Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  For the setting of his new story, Melville returned to the world he had first known as a visitor to Gansevoort and Allan’s law firm, and which he had always shunned for himself. “Bartleby” was in this respect an elaboration of that passage in Moby-Dick where crowds along the Battery gaze out to sea, seeking respite from their lives “pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” The support staff in Melville’s fictional law office consists of two copyists, nicknamed Turkey and Nippers, and a gofer who answers to Ginger Nut in honor of the waferlike spice cake that his officemates require him to fetch from vendors in the street. Turkey tends to be hungover in the morning, bleary-eyed yet focused; but as the day goes on, he turns florid from his “afternoon devotions,” spattering ink and bearing down so hard that his quill pens are liable to split. Nippers’s rhythm is just the opposite: vague and distracted in the morning, he expends his energy by shifting his desk back and forth, sliding it sideways, slipping bits of wood or flakes of blotting paper under its legs to try to level it at the perfect working height. By afternoon he has given up his quest for the right relation between his desk and himself. These two men—one dull in the morning and wild in the afternoon, the other “twitching in his chair with a dyspeptic nervousness” before settling down—amount between them to one full-time employee.

  In contrast, their nameless boss is level and tolerant, “an eminently safe man,” as he says of himself—someone, that is, to whom one can entrust both secrets and money as if to a vault. Only once, when Turkey wets a wafer in his afternoon delirium with his own saliva and tries to press it onto the document in place of sealing wax, does the lawyer even think of firing him. He is a version of Poe’s phlegmatic narrator in his 1840 story “The Business Man” (“I am a business man. I am a methodical man. Method is the thing, after all”), whom one meets as well in magazine sketches by Washington Irving or George W. Curtis (a Putnam’s editor): a spongy gentleman who absorbs an incident in the morning and saves it for a vignette to be told in the evening over cigars and brandy at the club. He fills his speech with buffering words like “quite” and “rather,” and on those rare occasions when permitting himself a boast, he muffles it in double negatives, as when speaking of the approval he had once enjoyed from the Donald Trump of his day, John Jacob Astor: “I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor … I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor’s good opinion.”

  If Melville had met versions of this lawyer in literature and life, he also had models in mind for the scriveners. One of the minor figures in Bleak House, which had been serialized in Harper’s in the months just before Melville wrote “Bartleby,” is a gaunt and sickly copyist to whom Dickens gives the telltale Latin name Nemo (No one) to signify his dispensability, since a hundred men are lined up to take his place. In Charles Briggs’s New York novel, The Adventures of Harry Franco, the first job Harry lands upon coming to town is in the “dull business” of legal copying, which he “strove hard to do … well … and … quick” in a town where, as in Dickens’s London, the supply of labor was outstripping demand. So many young men were looking for advantage in the brisk New York market for scriveners that in 1852 one enterprising penmanship teacher came up with the gimmick of placing on his desk a bronze cast of his own arm and hand in the act of writing so his pupils might emulate his form.

  Like the whaleships Melville had once written about, the law office in “Bartleby” is a workplace on whose products (deeds, contracts, wills) many readers depended but whose inner workings they barely knew. In this sense “Bartleby,” like Moby-Dick, disclosed a world usually kept out of sight, and it has always been uncomfortable reading for believers in the American Dream. It was a story about a commercial society that depended increasingly on multiple copies of many kinds of documents, but in which no technology for copying yet existed beyond the handheld pen. A few years after Melville’s story appeared, Abraham Lincoln, in one of his frequent professions of faith in the promise of upward mobility, proclaimed America to be the nation where “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus … then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another beginner to help him.” But the law office at “No.—Wall-street” is no place for dreamers. The glut in the Manhattan labor supply was destroying the old apprentice system whereby merchants took on apprentices from their own social class, who then rose in the hierarchy to join or succeed their masters. By the 1850s, apprenticeship in a law office was more likely to be a dead-end job than a stepping stone to a legal career, and so the law office in “Bartleby” is a dungeon where broken men grow old, fidgeting away their vitality until the last sparks of life go out. Its windows command “an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade.” As for its interior arrangements, it is divided by opaque glass doors into separate spaces for employer and employees, who, immured in what Karl Marx (who contributed articles to Greeley’s Tribune in the 1840s) called alienated labor, scratch away at papers that document the extent of other men’s property. They are, in effect, human Xerox machines—and, for the sake of efficiency, the less human, the better.

  Into this lifeless place, in response to an advertisement for a new scrivener, there walks one morning a pale and quiet young man. He is “incurably forlorn,” like Dickens’s Nemo, who, when he is found dead in his freezing room, is not immediately recognized as having died, since his appearance while alive was barely distinguishable from that of the corpse he has become. In his “cadaverous” gloom, Bartleby seems a similarly ideal candidate for this kind of work—polite, uncomplaining, barely breathing. But on his third day of employment (Melville refers to his arrival as his “advent,” and with caustic irony conforms the story to the schedule of Christ’s resurrection), the new man comes strangely to life. In response to a request that he help compare the copy of a document with its original, he declines, not with a blunt “No” or “I don’t want to,” but with a gentle deflection: “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby has been presented with an utterly ordinary request, like ordering dinner from a waiter or asking a cabdriver to drive to your destination. But since there is not “the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence” in the clerk’s refusal, the lawyer feels more dismayed than angry and lets the matter pass. The “I would prefer not to”—a phrase that echoes the lawyer’s own gentility of phrasing—is a brilliant stroke: it leaves him disoriented and uncertain just what to say or do.

  A few days later, the circumstance repeats itself when Bartleby again declines, but this time the lawyer presses him:

  “Why do you refuse?”

  “I would prefer not to.”

  With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion, scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from my presence. But there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner touched and disconcerted me. I began to reason with him.

  “These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor saving to you, because one examination will answer for your four papers. It is common usage. Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy. Is it not so? Will you not speak? Answer!”

  But no matter how much the lawyer prods (“I burned,” he says, “to be rebelled against again”), he cannot provoke Bartleby to an outburst that would authorize one of his own. Trying to get a response out of Bartleby is like trying to “strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap”:

  “Bartleby,” said I, “Ginger Nut is away; just step round to the Post Office, won’t you? (it was but a three minutes walk,) and see if there is any thing for me.”

  “I would prefer not to.”

  “You will not?”

  “I prefer not.”

  “Prefer” is neither a street word nor an office word; it belongs in a formal dining room, with the ring of silver tinkling against crystal. It is a word that gently mocks the lawyer’s ci
rcumlocutions, and its anachronistic sound spreads around the office, infecting everyone, as on this occasion when “Nippers’s ugly mood was on duty, and Turkey’s off”:

  “Say now you will help to examine papers to-morrow, or next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable:—say so, Bartleby.”

  “At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.…

  “Prefer not, eh?” gritted Nippers—“I’d prefer him, if I were you, sir,” addressing me—“I’d prefer him; I’d give him preferences, the stubborn mule! What is it, sir, pray, that he prefers not to do now?”

  For Nippers, the word “prefer” has become a sanitized substitute for “kick his ass” or “tell him to stuff it” or some such practical recommendation. Still,

  Bartleby moved not a limb.

  “Mr. Nippers,” said I. “I’d prefer that you would withdraw for the present.”…

  As Nippers, looking very sour and sulky, was departing, Turkey blandly and deferentially approached.

  “With submission, sir,” said he, “yesterday I was thinking about Bartleby here, and I think that if he would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every day, it would do much towards mending him, and enabling him to assist in examining his papers.”

  “So you have got the word too,” said I, slightly excited.

  “With submission, what word, sir?” asked Turkey.…

  “I would prefer to be left alone here,” said Bartleby, as if offended at being mobbed in his privacy.

  “That’s the word, Turkey,” said I—”that’s it.”

  “Oh, prefer? Oh yes—queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer—”

  “Turkey,” interrupted I, “you will please withdraw.”

  “Oh, certainly sir, if you prefer that I should.”

  Bartleby’s little curtsy of a phrase conveys the bitter deference of someone who knows that his only recourse against his master is to compel him to give up the pretense of softheartedness and to acknowledge the hard fact of his mastery.

  But rather than back down or think about what he is asking, Bartleby’s master insists that he is being perfectly reasonable. “Every copyist,” he points out, “is bound to help examine his copy. Is it not so?” Yet the more he explains the grounds of his requests, the less grounded they come to seem, even to himself. The more he speaks, the more he feels like the child who repeats some vowely word like “owl” or “banana” until, after a few repetitions, it comes to sound like nonsense to the speaker himself. The word “prefer” has an amazing effect. Once confident that he was living the Right and Good Way, the lawyer starts to lose his focus on things he has previously seen clearly: “It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.” What “Bartleby” brings into view is the fact that all boundary lines between power and submission, mine and yours, right and wrong, too little and too much are finally nothing more than conventions to which we cling lest we lose our grip and tumble away into the infinity of unforeseen possibilities.

  As these alternative worlds open up and threaten to swallow him, the lawyer tries to stick to his routines. Stopping by his office one Sunday morning to catch up on work, he finds his key obstructed by something inserted from the inside of the door. To his amazement, he is admitted by Bartleby, who has evidently been living in the office, day and night, on ginger nuts and bits of cheese, “sole spectator of [his own] solitude.” At the sight of the young man in all his “miserable friendlessness and loneliness,” the lawyer is flooded by an unaccustomed despondency:

  For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none. These sad fancyings—chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain—led on to other and more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby. Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me. The scrivener’s pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet.

  Until this moment, this man’s awareness of human deprivation has been limited to “not-unpleasing” representations in sentimental stories and poems. Until now, he has been a representative city citizen: affable and blasé, walking through the world with blinders on so as not to be distracted or disturbed, equipped with an inventory of gestures adequate to get him through the fleeting encounters that fill an urban day, without getting entangled in any real human exchange. But now, at the sight of Bartleby in all his terrible aloneness, he feels for the first time what Redburn felt at the sight of the dying mother in the Liverpool gutter—that all his life he has been “making merry in the house of the dead.” He feels himself spinning away from all things fixed and stable until he becomes one of those, as Marx famously put it, for whom “all that is solid melts into air” and who “are forced to face … the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”

  The lawyer is a decent man. He redoubles his efforts to pull Bartleby back into the world of civility and order; but each time he is met with “I would prefer not to,” until one evening, having had enough, he tries to cut loose by giving Bartleby polite and proper notice, leaving him his wages and a little severance pay. But this expedient fails to put an end to the matter. Walking home that night amid the mingled voices of Broadway, he cannot get the young man out of his mind. He overhears fragments of speech (“ ‘I’ll take odds he doesn’t,’ said a voice as I passed”) and answers as if talking to himself, “ ‘Doesn’t go?—done!’ said I, ‘put up your money,’ ” reaching instinctively into his pocket to place his bet that, yes, Bartleby will go, until he realizes it is Election Day and that these men are talking about which candidate is likely to win the vote.

  Next morning, of course, Bartleby has gone nowhere, and things start to get nasty. How about a clerkship in a dry-goods store? the lawyer wants to know. Or perhaps some position for which your charm and loquacity will serve you well—bartender, bill collector, or a chaperone for a young man traveling in Europe, whom you could “entertain … with your conversation?” Bartleby responds to these barbed invitations as usual—he prefers not to—until the lawyer, pushed past the point of exasperation, declares his intention to move out of the office himself, hoping that his “motionless” vagrant will continue to exhibit his gift of inertia and stay put. He gets his wish. But when his successor finds Bartleby still squatting there, immovable as a rooted stump, he comes around to the lawyer to complain. “You are responsible,” he says, “for the man you left there.”

  4.

  With this accusation, we approach the sad end of a sad story. “Bartleby” touches a nerve with every reader who has ever tried to manage an unmanageable relationship with a parent, child, lover, spouse—anyone who compels our better self to try and try again but pushes us toward cruelty and a final “Enough!” It is the story of one of those Melvillean characters like Pip (and, in works yet to be written, Hunilla in The Encantadas and Colonel Moredock in The Confidence-Man), who has been shocked by some incommunicable experience that has left him scarred and less than whole. It is a city story about one of those innumerable urban casualties who makes us feel both sympathy and disgust, as well as fear, given that he might be a preview of what could happen to us upon some comparable reversal of fortune. But Melville’s aim is far from a pitch for pity or c
harity. As we follow Bartleby’s descent into the New York City jail (known even then as “the Tombs”) where he is sent to die alone, the story becomes ineffably sad but also bitterly funny, blending, as Richard Henry Dana, Sr., recognized, “the pathetic and the ludicrous,”† as the half-crazy Turkey and Nippers, like a couple of tramps in a Beckett play, climb up to ride tandem on their high horse in order to show Bartleby who’s boss.

  Perhaps some precipitating event in Melville’s life might explain the half-despondent, half-delirious mood of this remarkable story. Perhaps it was a story about Melville’s own fall into obscurity or an allegory of Hawthorne’s emotional recalcitrance (Melville describes Vine, in Clarel, as “opulent in withheld replies”). Searching for some explanation for the despair he had seen in Bartleby’s eyes, the lawyer reports in a brief Epilogue a rumor that the young man had once worked in the Dead Letter Office, where the clerks take piles of undeliverable mail and file them away into storage, where they will gather dust for eternity. It may be that the seed of “Bartleby” had been planted in Melville’s mind by an article, “The Lawyer’s Story,” about an odd clerk that was published in February 1853 in the New York Times, or by one that had run in September 1852 in the Albany Register about the Dead Letter Office, where “great sacks, locked and sealed … [are] piled in the halls, containing undelivered love notes, locks of hair … Daguerreotype portraits … lottery tickets and tickets for rail or ship passage, household keys, diamond ornaments,” all tokens of thwarted human dreams. Perhaps Bartleby had had such an encounter with the dead-endedness of life and had thereby, as we would say today, “gone postal”—no longer capable of sorting through his fingers the paper traces of a million ruined lives.