Spasms of virtue have been a curse
in my life, sort of like the grand mal
seizures suffered by epileptics, only we don’t call them grands bons. One came upon
me a couple of weeks ago. It occurred to
me that though the clock keeps ticking, I still had never read Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities. I was determined to read one or the other of
them. I am prepared to allow that, as
existential crises go, this one is pretty rarefied. I realize that there are probably many quite
sensible people prepared to meet their Maker without having ever read Pierre, or the Ambiguities; but they may
not be retired professors of English. So
I metaphorically girded my loins and reached for the relevant volume of Library
of America.
There
are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner
from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten
with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not bad, I guess, but I still had 140,000
words to go. Then God sent me a
message. I actually nodded in my easy
chair, just for a millisecond, and the book fell from my grasp, closing as it dropped
into my lap. When I reopened it,
somewhere toward its thick middle, it was fortuitously at the title page of a
completely different novel: Israel
Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile. I
am not sure that I had even heard of this title before, but as though
responding to the command of some invisible power, I abandoned Pierre
Glendenning in favor of Israel Potter.
Israel
Potter is an historical novel—sort of.
When it appears as a Netflix film it will be prefaced by the claim
“Based on a True Story”. But modern
sociology teaches us that the superstructures erected atop even firm
foundations may be rather rickety. Here’s
the story, the rudiments of which Melville found in an obscure autobiography,
dictated by or ghosted for its author in the 1820s. Israel Potter was born into a pioneer
colonial family in what is now Vermont somewhere around 1750. Youthful disappointment in love led him to
flee his rustic family farm in favor of the life of the loner-adventurer. He first became a trapper, following the life
of the Canadian mountain men. Later, he
went to sea, a part of the burgeoning merchant marine industry that was a
mainstay of the New England economy from early times. In June of 1775 he was conveniently in port
in Boston when the Battle of Bunker Hill went down. If he didn’t personally fire the shot heard
round the world, he still played no mean part in those famous early encounters
with the Redcoats. As the Revolution got
serious, the Continentals desperately needed a navy. They were facing the greatest naval power the
world had ever known. So Potter, an
experienced seaman, became an American sailor.
Very soon his vessel was captured by the Brits, and the whole crew shipped
as prisoners back to England. In England
this was thought of as “military recruitment.”
There were not all that many young men who truly volunteered for the
life of a common sailor on a man-of-war in the service of King George. But Potter was a hard case, and thrown into
chains.
This is where the possible
historical part wanes, and the unquestionably novelistic part takes off. The rest of the book is the account of
repeated escapes, recaptures, narrow scrapes, marvelous adventures with famous
men, and decades of proletarian misery as a fugitive in the dark Satanic mills
of industrial poverty. Potter was
finally repatriated only in 1826, arriving in the Back Bay of Boston on the
Fourth of July. Nobody remembered him,
certainly not the American government, which denied him a pension “by certain
caprices of the law.” No one ever knew
(save Melville), the details of Potter’s service as a secret diplomatic courier
between radical sympathizers in Britain and Ambassador Benjamin Franklin in
Paris, that he had served as chief lieutenant to John Paul Jones in that madcap
admiral’s most desperate exploits, including the combat with HMS Serapis in which a saber slash across Potter’s
chest joined with the signs of an ancient wound at Bunker Hill to render him
the “bescarred bearer of a cross,” or that he had witnessed the disgraceful
treatment of the American hero Ethan Allen in his British captivity. So far as I know he never met the infant
Abraham Lincoln or Sojourner Truth, but otherwise it was pretty much a clean
sweep of our early notables.
Particularly memorable is the “portrait” of Benjamin Franklin in his
Paris rooms. His American contemporaries
practically idolized the man, to whom they always gave the honorific “Doctor,”
and whom they regarded as a combination of Rousseau, Kant, and the great
naturalist, the Compte de Bouffon. Here
is Israel’s account of his first glimpse of the great man: Wrapped in a rich dressing-gown—a fanciful present from an admiring
Marchesa—curiously embroidered with algebraic figures like a conjuror’s robe,
and with a skull-cap of black satin on his hive of a head, the man of gravity
was seated at a huge claw-footed old table, round as the zodiac. It was covered with printed papers; files of
documents; rolls of MSS.; stray bits of strange models in wood and metal;
odd-looking pamphlets in various languages; all sorts of books; including many
presentation-copies; embracing history, mechanics, diplomacy, agriculture,
political economy, metaphysics, meteorology, and geometry….
Israel
Potter is one of Melville’s minor works.
The funny thing about minor works, though, is that you first have to
have some major works against which they can be judged slighter. Everything about the great writer is here,
especially his fastidiously researched details, his wit, his keen sense of
narrative, and his boldness of symbolic conception (Israel in the brick
factories of Egypt being one particularly brilliant touch). But the thing that struck me most is the
book’s enthusiastic patriotism. Melville
was no political patsy or company man.
One of his themes is the unseemly haste with which Americans were already
able by mid-century to forget their revolutionary origins. His sense of irony never grows dull from
periods of long disengagement. But for
him the American Revolution was irrevocably about human freedom, and those who
won it were the champions of the whole human race. This was still the national consensus expressed
in the Fourth of July celebrations of my own early years. You won’t find much like it in the editorial
pages of our opinion-makers today. Of
course there is still the minor problem of Pierre,
or the Ambiguities.
