Chapter 8

The Confidence Man was written in 1856, and published in the following spring, while Melville was abroad. It is by all odds the most difficult book that confronts Melville’s biographer; for it is possibly a palimpsest, and beneath its obvious legend, one may read indirect revelations of Melville’s own life. With Melville’s actual life and predicament in mind, there are passages in The Confidence Man one cannot read without misgiving: the story of Charlemont, The Gentleman Madman, for one, and the story of the Man in Weeds, wedded to a fiendish woman, Goneril, who covers up her own lecherousness by attributing insanity to her husband. Likewise somewhat mysterious is the story of the Indian-hater, who had been injured in youth by Indians, and never lost a chance to exterminate one. It is hard to fit these incidents into the logic of the plot: and their existence becomes plausible only if one believes Melville’s own torments and suspicions had, for a brief while, taken on a pathological character.

No one who approached The Confidence Man without preoccupation or bias would, I think, impute such personal and neurotic motives to the passages in question; but once the seed of suspicion is sowed, as the misanthropic one-legged man demonstrates in an early chapter, it spreads like the Canada thistle, and is almost as hard to root out. The words suspicion and confidence, that recur in these pages, increase one’s suspicions and weaken one’s confidence; in fact, there is no end to the pathological allusions one may discover, if one begins with the unfavourable hypothesis. Failing positive independent evidence, it would be foolish to build up a card-house of conjecture: enough to say that if Pierre partly reveals the causes of Melville condition, it is in The Confidence Man, if anywhere, that the psychologist will discover, probably, its immediate outward manifestations. The problem, though tantalizing, is not of paramount importance; for there is plenty of independent evidence to show that by 1858 Melville had regained possession of himself, and that his further life, though full of hardship and difficulty, had nothing in it that placed him outside the pale of family life and friendship and decent social intercourse—although it may have been dogged by memories and revulsions from an earlier period, and by the continuation of evil suspicions in the minds of those to whom the normal abstentions and irritations that attend productive literary effort would themselves be an evidence of eccentricity, or something worse.