The Whale (27 page)

After Hawthorne left Lenox, he and Melville corresponded very little, and they saw each other only three more times—once in Concord, Massachusetts, in November 1852; and twice in Liverpool, England, in the winter of 1856–57. During the period between their visits in Concord and Liverpool, Melville's fortunes went from bad to worse.

Moby Dick
was a critical and commercial failure, selling fewer copies than any of Melville's five previous books. His next novel,
Pierre, or the Ambiguities
(1852), was an even bigger disaster, universally condemned by critics. He failed to find a publisher for his subsequent effort, a novel called
Isle of the Cross
(now lost), and he published only shorter works in magazines for the next few years. The last novel Melville published in his lifetime,
The Confidence Man
(1857), was yet another commercial failure, after which he stopped writing prose for thirty years.

The period of Hawthorne's close association with Melville was the most productive of Hawthorne's life. During that time, he published a new edition of an older story collection,
Twice-Told Tales
(1851), and he wrote
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851),
A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls
(1851),
The Blithedale Romance
(1852), and
The Snow Image
(a new short story collection, 1852). After 1852, Hawthorne began five more novels but completed only one—
The Marble Faun
(1860).

The Blithedale Romance
, the novel that Hawthorne wrote immediately after leaving Lenox, prominently features a character named Hollingsworth, a charismatic, handsome, gruff social reformer who has the physical characteristics of Melville. Hollingsworth has a relationship with the book's narrator, Coverdale, who resembles Hawthorne in his self-restraint and reserve. The correlations between the fictional relationship of Coverdale and Hollingsworth and the actual relationship of Hawthorne and Melville are striking: in each case, the two men develop a close friendship based on an intellectual rapport with strong sexual undercurrents, and in each case, a crisis of intimacy causes them to separate. At the end of chapter XV (titled “A Crisis”), Hollingsworth declares his love for Coverdale and asks Coverdale to run away with him to form a Utopian colony. “Coverdale,” Hollingsworth says, “there is not the man in this wide world whom I can love as I could you. Do not forsake me!” A little later in the same highly charged scene, Hollingsworth says to Coverdale, “Will you devote yourself, and sacrifice all to this great end, and be my friend of friends, forever?” The moment ends when Coverdale rejects Hollingsworth, reporting that, in doing so, his “heart-pang was not merely figurative, but an absolute torture of the breast.”

In March 1852, soon after leaving Lenox, Hawthorne purchased a home from Louisa May Alcott's family in Concord, where he twice invited Melville to visit him. Melville declined the first invitation, in July 1852, but accepted one in November of that year. The visit was cordial, and the two talked about a true story that Melville had heard, which he tried to convince Hawthorne to write as a novel. The story concerned a woman who married a sailor she had found on a beach after a shipwreck, and Melville thought Hawthorne's approach to fiction would suit the subject matter better than his own; but Hawthorne was not interested. They wrote several letters back
and forth about it, making it the most sustained topic of their whole correspondence, but neither ultimately used the material.

Their final meetings occurred in Liverpool. Hawthorne's college friend Franklin Pierce had become president of the United States in 1853, and he had appointed Hawthorne the U.S. Consul in Liverpool. Because Melville had fallen on such hard times, Hawthorne attempted to get him a consulship post, as well, but could not; and when Hawthorne left for England to assume his own post, the two fell out of touch. By late 1856, Melville's family feared so much for his sanity that his father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, financed a trip for Melville to Jerusalem, and on his way, Melville made a side trip to see Hawthorne. Hawthorne recorded the visit in his notebook, in an entry dated November 20, 1856:

A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. . . . We soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; he has been affected with neuralgic complaints in his head and limbs, and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind. . . . 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. . . . He is a person of very gentlemanly instincts in every respect, save that he is a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen. . . . Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human
ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. . . . He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

Melville stopped in Liverpool again on his way back from Jerusalem, in order to retrieve a trunk he had left at the U.S. Consulate, but he saw Hawthorne only in passing.

After his trip, Melville tried but failed to support himself by lecturing, and he continued to spiral into debt. In 1863, he was forced to sell Arrowhead to his brother Allan, after which he moved his family to Manhattan, ultimately finding work as an inspector at the New York Customs House, where he worked until he retired in 1885. During this long period, he wrote constantly, composing poems that were published in small editions financed by Melville's father-in-law or paid for with money from Lizzie's inheritances. When critics bothered to notice his poetry at all, they reviewed it unfavorably. One such poem, an epic called
Clarel
, is the longest poem in American letters at nearly eighteen thousand lines, and it features a character based on Hawthorne, called Vine.
Clarel
is a meditation on the interrelationship of erotic and metaphysical longing and contains allusions to Melville's own yearning for Hawthorne.

Melville was shocked to hear the news of Hawthorne's death, in May 1864. After Hawthorne's funeral, which Melville did not attend, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “I thought there was a tragic element in the event . . . in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, & he died of it.”

Melville's poem “Monody” commemorates his feelings about Hawthorne's death. The two stanzas of the poem were written at different times, the first most likely just after Hawthorne died and the second probably after Melville visited Hawthorne's grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord:

To have known him, to have loved him

After loneness long;

And then to be estranged in life,

And neither in the wrong;

And now for death to set his seal—

Ease me, a little ease, my song!

By wintry hills his hermit-mound

The sheeted snow-drifts drape,

And houseless there the snow-bird flits

Beneath the fir-trees' crape:

Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine

That hid the shyest grape.

Sources for
The Whale
include biographies of Melville and Hawthorne, critical interpretations of their work, and the surviving letters and journals of many of Melville's family and associates during the time of the writing of
Moby Dick
, especially Melville's sister Augusta, the publisher Evert Duyckinck, and Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. Archivists at the Berkshire Historical Society (headquartered at Melville's old home of Arrowhead) and the Berkshire Athenaeum (Pittsfield's public library, which holds a Melville collection)
generously provided research assistance. An invaluable resource for tracking the movements of Melville and people associated with him is Jay Leyda's two-volume
Melville Log
, a day-by-day account of Melville's life composed of references to and quotations from primary documentary sources. I have been as faithful to primary sources and historical reality as possible. In referring to
Moby Dick
, I have followed Melville's own practice of writing it without the now-familiar hyphen, which was added to the first American edition because Melville's brother Allan mistakenly hyphenated it in a letter to the Harper brothers, and they unwittingly used the mistake. Hyphens were common in book titles in the nineteenth century—Melville's own previous novel was called
White-Jacket
—and subsequent editors adopted Allan's punctuation, as well. I have also tried my best to represent the opinions of every historical person in this novel as accurately as possible, based on their own surviving writings and the letters and journals of people in their circles.

Jeanie Field's character is the exception to this commitment to strict verisimilitude, though her character still corresponds in most ways with her historical reality. In real life, as in this novel, Jeanne Lucinda Field was the younger sister of the lawyer Dudley Field and the daughter of David Dudley Field II, a legal reformer and abolitionist. We know that she was at the picnic where Hawthorne and Melville first met because Hawthorne identifies her by name in his journal entry about the event, and we know that she socialized with Melville and Hawthorne and their acquaintances and that she traveled between her family's homes in Stockbridge and New York City. However, there is no historical evidence to indicate that she played the role of mediator between Hawthorne and Melville.

All of Hawthorne's actual letters to Melville have been lost or destroyed, save one, a brief note from Hawthorne asking if Melville would check on a package that Hawthorne had been expecting at
the Pittsfield station and requesting that Melville buy a clock in a Pittsfield shop for $1.50. In the present novel, I used this real note as the basis for the note of August 21, 1850. All of Hawthorne's other letters to Melville are inventions, in some cases created as likely responses to surviving Melville letters and in others borrowed from Hawthorne's private journal entries or adapted from letters Hawthorne actually wrote to other people regarding Melville. In all cases regarding Hawthorne's invented letters, Hawthorne's surviving writing was used as a guide.

Melville's letters to Hawthorne in
The Whale
are real, with the following exceptions: first, the pair of letters concerning Hawthorne's recommendations for revision of
Moby Dick
(beginning
here
); second, the letter that uses chowder as an allegory (
here
), the concept for which is borrowed from an early chapter of
Moby Dick
; and third, the letter describing Melville's Thanksgiving celebration at Arrowhead (
here
), which was adapted from a letter from Augusta Melville to her sister Helen describing that same Thanksgiving celebration.

In one case, a mundane matter was edited out of one of Melville's letters, since it held little significance for the emotional development of Melville's and Hawthorne's relationship. Expressions of feeling have not been added to any of Melville's actual letters, nor have any been edited to heighten their emotional effect: the letters contain Melville's actual sentiments, and one can read them in whole or part in myriad books and online at melville.org/
corresp.htm.

Thank you:

Joel Snyder, Rita Porfiris, Mark Votapek, Diana Kerr, and Michael Havens, for reading early drafts and offering invaluable criticism and comments.

Louisa Lebwohl, for the time at Arrowhead.

Stuart Bernstein, for believing in the soundness of this ship when no one else did, launching it into open waters, and guiding it through all kinds of weather.

Carole DeSanti and Christopher Russell, for finding so many ways to deepen and enrich this story.

Jane Cavolina, for your meticulous, insightful copyediting.

Everyone at Viking, for your kindness, imagination, and generosity.

Merci mille fois à la Reine des Bois.

Miguel Espinoza, for your big heart and the space to read and write.

Maha Almannai, for your faith and commitment to beauty.

Cynthia Gin, for reading between the lines.

Margaret O'Neill, for all the stories (and the coat hanger whale).

Raquel Stecher, for your unwavering enthusiasm and friendship.

Rose Todaro, for believing that our life together was a journey worth taking, and taking it.

Jeff Barnet: words cannot express my gratitude. But
thanks.