Emily & Herman Read online

  Thus it was that during the warm and arduous trip north, through Norwich and Colchester and Hartford, entering Massachusetts at Longmeadow and then pushing up into Springfield and Holyoke before entering North Hadley in the early evening—they said very little. Occasionally they would hold hands and touch each other briefly when pointing out one thing or another. What conversation they did have was devoted mostly to Shakespeare and to Jane Eyre, which Emily had read the year before, and both of them took delight in reviewing the days they had spent together since setting out for Boston. The smallest details acquired inordinate significance. There was little discussion devoted to the future, except for when he spoke about the upcoming visit to the Berkshires planned with the Duyckincks, the Hawthornes, and the Morewoods. What Emily most wanted to hear about were his thoughts and worries about Moby-Dick.

  “What is it about the final day of a trip that makes it feel so elusive?” he asked her all of a sudden. “No matter how long that day might be, and this has been a long one indeed, one still discounts it in a way.”

  “I discount nothing. You are living in the future today, and I in the recent past.”

  “I envy you that. I truly wish we were starting out all over again.”

  As agreed, the siblings met each other at a tavern in North Hadley, a small hamlet close to and southwest from Amherst. Melville found Austin distant, haggard, and—how to put it?—chastened. Clearly something had happened to his grand plan. And Austin had to pretend surprise at not seeing Hawthorne along with them, an emotion facilitated considerably due to the actual surprise it gave him to see them without Mr. Whitman either.

  “Nathaniel jumped ahead of us, back on the steamer. I’m surprised you did not see him on board. We parted company with Mr. Whitman early this morning before he went on to Boston.”

  “In any event, here you are and my sister is safe and sound.”

  “That I am,” she said, taking his arm.

  Melville had meant to say goodbye separately to Emily before this family rendezvous took place but the right occasion had never presented itself and now the moment of their final farewell was suddenly and unglamorously before them.

  They shook hands and looked into each other’s eyes for the briefest moment. Folded between her delicate fingers was a small sheet of paper she passed on to him. Then they were gone. He watched them leave and waved to them once and then found himself alone. He did not unfold the piece of paper until over an hour later when he checked into the inn where he and Hawthorne had stayed and left their horses a week earlier. In the narrow, dark stables at the back of the building, surrounded by hay dust and harnesses and saddles and the smell of manure, kissing his horse on its strong neck and patting it down—for here was another creature he was connected to—he read what she had written …

  Come slowly, Eden!

  Lips unused to thee,

  Bashful, sip thy jasmines,

  As the fainting bee,

  Reaching late his flower,

  Round her chamber hums,

  Counts his nectars—enters,

  And is lost in balms!

  The narrowness of his bed at the austere lodging house that evening called forth two realizations: Never had the prospect of returning to the comforts of his life at Arrowhead been more appealing, and that the frenzied, dark, shame-laced couplings so common in his part of the world, so hidden, so rushed, so awkward as a rule, stood in stark contrast to what sex had been like during his stay on the Marquesas Islands. There, time was taken, smiles abounded, relaxing oils were applied, there was an easy joyfulness to it he sorely missed that night. What had Christianity wrought upon his northern brethren? Or perhaps it was simply a question of climate—but he doubted it—for the Puritans did not let their hair down or open their bodices any easier with the arrival of summer. Last night’s interaction had held fast to that course. His was a culture of worry and prohibition.

  He lay there for a spell, weaving dreams … Emily with him on Nukuheva, her hair flowing, a gardenia behind an ear, wearing nothing but a sarong, her gentle breasts exposed, strolling with him along the beach, continuing their conversation about Shakespeare, about whom her erudition had bowled him over, while hearing the whispering surf and the gentle rhythms of swaying palm fronds, and then the two of them indulging each other, liberated from their world of starch and pale skin. But once he ejaculated into the void and returned reluctantly to the present, afflicted with an empty sensation he knew too well, he delved further into the Puritan ethos. He remembered Emily’s question from the other day as to whether his free-spirited noble savages were capable of falling in love. He thought it a defensive aspersion at the time, tinged with a degree of racism and condescension. But he had to admit, confined within the dark and humid New England night that there was some substance to her inquiry. If love is free and too easily available then what is its value, and is it in fact love? He came to recognize that when he told her his tales of what his life as a mutineer on the islands had been like, episodes he had managed to capitalize on through his first two books, he allowed himself a significant degree of poetic license and that by relating them so often and with such conviction he had reached a point, now some years ago, where he actually believed the more fanciful bits as if they had actually occurred. Perhaps many memories were like that, rudimentary reportages dressed up and expanded upon by the imagination, like the very fictions he wrote so laboriously. He recalled many an evening after a hard day’s work on Moby-Dick when he drifted off into sleep convinced he had actually taken part in Ahab’s manic hunt. And, of course, the adornments inevitably took their place in order to improve upon the rudimentary, to make oneself more sympathetic, more pronounced, more attractive, to sculpt people and events into more pleasing or dramatic shapes, to illume them with a more favorable or despicable light.

  There he lay in the dark, the cool night air entering through the window. Emily and her brother were once again captives in their impressive house on the other side of town. Was she, too, in her bed thinking of him or might she be already erasing their days together relieved to be home and eager to reestablish her reliable domestic routines? He made an effort to demythologize his personal narrative, to separate reliable wheat from his own invented chaff, and he was forced thus to recall that his actual liaisons with the native woman he called Fayaway derived their piquancy more from the allure of her being so thoroughly “the other” than because of her personal charm. Not speaking the other’s language allowed for a freedom from inhibition and offered all manner of opportunity for imbuing the other with depths and sensibilities that in all likelihood were not there. To the extent there had been any complicity at all between them, it was of the sort small children form playing primitive games articulated with primitive vocabularies. When he told his exotic sea tales, he omitted the mosquito bites, the rashes, the foul smells, the filthy feet, and oily hair. So, perhaps his own civilization’s mores were not entirely reprehensible. The complicity he experienced dialoging with Hawthorne and the Duyckinck brothers, with Elizabeth—the extraordinary complicity he felt in Emily’s company, all of it using the currency of precise language—was head and shoulders above the sign language and awkward smiles he had employed day after day in the Marquesas.

  And had the sex really been all that sensual? Perhaps from a strictly plumbing point of view it had—but there had been no lust, no compelling desire even close to the kind they had both felt last night in New London. He should like to tell her that, to relieve her of the misconception he had glibly allowed her to entertain about his rakish past in the South Pacific and in the brothels of Peru. All of that, upon closer inspection, now seemed much more awkward and labored than the New England rituals of courtship, like some prolonged adolescent phase of prurient experimentation engaged in not from genuine desire or excess affection, but rather as fodder to store for future braggadocio—which—he was now compelled to admit as well—had been the overwhelming impetus for his early literary works. Prolonged nudity upon
the islands was a great lust leveler, whereas the unexpected grace of seeing Emily’s naked bottom the other day ran its electrical current through him from stem to stern. Feeling her smooth, delicious wetness with his gently probing fingers under the flimsy skirt of her nightgown, licking her bare nipples in the dark of his room—all of that—for however limited and cloistered by Puritan injunction had set fire to his heart.

  12

  “THAT DAY, 1 AUGUST, MELVILLE CELEBRATED HIS THIRTY-second birthday by making an unannounced visit to Hawthorne, who just then was keeping Bachelor’s Hall with five-year-old Julian, Sophia having left with Una to display the baby to the Peabody and Hawthorne families. Hawthorne made this account in his journal:

  Returning to the Post office got Mr. Tappan’s mail and my own and proceeded homeward, but clambered over the fence and sat down in Love Grove to read the papers. While thus engaged, a cavalier on horseback came along the road, and saluted me in Spanish; to which I replied by touching my hat, and went on with the newspaper. But the cavalier renewing his salutation, I regarded him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville! So, hereupon, Julian and I hastened to the road, where ensued a greeting, and we all went homeward together, talking as we went. Soon, Mr. Melville alighted, and put Julian into the saddle; and the little man was highly pleased, and sat on the horse with the freedom and fearlessness of an old equestrian, and had a ride of at least a mile homeward.”

  HERMAN MELVILLE—A BIOGRAPHY, VOLUME 1, 1819–1851—BY HERSHEL PARKER

  Growing up is not for the faint of heart, and given that, for so many, being faint of heart forms an integral part of being human, growing up is difficult. The various ways of steeling the heart, the complicated mixtures of how we do it to ourselves and of how it is done to us, determine what kind of adults we become. But Julian Hawthorne was only five that day, his own ration of steeling hovering about in a still-distant future. He went to sleep a happy little boy that evening, secure in his father’s affection, kindly attended to by Miss Potter, kissed goodnight by his father’s energetic and extravagant friend.

  At his request, the door to his bedroom was left slightly ajar. The sounds of the adult male voices talking and laughing in the salon completed the boy’s notion of felicity. Miss Potter set some food out for the two gentlemen and bid them adieu. As they clinked their glasses of wine, Melville made no mention of his birthday.

  “How was your journey back?” he asked, looking out upon the gently sloping lawn.

  “Long, hot, humid, and dull and only relieved to some small extent by my trusty volume of Livy’s History of Rome. But the question surely is not—how was my journey back—but rather, how was yours!”

  “Where to begin?”

  “Ah, and before you do—I’d like to apologize—somewhat—for my unctuous attitude of disapproval. I think I was frustrated for reasons of my own, and a tad jealous, and irritated by having our own fine time taken over by the young Dickinsons I, myself, brought into the mix.”

  “I, too, am sorry, Nathaniel, and we must make it up to each other. Even Emily felt bad about it.”

  “All is forgiven, all the way round. And now that you have deigned to mention her name … out with it man! Are you still bewitched? Is the firmament about to break asunder beneath the foundations of Arrowhead?”

  Melville then related the events of his own return trip from Manhattan, beginning with the dinner party at the Morewoods that Hawthorne had excused himself from, and ending with his taking leave of Emily and Austin at the tavern in Hadley now just a week ago. He omitted no detail except for what had transpired between he and Emily along the path and then in his room at The Cardinal’s Deck in New London.

  “Don’t you feel better, sleep easier, converse with Lizzie more lightheartedly for having comported yourself throughout like a gentleman with Miss Dickinson?”

  “I had not given it much thought.”

  “I am sure that you do. And imagine the relief Emily feels, rejoined with her parents who reacted to our ill-conceived invitation with such understandable displeasure.”

  “Yes, I have thought about that.”

  “Imagine if you had seduced her, laid siege to her fragile ramparts with all that Melvillian charm, for a moment or two of pleasure, even for a short-lived romantic idyll? Betraying the trust of your beloved wife like some common cad …”

  “May I say something?”

  “By all means.”

  “Just a moment ago, when you seemed impatient for me to spill the goods, it sounded like you were perhaps prepared to hear almost anything. It even seemed as if you were relishing the possibility of hearing news of the most ‘caddish’ behavior possible.”

  “I am only a man, Herman. I confess it.” He laughed. “Weak as any of us and as prone to the paltry thrills of gossip as the next. But upon hearing what actually happened, I am bursting with relief. I feel ashamed for having doubted you.”

  Melville smiled with not a whit of condescension or irony, very glad to be rejoined with his more conservative friend. Despite their difference in age and personal quirks, he knew full well they were both examples, even allowing for the unusual fact that they were writers, of what proper society asked for in terms of marriage and manners. They were both espoused to fine women, both had handsome children, both did all they could to provide for their family’s wellbeing, both had servants and esteemed in-laws, and both, he knew but could not say, felt hemmed in and generally emasculated by it all. He also realized neither Elizabeth nor Sophia were to blame. They, too, were human and in possession of a full compliment of instincts and desires.

  While Hawthorne excused himself to go pee upon the lawn, Melville, and not for the first time, imagined how his life might be were he to announce his new affections to Lizzie and his family, to live apart from them and to attempt a new life with Emily. The initial surge of romantic emotion that overcame him accompanied an additional sensation of heart-swell particular to the self-destructive impulses common to the rebellious personality—carefully hued scenes flowed through his brain of he and Emily sharing a bed, swimming in Melville lake, having a child, reading together, walking the streets of Paris—but then he felt the tug of gravity pulling him down to reality’s stony terrain. And there he was forced to recognize that it would be his financial ruin if such a thing were ever to happen, his dependence on the generosity that emanated from Judge Shaw’s deep pockets, how all of that would affect any life he and Emily might have a chance at sharing. The romantic moments would fall by the wayside rolled over by an incessant clamor from bill collectors and the daily drudge that life can become defined by. They would grow thin and destitute and end up eking out a life of need and misery eventually coming to resent each other for having brought such disgrace upon lives that theretofore had been blessed with stability and well-stocked larders.

  Hawthorne returned and took notice of the somber expression upon his neighbor’s visage.

  “So, there I was, raining a steady stream of uric acid down upon ants and beetles and an unfortunate worm perhaps. Me standing there by the stately oak at peace with my world, breathing in the sweet night air, my son asleep and safe in the house behind me, my good friend here awaiting me, all the while wreaking suffering and death on those small creatures hidden amongst the blades of grass.”

  “As my Ahab says, the truth shall drive thee mad, Nathaniel.”

  “What are we to make of it? It’s as if a shower of meteors were to suddenly choose this spot on which to fall, sending you and I and dear Julian to Kingdom Come.”

  Melville slowly lit a cigar before answering.

  “It can get far darker still … are you sure there is a Kingdom Come?”

  “Of course, I am not. But there devil well better be!”

  “I expect luck has more to do with life and existence than either of us would feel comfortable admitting. Where many see the will or the hand of God there may be little more than a pair of rickety dice rolling sans rhyme or reason.”

  T
hey sat in silence, smoking, for a good while.

  “Are you really a Christian, Herman?”

  “Are you?”

  “I examine my conscience about this often, especially as I am growing older, and I have to say, even after taking into account all of my many doubts, complaints, and exasperations, that yes, I am. The universe is just too bleak and black without it.”

  “I honestly do not know.”

  “I mean if you take it away, what have you left but the law of the jungle, fangs, and claws? If God does not exist, all manner of murder and mayhem are permissible. On a personal scale, if a vigilant Christian deity is merely the product of our desperate imagination, then why comport yourself as a gentleman with an Emily Dickinson?”

  “Because I respect her. I respect my wife. I do not wish to spoil my family nor Miss Dickinson’s reputation.”

  “But that assumes goodness and respect and family are intrinsic values. If a gang of marauding Vikings came out of time and landed at Gloucester and marched across the Commonwealth pillaging and raping and arrived at Arrowhead and cut your head off and dashed your son against a rock and took your Lizzie as booty, what good would your respect and love of family be?”

  “What an astonishing thought.”

  “Such things have happened and happen still and shall continue to happen surely as long as man walks the earth with a club in his hand, and time passes and in the end the lives of the victims, the sounds of their lamentations, mean nothing in the end.”

  “Like the ants you have just drowned with your urine.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And how does your vigilant all-seeing Christian God tolerate such a thing?”