ellauri107.html on line 179: The zenith of [Hawthorne and Melville’s] relationship was reached . . . when Moby-Dick was published in middle November of 1851 and was dedicated to Hawthorne [“To Nathaniel Hawthorne: In token of my admiration for his genius”]. Hawthorne’s letter to Melville [at the time], like most of those to his friend, has not been preserved, but Melville’s answer on November 17 . . . speaks of the effect Hawthorne’s letter had upon him, in terms characteristic of his impassioned utterances:
ellauri107.html on line 187: suggestive panegyric [in his 1850 review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse], [that] Melville writes . . . “already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots in the hot soil of my Southern soul”.
ellauri107.html on line 214: Actually, the reader would have to be remarkably obtuse not to recognize the sexual tension between Coverdale and Hollingsworth. If only we could know what Melville thought when he read it! Certainly, Melville was aware that Brook Farm in Roxbury, Massachusetts, which Blithedale represents, had enjoyed the company of Hawthorne as a communal society member for most of 1841. Perhaps he also knew that substantial portions of Coverdale’s first person narration are taken directly from Hawthorne’s Brook Farm journals, and he would certainly know better than we the extent to which the novel may also represent allusions to Hawthorne’s and his experiences together during the year before the publication of Blithedale.
ellauri107.html on line 222: Melville’s concluding words are from his “Monody,” a poem that is thought to express his deep personal loss when learning of Hawthorne’s death in 1864:
ellauri107.html on line 236: Melville alludes to a guy named Billy Budd to Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark” and draws parallelograms between the two authors in regard to their interests in the relative good and evil sides of the front and back. Here is the portion that relates most clearly to the two authors’ relationship:
ellauri107.html on line 244: Claggart’s repressed, closeted attraction to Billy finds parallels with some interpretations of Hawthorne’s evident spurning of Melville’s too intimate attentions and Hawthorne’s character in The Blithedale Romance Coverdale’s similar rejection of the invitation from Holingsworth to be his “friend of friends, forever.” For Melville, Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale’s agonizing acknowledgement of adultery must have seemed a stunning parallel with what later generations would term “coming out of the closet.” Whether Hawthorne himself were a closeted gay man, it is clear that Melville was relatively open in his affections for the senior author and that those affections were somehow turned away and seem to have left a wound that never fully healed. The evils of the closet constitute a subtext in Billy Budd that may well have brought to its author’s mind the sad sundering of his closeness with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
6