When he was only 32, Herman Melville put a bullet in his career, writing a novel so outrageous (incest was one theme) that reviewers thought he had gone insane. “Pierre” was such a disaster that he made just $157 from it, which was only a little worse than the earnings from his previous flop — “Moby-Dick,” published the year before. Though he lived another 40 years, the world so completely forgot him that one of his few obituaries in 1891 remarked, “Even his own generation has long thought him dead.”
“It’s not a stretch to say that the author’s own white whale was a love that would sink his career as surely as Ahab’s voyage is destroyed by a mad pursuit across oceans.”
The early demise of Melville’s career — he wasn’t rediscovered until the 1920s — has been one of the most enduring mysteries of American literature. How did such a promising young writer end up a forgotten old man who hadn’t published a novel in decades?
The short answer is love, and the key to the mystery is his secret relationship with a woman rarely mentioned by his biographers — Sarah Morewood. She was his great passion, a woman for whom he was willing to risk everything. This love became an inspiration for Captain Ahab’s obsessive madness in “Moby-Dick.”
The couple met in the Berkshires of Massachusetts in August 1850. Both were unhappily married; Melville to a judge’s dutiful but unexceptional daughter, and Sarah to a wealthy Englishman whose greatest love was his business in New York.
A young poet of 27 with raven hair and dark, penetrating eyes, Sarah enchanted Melville from the start. In a few weeks he astonished his wife by suddenly insisting they abandon their comfortable home in Manhattan to move immediately to the Berkshires, where Sarah lived independently in a colonial mansion on a large estate.
Borrowing thousands he would never be able to repay, Melville bought the farm adjoining Mrs. Morewood’s and — like a man possessed — began clearing a path through the woods to her door.
They rode horses together, went on picnics, boating excursions and long walks in the woods. Indulging in costume parties, they dressed as characters from their favorite books and stayed up until 1 in the morning drinking Champagne. They exchanged expensive gifts — including a present from Sarah of two flasks of cologne, which prompted Melville to tell her that she was the “most considerate of all the delicate roses that diffuse their blessed perfume among men.”
Near the anniversary of their first meeting, Melville completed “Moby-Dick” in a frenzied rush. To celebrate, Sarah organized at her own expense a trip to the summit of Mount Greylock — the highest point in Massachusetts — where she and Melville spent the night with a few friends under the summer stars, treating themselves to brandy cherries and drinking rum and port wine while the author’s pregnant wife slept alone 15 miles away.
Sarah daringly compared the night to one spent in Sodom, thinking of herself as she descended the mountain as “Lot’s wife, casting many a lingering look behind.”
To remain next to his “goddess” and his “beautiful Lady of Paradise,” as Melville called Sarah, he needed to make a small fortune from “Moby-Dick.” It was the greatest gamble of his life, and that sense of a desperate but thrilling risk to win your heart’s desire at any cost is everywhere in “Moby-Dick.”
It’s not a stretch to say that the author’s own white whale was a love that would sink his career as surely as Ahab’s voyage is destroyed by a mad pursuit across oceans.
When “Moby-Dick” was published in 1851 to bad reviews and terrible sales, the financial setback left Melville dependent on his wife’s family. He lashed out at the literary world for failing to appreciate his masterpiece and for undermining his grand ambition to enjoy his Berkshire paradise with his secret goddess.
Then in “Pierre,” his wild efforts to describe a forbidden love affair were a partial attempt to convey his love for Sarah, but out of bitterness he made the book so strange and inaccessible that it became a kind of career suicide note.
So why did it take 150 years for the story of this tumultuous affair to be revealed?
For years Melville’s mostly male biographers and critics refused to take Sarah seriously as a love interest, ignoring her because she seemed on the surface merely a rich “socialite” unworthy of the great writer.
They were so convinced that Melville must have moved to the Berkshires because Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there for one year that they never wondered why, after Hawthorne left, Melville stayed another dozen, clinging to his debt-ridden farm. The answer, of course, is that Sarah was there for that whole time, right up to her death from tuberculosis at age 40.
Brokenhearted, Melville then returned to New York to live out the rest of his life in obscurity. Occasionally, a vision of his lost love would come to him, and in one poem from his old age set at their favorite lake in the Berkshires, he describes Sarah as a beautiful ghost trying to comfort him in the grip of his undying obsession, whispering just two words in his ear: “Let go.”
“Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick” (Ecco) by Michael Sheldon is out now.