Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is the seventh book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The novel uses many conventions of Gothic fiction and depicts psychological, sexual, and familial tension between Pierre Glendinning, his widowed mother, his cousin Glendinning Stanly, his fiancée Lucy Tartan, and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half-sister. According to scholar Henry A. Murray, in writing Pierre Melville "purposed to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" rather than to experiment and incidentally work some personal experience into the novel.

Published after the lukewarm reaction to Moby-Dick, Pierre was a critical and financial disaster. Reviewers universally condemned its morals and its style. More recent critics have shown greater sympathy toward the book, seeing it as a "psychological novel – a study of the moods, thought processes, and perceptions of his hero". "The book which was most potent in fashioning Melville's ideal and thus indirectly affecting his personality and his writings", Murray suggests, was Thomas Moore's Life of Byron. Second to Byron only, "though ahead of him as a source for the first two acts of Pierre", Disraeli—himself a Byronist—was another major influence of Melville's early ideal self-conception, and hence Pierre's personality.

Imitation of Psalms

According to scholar Nathalia Wright, the style of Psalms is imitated in the passage where Pierre and Lucy one morning ride into the country, which is described in the manner of "a prose paean which has many of the characteristics of a Hebrew poem":

<blockquote>Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth; the beauty, and the bloom, and the mirthfulness thereof! The first worlds made were winter worlds; the second made, were vernal worlds; the third, and last, and perfectest, was this summer world of ours. In the cold and nether spheres preachers preach of earth, as we of Paradise above. Oh, there, my friends, they say, they have a season, in their language known as summer. Then their fields spin themselves green carpets; snow and ice are not in all the land; then a million strange, bright, fragrant things powder that sward with perfumes; and high majestic beings, dumb and grand, stand up with outstretched arms, and hold their green canopies over merry angels—men and women—who love and wed, and sleep and dream, beneath the approving glances of their visible god and goddess, glad-hearted sun, and pensive moon!

Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth; the beauty, and the bloom, and the mirthfulness thereof. We lived before, and shall live again; and as we hope for a fairer world than this to come; so we came from one less fine. From each successive world, the demon Principle is more and more dislodged; he is the accursed clog from chaos, and thither, by every new translation, we drive him further and further back again. Hosannahs to this world! so beautiful itself, and the vestibule to more. Out of some past Egypt, we have come to this new Canaan, and from this new Canaan, we press on to some Circassia.</blockquote>

The vocabulary and rhythm of this passage, Wright argues, "unmistakably echo the Psalms." The Psalmist employs the words "praised be", "thereof", and "Hosannahs". Melville also follows the general principle of form, with a refrain to introduce each paragraph, with alternation between the outbursts of exultation and the description of matter providing the grounds for the exultation. In the first half of each paragraph is a stanzaic pattern: in the first a distich and a tristich, in the second a distich and a tetrastich. The pattern becomes clear if the passages are printed as poetry:

<poem style="margin-left: 2em;">Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth;

the beauty, and the bloom, and the mirthfulness thereof.

We lived before,

and shall live again;

and as we hope for a fairer world than this to come;

so we came from one less fine.</poem>

Unknown to the King James Version translators, parallelism is the fundamental characteristic of all Semitic poetry, with the distich or two-line parallel as the norm, and variations of tristich and tetrastich. Numerous examples from Psalms may be used for comparison, Wright chooses the following, printed to reveal the extent of the parallelism:

<poem style="margin-left: 2em;">Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving;

Sing praise upon the harp unto our God:

Who covereth the heaven with clouds,

who prepareth rain for the earth,

who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains...

He giveth snow like wool:

he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.

He casteth forth his ice like morsels:

who can stand before his cold?

He sendeth out his word,

and melteth them:

he causeth his wind to blow,

and the waters flow.</poem>

Publication history and critical response

In a letter from February 1852, now lost, Melville proposed to Richard Bentley, the publisher of his previous five books in Britain, that he publish Pierre, then still unfinished. On March 4, Bentley replied and offered to publish the new work without an advance sum, citing the poor sales of Melville's previous books as the reason for his proposal. On April 16, Melville sent the proofs of Pierre, together with a reply letter rejecting Bentley's offer. Melville's counteroffer for the book was £100, and he added that the finished book was 150 pages longer than he had anticipated when he first wrote about it. Having written the book with a feminine audience in mind, he further thought that "it might not prove unadvisable to publish this present book anonymously, or under an assumed name:–By a Vermonter say", or, he wrote in a footnote, "By Guy Winthrop".</blockquote>

When it was published in July 1852, it bore the author's real name and was immediately met with negative critical response. One review which ran in the New York Day Book bore the title "Herman Melville Crazy" while the American Whig Review wrote that Melville's "fancy is diseased".

Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker characterize the novel as "an ambitious experiment in psychological fiction" whose primary focus is the "complex workings of the human psyche", especially the "tortuous processes of distortion and self-deception involved in fervid states of mind combining religious exaltation and sexual arousal." They comment that the novel also draws on the conventions of Gothic fiction. Andrew Delbanco added that Pierre long suffered from being in the shadow of Moby-Dick, but that "with its themes of sexual confusion and transgression" it now seems "fresh and urgent".

Delbanco argues that Melville anticipates Sigmund Freud's assertion that the sexual behavior of each human being transgresses "the standard of normality" to some extent. The novel, Delbanco feels, is ambivalent in dealing with the "rather too loving" supervision of his mother and his "ardent sentiment" for Glen, the young man who is his cousin, with whom he explored "the preliminary love-friendship of boys". Yet, continues Delbanco, it is hard to know whether critics who now see Melville as a homosexual are simply making a long overdue acknowledgment, whether gay readers are projecting their own feelings onto Melville, or both. The novel is subtitled "The Ambiguities". Delbanco concludes that "the quest for a private Melville has usually led to a dead end, and we are not likely to fare better by speculating about his tastes in bed or bunk."

Readers, says Parker, have long been puzzled and critics bothered by the inconsistencies between the character of Pierre in the beginning of the novel and his suddenly becoming an author in later chapters. Parker argues that the reason for this change is biographical, not artistic. He deduces that Melville took a far shorter manuscript to New York for delivery to Harper & Brothers publishing house. The publisher was not pleased to see a psychological novel that delivered sexual and literary shocks and threatened to damage its audience. In any case, the Harper brothers offered a contract so unfavorable that it may actually have been meant as a rejection. This fueled Melville's ire—as did his reading of the negative reviews of Moby-Dick while he was in New York. Parker believes that Melville may have shown the original, shorter manuscript to Everett Duyckinck, who condemned the sexual content as immoral. In frustration and retaliation, Parker concludes, Melville, perhaps in two or three batches, may only then have added the sections dealing with Pierre's literary career, especially the chapter "Young America in Literature", which describes publishers and critics in scathing terms. These additions undermined the structure of the novel and muddied the characterization of Pierre, whom Melville had not originally intended to be an author.

In 1995, Parker published (with HarperCollins) an edition of Pierre that demonstrates what the original might have been like by removing the sections which present Pierre as an author, notably the entirety of Books XVII, XVIII, XXII and passages from other books.

Adaptations

Walter Leyden Brown directed a theatrical adaptation of the book at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan's East Village in 1974.

The book was the source for the 1999 French film Pola X and its extended cut for television, Pierre ou, Les ambiguïtés, both directed by Leos Carax.

The Denver Center Theatre Company developed and produced the world premiere of Pierre in 2002, a stage play written by Jeffrey Hatcher, and directed by Bruce K. Sevy. The cast included Christopher Kelly as Pierre Glendinning and Morgan Hallett as Isabel Banford.

Notes

  • <!-- quote=pierre ambiguities text. --> Pierre; or, The Ambiguities New York: Harper & Brothers 1852 on Google Books
  • Pierre; or, The Ambiguities New York: Harper & Brothers 1852 on Project Gutenberg
  • Pierre; or, The Ambiguities The Life and Works of Herman Melville publishing history, contemporary criticism, reviews