You will notice that Israel Potter is one of these characters who, by pure happenstance and dumb luck, participated in some key historical events. He fought the British at Bunker Hill, heard John Paul Jones proclaim he had not yet begun to fight the Serapis, smuggled secrets to Benjamin Franklin in Paris’s Latin Quarter, and convinced an English king that he was, at least, an honest rebel.

Throughout all this he proclaims a love for the land of his nativity, hardly yet a nation or a country—and a place he has never yet lived since its independence. But American he is, as apple pie—or at least, as hunters, trappers, farmers, and whalers.

But he has hardly an inkling of the events that actually go on around him. He heads to Boston to fight only after he’s finished plowing his field. He ends up a sailor on an American fighting ship simply because he’s been to sea before. He finds himself smuggling intelligence but never cares to find out what it is. He has no idea what Benjamin Franklin is doing in Paris, nor who John Paul Jones is at all until that man makes his fame and import very clear. When actually adventuring with Jones, Israel still has no idea how this fits into the larger picture of the war; after all, Jones is simply plying around the British Isles, harrying the coasts and dependent entirely on favorable winds and chance. None of these activities are placed within the context of the Revolution, which, as a larger historical event, doesn’t seem to particularly concern Israel.

He’s most concerned with it ending, so he can get home—he can’t sail from England otherwise. By the time he can, he has other ties to England, and remains there for many more years. Again, he only experiences the meaning of wars in his localized way: the Napoleonic conflict is important only insofar as its beginning removes soldiers from England’s shores, driving up the price of labor, while its end does the opposite, reducing Israel to poverty once more.

This haphazardness takes an adventure novel that superficially seems an exercise in American myth-making and turns that on its head. These adventures of Israel, his myths, lose the historical context that should give them power. Israel’s sad ending is of a piece with a kind of cynicism that presents the events of war as glorious and entertaining but ultimately less meaningful than one might want to make them.

The best parts of Israel Potter occur when Potter comes into contact with Important Historical Personages. The first such encounter, setting aside Potter’s fighting at Bunker Hill under General Israel Putnam’s instruction to wait to shoot until seeing the whites of the enemies’ eyes, is with none other than King George III. Israel is working temporarily in Kew Gardens and meets the King out on a stroll. He admits to being an American and tells George that he has no king.

Later, during his spying days, Israel meets Benjamin Franklin. Melville’s sketch of Franklin is hilarious. The aged doctor is decadent, hypocritical, persnickety, and one of the biggest know-it-alls around. He has a whole store of down-home, plain folk truths to share with Israel, whom he must keep waiting alone while Franklin is on other business. “But you must not be idle,” he tells Israel. “Here is Poor Richard’s Almanac, which in view of our late conversation, I commend to your earnest perusal.”

Retiring to his own room, Israel does pick up the book, but the Real American, the farmboy with the guerrilla-style marksmanship, the jack-of-all-trades who is constitutionally incapable of uttering the words “Sir John” in front of a man’s last name, is not impressed.

“Oh confound all this wisdom! It’s a sort of insulting to talk wisdom to a man like me. It’s wisdom that’s cheap, and it’s fortune that’s dear. That ain’t in Poor Richard; but it ought to be,” concluded Israel, suddenly slamming down the pamphlet.

It’s much more fun when we get to John Paul Jones. Any reader of Moby-Dick will find immediate similarities, as if Melville is playing a joke on himself. They meet in Doctor Franklin’s apartments, where both must spend the night in hiding. “Why not sleep together,” said Israel, “see, it is a big bed. Or perhaps you don’t fancy your bed-fellow, Captain?”

This time it’s Queequeg who isn’t ready for a bed-partner, and Jones and Israel don’t completely hit it off until later, on a whole different adventure. Israel has been conscripted into the English navy, and at the beginning of a cruise is sent as the only sailor to help aboard a small craft strugging in the Channel. Hearing through the fog a familiar voice, Israel is suddenly struck with the idea that he can take the boat himself, and does so in a flurry of action. Jones is pleased to see his old acquaintance, and impressed with his feat.

“Give me your hand, my lion; wave your wild flax again. By heaven, you hate so well, I love ye. You shall be my confidential man; stand sentry at my cabin door; sleep in the cabin; steer my boat; keep by my side whenever I land. What do you say?”

“I say I’m glad to hear you.”

“You are a good, brave soul. You are the first among the millions of mankind that I ever naturally took to. Come, you are tired. There, go into that state-room for to-night—it’s mine. You offered me your bed in Paris.”

There’s that naturally affinity again.

Later, Israel will meet one more famous revolutionary: Ethan Allen. The scene of Allen captured at Falmouth, half savage, half bear almost, is another lovely piece of American mythology, writ silly. But that’s a topic for tomorrow.

One Melvillean concern that I don’t think I’ve mentioned too much before—except in the context of White-Jacket—has to do with clothing. In that novel, the narrator’s white jacket seems to determine nearly all that befalls him and multiple times nearly costs him his life. In Redburn, also, clothing is important. Redburn takes great care choosing his clothes, but they are all wrong for his life as a sailor and determine how he is treated on board ship. Later, when he befriends a wealthy young man, Redburn wears his clothes and is temporarily transformed into a man about town rather than a penniless sailor. The motif occurs elsewhere, and seems closely related to issues like tattooing in both Typee and Moby-Dick.

Israel Potter abounds in costume changes, and whenever Israel dons a new set of clothes he is transformed. The first such transformation occurs during his escape from the British authorities; he exchanges his sailors’ clothes with a pauper. The pauper has only rags but Israel needs a disguise no matter what.

Israel looked suddenly metamorphosed from youth to old age; just like an old man of eighty he looked. But indeed, dull dreary adversity was now in store for him; and adversity, come it at eighteen or eighty, is the true old age of man. The dress befitted the fate.

Israel becomes a pauper, now, hiding from the authorities, sleeping in haylofts, going with hardly any food. He finds himself a job in the garden of a benevolent knight, but is too weak to work very hard until the knight takes pity, feeds him, and gives him a new set of cast-off clothes.

Later Israel will receive a very special article of clothing: shoes with false heels, to enable him to transport secret documents from sympathizers in England to Benjamin Franklin in France. His shoes have transformed him into a spy.

Israel is so used to this mode of judging men by their outfit that he hardly knows what to make of someone like John Paul Jones, who does not seem to fit the mold: “Israel thought to himself that seldom before had he seen such a being. Though dressed à-la-mode, he did not seem to be altogether civilized.”

Our hero will finally be dressed à-la-mode himself, if briefly, to provide one of the most comical moments in the book. He’s returned to his sympathizer friends in England to carry out one last round of spying, and has been secreted in an Elizabethan-era priest-hole until suspicion in the neighborhood dies down. But his benefactor fails to reappear in the allotted time, and Israel begins to fear being shut up in the walls of his house forever. He ventures out and comes to realize that his friend has suddenly died, and no one else knows Israel is there at all. His brilliant plan of escape is to dress himself in his dead friend’s clothes and simply walk out of the house. If anyone should be roused in the night they will think him a ghost. And again, he is transformed.

But after the first feeling of self-satisfaction with his anticipated success had left him, it was not without some superstitious embarrassment that Israel felt himself encased in a dead man’s broadcloth; nay, in the very coat in which the deceased had no doubt fallen down in his fit. By degrees he began to feel almost as unreal and shadowy as the shade whose part he intended to enact.

It doesn’t last; he can’t wear the clothes out and about in broad daylight, for fear of being caught, so he swaps again, this time with a scarecrow. Which he also is forced, nearly as comically, to imitate.

What is inside all these suits of clothes that can take on their characteristics, but a straw man? It is tempting to say Israel is an everyman, but I suppose more accurate to call him an anyman. You know, just like all us Americans.

Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, was the next novel published by Melville after Pierre, and it is a far cry from its predecessor. Melville made heavy use of a source text, The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, published in 1824, to provide the basis of his serialized 1854–1855 novel. Melville’s work, dedicated to “his Highness, the Bunker-Hill Monument,” claims that “with the exception of some expansions, and additions of historic and personal details, and one or two shiftings of scene, may, perhaps, be not unfitly regarded something in the light of a dilapidated old tombstone retouched.” He specifically notes that he “forbore anywhere to mitigate the hard fortunes of my hero…[and] durst not substitute for the allotment of Providence any artistic recompense of poetical justice….”

Those hard fortunes start out mildly enough, in the years prior to the American Revolution, when Israel Potter, son of a Western Massachusetts farmer, sets out on his own after his father disapproves of the girl he wants to woo. Israel heads north, to the frontier, and as a hunter and trapper learns the marksmanship that will serve him later at Bunker Hill. He makes his fortune trading with Indians and helping survey the land, improving his own stake each summer and securing more pelts each winter. Returning to his family to find the object of his love still out of reach, he takes to the sea and to whaling.

After passing through all available modes of pre-Revolutionary economic activity, Potter joins the Minutemen just in time for the outbreak of hostilities. He soon finds himself captured by the British and brought back to Portsmouth, imprisoned in a hulk. Thus begin his fifty years of exile, an exile in which he will make many fantastical escapes, be pathetically recaptured, contribute further to the Revolution, represent his newborn nation on the shores of Europe, and encounter such famous personages as John Paul Jones and Benjamin Franklin.

In Israel Potter Melville returns more to the style of Redburn or White-Jacket: the novel is a genuine novel, episodic to be sure, but entertaining, accessible, full of excitement and adventure, devoid of the flights of philosophy and dense narration of the likes of Mardi, Moby-Dick, or Pierre. Melville’s thinking is still there, and to someone familiar with his work should be clear throughout, but for the most part his deeper concerns are either hidden enough beneath the genuinely amusing surface story or presented in a way that would be congenial to the more “normal” reader—such as the symbol of Israel wandering in the wilderness of London, destitute, for forty years.

There is so much real fun in the novel as historical fiction about the American Revolution, plus the joy for the Melville aficianado at uncovering the familiar tucked away amid the adventures, to completely make up for the fact that this is surely only a “minor” work.

So far I haven’t had much good to say about Pierre, but of course there is good to say, and I did in fact like it. Lest that be misunderstood, I’ll wrap up with a rundown of what were, for me, some of the novel’s positive aspects.

First is the setting. Melville takes as his inspiration both upstate New York and Western Massachusetts, and the first half of Pierre has the stamp of an English village novel set in rural early America. The depiction of the early American aristocracy of families like the Glendinnings, whose ancestors included a famous general is interesting from the perspecive of American literary development, and many of the Romantic passages about the mountains recall Washington Irving’s myth-making. Later, when Pierre brings Isabel to the city, Melville traces the American population’s urbanization and contrasts the softness of village life, where community norms are all that’s necessary for society to function, with the hardness of the city, where vast numbers of anonymous people come together only through the more regulated means of policing.

The characters are also excellent. They are not, of course, realistic, but they are wonderful tragic types. Pierre is Romeo, and Hamlet. And Melville’s psychological exploration into his madness is gripping. Again, I would compare him to Ahab, and people love Ahab’s monomania.

The novel also deals much more directly with love than any of Melville’s other work, and while some of it is strange, some is lovely. Here is love, filtered through some very Melvillean prose about gliding and the sea:

No Cornwall miner ever sunk so deep a shaft beneath the sea, as Love will sink beneath the floatings of the eyes. Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love’s own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers’ eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover’s cheek. Love’s eyes are holy things; therein the mysteries of life are lodged; looking in each other’s eyes, lovers see the ultimate secret of the worlds; and with thrills eternally untranslatable, feel that Love is god of all.

Sorry, did I say lovely? What are those eye-fish? You have to take the weird with the wonderful, with this guy.

Then there’s lots of Melville’s greatest hits: Republicanism versus Europe, the individual and society, the principles of narration, nature and peace, Pantheism and Descartian vortices, fatalism, greatness and smallness in art, and, of course, ambiguity. Overall, the novel is more focused than Moby-Dick if not perfectly planned, but the familiar reader will find a lot that alludes to more than just the sentence or two contained in Pierre.

Yesterday I mentioned that in addition to the style of Pierre, its perceived message was also a problem for early readers. At a structural turning point in the novel, when Pierre is traveling with his new “wife” Isabel from country to city, he finds a fragment of a pamphlet based on the philosophy of one Plotinus Plinlimmon, on “chronometricals and horologicals.” The fragment is of course inserted into the narrative.

Briefly, the pamphlet outlines advice for ethical conduct. It uses the analogy of chronometers and horologes: chronometers are completely reliable, and can be carried across the sea from England to China, still faithfully telling the time in Greenwich when the bearer is in Shanghai. But, critically, that time is not the true time in Shanghai, as true as it may be for far-distant Greenwich. Perfect Christian virtue in the imitation of the divine is like a chronometer. Trying to follow such a virtuous course would be telling the right time for heaven, not for earth, where such a course of action might even be absurd. Men must instead follow horological time, leading a generally good and ethical life but recognizing the impossibility of complete sinlessness, and deeming the attempt foolish. “And thus, though the earthly widsom of man be heavenly folly to God; so also, conversely, is the heavenly wisdom of God an earthly folly to man. Literally speaking, this is so.”

Pierre reads this at a juncture in his life where he has just decided to follow a heavenly chronometer rather than conduct himself in the manner of normal men of average virtue. He believes he has made great sacrifices in favor of both Isabel and his mother, and to some extent also for his father. He believes that by following the clear course of God and godliness, he must be doing the right thing.

But it’s clear to any reader the Pierre is committing absurdities, ones that will make it impossible for him to live in the earthly community of men, whether or not they would be appropriate in heaven. Pierre insanely miscalculates the reactions of his mother and his cousin Glen Stanly to his decision to “marry” Isabel, and it’s clear that when his course of action lands him and two women he has made himself responsible for friendless and homeless in New York City, nearly arrested, his actions are not working out in normal human civilization—China to God’s England.

And Pierre and his friends don’t end well at all, seeming to put a capstone on the problems of adhering to what might appear the “virtuous” course. But does this countenance complacency, settling for human mediocrity? Consider Pierre’s plan: fake-marry his purported half-sister to avoid angering his mother, then adopt his former lover as his cousin in the household consisting of his fake marriage. Self-sacrificing, perhaps—but also sacrificing of just about everyone else in his life. Consider what a more normal, horological person might have done—a person, we should be careful to say, who is not heedless of virtue, but recognizes earthly limits: magnanimously acknowledge his half-sister with or without further evidence, force his mother to confront painful truths, and fulfill the promise he’s made to his fiancée. Is this a slap in the face to virtue or to Christianity? Or simply a sane, kind, and generous reaction to a difficult family situation?

Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, in their Historical Note to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Pierre, survey several interpretations of the pamphlet and Melville’s attitude toward it and Plotinus Plinlimmon, who will appear briefly as a character in the novel as well. They quote finally from an article by Floyd C. Watkins before summing up:

If Plinlimmon states Melville’s theme in Pierre, if Melville seems to be merely a compromiser, if he seems too expedient in his virtue, the reader must see that some expediency and reconciliation are necessary for sanity and existence.

Although criticism is so disparate, several of the major commentators, including Dr. Murray, Arvin, and Thompson, have partially indicated a way of resolving the difficulties: by accepting that on an intellectual level Melville might often if not always agree with the ideas attributed to Plinlimmon while altogether dissociating himself from the blandly rational and self-satisfied tone in which Plinlimmon is reported to express them.

That seems like an excellent resolution to me.

Yesterday I mentioned Melville’s possible “intentions” about Pierre, but I don’t like to pretend I know them. Interpretations of Pierre typically have, though. His contemporary critics, who almost universally eviscerated the novel, seem to have taken it unironically. They were certainly not pleased with Melville’s prose style, and several complained of his “inventing” words (especially by adding the suffix “-ness” to just about anything). They also bristled at the themes of incest, and even more so at a perceived denunciation of Virtue in favor of sinful complacency.

Those readers, mostly later, who did think Melville’s writing was any good here tended to regard it as parodying popular novels and purposely over-the-top. Later readers also began to appreciate the effect of the unrealistic dialogue, which pulls the characters out of any definite time or place, the mysteries, which evoke a Gothic atmosphere appropriate to the dark psychological themes, and the psychology itself. Pierre can easily be seen as a younger Ahab, an Ahab before he went mad, in the process of losing his mind.

There is also the question of how autobiographical the novel is.

I fell into the more ironic reading of Pierre, and I can also see, as is pointed out in the Historical Note to my Northwestern-Newberry edition (by Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, and the source of the historical information above), that there is a split midway through the novel where Melville seems to have begun to treat his subject more darkly. And I would entirely disagree with the premise of the reviewer from the Athenaeum, quoted in that Historical Note as follows:

We take up novels to be amused—not bewildered,—in search of pleasure for the mind—not in pursuit of cloudy metaphysics; and it is no refreshment after the daily toils and troubles of life, for a reader to be soused into a torrent rhapsody uttered in defiance of taste and sense.

But there is no denying that Melville is difficult here, and hardly commodious of the reader. Take Book VI, “Isabel, and the First Part of the Story of Isabel,” for example. Pierre has received a note asking him to call at a cottage and meet a woman who claims to be his father’s daughter. He arrives in the evening and meets Isabel, whom he’d seen before at a sewing circle and subsequently dreamt about. She’s dark, mysterious, beautiful. She has long black hair that she wears loose and is constantly enveloping her, Pierre, or both of them. That evening, she tells him the story of her early life, consisting mainly of faint and confusing memories. She uses the word “bewildering,” and all its affixed forms (there’s that “-ness”…), a lot. Then, “this abundant-haired, and large-eyed girl of mystery” asks Pierre to bring her her guitar.

She tells him that the guitar will finish her story, which cannot be spoken in words.

And still the wild girl played on the guitar; and her long dark shower of curls fell over it, and vailed it; and still, out from the vail came the swarming sweetness, and the utter unintelligibleness, but from the infinite significancies of the sounds of the guitar.

“Girl of all-bewildering mystery!” cried Pierre—“Speak to me;—sister, if thou indeed canst be a thing that’s mortal—speak to me, if thou be Isabel!”

“Mystery! Mystery!
Mystery of Isabel!
Mystery! Mystery!
Isabel and Mystery!”

Yes, that’s a song; in fact that’s an entire song. And that’s not the only place it appears.

Sometimes, when authors write exactly as they please, whether the intent is serious or ironic, it can cause what one might call an overabundantness of unfunness, or perhaps a surpassingness of painingness, demanding an extravagantness of forgivingness from even the lovingest and faithfullest of readers. Such as myself.

Title quote taken from a review in the New York Herald, also included in the Historical Note.

Without the question mark, that title headlined a newspaper article shortly after the publication of Pierre, Melville’s 1852 follow-up to Moby-Dick. Can it be that bad? We’ve dealt with messiness before, and certainly there’s plenty of insanity in Moby-Dick, but I have to agree that Pierre kicks things up a notch.

The title character, Pierre Glendinning, is a grand and magnanimous young man, a member of young America’s landed aristocracy in upstate New York, who right from the start exhibits a bizarre relationship with his mother. Pierre calls the still-attractive widow “sister Mary,” and she returns with “brother Pierre,” making sure “never to appear in the presence of her son in any dishabille that was not eminently becoming” and having him help tie ribbons around her neck, sealed with a kiss. The confusing intimacy of family relations is continued in Pierre’s reflections on his wishes for a real sister, whose affections would be similar to those of a wife.

Then, Pierre does find a real sister—half sister—maybe. He wants desperately to acknowledge her but knows his mother would never welcome the dark and mysterious Isabel into her home, never admit the possibility of Pierre’s father’s indiscretion. Pierre’s attempt to solve the dilemma of helping Isabel and not hurting his mother is insane; he throws aside his fiancée, the sweet, fair, angelic (and mother-approved) Lucy, and pretends to have secretly married Isabel, making her a Glendinning without marring his father’s memory. Mrs. Glendinning’s response is hardly unpredictable: furious, she disowns Pierre and eventually dies, seemingly of pure enraged pride.

In case that wasn’t enough, the spurned Lucy decides, after a period of pining, to go and live with Pierre and Isabel, pretending to be Pierre’s cousin.

A bit of a departure from harpooning whales and befriending cannibals. So what sort of animal is Pierre? You’ll note that it is Melville’s only book-length work to take place entirely on land, and even it can’t quite resist the ocean by the very end. There is evidence Melville may have meant the novel as a bit of rural romance. Much of the novel occurs within private homes, giving it certain elements of the domestic fiction popular at the time.

But Melville couldn’t write a popular romance; he had to write exactly as he pleased, and that meant a flight into the Gothic. Pierre is full of mystery and gloom, with a full-blown Romantic hero going mad. It’s also a step beyond the style of Moby-Dick, stuffed with high-flown prose and dialogue stylized beyond any pretense at realism. Here is a short speech from Pierre to Isabel, at least as Shakespearian as anything heard from Ahab:

“Call me brother no more! How knowest thou I am thy brother? Did thy mother tell thee? Did my father say so to me?—I am Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in the common humanity,—no more. For the rest, let the gods look after their own combustibles. If they have put powder-casks in me—let them look to it! let them look to it! Ah! now I catch glimpses, and seem to half-see, somehow, that the uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide of the mark. The demigods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice are trash! Isabel, I will write such things—I will gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!—I will write it, I will write it!”

This isn’t exactly representative, since Pierre isn’t this mad throughout the whole novel. But it’s not too far off, either. While I certainly enjoyed it, and beyond “mere” Appreciationism, and will be writing about it for the rest of the week, no, this is not a novel most people should read.