Jane Austen He’s Not

Pierre, or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville.  Library of America pp.1-421.  **1/2

It’s a bad sign when you finish the book and breathe a huge sigh of relief.

I have enormous admiration for Herman Melville.  Of all the 19^th century American novelists, his career has the largest span.  He began with popular books like Typee and Omoo, which recounted his adventures as a sailor to the South Sea Islands (Typee almost wasn’t published because people doubted it was authentic).  He was extremely popular as a young writer.  His novels gradually grew more serious and weighty, as did his understanding of the novel—especially after he read and met Nathaniel Hawthorne—and at the age of 32 he wrote one of the great novels in American literature, Moby Dick.  It’s astonishing to me that so young a man wrote that book.

What he found, to his shock and surprise—though it doesn’t surprise people who know the history of American literature—is that people preferred his easier, more sensational writing.  Moby Dick was utterly ignored.  Stunned by that, he wrote other novels, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence Man, tried his hand at short fiction, which he was able to sell to magazines, then turned largely to poetry, though toward the end of his life he wrote the magnificent novella Billy Budd.  For years he worked during the day as a customs inspector and spent his evenings writing the immense poem Clarel.  He died largely unknown, with Billy Budd unfinished and not published in his lifetime.  (For a good brief summation of his career, I highly recommend “Ishmael’s Double,” an essay by Guy Davenport in The Geography of the Imagination.)

For years I’ve heard that, if you love Moby Dick, you should avoid Pierre and The Confidence Man, except that there are those who love both books and believe they are among Melville’s best.[1]  I had no particular ambition to read them, but the Library of America advertised this year that for one week their volume of Melville’s late work was on sale for half price.  I love the Library of America volumes and couldn’t pass up such an offer.  And I’m glad to have it; the chronology alone—which I complained about in the Moby Dick volume—is excellent, and the volume includes many of Melville’s great stories, including Bartleby, The Scrivener.

But I found Pierre to be a puzzler.  Melville’s high style—supposedly based on that of Sir Thomas Browne and so beautifully suited to epic nautical adventure—seems out of place in a domestic drawing room.  In scenes that are essentially dramatic, he does decently well, though they seem rather frenzied, but he has a tendency to write long expository passages in between to explain the action.  In Moby Dick that was lore about sailing and whales, but here it’s Melville’s theories about nineteenth century society.  I found a lot of that tiresome.  There’s also something deeply weird about the narrative.  Melville seems to be getting at something but I was never sure what.  I’m not sure now, even after I’ve finished.

Pierre as the novel opens is a nineteen year old man who’s got the world by the short hairs.  He gets along wonderfully with his wealthy and very attractive mother—she’s so attractive and youthful that they’ve taken to referring to each other as brother and sister (?)—and he’s engaged to be married to a wonderful young woman named Lucy Tartan.  They’re deeply in love, in a way that only couples in nineteenth century domestic novels can be.  We don’t know what Pierre plans to do with his life, but it hardly seems to matter.  There’s plenty of money, and he spends his time indulging in social life.

He’s made uncomfortable when the local preacher—a fatuous man named Reverend Falsgrave who has a thing for Pierre’s widowed mother—comes to breakfast one day and they spend the whole meal excoriating a local woman named Delly, who had gotten in trouble (as my mother’s generation used to say[2]).  Pierre’s mother is ready to consign her to hell on the spot, and seems to delight in the fact.  The early scenes read like a stage play of a world that we suspect made Melville highly uncomfortable.  But he plays it straight, and everything is lovey-dovey.

Things get complicated when he and his mother go to visit a local sewing circle, and one of the seamstresses, hearing his name, makes a loud groan and faints dead away.  She later contacts Pierre and lets him know that she has a strong suspicion that she is his half-sister, that his long since dead father impregnated her mother before he met his future wife.  Pierre eventually meets with this dark beautiful woman, whose name is Isabel, and though her life story is weird and shadowy beyond belief, he becomes convinced that his father did indeed have a secret life, and that Isabel is his half sister.  She also happened to live in the same house with the disgraced Delly.

I assume this situation is one of the Ambiguities of the title.  His father was a virtuous man, but then again, maybe not.  I don’t know what you would do in a situation like this.  I don’t know what I would do.  Here’s what Pierre does: he breaks off his engagement to Lucy, whom he loves, goes to Isabel and proposes to marry her, even though they can’t actually live as man and wife, suggests that they adopt the disgraced Delly and take her along with them, and moves to New York city to create a new life, bringing respect and hope to these women who have been disgraced.

I don’t know how that strikes you.  To me it doesn’t sound like a great idea.

Things didn’t turn out terribly well.  His mother immediately disowns him; a cousin who had formerly been close to him (but who always had a secret thing for Lucy) pretends not even to recognize him, though Pierre had been counting on living in one of his houses in New York.   And as it turns out—though I don’t remember hearing anything about it before—Pierre actually has a literary career (at age nineteen!).  He’s known for some brilliant early work, and decides to make his living as a novelist!  I’ve got to say, Pierre, that’s another dubious choice, while you and Isabel and Delly occupy rooms in a grim boarding house in a bad part of the city.

I have the impression that Melville was an extremely rapid writer, who worked largely by instinct and intuition.  I suspect he began this novel wanting to say something about the hypocrisies of nineteenth century high society, or perhaps the way such people were portrayed in fiction.  But by the time he got to the middle of the book, he was beginning to realize that his best and most serious work, and one of the great novels ever written in this country, was being utterly ignored.  And he pivoted—as people say nowadays—to write about the travails of the literary world.

There’s also a fascination with incest here.  From the weird way Pierre and his mother talk to each other as the book opens, to the fact that he goes off and marries his half-sister, and has periods of wondering from time to time if maybe she isn’t his half-sister, and they can live as man and wife after all.  Whether or not he acts on those conjectures is unclear.  I won’t spoil any more plot details, except to say that Lucy, who had fainted dead away when she heard of Pierre’s rejection, shows up in the story again, along with Pierre’s evil cousin, and that the book’s ending is dark.  Dark doesn’t begin to describe it.  I also found it unbelievable, the kind of ending a writer grasps at when he has no idea what else to do.

I think Melville was a self-educated genius.  I admire the way he moved from theme to theme utterly fearlessly, and took up what he wanted.  But this book was ill-conceived from the start.  Then it got mired in the disappointment of a man whose greatest work was scorned.

[1] Sure enough, I checked Goodreads, and Pierre either gets one star or five.

[2] If you didn’t understand, they’d say, she’s pg.