The Melville-Hawthorne Connection: A Study of the Literary Friendship by Erik Hage (review)

This lively, readable book offers little new for the Melville scholar but will serve students and non-specialists as a reliable guide to the time-line and evolving emotional tenor (insofar as one can discern it) of the perennially fascinating Melville-Hawthorne relationship. Hage draws heavily on the extant correspondence and responsibly synthesizes the work of the two authors’ many biographers, negotiating interpretations that variously privilege financial imperatives, the lasting psychological impact of early life, the pressures of growing families, and literary ambitions. He resists reading the relationship as erotic, stressing instead the two men’s shared connection as “writers,” an identity whose nineteenth-century texture he leaves relatively unexamined. The volume’s strength lies in its careful, concise reconstruction of the relationship as it unfolded in 1850 and 1851 and in Hage’s assertion that Hawthorne exercised an immeasurable influence on Moby-Dick, a claim worth pondering with greater attention to textual detail than Hage himself provides. Readers will find richer explorations of this iconic friendship and its literary ramifications elsewhere—most notably, in Jana Argersinger and Leland Person’s edited collection Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship (2008)—but those new to Melville studies will appreciate the pithy overview.