Frederick Busch’s novel “The Night Inspector” begins with the protagonist, Billy Bartholomew, directing a craftsman in the construction of a mask. Billy, as mentioned, is a Civil War veteran who was horribly disfigured—the skin on his face is gone, as well as his lips and part of his nose, and he wants a mask to hide these injuries. The mask had slits for eyes, nostrils and mouth, and is constructed of pasteboard.
Why is this significant? you ask. Why are you talking about this?
Well. It leads we the readers to Herman Melville.
In Melville’s “Moby Dick,” Captain Ahab says, “All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks.”
Whoa!
Billy Bartholomew first encounters Herman Melville through Mr. Melville’s writing, at Yale where Billy is a student. We can speculate that Billy read “Moby Dick,” because he says so, as well as “Pierre, or the Ambiguities.” Again, Billy tells us he does when he introduces himself to the famous author: “I have read the Ambiguities and its analysis of your profession. I have read the Whale, I think it a blinding brilliance, the epitaph of our economy.”
Bill observes Melville before he meets him: “I had noticed M on Broadway as I walked the town at dawn and as he was going to his job. I knew his visage from a Boston paper. Then I had observed him; I had, during the War, been excellent at seeing how a man moved through his terrain.”
And then Billy finds himself in the same restaurant where Melville is eating: “M dined that night at eight…I stood. I was wearing the mask, not yet the veil. I walked slowly across the sawdust of the wooden floor…I moved into the man’s soft, myopic vision. Even his beard looked soft…”Sir,” I said. He looked up and squinted, as though I was dozens of yards away. I could study the pores of his strangely youthful skin.”
This is the Herman Melville of 1867, not the younger man who had written two extremely successful seafaring novels, “Typhoo” and “Omoo,” and then in 1851, published what is now regarded as his masterpiece, “Moby Dick,” which was a critical and popular failure at the time. By 1867, Melville, who had several children and a wife, had largely stopped writing and regarded himself as a failure. He worked at the U.S. Customs as an inspector of goods arriving by ship on the Hudson River.
Melville, or M, as Billy calls him, is depicted as a man who is not appreciated for his literary genius, or much of anything. He is bitter and alcoholic. He seeks some kind of meaning in his life particularly after the death of his son, Malcom, a death M blames himself for. Billy seems to appeal to him, as Billy appreciates and recognizes his work. M is also shown as being fascinated by Bill’s mask.
In the reality of this work of fiction, we can imagine that the man who wrote this: “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” would be amazed to encounter a man who wears a real pasteboard mask.
Billy writes: “…he had become enchanted, I thought, by my mask. He would have to be. He had spent his squandered or cursed career as an author in writing men who struck through the mask or curtain or surface of things not to do harm by the striking per se, but to learn what lay on the other side.”
There is great irony here because, behind his mask, Billy does not experience himself as an example of humanity at its best. On the contrary, he believes himself to be a pariah, an outcast, a human whose essence frightens others, a murderer. Billy, I think, fears that if Melville really saw what lay beneath Billy’s mask, he would be horrified.
Billy and M become increasingly entangled with one another; M’s son wishes to join the military, and M asks Billy if he can provide his son with a gun. M buys a pistol from Billy, gives it to his son Malcolm, who then shoots himself with it under ambiguous circumstances, i.e., the death is not clearly a suicide. M and Billy are grief struck and blame themselves. Billy, as mentioned, is involved with a prostitute named Jessie, who involves him in a venture to bring formerly enslaved children out of the south to New York. We will address this adventure at length in a later post, but it is relevant here to say that Billy involves M, who is a willing participant in an illegal but morally correct action. The climax of the story involves M witnessing who Billy really is, an extremely vengeful and violent man who destroys clearly evil people. In effect, M strikes through the mask and sees the truth on the other side.
Till next week, friends.
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