Melville in Love (10 page)

What is perhaps the most outrageous part of his plan is that he was willing to undertake this risky gamble using the judge's money. It was a gesture worthy of someone who had once jumped ship in the middle of the Pacific, abandoning a whaling vessel to try his luck as a castaway. That gamble had paid off handsomely in the end, and now he was hoping to use his pen to write a story that would transform his life once again. For a literary man with such outsize dreams, the stakes couldn't have been higher.

IT IS UNCLEAR
when Melville bid farewell to Sarah that year, but both seem to have been in and out of Pittsfield in late September 1850, Melville to organize the move from New York to the new house, and Sarah to prepare for her voyage. By the time Sarah's steamship, the
Niagara,
left for Liverpool on October 9, Melville had already packed up his family's belongings, sent them to Pittsfield, and taken up residence in the farmhouse. It was going to be crowded. His mother, his wife and child, and three of his four grown sisters were all going to live there. With so many dependents continuing to look to him for support, and with his fresh load of debt, a financial success with his new book couldn't come too soon.

Getting the old place in shape would take a couple of weeks. In a long October period of sunny weather, he worked incessantly to prepare the house for winter. After finding some ancient evidence of
Native American culture in the soil of his new property, he decided to call the house and its farm Arrowhead. Almost breathless with exertion and excitement, he wrote to Evert Duyckinck on October 6, “I have been as busy as man could be.”

On one glorious autumn day full of red and gold, Melville looked around his new farm and was amazed by the beauty of the landscape. Though Sarah was no longer there, he felt some of those “holy influences” of nature that she cherished. “It has been a most glowing & Byzantine day,” he wrote in the evening, “the heavens reflecting the hues of the October apples in the orchard—nay, the heavens themselves looking so ripe & ruddy that it must be harvest-home with the angels.”
¹⁰

With due obeisance & three times kissing of

your Ladyship's hands, & salutes to all your

Ladyship's household, I am,

Dear Lady of Southmount,

Your Ladyship's

Knight of the Hill

—HERMAN MELVILLE TO SARAH MOREWOOD

Winter came quickly to Arrowhead and Broadhall in 1850, blanketing the farms in snow. By early December the snow was everywhere, the skies were gloomy, and a cold wind was sweeping across the fields. As the storms raged, Melville sat at his desk upstairs looking north toward Pittsfield, with Broadhall to his left, and Dr. Holmes's summer place to his right, its windows shuttered for the winter. Day after day, his pen raced across the pages of his manuscript, and the book that would become
Moby-Dick
began to assume its final shape. All the while that he was working at this high window, with the north winds rattling the glass, he had the strange feeling that he was at sea again. “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is covered with snow,” he remarked in a letter. “I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship's cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost
fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”
¹

In the distance, clearly visible from his window, was a lumpish shape on the horizon that might have been mistaken for a leviathan coming up for air. The sloping form of Mount Greylock was about fifteen miles north of Arrowhead, and for those among his family and friends who knew the subject of his book, it was easy to imagine the author rubbing his eyes at twilight and wondering whether the great whale in his novel had escaped and was swimming across the hills.

For those who have fallen in love with the Berkshires at the height of summer, it is a sobering experience to know it in the depth of winter, when the snow hardens into crusty mounds, and the treetops that were so full and green are reduced to skeletal shapes against the sky. Even in midafternoon the light some days can take on the bluish tint of twilight and fool the eye into thinking the surrounding mountains are islands emerging from a sea. Over in Lenox, snowbound at times in his cottage, Hawthorne recognized the connection between Greylock and the Whale. “On the hither side of Pittsfield sits Herman Melville,” he wrote, “shaping out the gigantic conception of his white whale, while the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study window.”
²

Up by dawn each morning, Melville would spend a long day writing at his desk before taking a break when the sunlight at his window began to fade. He couldn't afford to waste any of those precious hours of winter light. While the sun tried to penetrate the gloom, he was determined not to do anything but write. It was a solitary life, with his family trying to stay out of the way as much as possible. His mother and sisters had their own domestic interests to occupy
them, but Herman's punishing work schedule didn't seem as bad to his mother as his reluctance to trust his future to her Christian faith.

The unspoken burden of living with his mother was enduring her religious zeal. Though her daughters tended to follow her lead dutifully in most things, her son quietly insisted on doing things his way. It wasn't enough that he was providing a roof over her head. She cared little for his books, but professed to worry greatly over his soul. When she complained about him she often spoke as though no one in the family could match the ardor of her faith. As she confessed to one of her daughters, she longed to see the day “when all my belove'd children will in truth & sincerity openly come forward before the world & proclaim themselves on the side of God, feeling in their hearts their own unworthyness, trusting in the atonement of their blessed Redeemer Jesus Christ.”
³

From Thanksgiving to the end of the year, Lizzie and young Malcolm were absent from Pittsfield, spending part of the brutal winter at Judge Shaw's home on Beacon Hill, where the blasts of cold weather were easier to bear, so it was Maria Melville who ruled Arrowhead in that period. Whenever Herman left his upstairs room, he walked back into the same kind of life he had known since childhood, sitting beside the fire with his mother and sisters as though little had changed since he had gone to sea. Lizzie seemed content to have all that time away from Arrowhead, where she was never truly mistress of her own home as long as her mother-in-law was there. She later recalled that period as one of great strain and hardship. “Wrote White Whale or Moby Dick under unfavorable circumstances,” she noted of her husband's work in her plain, telegraphic prose. “Would sit at his desk all day not eating any thing till four or five o clock—then ride to the village after dark—Would
be up early and out walking before breakfast—sometimes splitting wood for exercise.”
⁴

He did look forward to his daily trips to the village in the family sleigh, bundling up for the ride in the heavy layers of “buffalo and wolf robes.” By the end of each night he was exhausted. His eyes hurt and his head was throbbing. “My evenings I spend in a sort of mesmeric state in my room,” he wrote to Evert Duyckinck, “not being able to read—only now & then skimming over some large-printed book.” At first light, he repeated the same pattern of the day before. “I go to my work-room & light my fire—then spread my M.S.S. on the table—take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will.”
⁵

His steely resolve to complete the book by summer was fitting for a novel that is a kind of war story, a violent contest at sea between two implacable opponents. Ishmael certainly thinks he is at war. Even before the
Pequod
sets sail, he muses on the contradiction of the peace-loving Quaker owners of the ship sending it to invade the watery realms of the whale and spill great loads of “leviathan gore.” In its size and power, the whale is like a “line-of-battle ship,” and Melville describes whole fleets of the species moving through the seas in “martial columns” like a “grand armada.” Likewise, the harpooners are cast as warriors engaged in “mortal combat,” and the body of one—Queequeg—is so tattooed and scarred that he “seems to have been in a Thirty Years' War.” Ahab plots the movements of these men like a military commander. They are the key lieutenants “in that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahab would presently marshal his forces to descend on the whales.”
⁶

When the novel begins, Ahab is already a wounded veteran of this war, having lost his leg to the white whale. In his eccentric speech, he says that he is now like a sailing vessel that has lost one of
its masts. “It was Moby Dick that dismasted me,” he tells his crew; “Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.” It is this grievance that prompts him to announce that he intends to pursue the whale to the ends of the earth. “I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.” Just as wars are often seen as battles between good and evil, so Ahab turns his enemy—the white whale—into the embodiment of every sinful, despised thing on earth. “He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” He attributes to the creature an “intelligent malignity” that really belongs only to the race of Adam. Spiteful, sadistic killing is a specialty of humans, though they often find good reasons to deny it.
⁷

As so many readers have recognized, it isn't the white whale alone that drives the madness. The whale is the illusion that grips the mind at the height of the fever. The whale is the thing that, beyond all reason, must be chased and caught. It is that fatal urge lurking in every heart to break the usual restraints of life and reach too far, to go over the edge and not come back. So, without leaving the Berkshires, Melville waged two major battles that winter. One was the imaginary conflict of Ahab and the Whale, and the other was the very real struggle to save his career.

TOSSED ON THE
WAVES
OF
HIS
SNOWY
SEA
, with Mount Greylock looming ahead, the author wrote all winter long, a ghostly figure in his study—except when venturing out in the night under his “buffalo and wolf robes” like a hunter. It was indeed hard sailing that winter as Melville led Ahab and the crew of the
Pequod
farther
and farther from New England to the deepest waters of the Pacific. Strangely enough, earlier in the summer he had given Evert Duyckinck the impression that the story was “mostly done,” and that it wasn't a dark tale at all. His friend came away with the idea that the new book would be “a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery.” At that point, no one besides Melville could imagine just how dark and apocalyptic the author of the relatively lighthearted
Typee
could become. The summer had changed him, and his new book would reflect both his fresh surge of ambition and his fierce determination to succeed at any cost.
⁸

Wanting the book to be overpowering at every level, he was able for the first time in his life to create something monumental. It was a big story about a long voyage, and the hunt for a massive creature without equal, but what the hard, lonely winter brought to it was a passionate intensity and wild abandon never seen in his work before. He wrote like a man possessed because now he was such a man, his whole future riding on every word he put to paper. However “fanciful” and light the story once was, the winter turned it into one of the great tales of dark obsession. There was no Ahab in his past, as far as we know, but all those grueling days at sea long ago on whaling ships engaged in a relentless slaughter had given Melville the kind of experience that could launch a thousand nightmares. Add to that his familiarity with the ghastly ordeal of the
Essex
disaster in the 1820s—with its terrifying details of a whale turning on its predators and sinking their ship, leaving the crew to the mercy of the waves—and Melville had all the material he needed to spin a tale that inhabits the border between the misery of madness and the delight of discovery.

What helps to set
Moby-Dick
apart from a mere tale of adventure at sea is the fact that Melville was not just telling a story. He
came to inhabit it, speaking as if from within the tormented heart of Ahab or the half-bedazzled, half-bewildered mind of Ishmael. Melville is a Jonah riding not only in the whale, but also in the
Pequod,
the waves, the clouds, the passing birds, and the spirit of the universe itself. That is one reason it is sometimes difficult in the novel to tell who is speaking—Ishmael, Ahab, an all-seeing narrator, or one of the crew. Melville doesn't seem to care—all the voices carry something of his, embellishing the voyage with strange poetic outbursts, or interrupting it with philosophical musings and furious rants. Inspired as if for the first time, he created a narrative large enough to contain so many hopes, fears, and demons that readers of all types have been astonished to find something of themselves floating through the story, flashes of their own obsessions in watery mirrors.

Thanks in no small part to his romance with Sarah, Melville didn't need much in the solitude of his study to fire his imagination or his ambition. He was in the grip of his own obsession, and was speeding along a dangerous path with the same unswerving force that propels Ahab across oceans. His book and his debts had locked him into that path, and there was no going back. “Swerve me?” Ahab asks. “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails.” Melville, at the helm of the imaginary ship that Arrowhead had sometimes become in his mind, was no less fixed in his purpose. His book, he would later say, was “broiled” in “hell-fire.” What Ahab says of the power of his will, Melville himself could have echoed: “What I've dared, I've willed, and what I've willed, I'll do!”
⁹

Ahab's madness is epic, but in the little world of Pittsfield, Melville must have seemed on the verge of madness himself that winter: spending money he didn't have, uprooting his family from New York for no logical reason, boasting of wild schemes to build a road and a
tower in his woods, and locking himself away for the winter to write a book about “the Whale fishery.” A good chief mate like Starbuck in the novel could have reasoned with him, but he wouldn't have listened to such talk any more than Ahab does. At the most basic level of
Moby-Dick,
all the mad pursuits at sea, the cries of the crew, the captain's diatribes, and the explosive violence of the great white whale bearing down on the
Pequod
are no more than phantoms in the mind of an author who fears that his brave but reckless pursuit of a dream will end in tragedy for all concerned. Yet he won't swerve to avoid the crash.

Looking back, Melville might have been tempted to follow this course regardless. He just needed the right push. The ex-castaway yearned to explore the edges of danger and test his limits. In that sense he identified not only with the hunters of whales and other objects of desire, but also with the great creatures whose dives in the unknown were spectacularly deep. “I love all men who
dive,
” Melville famously said, and by that he was referring, of course, to anyone eager to plunge below the surface of things to discover what lies below the usual levels of perception. He made this comment just one year before starting
Moby-Dick,
explaining, “Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will.” Five miles was an exaggeration, but he liked the idea of the mighty whales exploring the depths—a mile or two down, at most—where no other mammal could hope to go. In part,
Moby-Dick
is the result of the author's own extended dive into the depths of his life. It allowed him to explore the mysteries of his identity, his dreams, and his experiences in new and complex ways. With Sarah and Arrowhead in the balance, he had every incentive to dive down as far as he could go.
¹⁰