Melville in Love by Michael Shelden

8
“HOLY INFLUENCES”
    To repay his hospitality at Lenox, Melville invited Hawthorne to dinner at Broadhall on a Wednesday in the first week of September 1850. Though Hawthorne was the more esteemed, Melville had the old mansion at his disposal and could entertain the older writer much more grandly. The sale of the house to the Morewoods would soon be finalized, but Melville was acting as though the place belonged to him. That had been clear in August to Evert Duyckinck, who noted, “Melville . . . treated the house as his own & would suffer no payments.” For a short while at least, both Sarah and Herman acted as if they owned a mansion that still formally belonged to neither of them.
    Time was running out. Rowland Morewood was planning to leave for England on October 9 to visit his family, and he wanted to complete the sale so that renovations could start while he and Sarah were away. His wife, however, didn’t want to go with him. Only “reluctantly”—as she put it later—did she finally give in and agreeto the voyage. Later, in a sarcastic understatement, she would recall her mood after her bitter surrender: “I did not feel the most happy person in the world.” She didn’t have much choice. In England, Rowland’s father, whose wealth helped to sustain the New York branch of the family business, was eighty-six, and was unlikely to live much longer. The family expected Rowland and his wife and child to pay a visit before the patriarch was gone. It wasn’t acceptable that he would come by himself, so Sarah must have known all along that she couldn’t back out. Yet the more she stayed in the Berkshires, the harder it was to leave Broadhall and Melville behind. The only consolation was that when spring returned next year, she would be back, and Broadhall would be hers. She was already making plans to become a bright and permanent fixture on the social scene of the area. While Melville was getting to know Hawthorne, she applied her own modest literary talent to writing a poem for the biggest civic event of the year in Pittsfield. 1
    On September 9 the whole town was going to march through the streets to celebrate the dedication of the new cemetery. Several thousand people were expected to turn out, and all the leading citizens would be gathered in a central grove for speeches, prayers, and songs. Dr. Holmes had agreed to read a long poem, and Sarah wanted to submit her verses to the choir in the hope they would be set to music. At a time when women writers often struggled to get their work into print, this kind of civic occasion gave Sarah an opportunity to receive some recognition for her talent, so it came as a delightful surprise when her submission was accepted along with that of another woman. She was identified in the program as “Mrs. J.R. Morewood of New York, a Lady who is about to become a resident of Pittsfield.” The other woman—in keeping with the more accepted standards of female modesty—was described as simply “a Lady.” 2
    It must have been one of the great moments in Sarah’s young life when the choir sang her “Ode” before an audience of four thousand on a nearly perfect late summer morning under the blue skies of the Berkshires. In the local view, this triumph established her as one of the town’s literary figures. The Pittsfield Sun would later describe her as “a lady of superior literary accomplishments.” For a woman in a small town, she couldn’t have hoped for better praise. It was certainly more than Emily Dickinson ever received in her lifetime in nearby Amherst, Massachusetts. 3
    The strange fact that a seductive woman like Sarah would be credited with writing a hymn didn’t escape the notice of Dr. Holmes. “What the diablo had Elsie to do with hymns?” his narrator asks incredulously in Elsie Venner when a well-thumbed hymn book is discovered in her room. Unlike the