Melville in Love (8 page)

The “chimney” was never entirely metaphorical. It still dominates the farmhouse that Melville acquired at the end of the summer of 1850. In the cramped and dimly lit cellar where the “root” of the chimney sits, the walls are now lined with boxes of manuscripts belonging to the Berkshire County Historical Society. Some of the research for this book was done in that cellar, especially with the contents of a box containing, ironically enough, one of the largest collections of letters by Sarah Morewood.

There was another friend besides Mrs. Morewood who brightened Melville's first summer in the Berkshires. Only a couple of months before Herman began his holiday in Pittsfield in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne moved with his family to the small farmhouse he rented near Lenox. A replica of his little red cottage stands in its place now, but the general view toward Stockbridge is more or less the same. That summer, at forty-six, Hawthorne was enjoying a surge in popularity with the success of
The Scarlet Letter,
the first edition of which had sold out in only two weeks when it appeared in March. Among the novel's early admirers was Sarah Morewood, who—naturally—was fascinated by the subject of the book, and in particular by the bright image of the
A
on Hester Prynne's breast. She was so drawn to the story that her sharp eye spotted one day a newspaper reference to the German-American artist Emanuel Leutze planning to paint a scene from the novel. Leutze, best known for his
Washington
Crossing the Delaware
,
claimed that he had seen an old painting at a German castle depicting a woman remarkably like Hester wearing a scarlet letter, and that his work would be essentially a copy of this earlier one.

Sarah was intrigued to think that centuries ago, an artist had created an image of a woman in the same situation as Hester. It gave more validity to Hawthorne's vision of the brave mother of little Pearl, and she was especially fascinated by the claim that the original work was found in a place called the Castle of Pearls. But, as she told a friend in New York,
The Scarlet Letter
was so powerfully conceived that a whole set of paintings could be based on its scenes. “I can imagine,” she said, “that almost any artist might paint well from Hawthorne's descriptions—they are so vividly drawn.”
¹

When Melville and Hawthorne were not as highly regarded as they are now, Sarah Morewood saw the greatness in both men, and could share with Herman the enthusiasm that overwhelmed him when he became friends with his fellow writer. Later generations have marveled at the fact that two great American authors at the height of their powers would forge a brief friendship when they lived near each other for a year in the Berkshires. What has been absent from this story is the part played in it by Melville's love for Sarah.

AT THE OUTSET,
Melville was quick to appreciate that he and the novelist on the other side of Lenox had a lot in common. By different means, and in much different styles, they were aiming for a similar artistic goal. In
The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne identified that goal as the “neutral territory . . . where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” In this way Hes
ter's tale can “imbue” the actual evils of the old Massachusetts Bay Colony with the real horror and pathos that time has worn away. For Hawthorne, fiction enabled the letter of shame to burn once again, which is why he pretends at the beginning of the novel that he discovered an actual scarlet
A
in the dusty attic of Salem's Custom House, and that when he placed it to his breast, he felt a “burning heat . . . as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron.” For both Hawthorne and Melville the past wasn't dead as long as the imagination could rekindle it.

Yet it was partly bitterness and spite about his own past that drove Hawthorne into making the Berkshires a temporary refuge. A change in political administrations in Washington had cost him his job at the Custom House in his native Salem. He placed much of the blame for this setback on his political opponents locally, and—believing he was unappreciated—he vowed “to remove into the country and bid farewell forever to this abominable city.” Perhaps identifying too closely with Hester Prynne's tragedy in his masterpiece, he saw himself as someone unjustly shamed by his community, and he turned angrily against it—as if he shared Hester's punishment of having to wear a mark of disgrace in public. “I detest this town so much,” he wrote only a month before
The Scarlet Letter
was published, “that I hate to go into the streets, or to have the people see me.” By moving to Lenox at the opposite end of Massachusetts, he went about as far as he could go without actually leaving the commonwealth. His new place was a good walk beyond the town itself, and in his relative isolation, he could avoid seeing other writers. It didn't take long for his path to cross Melville's, however, partly because the younger writer was emerging from his own bubble of isolation to enjoy the reinvigorated social scene at Broadhall.
²

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 imitat
ing 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.”
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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 fascinates 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