Melville in Love (23 page)

Even if Whitmarsh wasn't also thinking of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes as one of the men of genius, he was indeed thinking of Sarah in the days after her death. Holmes couldn't forget his “Elsie Venner.” He sent Rowland and the family a poem written in Sarah's memory. The little doctor was under her spell to the end, imagining himself looking down at her casket and finding nothing but a single rosebud.

Oh, could it open into song,

                     
How would its rosy heart-leaves tell

That kindly thoughts are treasured long,

And loving deeds remembered well;

And while the grace that Nature gives

                     
Looks from the gentle downcast eye,

The fruit, though perished, ever lives,

                     
The flower, though faded, cannot die!
¹⁴

A few weeks after Sarah's death, Melville wrote to a young woman from Ohio who had visited Broadhall in recent summers and had attended some of the Morewood picnics at the family lake. She had sent him a request for a charity contribution and had addressed her letter to Pittsfield, but it had been forwarded to him at his new address on East Twenty-Sixth Street in New York. Informing her of the change, he wrote of his long stay in the Berkshires as if he had been there on an extended voyage—or, as he put it, a “visit.” Twelve years was a long time to have been a Berkshire castaway: “Owing to my recent return to this, my native town, after a twelve years' visit in Berkshire, your note was delayed in reaching me.”
¹

The move back to New York was only possible because of Lizzie. She had come into money—much more than she had received from the old family doctor. In 1861, at eighty, Lemuel Shaw had died, leaving her a good inheritance for the time—fifteen thousand dollars.
More important, not long before his death the judge had used all his considerable legal skill to disentangle Melville from debt and pay off what was left of the farm at Arrowhead. As a result, however, Melville was left with nothing. Judge Shaw managed to arrange things so that Lizzie—for her future well-being after he was gone—took possession of Arrowhead as her own property. By the time of Sarah's death, the place had been sold to Melville's brother Allan, and the move to New York was in the works.

So the Berkshires were home to Melville beginning with the Morewood purchase of Broadhall in 1850 and ending with Sarah's death in 1863. The last few years had been difficult because Sarah had so often been ill, and Herman was essentially living as a ward of his wife. He had earned nothing since 1860 and had no job in sight. He had to go where Lizzie led him, and she was enjoying her hold on the family budget. In her dry chronology of Melville's life that she prepared in old age, she writes of 1863 as though she were his banker, not his wife. “He moved into a house in New York—104 East 26th St bought from his brother Allan giving $7,750 and the Arrowhead estate valued at $3000 and assuming a mortgage of 2000 to Mrs. Thurston which was afterwards paid off by Dr Hayward's legacy to me of $3000 in May 1864—about $1000 [from] Aunt Priscilla's legacy was spent in repairs.”
²

After he left the Berkshires to live in his New York townhouse, Melville worked on his Civil War poems for
Battle-Pieces,
but for many months his heart wasn't in his work. As the reality of losing Sarah began to sink in, and the grimness of city life impressed itself on him, he didn't feel like doing anything. He was lonely, but that was now increasingly by choice. As the smoke cleared over the rubble of his career, he had tried in the later part of the 1850s to repair his relations with the Duyckincks, but there wasn't much they could do
for him. Perhaps it was a sign of his own desperation that he had even made the effort to renew the friendship. It was gracious of him to try, and their past differences were quietly buried, though there was no pretending that things could ever be the same again. When Evert asked him to review a book shortly after Sarah's death, he declined, saying, “I have not spirit enough.”
³

THERE MUST HAVE
BEEN
MANY
TIMES
when Melville looked back on the storm that
Moby-Dick
churned up for him and wondered what it all meant. There can be no question that the sacrifice was enormous. The move back to New York in 1863 brought nothing but greater heartache, at least in the first several years. Once Sarah was no longer in his life, Melville saw his marriage take a decidedly acrimonious turn. There was no escape from the brutal truth of their basic incompatibility. Melville retreated into himself, and everyone suffered.

Still only in his forties, he was gripped by a simmering rage over the losses he had suffered. He didn't seem to care much for anything, including his own children by Lizzie. He had never been an attentive father, and now he was an angry one. As they grew older, his sons avoided him, and his daughters were wary of doing anything to provoke him. When his youngest child, Frances, was interviewed in the twentieth century, she was asked, “Did he rail at things in general when he was angry, or were his attacks more personal?” She responded with one word only. “Personal.”
⁴

Having nowhere to turn, he took out his frustrations on Lizzie. He went from being a chronically preoccupied, often distant husband to a bitter and utterly impossible one. At one stage of his decline in the 1860s, Lizzie's family begged her to leave Melville, and her brothers
were eager to help in any way possible. Because the old judge was no longer in the picture, there was no one who seemed capable of reasoning with Melville.

A Unitarian minister in New York was asked to help arrange a separation if Lizzie agreed. One of her brothers—Samuel Shaw—told the minister in May 1867, “The thing has resolved itself into the mere question of my sisters willingness to say the word. . . . If you can suggest any plan of action by which the present lamentable state of things can be ended it will be most gratefully received.” As her brother confided, the family was now firmly convinced that Melville had lost his mind, and that the only thing preventing Lizzie from leaving him was her anxiety over the way it would look “in the eyes of the world, of which she has a most exaggerated dread.”
⁵

Lizzie did seek help from the minister, Dr. Henry Bellows, but only so she could unburden her sorrows to him. A public separation from her husband at this late date was a step too far for this proud daughter of Judge Shaw, but she left no doubt in Dr. Bellows's mind that her marriage had become a “trial” to her. “And whatever further trial may be before me,” she wrote to him, “I shall feel that your counsel is a strong help to sustain, more perhaps than any other earthly counsel could.”
⁶

WE CAN ONLY
IMAGINE
how painful the marriage had become to both husband and wife, and it is probably no coincidence that this turmoil became almost unbearable in the first few years after Melville lost Sarah. He must have felt at times that he had nothing left to live for. There was a hole in his life that no one could fill. On an allowance that Lizzie gave him, he was able to buy books and engravings, but he had no one with whom he could share them. One day in May 1867—at the
height of his conflict with Lizzie—he acquired a book of poetry that affected him profoundly, largely because it brought his secret life with Sarah so vividly to mind. It was an old volume of verse translated from the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camões, who inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Sonnets from the Portuguese
.

In the introduction, Melville underlined a remark about Camões that shows how much, in his current distress, he was missing Sarah. “Woman was to him as a ministering angel, and for the little joy which he tasted in life, he was indebted to her.” There was no joy with Lizzie, and like many couples who stay together when they should be apart, they were making each other miserable. With every argument, every unkind word, memories of the lost life at Broadhall must have heightened Melville's fury. It doesn't excuse it—it simply explains it.

The poems of Camões brought back all the old arguments for love that Melville had rehearsed in
Pierre
—the question of whether love is ever wrong, and the magnetic attraction of one lover to the other because of a glance or the sudden turn of a face. It was in Camões's “Madrigal” that the phrase “sweetest eyes” seemed to recall Sarah for Melville, who marked the poem in his copy:

And sure if Love be in the right,

                     
(And was Love ever in the wrong?)

To thee, my first and sole delight,

                     
That simple heart must now belong—

Because thou hast the fairest mien

And sweetest eyes that e'er were seen!
⁷

After reading accounts of the Portuguese poet's career, Melville decided to write his own poem about Camões because he thought
their experiences were similar. Some of the facts were questionable, but he was drawn to the idea of Camões as a young seafaring adventurer who tasted love and fame and died with neither. Melville's words are supposed to describe the neglected writer in his unjust obscurity, but they are really a lament for his own fallen state. They are some of the most beautifully concise lines he ever wrote:

Vain now thy ardor, vain thy fire,

Delirium mere, unsound desire;

Fate's knife hath ripped thy chorded lyre.

THE RIFT IN
M
ELVILLE
'
S
MARRIAGE
may never have healed, but the turmoil did seem to abate after one of the children died. One day in the late summer of 1867, when the couple continued to be at odds, and the storm around them raged relentlessly, their older son, Malcolm, who was born in the heyday of Melville's literary success, shot himself in the bedroom of the family's New York house. He was only eighteen.

Melville was sobered by this tragedy. His son, he confessed too late, “never gave me a disrespectful word in his life, nor in any way ever failed in filialness.” Gazing down on the boy as he lay dead, and seeing the look of peace on his son's face—“the ease of a gentle nature”—the father tried to find some comfort to soften the blow of his own failure as a parent. At first the death was ruled a suicide, but it was judged shortly afterward to be an accident—partly because of pressure from the family, all of whom wanted to deny that Malcolm had intended to kill himself.
⁸

This was the lowest point in the marriage, and both husband and
wife must have understood in the aftermath that they had to declare a truce. They couldn't change themselves or bring Malcolm back or find peace. They could only try to continue their lives without causing further damage. And so Melville retreated to his corner, Lizzie to hers, and they began the long march into an uneasy old age.

MELVILLE SURVIVED BOTH
HIS
SONS
. The child born in the year that
Moby-Dick
was published—Stanwix—died of tuberculosis when he was thirty-four, far from home in San Francisco. But both of Melville's daughters would outlive their father. The older, Elizabeth, suffered from bad health most of her life, and never married. She died in 1908, when she was in her mid-fifties. Only one of Melville's children would enjoy a long life. Younger daughter Frances married, had four girls, and lived into her eighties. By the time she died in 1938, her father's name would finally be famous again, but she would say that this more celebrated figure was one she didn't recognize. “I don't know him in the new light,” she remarked.
⁹

Melville did find employment to fill his later years, but it was nothing he was proud of. At the end of 1866 he accepted the burden of a new job that was an especially humiliating one for a writer of his talent, but he wanted the money. It was a position as a customs officer in New York, earning four dollars a day. It wasn't such a bad job, but what a fall it signified from the heights of his celebrity, and the high ambitions he had set for himself as a young man.

When he reported to his first post on the Hudson docks at the foot of a street with a name sure to haunt him with thoughts of lost Dutch-American glory—Gansevoort—one of his fellow officers recognized him, and was astounded to see him forced into taking the job. The man was a writer himself—Richard Henry Stoddard—and could remember meeting Melville many years earlier when the author was at the top of his career. “No American writer,” he recalled, “was more widely known in the late forties and early fifties in his own
country and in England than Melville.” For almost the next twenty years the once-acclaimed author would labor in obscurity at his post.
¹

Business-minded Lizzie was pleased that her husband had finally been able to stick to a real job and see it through. Because of the money inherited from her family, she and her husband were finally able to live in reasonable comfort. In a letter to a relative on the occasion of Herman's retirement she wrote glowingly of his success as a customs man: “This month was a good turning-point, completing 19 years of faithful service, during which there has not been a single complaint against him—So he retires honorably of his own accord—He has a great deal [of] unfinished work at his desk which will give him occupation, which together with his love of books will prevent time from hanging heavy on his hands.”
²

Well meaning as these comments are, they give a good indication of why Melville so often struggled in his marriage. In her letter, the routine of toiling for nineteen years at the same job without “a single complaint” is a matter of proud achievement, whereas those books and the unfinished literary work in his study are primarily diversions to keep him from being bored. It brings to mind again that moving comment from Melville's
Clarel
: “My kin . . . would have me act some routine part. . . . This world clean fails me; still I yearn.” If the world had not so completely failed him, his “honorable” career at the customs house would, in fact, have been filled with complaints. Angry ones at that, from any intelligent readers demanding to know why the author of
Moby-Dick
was “buried in a government office.” But he didn't seem willing to fight the battle himself. For his family's sake, he accepted his fate, and came out on the other end of nineteen years like a prisoner ready to be released on good behavior.

IN RETIREMENT FROM
HIS
CUSTOMS
POST
, Melville could be forgiven for thinking his previous career as a professional author belonged to ancient history. He had written about the sea so long ago that he could be excused for thinking it belonged to some vanished dream of authorship. If asked about his days as a famous writer, he would shrug and pretend that it was all so long ago he couldn't remember much of it. “He seemed to hold his work in small esteem,” recalled an old naval veteran, Peter Toft, who knew him in his last years, and who was one of his most enthusiastic champions. Melville would resist any attempt to discuss his books, telling his friend, “You know more about them than I do. I have forgotten them.” But Peter Toft was not easily fooled by such talk. He was himself a survivor of the same maritime world that Melville had known in the 1840s, and he admired the author's major books precisely because they captured so vividly the life of that period. A few years after the author's death, Toft wrote in the
New York Times,
“Like Melville, I have also in my youth had a brief experience in a merchant ship, a Yankee whaler, and an American man-of-war. As a sailor boy in the maintop of the United States ship
Ohio
I was fascinated by his
Typee,
Omoo,
White-Jacket,
and his weird
Moby-Dick
.”

With such a man, Melville couldn't resist discussing old times, but the books were another matter. The subject was too sensitive, not because he had forgotten them, but because the world had. “Melville, I understand, deliberately effaced himself in his latter years,” said Toft, “and was naturally left severely alone, but I accidentally discovered him some years ago during my stay in New York, and, having much in common, we became good friends. Though a delightful talker when in the mood, he was abnormal, as most geniuses are, and had to be handled with care.” One valuable insight that Toft
managed to bring away from their talks was a strong sense of the affinity between the “weird romance” of
Moby-Dick
and the art of J. M. W. Turner. His new friend noted of this connection: “Melville, like Turner, delighted in ‘color,' and sometimes in lurid color.” At a time when Melville's work was relegated to the lower ranks of men who had written old-fashioned sea adventures, Toft was making an extraordinarily ambitious claim for his friend's talent, dropping his name alongside that of the great Turner. It would take at least another generation before anyone would entertain that connection seriously.
³

BY THE END
OF
M
ELVILLE
'
S
LIFE
, the lingering taste of his earlier fame had turned acrid. Told of another writer who had yet to achieve fame, he scoffed, “What of that? He is not the less, but so much the more. . . . The further our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does ‘fame' become, especially of the literary sort.”
⁴
In his spare time Melville continued to write poetry, and to occasionally publish it in volumes that didn't sell. His verse epic,
Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land,
occupied him for many years after his Mediterranean trip in 1856–57. It has moments of rare beauty, but as one contemporary reviewer pointed out when the poem appeared in 1876, the reader will have to climb over a “mound of sliding stones and gravel in the search for the crystals which here and there sparkle from the mass.” The last of Melville's books published in his lifetime was a volume of poems in a private edition of twenty-five copies, with the unpromising title
Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse
.
⁵

One reminder of the loss of Sarah may have found its way into the dense and confusing
Clarel
when its young hero contemplates
at Easter the end of a thwarted romance and the death of the girl he loved, a woman named Ruth. In the wake of her loss everything seems hollow, especially at Easter in the Holy Land as she lies in her grave. She is sorely missed, yet even the cherished memory of her face is beginning to fade. The young man grieves that there is no hope for her return from the “prison” of the grave: “Christ is arisen; / But Ruth, may Ruth so burst the prison?”

AFTER MOVING TO
N
EW
Y
ORK
, Melville only occasionally returned to the Berkshires. His association with the area began to disappear from the memories of the locals, except among a few old friends he had shared with Sarah, such as J. E. A. Smith, who always did his best to remind Pittsfield that the author of
Typee
once roamed among them. Broadhall remained in the Morewood family until around the end of the century. Rowland was a figure of some envy for Herman simply because the scenes of so many happy times still surrounded him at Broadhall. He never remarried, never seemed to take any interest in doing so, and was content to follow the usual twin passions of his life—business and religion.

When Melville sent his toast to Broadhall for the marriage of Anne Rachel, he also included a toast to Rowland. He made a point, not too subtly, of reminding him that Broadhall had once been his own paradise, and now what was left belonged to the widower. In the end Sarah was a bond that united these two very different men. “He ought to be a Happy Man,” Melville's toast began, “for all he looks on without and within, is like a Paradise: and what is better, he
deserves
to be!”

So he did his duty in sending his best wishes to Rowland and Anne
on her happy day, but he didn't think his job was complete unless he wrote a “Final & Concluding Toast.” This one was meant for Sarah, whose spirit he guessed must surely be lingering somewhere in Broadhall that day. For a man who was never religious, but certainly spiritual, it was as close to a gesture of faith as he would ever make. Hoping that his words would reach her in the house that had meant so much to them, he tried summoning her spirit. It was a tribute to her enduring presence in his life. He filled it with the lavish praise he so often gave her. Someone was delegated to read his words to the assembled guests: “If there be a Spirit in this Company who seeks the pleasure of others before her own, whose delight is in happy faces about her, who forgets not friends far away, and whom no acquaintance with the world can make worldly or selfish—as one who is distant from the scene now clearly sees there is—at this moment of parting be she now remembered by us all as we drink, from the heart.”
⁶

Not only is the spirit a “she,” but Melville also uses the present tense to make her seem alive, and then interrupts the listing of her virtues to affirm that even though he is “distant” from the wedding he “now clearly sees there is” indeed “a Spirit in this Company.” He answers his own summons, offering the wedding guests a vision of Sarah whether they know to look for her or not.

IN OLD AGE
Melville was exercising all the imagination he could bring forth to “clearly see” Sarah. At his death he left behind a poem about it. The setting is the wooded shore of their favorite lake north of Pittsfield, just below Greylock. At one point he thought of calling it simply “The Lake,” but then—with his own eccentric spelling—he gave it the title “Pontoosuce,” adding an
e
to the real name.

The poem takes place on a brilliant day at “autumnal noon-tide.” The poet stands above the lake and admires its gleaming surface and the rich colors of the woods surrounding it. The more he thinks about the scene, the darker his thoughts become. The dying leaves give him an overwhelming sensation that death conquers everything, and that nothing survives. “The workman dies, and after him, the work,” he says. Just when he is slipping into a moment of deep despair, convinced that “even truth itself decays,” a vision comes to him of a beautiful woman whose form is bathed in a soft light like “the pale tints of morn.” She is a dryad who emerges from a glade with a song on her lips, and she “floats” toward him with a wreath of pine sprigs to “her brow adorn.” Her message, sung like a hymn, is the same as one of Sarah's later poems about autumn as a season that holds the promise of rebirth. (“Light, that's born of our decay,” as Sarah expressed the idea in the work published as a hymn shortly after her death.) In Melville's poem the woman sings of nature, “Over and over, again and again, / It lives, it dies and it lives again.”

To comfort the poet, she comes closer and hovers near his face to tell him in a soft voice not to shed tears for the dead. They have simply moved into another sphere of life. “All revolves,” she says, “no more ye know.” Then she whispers, “Let go, let go!” Coming even closer, she kisses him, and the “cold” wreath on her brow brushes against his, so that for a second the chaplet—as Melville calls it—seems to crown them both. Then she vanishes as abruptly as she appeared, leaving him feeling a combination of “warmth and chill,” as if “life and death” had just been joined together—or, as he says, “wedded.”
⁷

It is possible to see Sarah in this poem, with its image of a wreath uniting two lovers, and to feel a sense on the poet's part that they should have been joined together in life and death. After Melville's
career as an author of prose fiction fell apart and he turned to poetry, he rarely achieved the lyric grace and mystical power that he so movingly demonstrates in this poem about the woman who touched his life in ways that will never be fully understood. She was indeed his muse—his “goddess”—and the greatest love of his life, and hardly anyone knew it.

Sarah Morewood gave Melville a sympathetic ear just when he needed it most for the greatest challenge of his life—the writing of
Moby-Dick
. She was there to crown his success, regardless of what the world said, just as Hawthorne loyally wrote to him before leaving the Berkshires to say how much he admired
Moby-Dick
. Though the general reader will always think first of Melville's years at sea whenever the topic of
Moby-Dick
comes up, the book's true home is the Berkshires. Without Hawthorne, and without Greylock's majesty—the mountain as well as the woman—Melville might never have written what stands now beyond dispute as one of the greatest creations of any mind.