Review by Booklist Review
In spite of the efforts of countless interpreters, Melville remains one of the most enigmatic of writers. Hardwick, a superb essayist and astute literary critic, believes that "Melville didn't want to be known." But he did want to be read, and Hardwick performs that art masterfully in her vivifying contribution to the marvelous Penguin Lives series. She deftly sketches Melville's family history of people wellborn but not well-off and chronicles his seafaring adventures and his "gruesome overwork" as a writer (by the time he was 37, he'd written five novels, including Moby Dick). The heart of the book, though, is Hardwick's analysis of Melville's work. She celebrates Melville's "liberality of mind," "startling command of narrative," "wild metaphors," and "poetic anthropology." She also commiserates with his burdened wife, who cared for a large extended family and copied his manuscripts, and calls gentle attention to all the "beautiful young men" Melville portrayed so romantically in his fiction. Characterizing her subject as being "needy as an orphan," Hardwick expresses awe and empathy for this strange and unfulfilled genius. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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" paradigmÄhis 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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In spite of two recent mammoth biographies of Melville, he remains something of an enigma in American literature. In his own time, he never gained his current stature, and he spent his last 19 years toiling away in the U.S. Customs House. Interweaving critical readings of his fiction and poetry with events in Melville!s life, Hardwick (Sight Readings, LJ 7/98) offers glimpses into his tortured writing career, his sometimes difficult family life, and his ambivalent relationship with his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hardwick makes no claims to providing new information about his life here, acknowledging that so much about Melville is seems to be, may have been, and perhaps. Rather, she offers us a lyrical and engaging portrait of the writer. Hardwick includes appreciative annotations of the two most recent Melville biographies"Hershel Parker!s Herman Melville (LJ 9/15/96) and Laurie Robertson-Lorant!s Melville: A Biography (LJ 3/15/96)"as well as a list of significant studies for further reading. Highly recommended as an excellent introductory guide to Melville!s choppy seas and craggy shores."Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In another of the Penguin Lives series, the estimable Hardwick offers a critical biography filled with tapestry-like riches from start to end. Naming him "this profligate benefactor of our literature," Hardwick, rightly enough for so brief a treatment as this, provides less a fact-by-fact life of the great--and greatly tormented--Melville than she does an almost Whitmanesque song of what the man was and what his work is. The approach leads her naturally enough to present the man by presenting the work--and so it is that she praises Moby-Dick (a novel that came into existence "with no antecedents at hand") in passages of criticism almost as memorable as many in the novel itself. Other elements of Melville's life are brought to the surface even so--his never-ending financial straits; the vapor-like dissolution of his literary audience after Moby-Dick, never to be brought back again; the sheer volume of the writer's output and the sheer energy poured into it; his wife's thoughts of separation, suspecting her husband to be "deranged"; the pitiable death of a son by suicide at 18, of the second by tuberculosis at 25; the never-quite-successful friendship with Hawthorne; the effort to turn to poetry; the dreary long years of wage-slavery at the customs house. Hardwick prods delicately, in addition, at the possibility of Melville's homosexuality--citing, in particular, passages in Redburn, the bed-scene with Ishmael and Queequeg, other scattered but important hints--and makes clear how differently such a possibility may have been taken (or ignored) in Melville's century as opposed to those later. Hardwick's final assessment of the great author, however, is grand, broad, high, and entirely right, albeit against the grain for our current age of literary reductionism and single-theme-thumping. Melville, for this true critic Hardwick, must not be "robbed" of his "melancholy atheism," his understanding of what it means to be "damned by life." Fine, worthy, and built strong. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
