High Diddle-Diddling

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."