Jay Parini on Herman Melville

Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the two great novelists of 19th-century America, were close friends at a major juncture in their writing lives, and it’s hard to imagine a more fruitful, poignant or complex relationship. For Hawthorne, it was a connection that stirred deep intellectual interest. For Melville, it was a matter of love.

After several years in Boston as an inspector at the Custom House, Hawthorne moved to Lenox, in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, in 1850. He lived in a small cottage with his beautiful wife, Sophie, and their two children, Una and Julian. The Berkshires were dominated by such imposing literary figures as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fanny Kemble and James Russell Lowell, but Hawthorne was a shy man who rarely ventured into literary society.

In early August, when Melville was staying with an aunt in Pittsfield (six miles from Lenox), a prominent local figure invited him to meet the great Hawthorne – who had just published The Scarlet Letter to wide acclaim – at the base of Monument Mountain, a popular spot for outings.

They hiked up a trail with half a dozen others. Apparently a storm blew up, and the group retreated to a cave to drink champagne from a silver mug and read poetry aloud. Melville grew buoyant, leaping into the rain to a rocky precipice, where he played sailor, pretending to haul up imaginary ropes for everyone’s amusement. Hawthorne, in particular, admired this brash young author, who at 31 was 15 years his junior.

Two days later Hawthorne wrote to a friend: “I met Melville the other day and liked him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me before leaving these parts.”

The visit went so well that Melville – always impetuous – insisted on moving his own family at once to the Berkshires from New York. They – Melville and his wife, their infant son and Melville’s mother – purchased Arrowhead, a lovely farmhouse on the edge of Pittsfield, only a month later. At the same time, Melville reviewed Mosses from an Old Manse, a book of stories and sketches by Hawthorne, in a prominent journal, declaring: “There is no man, in whom humour and love, like mountain peaks, soar to such a rapt height, as to receive the irradiations of the upper skies; there is no man in whom humour and love are developed in that high form called genius.” The review was a big wet kiss for Hawthorne.

Now in the Berkshires, Melville came by to visit often, and Sophie Hawthorne found the young writer highly entertaining. The following spring she wrote that Melville spoke “his innermost about God, the Devil and Life, if so be he can get at the Truth” to her dear husband. “Nothing pleases me better than to sit and hear this growing man dash his tumultuous waves of thought against Mr Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences,” she added.

Melville was working on Moby-Dick, his masterpiece, at this time, and Hawthorne pushed him to go beyond anything he had done before. As ever, Melville needed money, and desperately hoped that his rip-roaring story of the pursuit of a massive and dangerous white whale would attract readers.

Hawthorne, the allegorist par excellence, saw that Melville had before him more than a sea story. Here was a metaphysical quest, with man pitted against nature. Without Hawthorne’s conversations through the winter and spring of 1851, Melville may not have realised fully what he had on the desk before him.

We don’t have all the information we might like to possess about their friendship, but we do know that once, in a snowstorm, Hawthorne appeared at the back door of Arrowhead and was invited to spend the night. The two authors sat in Melville’s study all night, talking in low voices, arousing the curiosity of his wife, mother and sister, who listened closely at the door. The extent of their intimacy is unknown, though it has intrigued biographers for a very long time.

For the most part, as Sophie Hawthorne said, Melville poured his heart out, and Hawthorne listened. Certainly the few extant letters of Melville to his mentor are full of yearning. In one, he imagined the two friends sitting down together in Paradise in eternal conversation: “O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us.”

Hawthorne withdrew, infuriating Melville by refusing invitations to dinner and tea. One would have to suspect that he could not bear such closeness. Yet Hawthorne did manage a letter in praise of Moby-Dick. The book was, after all, dedicated to him.

Melville wrote back in ecstasy: “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… 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.”

Hawthorne seems to have panicked when presented with Melville’s effusiveness and he fled the Berkshires for good, saying the weather there didn’t agree with him. That weather, one might assume, was Herman Melville.

The two met only once after this, in England, where Hawthorne served as American consul in Liverpool. They went for a long walk one afternoon along the beach, smoking cigars and talking, as Hawthorne recalled in his journal:

“Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken… It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

Hawthorne never contacted Melville when he returned to New England in 1864, and died soon thereafter. Melville, by this time, had fallen sharply from public view, working as an obscure inspector in the Custom House in New York (a position that echoed Hawthorne’s earlier position in Boston). By the time he died in 1891, all of his work was forgotten.

A few years before Melville died, Julian Hawthorne (who was researching a biography of his father) stopped by for a visit with the elderly man and recorded his impressions: “At first he was disinclined to talk; but finally he said several interesting things, among which the most remarkable was that he was convinced Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career.”

The only certainty here is that Melville wanted more from Hawthorne – much more – than Hawthorne was prepared to give. And it’s clear that Hawthorne was frightened either by the intensity of Melville’s affections or his unquenchable thirst for approval.

The deeper story remains a mystery and it will never really be unlocked to anyone’s satisfaction.

* Jay Parini’s latest novel is The Passages of Herman Melville, published this month by Canongate at £17.99

T £15.99 books.telegraph.co.uk. The Last Station, the film of his book about Tolstoy, was released in 2009