Melville and Hawthorne

 In time, Melville came to accept a difficult truth. Much as he admired Hawthorne, their temperaments were too disparate. The author of The House of the Seven Gables was not one who shared Melville’s notion of diving deep. He was never going to join him in a fearless plunge into the most dangerous waters of the soul. He was always going to keep his head above water. So restrained and aloof was Hawthorne that Sophia once said of her husband, “He hates to be touched any more than anyone I ever knew.” As a literary craftsman, he was the jeweler working in the quiet back room, while Melville was the sculptor dangling from the side of a massive stone.8Perhaps one reason the sculptor interested Hawthorne is that, on occasion, he wanted to throw caution to the winds himself and take greater risks. A scene in The House of the Seven Gables suggests as much. It takes place at the long window in the old house when a noisy political parade passes by in the street below. Poor Clifford, the sad wreck of a man whom life has treated so unfairly, stands at the window in an agitated state and almost jumps into the middle of the crowd, but his sister and their young cousin Phoebe restrain him. Sounding very much like Melville, Hawthorne says in his narrative voice that Clifford might have been better off to jump. What he has in mind is more in keeping with Melville’s metaphorical diving than the real thing: “He needed a shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the world and to himself.” But, of course, Clifford does not take that plunge. Such dives belong in Melville’s work, not in The House of the Seven Gables, and the best Hawthorne can offer is the recognition that—for those brave enough, and reckless enough—the result might be worth the risk. Then again, Hawthorne adds with his typical good sense, it might simply result in “the great final remedy—death!”9

from Melville in Love

by Michael Sheldon