Melville in Love (4 page)

In the heart of Boston's most exclusive district, at the very top of Beacon Hill, is a large townhouse with an enormous arched doorway of heavy stone that looks like an entrance to a jail or a bank vault. In a neighborhood that Henry James called “the solid
seat
of everything,” this house—Number 49—seems as if it began life as a fortress and only gradually came to resemble the other comfortable but very solid homes on Mount Vernon Street. For two hundred years the rich and powerful have been affirming their success by buying houses in this long thoroughfare that begins near the Charles River and rises all the way to the back of the State House. In Melville's time there was no more powerful resident of this street than the man who owned Number 49, Lemuel Shaw, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
¹

Shaw's many friends regarded him as the greatest man in Boston. A future United States senator from Massachusetts would recall
that Judge Shaw was “venerated as if he were a demi-god.” People saw him as a model of judicial integrity and fairness, a solid defender of the law with a gruff, no-nonsense manner but a soft heart when compassion demanded it. He had no patience for insincerity in his courtroom and wouldn't hesitate to use his booming voice to silence upstart lawyers trying to sway him with theatrics. When an officious attorney waved a book in front of him, crying, “Look at the statutes, Your Honor, look at the statutes,” the judge thundered, “Look at them yourself, sir.”
²

When he was offended, Judge Shaw made an expression not unlike that of an angry bloodhound. Heavy and broad-shouldered, he had a big, jowly face with a prominent nose and shaggy brow. With his spectacles balanced on the tip of his nose, he could glower at an impertinent lawyer and stop him midsentence with a low rumbling of displeasure. One day, an attorney who had frequently been admonished by Shaw was seen walking a large dog on a leash and was asked where he was going. “Down to the Supreme Court,” he replied. “I thought I would show him the Chief Justice so as to teach him to growl.”
³

At his home in his spacious brick townhouse, this mighty bulwark of justice could act more like a sleepy, harmless spaniel. An avid reader with a taste for history, he was most at ease in the warm comfort of his second-floor study, with long shelves of books on every wall. He liked the eighteenth century—he was born in 1781—and was fond of his Hogarth engravings and of the evenings he spent playing whist, the fashionable card game of his youth. His second wife—Hope—doted on him and even put aside her religious scruples to play cards with him late at night before Sunday services the next morning. When he had finished with the serious work of the day, his
voice rang through the house as he playfully commanded his wife to join him for cards. “Hope, come here and have a game,” he would shout.
⁴

He was especially indulgent toward the only daughter among his four children, Elizabeth. There was a son by his first wife, who had died giving birth to Lizzie—as she was known in the family—and two more sons by his second wife. He was always generous to his daughter. When he gave a coming-out party for her, the very best of Boston society showed up—two hundred in all—and he spared no expense for the proud occasion. He hired musicians, took up the carpets for dancing, and spent lavishly on the food and drink. There was champagne, claret, and sherry, with ham, pâté, and oysters served three ways (scalloped, stewed, and fried), and then cakes, ices, and truffles for dessert. He could afford such extravagance. Before becoming chief justice in 1830, he had been one of New England's most successful lawyers, and had amassed a tidy fortune of one hundred thousand dollars.

Because of his wealth, his daughter should have had her pick of Boston's most eligible bachelors, but she was a quiet, unassuming young woman who seemed happy living in her father's large shadow. Refined and dutiful, with a plain face and a prominent nose too much like her father's, she didn't have a reputation for turning heads. She seemed most likely to marry a hardworking but unexceptional lawyer or schoolteacher.

Given his background as a largely self-educated man who had become famous for paddling around a Pacific island with a nude “savage,” Melville wasn't the logical choice for Judge Shaw's daughter. But marry her he did in August 1847, at the height of his new fame, and with her father's fond approval. She was a far cry
from the dark romantic maiden that readers of
Typee
might have expected their author to wed.

FANNY APPLETON LONGFELLOW—
a great beauty of Beacon Hill who visited the Berkshires with her husband, the poet—was astounded when she heard of Melville's marriage. She had read
Typee,
and as a former neighbor of the Shaw family she knew all about the judge and his daughter. In private she remarked of Herman and Lizzie, “After his flirtations with South Sea beauties it is a peculiar choice (in her).” No doubt many others thought the same. In temperament and intellect, the couple had little in common. Elizabeth was uncomplicated, practical, and straightforward, with few interests beyond friends and family. She wasn't artistic or literary, didn't seem to care much for travel, and rarely stood out in a crowd.
⁵

For those who knew little about the bride except her name, the match seemed a fairy tale in the making. Far away on the shores of Lake Michigan, the
Chicago Tribune
took the news of the marriage as the final proof that the celebrated writer was leading a charmed life. “Five years ago Herman Melville was a sailor before the mast in a South Sea whaler, a fugitive, and a prisoner. Now he is a famous author, ‘the Phoenix of modern voyagers,' and has just been married to a daughter of the Chief Justice of the State of Massachusetts. The novelist never imagined a series of more romantic adventures than these events of real life.”
⁶

The truth is that the marriage came about largely because the Shaw and Melville families had been connected for many years. In his youth the judge had been in love with one of Melville's aunts. She had died before they could marry, but he had remained a friend of
the family ever since, and had been especially close to Herman's father, Allan. Like his brother Thomas, Allan was good at losing money faster than he could make it, and he sometimes turned to his friend Lemuel Shaw for legal advice and other assistance. But no one could save Allan from financial disaster.

Urbane, kindhearted, and ambitious, Allan had once been a prosperous merchant in New York, importing goods from France, where he traveled widely. He gave his wife, Maria Gansevoort, and their large family—which grew to include four boys and four girls—a comfortable life in a series of well-furnished Manhattan homes. But with merciless speed his business collapsed under too much debt, and he was forced into bankruptcy. Herman was only ten when his father's troubles began.

Allan tried to revive his fortunes in Albany, his wife's hometown, but he continued struggling to pay his bills. Two years later—broken and humiliated—he died after a short illness. He was only forty-nine. The family fell on hard times, Herman left school to work in an Albany bank, and life was never the same. The proud, determined Maria, whose ancestors were Dutch gentry, settled into a long widowhood and did her best to care for her family. “Oh the loneliness,” she would later say, “the emptiness of this world when a woman has buried the husband of her youth & is left alone to bring up their children.”
⁷

A domineering, self-righteous figure in her family, Maria expected her children and other relatives to provide for her. She used her religious faith to instill guilt not only in her children, but also in the heart of her family's most generous benefactor—Judge Shaw. Pleas to him for help were accompanied by Maria's reminders that “the sincere prayers of the Widow & Children shall ascend for your
repose here & hereafter.” Herman grew up regarding the judge as something of a father figure, so Lizzie Shaw was almost like a cousin, and the two had met long ago.
⁸

It is impossible to gauge the depth of Melville's feelings for his bride. No letters survive that would provide some glimpse into his heart. He and his family lost or destroyed so many of his letters that only one survives from him to the woman who was his wife for more than forty years, and it is only a routine item of little interest. Any trace of the dreamy, romantic side of the young man who had run off to sea is hard to find in the author who agreed to wed the judge's daughter. In settling for the unspectacular Lizzie as his wife, the promising new writer was apparently willing to forgo an American Fayaway for the security of a generous father-in-law with influence and high standing in society.

He had already used his connection with the judge to promote
Typee
. Anticipating that many critics would question the more sensational events in his first book, he drew attention to his relationship with the great man of the law by dedicating the book to him, hoping that the older man's sterling reputation would lend his tale some credibility. Following the title page, this prominent tribute appeared in the American edition of
Typee
: “To LEMUEL SHAW, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this little work is gratefully inscribed by the author.” (The British edition substituted “affectionately” for “gratefully.”) The judge was flattered, and presumably Melville penciled this in with Judge Shaw's permission. Because Shaw cared about language, loved books, and had been kind to the Melville family, it made sense for Herman to seek a little protection behind the judge's very large shield of integrity. No doubt many readers were impressed, but some of the
book's critics were shocked. “It is a matter of surprise to us,” declared the
Christian Parlor Magazine,
“that such a work could have obtained the name of LEMUEL SHAW.”
⁹

The judge must have had a few misgivings about handing his daughter over to a man with no steady job and a vagabond past. If he had been more objective, Shaw might have used his sharp legal mind to question how a pampered young lady of Beacon Hill with ordinary looks and no special talents could please the extraordinary hero of
Typee
. Lizzie seems to have had her own doubts, because one of her great fears before the marriage was that the church would be overrun by all the envious women who yearned to be Melville's Fayaway. In the end she insisted that the wedding take place at her home in Mount Vernon Street instead of at the family's church.

They were married in the late morning of August 4, 1847. Lizzie was twenty-five and Melville had just turned twenty-eight. What would endure in the bride's memory was “a vision of Herman by my side, a confused crowd of rustling dresses, a row of boots, and [the Reverend] Mr. Young in full canonicals standing before me, giving utterance to the solemn words of obligation.”
¹⁰

AS A FIRST
TOKEN
of his generosity to the couple, Judge Shaw helped them to acquire a twenty-one-year leasehold on a house in Manhattan large enough to accommodate not only the newlyweds but also Melville's mother, a younger brother and his wife, and—as if that weren't enough—all four of Herman's grown, but unmarried sisters. It was a good first step in putting his mother and siblings back where they had started as a respectable family living well in New York in earlier times, and he couldn't have done it without the judge's help.

The house was in a decent neighborhood on Fourth Avenue behind the recently constructed Grace Church. The Melvilles would be one big family under one roof—as though Lizzie had always been among them, like an adopted daughter. Most newlyweds would have sought a more private love nest than this crowded house, but Lizzie acquiesced to the arrangement and wrote reassuringly to her family in Boston that she was enjoying her new life, though she had never been to New York before. “I'm afraid no place will ever seem to me like dear old crooked Boston,” she told them, “but with Herman with me always, I can be happy and contented anywhere.”
¹¹

At the outset, there was certainly affection and warmth in this relationship, but no sign of any great passion. As Melville would lament in one of his later poems, “few matching halves here meet and mate.” One of his cousins thought the feelings between the couple were more “ethereal” than physical. Many decades later, after both were gone, the couple's granddaughter Eleanor Metcalf would tell an early biographer, “You say, in your
Nation
article, that Melville was happily married. He wasn't.”
¹²

For three years Herman did his best to make it all work, to keep Lizzie and the rest of his family happy. In less than two years he became a father. His son Malcolm was born in February 1849. Proud of this new addition to the family line, he gave him a name that paid tribute not to his mother's Dutch background, but to his father's Scottish roots. He boasted that he was “of noble lineage—of the Lords of Melville & Leven.” And, in fact, in Elizabethan times one of Herman's ancestors held a knighthood and a small castle by the edge of the sea near Edinburgh. (In America the family had been spelling the name without the final
e,
but after the death of Herman's father his class-conscious mother decided a change was needed. So the widow
and her brood abandoned “Melvill” for what was then considered the more distinguished “Melville.”)
¹³

While Lizzie cared for her new infant, her husband scribbled away upstairs. His oldest sister—Helen Maria—helped out by making fair copies of his manuscripts, keeping pace with her brother page by page. Grimly diligent, he went to his desk each day as though to a barn to do chores. Needing to produce something sufficiently commercial, he reported to Judge Shaw that he felt compelled to keep writing “as other men are to sawing wood.”
¹⁴