Leviathan or The Whale

still percolating through the pines, drip-drip-dripping as I clamber my way up the slippery path. The hillside is strewn with huge boulders; a deep valley opens to the other side, coursed by a stream overhung by ferns. As I make my final ascent, a rain cloud bursts overhead, sweeping over the rocks on which garter snakes bask; bright orange lizards dart into crevices. At the summit, quartzite crags topped with stunted pines hang precipitously over themselves. Far below is the green-carpeted valley of the Housatonic River. Hawks hover on the updraught. All the world seems caught in the stillness.
    It was here in Western Massachusetts, in the summer of 1850, away from ‘the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York’, that Melville met a man who would change the course of his life. While staying with his aunt in nearby Pittsfield, he read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Mosses from an Old Manse
, and was besotted with its wistful evocation of old New England. By coincidence Hawthorne himself was living nearby, drawn to the sublime beauty of the Berkshires–countryside not unlike England’s Lake District. It was a romantic setting in the purest sense of the word; and what happened next was a kind of epiphany.
    At forty-six years old, Nathaniel Hawthorne was America’s most famous writer. He too came from a sea-going family–he was only four when his father, a sea captain, had died of fever in Surinam–and he had grown up with his mother and two sisters. That much he and Melville had in common. But where the sea was Herman’s Harvard and Yale, Nathaniel had attended the grassy campus of Bowdoin College, Maine, before exchanging it for a gloomy house in Salem, where he spent twelve years sequestered in his attic, emerging only at night to walk the streets. ‘I have made a captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon,’ he confessed; ‘and now, I cannot find the key to let myself out.’
    ‘Handsomer than Lord Byron’, with dark eyes ‘like mountain lakes seeming to reflect the heavens’, Hawthorne dwelt on morbid things, although the monsters he summoned were decidedly human. His Puritan ancestors–with ‘all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil’–had persecuted Quakers, and had taken part in the Salem witch trials. This legacy infused the fictional world Hawthorne inhabited, and the real world he invented. He was, as the poet Mary Oliver would write, ‘one of the great imaginers of evil’.
    Hawthorne was filled with regret at the way the world had been, and the way it was becoming. ‘Here and there and all around us,’ he wrote in his story, ‘Fire Worship’, ‘…the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.’ He once told his wife Sophia that he felt as if he were ‘already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed’. And although he loved to swim in the river at the bottom of his garden in Concord at night, seeing the moon dance on the surface–where I swam too, pushing my way through the clear water and bright green weeds, imagining Billy Budd caught in their oozy fronds–he was haunted by the memory of a drowned young woman who was once pulled from the same river, her limbs white and swaying in the water.
    Hawthorne was, in his own words, ‘a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped in the midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness’. He wrote artful allegories burdened with the weight of history, guilt and revenge; especially the stories that Melville saw as Hawthorne’s masterpieces, and which would influence his own work. In ‘Young Goodman Brown’, set in seventeenth-century Salem, a young man is summoned to the forest at night to find the entire town enslaved to the devil, even his young wife. In the futuristic ‘Earth’s Holocaust’, a bonfire on the prairie incinerates every example of human excess, from tobacco to works of literature. Yet one thing will not burn in this reforming pyre: the latent evil in every human heart. Sin, too, was the subject of his novel,
The Scarlet Letter
, published in 1850; and in the wake of its success, Hawthorne had escaped the clamour of fame by moving to Lenox in the Berkshires, close by a calm freshwater lake, where he hoped to work on his next book,
The House of the Seven Gables
.
    Hawthorne could not avoid society even in the country, and on 5 August he was persuaded to attend a picnic organized by David