Daniel Handler on Melville's "The Confidence-Man"
A Dalkey classic that will be featured in the next season of the Two Month Review
This week marks the launch of the twenty-fourth season of the Two Month Review podcast—one that will feature two titles: The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville (I’ll be using the Dalkey Archive version, but obviously there are many others) and then Melvill by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden (which we published at Open Letter last month).
If you’re not already familiar with the Two Month Review, we (Open Letter, myself, author Brian Wood, and Kaija Straumanis) launched this podcast is 2017 as a way of discussing long, complicated books that some readers will find daunting. We break each title down into 8-10 episodes, covering roughly 65 pages every week, treating the work as if it were being serialized, which lets us really dig into each part and dwell in the text. It’s our attempt at creating a “slow reading” movement in which, instead of racing from new book to new book, with each month’s new releases seeming to erase the previous month’s books from public consciousness, we take the works seriously and do our best to talk about them in intelligent, informed ways, but it’s far from academic. There are jokes, there is cursing—it’s a podcast that wants to put the joy back into reading these “challenging” works.
The very first season of TMR was dedicated to Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part, and we’ve also covered the other two books in his trilogy—The Dreamed Part, and The Remembered Part. So we were always going to do a season on his new novel, Melvill. But, in contrast to his earlier books (all around 600 pages), this is a slender 308 pages in total (including the 14-page acknowledgments section—a staple of Fresán’s books). Since the book really is about Herman Melville, we thought it would be fun to add on one of Melville’s books, hence The Confidence-Man, a book that Fresán refers to as “Pynchon before Pynchon.”
It’s been ages since I read this particular Melville, but in my vague memory it’s a really weird, twisty sort of book that’s fun and not really what you think of when you say “Melville-esque.” Which will only make this season more of a blast!
You can find the reading schedule here, and since we’re covering a Dalkey title, I’ll post the five Melville episodes on this Substack. But you can subscribe to the podcast via Apple or Spotify (or find it on the Three Percent website or on the Three Percent Substack, which is for all my writing that’s not Dalkey related).
In terms of The Confidence-Man itself, the jacket copy on the Dalkey edition perfectly captures what makes this novel so interesting. (And I particularly love the final paragraph.)
A scathing, razor-sharp satire set on a New Orleans-bound riverboat, The Confidence-Man exposes the fraudulent optimism of so many American idols and idealists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and P. T. Barnum, in particular—and draws a dark vision of a country being swallowed by its illusions of progress.
It begins with a mute boarding a Mississippi boat and ends without a conclusion: "Something further may follow of this Masquerade." In between, the confidence man, so well disguised as to avoid clear identification even by the reader, meets and tricks a boatful of unusual characters. The culmination of Herman Melville's brilliant career as a novelist, and the introduction of a particularly American brand of satire that is as caustic as it is funny, The Confidence-Man creates an elaborate and beautiful masquerade that asks: who in this world is worth our confidence?
Why is Dalkey Archive doing yet another edition of The Confidence-Man? And why is it doing Melville at all? First, this edition, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill over forty years ago, contains remarkable annotations by H. Bruce Franklin, intended for both the general reader and the scholar. It's an edition we have long admired. More importantly, we believe that The Confidence-Man is America's first postmodern novel—game-like, darkly comic, and completely inventive.
If that doesn’t sell you, below you’ll find the preface that Daniel Handler wrote for the Dalkey edition about his love for this “novel that tends to slip away while one isn’t looking—or even when one is.”
Enjoy!
PREFACE
The copy of The Confidence-Man that sits on my desk—supposedly to serve as some sort of assistance in writing this introduction—is the third copy I have owned. The first I bought when in college, having read Moby-Dick and hearing the professor proclaim, at that great novel’s juggernauty resistance to any of the heat-seeking interpretative missiles we’d been given in the books of literary theory we’d half-read during our under-graduate years, that the epic quest for the white whale was nothing compared to a little jaunt down the river in Melville’s last novel. I read it one long summer after graduation—one of those twenty-two-year-olds in filthy cut-offs one sees lollygagging around campus with a brow furrowed both in earnest and in the hopes women will notice. The only phrase I can think of to describe the book’s effect on me is “I lost it.” My brain hopelessly jigsawed. I immediately thrust my copy at a friend so that he might read it and together we’d hash it out over whatever drinks we could afford, but this never materialized: for a few weeks I’d stop by his sublet and see his bookmark making progress in the thin volume, but somehow we ended up talking of other things and now I haven’t seen him in fifteen years and it’s probably safe to say I’m not getting my copy hack.
A few years later I bought another copy and read it again and lost it again. Another friend saw me reading it and asked to borrow it when I was through. We were in a somewhat crazed band together—we called our genre “fake world music"—and he was starting a zine called Scrimshaw. The clarinet player was going to write an essay about Moby-Dick, and I had proclaimed that the epic quest for the white whale was nothing compared to, etc. The band broke up; the zine never materialized and my copy vanished with James’s guitar. That’s another copy I’m not getting back. I lost it, in other words.
This third one I bought used, and it has notes in the margin from some previous reader—notes I regard with the wry smile one gives someone who’s going to try and win back an ex-lover with an epic poem, or use a coffeemaker without a filter: there are times when circumstances are so desperate, desires so untrammeled, that one has to learn these things oneself. The first pages are swarming in theories, arrowed to underlined phrases like hurried scaffolding. "Story of sorrow —— received money,” is linked up to “dog” and “lamb-faced man,” all flowering from the “superior intelligences” underlined in chapter three or the “long weed” noted at the beginning of chapter four. The word “moral” appears a number of times, often below a confident check in the upper corner of a particular page. But then the confidence in tackling Confidence begins to falter. By page forty-eight the check looks a little shaky, and underneath it are the unhealthy captions “Satan?” and “Doubt?” which even the most zealous of atheists will admit sound like cries for help. The word “Christ” is stricken through. A few more underlines, and then, above the heading for chapter seven, “uncertainty throughout” is scrawled. There are no more notations in the entire text until the very last sentence, which is underlined in a trembling hand. And then, of course, it turned up in a used bookstore. It’s another copy someone isn’t going to get back.
The Confidence-Man is a novel that tends to slip away while one isn’t looking—or even when one is. It is difficult to pin down this novel in any of the usual ways. For instance, look at its place in the Melville canon: We have the early Melville novels, which are tight and keen adventure stories—the novels that at the time were considered big hits, but are now read almost solely by people (such as myself) who have become arguably somewhat unhealthily taken with the author. Then we have Moby-Dick, and insert here some concise caption for that wondrous and wild thing of a book. This is pretty much when we modern readers like to think of Melville finding it—the triumphant epiphany of Moby-Dick cackles its lightning over what came after, including Pierre; or, The Ambiguities and all that gorgeous Civil War poetry—but the consensus circa 1851 is that he pretty much lost it. His bestselling success dribbled away, and he embarked on a few lecture tours, wrote a bunch of bitter stories nobody liked—"I’d prefer not to" didn’t become the catchphrase it should have—and began to publish privately. Some thirty years alter his death they published Billy Budd and high school English was ruined forever. The Confidence-Man was his last published novel, and it sold like he’d lost it—one biographical essay claims the book sold 343 copies in its first year—and yet it reads like he found it. The prose is tight, and luminous, the dialogue hilariously tricky, everything rancorous but somehow easygoing, bristling with all the drubbings of travel and the breathless glory of a true voyage. He hadn’t lost it, as hopefully those 343 readers realized. Melville had found it—if only one could figure out exactly what “it” is.
Which brings us to the plot: a boat departs on a voyage—the title of the opening chapter, “A mute goes aboard a boat on the Mississippi,” always reminds me of the opening of a joke, as in “Two rabbis walk into a bar.” There seems to be a confidence-man amongst them. Or, several confidence-men. Definitely there are people in disguise who are trying to coax money out of one another. Or, they are pretending to coax money out of one another in the hopes that other people will overhear the coaxing and be taken for some money. Or so somebody says. Who may be in disguise. Religious belief and philosophical inquiry weave themselves into these conversations—or atheism and frippery, disguised as such. The zealot may be faking zealotry—zealously. It is all well and good to say it is a ship of fools, but none are so foolish as to let another fool get the upper hand, so it may be a form of wisdom to play the fool. Or, this all might be foolishness.
Perhaps you can see where this is going, but as with a good joke—or a long con—even when you can see where it is going it goes someplace else. The confidence in “confidence-man” is not the confidence one puts in him, but the confidence one receives from him—the upper hand that feels bestowed upon us by a foolish gentleman who is using his own upper hand to pick one’s pocket. The Confidence-Man instills its own confidence, too—it resists all interpretations by offering an endless array of them, all of them attractive and all of them falling short, so it begins to feel as if the book is falling short of the confidence it has instilled in you, when all the time you arc falling short of the book’s endless sneakiness, and as you fall short you fall hard, and the term for falling short and falling hard, like trying to win back a lover or make coffee without the proper equipment, is “losing it.”
But even this falls short of The Confidence-Man, because a true con ends with the mark unaware that a con has taken place—that is, the confidence remains unshattered. And this is the way with this novel. One gains a confidence as one’s expectations and interpretations are dismantled and refracted through the course of the book—not a confidence in oneself, but a confidence in literature, which appears to have been a dire issue when the novel was written, let alone in our own buzzing era. As one gets lost in The Confidence-Man and gives up on taking notes in the margin, one is reminded of why we read—and that it is precisely to get lost. So one finds it, in effect, as one loses it—or, as the con man would say, one loses it with one’s confidence unshattered. (This sort of literary recharging is the primary use of The Confidence-Man. The secondary use is keeping it around so when someone speaks, either in tribute or in insult, to the invention of this kind of trickery as “postmodern,” you can hit them with this book.)
I bought my third copy of The Confidence-Man while writing something of a con of my own—a novel I wrote under a disguised name. My plan was to structure my own novel after Melville’s, but that didn’t quite work out. Instead I was reminded of how gripping literature can be, even when it eludes one’s grasp. I lost it all over again. If this is your first copy—or your umpteenth—I tell you, you will lose it, too. And there’s no getting it back.
Daniel Handler
2006
This preface originally appeared in the 2007 edition of The Confidence-Man published by Dalkey Archive Press, and can be found in full on The Snicket File Tumblr.