Dragooned!  Ten Traces of
Herman Melville
in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853)

Philip St. George Cooke

Radical Freelance, Esq.

William Gibson, USN

Augustus Ely Silliman

Texts by Anonymous

Resources

Events

7

NUMBER SEVEN tugs on perhaps the longest thread in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the ongoing meta-fictional debate between the narrator and his imaginary prairie friend on the value of poetry and romance in a material world.  Cooke, by the way, expressed zero interest in such theoretical questions outside of Scenes and Adventures in the Army.  His literary tastes leaned decidedly to the conventional and prosaic.  In a letter to his son, written just one year after the publication of Scenes and Adventures in the Army, Cooke admits to reading what he called “the higher order” of books and novels, of which he instanced three:  Guy Livingstone by George Alfred Lawrence and two widely available works by the Anglican clergyman and social critic Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!  and Two Years Ago.  Besides these three specimens of manly British fiction, Cooke was also reading a then-popular work on Debt and Credit.  To his son, he particularly commended Livingstone’s Travels in Africa as “full of important knowledge.”  Earlier in the same letter, Cooke had urged his son to “take & read the principal foreign reviews” and (ironically enough) to “shun all but the first class novels; and especially magazine articles!”  [Letter to John Rodgers Cooke, 15? July 1858 (Mss.1C774a14), Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia.]

While his ghostwriter was engaged in a spirited, dialogic defense of poetry and romance in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger, Cooke was preoccupied, as always, with advancing his military career: 

“The inactivity of his command at Carlisle Barracks seemingly weighed so heavily upon Major Cooke that by July, 1851, he was querulous and irritable; he even went so far as to protest ungenerously at the promotion over his own head of old Nathan Boone to the lieutenant-colonelcy of the 2^nd Dragoons.  The War Department quite properly ignored his complaint that Boone was unqualified for the promotion, but the incident is useful in illustrating the blow to Cooke’s morale which his exile from the frontier entailed.” 

— Otis Young, The West of Philip St. George Cooke, 247.

Cooke's biographer, quoted above, was right, as the following excerpts from surviving letters to the Adjutant General's Office show:

Carlisle Barracks, July 13, 1851.
“The official announcement of the promotion (above me) of several Majors of the infantry arm—two of whom have for sixteen or seventeen years been my inferiors in rank—makes it my duty now to urge my conviction that an injustice has been done me. …if not remedied it [the ‘evil’ of being passed over for promotion] has already seriously affected my professional prospects, probably for life.”  (Letters to Adjutant General’s Office, National Archives)

Fort Mason, Texas.  March 9, 1853.
“Five juniors in rank, have now, in consequence become my seniors and probable commanders.  I am kept in an inferior grade.  Injustice has been done me; and I ask redress,—or a remedy.” 

Washington.  May 21, 1853   
“…no officer, whatever his merit, can be advanced three grades, at a step, without injustice to others;—without, in this case, degrading,—sorely wounding, its field officers. …  But it is worth a struggle to save myself from the degradation of being thus “overslaughed”—and to remind you that in the [Mexican] war, it was the government which forced upon me the bitter cup of labour; fruitful indeed, but obscure as distant… I served…in that remote obscurity which even steam yet hesitates to penetrate—whence the light of letters never shone; that potent ally! a want of which a Cesar could fail, in becoming his own Commentator.  (Letter to Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War; National Archives.)

The running argument over poetry and romance in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” betrays the peculiar angst of a committed writer, not that of a career army officer. 

As the magazine series "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" progresses, the Captain’s imaginary friend assumes the role of devil’s advocate and eventually becomes a mouthpiece for Herman Melville’s critics, particularly his increasingly critical friend, New York editor and publisher Evert Duyckinck.  Less than a month after the hurtful second part of Duyckinck’s review of Moby-Dick appeared in the Literary World (22 November 1851), a new installment of “Scenes Beyond  the Western Border” features the Captain’s “imaginary friend” or “I. F.” in the role of literary critic.  I. F. faults C. and his freewheeling narrative for overindulgence in poetry and romance, just as Duyckinck had criticized transcendental, romantic, and “poetical” elements of Moby-Dick.  I. F.’s continuing assault on poetry and romance leads to a bad pun in the January 1852 installment:  “I conceived hopes of you, that the poetic spirit was layed.”  Forecastle revelry in Moby-Dick was criticized for “bad taste” in the Literary Review and elsewhere; I. F. now wishes C. “a little better taste” (48).  Increasingly transparent on the profession of his imaginary friend, C. addresses I. F. as “Dear critic, and lover of bathos!”  (48). 

Melville's Agenda (writing to his London publisher about Mardi):
 

I have long thought that Polynisia furnished a great deal of rich poetical material that has never been employed hitherto in works of fancy; and which to bring out suitably, required only that play of freedom & invention accorded only to the Romancer & poet. … & the romance & poetry of the thing grow continuously, till it becomes a story wild enough I assure you & with a meaning too.  —Letter to John Murray, 25 March 1848 (Correspondence, 106).

 Melville’s Matter-of-Fact Friend:

Among conveniently opposable literary categories, Duyckinck advocated not “fancy” but “fact,” not “romance” (which was foreign and going out of fashion, he hoped) but “realism” … —“Historical Note” to Melville’s Confidence-Man (Northwestern-Newberry ed., 259).

The Debate on Poetry and Romance in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border"

December 1851
I. F.  …as your old fashioned friend, I feel interested in your surface wanderings; but let your double-refined poetry and romance go ‘to the D—.’  (729)

 January 1852
...Dear critic, and lover of bathos!  hast thou found poetry in a full stomach?  (48)

 …there was little more poetry in it, than in thy singular name; (and thus both were highly satisfactory to my matter-of-fact Friend…)  (50)

 April 1852
I. F.  you…nearly spoiled your honest but faint description of natural beauties by a lamer flight….But I really congratulate you on arriving so safely in a sober ‘camp’ in the midst of this very flat earth.

C.  Amigo Mio!  Didn’t you desert me on the eve of a snowstorm, like many another friend of so honest mouthing!  And is a touch of poetry a bad companion in difficulty and trial?  (232)

May 1852
I. F.  …were enough, with an empty stomach, to evaporate an ocean of romance.  (317)

June 1852
C.  …Worn out by change, Romance is gone; but Poetry, its vital element, is left; and its refined spirit alone can save love from materialism and degradation…  (380)

August 1853
C. …But I have been writing, Frank, something for your especial approval; I have been setting forth grim realities,—and most philosophically.  I did strike at last, but most naturally and truly, a little vein of—

F.—Poetry, perhaps?  (461)

1857
Thus to poetry, and much-abused romance, we owe the cherished oblivion of our animal natures. 

(Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 411; this is a revised version of the Captain’s earlier tribute to “poetic fancies” and “romantic yearnings” in the May 1853 installment, p.313.)

The revised book version from Scenes and Adventures in the Army points even more directly to Evert Duyckinck as the critical voice behind the mask of I. F.  Later additions to the text of August 1852 have C. attacking “the world” inhabited by “poor dollar-dealing sinners” (Scenes and Adventures, 355).  The world as used in this updated dialogue covertly alludes to the Literary World, edited by Evert and his brother George Duyckinck.  The expression "dollar-dealing sinners" also carried a private message for the Duyckincks, who as editors and publishers had been “dollar-dealing” vendors of Holden's Dollar Magazine, a popular journal that Melville once refused to write for.  The “Friend” readily perceives the Captain’s “fling at the world” as a gratuitously personal “fling at me.” 

The last exchange between C. and F. in the thirteenth and final installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” responds directly to criticism of Melville’s Pierre in the Literary World.  Evert Duyckinck quarreled with Melville’s principles and theory of art, raising fundamental questions about the process and purpose of artistic endeavor: 

Mr. Melville may have constructed his story upon some new theory of art to a knowledge of which we have not yet transcended; he evidently has not constructed it according to the established principles of the only theory accepted by us until assured of a better, of one more true and natural than truth and nature themselves, which are the germinal principles of all true art.  (Contemporary Reviews, ed. Higgins and Parker, 430; emphasis added)

This high-minded demand for a traditional aesthetic based on “established principles” of “truth and nature” reverberates throughout the Literary World review.  Duyckinck alleged that idealism and gothic motifs in Pierre have “completely befogged nature and truth”; and again, that “truth and nature” are self-evidently missing in the ill-conceived main characters (430).

The Captain tries to appease his critical friend by sticking close to nature and truth—doing, in other words, what Duyckinck charged Melville with not doing:

But I have been writing, Frank, something for your especial approval; I have been setting forth grim realities—and most philosophically.  I did strike at last, but most naturally and truly, a little vein of—

F.—Poetry, perhaps?  By the merest accident in the world. 
(461; emphasis added)

To the chagrin of Frank (and Duyckinck), the Captain’s aesthetic (like Melville’s) leads inexorably to the writing of poetry.

Always impressed by Melville’s virtuosic powers of description, Duyckinck wished the author of Pierre had written “in a style of simplicity and purity” (emphasis mine).  Frank wants the same thing from C. that Evert Duyckinck asked of Melville: 

F.—Well, let me hear your specimen of “grim reality.”  If you could only realize the charm of simplicity!  (461; emphasis mine).

Upon hearing C. read from his journal, Frank restates his preference for narrative simplicity:

...how easily by a mere turn of expression, you could have given it the interest of a simple narrative.  (461; emphasis mine)

In Pierre, Melville had openly defied conventional, "practical" rules of expository writing:  “I write precisely as I please" (244).  In the same vein, C. dodges the objections of his practical friend in a declaration of literary independence:  “I scribble by no rule…you perceive, then, that I was experimenting?”  The Captain’s self-reflexive, dialogic, and experimental approach to fiction anticipates major tenets of postmodernism by more than a century.  The wide-ranging prairie dialogues of C. and F. are not the invention of an ordinary writer, certainly not of the cavalry officer, now in his early forties, who cautiously approved only “first class” novels by popular authors.