Melville in Love

by Michael Shelden

  What helps to set Moby-Dick apart from a mere tale of adventure at sea is the fact that Melville was not just telling a story. He came to inhabit it, speaking as if from within the tormented heart of Ahab or the half-bedazzled, half-bewildered mind of Ishmael. Melville is a Jonah riding not only in the whale, but also in the Pequod, the waves, the clouds, the passing birds, and the spirit of the universe itself. That is one reason it is sometimes difficult in the novel to tell who is speaking—Ishmael, Ahab, an all-seeing narrator, or one of the crew. Melville doesn’t seem to care—all the voices carry something of his, embellishing the voyage with strange poetic outbursts, or interrupting it with philosophical musings and furious rants. Inspired as if for the first time, he created a narrative large enough to contain so many hopes, fears, and demons that readers of all types have been astonished to find something of themselves floating through the story, flashes of their own obsessions in watery mirrors.

  Thanks in no small part to his romance with Sarah, Melville didn’t need much in the solitude of his study to fire his imagination or his ambition. He was in the grip of his own obsession, and was speeding along a dangerous path with the same unswerving force that propels Ahab across oceans. His book and his debts had locked him into that path, and there was no going back. “Swerve me?” Ahab asks. “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails.” Melville, at the helm of the imaginary ship that Arrowhead had sometimes become in his mind, was no less fixed in his purpose. His book, he would later say, was “broiled” in “hell-fire.” What Ahab says of the power of his will, Melville himself could have echoed: “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed, and what I’ve willed, I’ll do!”9

  Ahab’s madness is epic, but in the little world of Pittsfield, Melville must have seemed on the verge of madness himself that winter: spending money he didn’t have, uprooting his family from New York for no logical reason, boasting of wild schemes to build a road and a tower in his woods, and locking himself away for the winter to write a book about “the Whale fishery.” A good chief mate like Starbuck in the novel could have reasoned with him, but he wouldn’t have listened to such talk any more than Ahab does. At the most basic level of Moby-Dick, all the mad pursuits at sea, the cries of the crew, the captain’s diatribes, and the explosive violence of the great white whale bearing down on the Pequod are no more than phantoms in the mind of an author who fears that his brave but reckless pursuit of a dream will end in tragedy for all concerned. Yet he won’t swerve to avoid the crash.

  Looking back, Melville might have been tempted to follow this course regardless. He just needed the right push. The ex-castaway yearned to explore the edges of danger and test his limits. In that sense he identified not only with the hunters of whales and other objects of desire, but also with the great creatures whose dives in the unknown were spectacularly deep. “I love all men who dive,” Melville famously said, and by that he was referring, of course, to anyone eager to plunge below the surface of things to discover what lies below the usual levels of perception. He made this comment just one year before starting Moby-Dick, explaining, “Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don’t attain the bottom, why all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” Five miles was an exaggeration, but he liked the idea of the mighty whales exploring the depths—a mile or two down, at most—where no other mammal could hope to go. In part, Moby-Dick is the result of the author’s own extended dive into the depths of his life. It allowed him to explore the mysteries of his identity, his dreams, and his experiences in new and complex ways. With Sarah and Arrowhead in the balance, he had every incentive to dive down as far as he could go.10

  10

  REVERIES

  At Princeton University one night in November 1951, a Harvard professor told an audience celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of Moby-Dick’s publication that Melville’s book was “wicked.” Dr. Henry A. Murray wasn’t a rabid moralist trying to ban the novel from college campuses, and he wasn’t an old-fashioned English professor trying to exclude from the literary canon the upstart Melville, whose work was then enjoying its long-overdue acceptance by so much of the academic establishment. In fact, Dr. Murray lacked any literary credentials, but he was one of the most distinguished psychologists of his generation, a student of Carl Jung, and a major figure at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, with an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. When he called Moby-Dick wicked, he was praising the book, not condemning it, which must have made his comment seem all the more shocking to an audience in the 1950s. He insisted that any true appreciation of the novel had to take into account Melville’s own remark when the work was nearly finished: “I have written a wicked book,” the author had told Hawthorne, his fellow student of sin.1

  The Harvard psychologist, who had also spent decades reading Melville and collecting information for a biography, was pretty sure he knew the itch the novelist was trying to scratch—the source of all the vitriolic attacks hurled against God and man in Moby-Dick. Drawing on his professional expertise, he deduced that it was a classic Freudian case: “When one finds deep-seated aggression . . . aggression of the sort that Melville voiced—one can safely attribute it to the frustration of Eros.” Spirited and brilliant, the author of Moby-Dick must have been at war with his culture and its deity, Dr. Murray argued, because he hated the condemnation and guilt associated with pleasure and sexual freedom. Eros was seen as a force leading to “depravity,” yet Melville yearned to experience it only as pleasure.

  Murray even had a formula for the problem: “An insurgent Id in mortal conflict with an oppressive cultural Superego.” It was a lot of intellectual weightlifting just to say that sex must be lurking somewhere in all the violent energy unleashed in Moby-Dick. Without knowing particularly why, many readers of the novel have felt that there is something sexual in the exuberance of Melville’s prose, the lush, sensual quality of his descriptions, and the fierce intensity of his vision. The British writer Rebecca Stott has called it “the eroticized audacity of Moby-Dick . . . the briny adrenaline rush of its quest.” Murray was on to something, and that’s why it’s odd that this towering figure in academic psychology discovered vital information about Sarah Morewood, yet saw nothing in it to reinforce his case. Summer after summer, with a real love for Melville’s work, he traveled to Pittsfield searching for clues to various mysteries, helping to recover such treasures as the only surviving letters from Herman to Sarah. (The Berkshire Athenaeum’s Melville Room, where the letters are now accessible, “was established by the planning and generosity of Dr. Henry A Murray.”)2

  The Harvard professor quoted from one of these letters in his address at Princeton. He used it to explain that Melville wanted Moby-Dick to challenge readers and to make them reconsider their comfortable assumptions about life and art. What Herman told Sarah after he finished the novel was that she should “warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book.” Moby-Dick was strong medicine and would overwhelm such people. “A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it,” he said of the novel. It was probably this letter that led Murray—and others since—to discount Sarah’s importance because, if Melville’s words are taken literally, he seems to be telling this young wife that she is one of those weak, “fastidious” readers. Without any knowledge of her untamed character, or an awareness of the literary tastes she shared with Herman, it would be easy to mistake the extravagant, playful tone of his letter for something more serious:

  Dont you buy it—dont you read it, when it does come out, because it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk—but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book—on risk of a lumbago & sciatics.3

  This last joke suggesting that back pain will be the worst result of rea
ding Moby-Dick is enough to give the game away. It’s a very funny passage that uses self-deprecating wit to confide real truths about the book to a woman who knows the author better than anyone. It was always under the cover of language hidden in plain sight that these two lovers of words could safely communicate, knowing that no one else around them would catch the subtleties.

  One of the inside jokes in this particular letter comes from the fact that it was partly in response to the gift of another book from Sarah. During her six months overseas with Rowland in 1850–51, she acquired a number of British books, and one of them was by a woman who was the exact opposite of the pampered lady toying with “fine feminine” silks. This author was Harriet Martineau, a tough, uncompromising journalist, lecturer, and novelist who established herself over a long career as one of her generation’s leading feminists. Her most ambitious novel, The Hour and the Man, is a long piece of historical fiction about Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave revolt in Haiti, and it’s far more violent than Moby-Dick. A scene in which children are torn to pieces by ravenous bloodhounds is especially gruesome. Yet this is the book that the supposedly “gentle” and “fastidious” Sarah bought, read, and then sent to Melville as a gift. She knew that its graphic descriptions of an island revolt might appeal to him, but he couldn’t resist teasing her that his book had a texture that was even more “horrible.”

  Henry Murray didn’t need Freud to understand Melville’s yearning for a woman like Sarah. In a world full of proper ladies carefully brought up to focus their minds only on “gentle” subjects, here was a woman open to almost anything. You could even joke with her about masturbation, as a closer reading of Herman’s letter might have shown Dr. Murray. But, first, it is useful to know a little bit about Pittsfield’s most famous moralist in Melville’s day—its most ardent defender of America’s “oppressive cultural Superego,” as Murray would have put it, and New England’s preeminent authority on the wickedness of masturbation.

  HAWTHORNE, HOLMES, AND MELVILLE PALED as cultural giants in Pittsfield when placed against the blazing star of Rev. John Todd, pastor of the First Congregational Church. His followers were in awe of him, all the clergymen in the nearby towns looked up to him, and thousands of schoolboys and college men tried to follow the moral code outlined in his bestselling The Student’s Manual, which had been reprinted twenty-four times by the 1850s.

  A Melville family copy of The Student’s Manual survives. It belonged to Allan, Herman’s younger brother, but almost every well-read young man knew the book, if only by reputation for its terrifying chapter 4, which was innocently titled “Reading.” The page headings in Allan’s copy—“A delicate subject,” “Their certain ruin,” etc.—highlight the real subject of the chapter. When young men read too much, Todd explained, and especially when they read the wrong books, their minds will begin to stray. The next thing you know they will be overcome by dangerous “reveries,” their hands will become the devil’s playthings, and then . . . The final step was so “delicate” that Todd had to switch to Latin to explain the worst details, but a footnote made sure that any boy whose Latin was insufficient could see the ruin awaiting him in a moment of weakness. The act was “very frequently the cause of sudden death,” Todd warned. You could be so immersed in the sinful deed that you wouldn’t even realize God was just waiting to fell you with a stroke. “The apoplexy,” the reverend darkly informed his readers, “waits hard by, as God’s executioner, upon this sin.”4

  Because Todd couldn’t bring himself to name the dreaded act in English, he relied primarily on “reverie” as his preferred euphemism. It was bad enough for boys to allow their suspect reading to lead them into a reverie, but Todd thought that some of the most sinful creatures were the authors of dangerous books whose words tainted the minds of innocent youth. These “bad” authors, of whom he could bear to name only half a dozen, including Lord Byron and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, were doomed to suffer unimaginable torments. “They dig graves so deep that they reach into hell.”

  The trembling youth anxiously turning the pages of Todd’s chapter on reading found only two ways to avoid joining Byron and Bulwer-Lytton in hell. First, avoid at all costs “the habit of reverie”; second, do not read bad books—“I do entreat my young readers never to look at one—never to open one.” These are the words that Melville is parodying when he writes of Moby-Dick to Sarah, urging her in a mock tone, “Dont you buy it—dont you read it.” His letter prepares her for the joke a few sentences earlier by a sly remark about their shared love of “falling into the reveries” of their books. “A fine book is a sort of revery to us—is it not?” he adds coyly.

  Sarah knew very well what he meant. She read a famous rejoinder to Todd’s obsessive fears—Reveries of a Bachelor—around the time it first appeared in early 1851. The author, Donald G. Mitchell (or Ik Marvel, as he inexplicably called himself), invited his readers to go ahead and indulge their imaginations and not restrain themselves. “And have you not the whole skein of your heart-life in your own fingers to wind, or unwind, in what shape you please? Shake it, or twine it, or tangle it, by the light of your fire, as you fancy best.” Likewise, in his own “wicked” book, Melville took direct aim at Rev. Todd and the other self-appointed guardians of virtue for turning pleasure into their idea of “depravity.” In the chapter of Moby-Dick called “A Squeeze of the Hand,” Ishmael falls into reveries by the score as he joins his fellow sailors of the Pequod to squeeze a tub full of lumpy whale spermaceti into liquid.5

  I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me. . . . Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!

  Modern readers get the point, and some have even interpreted this passage as an example of homoeroticism in Melville’s work. He was, in fact, always fascinated by the possibilities of male friendship, and his openness to the idea of intimacy between men is obvious in his treatment of the warm relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. Yet part of the fun of sharing jokes with Sarah was that she was liberated enough to entertain all sorts of forbidden thoughts. Very little seems to have shocked her. It’s no wonder that so many of Melville’s contemporaries were left bewildered by the strange fun the novelist was having in the middle of such a grim tale of obsession. Apart from Sarah, few readers in the 1850s could appreciate even half of what Melville was trying to say about the battle Dr. Murray described in the 1950s as the id combating the massive, whale-like bulk of the “cultural Superego.”

  Whatever name it’s given, the battle was staged in great part for Sarah’s benefit—to amaze her, amuse her, and to conquer the world for her. At the most basic level Melville needed to conquer the book trade first, enabling him to be independent and to sustain a lifestyle that Rowland Morewood could afford but that he could not. All the same, the author of Moby-Dick is chasing a dream that is much grander than dollars, though the dollars will be necessary to him in the end, which is the inescapable reality he must face as he struggles to make a whaling yarn sing like poetry. Fortunately for posterity, poetry prevailed, allowing reverie to triumph over reality.

  As Melville sensed at the beginning of his work on the story, the great artistic challenge he faced was to find a poem of life in something as elemental as “blubber.” Just before his summer at Broadhall, he told fellow author Richard Henry Dana Jr. in May 1850,

  It will be a strange sort of a book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; —& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.6

  Though no woman plays any part in the major action of Moby-Dick, its muse was Mrs. Morewood. She was t
he ghost that Dr. Murray almost glimpsed between the pages when he saw “the frustration of Eros” looming so large over the masterpiece he loved. It was her spirit that fueled Melville’s dreams for a different kind of life, opening that hidden vein of poetry which runs so wildly through Moby-Dick.

  11

  BLACK QUAKE

  In the rolling hills of Derbyshire—just west of one of England’s grandest houses, Chatsworth—the Morewood family had their own modest estate on land they had owned since the eighteenth century. Their handsome old house was called Thornbridge Hall, and it looked out on a green and pleasant land where the family had long prospered. Over several generations there had been at least four high sheriffs of the county who were Morewoods. The current patriarch—Rowland’s father, George—had been born in 1763, and was still working hard to expand his fortune in his eighties.

  Though Thornbridge Hall overlooked some of the prettiest scenery in the north of England, Sarah would have found little there to keep her entertained except her books. Business always came first in the Morewood family—at least in those days, when they had such a wide and diverse range of interests. They were not the sort to dash off at a moment’s notice for picnics and long sightseeing tours. Travel was for making money. Most of their early fortune came from the cotton trade, and at one time they had offices not only in England and America, but also in Russia. It is unlikely that Sarah could have endured her long stay in the lonely isolation of Derbyshire, and at another family home in Lancashire, without writing to Melville, but none of her letters to him have been found. “Make a fire bright with my letters and oblige me,” she once told another man to whom she sent flirtatious messages, and no doubt she advised Melville to do the same.1