E-Mail This Article to a Friend When Nathaniel met Herman (continued) BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

By April, Melville’s letters had gotten even gushier. At one point he could not seem to control himself and added a P.S., followed by an N.B., followed by a P.P.S. In June 1851, Melville wrote a long letter to Hawthorne in which his hero worship began to blur boundaries, as he discussed their careers in the same breath:

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 (in a publisher’s point of view) allusions to the "Seven Gables." And I have seen "Tales," and "A New Volume" announced, by N.H. So upon the whole, I say to myself, this N.H. is in the ascendant. My dear Sir, they begin to patronize. All Fame is patronage. Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in that. 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"!

On July 22, 1851, Melville wrote of finishing Moby-Dick, as he made plans to visit Hawthorne.

My dear Hawthorne:

This is not a letter, or even a note — but only a passing word said to you over your garden gate.... I am now busy with various things — not incessantly though; but enough to require my frequent tinkerings; and this is the height of the haying season, and my nag is dragging me home his winter’s dinners all the time. And so, one way and another, I am not yet a disengaged man; but shall be, very soon. Meantime, the earliest good chance I get, I shall roll down to you, my good fellow, seeing we — that is, you and I, — must hit upon some little bit of vagabondism, before Autumn comes. Graylock — we must go and vagabondize there. But ere we start, we must dig a deep hole, and bury all Blue Devils, there to abide till the Last Day.

Goodbye, his X mark.

On July 28, Sophia Peabody left Lenox to visit her parents in West Newton. Four days later, on August 1 — how did he wait so long? — Melville showed up unexpectedly. As Hawthorne and Julian were out romping in the part of the countryside known as "Love Grove," Hawthorne wrote in Twenty Days:

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 there upon, Julian and I hastened to the road, where ensued a greeting and we all went homeward together, talking as we went.

Melville stayed for dinner and the two men spent much of the night speaking of "time and eternity, things of this world and the next, books and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters," according to Hawthorne.

It is possible to read this as a 19th-century version of guys’ night out — they even smoke cigars together "in the sacred precincts of the parlor" — but there is a comfortable eroticism here that is absent in Hawthorne’s fiction and other letters. Never in his work do we ever sense that he is, well, comfortable with anything in his life. Is it possible that Melville was finally getting through to him? That the younger man’s constant attention was melting Hawthorne’s harsher, more-guarded emotional shell? Notable, too, is that August 1 was Melville’s birthday — a fact Hawthorne never mentioned, possibly because he didn’t know — and that the younger man chose to spend it with his idol rather than with his wife.

Melville persisted. On August 8 he joined Hawthorne, Julian, and his friends George and Evert Duyckinck — publishers of the Literary World — for a picnic, after which they visited the Shaker village in nearby Hancock. In the midst of what had been a nothing-but-happy time since Sophia had been away, Hawthorne suddenly had a fit of anger. He was appalled by the Shakers, calling them a "filthy set" because of their communal living and bathing facilities. But his anger seems to have had a sexual undertone — which was darned peculiar, given that the Shakers were committed to celibacy. He was appalled by the separation of the sexes and the fact that two people of the same sex were forced to share "particularly narrow beds." He railed away at this "close junction of man with man," stating that "the sooner the sect is extinct the better — the consummation which, I am happy to hear, is thought to be not a great many years distant." It is revealing that Hawthorne — a man who carefully chose each word, even in light sketches — would write "consummation," a word with a clear sexual connotation. Can it be that this was a moment of homosexual panic? Had Melville pushed too much? Was their relationship — in the absence of Sophia — becoming too threatening?

On August 9, Hawthorne wrote:

Julian awoke in a bright condition, this morning; and we arose at about seven. I felt the better for the expedition of yesterday; and asking Julian if he had a good time, he answered with great enthusiasm in the affirmative; and that he wanted to go again, and that he loved Mr. Melville as well as me, and as mama, and as Una.

Maybe Julian’s love of Melville — too obviously a reflection of his own? — had contributed to Hawthorne’s agitation. On August 10, he wrote a nearly hysterical passage in his journal — so different from everything else that it stands out as a cry for help and understanding — declaring his love for Julian and his family:

Thank God! God Bless him! God bless Phoebe for giving him to me! God bless her as the best wife and mother in the world! God bless Una, whom I long to see again! God Bless little Rosebud! God Bless me, for Phoebe’s, and all their sake! No other man has so good a wife; nobody has better children. Would I were worthier of her and them!

Well, it’s hard to see how Hawthorne’s affection for Melville — whatever its nature — could survive such an outburst of familial devotion.

LUCKILY FOR Hawthorne, Sophia returned on August 16. But something had changed. On November 14, at a dinner, Herman Melville presented Hawthorne with a copy of Moby-Dick, which was to be published the next day. The dedication read "In Token of my Admiration for his Genius. This book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne." In a lost letter Hawthorne responded favorably to the book, which prompted yet another effusive reply from Melville. In a long letter dated November 17, he wrote:

Your letter was handed me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood’s, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous — catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can’t write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then — your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book....

Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns over another page. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book — and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon, — the familiar, — and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes....

Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it’s a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality....

Herman.

P.S. I can’t stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of Magians, I’ll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand — a million — billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question — they are One.

H.

P.P.S. Don’t think that by writing me a letter, you shall always be bored with an immediate reply to it — and so keep both of us delving over a writing-desk eternally. No such thing! I sh’n’t always answer your letters, and you may do just as you please.

Again, there is no mistaking the sexual overtones. Nineteenth-century writers knew their Hebrew Bible, and Melville, in fact, had carefully chosen the names of his characters in Moby-Dick for their biblical allusions. So when he wrote, "I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality," the biblical meaning of the word "know" — to consummate sexual passion — is unmistakable.

We have no record of how Hawthorne felt about or responded to this letter. We do know, however, that five days later, on November 21, he and his family left their home in Lenox to move back to Boston. Whatever happened in the Berkshires that summer — aside from the details recorded in Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa — we will never know.

Clearly, Melville’s romantic enthusiasm for Nathaniel Hawthorne grew, and may even have been encouraged. But only up to a point. A few more letters were exchanged between the writers in the fall of 1952; Melville tried to get Hawthorne to write a novel based on a tale he had heard of a wronged woman named Agatha. The tale, significantly, turns on the betrayal of a betrothal vow. Hawthorne refused to write the story, claiming to have no interest, and suggested that Melville write it himself — but they were never really friends again.

One standard scholarly explanation for their disaffection is that they simply went their own ways, that temperamental artists rarely remain friends forever. Others claim that Melville’s desperate attempts to convince the older man to write a novel based on the Agatha story had caused the separation. And it's true that, at times, Melville’s sense of the psychological boundaries between himself and Hawthorne seemed shaky at best.

But whatever caused their break, it is clear from Melville’s letters, as well as from Hawthorne’s words about Melville in Twenty Days, that the younger man was — what words to use here? "in love with"? "smitten with"? "in deep admiration of"? — the older Hawthorne. Melville was no stranger to love between men — even physical love between men — but he was clearly naive and overly incautious when expressing his feelings to Hawthorne. What is finally so charming about this tale is the poignancy of Melville’s unabashed emotional enthusiasm for the older man. The intensity of such a love can be frightening, and frighten it did. Is it any wonder that Hawthorne not only pulled away from his friend, but actually moved?

In the summer of 1851, depressed, melancholy Nathaniel Hawthorne may have discovered more than the fun of cavorting with his son Julian. And to a man already wracked with guilt and gloom, that discovery may have been simply too much to bear. Unlike his noble and magisterial heroine Hester Prynne, he wasn’t ready to take the next step and act upon his feelings.