The Whale (20 page)

“Who's this reviewer?” the doctor said. “Never heard of him.”
He handed the magazine back to Herman. “I wonder if that gentleman even read the book.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I've just finished it myself, and this review doesn't even begin to touch its most interesting points.”

“You have a copy already?”

“Hawthorne gave it to me a couple of days ago. As I said, I've just finished it.”

Now Herman began to shiver in earnest, but not from the cold: how easily Hawthorne could still hurt him, and how quickly his jealousy flared to life! Apparently, he kept in better touch with this flinty blowhard than with Herman himself. “Hawthorne gave you a copy of his book?”

“I just said so. Are you ill, Melville? What is the matter?”

“I am quite all right, Doctor. How did you leave Hawthorne?”

“Hawthorne is well, but his wife is doing poorly. I've never seen anything quite like it. Migraine headaches, sensitivity to light, stabbing pains in her side. Loud noises make her vomit. I suppose it's just childbearing, but the combination of things worries me.”

“She used to be an invalid, you know.”

“Thank you for mentioning that, Dr. Melville,” said Holmes. “Are you sure you're quite well?”

“Did Hawthorne send any message for me?”

Holmes looked at Melville as if he had gone mad. “He was rather preoccupied with his wife.” He cleared his throat. “His new book isn't bad, you know. Not as good as this review makes it, but pleasant enough and dark in his usual way. A story about old dead sins laid away in secret drawers of the soul. Very German. Terrible ending. Incidentally, Melville, thank you for breaking off your affair with Jeanie Field.”

“I didn't break off my affair. I never had an affair with her, as you surely know.”

“Have it your way,” Holmes puffed. “I'm just glad it's over.”

“Who told you it was over? The same person who told you it existed in the first place?”

“Whatever you're implying, Melville, I don't care. I'm sorry I got mixed up in it.”

“Then why did you?”

“To prevent Dudley from shooting you in a duel, as I said at the time. I hate being the holder of secrets or the bearer of gossip—thinking that people are hiding something all the time makes one liable to superstitious fancies, which is bad for the digestion.”

“I daresay. Though it would be a man of extraordinary moral fortitude who never had anything to hide.”

“If you never do anything dishonorable, you never have anything to hide,” said Holmes. “Where is the extraordinary moral fortitude in that?”

“Even God has things to hide, Doctor. Or have you forgotten the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?”

“Must you always blaspheme, Melville?”

“God's secret knowledge and his refusal to share it with mankind are the reasons we're in this fix.”

“What fix?” Holmes rolled his eyes and flapped his arms. “I don't have time to stand here debating Milton and Jeremy Bentham and who-knows-what with you in your underclothes. If I'd wanted to talk nonsense, I would have stayed at Harvard.” Holmes set off toward town.

“Always a pleasure to see you, Doctor,” said Herman.

The doctor stopped, turned, and stared for a long moment at Melville, and then said, sincerely, “Likewise.”

April 16, 1851

Arrowhead, Pittsfield

My dear Hawthorne,

I have just finished reading a book you may know, “The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance.” The contents of this book do not belie its rich, clustering title. With great enjoyment we spent almost an hour in each abundantly but judiciously furnished gable. There are rich hangings, wherein are braided scenes from tragedies! There is old china with rare devices, set out on the carved buffet; long and indolent lounges to throw yourself upon; an admirable sideboard, plentifully stored with good viands; a smell of old wine in the pantry; and finally, in one corner, a dark little black-letter volume in golden clasps, entitled “Hawthorne: A Problem.” It has delighted us; it has robbed us of a day, and made us a present of a whole year of thoughtfulness; it has bred great exhilaration and exultation with the remembrance that the architect of the Gables resides only six miles off, and not three thousand miles away, in England, say. We think the book surpasses the other works of the author. The curtains are more drawn; the sun comes in more; genialities peep out. Clifford is full of an awful truth throughout. He is conceived in the finest, truest spirit. And
here we would say that, did circumstances permit, we should like nothing better than to devote an elaborate and careful paper to the full analysis of what so strongly characterizes this author's writings, namely a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. No mind has recorded the intense feeling of the visible truth more deeply than this man's. By visible truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him; the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself sovereign amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish; but so long as he exists, he insists upon treating with all Powers upon an equal basis. If any of those other Powers choose to withhold certain secrets, let them; that does not impair my own sovereignty in myself. And perhaps, after all, there is no secret. We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason's mighty secret, so terrible to contemplate until it turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron—nothing more! Even God cannot explain His own secrets, and He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say God, you jump off your stool and hang from a beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.

The grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne is that he says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no—why, they are in the happy condition of unencumbered
travelers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag—that is to say, their own Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House. What's the reason, Mr. Hawthorne, that in the last stages of metaphysics a fellow always falls to swearing so? I could rip an hour.

Walk down one of these mornings and see me. No nonsense; come. Remember me to Mrs. Hawthorne and the children.

H. Melville.

P.S. The marriage of Phoebe with the Daguerreotypist is a fine stroke, because of his turning out to be a Maule. If you pass Hepzibah's cent-shop, buy me a Jim Crow (fresh) and send it to me by Ned Higgins.

May 11, 1851

Arrowhead, Pittsfield

My dear Hawthorne,

I should have been rumbling down to you in my pine-board chariot a long time ago, were it not that, for some weeks past, I have been more busy than you can well imagine out of doors, building and patching and tinkering away in all directions. I had my crops to get in the ground, corn and potatoes (I hope to show you some famous ones by and by), and many other things to attend to, all accumulating upon this one particular season. I work myself hard; and at night my
bodily sensations are akin to those I have so often felt before, when I was a hired man, doing my day's work from sun to sun. But the true reason I have not been to Lenox is this—the Whale! In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my Whale while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now, I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. A presentiment is on me that I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by constant attrition. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. But I mean to continue visiting you until you tell me that my visits are supererogatory and superfluous.

I'm rather sore, perhaps, in this letter, but see my hand! Four blisters on this palm, made by hoes and hammers within the last few days. If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won't believe in a Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert—then, O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us—when all the earth
shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity. Then shall songs be composed as when wars are over; humorous, comic songs, “Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the world,” or, “Oh, when I toiled and sweated below,” or, “Oh, when I knocked and was knocked in the fight.” Yes, let us look forward to such things. Let us swear that, though now we sweat, it is that same dry heat which is indispensable to the nourishment of the vine, the vine that will bear the grapes to give us champagne hereafter.

But I was talking about the Whale. As the fishermen say, he is in his flurry. He feels always to be in his flurry and never dies; I'm going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other. What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.

Don't trouble yourself about writing; and don't trouble yourself about visiting; and when you do visit, don't trouble yourself about talking. I will do all the writing and visiting and talking myself. By the way, in the last
Dollar Magazine
, I read your story “The Unpardonable Sin.” He was a sad fellow, that Ethan Brand. I have no doubt that you are by this time responsible for many a shake and tremor of the tribe of “general readers.” It is a frightful poetical creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart, but it's my opinion that in most cases, in those men who have fine brains and work them well, the heart extends down to the hams. And though you smoke them with the fire of tribulation, yet, like veritable hams, the head only gives the richer and the better flavor. I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had
rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?) Another thing. I was in New York for four-and-twenty hours the other day, and saw a portrait of N.H. And I have seen and heard many flattering allusions to the
Seven Gables
. So upon the whole, I say to myself, this N.H. is in the ascendant. What reputation H.M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a “man who lived among the cannibals!” When I speak of posterity, in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of them, in all likelihood.
Typee
will be given to them, perhaps, with their gingerbread. I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now.

My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded
within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. It seems to me now that Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet that he managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism; or else there have been many corruptions and interpolations of the text. In reading some of Goethe's sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, “Live in the all.” That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one—good! But get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. “My dear boy,” Goethe says to him, “you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!” As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.

H. Melville.

P.S. “Amen!” saith Hawthorne. This “all” feeling, though, there is some truth in it. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of such a temporary feeling or opinion.

P.S.S. You must not fail to admire my discretion in paying the postage on this letter.

June 29, 1851

Arrowhead, Pittsfield

My dear Hawthorne,

The clear air and open window invite me to write to you. For some time past, I have been so busy with a thousand things that I have almost forgotten when I wrote you last, and whether or not I received an answer, though in truth I suspect I have not heard one peep from you in many weeks—no doubt because you are being feted in all the capitals of our small Republic.

This most persuasive season has now for weeks recalled me from certain crotchety and over-doleful chimeras, the like of which men like you and me must be content to encounter now and then, and fight them the best way we can. But come they will—for, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious wild wilderness through which these outposts run, the Indians do sorely abound, as well as the insignificant but still stinging mosquitoes. Since you have been here to visit me, I have been building some shanties of sheds and outbuildings (connected with the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays. I have been plowing and sowing and raising and painting and printing and praying—and now begin to come out upon a less bustling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farm house here.

Not entirely yet, though.
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; 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 enjoying 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.

Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked—though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this. This is the book's motto (the secret one)—
Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!

H.M.

July 21, 1851

Lenox

My dear Melville,

I think the face of nature can never look more beautiful than now. The sunshine fills the airy woods with fresh green light; Monument Mountain and its brethren are all clothed in
green, and the lightness of the tint takes away something from their massiveness and ponderosity, and they respond with lively effect to the shine and shade of the sky. Each tree now within sight stands out with its own individual hue. This is a very windy day, and the lights shift with magical alternation. In a walk to the lake, just now, with the children, we found abundance of flowers—wild geraniums, violets of all families, red columbines, and many others, known and unknown, besides innumerable wild strawberries. The housatonias quite overspread some pastures. Not merely the flowers, but the various shrubs one sees, when one is seated for instance on the decayed trunk of a tree, are well worth looking at, such a variety and such enjoyment they seem to have of themselves and their growth. Amid these creations, we see the remains of others that have already run their course—the hoary periwigs, I mean, of dandelions long since gone to seed. And water weeds, on the edge of the lake, whose roots seem to have nothing to do with earth but only water.