THE CONFIDENCE-MAN - HERMAN MELVILLE

I would count MOBY DICK among my top 10 (maybe top 5) favorite novels and I also really adore BARTLEBY so you’d think I’d be a Melville guy. However, those are the only two works of his I’ve read and, frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone go to bat for any of the other ones. Turns out, this is quite unfair, at least if THE CONFIDENCE-MAN is any indication. I bought this cheap copy because I was interested in the theme. I’d been thinking about Iceberg Slim and reading all this news about modern day scammers and pondering why this archetype seems so quintessentially American. Turns out, Melville wrote a whole book on exactly this subject. The book has this, I believe, unique device where it takes place on the day it was published, April Fool’s day 1856, on a steamboat headed down to New Orleans. The novel consists of the passengers walking around the boat, talking to one another and scamming. All the conversations are high-minded and about the nature of man so t’s sort of like a Thomas Mann novel but all the characters are grifting. Melville does not let up on what human interactions are confidence games at heart. He examines banking, business, charity, manners, credit, fashion, ambition, capitalism, and dozens of other topics pointing out how all of these subjects are rife with manipulation and predation. He’s got a horrifyingly precinct section where a character suggests that his charity is bringing a Wall Street Spirit to its work in Africa. There’s an interesting use of “philanthropy” to not mean “a rich guy engaging in some reputation laundering” (i.e. its current usage) but rather as the antonym of “misanthropy” and which mindset, a general trust or distrust of mankind, is more reasonable or desirable. Melville can be the darkest sort of cynic so the characters espousing philanthropy are exactly the ones you need to distrust at all costs. He also really gets at how American this mindset is. America sees itself as city on a hill attracting people from all over to work hard and get ahead which works out in real life to mean a bunch of rootless people from all over who have no obligations to anyone trying with all their might to get a rich as possible by whatever means. “When wolves are killed off, the foxes increase.” And now that we’ve truly experienced a con-man president it’s hard to argue that Melville didn’t see exactly the world we’re living in. Definitely should be read in conjunction with Iceberg Slim, the other major American writer on cons. 56 cons