Appreciation: Israel Potter

Nobody would say that Israel Potter is Melville's best novel, or even a very good one: there's an air of incompleteness about it, of exhaustion, as if he couldn't bring himself to do the whole job. Or something that good folks in the entertainment biz might call "a treatment"--a workup and promise of more fully fleshed out things to come.

Yet it has a tang all its own--the odd mix of nostalgia, disappointment, apology and contentiousness which marks so much of Melville's work. I suspect you might even say that it is his most explicitly personal work: the one that most mirrors his own bewildered life. As Israel makes his own sojourn from confident colonial beginnings through a life of isolation and exile that mark the writer's own story.

Some of the very best stuff comes at the very beginning, where Melville offers his threnody to a world gone by--specifically, the Berkshire hills in Western Massachusetts:

Often, as your horse gaining some lofty level tracts, flat as a table, trots gayly over the almost deserted and sodded road, and your admiring eye sweeps the broad landscape beneath, you seem to be Boótes driving in heaven. Save a potato field there and there, at long intervals, the whole country is either a wood or pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep are the principal inhabitants of these mountains. ... [A]s for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here. At any rate, no man by tht means accumulates a fortune from this thin and rocky soil, all whose arable parts have long since been nearly exhausted.

Yet during the first settlement of the country, the region was not unproductive. Here it was that the original settlers came, acting upon the principle well known to have regulated their choice of site, namely, the high land in preference to the low, as less subject to the unwholesome miasmas generated by breaking into the rich valleys and alluvial bottoms of primeval regions. By degrees, however, they quitted the safety of this sterile elevation, to brave the dangers of richer though lower fields. So that, at the present day, some of those mounttsian townships present an aspect of almost singular abandonment. Though they have never known aught but peace and health, they in one lesser aspect at least, look like counties deppopulaated by plague and war. ...

Here Mevlille pauses to indulge himself in an apostrophe to a venerable New England artifact:

On all sides are seen the tokens of ancient industry. As stone abounds throughout these mountains, that material was, for fences, as ready to the hand as wood, besides being much more durable. Consequently the landscape is intersected in all directions with walls of uncommon neatness and strength.

The number and length of these walls is not more surprising than the size of some of the blocks comprising them. The very Titans seemed to have been at work. That so small an army as the first settlers must needs have been, should have taken such wonderful pains to enclose so ungrateful a soil; that they should have accomplished such herculean undertakings with so slight prospect of reward; this is a consideration which gives us a significant hint of the temper of the men of the Revolutionary era.

--Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile,
Warner Paperback ed. 18-19 (1974)

For me, one of the oddest aspects of this presentation, is how accurately it seems to describe the country of my own boyhood in the 1940s--Bedford and even more Bradford, New Hampshire. For another and more sombre take on the New England uplands, read Edidth Wharton's Summer. For Boótes, go here.