United We Scam (Page 2)

After inhabiting the Squire, Sheppard reanimates the corpses of a foppish fortune hunter, a usurious miser (clearly Jewish), a Quaker philanthropist, a Virginia slave and a melancholic slave master--a sizable slice of antebellum society. Through all these transformations some fragile residue of Sheppard remains, but even he is struck by how easily he assumes the attitudes, values, passions and idiosyncrasies of each new identity, each from a different walk of life. "What had become of me?" he asks. Sheppard's "memoir" becomes a picaresque meditation on the self and the sacred shibboleths of his age. Rather than symbolizing that rock-solid independent, self-affirming individual so central to the ethos of democratic capitalism, Sheppard's experience suggests that the self melts away into a series of performances staged in the theater of the marketplace. It assembles and disassembles and reassembles from moment to moment. And a self like Sheppard's, one that is essentially ephemeral, more a working hypothesis than a fact, hardly inspires confidence, neither deep down in the individual psyche nor between one self and another. It can also be disorienting to the contemporary reader: is this really a novel of the early nineteenth century? Doesn't all this liquefaction of the self express a sensibility more familiar to life in our so-called postmodern era? While the novel is clearly one of its time, Bird's skill as caricaturist, his wit, irony and iconoclasm, lend Sheppard Lee an odd contemporary feel.

Why all this shape-shifting, anyway? Why doesn't Sheppard just settle into a prosperous and respected life as Squire Higginson, a Philadelphia "gentleman"? In every transmigration--with one critical exception I will return to in a moment--Sheppard's happiness about his new existence sours into a feeling of discontent from which he longs to escape. Although the pitfalls of each of Sheppard's lives are distinct, his chronic unease is time and again driven by the poisonous quality of his social relationships. There is a high quotient of jealousy, resentment, envy and deception in the novel, most often the bitter fruit of the money-hunger and social pretensions exhibited by Sheppard's "selves" as well as family members, neighbors, competitors, swindlers and con artists. All of this turns the "memoir" into a scathing sendup of social mobility, equality and democracy. Sheppard Lee's memoir is a Tocquevillian black comedy. The chance to leave behind lowly beginnings and rise to something grander--America as the land of second chances--was one of the great promises of Jackson's "Age of the Common Man." However, as Sheppard never fully realizes but Bird (along with Tocqueville) conveys all too well, this race up the mountain breeds a society in which everyone is trying to put one over on others, luring them like "minnows," a world driven by invidious social distinctions that undermine its celebrated egalitarianism.

Sheppard Lee has plenty of telling aperçus about this peculiarly American form of what Bird calls variously the "republican aristocratic society," "chip-chop" aristocrats and the "nabobocracy." It's a world of bloated self-importance, of "dash, flash, and splash," full of parvenu strivings and resentments. What counts here is money, perhaps the character of one's profession--preferably something as far away from manual labor as possible--and maybe even what your father did, but no need to trace the roots back further since all American grandfathers "were pretty much alike, and the sooner we forget them the better." Bird has a nice appreciation of the psychosocial and political chemistry that imparts a distinctive frisson to this admixture of faux aristocracy and democratic aspiration. The pomp, ostentation and arrogance of the rich, the supercilious airs put on to fend off reminders of the shallowness of their lineages, incite a bitter hostility in the poor, who've been promised equality but receive a fistful of social insult instead. All this "puerile vanity and stolid pride of the genteel and refined" exasperates the lower orders, feeding "mobocracism" and "all other isms of a vulgar stamp." The problem for the newly risen, anxious to put distance between themselves and their lowly beginnings, is that the "cobbler is [a gentleman] or thinks himself so--which is all the same thing in America." Looked at wrong-side out, that sunny vision of equality of opportunity and plebeian democracy that lit up the Jacksonian imagination seems a sham. No one is who he claims to be.

Democracy itself turns vile in the later stages of Sheppard Lee's transmigrations. When he pops into the body of a wealthy Quaker philanthropist (Zachariah Longstraw), Sheppard hopes for an escape from all that devil-take-the-hindmost, self-seeking nastiness into a life of virtue (although he does slyly admit he's game on philanthropy more for the material ease than the virtue). His life as a good Samaritan, however, turns into a nightmare. Giddy with good intentions, Zachariah starts up charities to succor "the suffering poor" while exhorting them to "economy, industry, prudence...and so forth"; tries schemes to "effect a reformation in [the] habits and feelings" of "poor wretches in prison"; and establishes schools to "keep the children of the poor out of mischief." But every one of his naïvely conceived and self-righteous acts of do-goodism is received with howls of ingratitude by the objects of his charity: poor working women, criminals, small businessmen down on their luck, embattled marble cutters and shoemakers, even an escaped slave he hides but who then runs off with the family silver.

All that is nothing, however, compared with Sheppard's next comeuppance. He is kidnapped by two slave catchers who, fresh out of slaves, intend to sell him down South as an abolitionist, ripe for lynching. Of course Sheppard is not an abolitionist...but then again, nobody is what they seem to be, and he'll do. His captors do a bang-up public-relations job of inventing and inflating his abolitionist credentials; indeed, they do their job too well and democracy takes care of the rest. Although our brigands want to sell Sheppard in Louisiana, where abolitionists command top dollar, they get only as far as an election rally in Virginia, which Bird uses to provide a wicked portrait of the mob, and Jacksonian democracy, in full frenzy. Their blood up, these white male citizens are ready for rough justice right there and then, and they don't plan on paying for it either. In a hilarious scene the kidnappers appeal to the sanctity of private property--that is, their "ownership" of the philanthropist Sheppard--but the mob isn't buying it. Riled up by a thunderclap of fatuous democratic bluster about the sanctity of The People, they set off to do away with him.

Sheppard manages to escape by transporting himself into the body of a dead slave, and being a slave turns out to be the only incarnation that Sheppard finds inherently satisfying. At first he can hardly believe it himself. Up to this point he has invariably opted for identities (or rather stolen them; we might call him a master of identity theft) that promised some improvement in his social condition. Now the process has been reversed, and out of desperation, he finds himself at the very bottom, the despised dead end of the social hierarchy. Yet wondrous strange, he and his fellow slaves are utterly content. Indeed, only as a slave does Sheppard entirely lose touch with his former self, his "Sheppardness." Christopher Looby's introduction to Sheppard Lee notes the racism of these passages, about which there can be no doubt. Sheppard--whose slave name is, of course, Tom--and his mates are perfect Sambo types: happy-go-lucky, childlike, slow-witted and loyal unto death to a master as all-caring as our father who art in heaven. It is the book's most unsettling invention, an inadvertent reminder of the identity theft that occurred beyond the confines of its plot.

According to Looby, Bird considered but ultimately abandoned a wide variety of scenarios for Sheppard's masquerades. One would have had him reincarnate as a counterfeiter. I suspect this would come as no surprise to Stephen Mihm, whose A Nation of Counterfeiters is a brilliant description of a time--Sheppard Lee's time--in American history that seems at once distant and familiar. Mihm's book is a lucid history of counterfeiting in antebellum America, that dark art's golden age, so to speak. Mihm's central subject is the transubstantiation of money, and his and Bird's books together make up a devil's dictionary of a burgeoning market society, its vaunted individualism and of capitalism as a kind of necromancy.

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