Melville in Love (13 page)

By the end of the summer, he had found some of that poetry, and he had found love. And now at the end of 1850—looking back
at how far he had come since the previous December with Samuel Rogers—he was wondering whether his own progress from brilliant beginnings would end well, or turn into a disaster. He understood both the plight of the everyman caught in the larger designs of others and the exhilaration of the extraordinary hero aspiring to the highest pinnacle. He could write convincingly of both positions, and warn of the dangers facing both. But could he save himself? Or would his failure simply provide another “feast for vultures”?

In that long winter in the Berkshires, Melville was not the only one in the neighborhood writing an American classic. Over in Lenox, Hawthorne was working on his novel
The House of the Seven Gables,
and he was writing at a Melvillean pace. He began the book in August 1850 and finished it at the end of January. Unlike Melville's marathon with
Moby-Dick,
this literary sprint of Hawthorne's was a relatively painless endeavor. In their snug little house Sophia Hawthorne helped to keep everything running smoothly while her husband wrote in the mornings, and when he appeared at lunch, she and their two small children would welcome him like a hero, with “great rejoicing throughout his kingdom,” as Sophia put it.
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Preoccupied with their books, Hawthorne and Melville saw each other infrequently during the winter. In January, when Melville went to Lenox for a brief visit, he was happy to see that his fellow author was doing well after a storm. “I found him, of course, bur
ied in snow,” Melville wrote to Duyckinck, “& the delightful scenery about him, all wrapped up & tucked away under a napkin, as it were.” After a meal of cold chicken, Melville returned home, but with a promise that Hawthorne would soon visit him at Arrowhead. He was hungry for companionship and yearned to discuss his novel with the older writer over “a bottle of brandy & cigars.” Without Sarah in the neighborhood, he had gone far too long in solitude thinking about art and life.
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When Hawthorne kept putting off the promised visit because of his work, the weather, and other concerns, Melville grew increasingly impatient. Here he was with those six miles separating him from a great American writer with insights into fiction, fame, darkness, and sin, yet weeks were going by without a word between them. He tried to make it clear that there was some urgency on his part. He wrote, half in jest, “Come—no nonsence. If you don't—I will send the Constables after you.” A room at Arrowhead was waiting: “Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire.”
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At last, in mid-March Hawthorne came to Arrowhead for a short stay. The weather was still cold and raw, so the two novelists didn't venture outdoors much, but took shelter in the barn, where they could talk and smoke to their heart's content. Hawthorne found a carpenter's bench to be the best resting place, and there he would sit or lie for hours listening to Melville unload all the many weeks of thoughts he had been holding inside. Occasionally they stepped outside for air, to stretch their legs, and admire “a fine snow-covered prospect of Greylock.” After a couple of days of indulging Melville's need for a sounding board, Hawthorne felt as if he had been at Arrowhead for a week. Recalling Henry David Thoreau's recent book,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,
Hawthorne joked
as he was leaving that he should follow
The House of the Seven Gables
with a new volume called “A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn.”
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His dry wit didn't offend Melville, who would have kept him as a captive audience for a week if he could have. It was an old habit from his naval days to gather with friends on the foretop of the old warship
United States
and talk for hours. On dry land in the Berkshires, the carpenter's bench was the best substitute available for the airy platform high above the ship's decks. As he recalled in
White-Jacket,
“the tops of a frigate are quite spacious and cosy. They are railed in behind so as to form a kind of balcony, very pleasant of a tropical night. From twenty to thirty loungers may agreeably recline there, cushioning themselves on old sails and jackets.” In his imagination, Melville must have spent many a day that winter in the foretop, planning and writing his novel as if from a great height, looking down on the
Pequod
and gazing far away at the sea as his cast of characters sailed along. In truth, it was such a lonely voyage that when Hawthorne finally came to spend a little time with him, he acted like a man who hadn't seen another soul for months.
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There were things about his work that he felt Hawthorne could understand especially well, and in an ideal world, Melville could see himself and his friend as brothers living and working side by side, engaged in endless speculations about the universe. In a burst of enthusiasm one day that spring, he wrote to Hawthorne to share his vision of a tropical eternity in which they would drink champagne and talk “in some little shady corner” until the earth is just “a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity.” Such talk was simply too much for a private man like Hawthorne, and in the coming months he began finding more excuses to keep Melville at a comfortable distance. He didn't crave literary companionship of the kind the younger author
sought. An intense and revealing relationship with another writer was the last thing he needed, and it was too much to expect an author of his stature to be anyone else's sounding board. Nevertheless, that was what Melville tended to want from him. “I know little about you,” wrote Herman, “but something about myself. So I write about myself. . . . Don't trouble yourself about talking. I will do all the writing and visiting and talking myself.” Soon even Melville feared that he had treated his friend too often as a choir expected to sit patiently through another long sermon. In one letter he apologized to Hawthorne: “I am falling into my old foible—preaching.”
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It wasn't really in Melville's nature to bombard others with his thoughts or to seek closer bonds with writers generally. He was almost as private as Hawthorne, and sometimes even as reserved, but when he found the right person who seemed to share his views or sympathize with his aims, he came to life in an explosion of feeling. Once he opened his heart to someone, the force of his personality could be overwhelming. Sophia Hawthorne recognized this and responded to it better than did her husband. “He is an incalculable person,” she wrote of Melville, “full of daring & questions, & with all momentous considerations afloat in the crucible of his mind. He tosses them in, & heats his furnace sevenfold & burns & stirs, & waits for the crystalization with a royal indifference as to what may turn up, only eager for truth, without previous prejudice.”
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In time, Melville came to accept a difficult truth. Much as he admired Hawthorne, their temperaments were too disparate. The author of
The House of the Seven Gables
was not one who shared Melville's notion of diving deep. He was never going to join him in a fearless plunge into the most dangerous waters of the soul. He was always going to keep his head above water. So restrained and aloof
was Hawthorne that Sophia once said of her husband, “He hates to be touched any more than anyone I ever knew.” As a literary craftsman, he was the jeweler working in the quiet back room, while Melville was the sculptor dangling from the side of a massive stone.
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Perhaps one reason the sculptor interested Hawthorne is that, on occasion, he wanted to throw caution to the winds himself and take greater risks. A scene in
The House of the Seven Gables
suggests as much. It takes place at the long window in the old house when a noisy political parade passes by in the street below. Poor Clifford, the sad wreck of a man whom life has treated so unfairly, stands at the window in an agitated state and almost jumps into the middle of the crowd, but his sister and their young cousin Phoebe restrain him. Sounding very much like Melville, Hawthorne says in his narrative voice that Clifford might have been better off to jump. What he has in mind is more in keeping with Melville's metaphorical diving than the real thing: “He needed a shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the world and to himself.” But, of course, Clifford does not take that plunge. Such dives belong in Melville's work, not in
The House of the Seven Gables,
and the best Hawthorne can offer is the recognition that—for those brave enough, and reckless enough—the result might be worth the risk. Then again, Hawthorne adds with his typical good sense, it might simply result in “the great final remedy—death!”
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WHEN, IN APRIL,
M
ELVILLE
WROTE
to Hawthorne about
The House of the Seven Gables,
which had just been published, he began by
praising the book generally, then singled out Clifford's aborted jump as one of the best scenes in the book. It struck a chord with him, as Hawthorne must have known it would. Melville didn't try to interpret it or turn it into a commentary on Hawthorne himself. The book was selling well and getting good reviews, so there wasn't much that Melville could add—except to seize the chance to plead once again for a greater friendship between them. Perhaps thinking of his long separation from the woman he loved, Melville was struck by the fact that his elusive neighbor was so aloof that he might as well be in England. He felt it was necessary to remind Hawthorne that “the architect of the Gables resides only six miles off, and not three thousand miles away, in England, say.”
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Such reminders had little effect. Hawthorne was not going to be William Wordsworth to Melville's Samuel Taylor Coleridge in an American Lake District. He was already thinking that a year in the Berkshires was too much. He was anxious to move. He missed the sea, didn't care much for the snow, hated the bitter cold, and no doubt believed that six miles was too close for comfort with a demanding friend like Melville, who was never subtle in his approach. Melville ended his letter about Hawthorne's new novel with another blunt order: “Walk down one of these mornings and see me. No nonsense; come.”
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It took a while, but Melville began to get the hint that his fellow author preferred to be friendly at a distance. At first he tried to cover his disappointment by pretending that Hawthorne wasn't the only one who could stand aloof. Suddenly he was too busy and too tired to travel even the short distance to Lenox. “I feel completely done up, as the phrase is,” wrote Melville, “and incapable of the long jolting to get to your house and back.” Soon he changed his tone again, going
from feigned weariness to wounded indifference. “Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life.” This strain between the two doesn't fit the usual narrative of their friendship as something so close it was like a love affair. There was a good reason why Melville was finally able to tell Hawthorne to come or to forget it. By the time he wrote that remark, Sarah Morewood had come home from England. The real love affair in his life could finally resume where it had left off.
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IT WOULD TAKE
the rest of the spring and part of the summer to finish
The Whale,
as he was then calling his novel, and he was feeling the pressure not only to get the book out, but to collect some money for his labors. It wasn't going to do any good to have Sarah near him again if he couldn't afford the financial burden of being her neighbor. On April 25, 1851, one week before she returned to America, he wrote to his publisher in New York—Harper & Brothers—asking for an advance on the new work. Lacking any strong sense of the book's prospects, the firm said no, causing a desperate Melville to make his problems worse by going even deeper into debt. On May 1, he quietly borrowed $2,050 from an old family friend, neglecting to tell his wife or father-in-law about it.

Melville spent part of the money on improvements to Arrowhead. A few changes to the house were necessary, but at least one was totally to please his fancy. Unable to afford his tower with a grand lookout toward Broadhall and Greylock, he paid instead to have a covered porch built at the side of his house with a view in the same direction. It would at least give him a place to sit when the weather turned warmer, though some visitors would wonder why he built it facing
north. If he couldn't have a castle top for his perch, Melville could at least fancy himself on some Italian hillside watching the clouds drift by from a place he insisted on calling his “piazza.” A modern visitor can sit there in shadows now and question why anyone would call it by such a name. It's just a porch, with a sloping roof, a narrow floor, and a few wooden steps leading up to it, but Melville was making an effort to cast a more romantic light over his poor substitute for Broadhall, his only foothold in the neighborhood.

In the long period of Sarah's absence, Melville's dreams of her return didn't keep him from taking some comfort in Lizzie's arms. However unhappy their relationship, and however unromantic their overcrowded house, they continued having sex, and—as winter came to a close—Lizzie discovered she was pregnant. For months afterward, the family spoke little of it. With so much debt hanging over him, Melville couldn't have been overjoyed to have another mouth to feed. “Dollars damn me,” he told Hawthorne near the end of his work on
Moby-Dick
. “The malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.” Like Ahab, he was in a race, impatient to overcome all obstacles and capture the greatest prize. What he was after would prove every bit as elusive as the white whale.
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