Photo of the Day: Herman Melville’s ‘Arrowhead,” Pittsfield MA—In Honor of the Novelist’s Bicentennial

This week, America celebrates the 200th birthday of Herman Melville. Like Walt Whitman, another foundational American writer with a bicentennial this year, the creator of Moby Dick, Billy Budd and other tales was born in New York State and wrote numerous poems during the Civil War. Unlike the “Sage of Camden,” Melville wrote from a dark vision of humanity in general and America’s mission in particular, and died with his reputation in such eclipse that it would take another three decades for it to emerge from the shadows.

Nearly two years ago, for the third time over the past 30 years, I visited “Arrowhead,” the rambling homestead in Pittsfield, Mass., where Melville lived with his family for 13 years. I took the attached photo during that late-summer 2017 visit. 

I’ve always been fascinated by the notion that Melville could write about the sea so much in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, but maybe I shouldn’t be: his imagination was so fertile that he likened Mount Greylock, visible from his second-floor study window, to the white whale that obsessed him. 

Because Pittsfield was so inextricably tied to his family’s fortunes, Melville invested an enormous amount psychologically in these grounds. He first came to the area in 1837, at a time when his father’s death had plunged the surviving family members into debt. Working for his uncle Thomas that year, teenage Herman found the experience far different from what he knew in New York: eating well and working in the fields. 

More than a decade later, still with these fond memories, he thought it was an opportune time to relocate here from Gotham. This time, though, he had nothing like his earlier carefree experiences.

Herman thought sales of his books would enable him and his family to live comfortably. Inspired by a brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne (described in this prior blog post of mine), a fellow Berkshires resident, he created a book on the short list of Great American Novels, Moby Dick. But this turn from adventure fiction to more symbolic, experimental fare sent his sales plunging.

Arrowhead (named after an Indian artifact that Melville found on the property) was, and is, a site of pastoral beauty. But increasingly, it produced problems for the Melvilles. 

With wife Lizzie and son Malcolm soon joined by three more children, plus his mother and several sisters, it could not have been an easy environment for Herman to create. His indefatigable attempts to carve out time—notably, writing till 9 pm, when he couldn’t see anymore—strained his health and, his family feared, his sanity. (Afflicted by hay fever, Lizzie had her own health issues in the home.)

In 1863, a financially strapped Melville sold his home to his brother Allan, who expressed his admiration through an inscription on the chimney from Herman’s Piazza Tales story, “I and My Chimney.”

When Melville died in 1891, only a single obit noted his passing. He is read constantly in high schools and colleges now, of course. 

But  a visit to Arrowhead is a must for any Berkshires travelers, as well as just anyone who wants to better understand this essential writer who still has so much to say to us today about unfulfilling work (“Bartleby the Scrivener”), American race relations (“Benito Cereno”), a leader who drives his followers to catastrophe (Moby Dick), and the national tendency to fall for empty promises and fraud (The Confidence Man).

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.

This Day in Literary History (Melville Meets Hawthorne)

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.