The Whale (13 page)

After Herman's first two books became sensations, his marriage to Lizzie had been almost a fait accompli, since it satisfied so many desires: Judge Shaw's desire to formalize the alliance between the Melvilles and Shaws, Maria's to shore up the Melville fortunes, Lizzie's to become something like a real sister to Helen, and Herman's to be accepted by society. The desires it hadn't satisfied were the ones Herman and Lizzie experienced every evening at their dinner table, every night in their bed, and every day when Herman set sail across the lonely oceans of his mind, chasing unheeding phantoms across an endless horizon of empty white pages.

 • • • 

Herman thought constantly of the silly thank-you note he had sent Hawthorne. He recited its contents over and over again in his mind, cringing. Still, no answer came. He became so consumed with Hawthorne's silence that he barely noticed when Lizzie and Malcolm left for Boston.

He walked in the woods at night, accompanied by the ghostly shushing of Hawthorne's sighs; he fed his cow in the morning, and it was Hawthorne who peered at him through her moony bovine eyes; the babbling cascade of the brook beyond his barn murmured Hawthorne's unintelligible secrets. Every evening, an oriole in the tree outside Herman's study, late departing on her migration south, warbled Hawthorne's laughter in twittering song; and though Herman felt Hawthorne's spirit with him everywhere and always, the real Hawthorne would not speak a word. Day after day dissolved into loneliness, and still no letter came.
No more riddling books as gifts. Hawthorne himself refused to appear striding up the hill toward Arrowhead. How much richer would a single ordinary word from Hawthorne's own lips have been than all the glories of love in Herman's imagination!

As the days passed without a sign from Hawthorne, the older author became a nightmare as much as a fantasy, so completely did he confound Herman's hours. Herman began to hoard tiny daily memories, in order to offer them to Hawthorne later: the setting sun glinting orange on the handle of a silver spoon; the drum-tightness of his cheeks in the frosty predawn air; the way the midnight stars crowned the bare branches of the elm tree down the road. Fleeting impressions and passing fancies became the currency of Herman's lonely kingdom, and he stored them like a miser, in case the dream of sharing them with Hawthorne became the only treasure that life ever offered him again.

By Thanksgiving Day, Herman had still heard nothing in response to his note. Hawthorne was there, a short ride away, in his little red cottage, where he was no doubt chopping wood and reading to Sophia and bouncing little Julian on his knee; and surely Hawthorne found time during the course of his days to write letters to his sister and his publisher and that goat Longfellow and perhaps even to Dr. Holmes, who was spending the holidays just over the next hill from Herman's house. Yet he would not spare a single word for Herman.

November 28, 1850

Arrowhead, Pittsfield

My dear Hawthorne,

I write still in the last flush of Thanksgiving glory to send you a report on that sanctified holiday from Pittsfield. I hope that your first Thanksgiving in Lenox was more than
satisfactory and am sorry only that we did not quaff a few tureens of gravy together—but even your own little clan may not have fit at Arrowhead this year: the entire Melville tribe came whooping around Pittsfield. How the Berkshires have made country devils of us all!

Thanksgiving dawned stormy (as it always seems to be in this country), and a warm rain fell throughout the morning. My Aunt Mary made the bone-jolting ride over the hills from Albany with all of our Lansingburgh relations piled into a bed of straw in the back of a great lumber wagon. They arrived completely hidden from sight beneath piles of cloaks and buffalo robes and umbrellas. They attacked our home like sailors just arrived in harbor ransacking a public house, and there was such a shaking out of dresses and rubbing of backs and puffing by the fire as you can scarcely imagine. Aunt Mary led the way—the tribe of Melville following one by one, up the stairs to my study, which was the only room large enough and empty enough to accommodate the whole party. The room looked beautiful, though at the cost of displacing all of my work, since we laid my desk end to end with a dining table from downstairs (there are gravy stains on my desk still). We numbered a dozen all told, plus the two serving girls, who sat with us at dinner as guests. My wife, Lizzie, and son, Malcolm, were the only ones missing from the Melville festivities, having taken their accustomed Thanksgiving journey to Boston. Everything was beautifully cooked, the skin of the turkey a golden crispy brown, and how you would have admired the squash soup. We ate with happiness, and after several glasses of champagne, my sister Augusta pranced about the room serving everyone, carving and ladling and dishing. After dinner, we passed the evening
looking at the French Portfolio through the glass and having our fortunes told by Augusta with cards that I acquired from a Portuguese sailor in Peru. We handed around tea at seven o'clock and egg nog at nine, the appetites of the company so fully satisfied that they begged not to be asked to partake of anything more, even if it were Thanksgiving! At this, I forced each person to take an extra sip of brandy.

At ten—just an hour ago, now—they rumbled off in their cumbrous vehicle, and we have left the cleaning up for tomorrow—all except my desk, that is, which I immediately cleared and set right, so that I could write you this missive and begin running out my whale again first thing tomorrow.

And now that Thanksgiving has passed, I will take a moonlight ramble through the woods—yes, the city has its culture and cafes, and the sea has its drama, but for now give me the fallen leaves and rolling hills and the smell of the earth after a rain! Give me that over all the operas on earth, so long as I can harpoon whales with my pen!

Hawthorne, my family has returned whence they came, and Lizzie and Malcolm will remain in Boston for a week or more: there is a room awaiting you now at Arrowhead, if, after your own feasts and festivities, you would like to walk up the road and have a friendly discussion about Coleridge or anything else. As you see, I have put away my chowder-headed metaphors and send you only this straightforward greeting from a Berkshire Thanksgiving turkey—namely, yours truly,

Melville

After Thanksgiving, Lizzie wrote to say that she would be staying indefinitely in Boston. She delivered the decision offhandedly—it was a single line in a long paragraph about a new armoire that her father had purchased. Even when Augusta wrote to Lizzie to include her in the plans they were making for Christmas at Arrowhead, Lizzie wrote back instead of the Shaws' planned celebrations and her accustomed role in them, making it clear that she might not return to the Berkshires for Yuletide, either.

In Lizzie's and Malcolm's absence, Herman settled into a stable pattern of work, which nevertheless failed to bring him peace of mind, as he spent nearly every waking moment pining for Hawthorne. And beyond the tension of Lizzie's indefinite sojourn in Boston, which felt more like a standoff every day, and beyond his obsession with Hawthorne, the wider world continued to aggravate Herman's emotions, as well: he ordered several books on whaling from Harper and Brothers—his own publisher—in New York, and they declined to fulfill the order, informing him that they could not extend him even a paltry credit of $8.43: sales of his recent novels still had not recuperated the advances they had paid, so not only did they refuse his book order, but they also sent him a bill for $695.86.

This state of affairs, and Hawthorne's maddening silence, continued all the way through the winter solstice, which brought the first real snowstorm of the season. It started when the lightest wisp
of a snowflake fell against the window of Herman's study, and he traced its watery expiration down the pane with his finger.

Here, he thought, is the mystery of all life, in the transformations of water, the vast roaring swells of the ocean ascending drop by drop and moment by moment as vapors floating like angels into clouds, gliding far away from the mothering sea, floating inland over the solid earth, and then fluttering in crystalline loneliness down from the heavens—and how could this single drop of frozen water falling from the clouds, this lonely container for all of heaven and earth, return to the great unknowing ocean from which it had ascended? All of creation and all of human longing trickled down Herman's windowpane before him, every secret of the universe locked in drops of water. Oh, Nathaniel, we humans are but droplets of the essence of God, lost on the fertile earth, all separate but remembering the same vast ocean from which we came. Oh, Nathaniel, I know that you felt the pull of this tide of love in your heart—we are split from the same original impulse, and together we create not just love but creation itself, the God of love waiting to arise from each of us. Herman pressed his sweating forehead against the cold glass and felt as if he were on fire. This fever of longing is not love, he thought, it is the opposite of love. It is the separation from love that burns like the fires of hell.

More and more snowflakes fell, lonely souls blown by the fates and the winter winds, each separate and unique, each falling blindly, hoping against hope to land in the original ocean of love and finding instead only more lonely souls collecting on the ground. The snow transformed the landscape, at first pleasantly erasing the grass and the dirt and the sharp edges and corners of the house and barn; but then, as the flakes became heavier and bigger and fell faster and faster, the air itself turned white, a blank wall against which Herman's longing was just another ghost.

Herman's cow stepped out of the barn into the newly whitened
world, and the steam of her breath circled her head like a nun's wimple; she retreated again to the warmth of her hay. Normally Herman could at least produce a few new manuscript pages every day, but on this day he could not bring himself even to step away from his window: peering out on the blizzard, on the mantle of new snow collecting rapidly through the afternoon, he imagined that the whole earth was being swallowed by the all-consuming albino whale in his mind, that it had breached the pages of his book and devoured the landscape and he gazed out now on the great beast's gullet—that this vast cosmic whale was as white inside as out. At last, he thought, he knew how Jonah had felt. But as desolate as the landscape seemed, Herman still saw that the whiteness paradoxically enhanced the beauty of every object it touched: the rotting roof of the lean-to over the woodpile, now hidden by an unbroken plaster of snow; the newly statuesque solemnity of the old outhouse, redeemed into politeness by its alabaster coat; and the spindly bare branches of maple trees, rising like the marbled fingers of Bernini sculptures from the blank white pedestal of earth below. This is how beauty must be, he thought, not pretty and safe but unbearable and blank and fierce with the horror of isolation. The whiteness provided a visual uniformity from which Herman's ideas could emerge, a canvas of terrifying emptiness; and the sudden winter death of the world, mercifully, made Hawthorne's silence tolerable, for the whole earth now became silent with an icy calm. Herman occasionally opened his study window, to let the freezing air in, to numb his body if not his mind to the emptiness of Hawthorne's absence, and as his fingers turned stiff and red, he thought, I am freezing inside, and my heart will harden into an icicle of longing, but, oh, Nathaniel, you could thaw me with a word, a glance!

 • • • 

On the morning after the blizzard, in the midst of this wintry captivation, Herman's imagination suddenly loosened and broke free, like a
calving glacier exploding into the sea. His ideas came with such urgency that he found himself cursing both his quill pen and his metal nib, as he blotted line after line struggling to match the speed of his mind with the pace of his hand. He was so enthralled that, at first, he paid no attention to the heavy pounding on the front door, but simply kept writing as fast as his fingers would allow; but soon he heard squeaking hinges downstairs and the voice of Mary the maid, and then a man's voice, and then another, and he could not help wondering what errand would bring someone to Arrowhead through such formidable conditions. He opened his study door a crack to see Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Fields stepping inside.

Fields was wearing a striking knee-length green coat with fluffy fur lapels and a massive fur collar. Twenty beavers must have died to make it. Fields handed his walking stick to Holmes and then elaborately removed the coat, to extraordinary effect: he swooped it off like a matador flashing a cape, and then he whipped it around his head in an elegant parabola, dashingly and improbably missing the heads of Holmes and Mary and only grazing the paintings on the wall. The coat's white silk lining was speckled with cherry polka dots, which had a hypnotic effect. Fields then tossed the coat into the air, nonchalantly took his walking stick back from Holmes, and neatly caught the coat over his shoulder with it, as if the heavy fur weighed nothing. Beneath his coat, Fields wore a sleek suit of lemon yellow, with a cinnamon-colored tie. It was dandyism elevated to theater, and Herman thought he might try to reproduce it himself sometime. Holmes, by comparison, seemed like a man who had dressed conscientiously for a funeral and then been run over by a milk wagon.

Herman smoothed his hair and stepped out onto the landing.

“What's the meaning of this, Melville?” Holmes said, when he caught sight of the disheveled author above him.

“The meaning of what?”

“We must speak to you confidentially,” said Fields.

Herman shrugged. “Very well. In honor of your tropical appearance, Fields, I will offer you a sunny beverage against the chill. What do you say to a brandy?” Herman descended the stairs.

Fields replied, “My doctor has advised me never to drink brandy without also smoking a cigar.”

“I'm your doctor,” Holmes said, “and I never said any such thing.”

“Brandy and cigars, then!” Herman announced.

“But it's only eleven o'clock in the morning,” said Holmes.

Herman scoffed. “Why must you object to
everything
?” He led the way into the parlor, where he threw two new logs onto the embers in the fireplace and blew the blaze noisily to life. He excused himself and returned with a bottle of brandy, three snifters, and three cigars. When he had poured everyone a glass and they had puffed their Havanas ablaze, Fields asked, “May we close the doors, Melville? We have something rather confidential to discuss.”

“The ladies will spend the next week railing against the evils of cigar smoke, but as you wish.” He closed both doors to the parlor and sat back down, and the smoke immediately began accumulating above them. Herman thought of the smoking cauldron of the three witches from
Macbeth
, and he thought of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, smoking bodily in the Babylonian furnace; and his mind seethed with historical and mythical groups of threes: the Wise Men from the New Testament, the Roman Triumverates, the Great Schism of the Catholic Church and the Avignon popes, the Three Fates, the Christian Trinity, Buddhism's Three Jewels. He realized that he had left his writing desk too quickly, and that his brain was laboring to make the three of them sitting there by his fire mean something, connect to something, symbolize something, and he suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad. Here were two gentlemen in his parlor on a social visit, and he was thinking of ancient kings and popes. He
became aware that Holmes and Fields were staring at him, and he suddenly wondered how long he had been lost in his own thoughts.

Holmes pulled his chair closer to Herman and puffed his cigar at him. “There's no point hemming and hawing,” he said. “Dudley is hopping mad and demands that you discontinue your ridiculous affair with his sister. He sent us to tell you, so that he wouldn't have to come himself and challenge you.”

“Challenge?” Herman was still thinking about the Avignon popes.

“To a duel.”

Fields cleared his throat. “Everyone knows that your wife has left you, and you're throwing your life away on Jeanie. It's unseemly. She's pretty and smart, yes, but this is no way for a family man to behave. Not to mention that you're the son-in-law of the most prominent jurist in Massachusetts. Truly, we have your best interests at heart. We have come to save you from yourself and spare you further embarrassment. Stop this nonsense!”

It took Herman a few seconds to comprehend completely what they were saying. When he finally did, he nearly laughed, but Fields and Holmes were so solemn that all of his incredulity got stuck in a sideways grin: Herman suddenly looked like an extra in an opera buffa. Try as he might, he could not wipe the smile from his face. He drew on his cigar and took a long drink of brandy: fire and brimstone, he thought, strong drink and the burning of leaves and the thick smoke that catches in your throat. He spied a piece of gray lint on Holmes's white collar, and the texture of it seemed hideous. Everything was too real, all of a sudden. He could not bring his mind down from its writing frenzy, and he vowed never to let himself be interrupted in the middle of writing a sentence again. He felt sweat seeping from his scalp and oozing in slow drops around his hair follicles like worms slithering out from the inside of his head.

“Do you have nothing to say, Melville?”

The two gentlemen were looking at him with both concern and moral censure. So this was the literary community of the Berkshires, Herman thought, outwardly sophisticated and broad-minded but privately priggish and reactionary.

“I'm sorry to disappoint such a well-intentioned social call, but Lizzie hasn't left me, and I'm not having an affair with Jeanie Field.”

“Come, come, Melville,” said Holmes. “Everyone knows that Mrs. Melville has gone to live with her parents.”

“My wife is spending the holidays in Boston, as she always does, while I remain here to finish my novel. I am working against deadline, Holmes, an idea you might be familiar with, and Jeanie Field has made exactly one visit to our house, while my wife and mother were both here. I have not even laid eyes on the girl in more than a month now.”

“Don't obscure the issue, Melville,” said Fields. “Even Hawthorne says you're having an affair, and Hawthorne is no gossip!”

“Hawthorne?” Herman's heart raced. “What has Hawthorne got to do with it?”

“Well, nothing,” said Fields. “But we were there yesterday, and it happened to come up. If even Hawthorne mentions a rumor, it's probably true.”

Herman puzzled over this new bit of innuendo. Why would Hawthorne profess to believe a scandalous rumor about him and Jeanie, when Hawthorne himself had trusted Jeanie to privately convey a message to him?

“Stop being obstinate, Melville,” said Holmes. “We are doing you a favor, and you sit there grinning like a jackanapes.”

Herman had stopped listening. Was it possible that Hawthorne genuinely thought he was having an affair with Jeanie, and
that
was why he hadn't responded to Herman's letters? Could Hawthorne be not merely aloof and protective of his own wife's honor but also
jealous? Herman knew that he had to see him immediately—a potentially catastrophic misunderstanding had happened, and he had to set things right!

“Are you going to give up the affair or not?” Fields said.

“Of course not!” Herman answered. “Since there is no affair to give up.” He could no longer even talk to these two gentlemen, so fully was his mind consumed with Hawthorne and the untoward possibility that rumormongers were interfering with the
actual
affair he wanted to have. Hawthorne must know the truth—that he and he alone held the key to Herman's heart. He drained off his brandy and stood up. “If you'll excuse me, I'll thank you for coming and bid you good day. I have rather pressing business to attend to.”

Fields and Holmes looked at one another. Holmes said, “Don't you remember what happened with Poe's affair and all of that nonsense in New York? And Dudley is a frightfully good shot. You don't want a duel with him.”