Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  “You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?” “The negro.”

  Benito Cereno, Ellison knew, plumbs the depths of a white man’s infinite ignorance and, by leaving the black man “voiceless” to the end, acknowledges that the “whole story” of New World slavery is truly unspeakable. Alone among our classic American writers, Melville had thereby made a start toward telling it.

  * In her novel The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a similar scene of closely witnessed shipwreck; a variant of the theme occurs in one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, probably composed in the early 1860s, in which the promise of salvation is described as God’s cruel lie to man: “To lead Him to the Well / And let Him hear it drip / Remind Him, would it not, somewhat / Of His condemned lip?” The greatest nineteenth-century work on the theme of shipwreck close to shore was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876).

  † Melville mentions the Cluny ivories in his journal entry for December 5, 1849, and the Gaddi portraits at the National Gallery on December 17.

  ‡ Melville makes reference in “The Apple-Tree Table” to the Fox sisters, who had recently become famous for the putative ghosts in their upstate New York house, which made themselves known by “spirit rappings.”

  § Three years after the publication of Benito Cereno, Thomas Wentworth Higginson told the American Anti-Slavery Society: “I have wondered in times past, when I have been so weak-minded as to submit my chin to the razor of a coloured brother, as his sharp steel grazed my skin, at the patience of the negro shaving the white man for many years, yet [keeping] the razor outside the throat.” See Eric Sundquist, “Benito Cereno and New World Slavery,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 112.

  ‖ Acts 9:18: “And immediately the scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.”

  CHAPTER 10

  ADRIFT

  1.

  Newton Arvin calls them the “black years,” the years in which, having given up his Vesuvian ambitions, Melville was in retreat like a painter who had once done palace frescoes but was now reduced to doing pencil sketches. Sensitive to the diminution, one English reviewer of Israel Potter remarked that the novel made him “feel that the author is capable of something better, but … is resolved to curb his fancy and adhere to the dustier routine.” Though the print run (3,700 copies) had been relatively large, and sales (around 2,500 copies) respectable, proceeds were small. After deductions for advances, royalties due to Melville in the fall of 1855 amounted to $48.31. As for The Piazza Tales, published by Dix & Edwards (the successors to Putnam) in May 1856, in which Melville included “Bartleby” and Benito Cereno, the New York Times found them not without merit, but offered Melville the unwelcome advice that he “should do something higher and better than Magazine articles.”

  These were black years, too, in the sense that they have proven impenetrable to even the most determined scholars, who have been unable to illuminate the state of Melville’s marriage or the fate of his children, much less the secrets of his soul—though there has been no shortage of pronouncements about all these matters. D. H. Lawrence was sure that “after an ecstasy of a courtship,” Melville endured “fifty years of disillusion” with a woman who (in Arvin’s phrase) “proved no fulfillment of his deepest needs.” Ever loyal to the floral Fayaway, Bernard De Voto made the same point more anatomically: “if [Lizzie] had breasts … no one crushed flowers between them.”

  Maybe not. But in a dedicatory preface to a group of poems left unpublished at his death, Melville recalled how he had saved Lizzie’s roses at Arrowhead from an early snow (“winter’s folic skirmisher in advance”) and taken them indoors to her so they could sit together and watch the melting of “the fleecy flakes into dew-drops rolling off from the ruddiness.” Looking back in the spring of what was to be his last year upon their long shared life, he begged her to remember that she had called the tiny drops “Tears of the Happy” and to accept his poems, written in “that terminating season on which the offerer verges,” as love offerings like those “dissolved snow-flakes on the ruddy oblation of old.”

  But not all—or even most—of Lizzie’s tears had been tears of happiness, and there is reason to suspect that the mid-1850s were a trying time in her life with Herman. In a story called “I and My Chimney,” published in Putnam’s in March 1856 and probably composed in the spring of 1855 after the completion of Benito Cereno, Melville wrote about the great chimney that, running straight through the center of their house and opening on the ground floor into a wide-mouthed hearth, gets in the way of his wife’s desire for a spacious central foyer. Poking out above the roof, the chimney looks oddly squat and foreshortened, the result of its having been chopped down in a “surgical operation” with a masonry saw—circumcised, in effect—after the roofline had been lowered, thereby exposing to “the open air a part of the chimney previously under cover.” The narrator of “I and My Chimney” gives this phallic chimney a good deal of tender loving care, “humbly bowing over it with shovel and tongs, I much minister to it,” while his harpy-wife, whose “maxim is, Whatever is, is wrong,” wants nothing to do with it (“her eggs, too—can’t keep them near the chimney, on account of hatching”) and “is desirous that … I should retire into some sort of monastery.” Melville was in his mid-thirties when he wrote these passages about a man whose wife regrets that her husband’s chimney requires constant care. “My wife,” the narrator adds for good measure, “cares not a fig for my philosophical jabber.” Years later, Lizzie wrote in the margin of her copy of the story the self-exonerating comment that “all this about the wife applied to his mother.”

  In the summer of 1856, Lizzie’s half brother Sam wrote to his parents that Herman suffered from “ugly attacks,” and Judge Shaw heard from Lizzie herself that she felt “great anxiety” on behalf of her husband. She worried about his physical health, as his back pain became chronic and he suffered more and more from eye strain; and she worried as well about his mental condition. Melville had always been fascinated by madness (in his copy of the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb he marked the passage about Lamb’s unwavering love for his sister “even when she was a prisoner in the Asylum after the fatal attack of lunacy”), and the renditions of madness in his own writing were alarmingly convincing. As early as 1851, the Melvilles’ Berkshire neighbor Sarah Morewood had half-jocularly written that “the recluse life he was leading made his city friends think he was slightly insane.” Two years earlier, when his friend Charles Fenno Hoffman was committed to an asylum, Melville had described him to Duyckinck in terms that could have been self-referential (“imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor, unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors”) and remarked that “this going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him.… For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire.”

  Having touched upon the theme of madness in “Bartleby” and Benito Cereno, Melville now expressed his own state of mind, as he had done in brief in “I and My Chimney,” in a half-deranged book that turned out to be the last of his novels to be published in his lifetime. In the spring of 1855, there was widespread press coverage of a New York swindler who fleeced his victims by passing himself off as an honest soul in need of an emergency loan. Melville had always been interested in dupes and duping, and in October, when he began writing The Confidence-Man, he had before him, in addition to these newspaper accounts that classic novel of gullibility and illusion, Don Quixote, which he had acquired in the Jarvis translation from an Albany bookstore.

  The work he now devoted to these themes, possibly with the intention of magazine serialization before publication in book form, was, as Arvin has put it, “a series of conversations rather than an action.” It was set on a Mississippi steamboat ironically named the Fidèle, w
here a con man in multiple guises preys on potential buyers who range in their responses from eager greed to misanthropic skepticism to naive credulity. Like a storefront clairvoyant who senses the wants and fears of each client, he customizes his prophecies until they fit each victim as perfectly as a bespoke suit.

  Whether he is selling counterfeit stock, extorting money for some spurious charity, or “borrowing” an item of value with a promise to return it with interest, the confidence man offers his customers what they most want: hope, hope for themselves, hope for the world. The Confidence-Man was an extended answer to a question that Melville had asked in White-Jacket: “Who can forever resist the very Devil himself, when he comes in the guise of a gentleman, free, fine, and frank?” One by one, the passengers of the Fidèle step forward to be fleeced, introduced by a narrator whose tone is that of a mellow movie voice-over commenting on the fools and follies that pass before our eyes. And with his frequent costume changes, the confidence man leaves us “at a loss to determine where exactly the fictitious character had been dropped, and the real one, if any, resumed.”

  This dizzying story was set on a riverboat of the type on which Melville had traveled down the Mississippi twenty years earlier with his friend Eli Fly. But it also borrows from the world he had known more recently in New York, where merchants mixed sand with their salt and tavernkeepers watered their ale before serving it up as pure brew. The Confidence-Man included thinly veiled caricatures of such New York con men as P. T. Barnum. In an 1852 issue of Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, a writer, one “Martin Takemthrough,” observed that “there are but two classes in the world—the Skinner and the Skinned,” and offered some sound New York advice: “if you do not skin, you must assuredly be skinned—so you can make your own choice.”

  But Melville’s book was more than a retrospective catalogue of con artists he had known or known about. It belonged to the same genre as Joseph Baldwin’s The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), a collection of sketches whose narrator seems somehow in collusion with the crooked bankers and lawyers whom he exposes as swindlers and fakes. The Confidence-Man was about a time of hectic expansion when, in Baldwin’s phrases, “swindling was raised to the dignity of the fine arts” and Americans were continually inventing new forms of “elaborate machinery of ingenious chicane.” It was a time when paper money was promiscuously printed (“let the public believe that a smutted rag is money,” as Baldwin put it, and “it is money”), when every borrower was ready to cheat every lender by putting up as collateral arid land, or infirm slaves, or worthless stock, and when lenders cheerfully loaned money that they did not have. Confidence, it seemed, was always misplaced.

  When Melville’s highly topical book first appeared, on April Fool’s Day, 1857, the critics were baffled. Public reviews were vicious. (One reviewer, declaring Typee the best of Melville’s works and The Confidence-Man “decidedly the worst,” concluded that “Mr. M.’s authorship is toward the nadir rather than the zenith, and he has been progressing in the form of an inverted climax.”) The critic for the London Illustrated Times reported with contempt:

  We began the book at the beginning, and, after reading ten or twelve chapters … found … that we had not yet obtained the slightest clue to the meaning (in case there should happen to be any)…. After reading the work forwards for twelve chapters and backwards for five, we attacked it in the middle, gnawing at it like Rabelais’s dog at the bone, in the hope of extracting something from it at last.… As a last resource, we read the work from beginning to end; and the result was that we liked it even less than before.

  Private responses were almost as harsh, as when Lem Shaw, Lizzie’s half brother, complained that there were “pages of crude theory & speculation to every line of narritive—& interspersed with strained & ineffectual attempts to be humorous.”

  But in our own time The Confidence-Man has been rehabilitated as a work that “holds up a mirror to the American people,” as Walter McDougall puts it in his comprehensive history of the United States—a key book of our culture that risked “telling the truth … about the tricks Americans played on themselves in their effort to worship both God and Mammon.” And if The Confidence-Man is being reclaimed today for its broad insights into the American psyche, recent critics have also construed it more narrowly as a series of satirical portraits of Melville’s contemporaries. The amiable Mark Winsome, who believes in what another character (Charlie Noble, possibly a representation of Hawthorne) calls the “latent benignity” of rattlesnakes, has been identified as a portrait of Emerson. Winsome’s “practical disciple” Egbert appears to have been a portrait of Thoreau, and there is a rhapsodic beggar who, with his dissolute babble, seems a stand-in for that ranting alcoholic Edgar Allan Poe—author, as Melville may have recalled, of an article published in 1845 in the Broadway Journal, “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.” One scholar has recently asserted that the busybody merchant Henry Roberts “embodies Melville’s accumulated resentment toward his sometime literary friend and benefactor” Evert Duyckinck. The pompous “Man in Gold Buttons” may have been Melville’s version of the philanthropic industrialist Abbott Lawrence, and the (seemingly) passionate do-gooder, the “Man in Gray,” a portrait of the unappeasable Theodore Parker. For Goneril, an unfaithful wife with a nasty Shakespearean name who is as embraceable as a cactus, Melville seems to have had in mind the actress Fanny Kemble Butler, about whom he had once written (to Duyckinck) that “had she not, on unimpeachable authority, borne children, I should be curious to learn the result of a surgical examination of her person in private.”

  This most time-bound of Melville’s works has been well described by another historian, Jean-Christophe Agnew, as having an “allusiveness that only adds to the elusiveness of the narrative as a whole.” And perhaps for just that reason it was rediscovered in the 1950s and ’60s as a precursor of the labyrinthine fictions then being written by such writers as Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire) and John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse) that induce the same feeling of trying to navigate an amusement park hall of mirrors, where every step leads into a wall of glass. Melville’s book now seems a prophetically postmodern work in which swindler cannot be distinguished from swindled and the confidence man tells truth and lies simultaneously:

  I do not jumble them; they are coordinates. For misanthropy, springing from the same root with disbelief of religion, is twin with that. It springs from the same root, I say; for, set aside materialism, and what is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness? Don’t you see? In either case the vice consists in a want of confidence.

  There is something right and wise about this pronouncement that love can save us from despair, but the speech is also designed to win over a doubter who might have the wit to resist the con man’s next sting.

  In this book of sensible nonsense, humor is both a saving quality and the last resort of the nihilist. Nature is a fountainhead of health (“poets send out the sick spirit to green pastures, like lame horses turned out unshod to the turf to renew their hoofs”) but also the source of suffering (“who froze to death my teamster on the prairie?”), and only machines can be trusted:

  Machines for me. My cider-mill—does that ever steal my cider? My mowing-machine—does that ever lay a-bed mornings? My cornhusker—does that ever give me insolence? No: cider-mill, mowing-machine, corn-husker—all faithfully attend to their business. Disinterested, too; no board, no wages; yet doing good all their lives long; shining examples that virtue is its own reward—the only practical Christians I know.

  Convinced that “the mystery of human subjectivity” is impenetrable, Melville devoted the better part of one chapter to a debate between two “convivialists” over whether the letters “P.W.” on the label of a wine bottle signify port wine, pure wine, or poison wine. Since a taste test might be fatal, the question is left hangin
g.

  But The Confidence-Man is not only about illusion and masquerade. It is also about hatred as a form of authenticity, on the premise that all great “haters have at bottom loving hearts.” Ever since his memorable portrait of a misanthropic sailor, Jackson, in Redburn—a “Cain afloat” who “seldom spoke, but to contradict, deride, or curse”—Melville had been fascinated by soul-dead characters who stand apart from life and laugh at the living. Now, in a chapter entitled “The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating,” he introduced a “backwoodsman” who, when he was a boy, had learned that his mother and siblings had been slaughtered by Indians:

  He was just entering upon manhood, when thus left in nature sole survivor of his race. Other youngsters might have turned mourner; he turned avenger. His nerves were electric wires—sensitive, but steel. He was one who, from self-possession, could be made neither to flush nor pale. It is said that when the tidings were brought him, he was ashore sitting beneath a hemlock eating his dinner of venison—and as the tidings were told him, after the first start he kept on eating, but slowly and deliberately, chewing the wild news with the wild meat, as if both together, turned to chyle, together would sinew him to his intent. From that meal he rose an Indian-hater.

  As “straggling thoughts of other outrages troop to the nucleus thought, assimilate with it, and swell it,” this man “commits himself … to act upon a calm, cloistered scheme of strategical, implacable, and lonesome vengeance.” In its dark eloquence, this passage pointed back to Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick and forward to Mr. Claggart in Billy Budd. Melville had always recognized in such characters something of himself, and one deep purpose of his writing was to save himself from becoming too much like them.