Melville in Love (18 page)

On his way to attend yet another party at Broadhall, Melville was stopped by someone from the village and handed a letter. It was mid-November 1851,
Moby-Dick
had just been published by Harper & Brothers in New York, and reviews were starting to appear in the press. The envelope didn't contain news of any professional critic's latest pronouncement. It was a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne giving his private views of the new book. Nervous with anticipation, Melville raced ahead to Broadhall and read it there. He couldn't wait to hear the verdict.

The letter was good. Hawthorne liked the novel and was liberal with his praise. Melville was euphoric, believing that if he received such a major writer's approval for his masterpiece, everything else was destined to fall into place. Unable to restrain his joy, he sat down the next morning to write a letter of gratitude. After his long struggle, he felt vindicated and—at least for now—at peace with
himself. “A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment,” he wrote to Hawthorne, “on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. . . . I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon.” If Hawthorne had been embarrassed before by some of Melville's warm declarations of literary friendship, this letter was sure to make him blush. His friend was ready to turn him into a lord of the universe, and join him on the cosmic pedestal. “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper,” he told him, “and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.”
¹

At this moment the world was too small for Herman Melville. He knew that he had created a masterpiece, a book of unparalleled boldness and brilliance with soaring passages of prose like the best poetry. In a little village far from the great capitals and commercial centers of the world, he had fashioned a work of genius in the solitary space of his farmhouse study. His family needed him and wanted to believe in him, but they had no concept of the vast range of his imagination and the breadth of his learning. For the most part, to his family and to almost everyone in Pittsfield, he was just Herman, the eccentric and willful literary man who had settled on his Berkshire farm for no logical reason, and who was staking his fortunes on a strange book about whales.

Yet it was his ambition to shake the world—to reinvent the novel, remake American literature, reintroduce the world to the wonders of the whale, and to redesign J. M. W. Turner's artistic style to shine anew in prose. Few writers have come as close as Melville to achieving such high goals in such modest circumstances. Like most geniuses, his chief assets were his talent and his yearning to create something
never seen before, but working in an environment where so few of those in his daily life shared his high sense of purpose was a constant weight on his spirits.

All of which explains why Hawthorne and—to a greater extent—Sarah Morewood were so important to him, and why he wanted each to glow in his imagination like a companion star. They helped to make the isolation bearable and to make him think that impossible goals were worth chasing. In his greatest moments of enthusiasm, he could elevate them to a lofty plane where they could stand in majesty apart from the herd. Just as Sarah could be celebrated as the “ever-excellent & beautiful Lady of Paradise,” so Hawthorne's appreciation for the larger designs of
Moby-Dick
earned him a celestial ranking. As Melville put it, “You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body [of the book], and embrace the soul.”
²

It's only because we have a surviving transcript of Melville's letter that we know what was in Hawthorne's. Unfortunately, like so much of Melville's correspondence, this landmark letter of praise has disappeared, probably because of what Melville once called “a vile habit of mine to destroy all my letters,” so it is impossible to know just how encouraging Hawthorne was or whether he hedged his approval in any way. As a writer more attuned to the marketplace than Melville, the successful author of
The Scarlet Letter
and
The House of the Seven Gables
must have known that
Moby-Dick
was going to be difficult to sell in America. Yet he also knew that Melville didn't want the usual warnings about the tastes of the reading public, and the fickle attitudes of critics and publishers. What he wanted was apparently exactly what Hawthorne gave him—one literary giant's blessing to another. It wasn't Hawthorne's kind of book, but it was enough—as Melville acknowledged—that he “un
derstood the book.” More than sales and more than simple praise, the author wanted to know that he had succeeded in doing what he had set out to do. To Hawthorne's great credit, he gave him that assurance.
³

Sending his letter of praise was also a graceful way of exiting the Berkshires. As another winter approached, Hawthorne and his family were ready to clear out. They were headed to the other end of the commonwealth and would never reside in the Berkshires again. Writing to Melville was almost the last thing Hawthorne did as he closed up his rented cottage in Lenox. If he had waited much longer, he might have completely undermined Melville's idealized image of him by angrily revealing what he truly thought of this rural paradise. It would have broken the younger writer's heart to know how his beloved Berkshires rated in Hawthorne's estimation. “I detest it! I detest it! I detest it!!!” stormed Hawthorne in his diary. “I hate Berkshire with my whole soul, and would joyfully see its mountains laid flat.”
⁴

Given the haste of his exit, he didn't have much time to write a proper review for publication, but Melville was quick to let him off the hook, telling him that he didn't need to take the trouble. If
Moby-Dick
had passed muster with Nathaniel Hawthorne, then surely the best critics would find much to praise on their own, or so Melville must have reasoned as he waited for reviews to appear. Based on past experience, and taking account of his own fears, he was prepared to be disappointed, but Hawthorne's praise gave him hope that this time the world would correctly judge his worth. (At any rate, it would have been awkward for the older author to publish a review of
Moby-Dick
because of Melville's generous dedication page: “In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.”)

AT FIRST
, the publication of
Moby-Dick
was a mixture of good and bad news. Some of the most influential papers offered praise. The
New-York Tribune
said it was his best book;
Graham's Magazine
called it a work “of a bright and teeming fancy”; the
Philadelphia American Saturday Courier
hailed it as “decidedly the richest book out”; and the
Spirit of the Times
in New York said it was a work “of exceeding power, beauty, and genius.”
⁵

Few of the major American reviews took a neutral position. Most critics either loved the book or hated it, and those who hated it were unsparing in their condemnations. The
Southern Quarterly Review
damned it as “sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous.” It was “not worth the money asked for it,” said the
Boston Post
. Ahab was “a perfect failure,” claimed the
Albion
in New York, “and the work itself inartistic.” The
New York Independent
confessed that the waste of so much talent on such profane material made “us ashamed of him that he does not write something better.”
⁶

Melville could have used someone as influential as Hawthorne to shift the balance of opinion in his favor. As it was, he relied on Evert Duyckinck to champion
Moby-Dick
in the pages of the
Literary World
. It was only natural to assume that his old friend would be an even more generous and sympathetic reader than Hawthorne. For months Melville had been telling Evert about the book, and twice he'd entertained him in the Berkshires, providing rooms and food, and a wagon for travel.

But something went wrong. In the months since the Greylock trip, Evert and George Duyckinck had found reason to think that their gracious host in the Berkshires needed chastising. On November 22 the
Literary World
aimed its guns at the imposing bulk of
Moby-Dick
. Though Evert seems to have written the review, George was prob
ably involved in the editing, for the heavy moral criticism suggests his influence. Though they sprinkled praise throughout the review, the Duyckincks went out of their way to cheapen the work by comparing it to an overlong “German melodrama,” with “Captain Ahab for the Faust of the quarter-deck.” In a snide and condescending tone, Evert treated Ahab as more of a bore than an inspired creation. He told his readers that he was so weary of spending time in the book's “melancholic company” that he now understood “why blubber is popularly synonymous with tears.”

He tried to make these criticisms seem playful, but of all people, he and George should have understood how seriously Melville took his work, and how much he had sacrificed for it. It was one thing to point out weaknesses in the book. What was painful for Melville was to see friends make light of the high ambitions of the work, undermining its tragic majesty by treating it as little more than tedious melodrama. A minor writer like Evert probably felt that Mr. Melville of little Pittsfield was trying too hard to be a major writer and needed to be brought down a notch or two.

He and his brother may also have decided that Sarah Morewood's friend was becoming a little too irreverent and unconventional for his own good. The Duyckincks saved their strongest criticism for an attack on the morals of Melville's book. Evert objected to its “piratical running down of creeds and opinions,” and declared with self-righteous pomposity, “We do not like to see . . . the most sacred associations of life violated and defaced.” It is tempting to read this moral outrage as a barb directed at Melville personally, and not just as a criticism of Ishmael's fondness for his pagan friend Queequeg or other impious moments in Ahab's defiant assault on the universe. Religious critics could find reasons for saying that
Moby-Dick
“defaced” “sa
cred associations,” as the New York
Churchman
did when it attacked the book for its “sneers at revealed religion and the burlesquing of sacred passages of Holy Writ.” Evert's charge of violating something sacred seems unwarranted unless it was meant for the author himself.
⁷

His friend was in a position to hurt Melville, and he succeeded. Even Hawthorne couldn't understand the hostile tone. He had seen Melville and the Duyckinck brothers in August, before the Greylock excursion, and thought they were all the best of friends. Bewildered, Hawthorne wrote to Evert after the
Moby-Dick
review appeared and observed politely that it “hardly . . . did justice to [the book's] best points.” That was an enormous understatement. As he well knew, it was a knife in the back of a great writer who had expected more understanding from Evert.
⁸

The
Literary World'
s callous treatment of a formerly valued contributor doesn't make much sense unless Evert believed—in his high-minded fashion—that he was saving Melville from himself, just as brother George must have believed he was trying to help Sarah by sending her religious books. In confidence, after the death of Sarah's precious colt, Herman had more or less admitted to Evert that he was in love with another man's wife. On Greylock that night in August one of the brothers may have been alarmed by some sign of intimacy between the two lovers, or by the later news from Sarah that she and Melville were roaming the Berkshires together with a spyglass—a “piratical” image indeed. Or they may simply have been annoyed enough at Sarah's interest in George to land a blow of their own for the moral code they valued even more than friendship.

The Duyckincks weren't malicious. They were just sanctimonious. Their review was a message from two guardians of culture and morality that Melville had done something more serious than
violate good taste in an overlong melodrama about blubber. To them the sin was to undermine “the most sacred associations of life.” There was nothing worse they could say of him. It's doubtful that the sins of the book were enough in themselves to merit such a devastating rebuke. The brothers must have also realized that the young man who had charmed them with the seeming innocence of
Typee
was now acting like a heathen himself, as they would have seen it, breaking what were for them the sacred bonds of marriage and family. Part of the mission of the
Literary World
was to reinforce such moral values. At least, that was the view of George's religious friends. The Episcopalian Church Book Society believed that the Duyckincks gave their journal “a savor of Church life which made it especially acceptable to the members of our Communion—opening its columns to, and inviting contributions from the younger of the clergy.”
⁹

For Melville, this whole episode cast a cloud over his book, and it denied him the chance to have his masterpiece taken seriously in a New York journal that so many of his fellow writers respected. It gnawed at him, as only a really bad and personal criticism can sometimes do. There was no way to undo the damage to
Moby-Dick,
and soon Melville's elation turned to bitterness.

DESPITE THE MANY
GOOD
REVIEWS
—both in America and Britain (where the
Illustrated London News
praised Melville's “almost unparalleled power over the capabilities of the language”)—
Moby-Dick
simply couldn't attract enough readers. Its sales were modest not only in America, but also in England, even though the reception there was so much more enthusiastic. In London, the publisher
Richard Bentley lost more than a hundred pounds on his edition of
The Whale,
as the book was called in Britain, using the original title.