Melville in Love (3 page)

Guiltily, young Alexander confessed to his brother that he had been “very indiscreet and imprudent.” Given his reputation for womanizing, he probably did little to discourage Sarah's attentions until they became a problem for him, but he pretended that the trouble was mostly Mrs. Morewood's fault. “I have apprehended sometimes that Mrs M's familiarity with me might lead to such a result and have done everything in my power to avoid it.”
⁹

Whoever was at fault, it was a dangerous game, but the remarkable thing is that neither Sarah nor Rowland seemed to understand how dangerous it could be. A powerful New York lawyer with a former president as his friend could ably defend himself against scandal. The Morewoods were small fish in comparison to sharks like Gardiner. Yet it was he who couldn't wait to clear out of Pittsfield as soon as he sensed real trouble.

There was always a disarming touch of innocence to Sarah's character. She didn't like to take no for an answer and resented the suggestion that she could ever do anything wrong. Once, when neighbors began gossiping about a clergyman who was spending too much time as a guest in the Morewood home, she wrote that she couldn't understand why anyone would doubt her good intentions. As always, she hated being judged by those who had no wish to adopt her larger
point of view. “Slander,” she remarked, “is an evil which no one can bear without great suffering let their innocence be ever so clear in their friends' minds.”
¹⁰

It is something of a miracle that Alexander Gardiner's hastily scrawled letter to his brother has survived. He lived only sixteen months after he left Sarah and the Berkshires, and his fondness for partying apparently hastened his death. After coming home drunk for three nights in a row, he fell ill and died of a ruptured appendix. His letter to his brother is now held in the neo-Gothic splendor of Yale's Sterling Memorial Library among a vast range of other documents from John Tyler's family. If it weren't for the Gardiner connection to an American president, the letter might well have disappeared long ago.

Domestic intrigues and romances were common in the fashionable boardinghouses of the time. Alexander Gardiner's own mother had warned him against them, urging caution in his dealings with ladies who happened to be sharing a roof with him for even a brief spell. “A very general and rather distant politeness is all that is necessary until you find them out,” she had said of the ladies, “and then very likely you will wish to be still more distant.”
¹¹

Undaunted by Gardiner's quick retreat, and the Pittsfield gossip, Sarah was thrilled to return to the Berkshires in 1850, and she had a foolproof method of avoiding more trouble from cousin Robert at Broadhall. With Rowland at her side, she would offer to buy him out and turn the place once again into a private home where she could come and go as she pleased. But it would take some time to complete the sale. Meanwhile, perhaps not by accident, she would find herself that summer living for more than a month under the same roof with the man whose emotional investment in Broadhall was beyond measure—Herman Melville.

In the years just before Herman met Sarah, one of the most celebrated characters in American literature was a nude Polynesian beauty. An English racehorse was named after her, a racing yacht carried her name on its hull, and a popular song was written about her (“The tender light of her blue eyes / Was mild and deep as moonlight skies”). Men dreamed about her, and imagined themselves locked in her embrace. She was the star of the most erotic scene in any major American book of the time, a vivid moment when she stood nude at the front of a canoe using her only garment as a sail and floating along like a South Seas Venus, free and unashamed. This was, of course, the lovely Fayaway in Melville's first book,
Typee,
where he coyly remarks of her classic figure, “We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a prettier little mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.”
¹

For most of his career, Melville was known first and foremost as the “American Robinson Crusoe,” a daring castaway who had lived among cannibals, frolicked with native girls, and then returned to share his beguiling tales with a curious public. At twenty-one he had sailed from New England on a whaling ship, enduring eighteen months aboard until abandoning the vessel in the Marquesas Islands, on the other side of the world. For the next two years he was an Ishmael of sorts, a wanderer in search of adventure, slowly finding his way home after visiting Tahiti, Hawaii, and South America. Part fiction, part fact,
Typee
allowed him to embellish the most dramatic of his experiences among islanders whose exotic culture both frightened and delighted him. But for almost every admirer of
Typee,
what mattered most was the author's discovery of one island native in particular—Fayaway. Before his Whale caught on in the twentieth century, Melville's name was kept alive by his fond portrait of life with this slender young woman.

Men were jealous. “Enviable Herman!” a reviewer exclaimed in the usually understated literary pages of the London
Times,
adding, “A happier dog it is impossible to imagine than Herman in the Typee Valley.” Even the cautious Nathaniel Hawthorne was aroused by what he called Melville's “voluptuously colored” descriptions of “native girls.” And when Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, met the young author he charmed her—as he did many other women—with an air of exotic mystery suggesting forbidden pleasures. “I see Fayaway in his face,” she said. She also liked to call him Mr. Omoo, after his second book on his island exploits,
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
. Others simply called him Typee.
²

In 1846, when Melville was just twenty-six, the publication of
Typee
gave its author the same thing that Lord Byron achieved when
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
first appeared—overnight literary celebrity. Or, as Byron put it, “I woke up one morning and found myself famous.” Melville's publisher in England had also been Byron's, and the connection wasn't lost on the young American writer. When he received his first written request for an autograph, he was amused at his sudden celebrity and replied to his admirer, “You remember some one woke one morning and found himself famous—And here am I, just come in from hoeing in the garden, writing autographs.”
³

It isn't difficult to understand why the book resonated with so many readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Sexy women and friendly cannibals will always draw a crowd.
Typee
aroused too much curiosity for the public to resist. It was the kind of book guaranteed to make the Victorians squirm in all the right ways. The islanders were humans like themselves, but different enough to be regarded as creatures of another world where sexual freedom wasn't unnatural, and eating your enemies was thrillingly repulsive.

Melville's “peep” into native life was just revealing enough to make his readers shudder, yet keep them reading. One moment he was giving the reader a glimpse of naked flesh, and the next just a peep into the cannibal's cauldron. “The slight glimpse sufficed,” he wrote; “my eyes fell upon the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging to them here and there!” In sexual matters he knew how to draw the veil just when his contemporaries might lose their nerve and look away. “The varied dances of the Marquesan girls are beautiful in the extreme,” he wrote at the end of an early chapter, “but there is an abandoned voluptuousness in their character which I dare not attempt to describe.”
⁴

This kind of titillation drove some of his more enthusiastic fe
male admirers to distraction. They wanted to share their own adventure with the dashing sailor. He soon became—in the words of a journalist—“one whose name often lingers now in terms of adulation upon many rosy lips.” Through the post, an especially ardent female fan—a married Englishwoman in New York with the impressive name of Mrs. Ellen Astor Oxenham—pleaded with him, “Typee, you dear creature; I want to see you so amazingly.” Among the many women who found Melville's adventures in his tropical paradise irresistible was America's most outspoken feminist, Margaret Fuller. In Horace Greeley's
New-York Tribune
she happily recommended
Typee
to her readers, saying that “Othello's hairbreadth 'scapes were nothing to those by this hero . . . and many a Desdemona might seriously incline her ear to the description of the lovely Fayaway.”
⁵

Some of his sympathetic critics were amazed at his ability to get away with so much questionable description without being censored. No one, said a writer in the
New York Daily News,
“dances the tight-rope of propriety better than Herman Melville. You are always expecting to see him fall off, but he never does. Some of his scenes with the nude nymphs of the Marquesas are so carelessly, and yet so tenderly told, that we trembled when we first read his
Typee,
but he went clean through the conventional hoop without damaging either himself or the circle.”
⁶

The predictable backlash against the book by moralistic critics only made it more popular with both sexes. There was something tempting about a story that provoked so many overwrought attacks. Melville was called “the shameless herald of his own wantonness,” and was condemned for sharing so candidly his “voluptuous adventures.” Horace Greeley was so confused by the stark contrast between the book's obvious literary merit and its occasionally racy language
that he said it was both brilliant and “unmistakably defective if not positively diseased in moral tone.”
⁷

What was so dangerous about Fayaway was Melville's unapologetic celebration of her nudity in an age seemingly determined to bury the female figure under various layers of garments. She stood out in the imaginations of so many readers precisely because she was so refreshingly “devoid of corset, skirts, or crinoline,” as a British poet put it. In that respect her “savage” freedom looked much more attractive than the grotesquely bundled bodies of so many women among Melville's supposedly civilized contemporaries. (In
Typee
the overdressed ladies parading through the great capitals of the world are described as “moving in whalebone corsets, like so many automatons.”)
⁸

This was the kind of unconventional thinking that would get the author into more and more trouble as his career progressed. In the early going, however, the pure delight in his portrait of a strange but fascinating culture won him more fans than it did detractors. He pulled off a trick that few writers of his time even attempted—he made erotic confession seem almost innocent, as in his surprisingly matter-of-fact remark in
Typee
: “Bathing in company with troops of girls formed one of my chief amusements.” With every subsequent book there was always a general sigh of regret by his most devoted admirers that he didn't give them another character like Fayaway.
⁹

Whether or not every word of
Typee
was true never mattered much to those who loved its story. The book offered a glimpse of a paradise that was radically different from the grim realities of daily life in societies where too many natural freedoms were forbidden or harshly punished. For a young woman like Sarah Morewood, romantic visions of sexual freedom like those in
Typee
were the stuff of
her dreams. She was one of those Desdemonas that Margaret Fuller imagined sitting in their parlors yearning to hear more from Melville.

THOUGH NONE OF
HIS
SUBSEQUENT
BOOKS
would enjoy the success of his first, Melville quickly turned out four more in the next four years. The reading public could hardly keep up as the young author gave them variations on his adventures at sea, tales that always seemed to mix fact and fiction, and to add further mystery and intrigue to the life of the exotic voyager. All of his titles sounded odd to his contemporaries, and none seemed self-explanatory—
Omoo
in 1847,
Mardi
and
Redburn
in 1849, and
White-Jacket
the following year. He wrote the last two at such astonishing speed that he needed only four months to complete both.

Not a few reviewers wondered if the same man could be the author of all these works. Before they accepted that the stories were based on the experiences of a single young man, some critics asked how anyone at that age could write so well and show such courage at sea and in remote lands. It was difficult to believe that Melville the Hero was not only a Pacific castaway, but also the endearing innocent sailing the Atlantic for the first time in
Redburn,
and the slightly older but more cynical navy man on the warship
United States
(or
“Neversink
”
) in
White-Jacket
. Though a large part of all these stories was indeed drawn from his own life, British reviewers were especially dubious, asking whether they were being fooled by episodes created out of nothing by one or more writers hiding behind a false name. Protested one critic, “Herman Melville sounds to us vastly like the harmonious and carefully selected appellation of an imaginary hero of romance.”
¹⁰

At the height of his celebrity in the late 1840s, the author was such an object of curiosity that even his youthful past in the Berkshires became widely known. During Longfellow's stay at Broadhall when it was a boardinghouse, he jokingly gave his address as “Melville Hall, Typee Valley Pittsfield.” On her visit in 1849 Sarah couldn't have avoided hearing about the area's newest celebrity—Mr. Herman Typee himself—and the fact that the old mansion on the outskirts of Pittsfield was a place that he occasionally graced with his presence.
¹¹

If Mrs. Morewood wanted to meet the author, then becoming the owner of Broadhall was an extravagant but effective way of drawing him to her door. For a woman desperately wanting a summer romance with a companion who might be steadier than the capricious Alexander Gardiner, Melville must have seemed an immensely attractive choice. The man who could lean back and calmly study Fayaway's fine features when she had removed her last garment was just the sort of fellow Sarah Morewood was hoping to find. The fact that another woman had already found him and married him was inconvenient, but it wouldn't stop her.