Customer Reviews

Herman Melville

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Newton Arvin provides an involving overview of Herman Melville's personal life and literary career in this biography, which won the National Book Award in 1950. In contrast to many current biographies, Arvin clearly wrote this book and did not simply edit his lectures. This counts with me, since many biographies nowadays have the pace and style of lectures, not the elegance and precision of great written prose. The result, in this case, is that HERMAN MELVILLE is its own literary experience, not simply informed dictation transferred to the page.

Certainly, Herman Melville wrote what Arvin calls "one very great book." And Arvin does a wonderful job describing what he believes is great about MOBY DICK in his excellent chapter "The Whale". But he does an even better job addressing this question: Why didn't Melville write more great books after hitting his stride in MOBY DICK? The short answers to this question are burnout and Melville's failure, after MOBY DICK, to find a form to match his gifts. As Arvin explains, Melville chose, after his great book "...to write in a form that was as inexpressive to him as a foreign tongue." In a sense, this makes Melville's decline a lesson to all writers, as they grope for the form and structure that celebrates their content.

Although published in 1950, HERMAN MELVILLE holds up very well. By current mores, this biography probably underplays Melville's sexual issues and overplays its occasional Freudian insights. But the book is NOT dated.

This seminal critical biography of Melville is by far the best introduction to the life and work of Herman Melville. Arvin's book bristles with intelligence and insight and is, unlike many academic studies of Melville, highly readable. Search for it and when you get your own copy rejoice. Some smart publisher could do worse than bring this truly classic volume back into print.

Any fan of Melville's writing who has not read this seminal and still unequaled critical study and biography has sheer pleasure in store. Arvin's intelligence and immense knowledge are seamlessly matched by a writing style that is measured and seductive. Anybody reading this study without knowing jack about Melville would probably be so excited that s/he would have to rush out to buy the complete works. This book is worth whatever effort you have to invest to find a copy. The question is: why is this TRUE classic out-of-print?

Next year I'm taking a trip to a famaliar yet vaguely forbidding American landmark. In other words, I'm planning to re-read "Moby Dick". To prepare myself for this metaphysical adventure, I wanted to read something that would refresh my memory regarding this novel and its author; and Viking Press offers Elizabeth Hardwick's "Herman Melville", published last summer as part of that house's Penquin Lives Series. It's an eclectic series, the subjects ranging from Joan of Arc to Elvis Presley. Ms Hardwick's contribution is not a biography per se (there are no plates and there is no index) but rather a set of essays combining Melville's personal experiences with the art he created. In fact, many of the chapter headings are titles of Melville's stories -- e.g., "Redburn" or "Billy Budd". Reading these chapters inspires one to take up the Meville the reader may have put aside "till later". The two longest chapters are devoted to "Moby Dick" and to Hawthorne, to whom the masterpiece is dedicated. Despite its brevity, (161 pages), Ms Hardwick's book follows Melville's life closely, from his voyages as a young man to his forty-four-year long marriage (which Ms Hardwick compares to Tolstoy's) and ending with his nineteen-year servitude at the New York Custom House. Heavy his marriage was (one of his sons committed suicide, the other became adrifter)...Ms Hardwick's succinct yet complex narrative is smoothlywritten, and she has a way with words (she calls "Moby Dick"a "gorgeous phantasmagoria".) But for a reader who just needs an outrigger against the mammoth "Moby Dick", Ms Hardwick's slim but strong volume offers appropriate support.

I became interested in this book on the basis of two other works: Edna O'Brien's great Penguin Life of James Joyce, my favorite author; and Hardwick's excellent introduction to the Modern Library edition of Moby-Dick. It certainly lived up to the promise of the second, if not fully the first. As nearly every other reviewer has noted, it's not very thorough as a biography, focusing instead on the highlights of which any Melville fan is probably already aware; but then again the Penguin Lives series doesn't pretend to be extremely in-depth. As literary criticism, though, this book is great stuff. Here Hardwick decidedly avoids a formulaic or predictable approach, coming up with novel observations on Melville's work and turning as perceptive an eye on lesser works like Redburn and Typee as on the masterpiece -- indeed, it was this book which inspired me to read Redburn, which I've come to admire as a great entry in the Melvillean canon. Add to this Hardwick's voice, sometimes beautifully evocative, sometimes obscure, but always greater than your average nonfiction author's, and you've got a book definitely worth reading.

This is one of several volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Each provides a concise but remarkably comprehensive biography of its subject in combination with a penetrating analysis of the significance of that subject's life and career. I think this is a brilliant concept. Those who wish to learn more about the given subject are directed to other sources.

When preparing to review various volumes in this series, I have struggled with determining what would be of greatest interest and assistance to those who read my reviews. Finally I decided that a few brief excerpts and then some concluding remarks would be appropriate.

Those who write reviews such as this one have other writers whom they especially admire. Mine are George Orwell, E.B. White, and Elizabeth Hardwick. You can thus understand my eagerness to read her biography of Melville. Early on, she observes that "....the sea was to give him his art, his occupation, but the actual romance of landscape, the sun on the waves, the stars at night, are nearly always mixed with with the brutality of life on board. And the art that saved him, the discovery of his genius, was a sort of Grub Street, a book a year, sometimes two." As Hardwick carefully explains, there was throughout Melville's life "a forlorn accent shadowing the great energy of his thought and imagination. There is a rueful dignity in his life and personal manner, and sometimes a startling abandonment of propriety on the pages."

On Elizabeth Shaw: "The marriage was more prudent for Melville than for his wife. He might long form male companionship, even for love, but marriage changed him from an unanchored wanderer into an obsessive writer, almost if there, in a house, in a neighborhood, there was nothing else for this man to do except to use the capital he had found in himself with the writing of Typee and Omoo [two of his earliest works]." (page 51)

On friendship with Hawthorne, to whom Moby Dick was dedicated: "Hawthorne and Melville met in the Berkshires, and a friendship developed unique in Melville's life, unique in inspiration and disappointment....Melville had found in Hawthorne the lone intellectual and creative friendship of his life, had found another struck by the terror and dark indifference of the universe...He would share the fate of being a writer in America, share his ragged banner: Failure is the test of greatness. But there was a disjunction of temperament, an inequality of fervor." (Page 66)

On Ishmael: "[He], the young man from Manhattan, is the moral center of [Moby Dick], a work tantalizingly subversive and yet somehow if not affirming at least forgiving of the blind destructiveness of human nature and of nature itself." (Page 84)

On Melville's death: "He died at home in his own house with a wife to care for him in his great distress and need. It appears he came to be grateful for her long years as Mrs. Melville, a calling certainly unexpected in her youth. Old age and habit, a settling down, a relief from the active `writhing' D.H. Lawrence named the condition of Herman melville's soul. If so, this ornament and pride of our culture was to end his days with a sigh, a resigned, bearable, pedestrian loneliness."

As is also true of the other volumes in the "Penguin Lives" series, this one provides all of the essential historical and biographical information but its greatest strength lies in the extended commentary, in this instance by Elizabeth Hardwick. I hope these brief excerpts encourage those who read this review to read her biography. It is indeed a brilliant achievement.

A terrible introduction to Melville and his work. Overwritten, inconsequent, self-indulgent, this is yet another flop from this mediocre series. As for her readings of the novels, they are nothing but disguised plot summaries. And her bibliography is scandalous--no Olsen, no CLR James, nothing by any of the major academics who have produced a series of readings of Melville in recent years. Truly a waste of time.

Elizabeth Hardwick's entry in the Penguin "Brief Lives" series is a tremendous disappointment. Although the great figure of letters professed a deep affinity for Melville throughout her writing career, this short biography of the great 19th-century novelist (one of the last books she ever finished) is neither illuminating nor particularly helpful. Like several other of the biographers in the series, Hardwick affects a somewhat experimental style to pursue her subject that is meant to echo the subject's own writing. But whereas Edna O'Brien did something in her entry into the series "James Joyce" that helped the reader understand that Irish novelist by her vaguely Joycean style, Hardwick's pastiche of Melville here helps us understand almost nothing of the writer--it just seems like an oddly florid way to write. She does come through with a few choice phrases and sentences, but overall the whole thing seems all flair with no substance. Hardwick brings in discussions of Melville's famous novels and tales but mostly to summarize them rather than to interpret anything about them. Worst of all, you come away from the book with almost no sense of who Melville was, which should be the test of any biography, long or brief. It's a real let-down.

Elizabeth Hardwick's short take on Melville is a mess and simply not up to many of the other biographies of the Penguin series. Years fly on a single page and Hardwick often spends more time offering her descriptions of the books instead of telling about the life of her subject. Even worse, she ignores a good deal of scholarship on Melville while pulling in material that simply is not relevant. For example, Hardwick tells us that Elizabeth Melville was her husband's amanuensis but there is not that much information about it. So what does Hardwick do? She goes to Russia to tell us about Tolstoy's wife in the same role for her famed literary husband. That's interesting but it has nothing to do with Melville. That's the chief problem with this biography. Hardwick knows the man's work but she does not know the man and, more than a few times, seems to lose sight of him. While the book gives a decent if short overview of Melville's major works (though Hardwick does not cover his poetry to any extent), this biography simply fails to offer any insight into the life of Herman Melville.

This book is appalling.

Consider this: many people find Herman Melville--especially the Melville of "Moby Dick"--to be slow going and difficult to fathom. But in Hardwick's biography, the ONLY passages that are at all lucid are the Melville quoatations. This is, without a doubt, the worst biography I've ever read. Self-indulgent, obscure, boring... it's not really worth my time (or yours) for me to go on.

Read Andrew Delbanco's "Melville" for a much more readable, penetrating insight into the man and his work.