This feat-how others achieved it, and how she might-was among her most lasting concerns. Melville’s “I” let the body’s biography in to the right degree and at the right time to capture the biography of the mind. But it did have something to do with such things. The mind’s life was not reducible to being born in Boston, sailing around for a while, and then returning at journey’s end. Hardwick held dear one of literature’s oldest ambitions: to preserve the life of the mind past the life of the body. The use and misuse of the first-person pronoun were among the most enduring preoccupations of Hardwick’s long career. But you had none too clear an idea of how far down the bottom was. You could always tell when you were looking out at the sun from beneath its waters. An “observer” and a “narrator,” his first person was a coloring for the world. Melville’s “I,” on the other hand, exceeded his social being. She commented disparagingly of Dana’s legible personality: “His ‘I’ is everywhere present, telling us who he is”: a “Bostonian,” or “a ‘normal’ young man,” or “one who has dropped out of Harvard but will go back at the end of the journey.” If there was one thing that did not interest Hardwick in first-person writing, it was the declaration of one’s identity. Hardwick compared “Melville’s ‘I’” to the confessional “I” of Richard Henry Dana, a well-born contemporary of his who had also gone to sea and written about it. And yet Melville himself was somehow elusive. His celebrated sea novels made pervasive reference to these experiences. Born into a prominent New York family, Melville had shipped as a common sailor as a young man. She cherished Melville for bearing out her early maxim. “People do not live their biographies,” she insisted in an essay for the Partisan Review, where she began her career as an essayist in the 1940s. A biographical critic and an autobiographical novelist, Hardwick nonetheless relished intricate mismatches between the life as experienced and the life as written. Hardwick commented, “So much about Melville is seems to be, may have been, and perhaps.” “The living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait,” wrote Melville in Moby-Dick. Like Moby-Dick, Herman Melville underscored the impossibility of ever coming to a final account of its majestic subject. The final book and first biography that Elizabeth Hardwick wrote was Herman Melville, which appeared in 2000, the year she turned 84.
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