During August of
1849 an explosive friendship began between Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Herman Melville. Although it only lasted a year and a half, it was
during this time that Melville wrote one of the few American, true
masterpieces which he dedicated to Hawthorne with "In token of my
admiration for his genius." Hawthorne was at the height of his
literary success, having just published The Scarlet
Letter and then The House of the Seven
Gables. He was thrilled by the renegade maverick who had
sailed the seven seas and come back again to the summer mountains of
western Massachusetts. They visited each other often. Only a few
months after it began, their friendship and their separate lives took
dangerous turns for the worse. Melville published his genius
Moby-Dick to little notice except out and out
derision in the press, an event that he never was able to understand.
Hawthorne, afraid of the dark door he had opened in The
Scarlet Letter, retreated into idyllic fairy tales that sold
well but showed little of his inner life or dire, emotional struggles.
Incredibly, after the disaster of Moby-Dick, Melville
went to work for twenty years as an ordinary custom's inspector in
downtown New York. For twenty years he published nothing but poems and
then simply nothing. His son committed suicide and he began his
terminal relationship with alcohol. Hawthorne took a patrician's job
as consul to Liverpool, cutting himself off physically and mentally
from the "blue room" he had entered in New England with Melville. He
died a relatively young man that even he described as "another pallid
phantom gliding noiselessly up and down the stairs"
AXIS figures out what may have happened to these men as they crashed
into each other like a freight train wreck, and then spun away to
lives of darkness, boredom and frustration. Using impressions, film,
music, Hawthorne and Melville's brilliant, sad and funny writing and
every possible means, AXIS unfolds the interiors of two of the
greatest minds in the artistic world.
During August of
1849 an explosive friendship began between Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Herman Melville. Although it only lasted a year and a half, it was
during this time that Melville wrote one of the few American, true
masterpieces which he dedicated to Hawthorne with "In token of my
admiration for his genius." Hawthorne was at the height of his
literary success, having just published The Scarlet
Letter and then The House of the Seven
Gables. He was thrilled by the renegade maverick who had
sailed the seven seas and come back again to the summer mountains of
western Massachusetts. They visited each other often. Only a few
months after it began, their friendship and their separate lives took
dangerous turns for the worse. Melville published his genius
Moby-Dick to little notice except out and out
derision in the press, an event that he never was able to understand.
Hawthorne, afraid of the dark door he had opened in The
Scarlet Letter, retreated into idyllic fairy tales that sold
well but showed little of his inner life or dire, emotional struggles.
Incredibly, after the disaster of Moby-Dick, Melville
went to work for twenty years as an ordinary custom's inspector in
downtown New York. For twenty years he published nothing but poems and
then simply nothing. His son committed suicide and he began his
terminal relationship with alcohol. Hawthorne took a patrician's job
as consul to Liverpool, cutting himself off physically and mentally
from the "blue room" he had entered in New England with Melville. He
died a relatively young man that even he described as "another pallid
phantom gliding noiselessly up and down the stairs"
