Book Reviews: The Whale: A Love Story; and Melville in Love

The Whale: A Love Story by Mark Beauregard is an engaging and absorbing  read. This fictionalized retelling of Melville's relationship with fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne is based on Melville's passionate letters to Hawthorne (almost none of Hawthorne's replies exist). The premise is that the two men were in love, Melville more besotted than Hawthorne, but Hawthorne chose not to enter into a physical relationship due to social conventions and because he was happy in his marriage. Including the text of Melville's contemporaneous letters to Hawthorne adds a resonance to the story that makes it very believable.

Amazingly, Melville was so infatuated after a single meeting with Hawthorne that he felt compelled to go into debt, move from New York, and buy a house in the Berkshires just to be close to his crush. Impetuous and emotional in his nearly unrequited longing, Melville is sympathetically portrayed, but the author doesn't shy away from showing how he neglected his family, even as they toiled to assist him with his manuscript.

Oxford World's Classics edition, 1999 (my copy). Don't buy this edition, it's missing the epilogue!

Note the unusual size and layout of this dedication, in all its full page glory. I'm guessing this had to be love.

Near the end of the book, Hawthorne and his family move from the Berkshires to West Newton, to stay at the home of Horace Mann.  West Newton is 10 minutes away from me, so this was a great excuse for a mini field-trip!  The original home is long gone, but Crocker Circle is where the driveway used to be.

2020 view of the driveway of Hawthorne's West Newton residence from 1851-1852, where he wrote The Blithedale Romance.

 UPDATE: Revising this because I have now read  Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby Dick by Michael Shelden. This book differs from The Whale as it is a straight biography rather than a novel. The subject is also Melville at the time he was living in Pittsfield and writing Moby Dick. Yet instead of pining after Nathaniel Hawthorne, in this book Melville is in love with his beautiful (and also married) neighbor, Sarah Morewood. The evidence behind this relationship is again provided through Melville's letters, in which he used unusual courtly language and employed flowery sobriquets for  Mrs. Morewood such as "Thou Lady of All Delight."   I have to admire Shelden's attention to detail, as he goes to great lengths to interpret obscure turns of phrase and the symbolic importance of the smallest gestures such as underlined verses in a book given to Morewood. However, whether or not this love affair actually happened, I had a hard time believing the thesis that Mrs. Morewood was in fact the muse of Moby Dick, which is brimming with homoerotic imagery and doesn't consider women at all.  Worth a read, though, especially in tandem with The Whale.