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Penguin Lives
Herman Melville
A single novel, an eternal classic, established him as a founding father of American literature. Now, a century after his death, a new popular surge of interest in Herman Melville calls for Elizabeth Hardwick's rich analysis of "the whole of Melville's work, uneven as it is, and the challenging shape of his life . . . a story of the creative history of an extraordinary American genius."
Hardwick's superb critical interpretation and award-winning novelistic flair reveal a former whaleship deckhand whose voyages were the stuff of travel romances that seduced the public. Later, a self-described "thought-diver" into "the truth of the human heart." Melville harbored a bitterness that knew no bounds when that same public failed to embrace his masterwork, Moby-Dick. Invaluable for enthusiasts of American literature, Herman Melville is itself a masterwork of critical commentary in the tradition of D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature.
Hardwick's superb critical interpretation and award-winning novelistic flair reveal a former whaleship deckhand whose voyages were the stuff of travel romances that seduced the public. Later, a self-described "thought-diver" into "the truth of the human heart." Melville harbored a bitterness that knew no bounds when that same public failed to embrace his masterwork, Moby-Dick. Invaluable for enthusiasts of American literature, Herman Melville is itself a masterwork of critical commentary in the tradition of D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature.
161 pages, Hardcover
First published June 5, 2000
About the author
Elizabeth Hardwick
48 books210 followersElizabeth Hardwick was a formidable American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer who reshaped the landscape of American intellectual life. After earning degrees from the University of Kentucky and pursuing graduate studies at Columbia, she gained notoriety for her 1959 essay "The Decline of Book Reviewing." This scathing critique directly inspired her to co-found The New York Review of Books in 1963. A prolific essayist and novelist, her major works include the novel Sleepless Nights and influential criticism such as Seduction and Betrayal. Hardwick was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and mentored a generation of writers at Barnard and Columbia. Her posthumously published collections continue to cement her legacy as one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant prose stylists.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
June 6, 2025
Melville's Sleepless Nights
After reading Elizabeth Hardwick's lyrical introspective 1979 novel, "Sleepless Nights", I turned to this book to learn how Hardwick viewed one of my favorite authors. Born in Kentucky, Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was a co-founder of the New York Review of Books and a critic and essayist who had written about Melville's "Bartleby". She also endured a long difficult marriage to the American poet Robert Lowell.
It is tempting to see a connection between the reclusive, lonely narrator of "Sleepless Nights" and Melville (1819 -- 1891) himself as Hardwick portrays the man. The subject of many lengthy and perceptive biographies, Melville remains a stubbornly elusive figure, a loner and an outcast of ambiguous beliefs and sexuality as are many of the characters that people his novels. I also thought that Hardwick might be viewing her subject from the standpoint of Melville's long-suffering wife, Elizabeth Shaw. The daughter of an illustrious Massachusetts judge, Elizabeth remained married to Melville for 44 years. She endured her gifted husband's frustrations, long silences, drunkenness, withdrawals and possible violent behavior. She also suffered the suicide of the couple's son Malcolm at the age of 18 and the subsequent early death of another son, Stanwix. At the midpoint of the marriage, Elizabeth thought seriously of leaving Melville. But the marriage endured. Perhaps there are parallels between Elizabeth Shaw's marriage to Herman Melville and Elizabeth Hardwick's marriage to Robert Lowell.
Hardwick's biography is part of the "Penguin Lives" series which has the aim of presenting the lives of famous persons from a variety of walks of life in short, accessible formats for busy readers. (Another similar such series is the American Presidents series edited by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Willentz.) Hardwick's book thus is only 160 pages in length and can be read in an extended sitting or two. Especially for a figure as complex as Melville, a short study must if it is to succeed capture its subject in a few words, present the subject insightfully and provocatively, and encourage the reader to pursue the subject on his own. While Hardwick's book received mixed reviews, I think it succeeds admirably in its aims.
Hardwick considers both Melville's life and his writings with an emphasis on the latter. The book is written in a passionate, novelistic style which bears little resemblance to academic or journalistic writing that might be expected in a short biography. The book is in the voice of a writer deeply committed to the work of a fellow-writer, shortcomings and all. The book describes Melville's early life, his marriage, the friendship with Hawthorne, his period of novel writing, and his long "withdrawal" late in life in sufficient detail to give a picture of the man in a short compass. While sympathetic to her subject, Hardwick shows the reader a troubled, enigmatic individual.
Melville's life, in Hardwick's account, is intertwined with his novels. She begins with a tough-minded portrayal of life at sea in mid-18th Century America and of how Melville saw such a life. She is drawn to the loners and outcasts that made up seafarers in Melville's day, as she points out the traits Melville shared with his fellow sailors and the ways in which he would differ from them.
Hardwick gives selective descriptions of Melville's books. For a short book, she gives an extensive treatment of "Moby-Dick" which helped me think about this difficult American masterpiece. Hardwick also offers good insight into the two other books for which Melville is best remembered: "Bartleby" and the posthumous "Billy Budd". Of the rest of Melville's writings, Hardwick offers praise for Melville's fourth novel, "Redburn", for his first novel, "Typee" and for his final novel, "The Confidence Man." She values "Redburn" especially highly and made me want to revisit the book. I was somewhat surprised by her negative judgment of "White Jacket", of Melville's Civil War poetry, and, perhaps, of "Mardi".
Hardwick's book captured something of Melville and gave me a fresh perspective on his life and writings. She made me eager to read Melville, an author I have already read and read about many times. The book makes no pretense of being definitive. But it offers insight into how one author views a great predecessor and thus is more than a simple introductory book. Hardwick has written a valuable short study for readers who wish to engage with Herman Melville.
Robin Friedman
After reading Elizabeth Hardwick's lyrical introspective 1979 novel, "Sleepless Nights", I turned to this book to learn how Hardwick viewed one of my favorite authors. Born in Kentucky, Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was a co-founder of the New York Review of Books and a critic and essayist who had written about Melville's "Bartleby". She also endured a long difficult marriage to the American poet Robert Lowell.
It is tempting to see a connection between the reclusive, lonely narrator of "Sleepless Nights" and Melville (1819 -- 1891) himself as Hardwick portrays the man. The subject of many lengthy and perceptive biographies, Melville remains a stubbornly elusive figure, a loner and an outcast of ambiguous beliefs and sexuality as are many of the characters that people his novels. I also thought that Hardwick might be viewing her subject from the standpoint of Melville's long-suffering wife, Elizabeth Shaw. The daughter of an illustrious Massachusetts judge, Elizabeth remained married to Melville for 44 years. She endured her gifted husband's frustrations, long silences, drunkenness, withdrawals and possible violent behavior. She also suffered the suicide of the couple's son Malcolm at the age of 18 and the subsequent early death of another son, Stanwix. At the midpoint of the marriage, Elizabeth thought seriously of leaving Melville. But the marriage endured. Perhaps there are parallels between Elizabeth Shaw's marriage to Herman Melville and Elizabeth Hardwick's marriage to Robert Lowell.
Hardwick's biography is part of the "Penguin Lives" series which has the aim of presenting the lives of famous persons from a variety of walks of life in short, accessible formats for busy readers. (Another similar such series is the American Presidents series edited by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Willentz.) Hardwick's book thus is only 160 pages in length and can be read in an extended sitting or two. Especially for a figure as complex as Melville, a short study must if it is to succeed capture its subject in a few words, present the subject insightfully and provocatively, and encourage the reader to pursue the subject on his own. While Hardwick's book received mixed reviews, I think it succeeds admirably in its aims.
Hardwick considers both Melville's life and his writings with an emphasis on the latter. The book is written in a passionate, novelistic style which bears little resemblance to academic or journalistic writing that might be expected in a short biography. The book is in the voice of a writer deeply committed to the work of a fellow-writer, shortcomings and all. The book describes Melville's early life, his marriage, the friendship with Hawthorne, his period of novel writing, and his long "withdrawal" late in life in sufficient detail to give a picture of the man in a short compass. While sympathetic to her subject, Hardwick shows the reader a troubled, enigmatic individual.
Melville's life, in Hardwick's account, is intertwined with his novels. She begins with a tough-minded portrayal of life at sea in mid-18th Century America and of how Melville saw such a life. She is drawn to the loners and outcasts that made up seafarers in Melville's day, as she points out the traits Melville shared with his fellow sailors and the ways in which he would differ from them.
Hardwick gives selective descriptions of Melville's books. For a short book, she gives an extensive treatment of "Moby-Dick" which helped me think about this difficult American masterpiece. Hardwick also offers good insight into the two other books for which Melville is best remembered: "Bartleby" and the posthumous "Billy Budd". Of the rest of Melville's writings, Hardwick offers praise for Melville's fourth novel, "Redburn", for his first novel, "Typee" and for his final novel, "The Confidence Man." She values "Redburn" especially highly and made me want to revisit the book. I was somewhat surprised by her negative judgment of "White Jacket", of Melville's Civil War poetry, and, perhaps, of "Mardi".
Hardwick's book captured something of Melville and gave me a fresh perspective on his life and writings. She made me eager to read Melville, an author I have already read and read about many times. The book makes no pretense of being definitive. But it offers insight into how one author views a great predecessor and thus is more than a simple introductory book. Hardwick has written a valuable short study for readers who wish to engage with Herman Melville.
Robin Friedman
July 10, 2023
3.5*
Quite useful and very well-written, if but lightly treating the texts, but hey it's an introduction. Strangely (but usefully), she has a lot to say about (and is *quite* keen on) Redburn, HM's unjustly ignored 4th novel (1849)...
Quite useful and very well-written, if but lightly treating the texts, but hey it's an introduction. Strangely (but usefully), she has a lot to say about (and is *quite* keen on) Redburn, HM's unjustly ignored 4th novel (1849)...
September 30, 2019
It has often been observed that what we as readers take away from a book is largely dependent of what we bring to it, in the way of preconception, attitude, and belief. Bearing this in mind, I will confess that I approached Elizabeth Hardwick's biography of Herman Melville as a poor substitute for the massive two-volume work produced by Hershel Parker on the same subject - a book whose tremendous size and scope suggested nothing so much as a mountain that I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to climb. This ungracious approach may be partly responsible for the almost-violent dislike I felt for Hardwick's book throughout the first third of the volume.
I found the author's grasp of certain aspects of American history somewhat wanting, and although this manifested itself mostly in incidental, "throwaway" lines and paragraphs, largely irrelevant to the main topic of the book, the historian in me was still somewhat perturbed. Hardwick's careless comments about Joseph Brant and the Iroquois Confederacy (found in one paragraph on page 12), particularly irked me, owing no doubt, to the fact that I am doing some reading on that very topic at the moment. I realize that this book is devoted neither to the Revolutionary War, nor to the Six Nations, but when an author slips up on a topic I do know something about, I find myself wondering if there are other errors of understanding, pertaining to subjects about which I'm less well-informed, that I'm just not catching.
I also found it very difficult to acclimate to Hardwick's stylistic quirks, which include a tendency to transform sentences into long lists of adjectives, frequently dispensing with the verb altogether. She has a habit of beginning a sentence with a name or short phrase, followed by a colon and a short description, as if she were either too busy or too clever to write in a more traditional fashion that would better serve communication. I found the overall effect of Hardwick's prose pretentious, and it was something of a distraction from the topic at hand. It is my understanding that Hardwick has won some acclaim as a novelist, but this is meant to be a work of nonfiction, something of which her editor would have done well to remind her.
While my initial reaction to this short biography, part of the Penguin Lives series, was overwhelmingly negative, I should note that, contrary to my expectations, it did improve somewhat. Hardwick seemed to "settle down" after a while, and as her stylistic idiosyncrasies became less pronounced, the text became more lucid. When she wasn't trying too hard to dazzle, her writing had an almost-luminous quality that truly bespoke her great love for the topic at hand. I found myself interested, and even charmed occasionally, by her ruminations on some of Melville's masterpieces. The chapter on Moby-Dick was quite enjoyable, although I found myself wishing that she had devoted more space to some of the other great works, The Confidence-Man in particular.
Which brings me to my final point. The author seemed undecided in this book, as to whether she was writing a biography or a work of literary criticism, and the book does not succeed in either category. There is simply not enough material about the life of Meville to make this an adequate biography. By the same token, the textual criticism is just not detailed or extensive enough to satisfy. Despite these, and my earlier criticisms, I am glad, on the whole, that I read this book. As a friend pointed out to me, this series provides an excellent starting point for further investigation. In other words, it looks like I'll be reading that Hershel Parker after all...
I found the author's grasp of certain aspects of American history somewhat wanting, and although this manifested itself mostly in incidental, "throwaway" lines and paragraphs, largely irrelevant to the main topic of the book, the historian in me was still somewhat perturbed. Hardwick's careless comments about Joseph Brant and the Iroquois Confederacy (found in one paragraph on page 12), particularly irked me, owing no doubt, to the fact that I am doing some reading on that very topic at the moment. I realize that this book is devoted neither to the Revolutionary War, nor to the Six Nations, but when an author slips up on a topic I do know something about, I find myself wondering if there are other errors of understanding, pertaining to subjects about which I'm less well-informed, that I'm just not catching.
I also found it very difficult to acclimate to Hardwick's stylistic quirks, which include a tendency to transform sentences into long lists of adjectives, frequently dispensing with the verb altogether. She has a habit of beginning a sentence with a name or short phrase, followed by a colon and a short description, as if she were either too busy or too clever to write in a more traditional fashion that would better serve communication. I found the overall effect of Hardwick's prose pretentious, and it was something of a distraction from the topic at hand. It is my understanding that Hardwick has won some acclaim as a novelist, but this is meant to be a work of nonfiction, something of which her editor would have done well to remind her.
While my initial reaction to this short biography, part of the Penguin Lives series, was overwhelmingly negative, I should note that, contrary to my expectations, it did improve somewhat. Hardwick seemed to "settle down" after a while, and as her stylistic idiosyncrasies became less pronounced, the text became more lucid. When she wasn't trying too hard to dazzle, her writing had an almost-luminous quality that truly bespoke her great love for the topic at hand. I found myself interested, and even charmed occasionally, by her ruminations on some of Melville's masterpieces. The chapter on Moby-Dick was quite enjoyable, although I found myself wishing that she had devoted more space to some of the other great works, The Confidence-Man in particular.
Which brings me to my final point. The author seemed undecided in this book, as to whether she was writing a biography or a work of literary criticism, and the book does not succeed in either category. There is simply not enough material about the life of Meville to make this an adequate biography. By the same token, the textual criticism is just not detailed or extensive enough to satisfy. Despite these, and my earlier criticisms, I am glad, on the whole, that I read this book. As a friend pointed out to me, this series provides an excellent starting point for further investigation. In other words, it looks like I'll be reading that Hershel Parker after all...
December 14, 2025
In 1981, Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “Bartleby and Manhattan” appeared in The New York Review of Books. This “grain from a backyard plot,” as she modestly terms it, grew nearly two decades later into this volume on Herman Melville for the “Penguin Lives” series. Though the series consists of short biographies of its subjects, by her own admission her contribution is less a biography than it is a reading of Melville’s work. This she uses to explore the life of its author, using its passages and character to consider details about his character and experiences.
This is understandable given the reason for Melville’s inclusion in the series, and there are many interesting observations contained within the pages of Hardwick’s succinct study. Yet much is sacrificed in the process. So much attention is focused on the work that details about the man himself are missed. With the bulk of the text spent examining Melville as a writer, his later years are covered in just a couple of paragraphs. While this may be adequate for those who want just a little context for Melville’s many works, those desiring more substance would be better advised turning to Hershel Parker's monumental two-volume study, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1, 1819-1851 and Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 2, 1851-1891 or Laurie Robertson-Lorant's relatively shorter Melville: A Biography.
This is understandable given the reason for Melville’s inclusion in the series, and there are many interesting observations contained within the pages of Hardwick’s succinct study. Yet much is sacrificed in the process. So much attention is focused on the work that details about the man himself are missed. With the bulk of the text spent examining Melville as a writer, his later years are covered in just a couple of paragraphs. While this may be adequate for those who want just a little context for Melville’s many works, those desiring more substance would be better advised turning to Hershel Parker's monumental two-volume study, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1, 1819-1851 and Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 2, 1851-1891 or Laurie Robertson-Lorant's relatively shorter Melville: A Biography.
October 14, 2012
I just can't rate this book higher than a star for a number of reasons.
It presents a surface reading of Melville's opus and an unsubstantive account of his life.
The author does have a certain gift for language...I would call her style a little florid, a bit brusque, but not necessarily in a bad way. A sentence without a verb seems to be one of her favorite constructions. It doesn't flow easily but her style does cause you to think due to its complexity and unusual constructions.
My main problem with this slim volume is the treatment of Melville's life. I was hoping to find out a little about Melville the man. You will find out little about him here. What effect did his son's suicide have on him? Why does he burn much of his work? What great themes preoccupied his spirit? What was the latter part of his life like, after he fell from fame and literary success? What was his home life like?
Instead the book is structured in an unimaginative way. Basically most chapters are devoted chronologically to his various works. These are related to the reader as opposed to being discussed. We get an albeit colorful precis of the story with selected quotes. But no exegesis.
A case in point would be her superficial treatment of Bartleby The Scrivener. Bartleby to me has always represented something profound, the act of negation as a positive, something the West and the USA has never really understood, with all being skewed to success, money, progress and expansion. The spiritual power of yin, as the ancient Chinese would have realized. Bartleby and Moby Dick and Billy Budd are not that different. But if you just want to be told the story, without discussion of its meaning, then this book might work for you.
What one does learn about his life is squeezed in between these twice told tales. The one area of his life she does try to focus on reveals a scurrilous purpose that reminded me of a dressed up tabloid. She tries really hard to cast every insinuation that Melville was a closeted or repressed homosexual. This, she admits in her afterward, is the main part of Melville's life that interested her, along with his admiration for Hawthorne, which she claims is another proof of his homoeroticism. I feel she has substituted sensationalism for scholarship, and what's worse, her case is not convincing or conclusive, as she herself admits.
My problem with this is, so what? She admits in her afterward that she has no clue as to what this might mean for his work. So what if Thomas Mann had homoerotic feelings? You can't analyze a writer's true worth from this vantage point. Also, she spent a lot of the biographical part of the book on this subject, and as a result does not analyze much of the rest of his life experience, his marriage, his family, his relation to success and failure, even his themes.
I really did not think she did Melville justice or gave his greatness his due.
It presents a surface reading of Melville's opus and an unsubstantive account of his life.
The author does have a certain gift for language...I would call her style a little florid, a bit brusque, but not necessarily in a bad way. A sentence without a verb seems to be one of her favorite constructions. It doesn't flow easily but her style does cause you to think due to its complexity and unusual constructions.
My main problem with this slim volume is the treatment of Melville's life. I was hoping to find out a little about Melville the man. You will find out little about him here. What effect did his son's suicide have on him? Why does he burn much of his work? What great themes preoccupied his spirit? What was the latter part of his life like, after he fell from fame and literary success? What was his home life like?
Instead the book is structured in an unimaginative way. Basically most chapters are devoted chronologically to his various works. These are related to the reader as opposed to being discussed. We get an albeit colorful precis of the story with selected quotes. But no exegesis.
A case in point would be her superficial treatment of Bartleby The Scrivener. Bartleby to me has always represented something profound, the act of negation as a positive, something the West and the USA has never really understood, with all being skewed to success, money, progress and expansion. The spiritual power of yin, as the ancient Chinese would have realized. Bartleby and Moby Dick and Billy Budd are not that different. But if you just want to be told the story, without discussion of its meaning, then this book might work for you.
What one does learn about his life is squeezed in between these twice told tales. The one area of his life she does try to focus on reveals a scurrilous purpose that reminded me of a dressed up tabloid. She tries really hard to cast every insinuation that Melville was a closeted or repressed homosexual. This, she admits in her afterward, is the main part of Melville's life that interested her, along with his admiration for Hawthorne, which she claims is another proof of his homoeroticism. I feel she has substituted sensationalism for scholarship, and what's worse, her case is not convincing or conclusive, as she herself admits.
My problem with this is, so what? She admits in her afterward that she has no clue as to what this might mean for his work. So what if Thomas Mann had homoerotic feelings? You can't analyze a writer's true worth from this vantage point. Also, she spent a lot of the biographical part of the book on this subject, and as a result does not analyze much of the rest of his life experience, his marriage, his family, his relation to success and failure, even his themes.
I really did not think she did Melville justice or gave his greatness his due.
March 6, 2013
This short biography successfully integrates Herman Melville's life with his literary works. Following a couple of introductory chapters Hardwick identifies most of the remainder with specific novels or shorter works by the author. While its brevity prevents this biography from the "Penguin Lives" series from being comprehensive it still is worth reading for both the insights of Elizabeth Hardwick and her impeccable prose. With the inclusion of a thoughtful afterword and useful bibliographic suggestions for further reading this book presents a good introduction to Melville or a traversal of familiar territory for others who can read and enjoy the author's portrayal of one of America's and the World's greatest authors.
July 10, 2025
Esta es una biografía maravillosa, sobre todo porque es una biografía lectora: una lectura crítica de la obra de Melville que inevitablemente se enreda en los hechos de su vida, pero no los concibe como anécdotas o datos enciclopédicos. Hardwick es una crítica excepcional, aguda, detallista, generosa, y su prosa tiene una construcción elegante y compleja que es un suficiente para recompensar la lectura. Pero lo que más se agradece es la extensión, la capacidad de síntesis para englobar una obra tan extensa y una vida tan intensa; Hardwick sabe apuntar a lo esencial y mantener sin embargo la cualidad poética de la búsqueda errática de Melville. Uno termina este libro con ansias por leer o releer a este gigante enterrado.
February 9, 2025
2.5
La biografía de Melville confeccionada por Elizabeth Hardwick no es muy ambiciosa, aunque ella misma declara al final del ensayo no tener muy claro qué está persiguiendo con el libro. La autora establece una relación cronológica entre las obras y los principales acontecimientos biográficos de la vida de Melville. De alguna manera, todo parece entrelazado, pues Hardwick opina que el escritor neoyorquino fue el protagonista encubierto de la mayoría de sus relatos.
Aunque Hardwick profundiza de una forma bastante interesante entre la relación de Melville y Hawthorne, el resto del ensayo es bastante anecdótico. Sesgado, sin mucho en lo que apoyarse, con predilección por oraciones ortopédicas y de un estilo que le pueden haber merecido a la escritora su puesto en el campo de la novelística experimental, pero que me parece inapropiado para la redacción de biografías sobre terceros. Si bien disfruté del análisis que realiza de Moby Dick, al igual que me descubrió algunas obras desconocidas para mí de Melville (como sus poemas, Taipi o Redburn), el análisis de otras me pareció muy pobre y superficial (Bartleby) así como me faltó la reseña de Chaqueta Blanca, etc.
Un libro muy divulgativo y personalista que se hubiera concretado mejor en ensayos temáticos o en una obra de mayor envergadura, que le dedicara el tiempo justo a cada aspecto de la vida de este gigantesco autor, como se merece... pero claro, para eso ya existen las obras de Hershel Parkel y Robertson-Lorant.
Aprobado porque comparto, sin embargo, la mayor parte de las opiniones de la autora, y por el potencial que le veo y que quizá pueda explorar en otras producciones. Y porque me hizo amenos un par de viajes de tren.
La biografía de Melville confeccionada por Elizabeth Hardwick no es muy ambiciosa, aunque ella misma declara al final del ensayo no tener muy claro qué está persiguiendo con el libro. La autora establece una relación cronológica entre las obras y los principales acontecimientos biográficos de la vida de Melville. De alguna manera, todo parece entrelazado, pues Hardwick opina que el escritor neoyorquino fue el protagonista encubierto de la mayoría de sus relatos.
Aunque Hardwick profundiza de una forma bastante interesante entre la relación de Melville y Hawthorne, el resto del ensayo es bastante anecdótico. Sesgado, sin mucho en lo que apoyarse, con predilección por oraciones ortopédicas y de un estilo que le pueden haber merecido a la escritora su puesto en el campo de la novelística experimental, pero que me parece inapropiado para la redacción de biografías sobre terceros. Si bien disfruté del análisis que realiza de Moby Dick, al igual que me descubrió algunas obras desconocidas para mí de Melville (como sus poemas, Taipi o Redburn), el análisis de otras me pareció muy pobre y superficial (Bartleby) así como me faltó la reseña de Chaqueta Blanca, etc.
Un libro muy divulgativo y personalista que se hubiera concretado mejor en ensayos temáticos o en una obra de mayor envergadura, que le dedicara el tiempo justo a cada aspecto de la vida de este gigantesco autor, como se merece... pero claro, para eso ya existen las obras de Hershel Parkel y Robertson-Lorant.
Aprobado porque comparto, sin embargo, la mayor parte de las opiniones de la autora, y por el potencial que le veo y que quizá pueda explorar en otras producciones. Y porque me hizo amenos un par de viajes de tren.
November 16, 2024
Leo la traducción de Navona que acaba de salir. No es una biografía así como con información sobre el biografiado, es más un ensayo largo. Wenas cosas sobre Moby Dick y Billy Budd. Discute bien las rarezas de Melville. Quizá un poco wishi washi en ocasiones, como si pasara demasiado rápido por los temas.
September 25, 2017
A review with, or in, digressions:
Elizabeth Hardwick, who died a decade ago at 91, is having a literary revival. Her collected essays are due later this year; articles abound, and will abound. Sentences are offered for our delectation. Sarah Nicole Prickett gives us this observation of Bloomsbury: “Certain peripheral names scratch the mind.” Having written a dissertation chapter on Virginia Woolf while persisting in total indifference even to Leonard and Vanessa, to say nothing of Lytton and Duncan and Dora and Thoby and Ottoline and Roger and Julian and all the rest, I know exactly what Hardwick means. Yet I find the phrase empty, adding a mere simulacrum of the sensuous—the mind, in distinction to the brain, lacks any skin to scratch—to the venerable abstract cliché ("vex the spirits") it so theatrically revises. Brian Dillon gives us this, on Billie Holiday:
Prickett contrasts Hardwick on just these grounds to Kate Zambreno, who champions subjectivism and gender exclusivity (I confess I somewhat contemptuously ceased to read Zambreno's Heroines somewhere around the place where she pronounced that Woolf and Stein, because they succeeded in their literary aims, were "men"):
I like the old Penguin Lives books. They are the right size for literary biography, in my view. I avoid door-stopper biographies of novelists and poets. Once I have been apprised of the basic Freudian and Marxian data about who any given writer slept with and how, and the way he or she made money and how much, the rest is intellectual history. Writers' lives are in their reading and writing; what lives on writers' bookshelves is more important for their work than what happens in bedroom and bank account. Hardwick knows this. Of Melville and the frustrations of biography, she writes:
All of the above to say that I approach Hardwick, at this stage of my reading life, with a bit, just a hint really, the proverbial soupçon, whatever that means, of suspicion— with apprehensions of fatigue. These days, for me, somehow, the New York Intellectuals, The New York Review of Each Other's Books, have lost their luster. If I don't care about Bloomsbury, why should I care about this even less generally relevant coterie? Their organs have been disintermediated, their politics obsolesced, in the thresher of the twenty-first century. The problem with ressentiment and separatism, though, is that you miss too much of relevance to yourself, because you have artificially constricted your own soul too far in advance of experience. Lady Ottoline Morrell, Barbara Epstein—sure, if you're not in the club, who cares? But you would not want to miss a Virginia Woolf, not even in the twenty-first century: so to Hardwick's Melville I go.
Anyway, Hardwick was no more indigenous to that world than I am, and (I do not say "so," my overture to the identitarians two paragraphs above notwithstanding) she is good on the Marx and the Freud of Melville. Melville's family was the American equivalent of decaying aristocracy: they had the names (both Melville and Gansevoort, burnished at the Revolution), but periodically found themselves without the money: "In life it is common," notes Hardwick with irresistibly worldly mordancy, "to find persons in truth absolutely broke, and yet there they are the next day buying the newspapers; and so it went with the Melvilles and their hanging on, bleeding."
On the Freud of it all, she admits her interest in and focus on "gay Melville" in her afterword:
Hardwick is better on Melville's marriage. Her descriptions of Lizzie Shaw, braiding severity and sympathy, are superb:
This book is less a biography, Hardwick admits, than a "reading of the work," and the reading is impressionistic and appreciative rather than interpretative. This makes for some spells of summary or redescription that seem dithery and perfunctory. Yet those sentences stand out. A useful generalization—
What did I ever want from New York intellectuals before ressentiment overtook me? What do I want now that I know the literati is not necessarily any more reliable than they were when they, alongside dollars, damned Melville—damned him for a lunatic or a heretic? John Leonard, reviewing his New York Review of Books colleague in where else but The New York Review of Books, praised her thusly, while she lived, almost two decades before she got her posthumous revival:
Elizabeth Hardwick, who died a decade ago at 91, is having a literary revival. Her collected essays are due later this year; articles abound, and will abound. Sentences are offered for our delectation. Sarah Nicole Prickett gives us this observation of Bloomsbury: “Certain peripheral names scratch the mind.” Having written a dissertation chapter on Virginia Woolf while persisting in total indifference even to Leonard and Vanessa, to say nothing of Lytton and Duncan and Dora and Thoby and Ottoline and Roger and Julian and all the rest, I know exactly what Hardwick means. Yet I find the phrase empty, adding a mere simulacrum of the sensuous—the mind, in distinction to the brain, lacks any skin to scratch—to the venerable abstract cliché ("vex the spirits") it so theatrically revises. Brian Dillon gives us this, on Billie Holiday:
In her presence on these tranquil nights it was possible to experience the depths of her disbelief, to feel sometimes the mean, horrible freedom of a thorough suspicion of destiny.Perhaps one "of" too many, but I see how the sentence drifts off into polysyllabic abstractions as the singer dispels them with her disbelief, on waves of sound amid clouds of smoke. A stylist, no doubt. Dillon attempts a general characterization:
How exactly to describe Hardwick’s singular style? For sure, it is a kind of lyricism, a method that allows her as a critic to bring the reader close to her subject via the seductions first of sound and second of image and metaphor.The lyric as a mode is the expression of sensibility and self, so a lyric style must be a personal one, hence the cultivation of any style at all (plenty of authors, insensible to lyric, do not cultivate style as such). But the essayist on literary and political matters wants to express more than just her self. Literary and political argument cannot be private: they aim at suasion, imagine interlocutors. This is why sentences, no matter how original or arresting, are not enough: why, as Aristotle said, the poet is a maker of plots before a maker of verses.
Prickett contrasts Hardwick on just these grounds to Kate Zambreno, who champions subjectivism and gender exclusivity (I confess I somewhat contemptuously ceased to read Zambreno's Heroines somewhere around the place where she pronounced that Woolf and Stein, because they succeeded in their literary aims, were "men"):
Zambreno’s revisionism is separatist, making claims to equality specious. She believes that to take “the self out of our essays is a form of repression,” but I have to confess that while Chris Kraus’s epistolary I Love Dick matters hugely in a Moby-Dick world, I no longer care who loves dick. I care that Hardwick spent her life loving Melville and made her study of him, published in 2000, her excellent last work, careful by then to find the feminine in her hero as a better way of saying that there can be heroines—if we are given the time and the space, but also the covert, exacting generosity of higher standards.Which brings me around to Hardwick's little Melville study, an entry in the short-lived turn-of-the-millennium Penguin Lives series and yet not quite a biography. I read it for two reasons: because I'm both reading and teaching a great deal of Melville lately, and because I want to see the Hardwick revival for myself, whether as spirit-moved congregant or skeptical reporter.
I like the old Penguin Lives books. They are the right size for literary biography, in my view. I avoid door-stopper biographies of novelists and poets. Once I have been apprised of the basic Freudian and Marxian data about who any given writer slept with and how, and the way he or she made money and how much, the rest is intellectual history. Writers' lives are in their reading and writing; what lives on writers' bookshelves is more important for their work than what happens in bedroom and bank account. Hardwick knows this. Of Melville and the frustrations of biography, she writes:
And then, it is unsettling to have Ishamel in Pittsfield coming down to dinner at night when the talk will be of money. More dislocating to find him retiring to the bedchamber to produce, after Malcolm and Stanwix, his daughters, Elizabeth and Frances. The assembled family cannot have had any idea of this reluctant head of the household. Nor can the graduate students with their theses, the annotators, the eyes searching passages marked in his books, the critics, the biographers in long, long efforts and short ones. It must be said about Melville that he earned the mystery of hi inner life.But let us give the Kate Zambrenos of the world their due. Identity—or in the slightly more useful academo-pomo formulation, "subject position"—matters, at least until you insist that it does not. Censuring ressentiment and separatism in others, I feel it in myself, like Dostoevsky dismissing the writing of Tolstoy and Turgenev as "landlord literature" or even Junot Díaz, in the now-obligatory racialist idiom, declaiming that "that shit was too white."
All of the above to say that I approach Hardwick, at this stage of my reading life, with a bit, just a hint really, the proverbial soupçon, whatever that means, of suspicion— with apprehensions of fatigue. These days, for me, somehow, the New York Intellectuals, The New York Review of Each Other's Books, have lost their luster. If I don't care about Bloomsbury, why should I care about this even less generally relevant coterie? Their organs have been disintermediated, their politics obsolesced, in the thresher of the twenty-first century. The problem with ressentiment and separatism, though, is that you miss too much of relevance to yourself, because you have artificially constricted your own soul too far in advance of experience. Lady Ottoline Morrell, Barbara Epstein—sure, if you're not in the club, who cares? But you would not want to miss a Virginia Woolf, not even in the twenty-first century: so to Hardwick's Melville I go.
Anyway, Hardwick was no more indigenous to that world than I am, and (I do not say "so," my overture to the identitarians two paragraphs above notwithstanding) she is good on the Marx and the Freud of Melville. Melville's family was the American equivalent of decaying aristocracy: they had the names (both Melville and Gansevoort, burnished at the Revolution), but periodically found themselves without the money: "In life it is common," notes Hardwick with irresistibly worldly mordancy, "to find persons in truth absolutely broke, and yet there they are the next day buying the newspapers; and so it went with the Melvilles and their hanging on, bleeding."
On the Freud of it all, she admits her interest in and focus on "gay Melville" in her afterword:
I admit I have found it of interest and have marked the notes in the various places they are heard. What it means we cannot know. The fair young men have their dreamlike quality that fades at the break of day. And there we leave them.The academics scorn the belletrists because of this "cannot know." I have my academic side. Hardwick, whose bibliography is midcentury-focused and ends with James Wood, can perhaps be excused from the labor (she was then in her ninth decade) of parsing the prose of the late Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, but all the same, I am broadly persuaded that Sedgwick is right when (if I understand her rightly) she assigns to Melville, as to Wilde, the historical task of re-orienting sentimentality for the later nineteenth century around the figure of the beautiful boy rather than the sweet girl—from Little Eva to Billy Budd.
Hardwick is better on Melville's marriage. Her descriptions of Lizzie Shaw, braiding severity and sympathy, are superb:
In The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy would write of marriage as "two convicts serving a life sentence of hard labor welded to the same chain," which led the Countess to threaten to jump into the pond. As Elizabeth Shaw labored on a weary evening to bring the skewered, cramped handwriting to legibility, she could read of "the disenchanting glasses of matrimonial days and nights." Well, pass on in the manner of a court stenographer clicking away about heads severed with a hatchet.Eventually—at a mention of Robert Gould Shaw (as perhaps related to Mrs. Melville) that concludes a chapter—I recalled that Hardwick was married, largely unhappily (if I am not mistaken), to the author of "For the Union Dead," (not to speak of "'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage'") a tormented genius not entirely unlike Melville, and that Hardwick, like Mrs. Melville, went by "Lizzie." (Making a trio with Lowell and Melville, I am also married to a Lizzy—note the y—but will try not to dwell on the implications.) With Sarah Nicole Prickett above, I admire the feminism that sees the heroine in Melville rather than the feminism that would, to no great purpose at this late date, censure him.
This book is less a biography, Hardwick admits, than a "reading of the work," and the reading is impressionistic and appreciative rather than interpretative. This makes for some spells of summary or redescription that seem dithery and perfunctory. Yet those sentences stand out. A useful generalization—
Throughout Melville's writing there is a liberality of mind, a freedom from vulgar superstition, occasions again and again for an oratorical insertion of enlightened opinion.—or this more specific rendering of Billy Budd, just for example—
Garden of Eden before the Fall, sunlit, happy-go-lucky, blissful ignorance; there lies the brute human temptation to bewilder confidence, to test, like Claggart, the defensive powers of the beguiling, androgynous athlete.She is beautifully withering on Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, even though I think I love it, while she seems not even to like it:
The windswept Wuthering Heights had been published in 1847, five years previous to Pierre, and it could be wished, if Melville were drawn to exorcising demons, that he had read Emily Brontë; he had not.And Hardwick renders the greatest service a critic can render: adding a book to one's reading list. I probably never would have even gotten around to the autobiographical Redburn, but she makes it sound irresistible, essential.
What did I ever want from New York intellectuals before ressentiment overtook me? What do I want now that I know the literati is not necessarily any more reliable than they were when they, alongside dollars, damned Melville—damned him for a lunatic or a heretic? John Leonard, reviewing his New York Review of Books colleague in where else but The New York Review of Books, praised her thusly, while she lived, almost two decades before she got her posthumous revival:
So superior are these sentences to the churlishness that passes for criticism elsewhere in our culture—the exorcism, the vampire bite, the vanity production, the body-snatching and the sperm-sucking by pomo aliens—so generous and wise, that they seem to belong to an entirely different realm of discourse, where the liberal arts meet something like transubstantiation. […] She sends up kites; she catches lightning.When I was a teenager, I would set an alarm on Sunday mornings so I could wake up to watch Leonard deliver his own enthusiastic sentences, all incantatory litanies of incongruities, on some network show, reviewing books, reviewing TV (before the golden age!). It was also before the ubiquity of the Internet; such things as learned men and women on TV were needed; he sent me to Rushdie, to Morrison, to DeLillo. What was it I wanted? Not so much the lightning, not from the urbane belletrists. For the lightning, you need the isolatos, the crazies, the Melvilles, the ones who will not be in the club.
After his few years at sea in his twenties, Melville lived among decent, well-bred men and women, all the while knowing much of life they could not have known.And what, we men of resentment, is so great about not being in the club as such? Whence this desire to kill all normies, to take it upon ourselves to judge the landlords' literature (as if Tolstoy were not a genius) and pronounce that shit too white (as if the sentence would not read just the same if one substituted "Jewish" for "white")? The worldly-wise, even the worldly-wife, knows that once or twice one must blame the self-anointed victim:
His intelligence and remarkable talent for self-education would have opened any door for him if he had wanted doors to open, as perhaps he did not.I did not just want "oratorical insertions of enlightened opinion" from the New Yorkers either—though Leonard was a past master at that—but something, as well, a bit more jaded, rumpled, a sign, in a word, of experience. No, to the New Yorkers one goes for higher gossip, gossip in the best sense, Jamesian or Proustian or Saint-Simonian (whoever Saint-Simon was; I scarcely know), the efflorescence of the inner life as it bends toward the light of the outer without any Melvillean need for transcendence or ultimacy. The very rhythm in the cultivated sentences of secularity itself:
Critics, noting the lonely study of the philosophical questions of the mid-nineteenth century, are too quick to rob [Melville] of a melancholy atheism, the moral intransigence of one acquainted with those damned by life.Whatever form literary culture will take after the disintegration of the culture the NYRB addressed or thought it did, this "moral intransigence" praised by and found in Hardwick is well worth reviving, however one judges this sentence or that.
February 3, 2019
"Lizzie Melville, in a harmless but never-to-be-unnoted remark, wrote in a letter: 'Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you k now how such things get around'."
April 24, 2025
Una biografia més literària que exhaustiva o cronogràfica, que no per això menys profunda. Tal vegada la vida, escassament documentada, de Melville, només sigui capaç de ser transmesa així: a través d'una paraula alliberada dels requeriments formals, avessada a la captura dels moments externs definitoris i els moments interns necessàriament transcendentals d'una existència torturada. Bo.
November 17, 2024
good book of general melville criticism marking the well known sights on a heavily trodden path. was hoping for more emphasis on lesser explored works but also that’s not what this kind of thing is. definitely recommend for people who read moby dick but don’t know where to go next with melville.
February 25, 2023
edited to add:
this was a quick lil jaunt through Herman's sad weird life, which (here in 2023) is almost as strange to consider as the lives of whale hunting men on a boat for a year. It's a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll: some analysis of his writing, and some biography of his life. It was not enough of either to be much of anything, tbh, but it helped me decompress and contextualize Moby Dick a bit.
this was a quick lil jaunt through Herman's sad weird life, which (here in 2023) is almost as strange to consider as the lives of whale hunting men on a boat for a year. It's a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll: some analysis of his writing, and some biography of his life. It was not enough of either to be much of anything, tbh, but it helped me decompress and contextualize Moby Dick a bit.
July 10, 2025
The Penguin Lives Series presents biographies of celebrated writers as well as religious and historical figures in a quick easy-to-read format of about 150 pages. Seeing that the subjects chosen for the series are extremely famous, e.g. the Buddha, Martin Luther King, Jr., or James Joyce, the reader can only expect a quick introduction that might be used as a reference source inspiring further reading. The selling point of the imprint is that the chosen writers are not career biographers but known authors in their own right. From the Penguin Lives page of the publisher’s web site: “A beautifully designed, innovative series of biographies pairing celebrated writers with famous individuals who have shaped our thinking.” Thus, it would be a mistake to treat these slim volumes as standard biographies. I, personally, turn to Penguin Lives for a brief introduction or for an individual whom I already care deeply about, e.g. Herman Melville.
Seeing that I am an American born and raised in Manhattan* and had a thirty-year maritime career, largely as an unlicensed able-bodied seaman, I am a self-admitted Herman Melivlle obsessive. I have a bookcase dedicated to Melville’s fiction, Melville criticism and his life in both primary and secondary sources, many of which are out of print. I reread Moby-Dick every half decade or so, as well as his other major works. I have visited Arrowhead. I have taught the text of Bartleby as a community college English teacher and performed songs at open mics under the moniker “Bartleby, the Sailor.” And, I have slogged through several Melville biographies including the one regarded as the gold standard: Hershel Parker’s two volume monstrosity which might be better utilized for a mediaeval execution cum torture-like “death by pressing” rather than for actual reading. The two- volume set checks in at almost 2000 pages of—mostly—exceedingly dense, turgid, and uninspired prose. Parker leaves no stone unturned in the describing the minutia of Melville’s humdrum haunted 35-year existence after his literary career had fizzled out and he was left with a day job, family tragedy, and harrowing domestic strife. Although, like any other intrepid Melville acolyte, I get to brag about actually reading these volumes (and not just displaying them on my bookcase), I much prefer other biographies and studies on Melville, especially ones of more reasonable length that are not marred by the academic prose of career academics, though professor Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work avoids this fate and is both compelling and utterly inspiring.** Thus, I have always considered Elizabeth Hardwick’s to be among the more under-rated works of Melville criticism in both its readability and able to distill the major moments in his life and literary career.
Elizabeth Hardwick was a perfect choice to author the Penguin Lives “biography” of Melville. Quotation marks because the work is not so much a biography, but a study and celebration that coalesces some of the major moments in Melville’s life and works. Coming from a blue-collar family in Kentucky but rising to literary prominence among the literati in Manhattan, Hardwick immediately comprehended Melville’s outsider status, his heterodoxy, and his blue-collar autodidact proclivities. Melville came from dilapidated gentility but married well, the daughter of New England aristocracy. He went to sea as a common seaman, once, and then on a 4-year whaling voyage from which he desserts. He ran a failed farm in Western Massachusetts before being pestered by creditors. He pissed off the literary establishment in the USA from the beginning with the publication of his first work, Typee a potboiler that both condemned missionaries and depicted an exotic wanton licentiousness atypical of the era. He wrote the great American novel but was never lauded for it, dying in obscurity three decades before Ishmael and Ahab become household names for reasons other than their biblical allusions. He rebutted the misguided criticism that was bereft of acknowledging his genius with a Gothic novel that got him labeled “mad” and then followed up with two novellas for publication in serial format in magazines that are rightly regarded as masterpieces. He left a posthumous manuscript that is among the masterpieces of world literature, inspiring both an opera by Benjamin Britten and a loosely inspired film by Claire Denis that regularly appears on critics’ lists of best films ever.
Elizabeth Hardwick, along with her contemporary Renata Adler, developed a literary style in the 70’s that favors a brief paragraph or description rather than a linear plot. Consequently, Hardwick has a knack for avoiding intellectualization and over-analysis of Melville, focusing on his abhorrence of “Sultanism,” i.e. his disdain for authority and his preference for the outcasts of society, with whom he felt a kinship.
Hardwick’s brief descriptions and assessments, reminiscent of her novel 1979 Sleepless Nights, make observations that are often overlooked or glossed over in the standard biographies of Melville:
On choosing a maritime career, at least for the moment: Going to sea was an acceptable decision in the America of the late 1840’s; it was a career open to talent and, more strikingly, open to lack of talent. (Pg. 32).
Her subtle dig at Melville biographer Hershel Parker: The intrepid and imaginative biographer Hershel Parker "wants" him to have visited Judge Shaw and thereby have made a closer acquaintance with the fated Elizabeth Shaw, later to become Melville’s wife. (Pg. 41, quotation marks in lieu of italics in the quote).
And, finally, her jab at oblivious critics who impart religiosity where there is none: Critics, noting the lonely study of the philosophical questions of the mid-nineteenth century, are too quick to rob him of a melancholy atheism, the moral intransigence of one acquainted with those damned by life. (Pg. 124).
While I find Hardwick’s offering to the Penguin Lives series to be among the stronger works on the imprint, I do quibble with her straying too far into the realm of literary analysis in her observations on Moby-Dick, particularly Melville’s homoerotic descriptions in his masterpiece, but also in Reburn, White Jacket and, of course, Billy Budd. These analyses, although spot on, were virtually endemic in PhD programs in the 80’s and 90’s and dominated lectures on Melville. Professor Kenneth Silverman regurgitated the same homo-erotic lines that Hardwick does; she pretty much apologizes for focusing on this so much in the book’s “afterward.” I do prefer the literary insights of Delbanco, but Melville is so deep and rife for analysis that this is a mere quibble. Finally, I find the studies Charles Olsen*** and C.L.R. James to be deeper and more compelling. However, as a brief introduction to Melville, Elizabeth Hardwick hits the nail squarely on the head.
-------------------------------
*I was raised about 6 blocks from Melville’s last residence in Manhattan. Only a plaque remains. Ditto with the residence where he started Moby-Dick which was 2 blocks my first college dorm.
**Delbanco is the rare academic who escapes jargon and whose prose is a pleasure to read. Ditto for Christopher Ricks.
***Also reviewed by me on Goodreads.
Seeing that I am an American born and raised in Manhattan* and had a thirty-year maritime career, largely as an unlicensed able-bodied seaman, I am a self-admitted Herman Melivlle obsessive. I have a bookcase dedicated to Melville’s fiction, Melville criticism and his life in both primary and secondary sources, many of which are out of print. I reread Moby-Dick every half decade or so, as well as his other major works. I have visited Arrowhead. I have taught the text of Bartleby as a community college English teacher and performed songs at open mics under the moniker “Bartleby, the Sailor.” And, I have slogged through several Melville biographies including the one regarded as the gold standard: Hershel Parker’s two volume monstrosity which might be better utilized for a mediaeval execution cum torture-like “death by pressing” rather than for actual reading. The two- volume set checks in at almost 2000 pages of—mostly—exceedingly dense, turgid, and uninspired prose. Parker leaves no stone unturned in the describing the minutia of Melville’s humdrum haunted 35-year existence after his literary career had fizzled out and he was left with a day job, family tragedy, and harrowing domestic strife. Although, like any other intrepid Melville acolyte, I get to brag about actually reading these volumes (and not just displaying them on my bookcase), I much prefer other biographies and studies on Melville, especially ones of more reasonable length that are not marred by the academic prose of career academics, though professor Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work avoids this fate and is both compelling and utterly inspiring.** Thus, I have always considered Elizabeth Hardwick’s to be among the more under-rated works of Melville criticism in both its readability and able to distill the major moments in his life and literary career.
Elizabeth Hardwick was a perfect choice to author the Penguin Lives “biography” of Melville. Quotation marks because the work is not so much a biography, but a study and celebration that coalesces some of the major moments in Melville’s life and works. Coming from a blue-collar family in Kentucky but rising to literary prominence among the literati in Manhattan, Hardwick immediately comprehended Melville’s outsider status, his heterodoxy, and his blue-collar autodidact proclivities. Melville came from dilapidated gentility but married well, the daughter of New England aristocracy. He went to sea as a common seaman, once, and then on a 4-year whaling voyage from which he desserts. He ran a failed farm in Western Massachusetts before being pestered by creditors. He pissed off the literary establishment in the USA from the beginning with the publication of his first work, Typee a potboiler that both condemned missionaries and depicted an exotic wanton licentiousness atypical of the era. He wrote the great American novel but was never lauded for it, dying in obscurity three decades before Ishmael and Ahab become household names for reasons other than their biblical allusions. He rebutted the misguided criticism that was bereft of acknowledging his genius with a Gothic novel that got him labeled “mad” and then followed up with two novellas for publication in serial format in magazines that are rightly regarded as masterpieces. He left a posthumous manuscript that is among the masterpieces of world literature, inspiring both an opera by Benjamin Britten and a loosely inspired film by Claire Denis that regularly appears on critics’ lists of best films ever.
Elizabeth Hardwick, along with her contemporary Renata Adler, developed a literary style in the 70’s that favors a brief paragraph or description rather than a linear plot. Consequently, Hardwick has a knack for avoiding intellectualization and over-analysis of Melville, focusing on his abhorrence of “Sultanism,” i.e. his disdain for authority and his preference for the outcasts of society, with whom he felt a kinship.
Hardwick’s brief descriptions and assessments, reminiscent of her novel 1979 Sleepless Nights, make observations that are often overlooked or glossed over in the standard biographies of Melville:
On choosing a maritime career, at least for the moment: Going to sea was an acceptable decision in the America of the late 1840’s; it was a career open to talent and, more strikingly, open to lack of talent. (Pg. 32).
Her subtle dig at Melville biographer Hershel Parker: The intrepid and imaginative biographer Hershel Parker "wants" him to have visited Judge Shaw and thereby have made a closer acquaintance with the fated Elizabeth Shaw, later to become Melville’s wife. (Pg. 41, quotation marks in lieu of italics in the quote).
And, finally, her jab at oblivious critics who impart religiosity where there is none: Critics, noting the lonely study of the philosophical questions of the mid-nineteenth century, are too quick to rob him of a melancholy atheism, the moral intransigence of one acquainted with those damned by life. (Pg. 124).
While I find Hardwick’s offering to the Penguin Lives series to be among the stronger works on the imprint, I do quibble with her straying too far into the realm of literary analysis in her observations on Moby-Dick, particularly Melville’s homoerotic descriptions in his masterpiece, but also in Reburn, White Jacket and, of course, Billy Budd. These analyses, although spot on, were virtually endemic in PhD programs in the 80’s and 90’s and dominated lectures on Melville. Professor Kenneth Silverman regurgitated the same homo-erotic lines that Hardwick does; she pretty much apologizes for focusing on this so much in the book’s “afterward.” I do prefer the literary insights of Delbanco, but Melville is so deep and rife for analysis that this is a mere quibble. Finally, I find the studies Charles Olsen*** and C.L.R. James to be deeper and more compelling. However, as a brief introduction to Melville, Elizabeth Hardwick hits the nail squarely on the head.
-------------------------------
*I was raised about 6 blocks from Melville’s last residence in Manhattan. Only a plaque remains. Ditto with the residence where he started Moby-Dick which was 2 blocks my first college dorm.
**Delbanco is the rare academic who escapes jargon and whose prose is a pleasure to read. Ditto for Christopher Ricks.
***Also reviewed by me on Goodreads.
May 26, 2014
Elizabeth Hardwick’s last book, wherein she shares her considerable enthusiasm for Melville. (Her four-page discussion of Bartleby is a revised version of her essay published in 1983.) Of course, in this short, highly readable book (this is in the Penguin Lives Series) you get neither a full biography nor a full critical review – which she’s the first to admit. Her purpose is to promote reading of Typee, Redburn, and The Confidence-Man in addition to the more popular works like Moby-Dick. I certainly agree about that, but wish she had something more to say about Melville’s poetry, and less re-telling of Moby-Dick. It’s interesting that she praises and relies on and even quotes from the first volume of Hershel Parker’s Melville biography (although I take it that Parker does not approve of her book), but at the time she wrote it, the second volume (1852-1891) was not yet published. So I wonder how she might have done things differently had she had the full biography. Includes a selected bibliography, but no index.
January 21, 2016
There's a little more that could be said about the life, and a lot more that could be said about the work (Hardwick freely admits to skipping over Mardi, Pierre, Clarel, some of the short stories and all the poetry that isn't Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War), but otherwise this is fantastic; a genuine sympathy and admiration for how Melville persisted in writing despite everything he suffered, respect for the ambiguity and mystery that still hangs over so much of what we know about him, unsparing clarity of insight (I can get very protective and outspoken over Melville, but I was in agreement with all of this; plus the chapter on Moby-Dick articulates Ahab and Starbuck wonderfully), and every so often, an absolutely gorgeous sentence. The best way to describe her prose is gemlike: luminous, hard-edged, opulent and beautiful.
If you've read Moby-Dick and are curious as to what kind of mind makes a book like that, this is the best place to start. (though John Bryant's A Half-Known Life may also be worth looking at, depending on how it turns out.)
If you've read Moby-Dick and are curious as to what kind of mind makes a book like that, this is the best place to start. (though John Bryant's A Half-Known Life may also be worth looking at, depending on how it turns out.)
November 30, 2014
A short, impressionistic survey of the author’s biography, works, and criticism about them. Hardwick confesses in her afterword to more emphasis on Melville’s most popular prose, Moby-Dick, Billy Budd and “Bartleby the Scrivener," admitting that “critics have found much of interest in,” what she terms, “the forbidding texts:” Mardi, Pierre, and Clarel.
“In the matter of biography, I have given space to the obsessive relation with Hawthorne and to the ‘homoerotic’ refrain throughout the books. This recurrent musical theme has not done Melville’s reputation any harm in the present landscape.”
This makes the book is a pleasantly idiosyncratic read.
“In the matter of biography, I have given space to the obsessive relation with Hawthorne and to the ‘homoerotic’ refrain throughout the books. This recurrent musical theme has not done Melville’s reputation any harm in the present landscape.”
This makes the book is a pleasantly idiosyncratic read.
November 5, 2025
The sea and the Whale, the Leviathan, monarch of the deep, preternatural immensity, exorbitant appetite, "a barrel of herrings in his belly"; hairless blubber, horizontal tail - the lure of the whale himself, his island bulk, "one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air." We take Melville at his word, for he is the historian, the biographer of the whale; the Sperm Whale with its precious oils and bones, the shy Fin Back, the Hyena Whale, the Right Whale, the Killer Whale. Cetology - a challenge to the mind and soul; the whale a fish for Melville, not a mammal, however warm-blooded the great one may be.
To go from contemplation of the Whale to Whaling is a brute descension should youthful wanderlust see the world by this dark contract, by signing on. It's a floating abattoir, an abysmal duty to sight one or a group coming up for air, to man the boats hanging on the ship's side and in the boiling splash of the water with appalling human effort match the whale's torrential struggle with the flying spears. Caught, lashed to the boat's side, gallons and gallons of blood and the sharks competing. There it is, the huge, dying cargo, then dead, ready for "cutting in." The thick blubber to be stripped off, not in sections but as a blanket. "Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it ... for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky."
To go from contemplation of the Whale to Whaling is a brute descension should youthful wanderlust see the world by this dark contract, by signing on. It's a floating abattoir, an abysmal duty to sight one or a group coming up for air, to man the boats hanging on the ship's side and in the boiling splash of the water with appalling human effort match the whale's torrential struggle with the flying spears. Caught, lashed to the boat's side, gallons and gallons of blood and the sharks competing. There it is, the huge, dying cargo, then dead, ready for "cutting in." The thick blubber to be stripped off, not in sections but as a blanket. "Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it ... for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky."
August 21, 2017
One of the Penguin Brief Lives, similar in brevity to Nathaniel Philbrick's Why Read Moby Dick? Hardwick outlines Melville's own early experiences at sea, examines his family life (such as it was) and his relations with other writers. She records his sad, long life (in spite of finally writing Billy Budd virtually on his death-bed), never well-known. His New York Times obituary recorded his first name as Henry. She also describes each of his early novels in some detail and wonders at "the fantastic explosion of genius in Moby Dick." She is vivid about his wrestling with Providence and futurity, God and nothingness, in what Hawthorne called his relentless "wandering to and fro over these deserts...dismal and monotonous." She is remarkably skilled at reporting without endorsing many different ways of reading him, finally saying "Melville's pages are the object of wild overinterpretation, even if it must be said that his genius is of such peculiarity, such insistence, discursiveness--or prolixity if the manner doesn't please--that it lends itself to flights of meaning." An excellent introduction to his life.
January 10, 2025
Hardwick’s biography of Melville is similar to her magnificent literary essays. Rather than offering a complete life story, she focuses on Melville’s writing life. Melville the man remains a shadowy, moody character. But Hardwick’s approach may be the only one possible. She writes that Melville “is not a painter of his own face in the mirror…He is a mystery, and perhaps, like Bartleby the Scrivner in a late story, ‘no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of the man.”
I valued Hardwick’s careful analysis of Melville’s novels and stories, but what I love most is her incisive comments which take us straight to the heart of her subject's situation. Of the genteel poverty in which Melville was raised, Hardwick writes, “Thrift is as unpleasant as poverty. Nothing to offer in daily life except reality.”
She quotes the ever-cranky D.H. Lawrence to great effect. But she also pays homage to Melville’s perseverance. There is something impressive in his doggedness: “Melville writes fiercely, anxiously, tirelessly - that’s all of his life; even in the years of ‘withdrawal’ he does what he can after the days at the Custom House. He is in love with language, with reading, thinking.” So is Hardwick and her biography of Melville makes for a happy pairing.
I valued Hardwick’s careful analysis of Melville’s novels and stories, but what I love most is her incisive comments which take us straight to the heart of her subject's situation. Of the genteel poverty in which Melville was raised, Hardwick writes, “Thrift is as unpleasant as poverty. Nothing to offer in daily life except reality.”
She quotes the ever-cranky D.H. Lawrence to great effect. But she also pays homage to Melville’s perseverance. There is something impressive in his doggedness: “Melville writes fiercely, anxiously, tirelessly - that’s all of his life; even in the years of ‘withdrawal’ he does what he can after the days at the Custom House. He is in love with language, with reading, thinking.” So is Hardwick and her biography of Melville makes for a happy pairing.
November 18, 2019
A fascinating short study of the life and works of the mysterious writer, Herman Melville. As author Elizabeth Hardwick says at the end of a chapter, “But then, so much about Melville is ‘seems to be, may have been’, and ‘perhaps’”.
Unfortunately for readers and scholars, Melville was apparently a serial burner of correspondence and other papers. What we know of him comes from his own work, replies to his correspondence saved by contemporaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the fact he had well-connected relatives.
Elizabeth Hardwick does a brilliant job of synthesising her own impressions of Melville’s work with what Melville’s contemporary critics said and what his most prominent biographers, Hershel Parker and Laurie Robertson-Lorant, have written.
Unfortunately for readers and scholars, Melville was apparently a serial burner of correspondence and other papers. What we know of him comes from his own work, replies to his correspondence saved by contemporaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the fact he had well-connected relatives.
Elizabeth Hardwick does a brilliant job of synthesising her own impressions of Melville’s work with what Melville’s contemporary critics said and what his most prominent biographers, Hershel Parker and Laurie Robertson-Lorant, have written.
October 6, 2024
The book begins:
"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 that sparkling waters and their roll-on beauty and, when angry, their powerful, treacherous indifference to the floundering boat and the hapless mariners."
And it doesn't get better from there. I'm not entirely certain the author knows what she means, but she clearly a fan of word salad and bizarre combinations of words that might simultaneously be run-on sentences AND sentence fragments.
"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 that sparkling waters and their roll-on beauty and, when angry, their powerful, treacherous indifference to the floundering boat and the hapless mariners."
And it doesn't get better from there. I'm not entirely certain the author knows what she means, but she clearly a fan of word salad and bizarre combinations of words that might simultaneously be run-on sentences AND sentence fragments.
October 28, 2024
Don’t come to Elizabeth Hardwick for a by-the-book bio of the “Moby-Dick” master. (Andrew Delbanco’s “Melville: His World and Work” is a very fine, more traditional alternative.) Her slim essay-poem was part of a ’90s-’00s Penguin series of authors-on-authors that’s so eclectically weird—Janet Malcom on Chekov. Edna O’Brien on Joyce. Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse!—it’s hard to believe it ever existed. Hardwick likes anguished artist/closeted homosexual/bad husband Melville more than high seas adventurer Melville. Given her own battles with the blank page—not to mention with her husband, poet Robert Lowell—maybe Penguin knew what they were doing.
August 6, 2017
Short and interesting, but almost too short. It's a good book for someone not familiar with Melville or his works. Hardwick admits in the afterward to giving both Pierre and Clarel short shrift... the absence of which hurts her attempt to discuss reoccurring themes and motifs in Melville's work. Much was made of the homoerotic elements in his work, beginning in Redburn; but rather than treat this critically, it reads more like gossip.
December 26, 2024
No tengo muy claro que este libro aporte algo más de las biografías ya existentes de Melville, pero como no los he leído, algo ha hecho. Me ha gustado su estilo fresco, pero no me ha aportado gran cosa, especialmente sobre la mente atormentada de Herman, que tan maravillosamente explota en Moby Dick. Una obra que me ha atraído siempre, y que me llevó a leer sobre ballenas y sobre Nantucket, la isla norteamericana ballenera.
February 3, 2021
I'm realizing the fruitlessness of pursuing biographies of melville hoping to get to the bottom of something, now knowing that he burned all his letters, drafts, notes, etc., or had his family burn them. I appreciated how this angle looked to his autobiographical novels as a way of reading into his family and how it emphasized his tragic marriage. I wanted more on homoeroticism (always more!).
February 22, 2024
A primer on Melville, the writer. Ironically, the man who wrote 11 novels in 10 years is almost as enigmatic a figure as Shakespeare. Hardwick relates Melville's plots and some insightful reflections but its purpose is only introductory, so don't expect much detail or elaboration. Better to go ahead and read Melville.
August 5, 2024
Lovely, quick trip through Melville’s life and his bibliography. There’s a fixation on his latent bisexuality that I would consider odd/morbid/creepy if I didn’t also have a fixation on his latent bisexuality
Wait is Hardwick a fujoshi
Wait is Hardwick a fujoshi
January 5, 2025
A valuable addendum to my earlier read of Moby Dick, offering surprising illumination into the author's complex life, particularly the difficult later years after the "failure" of his great masterpiece.
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