Quote of the Day (Melville to Hawthorne, on His “Whale” and Home)

“The ‘Whale’ is only half through the press; for, wearied with the long delay of the printers, and disgusted with the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the country to feel the grass -- and end the book reclining on it, if I may. -- I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself, for if I say so much on that head, be sure all the rest of the world are thinking about themselves ten times as much. Let us speak, although we show all our faults and weaknesses, -- for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it, -- not in [a] set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation. -- But I am falling into my old foible -- preaching. I am busy, but shall not be very long. Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life. When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together. This is rather a crazy letter in some respects, I apprehend. If so, ascribe it to the intoxicating effects of the latter end of June operating upon a very susceptible and peradventure feeble temperament.”—Herman Melville, to friend and inspiration Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29, 1851, in The Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (1960)

A year before writing this letter from Arrowhead, his farmhouse in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, Herman Melville was part of what was probably the most consequential picnic in American literature—the day he met Nathaniel Hawthorne. A prior post of mine dealt with that event, as well as the larger course of their relationship.

But I think it’s worth revisiting here, because “The Whale” that Melville is referring to is his epic of the sea, Moby Dick—a novel certainly inspired by the two writers’ “ontological heroics.” That relationship is reflected in the book’s dedication to Hawthorne.

Melville certainly did have a “very suspectible and peradventure feeble temperament.” When Hawthorne was coming, the younger man would slip out to the barn, away from the sound of his workers and the smell of household privies, and engage his visitor in feverish discussions on metaphysics and on his hulking manuscript about a malignant white whale and the maimed sea captain obsessed with destroying it.

A month after meeting Hawthorne in 1850, Melville bought the Pittsfield homestead—without first selling his New York home, without shopping around for a better property, and without considering that its $65,000 cost was more than the combined sales of his first five books.

That financial rashness would produce great misery in his marriage, and even the friendship with Hawthorne would more or less conclude by 1852, for reasons that biographers can only speculate about. But even knowing all of this, a reader wishes he could have been a fly on the wall as Melville celebrated his distance from “the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York” by sharing a “heroic drink” with the reserved but great man he respected so much.