UBC: Montillo, The Wilderness of Ruin

The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer by Roseanne Montillo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars




This book is kind of a mess.

It's about Jesse Pomeroy, Herman Melville, and the Great Boston Fire of 1872, and the biggest problem I had with it is that none of the three has anything very much to do with the other two. This kind of historical writing, the New Historicist anecdote technique expanded to book form, is kind of in vogue right now--it's all postmodern and shit--and when it's done well, it can be extremely illuminating. But to make it work, the reader has to be able to follow the subterranean connections between topic A and topic B, and the closest Montillo ever really came to that was the horrifying moment when I thought she was going to try to argue that Billy Budd is about Jesse Pomeroy. She didn't, thank goodness, but she never really made it clear why she was trying to juxtapose Pomeroy and Melville, nor what the Great Boston Fire had to do with either of them. Nor any of the other things that felt like random digressions.

Montillo also has difficulty--or I have difficulty with Montillo--over organizing her facts (I always think of Harriet Vane giving testimony at the inquest in Have His Carcase when I trot out this complaint). She loops back and forward through her chronology, which--again--can be really effective when done well (e.g., Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn), but it takes unwavering control and pinpoint precision. And, I'm thinking, a lot of practice. In this book, it just means that it's difficult bordering on impossible to get a clear sense of the order in which events happen. And since one of her themes is the progression of Pomeroy's crimes, that is kind of a problem.

Now, I can see, because I've had a lot of practice, the connection she wants to make between Melville and Pomeroy, which is the emerging and evolving Victorian understanding of insanity--something she argues Melville was obsessed with and something that is visibly relevant to Pomeroy (was he insane? legally? medically? morally? what do any of those ideas even mean?). And, okay, yes, Pomeroy was living in Boston in 1872--I think? Again, I don't have a good sense of the timeline. The Great Boston Fire occurred on November 9, 1872 (with a follow-up on November 11 when the broken gas mains exploded). Jesse Pomeroy was sentenced to the state reform school September 21, 1872 and was released (four years early) in February 1874 . . .

. . . Okay, wait a minute. This doesn't even make sense. Pomeroy was sentenced to the reform school September 21, 1872 (p. 51). The Great Boston Fire happened November 9 (p. 77). Pomeroy was released February 6, 1874 (p. 101). Horace Millen was murdered and Jesse Pomeroy arrested April 23, 1874, "some five weeks after Katie Curran went missing" (p. 93). But Katie Curran disappeared "March 18, 1873, nearly four months since the deadly fire had devastated downtown Boston" (p. 91). This isn't merely a typo, although the book is riddled with errors (I will give one example, that of Captain George Pollard, "who had manned the Essex on its faithful journey when a whale rammed and sunk the ship" (228). How the near-homophone of "faithful" got used in place of "fateful" I do not know, but it is not the only place in this book where a word like the correct word--but, crucially, not--made it into print.) If Katie Curran went missing "four months since the deadly fire," she did go missing in 1873. But Pomeroy wasn't living in Boston to murder her until February 1874, more than a year after the Great Fire. So, okay, the timeline problems aren't just me. But, to make a long story short, Pomeroy wasn't living in Boston at the time of the Great Fire. He was in Westborough. Melville (whose timeline doesn't actually synch with Pomeroy's at all: Moby-Dick, where she's trying to pull the threads together, was published in 1851; Billy Budd, the other option, was left unfinished at Melville's death in 1891) was in New York.

There's lots of interesting stuff in this book, but it feels thrown together at random. There's nothing that actually pulls it together into a cohesive whole. It's just the interwoven, but not clearly connected, stories of Jesse Pomeroy, Herman Melville, and the Great Boston Fire of 1872. I found myself wishing she'd just picked one and stuck to it. My vote is for Pomeroy.

The next time someone tries to tell you Jack the Ripper was "the first serial killer," whatever they may mean by that, kindly point them at Jesse Harding Pomeroy, who has the Ripper beat by fourteen years. And the thing about Pomeroy, aside from the part where he spent 50 years in solitary confinement and came out no less sane than when he went in, is that between the interviews he gave before he was sentenced and the letters he wrote and the autobiography published in the Boston Sunday Times, you can get a weird sense of who he was (which you can't for the Ripper). Watching him trying to figure out how to tell the right lies to get judged legally insane makes it absolutely clear that he has no idea why what he did was wrong and only sort of understands why he might be considered insane for torturing and murdering a small boy. Pomeroy was a psychopath, using the strict definition of the term, and one thing I will applaud Montillo for is the careful accuracy with which she uses words like "psychopath" and "monomaniac." She balances the modern definition with the Victorian definition in a way that, through the example of Pomeroy, makes them both easier to understand. She shows very clearly that the Victorian model of sanity vs. insanity was simply not capable of dealing with a person like Pomeroy (or, for that matter, with poor Herman Melville, whose family spent years telling him to stop writing because they felt it was driving him insane; although Montillo doesn't cite "Bartleby the Scrivener," her description of Melville's dutiful, conscientious, hopeless performance of his job at the Customs House makes it all too clear where Bartleby comes from). The modern model has better words, delicate and precise enough to distinguish between mental illness and personality disorder, and Montillo demonstrates very clearly that Jesse Pomeroy was a psychopath by the modern definition--something his contemporaries had no word for.

Obviously, I would be interested in a much more in-depth exploration of that conceptual gap, both in the sense of how the words we use mold what we can and cannot say with them, and in the sense of what Pomeroy himself was, how he thought, what his understanding was of his self and his actions. This is not that book because that's not Montillo's project. She's trying to make a thematic connection between the whiteness of the whale and the whiteness of Pomeroy's right eye (she occasionally uses the word "albino," which of course has its own freight of negative symbolism--which she does not address at all), and although she doesn't succeed--the transition between Moby Dick as symbol of evil and Pomeroy as someone who creates evil jars instead of meshing. You can see the problem in what I wrote as well--the two registers of (1) the symbolism within Melville's novel, i.e., the symbolism Melville invested in a figment of his own imagination and which other people, very belatedly, well after Pomeroy was stashed away in the Massachusetts State Prison, started to find meaningful as well; and (2) any attempt to make a meaningful pattern out of Jesse Harding Pomeroy, to fit him into any kind of moral schematic of good and evil (and there's a whole 'nother problem there about whether morality has any useful meaning at all in contemplating Pomeroy), can't be brought together without trivializing or misrepresenting one or both sides. And she can't show, no matter how much she wants to, that anyone contemporaneous with Pomeroy thought of linking Melville's symbolism with him. (I was a little surprised that nobody apparently brought up "The Tell-Tale Heart," because that was certainly what I was thinking about in reading descriptions of Pomeroy's white eye.

SO, although Montillo doesn't succeed--I never buy into the pattern she's trying to show me--it's an interesting attempt, even if I did periodically find myself thinking, Why is this chapter about Herman Melville? And I appreciate the care with which she treats Pomeroy, the precision of the language she uses.

But, honestly, I still don't understand what the Great Boston Fire has to do with any of it.



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