Hawthorne, Melville

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 27

Hawthorne, Melville

Pen Friends. By Michael Thorn. MacMillan, 1988. 349 pp. $49.95. (Reviewed by Alan Conway) The author of this novel is without doubt a product of one of the Schools of American Studies which sprang up in Britain in the 1950 s and 19605. Endless lectures and seminars in American literature have clearly not been sat through in vain because he demonstrates a complete mastery of the New England literary scene in a book which is quite a “tour de force.” By blending together fact and fiction and biography with literary criticism, Thorn has Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville living near to each other with their families in Massachusetts in 1850. The scene is thus set for a tremendous collaboration between these two literary giants, Hawthorne achieving fame with “The Scarlet Letter” and Melville with “Moby Dick.” As it happened, Hawthorne who was 15 years older than Melville was reluctant to indulge in great philosophical and literary. discussions and eventually their friendship fizzled out on the docks in Liverpool in 1856. Thorn has done an extremely good job of re-creating an atmosphere of effete unworldliness in rural New England as, for example, in such lines as: “Late in the evening, his body weary from further chopping of wood,

and his heart pining for his de.ar Little wife, Mr Hawthorne sat in the Grandmother Chair winding and rewinding Mr Thoreau’s musical box, until the peculiar sweetness of its melody evaporated and he might almost have thrown the little machine clear into the garden.” In some respects this novel has a similarity to Lady Barker’s nineteenthcentury journal of life here in Canterbury, although colonial life in New Zealand was far more rugged than that in New England. Moreover, she would have left both Hawthorne and Melville exhausted by her energy and exuberance. The author does try once or twice to make his major characters a little more robust by having Hawthorne, for instance, indulge in a little genteel lusting after a servant-girl. But where matters sexual are concerned there is only the occasional discreet twitch. If Thorn imagines that culturehungry Kiwis will be besieging the bookshops with $5O notes clutched in their would-be-work-calloused hands, he is likely to be disappointed. This cleverly written book based on a great deal of research is certain to appeal to the Am.Lit.cognoscenti. The general reader, however, will find it so slow paced as to make it only marginally more exciting than watching grass grow at a five-day Test match.