It's love at first sight for Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne in Mark Beauregard's new novel The Whale: A Love Story (Viking) �" and likely shock and awe for most of its imagined readers. Surely Beauregard is banking on the idea that most of his audience �" who may have survived high school passages through Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter �" will be startled to learn of the men's charged friendship, into which it is not hard to read a homoerotic subtext. And even those to whom that idea is not new may be awed, for good and ill, by the Hawthorne we first see, albeit through Beauregard's Melville's eyes (note the levels of refraction in the lens):
"Hawthorne's features were so fine that they could have belonged to a woman: eyebrows that prettily framed his coffee brown eyes; a hawkish Roman nose; sensuous red lips, the bottom lip a wide devouring flare; and waving chestnut hair that fell in ringlets behind his ears." Little surprise that by the end of the next, short chapter, "Herman forgot all about his whale manuscript, and he forgot about his debts and even about his wife and son and mother. He forgot about himself. The only thing he knew for certain was the radiance of Nathaniel Hawthorne."
The real-life Melville famously dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne "in token of my admiration for his genius." Quite a token, that, and Beauregard gives an imaginative account about how that admiration may have taken wing over the years 1850-51. In an afterword he notes his book's basis in a body of letters from Melville to Hawthorne (none in the other direction survives) �" a few of which he uses in the story, and a few tawdrier ones Beauregard makes up �" that have that unmistakable scent of Melvillian manlove.
Saturated and high-flown as it is, it's not, in fact, an unusual tone for 19th-century men to strike in correspondence. What we know of Wagner's correspondence with queenly King Ludwig, his major sponsor, could lead a 21st-century reader who reads it to think theirs was a torrid affair, though the (to say the least) sex-positive Wagner was, for all his kinks, a ladies' man (even if it doesn't tax the imagination that he may have lain back and thought of Mathilde as Ludwig hummed his praises). Beauregard knows how to read that language, and his speculative answer to what might have been between Melville and Hawthorne does not claim to be conclusive, and gratefully, it's not banal.
Truth in advertising: in this otherwise frank book there is, wisely, no explicit sex between the men beyond what could be some frottage, clothed and standing, and a presumptive erection or two. If dewy eyes and wet kisses count, those too. But the author has the sense to keep two of the giants of American literature out of each other's respective (marital) bedrooms �" though barns and outdoor spaces are another matter �" and away from our prying eyes.
Neither author is diminished by Beauregard's excursion, and the novel whets your appetite for the works by both men that Beauregard mentions and that you haven't read �" and virtually compels re-reading of Moby-Dick and The Blithedale Romance. But as the two men's loves are in no way equal (the fulcrum on which Beauregard's story rocks), neither are their ways as writers and individuals, and Hawthorne, who seems almost spoofed in Beauregard's Melville's first regard, comes off the better of the two in a number of ways, principally emotional maturity and sexual integrity.
Altogether plausibly, Beauregard's Melville is wholly without gay self-hatred �" but at the price of not being able to see anything beyond his personal desires and obsessions. He's not reliving, but rather, stuck in his own neglected childhood, and everything about him is childish in that way that is often true of the greatest artists. There are lovely, memorable children throughout this book, but for Melville they're little more than barriers to his access to Hawthorne; there is no greater child than Melville, and he's a petulant one at that.
Also preposterous, but in ways that are calculated to make you love him the more. The depiction of a love-besotted, barely clad Melville marching sweatily through the snow at night to see the object of his mania, his make-believe lover with the gall not to answer his overheated letters, is wrenching in its pathos and easily this novel's finest and truest scene.
Elsewhere, it's not the lofty language of the great authors' century, but rather, Beauregard's that perplexes and deflates. It's the chief peril of any historical novel, and while it doesn't defeat Beauregard, it frequently blunts or waylays his writing. Particularly in the first third of the book, when it's still gathering steam, infelicities of language confound. In an early episode of Melville's torment, "The Sirens were singing celestial odes of Hawthorne in Herman's ears, piercingly beautiful songs beckoning him to Lenox; but he saw the possibility of crashing against the rocks, as well, and he recognized that it would be better to lash himself to the mast for the duration of a breakfast than destroy himself through foolish haste."
If you found that in actual prose by Melville or Hawthorne, you'd work with it or around it. In Beauregard's novel, it's just embarrassing to read.