Melville in Love Read Online Free

of admirers in the 1920s. Moby-Dick was the great beneficiary of this revival. Survivors of the horrors of the First World War—the “Lost Generation”—didn’t have any trouble understanding how Captain Ahab’s dark battle against a monstrous foe could become an all-consuming descent into madness and destruction.
    The Melville revival was a little slow getting off the ground in America, but British readers quickly rallied to the cause, and praise for the forgotten author poured from the London press. In 1927 the British novelist E. M. Forster was among the earliest critics to argue for the brilliance of Billy Budd . In his landmark work Aspects of the Novel, he treated the story as if the author’s genius had always been apparent. “ Billy Budd is a remote unearthly episode,” wrote Forster, “but it is a song not without words, and should be read both for its own beauty and as an introduction to more difficult works. . . . Melville—after the initial roughness of his realism—reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcendingour own that they are undistinguishable from glory.” The glory Melville had sought was finally his. Now the laurel wreath came from one of Britain’s most influential literary voices. 3
    American writers soon chimed in with their tributes to Melville, including praise from a young author of thirty who was at the very start of his career as a novelist. In July 1927 the Chicago Tribune asked William Faulkner if he could name a book he wished he had written. He chose Moby-Dick and went into flights of fancy about its “Greek-like” beauty, but what he enjoyed most was the evocative quality of Melville’s whale. “There’s magic in the very word, A White Whale,” said Faulkner. “White is a grand word, like a crash of massed trumpets; and leviathan himself has a kind of placid blundering majesty in his name.” 4
    Though born several years after Melville’s death, Faulkner could hear the author’s music loud and clear. Still resounding, the trumpets of Moby-Dick play on. But all the praise heaped on Melville in the last hundred years came so late that it wasn’t easy to reconstruct the old story of a young author in love. It was much more convenient to assume that Moby-Dick ’s origins were forever lost in forgotten yarns of the sea, or in some obscure rage suffered by a writer who would mysteriously decline into a kind of madness. But all the while, as decades came and went, the outlines of Melville’s past in the Berkshires slowly began to take shape. The story of Sarah and Herman has finally emerged from the shadows, thanks to generations of scholars uncovering the detailed information on which this book has been built. Like Moby-Dick itself, the love story stubbornly refused to die.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    From the earliest stages of this book I have been fortunate to have the wise guidance and support of two remarkable women at the Friedrich Agency in New York, Molly Friedrich and Lucy Carson. This book could not have been written without their kind encouragement and advice.
    I’m also grateful for invaluable editorial help from a great team of professionals at Ecco Books—Daniel Halpern, Hilary Redmon, and Emma Janaskie. I deeply appreciate their enthusiasm for this book, and their hard work on its behalf. Many thanks as well to Tom Pitoniak, for helpful suggestions when the book was still in typescript.
    The marvelous collection of Melville documents and artifacts at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was essential to my book, and I feel especially fortunate to have worked there with Kathleen M. Reilly, supervisor of the Local History Department. She is a model of efficiency and a great supporter of Melville scholarship. On every visit to the Athenaeum I was encouraged by her warm welcome and generous assistance.
    My time at Melville’s