5.
As Pierre commits himself to this wanton girl, Melville launches a violent attack on the provincial culture that has expelled and stigmatized her. In this respect, especially in the account of Pierre’s confrontation with his family minister, Mr. Falsgrave, Pierre anticipated such books as Main Street, Winesburg, Ohio, and even, in its combination of prurience and prudishness, Peyton Place. Mr. Falsgrave is a personification of Main Street hypocrisy. One of the most repulsive characters in American fiction, he is nominally (falsely grave) a clergyman, but in fact he is a glorified valet to Pierre’s mother—kin to the many prevaricating village parsons in the novels of Anthony Trollope (Pierre was published in the same year as Trollope’s The Warden). Slender and sinuous, he is a figure whom one can imagine having been painted collaboratively by Bronzino and Beardsley, the “image,” as Melville puts it with palpable disgust, “of white-browed and white-handed, and napkined immaculateness.” Much of the writing in Pierre can be loose and blowzy, but Melville’s animosity toward Falsgrave sharpens his wit and yields a marvelous description:
Mr. Falsgrave was just hovering upon his prime of years; a period which, in such a man, is the sweetest, and, to a mature woman, by far the most attractive of manly life. Youth has not yet completely gone with its beauty, grace, and strength; nor has age at all come with its decrepitudes; though the finest undrossed parts of it—its mildness and its wisdom—have gone on before, as decorous chamberlains precede the sedan of some crutched king.
Falsgrave is a close relative of the flute-playing Reverend Runt in Thackeray’s novel of 1844, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and a virtuoso of ingratiation: “Heaven had given him his fine, silver-keyed person for a flute to play on in this world, and he was nearly the perfect master of it.” Always studying himself, fidgeting, rearranging his personal decor, he recoils from contact with the untidy world as if touching anything outside himself would pollute him. One suspects that his favorite companion is his mirror.
After receiving Isabel’s letter and learning of Delly’s expulsion, Pierre, like Hamlet coming to Polonius, comes knocking late one night at this man’s door. The smarmy minister leans out his bedroom window to see what the fuss is about. “In heaven’s name, what is the matter, young gentleman?,” he asks, to which Pierre replies: “Everything is the matter; the whole world is the matter. Will you admit me, sir?” Mr. Falsgrave, suddenly nimble, descends the stairs with candle in hand and hops to the door to let in the young zealot, desperate to stop the knocking lest the neighbors be annoyed. He asks again, “For heaven’s sake, what is the matter …?,” and Pierre replies: “Heaven and earth is the matter, sir! shall we go up to the study?” Still with candle in hand, Falsgrave takes him upstairs, then waits in a funk of apprehension for Pierre to get to the point.
“Thou art a man of God, sir, I believe,” says Pierre. In recording the clergyman’s answer, which is the verbal equivalent of a squirm, Melville puns wickedly on “aye” and “I”: “I? I? I? Upon my word, Mr. Glendinning!” Pierre helps him out: “Yes, sir, the world calls thee a man of God. Now, what has thou, the man of God, decided, with my mother, concerning Delly Ulver?” This question sends the minister into another stutter: “Delly Ulver! Why, why—what can this madness mean?… She?—Delly Ulver? She is to depart the neighborhood; why, her own parents want her not.”
This man of God, confronted by a young man looking for someone to validate and salve his anger, might have been expected to seize the moment to step back from Caesar and turn, in penitence and charity, to Christ. Instead, he speaks from the depths of his calculating, trimming, prevaricating self. Pierre responds by unleashing a tirade that Melville conveys through an attack of italics: “How is she to depart? Who is to take her? Art thou to take her? Where is she to go? Who has the food for her? What is to keep her from the pollution to which such as she are every day driven to contribute, by the detestable uncharitableness and heartlessness of the world?” Pierre has discovered what Harold Bloom, in his book The American Religion, calls “the immense difficulty of becoming a Christian in any society ostensibly Christian.”
With the savage portrait of Falsgrave, Melville turned the fractured mirror of his inward novel outward, affording us fragmentary reflections of the moral and political world in which he was living. It was a time, according to Lemuel Shaw’s college friend Joseph Story (whose collected works were published in the same year as Pierre), of “ultraism of all sorts,” and in Pierre Melville portrayed exactly the sort of “importunate reformer” who stormed through the world leaving, in Story’s view, “desolation and ruin on every side.” The sorts of questions Pierre asks were being asked everywhere at a time when, as Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle, Americans were “all a little wild with numberless projects of social reform.” What was to be done for those excluded from the vaunted bounty and freedom of American life? Who would take up their cause? Antebellum America was alive with reformers demanding answers to such questions—feminists, temperance advocates, activists for the deaf and the blind, proponents of public education, and, most conspicuously, abolitionists—all of whom contributed elements to the portrait of Pierre. In Melville’s allegory, Falsgrave is Mr. Respectability and Pierre is Mr. Rash Radical.
He sounds, for instance, more than a little like William Lloyd Garrison, who had announced in his abolitionist paper The Liberator, “I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire … but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I WILL BE HEARD.” As for Falsgrave, his was the countervailing voice of prudence, in which Melville heard only empty sententiae—perhaps the best elaboration in our literature of what Emerson had called the “formalist” who usurps the pulpit, leaving the worshippers feeling “defrauded and disconsolate.” And Falsgrave had his models, too. He may have been based in part on the Shaw family minister, Orville Dewey, and he may even have incorporated aspects of Shaw himself, whose “intense and doating biasses” for “Unitarianism and Harvard College” (according to Richard Henry Dana, Jr.) held him steady during the storm over the Fugitive Slave Law that broke out not long before Melville began writing Pierre. Melville’s granddaughter noted in her copy of Pierre that the “almost infantile delicacy and vivid whiteness” of Falsgrave’s hands were characteristic of Judge Shaw.
Orville Dewey (list of illustrations 7.3)
Early in 1851, Dana recorded in his journal his confrontation with Shaw over the arrest and imprisonment of the fugitive slave Thomas Sims. As soon as he heard news of the arrest, Dana, whose law office was near the courthouse where Sims was being held, had gone straight to the judge with a petition for habeas corpus. The passage could be transported intact into the Delly Ulver episode in Pierre:
The Ch. Justice read the petition, & said, in a most ungracious manner—“This won’t do. I can’t do anything on this.” & laid it upon the table & turned away, to engage in something else.… I asked him to be so good as to tell me what the defects were, saying that I had taken pains to conform to the Statute. He seemed unwilling to notice it, & desirous of getting rid of it, in short, he attempted to bluff me off.
It is Falsgrave in his house, trying to get rid of the intruder.
Cymbeline, Act 2, Scene 2: “A bed chamber; Imogen in Bed,” print in Melville’s collection (list of illustrations 7.4)
6.
The foaming hatred that Pierre feels for Mr. Falsgrave is matched only by his passion for Isabel as he rushes out of the minister’s snug house into the night. He then flees to New York with both girls in tow, as if Hamlet were running away from Elsinore to the nunnery not with one Ophelia but with two. En route he receives a cryptic warning in the form of a philosophical pamphlet, in the mode of Plutarch, that falls into his hands aboard
the city-bound coach, the gist of which is that one must strive in life for a “virtuous expediency,” taking a little, giving a little, staying away from extremes. Pierre is the wrong reader for this type of middle-of-the-roadism. After Ahab, he is the strongest exemplar of the theme that Hannah Arendt (one of those who saw Melville as a prophet warning against totalitarianism) considered the key to his writing: the idea that once “the absolute [is] introduced into the political realm,” righteousness becomes madness. What begins as a wish to correct some personal or historical wrong becomes fanaticism, and Pierre embarks on the road to madness.
There were many sources—visual as well as literary—that mixed in Melville’s imagination to make a fertile seed ground for Pierre. For the scenes in Books II and XI when Pierre enters Lucy’s bedroom, Melville may have had in mind a scene from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline—a play about a thwarted marriage between a sister and stepbrother—of which he owned an engraved illustration in which Iachimo spies on the sleeping Imogen. On his European trip in 1849, Melville had purchased a set of literary illustrations, including some of Dante’s Inferno, by the English artist John Flaxman. Pierre associates the mysterious face that comes to him in his dreams with “Francesca’s mournful face” in “Flaxman’s Dante,” and when Melville writes of the “long dark shower” of Isabel’s hair, he evidently had in mind Flaxman’s depiction of Francesca’s flowing locks in Canto 5, where in the most erotic passage of the poem Dante recounts her quasi-incestuous passion for Paolo, her brother-in-law. As Pierre runs off with his girls, allusions pile up to Dante’s Inferno and to Enceladus, the mutilated Titan child of incest doomed to an eternity of “writhing from out the imprisoning earth” as he struggles heavenward while locked in dirt and stone. As befits his name, Pierre imagines himself the rock of a new church; he wants to “gospelize the world anew,” to tear it down and rebuild it, cleanse it and repopulate it. But in rushing off toward his new heaven he sinks into a hell of his own making, and unlike Dante, who is guided into and out of hell by his master poet Virgil, Pierre will not emerge wiser and stronger. In fact, he will not emerge at all.
Dante, Inferno, Canto 5, illustrated by John Flaxman. Melville bought a set of Flaxman illustrations in Paris in 1849 (list of illustrations 7.5)
Seeking the “sublime heaven of heroism,” Pierre arrives instead at the infernal city, loses himself among “frantic, diseased-looking men and women of all colors … all imaginable flaunting, immodest, grotesque” forms, “leaping, yelling, and cursing around him,” and becomes—what else?—a writer. In this city of demons, he comes to believe his own messianic dream of having been called to witness and denounce sin (“I will write such things—I will … show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!—I will write it! I will write it!”), yet turns into a pitiable figure sitting alone in his room:
Sleighing in New York, lithograph by Thomas Benecke, 1855 (list of illustrations 7.6)
From eight o’clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening, Pierre sits there in his room;—eight hours and a half!
From throbbing neck-bands, and swinging belly-bands of gay-hearted horses, the sleigh-bells chimingly jingle;—but Pierre sits there in his room; Thanksgiving comes, with its glad thanks, and crisp turkeys;—but Pierre sits there in his room; soft through the snows, on tinted Indian moccasin, Merry-Christmas comes stealing;—but Pierre sits there in his room; it is New-Year’s, and like a great flagon, the vast city overbrims at all curbstones, wharves, and piers, with bubbling jubilations;—but Pierre sits there in his room:—Nor jingling sleigh-bells at throbbing neck-band, or swinging belly-band; nor glad thanks, and crisp turkeys of Thanksgiving; nor tinted Indian moccasin of Merry Christmas softly stealing through the snows; nor New-Year’s curb-stones, wharves, and piers, over-brimming with bubbling jubilations:—Nor jingling sleigh-bells, nor glad Thanksgiving, nor Merry Christmas, nor jubilating New Year’s:—Nor Bell, Thank, Christ, Year;—none of these are for Pierre. In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of Time, Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity; Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time.…
The mockeries in this passage are multiple and merciless. It mocks the sentimental poetry of sleigh bells and Christmas cheer. It mocks the holiday rituals (“Thank, Christ, Year”) from which Pierre exempts himself. It confirms that Pierre (“peak inflexible”) has aroused himself to onanistic pride, spewing out, like the mountain peak that once towered over his childhood home, “unstinted fertilizations” on himself, bathing in the spurtings of his own ego. And finally, with the image of the hermit artist indifferent to a world that generously returned the indifference, Melville was bitterly mocking himself. He could not decide whom he loathed more, the blocked but stupendously pretentious writer who could squeeze out only puny productions or the publishers and promoters who were eager to have him sit for a daguerreotype. Among other things, Pierre was Melville’s belated valedictory message to the New York literary scene—a message that might be summed up as “Up yours.”
Here is Melville’s visual representation of Pierre’s pretension and the teeny-tiny foundation on which it rests:
THE
COMPLETE WORKS
OF
GLENDINNING
AUTHOR OF
That world-famed production, “The Tropical Summer: A Sonnet,”
“The Weather: a Thought.” “Life: an Impromptu,” “The
late Reverend Mark Graceman: an Obituary.” “Honor:
a Stanza.” “Beauty: an Acrostic.” “Edgar:
an Anagram.” “The Pippin: a Paragraph.”
&c. &c. &c. &c.
&c. &c. &c.
&c. &c.
&c.”
What we have here is a parody of the Romantic author imagining himself as high priest charged by God to bring forth Truth. It was an idea of authorship first articulated for the English-speaking world by Carlyle, who in 1827 had introduced Anglo-American readers to the ideas of the German philosopher Johann Fichte:
According to Fichte, there is a “Divine Idea” pervading the visible Universe; which visible Universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible manifestation.… To the mass of men this Divine Idea of the world lies hidden; yet to discern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, freedom; and the end therefore of all spiritual effort in every age. Literary Men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea; a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth generation after generation, as the dispenser and living types of God’s everlasting wisdom.
This vision of the Literary Man as the voice of God had been advanced in America by Emerson (“I look for the new Teacher that shall … see the world to be the mirror of the soul”) and Whitman (“the priest departs, the divine literatus comes”), and Melville, too, had once imputed such power to himself, as when he boasted in Moby-Dick of the “out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep” of his own imagination. Filled though Moby-Dick had been with bravado passages announcing in “placard capitals” the secrets of the sea, Melville had backed away from that part of himself which had sought the Divine Idea. Such, after all, was Ahab’s quest—to pierce through the “pasteboard mask” of appearances—and Melville had treated Ahab’s will to metaphysical knowledge as a species of insanity. In Pierre we find Melville contending, as Ahab had done (“Sometimes, I think there’s naught beyond”), with the prospect that there is no Divine Idea behind Nature, and that those who pursue it are stark mad. Nature in Pierre is a tease and a taunt, flattering us into thinking that what we find in the landscape or seascape is the visage of God, when in fact she is nothing but a mocking reflection of ourselves: “Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.” This was Melville’s retort to romantic dreamers whose belief in the “all-controlling and all-permeating wonderf
ulness” of the world (his parodic paraphrase of Emerson) blinds them to the truth that nature is nothing but a vast blankness on which man inscribes his fantasies.
As Pierre scribbles away in romantic ecstasy at his manuscript, which one imagines is a screed in the genre of Mein Kampf, his menage grows to include the ever faithful Lucy, who, despite his having broken their engagement in order to run away with Isabel, shows up with her easel to pursue her painting while he works at his writing. Lucy, with her unshakable fidelity, is as unbearably virtuous as ever: “almost a nun,” Pierre explains to Isabel, who “hearing of our mysterious exile” and “without knowing the cause, hath yet as mysteriously vowed herself ours—not so much mine, Isabel, as ours, ours—to serve us.” As for Pierre’s mother, she has died embittered against her son and left her estate to his successor in suing for Lucy’s affections—none other than cousin Glen, who, when Lucy flees to New York, feels jilted by Pierre for a second time.
In telling this wild story, Melville intimates that Pierre is waging a losing battle against some taboo desire that he cannot bring himself to state outright: “Never, never would he be able to embrace Isabel with the mere brotherly embrace; while the thought of any other caress … was entirely vacant from his uncontaminated soul, for it had never consciously intruded there.” Not consciously, perhaps; but he and Isabel are fooling themselves when they assure each other that “there is no sex in our immaculateness”:
He held her tremblingly; she bent over toward him; his mouth wet her ear … the girl … leaned closer to him, with an inexpressible strangeness of an intense love, new and inexplicable. Over the face of Pierre there shot a terrible self-revelation; he imprinted repeated burning kisses upon her … they coiled together, and entangledly stood mute.
Melville: His World and Work Page 27