Collected Prose

it seemed to me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive; for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm. But, at length, you were revealed to me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own. I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm and renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have a heart,—you only have thrown a light, deep downward and upward, into my soul. You only have revealed me to myself; for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow,—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. Do you comprehend what you have done for me?”
    They lived in isolation, but visitors nevertheless came (relatives, old friends), and they were in contact with several of their neighbors. One of them, who lived six miles down the road in Pittsfield, was Herman Melville, then thirty-one years old. Much has been written about the relationship between the two writers (some of it pertinent, some of it nonsense), but it is clear that Hawthorne opened up to the younger Melville with unaccustomed enthusiasm and took great pleasure in his company. As he wrote to his friend Bridge on August 7, 1850: “I met Melville, the other day, and liked him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me before leaving these parts.” Melville had only been visiting the area at the time, but by October he was back, acquiring the property in Pittsfield he renamed Arrowhead and installing himself in the Berkshires as a fulltime resident. Over the next thirteen months, the two men talked, corresponded, and read each other’s work, occasionally traveling the six miles between them to stay as a guest at the other’s house. “Nothing pleases me more,” Sophia wrote to her sister Elizabeth about the friendship between her husband and Melville (whom she playfully referred to as Mr. Omoo), “than to sit & hear this growing man dash his tumultuous waves of thought against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences…. Without doing anything on his own, except merely being , it is astonishing how people make him their innermost Father Confessor.” For Melville, the encounter with Hawthorne and his writings marked a fundamental turn in his life. He had already begun his story about the white whale at the time of their first meeting (projected as a conventional high-seas adventure novel), but under Hawthorne’s influence the book began to change and deepen and expand, transforming itself in an unabated frenzy of inspiration into the richest of all American novels, Moby-Dick. As everyone who has read the book knows, the first page reads: “In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Even if Hawthorne had accomplished nothing else during his stay in Lenox, he unwittingly served as Melville’s muse.
    The lease was good for four years, but shortly after the completion of Twenty Days and Sophia’s return from West Newton with Una and baby Rose, Hawthorne contrived to get himself into a dispute with his landlords over a trivial matter of boundaries. The issue revolved around the question of whether he and his family had the right to pick the fruits and berries from the trees and bushes on the property. In a long, hilariously acidic letter to Mrs. Tappan dated September 5, 1851, Hawthorne set forth his case, concluding with a rather nasty challenge: “At any rate, take what you want, and that speedily, or there will be little else than a parcel of rotten plums to dispute about.” A gracious, conciliatory letter from Mr. Tappan the following day—which Sophia characterized to her sister as “noble and beautiful”—seemed to settle the matter once and for all, but by then Hawthorne had already made up his mind to move, and the family soon packed up their belongings and were gone from the house on November twenty-first.
    Just one week earlier, on November fourteenth, Melville had received his first copies of Moby-Dick . That same day, he drove his wagon over to the red farmhouse and invited Hawthorne to a farewell dinner at Curtis’s Hotel in Lenox, where he presented his friend with a copy of the book. Until then, Hawthorne had known nothing about the effusive dedication to him, and while there is no record of his reaction to this unexpected tribute to “his genius,”