Melville in Love (9 page)

THE HAWTHORNES INVITED
Melville to stay at their cottage for a few days in early September, and during that visit either they were able to tease the secret out of him or Duyckinck revealed his identity in a letter to them. When Sophia found out the truth, she seemed genuinely surprised. “We have discovered who wrote the Review in the
Literary World,
” she informed her sister. “It was no other than Herman Melville himself!”

Once he was found out, Melville pretended that he had written the whole thing at a time when he never dreamed that he would actually meet Hawthorne. Sophia accepted this white lie wholeheartedly, and gushed to any and all that their new friend was the best possible company. She had long conversations with him, and recalled one evening in particular when there was “a golden light” over the landscape as they sat outside. She was enchanted by his high spirits and found him “a person of great ardor & simplicity. He is all on fire with the subject that interests him. It rings through his frame like a cathedral bell.” That phrase “on fire” was not one that most people who knew him in earlier days would have applied to Melville. He was usually more restrained, but not now. The sound of that bell was from something less spiritual than a cathedral.
⁸

Hawthorne was more cautious in his response to this fervent admirer. He was used to working alone, and his darker, brooding side did not align with Melville's almost boyish enthusiasm for a new age of American literary excellence. He may have also suspected that his admirer's praise was, for whatever reason, overdone, so he hesitated to share more of his life with the younger man, and was measured in his responses to any questions. Often he said nothing at all, but just nodded or exchanged meaningful glances as Melville spoke to him in long, rolling tides of conversation.

Unabashed, the younger writer found excuses to see this “silence” as something positive, telling Sophia that her husband's “great but hospitable silence drew him out—that it was astonishing how
sociable
his silence was.” With witty conciseness, Dr. Holmes summed up Hawthorne's character in one memorable couplet: “Virile in strength, yet bashful as a girl, / Prouder than Hester, sensitive as Pearl.”
⁹

To repay his hospitality at Lenox, Melville invited Hawthorne to dinner at Broadhall on a Wednesday in the first week of September 1850. Though Hawthorne was the more esteemed, Melville had the old mansion at his disposal and could entertain the older writer much more grandly. The sale of the house to the Morewoods would soon be finalized, but Melville was acting as though the place belonged to him. That had been clear in August to Evert Duyckinck, who noted, “Melville . . . treated the house as his own & would suffer no payments.” For a short while at least, both Sarah and Herman acted as if they owned a mansion that still formally belonged to neither of them.

Time was running out. Rowland Morewood was planning to leave for England on October 9 to visit his family, and he wanted to complete the sale so that renovations could start while he and Sarah were away. His wife, however, didn't want to go with him. Only “reluctantly”—as she put it later—did she finally give in and agree
to the voyage. Later, in a sarcastic understatement, she would recall her mood after her bitter surrender: “I did not feel the most happy person in the world.” She didn't have much choice. In England, Rowland's father, whose wealth helped to sustain the New York branch of the family business, was eighty-six, and was unlikely to live much longer. The family expected Rowland and his wife and child to pay a visit before the patriarch was gone. It wasn't acceptable that he would come by himself, so Sarah must have known all along that she couldn't back out. Yet the more she stayed in the Berkshires, the harder it was to leave Broadhall and Melville behind. The only consolation was that when spring returned next year, she would be back, and Broadhall would be hers. She was already making plans to become a bright and permanent fixture on the social scene of the area. While Melville was getting to know Hawthorne, she applied her own modest literary talent to writing a poem for the biggest civic event of the year in Pittsfield.
¹

On September 9 the whole town was going to march through the streets to celebrate the dedication of the new cemetery. Several thousand people were expected to turn out, and all the leading citizens would be gathered in a central grove for speeches, prayers, and songs. Dr. Holmes had agreed to read a long poem, and Sarah wanted to submit her verses to the choir in the hope they would be set to music. At a time when women writers often struggled to get their work into print, this kind of civic occasion gave Sarah an opportunity to receive some recognition for her talent, so it came as a delightful surprise when her submission was accepted along with that of another woman. She was identified in the program as “Mrs. J.R. Morewood of New York, a Lady who is about to become a resident of Pittsfield.” The other woman—in keeping with the more accepted standards of female modesty—was described as simply “a Lady.”
²

It must have been one of the great moments in Sarah's young life when the choir sang her “Ode” before an audience of four thousand on a nearly perfect late summer morning under the blue skies of the Berkshires. In the local view, this triumph established her as one of the town's literary figures. The
Pittsfield Sun
would later describe her as “a lady of superior literary accomplishments.” For a woman in a small town, she couldn't have hoped for better praise. It was certainly more than Emily Dickinson ever received in her lifetime in nearby Amherst, Massachusetts.
³

The strange fact that a seductive woman like Sarah would be credited with writing a hymn didn't escape the notice of Dr. Holmes. “What the diablo had Elsie to do with hymns?” his narrator asks incredulously in
Elsie Venner
when a well-thumbed hymn book is discovered in her room. Unlike the conventionally religious verses of the other “Lady,” Sarah's lines were pure pantheism, mentioning neither God nor heaven, but locating all beauty and spiritual power in Nature. Such was her devotion to the natural world that she praised its “holy influences” as the one sure source of grace and comfort. Nature was immortality, and whether as a woman or leaf or stream, all things were united in the eternal cycle of the seasons, and of life and death. Every path was circular, every living thing a marvel inhabiting a world of ceaseless change.
⁴

The stream whose waters glide along,

                     
Till lost amid the rolling sea,

Shall tell us of the eager throng

Fast hurrying to eternity.

But spring unfolds a sweeter tale,

                     
From which the heart may comfort learn,

When flower-gems strown o'er hill and vale

                     
Proclaim the op'ning year's return.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Then “Woodlawn!” hallowed be thy ground,

                     
We consecrate thee to the dead;

Rest they, where Nature all around

                     
Her holy influences hath shed.
⁵

Though both her talent and her theme followed predictable patterns, her fascination with the natural world, her great curiosity, and her openness to new experiences meant that she was far more in tune with Melville's ambitions and interests than any other woman he knew. He was as reluctant to let her go as she was to leave. Their first summer together was no casual fling. If Melville had been a typical womanizer of the time—like Alexander Gardiner—he would have welcomed Rowland's planned trip overseas as a timely escape from any entanglement. But Melville wanted to be entangled. When Sarah returned in the spring, he planned to be not only in the Berkshires, but as close to her house as possible without actually moving in.

His plan only made sense in light of his fervent attraction to Sarah. Otherwise, to most people, it would have seemed merely foolish and irresponsible. He shared his idea with Lizzie's father the day after the choir had performed Sarah's verses at the cemetery dedication. Judge Shaw happened to be in the area on court business, and his son-in-law couldn't wait to ask him for help. What Melville proposed was that he and the rest of his New York household should abandon the city immediately and buy a place in the Berkshires. The property in question was a humble old farmhouse on 160 acres bordering Broadhall. To buy it, he needed $6,500, but his finances were in such disarray that
he couldn't afford to pay any of that amount. Would Judge Shaw loan him the money for it? he asked.

It was an audacious and impulsive request, especially considering that the judge had his legal duties to attend to. Strictly as a land deal, it wasn't a good idea. The asking price was exactly the same amount as Rowland had paid for Broadhall. For $6,500 Rowland had bought a mansion, and a much better farm that was two-thirds larger than the one Herman wanted. His deal had been a bargain, but the author was being asked to pay the full market value for a mediocre property. To afford it, he would have to go deeply into debt. But without a steady income, he would find it almost impossible to pay off his loans.

To explain this reckless deal, Melville's modern biographers have universally agreed that he was indeed desperate—so much so, in fact, that he was willing to do anything to remain near his new friend and “neighbor,” Nathaniel Hawthorne. Buying a place six miles away from Lenox, however, wasn't very neighborly. Renting a cottage, as Hawthorne himself had done, would have made more sense for a former sailor who was never going to be much of a farmer on these rolling acres in Pittsfield. In fact, given the small amount he was earning from his books, renting was the only reasonable plan for staying in the Berkshires. Buying the farm was so beyond his means that—as his most scholarly biographer, Hershel Parker, has pointed out—it would cost him “more money than he had earned from all his five books together, in both England and the United States.” By contrast, renting was cheap. As Melville was later to admit, it was possible to find a decent house in town for as little as $150 a year.
⁶

There was only one explanation for his desire to buy this particular farm, and for his willingness to pay whatever was necessary to get it, no matter how unaffordable. The young author who thought he be
longed at Broadhall with Sarah was making sure he had the next-best thing—a farm adjoining hers. The wonder is that Melville was able to talk Judge Shaw into loaning him $3,000 toward the purchase. The rest of the amount he planned to cover by arranging for a mortgage and a deferred payment to the owner—obligations he was ill-prepared to honor. It was a recipe for disaster, but he couldn't help himself.

THE PURCHASE WAS
COMPLETED
so quickly that he acquired the farm just four days after Judge Shaw arrived in Pittsfield. Significantly, when the town historian—the poet J. E. A. Smith, a mutual friend of Sarah and Herman—recalled the deal forty years later he let slip that Melville's decision was influenced by Rowland's purchase. “In anticipation of the sale of Broadhall,” wrote Smith, “Mr. Melville on the 14th of September, 1850, bought of Dr. John Brewster Sr. the farm adjoining the Broadhall estate.”

Often a guest at Broadhall, and romantically linked to one of Sarah's sisters, Smith was present at the “Laurel Wreath” Christmas dinner of 1851. In old age—when both Sarah and Herman were gone—he wrote a long newspaper series on the novelist's life. It caught the attention of Lizzie Melville, then the stoic widow who had steadfastly remained in her unhappy marriage for more than forty years. Pleased with Smith's sympathetic and uncontroversial account, she arranged to have the piece reprinted in a booklet. In addition to correcting some factual errors, she also eliminated an entire section that recalled the day when Mrs. Morewood finally decided that her new house would indeed be christened “Broadhall.” In a rare lapse of discretion, Smith had revealed that it was Sarah and Herman who had reached the decision over the name, contriving a sly contest to hide
their collusion. Smith used coy language to tiptoe around the truth, but his revealing glimpse of Sarah's relationship with Herman was too much for the widow. It seems the most likely reason she deleted an episode that would appear innocent enough to most readers. Here is the passage:

One evening in a merry party of men and women more or less distinguished, it was proposed to give [Mrs. Morewood's house] a name; each person present having the privilege of putting one in a basket; the first drawn out to be forever fixed upon the venerable historic mansion. Mr. Melville wrote on his slip the word Broadhall, and that came first to the deft hand [of Mrs. Morewood] which was appointed to be the minister of fate. We have a very strong suspicion that the deft hand was guided by a deft brain, and that so happy a drawing was not so entirely a matter of chance as it purported to be.
⁷

Lizzie, the privileged daughter of the chief justice whose world revolved around Beacon Hill, probably wasn't thrilled at the idea of trading her home in New York for a farmhouse in Pittsfield, but she must have agreed to the plan in the end because her doting father wouldn't have loaned the money otherwise. Still, it was difficult to hide just how bad the deal was, and how ominous the future would look if the next book failed. The young novelist would have to fight two battles at the same time, one for art and one for ready cash.

THOUGH MELVILLE MAY
HAVE
KNOWN
for some time that he would try to buy the Pittsfield farm, the suddenness of his action
stunned many. One of his cousins wrote to Judge Shaw that she hoped Herman's family “will have no cause to regret” the move. “I confess,” she added, “that it surprised
me
at first.” Evert Duyckinck and his brother, George, were also caught off guard by the news. “Herman Melville has taken us by surprise by buying a farm,” wrote George. “It is mostly woodland which he intends to preserve and have a road through, making it more of an ornamental place than a farm.”
⁸

There was already a good road running right in front of the farmhouse, connecting it to Pittsfield in one direction and Lenox in the other. If he put “a road through” the “ornamental” woods behind his house, it wouldn't take him any closer to Hawthorne, but it would take him much closer to Sarah's door, which was the idea. Or rather, that was the dream, because he didn't have the money to build a proper road. (The best he could manage in the coming year would be to clear a rough trail good enough for fair-weather travel. It went straight to Broadhall.) Nor did he have the money to build something else he talked about—a tower that would give him a view of Sarah's place over the tree line. When he told Sophia Hawthorne that he was going to construct a new house on his property and include a large tower, she couldn't believe it. He insisted that it was no mere fantasy. “He is really going to build a real towered house—an actual tower,” she wrote afterward, as if still trying to convince herself. At the top of that tower, he could have a study and write his books, and always with a view of Broadhall in the near distance.
⁹

These were the overexcited dreams that surrounded his purchase, and the only hope he had of seeing them realized was to finish that book of his on the Whale. If he could produce a brilliant book on a gigantic scale that would leave the literary world in awe, then he just might realize the ambitions spelled out in his essay on Hawthorne—
and, not incidentally, earn enough money to keep his dreams alive and enjoy more summers in the Berkshires like this magical one of 1850, now drawing to a close. Success in the coming year would allow him at least to continue dividing his life between Mrs. Morewood and the judge's daughter he had wed before he knew of a better match.