Herman Melville seems to have got the idea to write a novel about a mad hunt for a fearsome whale during an ocean voyage, but he wrote most of “Moby-Dick” on land, in a valley, on a farm, in a house a-dither with his wife, his sisters, and his mother, a family man’s Walden. He named the farm Arrowhead, after the relics he dug up with his plow, and he wrote in a second-floor room that looked out on mountains in the distance and, nearer by, on fields of pumpkins and corn, crops he sowed to feed his animals, “my friends the horse & cow.” In the barn, he liked to watch them eat, especially the cow; he loved the way she moved her jaws. “She does it so mildly & with such a sanctity,” he wrote, the year he kept on his desk a copy of Thomas Beale’s “Natural History of the Sperm Whale.” On the door of his writing room, he installed a lock. By the hearth, he kept a harpoon; he used it as a poker.

There is no knowing Herman Melville. This summer marks the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth and the hundredth anniversary of his revival. Born in 1819, he died in 1891, forgotten, only to be rediscovered around the centennial of his birth, in 1919. Since then, his fame has known no bounds, his reputation no rest, his life no privacy. His papers have been published, the notes he made in his books digitized, a log of his every day compiled, each movement traced, all utterances analyzed, every dog-eared page scanned and uploaded, like so much hay tossed up to a loft. And yet, as Andrew Delbanco wrote in a canny biography, “Melville: His World and Work” (2005), “the quest for the private Melville has usually led to a dead end.”

On the road to that dead end there stands a barn, and it is on fire. Melville did not want his papers to be preserved. “It is a vile habit of mine to destroy nearly all my letters,” he confessed. He burned his manuscripts. He shied from photographers: “To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!” In “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities,” his freakishly autobiographical and, unless you take it seriously, deliriously funny gothic thriller set at a fictionalized Arrowhead and published in 1852—less than a year after “Moby-Dick”—a fevered, manic Pierre, having sunk himself into ruin and dragged his family into infamy, ponders his legacy:

Hitherto I have hoarded up mementoes and monuments of the past; been a worshiper of all heirlooms; a fond filer away of letters, locks of hair, bits of ribbon, flowers, and the thousand-and-one minutenesses which love and memory think they sanctify:—but it is forever over now!

In a frenzy, Pierre proceeds to destroy his father’s portrait, tearing the canvas from its frame, rolling it into a scroll, and committing it to the “crackling, clamorous flames,” although, watching it blacken, he panics when, “suddenly unwinding from the burnt string that had tied it, for one swift instant, seen through the flame and smoke, the upwrithing portrait tormentedly stared at him in beseeching horror.” But then he casts about the room, looking for more to burn:

He ran back to the chest, and seizing repeated packages of family letters, and all sorts of miscellaneous memorials in paper, he threw them one after the other upon the fire. “Thus, and thus, and thus! . . . Now all is done, and all is ashes!”

Making kindling of correspondence appears to have been something of a Melville family tradition. Someone among Melville’s ragged kin of landed aristocrats and wayward seamen and scheming bankrupts and gloomy widows destroyed the author’s letters to his mother along with nearly all of his letters to his brothers and sisters. One of his nieces threw correspondence between her father and her uncle into a bonfire at Arrowhead, and, even though Melville’s widow kept her husband’s papers in a tin box, including his unpublished manuscripts (“Billy Budd,” tucked away in that box, wasn’t published until 1924), Melville’s letters to his wife, Elizabeth, appear to have been destroyed by their daughter, who refused to speak her father’s name, possibly because, as some evidence suggests, Melville was insane. Elizabeth sometimes thought so, and critics said so, though the latter can scarcely be credited, on account of cruelty, and because what they meant was that his stories were nuts. “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY” was the headline of a now notorious review of “Pierre.” “N.B. I aint crazy,” Melville wrote in a late-in-life postscript.

Maybe not, but he suffered horribly in the attic of his mind. After he finished “Moby-Dick” and was starting “Pierre,” he wrote, from Arrowhead, to Nathaniel Hawthorne—“Believe me, I am not mad!”—that he wished he could “have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand—a million—billion thoughts.” He needed to write. He wanted to be read. He could not bear to be seen. His upwrithing portrait tormentedly stares at us in beseeching horror.

The plot of “Pierre” is set in motion by the arrival of a letter, handed to Pierre at a garden gate in the dark of a moonless night by an obscure, hooded figure:

“For me!” exclaimed Pierre, faintly, starting at the strangeness of the encounter;—“methinks this is an odd time and place to deliver your mail!”

The letter is from Pierre’s sister, the whale to his Ahab.

“Write direct to Pittsfield, Hermans care,” Melville’s sister Augusta instructed her correspondents when she moved to Arrowhead to live with him. Melville delivered the mail on his horse, Charlie, from a post office in the Berkshire village of Pittsfield, and carried it back, too. “Herman is just going to town & I have been obliged to make my pen fairly fly,” Augusta apologized.

“Let’s now take a moment to remember those we’ve lost to dogs and roof gutters.” Facebook

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Augusta Melville was the most dutiful Melville letter writer, a role she appears to have been assigned by her mother. (“You had better write Herman on Thursday,” the not-to-be-refused Mrs. Melville commanded. ) She lived with her brother for most of her life—she never married—and served as his copyist, which made her his first reader. He often appears in her letters: “Herman just passed through the room. ‘Who are you writing to Gus?’ ” And she appears in his scant surviving letters, too. “My sister Augusta begs me to send her sincerest regards both to you and Mr. Hawthorne,” Melville wrote to Sophia Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s wife.