Melville in Love Page 7

  THE OCCASION OF THEIR FIRST MEETING was a rural outing on August 5, 1850, a day that would become a famous set piece in literary history. In a group that included Dr. Holmes and Evert Duyckinck, along with a few other visitors from New York and Boston, Hawthorne and Melville came together for a summer hike to the top of Monument Mountain, a few miles south of Stockbridge.

  As a climb, it wasn’t too demanding and gave ample opportunities for the group to converse, joke, and horseplay as they went along. The highlight came when a sudden thunderstorm forced everyone to take cover, and a mug of champagne was passed around to raise the group’s spirits as they sheltered under a cliff. Later, at the summit, Melville couldn’t resist a new opportunity to show off, displaying his sailor gymnastics, straddling “a peaked rock, which ran out like a bowsprit,” and pretending to haul up an imaginary rope. (Wary of the rocky ledges, Dr. Holmes “peeped about the cliffs and protested it affected him like ipecac.”)3

  The group remained together after they descended the mountain, and then they all shared a long dinner. This eventful day gave Melville and Hawthorne several opportunities to size each other up, and each was intrigued by the other. In the days that followed, the younger writer received an invitation to pay a visit to the older one. It was rare for Hawthorne to warm so quickly to a new acquaintance, but his self-imposed exile from Salem had lasted long enough to make him eager for a little companionship from an author with a background as interesting as Melville’s.

  Hawthorne wasn’t the only one drawn to this new friend. Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, found Melville charming right from the start. She could barely contain her enthusiasm after his first visit to the red cottage. A handsome, creative woman ten years his senior, she thought Melville was “a man with a true warm heart & a soul & an intellect—with life to his fingertips.” She also found his physical presence captivating. Her husband’s good looks had a delicate, refined quality, but the former sailor with his full beard and strong body had “an air free, brave & manly.” Most of all, she was moved by the power of his eyes. His gaze “does not seem to penetrate through you,” she observed, “but to take you into himself.”4

  Fascinated by Hawthorne’s books, his character, and his summer life in the Berkshires, Melville decided on an impulse to write an essay about him. He created it with amazing speed one weekend at Broadhall, and in the second half of August, Evert Duyckinck published the essay in the Literary World. At first the identity of the author was a mystery. The journal identified him by the misleading but mysterious title “A Virginian Spending July in Vermont.” The writing was so extraordinary, and the praise so extravagant, that people were convinced it was the work of a major critic temporarily hiding behind a pseudonym. It was obvious that this “Virginian,” who was supposedly idling the summer away in New England, was a superb stylist whose comments soared to lyrical heights few literary journalists could touch. (And this “Virginian” seemed to have little respect for ordinary reviewers, joking, “There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.”) Pleading for American readers to acknowledge the genius of Hawthorne, Melville—the mystery author—argued that the essence of the nation was embodied in the works of the man: “The smell of your beeches and hemlocks is upon him; your own broad prairies are in his soul; and if you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara.” The portrait that emerges from this essay is of an American Shakespeare, a literary giant achieving his grand effects not by imitating Shakespeare but by exploring some of the same tragic aspects of human experience. “I do not say that Nathaniel of Salem is a greater than William of Avon,” wrote Melville, “or as great. But the difference between the two men is by no means immeasurable. Not a very great deal more, and Nathaniel were verily William.”5

  Generous as it was, the enthusiasm here was not entirely for Hawthorne’s benefit. At this stage, Melville didn’t know the author’s work that well, but he had recognized a kindred soul—both in the pages of the books and in the conversation of the man—and he wanted to use the achievement of the older writer to justify the high ambitions of his own work.

  The essay is a plea to America to take its best writers seriously, and to give them the respect they deserve: “Let America then prize and cherish her writers, yea, let her glorify them. They are not so many in number, as to exhaust her good-will.” Sounding like a literary evangelist, Melville declares, “Believe me, my friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.” The country was preparing for the day when it would enjoy “political supremacy among the nations,” but it was “deplorably unprepared” for the coming time when its writers would rank among the world’s best. One day, Melville predicted, it will not be necessary to use Shakespeare or any other British writer as the measure of an American writer’s greatness. “We want no American Goldsmiths, nay, we want no American Miltons. . . . Call him an American, and have done, for you can not say a nobler thing of him.”

  Ahab and Ishmael, like Hester, would be the faces of an American literature second to none. In his own study of British writers and artists, Melville had learned how to reach for a higher form of art, but the literary and historical models were only starting points. It would be up to this young man barely past thirty to find the unique shape and texture of Moby-Dick. His ambition at this moment knew no bounds. “If Shakespeare has not been equaled,” he boasted, “he is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed by an American born now or yet to be born.” In all his dreams of immortal fame Shakespeare himself could not have allowed his spirits to soar any higher than Melville’s in this inspired essay written in the romantic landscape of a summer in the Berkshires.

  Yet there was something in the darker side of Hawthorne’s writing that also held a powerful attraction for Melville. He had lately been reading the author’s collection of stories Mosses from an Old Manse, and had been drawn to “that great power of darkness in him [which] derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin.” His copy of the stories has survived, and in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Melville underlined this telling remark: “It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin.”6

  Sarah Morewood and Herman Melville didn’t need Hawthorne’s books to guide them in penetrating “the deep mystery of sin,” but that aspect of his work was—above all else—the most alluring part of his appeal for them. The exact moment when Melville wrote his essay on Hawthorne is important, for it was in that hectic August weekend of Sarah’s costume party, when he was “kidnapping” the wholesome bride Mary Butler, that he dashed off the essay. It is a long and, at times, almost breathlessly exuberant piece written with such speed and concentration that the intensity of Melville’s excitement is palpable on the page. Reading Hawthorne may account for some of that excitement, but the greater part must have come from the same attachment that made Melville dress like a Turk, steal a wife from a train depot, and stay up until one in the morning with a young Aunt Tabitha eager for romance. What he found in Hawthorne’s work gripped his imagination because it mirrored what he was suddenly finding in his own life—a sense of passion and adventure with a strong undercurrent of something forbidden and secret.

  Though Melville wouldn’t resume an intensive routine of writing his new novel until the autumn, it is worth noting here what Ishmael says in Moby-Dick: “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” So did Melville, and it must have thrilled him to the core to discover that he had sailed all over the world only to discover that his beloved Berkshires contained primitive delights as wondrous as those in the Pacific. As he was falling in love with Sarah, and contemplating a voyage into an unknown world forbidden by every authority in his society, it is little wonder that he found so much to like in the author of The Scarlet Letter. He put it plainly to the unsuspecting readers of the Literary World. “It is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes me and fasc
inates me.”

  Equally unsuspecting were Hawthorne and his wife when they read the essay just after its publication. Carried away with all the praise for her husband, Sophia was practically shaking with delight. Her more subdued husband tried to take all this adulation with some show of modesty, saying that it was “more than I deserve,” but Sophia couldn’t “speak or think of any thing [else].” As she read the piece over and over, she was increasingly amazed that any critic had dared to shout Hawthorne’s praises to the sky with no apologies or reservations. Not yet having any idea of Melville’s authorship, she was desperate to discover who could have written such a brilliant essay: “Who can he be, so fearless, so rich in heart, of such fine intuition? Is his name altogether hidden?”7

  THE HAWTHORNES INVITED Melville to stay at their cottage for a few days in early September, and during that visit either they were able to tease the secret out of him or Duyckinck revealed his identity in a letter to them. When Sophia found out the truth, she seemed genuinely surprised. “We have discovered who wrote the Review in the Literary World,” she informed her sister. “It was no other than Herman Melville himself!”

  Once he was found out, Melville pretended that he had written the whole thing at a time when he never dreamed that he would actually meet Hawthorne. Sophia accepted this white lie wholeheartedly, and gushed to any and all that their new friend was the best possible company. She had long conversations with him, and recalled one evening in particular when there was “a golden light” over the landscape as they sat outside. She was enchanted by his high spirits and found him “a person of great ardor & simplicity. He is all on fire with the subject that interests him. It rings through his frame like a cathedral bell.” That phrase “on fire” was not one that most people who knew him in earlier days would have applied to Melville. He was usually more restrained, but not now. The sound of that bell was from something less spiritual than a cathedral.8

  Hawthorne was more cautious in his response to this fervent admirer. He was used to working alone, and his darker, brooding side did not align with Melville’s almost boyish enthusiasm for a new age of American literary excellence. He may have also suspected that his admirer’s praise was, for whatever reason, overdone, so he hesitated to share more of his life with the younger man, and was measured in his responses to any questions. Often he said nothing at all, but just nodded or exchanged meaningful glances as Melville spoke to him in long, rolling tides of conversation.

  Unabashed, the younger writer found excuses to see this “silence” as something positive, telling Sophia that her husband’s “great but hospitable silence drew him out—that it was astonishing how sociable his silence was.” With witty conciseness, Dr. Holmes summed up Hawthorne’s character in one memorable couplet: “Virile in strength, yet bashful as a girl, / Prouder than Hester, sensitive as Pearl.”9

  8

  “HOLY INFLUENCES”

  To repay his hospitality at Lenox, Melville invited Hawthorne to dinner at Broadhall on a Wednesday in the first week of September 1850. Though Hawthorne was the more esteemed, Melville had the old mansion at his disposal and could entertain the older writer much more grandly. The sale of the house to the Morewoods would soon be finalized, but Melville was acting as though the place belonged to him. That had been clear in August to Evert Duyckinck, who noted, “Melville . . . treated the house as his own & would suffer no payments.” For a short while at least, both Sarah and Herman acted as if they owned a mansion that still formally belonged to neither of them.

  Time was running out. Rowland Morewood was planning to leave for England on October 9 to visit his family, and he wanted to complete the sale so that renovations could start while he and Sarah were away. His wife, however, didn’t want to go with him. Only “reluctantly”—as she put it later—did she finally give in and agree to the voyage. Later, in a sarcastic understatement, she would recall her mood after her bitter surrender: “I did not feel the most happy person in the world.” She didn’t have much choice. In England, Rowland’s father, whose wealth helped to sustain the New York branch of the family business, was eighty-six, and was unlikely to live much longer. The family expected Rowland and his wife and child to pay a visit before the patriarch was gone. It wasn’t acceptable that he would come by himself, so Sarah must have known all along that she couldn’t back out. Yet the more she stayed in the Berkshires, the harder it was to leave Broadhall and Melville behind. The only consolation was that when spring returned next year, she would be back, and Broadhall would be hers. She was already making plans to become a bright and permanent fixture on the social scene of the area. While Melville was getting to know Hawthorne, she applied her own modest literary talent to writing a poem for the biggest civic event of the year in Pittsfield.1

  On September 9 the whole town was going to march through the streets to celebrate the dedication of the new cemetery. Several thousand people were expected to turn out, and all the leading citizens would be gathered in a central grove for speeches, prayers, and songs. Dr. Holmes had agreed to read a long poem, and Sarah wanted to submit her verses to the choir in the hope they would be set to music. At a time when women writers often struggled to get their work into print, this kind of civic occasion gave Sarah an opportunity to receive some recognition for her talent, so it came as a delightful surprise when her submission was accepted along with that of another woman. She was identified in the program as “Mrs. J.R. Morewood of New York, a Lady who is about to become a resident of Pittsfield.” The other woman—in keeping with the more accepted standards of female modesty—was described as simply “a Lady.”2

  It must have been one of the great moments in Sarah’s young life when the choir sang her “Ode” before an audience of four thousand on a nearly perfect late summer morning under the blue skies of the Berkshires. In the local view, this triumph established her as one of the town’s literary figures. The Pittsfield Sun would later describe her as “a lady of superior literary accomplishments.” For a woman in a small town, she couldn’t have hoped for better praise. It was certainly more than Emily Dickinson ever received in her lifetime in nearby Amherst, Massachusetts.3

  The strange fact that a seductive woman like Sarah would be credited with writing a hymn didn’t escape the notice of Dr. Holmes. “What the diablo had Elsie to do with hymns?” his narrator asks incredulously in Elsie Venner when a well-thumbed hymn book is discovered in her room. Unlike the conventionally religious verses of the other “Lady,” Sarah’s lines were pure pantheism, mentioning neither God nor heaven, but locating all beauty and spiritual power in Nature. Such was her devotion to the natural world that she praised its “holy influences” as the one sure source of grace and comfort. Nature was immortality, and whether as a woman or leaf or stream, all things were united in the eternal cycle of the seasons, and of life and death. Every path was circular, every living thing a marvel inhabiting a world of ceaseless change.4

  The stream whose waters glide along,

  Till lost amid the rolling sea,

  Shall tell us of the eager throng

  Fast hurrying to eternity.

  But spring unfolds a sweeter tale,

  From which the heart may comfort learn,

  When flower-gems strown o’er hill and vale

  Proclaim the op’ning year’s return.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Then “Woodlawn!” hallowed be thy ground,

  We consecrate thee to the dead;

  Rest they, where Nature all around

  Her holy influences hath shed.5

  Though both her talent and her theme followed predictable patterns, her fascination with the natural world, her great curiosity, and her openness to new experiences meant that she was far more in tune with Melville’s ambitions and interests than any other woman he knew. He was as reluctant to let her go as she was to leave. Their first summer together was no casual fling. If Melville had been a typical womanizer of the time—like Alexander Ga
rdiner—he would have welcomed Rowland’s planned trip overseas as a timely escape from any entanglement. But Melville wanted to be entangled. When Sarah returned in the spring, he planned to be not only in the Berkshires, but as close to her house as possible without actually moving in.

  His plan only made sense in light of his fervent attraction to Sarah. Otherwise, to most people, it would have seemed merely foolish and irresponsible. He shared his idea with Lizzie’s father the day after the choir had performed Sarah’s verses at the cemetery dedication. Judge Shaw happened to be in the area on court business, and his son-in-law couldn’t wait to ask him for help. What Melville proposed was that he and the rest of his New York household should abandon the city immediately and buy a place in the Berkshires. The property in question was a humble old farmhouse on 160 acres bordering Broadhall. To buy it, he needed $6,500, but his finances were in such disarray that he couldn’t afford to pay any of that amount. Would Judge Shaw loan him the money for it? he asked.

  It was an audacious and impulsive request, especially considering that the judge had his legal duties to attend to. Strictly as a land deal, it wasn’t a good idea. The asking price was exactly the same amount as Rowland had paid for Broadhall. For $6,500 Rowland had bought a mansion, and a much better farm that was two-thirds larger than the one Herman wanted. His deal had been a bargain, but the author was being asked to pay the full market value for a mediocre property. To afford it, he would have to go deeply into debt. But without a steady income, he would find it almost impossible to pay off his loans.