Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile

PENGUIN       CLASSIC

ISRAEL POTTER

HERMAN MELVILLE was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. His father died when he was twelve, and Melville worked as a bank clerk and later an elementary school teacher before shipping off on a whaling vessel bound for the Pacific. Upon his return he published several books based on his experiences at sea, which won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married and had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he wrote Moby-Dick. His later works, including Moby-Dick, became increasingly complex and alienated many of his readers. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where he died in 1891.

ROBERT S. LEVINE is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance; Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity; and Dislocating Race and Nation; and is the editor of a number of volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville; The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820–1865; and (with Samuel Otter) Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation.

HERMAN MELVILLE

Israel Potter

HIS FIFTY YEARS OF EXILE

Introduction and Notes by ROBERT S. LEVINE

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First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam & Co. 1855

This edition with an introduction and notes by Robert S. Levine published in Penguin Books 2008

Introduction and notes copyright © Robert S. Levine, 2008

All rights reserved

This text of Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile was published in 1982 by Northwestern

University Press as part of Volume Eight of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings

of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle.

Reprinted by arrangement with Northwestern University Press.

CIP data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-101-66198-7

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Contents

Introduction by Robert S. Levine

Works Cited and Suggestions for Further Reading

A Note on the Text

CHAPTER 1     The Birthplace of Israel

CHAPTER 2     The Youthful Adventures of Israel

CHAPTER 3     Israel Goes to the Wars; and Reaching Bunker Hill in Time to Be of Service There, Soon After Is Forced to Extend His Travels across the Sea into the Enemy’s Land

CHAPTER 4     Further Wanderings of the Refugee, with Some Account of a Good Knight of Brentford Who Befriended Him

CHAPTER 5     Israel in the Lion’s Den

CHAPTER 6     Israel Makes the Acquaintance of Certain Secret Friends of America, One of Them Being the Famous Author of the Diversions of Purley. These Dispatch Him on a Sly Errand across the Channel

CHAPTER 7     After a Curious Adventure upon the Pont Neuf, Israel Enters the Presence of the Renowned Sage, Dr. Franklin, Whom He Finds Right Learnedly and Multifariously Employed

CHAPTER 8     Which Has Something to Say about Dr. Franklin and the Latin Quarter

CHAPTER 9     Israel Is Initiated into the Mysteries of Lodging-houses in the Latin Quarter

CHAPTER 10    Another Adventurer Appears upon the Scene

CHAPTER 11    Paul Jones in a Reverie

CHAPTER 12    Recrossing the Channel, Israel Returns to the Squire’s Abode—His Adventures There

CHAPTER 13    His Escape from the House, with Various Adventures Following

CHAPTER 14     In Which Israel Is Sailor under Two Flags, and in Three Ships, and All in One Night

CHAPTER 15    They Sail as Far as the Crag of Ailsa

CHAPTER 16    They Look in at Carrickfergus, and Descend on Whitehaven

CHAPTER 17    They Call at the Earl of Selkirk’s; and Afterwards Fight the Ship-of-war Drake

CHAPTER 18    The Expedition That Sailed from Groix

CHAPTER 19    They Fight the Serapis

CHAPTER 20    The Shuttle

CHAPTER 21    Samson among the Philistines

CHAPTER 22    Something Further of Ethan Allen; with Israel’s Flight Towards the Wilderness

CHAPTER 23    Israel in Egypt

CHAPTER 24    In the City of Dis

CHAPTER 25    Forty-five Years

CHAPTER 26    Requiescat in Pace

Appendix: Selections from The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824)

Explanatory Notes

Introduction

Herman Melville’s eighth novel, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, was serialized in the July 1854 through March 1855 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and published as a book by G. P. Putnam & Company in March 1855. It garnered admiring reviews but low sales and then practically disappeared from the literary landscape, becoming almost as obscure as the self-proclaimed Revolutionary hero Israel Potter, whose 1824 autobiographical narrative served as a crucial source for Melville’s novel. In his dedication to Israel Potter, Melville imagines his eponymous hero one day emerging from the shadows to achieve his popular advent. This introduction is informed by a similarly hopeful vision of a resurgence of interest in Melville’s little-known Revolutionary novel. In Israel Potter, war is presented as an inchoate succession of violent and banal episodes in which participants have virtually no understanding of what is at stake or why they are doing what they are doing. Terroristic attacks on innocent civilians, brutal hand-to-hand combat, rampant explosions bringing about the instant deaths of scores of combatants, mass imprisonments and impressments, blurrings of national identities, and a lust for power constitute the Revolutionary War as depicted in Melville’s novel. This is a novel for our times.

And yet the novel is much more than a cynical and despairing demythologizing of the American Revolution. It is also a comically loopy work that mixes fictional with historical characters, skews historical chronologies, and depicts such celebrated historical figures as Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen as tricksters, plotters, artful performers, and (especially in the case of Jones) killers. Among Melville’s great achievements in Israel Potter are his bold characterizations of such distinctive figures, including the indomitable Israel Potter, even as he raises questions about their very distinctiveness, linking his main characters to the contingencies and confusions of their historical moment. Ultimately, Melville’s tragicomic novel of the American Revolution works to unsettle fixed meanings of wars, individual lives, and nations, presenting the Revolution in antiexceptionalist terms as just another war that gives birth to just another self-regarding nation. Such a vision of the Revolutionary War may seem jaded, and it certainly went against the patriotic grain of Melville’s times. But the novel is ultimately rejuvenating in the spirited way that it presses its readers to reflect on the value of wars that are made in the name of nations but not necessarily in the service of the ordinary people who inhabit them.

A trenchant comic novel of the American Revolution, Israel Potter can nonetheless prove to be a baffling and elusive read. Such are Melville’s complex narrative strategies that it is sometimes difficult to discern the narrator’s relation to his central character. Is he mocking Israel Potter or celebrating him? Additionally, there are jarring tonal shifts from comedy to tragedy; a looseness in the plotting typical of the picaresque; numerous references to arcane moments and figures in the Revolutionary War; and a rich, occasionally dense allusiveness to history, literature, philosophy, and the Bible that can send readers scrambling to encyclopedias, dictionaries, concordances, and endnotes. Though the novel received a number of glowing reviews when it was published in 1855, and went through three printings that same year, it never achieved the sales that its publisher was hoping for, selling well under ten thousand copies. A reviewer for the New York newspaper Commercial Advertiser declared in a March 1855 issue that Israel Potter is an original and extremely graphic story of our revolutionary era, and is thoroughly saturated with American sentiment. But given the novel’s relatively tepid sales, one suspects that Melville’s contemporary readers didn’t find the novel quite as graphic or exciting as this particular reviewer suggests, or even all that pleasing (or comprehensible) with respect to American sentiment.

Still, ten years after its initial appearance in book form, the publisher T. B. Peterson took a chance with the novel, perhaps because of the potential appeal of its Revolutionary setting, and brought out two unauthorized printings of a slightly bowdlerized version in 1865. Thereafter, for the remainder of the nineteenth century (and for much of the twentieth century), Israel Potter lay hidden in the shadows, though in January 1888 there was at least one person interested enough in the novel to write Melville directly with his or her questions about how to make sense of it. Though the letter from this unknown correspondent has not survived, we can extrapolate from Melville’s extant response that the letter writer had been frustrated by a recent reading of the novel and was reaching out to Melville for interpretive assistance. Melville offers the following guidance in a letter of January 31, 1888: "In what light the book entitled I.P. or 50 Years of Exile is to be regarded, may be clearly inferred from what is said in the Dedication."

So we turn to the dedication looking for clarity, and find that Melville archly dedicates his Revolutionary novel to His Highness, the Bunker-hill Monument. The monument itself, completed in 1843, commemorated the first significant military conflict between the colonial army and British forces, the Battle of Bunker Hill, which took place on June 17, 1775, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and came to be celebrated by Americans for its mythic status in inaugurating the Revolution that gave birth to the U.S. nation. In a speech of June 1825 on the laying of the cornerstone of the monument, the noted orator and politician Daniel Webster termed the American Revolution the wonder and blessing of the world, and he made a special appeal to the approximately two hundred Revolutionary troops who had accompanied Lafayette to the dedication:

VETERANS OF HALF A CENTURY! When in your youthful days you put every thing at hazard in your country’s cause, good as that cause was, and sanguine as youth is, still your fondest hopes did not stretch onward to an hour like this! At a period to which you could not reasonably have expected to arrive, at a moment of national prosperity such as you could never have foreseen, you are now met here to enjoy the fellowship of old soldiers, and to receive the overflowing of a universal gratitude.

One might read Melville’s dedication to the Bunker Hill Monument as an effort to participate in the patriotic nationalism espoused by Webster and of great importance to his own family, for his grandfathers on both sides, Major Thomas Melvill and General Peter Gansevoort, were celebrated Revolutionary heroes. Or, given the demythologizing strategies of the overall novel, one might take the dedication as an ironic reminder of the nation’s failure to live up to the Revolutionary ideals emblematized by the Monument, with the comically mock deference to a royalist-sounding His Highness suggesting a betrayal of republican principles. All of which is to say that Melville’s supposedly clarifying letter may have left his inquiring reader at a loss.

Then again, perhaps the key to the dedication can be found in Webster’s salute to the Revolutionary War veteran, for the novel that Melville dedicates To His Highness the Bunker-hill Monument tells the story of the Revolutionary War veteran Israel Potter, an actual historical person (1754?–1826?). Unlike the veterans celebrated by Webster, however, who are recognized for their services and receive the overflowing of a universal gratitude, the devoted patriot, Israel Potter, as Melville terms him in the novel’s first chapter, never achieves such recognition. Instead, this little-known person, who supposedly fought heroically at the Battle of Bunker Hill, was denied a government pension by Congress after returning to the United States from a nearly fifty-year exile abroad, and died a pauper. In this respect, Melville can be seen as telling the story of a common man who does good work for his country but remains in the margins, unrecognized by his compatriots. By focusing on a patriot who was forced to struggle for his very survival, Melville may have been attempting to convey his own version of a key motif of his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851): In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. That Israel Potter spent most of his adult life in England would have simply added a transatlantic dimension to the darkly resonant vision that Melville had appropriated from Hawthorne’s House, a novel that he admired.

And yet the fact is that Melville wrote Israel Potter around the time that he was despairing about his own lack of recognition as an author and wrestling with his own financial difficulties. Though he doesn’t say as much to his unknown correspondent of 1888, one suspects that there was an autobiographical component to Melville’s portrayal of the neglected Potter. After all, in a letter to Hawthorne of May 1851 written as Moby-Dick was going to press, the then thirty-one-year-old author accurately predicted that his great novel would be ignored by readers and reviewers, and that there would be grave economic consequences for the young man struggling to support his family: Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter. Angered by the poor sales and mixed reviews of Moby-Dick, Melville wrote a caustic domestic novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), which featured a satirical attack on the genteel literary culture of his time. Unsurprisingly, Pierre sold fewer than two thousand copies, and during the late summer and early fall of 1852 received some of the harshest reviews ever accorded a work by a major American writer. The Boston Post termed the novel utter trash; the New York Albion called it a dead failure, objectionable, and an incoherent hodge-podge; and the New York Evening Mirror judged it morbid and unhealthy. The New York Day Book went so far as to announce that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment, expressing the hope that as part of this treatment Melville would be stringently secluded from pen and ink.

In the wake of these harsh reviews, Melville to some extent chose to give the appearance that he had adopted such seclusion, or indeed had that seclusion forced upon him by his friends. He went underground, as some critics have termed this phase of his career, by writing short fiction and sketches for the popular magazines Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, and publishing these works anonymously. During the period between 1853 and 1855, the regular publication of such fictions as Bartleby the Scrivener (Harper’s 1853), The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids (Harper’s 1855), and Benito Cereno (Putnam’s 1855) brought Melville a steady income (he was typically paid five dollars a page) and helped to restore his reputation, at least with the editors associated with Harper’s and Putnam’s.

With a resurgent confidence in his ability to find an audience, Melville continued his efforts to write longer fictional narratives. The evidence suggests that sometime in 1853 he finished a novel called The Isle of the Cross, but for reasons that remain murky, and perhaps forever lost to the historical record, was unable to find a publisher. The manuscript has not survived (or is waiting to be discovered). There is also evidence that in late 1853 he began a long narrative about tortoise hunting, for in May 1854 he wrote Harper and Brothers with the hope of publishing an extract in Harper’s along with a serialization of a new work (Israel Potter). But Harper’s had suffered a major fire at its offices in December 1853, which set back its publication schedule. So, unable to interest the editors at Harper’s in the tortoise narrative or Israel Potter, Melville turned to the more politically liberal Putnam’s, negotiating an advance payment of one hundred dollars (at the rate of five dollars per printed page) for Israel Potter, his one and only serialized novel. He would eventually earn $421.50 for the magazine serialization—a hefty sum for Melville at that time. The first installment of the novel, with the working title of Israel Potter; or, Fifty Years of Exile: A Fourth of July Story, appeared, appropriately enough, in the July 1854 Putnam’s. Melville would eventually drop the subtitle and retitle the novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile when it was published by G. P. Putnam & Company in the spring of 1855.

The novel did not come without controversy. In the pages of Putnam’s itself, a reviewer in the May 1855 issue complained that Melville diverged significantly from his source text, the 1824 first-person Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, and wondered what gave Melville the right to take such liberties in imagining Potter as linked, for example, with John Paul Jones. These remarks take us back to Melville’s supposedly explanatory letter of 1888 about Israel Potter, for it is in the dedication to his novel that Melville addresses the Israel Potter source text. Melville’s only other reference to the 1824 Life and Adventures, prior to the 1855 dedication, can be found in the journal he kept of his October 1849 through January 1851 visit to England and the Continent. In an entry of December 1849, Melville remarked on a typical day in London:

Miserable rainy day. Treated myself to a sugar omelette, at the old place, for breakfast. Then went to the British Museum—closed. Then among the old book stores about Great Queen Street & Lincoln’s Inn. Looked over a lot of ancient maps of London. Bought one (A.D. 1766) for 3 & 6 pence. I want to use it in case I serve up the Revolutionary narrative of the beggar.

There is no mention of when he obtained the Revolutionary narrative, which was no doubt Potter’s, but it is clear from this entry that Melville had come to know London (which has an important place in Israel Potter) and wanted to know even more about the city and its environs for an anticipated future piece of writing about the Revolutionary beggar. In the dedication to his 1855 novel, Melville states that "with a change in the grammatical person, it [Israel Potter] preserves, almost in a reprint, Israel Potter’s autobiographical story, and that in his biographical novel about Potter, he aspires to present a common life that should not have appeared in the volumes of [Jared] Sparks—an editor and publisher known for bringing out biographies of great men in American history. In important ways, then, Melville implicitly suggests in his dedication that his historical novel will be raising questions about what constitutes a great" life.

This Penguin Classics Edition of Israel Potter reprints approximately half of Potter’s 1824 narrative, and readers will therefore be able to come to their own conclusions about Melville’s accuracy in preserving Potter’s story and about the possible significance of the many changes that Melville made to his source text when fictionalizing Potter’s life. As can be quickly discerned from a comparative reading of the two texts, Melville follows the 1824 narrative rather closely for chapters two through six of his novel, and then for the most part leaves the narrative behind for his own fabulous inventions, such as the sequences of chapters featuring Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen. (For these chapters, Melville drew on such diverse texts as Ethan Allen’s A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity [1799], Robert C. Sands’s Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones [1830], James Fenimore Cooper’s The History of the Navy of the United States [1839], and the writings of Benjamin Franklin.) Even when closely adhering to Potter’s 1824 narrative, however, Melville makes a number of changes, including moving from first- to third-person narrative, a change that allows him to present an ironically detached portrait of Israel Potter in an allusive and often elusive narrative that, unlike Potter’s self-interested autobiography, attends to a range of interpretive perspectives.

To return one more time to the highly evocative dedication that Melville describes late in life as central to understanding the novel: It is crucial to note that Melville states in the dedication that the Potter narrative was forlornly published on a sleazy gray paper, which is to say that the narrative was as marginal or beggarly as Potter himself, and that it was written, probably, not by himself, but taken down from his lips by another. This point is worth emphasizing, for Melville is informing us that his own novel, which tells the story of a historical personage, draws on a first-person account that was itself a telling by another of the story of a historical personage. There is a slipperiness to the 1824 narrative, in other words, that Melville may have decided to develop as one of the main subjects of his novel. In this respect, both the 1824 narrative and Melville’s 1854–55 novelistic retelling and reimagining can be taken as forerunners of Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man, which focuses on the instability of character, the difficulties of interpretation, and the con games that inevitably accompany storytelling. The key to Melville’s 1888 letter to his inquiring correspondent would appear to be that it offers no key at all. And perhaps that is the key to Israel Potter, which can be read as a reader-friendly version of the con games that will come to dominate the much more difficult and elusive The Confidence-Man. Viewed in this way, the 1824 Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter can be thought of as a source text that, rather than offering a clear foundation for interpretation, ultimately destabilizes interpretation, suggesting the radical instability of historical narrative—and indeed of history itself. There is no more powerful theme in Israel Potter; and the purported autobiography of the historical Potter (whoever that person may be) can be taken as an exemplary instance of such instability.

As the historians David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar have demonstrated in their study of the historical Potter’s 1824 Life and Remarkable Adventures, the book that claims to tell the history of an American Revolutionary veteran who fought heroically at Bunker Hill, and was subsequently exiled in England for nearly fifty years, is crammed with errors and inventions. Town records suggest that Potter was born in Cranston, Rhode Island, in 1754, not 1744; that he was a bastard child and not, as he claims at the outset, of reputable parents; that he probably did not participate in the battle of Bunker Hill; that he may have served as a British spy; that he probably did not meet with George III; and that there was no need for him to remain in England for nearly five decades, except by choice. There is evidence that Potter met with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, as Potter briefly mentions in his account (and as Melville then elaborates upon at length), but his meeting may have been for the purpose of embezzling funds for himself or as a function of his spying for England. Whatever the truth of these various matters, Melville would no doubt have known something of Henry Trumbull, the amanuensis and publisher of Potter’s account, who was notorious for his production of wildly inaccurate histories, biographies, and autobiographies. (Melville probably did not know that the same year that Trumbull published Potter’s narrative, one of his apprentices was arrested in Providence, Rhode Island, on a morals charge for selling pornographic materials published by Trumbull to minors.) Trumbull’s stated reason for publishing the Potter narrative was to assist a Revolutionary veteran who had returned to the United States in 1823 in quest of a government pension, but Trumbull was also trying to cash in on the market for narratives by Revolutionary veterans. Potter’s was one of the last of hundreds of such accounts in this very popular autobiographical genre.

Although Melville follows the basic details of the first half of Trumbull’s narrative, his divergences from the 1824 source text were even more fanciful than Trumbull’s own straying from whatever constituted the historical truth of Potter’s life story. To highlight some of Melville’s changes: Melville switches the opening setting of his narrative from Cranston, Rhode Island, to the Massachusetts Berkshires, thereby locating Potter in the region where Melville himself had been living since 1850 and thus in the larger context of the history of colonial Massachusetts. Melville’s Potter is depicted as a disinterested patriot, whereas Trumbull’s regularly speaks self-interestedly of his desire for a pension. Consistent with this change, Melville greatly expands upon Potter’s possible meeting with King George III, making the king more appealing than in the source text and Potter himself into more of a feisty, patriotic democrat. Melville then goes off in new directions, inventing such scenes as Potter’s near-death imprisonment in a secret recess of the mansion of a British squire; his plotting with the Paris-based Benjamin Franklin; his meetings with John Paul Jones and eventual participation in the famous 1778 naval battle between Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the British Serapis; and his witnessing of the imprisonment of the fiery Ethan Allen in the British coastal town of Falmouth. In Trumbull’s first-person narrative of Potter, there is much concerning Potter’s decades of poverty in England; Melville compresses that material and brings it to powerful focus in the Dantean chapter 24, entitled The City of Dis. Trumbull’s Potter returns to the United States in 1823, arriving first in New York City and then traveling to Boston, and at that time beginning the process of attempting to attain a pension; Melville’s returns directly to Boston on July 4, 1826, and learns almost immediately that his pension request will fail. Trumbull tells yet another story of a Revolutionary veteran; Melville adds to Potter’s story a panoply of Revolutionary heroes, a wealth of literary and historical allusions, and a shrewd narrative irony—all of which contribute to his efforts to address larger interpretive matters of history, biography, and nation.

Such complexities are addressed in relatively indirect fashion in the novel, for in a letter of June 1854 Melville insisted to his editor at Putnam’s that Israel Potter will have very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure. In other words, Melville sought readers who liked a good story. A number of Melville’s contemporary reviewers praised the book precisely for its storytelling, taking little note of its historical or political thematics, and early in the twentieth century the critic Yvor Winters declared that "Israel Potter, the life of an American patriot of the Revolutionary War, is one of the few great novels of pure adventure in English." Though the novel certainly has its share