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Herman Melville |
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"Herman Melville " by Elizabeth Hardwick, Viking, Hardcover, 2000,161 pages, $19.95
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Book Review by Adam Hyla, Editor
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When I was 21, my big-city cousins went on a mission to get me drunk in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. En route we found ourselves on an empty street, the end of which was plugged by a police barricade. All around there was sound: cars, people, an electric hum that must be the vibration of real cities. (Seattle doesn’t have it, so don’t bother checking.) My two cousins — older, beautiful — walked up and talked a broad-shouldered cop into letting us pass. Champagne bottle in tow, my black-clad cousins strode toward Times Square like they owned it. I recognized the same style and moxie in the work that New York Review of Books co-founder Elizabeth Hardwick brought to American letters for decades. Her take on the life and extensive writings of Melville is a delight for its class: where other literary historical analysis gets heavy, she casually points out how little is on the table: “…so much about Melville is it seems to be, may have been, and perhaps.” Perhaps because no one’s term paper is on the line, Hardwick doesn’t see the point of arguing for one grand conclusion about Moby-Dick — though she redeems the maniacal Ahab’s first mate, Starbuck, “his reason and experience a torture, for he is standing and waiting for a doom foreseen.” Even the man himself is a bit more prosaic than we often allow: in an era when novelists weren’t quite so lionized, Melville was acting not as the dark oracle of Americana but as a middle-class husband determined to sow his hard seagoing lessons and harvest a remunerative career — so his kids could stay in school and refrain from peddling sweets door to door. |
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