“It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to
look as if he had a great secret in him.”— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
He achieved success with novels of sea adventure that
promised so much sensation that they would seem to be nothing like acts of
concealment. But as I toured Arrowhead, the homestead Herman Melville owned and
farmed in Pittsfield, Mass., for a dozen years, it became more and more clear
to me that not only were the works of his maturity anything but transparent,
but that his private life remains heavily shrouded in mystery. For instance,
what was his true relationship with his wife? Did he have an affair with a
neighbor, or might he have been bisexual, with powerful unrequited feelings for
Nathaniel Hawthorne?
And why did he leave the Berkshire Mountains, a region
that a relative would later claim was his first real love?
We may never know. What we do know is that, even on
the surface, this giant of the great 19th century American literary
flowering wrote works with the same type of turbulence as the South Seas where
he worked and that provided the experiences he needed to work through on paper.
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