Melville in Love (22 page)

On a cold, rainy Saturday in November—one of those bleak occasions that Ishmael calls “a damp, drizzly November in my soul”—Herman Melville was warming himself in the snug comfort of the White Bear Hotel in Liverpool, England. It was 1856—five years after
Moby-Dick
's publication—and the author was at the start of a long trip, largely financed by his indulgent father-in-law the chief justice, who had reacted more in sorrow than anger to Herman's failures.

Earlier in the year Melville had narrowly avoided financial ruin when he paid off some of his debts by selling half of his farm acreage, and by securing another large loan—five thousand dollars—from Judge Shaw. He had little money, few prospects, and in recent months his health had been bad. He had overworked himself trying to salvage something from the wreck of
Pierre
. Book publishers were now reluctant to deal generously with him, so he had been concentrating lately on shorter works of fiction for periodicals, producing a handful
of brilliant works, including “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno.” He also wrote a novel that no one published—“The Isle of the Cross”—and two novels that their publishers probably wished they hadn't published—the historical fiction
Israel Potter,
and the dark, almost impenetrable satire
The Confidence-Man
.

Nothing he did made any difference to his fortunes. His reputation as a novelist was well and truly ruined. Poetry became an option because he didn't have any reputation as a poet, and he could write for himself if he chose and not bother with publishers. As far as full-scale novels were concerned, he was done with them for life. It is tempting to imagine him as another veteran of the Dead Letter Office, like his Bartleby, who will resolutely reply, “I prefer not to,” if ever asked to write another book as large and majestic as
Moby-Dick
.

In her letters to her family on Beacon Hill, Lizzie had told her father of her worries for Herman's health, especially his mental state, and it was at her urging that the judge had agreed to help him go abroad for at least several months. “I think he needs such a change,” her father said, “& that it would be highly beneficial to him & probably restore him.” As he explained to one of his sons, “I suppose you have been informed by some of the family how very ill Herman has been. . . . When he is deeply engaged in one of his literary works, he confines him[self] to hard study many hours in the day, with little or no exercise, & this specially in winter for a great many days together. He probably thus overworks himself & brings on severe nervous affections.” It was clear that both his health and his career were in decline, and it was only natural that his family thought a long voyage would help. Even the local newspaper gave its approval to the idea. “Mr. Melville much needs this relaxation from his severe literary labors of several years past,” said the
Berkshire County Eagle,
“and we
doubt not that he will return with renovated health and a new store of those observations of travel which he works so charmingly.”
¹

Beneath the surface there seems to have been a growing fear that Herman would never recover from whatever it was that had made him so restless and unhappy. In old age Lizzie confided to a niece that this overseas trip was in fact “a tentative separation,” and—as early Melville scholars discovered—“some members of the family hoped he would get lost and never return.” The only bright spot in his life was Sarah. Whenever he wrote to her in private, his prose once again came to life and showed spirit. One of the last letters he sent before going abroad ends with the same light air of his early letters, but with a poignant “adieu” to mark his departure: “So Adieu to Thee Thou Lady of All Delight; even Thou, The peerless Lady of Broadhall. H. M.”
²

HE LEFT HOME
in October 1856 and was expected to be away for six or seven months, traveling through Europe and as far as the eastern Mediterranean, including a visit to Jerusalem. There was no real necessity to stop in Liverpool, except for one sentimental reason—the chance to see Nathaniel Hawthorne, now the American consul to the city. Thanks to an appointment by Hawthorne's college friend, President Franklin Pierce, the author of
The Scarlet Letter
was enjoying a long stay in England as one of his country's minor diplomats.

Melville was then thirty-seven, and was still struggling to understand how his great gamble with
Moby-Dick
had blown up in his face. Ahead of him lay more than thirty years in which he would have to bear the burden of that failure. He was so out of touch with even his recent past that he didn't have a current home address for Hawthorne
in Liverpool, and was forced to seek him out during office hours at the consulate. When he arrived there on a Monday in early November, he seemed to Hawthorne “a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder.” After spending a couple of days together, Hawthorne concluded that his former neighbor had endured a great many hard blows, and the effects showed. “The spirit of adventure is gone out of him,” he remarked. “He certainly is much overshadowed since I saw him last.” Even Hawthorne's young son Julian, who had found Melville a playful friend in the Berkshires, was struck by the change in the man, who “seemed depressed and aimless.”
³

Like most of those who knew Melville, Hawthorne thought this long trip was a good idea. “I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world after so many years of toilsome pen-labor and domestic life, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was.” Though they had not seen each other for a few years, they soon found themselves back in the old familiar relationship of Melville pouring out his thoughts and Hawthorne doing his best to respond sympathetically. As usual, it was an intense experience, but this time—with the cloud of failure hanging so heavy over Melville—Hawthorne couldn't help admiring his old friend's courage in the face of disaster. After a long walk together by the sea one day, talking and smoking cigars, Hawthorne commented in his journal about his friend's strong character: “He has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”
⁴

After about a week in Liverpool, Melville was ready to move on. He would have liked to have spent more time with Sophia Hawthorne, but she was ill during much of his visit. (“Mrs. Hawthorne not in good health,” he noted in his journal.) He always valued her kindness, and had been “amazed” when she wrote to him at the time
of
Moby-Dick
's publication, praising the novel in a “highly flattering” way, as he put it. What he especially valued in her, he had said at the time, was her “spiritualizing nature.” It enabled her to “see more things than other people.”
⁵

When Melville said goodbye to the family, Hawthorne was surprised to see that the only thing Melville was carrying was a simple carpetbag: “This is the next best thing to going naked; and as he wears his beard and moustache, and so needs no dressing-case—nothing but a tooth-brush—I do not know a more independent personage. He learned his travelling habits by drifting about, all over the South Pacific, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trousers. Yet we seldom see men of less criticizable manners than he.” The man whose career had once seemed on the verge of shooting straight to the top of American literature wandered off to board his steamer looking like the most ordinary vagabond. For Hawthorne, now the distinguished diplomat and man of letters, the sight of Melville going off to face the world without friends or family or a cartload of baggage was a revelation.
⁶

In that parting image of Melville, there is an insight into the castaway mentality that would help the old sailor survive the next few decades. As the most “independent personage” Hawthorne ever knew, Melville was just the type to stay afloat until the right wave washed him ashore somewhere in the world. Whether he was wandering the Berkshires or Manhattan or the Liverpool docks, there was always something of the mariner in him, the surprisingly brilliant stranger whose heart is always in the foretop, searching real or imagined horizons with a magical spyglass and waiting for the next “wonder-world” to come into view.

Invariably, he was disappointed and would spend most of his
later life as a lost soul on the crowded island of mercantile Manhattan, among its robber barons and Wall Street pirates. He would survive until old age claimed him, an ancient Ishmael with a long gray beard, and he would even leave a message in a bottle, so to speak. For at the very end, there was a miracle, a resurrection of the writer still lingering in the old man's soul. He would write one last great book and leave it behind to bob on the waves until someone retrieved it almost thirty years after the old castaway died. It was the manuscript of
Billy Budd
.

Hawthorne would prove less robust, dying at fifty-nine, only seven and a half years after he watched Melville leave Liverpool in November 1856. They would see each other only once more after that day—in the spring of 1857, when Melville was on his way back home from the Mediterranean. But he was in a hurry then, and the only record of their meeting is the short note in his journal, “Saw Hawthorne.” As a friendship, it was never entirely satisfying to either man, but for Melville it was really his only chance to share the life of his mind with a true literary peer.
⁷

ON HIS SHORT
TRIP
through England in 1857, Melville stopped for a few days in London. But, of course, no one made a fuss over his visit. He was no longer the literary darling to be wined and dined on the chance that he might write a bestseller. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic believed he was going to do that.

There wasn't even the opportunity for Melville on his quick swing through London to pay his respects to Samuel Rogers. The poet of St. James's Place—friend of Turner and Melville's guide to the painter's art—had finally surrendered peacefully to death in December 1855.
The next year his house had been emptied of all its fabulous contents, and everything was sold off for the remarkable sum of fifty thousand pounds. If Melville had tried to get a peek into the house, he would have found it a ghostly shell, as if the treasures he had seen there were never real, but only part of a dream.

The long trip did little to change Melville's views of his life, and it made no difference in his marriage. He returned to Arrowhead with his family, and he muddled through the next few years, discontented but persevering. A couple of visiting college students who made a “literary pilgrimage” to meet Melville vividly captured his mood in the last years of the 1850s. The students wanted Melville to talk about the South Seas, but the subject didn't hold much interest for him. He was more interested in the failures of the world around him. “He was evidently a disappointed man,” recalled one of the students, “soured by criticism and disgusted with the civilized world.” The other young man gathered from the conversation that Pittsfield itself was a thorn in the novelist's side. Melville had long ago worn out his welcome and was barely tolerated in the community. “With his liberal views he is apparently considered by the good people of Pittsfield as little better than a cannibal or a ‘beach-comber.'”
⁸

Knowing hardly anything of the author's personal history, the students wondered why Melville bothered with Pittsfield at all. How could a man who had once explored the balmy regions of the earth resign himself to a lonely life in a cold climate? They didn't dare ask that question, but they came away mystified by his determination “to shut himself up in this cold North as a cloistered thinker.” They had no way to know that his heart was still anchored there, despite his disappointments.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Sarah found the great public purpose of her life. Despite her weakening health, she quickly established herself as the leader of the local women helping the troops who streamed in and out of town on training missions and recruitment drives. She organized efforts to give medical supplies and food to the men, held dances and parties at Broadhall for officers, served refreshments to regiments on the march, made flags and various keepsakes for them, and welcomed them home when they returned from the battlefront. As one of her friends would recall, “How her library table was strewn with the photographs and grateful letters of soldiers who had been strangers to her till the war began.”
¹

Army camps were named after her in and around two major cities—New Orleans and Washington, D.C. One Massachusetts regiment reported from their camp that the assembled troops raised the silk flags she had presented to them and cheered Mrs. Morewood's
name just before they sang the national anthem. One American flag she gave to a regiment came with a staff cut from wood on Mount Greylock. After the war a Massachusetts colonel recalled carrying a flag from Sarah “many days in Virginia and many miles up and down the valley of the Shenandoah.”
²

The relaxed social codes of the war allowed her to mingle among the officers and absorb their attention in a way that delighted her, and she enjoyed joking with them in a free manner that would have shocked Pittsfield before the war. “If you and your officers will favor us with your company,” she wrote from Broadhall to a colonel camped nearby, “we will try and ‘have a little dance tonight, boys.' I am longing, too, to have those camp glee songs begin; and as your time is now short here, I do hope you will all come tonight.”
³

A few of the younger officers were so grateful for her attention that they fancied themselves in love with her, and despite her poor health, she valiantly tried to sustain the illusion that she was still the most desirable woman in the Berkshires. Most of her flirtations were harmless, but at least one young captain—a Yale man named Edward Nettleton—reacted with great seriousness and wrote her long, suggestive letters. “Nothing,” he urged her from his post at Camp Morewood in New Orleans, “can be enjoyed
heartily
without more than one heart to enjoy it.” She tried—a little late in the game—to make light of his infatuation, but he was under her spell and insisted that his interest in her was serious. “No,” he told her. “I do
not
write so long letters to everyone—I never knew you to complain of that before.”
⁴

Her proudest moment of the war came in August 1863, when she played host to one of the legendary heroes of the conflict, young William F. Bartlett, then a colonel in his twenties whose bravery in the
face of intense fire had left him severely wounded and missing a leg. He was a Harvard junior when he entered the war in 1861, and his battlefield heroics had raised him quickly in the ranks. All of Pittsfield turned out to welcome his regiment when it returned to the Berkshires after a bloody campaign, and Melville's name was prominent among those helping to decorate the streets for the parade.

The colonel and his parents were Sarah's guests for a week, and she spared no expense to honor him and his men. Broadhall was transformed into a victory palace one evening, with a blue light shining in every window. Chinese lanterns were strung across the grounds and the sky was illuminated by fireworks. Melville was so impressed by the young colonel's stoic courage that he wrote an admiring poem about him after the welcoming festivities had ended. In “The College Colonel” he gave Sarah's guest the highest compliment he could offer, honoring him as a fellow castaway:

He brings his regiment home—

                     
Not as they filed two years before,

But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn,

Like castaway sailors, who—stunned

                          
By the surf's loud roar,

                     
Their mates dragged back and seen no more—

Again and again breast the surge,

                     
And at last crawl, spent, to shore.

Sarah also wrote poems about the war. As the scholar Stanton Garner suggested long ago, one of her verses may have given Melville part of the title for his book of war poetry,
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
. She could have shared her poem privately, but it was also
published in the local paper under the title “The Rebellion.” The first few lines contain the phrase that later reappeared in Melville's title:

Painfully the people wait

For the news by flying car,

Eager for the battle's fate

And the aspect of the war.

When the
Pittsfield Sun
published her work it was always anonymously or with a cryptic “S.,” or in one unfortunate case with her full initials misprinted as S.V.M. (Depending on her mood and circumstances, her handwriting could vary considerably, and it is easy to imagine that the first letter of her middle name Anne could be misread as a
V
.) Topical themes didn't suit her as much as lyrical verse on her favorite subject of nature. One poem of this kind, written in 1862, did eventually end up in an anthology under “Mrs. S. A. Morewood,” but without a title. This short work is her conventional but moving hymn to autumn as a serene but somber season full of memories of better days. It pleads for “future strength” to face the ordeal of “future loss,” and it holds out the hope that underneath “autumn's blight” is a flickering gleam of spiritual rebirth for “bodies worn and wasted.” It ends in a vision of “light, that's born of our decay, / Light, that ne'er shall waste away.”
⁵

Sadly, even as she threw herself so completely into the drama of the war, Sarah was wasting away. She lost weight, grew alarmingly pale, and often thought she was near death. But she refused to retreat from life and surrender to her illness, and time after time she struggled back from some dire moment of sickness to recover and go on for a little while longer. Doctors could do little to help, and Row
land grew so concerned that he even turned for guidance to Rev. John Todd, who blithely suggested that a few weeks in the remote woods at a hunting lodge in the Adirondacks would be a great tonic for Mrs. Morewood. Reluctantly, she gave the lodge a try and soon came home feeling no better for the trouble.

When her mother, Sarah Paradise Huyler, died in August 1862, she took it as a sign that her own time was finally coming to an end. After the funeral, she wrote movingly to her oldest child, William: “I have not been at all well since—and feel as if I lived in an unreal world. My mother was coming to visit me during this month and now I am never to see her again in this world. This is all that makes death so terrible—the eternal separation from friends.”
⁶

She loved the world and couldn't bear the thought of losing it. What helped her more than anything during the war was the joy of being the center of attention at large gatherings of soldiers. She kept entertaining and corresponding with them and giving them small presents until she had just weeks to live. Not even the smallest demands escaped her attention. Only two and a half months before her death the local paper reported, “Mrs. J.R. Morewood, who is never weary in the cause of well doing, has sent to the Soldiers' Relief Association a liberal donation of jellies, raspberry vinegar and sweetmeats.”
⁷

After struggling so long to keep her disease at bay, she faced death in 1863 at the height of autumn's beauty in the Berkshires. So great was her love for the region that, only a few days before she died, she gathered the strength for one last tour of the countryside. The early October weather was perfect, and she made a point of lingering over the views at her favorite hills. Riding in her carriage with her friend Caroline Whitmarsh, she covered eighty-five miles in a single outing
and was so worn out by the end that she almost didn't make it home alive. “At each new turn of roads she knew so well,” recalled Whitmarsh, “her sunken eyes would grow brilliant, and when too tired to speak, her languid hand pointed or grasped ours tightly; the little thin hand that had led so many toward happiness, and lifted so many from the dust. I feel it now!”
⁸

Though it had been clear that she was fading fast, she had rallied so often that her death on October 16—one month and a day after her fortieth birthday—took everyone by surprise. Melville had left a few days earlier on a trip to New York, and was still there when the news came of her passing. Lizzie had visited Broadhall the day Sarah died and was at her bedside at the end. “She was much surprised herself when she knew her days were numbered—,” Lizzie recalled afterward in a letter to Augusta. “Said she did not want to die, but was calm in view of it.” On her last morning her sister opened a window in Sarah's room, and the dying woman raised her head to gaze one more time at the view. “How heavenly!” she said, then fell back and closed her eyes. Those were her last words. “Her respiration grew fainter & fainter,” Lizzie remembered, “and so placid was her death, that no one knew exactly
when
she ceased to breathe.”
⁹

Devoted as always to his faith, Rowland accepted Sarah's death as God's will, and had sat peacefully near her while she was dying, busying himself with a letter to his son, William. Thinking at first that Sarah might survive the day, he began the letter by warning the boy—who was away at school in England—that the next letter he received would surely contain bad news. In Rowland's pious world, there was always a lesson to be learned from sad tidings. “Bear always in your mind,” he wrote to his son, “that, though you are not likely to see her again on this earth, there is another world where you may
again meet your Mother, if you rightly guide your own steps through life.” Before he could finish this letter Rowland watched Sarah take her last breath. Instead of beginning a new message to William he put the news into a brief postscript: “3 o'clock P.M. . . . a change came over your dear Mamma's breathing, and she has now passed to the world of spirits.”
¹⁰

LIZZIE HAD NEVER
seen anyone die before, and she said the experience left her shaken. She gave no hint in her letter to Augusta that she had any suspicions of an affair between Herman and Sarah, but she would spend the rest of her long life trying to pretend to the world that nothing was amiss in her marriage. At this point she may well have been fooled by all the precautions her husband had taken to hide his affair, and was still innocently assuming that his long attachment to Sarah was always just a friendship. That doesn't seem likely, however, and there is a forced note in Lizzie's declaration to Augusta that in her long relationship with Mrs. Morewood they never suffered “the least shadow of a break.”

Only a private message that Lizzie carved into an inner compartment of her desk—crudely cutting the words into the wood with a sharp knife—gives some indication of the storms swirling below the surface of her married life. When she wrote the message isn't clear, but Melville's affair with Sarah continued to haunt him for the rest of his life. The desk is now at the Melville Room in the Berkshire Athenaeum, and the words in the dark recess of the compartment form a jagged line: “To know all is to forgive all.” The sentence suggests that Lizzie may have always known more than she ever acknowledged, and that she struggled to make her peace with the facts.

Interestingly, even though servants came to prepare Sarah's body for burial, Lizzie insisted on remaining behind to help them. It is disturbing to think of her washing and dressing Sarah for the grave, especially in light of a jarring note of joy scrawled across one margin of Lizzie's otherwise dutifully solemn letter to Augusta. An old friend of the Shaws, the family doctor, had recently died and left Lizzie a generous bequest. Right next to her description of Sarah's final moments of life, Lizzie exulted in a chatty tone, “Did you know that Dr. Hayward left me a legacy of three thousand dollars? Nothing could have been more unexpected.”
¹¹

No one but the two partners can know what really happens in a marriage, but Lizzie's letter on Sarah's death is eye-opening. As Somerset Maugham once noted, Melville's wife “was not a good letter-writer,” but here she shows a disconcerting ability to switch her feelings on and off, and to allow personal pettiness to undercut a moment of deep sorrow and loss. Many people could overlook this sort of thing, but not Melville. He sought sympathy, warmth, and exalted feelings from Sarah, and perhaps he valued those from her all the more because he often failed to find them from Lizzie.
¹²

ON THE DAY
OF
BURIAL
, both Herman and his wife stood at Sarah's graveside in Pittsfield Cemetery. From New York, Melville had earlier sent a large floral wreath—all in white—for the church service he was forced to miss. In a newspaper tribute to Sarah a few days after her death, Caroline Whitmarsh predicted that the men whose lives her friend had “inspired” would not forget her. These included soldiers (men of “valor”), but rather daringly Whitmarsh wrote that Sarah had also inspired “men of genius.” There weren't many of
those in Pittsfield—except possibly a famous Harvard doctor who had moved away, and a novelist whose career had run aground in the fields of Arrowhead. If any friend knew how much Sarah had touched Melville's life, it would have been Whitmarsh. The wonder is that she was willing to hint at it in the pages of the Pittsfield press, and to add that Sarah's own talents for living large made an interesting contrast to the brilliance of more famous men—ones, for example, who wrote epics: “There is a genius that rears temples and writes epics; there is a better genius that makes all earth its temple, and all existence special. Such had Mrs. Morewood.”
¹³