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I recently read one of the strangest American novels of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville's steampunky Pierre, or The Ambiguities. He called the book his "Kraken," and wrote it in the early 1850s, right after publishing Moby Dick, an experience which had disheartened the author immensely. All his early novels -- rolicking adventures set on the high seas -- had been top sellers. But Moby Dick, with its brooding narrator and bizarre style, was a financial dud. The critics liked it, but nobody wanted to buy it. When Melville showed *Pierre *to his publisher, he was told it would never sell and offered a punishingly small advance.
It's no wonder the publisher did that: the book is the story of wealthy young writer (Pierre) who has a semi-incestuous relationship with his mother, then runs away to New York after pretending to marry his sister. Later, his ex-girlfriend joins them and they form one big, unhappy, adulterous-incestous love nest. Yeah, I'm thinking that wouldn't have gone over well with nineteenth-century audiences. Feeling betrayed by his publisher, and also pissed about having to work in a post office to support himself, Melville completely rewrote Pierre before sending it back to be published. He added a whole section about the awfulness of the publishing industry in New York, and how it promotes vapid trends and pseudo-celebrities while ignoring true works of genius. 150 years later, that's all still true. In fact, Melville made a lot of prescient comments about the business of publishing, including predicting that print would one day go the way of alchemy. More below the fold . . .
Many of Melville's criticisms sound fascinatingly contemporary,
especially when he talks about how the book industry lionizes extremelyyoung authors of autobiographies simply because, as Melville puts it,
"they were chiefly indebted to some rich and peculiar experience inlife." Sounds like he's talking about Augusten Burroughs. One of myfavorite bits in Pierre is when Pierre excoriates the then-chicpractice of putting an author's Daguerreotype on the cover flap of hisor her book. The editor of a certain Captain Kidd Monthly,
a magazine where Pierre publishes, hounds the young author to get hisDaguerreotype done so that he can have his face published with hiswriting. Pierre is repulsed by this crass publicity stunt, and at lastexplodes, "To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!" ApparentlyMelville shared his protagonist's hatred of publicity photographs,
writing in a letter to a colleague who urged him to get hisDaguerreotype done:
Obviously he changed his mind later, since he did have his photographtaken, as you can see above the fold -- though I believe that's tintyperather than a Daguerreotype. And of course Melville was not "oblivionated," and today his books areremembered better than those of many a Daguerreotyped author (thoughfew, perhaps, are brave enough to do battle with the Kraken of Pierre).
If you want to know more about this mysterious novel, you can read ityourself. Melville fanboy and scholar SamOtter recommends the out-of-print Hendricks House edition (which I
read), though you can get the same text with slightly less crazyfootnotes in the current Penguin edition. Otter has also written a book which contains an extended analysis of Pierre, which you may find comes in handy.
Pierre, or The Ambiguities [via Amazon]
