Melville in Love (17 page)

Nothing could overcome his firm resolve to be good, no matter how many suggestive poems Sarah sent his way. Her letters to him fill a small folder at the New York Public Library, and the tone is at times so literary that they almost sound like rough drafts of a novel. At a time in New York when an enraged husband might choose to thrash his wife's lover in the street, George must have been stricken with fear when Sarah suddenly sent him a fervent invitation to meet her husband. She made it sound as though they would have an affair, and they would have to inform Rowland. “I shall find very great pleasure in bringing him [Mr. Morewood] to see you. I want you to know him and to understand that I act with his full knowledge and wish and will—a fact which those
who know me
ought to know.” Though an affair was the last thing George wanted, Sarah's letters had to worry him for the damage she might do to his reputation. It would only make sense if he blamed Melville for her unwanted attentions. Herman introduced her to George, and he seemed to be her closest companion in the Berkshires, the one with whom she shared vistas through that spyglass.
¹⁵

Whatever the Duyckinck brothers thought of their old friend Herman after “that excursion to Greylock,” it couldn't have been good. In November, a change in their opinion of Melville seems to have triggered an otherwise inexplicable attack on him in the pages of their influential journal. It would have devastating consequences.

Throughout that emotionally charged summer and into the early autumn of 1851, Melville couldn't see enough of Sarah. There was card playing and dancing at Broadhall, and harvest festivities in the neighborhood. On several occasions, they visited one of the larger lakes in the area, Pontoosuc, where they went boating and fishing. The shoreline was bordered on one side by low hills that stretched toward Greylock, and the blue water sparkled in the sunlight. Melville confided that it was fast becoming one of his favorite places in the Berkshires, telling Sarah “that each time he came there he found the place possessing new charms for him.”
¹

About a mile from the lake was one of her favorite spots, a pretty grove where a huge limestone boulder sat on a much smaller base of rock, balanced there by nature ages ago but looking as though it might tip over at any moment. Sarah loved it for its dramatic effect. Her guests could always be amused on a trip there when she seemed
to defy danger by lying under the overhanging edge of Balance Rock, as it is still called, or by pretending that she could push it over. A friend once described her as rushing up to the boulder “with a merry laugh, declaring she would push the monster from the seat he had kept longer than was right.”
²

Visiting it with Melville and others, she enchanted him by hiding a music box under the rock and acting as if the tune magically flowed from the earth itself. This was the kind of fanciful act that stirred his imagination and set him to thinking of similar wonders in his reading. What came to mind was the story of the Egyptian statue that made a low moaning sound at dawn—a noise almost musical—and was supposedly a monument to an ancient king, Memnon. Listening to Sarah's music box while their friends picnicked, Melville decided to christen the rock Memnon, and to carve that strange word into a nearby tree filled with the names of couples who had been there before them. In this way the name united them and was a clever substitute for inscribing “Herman” and “Sarah” alongside those other lovers.

Caught up in so many vivid scenes from day to day, Melville couldn't help but think of writing about them. This was the greatest story of his life, unfolding before his eyes with both drama and suspense. He could only guess where this story was headed, and he knew that he couldn't afford to tell everything. Because he'd always drawn from his experiences to create his books, here was a sequence of events in a beautiful location that was a narrative gift impossible to ignore. The trick was to hide identities without ruining the drama.

With
Moby-Dick
completed in August, and now awaiting publication in November, Melville could have waited months to start a new book. He wasn't sure how his whaling saga would be received,
and writing books was his only way of making money. Just as Sarah couldn't wait to write about Greylock, so that memorable night was probably the spark that started Melville writing the Berkshire romance that would become his seventh book in six years—
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
.

HE WROTE
PIERRE
with white-hot speed not only because he was in his usual hurry to sell a new book, but because he was chasing the events of his story as he lived them, trying to put them on paper even as fresh dramas hurtled toward him. The basics of his novel were taken straight from his life, but with a major twist that was so unusual and controversial that it threw readers off the track of the real story for more than 150 years.

Without this strange twist, it's a fairly straightforward tale of an idealistic youth whose life is forever changed by his romance with a dark, mysterious beauty. Isabel is an unconventional young woman who lures the budding author Pierre away from his steady girl, the good-hearted Lucy, the uncomplicated daughter of “an early and most cherished friend of Pierre's father.” In other words, Lucy is essentially Judge Shaw's daughter, and Isabel is Sarah. The parallels aren't exact—they never are in good fiction—but the basic arrangement is there, and so are many of the actual elements of character and setting. For most of the book Pierre is torn between these two women, both of whom are devoted to him, and neither of whom he wants to hurt. The recognizable landscape of the Berkshires is featured in the story, with Greylock, the Balance Rock (called the Memnon Stone), and Broadhall and Pittsfield thinly disguised.

Then comes the twist—Isabel is not simply the attractive woman
who seduces the starry-eyed hero, but someone who calls herself his secret half sister, the supposedly illegitimate daughter of an affair his father—now dead—hid from the family for years. By this alteration of his situation in real life Melville fooled almost everyone, changing one kind of forbidden love—adultery, in his case—to the more sensational and sinister suggestion of incest in the novel. In doing so he added a sexual layer that scandalized his readers beyond anything he anticipated. They could confront adultery, but incest was the great unmentionable.

It was also a wonderful red herring. Scholars have scattered in all directions trying to establish whether Melville had a secret sister or even an especially amorous cousin, and every lead has hit a dead end. Undeterred, some have suggested that Melville's mother must have been his forbidden lover or that Isabel is actually a “he”—a Nathaniel Hawthorne in petticoats, disguised in order to hide Melville's secret love for him. There is no question that Herman yearned for a closer relationship with the older writer, but there is also no evidence that he contemplated having a physical relationship with him. For one thing, Hawthorne couldn't bear the idea of such a relationship. Advocates of a supposed love affair between the two writers seem not to have read Hawthorne's tirade in 1851 against men he saw living in close intimacy at a Shaker dormitory that he visited with Melville in the Berkshires. The mere idea of men sharing such close quarters so filled him with horror that he not only recoiled from it but wanted the “disgusting” Shaker men to disappear from the face of the earth. In his journal Hawthorne lashed out at the group: “Their utter and systematic lack of privacy; their close junction of man with man, and supervision of one man over another—it is hateful and disgusting to think of; and the
sooner the sect is extinct the better—a consummation which, I am happy to hear, is thought to be not a great many years distant.”
³

Once Sarah's place is established in Melville's story,
Pierre
isn't much of a mystery. Even filtered through the murky lens of its incest theme, Isabel's spellbinding effect on Pierre is the same as Sarah's hold on Melville. The story is like an eruption, a great outpouring of emotion after long delay. At last Melville found a way to explain the transformation in his life that had abruptly caused him to settle in the Berkshires, sent him deeply into debt, strained his marriage, and inspired in
Moby-Dick
the best book he would ever write
.

REDUCED TO THE
ESSENTIALS
of its love triangle and its hero's literary struggles,
Pierre
brings to life Melville's mood of desperation and exhilaration in this period. Like him, his hero is haunted by the “beautiful sad-eyed girl” with her “long, dark locks of mournful hair.” The combination of her “dark, regal” bearing and mysterious sensuality have an electric effect. Rising to poetic heights equal to those of
Moby-Dick,
Melville describes his heroine as a kind of storm rising on the horizon and rapidly engulfing his hero in a burst of overwhelming energy. “She seemed molded from fire and air, and vivified at some Voltaic pile of August thunder-clouds heaped against the sunset.”
⁴

There was no one like Isabel in the author's life except Sarah. What Melville says of Pierre's literary labors was also true of his: “He seems to have directly plagiarized from his own experiences to fill out the mood of his apparent author-hero.” As Pierre's emotional life becomes increasingly complicated—with Lucy the “good angel” on the side of right and society, and Isabel the supposedly
“bad angel” on the side of love and desire—the ambitious young writer vows “to give the world a book, which the world should hail with surprise and delight.”
⁵

Three overwhelming problems confront Isabel and Pierre. They can surrender to love, but sex is taboo; they have a secret they relish, but can't afford to reveal; and they yearn to escape the morality that has so restricted their freedom, but they can't. Standing in their way is what Sarah had called the “iron rule” that interferes with “our best and purest feelings.” They are trapped whichever way they turn. Secrecy becomes a weapon they can employ to confuse the moralists determined to condemn them. “The deceiving of others” must be done, they agree, “for their and our united good.” Creating an invisible fortress of secrecy around them, Pierre becomes her faithful knight, vowing to “champion Isabel, through all conceivable contingencies of Time and Chance.” Behind this fortress, they allow themselves slowly to test the limits of what is wrong and right.
⁶

The easy way out for Pierre is to walk away from what is forbidden and accept the safe love of Lucy, the well-bred woman from a respectable family. Though Lucy has her appeal, Isabel shimmers in his eyes with “sparkling electricity” and touches the core of his being. The forbidden nature of their attraction makes it defiant in a way that Pierre finds endlessly thrilling. When Isabel vows not to abide by any “terms from the common world,” there is almost a kind of swoon in the narrative. There aren't any whales in sight or lashing gales on an open sea, but Melville writes of this moment as though describing the emergence of some mythic creature from the waves. In her proud defiance even Isabel's hair is “scornful”—“Her changed attitude of beautiful audacity; her long scornful hair, that trailed out a disheveled banner; her wonderful transfigured eyes,
in which some meteors seemed playing up; all this now seemed to Pierre the work of an invisible enchanter. Transformed she stood before him; and Pierre, bowing low over to her, owned that irrespective, darting majesty of humanity, which can be majestical and menacing in woman as in man.” As Dr. Henry Murray noted long ago, “Isabel may be roughly correlated with the ‘ungraspable phantom of life' reflected in the sea; and Lucy with the securities, comforts, and consolations of land.”
⁷

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
I
SABEL
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.