The Misanthrope

THE CONFIDENCE-MAN (392 pp.)--Herman Melville--Hendricks House ($4).

Herman Melville was in hock to his publishers and out of favor with his pubic. Moby Dick had provoked mixed reviews; its successor, Pierre, got savage ones. His readers wanted him to spin more of his early, popular South Sea romances such as Typee and Omoo. Exhausted and distraught, Melville developed neurotic mental tics and jumpy relatives made tentative moves to have him declared insane. His wife was soon to voice her special qualms in a letter to her mother: "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around." In despair, and doubting even his creative powers, Melville in 1856 wrote The Confidence-Man, as black-biled a novel as exists in American literature.

Published for the sixth time in English, it nonetheless remains the least known work of the U.S.'s greatest novelist. What the book needs, and ably gets in an introduction by Elizabeth S. Foster, a perceptive Melville specialist, is a key to its structure and a path through its symbols.

Practical Joke. The Confidence-Man is a satiric picaresque allegory that indicts not only man's inhumanity to man, but, as Melville saw it, God's as well. The theme and mood of the novel are caught in a line from Moby Dick: "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke." The setting for Melville's vast practical joke 'is a Mississippi riverboat, named Fidele, on a run from St. Louis to New Orleans. The day is April Fool's Day. The characters are a bustling "congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man . . . farm-hunters and fame-hunters, heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters and still keener hunters after all" these hunters." The multiform hunters are uniform prey; they exist only to be duped.

An unworldy stranger prepares the way for the confidence-man, the master-duper. Silently, the stranger scrawls some words on a slate and holds it up for the passengers to see: "Charity thinketh no evil," "Chanty endureth all things," "Charity never faileth." Close by, the ship's barber opens his shop for the day and he too hangs up a sign: "No trust."

The Wall Street Spirit. A string of episodes fleshes out the mordant meaning of this dumb show. A Negro cripple named Black Guinea squats on his deformed legs and begs for his supper by singing an idiotic little tune, winning the crowd's favor by catching pennies, and more than a few buttons, in his mouth. A mean-spoken cynic promptly accuses the cripple of shamming, and after a vain, mumbling plea for "confidence," Black Guinea slinks off the boat at the next landing. Black Guinea is the first of many disguises assumed by the confidence-man and the clue to Melville's bitter moral. He mulcts the fools who believe in him, but can only be exposed by knaves who have no jot of faith in any man.

After this, the confidence-man's masquerades multiply fast. He appears as a businessman and shakes down a merchant for a loan, by convincing him that he is an old acquaintance. He gulls a sympathetic gentleman with a billion-dollar worldwide relief scheme ("Missions I would quicken with the Wall Street spirit"). Ever extolling the power of positive thinking, the confidence-man takes the form of an herb doctor with a cure-all called the Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator ("Health is good, and nature cannot work ill").

Riverboat Devil. What Melville aims at in these episodes is a scathing, nihilistic critique of every reigning belief of 19th century America: shallow assumptions about perpetual progress, Christian hypocrisy and pretensions, easy optimism about man, nature and the universe, Emersonian uplift and self-seeking self-reliance, and the hard-driving spirit of commerce in all things. But Melville will not stop until he can debunk the goodness and glory of God. In a final episode, an old man sits reading the Bible by the light of a solitary lamp. A young sharper (not the confidence-man) exposes the old man's imperfect faith by selling him a lock and a money belt, and giving him a counterfeit-detector as a bonus. The confidence-man gently chides the old fellow, "since in Providence, as in man, you and I equally put trust." "Let me extinguish this lamp," he says, and as he leads the old man off into the darkness, the confidence-man is no longer a smooth-talking Iago turned riverboat swindler, but the Devil himself holding the whole earth in his black hand.

As a novel, The Confidence-Man is a near miss, one of those pregnant and provocative failures that prove more rewarding to read than a whole litter of lesser writers' tidy but empty triumphs. Austere and philosophical, it sometimes seems all head and no tale. Despite its dire point of view, the book jests and jostles with life, and really belongs with the sardonic comic charades of Swift, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and Ben Jonson's Volpone. Like them, it is a kind of cosmic hangover suffered by a man who--having drunk overfull of the human race--swears off mankind. Melville's nausea ran so deep that he did not write another novel for 32 years. In the end he did make his peace with the universe, a serene and affirmative one, in the classic pages of his final masterpiece, Billy Budd.

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