[QSI]⋙ [PDF] Herman Melville Elizabeth Hardwick 9780736656894 Books

Herman Melville Elizabeth Hardwick 9780736656894 Books

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Herman Melville Elizabeth Hardwick 9780736656894 Books

Having read the outright hostility to biographers in Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays, I was surprised she undertook on, but not surprised that it was widely panned. The Penguin Lives Herman Melville is primarily a reading of his writings with a minimum of biography. In that she was a perspicacious writer on Melville’s work (essays in the Collected Essays on “Bartleby” and “Billy Budd” are largely incorporated, I think her book a fine introduction to Melville’s writing, with enough to see what an unpleasant life he led. Still, I’d like to know what he did working the for New York Customs House for 19 years, and how much opportunity it afforded him to write (poetry that is of no interest to me).

Hardwick wrote that “Melville’s pages are the subject of wild overinterpretation.” She maintained sobriety, rising to defend Redburn and The Confidence Man. In prose only occasionally overblown as Melville’s so often was, she was quite sympathetic to his wife, Elizabeth, who bore two sons who predeceased Herman. She also gave birth to two daughters, one of whom later took an interest in her father’s writings (or at least copyrights to them). How conscious Melville was of his homoerotic yearning remains an open question for Hardwick, who does not dispute that there is a lot of evidence in the texts, which may have been missed in the 1850s (but not, apparently, by the 1920s, when “Billy Budd” was published and celebrated).

(For a more conventional biography, there is Laurie Robertson-Lorant's, which is four times as long and more detailed about his and hie wife's many family connections.)


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Herman Melville Elizabeth Hardwick 9780736656894 Books Reviews

Unlike most of the Penguin Life books, this bio is uninformative and disjointed. Surely, a great writer like Melville deserves better.
I read about 20 biographies in the Penguin Lives series, and I have enjoyed almost all of them. This is the worst I've come across. The author is ponderous. I can't get through it. Many books begin in a slow and ponderous way, apparently for the author to show off his chops, and it's a bad habit that really needs to end. But this book never advances beyond the slow start. The whole book is that way. I like the concept of concise biographies, but not when the writing style makes a short book seem endless.
An unconventional biography, to say the least.

It's as though the author wrote a bunch of rhapsodic paragraphs musing on various aspects of Melville's life and works, and then lumped them together and called them a biography.

It's on this side of coherence, but only just.
This book, while not "comprehensive", is intelligent and imaginative. The author offers vital insights into various elements of Melville's life and major works. It's not scholarly or academic, but from the a different place. And that's a good thing. The writing style is fresh--none of the lit-speak or pomp that can ruin a book.
This is not the Newton Arvin book. It is rather a biography by his granddaughter Eleanor Melville Metcalf compiled of Melville's correspondences & the recollections of family members. Will post further once the book is read ...
Newton Arvin provides an involving overview of Herman Melville's personal life and literary career in this biography, which won the National Book Award in 1950. In contrast to many current biographies, Arvin clearly wrote this book and did not simply edit his lectures. This counts with me, since many biographies nowadays have the pace and style of lectures, not the elegance and precision of great written prose. The result, in this case, is that HERMAN MELVILLE is its own literary experience, not simply informed dictation transferred to the page.

Certainly, Herman Melville wrote what Arvin calls "one very great book." And Arvin does a wonderful job describing what he believes is great about MOBY DICK in his excellent chapter "The Whale". But he does an even better job addressing this question Why didn't Melville write more great books after hitting his stride in MOBY DICK? The short answers to this question are burnout and Melville's failure, after MOBY DICK, to find a form to match his gifts. As Arvin explains, Melville chose, after his great book "...to write in a form that was as inexpressive to him as a foreign tongue." In a sense, this makes Melville's decline a lesson to all writers, as they grope for the form and structure that celebrates their content.

Although published in 1950, HERMAN MELVILLE holds up very well. By current mores, this biography probably underplays Melville's sexual issues and overplays its occasional Freudian insights. But the book is NOT dated.
A spirited 19th century man with joy in his heart as long as the wind was at his back, and the sail was hoisted.
Other wise, he got bogged down in the petty struggles of New England pride, sentimentality, and the need to be middle class. Something this "pen man" would find hard to achieve. What with his exotic tales of the sea, far flung islands, and the sexual morays of south sea island folk. It didn't help to have a passion for a fellow writer of a different sort. But, he wasn't alone in this, it was just not the age to express such sentiment.
Having read the outright hostility to biographers in Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays, I was surprised she undertook on, but not surprised that it was widely panned. The Penguin Lives Herman Melville is primarily a reading of his writings with a minimum of biography. In that she was a perspicacious writer on Melville’s work (essays in the Collected Essays on “Bartleby” and “Billy Budd” are largely incorporated, I think her book a fine introduction to Melville’s writing, with enough to see what an unpleasant life he led. Still, I’d like to know what he did working the for New York Customs House for 19 years, and how much opportunity it afforded him to write (poetry that is of no interest to me).

Hardwick wrote that “Melville’s pages are the subject of wild overinterpretation.” She maintained sobriety, rising to defend Redburn and The Confidence Man. In prose only occasionally overblown as Melville’s so often was, she was quite sympathetic to his wife, Elizabeth, who bore two sons who predeceased Herman. She also gave birth to two daughters, one of whom later took an interest in her father’s writings (or at least copyrights to them). How conscious Melville was of his homoerotic yearning remains an open question for Hardwick, who does not dispute that there is a lot of evidence in the texts, which may have been missed in the 1850s (but not, apparently, by the 1920s, when “Billy Budd” was published and celebrated).

(For a more conventional biography, there is Laurie Robertson-Lorant's, which is four times as long and more detailed about his and hie wife's many family connections.)