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Timothy Flint's “Wicked River” and The Confidence-Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Much of the charm of Huckleberry Finn results from Twain's having tempered his satire with long, lyric descriptions of the Mississippi River, and, conversely, the bitter tone of Melville's The Confidence-Man has turned away readers because of the lack of any comparable scenic relief. “The setting Melville hit upon was the perfect one for such a book, but the setting is named or indicated rather than fully rendered. One is alleged to be on a steamboat descending the greatest of American rivers, but sensuously, pictorially, kinaesthetically, one has little or no sense of being on such a boat or such a river.” The opinion is Newton Arvin's, who credits this absence of natural description to the low ebb of “Melville's purely plastic power, his fictive and dramatic power.” According to Arvin, “the magical power of sensuous embodiment that had rendered the sea with such grandeur in Moby Dick had now failed him, all but wholly.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
Note 1 in page 75 Herman Melville: A Critical Biography (New York, 1950), p. 252.
Note 2 in page 75 An adaptation of Appendix i, in the Hendricks House edition of The Confidence-Man, edited by Elizabeth S. Foster (New York, 1954), pp. 379–390. For purposes of clarity, I have eliminated Miss Foster's editorial apparatus, corrected misspellings, etc.
Note 3 in page 75 John Nichol, in “Melville and the Midwest,” PMLA, Lxvi (1951), 613–625, thoroughly explores Melville's possible acquaintance with the Mississippi River. From Melville's own statement we know that he visited his kinsman, Thomas Melville, in Galena, Illinois, about 1841, and to this “core of external evidence,” Nichol has added a body of internal evidence, “imagery which very possibly was suggested from [sic] personal observation,” that indicates Melville traveled to New York by way of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Nichol attributes the fragment quoted above to a probable excursion to the Falls: “In the summer months excursion boats frequently left Galena for the Falls, which was a renowned picnic and resort spot” (p. 620).
Note 4 in page 76 Merton M. Sealts, Jr., notes that Judge Shaw owned a copy of the Recollections, and that it was therefore available to Melville. “Melville's Reading; A Supplementary List of Books Owned and Borrowed,” HLB, vi (1952), 241–242.
Note 5 in page 76 See Histary, I, 64–65, 113 ff., 136, 137, 310; Recollections, pp. 153, 176–177. Richard Chase has observed the Yankee grin behind the polite mask of the Confidence-Man, and while contemporary references to this folk figure saturate the literature of the day, it is interesting to note that Flint, being from New England himself, was sensitive about the reputation of the Yankees for trickery: “I might relate a score of Yankee tricks, that different people assured us had been played off upon them … but as these [Yankees] possess the power of talking, and inspire a sort of terror by their superior acuteness, and as that terror procures a certain degree of respect, many a blockhead from the southern and middle states has wished to shine his hour, as a wise man, and has assumed this terrific name; and thus the impression has finally been established, that almost all the emigrants who pass down the river, are Yankees” (Recollections, pp. 32–33; see Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study, New York, 1949, pp. 186–188).
Note 6 in page 76 History, I, 95; Recollections, pp. 95, 101. Cf. The Confidence-Man, pp. 7, 173; Nichol, p. 622.
Note 7 in page 76 As “Giradeau,” p. 128; Recollections, pp. 229–232; cf. Nichol, p. 623. In Recollections, pp. 278–279, Cape Girardeau is mentioned in connection with a band of fanatic “Pilgrims” who came to the region in search of their “New Jerusalem”: “Here dissensions began to spring up among them. Emaciated with hunger, and feverish from filth and the climate, many of them left their bones.” Cf. The Confidence-Man, pp. 55–56; Nichol, p. 622.
Note 8 in page 76 History, i, 93; Recollections, p. 95; “Opposite ‘the [Grand] Tower’ is another bold bluff, on the Illinois shore, called the ‘Devil's oven.‘ This, too, throws off another sweeping current, and between these currents the passage is difficult, and at some stages of the water, dangerous.” Cf. The Confidence-Man, p. 146; Nichol, p. 622.
Note 9 in page 76 History, i, 143–144, 146; Recollections, p. 75. Cf. The Confidence-Man, pp. 13–17.
Note 10 in page 76 The Confidence-Man, p. 8. Melville, in his review of Parkman's California and Oregon Trail (The Literary World, IV, 1849, 291–293), mentions the Mississippi “steamer, crammed with all sorts of adventurers, Spaniards and Indians, Santa Fe traders and trappers, gamblers and Mormons …” which carried Parkman to a point at the verge of the wilderness.“ This boat, undoubtedly, contributed to the ”idea“ of the Fidèle, that ship of fools afloat in the American wilderness.
Note 11 in page 77 Recollections, p. 392; cf. The Confidence-Man, p. 177.
Note 12 in page 77 History, I, 158. The Confidence-Man, p. 7.
Note 13 in page 78 History, i, 93; cf. the Missourian's loss of his plantation by flood (The Confidence-Man, p. 122).
Note 14 in page 79 History, i, 90; see also p. 300.
Note 15 in page 79 Nichol, p. 623. Of course, the story does not end at Cairo. What does end, though, are references to the River. I would like to add, however, that nothing I have said above discounts the possibility outlined by Nichol; all that I have hoped to do is elaborate upon his qualifying statement, that “Melville made continuous and skillful use of other people's books, and no one can say with certainty whether or not any one of his western allusions was the result of first-hand experience” (p. 613).