Melville in Love

by Michael Shelden

  Though it had been clear that she was fading fast, she had rallied so often that her death on October 16—one month and a day after her fortieth birthday—took everyone by surprise. Melville had left a few days earlier on a trip to New York, and was still there when the news came of her passing. Lizzie had visited Broadhall the day Sarah died and was at her bedside at the end. “She was much surprised herself when she knew her days were numbered—,” Lizzie recalled afterward in a letter to Augusta. “Said she did not want to die, but was calm in view of it.” On her last morning her sister opened a window in Sarah’s room, and the dying woman raised her head to gaze one more time at the view. “How heavenly!” she said, then fell back and closed her eyes. Those were her last words. “Her respiration grew fainter & fainter,” Lizzie remembered, “and so placid was her death, that no one knew exactly when she ceased to breathe.”9

  Devoted as always to his faith, Rowland accepted Sarah’s death as God’s will, and had sat peacefully near her while she was dying, busying himself with a letter to his son, William. Thinking at first that Sarah might survive the day, he began the letter by warning the boy—who was away at school in England—that the next letter he received would surely contain bad news. In Rowland’s pious world, there was always a lesson to be learned from sad tidings. “Bear always in your mind,” he wrote to his son, “that, though you are not likely to see her again on this earth, there is another world where you may again meet your Mother, if you rightly guide your own steps through life.” Before he could finish this letter Rowland watched Sarah take her last breath. Instead of beginning a new message to William he put the news into a brief postscript: “3 o’clock P.M. . . . a change came over your dear Mamma’s breathing, and she has now passed to the world of spirits.”10

  LIZZIE HAD NEVER seen anyone die before, and she said the experience left her shaken. She gave no hint in her letter to Augusta that she had any suspicions of an affair between Herman and Sarah, but she would spend the rest of her long life trying to pretend to the world that nothing was amiss in her marriage. At this point she may well have been fooled by all the precautions her husband had taken to hide his affair, and was still innocently assuming that his long attachment to Sarah was always just a friendship. That doesn’t seem likely, however, and there is a forced note in Lizzie’s declaration to Augusta that in her long relationship with Mrs. Morewood they never suffered “the least shadow of a break.”

  Only a private message that Lizzie carved into an inner compartment of her desk—crudely cutting the words into the wood with a sharp knife—gives some indication of the storms swirling below the surface of her married life. When she wrote the message isn’t clear, but Melville’s affair with Sarah continued to haunt him for the rest of his life. The desk is now at the Melville Room in the Berkshire Athenaeum, and the words in the dark recess of the compartment form a jagged line: “To know all is to forgive all.” The sentence suggests that Lizzie may have always known more than she ever acknowledged, and that she struggled to make her peace with the facts.

  Interestingly, even though servants came to prepare Sarah’s body for burial, Lizzie insisted on remaining behind to help them. It is disturbing to think of her washing and dressing Sarah for the grave, especially in light of a jarring note of joy scrawled across one margin of Lizzie’s otherwise dutifully solemn letter to Augusta. An old friend of the Shaws, the family doctor, had recently died and left Lizzie a generous bequest. Right next to her description of Sarah’s final moments of life, Lizzie exulted in a chatty tone, “Did you know that Dr. Hayward left me a legacy of three thousand dollars? Nothing could have been more unexpected.”11

  No one but the two partners can know what really happens in a marriage, but Lizzie’s letter on Sarah’s death is eye-opening. As Somerset Maugham once noted, Melville’s wife “was not a good letter-writer,” but here she shows a disconcerting ability to switch her feelings on and off, and to allow personal pettiness to undercut a moment of deep sorrow and loss. Many people could overlook this sort of thing, but not Melville. He sought sympathy, warmth, and exalted feelings from Sarah, and perhaps he valued those from her all the more because he often failed to find them from Lizzie.12

  ON THE DAY OF BURIAL, both Herman and his wife stood at Sarah’s graveside in Pittsfield Cemetery. From New York, Melville had earlier sent a large floral wreath—all in white—for the church service he was forced to miss. In a newspaper tribute to Sarah a few days after her death, Caroline Whitmarsh predicted that the men whose lives her friend had “inspired” would not forget her. These included soldiers (men of “valor”), but rather daringly Whitmarsh wrote that Sarah had also inspired “men of genius.” There weren’t many of those in Pittsfield—except possibly a famous Harvard doctor who had moved away, and a novelist whose career had run aground in the fields of Arrowhead. If any friend knew how much Sarah had touched Melville’s life, it would have been Whitmarsh. The wonder is that she was willing to hint at it in the pages of the Pittsfield press, and to add that Sarah’s own talents for living large made an interesting contrast to the brilliance of more famous men—ones, for example, who wrote epics: “There is a genius that rears temples and writes epics; there is a better genius that makes all earth its temple, and all existence special. Such had Mrs. Morewood.”13

  Even if Whitmarsh wasn’t also thinking of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes as one of the men of genius, he was indeed thinking of Sarah in the days after her death. Holmes couldn’t forget his “Elsie Venner.” He sent Rowland and the family a poem written in Sarah’s memory. The little doctor was under her spell to the end, imagining himself looking down at her casket and finding nothing but a single rosebud.

  Oh, could it open into song,

  How would its rosy heart-leaves tell

  That kindly thoughts are treasured long,

  And loving deeds remembered well;

  And while the grace that Nature gives

  Looks from the gentle downcast eye,

  The fruit, though perished, ever lives,

  The flower, though faded, cannot die!14

  23

  HOME FRONT

  A few weeks after Sarah’s death, Melville wrote to a young woman from Ohio who had visited Broadhall in recent summers and had attended some of the Morewood picnics at the family lake. She had sent him a request for a charity contribution and had addressed her letter to Pittsfield, but it had been forwarded to him at his new address on East Twenty-Sixth Street in New York. Informing her of the change, he wrote of his long stay in the Berkshires as if he had been there on an extended voyage—or, as he put it, a “visit.” Twelve years was a long time to have been a Berkshire castaway: “Owing to my recent return to this, my native town, after a twelve years’ visit in Berkshire, your note was delayed in reaching me.”1

  The move back to New York was only possible because of Lizzie. She had come into money—much more than she had received from the old family doctor. In 1861, at eighty, Lemuel Shaw had died, leaving her a good inheritance for the time—fifteen thousand dollars. More important, not long before his death the judge had used all his considerable legal skill to disentangle Melville from debt and pay off what was left of the farm at Arrowhead. As a result, however, Melville was left with nothing. Judge Shaw managed to arrange things so that Lizzie—for her future well-being after he was gone—took possession of Arrowhead as her own property. By the time of Sarah’s death, the place had been sold to Melville’s brother Allan, and the move to New York was in the works.

  So the Berkshires were home to Melville beginning with the Morewood purchase of Broadhall in 1850 and ending with Sarah’s death in 1863. The last few years had been difficult because Sarah had so often been ill, and Herman was essentially living as a ward of his wife. He had earned nothing since 1860 and had no job in sight. He had to go where Lizzie led him, and she was enjoying her hold on the family budget. In her dry chronology of Melville’s life that she prepared in old age, she writes of 1863 as though she were his banker, not
his wife. “He moved into a house in New York—104 East 26th St bought from his brother Allan giving $7,750 and the Arrowhead estate valued at $3000 and assuming a mortgage of 2000 to Mrs. Thurston which was afterwards paid off by Dr Hayward’s legacy to me of $3000 in May 1864—about $1000 [from] Aunt Priscilla’s legacy was spent in repairs.”2

  After he left the Berkshires to live in his New York townhouse, Melville worked on his Civil War poems for Battle-Pieces, but for many months his heart wasn’t in his work. As the reality of losing Sarah began to sink in, and the grimness of city life impressed itself on him, he didn’t feel like doing anything. He was lonely, but that was now increasingly by choice. As the smoke cleared over the rubble of his career, he had tried in the later part of the 1850s to repair his relations with the Duyckincks, but there wasn’t much they could do for him. Perhaps it was a sign of his own desperation that he had even made the effort to renew the friendship. It was gracious of him to try, and their past differences were quietly buried, though there was no pretending that things could ever be the same again. When Evert asked him to review a book shortly after Sarah’s death, he declined, saying, “I have not spirit enough.”3

  THERE MUST HAVE BEEN MANY TIMES when Melville looked back on the storm that Moby-Dick churned up for him and wondered what it all meant. There can be no question that the sacrifice was enormous. The move back to New York in 1863 brought nothing but greater heartache, at least in the first several years. Once Sarah was no longer in his life, Melville saw his marriage take a decidedly acrimonious turn. There was no escape from the brutal truth of their basic incompatibility. Melville retreated into himself, and everyone suffered.

  Still only in his forties, he was gripped by a simmering rage over the losses he had suffered. He didn’t seem to care much for anything, including his own children by Lizzie. He had never been an attentive father, and now he was an angry one. As they grew older, his sons avoided him, and his daughters were wary of doing anything to provoke him. When his youngest child, Frances, was interviewed in the twentieth century, she was asked, “Did he rail at things in general when he was angry, or were his attacks more personal?” She responded with one word only. “Personal.”4

  Having nowhere to turn, he took out his frustrations on Lizzie. He went from being a chronically preoccupied, often distant husband to a bitter and utterly impossible one. At one stage of his decline in the 1860s, Lizzie’s family begged her to leave Melville, and her brothers were eager to help in any way possible. Because the old judge was no longer in the picture, there was no one who seemed capable of reasoning with Melville.

  A Unitarian minister in New York was asked to help arrange a separation if Lizzie agreed. One of her brothers—Samuel Shaw—told the minister in May 1867, “The thing has resolved itself into the mere question of my sisters willingness to say the word. . . . If you can suggest any plan of action by which the present lamentable state of things can be ended it will be most gratefully received.” As her brother confided, the family was now firmly convinced that Melville had lost his mind, and that the only thing preventing Lizzie from leaving him was her anxiety over the way it would look “in the eyes of the world, of which she has a most exaggerated dread.”5

  Lizzie did seek help from the minister, Dr. Henry Bellows, but only so she could unburden her sorrows to him. A public separation from her husband at this late date was a step too far for this proud daughter of Judge Shaw, but she left no doubt in Dr. Bellows’s mind that her marriage had become a “trial” to her. “And whatever further trial may be before me,” she wrote to him, “I shall feel that your counsel is a strong help to sustain, more perhaps than any other earthly counsel could.”6

  WE CAN ONLY IMAGINE how painful the marriage had become to both husband and wife, and it is probably no coincidence that this turmoil became almost unbearable in the first few years after Melville lost Sarah. He must have felt at times that he had nothing left to live for. There was a hole in his life that no one could fill. On an allowance that Lizzie gave him, he was able to buy books and engravings, but he had no one with whom he could share them. One day in May 1867—at the height of his conflict with Lizzie—he acquired a book of poetry that affected him profoundly, largely because it brought his secret life with Sarah so vividly to mind. It was an old volume of verse translated from the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camões, who inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

  In the introduction, Melville underlined a remark about Camões that shows how much, in his current distress, he was missing Sarah. “Woman was to him as a ministering angel, and for the little joy which he tasted in life, he was indebted to her.” There was no joy with Lizzie, and like many couples who stay together when they should be apart, they were making each other miserable. With every argument, every unkind word, memories of the lost life at Broadhall must have heightened Melville’s fury. It doesn’t excuse it—it simply explains it.

  The poems of Camões brought back all the old arguments for love that Melville had rehearsed in Pierre—the question of whether love is ever wrong, and the magnetic attraction of one lover to the other because of a glance or the sudden turn of a face. It was in Camões’s “Madrigal” that the phrase “sweetest eyes” seemed to recall Sarah for Melville, who marked the poem in his copy:

  And sure if Love be in the right,

  (And was Love ever in the wrong?)

  To thee, my first and sole delight,

  That simple heart must now belong—

  Because thou hast the fairest mien

  And sweetest eyes that e’er were seen!7

  After reading accounts of the Portuguese poet’s career, Melville decided to write his own poem about Camões because he thought their experiences were similar. Some of the facts were questionable, but he was drawn to the idea of Camões as a young seafaring adventurer who tasted love and fame and died with neither. Melville’s words are supposed to describe the neglected writer in his unjust obscurity, but they are really a lament for his own fallen state. They are some of the most beautifully concise lines he ever wrote:

  Vain now thy ardor, vain thy fire,

  Delirium mere, unsound desire;

  Fate’s knife hath ripped thy chorded lyre.

  THE RIFT IN MELVILLE’S MARRIAGE may never have healed, but the turmoil did seem to abate after one of the children died. One day in the late summer of 1867, when the couple continued to be at odds, and the storm around them raged relentlessly, their older son, Malcolm, who was born in the heyday of Melville’s literary success, shot himself in the bedroom of the family’s New York house. He was only eighteen.

  Melville was sobered by this tragedy. His son, he confessed too late, “never gave me a disrespectful word in his life, nor in any way ever failed in filialness.” Gazing down on the boy as he lay dead, and seeing the look of peace on his son’s face—“the ease of a gentle nature”—the father tried to find some comfort to soften the blow of his own failure as a parent. At first the death was ruled a suicide, but it was judged shortly afterward to be an accident—partly because of pressure from the family, all of whom wanted to deny that Malcolm had intended to kill himself.8

  This was the lowest point in the marriage, and both husband and wife must have understood in the aftermath that they had to declare a truce. They couldn’t change themselves or bring Malcolm back or find peace. They could only try to continue their lives without causing further damage. And so Melville retreated to his corner, Lizzie to hers, and they began the long march into an uneasy old age.

  MELVILLE SURVIVED BOTH HIS SONS. The child born in the year that Moby-Dick was published—Stanwix—died of tuberculosis when he was thirty-four, far from home in San Francisco. But both of Melville’s daughters would outlive their father. The older, Elizabeth, suffered from bad health most of her life, and never married. She died in 1908, when she was in her mid-fifties. Only one of Melville’s children would enjoy a long life. Younger daughter Frances married, had four girls, and l
ived into her eighties. By the time she died in 1938, her father’s name would finally be famous again, but she would say that this more celebrated figure was one she didn’t recognize. “I don’t know him in the new light,” she remarked.9

  24

  LETTING GO

  Melville did find employment to fill his later years, but it was nothing he was proud of. At the end of 1866 he accepted the burden of a new job that was an especially humiliating one for a writer of his talent, but he wanted the money. It was a position as a customs officer in New York, earning four dollars a day. It wasn’t such a bad job, but what a fall it signified from the heights of his celebrity, and the high ambitions he had set for himself as a young man.

  When he reported to his first post on the Hudson docks at the foot of a street with a name sure to haunt him with thoughts of lost Dutch-American glory—Gansevoort—one of his fellow officers recognized him, and was astounded to see him forced into taking the job. The man was a writer himself—Richard Henry Stoddard—and could remember meeting Melville many years earlier when the author was at the top of his career. “No American writer,” he recalled, “was more widely known in the late forties and early fifties in his own country and in England than Melville.” For almost the next twenty years the once-acclaimed author would labor in obscurity at his post.1

  Business-minded Lizzie was pleased that her husband had finally been able to stick to a real job and see it through. Because of the money inherited from her family, she and her husband were finally able to live in reasonable comfort. In a letter to a relative on the occasion of Herman’s retirement she wrote glowingly of his success as a customs man: “This month was a good turning-point, completing 19 years of faithful service, during which there has not been a single complaint against him—So he retires honorably of his own accord—He has a great deal [of] unfinished work at his desk which will give him occupation, which together with his love of books will prevent time from hanging heavy on his hands.”2