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:

 
  Then, too, we had a large library-case, that stood in the hall;... 
  with large glass doors, through which might be seen long rows of old 
  books, that had been printed in Paris, and London, and Leipsic.... And 
  there was a copy of D'Alembert in French, and I wondered what a Great 
  Man I would be, if by foreign travel I should ever be able to read 
  straight along without stopping, out of that book, which now was a 
  riddle to everyone in the house but my father, whom I so much liked to 
  hear talk French, as he sometimes did to the servant we had. (Melville 
  1969, 7) 

His favorite uncle Thomas had lived in France and married a French woman, giving Melville a close French relative, offering him another incentive to learn the language. His French-born cousin Priscilla was an active member of Melville's extended family in the Berkshires (Parker 2002, 59-60). There is even some speculation that Melville may have had another, illegitimate, relation possibly of French background as well (Sparks 1991). (4) Had Herman voiced even the slightest literary interest, some of his family would likely have told him stories about the work of the writer just then the rage of readership in Europe or have translated or recited some "appropriate" tales for him from the books themselves: Reading aloud together was a contemporary practice exercised in his household.

Many of the travel books Melville enumerates in Chapter 30 of Redburn bear French titles and may have been at his side during composition. The citation above identifies the process for learning French as "foreign travel," and not formal, documented schooling. Melville engaged in just such traveling (and in French territory). Pierre Melvill was "a romantic figure" to Herman up until his death in 1844. He had gone to sea and spent time on a route "almost identical to the one Melville was about to follow" to les Marquises (Robertson-Lorant 1996, 90).

This expedition in the early 1840s afforded Melville an opportunity not only to improve his French in the outer territories but also to encounter Balzac in books or in summary retellings brought along by immigrants and sailors. It was common to encounter shipboard libraries, often with eclectic and multifaceted collections. Melville describes one of these in White Jacket: "There was a public library on board, paid for by the government, and trusted to the custody of one of the marine corporals, a little, dried-up man, of a somewhat literary turn" (1970, 167). Although in New York Balzac's morals made him a public nuisance, in the rest of the world, particularly for readers of French on the islands Melville visited on his voyage, Balzac had been a sensation for a decade. Literature from the homeland takes on exceptional value to citizens dwelling far overseas. Nuku Hiva, the second largest island in the Marquises, which occupied the bulk of Melville's attention in Typee, contained the French administrative seat, Hakapehi, with a sizeable contingent of European settlers. Significantly, France annexed the islands in 1842, exactly the time Melville arrived there that summer. Clearly, at such an intense cultural moment for the French, if Melville wanted to improve his language "by foreign travel," he had an excellent opportunity and the quick mind to do so.

Other direct practice with French language and society presented itself on his trip to Europe in 1849, and in this case, he had still a better opportunity to discover the philosophy, methods and stories of Balzac. The ship's library would have been a primary and likely source for Melville to probe. Assembled for educated international travelers and not simply puritanical Americans, the collections for reading on the packet boats were both diverse and contemporary. Ralph Waldo Emerson gave an example of the nature of such libraries, which Melville also would have encountered.

 
  We found on board the usual cabin library: Basil Hall, Dumas, Dickens, 
  Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were our sea-gods. Among the passengers, 
  there was some variety of talent and profession; we exchanged our 
  experiences, and all learned something. The busiest talk with leisure 
  and convenience at sea, and sometimes a memorable fact turns up, which 
  you have long had a vacant niche for, and seize with the joy of a 
  collector. (Emerson 1856, 8) 

Emerson found Balzac among the books in a standard shipboard library to Liverpool in 1847, almost two years before the same sort of passage taken by Melville. Such coincidence indicates a high degree of probability that Melville could have met with Balzac's writing in this environment. Emerson does not say whether the literature he read was in French or English; but either language could have provided enough material for shipboard interchange.

Melville's journal shows that his onboard…