Session VII - June 6, 2007 - Melville Continued: The Confidence Man

The 4 Chevaliers of the Apocalypse! There seems to be the expression - "chevalier of fortune" - the same seems possible in French - see here (link opens Word-Document, and that document is obviously dealing with a Tarock deck, or something like it) - and, taking the knightly connotations into wordlier concerns, chevalier may also mean something like gentleman, and that doesn't get us much closer to the way the word is used in the novel. The Norton Edition - oh mighty, mighty Norton Edition! praise thee, Almighty! - explicates the term as "Swindlers, here engaged in picking pockets", and indeed, a few more clicks get us to the Chevalier D'Industrie, that is someone who uses his (knightly?) virtues (perseverance, stamina, wit, and so on) to a banal, industrial, mechanical, and not too honorable end, I take it.

The Confidence Man (1857)

The Confidence Man was Melville’s final novel, about the last thing he wrote in prose. As most of his previous novels, this one was no commercial success – and he seems to have cancelled his novel writing also because he was fed up with writing for a market that didn’t honor it in a financial way. At this point, we don’t need to go through a complete list of his novels: there are 11 of these, written over the course of 11 years, and during that time he went from hopeful to less hopeful to completely desperate. By the middle of the 1850s, he was so deeply into debt and financial problems that his wife and his brother took his finances out of his hands.

When The Confidence Man came out in 1857, readers didn’t quite seem to grasp what it was: it was only later, in the 20th century, that readers appreciated the allegorical depth of the book. The print run was small, not many novels were sold, and Melville turned to writing poetry (which he had hardly more success with), to lecturing, and finally to working as a custom inspector in New York City, and that would have been the first time in his life his financial survival was secure. He died in NYCin 1891. At the time his reputation had somewhat drifted into the obscure – it was only in the 1920s that he was re-discovered by literary criticism, and he has been popular ever since, so that by now he’s is (justly!) considered as one of the greatest American writers at all. Scholarly criticism on his work and life keeps coming up at great numbers.


We went into the first two chapters, to sort of give the confidence man a decent admission to the stage - he is that ultra-flashy figure on the ship, Fidèle, and with him faith/the faithful are going down the river...to New Orleans, but also to the end)

AT sunrise on a first of April there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.

His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger. (emphasis mine)

He's opening his own hunting season (by installing that placard that draws notice to the mysterious impostor from the East) - and then walks around with his signs, advertising charity. The boat becomes his stage, and his stage only - we read the beginning of the second chapter, where the audience, the passengers utter these curt, hypothetical remarks as to the nature of the fur-hat-wearer, as minor characters in a play would.

We also read that passage from Hawthorne's Twice-Told-Tales, to look at another confidence man, a satanic beggar, as it were -

While the merry girl and myself were busy with the show box, the unceasing rain had driven another wayfarer into the wagon. He seemed pretty nearly of the old show man's age, but much smaller, leaner, and more withered than he, and less respectably clad in a patched suit of gray; withal, he had a thin, shrewd countenance, and a pair of diminutive gray eyes, which peeped rather too keenly out of their puckered sockets. This old fellow had been joking with the show man, in a manner which intimated previous acquaintance; but perceiving that the damsel and I had terminated our affairs, he drew forth a folded document and presented it to me. As I had anticipated, it proved to be a circular, written in a very fair and legible hand, and signed by several distinguished gentlemen whom I had never heard of, stating that the bearer had encountered every variety of misfortune, and recommending him to the notice of all charitable people. Previous disbursements had left me no more than a five dollar bill, out of which, however, I offered to make the beggar a donation, provided he would give me change for it. The object of my beneficence looked keenly in my face, and discerned that I had none of that abominable spirit, characteristic though it be of a full blooded Yankee, which takes pleasure in detecting every little harmless piece of knavery.

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