Melville in Love

by Michael Shelden

  For a man who had little experience writing love scenes, Melville rose to the challenge when his lovers cross the line between affectionate warmth and real passion. Leaning into each other, they begin to press so close with their lips and hands that they become almost one body. “They changed,” Melville writes with great feeling and simplicity; “they coiled together.” He writes about lovemaking as though he is discovering its pleasures for the first time. In his new enthusiasm he declares that “love is god of all. . . . This world’s great redeemer and reformer.” In case anyone doubted the source of all his excitement, Melville traces it to a renewed appreciation of women as love’s “emissaries,” a grateful sense of wonder for their refining sensibilities in a world sorely in need of them. As one who had begun his writing career gazing admiringly at the female form in a South Seas Eden, Melville opens his eyes now and finds that the woman makes the paradise, not the paradise the woman: “Where a beautiful woman is, there is all Asia and her Bazars.” Whatever else this is, it is the sound of a man in love. It isn’t heard in Melville before Moby-Dick and Pierre, and it won’t be heard in his prose after those works. By comparison, Fayaway was merely an infatuation.8

  For anyone who has loved and was led to believe it was wrong, Pierre asks the great question of the novel, “Is Love a harm?” The answer for society is always complicated, depending on the nature of the love, but from deep within the actual moment of a romance as intense as Melville’s, there is only one answer—a resounding no. Society won’t abide that answer in so many cases, and that is the tragedy for those who choose to love anyway.9

  PART OF PIERRE’S ATTRACTION TO ISABEL is that she so closely resembles the pale beauties in romantic fantasies of tragic love, the woman with raven hair and “bewitchingly mournful eyes.” In their determination to love each other despite the condemnation of the world they are as doomed as Ahab sailing into his vortex. It is as if a malignancy is ever present and always posed to strike. Isabel seems to think that death is close at her heels, and that his shadow can be detected in her appearance. “Look,” she tells Pierre, “see these eyes,—this hair—nay, this cheek;—all dark, dark, dark. . . . Was ever hearse so plumed?”10

  The world expected Melville to be the manly seafarer with endless tales of ships, storms, and island adventures, and so there were few readers prepared to take this very different voyage into Melville’s turbulent emotional life on dry land. But it was a book that he had to write, though he was increasingly doubtful it would succeed. It wasn’t just that readers would be confused to find their stalwart mariner suffering from lovesickness in an unfamiliar land far from any sea. It was also because the author knew he couldn’t tell the whole story. His characters would only be ghostly players reenacting a lesser version of the real drama that had been unfolding in the Berkshires for the past year.

  17

  HARVEST

  On his way to attend yet another party at Broadhall, Melville was stopped by someone from the village and handed a letter. It was mid-November 1851, Moby-Dick had just been published by Harper & Brothers in New York, and reviews were starting to appear in the press. The envelope didn’t contain news of any professional critic’s latest pronouncement. It was a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne giving his private views of the new book. Nervous with anticipation, Melville raced ahead to Broadhall and read it there. He couldn’t wait to hear the verdict.

  The letter was good. Hawthorne liked the novel and was liberal with his praise. Melville was euphoric, believing that if he received such a major writer’s approval for his masterpiece, everything else was destined to fall into place. Unable to restrain his joy, he sat down the next morning to write a letter of gratitude. After his long struggle, he felt vindicated and—at least for now—at peace with himself. “A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment,” he wrote to Hawthorne, “on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. . . . I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon.” If Hawthorne had been embarrassed before by some of Melville’s warm declarations of literary friendship, this letter was sure to make him blush. His friend was ready to turn him into a lord of the universe, and join him on the cosmic pedestal. “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper,” he told him, “and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.”1

  At this moment the world was too small for Herman Melville. He knew that he had created a masterpiece, a book of unparalleled boldness and brilliance with soaring passages of prose like the best poetry. In a little village far from the great capitals and commercial centers of the world, he had fashioned a work of genius in the solitary space of his farmhouse study. His family needed him and wanted to believe in him, but they had no concept of the vast range of his imagination and the breadth of his learning. For the most part, to his family and to almost everyone in Pittsfield, he was just Herman, the eccentric and willful literary man who had settled on his Berkshire farm for no logical reason, and who was staking his fortunes on a strange book about whales.

  Yet it was his ambition to shake the world—to reinvent the novel, remake American literature, reintroduce the world to the wonders of the whale, and to redesign J. M. W. Turner’s artistic style to shine anew in prose. Few writers have come as close as Melville to achieving such high goals in such modest circumstances. Like most geniuses, his chief assets were his talent and his yearning to create something never seen before, but working in an environment where so few of those in his daily life shared his high sense of purpose was a constant weight on his spirits.

  All of which explains why Hawthorne and—to a greater extent—Sarah Morewood were so important to him, and why he wanted each to glow in his imagination like a companion star. They helped to make the isolation bearable and to make him think that impossible goals were worth chasing. In his greatest moments of enthusiasm, he could elevate them to a lofty plane where they could stand in majesty apart from the herd. Just as Sarah could be celebrated as the “ever-excellent & beautiful Lady of Paradise,” so Hawthorne’s appreciation for the larger designs of Moby-Dick earned him a celestial ranking. As Melville put it, “You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body [of the book], and embrace the soul.”2

  It’s only because we have a surviving transcript of Melville’s letter that we know what was in Hawthorne’s. Unfortunately, like so much of Melville’s correspondence, this landmark letter of praise has disappeared, probably because of what Melville once called “a vile habit of mine to destroy all my letters,” so it is impossible to know just how encouraging Hawthorne was or whether he hedged his approval in any way. As a writer more attuned to the marketplace than Melville, the successful author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables must have known that Moby-Dick was going to be difficult to sell in America. Yet he also knew that Melville didn’t want the usual warnings about the tastes of the reading public, and the fickle attitudes of critics and publishers. What he wanted was apparently exactly what Hawthorne gave him—one literary giant’s blessing to another. It wasn’t Hawthorne’s kind of book, but it was enough—as Melville acknowledged—that he “understood the book.” More than sales and more than simple praise, the author wanted to know that he had succeeded in doing what he had set out to do. To Hawthorne’s great credit, he gave him that assurance.3

  Sending his letter of praise was also a graceful way of exiting the Berkshires. As another winter approached, Hawthorne and his family were ready to clear out. They were headed to the other end of the commonwealth and would never reside in the Berkshires again. Writing to Melville was almost the last thing Hawthorne did as he closed up his rented cottage in Lenox. If he had waited much longer, he might have completely undermined Melville’s idealized image of him by angrily revealing what he truly thought of this rural paradise. It would have broken the younger writer’s heart to know how his beloved Berkshires rated in Hawthorne’s estimation. “I detest it
! I detest it! I detest it!!!” stormed Hawthorne in his diary. “I hate Berkshire with my whole soul, and would joyfully see its mountains laid flat.”4

  Given the haste of his exit, he didn’t have much time to write a proper review for publication, but Melville was quick to let him off the hook, telling him that he didn’t need to take the trouble. If Moby-Dick had passed muster with Nathaniel Hawthorne, then surely the best critics would find much to praise on their own, or so Melville must have reasoned as he waited for reviews to appear. Based on past experience, and taking account of his own fears, he was prepared to be disappointed, but Hawthorne’s praise gave him hope that this time the world would correctly judge his worth. (At any rate, it would have been awkward for the older author to publish a review of Moby-Dick because of Melville’s generous dedication page: “In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.”)

  AT FIRST, the publication of Moby-Dick was a mixture of good and bad news. Some of the most influential papers offered praise. The New-York Tribune said it was his best book; Graham’s Magazine called it a work “of a bright and teeming fancy”; the Philadelphia American Saturday Courier hailed it as “decidedly the richest book out”; and the Spirit of the Times in New York said it was a work “of exceeding power, beauty, and genius.”5

  Few of the major American reviews took a neutral position. Most critics either loved the book or hated it, and those who hated it were unsparing in their condemnations. The Southern Quarterly Review damned it as “sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous.” It was “not worth the money asked for it,” said the Boston Post. Ahab was “a perfect failure,” claimed the Albion in New York, “and the work itself inartistic.” The New York Independent confessed that the waste of so much talent on such profane material made “us ashamed of him that he does not write something better.”6

  Melville could have used someone as influential as Hawthorne to shift the balance of opinion in his favor. As it was, he relied on Evert Duyckinck to champion Moby-Dick in the pages of the Literary World. It was only natural to assume that his old friend would be an even more generous and sympathetic reader than Hawthorne. For months Melville had been telling Evert about the book, and twice he’d entertained him in the Berkshires, providing rooms and food, and a wagon for travel.

  But something went wrong. In the months since the Greylock trip, Evert and George Duyckinck had found reason to think that their gracious host in the Berkshires needed chastising. On November 22 the Literary World aimed its guns at the imposing bulk of Moby-Dick. Though Evert seems to have written the review, George was probably involved in the editing, for the heavy moral criticism suggests his influence. Though they sprinkled praise throughout the review, the Duyckincks went out of their way to cheapen the work by comparing it to an overlong “German melodrama,” with “Captain Ahab for the Faust of the quarter-deck.” In a snide and condescending tone, Evert treated Ahab as more of a bore than an inspired creation. He told his readers that he was so weary of spending time in the book’s “melancholic company” that he now understood “why blubber is popularly synonymous with tears.”

  He tried to make these criticisms seem playful, but of all people, he and George should have understood how seriously Melville took his work, and how much he had sacrificed for it. It was one thing to point out weaknesses in the book. What was painful for Melville was to see friends make light of the high ambitions of the work, undermining its tragic majesty by treating it as little more than tedious melodrama. A minor writer like Evert probably felt that Mr. Melville of little Pittsfield was trying too hard to be a major writer and needed to be brought down a notch or two.

  He and his brother may also have decided that Sarah Morewood’s friend was becoming a little too irreverent and unconventional for his own good. The Duyckincks saved their strongest criticism for an attack on the morals of Melville’s book. Evert objected to its “piratical running down of creeds and opinions,” and declared with self-righteous pomposity, “We do not like to see . . . the most sacred associations of life violated and defaced.” It is tempting to read this moral outrage as a barb directed at Melville personally, and not just as a criticism of Ishmael’s fondness for his pagan friend Queequeg or other impious moments in Ahab’s defiant assault on the universe. Religious critics could find reasons for saying that Moby-Dick “defaced” “sacred associations,” as the New York Churchman did when it attacked the book for its “sneers at revealed religion and the burlesquing of sacred passages of Holy Writ.” Evert’s charge of violating something sacred seems unwarranted unless it was meant for the author himself.7

  His friend was in a position to hurt Melville, and he succeeded. Even Hawthorne couldn’t understand the hostile tone. He had seen Melville and the Duyckinck brothers in August, before the Greylock excursion, and thought they were all the best of friends. Bewildered, Hawthorne wrote to Evert after the Moby-Dick review appeared and observed politely that it “hardly . . . did justice to [the book’s] best points.” That was an enormous understatement. As he well knew, it was a knife in the back of a great writer who had expected more understanding from Evert.8

  The Literary World’s callous treatment of a formerly valued contributor doesn’t make much sense unless Evert believed—in his high-minded fashion—that he was saving Melville from himself, just as brother George must have believed he was trying to help Sarah by sending her religious books. In confidence, after the death of Sarah’s precious colt, Herman had more or less admitted to Evert that he was in love with another man’s wife. On Greylock that night in August one of the brothers may have been alarmed by some sign of intimacy between the two lovers, or by the later news from Sarah that she and Melville were roaming the Berkshires together with a spyglass—a “piratical” image indeed. Or they may simply have been annoyed enough at Sarah’s interest in George to land a blow of their own for the moral code they valued even more than friendship.

  The Duyckincks weren’t malicious. They were just sanctimonious. Their review was a message from two guardians of culture and morality that Melville had done something more serious than violate good taste in an overlong melodrama about blubber. To them the sin was to undermine “the most sacred associations of life.” There was nothing worse they could say of him. It’s doubtful that the sins of the book were enough in themselves to merit such a devastating rebuke. The brothers must have also realized that the young man who had charmed them with the seeming innocence of Typee was now acting like a heathen himself, as they would have seen it, breaking what were for them the sacred bonds of marriage and family. Part of the mission of the Literary World was to reinforce such moral values. At least, that was the view of George’s religious friends. The Episcopalian Church Book Society believed that the Duyckincks gave their journal “a savor of Church life which made it especially acceptable to the members of our Communion—opening its columns to, and inviting contributions from the younger of the clergy.”9

  For Melville, this whole episode cast a cloud over his book, and it denied him the chance to have his masterpiece taken seriously in a New York journal that so many of his fellow writers respected. It gnawed at him, as only a really bad and personal criticism can sometimes do. There was no way to undo the damage to Moby-Dick, and soon Melville’s elation turned to bitterness.

  DESPITE THE MANY GOOD REVIEWS—both in America and Britain (where the Illustrated London News praised Melville’s “almost unparalleled power over the capabilities of the language”)—Moby-Dick simply couldn’t attract enough readers. Its sales were modest not only in America, but also in England, even though the reception there was so much more enthusiastic. In London, the publisher Richard Bentley lost more than a hundred pounds on his edition of The Whale, as the book was called in Britain, using the original title.

  Frustrated, Bentley sent Melville a stern letter of rebuke, telling him, “If you had . . . restrained your imagination somewhat, and had written in a style to be understood by the great mass of rea
ders—nay if you had not sometimes offended the feelings of many sensitive readers you would have succeeded in England.” What was worse, he didn’t see much hope for the author in the British market and didn’t mince words. “Perhaps somebody ignorant of the absolute failure of your former works might be tempted to make a trifling advance on the chance of success; but . . . any new book would have an uphill fight of it.” These words were like a death sentence to a young author. Of course, as the long arc of time would prove, Bentley was wrong, and Melville was right. “There are goodly harvests which ripen late, especially when the grain is remarkably strong,” he had written to Bentley in 1849. He had fought his battle valiantly, and should have won it. In the aftermath of the battle, his accomplishments quickly began to look like a monumental defeat. Moby-Dick was threatening to sink his career, and ruin his finances.10

  As one of his harsher reviewers declared in January, the size and scope of the new book signified nothing but the inflated self-importance of an author whose only good work was in the past: “Mr. Melville has survived his reputation. If he had been contented with writing one or two books, he might have been famous, but his vanity has destroyed all his chances of immortality, or even of a good name with his own generation.” His grand calls for a new American literature with its own native giants superior even to Shakespeare now sounded hollow. For the sin of daring to write an American epic, he was damned for revealing his “morbid self-esteem, coupled with a most unbounded love of notoriety.”11