1850 At mid-century, in mid-summer, the two classical authors of the American renaissance were in mid-career. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter had come out five months earlier. Melville had written five books on seafaring themes, starting with Typee (1846), the bestselling account of his adventures in the South Pacific – favourably reviewed by Hawthorne, as it happens – and was now at work on a sixth, about a whaling vessel hunting an albino whale.
Melville had just bought a house in Pittsfield, in north-western Massachusetts, where other literary notables lived, like the poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, poet and later editor of the Atlantic. Just six miles away, in Lenox, lived Nathaniel Hawthorne.
A perfect setting for a literary coterie, you might think. You’d be wrong. Nineteenth-century America didn’t do literary coteries, except in New York City. Melville and Hawthorne had never met, nor even knew they were neighbours, and it’s not clear that Melville had yet met Holmes and Lowell either. Café society it wasn’t.
So it took a New Yorker, Melville’s friend, Evert Duyckinck – editor, publisher and leading light of the Young America Group, which promoted American literature and worked for copyright reform to keep cheap British books from flooding the local market – to bring them together. At his suggestion a picnic was arranged for 5 August, to include Melville, Hawthorne and Holmes. They would climb nearby Monument Mountain, drink champagne and talk about the necessity of a distinctly American literature.
As it turned out, the excursion was surprised by a thunderstorm. While sheltering from the rain, the two novelists got to talking, and Melville’s usually chilly manner thawed into a torrent. In a later letter to Hawthorne he wrote: ‘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.’
Something else happened too. Either in preparation for the meeting, or in response to it, Melville belatedly read Hawthorne’s collection of stories, Mosses From an Old Manse (1846). His essay on the experience, published in two parts by Duyckinck in The Literary World for 17 and 24 August, remains one of the most perceptive assessments of Hawthorne’s deep allegories ever written. Commenting on the ‘darkness’ lurking in Hawthorne’s tales, Melville wrote that ‘this great power of blackness derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations … no deeply thinking mind is wholly free’.
That association between darkness and depth would, in turn, deepen the white whale tale, then in process, and turn it into Moby-Dick.