Den Koopman

During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one “Fitz Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott’s, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean “The Cooper,” but “The Merchant.” In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery. 

-- Moby-Dick or The Whale Chapter 101 The Decanter 

William Scoresby, An Account of the Arctic Regions Volume 2

"I am only in a mood; buoyant and bitter; tameless as the Arab coursing his native desert; free as yonder soaring eagle! it's this wild mountain air! Let us have a fling at the world, — the poor dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens — " 

--Scenes and Adventures in the Army

This view of "the world" as a collection of "dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens" was added in revision of the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border.

down on the philosophy of Human Destiny

Look to the right and you will see links to monthly installments of the magazine series Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  Taken together the series forms part two of the 1857 book Scenes and Adventures in the Army.  Many fine previous commentators (Hamilton Gardner, Otis E Young) on the book did not know about earlier printings of the same material in newspapers and magazines including the Southern Literary Messenger.  The late date of the book mostly reflects the difficulties Lt. Colonel Cooke had with getting the thing published.  Seeing the magazine installments month-by-month more precisely and usefully situates the writing, especially the freewheeling prairie dialogues between the narrator and his imaginary friend, in 1851-1853.

Besides all the verbal and thematic correspondences shown relentlessly on this blog, the chronology of publication dates matches up surprisingly well to known milestones and moods of Herman Melville during the same period.

The series begins in June 1851, with the narrator sounding cocky and confident like Melville did, about to wrap up Moby-Dick.  Looking to make a friend of one ideal reader, the "Captain of U. S. Dragoons" even talks like Melville to Hawthorne, promising to do all the work of socializing.  Early on, the chatty survey of books and ideas covers the subjects discussed by Melville and Hawthorne, who named some in his journal entry for August 2, 1851:

“time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.”  (quoted in Hershel Parker's biography, V2.8)

Or in another view, the early installments of Scenes Beyond the Western Border effectively flesh out "A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn," the book Melville and Hawthorne reportedly planned after Thoreau, to memorialize their conversations.

The mood shifts in December 1851, as the imaginary friend starts to sound less like idealized Hawthorne and more like Melville's critical friend Evert Duyckinck:

 ... as your old fashioned friend, I feel interested in your surface wanderings; but let your double-refined poetry and romance go 'to the D—.'" (Scenes Beyond the Western Border)

The amazingly self-aware critique of poetry and romance continues for the rest of the series.  References to motherhood and nursing infants occur only after the birth of Melville's son Stanwix in October 1851.  The bizarre and inappropriate if not inexplicable rant on foreign books and international copyright in September 1852 follows Melville's discouraging correspondence in March-April 1852 with Richard Bentley, his London publisher.  Bentley had based his low estimation of Pierre on copyright concerns and lousy sales of previous works.  Copyright provided editorial grist for New York newspapers, as Parker shows in columns that must have caught Melville's attention (Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative 402-7).  The Harpers and New York Times promoted Dickens over American authors while Greeley and the Tribune defended them and promoted international copyright.

In September 1852, the Captain of U. S. Dragoons (ostensibly writing in July 1845) seems oddly, personally immersed in these New York newspaper wars of spring 1852, complaining bitterly about "cockney condescension" abroad and "foreign-fashion loving public taste" at home:

And then the infernal trash—much of it from the stews of Paris and London—utterly undersells us, to the almost total suppression of native labour; and to the robbery too of the best foreign authors, whose works would command a copyright.

So much for the fourth of July,—and a dry one!  (September 1852) 

The March 1853 episode of the grizzly bear cub, presented as a mock tragedy, wittily twists negative reviews of Melville's Pierre.  In August 1853, the concluding number, in dialogue between the narrator and his imaginary friend, (named Frank since August 1852) incorporates key terms deployed by Evert and George Duyckinck in their review of Pierre for the New York Literary World.

OK, I said all that to say this, on the subject of Human Destiny in Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  Now then, the matter of 1843 is concluded in January 1852.  After two months off, the series resumes in April 1852 with a new subject, the matter of the 1845 dragoon expedition to the Rocky Mountains.

Having of necessity dropped the source material in Cooke's 1843 Santa Fe Journal, the writer or ghostwriter confronting new matter of 1845 needed new sources.  He found the first one in
Oregon, Ho!, first printed over the signature of "St George" in the Washington National Intelligencer, July 15, 1845. 

Examining the revisions to Oregon, Ho! in April 1852, we find the writer now cynically regarding the Oregon emigrants as "unconscious workers of National Human Destiny."  Our narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons views westward expansion as a second fall, a comparison that Melville saved for Clarel.

They scorn all royal paper claims to this virgin world of ours! The best diplomatists of us all, they would conquer the land as easily as, — Adam lost Paradise.
(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, April 1852; and  Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

 Whatever happen in the end, 
Be sure 'twill yield to one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. Sequel may ensue,
Indeed, whose germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pygmy parts-- 
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be:
Man disennobled--brutalized
By popular science--Atheized 
Into a smatterer " (Clarel 4.21)

The fixation with Human Destiny persists into the June 1852 number--possibly indicating a cluster of 1852 installments, April-May-June, apparently composed and submitted together.  In late January and February 1852, Orville Dewey had repeated his Lowell lectures on the Problem of Human Destiny at the Church of the Messiah in New York City.  Melville wrote a dig at Human Destiny lecturers into book 17 of Pierre, then the Captain of U.S. Dragoons railed at "demagogues and infidels" who wowed crowds with "licentious speculations on human destiny":

C.  "But even science is at fault—philosophy at a discount. The public mind is occupied with the theorism of demagogues and infidels, who, abandoning themselves to licentious speculations on human destiny, attract multitudes of fanatical followers, whose minds they bewilder, and whose morals they debase." (June 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

The celebrated Rev. Orville Dewey, a demagogue and infidel?

What's more, a licentious infidel. Debasing the masses with marketable science or "philosophy at a discount."

Who talks like that?  Melville's Ungar the self-exiled soldier, for one, denouncing "popular science" in the lines from Clarel quoted above.  Also Babbalanja in Mardi, musing on the popularity of theorists.  And Ahab, contemplating the whale's head that has voicelessly witnessed enough to "make an infidel of Abraham."

And Melville as Pierre's biographer who disparages "infidel levities" and "infidel-minded" knaves.

Curiously, another bit from one of Dewey's Manhattan lectures on Human Destiny also made its way into the same June 1852 installment with the denunciation of Human Destiny demagogues.  As reported in the New York Daily Tribune for Thursday, February 5, 1852, Dewey's third NYC lecture at the Church of the Messiah considered laughter as a unique feature of "human organization, regarded in its connection with the formation of character and the development of mind":

Another important element in his training to higher ends is the faculty of laughter.  The animals are not endowed with this power, unless the grinning of monkeys is an exception.  This is not merely an expression of the sense of the ludicrous.  Laughter is the symbol of a contented mind, of a genial fellowship, of a comfortable sense of satisfaction, and tends to unite the scattered elements of society in a common feeling of fraternity.  Its influence on health is not to be overlooked.  An explosion of laughter is an excellent aid to digestion.  Superior to old wine, or old cheese, or other celebrated peptic persuaders.

In the June 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, one of the prairie dialogues makes use of Dewey's theme, as follows:

C.   "....Strange, that laughter, man's lowest attribute, is distinctive; while the smile, which seems borrowed from Heaven, and which can confer rapturous joy, if not happiness, is shared, I think, in a slight degree by brutes."   

(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, Southern Literary Messenger, June 1852); and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Melville took up the same theme in The Confidence-Man, riffing ironically on what Orville Dewey had said in praise of laughter, in those widely beloved Lowell lectures on Human Destiny:

Humor is, in fact, so blessed a thing, that even in the least virtuous product of the human mind, if there can be found but nine good jokes, some philosophers are clement enough to affirm that those nine good jokes should redeem all the wicked thoughts, though plenty as the populace of Sodom. At any rate, this same humor has something, there is no telling what, of beneficence in it, it is such a catholicon and charm—nearly all men agreeing in relishing it, though they may agree in little else—and in its way it undeniably does such a deal of familiar good in the world, that no wonder it is almost a proverb, that a man of humor, a man capable of a good loud laugh—seem how he may in other things—can hardly be a heartless scamp."

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed the other, pointing to the figure of a pale pauper-boy on the deck below, whose pitiableness was touched, as it were, with ludicrousness by a pair of monstrous boots, apparently some mason's discarded ones, cracked with drouth, half eaten by lime, and curled up about the toe like a bassoon. "Look—ha, ha, ha!"

"I see," said the other, with what seemed quiet appreciation, but of a kind expressing an eye to the grotesque, without blindness to what in this case accompanied it, "I see; and the way in which it moves you, Charlie, comes in very apropos to point the proverb I was speaking of. Indeed, had you intended this effect, it could not have been more so. For who that heard that laugh, but would as naturally argue from it a sound heart as sound lungs? True, it is said that a man may smile, and smile, and smile, and be a villain; but it is not said that a man may laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and be one, is it, Charlie?"

"Ha, ha, ha!—no no, no no."

amigo mio

Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker on the break between Herman Melville and Evert Duyckinck in early 1852: 

"Only a dramatic personal confrontation just at this time, a meeting in which Duyckinck told Melville that he could not recommend the work to any publisher, seems adequate to account for the anger Melville displayed toward his friend in what he inserted into his manuscript a week or so into January."

"... Duyckinck's blunt condemnation of Pierre is the most likely cause of Melville's apparent decision not even to try to find another publisher for his manuscript."
(Reading Melville's Pierre 147)

C.  "Amigo Mio!  Didn't you desert me on the eve of a snow storm, like many another friend of so honest mouthing!  And is a touch of poetry a bad companion in difficulty and trial?  Never a bit; it was the boon of a God — Wisdom was ever feminine."

I. F.  "Phew!  The fit is on!  Sorry I said a word!   (April 1852)

"I. F." stands for "Imaginary Friend," later in this same installment also called "friend critic."   Just now the Captain is feeling abandoned, deserted again by a friend

"on the eve of a snowstorm." 

the moral of the story

"Beyond any doubt Duyckinck considered Pierre immoral:  we know that from the review he later wrote of the expanded version that the Harpers published."
Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Reading Melville's Pierre, 147

"The most immoral moral of the story, if it has any moral at all, seems to be the impracticability of virtue..."
(Review of Melville's Pierre in Duyckincks' Literary World, August 21, 1852)

 My tragedy is all true,—and if not quite serious, has, as is proper, its moral;—but rather, as I have alluded to the primitive tragedy, let that " future reader" here imagine the entry of Chorus, and their song to Freedom! That dumb beasts prefer death to slavery! Liberty lost, they can die without the excitement of the world's applause, or hopes of a grateful posterity! (It is not possible, I think, that the cub could have known that I would immortalize him.)
("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," March 1853)

Below, the whole mockudrama as it originally appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger for March 1853.  This installment begins with a new and unique feature, a subheading with synopses of major episodes in italics.  The subheading shows that with the series winding down, the writer is getting ready to make a book of it, experimenting with italicized synopses for the table of contents.  The tale of the captured grizzly cub burlesques Greek tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet, while at the same time—as shown here—mimicking the vocabulary used in the hurtful review of Pierre in the New York Herald (September 18, 1852).  In the 1853 subheading, this incredible episode is titled:   Cub, a tragedy in three acts; same title appears in the table of contents for the 1857 book version, only with initial capital letters and without the italics:  Cub, a Tragedy in Three Acts.

Cub, a tragedy in three acts
March 1853

So there is a moral, after all.  And YOW what a moral!

Imaginary Friend talks like Evert Duyckinck

E. A. Duyckinck

Historians of the American West understandably have wanted nothing to do with Philip St George Cooke's imaginary prairie friend.  They don't know what to make of him so they mostly ignore him—even when relying on Scenes and Adventures in the Army for primary source material.  Well for one thing, the invented "Imaginary Friend" or "I.F.," christened "Frank" in the August 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," is a literary device, serving to advance the aims of philosophical fiction through dialogue.  What John Wenke says of Melville's Mardi (1849) applies also to the ongoing dialogues and their function in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" / Scenes and Adventures in the Army, Part II:

The philosophical dialogue is congenial to Melville's loose episodic structure, with the questers wrangling indefatigably over such issues as the soul's immortality, art, inspiration, Oro (God), right reason, preexistence, atavism, and practical ethics.  A dialogue often generates from a contrived incident or setting that offers a quickly displaced point of departure. (Melville's Muse, 48-49)

For another thing, the device of the Imaginary Friend allows the writer to present and respond to criticism of the narrative itself, seemingly as it is being written.  Criticism of the narrative by the Captain's Imaginary Friend sounds like Evert Duyckinck, then editor of the New York Literary World, criticizing

the "painful contradictions" of Ishmael in Moby-Dick:  in subsequently deleted lines the imaginary friend claims to have the Captain "fairly pinned in contradiction" (August 1852)

and

Melville's aesthetic disregard in Pierre for "truth and nature":  when the Captain defensively explains that to please his imaginary friend (Frank), he added some poetry "most naturally and truly" (August 1853)

In May 1852 (before "Frank" got his name, when he was still called "I. F") appears the following exchange:

I.F. "Ah! gazing at the stars? The three mortal hours we passed on the verge of the table land, whilst the guide sought a clew to this strange labyrinth of hills, or mountains—"

C. "And found it, much thanks to the buffalo, and the aid of their paths—"

I. F. "Were enough, with an empty stomach, to evaporate an ocean of romance."

C. "Considering, too, how dry it was; we had not drank for thirteen hours."

I.F. "Considering, too, you slipped off alone to the island yesterday, and 'fell asleep;' but as I verily believe, only dreamed; for, in our silent ride to overtake the regiment, you were still rapt, past all observation."

I. F associates the image of diminishing romance, a disappearing "ocean of romance," with the effects of "an empty stomach."  As it happens, Evert Duyckinck is on record talking exactly that way after an 1848 excursion with Herman Melville:

I was out the other day to Fort Lee with Melville—a grand picnicking day.  The first lady & gentleman we came upon were in front of a table cloth spread on a rock and covered with hams, sardines, &c, affectionately mouthing to each other, the Lady of Lyons.  They had just reached the 'magnificent' Tale of Como hostage [passage,surely] "Dont [Do'st] like the picture lady?"  A remark she let fall that champagne didn't inhale on an empty stomach distressed the romance or whatever it was. 
(Evert Duyckinck to William A. Jones, July 28, 1848, quoted here from Jay Leyda's The Melville Log, 279)

"Whatever it was"?  That's E. A. D. for you. And I. F. / Frank, too:

F.  "Come now, no romance; you must tell how that was done."  (September 1852)

 If you ask me, that's a fine passage to read aloud with your lover!  . 

Mel. A palace lifting to eternal summer
     Its marble walls, from out a glossy bower
     Of coolest foliage musical with birds,
     Whose songs should syllable thy name! At noon
     We'd sit beneath the arching vines, and wonder
     Why Earth could be unhappy, while the Heavens
     Still left us youth and love! We'd have no friends
     That were not lovers; no ambition, save
     To excel them all in love; we'd read no books
     That were not tales of love—that we might smile
     To think how poorly eloquence of words
     Translates the poetry of hearts like ours!
     And when night came, amidst the breathless Heavens
     We'd guess what star should be our home when love
     Becomes immortal; while the perfumed light
     Stole through the mists of alabaster lamps,
     And every air was heavy with the sighs
     Of orange-groves and music from sweet lutes,
     And murmurs of low fountains that gush forth
     I' the midst of roses!—Dost thou like the picture?

     Pauline. Oh, as the bee upon the flower, I hang
     Upon the honey of thy eloquent tongue!
     Am I not blest? And if I love too wildly,
     Who would not love thee like Pauline?

dollar-dealing sinners

"Mrs. Morewood had freely hinted that his [Herman Melville's] New York friends thought him crazy, and the most intimate of them, Duyckinck, had commented upon Moby-Dick [in the Literary World] like a missionary on Typee and had reprinted the review in the Dollar Magazine."  (Leon Howard)

"A significant event around the same time of the Moby-Dick debacle was Duyckinck’s acquisition of Holden’s Dollar Magazine in early 1851.  This magazine was the opposite of what the early Young America movement had stood for, embracing no issue of substance and devoted merely to commercial success and reading of a browsing nature."  (Widmer, Young America)

 "To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!"

(Melville's Pierre to the fictionalized Evert Duyckinck)

"For Melville to portray Duyckinck in this manner, exploiting their personal correspondence, was to break the friendship…."
(Higgins and Parker, Reading Melville's Pierre)

Revision to the August 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" inserts new references to  a "fling" at "dollar dealing sinners," with a new excuse for the "fling":  calm down, it was "only a love tap."

Friend.—You are a monomaniac, by Jove! incapable of argument, or even conversation.

"I detest argument! it is the favorite resort of fools, to convince—themselves. 

"I am only in a mood ; buoyant and bitter; tameless as the Arab coursing his native desert; free as yonder soaring eagle! it's this wild mountain air! Let us have a fling at the world,—the poor dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens—"

Friend.—But you began by a fling at me—

"Only a love tap, Friend; my way of argument. 

(Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

I fancy

"Well, well, — I wrote what pleased myself; and, — another object I have, which I did not mention: with scarce a book to read, if one did not write,
I fancy the beef and pork and beans would in time form a coating round his brain; — turn it all perhaps to thick and solid skull! How is it with you, Frank? Does yours retain a slight softness?"  

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border," August 1853; and (with "Frank" revised to "my Friend") Scenes and Adventures in the Army

  "I fancy that this moment Shakspeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael." (Letter to Evert Duyckinck, February 1849)

"By the way, I have recently read his 'Twice Told Tales' (I hadn't read but a few of them before). I think they far exceed the 'Mosses.' They are,
I fancy, an earlier vintage from his vine. Some of those sketches are wonderfully subtle. Their deeper meanings are worthy of a Brahmin.  Still there is something lacking—a good deal lacking—to the plump sphericity of the man. What is that? — He does'nt patronise the butcher—he needs roast-beef, done rare."  (Letter to Evert Duyckinck, February 1851)

“There are times when I fancy myself a lunatic,” resumed Babbalanja.

“Ah, now he’s beginning to talk sense,” whispered Mohi.  (Mardi)

The Importance of Being Frank

"my fine frank friend, poor Mark..." (Mardi)

 "Thank you for your frankness," said Paul; "frank myself, I love to deal with a frank man." (Israel Potter)

"What a madness & anguish it is, that an author can never – under no conceivable circumstances – be at all frank with his readers.  Could I, for one, be frank with them – how they would cease their railing." 
--Melville's Letter to Evert Duyckinck (14 December 1849)

By-the-way, though but a formality, friends should know each other's names. What is yours, pray? 

"Francis Goodman. But those who love me call me Frank." (Confidence-Man)

In "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853) the narrator's talkative traveling partner evolves from "Imaginary Friend" (called I. F. for short) to "Frank."  The idealized Imaginary Friend first receives a name in the August 1852 number of the Southern Literary Messenger:

 "But here comes Frank again: well, rest is evidently not a time for dull narrative." 

F.   Most industrious of scribblers, I give you good evening!

 --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1852

A practical man and a realist, Frank usually gives the utilitarian view on any subject.  On the subjects of poetry and fiction, his pronouncements echo those of Herman Melville's critical friend Evert A. Duyckinck.

"But I have been writing, Frank, something for your especial approval..."
 --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1853

Frank is not Frank anymore in the 1857 book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army. In the book, Frank is identified only as "Friend."

Books and Brains

But I don’t know but a book in a brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.

-- Herman Melville, letter to Evert A. Duyckinck on December 13, 1850; collected in the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth page 174.

* * * 

C.—" Well, well,—I wrote what pleased myself; and,—another object I have, which I did not mention: with scarce a book to read, if one did not write, I fancy the beef and pork and beans would in time form a coating round his brain,—turn it all perhaps to thick and solid skull! How is it with you, Frank? Does yours retain a slight softness?"  

-- Scenes Beyond the Western Border, Southern Literary Messenger 19 (August 1853) page 461; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army page 426.