Friendship, friendship, sure, but despite what the old song says - not always the perfect blendship. Especially when it comes to writers - a sensitive, moody lot, the quintessential practitioners of the tortured artist effect in which virtually every nuance of affability and falling-out is wrung out in Richard Lingeman’s insightful and incisive Double Lives: American Writers' Friendships. From a pat on the back to the stab in the back, an assorted and sundry sampling of interpersonal reinforcement and mutual you-scratch-my-ego admiration, literary assistance and professional feedback, and friendly rivalries and short-fused feuds are captured as he traces the kith-centric chronicle from early misery-loves-company artistic alliances that marked “The Puritan and the Pagan” companionship of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, to the problematic misery-loves-anything but “Three for the Road” camaraderie of Jack Kerourac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.

Going beyond the interrelationships themselves, Double Lives also affords an engrossing exploration of the cultural and societal landscape in which these friendships were pursued, impressing upon the reader how the temper of the respective times has a bearing on the friendships fashioned and finished-up. In this regard, the early- and mid-19th century must be understood in the distinctive light of the newly emerging American Renaissance identity - the effort of relatively few serious writers to sever national literary ties to English dominance.

As this movement is significantly marked by the publication of Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter, Lingeman appropriately begins with a focus on the friendship of Hawthorne and Melville not only in the narrow sense, but also in more broader terms that, by extension, serves as a bookish benchmark by which the considerations of literary friendships and cultural concerns for the subsequent 100 years are measured. Hawthorne, then, though aloof by nature, not only took a big step merely by his out-of-character acceptance of an invitation to a momentous social and literary gathering — thereby solidifying his relations with Melville — he also sensed and was spurred on by a larger need for “intelligent, cultivated companionship.” And similarly, Melville, driven by his desire to further develop an idiosyncratic American literature, mixed the personal with the idealistic as he “hungered for literary companionship - a soulmate. And he invested in Hawthorne, 15 years older, his thwarted filial need for his own dead father.”

Lingeman does not, refreshingly, delve too much into psychobabble-skewed analysis, but his social perspective does shine a strong light needed to fully illuminate discussions of such questions as homosexuality — issues, he takes pains to explain, that need to be considered in the context of their era. Far from the later gay-tinged accounts of Henry James, Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, and certainly distant from the promiscuousness that marked the relationships of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady and other Beats, the homoerotic language used by Melville toward Hawthorne — language many scholars have construed as love overtures — need to be understood in the expressions of “transcendent oneness” suitable for the mid-19th century. “It seems more logical,” Lingeman notes, “that the flowery rhetoric, typical of the times, was meant as effusive thanks for Hawthorne’s gift of understanding, so deep and complete that Melville considered them to be separate hearts beating in a single body.”