Melville’s next three novels, sea tales of various kinds, met with less enthusiasm. An encounter with his idol Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Berkshires led to the most important friendship of his life. After the move to Pittsfield he poured out his waning self-confidence to Hawthorne, to whom he later dedicated Moby-Dick: “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.”The basic rule in the Melville household was that Herman wrote while the women—his wife, mother, and three sisters—did everything else: “They cooked, composed letters, completed chores, cared for [his son] Malcolm, and copied Melville’s pages.”
When his daughters were old enough, they too were conscripted. On one occasion he woke his younger daughter, Frances, at 2:00AM so that she could help him proofread his immense, 18,000-line epic poem, Clarel. She never forgave him, the narrator notes, though his biographer—“the Biographer,” as the narrator of Dayswork refers to Hershel Parker—did, suggesting that Frances could have taken a nap during the day. And then there are the “bombshell” letters that first surfaced in 1975, which contained “anecdotal evidence, derived from family stories and letters, that Melville verbally and physically abused his wife,” including on one notorious occasion when Melville came home drunk and allegedly threw her down the stairs. Again, the Biographer testifies for the defense. “Could Herman have brushed Lizzie out of his way as he was going up the stairs and could she have fallen against the wall?” Doubt surrounds much of what happened in Melville’s life, the narrator of Dayswork notes, quoting another biographer, Elizabeth Hardwick: “So much about Melville is seems to be, may have been, and perhaps.” But the question lingers for her: “Would I be turning on my book light to read about Melville in the middle of the night if I knew for certain that he beat his wife?”
The Cornell historian Aaron Sachs is surprisingly bullish on the Melville marriage in Up from the Depths, another pandemic production. Sachs argues that the unequal division of household responsibilities was actually an honor for Elizabeth. Melville, he writes, “was capable of acting as…a solid, faithful husband who shared secrets with his wife about his writing and trusted her as a copier and proofreader of his manuscripts.” In an otherwise strong chapter on Clarel, the poem Lizzie described as a “dreadful incubus” that had “undermined all our happiness,” Sachs again adopts a glass-half-full perspective: “At least there had been some kind of happiness to be undermined.”
