The Confindence-Man by Herman Melville

Author:Herman Melville
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: test
Publisher: test
Published: 2010-08-27T03:00:00+00:00

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and his book was praised for its “fidelity to nature” and its “thorough impression and conviction of reality.” The “reflection” in it (a potential danger) was of the solid kind that “may stir the profoundest depths of manhood’’; but one brief episode did involve a questionable element: “we are introduced to a fancy young gentleman who gets up with Redburn a hurried, romantic night visit to London, which is enveloped in the glare of a splendid gambling establishment. The parties, however, soon get back to duty, and find nothing whatever lurid or romantic in the discipline under Captain Riga.” White-Jacket, judged by the same criterion, measured up even better when reviewed by the Literary World (March 16, 1850). The theme of the review was precisely the balance of “observation” and “thought” in the work: “The keen sense of outward life, mingled with the growing weight of reflection which cheers or burdens the inner man, observable in Mr. Melville’s later volumes, keep us company in the present.” The reviewer (presumably Duyckinck) knew his man, and had read his books carefully: “It is this union of culture and experience, of thought and observation, the sharp breeze of the forecastle alternating with the mellow stillness of the library, books and work imparting to each other mutual life, which distinguishes the narratives of the author of Typee from all other productions of their class…. To have the fancy and the fact united is rare in any walk, almost unknown on the sea. Hence to Herman Melville, whose mind swarms with tender, poetic, or humorous fancies, the ship is a new world, now first conquered.” This formulation seemed fair enough, but in actuality it severely limited “culture” and “fancy.” Moreover, it excluded elements that were stirring in Melville’s feelings and imagination and that had manifested themselves, unremarked by Duyckinck, through situations and images in both books, and particularly through the new sense of victimization, imprisonment, and outraged resentment of authority that became so central in the latter. By the late summer of 1849 when he wrote White-Jacket, outer and inner pressures were working on Melville and contributing to the imaginative shaping of the book. The city hemmed him in; his household was crowded; economic demands pressed; his literary “wood sawing” jobs confined him to his desk; his high hopes for Mardi were defeated; and, not least, literary formulas—notably his friend Duyckinck’s so sensible ones—cribbed and confined his imagination and forced him to “repress” himself. Doubtless more obscure forces were involved as well.

Whatever release Melville’s trip to England and the Continent from October through December afforded him did not remove those pressures.

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