{"id":214354,"date":"2022-06-20T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2022-06-20T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=214354"},"modified":"2022-06-02T05:13:12","modified_gmt":"2022-06-02T04:13:12","slug":"herman-melvilles-passionate-beautiful-heartbreaking-love-letters-to-nathaniel-hawthorne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/06\/herman-melvilles-passionate-beautiful-heartbreaking-love-letters-to-nathaniel-hawthorne\/","title":{"rendered":"Herman Melville\u2019s Passionate, Beautiful, Heartbreaking Love Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYour heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God\u2019s\u2026 The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The summer when nineteen-year-old Emily Dickinson met the love of her life<\/a> \u2014 the orphaned mathematician-in-training Susan Gilbert, who would come to be the poet\u2019s greatest muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her \u201cOnly Woman in the World\u201d \u2014 another intense, label-defying love was igniting in the heart of another literary titan-to-be some fifty miles westward. That other love unfolds alongside Dickinson\u2019s in Figuring<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 a book I wrote to explore, among other existential perplexities, the bittersweet beauty of asymmetrical and half-requited loves<\/a>. (This essay is adapted from the book.)<\/p>\n

On August 5, 1850, Herman Melville<\/strong> met Nathaniel Hawthorne<\/strong> at a literary gathering in the Berkshires. Hawthorne was forty-six. The achingly shy, brooding writer, once celebrated as \u201chandsomer than Lord Byron,\u201d had risen to celebrity a decade earlier, much thanks to a glowing endorsement by Margaret Fuller<\/a>. Melville \u2014 whose debut novel had rendered him a literary star in his twenties \u2014 had just turned thirty-one.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A potent intellectual infatuation ignited between the two men \u2014 one that, at least for Melville, seems to have grown from the cerebral to the corporeal. Within days, the young author reviewed Hawthorne\u2019s short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse in Literary World<\/em> under the impersonal byline \u201ca Virginian Spending July in Vermont.\u201d No claim of this intentional ambiguity was true \u2014 Melville was a New Yorker, the month was August, and he was spending it in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

The review, nearing seven thousand words, was nothing less than an editorial serenade. \u201cA man of a deep and noble nature has seized me in this seclusion\u2026 His wild, witch voice rings through me,\u201d Melville wrote of reading Hawthorne\u2019s stories in a remote farmhouse nestled in the summer foliage of the New England countryside. \u201cThe soft ravishments of the man spun me round in a web of dreams.\u201d Melville couldn\u2019t have known that his allusions to witchcraft, intended as compliment, had disquieting connotations for Hawthorne. Born Nathaniel Hathorne, he had added a w<\/em> to the family name in order to distance himself from his ancestor John Hathorne \u2014 a leading judge involved in the Salem witch trials, who, unlike the other culpable judges, never repented of his role in the murders. Unwitting of the dark family history, Melville found himself under \u201cthis Hawthorne\u2019s spell\u201d \u2014 a spell cast first by his writing, then by the constellation of personal qualities from which the writing radiated. Who hasn\u2019t fallen in love with an author in the pages of a beautiful book? And if that author, when befriended in the real world, proves to be endowed with the splendor of personhood that the writing intimates, who could resist falling in love with the whole person? Melville presaged as much:<\/p>\n

No man can read a fine author, and relish him to his very bones, while he reads, without subsequently fancying to himself some ideal image of the man and his mind\u2026 There is no man in whom humor and love are developed in that high form called genius; no such man can exist without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet. Or, love and humor are only the eyes, through which such an intellect views this world. The great beauty in such a mind is but the product of its strength.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After comparing Hawthorne to Shakespeare, he writes:<\/p>\n

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, \u2014 even though it be covertly, and by snatches.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI am Posterity speaking by proxy,\u201d Melville bellows from the page, \u201cwhen I declare \u2014 that the American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.\u201d In an aside on the process of composing his review, he notes that twenty-four hours into writing, he found himself \u201ccharged more and more with love and admiration of Hawthorne.\u201d Quoting an especially beguiling line of Hawthorne\u2019s, he insists that \u201csuch touches\u2026 can not proceed from any common heart.\u201d No, they bespeak \u201csuch a depth of tenderness, such a boundless sympathy with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love\u201d that they render their author singular in his generation \u2014 as singular as the place he would come to occupy in Melville\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Hawthorne\u2019s home, Old Manse. Concord, Massachusetts. (Boston Public Library.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fervid correspondence and frequent visits followed over the next few months. Only ten of Melville\u2019s letters to Hawthorne survive, but their houses were just six miles apart and they saw each other quite often \u2014 \u201cdiscussing the Universe with a bottle of brandy & cigars,\u201d as Melville put it in one invitation, and talking deep into the night about \u201ctime and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters,\u201d as Hawthorne recounted in his diary. Punctuating the invisible log of all that was written but destroyed is all that was spoken but unwritten, all that was felt but unspoken.<\/p>\n

Melville\u2019s ardor was most acute during the period of writing Moby-Dick<\/em>, which he dedicated to Hawthorne. Printed immediately after the title page was \u201cIn Token of My Admiration for his Genius, This Book is Inscribed to Nathanial [sic] Hawthorne.\u201d<\/p>\n

One November evening over dinner, a restlessly excited Herman presented Nathaniel with a lovingly inscribed copy of the novel whose now-legendary protagonist sails from Nantucket into the existential unknown. I can picture the brooding Hawthorne turning the leaf and suppressing a beam of delight upon discovering the printed dedication. In the following century, Virginia Woolf would perform a similar gesture with her groundbreaking, gender-bending novel Orlando<\/em>, inspired by her lover Vita Sackville-West and later described by Vita\u2019s son as \u201cthe longest and most charming love letter in literature.\u201d<\/a> On the day of Orlando<\/em>\u2019s publication, Vita would receive a package containing not only the printed book, but also Virginia\u2019s original manuscript, bound specially for her in Niger leather and stamped with her initials on the spine.<\/p>\n

But after the elated private presentation, a very different public fate awaited Moby-Dick<\/em>. Its 1851 publication was met with a damning review in New York\u2019s Literary World<\/em>, which set the tone for its American reception and precipitated its decades-long plunge into obscurity. The reviewer\u2019s chief complaint was that the novel \u201cviolated and defaced\u201d \u201cthe most sacred associations of life\u201d\u2014an indictment aimed at the homoeroticism of Melville\u2019s choice to depict Ishmael and Queequeg as sharing a \u201cmarriage bed\u201d in which they awaken with their arms around each other.<\/p>\n

Ten days later, Hawthorne lamented the obtuseness of the review and praised Moby-Dick<\/em> as Melville\u2019s best work yet. Touched to the point of delirium by this \u201cexultation-breeding letter,\u201d Melville hastened to reply:<\/p>\n

Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God\u2019s\u2026 It is a strange feeling \u2014 no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content \u2014 that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.<\/p>\n

Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Aware of how his intemperate fervor might incinerate his relationship with the cooler-tempered Hawthorne, Melville reasons with himself for a moment, then chooses to abandon reason:<\/p>\n

My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms steal into me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After signing, he adds a feverish postscript:<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of [magicians], I\u2019ll 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 \u2014 a million \u2014 billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question \u2014 they are One.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The intensity proved too concussing for Hawthorne \u2014 he pulled away from the divine magnet. Melville seems to have presaged the eclipse of their relationship in the review in which the magnetism had begun:<\/p>\n

It is that blackness in Hawthorne\u2026 that so fixes and fascinates me. It may be, nevertheless, that it is too largely developed in him. Perhaps he does not give us a ray of his light for every shade of his dark.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Hawthorne retreated into his cool darkness, Melville suffered with the singular anguish of unreturned ardor\u2014anguish that stayed with him for the remaining four decades of his life, for he eulogized it in one of his last poems, \u201cMonody,\u201d penned in his final year:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Herman Melville in his final years.<\/p><\/div>\n

To have known him, to have loved him,
\nAfter loneness long;
\nAnd then to be estranged in life,
\nAnd neither in the wrong;
\nAnd now for death to set his seal \u2014
\nEase me, a little ease, my song!<\/p>\n

By wintry hills his hermit-mound
\nThe sheeted snow-drifts drape,
\nAnd houseless there the snow-bird flits
\nBeneath the fir-tree\u2019s crape:
\nGlazed now with ice the cloistral vine
\nThat hid the shyest grape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, the gaps of the invisible and the unspoken are filled with posterity\u2019s questions about specifics that vibrate with the universal: What happened between Melville and Hawthorne in the unrecorded hours? Why did Nathaniel ultimately repel the divine magnet of Herman\u2019s love? Most probably, we\u2019ll never know. Possibly, they themselves never fully did. It is almost banal to say, yet it needs to be said: No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people, often not even the people themselves, half-opaque as we are to ourselves. One thing is certain: The quotient of intimacy cannot be contained in a label. The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse \u2014 to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves. The labels we give to the loves of which we are capable \u2014 varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again \u2014 cannot begin to contain the complexity of feeling that can flow between two hearts and the bodies that contain them.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is Maria Popova<\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What <\/em>is<\/em> all this? (More<\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYour heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God\u2019s\u2026 The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":214357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[2869,1177,2553,2870],"class_list":["post-214354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-herman-melville","tag-inspirational","tag-love","tag-nathaniel-hawthorne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}