Dark strangeness

HERMAN MELVILLE.

By Elizabeth Hardwick.

Viking; 160 pages; $19.95.

Weidenfeld; £12.99

WITH a writer such as Herman Melville, whose exorbitance is matched by a mountainous bibliography, a brief pocket life might seem a paradox. But since so much of his story is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, “seems to be, may have been, and perhaps”, she is able to turn it to advantage. While she is generous to Melville's academic biographers, to their hundreds of pages of “just about everything under the sod” including “picnics, headaches, housekeeping”, she herself, a distinguished American critic and novelist, is thankful, you sense, for the freedom to look for him in essence, as it were—in his books.

Melville's “deepest attachments” she says, “were to travelling, getting away and writing, writing, writing”. Thus, her opening chapter is no genealogical recitation, but an evocation of the Melville of “Moby Dick”: “sound the name and it's to be the romance of the sea, the vast mysterious waters for which a thousand adjectives cannot suffice.” Of course she does give us the salient facts: the improvident Melvilles, a Boston merchant family, educated and sometimes dashing; the Gansevoorts, his mother's Dutch-settler family, ambitious and sometimes snobby; Herman's childhood, upwardly and downwardly mobile, as his father's affairs prospered or, more often, failed. Melville senior died when the boy was 13, leaving his family in genteel poverty, from which, seven years later, in 1839, the young Melville escaped as cabin boy on a merchant ship bound for Liverpool.

The autobiographical “Redburn”, based on this English voyage, was written a decade later, after his whaling years in the South Seas which resulted in his first two novels, “Typee” and “Omoo”. These essentially “boy's books”, Ms Hardwick calls them (not disparagingly), had some success, allowing Melville to get engaged to Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of an old family friend who became chief justice of Massachusetts. Thus began what D.H. Lawrence was to describe as “50 years of disillusion”—adding dryly: “A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture box. A wife: a thing with clay feet. Life: a sort of disgrace.”

Ms Hardwick argues with any notion of Melville as pitiable, but she does concede some truth in Lawrence's desperate summary. On the face of it, Melville's life was marked by failure: failure to make money, to obtain appointments, to achieve critical recognition, and in the final 19 years as a clerk in the Boston Custom House, failure of temper—enough to drive his wife to the brink of divorce. Ms Hardwick makes the question of Melville's homo-eroticism deeply interesting in this connection. She points (as others have) to the male brothel scene in “Redburn”, to the pretty boys and dandies in the novels, to the intimacies between Ishmael and Queequeg in “Moby Dick”, and to the amazingly frank eroticism elsewhere in that book. But always alert to the danger of modern overinterpretation, she notes the ingenuousness, the innocence inherent in such frankness and, given how little his readers seemed to be aware, she wonders—no more—how much Melville understood himself.

It is a mark of Ms Hardwick's critical subtlety throughout. Her readings of Melville are alive with detail and analysis—a surprising word here, a dying cadence there, the shapes and structure of plot and meaning—but she is above all conscious of the inexplicable in his work. Her own language, dramatic, highly wrought, poetic, sometimes even archaic, is a measure of her sense of this, particularly in the chapter on “Moby Dick”. It is perhaps an acquired taste, like Melville himself; but its effect is to allow Ms Hardwick to hold his characters to the light (the pages on his short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, a version of an earlier essay, are particularly rewarding), while leaving their strangeness dark.