jobs , which I have done for money—being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood.” Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) brought him money and restored his prestige with the readership he did not want—the adventure lovers.

Throughout this period Melville’s intellectual and literary encouragement came from a man he had first met during the preparation of the proofs for Typee —Evert Duyckinck, an editor for Wiley and Putnam, Melville’s first publishers. Duyckinck was only a few years older than Melville, but he possessed a college education (which Melville did not) and a large store of experience with the greater and lesser literary lights of New York, to whom he was able, as the host of countless lively dinners and smokers, to introduce the young author. His well-stocked library and the generosity with which he lent his books was a great help to Melville, with his insatiable appetite for English literature. Urbane, polished, and amiable, Duyckinck was the well-connected promoter of the small circle of New York writers and artists to which Melville was now welcomed. The editor-patron refused to be intimidated by the awesome collection of talent in proud Boston. His energetic efforts to promote the arts and letters of his own city were not completely unnoticed by the Bostonians, who snickered when James Russell Lowell twitted the upstart New Yorkers in the Fable for Critics :

Good day, Mr. D——, I’m happy to meet, With a scholar so ripe, and a critic so neat, Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries; What news from that suburb of London and Paris Which latterly makes such shrill claims to monopolize The credit of being the New World’s metropolis?

Toward the close of the 1840’s Duyckinck forged his most formidable weapon for promoting the arts generally, and dealing with the New Englanders in particular, when he bought The Literary World , a journal that was to have considerable importance in shaping American literary life.

Duyckinck never allowed his interest in Melville’s unpredictable talent to flag, even when his prudishness winced at the young author’s frequently gamy taste in allusions and metaphors. He was, by all accounts, a loyal and helpful friend. But the pleasant Clinton Place soirees and whist parties could hardly satisfy Melville’s growing hunger for someone to talk with at the most intimate level of his feelings, hopes, and fears. He may once have entertained the notion that his wife, Elizabeth, could fill the empty place in his inner life, but she had tried and failed to comprehend Mardi , written during the first months of their married life. Elizabeth Melville found a house and a new baby as much as she could manage of her husband’s expectations, and he returned from England early in 1850 to shut himself up alone

in his study with his new novel about whaling.

He received encouragement from Richard Henry Dana, Jr., whose Two Years Before the Mast had first suggested to Melville that this kind of experience could be written about. At the beginning of May he wrote Dana that although he was “half way” through what would be “a strange sort of book,” he meant “to give the truth of the thing.” He seemed resigned to limit his ambition to what could more easily be managed rather than risk another Mardi .

The onset of summer in New York made the desk-bound Melville long for a climate more congenial than the “Babylonish brick-kiln,” and in July he packed up Lizzie, young Malcolm, his long-widowed mother, Maria, and a sister or two and set out in search of “the grass-growing mood” that he hoped to find in the declining rural grandeur of his late uncle’s farm at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Robert Melvill, a cousin, was operating the farm as an inn until its purchasers, the J. R. Morewoods, could take it off his hands in the fall. Herman had known and loved the place as a boy and young man, and in the familiar and pleasant surroundings he expected no difficulty in quickly tidying up the loose ends of his book and sending it off to the publishers, with whom he was already bargaining. He determined to relax a bit and persuade Duyckinck to allow him, for once, to play host. On August a, the day after Melville’s thirty-first birthday and two days before his third wedding anniversary, his friend arrived, along with a colleague, Cornelius Mathews.

Melville had laid grand plans for some heroic parties in the old homestead, unaware that an ambitious plan had already been hatched during the train ride up the Hudson while Duyckinck and Mathews had smoked their cigars and chatted with Dudley David Field, a well-known lawyer on his way back to his habitual summer in Stockbridge. Field obliged the two travellers with anecdotes about the summer literati of the Berkshires —William Cullen Bryant and, from time to time, Longfellow; Oliver Wendell Holmes, of greater fame for his witty prose and poetry than for his deanship of Harvard Medical School; J. T. Headley and G. P. R. James, whose names were often linked with Melville’s as “talked-about authors”; doughty Catherine Sedgwick, one of the first successful American women writers; James T. Fields, the Boston publisher, said to be visiting in the area with his new bride … As Field went on, his reputation as a party giver suggested to him the possibility of engineering the social coup of the season. He proposed a gigantic feast at his Stockbridge home, preceded by a hike up a local mountain made famous by a Bryant poem, which would include every literary lion he could catch in his net. If he was very lucky, the party might include the shy Nathaniel Hawthorne, who

had just located himself with his wife, Sophia, and two young children in a small red farmhouse in Lenox, only seven miles from Melvill House.

Clearly the New Yorkers had gotten themselves into something. Dudley Field’s renown as a host was such that the people he invited were likely to show up. This meant that the trio from Manhattan would be matched against some very impressive talent from Boston. James Fields, the publisher, was just Duyckinck’s age but had already maneuvered himself into the venerable House of Ticknor as the partner who made all the important decisions. His good judgment was legendary. He had a diplomatic, persuasive manner, an unerring eye for good copy, and a reputation for fair dealing with his authors—qualities that in a few short years had won away from other publishers every important literary name in New England. Fields had shared greatly in the creation of The Scarlet Letter by encouraging a despondent Hawthorne to turn it from a short story into a novel. Its immediate success was a tribute to Fields’s shrewdness. And it was his literary salon—far outclassing Duyckinck’s in brilliance and importance—that was largely responsible for the awesome cultural power of Boston.

Cornelius Mathews must have been more than a little apprehensive over the prospect of matching wits with Holmes. Mathews had founded and edited Yankee Doodle , a humorous child of The Literary World with pretensions of being for America what Punch was for England. But in spite of some good moments, including a Melville series lampooning Zachary Taylor, Yankee Doodle had proved rather vapid. Lowell’s Fable for Critics sentenced petty thieves to an indefinite term of reading “that American Punch, like the English, no doubt—Just the sugar and lemons and spirit left out.” Mathews himself was skewered as Duyckinck’s court jester, “a small man in glasses … dodging about, muttering ‘Murderers! asses!’ ” Now he would be expected to hold his own with Oliver Wendell Holmes, who by repute possessed the sharpest tongue and the most mischievous pen in New England.

Undaunted, Duyckinck, Mathews, and Melville picked up Holmes —a slight but energetic little man carrying an India-rubber doctor’s bag full of provisions—at the Pittsfield station -on August 5. After the short trip on the jolting Housatonic railroad car, they arrived in Stockbridge Village, where they were met by Dudley Field. The men took a playful practice run up the hill in back of Field’s home and upon their return found the party organized. Hawthorne, who usually avoided such gatherings if he could possibly help it, had arrived—no doubt to the delight of James Fields, who never missed an opportunity to show off his most successful authors. Fields, with his curly brown whiskers, was there with his bride, Eliza, “the violet of the season in Berkshire”—though she was doubtfully dressed for mountain climbing with her blue silk and crinoline. As they were preparing

to leave—James and Eliza Fields, Mr. and Mrs. Field with daughter Jenny, Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, Mathews, and Duyckinck —one Henry Sedgwick appeared on horseback, in time to save Melville from being the youngest male of the company and to represent the large and energetic Stockbridge family Dudley Field knew so well. Sedgwick was just establishing himself in the law firm in which Field and the elder Sedgwick were partners, and he had been on hand four years before to escort visiting James Russell Lowell up the same mountain.

The weather was not altogether cooperative, but the party decided to make a go of it and tumbled into the conveyances for the three-mile trip to the foot of the mountain. Bravely, the group began the scramble up the side. Duyckinck and Hawthorne led the way, with the former asking questions and making polite observations about The Scarlet Letter . The others fell quickly into the mood of “glorious exercise” for body and wit, which was vigorous indeed. “Stealing glances through the trees at the country underneath,” Mathews recalled, they were “rambling, scrambling, climbing, rhyming—puns flying off in every direction like sparks among the bushes.” Once Mathews had difficulty keeping a straight face as Holmes, in mid-pun, stumbled and came near to dropping a thousand feet.

“A swift-sailing thunder cloud, like a black pirate-ship,” was now “scudding past directly alongside,” lending authority to Mathews’ stated opinion that he felt as though they were all passengers on a sea voyage. This inspired Melville to clamber onto a jutting pinnacle of rock and, standing precariously on its tip, begin hauling in sail. Holmes, who had been subdued since his wit had faltered along with his footing, pantomimed seasickness and asked for ipecac. These antics brought out a deeply buried sense of humor in Hawthorne, who, for his part, launched a search for the fictitious “Great Carbuncle” (supposedly a beautiful garnet hidden on this very mountain) about which he had once written a story.

But now the rain began to come down in earnest, and the company expressed concern for the finery worn by the newlyweds. Holmes produced a penknife and fashioned an umbrella out of some tree branches, and an indentation in the cliffs was located that, with its mossy undergrowth and cover of brush, afforded adequate shelter. The downpour proved but a shower, the clouds cleared, and the procession moved on toward the top.

The reading of William Cullen Bryant’s “Monument Mountain” from the top of the original had been proposed earlier in the day, and diplomacy had dictated that the honor be given to one of the guests who, like Bryant, had his name associated with New York. When the time came, it was Mathews who rose to the occasion, producing the volume from his jacket pocket and adjusting his spectacles. The damp company squinted and dried out in the noon sun, now quite bright and

warm, as he put his heart into the reading:

There is a tale about these gray old rocks, A sad tradition of unhappy love, And sorrows borne and ended, long ago…

As he read of the Indian maiden who, unable to many her true love, hurled herself from these very cliffs, the company drank in the surroundings and the view and imagined themselves figures in some German romantic painting of a mountain hike, leaning on their walking sticks and shutting out the pettiness of the ordinary life down below. The air was intoxicating, and the mood was helped along hy the champagne that Holmes began to pass around in a silver mug he suddenly produced. Mathews tried to recapture the moment later:

Behold, now! the panorama spread out like a sea. At that height it occurs to us all, at once, that we have passed the previous parts of our lives in very small matters. What is Trade to us at that elevation! Business is referred to with disgust. Wall street and Washington (supposed to be of some importance down below) are mere alleys and dogpaths. Even the writing of Hooks and Poems is child’s play—regarded from that watch-tower, so near up towards heaven.… The storm had passed away, hut there still lingered in the thoughts of the mountain-climbers a remembrance of the sad daughter who, in default of love, cast herself from this lonesome height and perished on the rocks below. We walk about, in the new sun, upon the mountain top, as though we were the angels of the lime, and as (hough these airy ridges were our natural promenade.

In “silence and sighing,” Mathews brought the poem to its close:

And o’er the mound that covered her, the tribe Built up a simple monument, a cone Of small loose stones. Thenceforward, all who passed, Hunter, and dame, and virgin, laid a stone In silence on the pile. It stands there yet. And Indians from the distant West, who come To visit where their fathers’ bones are laid, Yet tell the sorrowful tale, and to this day The mountain where the hapless maiden died Is called the Mountain of the Monument.

The applause was genuine, and someone proposed “long life to the dear old poet.” This was the favorite toast during the lunch the ladies then spread, and as James Fields later recalled, “it took a considerable amount of Heidsieck to do it justice.”

It is probable that it was during the lunch and the walking about atop the mountain that Hawthorne and Melville got acquainted. They may have compared notes on the books each had in progress. Hawthorne had just begun his stories based upon the old seven-gabled house in the Salem he had just departed (”forever,” he was saying at

the time), and Melville was near the end of what Duyckinck had described as “a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery.” Whatever they might have discussed, the professional and life situations of the men and the mood of the day rendered them particularly vulnerable to what Melville would, in a few days, call “the shock of recognition.” Hawthorne was in an unusually expansive mood; Fields, who saw his author often through the years, said almost thirty years later that he had never seen Hawthorne in better spirits than on that fifth of August in 1850. Henry James, Sr., once described Hawthorne’s bearing in society as that of “a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives,” and John Greenleaf Whittier once mused that Hawthorne “never seemed to be doing anything, and yet he did not like to be disturbed at it.” This was certainly the impression Melville had received from literary gossip. “Where Hawthorne is known,” he wrote a few days after their meeting, “he seems to be deemed … a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated—a man who means no meanings.” Perhaps it was this universal characterization that had kept Melville from reading, or at least from reading with any real interest, Hawthorne’s work. But for once he was “among the most enterprising of the merry-makers” and “rayed out in a sparkling and unwonted manner.”

Caught at one of the few moments in his life when he was willing to entertain the notion that someone he did not already know might be worth knowing, Hawthorne allowed Melville to stake his claim within the territory that the older man valued above all else—his privacy. No man could have been a better choice to provide Melville with the thread to follow out of his frustration and sense of isolation. Hawthorne was forty-six, just old enough to provide a fatherly aspect to a relationship with the younger man. His personality and his writing were of one piece —as anyone who met him readily testified—and would have suggested to Melville that his own internal confusions could be appropriately and artistically externalized in the exercise of his craft. Hawthorne was an excellent listener. And perhaps most important of all for Melville, he almost always wrote exactly what he intended to write, in spite of the dictates of fashion. If Hawthorne was not financially well off (indeed, at the time of their meeting Melville was probably doing a bit better), he nevertheless presented to his new acquaintance the picture of an author who had not had to sacrifice his integrity as an artist in order to get by.

Let Sophia Hawthorne’s words describe what the two men saw in each other from the time of their first meeting. Melville spoke at length with his new friend’s wife only a few weeks later, on the verandah of the Red House in Lenox: