A literary pilgrimage

New England in October makes a lovely, sensible vacation. I recently invested a week, and risked a relationship with a boy, driving across Massachusetts, through Boston, up the coast to Maine, and back through upstate New York. It wasn’t exactly a Kerouac-transcendent road trip, but the chowder was topnotch and the boyfriend survived the week alone in my neurotic presence — which in my book puts Rockport up there with Rome.

The trip’s highlight was Herman Melville’s house in western Massachusetts. It probably helps if you’re embarking on your journey in the same mood as I did — the same mood as Melville’s narrator in “Moby Dick”: "whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hopes get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off” — yes, in that temper it is sweet to stop awhile in the house where such sentences were composed. But driving to Melville’s house doesn’t feel like it should. There’s no ocean view; there isn’t even an ocean.

Traversing upstate New York, you reach Pittsfield Massachusetts, a town where, in case you miss the beach, about five separate tanning salons offer to bring colour to your cheeks (any pair you prefer). Strip malls and gas stations are about all this place has to offer. But keep a close eye on the road out of Pittsfield and eventually you’ll reach an intersection that alludes vaguely to Moby Dick. Turn left, and suddenly you’re in suburbia. Houses surrounded by aluminum siding and leafy yards seem to mock the notion that you’re on a literary pilgrimage. What now? A mile and a half down this road my boyfriend and I completed the series of anachronisms by turning our 1991 Toyota onto Melville’s driveway, now converted in back to a parking lot for visitors to this National Historic Landmark.

Melville lived in Arrowhead — as he dubbed the 18th century farmhouse — from 1850 to 1863. He wrote “Moby Dick” there, as well as “Pierre, The Confidence Man,” and “The Piazza Tales” (named after the porch he added to the house). Three of his four children were born here. Arrowhead literally housed the most productive period in his life. He moved here an already famous author, having achieved popular success with the books based on his early seafaring adventures (“Typee,” “Omoo,” “Mardi,” “Redburn,” “White Jacket”) — and he left to return to New York city, work as a customs official and (a nice warning to poets) slip back into obscurity writing verse.

The guided tour (worth US$6) is at first a bit deflating: we learned who owned the chairs by the fireplace, who supplied the knickknacks on the mantle piece, and that the beds are "authentic Melville" artifacts. But the upstairs study, where Melville wrote from 8am to 2pm each day, is enough to knock the breath out of you. Standing there you realize the entire house is worth preserving simply so the view from Melville’s study, of Mount Greystone, which he gazed at as he worked, remains intact. From his window the mountain looks suspiciously whale-like: blunt forehead and blue tail jutting from the horizon. But back to the anachronisms.

An hour northwest of Arrowhead is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA). It’s worth stopping if you’re Melville-bound, or vice versa. The two attractions make a nice contrast between past and present. When we went, one of several shows was a huge installation — really more like an indoor subdivision — by American artist Robert Wilson (on display through October 2003). Wilson is known for his experimental theatre pieces; his 1976 "Einstein on the Beach," created in collaboration with Philip Glass, marked him as an auteur of the art world. All this I picked up off the Internet afterward; at the time, I’m ashamed to admit, I’d never heard of Robert Wilson — but I was quickly converted. "Fourteen Stations" dominates an entire wing of the building.

Very literally, what you see when you enter is: Six one-room houses on each side of a wooden boardwalk running the length of the warehouse-sized space. Presaging the view out Melville’s study (which we visited next), each of these little homes has one window through which you glimpse a surreal sculpture and hear an eerie sound byte. No whale-shaped mountains here; more like oversized boulders, pilgrims brandishing knitting needles, levitating dresser drawers, and rooms drowning in luminous glass beakers. By the time you arrive at the boardwalk’s terminus, where a teepee made of twigs and grasses surrounds a gigantic porcelain mannequin suspended upside-down over a stylized blue bed (not as silly looking as it sounds), you’ve undergone something of an allegory of human life. It’s a mild, pleasant blow to the gut — similar to the effect of staring out Melville’s window 150 years too late. Wilson’s pencil drawings, a short film, and his famous chair sculptures, are also on display, attesting to his technical skill and visual playfulness. The abstract black and white drawings are especially mesmerizing.

I’d say, if you have a free weekend and a car, these soft, intense compositions by themselves are worth a junket to North Adams. Such cultured fare makes a nice preface to a leisurely drive up the New England coastline. If you start at Boston (which we skipped owing to an ineluctable urge to Get Out Of The City), and if you manage to navigate the demented highways surrounding Boston without breaking up with your significant other, you’ll arrive at a quaint stretch of coast that features the postcard towns of Salem, Gloucester, and Rockport.

Salem in October is like New Orleans in February: it’s busy fulfilling itself. It seems like each imposing manor contains a witch museum or a reenactment of the witch trials, and the pedestrian strip in the centre of town is lined with a nice balance of costume-sellers and candy vendors. But it was rainy and miserable when we visited — not even rainy and atmospheric — and Salem failed to put a spell on us. The next morning we drove to Rockport, which immediately upstaged Gloucester for quaintness. Piers lined with souvenir boutiques jut out into the Atlantic and fresh seafood abounds. The sun shines. People on the beach fly enormous kites shaped like sailboats. You’re three days into your holiday, and you’re finally starting to feel it.

Jana Prikryl can be reached at janaprikryl@hotmail.com