Melville's The Confidence Man and his Descendants in David Mamet's Work

Stanley Kaufmann, in a lecture at Skidmore College about Mamet's House of Games, suggested that its concern with con men, betrayal and trust in American life might well stem from Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. This essay is merely an elaboration of that suggestion. When I spoke to Kaufmann after the lecture to draw him out on the subject he said that it was merely a hunch, and that he hadn't read the novel for, he guessed, fifty years. I was interested because the novel was a favorite of mine. I taught it for many years in a hobby horse seminar at Goddard College called "Irony," and as a student there in the 60's, David Mamet took the seminar.

When I spoke to him about Kaufmann's lecture I asked him whether he'd read The Confidence Man, and he said "Of course" with the right amount of bluster, in the tone of a student being quizzed by a teacher. And I never doubted it. Despite his picture of his Goddard years in his essay "Sex Camp" (in Make Believe Town) as a brainless romp, he was a highly disciplined, brilliant student, and the sexual revolution was not hidden away in northern Vermont.

In speaking of the con man as a literary figure we can not dismiss him as a marginal criminal oddity. By the customary modern morality we take public and private fraud for granted and are more inclined to be horrified by crimes of violence. Our images of the depth of moral depravity are shaped by Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and the organized production of death, in what Camus called the univers concentrationaire. However, in the moral world of Aquinas and Dante, the lowest circles of hell are reserved for Frauds, betrayers of the spirit and of God, crimes they considered much more grave than acts of violence, which are merely sins against man. When one has one's eyes on threats to the integrity of a culture and its values, one need not be a Thomist to place in your visionary Hell panderers, seducers, flatterers, simoniacs, sorcerers, barrators, hypocrites, thieves, counsellors of fraud, sowers of discord and falsifiers (the descending scheme of Dante's malbolges.) And the very worst, traitors to their kindred, country, guests and lords temporal and spiritual, are placed in the very depths of hell. This set of values is not a moral inversion or a bizarre theology or merely a provocative literary device, but a severe and often caustic view of the human condition and the social world.

Now, let us consider the moral world that Melville deals with in The Confidence Man. I am going to offer here a reading of the novel that focusses on the elements that would be useful to a brilliant undergraduate like Mamet with a highly developed sense of satiric comedy and with a fundamental commitment to theater.

The narrative point of view in the novel is not the customary omniscient third person narrator. It is, in fact, subtly variable, moving from a wry and witty observer to a kind of subtle, deliberate moral obtuseness that refuses to recognize or judge what seems to be obvious to the reader. There is a minimum of description of setting or scene. Often the details invite allegorical reading. The action takes place on April Fools Day on a Mississippi river boat, the Fidele, which, like the Ship of Fools (it's called that, at one point) contains a cross section of American types just like the infantry platoon or the flight crew of a World War II movie. It announces that this is your country, the particular setting in which you are fated to deal with your universal confusions. (The Pequod in Moby Dick has an international crew and is concerned with different theological problems.)

The novel consists largely of a series of dialogues in which a man in many disguises, running from a crippled "negro" (as he's called) to a suave cosmopolitan, who argues for the need to be given the confidence of his interlocutors, as an act of faith both in him and in mankind and in divine caritas. Formally, The Confidence Man is a virtuoso stunt in which we never enter the mind of the central character, who is in every scene. We hear him talk and see him act, but we never share what he is thinking or see him changing disguises. A new character appears, as from nowhere, and we can only surmise from the general direction of his talk that it is the same man. Description of action and setting serves almost entirely as stage setting and stage direction, and the novel's symbolic bearings are carried largely by dialogue. In other words, its method is primarily dramatic.

The con game, the exchange of confidence, enters the dialogue as a form of high-spirited intellectual comedy. It is all very, very Christian and very philosophical. We do not have to look too hard, in the wake of contemporary Christmas, to see the debasement of the spiritual for commercial purposes, but it had an especially bitter edge in the first half of the 19th century where the language of radical Calvinism, and of the messianic hope of the new world and its institutions, of the New Jerusalem, were current and living language and the promise of America, the New Land. As evidence that this was not a remote, defunct or merely abstract tradition, I rhould put on record that I went to a college in a dumpy little town in northern Ohio that was founded in 1833--15 years before the publication of The Confidence man--as "A new Jerusalem, a city without sin in the wilderness." The divine spirit was in its full presence there. The college's president in its formative years, Charles Grandison Finney, a very successful evangelist, was pronounced by the Whitman disciple R. M. Bucke, to possess the "Cosmic Consciousness"--the spiritual flood of Universal Divinity--along with Whitman, Jesus, Mohammed, Francis Bacon (the author of plays falsely attributed to a member of the commercial class) and a select few others.

Faith in God and Man were under a severe test in the wilderness, in the unstable and unfamiliar new world where messianic and salvationist hope and the pastoral ethical teachings of Christianity struggled with the language of daily life and commerce. This is a country, Melville reminds us, with multiple and dubious currencies and coins issued by states in and out of the Union, and by private banks, as well as the central government, and with a wild and unregulated brokerage. To call it freewheeling simply reminds us of how contemporary it seems, and how similar to the world of Glengarry Glen Ross. What could one trust? It was an explosive mixture in which the language of the spirit is put under more stress than language or the spirit can bear. And the faith in this language of Christian teachings was matched in loftiness and purity of spirit by Emerson and the Transcendentalists and their faith in a beneficent nature. This often boundless spiritual optimism of Christians and Transcendentalists is the butt of the searching and extravagant intellectual comedy that delights in its absurd clash with the cruelty of the natural world and the selfishness of natural man, to put it into the traditional theological language that was still current. And this spiritual optimism abounded as well in the ideology of the world of commerce. Melville enters the lists as the ironist and sophisticate in the community of the faithful--of the pious. This ironic posture is not unlike Jonathan Swift among the enthusiasts and projectors, and Melville uses these words of Swift repeatedly.

There is a savage indignation at folly and duplicity, recorded through the orders and disorders of language, that unites Mamet, Melville and Swift.

What happens in the novel? Almost nothing. In his first guise (and some critics doubt that it is the confidence man, but most don't) he appears as a deaf mute, a true fleecy lamb of god, who raises up alongside the poster that warns of the con man his chalk slate that reads: "Charity thinketh no evil," "Charity suffereth long and is kind," "Charity endureth all things," "Charity believeth all things," "Charity never faileth." And after this gospel series, as an anticlimax, "His aspect was at once gentle and jaded" (6-7). This phrase is offered by the narrator with a seeming unawareness of its contradictoriness: a disingenuous voice that we again know from Swift.

It is hard to do justice to the complex and delicious texture of the novel, and this deaf mute is compared in a dazzling sequence to Christ, Caspar Hauser, Manco Capac (from Incan mythology), Vishnu, Joseph Smith, the mooncalf and Jacob dreaming at Luz: figures of divinity and insanity, saintly fools, prophets and gods in one breath. A dangerous and heretical list when assembled in one figure. We are reminded this is the dawn of comparative religion, cultural anthropology, The Golden Bough and the half-century of Marx's and Nietzsche's perspectives on Christianity.

Our central character is frequently compared to the devil, and if we believed the novel to be a strict allegory as some scholars argue (though none argue that it is a coherent one), the moral scheme would be simple. However it is not a strict allegory, though it contains many allegorical passages. It is a mixed form, like Moby Dick, and the Satyricon and Gargantua and Pantagruel and Gulliver's Travels. On the level of narrative, he's a con man, but a very petty one. As the crippled slave, Black Guinea, he catches pennies in his mouth. In complex disguises as representatives of various charities--the Seminole Widows and Orphans Fund--the inventor of the Protean Chair that relaxes all infirmities by its flexibility, including (he was about to say--as a way of saying it) infirmities of the tormented conscience, as a naturopath herb doctor, as a representative of the Philosophical Intelligence Office who sells young boys as laborers and servants, defending them from the imputation that boys are naturally troublesome, etc.

Through all of this his profits are minuscule--a dollar or three, a shave on credit, and so forth. His triumphs are the granting of confidence in him, not the money. He is an artist, a con artist on one hand, but clearly aimed at a spiritual goal of getting people to learn to trust in the utterly untrustworthy. He is a theological trickster, more like Puck leading to trouble than the Devil leading to ruin and damnation. This aspect of the novel is theological satire.

Few of these are easy conquests, and his triumphs are against worthy antagonists. One truth-speaker sees through the early disguises. A man on a wooden leg recognizes the crippled slave as a fraud and is beaten for speaking the truth by a Methodist minister. A Missourian, a backwoodsman named Pitch--which is black and which things stick to--has massive and eloquent doubts about the benign intentions of nature and the spiritual primacy of confidence. However, these are overcome when he is finally sold a boy by the con man in the guise of the representative of the Philosophical Intelligence Office who has the abstract and disingenuous devious innocence of the Special Prosecutor of the Clintons.

The final incarnation (and the word suggests his theological bearings) of the confidence man is Frank Goodman referred to in the last half of the novel as "the Cosmopolitan." This frank good man is extravagantly dressed in a costume referred to as motley, the colors of the fool and clown, and spends the time from nightfall to midnight, when April Fool's Day ends and the novel closes, in conversation with another con man--whom he recognizes instantly as such--named Charlie Noble, and with two figures who are thinly disguised versions of Emerson and Thoreau. He then cadges a free shave from the barber, whose "No Trust" sign opened the novel, and the night concludes with his encounter with an old man reading the Bible, who reassures him about the Christian provenance of trust. He ushers the old man back to his stateroom and the novel ends with the teasing sentence: "Something further may follow of this Masquerade"(350).

In all of these encounters the main subject of discussion is the appeal for confidence by the confidence man, the giving of it as an act of faith in God and Man. He marshals on his side the language of Christian faith, brotherly love, and a banal, genial, complacent, humane civility, anticipating George Babbit. He says: "irony is so unjust; never could abide irony; something Satanic about irony. God defend me from Irony, and Satire, his bosom friend." To which Pitch responds, "A right knave's prayer, and a right fool's, too"(192-3).

Yet Pitch, though generally acute in his suspicions, is a hyperbolic crank, and Melville artfully, and with telling irony, manipulates the reader onto the side of the con man. This is true again when he opposes the rigorously selfish individualism and faith in nature's invisible hand, of the Emerson and Thoreau figures, with their spiritual purism. Sounding reasonable and appealing, he says, "never a sound judgement without charity. When man judges man, charity is less a bounty from our mercy than just allowance for the insensible lee-way of human fallibility" (221). If this is the serpent and the devil--and there are many references connecting him to both--he has his charms that are generous and humane, opposed to an extreme severity. But then theology reminds us that no one would be tempted by a repellent devil. And again, his con jobs are done for very little profit. The trickster--shape-changer--is the more plausible model for this character. He is a virtuoso abuser of confidence, and the goal--at times complex and elusive, is to attack the commercial use and abuse of the language of the spirit, where confidence becomes both the test of wholesome spirituality and the requirement of the swindle. Melville transforms the Swiftian device of a double ingenue comedy--that we see with Gulliver and the Houhynhm master--into the discussion of truth among liars and faith among the faithless. In the novel there is something of the impulse of Serrano's "Piss Christ," which conflates anger at the abuse of God with anger at God.

What is there in this novel useful to a young dramatist? The dialogue's formal eloquence is too ornate, programmatic and playful to have been useful to one caught up with dramatic realism. Likewise, the figure of the trickster and his enterprise are entirely too mythic for a realist. It is in the impact of Melville's central themes, the drama of trust and betrayal, the impact of fraud and misplaced faith on American capitalist society that we can see the influence of this novel on Mamet. In an early work like American Buffalo, confidence takes the form of an ongoing discussion of who can be trusted, and it is located in the heart of the American Way: theft as a business proposition, in which the thief, or would-be thief is an agent of free enterprise, where the individual should be free "to embark on any fucking course he sees fit...In order to secure his honest chance to make a profit" (221) This sounds less like the con man than like Mark Winsome, the radical individualist who is a parody of Emerson. The nature of friendship forms the debate between the cosmopolitan and the Thoreau figure, Egbert, who maintains that money or any practical consideration, belong outside the pure and spiritual bond of friendship. He is portrayed as a fanatic and monster and refuses on this ground to loan money to a friend in dire need. This, comically twisted, informs the bitter ravings of Teach: "We're talking about money for chrissake, huh? We're talking about cards. Friendship is friendship, and a wonderful thing, and I am all for it...but lets keep it separate huh, lets keep the two apart, and maybe we can deal with each other like some human beings" (162).

The chaotic manuscript of Lone Canoe, a play of the American Buffalo years, is a choral meditation on complex betrayal of trust and loyalty to culture, family and tribe, between two 19th Century explorers. The issue here is not criminality but inauthenticity, fraud and betrayal. It seems unfair to speak of it in detail because it has never been prepared for production or publication. But it does bear, in these respects, on issues of confidence and trust.

Edmond is a play where the character's senseless act of murder is prepared for by a series of scenes of con games and fraud, peep shows and three card monte. He makes a desperate, brutal lunge toward seeing things as they really are. Some version of "things are not always what they seem" is a signature line for a Mamet script, and breaking through the barriers of deception to the difficult truth is the dramatic thrust that drives Edmond through brutality to acceptance of a genuine human contact that is reached through shame and degradation.

The language of confidence and trust is at the center of both Glengarry Glen Ross and House of Games. In the former, we are shown confidence and betrayal--in the capitalist war of all against all--at the heart of the American enterprise. In the latter, we see a gang operating a "big con"--some of the operations of which may have been derived from David Maurer's book of the same name--in which a psychologist, Margaret Ford (played by Lindsay Crouse) is swindled by a con man , Mike, (played by Joe Mantegna). When she realizes what is going on she confronts him with the comment: "You folks were going to con me out of my money." He replies, as a good capitalist: "It's only business. It's the American Way." In a grotesque satiric turn, the psychologist grants herself permission--with help from an older therapist friend--to murder the con man who seduced her. She says: "You raped me. You took me under false pretenses. You used me." His answer, hilariously, is "We live in an imperfect world." In both cases the rules of the game--the modern one of self-fulfilling psychological health (she can't help her patients and thinks of therapy as a con game) and the ancient one of the con game--permit one to get away with murder, figuratively and literally.

In Homicide, we see a particularly bitter and intimate betrayal of Bob Gold (played again by Mantegna), that comes close to home, since Mamet at the time was exploring his connection to Judaism with a passion. Like all Jews (a dangerous phrase) Mamet is outraged by crimes against his people. The Old Religion, about the 1914 lynching of Leo Frank, framed for a rape and murder, ends: "They covered his head, and they ripped his pants off and castrated him and hung him from the tree. A photographer took a picture showing the mob, one boy grinning at the camera, the body hanging, the legs covered by a blanket tied around the waist. The photo, reproduced as a postcard, was sold for many years in stores throughout the South" (194). However all Mamet's passions are complex and self-reflexive, as becomes an instinctive ironist. Loyalty is never simple. Gold, as the homicide detective assigned to the case of a murdered Jewish storekeeper, is persuaded by her rich and powerful Jewish family, that the murder was done by neo-Nazis, through an incredibly elaborate series of deceptions designed to appeal to his rootlessness as a diaspora Jew. He is systematically misinformed by a sham librarian, and lured to a sham meeting of Zionist heroes. He is persuaded by them to blow up the headquarters (in a Lionel train store) of the Nazi group, and then he is blackmailed by photos of himself emerging from the store to get information from an evidence folder that the group needs. This folder is professionally sacred and to reveal it is a profound betrayal of his work. In the course of this run-around he shows up late for an assignment to trap a killer, in which he has a crucial role as the 'con man' hostage negotiator, and his partner is killed. He gets seriously wounded himself and this defection gets him expelled from the group, the community of homicide detectives, that he comes closest to really belonging to. So much for confidence.

These questions lead irresistibly to issues of truth and falsity, and True and False, Mamet's discussion of honest method for the actor, begins with the following paragraph:

My closest friends, my intimate companions, have always been actors. My beloved wife is an actor. My extended family consists of the actors I have grown up, worked, lived and aged with. I have been, for many years, part of various theater companies, any one of which in its healthy state more nearly resembles a perfect community than any other group I have encountered (3).

That actors, like con men, are impersonators, raises no problem here. The language suggests a framework of love and trust and 'perfect community' and how genuine, heartfelt, sincere, not fraudulent, these values are. For all the concern throughout the book with the art of impersonation, the goal is truth, and it concludes with the following:

The well-made play, scene, design, direction, the good performance, must be true. The simple truth may stem from a natural disposition, or come from years of arduous study--it's nobody's business but your own.

The blandishments of fame, money, and security are great. Sometimes they have to be quieted, sometimes they have to be compromised with--just as in any other sphere of life

What is true, what is false, what is, finally, important?

It is not a sign of ignorance not to know the answers. But there is great merit in facing the questions (127).

This is the language of the moral realist with a sense of how difficult it is to achieve our values and not that of a bitter idealist who rails at man's defections from the absolute. Truth remains as the problem that the truth-seeker is committed to pursue. For which reason, we must not accept as a moral conclusion, Del's outburst in Cryptogram, amid the pain of lifelong betrayals of intimate friends: "Oh, if we could speak the truth, do you see? For one instant. Then we would be free" (54). Despite the echo, this can not be read as an affirmation of John's promise of salvation in his gospel. Del is driven away. And as every student of drama knows, the truth is just as likely to force your Queen-mother-wife to kill herself, you to blind yourself with her brooch, and then to drive you into exile. The redeeming comfortable possession of, and utterance of, the truth is not a safe bet.

Wag the Dog is a brilliant satire on the operators of the media delusion-mill in American politics. This is about a con job on a global scale and the "real" world of politics-in-the-media refused to be outdone by the film's extravagant farce. I accused David of "producing" the Monica Lewinsky scandal to promote the film and he refused to deny it.

WORKS CITED

Mamet, David, Cryptogram, London, Methuen, 1995

------------, American Buffalo in Plays: One, London, Methuen, 1994

------------, The Old Religion, NY, Free Press, 1997

------------, True and False, NY, Pantheon, 1997

Melville, Herman, The Confidence Man, ed. Bruce Franklin, NY, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967

Note: Quotations from David Mamet's House of Games were transcribed from the film.

Professor Barry Goldensohn

Department of English

Skidmore College

Saratoga Springs, New York

12866