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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."

life, threads, warp and woof

"But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof...."  

-- Moby-Dick (1851) chapter 114, The Gilder   

 

"Thus do the silent Fates prepare for our warped life-threads their sombre woof!" -- "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger 18 (September 1852) page 554.

"Thus do the Fates spin our warped life-threads,--thus do we weave its chequered or sombre web!" -- Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857 and 1859).

A Truce

Maybe it's from living out here on the prairie too long but these things haunt me.  These innumerable congruences I mean between the writings of Herman Melville and the prairie musings of "A Captain of U. S. Dragoons" in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border."  Originally serialized in the Southern Literary Messenger from June 1851 through August 1853, "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" became (after revision) Part II of Philip St. George Cooke's first book, Scenes and Adventures in the Army: Or, Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857).  Did Herman Melville ghost-write military memoirs for Philip St George Cooke?  Despite no, that is to say, zero documentary evidence linking Melville and Cooke, I don't know how else to account for so many congruences or correspondences or parallels or whatever they are.  What am I talking about?  Ah, thank you for asking!  Here goes then...

Herman Melville in Mardi (1849):

"A truce to your everlasting pratings of old Bardianna," said King Media.

 "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger (August 1852):  509;  Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857), p. 358:

C. "...But a truce to day-dreams; light as they are, the whole world granteth them not a foundation spot!"