Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick and The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne

Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick. By Michael Shelden. New York, New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016. 288 pp. $25.99 cloth; The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Edited by Mark Niemeyer. Asheville, NC: Orison Books, 2016. 105 pp. $18.00. Herman Melville's life has continually allured researchers because it necessarily retains a bit of mystery, but that mystery sometimes becomes a blank space onto which biographers and scholars project their own interests and desires. Combine that with what we do know of the author's captivating life--working on whaling ships, deserting in the Marquesas, writing a novel of hardly fathomable scope and ambition, living out his later years as a forgotten author--and you have plenty of inspiration for conjecture and inference. Conjecture can be part of the natural course of things: the biographer, at times, draws as close as possible to a revelation through primary source material, and then makes that final leap through hypothesis. But this is momentary conjecture, built on substantial evidence and framed as just that. However, Michael Shelden's Melville in Love is a whole book based on conjecture, built upon circumstantial evidence that is rolled out as revelation. The work claims to uncover an illicit romance between Melville and his neighbor, Sarah Morewood, the young wife of a prosperous merchant and trader who lives in a large home on the adjoining property in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. (The house, "Broadhall," had been formerly owned by Melville's uncle.) Shelden's clues primarily emerge from Melville's playful, effusive, and affectionate letters to her and from clues in the plot and characters of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), the much-maligned follow-up to the already critically maligned Moby-Dick--and the book that hastened Melville's downward spiral as a commercially viable author. Morewood, the author claims, not only drove Melville's decision to move to Pittsfield but inspired him to greater depths with the whale book. Shelden's sweeping revelation is that understanding "the great drama of this relationship is necessary to answer the most puzzling questions of the author's career. How did this young man known primarily for writing light books of adventure suddenly experience one of the most remarkable bursts of creative inspiration in literary history?" (p. 10). (Melville, in fact, had a long love affair with the Berkshires and Pittsfield, going back to working his uncle's farm as a teenager.) The letters are not the smoking gun that Shelden heralds, and Melville researchers will not find anything startling in the effusive and affectionate writings to Morewood, even in his calling her "Mrs. Morewood the goddess" and himself "Your Ladyship's Knight of the Hill," as Shelden notes (p. 9). His letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne are just as provocative, warm, and playful--and even friend and Literary World editor Evert Duyckinck becomes "My Beloved" in the elevated prose of Melville's letters. When writing to those with whom he is close and comfortable, his missives are often effusive performances of affection, humor, and pith. His ten extant letters to Hawthorne have also invited erotic and romantic inference, but the closest that the most acclaimed biographies of both authors will get is "well, it's possible." Is it also possible that Melville had an affair with Sarah Morewood? Perhaps, though the evidence here is not convincing. To make it a given and the basis of an entire book is, unfortunately, a stroke of sensationalism. Shelden is a marvelous writer who spins a compelling narrative well-steeped in knowledge of Melville's life and work, but he has likely not captured something that decades of hyper-diligent Melville biographers have missed. …