Melville in Love (16 page)

As mountaintops go, Greylock's is rather tame—at least in summer. The summit is broad with lots of room to wander from side to side for different views. Some of the slopes are gentle enough to encourage cautious strolls near the edge of the mountain. What mere photos can't convey is the sense at the top of standing in a snow globe at rest—a tranquil, watery atmosphere of blue and white where everything around the mountain seems to be floating in and out of the hazy distance. The wide grandeur of the green countryside below also seems in movement, changing with the light. When Henry David Thoreau spent the night here in July 1844, he felt that he was immersed in “an undulating country of clouds. . . . A country as we might see in dreams.”
¹

It can be exhilarating to stand at the top in high summer, the air cool and pungent with the smell of balsam. When darkness falls, the light fades slowly as the horizon goes gray and then black. Modern
climbers can stay overnight at a lodge with all the comforts of the world below, but in Melville's day the only shelter was a ramshackle observatory with rough places for sleeping that brought to mind the comfort of a hayloft. It was exactly what Sarah was hoping for. She loved the rustic feel of the structure, and she was in awe of the view, which was all the more impressive to those of her time, who were born long before anyone could admire the landscape from an aircraft window.

Far from exhausted by the ascent, Sarah reveled in it, stopping frequently to admire the views and the vegetation, and to gather wildflowers. By the time everyone reached the summit, the sun was going down and a summer mist was hanging over the rugged expanse below, adding—said Sarah—“beauty to what was already too beautiful for description.” Their evening meal was taken in the observatory (Sarah called it the Tower), with “brandy cherries” served as a special treat. Melville—by far the strongest in the group—chopped wood for a large fire outside, and everyone gathered around it to warm themselves. Looking up, they watched the summer moon—“full and red”—rise “more majestically than usual.” The whole party stayed up until midnight, talking and drinking champagne, with extra supplies of rum and port wine. Then they gathered in the observatory to sleep under buffalo robes left behind in the winter. A candle made from the oil of a sperm whale was placed in a champagne bottle to provide a little light, but it flickered out long before dawn.

Soon many in the group were sound asleep, but not Sarah and Melville, who stayed up all night. They were among the few who were “too merry for sleep,” as she put it. Her laughter kept waking up Evert Duyckinck, who muttered wittily, “Sleep no more, Morewood has murdered sleep.” Casting her gaze across the awkward forms of
her slumbering friends, Sarah liked the unguarded, casual atmosphere of the night, and later wrote of it, “How absurd it is, when parties go on such wild excursions as this one was, to expect reserve, or any of the etiquette of refined life.”
²

After so much excitement and drinking Sarah and Herman didn't spend this romantic summer night at the top of a mountain making polite conversation. They did what would have come naturally to two people in love, taking advantage of the late hour and the darkness to enjoy a passionate bond that had been growing for more than a year. This was their reward for all the months they had endured apart, and for the book that Melville had created in her absence with Greylock always in view. Herman was certainly keyed up for this moment. He had been doing his best throughout the trip to show off his virility, as if that were necessary, and Sarah had taken careful note of his various feats of strength, especially when he quickly climbed a tree on the way up to signal to the other half of their group. Describing this scene later in her essay for Smith's book, she made a point of capturing the sheer joy of Melville's antics: “Suddenly we are startled by shouts which echo through the wood like the yells of the red men, and one of our party, with the agility of a well trained sailor (as he was) soon ascends the trunk of a tall tree, and from a seat which appears to us dangerously insecure, echoes shout for shout, till the remaining few of our party . . . make their appearance.”
³

All this manly exertion likely filled Sarah with amorous thoughts. After Melville built the fire at the summit, she grew excited as she watched the flames flicker across the faces of her party. The fire reminded her of those moments of reverie that Rev. John Todd had warned would unduly stimulate the mind to impure thoughts, and of the competing author (“Ik Marvel”) whose
Reveries of a Bachelor
advised surrendering to temptation. “So a large fire is lighted under a giant stump,” she recalled in her essay, “and we gather about it, each one indulging, like Ik Marvel, in his own reveries.”
⁴

At the end of her essay Sarah cleared up any doubts about her state of mind on the mountain that night when she lamented having to leave it the next day. If she had wanted to play it safe, she could have said Greylock was an Eden, and that she had hated to see a perfect adventure come to a close. Her night in Melville's company brought to mind something more sexually thrilling than an innocent Adam and Eve. What she had in mind was a biblical place so notorious that even the vaguest reference to it was sure to rattle Pittsfield to the core. The wonder is that she talked Smith into allowing her to compare her night on Greylock with a night in Sodom. Confessing that on her morning descent she kept looking back at the mountain, Sarah wrote in
Taghconic
that she didn't want to leave because what she had enjoyed on the summit was a kind of freedom forbidden in the world below, with its “iron rule” of morality interfering with “our best and purest feelings.” On her way down the mountain, she wrote, she felt “like Lot's wife, casting many a lingering look behind.”
⁵

In a region once dominated by the strict code of Puritan demagogues, this was a stunningly rebellious note of blasphemy to outdo anything close to it in
Moby-Dick
.

Like the woman turned to a pillar of salt for looking back longingly at sinful Sodom before it was obliterated, Sarah was refusing to ignore pleasures simply because they violated laws or commandments. She was willing to boast of her defiance at a time when no woman of her standing would ever have dreamed of comparing herself to Lot's wife. As Ahab says, “Thy right worship is defiance.”
⁶

Obviously, the new mistress of Broadhall was as unashamedly
forward as Hawthorne was reticent and aloof. She didn't live six miles away from the most handsome man in the neighborhood—she was six minutes away on horseback. Sarah was emboldened by Herman, and her sympathy and understanding inspired him in turn to share her defiance, attacking religion, authority, and civilization itself with far more force and spirit than ever before. It's partly why he felt that he could make a proud boast of his own to the author of
The Scarlet Letter,
telling him that the forthcoming
Moby-Dick
was not only a “wicked” book, but one with a secret motto celebrating baptism in the name of the devil (“in nomine diaboli”). Hawthorne must have thought such talk was mere bluster or a sailor's rant, but Sarah knew intimately the depth of Melville's dissatisfaction with the well-ordered, self-satisfied world that would condemn him for loving her, and for wanting to write books undermining its values.
⁷

In his anger and frustration, Melville wanted both to succeed and to spurn success. He hated debt, but couldn't escape it. He lived like a ghost in his own cramped home all winter, but burst into life the moment Sarah returned. His wife was pregnant, but he would rather spend the night on a mountain than in bed with Lizzie. Though he needed her father's money to live, he didn't like admitting it, and increasingly resented it. All these contradictory urges and circumstances were becoming harder to manage except when he could escape them with Sarah. In the weeks after “that excursion to Greylock,” the couple turned their August night on the mountain into a glowing example of the freedom they craved, the ultimate escape from family burdens and career disappointments. The experience became, said Sarah, a “shrine for memory to return and refresh itself at, when cares and trials make us weary.” To Evert's brother, George Duyckinck, Sarah reported that she and Melville were still reliving the experience
on the mountain: “Greylock is not forgotten here but often recalled in an amusing way—by Mr Herman or myself—In some of our long walks we have taken a spyglass with us so as to bring nearer to us the Tower and its associations.”
⁸

WITH THAT SPYGLASS
tucked under his arm, Melville could indeed think that he had arrived in the Berkshires by sea and was a castaway again, and with Sarah at his side to explore their paradise, rather than Fayaway. Confiding such intimate information to the incorruptible George was part of the fun of being “wicked” together. Just as Sarah liked to tease upright men like Dr. Holmes with her beauty and charm, and to befriend wayward clergymen like Rev. Entler, so she would in the months after Greylock try to captivate poor George.

It was easy to shock him, and she loved doing it. He was almost too easy to fool. A friend once described him as “meek” and “guileless,” and “detesting wrong & deceit.” One day Sarah made a passionate plea to George to stop shaking her hand limply when they met and to offer “a warmer grasp.” Knowing that even such mild teasing would upset him, she wrote gleefully, “[I] can almost see how shocked you are looking while reading this letter.”
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At first George seemed to misunderstand the nature of her attentions, responding by sending her religious books for study and stiffly offering them to her in a tortured rhetorical question: “Will Mrs Morewood please accept the accompanying little volumes . . . as a slight memento of Greylock and mark of heartfelt sympathy respect and gratitude [?]” In time he realized that she was trouble, and he did his best to avoid her. “You refused to call on me on Monday,” she wrote indignantly after he kept finding excuses not to see her in New
York. Another letter began, “I cannot at all understand the reasons why you treat my letters with Silence and I am deeply pained that you do so.”
¹⁰

Dr. Holmes had a theory for why Sarah was so provocative. In the sexist thinking of the time, he concluded that his fictional Elsie Venner was dangerously alluring simply because she couldn't be otherwise. It was in her nature, as if she had been poisoned at birth by some slow-acting venom. Holmes wanted to hate the sin and love the sinner, turning his heroine into “a proper object of divine pity, and not of divine wrath.” A schoolmistress in his novel says of Elsie, “Women's love is fierce enough, if it once gets the mastery of them, always; but this poor girl does not know what to do with a passion.” No doubt Sarah would have argued that she was capable of managing her passions, and she tried to prove it in loving Melville. When a sympathetic but innocent male character asks Elsie what he can do to help her, she has a simple answer: “Love me.” Yet in her small town—with all the complications and entanglements of marriage and courtship—it is too much to ask of any man already spoken for.
¹¹

Toying with respectable George may have been a game that both Sarah and Melville enjoyed. George's oldest friend was William Allen Butler, the man whose bride Herman “kidnapped” the previous summer. Just as Butler was led on a wild chase, so George would find himself pursued to laughable extremes by Sarah. Valiantly he resisted, and not only with her, but with every woman who entered his life. He wouldn't accept Sarah's invitations to the Berkshires and played hide-and-seek from her in New York. He wasn't experienced enough with women to know whether Sarah was playing with him or setting a more serious romantic trap. Everyone knew that his only serious
interest was his faith. As a friend once said of George, “Everything about him proclaimed his religion to be
life
. . . devotion forming an essential part of his disposition.”
¹²

To deflect attention from her relationship with Melville, Sarah would soon find it convenient—and probably amusing—to pretend with Herman's sisters that banal George was the only man for her. The credulous sisters and their sanctimonious mother swallowed the bait entirely, and began worrying that she would somehow compromise her honor with young Duyckinck. If nothing else, this ruse shows how completely the family misjudged their own Herman, believing that the spirited Mrs. Morewood saw nothing in him, but everything in a pallid character like George.

What she really wanted all along from the young man—who was only a month her junior—was his help in getting her poems published in New York. She expected him to take her seriously as a poet and to keep her informed of the latest book news and literary events. He rudely dismissed her early efforts to send him anything. In a letter beginning “My dear Sir,” she responded politely, “I do not send you the verses I wrote you about because you told me not to trouble myself in so doing. It was well you told me in time—else I might have inflicted upon you more reading than would have been agreeable to you.”
¹³

It was when George responded so coldly to her verses that she began writing to him more warmly, hoping to win over his heart if not his head. Cleverly, she filled her letters with lush descriptions of the natural world to show off her poetic talents even when he wouldn't look at her actual poetry. When she read Evert's remark in the
Literary World
that “we hold every production of the mind to be of interest, like a collection of minerals,” she promptly quoted it back to George and suggested that her letters were worth collecting, too.
¹⁴