Leviathan or The Whale

Dudley Field, a well-connected New York lawyer. The guests included distinguished literary figures: Evert Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes–coiner of the term, Boston Brahmin–‘several ladies’ and Melville. The party set off for Monument Mountain, but before they could reach the summit a sudden shower sent them running for shelter under a rocky ledge, where they drank champagne from a silver mug.
    As the sun reappeared, the picnickers struck out for the mountain top. Melville was in high spirits; perhaps the alcohol and the rarefied air had gone to his head. He clambered over a long rock which jutted out like a bowsprit, pretending to haul in imaginary rigging, and made as if to harpoon a whale-shaped pond in the valley below. The young man’s play-acting was a burst of energy in the dog-days of summer–an echo of the scenes in
Typee
in which the narrator and his fellow deserter Toby climb a tropical peak to escape the tyranny of their ship, and feel the intensity of their new-found freedom.
    The headiness of the day, the sublimity of the landscape, and, perhaps, Melville’s company, were infectious, and they roused Hawthorne to similar antics. That afternoon, as they wandered through the ‘Gothic shades’ of a gloomy spot known as the Icy Glen–it was said ice was found in its mossy recesses all year round–it was his turn to perform, shouting out, in his rich voice, ‘warnings of inevitable destruction to the whole party’. Then they all repaired to the Fields’ house for dinner, at which they discussed the sea serpent that had made an appearance off the coast of Massachusetts.
    It was clear that Hawthorne–already an admirer of
Typee
–found Melville a magnetic figure. ‘I do not know a more independent personage,’ he would write. ‘He learned his travelling-habits by drifting about, all over the South Sea, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trousers.’ Perhaps he even listened with envy to the sailor’s adventures, a sense of outlandish experience to contrast with his own haunted introspection. That day on the mountain marked an almost alchemical mix: of fire–Hawthorne’s prairie holocaust–and water–Melville’s whalish romance. Both were men of a brave new republic; both might have looked optimistically towards the future. But in time, the lively and mercurial Melville would descend into the gloom that Hawthorne inhabited, swapping the sun-baked summit for the dank dripping glen.

    A month after meeting Hawthorne, Melville moved to a farm two miles south of Pittsfield, bought with the help of his wealthy father-in-law and named Arrowhead after the Indian artefacts he found in its fields; in the distance stood Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts. For two hours a day Melville would work the fields as a farmer; he even sold cider from the roadside, a memory of the house’s former guise as a tavern. But he was also less than an hour’s ride from Hawthorne’s house at Lenox. ‘I met Melville, the other day,’ Hawthorne told a friend, ‘and I like him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me.’
    Melville expressed himself in rather stronger terms. In a gesture that was both revealing and concealing at the same time, he wrote a review of
Mosses from an Old Manse
in the guise of ‘a Virginian spending July in Vermont’, and in language that seems astonishingly suggestive to modern ears: ‘I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots in the hot soil of my Southern soul.’
    Tethered by meetings and ever longer letters, the friend–ship between the two men grew. Later, when Sophia Hawthorne and their daughters, Una and Rose, went to visit relatives, leaving Nathaniel in charge of five-year-old Julian and his pet rabbit, Melville took the opportunity to call. He arrived, glamorously, driving a barouche and pair, with Evert and George Duyckinck, his dog and a picnic in the back. Hawthorne supplied the champagne, and they set off to visit the Shaker village at Hancock. Hawthorne, who had sampled Utopia during his brief stay at the Transcendentalist commune, Brook Farm, found the celibate Shakers a sad blasphemy, with their ‘particularly narrow beds, hardly wide enough for one sleeper, but in each of which, the old elder told us, two people slept’. It was a ‘close