The lawyer, overcome by pity, by troubling thoughts of human diversity, by self-analysis, goes so far as to take down from the shelf certain theological works which give him the idea that he is predestined to “have Bartleby.” But as a cheerful, merely social visitor to Trinity Church, this idea does not last and indeed is too abstract because the lawyer has slowly been moving into a therapeutic role, a role in which he persists in the notion of “personality” that may be modified by patience, by suggestion, by reason.
Still, at last, it is clear that Bartleby must go, must be offered a generous bonus, every sort of accommodation and good wish. This done, the lawyer leaves in a pleasant agitation of mind, thinking of the laws of chance represented by his overhearing some betting going on in the street. Will Bartleby be there in the morning or will he at last be gone? Of course, he has remained and the offered money has not been picked up.
“Will you not quit me?”
“I would prefer not to quit you.”
The “quitting” is to be accomplished by the lawyer’s decision to “quit” himself, that is, to quit his offices for larger quarters. A new tenant is found, the boxes are packed and sent off, and Bartleby is bid good-bye. But no, the new tenants, who are not therapists, rush around to complain that he is still there and that he is not a part of their lease. They turn him out of the offices.
The lawyer goes back to the building and finds Bartleby still present, that is, sitting on the banister of the stairway in the entrance hallway.
“What are you doing here, Bartleby?”
“Sitting upon the banister.”
The lawyer had meant to ask what will you do with your life, where will you go, and not, where is your body at this moment. But with Bartleby body and statement are one. Indeed the bewitching qualities, the concentrated seriousness, the genius of Bartleby’s “dialogue” had long ago affected the style of the lawyer, but in the opposite direction, that is, to metaphor, arrived at by feeling. His head is full of images about the clerk and he thinks of him as “the last column of some ruined temple” and “a bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic.” And from these metaphors there can be no severance.
There with Bartleby sitting on the banister for life, as it were, the lawyer soars into the kindest of deliriums. The therapeutic wish, the beating of the wings of angels above the heads of the harassed and affectionate, unhinges his sense of the possible, the suitable, the imaginable. He begins to think of new occupations for Bartleby and it is so like the frenzied and loving moments in family life: would the pudgy, homely daughter like to comb her hair, neaten up a bit, and apply for a position as a model?—and why not, others have, and so on and so on.
The angel wings tremble and the lawyer says: “Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store?”
Bartleby, the unimaginable promoter of goods for sale, replies with his rapid deliberation. Slow deliberation is not necessary for one who knows the interior of his mind, as if that mind were the interior of a small, square box containing a single pair of cuff links.
To the idea of clerking in a store Bartleby at last appends a reason, one indeed of great opacity.
“There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not particular.”
Agitated rebuttal of “too much confinement” for one who keeps himself “confined all the time”!
Now, in gentle, coaxing hysteria, the lawyer wonders if the bartender’s business would suit Bartleby and adds that “there is no trying of the eye-sight in that.”
No, Bartleby would not like that at all, even though he repeats that he is not particular.
Would Bartleby like to go about collecting bills for merchants? It would take him outdoors and be good for his health. The answer: “No, I would prefer to be doing something else.”
Doing something else? That is, sitting on the banister, rather than selling dry goods, bartending, and bill collecting.
Here the lawyer seems to experience a sudden blindness, the blindness of a bright light from an oncoming car on a dark road. The bright light is the terrible clarity of Bartleby.
So, in a blind panic: “How then would be going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation—how would that suit you?”
“Not at all. It does not strike me that there is anything definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not particular.”
Definite? Conversation is not definite owing to its details of style, opinion, observation, humor, pause, and resumption; and it would not be at all pleasing to Bartleby’s mathematical candor. Bartleby is definite; conversation is not. He has said it all.
But I am not particular? This slight addition has entered Bartleby at the moment the lawyer opens his fantastical employment agency. The phrase wishes to extend the lawyer’s knowledge of his client, Bartleby, and to keep him from the tedium of error. Bartleby himself is particular, in that he is indeed a thing distinguished from another. But he is not particular in being fastidious, choosey. He would like the lawyer to understand that he is not concerned with the congenial. It is not suitability he pursues; it is essence, essence beyond detail.
The new tenants have Bartleby arrested as a vagrant and sent to the Tombs. The same idea had previously occurred to the lawyer in a moment of despair, but he could not see that the immobile, unbegging Bartleby could logically be declared a vagrant. “What! He a vagrant, a wanderer that refuses to budge?”
No matter, the lawyer cannot surrender this “case,” this recalcitrant object of social service, this demand made upon his heart to provide benefit, this being now in an institution, the Tombs, but not yet locked away from the salvaging sentiments of one who remembers. A prison visit is made and in his ineffable therapeutic endurance the lawyer insists there is no reason to despair, the charge is not a disgrace, and even in prison one may sometimes see the sky and a patch of green.
Bartleby, with the final sigh of one who would instruct the uninstructable, says: I know where I am.
In a last urging, on his knees as it were, the lawyer desires to purchase extra food to add to the prison fare.
Bartleby: “I would prefer not to dine today. It would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners.” And thus he dies.
Not quite the end for the lawyer with his compassion, his need to unearth some scrap of buried “personality,” or private history. We have the beautiful coda Melville has written, a marvelous moment of composition, but perhaps too symbolical, too poetically signifying to be the epitaph of Bartleby. Yet he must be run down, if only to honor the graceful curiosity and the insatiable charity of the lawyer. He reports a rumor:
The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in administration. . . . Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? . . . On errands of life, these letters sped to death. . . . Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!
Bartleby in a sense is the underside of Billy Budd, but they are not opposites. Billy, the Handsome Sailor, the “Apollo with a portmanteau,” the angel, “our beauty,” the sunny day, and the unaccountable goodness, which is with him a sort of beautiful “innate disorder,” such as the “innate, incurable disorder” represented by Bartleby. Neither of these curious creations knows resentment or grievance; they know nothing of pride, envy, or greed. There is a transcendent harmony in Billy Budd, and a terrifying, pure harmony in the tides of negation that define Bartleby. Billy, the lovely product of nature and, of course, not a perfection of ongoing citizen life, has a “vocal defect,” the tendency to stutter at times of stress. By way of this defect, he goes to his death by hanging. Bartleby in no way has a vocal defect; indeed the claim this remarkable creation of American literature makes on our feelings lies entirely in his incompa
rable self-expression.
So, this bit of old New York, the sepia, horsecar Manhattan, Wall Street. Bartleby and the god-blessed lawyer. They were created by Melville before the Civil War and were coeval with John Jacob Astor’s old age and the prime of Cornelius Vanderbilt. And yet here they are, strange apparitions in the metonymic Wall Street district where the exertions, as described by Mark Twain, were, “A year ago I didn’t have a penny, and now I owe you a million dollars.”
Looking down, or looking up, today at the sulky twin towers of the World Trade Center, “all shaft,” the architects say, thinking of those towers as great sightless Brahmins brooding upon the absolute and the all-embracing spirit, it seemed to me that down below there is something of Manhattan in Bartleby and especially in his resistance to amelioration. His being stirs the water of pity, and we can imagine that the little boats that row about him throwing out ropes of personal charity or bureaucratic provision for his “case” may grow weary and move back to the shore in a mood of frustration and, finally, forgetfulness.
There is Manhattanism in the bafflement Bartleby represents to the alive and steady conscience of the lawyer who keeps going on and on in his old democratic, consecrated endurance—going on, even down to the Tombs, and at last to the tomb. If Bartleby is unsaveable, at least the lawyer’s soul may be said to have been saved by the freeze of “fraternal melancholy” that swept over him from the fate he had placed at the desk beside him in a little corner of Wall Street. It is not thought that many “downtown” today would wish to profit from, oh, such a chill.
1981
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
KATHERINE Anne Porter died at the age of ninety. She had one of those very long lives the sickly, with their bronchial troubles and early threats of tuberculosis, achieve as a surprise to us and perhaps to themselves. It was just two years ago, in September 1980, that she died and now we have a biography devoted to this long life.
Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together. They also make a consistent fiction, the fiction being the arrangement, artful or clumsy, of the documents. Biography casts a chill over the late years of some writers and, perhaps from their reading the lives of those they had known in the too solid flesh, has often provoked the insistent wish that no life be written. Among those who wished for no life after life were W. H. Auden, George Orwell, and T. S. Eliot. The result has been two lives already of Auden and Orwell, and Eliot’s life is in the making, waiting to be lived again by way of the flowing bloodstream of documentation.
Sometimes very fine writers and scholars undertake biographies, and their productions have at least some claim to equity between the subject and the person putting on the shoes. Others hope to establish credentials previously lacking by hard work on the abounding materials left by a creative life. In any case, a biography appears to be thought of as a good project, one that can at the very least be accomplished by industry. And if there is a lot of busywork in it—many visits to the libraries, a store of taped interviews, and, of course, the “evidence” of the writer’s work itself (the last rather a difficulty since it is not precisely to be understood by research)—the book gets written, and the “life of” is, so to speak, born.
In her eighty-sixth year, Katherine Anne Porter appointed Joan Givner to undertake the re-creation of her many decades. The biographer might be thought to be in luck since Miss Porter advised her to “get at the truth,” an always murky command when ordered on one’s own behalf. The real luck about the truth turned out to be that the distinguished writer was unusually inclined to fabrication about her past. These fabrications, dashing often and scarcely news and only mildly discrediting, seem to be the driving engine behind Joan Givner’s accumulation of the facts of life.
How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one’s life; every life is rich in material. By the nature of the enterprise, the contemporary biographer with his surf of Xerox papers is doing something smaller and yet strikingly more detailed than the great Victorian laborers in the form. Our power of documentation has a monstrous life of its own, a greater vivacity than any lived existence. It makes form out of particles and finds attitude in a remembered drunken remark as easily as in a long contemplation of experience—more easily in fact. It creates out of paper a heavy, obdurate permanency. Threats to its permanency will come only by way of other bits of paper, a footnote coup d’état. No matter—a territory once colonized in this way has had its indigenous landscape and culture put to the heel.
In Joan Givner’s book, the root biographical facts have the effect of a crushing army. Everything is underfoot. Each character and each scene of Miss Porter’s fiction is looked upon as a factuality honored by its provenance as autobiography. And separate fictions are mashed together as bits of the life recur or are suggested in different works. Miss Porter, in a manner impertinently thought of as dilatory, did not often translate experience in a sequential fashion. So she is writing “Hacienda” while she is “living” “The Leaning Tower.” She is boarding the ship of fools before the Mexican stories have been accomplished. It is something of a tangle to get this particular life and its laggard production into time slots, and the result is an incoherence in regard to the work. Information about when each story was actually completed, when published and where, is lost in the anecdote of days and nights. No doubt the information is somewhere among the pages, but it is a slogging task to dig it out.
The life—some scandal and a considerable amount of folly: Katherine Anne Porter was born in a log cabin in Texas and grew up in hardship without a really good education. She knew a genuine struggle to provide for herself and slowly to define herself. Gradually, along the way, after her stories became known, she slipped into being a Southern belle and into being to some extent a Southern writer after “Flowering Judas.” The role was there for the choosing since to be a belle and to be a Southern writer is a decision, not a fate. (Poe, for instance, was a Southerner but not a Southern writer.) Perhaps under the influence of the very talented Southern Agrarians—Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and others—she began to appropriate a rather frantic genealogy of Daniel Boone and certain Southern statesmen; in addition, she developed some soothing memories of plantation dining rooms, “several Negro servants, among them two aged former slaves,” and so on. In this way, she filled in the gap between what she was and what she felt like.
She was handy, too, in disposing of the traces of her various mismatings, the first a marriage at sixteen. “I have no hidden husbands,” she once said. “They just slipped my mind.” She was beautiful, a spendthrift, an alert coquette, and, since she lived long, a good many of her lovers and three of her husbands were younger than she was. She lopped off a few years here and there. The book goes into a determined sorting out, and the husbands are lined up, the years restored.
Her serious work was slow in coming about because of a scratchy, hard life after she literally ran away from her first husband—just ran off, as they say. She tried acting, did very provincial newspaper work and finally got a job on The Denver Post. Everything was hard, poorly paid, hand-to-mouth. During this period, she seems quite Western or Middle Western, like someone in a Willa Cather story trying to find the way out. Her story “Maria Concepción” was published when she was thirty-four, and her first book, Flowering Judas, appeared when she was forty. Fortunately for her future work, she went to Mexico as a reporter; she was in and out of Greenwich Village, where she met writers and no doubt increased her sophistication about literature and the act of writing.
At this point, the shape of her life falls into a sort of twenties pattern. She went to France and to Germany with her third husband, Eugene Pressly—her second husband, a person named Ernest Stoc
k, “deadly Ernest,” as she called him, having been run away from while he was sleeping. In Mexico, she met the Russian film director Eisenstein; in Germany in 1932 she met Göring; in Paris, she met Hemingway. Eisenstein became Uspensky in “Hacienda,” the ship upon which she traveled from Mexico to Germany became the Vera in Ship of Fools. In Berlin, she stayed on alone, having encouraged Pressly to return to America for a holiday without her. She never liked the constant presence of her husbands or lovers and did not like, she soon found out, to be alone—a dilemma in one shape or another common to most of mankind. The pension where she stayed in Germany went, with little need for renovation, into “The Leaning Tower.”
Research finds that in Germany, Katherine Anne Porter did not always conduct herself with generosity or moral refinement. She had a young friend, Herb Klein, a newspaper reporter, who tells years later of her leaving a seamstress without paying for a dress she had ordered—leaving the dress, too—and in this way embarrassing Klein’s mother, who had brought the two together. He also discredits her claim to have met Hitler and feels strongly that she did not move widely or knowledgeably about the Germany of the time. So, a little more unstitching of the embroidery here.
Also, and again many decades later, she made in an interview slanderous, nasty remarks about Sigrid Schultz, a reporter in Berlin in the thirties for The Chicago Tribune. All of this, no doubt rightly, brings on a fit of temper by the biographer, who finds that the German experience, as the chapter is called, “forms a dismal record of cheating, lying, slander and malice.” She sees ruthlessness, alienation (?), and brutality at the “beginning of her fifth decade.” Garrulousness and a certain untidiness in 1932 are excavated and rebuked in 1982, showing at least one of the dangers of living. The celebrated do not understand that they are chatting away in a bugged universe.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 39