Melville in Love (24 page)

The bearded old man returning home from Central Park with his young granddaughter didn't attract any notice as he walked down Fifth Avenue. He was about seventy, wore a plain blue suit, and moved at a steady pace, though with the help of a cane. Under a soft black hat his keen, watchful eyes studied the crowds who surged past him on the busy street, none of them aware that this quiet, unassuming grandfather was Herman Melville, the once-popular author.

Though people remembered
Typee,
no one knew much about
Moby-Dick
. It was a heavy old book from the lost age of sailing ships that told the story of harpooners in small boats sent to kill whales. Now coal and petroleum were fueling America's rise in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and
Moby-Dick
was largely forgotten. Even the little girl at his side, Eleanor—his first granddaughter, the child of Frances Melville—didn't think of him in those days as an author. It wasn't clear what he did each day in the dark study of
the old house at 104 East Twenty-Sixth Street, with its big mahogany desk and sagging shelves of books. “His own room was a place of mystery and awe to me,” she would recall. “There I never ventured unless invited by him.” But she knew early on that his younger years had been full of strange and magical experiences, and that he had roamed far and wide.

On their return from these outings together he would pause in the front hall and stare at an engraving of the Bay of Naples. She never forgot the odd, almost dreamlike way that he would point at it with his cane and say, “See the little boats sailing hither and thither.” Words like
thither
seemed almost exotic to her when he spoke them, but that was long before she knew that one of his books was called
Mardi: And a Voyage Thither
. She was spellbound whenever he put her on his lap and told her “wild tales of cannibals and tropic isles.” When he was finished with his storytelling, she liked to tease him by pulling his beard, and he obliged, though she squeezed it hard, finding it “firm and wiry to the grasp.”
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The old fires that used to rage in his heart had subsided. He seemed reasonably at peace, at least on the outside. Occasionally, a young admirer who had stumbled across one of his old books in a dusty shop would show up at East Twenty-Sixth Street to pay homage to the forgotten genius. When he retired from the government in 1886, one of the papers in New York remarked on the news: “The author is generally supposed to be dead. He has, indeed, been buried in a government office.” A reporter paid him a call and found the old man to be “a genial, pleasant fellow, who, after all his wanderings, loves to stay at home.”
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After retiring, Melville had one last chance to add another treasure to his prose works. At his desk in his study, he kept a quotation
from Friedrich von Schiller: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.” In his story of the life and death at sea of a simple young British sailor—the short work that would become
Billy Budd
—Melville set out to explore what it meant to leave behind in life a defining moment of greatness. In
Moby-Dick
it is the awful wreckage of Ahab's crazed voyage that takes the breath away. In
Billy Budd
it is the notion that some acts of sacrifice are so awe-inspiring that whatever the cost—however terrible the wreckage—they are worth it.

Billy goes bravely to his execution for killing a man on his ship who wronged him. Though his victim hated him and plotted to ruin him with false accusations, Billy's impulsive killing of the man is still murder and—according to the unyielding rules of the British Admiralty—the young man must be put to death. Accordingly, he is hanged from the mainyard, and afterward his body is sewn into his hammock and cast overboard. “The criminal paid the penalty of his crime,” says a fictional naval publication that Melville cites in the aftermath of Billy's death. It is a severe, though correct, judgment.

Of course, the sailor is essentially an innocent man provoked into defending his honor. He never meant to kill his accuser when he impulsively lashed out and struck him. All the same, the law insists on sacrificing him to maintain its integrity, and the commander of Billy's ship—Captain Vere—will not do what his name suggests. He will not veer off course from the straight-and-narrow path of the law. It is his duty to hang Billy, and so he does. But whereas Captain Vere fails to rise to the occasion and sacrifice himself to save Billy, the young man proves with grace and dignity that he is better than the law that condemns him. The very simplicity of his character is his chief adornment as he embraces his sacrifice and dies like a hero instead of the criminal he is supposed to be in the eyes of the law.

As this late masterpiece proves, time wasn't “hanging heavy” on Melville's hands in retirement, as his wife sometimes feared. He was still wrestling with old questions and was still trying to come to terms with his own sacrifice on the altar of art. The world had condemned him for his supposed failures, and though his fate wasn't to die by a shot or at the end of a rope, he surely sacrificed his happiness and his family's happiness to write books that—as far as he could tell in the late 1880s—were mostly unread, and loved by only a few.

If he had learned anything from his career, it was that noble endeavors often suffer neglect and misunderstanding. Whatever whale he had been chasing in the most feverish and tumultuous part of his life, he had long ago lost track of it as it slipped beneath a wave and disappeared. The biggest question was always, Was it worth it? As an imperfect, indirect answer,
Billy Budd
offers a valiant yes. It is a powerfully imagined story that shows an old master back at work with undiminished powers. The manuscript is full of revisions and alterations, and he wouldn't have lavished so much care on it if he had not believed that his words still mattered. It was one last act of faith in a career that most people assumed was dead and buried. There were no more mad voyages to take, just one last story to tell in his best manner.

Uncomplaining and unafraid, Billy may die violently, but the moment of his execution is oddly quiet and peaceful. Instead of the all-consuming vortex swirling downward as it does in
Moby-Dick,
Melville offers a vision of Billy rising into a brilliant light. The rope that kills him also seems to deliver him into some greater realm. “Watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.” It is not, by any means, a vision of simple deliverance. The light may be there, high overhead, but Billy is still suspended by the neck, a sacrificial victim strangled
like an animal. What is significant is that, at his death, he stares into an engulfing, frightening darkness as if it were light. That is his glory, his triumph over an uncomprehending world.

The fictional Billy Budd becomes a sacred hero to sailors. They even seek out relics. The spar from which Billy was hanged is so venerated among sailors that “a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross.” He is no savior, but the sailors do admire his example, knowing that they might face a similar crisis one day, and that their resting place might be at the bottom of a deep ocean far from home. Vulnerable and superstitious, the men on those old sailing ships needed all the comfort they could find in their small keepsakes. Billy's relics were silent witnesses to courage.

THE MANUSCRIPT OF
B
ILLY
B
UDD
became something of a relic itself before its posthumous publication. When Melville died at home in New York on September 28, 1891—at the age of seventy-two—the story was among his papers, still needing further work but complete enough for publication. It was in such a confusing state that Lizzie wasn't sure how to deal with it, and at some point it was stored away in an old tin box. After Lizzie died in 1906, the manuscript moved around among family members until it came to rest in an attic of the New Jersey home belonging to his only married daughter, Frances. The box and its contents stayed in that attic for a decade, dust everywhere, and there was not much interest from the outside world in saving the literary remains of one Herman Melville.

Almost thirty years after he died, his granddaughter Eleanor rescued the forgotten manuscript that would help to bolster Melville's reputation in the twentieth century. Her mother allowed her
to retrieve it from the attic, and to keep it in her possession. In 1919, when Eleanor was thirty-seven, a young scholar from Columbia University—Raymond Weaver—came to her looking for help with a biography he intended to write of the novelist, and she surprised him by revealing that her grandfather had left behind a substantial manuscript. As relics go, it was in good shape, but Weaver found it hard to determine the correct arrangement of the various parts. Though his edition of
Billy Budd
was far from perfect, its publication in 1924 helped to restore Melville's reputation, as did Weaver's biography of the writer, which came out in 1921.

Disillusioned, alienated, bitter—Melville was a genius just right for adoration from the readers of the next two centuries. His reputation has remained high ever since, his works having found a new generation of admirers in the 1920s.
Moby-Dick
was the great beneficiary of this revival. Survivors of the horrors of the First World War—the “Lost Generation”—didn't have any trouble understanding how Captain Ahab's dark battle against a monstrous foe could become an all-consuming descent into madness and destruction.

The Melville revival was a little slow getting off the ground in America, but British readers quickly rallied to the cause, and praise for the forgotten author poured from the London press. In 1927 the British novelist E. M. Forster was among the earliest critics to argue for the brilliance of
Billy Budd
. In his landmark work
Aspects of the Novel,
he treated the story as if the author's genius had always been apparent. “
Billy Budd
is a remote unearthly episode,” wrote Forster, “but it is a song not without words, and should be read both for its own beauty and as an introduction to more difficult works. . . . Melville—after the initial roughness of his realism—reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending
our own that they are undistinguishable from glory.” The glory Melville had sought was finally his. Now the laurel wreath came from one of Britain's most influential literary voices.
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American writers soon chimed in with their tributes to Melville, including praise from a young author of thirty who was at the very start of his career as a novelist. In July 1927 the
Chicago Tribune
asked William Faulkner if he could name a book he wished he had written. He chose
Moby-Dick
and went into flights of fancy about its “Greek-like” beauty, but what he enjoyed most was the evocative quality of Melville's whale. “There's magic in the very word, A White Whale,” said Faulkner. “White is a grand word, like a crash of massed trumpets; and leviathan himself has a kind of placid blundering majesty in his name.”
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Though born several years after Melville's death, Faulkner could hear the author's music loud and clear. Still resounding, the trumpets of
Moby-Dick
play on. But all the praise heaped on Melville in the last hundred years came so late that it wasn't easy to reconstruct the old story of a young author in love. It was much more convenient to assume that
Moby-Dick
's origins were forever lost in forgotten yarns of the sea, or in some obscure rage suffered by a writer who would mysteriously decline into a kind of madness. But all the while, as decades came and went, the outlines of Melville's past in the Berkshires slowly began to take shape. The story of Sarah and Herman has finally emerged from the shadows, thanks to generations of scholars uncovering the detailed information on which this book has been built. Like
Moby-Dick
itself, the love story stubbornly refused to die.

On a cold Sunday morning in Elizabeth, New Jersey, an old man stood unsteadily beside a pew at the Christ Episcopal Church, trying to catch his breath. The service had started and all eyes were on the front of the church. Then, there was a loud moan, and every head turned to see the old man fall to the floor. He was carried to the vestibule and efforts were made to revive him. But he was gone, dead of a heart attack at eighty-two.

It had been more than half a century since the English-born John Rowland Morewood had married his young Dutch girl from New Jersey and settled her in the house of her dreams in the Berkshires. Now he lived alone, having retired and moved to Elizabeth, where he had some minor business interests. His fortune of earlier years was much diminished. “He was very wealthy at one time,” the New York
World
remarked in its report of his death. There was no mention of his wife, who had been gone for forty years and was mostly forgotten. Two children were said to survive him, Mrs. Anne Lathers and Mr. William B. Morewood. A third child—Alfred—had died at home at the young age of thirty-two.
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They buried Rowland under a large white cross in the Pittsfield Cemetery, beside Alfred and Sarah Anne. The passage of time has
left all the stones in bad shape, but most especially Sarah's, which has broken in half so that one part rests against the other, and the name and dates are hard to make out. Meanwhile, Melville and his wife are spending eternity in the Bronx, where they are buried at Woodlawn Cemetery. Messages from admirers often sit on the top of Herman's headstone, anchored by rocks.

Thanks to history enthusiasts in Pittsfield, Sarah Morewood is no longer an unfamiliar name to many local people. Everyone knows the country club, and the fact that the Morewoods used to own the whole spread on the south side of town is a matter of some curiosity. In 2006 the historical society gave twilight tours of the cemetery, and Sarah's crumbling grave was one of the stops. About seventy people showed up one summer night to see where—as the local paper put it—“coquettish socialite Morewood” was buried. And, strange to say, the highlight of one of these evenings was an appearance by Sarah herself. Not a ghost saying, “Let go,” to a bearded stranger in the grip of an obsession. Just a local woman named Judy Daly who was wandering the grounds in costume. Someone had the inspiration to send out several actors dressed as departed figures from Pittsfield's history, each giving a little talk beside the grave of the famous person. How charming. Sarah would have loved it. One last costume party on a summer night in the Berkshires.
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