A Heart as Big as a Whale

“Come—no nonsence,” Melville writes [sic throughout] to Hawthorne. “If you dont—I will send Constables after you.”

This, from the first of the surviving letters between the writers, sets them down in the frieze of their dynamic. Hawthorne has, through his wife, begged off a visit to Melville’s place because he’s finishing House of the Seven Gables. Melville is having none of it. “The bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire.” He promises a feast of fowls; he has bottles of wine and port. But if Hawthorne isn’t in the mood for polite sociability, that’s okay too: “… you may spend the period of your visit in bed, if you like.” (This is the second mention of the bed.) Never mind excuses, the letter goes on, Melville is coming by sleigh next Wednesday at 11 a.m. to pick him up. The implication is that if Hawthorne isn’t waiting by the door with a suitcase, Melville will huff and puff and blow the house down, storm inside the ruins, pluck Hawthorne from his study desk, and carry him, jogging all the way back to Pittsfield with Mr. Noble Melancholy in a fireman’s carry.

The letter’s charming and thundering, an exuberant blast of “too much.” A dog so glad to see you it knocks you down. At the end Melville says, “By the way—should Mrs Hawthorne for any reason conclude that she, for one, can not stay overnight with us—then you must—& the children, if you please.” (How Mrs. Hawthorne staying home would allow the end of her husband’s book to get written goes unexplored.)

Read on in the letters and you learn that the visit didn’t happen: “sickness in the family.”

Melville was well into the writing of Moby-Dick when he and Hawthorne became friends. The various drafts have been lost but what’s known is that soon after their meeting, Melville went back into the book and began ripping it apart and substantially reworking it. Biographer Andrew Delbanco theorizes that the initial vision of the book was in line with Melville’s previous sea journeying novels, like Omee, Redburn, and Mardi. It was only after he and Hawthorne became friends that Moby-Dick as we know it began to coalesce in all its strange sublimity. Captain Ahab crystallized in its center. Around this time, the chapters with Father Mapple’s sermon may have gotten tucked in the front, and with them the marble markers of the Whaleman’s Chapel memorializing sailors lost at sea. (I wonder if the allusions to the unfortunate Stigg, the previous inn guest who killed himself with a harpoon, was added around this time too.) But it’s the entrance of the scorched, raging figure of Ahab that matters most. With him in the book, Melville was now going after something fifteen grades more ambitious than he’d done before. He was hunting the whale.

The two first met on a hike and picnic at Monument Mountain. A handful of other writers were present, but because Melville, then aged thirty-one, was the only one who had been a sailor on several sea voyages, we can assume he was the most (or the only?) physically coordinated writer in attendance. He clambered up a high rock and sat showily on the precipice. A thunderstorm came and created a mood of shouting and hooting joy for the men as they ran for cover from the rain. After the picnic, Hawthorne went home and read the five books Melville had published so far. Melville’s review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse was published soon after (it may have been written before they’d met or maybe not). It includes these lines, which, even after adjusting for “it was a different time,” shiver with innuendo: “[Hawthorne] expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him, and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”

A similar erotic charge runs through Melville’s letters to Hawthorne—a sort of exquisite receptivity. Was he sexually attracted to his new friend, and was it reciprocated? Or are we projecting? Scholars can only theorize at higher and lower volumes, and shippers fantasize. Delbanco notes, “Melville lived and died before the word ‘homosexual’ came into wide use.” He was married, and he and his wife Lizzie had four children. He was outwardly straight, but the novels and letters speak to an inner life that was more sexually complex, the novels especially filled with scenarios where men’s affectionate companionship progresses along unmissable homoerotic lines (like Queequeg and Ishmael waking up “married” in a New Bedford Inn).

Melville and Hawthorne’s friendship burned bright for over a year. They understood in each other the weight of “vile doubt and despondency,” as a Hawthorne biographer puts it. According to Hawthorne’s journal, they would stay up late in the night at his Lenox house, smoking cigars and conversing on “time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.” When Moby-Dick was published in 1851, it was dedicated to Hawthorne: “… In Token of My Admiration for His Genius.”

Years back, on a deep Melville kick, I grew low on his behalf about how the friendship eventually grew into imbalance. Of the two, Melville seemed the one always reaching; met with affection, yes, but of a measured, meted, judicious sort. It reminded me of Lily Bart’s last meeting with Selden in The House of Mirth, when she, in her extremis, “had passed beyond the phase of well-bred reciprocity, in which every demonstration must be scrupulously proportioned to the emotion it elicits…” As Lily sits with Selden, she is aware that her unguardedness is not rekindling love, only creating constraint.

Of course it’s possible to flip it to Hawthorne’s point of view: You can be warmly fond of a friend, and still startled by the CAPS LOCK ardor coming at you, by joking threats of constables at your door if you don’t come over. You might not reciprocate the romantic feelings drifting along the air currents towards you. (You might be fatally straight. And married!) And, finally, for all you might be intrigued and delighted by your younger sailor friend’s tales of adventure, you yourself might be, at core, a person who prefers to brood and write at home—someone who is 46, depressive, and predominantly worried about money and why his books aren’t selling more. Maybe in our relationships we’ve all sometimes been Melville and at other times, Hawthorne.

Still, my loyalty is with Melville, in all his yearning and inability to play it cool. The last meeting between the two men happened in England five years after Moby-Dick’s publication. By then, there was no more singing by post of buttered toast and port. Melville stayed with the Hawthornes for a few days, but the residue of their time together suggests a beach filled with endless gray stones and cold sand.

Nevertheless, while re-reading Moby-Dick the past couple weeks, something about their friendship registered differently. When we are in the grips of high infatuation, how much are we truly apprehending the other person, and how much are we seeing in them a silvery mirror of what we want for ourselves? As Hawthorne biographer Brenda Wineapple puts it, when Melville praised Hawthorne’s genius in the Manse review: “Was he writing of Hawthorne or himself?”

In Hawthorne, Melville saw the kinds of books he wanted to write—epically ambitious, Shakespearean in scope, aesthetically bold and truthful—and something in that identification allowed the wondrousness of Moby-Dick to surface. If the relationship later bruised his heart, maybe it was still worth it.

Grapnel your thoughts in the comments