Melville and Balzac: the man in cream-colors.(Essays)(novelists Herman Melville and Honore de Balzac)(Essay)

In their detailed commentary as part of the Northwestern Newberry edition of The Confidence-Man, the editors proposed the accepted theory that Herman Melville began writing his novel after reading a newspaper article about the re-appearance in New York of an "original confidence man," known as William Thompson. Yet beyond this assertion they confess uncertainty on several points still to be resolved. Two of these are the nature of the story's initial setting and its philosophical development.

 
  Nor do we know two further basic matters: how or when it occurred to 
  him to put his Confidence Man aboard a Mississippi steamboat rather 
  than keep him, like his prototype, in an eastern city, or when in his 
  planning and writing of the book Melville enlarged his Confidence Man 
  to a character of wider social and even cosmic significance than the 
  newspaper original. (Branch 1984, 278) 

Since the days of Howard Vincent's pioneering analysis of Melville's method of composition (1949, 1970), readers have acknowledged Melville's tendency to deliberately "expropriate," embellish and append observations and incidents from other writers to his own work (Branch 1984, 280). Although Melville never mentions French novelist Honore de Balzac in the documentation we possess from the 1850s or earlier, Balzac was a good candidate for literary borrowing. At the time The Confidence-Man was written, Balzac was among the most-read or at least most talked-about European authors in America (Post-Lauria 1996, 129). Moreover, we can show that Melville had easier access than has been previously considered to information about world literature through friends, family and the daily progress of his own reading habits. Researchers have successfully verified that in his later life Melville became voracious for writings by and information about this master proto-Realist (Dillingham 1996; Haydock 1996; Sealts 1988; Cowan 1987). Melville appears even to have used Balzac's Seraphita as a partial character sketch for Billy Budd. Additionally, several studies suggest that some dependence on Balzac may have been active much earlier (Hayes 2000; Haydock 2000; Lawson 1994; Chai 1987). Significantly, Kevin Hayes's discovery of common elements from Balzac in Melville's writing relates to the very same time frame as the conception of The Confidence-Man. (1) Although the dominant opinion is that Melville did not encounter Balzac's writing until at least 1870, to assume that Melville was ignorant of Balzac's achievement up to that time would make him practically a literary recluse; and the massive documents we have available now (Parker 1996, 2002) prove that this image is certainly not accurate. However, the hypothesis of early contact still evokes strong resistance from many conventional Melville critics and scholars. Consequently, a close examination of the opening section of The Confide nce-Man and in particular the characterization of the man in cream-colors in relation to Balzac's similar character in "Jesus-Christ in Flanders" should put any implausibility to rest while simultaneously providing a resolution to the Newberry editors' unanswered questions.

Melville and Balzac

The track of relying on internal evidence can be a slippery one. However, when such evidence is reviewed in the context of prevailing modes of cultural exchange, intellectual preoccupations, and public discourse the same points can become clearly demonstrative of real entanglement and not simply unintended affinity. The proofs offered from the texts that follow will be more authoritative once we establish the facts that there were many conditions in Melville's experience that made contact with the works and ideas of Honore de Balzac before 1857 probable and indeed vital for his creative life. As Jane Lundblad established, "When acknowledged in the early thirties, Balzac immediately became known outside the boundaries of France, and, as we have already seen, was read also in America ..." (1965, 167).

The first and most persistent barrier that is thrown in the path of Balzacian influence is deciding whether Melville had known French or not. Early commentators expected that he had; (2) but when no annotated books exclusively in French were uncovered in Melville's final estate, the general opinion turned to the assumption that he could not have known the language. This question, although often treated as settled in Melville criticism, is yet to be answered decisively. (3) Although he had little formal education, the breadth of Melville's learning has been frequently noted, including his use of German to comprehend Schiller (Sealts 1988, 211).

The primary evidence for the idea that Melville had effective knowledge of French is of course his well-documented familial connections to users of that language. His father spent much of his life visiting France and importing French cultural objects, books chief among them. The argument for immersion then arises as a simple alternative to formal study. The library at the Melville home probably contained numerous books in French. His sisters practiced French for their own classes. And if the passage in Redburn can be trusted as in part autobiographical, Melville at quite an early age had been attracted by French literature: