Chapter 6

In 1856, Melville gathered together some of the short stories he had written during the previous three years, and published them as The Piazza Tales. The sketch that gives the volume its title offers us a further glimpse of Melville’s life at Arrowhead.

One pictures him seated on that piazza on an August morning, with the meadow in front of him a little sear from the new-cropped hay, a haze lying over the valley of the Housatonic, and the light lavender hills billowing into Greylock’s double ridge against the horizon. The landscape brings a feeling of outward serenity, unbroken by the faint happy screams of the children playing in the hayloft, or the muted hum of his wife or his sisters in the kitchen, preparing the scant and largely vegetarian meal. What a contrast with the frayed knotty feeling within! Such warm and deeply balmy days should bring peace: but no day, however balmy, can annul the anxiety and weariness of the last five years, the incessant round of writing, and, further plaguing him, instead of giving relief, the equally endless round of the farm, wood to be chopped and sawed, hay to be mowed and gathered, cows and horses to be fed, vegetables to be planted and hoed, cabbage-worms to be fought ... oh! for a little coconut and poee-poee! Emerson had discovered that he could not tend his garden and his mind at the same time; and Melville, though at first robust, doubtless found that two careers were a little too much for a single man, exhausted, half spent. In a pinch, Melville could of course apply to Elizabeth’s father or to Allan for aid; and he did: but he could not continually write out unredeemable notes for their benefit; that was all right in a matter like the mortgage, where there was security; but as a source of daily income, it was little better than outright beggary.

Melville’s eyes would sweep over the valley to the hills beyond. There, ah! there perhaps lay happiness! What charming fairy might be living without relatives and grocers and publishers and promissory notes to harry her, in that little cottage on the mountainside before him? Some day he must find the road to that delectable retreat.... He found it, and to his sorrow and disillusion, instead of an idyllic bower, it was a weather-beaten old place, inhabited by a tired and troubled girl, who dreams of the happiness that lies in a marble palace in the distance below—Melville’s own white house. No fairy maiden she: no fairy prince he: but a sad girl and a tired, dutiful husband, straining night and day for the few pennies that will shoe his children’s feet, replace their tattered home-made clothes, and put bread and milk on the table. These five years, years that have enclosed his highest powers, his consummate manhood, have not left Melville with an eager taste for another fifty of the same pattern. Inevitably, he sought escape; and in his mind, escape meant the sea. Almost any slight change in atmosphere can bring the ocean back to him: the ocean, where physical sustenance, hard-tack and salt rhinoceros, was provided for one, where the hours were long and peaceful, and amid storm and rigour and dangerous courses, there brooded, within, a deep and unbreakable calm.

With a wry smile, Melville exchanges the topmast of reverie for the piazza; but tranquillity does not follow. His very pen lives only when it touches the sea; and when he gathers together these Piazza Tales, he does not bother to include most of his land-stories. He is wise: none of them has a tithe of the interest that Benito Cereno possesses. That story marked the culmination of Melville’s power as a short-story writer, as Moby-Dick marked his triumph as an epic poet.