RIFFS
No. 3 ― Melville as Wanderer

Philip St. George Cooke

Radical Freelance, Esq.

William Gibson, USN

Augustus Ely Silliman

Texts by Anonymous

Resources

Events

"Let me, then, be the unreturning wanderer."  ―Mardi (1849)

What better word than wanderer to describe Herman Melville?

The appellation fits him early and late.  Melville's early fame was gained by writing about his wanderings in the South Pacific.  Omoo (the title of Melville's second book) means "Rover."  In Mardi Melville joined wandering and talking in a romance of Polynesian travel.  Geographical explorations by land and sea are united with philosophical explorations of society, politics, art, science, and religion.  Yillah, emblem of everything unattainable, remains forever elusive.  Only Melville's alter-ego is brave or foolish enough to seek her still:  Taji, "the unreturning wanderer."

After Mardi, the biggest of Melville's books to join travel with wide-ranging conversation are his novel The Confidence-Man (1857) and epic poem Clarel (1876).  But his relatively neglected historical novel Israel Potter (1855) also betrays something essential and characteristic about Melville's identification with the figure of the wanderer.  Captured by the British during the revolutionary war, the obscure American hero wanders in exile like the biblical Israelites.  The recurring image of Israel Potter as "Wanderer" is Melville's invention, a telling addition to the 1824 pamphlet autobiography that served as his major source.  Hennig Cohen has perceptively noted the significance of the word wanderer for Melville's version of the Israel Potter story:

The word "wandering" does not occur in Life and Adventures, and the Israel Potter of Melville's source, though battered by misfortune, is a planner who has specific goals.  In Melville's version, "wanderer" is the most frequent term that "The Editor" applies to Israel, often with biblical reference...  ["Background and Foreground" in Melville, Israel Potter, ed. Hennig Cohen (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991), p. 337.]

Even before the war, before his long captivity, Melville's Israel Potter is shown "wandering in the wilderness, and wandering upon the waters."  Cohen is right―the word wanderer occurs ten times in Melville's version, thrice on the last page of the novel:

Look, WANDERER!  Rewriting the autobiography of Israel Potter, Melville made him like himself, born in the Berkshires.  All the above instances of hero-as-wanderer are likewise products of rewriting―Melville uses his editorial license to remake his protagonist in his own Odyssean self-image.

So what?  So believe me when I tell you (in utter defiance of a thunderously silent biographical record devoid of any external documentary evidence linking the great author and dutiful dragoon) that Melville ghostwrote the magazine series "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" for Philip St. George Cooke.  These sketches of travel and adventure in the far west ran intermittently in the Southern Literary Messenger from June 1851 through August 1853 and eventually became Part II of Cooke's Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857).  "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" is not strictly a chronicle of military exploits and is not the eyewitness record that it purports to be.  Rather, like Melville's Israel Potter, the narrative has been skillfully rewritten from original accounts by others.  And, as in Melville's Israel Potter, the narrator casts himself as a wanderer.  Same writing situation, same result.      

SA = Scenes and Adventures in the Army

And another thing.  In the dedicatory preface to Israel Potter, Melville places himself in the role of a benevolent but impartial editor.  Comparing his job of rewriting the original narrative to a project of restoration, Melville offers the polished-up story of Israel Potter as "something in the light of a dilapidated old tombstone retouched." 

Retouched is Melville's word for what he did to the 1824 pamphlet autobiography, The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel Potter.

In the July 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," the ghostwriter describes his project in eerily similar terms.  The context is the scene of writing, as the narrator (ostensibly "A Captain of U. S. Dragoons") self-consciously tries and discards a succession of styles and tones before admitting near defeat:

Few will follow me pleasantly or patiently through these solitudes, though sometimes "pleasant places."  I care not at all,―but that I feel I may fail to awaken the sympathy of any, while, like an artist retouching with kindled affection his painted thought, I linger to answer the appeal of Wasted Beauty to so rare appreciation.  (SA 333)

Retouching is the Captain's word for what he is doing to eyewitness accounts of army expeditions to the west in 1843 and 1845.

Now do you believe me?