The Whale (9 page)

Lizzie yanked her hand out of Herman's grasp. She stalked off,
flung open the door, and charged out into the rain. Herman shook Dr. Brewster's hand violently and told him they would talk in the morning; and then he grabbed his mother's elbow, lifted her to her feet, and marched her as quickly as he could out through the dining room.

“Lizzie,” Herman called. He was dragging his waddling mother by the arm. “Lizzie!”

Lizzie did not turn to face them and would not even slow her enraged pace until she had descended a long hill and rounded a curve, so that Brewster's farm was well out of sight. The hem of her dress was brown with mud, and she flapped her arms against her sides, as if she were a great flightless bird trying in vain to lift off. Herman continued to call her name.

“Will you let go of me, Herman?” Maria cried. “And stop shouting and making a spectacle of us. We can talk to Lizzie when we are back at Broad Hall.”

Suddenly, Lizzie stopped in the middle of the road and turned to face them. She yelled, “Why would you not discuss this with me, Herman? Have you made him any promises?”

Herman waited until they had caught up to her to say, “Fifteen hundred down and the farm is ours. With the three thousand we have against your inheritance, we can give the down payment, pay off our other debts, and have enough money to live on until my next book is published. We can move into Brewster's farm three weeks from today and have money in the bank all winter.”

“Fifteen hundred down against how much?”

“He has agreed to take our note.”

“For how much?”

“Six thousand five hundred.”

Lizzie nearly fainted.

“No, I misspoke. The note will be only five thousand, after our down payment.”

“But that is more than Broad Hall! Why would you even think of that, Herman? Why didn't you heed Robert's warning?”

“We must remember that Robert has bankrupted his farm,” Herman said. “His judgment is not sound. Truth be told,
we
have taken advantage of Brewster! His property is far better and worth far more than Broad Hall and has many superior advantages in terms of location and water and arable land, which Robert does not really understand.”

Lizzie staggered to the ditch at the edge of the road and sat down on a large stone, with her shoes in a rivulet of muddy water. She put her elbows on her knees and held her head firmly in both hands. “How will we pay such a mortgage? It isn't possible. Tell me you haven't agreed to this.” She looked down at the dirty hem of her dress. Herman said nothing. She struggled to her feet and continued walking, now in a desultory trudge.

Herman and his mother adopted Lizzie's gloomy pace; and despite Lizzie's wrath and Maria's silent but unmistakable censure, Herman's thoughts became more and more sanguine as they put the dreadful scene in Dr. Brewster's parlor further and further behind them. Lizzie would come around, he thought, as she always did—when they were all living in the Berkshires, they would not remember or care how it had happened or what it had cost. They would all get something they wanted from their new home. He pictured little Malcolm tottering through a field of clover behind the barn. Lizzie would settle in, happily, he imagined, to manage her own house. His mother would live in a country house again, instead of the cramped apartment that she had always detested. And his books would be successful again. Everything would come out well.

Herman thought how beautiful the Berkshires were in the rain, and how they would all take walks in the forest and have picnics down by the blackberry brambles. He heard birdsong through the splattering raindrops, and finally his thoughts turned once again to
their true object: in his imagination, not only Hawthorne's namesake trees but every flowering and growing thing in view became a natural emblem of Hawthorne the man; every goldenrod flower and pickerel weed by the side of the road, every grouse and cardinal and chickadee they startled from the branches overhead became a sign of the inevitability of his present course, a course that ultimately led down this road to Lenox. Down this very road, he thought—a road that began in the mists of his childhood and ended in a little red cottage with a white picket fence.

“Herman,” his mother said, spoiling his reverie.

“What is it, mother?”

“You should remember that your father-in-law is a judge, and that even
our
church makes provisions for divorce.”

Herman stopped and met his mother's disapproving eyes, and then he let her walk down the road ahead of him. He began mentally crafting the letter of explanation that he would write to Judge Shaw the moment they got back to Broad Hall.

August 29, 1850

Lenox

My dear Melville,

I have read your works with a progressive appreciation of the quality of your writing and also of the author himself. No writer ever put the reality of poverty and isolation before the reader more unflinchingly than you do in
Redburn
, and
White-Jacket
offers an impressively imagined and sympathetic view of the common navy sailor that I'm sure my own father would have approved.
Mardi
is a rich book, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life—it is so good that I am willing to pardon you for not having brooded over it longer so as to make it a good deal better.
Typee
and
Omoo
seem much of a piece—as I mentioned to you previously, I wrote a favorable review of
Typee
when it first came out, for the Salem
Advertiser
, so I had vagabonded about these islands with you before, somewhat unwittingly. These books are lightly but charmingly and vigorously written, and I am acquainted with no other works that give freer or more effective pictures of barbarian life, in that unadulterated state of which so few specimens now remain. Your view especially of the Edenic
beauty of the island men and women is voluptuously colored yet not more so than the exigencies of the subject appear to require, and you have a freedom of view—in some, it might even be called laxity of principles, my dear man!—which renders you tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own; an attitude that I would welcome exploring with you in more depth. I sense in these books, however, a development toward something which has not yet appeared from your pen, which is hinted at most in
Mardi
or perhaps in a combination of the approaches of
Mardi
and
Redburn
,
I don't know; but I am loath to offer advice where none is asked. How near completion is this whaling romance you are working on now? Duyckinck says you have it almost finished. I would be most interested in having a peek at it, as you prepare it for the printers, since I am currently in thrall of the Melville way with words and I have run through all of his available books.

yours,
Nath. Hawthorne

 

August 30, 1850

Pittsfield

My dear Hawthorne,

Farmers know that there are goodly harvests which ripen late, especially when the grain is strong; thus, my hope for my own writing. One might say that my corn has
tasseled but not yet silked, and I feel that my latest work, which I am calling
The Whale,
will not bring my full maturity as a novelist any closer to harvest. It is too like my earlier works, too whimsical, too realistic, too . . . too . . . everything that I have said before and yet something that I cannot name. And while I am most appreciative of your flattering portrayal of my earlier work, I do indeed ask for your advice about this new one, which I hope you will give to me freely and frankly—for I, too, feel that I am developing toward something more but must find the mechanism to release it. I have enclosed a fair copy of my whale manuscript, which my publisher tasks me for even now and which I could call done, if I were not so damnably sure that it merely repeats earlier books of mine with less success.

I have bought a grand old house in Pittsfield, Hawthorne! It is formerly a public house, built just after the War for Independence, and I intend to make it something of a public house again, where eminent philosophers such as yourself may come and clink cups and speak the language of the gods! When my new home is rightfully and truly mine, you must inaugurate it—you will be my first guest, a position which, once held, may never be usurped!

your
Melville

 

September 18, 1850

Lenox

My dear Melville,

I have been inspired by the prodigality of your literary production. I am sitting down this very day to begin work on a new romance, a fanciful story based upon the legend of a curse and some entanglements that go along with it. But since you have asked for my opinion of your own new romance
The Whale
,
I must tell you my recommendation before I wholly lose myself in my own work.

I believe that you have here, in this version, a vision of existence potentially much deeper than your story actually satisfies in execution. Or, let me be more plain: you have the opportunity in this work to swim in very deep, unknown, and dangerous waters but have chosen to navigate instead along the safe and well-known trade routes. Your story of the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg is pleasant and amusing, but I believe that their story merely fulfills a wish of your own for the society that you have previously found aboard a whaleship; and though their friendship is truly and realistically portrayed, the drama of your romance lies properly not in their relationship (in my opinion) but in the conflict between your monomaniac captain and his vast fishy prey. Ahab as he stands now is a figure used to deliver irreverent barbs against Quakers—but, in my fancy, he might be much more. If you will allow me a vision of allegorical grandeur, I see Ahab in his flashes of anger as potentially a Lear figure (as long as you are going to compare me in public to Shakespeare, my good man, you must indulge me in comparing one of your characters to one of the Bard's);
and this white whale of yours, while menacing, is frankly unconvincing as a figure representing reality—no matter that he may in fact be based upon a real and fearsome fish. He offers every opportunity to become symbolic, and a mighty symbol he could be, as vast metaphorically as a sperm whale is in reality (symbolic of what, precisely? you must decide for yourself, of course). I do not believe the real story here is of the two friends on a grand adventure, which, as you say, you have already written before; I believe the story you have here, if rightly told, would be the confrontation of an heroic personage against a single object which overpowers reason. But I am always inclined to seek the Soul inside the Machinery and the heart in the steel, as it were, so I naturally think in terms of allegory and symbol. However, that is where my insight stops: what this white whale may mean to your captain must come from somewhere inside your own soul, which I know is large and generous enough to provide a true meaning; and what role your two bosom friends Ishmael and Queequeg might play also escapes me; but I do believe that you have something ethereal in your story, beyond all the harpoons and ropes, and
that
is the thing you must bring out. The jokes are all very well; but it does not seem to me that you are writing a comedy but rather the story of a true quest, which you might rig out in mythic dimensions the way your whaler is rigged out in hawsers and planks. The reality of your whaleship quite amazes me; but I believe that you are capable of rendering the whole enterprise of whaling as something more than “really” real, and that reality is meager compared to the story you want to tell in your heart. I believe that this whale may swim beyond reality if only you should let it.

Now I am off to conjure up that new romance of my own, one which I hope will be more than merely a realistic story itself.

I look forward to the day, very soon now, when you and I shall truly be neighbors and may have more leisure to indulge in such conversations in person.

yours,
Nath. Hawthorne

P.S. Sophia asks me to tell you that our children find you very gentle and entertaining and agreeable, and that she believes you are a man with a true warm heart and soul and intellect, and reverent, though not in a way many people are accustomed to. As for this last, I must say that I agree that not many would find you reverent.

 

September 19, 1850

Pittsfield

My dear Hawthorne,

Please pass along my compliments to your wife: about the Hawthornes, at least, let it be said that I am the most reverent shaman in the New World; about other matters spiritual and divine, let others be the judge!

How it pains me to leave the Berkshires, even for a moment, knowing that it contains my current joy and the prospect of my future joy, but indeed leave it I must, in order to come back again for well and for good. Soon the true literature of this sleepy nation will shine out from the starry constellations of the Berkshires.

Thank you for your skillful harpooning of my
Whale
!
Indeed, I had felt that the present version, while dealing with the novelty of the whale fishery and therefore somewhat fresh as an adventure, still lacked vitality. After reading your comments, I see that, truly, I have underexploited the whale itself and must aim my dart at its very life and stab deep, until the oceans seethe with its blood! Have you read Owen Chase's excellent true tale of desperation called
Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex
? It is the story of a boat stove by a whale and the consequences of that wreck, upon which my adventure is somewhat remotely based. I read Chase's book on the open seas during a gam with a ship on which his son was serving, very near the same latitude where the
Essex
was sunk; and it was this very son who loaned me a copy of his father's book. I must tell you the tale sometime, a tale whose horror cannot lightly be condensed!

My dear Hawthorne, I would sleep my life away if, by doing so, I could dream myself into an endless conversation with you; and though I am off to New York now, we will soon lift the eternal chalice of dreams to each other's lips and drink deeply.

your
Melville

September 20, 1850

Lenox

My dear Melville,

When you have settled into your new manse, come visit us again in Lenox, and we will take a stroll around the lake behind our cottage. There is a matter of some urgency I wish to discuss with you.

yours,
Nath. Hawthorne