While I will be addressing one of Melville’s poems in a big way next week, that still leaves a lot undiscussed, not least of which is Battle-Pieces, and Aspects of the War. Amateur Reader wrote about it earlier in the week (along with other Melville poetry). I still have not finished the collection, and may not, so you should head over there and find out about it instead.

What I have read has been a mixed bag. Some poems I am simply bored by. Others are strange, but sometimes in a good, arresting way. Like “Donelson,” which is weirdly avant-garde and includes news bulletins about the progress of the battle it describes.

But “Misgivings,” the first poem in the collection, is more along the lines of what seems to appeal to me in poetry. The first half of the poem:

When ocean-clouds over inland hills
Sweep storming in late autumn brown,
And horror the sodden valley fills,
And the spire falls crashing in the town,
I muse upon my country’s ills—
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time
On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

I’m completely in love with the imagery of the first four lines. The spire crashing down like a mast in a storm, but in town, not at sea, where such storms are supposed to happen. And this is happening right now! And look at the awful thoughts it’s causing.

My problem is, I have no idea if this is any good. ABABACC—I don’t know what that is, if anything. I don’t know that the last line might not be a bit too much. I don’t think I particularly like “the waste of Time,” or know quite what it really means in context. But I guess this is what I have to do with poetry for a while, feel it out a bit.

Moby-Dick is well known for its many doubles, but they’re elsewhere as well; twinning things seems to have been almost unavoidable for Melville. The major twin in The Confidence-Man is confidence and distrust. Everything comes down to confidence or distrust. Whether passengers give to a beggar is a sign of whether they have confidence or distrust in their fellow-man. Whether they buy medicine from the herb-doctor is a sign of whether they have trust in the goodness of nature—and of course, trust in the herb-doctor. Whether stocks rise or fall is a matter of confidence.

It is the confidence-man who always brings this up, explaining what confidence has to do with whatever scene is at hand. Or rather, explaining why the problem with whatever is going on is that someone, somewhere, doesn’t have enough confidence. It can get somewhat convoluted. “Confidence” does a lot of work and makes the book a bit of pun of ideas.

For example, a cripple tells the pathetic story of how he was wrongly jailed and never recovered from the experience. The herb-doctor at first denies the possiblity that the story is true, but then, even granting it is, argues that in fact the man’s problem is a lack of confidence. Since human government is “subordinate to the divine,” it takes on some “characteristics of the divine”:

That is, while in general efficacious to happiness, the world’s law may yet, in some cases, have, to the eye of reason, an unequal operation, just as, in the same imperfect view, some inequalities may appear in the operations of heaven’s law; nevertheless, to one who has a right confidence, final benignity is, in every instance, as sure with the one law as the other.

But doesn’t it seem foolish to have such confidence? Foolish to have confidence in the herb-doctor’s remedies, or the legitimacy of the philanthropist’s charity? It does seem so. When the confidence-man tells an old man he is trying to convince about an investment, “I live not for myself; but the world will not have confidence in me, and yet confidence in me were great gain,” it hardly inspires confidence. It also seems a clear reference to a religious figure—or, to another, erm, irreligious figure.

But we must be confident! Those without confidence are gloomy, destroy the good, and only want to sulk. No one wants to share his champagne or cigars with the distrustful, for he is a bore. According to the confidence-man and his various avatars, those who lack confidence have two—twinned—faults as a result:

“You rather jumble together misanthropy and infidelity.”

“I do not jumble them; they are coördinates. For misanthropy, springing from the same root with disbelief of religion, is twin with that. It springs from the same root, I saw; 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 mistanthrope, 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.”

The confidence-man has a particular dislike for misanthropy, and in the following discourse on his philanthropy (literally) again brings to mind the possibility of the twinned religious referents:

“Is the sight of humanity so very disagreeable to you then? Ah, I may be foolish, but for my part, in all its aspects, I love it. Served up à la Pole, or à la Moor, à la Ladrone, or à la Yankee, that good dish, man, still delights me; or rather is man a wine I never weary of comparing and sipping; wherefore am I a pledged cosmopolitan, a sort of London-Dock-Vault connoisseur, going about from Teheran to Natchitoches, a taster of races; in all his vintages, smacking my lips over this racy creature, man, continually. But as there are teetotal palates which have a distaste even for Amontillado, so I suppose there may be teetotal souls which relish not even the very best brands of humanity.”

Pitch, whom I mentioned yesterday, is one such teetotaler—the object of this speech, in fact. But what then is right? Misanthropy is an “obvious” negative, just as charity is an “obvious” positive. But of course there are understandable instances of distrust—justified absences of confidence. Of course the confidence-man wants people to have confidence; that’s how he gets away with his confidence tricks. But isn’t it more loving toward your fellow-man to have confidence in him? The sands shift. But this isn’t a problem for me or for Melville—or for the cosmopolitan himself, who says:

“I seldom care to be consistent. In a philosphical view, consistency is a certain level at all times, maintained in all the thoughts of one’s mind. But, since nature is nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the progress?”

Interpolated in The Confidence-Man are three chapters where the narrator steps back from the riverboat to expound on theories of writing fiction. These are, of course, for the Melville fanatic, an irresistible glimpse into his thoughts about writing, and a much better one than we get in Pierre, which is too full of bile and unseriousness.

These chapters largely concern character, in the context of a demand for realism. This was a major complaint against Melville in his day. Reviewers insisted on thinking of him as the writer of Typee and Omoo no matter how many times he tried to show them that he was really the writer of Mardi and Moby-Dick, and in these chapters he rejects many of the criticisms made against him.

He also comments on the reputation of another writer, covertly of course. The evidence seems relatively sound that chapter 44, which discusses the real number of “original characters” in fiction, as opposed to simply “odd characters,” is referring to Dickens and his popularity for creating just such “originals.” Melville judges the mass creation of original characters frankly impossible, and refuses to put any even of his own creations on the footing of those he does name: Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Milton’s Satan. Others “are novel, or singular, or striking, or captivating, or all four at once,” but not original.

This could also have been a criticism of the future reviewers, and probably many regular readers, of The Confidence-Man, or at least a warning not to succumb to such feelings. Because there are, in the usual, looser terminology, a good number of “originals” in this novel, the confidence-man himself not least among them. My favorite, though, is Pitch:

It was a rather eccentric-looking person who spoke; somewhat ursine in aspect; sporting a shaggy spencer of the cloth called bear’s-skin; a high-peaked cap of raccoon-skin, the long bushy tail switching over behind; rawhide leggings; grim stubble chin; and to end, a double-barreled gun in hand—a Missouri bachelor, a Hoosier gentleman, of Spartan leisure and fortune, and equally Spartan manners and sentiments; and, as the sequal may show, not less acquainted, in a Spartan way of his own, with philosophy and books, than with wood-craft and rifles.

What’s not to love? Even better, he will be a real match for the confidence-man. Freely willing to admit his misanthropy and discourse on the ills even of mother nature herself, the Missouri bachelor is not an easy mark like everyone else on the boat. “[W]ith both hands on his rifle, used for a staff, and gazing in the herb-doctor’s face with no more reverence than if it were a target,”—the herb-doctor being the confidence-man’s current avatar—Pitch puts him in his place. He goes up against the confidence-man’s next avatar, going so far as to say that the devil, “[t]o judge by the event…appears to have understood man better even than the Being who made him,” freaking the devil—or Jesus—or just a supernatural confidence-man—the hell out. A Melvillean himself, the Missouri bachelor holds St. Augustine on Original Sin his textbook.

Alas, he does soften, and he does give in. Even Pitch, named thus for sticking to what he says, is taken in by a confidence-trick, at least for a moment. Fortunately, it only convinces him to be more misanthropic in future, and Pitch won my heart entirely telling the cosmopolitan, the confidence-man’s final incarnation, that this time his parables and analogies will not work, and that “I, who rate truth, though cold water, above untruth, though Tokay, will stick to my earthen jug.”

Many of the non-originals, including Pitch, are supposed to have been taken from life. In him we may have James Fenimore Cooper; elsewhere are (perhaps) Poe, Thoreau, Emerson…&tc. Interesting for context, certainly. I liked Emerson a lot more than Melville seemed to—though who could really say.

Melville’s prose is always a sight to see, and readers used to his “spiky writerly thrill[s]” should find new excitement in The Confidence-Man on this point. I’ll take a sentence almost at random—a random one I marked, at any rate, but not marked for this purpose. A mute holds a slate on which he inscribes phrases exhorting charity, then a barber hangs a sign over his door reading “NO TRUST”:

An inscription which, though in a sense not less intrusive than the contrasted ones of the stranger, did not, as it seemed, provoke any corresponding derision or surprise, much less indignation; and still less, to all appearances, did it gain for the inscriber the repute of being a simpleton.

So much hedging! “[I]n a sense,” “as it seemed,” and “to all appearances” all serve to qualify the narrator’s statement to a point approaching meaninglessness. “[N]ot less intrusive” is typical of another kind of hedging the narrator does throughout, inverting thought after thought with logical if not grammatical double negatives. The final clause takes that practice even further by phrasing matters effectively as “failing to gain ill repute”; notably, the instrument also becomes the subject of that clause, relegating what would normally be both subject and agent of the verb “gain” to indirect object status and general (but not grammatical!) passivity.

In a sense, what the narrator, or Melville, gives with one hand he takes away with the other, by and large, it would seem.

Sentences like this one are, first of all, omnipresent throughout the book, but more important they are a microcosm of the action as well, as far as it goes. The dialogues are similarly hem-and-haw, give-and-take, hedge-and-bend, convince-and-connive, underhand and slippery. The actual language of the book combines with its action to keep the ground continually shifting underneath, and submerge pretty effectively Melville’s intentions. Lots of things can still be excavated, but truly, as soon as you think you are getting somewhere, those sands will shift again.

The Confidence-Man was Melville’s first published novel-length work after Pierre, and like in Pierre we get a new setting. We’re on the water again, but this time on a Mississippi riverboat, headed down from St. Louis to New Orleans. The novel is most briefly and most often described as a series of conversations between passengers on the boat, including a “confidence-man” who changes disguises some seven times. Structurally, there is much more going on than that, but such will suffice for today.

The confidence-man, be he devil, Jesus, or some other supernatural being (or, perhaps, simply a confidence-man?), gets into more or less philosophical discussions with the other passengers on the cruise under the cover of his various confidence schemes. Just as Melville harped on blankness in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” here he harps on confidence: “confide,” “confidence,” and “confident,” and various other forms of the word, appear well over 200 times in the text (that’s based on a quick and dirty count; I suspect the number is actually much higher). The main thread of discussion is whether the confidence-man’s interlocutors have confidence in their fellow men, or whether they have only distrust.

Put aside for a moment what that might mean—after all, people have been arguing over it for over a hundred years now. It’s the way all these discussions occur that interests me today. A large chunk of the novel is devoted to dialogues, mostly metaphysical. The reader must keep track of a large number of variables. The confidence-man himself changes; not all readers even agree on exactly who among the cast is, underneath it all, the confidence-man. Once his avatar is identified, his interlocutor must be placed among the rest of the passengers that have come and gone throughout the novel. Sometimes those other passengers also speak to each other, without the confidence-man around. And the various avatars of the confidence-man take on slightly different opinions, or at least different ways of expressing those opinions, depending on who they “are” and who they are speaking to.

This complicated dialogic structure immediately reminded me of Mardi, with its long sections of conversation (usually including more than two people, however), on canoes paddling around Mardi and on the various islands the main group lands at. Back when I wrote about Mardi‘s disputes about religion, Amateur Reader commented that he “gave up on really sorting out the disputants” when he read it. Definitely a danger there, and likewise a danger in The Confidence-Man. I must say, my own seriousness did not hold up as well here, though I think that’s partly because The Confidence-Man is simpler and more enjoyable to read—certainly an improvement on Mardi in this and many other respects.

So things are slippery, and I could tell a lot of them slid through my fingers. Not that I minded. This is certainly a new favorite Melville for me and will bear much re-reading. And there’s still plenty of goodness to share with you all this week.