High Diddle-Diddling

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE CONFIDENCE MAN IN AMERICAN LITERATURE by Gary Lindberg; Oxford; 319 pages; $19.95

Con artists are familiar figures in American literature, though they are usually directed through culture's back door. Their calling card was written by a 19th century popular comic character named Simon Suggs: "It is good to be shifty in a new country." Gary Lindberg's elaborate study The Confidence Man in American Literature, uses Suggs and his cronies as models to examine the national character. The task requires the assistance of that old critical handyman, ambivalence.

It is not news that public condemnation of the con man is mixed with private admiration for his sting. More than 50 years ago, V.L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought noted that the sharpster appealed to the hidden desires of an otherwise hardworking, pious people. Lindberg considers the ambivalent attitude to be not hypocrisy but rather a theoretical expression of American genius. A con man may impoverish widows and orphans, but he cannot do so without first creating confidence. And confidence, says the author, who is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, is what America is all about.

The reader is plunged into a make belief, not a make-believe world. Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man was an early and largely forgotten guide. More studied than read, the book conjured up a group of impostors, gamblers, land agents and divines on an 1850s Mississippi riverboat. The only one to suffer loss of innocence on the trip was the reader, who had been exposed to a masquerade of identities and motivations. He was left with a befuddling sense of life as it is lived but rarely understood.

The magician uses sleights of hand to create his fiction; the writer uses sleights of mind. Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories and poems have put generations of readers into a gothic trance, took time out to satirize the tricks of the literary trade. His Eureka uses metaphysical doubletalk to "explain" philosophy. The patter creates credibility, leading Poe to conclude elsewhere that "pleased at comprehending, we often are so excited as to take it for granted that we assent." In "Diddling: Considered as One of the Exact Sciences," he offers the ingredients of a good con: "Minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin."

Many a used car and intellectual lemon have been sold with his formula. Lindberg does not label Poe a confidence man but a "New World technician." Yet tech man and con man are related by method. Writes Lindberg: "When the New World technician reduces complex process to duplicable parts, he provides the model by which the con man reduces another's gestures to imitable steps and dissects habits of belief so as to manipulate them."

The procedure amounts to an elaborate game. One of the great players was Benjamin Franklin, whom Lindberg hails as America's classic "do-it-yourself Self." Popular history tells a rags-to-riches tale that parallels the birth of the nation. History is not incorrect, though Franklin's Autobiography and his how-to text The Way to Wealth reveal a great practitioner of situation ethics. His affable description of "one of the first errata of my life" cannot disguise that he employed a highhanded scheme to break his legal obligation to complete an apprenticeship at his brother's print shop in Boston.

Lindberg's self-made men, boosters, gadgeteers, jacks of all trades and "shape shifters" share a love of the game that often exceeds their lust for profits. Even such desperate survivors as the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn threw themselves wholeheartedly into their roles. Their shenanigans tended to cloud the fact that Huck relished his own duplicities, and nearly everyone in the book was tricking someone else.

With the publication of P.T. Barnum's autobiography in 1855, says Lindberg, the con man in America went public. The rush to grab land, swindle immigrants and kite stock gathered momentum. As a great showman, Barnum hoodwinked the suckers and made them like it. Who could hate a man able to move crowds by changing the exit sign to one that read, "This way to the Grand Egress." His book ratified cynicism as entertainment, if not instruction.

Lindberg still detects the trend in society and fiction. Packaging is frequently given more attention than the product; politicians unashamedly talk about their image and how to sell it. In movies and books, notes the author, "con men now not only appear in a zany mix of styles, but they simultaneously carry on criminal activities and redemptive ones." In short, we no longer clearly distinguish between the good confidence man and the bad one.

Lindberg is a good con man. Contemporary literary critics can be lifeless and dutifully impenetrable. As Saul Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher put it in Humboldt's Gift, "Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse." Lindberg takes care of more business than most readers may care to handle. But his new readings of old books demonstrate how ingeniously some of our best writers juggled the subject of high ideals and low practices. It is an act that requires more than grace under pressure. In Lindberg's felicitous and confident phrase, it takes "poise in ambivalence."

--ByR.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"As [the King and the Duke] vie to establish fictive identities and the manners that should support their roles, they provide a parody of rights and privileges in a democracy, which are gained neither by birth nor strictly by merit but by effective persuasion and show. We never do know who they are. They hint at the underside of the self-made man and self-reliance, the freedom to become whatever others will believe. As they prey on others, they illustrate not what energy and diligence but what spunk and audacity wiE do in a protean society. The jack of all trades becomes the shape-shifting diddler, a reminder of how many occupations can be made to turn on the evasion of work. The cultural promise that one can make a self by shrewdness and diligence has, then, in the world of Huckleberry Finn, soured into a battle of con artists."

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