NONFICTION - June 19, 1994

A COMMON LIFE: Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence by David Larkin (Simon & Schuster: $25; 512 pp.) A breathless tour of America’s literary landscape by way of its promontories, “A Common Life” succeeds as a text, a lively doctoral thesis, but will probably lose some casual travelers along the way. David Larkin deftly, if arbitrarily, pairs eight of our giants, generation by overlapping generation--Hawthorne-Melville, Henry James-Edith Wharton, Porter-Welty, Elizabeth Bishop-Robert Lowell--and examines the influence each had on the other’s oeuvre, and on succeeding pairs. Wildly opposite in temperament, each “a solitary who could not live alone,” they developed friendships based initially on mutual admiration (though James could never quite get the hang of Wharton’s work, calling one of her best stories “a masterly little achievement,” emphasis on little).

Puritanical Hawthorne (“not an enjoying person”) fed off Melville’s “heated devotion . . . just a whisker shy of the erotic.” Hawthorne’s dark depth in turn affected the hitherto accessible Melville, notably in “Moby Dick” (one can only imagine the original: “Call me Ishmael. I’ll be your waiter tonight.”). James, to Wharton, was “a trophy she desperately wanted to carry off.” For his part, Gentleman James wanted to “pump the pure essence of my wisdom and experience into her.” Flamboyant, restless, self-centered Porter, who “thanked God for making her beautiful,” gave plain, sweet, modest Welty an indispensable leg up, professionally, simply because she recognized Welty’s towering gift for fiction. Charming, brilliant, Boston-aristocratic, poet Lowell, aggressively heterosexual and periodically mad, remained friends for 40 years with obsessively reticent, lesbian poet Bishop, in spite of her visceral dislike of his “confessional poetry.”

It would help to have read everything all eight have written. But if you’re game, you’ll find “A Common Life” stimulating.