“So what’s the matter with you, my dear,” Hawthorne says to him. “For at least a month you’ve been looking worried. And let’s come right out with it: unhappy. You definitely have the look of an unhappy man. Day by day I’ve been hoping to see you regain your good spirits, but I see instead that your anxiety gets darker and darker. Is it really so bad? What is it about? Can’t I be of any help to you? The reviews are wonderful. Did you see Salt’s last article in The Gentleman’s Magazine? And your book is a masterpiece, beyond a doubt. You should talk to me, you know. It will surely comfort you.”

“Yes, I’m uneasy,” says Herman. “We’re almost in February and . . . I’m waiting for news from a friend in England. He’s never gone for more than a month without writing me. Soon it will be four months since I’ve received anything from him.”

The last letter he’d received from her was dated October 1851. “I’m sick,” she wrote. “I look charming in my bed, if you can imagine that. I sneeze, I cough, I smell of camphorated alcohol and mandarins. That’s why my letter is so short and confused. Bah! I’m sending it anyway!”

“I wonder if she’s read it,” he says one day, in an undertone.

“What do you mean?” Hawthorne asks.

“I was just in the midst of wondering,” says Herman, “if that friend of mine has read my book.”

“Oh, you know,” says Hawthorne, “with the publicity in Harper’s, and how quickly the name of a masterpiece spreads far and wide, your Moby-Dick must be as famous as The Times. It’s impossible that your friend wouldn’t have read it.”

“Yes,” says Herman. “And all the more so, because then I’d be really cursed. . . .”

“What are you thinking about?” asks Hawthorne.

“I’m thinking,” says Herman, “what if that person died just before the book appeared?”

A year later, he’s just about ended all his strolls with Hawthorne. He rarely goes out. Now and then he encounters his friend at the end of the hedgerow.

“Are you working, at least?” asks Hawthorne.

“Yes. But only because I have to.”

“Have you had any news from your friend in England?”

“No, never again.”

•

The book he’s working on is called Pierre. When it appears, Hawthorne feels very embarrassed to talk to his friend about it. In the end, Hawthorne says, “It’s a book.”

“No,” says Herman.

•

“Oh, I’ve tried everything,” he says, four years later. “You see, Hawthorne, I’ve just written Israel Potter, but this time, this is my last book. I won’t write any more. This one’s a bit better than Pierre, but it’s all I’m capable of now. Every time, I have to push myself, to force myself. It takes whiplashes. Oh! Obviously, if you look at it as a triumph of the will over revulsion, then that’s what it is, and by that token, it’s still worthwhile. But as a book, as a creation, no, it has no life. After Moby-Dick I was disgusted. That book I threw myself into completely, in one great go . . .well, it came too late.”