Arrowhead

IT was the two little girls adventuring with me who discovered that the back door of Herman Melville’s house was unlocked. Their enthusiasm was keen. They had been reading Moby Dick. But their curiosity and excitement were no greater than mine, for I had been told that the house was deserted, that no one lived there, and it was with keen expectation that I opened the door and looked in. The result of that survey intensified the zeal with which this adventure had been undertaken. Staring at a dismantled kitchen filled with baskets of dishes covered with dust and cobwebs, as if they had lain there for many years, I wound my way across the floor to a door in an opposite wall. Opening this, I gasped, for there stood the famous bully of Arrowhead!

A few days before, while glancing along the shelves of the Great Barrington Library, the name of a book caught my interest because of its strange combination of words: Mariner and Mystic. Taking the book from the shelf, I crossed the room to a sunny seat, pondering curiously, for I knew much about mariners and would never connect the word ‘mystic’ with any of them. Soon, however, I was deeply interested in the life of Herman Melville, discovering that because of this incongruous but fitting combination of titles he was quite misunderstood in those days of the fifties, when the aristocratic Berkshires were ‘a jungle of literary lions,’ described, by a modern critic, as ‘amiably ferocious in its provincial vanity.’ His understanding of symbolism was too advanced for that age, and it is only in recent years that his books have received proper recognition.

Herman Melville had been a lonely man, the perpetual payment for individual thinking, until chance drew him into a strange friendship with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mr. Hawthorne was aware that Melville was the author of a very appreciative review of The Scarlet Letter, but this very knowledge, perhaps, kept the sensitive men apart and shy of approach, although thrown together occasionally in a company. One day a group of men were exploring Monument Mountain, described so vividly by Hawthorne in his WonderBook, when they were forced to seek shelter from a thunderstorm. Was it chance that sent Holmes, Hawthorne, and Melville under the same ledge of rock? Two hours of enforced intercourse, revealing so much of each other’s thought and feeling, sealed the strange friendship that was spiritual food for Melville.

Up the road, about a quarter of a mile from Holmesdale, was an historic home built in 1780, and it was here that Melville established himself with his family in 1852 to write many of his tales, including Moby Dick. He gave the name of Arrowhead to the estate because of the many Indian relics found during the ploughing of the spacious rolling fields. At that time Oliver Wendell Holmes was in his sanctuary at Holmesdale, writing ‘The Plowman’ for his Songs in Many Keys, as he was a keen gentleman farmer of Pittsfield as well as an author. Across the valley at Lenox was Hawthorne, in his little ‘red mansion,’ producing The House of the Seven Gables. In his Wonder-Book, also written there, read what he says of Melville: —

On the hither side of Pittsfield, sits Herman Melville, shaping out his gigantic conception of his white whale, while the gigantic shape of Graylock looms upon him from his study window.

Having made fruitless inquiries at several places about the location of Arrowhead, I stopped at Holmesdale on the fortunate day, and obtained directions from an old gardener who said, as he pointed up a road, ‘It’s up that road a spell — ’bout a quarter of a mile. Nothin’ to see — house is deserted and locked up.’ We found it hidden in a grove of pines and maples.

I had read that in the exact centre of the house at Arrowhead was a massive chimney, twelve feet square at the base. Its central location and great bulk made the occupants and the interior of the house conform to its peculiarities, therefore to Melville it was a bully. Because the ancient kitchen possessed the most spacious fireplace, he appropriated this for his study, adding a modern kitchen at the rear. Then he began a quaint discussion with his chimney, printing bits of philosophy all over the face of the bricks. One can better understand what he was expressing when it is known that he was lovingly dominated by the five women of his household — his wife, mother, and three sisters. It was this refuge that I longed to see, and it was this bully that faced me as I entered the room. Opening some shutters, we reveled in the whimseys of this exceptional man. They were in a fair state of preservation. Here are a few: —

A mighty smoke we two old philosophers make. It is resolved between me and my Chimney that I and my Chimney will never surrender. I and my Chimney have had narrow escapes. I and my Chimney, as Cardinal Wolsey used to say, I and my King. Yet this egotistic way of speaking wherein I take precedence of my Chimney is hardly borne out by the fact in everything except the above phrase. My Chimney taking precedence of me. My Chimney is Grand Signor here, the one Grand domineering object of the house.

To my surprise this room was still furnished as described in the book, Indian trophies adorning the walls and a whaler model over one door beside the chimney. This door, too, I opened, and saw the ‘fastidiously picked and decorous library,’ whose books still rested on their shelves, behind glass doors rising to the ceiling, looking on a room furnished with priceless antique furniture. Curiosity drew me farther and I crossed the front vestibule into the drawing-room. Here were enough treasures to start an antique shop. An air of mystery lay over this unlocked house, and we departed, carefully closing the back door, feeling that we had had a personal contact with the mind that created the tale of Ahab and the white whale.

The next point of interest was the north piazza, facing Graylock, the tallest mountain of the Berkshires. Here Melville wrote Piazza Tales, and this is what he said of this part of his home:

A piazza must be had. . . . The house was wide — my fortune narrow . . . upon but one of the four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted. Now which side? Graylock carried it. No sooner was the ground broken than all the neighborhood broke into a laugh. Piazza to the north! Winter piazza! . . . But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel — nipping cold and gusty though it be . . . for then, once more, with frosted beard, I pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.

In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just like the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods over the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising among the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.

Returning a few weeks later to this historic house to take some pictures, I was astonished to see the shutters and windows wide open and carpenters at work on the portico. A lady emerged from the house with an inquiry and, convinced of my interest, invited me to go upstairs to see where Moby Dick was really written. As I went up into a north bedroom, facing Graylock, — which coincided with Hawthorne’s description, — I was approached by a quaint little old lady who said she was Melville’s sister-in-law and the other lady his niece. They were gracious hostesses, but I felt that my former visit was the more intimate contact with the famous bully and its confiding companion.

The whole experience seemed like a dream, and indeed I began to wonder if it were not, for a few weeks later we passed the house again and it was barred, shuttered, and as desolate and deserted as we first saw it. Was the book, Mariner and Mystic, too realistic? No, for a newspaper clipping of recent date lies at hand telling of the sale of Arrowhead and the proposed restoration by its new owner.