James: Jack & Jill

(Picasso's L'Etreinte taken from somewhere.)

From On Some of Life's Ideals by William James:

In my previous talk, "On a Certain Blindness," I tried to make you feel how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view. The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us. There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in understanding this. It has the most tremendous practical importance. I wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is the basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political. The forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it——so importantly——is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.

If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.

How You Sleep at Night

(Image stolen from the Etsy store of one Shelle Kennedy.)

The latest issue of visceral Toronto lit zine The Puritan is out. It contains a short story I wrote called "How You Sleep at Night."

If you want to skip the table of contents and get right to my story, you can do that -- but I would recommend checking out the whole issue instead. My story is one of three fiction pieces, and I'm not sure whether I feel honored or somewhat inadequate to see my work placed alongside D. Hancock's "New Jersey" and A. Grassi's "Air Show," both of which are necessary reading.

Either way, I think this is pretty cool.

In Lieu of an Update, a Nitpick

Some time way back was a post about some of the hitches we're experiencing as our cultural digitization accelerates. Since then we've seen the unwarranted social media manhunt of Ryan Lanza, beautiful but fake Hurricane Sandy photographs, the bursting of the "Romney will win in a landslide" filter bubble, and so on. But today we're revisiting a recipient of the original post's criticism: QUOTE SITES.

There's a whole bunch of them out there, but they're pretty much the same: websites amassing pithy sayings from famous people and inviting browsers to search and peruse their ad-dappled indexes. One such site is Philosophical Quotes, whose Twitter feed I've recently begun following.

A few days ago, @philo_quotes posted:

« Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another. »
Plato

Which is a beautiful quote -- but doesn't it sound sort of familiar? 

Plato technically did write that, sure. But in the Republic the line is spoken by Glaucon, and his suggestion that astronomy belongs in the philosopher's curriculum is immediately shot down by Socrates, Plato's mouthpiece within the dialogue. It's equivocal to present the statement as part of Plato's philosophy, since it was only proposed in order to be dismissed.

Yeah, sure. Nobody cares, nobody needs to care. But it's essentially erroneous information that most people following @philo_quotes (over 150,000 of them) will credulously accept. However much we might disagree with his assessment of astronomy's value, our man Plato was a stickler for the truth and would not appreciate being quoted out of context.

I emailed Philosophical Quotes to point this out. The site master thanked me for doing so, but the quote is still there. Well, whatever. Why should he give a shit?

To me this is another line (however small) underscoring the supreme necessity of the fact checker amidst our century's unprecedented gout of information. It also implies that a greater share of the burden of verification has been foisted upon the consumer's shoulders, whether he knows it or not. Want to be a more effective Internet user? Read more books.

Insomnolence, Greek historians, New Year's tidings, et cetera & more et cetera.

Oof. I arrived in Jersey at about 10:00 AM yesterday morning and slept until 6:00 PM. Took a nap from 5:00 to 7:00 AM and NOW I AM WIDE AWAKE. My circadian rhythm is doing the polka.

An update about what I've been reading lately is good a way as any of perking myself up and getting primed to stay awake for another sixteen hours.

Numbers, Novels, and Other Objects of Towering Significance: A Series of Tangents

Today we will not discuss politics. Why don't we talk about math and books instead?

A few days ago I advanced from Chapter 3 to Chapter 4 in my secondhand calculus textbook. When given problems involving related rates and implicit differentation, I can now produce the correct answers, which is incredible to me. Only a year ago it would have been unthinkable. (Have I mentioned before that I only passed precalc with a D- and graduated high school because the teacher felt sorry for me? I think I probably have.)

So the mathematics kick continues. When I'm not cobbling together a working knowledge of all the algebra I deliberately ignored throughout high school, I'm often reading about mathematics instead. These are unusual times indeed.

Over the weekend a piece by Eugene Wigner ("The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences") pointed me towards a Bertrand Russel essay ("The Study of Mathematics," which I heartily recommend to educators and closeted mathphile kindreds alike) that sent flames running along a pair of fuses in my cortex.

First of all, Russel begins with:

In regard to every form of human activity it is necessary that the question should be asked from time to time, What is its purpose and ideal? In what way does it contribute to the beauty of human existence?

Sound advice, even (or especially?) on the personal scale. "Do I maintain my habits and beliefs out of reasoned conviction or behavioral inertia?"

So my first impulse was to put Russel's question to a some folks on a gaming forum, replacing "it" with "video games." Some responses were genuinely compelling -- but I realized after the fact that there are only a few ways of putting such a question to gamers without coming across as though you're trying to start an argument, and I chose none of them.

Then I looked away from my special six-button Chun-Li joypad and noticed the rough draft of a new short novel lying on my desk, still unedited. My asking myself the next question was inevitable.

What is the novel's purpose and ideal? In what way does it contribute to the beauty of human existence?

And: what, if anything, makes it indispensable to us?


First: I don't accept "entertainment" as an answer, although a good book must necessarily be engaging. There must be some kind of utility value to fiction. It must be able to make an argument for its worth on its own behalf, and one with more weight than "well, I'm amusing" or "because I'm beautiful/because I'm art." (The first statement is pablum, the second means nothing.)

On this planet we have millions of books consisting entirely of information about things that didn't actually happen, and words that were never said by people who never existed. Many such books form a mandatory constituent of a student's education, from primary school to university. I certainly hope there's a reason for this, and that we remember what it is.


(Mr. Russell grumbles about pedantic math teachers dissuading students from discovering the beauty of pure mathematics for themselves. I'm just as concerned when I hear students or former students complaining about being unable to enjoy The Great Gatsby -- a valuable novel that should be virtually impossible not to enjoy -- because of the way the instructor presented it.)

(I hope to god we know there are better reasons for teaching literature than to improve vocabulary and reading comprehension.)


The library that's the setting and focus of my day job hosts a modest a fiction section. The contents of these shelves don't get much love from the collection stewards, least of all me. I've been assigned the task of culling expendable books to make room for an influx of about 250 linear feet of material (blah blah blah job) and so far the majority of Goodwill fodder has come from the fiction shelves.

The consensus among the library's decision-makers is that a fiction section is a fine thing for our library to have, provided it is small and assigned less priority than anything else on the shelves, including the decorative little plants. Meanwhile, we'll put just about any book on spirituality or theology on the shelves (remember that I am employed at a facility associated with the Religious Society of Friends), provided its author isn't some self-published whackjob. For a novel to be absolutely safe from deaccessioning, it needs to have been written by an author found in college-required texts or a Pulitzer/Nobel prize winner.

But this is a value judgement informed by the policies of an institutional collection. After all, we have limited shelf space and the material on display should reflect the establishment and its values. Still -- I was initially taken aback by the committee's willingness to part with the novels in the collection before anything else. (This was, however, before I noticed that most of the stuff in the fiction section isn't exactly high-caliber. On a related note, I occasionally wonder if the contempt I feel for books counted in the "popular women's fiction" set is actually warranted. Maybe I'd find a specimen I liked if I could just check the urge to fling the book across the room after reading two pages.)

Meanwhile, I've been starting to notice that the majority of my friends who habitually read for pleasure are usually sitting down with nonfiction rather than novels. Hell, I've been mostly reading nonfiction for the last year or so.

A member of the library committee once offhandedly told me he never reads fiction. Not in decades.

And that chat brought to mind something I'd read some months before: a person explaining why he'd stopped reading novels and exclusively reads philosophy texts. Fiction doesn't go far enough, he says. Philosophy isn't just pithy; it is pure. In literature, the royal perfection of raw philosophic principle is diluted and muddled by the mundane exigencies of narrative.


And that's the second fuse. Russel again:

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.

And that's just it. Brilliantly and probably unintentionally, Russel implies the value of art even as he asserts the value of mathematics.

Mathematics and human experience don't occur in the same world. The study of mathematics, logic, philosophy, etc. might temporarily vault the human practitioner into a loftier realm (metaphorically speaking), but he's still stuck on planet Earth.

Mathematics, our conduit to Russel's world of pure reason, is damn near absolutely consistent and infallible. That's the beauty of it. I wouldn't be the first person to point out that 1 + 1 = 2 is practically a creed attesting to the existence of order in this world.

"One," "two," and the relationship between them only exists in the perfect, imaginary realm of pure mathematics. They don't live here with us.

Objects and quantities in the physical universe we inhabit aren't as simple. They're harder to parse. They're more elusive. A human being's sensory perception of reality doesn't always reflect the physical fact of reality. The individual's subjective experience of reality leads to disagreement and confusion regarding the contents of reality. To the physcial contents of the world we've added abstractions like "freedom," "love," "justice," "hope," "beauty," "meaning," etc., and assigned them tremendous importance without really taking the time reach a consensus what they are and what they mean. We can hardly concur on what apparently blitheringly obvious concepts like "good" and "bad" really mean, much less decide how these labels should be apportioned.

(Related, from Constance Reid:

Actually modern mathematicians have a considerable respect for the obvious. They have found that quite often what appears obvious is not at all; in fact, quite often it is not even true. They have also found that even when it is true, it is often almost impossible to prove that it is true. )

Mathematics and logic operate -- and they operate unreasonably well -- because they work in a system with clearly defined objects and rules. No such rules exist for subjective human experience.

Philosophy, logic, and mathematics have yet to conclusively solve humanity and the world. The qualitative experience of human existence has, of yet, resisted quantification.


In this life there is always ambiguity and uncertainty. And on the basis of this fact rests the continent where a search for the real value of art and of the novel should begin.

Literature is, like economics, a dismal science. We can create and read it as study of something about which we can guess and learn, but staunchly resists systematization: subjective human experience. If the principles along which human life acts are the stuff of philosophy, the novel makes an excellent petri dish in which we can observe what happens, how well they work, and what changes when our Ideas (in the Platonic sense) descend from the ethereal to the material.

We teach The Great Gatsby to instruct students on the meaning of America -- a thing that can't be quantified, that doesn't exist in any material sense. We teach Catcher in the Rye as a lesson about adolescence -- a biological/psychological/social state that can be characterized in a litany of quantitative terms that somehow seem to exclude important information in spite of their thoroughness. We teach Lord of the Flies to instruct students about human nature and society without compelling neophytes to wade through millennia of unresolved academic squabbling. We teach Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman because there are things in the dirty obscurity of subjective human experience that affect us profoundly, though most of us are as powerless to identify them as to articulate why and how they stir us.


The products of mankind's excursions into the world of pure reason -- math, logic, philosophy -- are our best hope for creating a better world for ourselves. But art is what can best teach us about who we are now and the world we're stuck for the time being.

And it is my partisan opinion that the novel, more than any other art, has addressed these things the most thoroughly and with the most maturity. (But this is a line of thought whose full pursuit would carry us much farther than the confines of a half-baked blog post.)

This fact that may well change as technology transforms the way information is created, transferred, and consumed. But I do believe the novel has value and potential that's far from being totally tapped -- despite what the existence of books like 50 Shades of Grey and Loving the Band might suggest to the contrary.


(Regarding my habit of writing novels, I suppose all this implies that I have a lot to which I must live up if I hope to assert the worth of what I do.)

Let's Read Pierre: Books XXIV - XXVI

(Swiped from the Rosenbach Museum & Library's Maurice Sendak page.)

Pierre lies arbored in ebon vines, and we have finally arrived at The End.

Those who stopped reading out of frustration for the novel's slothlike pace might be interested to know that it does gain momentum halfway through and continues accelerating. Problem is, the final chapters speed by almost too fast. The tension between the bizarre Pierre/Lucy/Isabel triangle doesn't have much time to simmer; Pierre is given little opportunity to mull over and soliloquize about Isabel and his fresh doubts regarding her origins; the situation with Cousin Glen barely conveys a sense of real menace before Pierre up and guns him down.

Actually, that last one works out rather well. The fact that Pierre just puts down his cousin's nasty letter, finds a couple of guns, and goes out looking for the jerk with hardly any reflection or deliberation at all demonstrates just how low our hero has been brought. He's snapped. He's angry at the world and his asshole cousin is good a scapegoat as any to take it out on. (If this were a novel written and set in a period with modern automatic weapons, Pierre would probably just start spraying bullets into everyone standing around Glen as well.)

"'Tis speechless sweet to murder thee!" is such a perfect line for an execution. I hope that anyone reading immediately flipped back to the first page of the book, as I did, to measure the depth of Pierre's plummet.


In these final chapters we also see the last of Pierre at his purgatorial writing desk. Melville's personal anguish is now, with no possibility for doubt, on full display.

Meantime Pierre was still going on with his book; every moment becoming still the more sensible of the intensely inauspicious circumstances of all sorts under which that labor was proceeding. And as the now advancing and concentring enterprise demanded more and more compacted vigor from him, he felt that he was having less and less to bring to it. For not only was it the signal misery of Pierre, to be invisibly -- though but accidentally -- goaded, in the hour of mental immaturity, to the attempt at a mature work, -- a circumstance sufficiently lamentable in itself; but also, in the hour of his clamorous pennilessness, he was additionally goaded into an enterprise long and protracted in the execution, and of all things least calculated for pecuniary profit in the end. How these things were so, whence they originated, might be thoroughly and very beneficially explained; but space and time here forbid.

At length, domestic matters -- rent and bread -- had come to such a pass with him, that whether or no, the first pages must go to the printer; and thus was added still another tribulation; because the printed pages now dictated to the following manuscript, and said to all subsequent thoughts and inventions of Pierre -- Thus and thus; so and so; else an ill match. Therefore, was his book already limited, bound over, and committed to imperfection, even before it had come to any confirmed form or conclusion at all. Oh, who shall reveal the horrors of poverty in authorship that is high? While the silly Millthorpe was railing against his delay of a few weeks and months; how bitterly did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart, that to most of the great works of humanity, their authors had given, not weeks and months, not years and years, but their wholly surrendered and dedicated lives. On either hand clung to by a girl who would have laid down her life for him; Pierre, nevertheless, in his deepest, highest part, was utterly without sympathy from any thing divine, human, brute, or vegetable. One in a city of hundreds of thousands of human beings, Pierre was solitary as at the Pole.

Melville acknowledges the novel's incongruities and apologizes for them, but he's also explaining himself. He wrote this the year after Moby Dick. Just one year later. Maybe Shakespeare could bang out masterpiece after masterpiece in his best years -- but Shakespeare was arguably a mutant of a more evolved strain than Melville, and his plays were much shorter than Melville's novels, besides. (Hamlet runs a little over 30,000 words, and is a rather long play. Pierre is five times that length, totaling something like 150,000 words.) It's much easier to shape a piece within the confines of a comprehensive vision when it's on the small side -- and when the exigencies of a breadwinner role aren't forcing you to rush the thing out the door.

If you're ever reading an S-tier literary masterpiece, it probably wasn't the result of a panicked rush job by an exasperated author at the end of his rope.

Melville was all too painfully aware of Pierre's shortcomings, but he couldn't do anything about it. He couldn't go back and change the beginning to better suit the shape taken by the end because he didn't have time. He had debts to pay, and this bizarre, imperfect, disturbing book was his only means of settling them.

The first two thirds of Pierre are an homage to Hamlet, but during the final third it shifts toward King Lear. This isn't about a prince's dilemmas and resolutions anymore. Now it's about bad things happening to good people. Now it's about the world beating down and deforming a noble soul with all the appearance of deliberate malice. Now it's about nothing working out for anybody. Now it's about the wanton gods killing Pierre and friends for their sport.


Toward the end of the Pierre's "Hamlet" section of the book, the Plinlimmon pamphlet acts as a sort of condensed, allegorical take on the plot. After the plot changes course, Melville uses the Enceladus hallucination to sum up the new state of things:

Nor did Pierre's random knowledge of the ancient fables fail still further to elucidate the vision which so strangely had supplied a tongue to muteness. But that elucidation was most repulsively fateful and foreboding; possibly because Pierre did not leap the final barrier of gloom; possibly because Pierre did not willfully wrest some final comfort from the fable; did not flog this stubborn rock as Moses his, and force even aridity itself to quench his painful thirst.

Thus smitten, the Mount of Titans seems to yield this following stream: --

Old Titan's self was the son of incestuous Coelus and Terra, the son of incestuous Heaven and Earth. And Titan married his mother Terra, another and accumulatively incestuous match. And thereof Enceladus was one issue. So Enceladus was both the son and grandson of an incest; and even thus, there had been born from the organic blended heavenliness and earthliness of Pierre, another mixed, uncertain, heaven-aspiring, but still not wholly earth-emancipated mood; which again, by its terrestrial taint held down to its terrestrial mother, generated there the present doubly incestuous Enceladus within him; so that the present mood of Pierre -- that reckless sky-assaulting mood of his, was nevertheless on one side the grandson of the sky. For it is according to eternal fitness, that the precipitated Titan should still seek to regain his paternal birthright even by fierce escalade. Wherefore whoso storms the sky gives best proof he came from thither! But whatso crawls contented in the moat before that crystal fort, shows it was born within that slime, and there forever will abide.

I have to read this as Melville licking the wounds in his soul -- or a very poetic act of self-flagellation. Either way, you're bogged in the filth and mud of the world. If you've got a noble spirit, well, sucks to be you: all you'll do is make things worse for yourself, and by your own nominal choice.

There is a difference between the gist of this and of the Plinlimmon tract. "Chronometricals and Horologicals" is a sort of cheat sheet for understanding the protagonist's tragic situation. The Enceladus digression is about Melville's own foundations cracking under his thwarted ambitions, all projected onto Pierre.


I can't be certain I'm not plagiarizing Mr. Sedgwick, but I'd like to think the thought would have occurred to me anyway: what's most striking about Pierre's end is its absence of tragic grandeur. Hamlet went out having bested Laertes, taken out Claudius, and avenged his father. Timon manages poetical justice in death, making vast Neptune weep for aye on his low grave, on faults forgiven (partial quote). Ahab and the Pequod go down like Lucifer, although in torrents rather than flames.

Pierre commits suicide in ignominy and obscurity after failing completely at what he set out to do, which might have actually been done for nothing.

About that...

The real sand in the eye here comes from the revelation regarding Isabel. Should we even call it a revelation? It might more fairly be called a rethinking. Much earlier, savvy reader Ivan pointed out that Pierre accepted Isabel’s claims without the least incredulity. Now, the dispirited but wiser Pierre finds some reason to doubt that Isabel is truly his sister -- or at least to back up and reexamine the evidence he accepted as verification of her claims.

“Ambiguities” indeed. Maybe Isabel is Pierre’s sister; in which case the well-meaning brother gives his best shot to a right and true cause. And maybe is Isabel is just some confused orphan with no relation to the Glendinning family, and the whole drama was actually a magnificently sick cosmic joke.

To use one final analogy from Hamlet, this would be comparable to Hamlet’s discovering – after he's been poisoned by Laertes’s rapier, but before he takes out Claudius -- that the joking gravedigger sometimes likes to get loaded, dress up like a ghost, and go outside after dark to fuck with people's heads. It would admit the possibility that his enterprise of great pith and moment was all for nothing. Worse than nothing: it would have made him the undisputed villain of the story. As it is, Hamlet comes out responsible (directly or indirectly) for a pile of mostly innocent corpses, but at the last avenges a regicide that would have otherwise gone unpunished. Whether or not the ends justified the means is up for debate.

Pierre’s momentous choice sets off a succession of events and subsequent decisions leading to the deaths of Mary, Lucy, Isabel, Glen, and himself. If it was all for the sake of his sister’s honor, well – good intentions and the service to a just and true cause paved another road to hell. But if Isabel isn’t his sister...

What a frightful thought.

When a lot of people use the word "ironic," what they actually mean is something more like "ain't that some shit."

Lucy's reappearance. Ain't that some shit?

She sacrifices her honor and her well-being for her beloved Pierre's sake as earnestly as Pierre sacrificed his honor and well-being for his beloved Isabel's sake. She and Pierre truly deserve each other, don't they?

Too bad that weirdo Isabel is in the way now.

In the end, what are we to think of Isabel?

Melville, as we know, relishes metaphor, allegory, and symbolism. This is a drama carried out between walking, talking archetypes. We have Pierre the tragic prince, Mary the vain queen, Lucy the angel, Glen the spiteful rival, and so on. But in the equation of Pierre, what does Isabel quantify?

"Bad angel" and "dark lady" are not satisfactory answers. She's something more anomalous than that -- but I certainly can't guess what. And there's another ambiguity. Isabel the ambiguity.

What is ironic are Isabel's last words. "All o'er, and ye know him not!" Spoken about someone whom the reader knows pretty bloody well by now, and spoken by somebody who will always remain a mystery.


And the rest is silence!


That's it for Pierre. Thanks again for joining me if you've been reading along, and for bearing with me if you haven't. We'll be returning to our regularly-scheduled, haphazard content next week. After this, I think I need to read a cheerier and more contemporary novel. I'm thinking The Monkey Wrench Gang, maybe...?

After failing as a writer, Herman Melville writes about failing as a writer (Pierre supplement)

Finished Pierre last night. And then I took a cold shower. What a bizarre, dark, disheartening book.

What I have for you today are two short stories written by Herman Melville and published anonymously by Harper's in 1854 (two years after Pierre). Taken with the understanding of Melville's circumstances after Pierre ruined his literary career and his aspirations, it's not hard to conjecture what he's getting at with these. It is, however, difficult to be sure. Are these efforts at self-consolation or reflections of a genuine change in his attitude?

*               *              *

The Fiddler

So my poem is damned, and immortal fame is not for me! I am nobody forever and ever. Intolerable fate!

Snatching my hat, I dashed down the criticism, and rushed out into Broadway, where enthusiastic throngs were crowding to a circus in a side-street near by, very recently started, and famous for a capital clown.

Presently my old friend Standard rather boisterously accosted me.

"Well met, Helmstone, my boy! Ah! what's the matter? Haven't been committing murder? Ain't flying justice? You look wild!"

"You have seen it then?" said I, of course referring to the critism.

"Oh yes; I was there at the morning performance. Great clown, I assure you. But here comes Hautboy. Hautboy——Helmstone."

Without having time or inclination to resent so mortifying a mistake, I was instantly soothed as I gazed on the face of the new acquaintance so unceremoniously introduced. His person was short and full, with a juvenile, animated cast to it. His complexion rurally ruddy; his eye sincere, cheery, and gray. His hair alone betrayed that he was not an overgrown boy. From his hair I set him down as forty or more.

"Come, Standard," he gleefully cried to my friend, "are you not going to the circus? The clown is inimitable, they say. Come; Mr. Helmstone, too——come both; and circus over, we'll take a nice stew and punch at Taylor's."

The sterling content, good humor, and extraordinary ruddy, sincere expression of this most singular new acquaintance acted upon me like magic. It seemed mere loyalty to human nature to accept an invitation from so unmistakably kind and honest a heart.

During the circus performance I kept my eye more on Hautboy than on the celebrated clown. Hautboy was the sight for me. Such genuine enjoyment as his struck me to the soul with a sense of the reality of the thing called happiness. The jokes of the clown he seemed to roll under his tongue as ripe magnum bonums. Now the foot, now the hand, was employed to attest his grateful applause. At any hit more than ordinary, he turned upon Standard and me to see if his rare pleasure was shared. In a man of forty I saw a boy of twelve; and this too without the slightest abatement of my respect. Because all was so honest and natural, every expression and attitude so graceful with genuine good-nature, that the marvelous juvenility of Hautboy assumed a sort of divine and immortal air, like that of some forever youthful god of Greece.

But much as I gazed upon Hautboy, and as much as I admired his air, yet that desperate mood in which I had first rushed from the house had not so entirely departed as not to molest me with momentary returns. But from these relapses I would rouse myself, and swiftly glance round the broad amphitheatre of eagerly interested and all-applauding human faces. Hark! claps, thumps, deafening huzzas; the vast assembly seemed frantic, with acclamation; and what, mused I, has caused all this? Why, the clown only comically grinned with one of his extra grins.

Then I repeated in my mind that sublime passage in my poem, in which Cleothemes the Argive vindicates the justice of the war. Aye, aye, thought I to myself, did I now leap into the ring there, and repeat that identical passage, nay, enact the whole tragic poem before them, would they applaud the poet as they applaud the clown? No! They would hoot me, and call me doting or mad. Then what does this prove? Your infatuation or their insensibility? Perhaps both; but indubitably the first. But why wail? Do you seek admiration from the admirers of a buffoon? Call to mind the saying of the Athenian, who when the people vociferously applauded in the forum, asked his friend in a whisper, what foolish thing had he said?

Again my eye swept the circus, and fell on the ruddy radiance of the countenance of Hautboy. But its clear honest cheeriness disdained my disdain. My intolerant pride was rebuked. And yet Hautboy dreamed not what magic reproof to a soul like mine sat on his laughing brow. At the very instant I felt the dart of the censure, his eye twinkled, his hand waved, his voice was lifted in jubilant delight at another joke of the inexhaustible clown.

Circus over, we went to Taylor's. Among crowds of others, we sat down to our stews and punches at one of the small marble tables. Hautboy sat opposite to me. Though greatly subdued from its former hilarity, his face still shone with gladness. But added to this was a quality not so prominent before: a certain serene expression of leisurely, deep good sense. Good sense and good humor in him joined hands. As the conversation proceeded between the brisk Standard and him——for I said little or nothing——I was more and more struck with the excellent judgment he evinced. In most of his remarks upon a variety of topics Hautboy seemed intuitively to hit the exact line between enthusiasm and apathy. It was plain that while Hautboy saw the world pretty much as it was, yet he did not theoretically espouse its bright side nor its dark side. Rejecting all solutions, he but acknowledged facts. What was sad in the world he did not superficially gainsay; what was glad in it he ! did not cynically slur; and all which was to him personally enjoyable, he gratefully took to his heart. It was plain, then——so it seemed at that moment, at least——that his extraordinary cheerfulness did not arise either from deficiency of feeling or thought.

Suddenly remembering an engagement, he took up his hat, bowed pleasantly, and left us.

"Well, Helmstone," said Standard, inaudibly drumming on the slab, "what do you think of your new acquaintance?"

The two last words tingled with a peculiar and novel significance.

"New acquaintance indeed," echoed I. "Standard, I owe you a thousand thanks for introducing me to one of the most singular men I have ever seen. It needed the optical sight of such a man to believe in the possibility of his existence."

"You rather like him, then," said Standard, with ironical dryness.

"I hugely love and admire him, Standard. I wish I were Hautboy."

"Ah? That's a pity, now. There's only one Hautboy in the world."

This last remark set me to pondering again, and somehow it revived my dark mood.

"His wonderful cheerfulness, I suppose," said I, sneering with spleen, "originates not less in a felicitous fortune than in a felicitous temper. His great good sense is apparent; but great good sense may exist without sublime endowments. Nay, I take it, in certain cases, that good sense is simply owing to the absence of those. Much more, cheerfulness. Unpossessed of genius, Hautboy is eternally blessed.

"Ah? You would not think him an extraordinary genius, then?"

"Genius? What! such a short, fat fellow a genius! Genius, like Cassius, is lank."

"Ah? But could you not fancy that Hautboy might formerly have had genius, but luckily getting rid of it, at last fatted up?"        

"For a genius to get rid of his genius is as impossible as for a man in the galloping consumption to get rid of that."

"Ah? You speak very decidedly."

"Yes, Standard," cried I, increasing in spleen, "your cheery Hautboy, after all, is no pattern, no lesson for you and me. With average abilities; opinions clear, because circumscribed; passions docile, because they are feeble; a temper hilarious, because he was born to it——how can your Hautboy be made a reasonable example to a handy fellow like you, or an ambitious dreamer like me? Nothing tempts him beyond common limit; in himself he has nothing to restrain. By constitution he is exempted from all moral harm. Could ambition but prick him; had he but once heard applause, or endured contempt, a very different man would your Hautboy be. Acquiescent and calm from the cradle to the grave, he obviously slides through the crowd."

"Ah?"

"Why do you say Ah to me so strangely whenever I speak?"

"Did you ever hear of Master Betty?"

"The great English prodigy, who long ago ousted the Siddons and the Kembles from Drury Lane, and made the whole town run mad with acclamation?

"The same," said Standard, once more inaudibly drumming on the slab.        

I looked at him perplexed. He seemed to be holding the master-key of our theme in mysterious reserve; seemed to be throwing out his Master Betty, too, to puzzle me only the more.

"What under heaven can Master Betty, the great genius and prodigy, and English boy twelve years old, have to do with the poor commonplace plodder, Hautboy, an American of forty?"

"Oh, nothing in the least. I don't imagine that they ever saw each other. Besides, Master Betty must be dead and buried long ere this."

"Then why cross the ocean, and rifle the grave to drag his remains into this living discussion?"

"Absent-mindedness, I suppose. I humbly beg pardon. Proceed with your observations on Hautboy. You think he never had genius, quite too contented, and happy and fat for that——ah? You think him no pattern for men in general? affording no lesson of value to neglected merit, genius ignored, or impotent presumption rebuked?——all of which three amount to much the same thing. You admire his cheerfulness, while scorning his commonplace soul. Poor Hautboy, how sad that your very cheerfulness should, by a by-blow, bring you despite!"

"I don't say I scorn him; you are unjust. I simply declare that he is no pattern for me."

A sudden noise at my side attracted my ear. Turning, I saw Hautboy again, who very blithely reseated himself on the chair he had left.

"I was behind time with my engagement," said Hautboy, "so thought I would run back and rejoin you. But come, you have sat long enough here. Let us go to my rooms. It is only a five minutes' walk."

"If you will promise to fiddle for us, we will," said Standard.

Fiddle! thought I——he's a jiggumbob fiddler, then? No wonder genius declines to measure its pace to a fiddler's bow. My spleen was very strong on me now.

"I will gladly fiddle you your fill," replied Hautboy to Standard. "Come on."

In a few minutes we found ourselves in the fifth story of a sort of storehouse, in a lateral street to Broadway. It was curiously furnished with all sorts of odd furniture which seemed to have been obtained, piece by piece, at auctions of old-fashioned household stuff. But all was charmingly clean and cozy.

Pressed by Standard, Hautboy forthwith got out his dented old fiddle and, sitting down on a tall rickety stool, played away right merrily at "Yankee Doodle" and other off-handed, dashing, and disdainfully care-free airs. But common as were the tunes, I was transfixed by something miraculously superior in the style. Sitting there on the old stool, his rusty hat sidways cocked on his head, one foot dangling adrift, he plied the bow of an enchanter. All my moody discontent, every vestige of peevishness, fled. My whole splenetic soul capitulated to the magical fiddle.

"Something of an Orpheus, ah?" said Standard, archly nudging me beneath the left rib.

"And I, the charmed Briun," murmured I.

The fiddle ceased. Once more, with redoubled curiosity, I gazed upon the easy, indifferent Hautboy. But he entirely baffled inquisition.

When, leaving him, Standard and I were in the street once more, I earnestly conjured him to tell me who, in sober truth, this marvelous Hautboy was.

"Why, haven't you seen him? And didn't you yourself lay his whole anatomy open on the marble slab at Taylor's? What more can you possibly learn? Doubtless, your own masterly insight has already put you in possession of all."

"You mock me, Standard. There is some mystery here. Tell me, I entreat you, who is Hautboy?"

"An extraordinary genius, Helmstone," said Standard, with sudden ardor, "who in boyhood drained the whole flagon of glory; whose going from city to city was a going from triumph to triumph. One who has been an object of wonder to the wisest, been caressed by the loveliest, received the open homage of thousands on thousands of the rabble. But to-day he walks Broadway and no man knows him. With you and me, the elbow of the hurrying clerk, and the pole of the remorseless omnibus, shove him. He who has a hundred times been crowned with laurels, now wears, as you see, a bunged beaver. Once fortune poured showers of gold into his lap, as showers of laurel leaves upon his brow. To-day, from house to house he hies, teaching fiddling for a living. Crammed once with fame, he is now hilarious without it. With genius and without fame, he is happier than a king. More a prodigy now than ever."

"His true name?"

"Let me whisper it in your ear."

"What! Oh, Standard, myself, as a child, have shouted myself hoarse applauding that very name in the theatre."

"I have heard your poem was not very handsomely received," said Standard, now suddenly shifting the subject.

"Not a word of that, for Heaven's sake!" cried I. "If Cicero, traveling in the East, found sympathetic solace for his grief in beholding the arid overthrow of a once gorgeous city, shall not my petty affair be as nothing, when I behold in Hautboy the vine and the rose climbing the shattered shafts of his tumbled temple of Fame?"

Next day I tore all my manuscripts, bought me a fiddle, and went to take regular lessons of Hautboy.

*               *              *

The Happy Failure
A Story of the River Hudson

The appointment was that I should meet my elderly uncle at the river-side, precisely at nine in the morning. The skiff was to be ready, and the apparatus to be brought down by his grizzled old black man. As yet, the nature of the wonderful experiment remained a mystery to all but the projector.

I was first on the spot. The village was high up the river, and the inland summer sun was already oppressively warm. Presently I saw my uncle advancing beneath the trees, hat off, and wiping his brow; while far behind staggered poor old Yorpy, with what seemed one of the gates of Gaza on his back.

"Come, hurrah, stump along, Yorpy!" cried my uncle, impatiently turning round every now and then.

Upon the black's staggering up to the skiff, I perceived that the great gate of Gaza was transformed into a huge, shabby, oblong box, hermetically sealed. The sphinx-like blankness of the box quadrupled the mystery in my mind.

"Is this the wonderful apparatus?" said I, in amazement. "Why, it's nothing but a battered old dry-goods box, nailed up. And is this the thing, uncle, that is to make you a million of dollars ere the year be out? What a forlorn-looking, lack-lustre, old ash-box it is."

"Put it into the skiff!" roared my uncle to Yorpy, without heeding my boyish disdain.

"Put it in, you grizzled-headed cherub——put it in carefully, carefully! If that box bursts, my everlasting fortune collapses."

"Bursts?——collapses?" cried I, in alarm. "It ain't full of combustibles? Quick! let me go to the further end of the boat!"

"Sit still, you simpleton!" cried my uncle again. "Jump in, Yorpy, and hold on to the box like grim death while I shove off. Carefully! carefully! you dunderheaded black! Mind t'other side of the box, I say! Do you mean to destroy the box?"

"Duyvel take de pox!" muttered old Yorpy, who was a sort of Dutch African. "De pox has been my cuss for de ten long 'ear."

"Now, then, we're off——take an oar, youngster; you, Yorpy, clinch the box fast. Here we go now. Carefully! carefully! You, Yorpy, stop shaking the box! Easy! easy! there's a big snag. Pull now. Hurrah! deep water at last! Now give way, youngster, and away to the island."

"The island!" said I. "There's no island hereabouts."

"There is ten miles above the bridge, though," said my uncle, determinately.

"Ten miles off! Pull that old dry-goods box ten miles up the river in this blazing sun!"

"All that I have to say," said my uncle, firmly, "is that we are bound to Quash Island."

"Mercy, uncle! If I had known of this great long pull of ten mortal miles in this fiery sun, you wouldn't have juggled me into the skiff so easy. What's in that box?——paving-stones? See how the skiff settles down under it. I won't help pull a box of paving-stones ten miles. What's the use of pulling 'em?"

"Look you, simpleton," quoth my uncle, pausing upon his suspended oar. "Stop rowing, will ye! Now then, if you don't want to share in the glory of my experiment; if you are wholly indifferent to halving its immortal renown; I say, sir, if you care not to be present at the first trial of my Great Hydraulic-Hydrostatic Apparatus for draining swamps and marshes, and converting them, at the rate of one acre the hour, into fields more fertile than those of the Genesee; if you care not, I repeat, to have this proud thing to tell——in far future days, when poor old I shall have been long dead and gone, boy——to your children, and your children's children; in that case, sir, you are free to land forthwith."

"Oh, uncle! I did not mean——"

"No words, sir! Yorpy, take his oar, and help pull him ashore."

"But, my dear uncle; I declare to you that——"

"Not a syllable, sir; you have cast open scorn upon the Great Hydraulic-Hydrostatic Apparatus. Yorpy, put him ashore, Yorpy. It's shallow here again. Jump out, Yorpy, and wade with him ashore."

"Now, my dear, good, kind uncle, do but pardon me this one time, and I will say nothing about the apparatus."

"Say nothing about it! When it is my express end and aim it shall be famous! Put him ashore, Yorpy."

"Nay, uncle, I will not give up my oar. I have an oar in this matter, and I mean to keep it. You shall not cheat me out my share of your glory."

"Ah, now there——that's sensible. You may stay, youngster. Pull again now."

We were all silent for a time, steadily plying our way. At last I ventured to break water once more.

"I am glad, dear uncle, you have revealed to me at last the nature and end of your great experiment. It is the effectual draining of swamps; an attempt, dear uncle, in which, if you do but succeed (as I know you will), you will earn the glory denied to a Roman emperor. He tried to drain the Pontine marsh, but failed."

"The world has shot ahead the length of its own diameter since then," quoth my uncle, proudly. "If that Roman emperor were here, I'd show him what can be done in the present enlightened age."

Seeing my good uncle so far mollified now as to be quite self-complacent, I ventured another remark.

"This is a rather severe, hot pull, dear uncle."

"Glory is not to be gained, youngster, without pulling hard for it——against the stream, too, as we do now. The natural tendency of man, in the mass, is to go down with the universal current into oblivion."

"But why pull so far, dear uncle, upon the present occasion? Why pull ten miles for it? You do but propose, as I understand it, to put to the actual test this admirable invention of yours. And could it not be tested almost anywhere?"

"Simple boy," quoth my uncle, "would you have some malignant spy steal from me the fruits of ten long years of high-hearted, persevering endeavor? Solitary in my scheme, I go to a solitary place to test it. If I fail——for all things are possible——no one out of the family will know it. If I succeed, secure in the secrecy of my invention, I can boldly demand any price for its publication."

"Pardon me, dear uncle; you are wiser than I."

"One would think years and gray hairs should bring wisdom, boy."

"Yorpy there, dear uncle; think you his grizzled locks thatch a brain improved by long life?"

"Am I Yorpy, boy? Keep to your oar!"

Thus padlocked again, I said no further word till the skiff grounded on the shallows, some twenty yards from the deep-wooded isle.

"Hush!" whispered my uncle, intensely; "not a word now!" and he sat perfectly still, slowly sweeping with his glance the whole country around, even to both banks of the here wide-expanded stream.

"Wait till that horseman, yonder, passes!" he whispered again, pointing to a speck moving along a lofty, river-side road, which perilously wound on midway up a long line of broken bluffs and cliffs. "There——he's out of sight now, behind the copse. Quick! Yorpy! Carefully, though! Jump overboard, and shoulder the box, and——Hold!"

We were all mute and motionless again.

"Ain't that a boy, sitting like Zacchaeus in yonder tree of the orchard on the other bank? Look, youngster——young eyes are better than old——don't you see him?"

"Dear uncle, I see the orchard, but I can't see any boy."

"He's a spy——I know he is," suddenly said my uncle, disregardful of my answer, and intently gazing, shading his eyes with his flattened hand. "Don't touch the box, Yorpy. Crouch! crouch down, all of ye!"

"Why, uncle——there——see——the boy is only a withered white bough. I see it very plainly now."

"You don't see the tree I mean," quoth my uncle, with a decided air of relief, "but never mind; I defy the boy. Yorpy, jump out, and shoulder the box. And now then, youngster, off with your shoes and stockings, roll up your trousers legs, and follow me. Carefully, Yorpy, carefully. That's more precious than a box of gold, mind."

"Heavy as de gelt, anyhow," growled Yorpy, staggering and splashing in the shallows beneath it.

"There, stop under the bushes there——in among the flags——so——gently, gently——there, put it down just there. Now, youngster, are you ready? Follow——tiptoes, tiptoes!"

"I can't wade in this mud and water on my tiptoes, uncle; and I don't see the need of it either."

"Go ashore, sir——instantly!"

"Why, uncle, I am ashore."

"Peace! follow me, and no more."

Crouching in the water in complete secrecy, beneath the bushes and among the tall flags, my uncle now stealthily produced a hammer and wrench from one of his enormous pockets, and presently tapped the box. But the sound alarmed him.

"Yorpy," he whispered, "go you off to the right, behind the bushes, and keep watch. If you see anyone coming, whistle softly. Youngster, you do the same to the left."

We obeyed; and presently, after considerable hammering and supplemental tinkering, my uncle's voice was heard in the utter solitude, loudly commanding our return.

Again we obeyed, and now found the cover of the box removed. All eagerness, I peeped in, and saw a surprising multiplicity of convoluted metal pipes and syringes of all sorts and varieties, all sizes and calibres, inextricably inter-wreathed together in one gigantic coil. It looked like a huge nest of anacondas and adders.

"Now then, Yorpy," said my uncle, all animation, and flushed with the foretaste of glory, "do you stand this side, and be ready to tip when I give the word. And do you, youngster, stand ready to do as much for the other side. Mind, don't budge it the fraction of a barley-corn till I say the word. All depends on a proper adjustment."

"No fear, uncle. I will be careful as a lady's tweezers."

"I s'ant life de heavy pox," growled old Yorpy, "till de wort pe given; no fear o' dat."

"Oh, boy," said my uncle now, upturning his face devotionally, while a really noble gleam irradiated his gray eyes, locks, and wrinkles; "Oh, boy! this, this is the hour which for ten long years has, in the prospect, sustained me through all my painstaking obscurity. Fame will be the sweeter because it comes at the last; the truer, because it comes to an old man like me, not to a boy like you. Sustainer! I glorify Thee."

He bowed over his venerable head, and——as I live——something like a shower-drop somehow fell from my face into the shallows.

"Tip!"

We tipped.

"A little more!"

We tipped a little more.

"A leetle more!"

We tipped a leetle more.

"Just a leetle, very leetle bit more."

With great difficulty we tipped just a leetle, very leetle more.

All this time my uncle was diligently stooping over, and striving to peep in, up, and under the box where the coiled anacondas and adders lay; but the machine being now fairly immersed, the attempt was wholly vain.

He rose erect, and waded slowly all round the box; his countenance firm and reliant, but not a little troubled and vexed.

It was plain something or other was going wrong. But as I was left in utter ignorance as to the mystery of the contrivance, I could not tell where the difficulty lay, or what was the proper remedy.

Once more, still more slowly, still more vexedly, my uncle waded round the box, the dissatisfaction gradually deepening, but still controlled, and still with hope at the bottom of it.

Nothing could be more sure than that some anticipated effect had, as yet, failed to develop itself. Certain I was, too, that the waterline did not lower about my legs.

"Tip it a leetle bit——very leetle now."

"Dear uncle, it is tipped already as far as it can be. Don't you see it rests now square on its bottom?"

"You, Yorpy, take your black hoof from under the box!"

This gust of passion on the part of my uncle made the matter seem still more dubious and dark. It was a bad symptom, I thought.

"Surely you can tip it just a leetle more!"

"Not a hair, uncle."

"Blast and blister the cursed box, then!" roared my uncle, in a terrific voice, sudden as a squall. Running at the box, he dashed his bare foot into it, and with astonishing power all but crushed in the side. Then, seizing the whole box, he disemboweled it of all its anacondas and adders, and, tearing and wrenching them, flung them right and left over the water.

"Hold, hold, my dear, dear uncle!——do, for Heaven's sake, desist. Don't destroy so, in one frantic moment, all your long calm years of devotion to one darling scheme. Hold, I conjure!"

Moved by my vehement voice and uncontrollable tears, he paused in his work of destruction, and stood steadfastly eyeing me, or rather blankly staring at me, like one demented.

"It is not yet wholly ruined, dear uncle; come put it together now. You have hammer and wrench; put it together again, and try it once more. While there is life there is hope."

"While there is life hereafter there is despair," he howled.

"Do, do now, dear uncle——here, here, put these pieces together; or, if that can't be done without more tools, try a section of it——that will do just as well. Try it once; try, uncle."

My persistent persuasiveness told upon him. The stubborn stump of hope, plowed at and uprooted in vain, put forth one last miraculous green sprout.

Steadily and carefully pulling out of the wreck some of the more curious-looking fragments, he mysteriously involved them together, and then, clearing out the box, slowly inserted them there, and ranging Yorpy and me as before, bade us tip the box once again.

We did so; and as no perceptible effect yet followed, I was each moment looking for the previous command to tip the box over yet more, when, glancing into my uncle's face, I started aghast. It seemed pinched, shriveled into mouldy whiteness, like a mildewed grape. I dropped the box, and sprang toward him just in time to prevent his fall.

Leaving the woeful box where we had dropped it, Yorpy and I helped the old man into the skiff, and silently pulled from Quash Isle.

How swiftly the current now swept us down! How hardly before had we striven to stem it! I thought of my poor uncle's saying, not an hour gone by, about the universal drift of the mass of humanity toward utter oblivion.

"Boy!" said my uncle at last, lifting his head.

I looked at him earnestly, and was gladdened to see that the terrible blight of his face had almost departed.

"Boy, there's not much left in an old world for an old man to invent."

I said nothing.

"Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent anything but——happiness."

I said nothing.

"Boy, about ship, and pull back for the box."

"Dear uncle!"

"It will make a good wood-box, boy. And faithful old Yorpy can sell the old iron for tobacco-money."

"Dear massa! dear old massa! dat be very fust time in de ten long 'ear yoo hab mention kindly old Yorpy. I tank yoo, dear old massa; I tank yoo so kindly. Yoo is yourself agin in de ten long 'ear."

"Aye, long ears enough," sighed my uncle; "Æsopian ears. But it's all over now. Boy, I'm glad I've failed. I say, boy, failure has made a good old man of me. It was horrible at first, but I'm glad I've failed. Praise be to God for the failure!"

His face kindled with a strange, rapt earnestness. I have never forgotten that look. If the event made my uncle a good old man, as he called it, it made me a wise young one. Example did for me the work of experience.

When some years had gone by, and my dear old uncle began to fail, and, after peaceful days of autumnal content, was gathered gently to his fathers——faithful old Yorpy closing his eyes——as I took my last look at his venerable face, the pale resigned lips seemed to move. I seemed to hear again his deep, fervent cry——"Praise be to God for the failure!"

Let's Read Pierre: Books XVIII - XXIII

(Melville's writing desk plucked from Weekends in Paradelle.)

Our hero Pierre relocates from his lavish family home in upstate New York to an NYC tenement inhabited by poor young writers, artists, philosophers, and itinerants, where he slaves away at a book that, for any number of tangled reasons, he can't seem to get written.

My, how little things have changed in 160 years.

(I've heard that the Beats were fans of Pierre, which makes sense. Melville, to an equal or perhaps greater extent than Kerouac himself, rigorously applies the "first thought, best thought" maxim in his prose. But now that our hero is an impecunious young poet living in a church-turned-apartment building with scores of bohemian proto-Subterraneans calling themselves The Apostles -- well, the congruities speak for themselves.)

At any rate: I guess I knew it was coming.

Maybe I kept it a secret from myself, but I think one of my reasons for deciding to read Pierre now, of all times, rather than check out the Dickens or Prus novels on my To Read shelf was my understanding that Melville used it as a vessel for his grievances about writing and about Moby Dick's undeservedly poor reception. (Borrowing a turn of phrase from Sedgwick: "[Melville may have] conceived Pierre as a bomb to throw at the critics and the public to which they pandered and so to have done with them forever.")

It's probably no secret to anyone following this modest little blog that I put out a book earlier this year, and I certainly can't call it a success. After that Kirkus Indie debacle, I felt absolutely defeated. There was a week or two where I liberally referred to myself as a "failed writer."

Melville is one of my heroes. I wanted to read him writing the things that were on my mind, to see him give expression to the same kind of outrage I was feeling.

He did not disappoint.

But whatever my personal travails as an author, they are incomparable to Melville's. After all: I'm a bachelor with a day job who depends on writing as a means to preserve his sanity rather than his capacity to pay rent. Melville at this point was still a career author. Though he was in it for the love -- or, rather, for a brand of semi-religious devotion -- he wrote Pierre primarily because he needed the money. He had a wife and kids to feed; if he didn't write books, he didn't get paid. Problem was, the sort books he grew passionate about writing weren't the kind of books the public wished to read. ("[T]he world worship[s] Mediocrity and Common-Place...")

Pierre's sufferings as an author are Melville's own. As our author tries to bang out this novel so he can answer his bill collectors, his Hamlet-turned-novelist struggles to write a salable book to support himself and his sister. Unfortunately for both of them, they book they're able to write -- without marring their own integrity, which neither is capable of doing -- aren't the books that will make them bucks.

(Pierre's big hit, "The Tropical Summer," probably alludes to to the lush, South Pacific paradise which is the subject of Typee. Remember once more that Typee was Meville's best selling and most praised work during his lifetime, and is most certainly a lightweight compared to his later work.)

Though it came from left field, Pierre's attempts to support Isabel and Delly with his writing does make some sense. Cut off from the family estate and adrift in the city, our hero needed to seek out the means to sustain himself, but his upbringing as a carefree aristocrat hasn't prepped him for the urban labor force. I can imagine an exasperated Melville deciding that his hero's new occupation in his new life should be the worst, most grinding, degrading labor he could think of -- and so he made Pierre a writer, like himself.

But Jesus, we've really leapt through the funhouse mirror.

When we first met Pierre he was an 19th century American Hamlet; now he's a broke and embittered writer. The blonde, blue-eyed, angelic Lucy was once his sweetheart; now his dark half-sister has replaced her as his best girl. Early on, Pierre vivacity and naivete made him seem like a ten year old in a young adult's body; now he seems nineteen going on forty-five. In his moody raving, Pierre has come, at moments, to resemble Ahab -- a young, powerless, uncommanding Ahab.

Pierre becomes nearly unrecognizable -- and in such a short span of time. "Timonization" is an apt term for this transformation, inasmuch as Timon's turning to a misanthrope occurs almost instantaneously in Shakespeare. Though the news of his mothers' death hardly leaves him unaffected, we don't watch brood on it from every conceivable angle as we might have expected to in the earlier chapters. He goes for a walk and gets back to his book. He's got no time to grieve. That fucking book won't write itself.

It's like an awakening. Pierre dreamed he was a prince, but wakes up and realizes he's a desperate novelist who needs to write a book to feed his family.

Or: the hero of Herman Melville's novel suddenly discovers that he's actually Herman Melville.

(Do we notice that Melville is here a struggling author writing about a struggling author named Pierre who writes about a struggling author named Vivia?)


I've long been curious to know how it felt to be Melville at his writing desk. As it turns out, it kind of sucked:

With cheek rather pale, then, and lips rather blue, Pierre sits down to his plank.

But is Pierre packed in the mail for St. Petersburg this morning? Over his boots are his moccasins; over his ordinary coat is his surtout; and over that, a cloak of Isabel's. Now he is squared to his plank; and at his hint, the affectionate Isabel gently pushes his chair closer to it, for he is so muffled, he can hardly move of himself. Now Delly comes in with bricks hot from the stove; and now Isabel and she with devoted solicitude pack away these comforting stones in the folds of an old blue cloak, a military garment of ,the grandfather of Pierre, and tenderly arrange it both over and under his feet; but putting the warm flagging beneath. Then Delly brings still another hot brick to put under his ink-stand, to prevent the ink from thickening. Then Isabel drags the camp-bedstead nearer to him, on which are the two or three books he may possibly have occasion to refer to that day, with a biscuit or two, and some water, and a clean towel, and a basin. Then she leans against the plank by the elbow of Pierre, a crook-ended stick. Is Pierre a shepherd, or a bishop, or a cripple? No, but he has in effect, reduced himself to the miserable condition of the last. With the crook-ended cane, Pierre -- unable to rise without sadly impairing his manifold intrenchments, and admitting the cold air into their innermost nooks, -- Pierre, if in his solitude, he should chance to need any thing beyond the reach of his arm, then the crook-ended cane drags it to his immediate vicinity.

Pierre glances slowly all round him; every thing seems to be right; he looks up with a grateful, melancholy satisfaction at Isabel; a tear gathers in her eye; but she conceals it from him by coming very close to him, stooping over, and kissing his brow. 'Tis her lips that leave the warm moisture there; not her tears, she says.

"I suppose I must go now, Pierre. Now don't, don't be so long to-day. I will call thee at half-past four. Thou shall not strain thine eyes in the twilight."

"We will see about that," says Pierre, with an unobserved attempt at a very sad pun. "Come, thou must go. Leave me."

And there he is left.

Pierre is young; heaven gave him the divinest, freshest form of a man; put light into his eye, and fire into his blood, and brawn into his arm, and a joyous, jubilant, overflowing, up-bubbling, universal life in him everywhere. Now look around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the place, and this be the trade, that God intended him for. A rickety chair, two hollow barrels, a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black ink, four leprously dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a dry biscuit or two. Oh, I hear the leap of the Texan Camanche, as at this moment he goes crashing like a wild deer through the green underbrush; I hear his glorious whoop of savage and untamable health; and then I look in at Pierre. If physical, practical unreason make the savage, which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold your victim!

. . . . . .

From eight o'clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening, Pierre sits there in his room; -- eight hours and a half!

From throbbing neck-bands, and swinging belly-bands of gay-hearted horses, the sleigh-bells chimingly jingle; -- but Pierre sits there in his room; Thanksgiving comes, with its glad thanks, and crisp turkeys; -- but Pierre sits there in his room; soft through the snows, on tinted Indian moccasin, Merry Christmas comes stealing; -- but Pierre sits there in his room; it is New Year's, and like a great flagon, the vast city over-brims at all curb-stones, wharves, and piers, with bubbling jubilations; -- but Pierre sits there in his room: -- Nor jingling sleigh-bells at throbbing neck-band, nor swinging belly-band; nor glad thanks, and crisp turkeys of Thanksgiving; nor tinted Indian moccasin of Merry Christmas softly stealing through the snows; nor New Year's curb-stones, wharves, and piers, over-brimming with bubbling jubilations: -- Nor jingling sleigh-bells, nor glad Thanksgiving, nor Merry Christmas, nor jubilating New Year's: -- Nor Bell, Thank, Christ, Year; -- none of these are for Pierre. In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of Time, Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity. Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time, as the isle-peak, Pico, stands unassaultable in the midst of waves. He will not be called to; he will not be stirred. Sometimes the intent ear of Isabel in the next room, overhears the alternate silence, and then the long lonely scratch of his pen. It is, as if she heard the busy claw of some midnight mole in the ground. Sometimes, she hears a low cough, and sometimes the scrape of his crook-handled cane.

Here surely is a wonderful stillness of eight hours and a half, repeated day after day. In the heart of such silence, surely something is at work. Is it creation, or destruction? Builds Pierre the noble world of a new book? or does the Pale Haggardness unbuild the lungs and the life in him? -- Unutterable, that a man should be thus!

When in the meridian flush of the day, we recall the black apex of night; then night seems impossible; this sun can never go down. Oh that the memory of the uttermost gloom as an already tasted thing to the dregs, should be no security against its return. One may be passibly well one day, but the next, he may sup at black broth with Pluto.

Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read in a very few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?

Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre's own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink. But circumstances have so decreed, that the one can not be composed on the paper, but only as the other is writ down in his soul. And the one of the soul is elephantinely sluggish, and will not budge at a breath. Thus Pierre is fastened on by two leeches; -- how then can the life of Pierre last? Lo! he is fitting himself for the highest life, by thinning his blood and collapsing his heart. He is learning how to live, by rehearsing the part of death.

Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room, when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and the profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened the chances for bread; that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation and cash. But the devouring profundities, now opened up in him, consume all his vigor; would he, he could not now be entertainingly and profitably shallow in some pellucid and merry romance. Now he sees, that with every accession of the personal divine to him, some great land-slide of the general surrounding divineness slips from him, and falls crashing away. Said I not that the gods, as well as mankind, had unhanded themselves from this Pierre? So now in him you behold the baby toddler I spoke of; forced now to stand and toddle alone.

Now and then he turns to the camp-bed, and wetting his towel in the basin, presses it against his brow. Now he leans back in his chair, as if to give up; but again bends over and plods.

Twilight draws on, the summons of Isabel is heard from the door; the poor, frozen, blue-lipped, soul-shivering traveler for St. Petersburg is unpacked; and for a moment stands toddling on the floor. Then his hat, and his cane, and out he sallies for fresh air. A most comfortless staggering of a stroll! People gaze at him passing, as at some imprudent sick man, willfully burst from his bed. If an acquaintance is met, and would say a pleasant newsmonger's word in his ear, that acquaintance turns from him, affronted at his hard aspect of icy discourtesy. "Badhearted," mutters the man, and goes on.

He comes back to his chambers, and sits down at the neat table of Delly; and Isabel soothingly eyes him, and presses him to eat and be strong. But his is the famishing which loathes all food. He cannot eat but by force. He has assassinated the natural day; how then can he eat with an appetite? If he lays him down, he can not sleep; he has waked the infinite wakefulness in him; then how can he slumber? Still his book, like a vast lumbering planet, revolves in his aching head. He can not command the thing out of its orbit; fain would he behead himself, to gain one night's repose. At last the heavy hours move on; and sheer exhaustion overtakes him, and he lies still -- not asleep as children and day-laborers sleep -- but he lies still from his throbbings, and for that interval holdingly sheathes the beak of the vulture in his hand, and lets it not enter his heart.

Morning comes; again the dropped sash, the icy water, the flesh-brush, the breakfast, the hot bricks, the ink, the pen, the from-eight-o'clock-to-half-past-four, and the whole general inclusive hell of the same departed day.

Ah! shivering thus day after day in his wrappers and cloaks, is this the warm lad that once sung to the world of the Tropical Summer?

I'm really enjoying these chapters, perhaps more than the the rest of the book. Melville's astounding intellect suffuses throughout, but not until now has he splayed his guts out onto the page. I can't imagine how the edited "Kraken" version could be at all complete without the awkward "Pierre is a writer" twist.

But it's also these chapters that throw the whole novel out of alignment. It's as though Melville began writing one book, and then glued on the ending to a completely different book at the end. It's impossible for me not to read it as the author imploding on himself 2/3 into the thing and composing much of the remainder as a sort of meta self-documentary of his collapse.

I see in Pierre fragmented glimpses of the same grand and terrible phantom conjured in Moby Dick, but Melville fails to establish a cohesion among them; the rendering is incomplete. We could guess this fact is as much a contributory impetus for Melville's retconning Pierre as a result of it.


A novel beginning as an allegory or a case study cannot properly end by becoming superlatively personal. Not like this, anyway.

(Sedgwick, once again too good not to quote: "Melville transfixed his own heart on the point of his tragic vision.")

Pierre's imperfections make it so extraordinarily interesting, but they're also what keep it from vaulting to the same heights as Moby Dick. One wonders what a masterpiece it would have been if Melville had managed to transcribe more of the larger, infinitely better book into the bungled version.


Well, we wrap this up next week. Thanks for reading along if you're been keeping up with your own copy of the book, and thanks for bearing with me if you haven't. And if you started reading along and dropped out midstream, my apologies -- I promise that if I do something like this again, I'll choose a much more accessible novel.