Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 189of Ahab measures the gap between them: one has opted for a safety that shades into
surrender, the other has pursued success only to meet with a kind of suicide. That
difference also registers the division Melville felt within himself. Moby-Dick negotiates
its way between the contraries experienced by its author and by his culture: between
head and heart, resignation and rebellion, the sanctions of society and the will of the
individual. And, like so many great American books, it remains open, “the draught of
a draught” as its narrator puts it, because it is in active search of what it defines as
impossible: resolution, firm belief or comfortable unbelief – in short, nothing less
than the truth.
Moby-Dick was not a success when it was first published; and Melville felt
himself under some pressure to produce something that would, as he put it, pay
“the bill of the baker.” That, anyway, was his explanation for his next novel, Pierre;
or, The Ambiguities. That book, he explained while writing it, was “a rural bowl of
milk” rather than “a bowl of salt water” like his whaling story. It was, he averred,
“very much more calculated to popularity ... being a regular romance, with a
mysterious plot to it, stirring passions at work, and withall, representing a new and
elevated aspect of American life.” If Melville really believed this, then he was
doomed to disappointment. A dark tale, ending in the suicides of the eponymous
hero and his half-sister, Pierre carries echoes of Edgar Allan Poe, not only in
its macabre tone, violent tenor, and rumors of incest but in its self-reflexivity, its
variations on the theme that “the truest book in the world is a lie.” More painfully,
for Melville, the book was a critical and commercial disaster. One reviewer was not
out of step with most of the others when he called it “the craziest fiction extant”;
and, in the first year of publication, it sold less than three hundred copies. Israel
Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), a weak historical romance set during the
Revolution, was similarly unsuccessful. The Piazza Tales (1856) was far more
accomplished, containing Melville’s major achievements in short fiction, “Bartleby
the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” but it attracted little attention. Melville’s
audience was evidently not ready for the one tale that tells of a man so convinced
of life’s futility and fatality that he would “prefer not to” do anything – or the other
that dramatically interrogates the American optimism of its narrator and the
European pessimism of its protagonist, Cereno, under the “shadow” of slavery.
Melville did, after this, explore the issues that obsessed him in two other works of
prose fiction. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) offers complex multiple
versions of the mythical figure of the trickster; it is at once a bleak portrait of the
“Masquerade” of life, and a biting satire on the material and moral trickery of
American society. Billy Budd, written in the five years before Melville’s death and
not published until 1924, in turn, reworks the traditional tale of the Handsome
Sailor, so as to consider the uses of idealism, heroism, and innocence in a fallen
world. However, to support himself and his family, Melville was increasingly forced
to turn to other, nonwriting work. And to express himself, he turned more and
more to poetry. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, based on a tour to
the Holy Land the author himself had taken, is typically preoccupied with faith
and doubt. It was privately financed for publication; so were the poetry collectionsGGray_c02.indd 189ray_c 02 .indd 189 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM