Melville’s treatment of the lawyer’s confusion over how to respond to this mutilated soul is a finely wrought portrait of a morally vexed man. But it is also a meditation on a large moral issue under dispute in antebellum America: how to define collective responsibility at a time when the old ad hoc welfare system of churches and charities could no longer cope with the growing number of workers and families left destitute by the boom-and-bust cycle of the industrial economy. As casualties mounted, the scope of corporate responsibility was being narrowed in the courts by business-friendly judges who routinely ruled against plaintiffs in cases of workplace injury and property loss. (One suit, brought against the Boston & Worcester Railroad in 1842 by an employee who had been injured in a derailment caused by another employee’s negligence, had been dismissed in a precedent-setting case by none other than Judge Lemuel Shaw.) In the 1850s, the United States was fast becoming a laissez-faire society with no articulated system for protecting individuals against impersonal power. In this respect, Bartleby—homeless, friendless, the urban equivalent of “a bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic”—was a figure more representative than eccentric.
Yet there was an opposite thrust in midcentury America that Melville also registered in “Bartleby.” This was the fundamentally religious impulse, expressed chiefly in the abolitionist movement but also in the whole array of reform movements from temperance to public education, to expand the scope of responsibility—to insist, that is, that the sufferings of some people must be the business of all people. This groping toward a widened sense of accountability was driven by multiple forces, among them the force of technology (railroads, canals, steamboats, and, especially, the telegraph) that enabled news to be circulated more broadly and rapidly than ever before, as well as by the evangelical movements that were springing up everywhere from the seaboard cities to the frontier. When the lawyer in “Bartleby” finds himself indisposed to taking his usual seat in his pew at Trinity Church (“the things I had seen disqualified me for a time from church-going”), he looks back, with a penitent sense of his own insufficiency, into the writings of the great evangelical theologian Jonathan Edwards, for whom religion is “not only … the business of Sabbath days, or … the business of a month, or a year, or of seven years … but the business of life.” The lawyer knows that he cannot rise to this impossible standard, which amounts to a call to put away “the old Adam of resentment” and to embrace the new Adam of selfless love in a lifelong act of imitatio Christi. But Melville does not write about the lawyer in a prosecutorial spirit. He writes about him as a witness to a good man trying to become a better man in the face of another man’s suffering.
What Melville achieved in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” was the integration of the radical insight that the standing social order is morally outrageous and must be rejected with the conservative insight that custom and precedent are precious and fragile and must be defended. “Bartleby” registers the truth of both views. It integrates the moral truth that we owe our fellow human beings our faith and love with the psychological and social truth that sympathy and benevolence have their limits—that, as the historian Thomas Haskell has put it, “the limits of moral responsibility have to be drawn somewhere and … the ‘somewhere’ will always fall far short of much pain and suffering that we could do something to alleviate.” The radical voice in Melville says, “Save him, succor him, embrace him as a child of God,” while the conservative voice says, “What more can I do for him? And if I turn my whole life over to him, what will become of the others who depend on me?” In “Bartleby,” these two voices speak as they do in life: they speak, that is, simultaneously.
* The Scarlet Letter (published in March 1850), having sold as many copies in ten days as Moby-Dick sold in three years, had already achieved such prestige that its author was the subject of college commencement orations. On August 15, 1851, Hawthorne noted in his journal (“I should have been curious to hear it”) that Mr. Edwin Holsey Cole, a Wesleyan student from Cromwell, Connecticut, spoke about him at that spring’s Wesleyan commencement.
† This mix of pathos and farce is captured well in Jonathan Parker’s expressionistic 2002 film adaptation of “Bartleby.”
CHAPTER 9
THE MAGAZINIST
1.
In its themes, “Bartleby” was continuous with Melville’s previous work, but in its style it was a departure. It marked the moment that Melville left behind the “ejaculatory prose” (F. O. Matthiessen’s phrase) of his novels, in which spoken words seem “never to have belonged to the speaker, to have been at best a ventriloquist’s trick.” If the characters in Melville’s novels sometimes hold forth as if to an audience outside the action, in “Bartleby” the dialogue has the feel of people actually talking with one another. Melville had found a new capacity, as Richard Henry Dana, Sr., put it, to play upon “the nicer strings of our complicated nature”—and was thereby making, after the sound and fury of Pierre, one of the notable artistic recoveries in our literary history.
But for an artist of vaulting ambition, the effort to keep down the volume can be trying, and by the fall of 1853 Melville was again showing signs of enervation. He was occupied that fall with what he described in a letter to the Harpers as his “Tortoise Hunting Adventure,” a series of sketches about the Galapagos Islands, where he had stopped on his first whaling cruise ten years earlier. Serialized in Putnam’s in the spring of 1854 under the title The Encantadas, these sketches were set in the same volcanic isles that Charles Darwin had explored aboard HMS Beagle in 1836, when the idea of natural selection had begun to form in his mind. Melville had read Darwin’s journal (published in 1839) and he drew upon it now in his own reminiscence of the Galapagos, which was less akin to Darwin’s vision of wondrous plenitude than it was a preview of what T. S. Eliot calls, in The Waste Land, a “heap of broken images where the sun beats.” The setting was once again the wide Pacific, but the author was not exactly in a tropical mood:
Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles, looking much as the world at large might, after a penal conflagration.…
In this charred version of the enchanted isles that he had described in Typee and Omoo, “bandit birds with long bills cruel as daggers” fly above the “prostrate trunks of blasted pines.”
By the end of 1853, Melville had a new reason to have cinders on his mind. On December 10, the Harper & Brothers warehouse on Cliff Street in Manhattan went up in flames, burning to the ground till nothing was left, according to the Herald, but a “mass of rubbish, comprising six houses on Cliff Street, running through to Pearl.” Since Harpers stored its stereotype plates in fireproof vaults, the plates were saved, but the whole inventory of Melville’s unsold books, including those still in unbound sheets, was lost. Years later he explained to his father-in-law that the fire reduced his already meager income, since upon receiving orders for his books, the Harpers now assessed a reprinting charge for which they debited his account.
In the eighth of the ten Encantadas sketches, probably written before the loss of his books, Melville played a variation on the story of Agatha Hatch that Harper & Brothers had refused to publish the previous summer. This time the fated woman is not a Nantucket bride but an Indian woman, Hunilla, dropped off by a whaleship with her husband and brother on an expedition to gather Galapagos tortoises, prized for the sweetness of their meat. While awaiting the ship’s return, the two men are caught in a squall that capsizes their catamaran:
Before Hunilla’s eyes they sank. The real woe of this event passed before her sight as some sham tragedy on the stage. She was seated in a rude bower among the withered thickets, crowning a lofty cliff, a little back from the beach. The thickets were so disposed, that in looking upon the sea at large she peered out from among the branches
as from the lattice of a high balcony. But upon the day we speak of here, the better to watch the adventure of those two hearts she loved, Hunilla had withdrawn the branches to one side, and held them so. They formed an oval frame, through which the bluely boundless sea rolled like a painted one. And there, the invisible painter painted to her view the wave-tossed and disjointed raft, its once level logs slantingly upheaved, as raking masts, and the four struggling arms undistinguishable among them; and then all subsided into smooth-flowing creamy waters, slowly drifting the splintered wreck; while first and last, no sound of any sort was heard. Death in a silent picture; a dream of the eye; such vanishing shapes as the mirage shows.
With this harrowing passage, Melville joined a number of nineteenth-century writers who were drawn to the theme of what Shakespeare had called, in The Rape of Lucrece, “double death” (“ ’Tis double death to drown in ken of shore”). In David Copperfield, which he and Lizzie had read aloud in the winter of 1850–51, Dickens describes a schooner foundering just off shore while helpless spectators watch until the last man clinging to the mast goes down in a shower of splinters and spray. Melville now followed his own version of “double death” with a portrait of the surviving witness eviscerated by what she has seen: year after year, Hunilla “trod the cindery beach” with “her spell-bound eye bent upon the incessant waves,” hoping without hope for the sight of a sail.*
There were other passages of emotional power in The Encantadas, but the linkages between them were weak, and the other stories that occupied Melville during this period were even weaker. He turned to a new form: diptychs, or pairs of contrasting scenes that illustrate this or that social pathology (rural poverty vs. urban snobbery, sham piety vs. Christian charity) by which his indignation had been aroused. He had read about the diptych tradition in a book by Charles Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting, that had been borrowed from the Athenaeum Library by Judge Shaw while Melville was visiting in Boston in the summer of 1848; and on his trip to London the following year, Melville had seen at the National Gallery dual saint portraits attributed to Taddeo Gaddi, as well as, in Paris, carved ivory diptychs at the Hôtel de Cluny.† Now, in the first panel of “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” (published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in June 1854), we meet an impoverished rural couple struggling to survive; in the second, we see dissolute aristocrats throwing banquet scraps to the poor. In “The Two Temples,” Melville juxtaposed the “fat-paunched, beadle-faced” sexton of New York’s Grace Church, whose job is to prevent loiterers from coming inside to beg or sleep, with a London theater usher who takes pity on a man whom he assumes to be a beggar and offers him free beer.
Putnam’s rejected “The Two Temples,” as Charles Briggs explained, because its “pungent” satire risked “offending the religious sensibilities of the public” and, more particularly, of the powerful “congregation of Grace Church,” so the story was never published in Melville’s lifetime. In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” published in Harper’s in April 1855 (the magazine had bought the story in May 1854), the first sketch describes the camaraderie of a London gentleman’s club, while the second describes an unheated New England paper mill where shivering girls operate machines that turn rags into pulp and pulp into paper. This was the most interesting of the diptychs, but its allegory was heavy-handed (the paper mill is located in a hollow known as “Devil’s Dungeon,” where a gnarled hemlock tree grows “undulatory as an anaconda”), and Melville simply could not overcome the limitation to which allegorical fiction is always subject: making unearned generalizations about big truths.
In all these stories, setting and incident seem chosen in order to illustrate this or that dinner-table point about, say, the differences between England and America or the degrading effects of factory labor. Melville was writing now about experiences tangential to his life—an excursion to an old-boys’ club on his London trip, a winter’s day tour of a papermaking factory. He was no longer writing fiction. He was writing commentaries in the form of fiction.
2.
In August 1853, Melville turned thirty-four years old—roughly the halfway point toward death for a nineteenth-century man who expected still to live a generous number of years—and his powers of invention were patently declining. In the past, he had poached incidents or descriptions from other writers, but he had never looked to others for subject or theme. Now he did so. At some point in the late 1840s he had acquired a copy of The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, a ghost-written memoir by a Revolutionary War veteran who had been taken prisoner by the British and, after nearly a half century of exile in England, returned to his native land to peddle his story in hopes of obtaining a government pension. Melville had been thinking about basing a book on Potter’s story when, in London in 1849, he bought an eighteenth-century map of the city that he thought might be useful “in case I serve up the Revolutionary narrative of the beggar.”
In the winter of 1853–54, with map at hand, he reread Potter’s book, along with other books that took him back to the world of his grandfathers: The Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones, Ethan Allen’s Narrative of Captivity, and James Fenimore Cooper’s History of the Navy. Potter’s memoir was the story of a Rhode Island boy who fought at Bunker Hill (where he obeyed the famous order not to shoot till he could see the whites of the enemy’s eyes), was taken prisoner during the British blockade of Boston, and shipped off to England. Beginning with Israel’s boyhood flight from his parents in order to seek his fortune, the story moves through his exploits as a soldier, his imprisonment behind stout and bolted doors in a foreign land, his escape and years of wandering, till he returns home as an old man. An Odyssey that failed to culminate in reunion or renown, it was also a truncated retelling of the Cincinnatus myth, in which the gentleman-farmer, called to public service, brings his pastoral virtue to his country’s cause but spends the rest of the tale trying in vain to get back to the fields whence he came. When, after a lifetime of being “harassed by night and day … and driven from place to place,” Israel finally returns to his native land, he is an unsung hero without garland or even greeting.
This story of a life that starts out gloriously but leads nowhere suited Melville’s mood. It was a report from the dark underside of the world he had heard extolled as a child, and in the spring and early summer of 1854, he rewrote it as Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. Published in Putnam’s in nine installments that ran from July 1854 through March 1855, this work (published as a book immediately after the last installment) vacillated between imitation and invention, and was pervaded by what Alfred Kazin has called the feeling of “exile as a lifetime experience, exile as a feeling about life unexplained by the circumstances of exile.”
The tone of Israel Potter, which Melville wrote partly in a breathless present tense, is mock-heroic. Israel starts out as a kind of eighteenth-century Forrest Gump (“before hastening to one duty, he would not leave a prior one undone”) who, when called to arms, finishes plowing his half-plowed field before tearing off to fight the British at Boston. A “sturdy farmer” (as Melville had called Cincinnatus in Redburn), Israel reserves his deepest feelings for hearth and home. But if he is not of keen mind, he fights with resourcefulness; during his captivity he learns to feign sleep or injury until his captors relax their vigilance. At the first chance at escape, he springs into action, and once at large he wins the confidence of anyone inclined to help or harbor him.
Sized up by a pro-Yankee cabal of English gentlemen as a reliable courier, Israel is dispatched with a secret message to Benjamin Franklin, who is in Paris trying to coax the French to join the war on the rebel side. Melville portrays Franklin as a sententious windbag—salacious and stingy, a randy old man with a touch of “primeval orientalness,” who, though he takes an interest in his young visitor, saves the best cognac and prettiest chambermaids for himself, thus teaching the boy a useful lesson about the world. Israel’s next mentor is th
e brazen and brutal John Paul Jones, that “jaunty barbarian in broadcloth,” who conscripts Israel as his sidekick in raiding British ports, where they land by night in order to spike the cannon and torch the town, a team of marauders delighted to bring the colonial war to the colonialists’ homeland.
Some of the strongest writing in Israel Potter came in Melville’s account of the sea battle between Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the British warship Serapis—a battle that had found its way, by Melville’s day, into American myth as the occasion of Jones’s famous reply to the British commander’s demand for surrender: “I have not yet begun to fight.” Melville heard in that story an echo of his Gansevoort grandfather’s reply (“it is my determined resolution … to defend this fort … to the last extremity”) when the British commander demanded that he give up Fort Stanwix.
But Israel Potter recounted a war that had neither dignity nor decorum, and in this sense the whole book was a kind of extended anti-myth. In one grim scene, Jones’s men wriggle out onto the yardarm to toss grenades as if they were dropping apples from a tree overhanging a neighbor’s field, blowing the enemy to bits with their “sour fruit.” The two ships, at close quarters, pour fire into one another, no longer belligerents “in the ordinary sense” but “a co-partnership and joint-stock combustion-company … two houses through whose party-wall doors have been cut” so that death can flow freely between them. This kind of writing was not exactly consonant with the national myth of America born in blood and glory; there was plenty of blood in Israel Potter, but precious little glory, and Melville concluded his account of Jones’s naval exploits by remarking, “in view of this battle one may well ask—What separates the enlightened man from the savage? Is civilization a thing distinct, or is it an advanced stage of barbarism?”
Melville: His World and Work Page 31