his first literary success with a novel that drew heavily on his seafaring experiences—The Adventures of Roderick Random.) The surprising and arousing novelty here, in the well-heeled Berkshires, was that Melville had found a pretty woman who could enjoy a good joke like a sailor. At least one of his literary friends from New York—the ever curious Cornelius Mathews—recognized, or was told, that Sarah was dressing as Aunt Tabitha, but it’s doubtful that anyone in Melville’s family would have known enough about Humphry Clinker to understand the meaning of her choice.2

  When Melville himself announced that he was coming to the party as a Turk, even Mathews may not have realized that the young author was matching Sarah’s provocative costume with one of his own from Smollett’s racy tale. A scene full of sexual innuendo takes place in the novel when a bearded Turk in full-flowing traditional dress, complete with turban and scimitar, enters an English drawing room and is overwhelmed by a wave of cultural misunderstanding. The great illustrator Thomas Rowlandson made the scene famous in a print depicting the clash between the tall, dignified Turk and an imbecilic English duke. So ridiculous is the conversation of the English aristocrat that the Turk decides the whole country must be “governed by the counsel of idiots.”

  Even at this early stage of their relationship, Sarah and Herman were reveling in their hidden, bookish jokes. As John Updike has pointed out, Melville’s “sense of truth held him stubbornly close to the actual; he was, in a style we can recognize as modern, both bookish and autobiographical.” Here was a young author who would fill the opening pages of Moby-Dick with scores of obscure references to whales, and now he had found a young woman fully capable of playing literary games right along with him in perfect sympathy. For more conventional lovers, such games would be dull, but for this couple they were essential to their relationship—a kind of elaborate foreplay that would be all the more exciting because no one else would understand what they were doing.

  The idea that they dress themselves as characters from Humphry Clinker probably originated with Herman, whose surname appears in the book. On his travels, Tabitha’s brother has an amusing encounter with the good-hearted Count and Countess de Melville and their stunningly beautiful goddaughter, Seraphina Melvilia. How could Herman resist this novel, with its echo of his name and Sarah’s in Smollett’s invention of Seraphina Melvilia? In his own work Melville had already raised the possibility that Smollett’s tales were excellent for inspiring amorous thoughts. In his second book, Omoo, he suggests that reading Smollett may have so aroused one of his male characters that the fellow spent the next seven days trying to seduce a reluctant South Seas maiden.3

  In any case, once a big man like Melville clothed himself in the exotic finery
of the old Middle East, he would make a strong sexual statement for anyone in his culture. By the prejudices of the time, he was an intimidating figure in Turkish garb, suggesting the forbidden ways of the harem and the supposed ferocity of the old Ottoman warriors. If that weren’t enough to keep Sarah amused, he went a step further. He decided to play a risky prank on one of Evert Duyckinck’s friends who was passing through town. Sarah was expecting that one of the guests that night would be arrayed as a bride. (In Humphry Clinker a funny episode tells of a “debauched” servant who “robbed” a man of his not-so-innocent bride.) So, when Melville heard that Evert’s friend had just been married in March, and that the wife was accompanying him on their present journey, he saw a chance to do something no one would forget. He would play two parts inspired by Smollett’s novel—the Turk and the “debauched” abductor—and he would begin by stealing a real bride and bringing her as a kind of trophy to the party.

  ON AUGUST 9, at three in the afternoon, twenty-five-year-old William Allen Butler and his bride, Mary, arrived at the Pittsfield depot, where they were supposed to change trains after a short delay. Melville was waiting for them and hopped aboard just as “the last echoes of the engine whistle” announced their arrival. They had no idea of what was to come, but they weren’t the sort of pair to indulge a prankster. Butler was a serious young man with a long, solemn face framed by bushy sideburns. His wife was a small woman with prim features and a severe hairstyle parted in the middle and tightly bunched on either side.

  Though Melville barely knew Butler—a minor contributor to Duyckinck’s highly regarded Literary World—he walked straight up to the young man’s wife and, without a whisper of explanation, led her off the train and into a waiting buggy. In the confusion of their arrival, and with their friend Duyckinck in view, the couple must have assumed that the tall stranger was there to help. Before Butler could say a word, Melville cracked the whip and rode away with the startled woman at his side. As the incensed husband later told the story, he was so taken off guard by this that he simply watched in disbelief as his wife was “whisked out of the cars by a strange man with luxuriant beard . . . and whirled away in a buggy behind a black pony of very questionable build, gait, and behavior.”

  Then, in a panic, Butler gave chase, and with Duyckinck at his side, he was able to track down the bearded desperado to the supposed hideout—Broadhall—where the “abducted” bride was being held. The idea was that Melville wanted to lure the couple into abandoning their trip and agreeing to stay for the party. He hoped they would play along, so that he could surprise Sarah by showing up with a pair of prisoners from a passing train to dazzle one and all. Or, as Butler later put it, “The object in view was to capture us for a masquerade which was on the carpet for the evening.”4

  The seething husband was truly alarmed by the prank and wanted nothing to do with Melville. Refusing to stay at Broadhall, he stormed off with his wife, and was still fuming about the incident months later, when he would get his revenge in a Washington newspaper by taking a few literary shots at the author in a review of Moby-Dick. He could have made even more trouble if he had wished—he was a lawyer and knew his rights in court, and he had a powerful father in New York, Benjamin Butler, a former attorney general of the United States. “We must enter our decided protest,” the angry husband would say of Melville in his review, “against the querulous and cavilling innuendoes which he so much loves to discharge, like barbed and poisonous arrows, against objects that should be shielded from his irreverent wit.” Though these words referred to Melville’s writing, Butler must have been thinking that his wife was one of those who should have been “shielded” from the author’s “irreverent wit.”5

  This episode soon became the talk of the party that August evening, especially because Butler went away complaining that Melville, the bearded Turk, had behaved like a Barbary pirate. “We are not to be caught in this Berber fashion,” he declared. Such an irresponsible bit of drama on Melville’s part must have left his New York friends shaking their heads in disbelief. They had never seen anything like it from him. Evert Duyckinck had championed his career from the beginning, and the two men had grown close over the past few years. Only three years older than Melville, Evert shared many of his literary interests, and was impressed by the depth of his knowledge and the discipline of his writing habits. He was drawn to the light side of Melville’s early work—what he called the author’s “fancy-sprinkled page.” But this unsettling prank seemed to come out of nowhere. Never again in his long life would Melville do anything in public as wild and bold as his “kidnapping” of a bride—unless we see Moby-Dick itself as the next shocking performance that would arise from what Butler feared was a touch of the Barbary shore in the Berkshires. Under Sarah’s influence, the man who had married a judge’s daughter would find new inspiration for breaking rules in his work and offending respectable people.6

  EARNEST, DILIGENT, AND RESPECTABLE, Duyckinck was closer in temperament to William Allen Butler than to Melville. His influence as a critic and editor was so high in New York that cultivating his friendship made sense for any young writer, and so Melville was inclined to overlook their differences. If Evert thought that his friend had lost all the high spirits of those earlier days at sea, this episode with Butler’s bride must have shown him otherwise. Walt Whitman—an expert on high spirits—was one writer who never sought Evert’s approval, and who always thought he was an empty suit. He considered him priggish and pretentious, and the same went for the editor’s younger brother and colleague at the Literary World, George Duyckinck. “I met these brothers,” recalled Whitman in old age. “They were both ‘gentlemanly men’—and by the way I don’t know any description that it would have pleased them better to hear: both very clerical looking—thin—wanting in body: men of truly proper style, God help ’em!”7

  As Melville would later discover to his sorrow, Evert could turn on a friend at a moment’s notice, but for now he was having too much fun to ponder the nature of their relationship. In deference to Evert, Butler probably decided not to make a greater fuss. Yet what a risk Melville had taken, and all for nothing except a few laughs. What if Melville had staged the prank all along simply to give Sarah a pointed message about husbands and wives? She may have been eager to cross the line into adultery, but was he?

  They never lacked for secluded spots where they could meet on the 250 acres of the farm. As Evert would observe during his stay at Broadhall, “Herman Melville knows every stone & tree.” If they soon found themselves alone in a quiet corner of the mansion or in the barn or the woods, would Melville seize the moment and give himself to her? His “kidnapping” of poor Mary Butler was perhaps the answer. Taking a woman away from her husband, whatever the reason, was no joke in his world—unless it was his bold way of proving to Sarah and himself that he could cross that line if he wanted to.8

  BY THE TIME THE COSTUME PARTY BEGAN, Butler and his wife were gone and on their way elsewhere, and the evening was allowed to unfold without any more drama. The event was a great success. It was a proper ball with dancing and a midnight supper. The last guests didn’t retire until after one in the morning, and when Sarah went to bed, she was pleased with her efforts. More important, she didn’t seem upset at the Turk who dutifully showed up to entertain everyone with his fierce looks and perhaps a suggestive swagger—though without any prisoners in the end. (The party had to make do with a costumed bride.)

  It may not have been apparent to all the guests, but Aunt Tabitha and the Turk were quite a potent match. No worse for the late night, they were on the road again the next day with some of their friends and family, dragging them off to an elaborate picnic deep in the countryside. Unused to so much merriment, Duyckinck complained that “the inexhaustible Mrs Morewood . . . understands the art of making a toil of pleasure.”

  Herman drove a big wagon full of picnickers and provisions while Sarah led the way on a colt named Black Quake, a rambunctious horse with a name that suggested
the thudding force of its galloping speed. It was the kind of mount Sarah preferred, a little dangerous but full of life, and she was thoroughly capable of handling the creature. With a few others on horseback at her side, she rode down a narrow country lane called the Gulf Road, which led into a steep wooded area north of town. The group stirred up so much dust at a gallop that they looked like “a flight of Cossacks in the desert.” Lizzie Melville was along on this excursion, but perhaps because she was feeling envious and overlooked, she made the mistake at one point of mounting a horse.9

  Unable to match the skills of her rival, she took a tumble when the horse threw her. Herman came to the rescue, but she was unharmed, and she tried her best to carry on as if nothing had happened. It was an awkward moment, and not a good sign for Lizzie, who had been a new bride herself only three Augusts ago. If he had not considered it before, Melville must have started wondering now whether he had married too soon. At any rate, the picnic went ahead, the woods were explored, and by the time they all returned to Broadhall it was almost dark.