My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. It seems to me now that Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet that he managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism; or else there have been many corruptions and interpolations of the text. In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, “Live in the all.” That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one—good! But get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. “My dear boy,” Goethe says to him, “you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!” As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.
H. Melville.
P.S. “Amen!” saith Hawthorne. This “all” feeling, though, there is some truth in it. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of such a temporary feeling or opinion.
P.S.S. You must not fail to admire my discretion in paying the postage on this letter.
June 29, 1851
Arrowhead, Pittsfield
My dear Hawthorne,
The clear air and open window invite me to write to you. For some time past, I have been so busy with a thousand things that I have almost forgotten when I wrote you last, and whether or not I received an answer, though in truth I suspect I have not heard one peep from you in many weeks—no doubt because you are being feted in all the capitals of our small Republic.
This most persuasive season has now for weeks recalled me from certain crotchety and over-doleful chimeras, the like of which men like you and me must be content to encounter now and then, and fight them the best way we can. But come they will—for, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious wild wilderness through which these outposts run, the Indians do sorely abound, as well as the insignificant but still stinging mosquitoes. Since you have been here to visit me, I have been building some shanties of sheds and outbuildings (connected with the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays. I have been plowing and sowing and raising and painting and printing and praying—and now begin to come out upon a less bustling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farm house here.
Not entirely yet, though. The Whale is only half through the press; for, wearied with the long delay of the printers, and disgusted with the heat and dust of the Babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the country to feel the grass— and end the book reclining on it, if I may. I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself; be sure all the rest of the world are thinking about themselves ten times as much. Let us speak, although we show all our faults and weaknesses—for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it—not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation. But I am falling into my old foible—preaching.
I am busy, but shall not be very long. Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life. When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like enjoying that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together. This is rather a crazy letter in some respects, I apprehend. If so, ascribe it to the intoxicating effects of the latter end of June operating upon a very susceptible and peradventure feeble temperament.
Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked—though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this. This is the book’s motto (the secret one)—Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!
H.M.
July 21, 1851
Lenox
My dear Melville,
I think the face of nature can never look more beautiful than now. The sunshine fills the airy woods with fresh green light; Monument Mountain and its brethren are all clothed in green, and the lightness of the tint takes away something from their massiveness and ponderosity, and they respond with lively effect to the shine and shade of the sky. Each tree now within sight stands out with its own individual hue. This is a very windy day, and the lights shift with magical alternation. In a walk to the lake, just now, with the children, we found abundance of flowers—wild geraniums, violets of all families, red columbines, and many others, known and unknown, besides innumerable wild strawberries. The housatonias quite overspread some pastures. Not merely the flowers, but the various shrubs one sees, when one is seated for instance on the decayed trunk of a tree, are well worth looking at, such a variety and such enjoyment they seem to have of themselves and their growth. Amid these creations, we see the remains of others that have already run their course—the hoary periwigs, I mean, of dandelions long since gone to seed. And water weeds, on the edge of the lake, whose roots seem to have nothing to do with earth but only water.
Quoth I to Julian, “Are you a good little boy?” “Yes,” said he. “What are you good for?” asked I. “Because I love all people,” answered he. A heavenly infant, powerless to do anything but diffuse the richness of his pure love throughout the moral atmosphere, to make all mankind happier and better. Or perhaps he understood the question to be for what reason he was good—and meant to reply, that good deeds gushed forth from his heart of love as from a fountain. I am raising up a new Fourier, I fear, or a Pangloss. You must not fail to remind me some day to tell you of my sojourn at Brook Farm, which I fear has influenced Julian covertly, nevermind that it happened before he was born—that is, after all, just how such things happen.
Sophia’s sister Elizabeth is here now, helping to care for our new little Rose, but at the end of this week, she and Sophia and Una and Rose will all travel to Boston to make the rounds of the family, leaving just Julian and me to our devices in our little cottage. They will be away for three weeks, and if you came during this time, we might have opportunity to speak of eternity and things of this world and the next, and books and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, at our leisure.
yours,
Nath. Hawthorne
Chapter 17
Happy Birthday, Herman
At midday on his thirty-second birthday—August 1, 1851—as he finished baling the last of the season’s hay, Herman stood in his field and exhaled the longest breath of his life, as if filtering all the air in the heavens. After a long summer of toil and sweat, he had finally caught up with the farmwork; and, by coincidence, that very morning, the carpenters had finally finished building his northern porch, facing Mount Greylock, so that, from now on, he could take his evening brandy sitting in a rocking chair and gazing in awe at that breaching whale of a mountain, seemingly placed there by Providence for him to look upon. He did not even regret his extravagance in spending money to have it built—not yet, at least—because, unbeknownst to his family (even to Lizzie) and underlying all the other more prosaic reasons for his relief and contentment, he had finally finished writing the narrative
of The Whale.
In this perfect moment, with all of his work finished—the book, the field work, some renovations to the house—he splashed water in his face from the little rivulet below his hay field and drank deeply of its cool water and then walked, still covered in hay dust and dirt and sweat, to his new porch. He stomped on the pine boards and knocked at the solid posts and took in the panorama of mown fields and deep green groves and glorious mountains. He breathed deeply the sweet honey of switchgrass and hay mixing with the pungent funk of his own body, and he heard the whirring of a grasshopper’s wings, which stopped abruptly with a thump as the little creature landed on the porch—and he felt happy.
His mind raced; he was still taut as a wire from the monumental effort of finishing the book, on top of everything else he had still been required to do around the farm, but it was done, all done, and all the evidence he saw before him favored his own personal definitions and nomenclatures—the universe was exactly as he defined it. The Whale was swimming through typesetting machines in New York to become the plates of a book, and he knew that the small drop of new cash in his bank account, courtesy of a secret loan from an old family friend in Albany, would soon turn into a roaring river spilling into an ocean of money from the book’s success.
He still had not secured an American publishing contract, but he had no doubt that he could do so, so much confidence did he have in the quality of the writing and the profundity of his themes. He wondered only half whimsically if President Fillmore would invite him to the White House after he had read it, so clearly did it portray such a vital piece of the American economy, and he imagined his lecture tours of the colleges, speaking on everything from whaling to the cultures of the South Seas to American expansionism to slavery to the nature of God Himself, all matters he felt he had explained satisfactorily in his book. In a few weeks, he would return to New York to proof the typeset pages and make final changes to the tumultuous ending, but for now it was out of his hands.
He had completed the concluding chapters in such a fever—of writing and building and mowing and caring for Lizzie with her pregnancy and her hay fevers and traveling back and forth to New York with the pages—that he was no longer quite sure even of the order of events at the very end, except in their broad outline and the fate of Ahab; but he felt he had delivered on the promise of the original idea and brought out the underlying themes that had drifted so lazily in the undercurrents of his imagination until Hawthorne had fished them out. He believed that he had even out-Hawthorned Hawthorne in the breadth and depth of his central allegory—and he could not wait for the older author to read it! He reveled in a feeling of divinity, that he was as much a part of eternal consciousness at that moment as it was possible for any mortal to be.
Everything suddenly seemed simple. His mind raced across vast cosmic distances in an instant, and he saw the whole long reach of philosophy and history and aesthetics plainly, as if all the ideas that had come before had been laid on a buffet for him to select or reject; and he felt, looking back on the sweep of his novel, that he could write another book better than The Whale starting tomorrow and it might take only tomorrow to do it.
His peace on his birthday unfortunately had not rippled into the rest of the Melville household. Lizzie was lying abed with a nose stuffed up so badly that she could hardly breathe, and her whole face had turned the bright rosy red of the stripes of the American flag; and Malcolm was suffering from another of his mysterious snot-filled ailments, which usually accompanied his mother’s illnesses. But Herman did not wish to think of Lizzie’s pregnancy or Malcolm’s illness: he simply wished to be left alone with his feelings of peace and triumph, which he felt he had achieved in spite of his family and not because of them.
Everything was in such perfect order in his mind that he had only one real birthday wish, one final piece of blue sky that would make his puzzle complete—to ramble down to Lenox to see Hawthorne, to take Nathaniel up on his invitation to visit without the ever-watchful presence of Sophia to circumscribe their conversation. He was eager to tell Hawthorne that The Whale was finished—it would have been Herman’s preference simply to present the book to him, already published, to give the first copy of the first edition to the man to whom it would be dedicated—but it would be some time yet before the book would come out, and it was finished now. It was done! He had written “The End,” and he wanted Hawthorne to be the first to know.
He bathed himself and changed clothes, donning a floppy green hat that he had won from a Spaniard in a card game on board his first whaling ship. Then he saddled his horse and set off down the road toward Lenox.
The day became stiflingly hot and humid as the afternoon progressed, and he quickly soaked his fresh clothes with sweat; but not even the bottle flies feeding on his horse’s neck and the bees that landed on his own skin could bother Herman today. He rode down the white dirt road, through meadows sprinkled with turtlehead blossoms and yellow celandines and loppyheaded bluebells, and he felt like laughing.
He passed a great deal of traffic, and he decided that he would greet everyone he met in Spanish, to match his Spanish hat. He said a hearty “buenos días” to the passengers of several farm wagons, two stately carriages, and a barouche, and to a few Shakers on foot he said “¡Qué hermoso cielo!” He was rewarded with puzzled looks, which delighted him; but, in one instance, a gentleman returned his greeting and asked a rather long question in Spanish, which Melville did not understand, so he replied, “E aha ta’oe i pe’au mai?”—one of the few phrases in Marquesan that he still remembered, which meant, “What did you say?” The gentleman and he stared at one another for a moment and then silently resumed their trips in opposite directions.
About half a mile outside of Lenox, Herman spied a man stretched out in the shade of a tree along the road, reading a newspaper. As he drew close, he discerned that it was none other than Hawthorne himself! He pulled the brim of his hat down low, rode up near him, and said in a hammy, gruff voice, “Buenos días, señor.”
Hawthorne looked up. “Yes. Hello.” He flicked his wrist, waving the horseman on.
“El cielo está hermoso esta tarde.”
A little tango of bemusement danced across Hawthorne’s features. “Sí,” he said, and he flicked his wrist again.
“I am afraid I am at the end of my Spanish, Hawthorne, unless you would like me to name parts of a ship. Velamen. Mástil.”
“What the devil? Melville!” Hawthorne folded his newspaper and stood up. “I mistook you for a conquistador.”
“Señor, it was no mistake.” He dismounted. They shook hands with gusto. Herman indicated the paper, now under Hawthorne’s arm. “What news?”
“They are still finding pieces of Fort Des Moines in New Orleans. How swims The Whale?”
“He’s fin up,” said Herman proudly. “The manuscript is done. Nothing left but to proof it and deliver it to Bentley.”
“Congratulations,” said Hawthorne. “And when shall I have a copy?”
“You know how these things are,” Herman shrugged. “Weeks, I hope, rather than months.”
“I look forward to it. Shall we walk? Julian is in a blackberry patch up the road.” Herman led his horse, and the two authors walked side by side. “I am coming out with a book for children later in the year, only a few hundred pages, but it’s mostly done. A simplified retelling of Greek and Roman myths, in an American setting.”
Herman was astonished. “You act like a man of leisure but come out with a book every three months.”
“It was Sophia’s confinement that did it this time. We have entertained practically no visitors for months, and my days have been filled with nothing but reading, writing, and fetching things for Sophia—or, more recently, for the new baby. And, as I have told you before, I knew that you were hard at work over in the next hamlet, and I have been inspired to accelerate my usual dawdling pace as a result. I will write whole Bibles
in the Berkshires, at this rate.”
“I suppose I must get back to work immediately, if I am to keep pace. What will this one be called?”
“A Wonder Book. Wonder frees your mind from necessity so that you can marvel at possibilities. And yours? Have you settled definitely on The Whale?”
“Bentley is convinced that that’s the right title for the English edition, but I am inclined to call it Moby Dick for the American.”
“Moby Dick? After the whale that sank the Essex?”
“His name was Mocha Dick, if you’ll recall.”
“Do sailors call all whales Dick, then?”
“All whales, and some other things, besides.”
A loud ruckus of snapping twigs and rustling brush signaled Julian’s appearance from beneath a berry bramble. He came running across a grassy field toward the road, shouting merrily, his face smeared purple with juice. “Herman Melville, Herman Melville,” he yelled. He collided roughly with Herman’s legs and threw his arms around them.
“And how are you for a horseman, Master Julian?”
“Capital!”
“Then up you go.” Herman hoisted Julian up by the armpits, onto his horse. When he was steady in the saddle, Melville let him go and said, “Salve Rey Julian.”
Julian was bright with glee. “What’s his name?” He rubbed the horse’s neck and tugged his mane.
“Anonymous.”
“Animus,” Julian tried. “That’s a funny name.”
The Whale Page 19