Melville in Love (11 page)

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 reading
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
M
ELVILLE
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 the 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
.

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

Throughout the long winter of her absence, Melville certainly made a point of picking up his own mail in town, not leaving the task to anyone else in his household. For the first three months he also always insisted on driving his mother, sisters, and wife everywhere in the family wagon or sleigh, even when it took precious time away from his writing. It would seem he didn't want to risk having a letter from England arrive and fall into the wrong hands. Sarah had a real talent for writing letters, and it is a great loss that we have none to Melville. Her casual prose outshines much of her poetry, for it tends to be more direct and vivid. Writing to one of her friends in New York, she described a winter day in the Berkshires as having “a mantle of snow wrapping the hills in a shroud—as it were—taking from them the friendly look they used to wear.” The “bleak north wind” was so strong, “the shutters of our house refuse to remain fastened . . . and bang as if at war with their hinges,—a dismal echo through empty rooms.”
²

There were acceptable reasons for Melville to keep in touch with the Morewoods. His cousin spent the winter at Broadhall acting as caretaker, and Herman could have sent Sarah a few seemingly innocent updates about the house or the farm, relying on their usual lit
erary references to slip more important information into the letters. One sad event at Broadhall that winter almost demanded that he write to Sarah. It was news about the three horses she left behind to await her return in the spring. They had been spooked by a train that ran near the edge of the pasture, and one of them—Black Quake—had raced into the locomotive's path.

Melville blamed his cousin Robert for the horse's death. Robert had been driving a sleigh toward the tracks, with the three horses following close behind, and when he cracked a whip to speed over the rail crossing, they ran after him. Black Quake broke “his leg clean into two pieces,” Melville learned afterward, and didn't survive. The other two were shaken, but would be all right. Knowing the strength of Sarah's bond with her young horse, Melville was the one person who could send her the news in a way that would soften the blow. But simply in recalling the incident in a letter that has come down to us intact—once again to Evert Duyckinck, who seems to have saved everything—Melville began to conjure fond images of Sarah and her horse, recalling that memorable weekend of the costume party when she dressed as saucy Aunt Tabitha, and he was a bride-abducting Turk. That was also the weekend when Sarah rode Black Quake into the dark green wilderness of the Gulf Road—Saturday, August 10.

Soon he was lost in this summer memory. The more he thought about that colt, with its “bounding spirit and full-blooded life,” the more he identified with it. At that point the local farmers had not yet given up hope that Black Quake could be saved, so what came to Melville was a vivid image of the lame colt no longer able to bear “Mrs Morewood on his back.” Suddenly, he realized that the real loss here was one he could understand. He said that what had happened to
the colt was “not one jot less bad than it would be for me.” In other words, as he now saw it, the tragedy for the horse was not merely the broken leg, but the loss of all those future summers in Sarah's company. For a moment he saw himself and the horse as one, and he was sorry to think how that creature “might for many a summer have sported in pastures of red clover & gone cantering merrily along the ‘Gulf Road' with a sprightly Mrs Morewood on his back, patting his neck & lovingly talking to him—considering all this, I say, I really think that a broken leg for him is not one jot less bad than it would be for me.”
³

Here, almost as a coy, throwaway line, Melville was openly admitting that a future without Sarah close to him would be heartbreaking. Duyckinck might have thought he was making some joke about broken legs, but that wasn't the “bad” thing he was “considering.” It was the prospect of losing a long idyllic future in summer pastures at Broadhall, with all those merry rides into the lush countryside, and all the other pleasures he was now missing on a snowy December evening, writing by candlelight, and listening to the wind howl. “Not one jot less bad than it would be for me” was a convoluted and whimsical way of suggesting, “I miss Sarah, and I miss her so much that I'm even going to share my secret tonight with you, Evert Duyckinck, if you pause long enough to think about it.”

This was Melville pointing from the date of his letter, December 13, 1850, backward to August 10, 1850, and then forward to the coming summer of 1851, and imagining how bad that season would be if Sarah didn't return, or if he failed to keep his tenuous hold on Arrowhead and wasn't waiting for her. (He was in a confessional mood that night, volunteering a detailed look at his typical day with the unprovoked question “Do you want to know how I pass my time?”)

THREE DAYS LATER,
on December 16, Melville did something unexpected while he was writing
Moby-Dick
. He stopped the narrative and put himself, along with his moment in time, straight into the passage he was working on. He was in the middle of one of his pedantic chapters, debating whether whales spout water or just vapor, when he suddenly removed the mask of the novelist and stepped forward to announce that he was writing his book at “fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850.” What was the point of doing this if not to remind readers that behind all the impersonal conventions of fiction there is always a real writer looking back at you with bills to pay, dreams to pursue, sorrows to bear? There is no way to know exactly what Melville had on his mind at one that afternoon, but what if the thought wasn't as important as the act of marking the date, as a prisoner might do in a cell for the time of release?
⁴

He was in the grip of something that had to conclude soon—for good or ill. He was on a long, hard voyage to that conclusion, sticking to a grueling schedule that he felt compelled to share with Evert only three days earlier. On reflection, “Do you want to know how I pass my time?” does indeed sound like a question from an inmate trying to fill the days until the sentence is served. It's what might be called the log mentality, natural enough to sailors keeping track of a voyage, but also useful for prisoners. In that study at Arrowhead where he locked himself away for much of the winter, Melville was both a mariner and a prisoner.

Marking the date also highlighted for Melville a one-year anniversary of special interest now that Sarah was abroad. The previous year at this time, he had been visiting the same country where she was now. For most of November and December 1849, he was in Lon
don dealing with publishers and searching for inspiration for his next book. Toward the very end of his stay, he seems to have found the spark for his story of “the Whale fisheries.”

What he was doing now at Arrowhead began the previous December when the work of the greatest English painter of the nineteenth century revealed to him the artistic potential of the mighty leviathan.