Melville in Love (21 page)

This was the catastrophe that Melville dreaded, the “courageous
wreck” of a career and a life that he had come to view with such bitter disillusionment. And, of course, he had brought much of it on himself, out of anger and frustration. To outsiders, the collapse was inexplicable. The only answer was that the author must have lost his mind. But he didn't lose his mind—he lost his nerve. He was young, impulsive, and still something of the “proud and savage” sailor who had taken his chances on the run as a castaway in the Pacific. This time, when he went overboard, he had good reason to expect that he wouldn't resurface.

HE JUMPED TOO
SOON
. Sarah had her baby in June—a boy she named Alfred. Her husband didn't make a fuss, and must have assumed the child was his. The women at Arrowhead didn't seem any the wiser, and there was no general outbreak of gossip beyond the knowing glances of astute observers like Dr. Holmes. Alfred grew up at Broadhall, and though he bore a little resemblance to Melville's sons by Lizzie, it wasn't close enough to stir suspicion.

Instead of a shattering explosion that summer there was only a long sigh of regret from friends and admirers who couldn't understand what had driven their young novelist over the edge. Readers have been wondering the same thing ever since. “How is one to account for the transformation of this apparently normal young man into the savage pessimist who wrote
Pierre
?” asked the novelist Somerset Maugham in the twentieth century. “What turned the commonplace undistinguished writer of
Typee
into the darkly imaginative, powerful, inspired and eloquent author of
Moby-Dick
?”

The short answer is falling in love. Maugham guessed as much, though he didn't have Sarah's name, and didn't know how or why the
author strayed from his wife. “I think it is probable,” he conjectured with old-fashioned politeness, “that Melville was impatient with the marriage tie; it may be that his wife gave him less than he had hoped.” Well, yes, a lot “less.” Mountains' worth of “less.” And that's a clue that there was some method to what critics thought was madness in
Pierre
.
¹²

Hovering over the book is the ghostly image of Mount Greylock, which is known in Pierre's world as the Mount of Titans. It is the same distance from his ancestral home as Greylock is from Broadhall and Arrowhead—fifteen miles—and there is a dark, mysterious place on its slopes that Melville describes in words almost identical to Sarah's recollection of her favorite place on Greylock. “The wild wood circle I shall never forget,” she says in her
Taghconic
memoir of the August excursion with Melville and their friends. It is “formed by fir trees so densely shaded with thick foliage as to exclude a single peep from the bright face of Sol; while the grass growing was of a light, moss color, of that peculiar green seldom to be found, except in small tufts by a shady brook side. And then the silence and repose of the place had the effect of awing one, as it were, and making one superstitious, in spite of oneself.”
¹³

Near the end of
Pierre,
Melville writes of a similar bower on the mountain slopes as a mossy spot with “a hidden life” so perfectly protected from view that it is cloaked in darkness even at midday in August. “Now you stood and shivered in that twilight, though it were high noon and burning August down the meads.” But, as Melville's use of “shivered” suggests, its darkness has acquired a chill. In
Pierre
he looks back at the spot as a place whose charm has turned gloomy. Its beauty now torments him because it is so empty and desolate. The “happy hours” have fled and all that remains is “ruin, merciless and ceaseless; chills and gloom.”
¹⁴

Once readers understand the influence of Sarah and Greylock in the story, it is easier to understand Melville's seemingly strange choice for the dedication page of
Pierre
: “To Greylock's Most Excellent Majesty.” It should be obvious now that Melville saw Greylock as a silent witness to the twin dramas of his recent life—writing
Moby-Dick
and falling in love with Sarah—and that both these dramas helped to inspire
Pierre
. It is also possible that he wasn't recognizing the mountain so much as the woman. The dedication has always been taken as a reference to the grandeur of Greylock, but it can also be read as a tribute to the reigning spirit of the Berkshires in Melville's eyes—the regal Lady of his letters, the goddess in his Berkshire paradise.

The book should have been dedicated to Sarah by name, but to have done so would have caused a firestorm in Pittsfield. Instead, cleverly, his phrase can be read two ways, and only Melville and Sarah would have understood how he was honoring her—his “ever-excellent & beautiful Lady of Paradise”—as the mountain's queen, “Greylock's Most Excellent Majesty.” In
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities,
an ambiguously worded dedication makes the perfect start. But, of course, the literal-minded critics of Melville's day didn't want ambiguity. That is a modern taste. They wanted an adventure from him that needed no interpretation. When they dipped into
Pierre
and found ambiguous lovers saying ambiguous things, they threw their hands in the air and gave up, calling the book unreadable and worse.

SARAH WOULD NEVER
let Melville forget the trip to Greylock. A few years after
Pierre
came out, when things weren't going well in life for either of them, she would send him a beautiful copy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's
The
Pilgrims of the Rhine,
bound in expensive leather with gilt trim and many elaborate engravings. It was a sump
tuous present to give to any friend, but it had a special significance related to Greylock, a reminder of a shared delight in a particular spot on the mountain. As Sarah pointed out in her
Taghconic
essay, her enchanted place on the slopes was so green, peaceful, and secluded that it reminded her of scenes in one of her favorite books,
The Pilgrims of the Rhine
. She would write in Melville's copy the simple inscription, “Herman Melville From his Friend S.A. Morewood Jan. 1st 1854.” The title page features a short quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley that might have conveyed what she really meant to say. It begins, “Wilt thou forget the happy hours / Which we buried in love's sweet bowers?”
¹⁵

In every practical sense, the author of
Moby-Dick
saw his literary career come to an end around August 1852, when he was only thirty-three. If he had taken his life that summer, as he may well have been tempted to do, the full story of his tragic rise and fall might have been revealed long ago by his saddened friends and family. It is easy to imagine how the world would romanticize a legendary seafarer who survived the perils of the deep only to find disenchantment on land and die young. In such a scenario
Moby-Dick
would surely have won renown much earlier, lauded as the young man's greatest achievement, the book he died for. The laurel wreath might have adorned his tomb long before the end of his century.

After the failure of
Pierre,
the love story of Herman and Sarah continued, though at a more subdued pace, and with a great struggle—as we shall see—to cope with continuing money troubles, and—especially for Sarah—illness.

Sarah was right to think that she needed to seize her pleasures from life while she could. She turned thirty in 1853, and for much of the decade ahead she would struggle to stay healthy. In August of that year, at the height of the Berkshire season, Lizzie Melville noted in a detached tone that something wasn't right up at the mansion on the hill. “Our neighbors at BroadHall,” she wrote to Judge Shaw, “are neighborly, as usual, though Mrs. M. not being very well this summer, and having a child sick also, is not in her accustomed picnicking mood—so altogether we have had a very quiet summer.” The main trouble was in Sarah's lungs. Summers in the Berkshires were usually good for her, but in winters she would have bad coughing spells. What she was fighting used to be called consumption, the old term for the slow, consuming illness of tuberculosis.
¹

In its early stages the disease was thought to have the magical effect of enhancing a woman's appearance, heightening the glow of
her face and eyes and giving her a sad radiance as if she were doomed to be consumed by her own beauty. Even when energetic and full of passion, the great consumptive heroines in the literature of the time would show a touch of melancholy in their eyes that men of the period found captivating. Edgar Allan Poe, a devoted admirer of such women, was capable of writing rapturously about “the gentle disease,” celebrating what he thought was the slow ecstasy of its progress: “How glorious! To depart in the heyday of the young blood—the heart all passion—the imagination all fire—amid the remembrances of happier days—in the fall of the year—and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves.”
²

The reality was not so romantic, but in her late thirties Sarah often had the classic haunted look of a languishing beauty. In
Pierre,
Melville plays up the appeal of Isabel as a beauty with the hint of some consuming illness waiting to overtake her, a woman with an “immortal sadness” in her face, and then toward the end of the novel—as mentioned earlier—she makes that poignant lament for her fragile health, “Was ever hearse so plumed?”

On the other hand, there were also times when Sarah seemed as full of life as ever, renewing her social activities with even greater vigor or galloping away on her latest steed, Kossuth, named after the Hungarian revolutionary whose speeches she admired. When Rowland took her to South Carolina for a rest cure in December 1854, she was feeling terrible, yet she still managed on most days to go for rides of ten miles on horseback. Regardless of her health problems, she was strong enough at thirty to give birth to another child, a daughter. Anne Rachel Morewood was born in November 1853, about a year and a half after Sarah's second son, Alfred.

Again, it is impossible to say for certain whether the father was
Rowland or Herman. After the publication of
Pierre,
Melville was so guarded about his private life, and so cut off from the literary world, that it's harder to track his movements. What we do know is that he struggled for years to cling to the unprofitable farm whose only real value for him was its location next to Broadhall. He never stopped loving Sarah, as we will see.

There are two clues about his possible relationship to Anne Rachel. One is that thirty years later he did something highly unusual for him in his often difficult and reclusive old age: he composed an affectionate toast for a wedding celebration. “The Fair Bride” was the opening salute he sent as his greeting to Anne on her wedding day at Broadhall. By that time, he had not lived in the Berkshires for almost twenty years, and wasn't in close touch with Rowland, then a widower. There was no apparent reason for him to acknowledge Anne's marriage, but he did so with these wistful words: “Wherever fortune carries her may she remember Berkshire, beautiful and happy, as Berkshire will always remember her.”
³

The second clue is in the immediate aftermath of Anne's birth, in December 1853, when Melville gave a curious twist to his usual habit of bestowing fanciful names on Sarah. He sent her a letter marked “Particularly Private and Exclusively Confidential” and addressed it, “For, The Honorable & Beautiful Lady, The Countess of Hahn-Hahn—Now at her Castle of Southmount.” As improbable as it may seem, there really was a Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn in Germany, and no romantic young man would use that as a nickname for his lover unless they both shared the same racy sense of humor.
⁴

In 1852 the
Christian Times
had singled out the countess as an especially undesirable figure whose fervid romances were some of the “most licentious and scandalous” in Europe. Only one of her
novels—
The Countess Faustina
—had been translated into English, but that was one too many for the guardians of public morality. The heroine (“one of those souls of fire, who desire continually to be draining the cup of happiness”) has been described as “a female Don Juan” in a novel where “adultery is glorified.” Worried about censorship, the English publisher suggested to readers that they take Faustina “not as an example but as a warning.” When it was reported in 1851 that Countess Hahn-Hahn had suddenly reformed and become a Catholic, the
New-York Tribune
scoffed at the news and said that no one would believe it until she chose to “burn some of her books rather than reprint them.”

Given their usual banter, Sarah must have enjoyed Melville's mischievous suggestion that she and the scandalous countess were twin spirits. But if the newborn Anne wasn't his daughter, he was far overstepping his bounds to close with his “compliments” to “that sweet heiress of your noble name, the infant Countess Hahn-Hahn.” It was one thing to joke about adultery with Sarah, but why bring her husband's newborn into the joke unless, of course, Anne wasn't Rowland's, but his?
⁵

AS THE YEARS
WENT
BY
, Herman and Sarah seem to have accepted that they would never live together, and would always have to keep their relationship a secret. They promoted the notion that they were just close neighbors, bookish friends, and often acted as if the Morewoods and the Melvilles were one big family. Rowland and Herman became friendly, as did Lizzie and Sarah.

Unlike her neighbor, Lizzie didn't dwell too much on romantic subjects, and didn't take literature too seriously. If Sarah's head was
often in the clouds, Lizzie's was preoccupied with practical matters involving her family. By the mid-1850s, she was the mother of four children, two boys and two girls. (Elizabeth was born in May 1853, and Frances in March 1855.) Unlike Sarah's businessman husband who was so busy in New York, Lizzie's husband was constantly struggling to provide for his family. If her father had not supported them so generously over the years, they would have surely lost everything.

Gradually, Melville's sisters and mother moved away, except for Augusta, who always stayed close to her brother. Of all his relatives, Melville's mother never warmed to Sarah. In the next generation, relations became so close that William Morewood—Sarah's oldest child born before she met Herman—married Melville's niece Milie. She was his brother Allan's oldest daughter, and her full name was the same as her grandmother's. When she married in 1874, Herman must have savored the irony that there was now a Maria Gansevoort Morewood in the family.

Melville's mother had so little understanding of his talent that she was ready to see him abandon a career that seemed nothing but trouble to her. In 1853 she wrote to one of her relatives that Herman needed a “change of occupation.” The profession of writing was draining her son's strength and doing nothing to help the family. Whether Herman knew it or not, the enforced isolation of the writer's life “does not agree with him,” his mother concluded. “The constant working of the brain, & excitement of the imagination is wearing Herman out,” she complained. No doubt Melville often heard such remarks from her, and with each reminder of his failures he must have found his struggles all the more difficult to bear.
⁶

Financial pressures over his debts and his lack of income shad
owed every year that Melville remained in Pittsfield. He was often elsewhere, and he found it harder to keep in touch with Sarah. When he was visiting the Shaws in Boston with Lizzie one year, he wanted to alert Sarah that he would be coming home to Arrowhead soon. Yet it was awkward to get a letter to her without the rest of the Shaw household noticing. Arranging to travel ahead by himself to prepare Arrowhead for Lizzie's return, he sent a friendly notice to Mrs. Morewood that he was on his way.

Written with the knowledge that Lizzie would probably see it, this note to Sarah is completely different from his other surviving letters to her, beginning with his uncharacteristically formal salutation, “My Dear Mrs. Morewood.” There are no references to goddesses or paradise or knights or the Countess Hahn-Hahn in this letter. It sounds more like a business message to an elderly aunt than one to a woman with whom he had shared so much of importance in his life. With stiff decorum, he signed it, “Very Truly & Sincerely Your Friend & Neighbor, H Melville.” He couldn't have done otherwise, for Lizzie did indeed inspect it and added a message of her own to it, supplying some church gossip and a playful but condescending remark about Herman doing as he had been told: “Wives propose—husbands dispose—don't you think so?” she asked Sarah.

From Melville's point of view the only real purpose of this letter was to let Sarah know that he was coming home and would be alone. She had written earlier to Lizzie, suggesting that the family could stay at Broadhall a few days when they returned if they wanted. But Melville was obviously looking forward to enjoying his own time with her, and had led Lizzie to think that his early return was all her idea. No doubt with a secret sense of excitement he was able to announce to Sarah in an open and seemingly innocent way
that he would “be happy to accept, for myself, your kind & neighborly invitation for a day or two.”
⁷

In this way, Sarah and Herman turned an invitation for all into an invitation for one, giving themselves a precious couple of days on their own at Broadhall, with servants silently looking the other way, and neighbors gossiping as usual about Mrs. Morewood's strange manner of hospitality. The formal letter made it all seem so proper. In such covert ways, the affair was able to continue long after the initial romantic upheaval had settled into something less dramatic. It was the best they could manage under the circumstances. Melville had realized early on that such a path might stretch out ahead of them, writing of Pierre's ongoing relationship with Isabel that it was full of “the secretness, yet the always present domesticness of our love.”
⁸

Yet Melville had wanted so much more from this affair, and he bitterly regretted that his setbacks had taken from him the chance to turn the Berkshires into the perfect retreat for a successful novelist and lover. When at some point in the late 1850s he gave Sarah his copy of Dryden's poems, he marked not only the line about the first night of love for Sigismonda and Guiscardo, but also a passage about the tragic end of their hidden love.

Discovering that the princess has secretly wed Guiscardo, her jealous father has the man killed and sends the heart in a golden goblet to Sigismonda. So devoted is the princess to her dead lover that she immediately resolves to poison herself rather than live without him, and presses her lips to his heart in a last kiss.

It is an extraordinary moment of distraught passion that Melville may have first encountered in an engraving of William Hogarth's painting of an overwhelmed Sigismonda clasping the goblet to her breast. In his gift of the Dryden volume to Sarah, Herman made a
long, dark penciled line down the margin beside the description of the princess kissing her lover's heart. Because he presented the poetry volume to her in the later years of their relationship, it is easy to see that it gave Sarah two passages that are like bookends to a romance, one signifying a bright beginning, the other a sad fate imposed by outside forces. (Like Sigismonda, Isabel and Pierre die by poison in Melville's novel.) These high and low points of love give an overview of the personal journey Melville undertook, largely in secret, in his thirties and early forties. It would take the rest of his life for him to come to terms with it.