Pierre

Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852) was, to put it mildly, not warmly received by critics. One newspaper headlined its review with “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY” and another reviewer complained that Melville’s fancy was diseased. Critics are divided over whether it is a grand failure or simply a failure. Updike caught the tone when he remarked that the novel “runs a constant fever pitch” and its characters are “jerked to and fro by some unexplained rage of the author’s.” In his recent Melville biography, Andrew Delbanco describes it “as a nineteenth-century preview of the camp sensibility that became pervasive more than a hundred years later in late twentieth-century culture,” teeming as it is with hints of submerged sexual transgressiveness.

Melville was never strong for plots (ask any disappointed high school student who wades through hundreds of pages of Moby Dick to meet the whale), and Pierre is full of improbabilities, extremities of passion, alternate courses of action that every reader but none of the characters considers.

Pierre Glendinning is at the beginning of the novel living in creepy innocence with his widowed and domineering mother, with whom his relationship is more sibling than parental (he calls his mother by her first name, and calls her “sister”). Through his mother’s encouragement, he is engaged to Lucy Tartan, the “pale” and civilized woman of the story, but is haunted by the vision of a dark-eyed, savage beauty and has premonitions that his world will not remain as blissful as he thinks it.

It doesn’t. While visiting a home for wayward girls, his name provokes a shriek from one of the girls, whom he recognizes as the girl of his visions. Shortly after, a mysterious man delivers a note from the girl, Isabel, who informs Pierre that she is his half-sister, the daughter of his father’s French mistress. Pierre is entranced by Isabel, and her mysterious story, and is thrust into what he considers an irresolvable dilemma: To protect his father’s pristine reputation, he must never let Isabel’s existence be known, and yet to fulfill his Christian duty he must care for Isabel for the rest of her life.

Outraged and feeling duped by the world, he arrives at a solution: He will pretend that Isabel is his wife, so that they can live in the same house, go everywhere together, and Pierre can care for her without bringing shame to his father’s name. He visits Lucy (all unbrac’d) and renounces her, informs his mother that he is already married, and leaves with Isabel for New York, with another girl, Delly Ulver, who has been cast out of her family because of sexual misconduct.

When he’s rejected by his cousin and boyhood pal, Glendinning (Glen) Stanly, Pierre goes to live with an artistic community known as the “Church of the Apostles,” and makes a living as a writer. Pierre and Isabel are clearly in love, despite their assurances and the author’s that there is “no sex in our immaculateness.”

At this point, the narrative picks up pace. Glen begins to court Lucy, Pierre’s mother dies, and Lucy decides that, despite it all, she wants to be near Pierre and comes to live with him and Isabel in the city, presenting herself as Pierre’s cousin. Glen and Lucy’s brother, Fred, attempt to remove her, and are thwarted, which leads Glen to challenge Pierre to a duel. Pierre kills both Glen and Fred, and ends up in jail. There, during a visit from Isabel and Lucy, Isabel reveals that she is Pierre’s sister, the shock of which kills Lucy instantly. Isabel smuggles poison into the cell, and Pierre and Isabel both commit suicide.

The book has some strong points. The portrait of New York City is unnerving, a genuine descent into hell, a description strengthened by repeated allusions to Dante’s Inferno throughout the novel. Mrs. Glendinning’s obsequious minister, Mr. Falsgrave, is wonderfully drawn, with his “white-browed and white-handed, and napkined immaculateness.” As Delbanco points out, Melville provides depth to the story by allusions to Dante, and to “Enceladus, the mutilated Titan child of incest doomed to an eternity of ‘writhing from out of the imprisoning earth’ as he struggles heavenward while locked in dirt and stone.” Melville gets his in his licks at American religious sects: “As befits his name, Pierre imagines himself the rock of a new church; he wants to ‘gospelize the world anew,’ to tear it down an rebuild it, cleanse it and repopulate it,” now that the purity of his home has been exposed as a hypocritical lie. He is a Hamlet, who alone discerns the difference between “is” and “seems,” and laments that he was born to put the world right. He is ultimately no Dante: “in rushing off toward his new heaven he sinks into a hell of his own making, and unlike Dante, who is guided into and out of hell by his master poet Virgil, Pierre will not emerge wiser and stronger. In fact, he will not emerge at all.”

Yet, Delbanco is right that the book makes for uncomfortable reading. He compares it to “the discomfort one feels in the presence of a brillian friend who, in the grip of some new passion, has gone ‘over the top.’”