Dragooned! Ten Traces of
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Riffs William Gibson, USN Augustus Ely Silliman |
5 NUMBER FIVE illustrates crucial stages in the evolution of the narrator’s traveling partner from “imaginary friend” to “Frank,” and (in the 1857 book version) back again to "Friend." What?! Imaginary Friend? Yes, though you would not know this from reading Otis Young’s otherwise superb biography, The West of Philip St. George Cooke—even though Young relies heavily on Scenes and Adventures as an authoritative primary source. Sober-minded Historians fail us here; they do not much like imaginary friends. Metaphorically intoxicated Melville readers like you and me, however, are ready to love them. The character of the imaginary friend begins to assume a consistent, recognizable shape in the January 1852 number. His earliest incarnation, back in June 1851, was the reader of whom the Captain wished to make a friend. From the narrator’s fantasy of one ideal reader, the imaginary friend evolves into a mild critic of the main source of the narrative, the 1843 Journal of the Santa Fe Trail, and its author, then-captain Philip St. George Cooke. In 1852, the object of criticism switches from Cooke’s journal to the Captain’s poetic embellishment of Cooke’s journal.
This excerpt from the January 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the Southern Literary Messenger shows the Captain’s fictive companion in a genial light. The bivouac on the prairie has become a convivial private club, where gentlemen can eat, drink, smoke, and converse freely. Details such as “the snake-bitten horse” are straight out of Cooke’s 1843 Santa Fe Journal. However, the artistic reconstruction of these details, in a dialogic and meta-fictional defense of poetry and romance, lies well outside the scope of Cooke’s practical agendas, military or literary. The Captain’s vocabulary is Melville's, not Cooke's, as may be seen (for instance) in the Captain's ultra-Melvillean exclamation, "Bravo!" Please observe too the Captain’s revealing association of critics with bathos: “Dear critic, and lover of bathos!” Melville made this same association in Mardi (1849) when he gave the name Batho to one of the critics of Lombardo's literary masterpiece, "the Koztanza": "Ay: the arch-critics Verbi and Batho denounced it."
The Imaginary Friend first receives a name in the August 1852 number:
Henceforth the conversations between narrator and friend take the printed form of dialogues between “C,” presumably for “Captain” or “Cooke,” and “F.” for “Frank.”
A page from the August 1853 installment in the Southern Literary Messenger exhibits the debate between C. and F. in full bloom:
At this advanced stage of the narrative, source-texts for the matter of 1845 have been abandoned for a discussion of aesthetic problems. Frank now represents the utilitarian view on any subject. On the subjects of poetry and fiction, his pronouncements echo those of Melville’s friend Evert Duyckinck on Moby-Dick and Pierre. In The Confidence-Man, Melville will play fast and loose with the signifiers C and F in dialogues between Charlie Noble and Frank Goodman. Elizabeth Renker in Strike through the Mask uniquely recognizes the importance of the letters ‘C’ and ‘F’ as, in her words, “equivalent tokens in a confidence game of characters.” Renker observes that “c and f are also associated with the constant (though variable) p…” In their last dialogue of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” C. defends a romantic theory of art against the objections of F., now a confirmed realist. The battleground is poetry. At one point, F. interrupts C. with the question, “Poetry perhaps?” The interjection of alliterating P-words in the final dialogue between C. and F. foreshadows the dialogic interplay of c, f, and p in Melville’s Confidence-Man. Additionally, C.’s declaration that “Poetry is Worship!” toys with the enigmatic letter combination "P. W.," later employed in the Confidence-Man as a shifting sign for, among other things, “Port Wine.” Significantly, the name "Frank" has been edited out and nowhere appears in the 1857 book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army.
In a calculated revision strategy, the name “Frank” (also as it happens, the avowed name of Melville’s cosmopolitan) vanishes, replaced by “Friend” throughout Part II of Scenes and Adventures. The letters ‘C’ and ‘F’ no longer preface or distinguish remarks by the Captain and Frank. The systematic deletion of “Frank” and the “characters” C and F in 1857 effectively erases the most obvious textual links between the dialogues of C. and F. in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” and those of Charlie and Frank in Melville’s Confidence-Man (1857).
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