A Literary Refuge

From Kurt Vonnegut’s stoop in Turtle Bay to Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage in the Bronx, New York City is full of places haunted by literary ghosts. One of the ghosts that looms the largest is that of Herman Melville. Who can forget the bustling 19th-century seaport that made New York what it is today after reading “Moby Dick”?

Unfortunately, because of New York’s dynamic economy, none of the places Melville lived in here are preserved for public appreciation, unless one counts plaques mounted at an office building at 104 E. 26th St., the site where he wrote “Billy Budd,” and at a garage at 6 Pearl St., the site where he was born in 1819.

About three hours north of the city, however, there is a place that tells the story of how Melville lived and worked, and even gives visitors the chance to look out his window, where supposedly he saw his great whale, rising in shape in the hills. That place is Arrowhead, the farmhouse in Pittsfield, Mass., where Melville lived between 1850 and 1862 with his wife and four children.

This weekend, exactly what and how visitors learn during their visit to Arrowhead — which is a registered National Historic Landmark — is up for debate. With a $13,732 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the house’s owner, the Berkshire County Historical Society, is gathering more than a dozen Melville scholars and descendants to plan, in museum parlance, “a new interpretive experience” at Arrowhead.

“Arrowhead has been one of the most neglected national monuments,” a professor at Columbia University and author of “Melville: His World and Work” (Knopf), Andrew Delbanco, said during an interview this week. “It is home to one of our greatest 19th-century writers. It’s great to see that serious efforts are being made to convey its significance.”

One desire of scholars is to situate Melville in relation to his peers in the Berkshires. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a frequent visitor to his barn. Henry Ward Beecher, who lived in Brooklyn Heights, had a gentleman’s farm in Lenox. Not too far across state lines were the Hudson River School painters.

“The idea is to enrich the interpretation and widen the appeal of the museum,” the program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities who managed the grant, Thomas Phelps, said. He said the project fell under the endowment’s efforts to strengthen house museums as centers of interpretation of American history.

“The idea of the program is to put Melville in context,” a resident scholar of the society, Carole Owens, said this week. “What was his life like? Where did he buy his groceries? What did he grow on his farm? Who were his neighbors?”

Currently, access to the house is through guided tours of between 30 and 60 minutes led by a group of 20 docents, who often cite Melville’s writings about his house. Only a few objects in the home are original to Melville’s habitation.

On Saturday night at the Pittsfield restaurant Aster’s, a University of Delaware professor and the author of a two-volume, 1,800-page biography, “Herman Melville” (Johns Hopkins University Press), Hershel Parker, and a Harvard librarian, Dennis Marnon, will give a talk titled “Melville In the Context of the Berkshires,” which is the one scholarly event open to the public.

The scholars expected to participate in the closed sessions include a professor at Hofstra University, John Bryant; a literary historian at the Williams College Mystic Seaport Maritime Studies Program, Mary Katherine Bercaw Edwards, and Wyn Kelley, who teaches Melville at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wrote the book “Melville’s City” (Cambridge University Press).

One scholar who is “heartbroken” she can’t attend the symposium is Debby Applegate, the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Henry Ward Beecher, “The Most Famous Man in America” (Doubleday). She will be in Los Angeles for a book awards announcement.

“What they’re trying to do is figure out how to make this an experience to come to even if you’re not a Melville addict,” Ms. Applegate said yesterday. “Given the fact that house museums are struggling right now, I think it’s really smart.”

Arrowhead’s visitation has been increasing in recent years, with the addition of special exhibitions and programs that branch out beyond Melville.

Ms. Applegate suggested the formation of a literary trail for the region. Arrowhead could be promoted with Edith Wharton’s the Mount in Lenox, Mass., Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, Mass., and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Steepletop in Austerlitz, N.Y., which is readying to open to the public as a museum in 2010.

The scholars gathering this weekend will not determine the fate of Arrowhead on their own. “We deal with paper and ideas,” Ms. Applegate said. “Museum curators and administrators will take our ideas and turn them into tactile and visual things.”

agordon@nysun.com