Volume 47, Number 12 · July 20, 2000
The Wise Woman and the Whale
By John Leonard
Herman Melville
by Elizabeth Hardwick
Lipper/Viking, 161 pp., $19.95
Elizabeth Hardwick and the whale: although it is very dark inside the whiteness, she will read her way by oil lamp to Melville, 'the most bookish of writers, a tireless midnight student.' Thigh-high in ambergris and spermaceti, she makes herself as much at home as on the prison ship, or the cannibal islands, or the Berkshire farm where Herman wrote in twelve-hour shifts, or inside the Manhattan townhouse down whose stairs he may have tossed his wife. Wherever and whatever—novels, letters, and biographies; marriage and derangement; carnival or crypt—Hardwick always moves in with her subject. And before she entertains, she will have picked the locks, ransacked the closets, let the madwomen out of the attic, brought up bodies from the basement, and bounced on the double bed like Goldilocks or Freud.
Review, 3862 words
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