Amazon.com Review
Ernest Hemingway famously declared
Huckleberry Finn to be the true font of American prose--and in the case of his own stripped-down stories, he was right. But there's another, more rococo strain in our literature, of which fish fancier Herman Melville would be the undisputed king. So who better to chronicle his life in brief than Elizabeth Hardwick? This deliciously acerbic critic and novelist hasn't, of course, attempted to mimic Melville's language, which often sounds like the sort of thing Shakespeare would have written if he'd been an ichthyologist. But she, too, is the possessor of an eccentric, sometimes shaggy style, and has already written about Melville with rare penetration. Even her opening salvo has an appropriately over-the-top ring to it:
Herman Melville: sound the name and it's to be the romance of the sea, the vast, mysterious waters for which a thousand adjectives cannot suffice. Its mystical vibrations, the great oceans "holy" for the Persians, a deity for the Greeks; forbidden seas, passage to barbarous coasts--a scattering of Melville's words for the urge to know the sparkling waters and their roll-on beauty and, when angry, their powerful, treacherous indifference to the floundering boat and the hapless mariners.
In a study of this length (160 pages), Hardwick doesn't even pretend to compete with such broad-canvas predecessors as Hershel Parker or Laurie Robertson-Lorant. But she hits all the high points (and the numerous low ones) in this all-American life, from Melville's earliest seagoing expeditions to his running aground in middle age. "The cabin boy became a family man," she notes, "or at least a man with a family, one always at home, but hardly the man of the house, with his scullery routine of writing at frightening speed, as if driven by a tyrannical overseer." There was, alas, worse to come: trapped in a dead-end job as a New York customs inspector, Melville retreated into desperate silence. But Hardwick burrows in to disclose new singularities, new complications, and to acknowledge that her subject's life is hardly less ambiguous than his art. "So much about Melville," we are told, "is
seems to be, may have been and
perhaps." What's certain, however, is that we could hardly find a better narrator than Hardwick herself.
--Bob Brandeis
From Publishers Weekly
The Penguin Lives series is a good one (see review of Rosa Parks, above): casual but serious, artfully rendered criticism that is not hell-bent on footnotes and references,; the slender volumes are produced by critical writers who are also impressive creative minds in their own right. Melville, whose life story is aptly told by literary critic and novelist Hardwick (Bartleby in Manhattan), is not the most accessible of subjects for a short format like this. Though he was an immensely prolific creator of novels, short fiction, poetry, letters and journals, and though he was one of the most important American writers, his life was barely public enough for any biographer to nail him down. His career is also too complicated to fit into any simple "rise" and "decline" paradigmAhis genius is unevenly distributed across his works. Nonetheless, "there is a rueful dignity in his life and personal manner," Hardwick writes. His family responded to him with a "puzzled sympathy." Hardwick gives a frank depiction of a depressive, often bitter man who weathered a constant struggle over income ("Dollars damn me," he wrote), the suicide of a son and, possibly, according to Hardwick, doubts about his own heterosexuality; Melville never seemed to forgive the world for refusing to recognize Moby-Dick as a masterpiece during his lifetime. Through 12 brief chapters, many centered on fresh readings of Melville's works and others thematic ("Whaling," "Elizabeth," "Hawthorne"), Hardwick's own talent for metaphor and no-nonsense interpretation makes this an especially engaging critical account. Perhaps most importantly, Hardwick is able to convey both the complexity of the man as well as the inherent impossibility of the biographer's task to fully elucidate the life of a multifarious individual. "He is a mystery," she writes, "no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man." Still, this work is a delight to read. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
