Free Melville in Love by Michael Shelden Page B

however, wasn’t very neighborly. Renting a cottage, as Hawthorne himself had done, would have made more sense for a former sailor who was never going to be much of a farmer on these rolling acres in Pittsfield. In fact, given the small amount he was earning from his books, renting was the only reasonable plan for staying in the Berkshires. Buying the farm was so beyond his means that—as his most scholarly biographer, Hershel Parker, has pointed out—it would cost him “more money than he had earned from all his five books together, in both England and the United States.” By contrast, renting was cheap. As Melville was later to admit, it was possible to find a decent house in town for as little as $150 a year. 6
    There was only one explanation for his desire to buy this particular farm, and for his willingness to pay whatever was necessary to get it, no matter how unaffordable. The young author who thought he belonged at Broadhall with Sarah was making sure he had the next-best thing—a farm adjoining hers. The wonder is that Melville was able to talk Judge Shaw into loaning him $3,000 toward the purchase. The rest of the amount he planned to cover by arranging for a mortgage and a deferred payment to the owner—obligations he was ill-prepared to honor. It was a recipe for disaster, but he couldn’t help himself.
    THE PURCHASE WAS COMPLETED so quickly that he acquired the farm just four days after Judge Shaw arrived in Pittsfield. Significantly, when the town historian—the poet J. E. A. Smith, a mutual friend of Sarah and Herman—recalled the deal forty years later he let slip that Melville’s decision was influenced by Rowland’s purchase. “In anticipation of the sale of Broadhall,” wrote Smith, “Mr. Melville on the 14th of September, 1850, bought of Dr. John Brewster Sr. the farm adjoining the Broadhall estate.”
    Often a guest at Broadhall, and romantically linked to one of Sarah’s sisters, Smith was present at the “Laurel Wreath” Christmas dinner of 1851. In old age—when both Sarah and Herman were gone—he wrote a long newspaper series on the novelist’s life. It caught the attention of Lizzie Melville, then the stoic widow who had steadfastly remained in her unhappy marriage for more than forty years. Pleased with Smith’s sympathetic and uncontroversial account, she arranged to have the piece reprinted in a booklet. In addition to correcting some factual errors, she also eliminated an entire section that recalled the day when Mrs. Morewood finally decided that her new house would indeed be christened “Broadhall.” In a rare lapse of discretion, Smith had revealed that it was Sarah and Herman who had reached the decision over the name, contriving a sly contest to hidetheir collusion. Smith used coy language to tiptoe around the truth, but his revealing glimpse of Sarah’s relationship with Herman was too much for the widow. It seems the most likely reason she deleted an episode that would appear innocent enough to most readers. Here is the passage:
    One evening in a merry party of men and women more or less distinguished, it was proposed to give [Mrs. Morewood’s house] a name; each person present having the privilege of putting one in a basket; the first drawn out to be forever fixed upon the venerable historic mansion. Mr. Melville wrote on his slip the word Broadhall, and that came first to the deft hand [of Mrs. Morewood] which was appointed to be the minister of fate. We have a very strong suspicion that the deft hand was guided by a deft brain, and that so happy a drawing was not so entirely a matter of chance as it purported to be. 7
    Lizzie, the privileged daughter of the chief justice whose world revolved around Beacon Hill, probably wasn’t thrilled at the idea of trading her home in New York for a farmhouse in Pittsfield, but she must have agreed to the plan in the end because her doting