Emily & Herman Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by John J. Healey

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Healey, John J.

  Emily & Herman: a literary romance / John J. Healey.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61145-830-5 (alk. paper)

  1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886--Relations with men--Fiction. 2. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891--Relations with women--Biography. 3. Authors, American--19th century--Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Emily and Herman.

  PS3608.E2355E45 2013

  813’.6--dc23

  2012046338

  FOR SOLE

  Preface

  I DISCOVERED THE MANUSCRIPT THAT FOLLOWS HERE Emily & Herman in the early summer of 2011. It was jammed into a cardboard banker’s box, number twenty of twenty-two, containing a life’s assortment of notes, syllabi, and even a collection of unpublished short stories pertaining to my grandfather, Vincent P. Healey, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Amherst College. He died that spring.

  I was his only grandchild and his house near Lenox, Massachusetts was left to me in his will. The two-story Cape Cod dwelling, originally built in 1796, sits near the Stockbridge Bowl less than a mile from where Nathaniel Hawthorne had lived for a time, a time depicted in Emily & Herman.

  My grandfather’s area of expertise was American Renaissance literature. His book The Epoch of Melville and Whitman is in its twelfth edition and is still read by graduate students at many prestigious universities around the country. Some of his personal library was left to Amherst, the rest remained on the shelves in his study, including the beautiful edition of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses he had often read to me when I was a boy.

  Some of the boxes were damaged by mildew and burrowing chipmunks. They were stored in the garage behind his well-maintained 1945 Willys MB Jeep. It took me over a month to sort through them all and for a time I toyed with the idea of trying to interest Amherst in publishing his short stories. But then I found Emily & Herman, a work he did not write, but for which he had written the prologue (see page ix). None of his friends and colleagues I spoke with knew anything about it, but all of them who have had the opportunity to read it agree upon its singular charm. One of those friends was a publisher, the publisher of the book you now hold in your hands (or that you are looking at on an eBook screen).

  Why my grandfather never attempted to have it published remains a mystery. Perhaps he worried the academic world he lived in would react with ridicule. Perhaps he was simply too busy—the dedication he brought to his tutorials and to his students was legendary. We might even consider the possibility that he wrote it himself, penning the preface as a witty ruse. Whatever the reason I think he would have been very pleased by this edition.

  J. J. Healey

  Lenox, Massachusetts 2012

  Prologue

  THE FOUND MANUSCRIPT IS A LITERARY DEVICE EMPLOYED most famously perhaps by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in Don Quixote de la Mancha. In the case I lay before you, it is not a stratagem at all but merely the simple truth, for I did find this manuscript, Emily & Herman, typed and rife with penned-in corrections, ten years after its author departed this earth. The romantic account contained within it, in which four iconic figures of American letters—Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson—play leading roles, is a work of fiction. For the reader who might have difficulty loosening ties to what she or he believes to have been the reality of these writers’ lives, I suggest the following considerations:

  The period in which this tale unfolds, the summer of 1851, was not chosen arbitrarily. In 1851, Walt Whitman was thirty-two years old, a Jack-of-all-trades, and master of none. The work for which he will always be remembered had yet to be put on paper.

  In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the senior member of the foursome, was an established author. It might even be said his best work was already behind him. As depicted in this tale, he really was a friend to his Berkshire neighbor, Herman Melville. Over that summer they lived a carriage ride apart and saw each other frequently. Although Hawthorne had the highest regard for Melville’s prose, it was not without ambivalence. Like Salieri with Mozart, the esteem Hawthorne held for his friend was an oleo of love and fear, admiration and envy. He, more than anyone, was fully aware of the depth and majesty contained within the work Melville slaved at that year and that was dedicated to Hawthorne upon its completion—for in the summer of 1851, Herman Melville was finishing Moby-Dick.

  Melville, a true aristocrat, and already known as the author of semi-autobiographical sea yarns, was composing a work many consider to be the Great American novel of all time. His days before the mast were over. He had married and lived between Manhattan and the countryside of Western Massachusetts hemmed in by mountains and forests, surrounded by willful women. A disaster in all matters financial, he owed money to virtually everyone and was in desperate need of fresh literary success. He hoped and believed Moby-Dick would give it to him.

  Emily Dickinson was barely twenty in 1851. She had written very little and had never published. Though unusually sensitive, she was a vibrant and engaging young woman that summer, years away from being cosseted by phobias and crippled by irrational fears. The image most readers have of Emily Dickinson today is of an older Emily, a deeper Emily perhaps, but also a tragic Emily who, as those she loved died around her, reduced her universe to the four walls of her room in Amherst. The story you are about to read thus, takes place in a time before any of that came to pass.

  The author, who chose to remain anonymous and whose wishes I can only respect, lived for a time at the Emily Dickinson house during the period it served as an Amherst faculty residence. The following note was paper-clipped to the first page of the manuscript:

  When Emily Dickinson died, in 1886, only eleven of her eighteen hundred poems had been published. Among the vast amount of documents she left behind were three unsent love letters, all of them addressed to: “Master.” For decades, Dickinson scholars have been spinning theories concerning the identity of this person. The conceit of this novel, entirely fictitious, is that the “master” was Herman Melville.

  For all we know, the delightful story told here actually happened. The degree of enchantment attained by its readers will depend on their personal taste and imagination. More to the point perhaps, is the expression an old professor of mine of Italian literature, a man who came from a wise and more permissive culture, would often say, ‘Se non e vero e ben trovato.’ True or not, it is a fine story.

  V. P. Healey

  Amherst, 1965

  1

  MIDSUMMER. MIDMORNING. PLACID, FRESH AIR. WOOD smells and the smell of drying hay, and a scent of withering lilac blossoms drifting through the barn’s open window. Out that window is Greylock Mountain. During the winter and covered with snow it had emulated the leviathan but now it rested massive and ponderous in a verdant haze. Leaning forward, pen in hand, about to re
vise the day’s final sentence, he listened to bees going about their work outside.

  At it since seven and having decided how to end his tale, he determined to reward himself with a break. He rose from his chair and approached the washstand, eyeing a dining needle stilled upon the white chipped sill. Scrubbing ink off of his fingers he glanced at his reflection in the looking glass. It may be raucous and ungainly, he thought, but it’s getting done. He smiled at himself and was then embarrassed by how it made him look, so he turned away.

  He drank a cup of water and put the pages aside for his sister Augusta to copy out. Using a piece of scrimshaw, he anchored them fast to the desktop that was stained from the doves roosting on the beams above. The table had belonged to his father’s brother Thomas who had inherited it from his grandfather, the original Major Melville. It gave off a sweet attic aroma that evoked the past. He remembered how at his grandfather’s house in Boston the piece had rested in an ornate dressing parlor under a painting of Pigeon Cove. On numerous occasions his father, inebriated and insisting on male conversation deep into the night, and finding his older son Gansevoort uncooperative, regaled him with tales of how the old Major had kept a mistress in that little coastal village just north of Rockport, a beautiful young widow whose husband had served under the Major’s command in the Continental Army.

  He dried his hands on a piece of sack cloth and looked out the window at the overgrown grass and lilac trees, at the piled bales, at one of the wagon horses rubbing against a tree. He thought of how all of them—the mistress, his father, his uncle, and grandfather, his older brother Ganesvoort, too—were gone and buried. All of that once-anxious and vibrant flesh had been transformed into darkened waste that had surely seeped through rotting pine by now fertilizing the surrounding loam. In his grandfather’s time the family had status and money. The Major had taken part in the Boston Tea Party and commanded his regiment during the war with distinction. In his later years, Boston society considered him a character due to his stubborn persistence in wearing fashions redolent of his most vibrant years—breeches and frock, linen cravats and buckled pumps. Herman’s father Alan, ashamed perhaps by the Major’s eccentricities, spent long periods abroad, making a career in French dry goods while sampling the ladies who went with them before marrying and settling in Manhattan. After mentioning the widow of Pigeon Cove, Alan often would go on about a particular girl he himself had loved in Paris, wondering what had become of her, a wondering that inevitably altered his alcohol-induced sentimentality transforming it into a depressive quietude, while his young son worried his mother might be listening. All of them, Herman thought, had come from and returned to “dust.” And yet there he was, still alive and spry enough, a striving scrivener confined in this country house his father-in-law had paid for, filled with women, nary a sail or a harpoon within a hundred miles.

  He set out to find Elizabeth, his wife, seven months pregnant with their second child. When he left her in bed that morning, rising to work at dawn, she had been “out of sorts” once again. He came into the main house and saluted his mother and sister Helen and almost tripped over his son Malcolm, sound asleep on a quilted throw rug by the hearth. The monstrous brown Newfoundland dog lay next to the dark-haired boy and it raised its tail to let him know all was well. Climbing upstairs and entering the bedroom, he found Elizabeth on her back with the shades drawn, one hand resting upon her swollen womb, the other holding a damp cloth over her eyes aflame with allergies.

  “Is that you?”

  “Aye.”

  “And Barney?”

  “Dreaming like an angel by the hearth.”

  “I trust there is not a fire lit.”

  “Just ashes from last night and mother is reading not five feet from him.”

  He sat beside her.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No.”

  It was clear she preferred to remain undisturbed. He studied her wrist and remembered it belonging to a lively young girl from Boston.

  “I’m finished for the day.”

  “That’s a good thing then. Perhaps you can devote more time to us now.” The tone was accusatory, but he did not take it to heart.

  “I’m going to take a few days off and bring what I have down to the printer next week.”

  He had hoped for a kiss, or a conspiratorial smile, the kind she used to offer when he spoke with her about his work. He patted her knee and then stood up again, hoping it was the pregnancy and the discomforts the season always brought that was putting her so at odds.

  An hour later he was carrying the boy in his arms along the path to the lake. The dog, pleased by the unexpected change in the morning’s routine, loped ahead, crisscrossing, snout close to the ground. The comely Irish cleaning girl’s arrival to their room had proven an instant cure for Lizzie’s malaise. When he bid them adieu both women were taking over the kitchen, planning the midday repast and catching up on local gossip.

  He hoped the new child would be a girl, for something told him that might help soothe things between them. Even more he hoped The Whale book would be a success. Such an outcome, more than anything else, would throw them a lifeline. The monies owed to Brewster and Stewart, to his father-in-law, and to Harpers cut into him like shark teeth.

  “Would you care for a little sister Barney?”

  The boy, who weighed little more than a September Bluefish, turned to look at him, leaning his head back, ignorant of the meaning behind the sounds emanating from his father’s lips. He transferred the boy from one side to the other and began to hum him a sea ditty while mentally reviewing his last meeting with Hawthorne. He was still feeling sheepish from the excess of enthusiasm that had possessed him when they had last conversed through the night. At first he blamed it on the brandy. But in his heart he knew it had been a reaction to Nathaniel’s comparative reticence. If his friend were a looser, freer soul it would be easier to interact with him in a more measured manner. But the man’s solemnity and verbal stinginess, especially pronounced that night, had transformed Melville into a pup too eager for praise and petting. He vowed to keep his compensatory instincts at bay and, in the future, to match the man with doses of his own medicine.

  A snowshoe hare appeared, emerging from a stand of beech. It stopped to sniff the sir and then dashed across the path before them, disappearing into the safety of some tall grass. The dog, too far ahead, barely had time to notice.

  At the lake’s edge, it gladdened him to see there was not another soul about. He stripped down and removed the diaper and chemise from his son, folding everything over the bough of a nearby pine. Lifting the boy up once again he walked into the water. The sandy, clayish bed was slippery with patches of slithering grass. The lake was warm on the surface and cold beneath. The dog barked in protest, running back and forth along the narrow shore before venturing in as well, suddenly quiet, all energies bent upon staying afloat while it did its best to remain close to the man and boy who continued to swim farther out.

  Melville was impressed by the boy’s equanimity. His small face displayed a countenance of agitated delight mixed with what could only be described as pleasurable caution. Being a father, fatherliness, overwhelmed Melville at times, feeling one minute in concord with and entranced by the office, linked in turn to his own sire for whom he had felt such affection, only to feel when the tide shifted, entrapped and inadequate.

  The irony of this inland life was especially pungent that morning. The sailor and adventurer, the ocean swimmer at ease in Atlantic and Pacific swells, on intimate terms with a multitude of Polynesian atolls, the whaling man on the verge of completing a woman—and childless yarn of biblical length that took place on the highest of seas—confined now to this valley that was laced with his family history, its lovely but trivial lake, deep in New England and far from any ocean air. Instead of dolphins and orcas and sperm whales to swim amongst, there were only sun perch and snapping turtles. God forbid I should cramp and drown in such a place and go down in the annal
s of literature a comical footnote. Herman Melville, author, the man who lived with cannibals, drowns from a leg cramp in Melville Lake.

  But he was a strong swimmer, something a surprising number of his fellow crewmen had not been, and he swam about enjoying the exercise to his limbs, holding his son aloft the way the naked maidens of Nukuheva had held their sarongs above their heads while swimming out to the ships. He swam that way a good ten minutes before returning to where he could stand. The dog, looking more like a small wet bear, made its way back to the shore and shook three or four times before, exhausted and relieved, it sat upon its haunches.

  He felt considerably more exposed leaving the water than he had going in and he made haste to dry himself with his shirt before pulling on his trousers. Then he reclined upon a patch of grass under a tree with the boy and the dog in shade-speckled sunlight. The dog hunkered down to chew on a dry pinecone and the boy, naked and relaxed, lay on his back looking up through branches.

  He was at home here. More so perhaps than he had been at sea or in Albany or in Boston. Melvilles had been coming here, especially during the summer months, for decades. It had been wise to return here. The streets of lower Manhattan first and foremost and then these fields and ponds irrigated with clear Berkshire air were home. He thought back on the summers he had missed here when he was twelve and already working at the State Bank in Albany, living at his uncle Peter Gansevoort’s mansion while his widowed mother and his brothers and sisters had all frolicked at this lake with their cousins, fleeing the cholera. And now he was a grown man, married and a father himself, returned from his seafaring, back to his roots.

  And he recalled how he had awakened that dawn in the grip of what had been a compelling and now forgotten dream. He had at first been unable to establish where or even who he was. The disorientation had only lasted a few seconds but it left him pensive and aware of being alive and mortal in a keener manner than usual. Leaning upon the earth there now, refreshed and seemingly content, watching the lake under a clear noon summer sun, his son cooing beside him and the dog now resting its massive head upon its front paws, the feeling returned. He wondered if it might be a first sign of age or some reaction to the impending completion of the book, some puritanical manifestation, a self-inflicted punishment for having felt so at ease that day. And as an exercise in orientation, if only to distract his mind from imagining how many heartbeats were left to him upon the Earth, he began to chart his position. He saw the lake from above, from a gull’s perspective, and the path that linked it to his property where his wife and the new still-forming child and the comely young maid and his mother and sisters and all of his papers and books and possessions were. Rising higher he saw Lenox where Hawthorne lived. Rising higher still he could see the Connecticut River severing Massachusetts in half, and Boston and the Cape and, out at sea, Nantucket, where The Whale book began, and looking south, Long Island, and then the island of Manhattan, where he was born and where his younger brother Alan junior and his bride were breathing that very minute. Rising higher still he saw the vast country with oceans at either end, San Francisco where his brother Tom lived a sailor’s life, and then across the vast Pacific seeing all of the tiny islands he had visited and known such wondrous people upon. It was, he knew, all there simultaneously, at that very moment, all of it, so far from each other according to one’s choice of scale, each place and creature going about its business within each particular conscience’s greedy and selfish present. “What,” he asked himself, and it was a question he would sometimes pose aloud to intimates, “was more miraculous and mystifying than reality itself, ordinary, disheveled, run of the mill reality?”