NP Hiter, Mussolini, Hearst

[Doug Millison]

"Melville in Love" by Elizabeth Hardwick
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20000615015F

It's an essay that appears to be adapted from her book, which I 
haven't seen yet, and which is the object of the review Jody pointed 
out.

Like another author many of us love (and some of us revere), Melville 
appears to have disowned certain of his earlier literary creations:

"[....] Melville's state of mind is revealed
  some years later with a purity of
  expressiveness in the novel Redburn,
  one of his most appealing and certainly
  the most personal of his works. He is
  said to have more or less disowned the
  book, more rather than less, since he
  claimed it was only written for tobacco.
  Whether this is a serious misjudgment
  of his own work or a withdrawal, after
  the fact, from having shown his early
  experience of life without his notable
  reserve and distance is, of course, not
  clear. For a contemporary reader,
  Redburn, the grief-stricken youth, cast
  among the vicious, ruined men on the
  ship, walking the streets of Liverpool in
  the late 1830s, even meeting with the
  homosexual hustler Harry Bolton might
  have more interest than Typee's
  breadfruit and coconut island and the
  nymph, Fayaway. But it is only pertinent
  to think of Redburn on its own: a novel
  written after Typee, Omoo, and Mardi
  in the year 1849, ten years after he left
  Lansingburgh to go on his first voyage."

Also, like Pynchon, Melville seems to have had a sensitivity to the 
plight of children abandoned or discarded or otherwise abused by 
their elders:

"[....]Nothing in Melville is more beautifully
  expressed than the mood of early
  sorrow in the forlorn passage at the
  opening of Redburn. It brings to mind
  the extraordinarily affecting last word in
  Moby-Dick. The word is orphan. "

Of tangential interest, perhaps, to readers who wonder what of his 
own sexuality if any Pynchon may have projected into his writings:

"Some commentators speculate that Melville's
  dislike of Redburn was owing to his
  subsequent realization that he had exposed
  his own homoerotic longings. Whatever his
  unconscious or privately acknowledged feelings
  may have been, Melville was innocent of the
  instinct for self-protection on the page. "

I've read many of Hardwick's essays in NYRB over the years. She's a 
fine writer.

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