August 5, 1850—In one of the most consequential picnics in American literature, the brooding ex-sailor Herman Melville, searching for a voice that would allow him to burst the mold of his traditional sea fiction, met saturnine, sin-obsessed Nathaniel Hawthorne (in the image accompanying this post) as part of a small literary group that went on a small day’s hike from Stockbridge to Monument Mountain in Western Massachusetts.
The two writers, both living in the Berkshires, found themselves in different stages—even moving in different directions—in their careers at the time of their momentous encounter.
The 31-year-old Melville, though he had five books to his credit already, had lost readers as he moved away from the conventional realistic mode that had made Typee a bestseller. In contrast, Hawthorne, 15 years his senior, had found his commercial niche at last only a few months before with The Scarlet Letter, a heavily symbolic novel.
When a rainstorm made the literary picnickers (who also included publisher David Dudley Field and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes) seek shelter, Hawthorne and Melville had an opportunity to talk at greater length, discovering that they were kindred spirits.
As Melville would shortly put it, in an essay on his new friend: “In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other great masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth—even though it be covertly and by snatches."
Melville made his most heroic attempt at “the great Art of Telling the Truth” thousands of miles from where he could smell the spray of the Pacific Ocean or hear the cries of the whaling crews that sailed it in a quiet farmhouse deep in Pittsfield, not far from where he encountered Hawthorne.
In one way, the millions of readers enthralled by Moby Dick should not be surprised by the distance between the turbulent world Melville created and the tranquil environment in which he did so. For the novelist’s imagination brought all things close to him, with such power that as he looked eastward from his study, he likened the twin peaks of Saddleback and Mount Greylock looming in the distance to the humps of a whale.
“My room seems a ship’s cabin,” Melville wrote his friend Evert Duychinck, “and at nights when I wake up and hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and I had better go on the roof and rig in the chimney.”
One hundred and fifty years after the sailor-turned-novelist moved his family here, RUVs and pickup trucks rumble more loudly and more often down the road that passes Arrowhead, the Melville homestead in Pittsfield, than the haywagons of his day did.
On the two occasions I visited the home over the last decade, I found that the mountain landscape that inspired the great novelist remains majestically impervious to developers’ depredations.
Even as a child, years before he bought the property, Melville had found these hills a source of serenity amid the financial catastrophe that overwhelmed his parents.
Once settled here, he quickly made friends with Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Tanglewood and whose example encouraged him to explore new dark, richly symbolic territory in his fiction.
For the next two years, Melville and Hawthorne visited and wrote each other frequently. During this time, Melville wrote Moby Dick, which he dedicated to the older man.
Longtime readers of this blog know of my fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Now, it might at first seem a bit of a stretch to compare the two Lost Generation authors with Hawthorne and Melville, but I think a case can be made for some fascinating similarities.
In each case, a younger writer—one who craved action—benefited by direct exposure to an older craftsman, and the results became quickly apparent.
Melville took his cues from Hawthorne more by example than anything else; Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises benefited greatly from judicious editing by Fitzgerald, who wisely urged his friend to cut almost all of the wise-guy opening that threatened to overshadow reader recognition that the situation of Jake Barnes and his circle was inherently tragic.
Both sets of writers found common ground by perfectly capturing the prevailing zeitgeist. Fitzgerald and Hemingway, writers with deeply ambivalent views of faith, wrote of characters who tried to find grace in blasted moral landscapes.
Characters in Hawthorne’s and Melville’s most famous novels suffer wounds that initiate wider tragedies. Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth becomes guilty of what Hawthorne called “the unpardonable sin” when he tries to discover what is in the soul of the man he rightly suspects of cuckolding him, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale. Melville’s Captain Ahab is literally wounded, so maimed by a past encounter with Moby Dick that he will pursue the great white whale to the far corners of the world—and take every member of his (characteristically American) multicultural crew (except narrator Ishmael) down with the ship in the mad attempt.
The friendship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway fractured, for a thousand reasons chronicled by themselves and their associates. The more reticent times in which Hawthorne and Melville lived ensured that at this juncture, we’re unlikely to know the precise reasons why they drifted apart after two years.
The following conjectures have been offered, with varying degrees of probability:
* Hawthorne was embarrassed by his failure to secure gainful employment for Melville. The author of The Scarlet Letter did not make a huge number of friends, but one was important indeed—Franklin Pierce, winner of the 1852 Presidential election. Hawthorne, the college classmate of the Democratic victor in this election, lent Pierce key support in what is believed to be the first American Presidential campaign biography. Pierce would reward him eventually by naming him the American Consul stationed in Liverpool. Yet, for all that, Hawthorne couldn’t secure a post for Melville, who by this time needed such a job much more than the older man.
* Melville grew too emotionally needy for the reticent Hawthorne. Coming to Arrowhead as a best-selling writer of adventure stories—a kind of combination of Sebastian Junger and John Irving—Melville proceeded to write at breakneck speed a series of challenging metaphysical novels and short stories. But he also could be, as Hawthorne’s beloved wife Sophia noted, “generally silent and uncommunicative.” Hawthorne’s brilliance drew the younger man out of his shell, something that Melville acknowledged in a tone that more than one modern critic has described as “homoerotic”: “Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him.” The handsome Hawthorne had felt squeamish about being stared at by female admirers openly on the street; can you imagine his discomfort, in that more straitlaced time, about being the object of an unabashed male’s adulation?
* Melville’s literary and personal situation was deteriorating so drastically that he might not have felt he could reach out to Hawthorne. Melville’s follow-up to Moby Dick, Pierre, with its hints of incest, still has the capacity to shock today. In its time, it must have seemed like an act of literary self-immolation. Neighbors and relatives were remarking this time on his habit of working relentlessly at night, leaving him exhausted and depressed the next day, and his tendency toward metaphysical speculation in his novels. In recent years, scholarly speculation has grown that Melville might have been an alcoholic and a wife-beater.
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