Melville in Love (7 page)

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.

Sarah Morewood's seductive powers worked their wonders on more than a few men, including one who, in the 1850s and many decades beyond, was more famous than Herman Melville. From 1848 to 1855 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes spent his summers in Pittsfield at a pleasant retreat near Broadhall, in the meadows along the Housatonic. Usually accompanied by his wife and children, he was then in his early forties, a celebrated poet, Boston wit, and renowned dean of the Harvard Medical School. Though not an easy man to impress, he was always fascinated by Sarah, and a little unnerved by her provocative glances and easy grace.

Half in love with her, but too cautious to make love to her, Dr. Holmes observed Sarah closely in his years as her neighbor, and he left behind elaborate descriptions of her that are almost clinical in their detail. He was quick to notice a sensual air to her movements, a delicate quality that gave him the impression that she glided, rather
than walked. “The clover hardly bent beneath her,” he said in a poem written for her. Likewise, in
Elsie Venner
—his novel inspired by Sarah and published a decade later, in 1861—he described the book's heroine as “slender . . . with a peculiar undulation of movement, such as one sometimes sees in perfectly untutored country girls, whom Nature, the queen of graces, has taken in hand.”
¹

This dark, exotic “wild beauty” leaves a cloud of dust as she gallops over Rockland (Pittsfield), where she is often just a fleeting vision in the shadows of its hills and its largest mountain, a towering mass like the real Mount Greylock. “Elsie loved riding,” Holmes writes, and her “wandering habits” leave everyone in the neighborhood of her father's eighteenth-century mansion questioning what she does in “her sylvan haunts.” Her “stately old home” in the countryside, with its “broad staircase,” its two large parlors, its “Old-World notions of strength and durability,” and its wide view of the distant “blue mountain-summit,” is unmistakably Broadhall. In fact, early-twentieth-century guidebooks would sometimes point out that the novel was largely set in “what is now the Pittsfield Country Club.”
²

Though Holmes added a lot of unnecessary speculation about a mystical source of Elsie's strange charms, the story captures much of Sarah's life in the Berkshires. Elsie is a strong-willed young woman of means who shocks her idyllic community with her desperate search for love. One of her admirers calls her “a wild flower” with “marks of genius—poetic or dramatic—I hardly know which.” The most obvious source of her appeal is her magnetic gaze—“black, piercing eyes” that can stop a man with a single glance. Her appearance has a startling effect on almost everyone: “She was a splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth which was always like a sur
prise when her lips parted.” Holmes found her looks so haunting that he included in a late chapter the blunt declaration, “Elsie would have been burned for a witch in old times.”
³

Dr. Holmes had roots in Pittsfield that ran even deeper than Melville's. As he was proud of saying, “All of the present town of Pittsfield, except one thousand acres, was the property of my great-grandfather.” If anyone doubted it, he kept Jacob Wendell's deed in the entry to his summer place. It was dated 1738. His present house stood on the last remaining acres, a mere 286 of the original 3,600. After she was settled in Broadhall, Sarah would occasionally visit him, and he relished his time with her. His own wife, Amelia, was, like Melville's, the daughter of a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justice, but she was so painfully shy and retiring that few of the neighbors knew much about her.
⁴

As Sarah left his house after a visit one day, Holmes had to steady his nerves when she paused before her horse and asked him to lift her into the saddle. He leaned over to take her boot in his hand, her skirts rose, and the great physician began to tremble. She had that kind of effect on men, and she knew it. “Now, gallant, now! Be strong and calm,” he recalled telling himself, “her foot is in thy hollowed palm.” In those days just the sight of a woman's shapely ankle was enough to excite most men. To hold it in your hand—as Holmes's language indicates—was pure delight. The moment was so titillating that he imagined even the surrounding flowers were shocked: “The violets shut their purple eyes, / The naked daisies stared in wonder.”

After watching Sarah bid him farewell and race off in a burst of speed—with her favorite cloth cape no doubt flying in the wind—he decided to call her Camilla. In his dreamy vision, she resembled the
swift beauty in the
Aeneid,
who outstripped “the winds in speed upon the plain,” and who waged war fearlessly with one breast exposed in battle. When Camilla is on horseback, every eye is on her. As John Dryden wrote in his translation,

Men, boys, and women, stupid with surprise,

Where'er she passes fix their wond'ring eyes:

Longing they look, and gaping at the sight

Devour her o'er and o'er with vast delight.

Sarah couldn't have doubted that she struck a nerve in the dean of the Harvard Medical School. Within days of that visit, he sent her a poem full of extravagant praise for her beauty and charm—especially recalling her “sparkling” smile and the lingering thrill of “her foot” in his hand. Confident that she would understand the reference, he gave the poem a title of only one word—“Camilla.”
⁵

AS ONE OF
THE
MANY
who fell under Sarah's spell, Dr. Holmes was both amused and alarmed by the close relationship that developed so quickly in 1850 between his new neighbors, Mrs. Morewood and Mr. Melville. He came to know his fellow author well in the next few years, and at one point he “attended & prescribed for him” in a professional capacity. Moreover, he knew Judge Shaw very well. Because he had been an expert medical witness in the judge's courtroom, he fully appreciated that Shaw was no man to be trifled with. It didn't take much to imagine how furious the chief justice would be if his son-in-law became ensnared in an adulterous affair.
⁶

Adultery was, in fact, a hot topic in 1850. Hawthorne's
The Scar
let Letter,
which came out in March, was selling briskly, and the New York press was full of lurid stories that summer about an affair between the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis (whom Melville knew) and the wife of the actor Edwin Forrest. One night in June the actor attacked Willis in Washington Square, throwing him to the ground and “thrashing” him with a whip for “interfering in his domestic affairs.” Forrest's warning to onlookers, after it was published in the newspapers, must have sent a chill down the spine of many New Yorkers contemplating an affair with someone else's spouse. “Gentlemen, this is the seducer of my wife, do not interfere!” he shouted, while Willis lay on the ground “screaming . . . ‘Help! Help! Save me! Police! Take him off!'” Willis managed to escape, but the resulting scandal ruined both men's careers.
⁷

The intense love affair between Herman and Sarah that took root that same summer was never much of a secret to Dr. Holmes, who had the confidence of many in the neighborhood, and who closely followed events in the small town. It intrigued him to see how the relationship would unfold, and whether the dangerous game being played by the “wild beauty” and the American Robinson Crusoe would turn tragic or comic. Holmes was also a little jealous of Melville, who was not only a much better writer, but also more physically imposing. As the doctor once admitted, he himself was so short that he measured “exactly five feet three inches when standing in a pair of substantial boots.” In most situations, he would always have been looking up at Melville, who was almost five feet ten inches. “A dare-devil fellow,” he would say of his Melville character in
Elsie Venner
when he fictionalized some of the events of the early 1850s. As a pun on the whaling epic that his neighbor wrote in Pittsfield, he would name Elsie's closest companion Dick. In the
novel the young man is “handsome and romantic,” but too reckless, and too much like Elsie.

After surviving a youthful period of dangerous travels overseas among “savage” primitives, Dick comes home to live in the ancestral mansion to which he and Elsie both have claims. “A young man of remarkable experience for his years,” he captures the interest of the little town as an “adventurous” figure “with stories to tell.” Elsie's beauty tempts him like “forbidden fruit,” and her father tolerates his presence because “anything that seemed [likely] to amuse or please Elsie was agreeable to him.” Melville's prank of abducting a bride and dressing as a Turk seems to have been known to Holmes, who describes Dick as a lusty young man with eyes like those of a Turkish pasha “in the habit of ordering his wives by the dozen.” Soon the two young people are together everywhere in Rockland. “Somehow or other,” writes Holmes, “this girl had taken strange hold of his imagination.” A neighbor in the novel asks, “Have you seen them galloping about together? He looks like my idea of a Spanish bandit on that wild horse of his.”
⁸

Holmes drew this image of Melville, like many other things in
Elsie Venner,
from local lore. It seems to have been one of Melville's eccentricities while he was in the Berkshires to go out riding and greet others in Spanish. Nathaniel Hawthorne, then temporarily living six miles away in Lenox, was given the full treatment one day when he was outside reading the newspaper at his cottage and Melville rode by. “A cavalier on horseback came along the road, and saluted me in Spanish; to which I replied by touching my hat, and went on with the newspaper. But the cavalier renewing his salutation, I regarded him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville!” Clearly, something—or more accurately someone—“had taken strange hold” of Herman's imagination.
⁹

WHEN
ELSIE VENNER
APPEARED
a decade after
Moby-Dick,
Sarah told an old friend that it “created a Storm in many quarters” of Pittsfield, but that Holmes—who had moved away by then—didn't care about “the strife of winds” he had stirred up. The storm soon died out, and the novel has long since been forgotten. The book, however, does offer a revealing glimpse into Melville's secret life by a physician who saw it as something of a case study worth documenting. He may not have been an accomplished novelist, but as a scientific observer he had one of the sharpest minds of his generation, contributing to advances in germ theory, antisepsis, and anesthesia (a term he coined).
¹⁰

Of all the intimate stories Holmes had uncovered in his long medical career, this one fired his imagination more than any other, and over the years he simply couldn't resist the temptation to smuggle some of the truth to the larger world beyond the Berkshires in the form of
Elsie Venner
. The novel isn't really a love story, but rather a tale of characters searching for love and willing to do anything for it. As Holmes sees it, Elsie and Dick are doomed from the start by their refusal to live by the rules of their community, and the good doctor is at pains to portray them as victims of their own disease of discontent. At the risk of getting a little ahead of our tale, it is worth noting that when Dr. Holmes left Pittsfield in 1855, he seems to have given Melville a friendly warning, advising him at that late point in the affair that it wasn't such a well-kept secret and might cause harm. In turn, Melville himself did a little smuggling of this truth into a story published not long after Holmes attended him that year, when—according to a mutual friend—the doctor treated him “with fraternal tenderness . . . giving him his best medical advice.”
¹¹

In his story “I and My Chimney,” written long after Melville had decided to make his home next to Sarah's, he transformed Holmes's
medical examination of him into a darkly funny tale about an architectural expert called in to examine an old farmhouse chimney for “soundness.” The wife of the house wants to get rid of the ancient chimney, but the husband is fond of it despite its age and structural faults and forbids anyone to disturb it. The expert—a Mr. Scribe—descends deep into the cellar to study “the root of the matter,” and concludes that something is amiss. “It is my solemn duty to warn you, sir,” Mr. Scribe reports, “that there is architectural cause to conjecture that somewhere concealed in your chimney is a reserved space, hermetically closed, in short, a secret chamber. . . . How long it has been there, it is for me impossible to say. What it contains is hid, with itself, in darkness.” The expert refuses to say what should be done with the chimney, but he strongly suggests that the secret chamber has made it unsound, and that—whatever action is taken—his own conscience is eased by telling the husband the truth. He concludes his report with the words, “Trusting that you may be guided aright, in determining whether it is Christian-like knowingly to reside in a house, hidden in which is a secret closet.”

The husband is unmoved and refuses to change a thing. He pays Mr. Scribe fifty dollars to alter his diagnosis and issue a certificate saying that “you, a competent surveyor, have surveyed my chimney, and found no reason to believe any unsoundness; in short, any—any secret closet in it.” Proudly, the husband frames the certificate and attaches it to the fireplace in the hope that his wife will stop questioning the future of the obviously phallic object. “I and my chimney will never surrender,” he vows, but the dispute is still raging when the story ends.

Holmes may never have seen Melville's thinly veiled criticism of his honest evaluation. It appeared anonymously in
Putnam
's Monthly
in 1856 and wasn't published under Melville's name until after both men were dead. Unlike Mr. Scribe in the story, Holmes waited a few years and issued a more detailed report in the disguised form of his novel. He called
Elsie Venner
“a psychological romance,” but even a doctor as distinguished and advanced as Holmes couldn't fathom the depths of the “strange hold” that Sarah so quickly established over Herman. It isn't surprising that when the doctor's son—the great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—recalled in 1921 his childhood memories of Melville, he described him as a mysterious “rather gruff taciturn man” who wrote “with an actuality and first hand contact with life that I suppose hardly pleased my father's generation as much as it does me.”
¹²