Chapter 4

Returning to 1853, the year that followed Pierre, we find Melville in the midst of a series of disappointments: he was to learn the truth of Hamlet’s observation: misfortunes come not singly but in battalions. Melville sought for a consular appointment in the South Seas, a place where he was fitted by experience and sympathy to perform a decent service, and perhaps, with relief from financial strain, recover a little that joy in the flesh which he had once known, and find again in his bosom the radiance of the landscape itself. Melville had no opportunity to try this remedy. In spite of Richard H. Dana’s intercession, Chief Justice Shaw’s efforts, and Allan’s assiduous canvassing, and Hawthorne’s friendly intercession, he did not get the post, nor did he get a consulship at Antwerp, which for a moment seemed possible. To make matters worse, Harper’s, his publishers, lost the plates of his novels and almost all the copies of his books in a fire that gutted out their quarters. If there was something prophetic in the foundering of the whaler Ann Alexander, and the total disappearance of the old Pequod itself, as Melville was finishing Moby-Dick, there was something equally uncanny in this conflagration. The very elements played against him, as they played against Ahab. His books were put out again by Harper’s, but perfunctorily: they had lost their original momentum. None of Melville’s subsequent books was to meet such eager acceptance.

Another sign of Melville’s weakened health and lessened energies is the fact that during 1853 his entire writing seems to have consisted only of two short stories, Cock-a-Doodle-Do and Bartleby the Scrivener, both published in magazines towards the end of the year. Melville was not at home in the narrow confines of the short story: he had scarcely time to get under way before he was back again in port. The result is that the best of his short stories are really short novels, while the lesser ones, like The Lightning Rod Man, are little more than mediocre anecdotes. I and My Chimney, The Appletree Table, The Paradise of Bachelors, The Tartarus of Maids, are more in the nature of discursive essays, “in character,” than they are of tales: Melville was at his weakest in deliberately symbolic tales, like Cock-a-Doodle-Do and The Bell-Tower; indeed, the latter might be slipped into one of Hawthorne’s volumes, without apology, as a minor work of his youth. When in 1852 Melville equably handed to Hawthorne the circumstances of a story he had gathered from a lawyer in New Bedford, he was so conscious of treading on the master’s ground that he relinquished his own right to exploit this particular plot. But except for the original impulse, his best stories owe nothing to Hawthorne: Melville’s symbolism is more delicately and carefully concealed; and his moral, like Shakespeare’s, rests in the demonstration, not in the conclusion.

Bartleby the Scrivener is one of Melville’s longer stories; and it gains much by its juxtaposition of incongruous personalities. The story is told by a comfortable, pursy old lawyer, with an office in Wall Street; the lawyer and his copyists are hit off with a warm sense of caricature. Into this office comes a pale, bleak creature, Bartleby, to serve as a scrivener. He is quiet and industrious; but he refuses to comply with the routine of the office: he will not compare copy, even for the lawyer himself; and yet there is something in this passive self-assertion and this methodical self-obliteration which makes the lawyer humour Bartleby. With these qualities goes a mystery; and by accident, on a Sunday at church-time, the lawyer discovers, on attempting to enter his office, that Bartleby not only works for him but has quietly occupied his business premises, to eat and sleep there. In spite of this gross irregularity, the lawyer keeps Bartleby, only to have the little man quit work entirely. When the lawyer demands a reason, he answers: I would prefer not to. When the lawyer asks him to move out, he answers: I would prefer not to. There is no getting behind his silence, his dead-wall reveries, his blank self-possession.

The effect of this passive resistance upon the lawyer is upsetting. “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy verge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is due to the inherent selfishness of the human heart: it rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succour, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning convinced me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to the body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.”

The lawyer moves and Bartleby remains on the original premises; but the new tenant is not so patient and he has Bartleby arrested. When Bartleby finds himself in prison, he prefers not to eat. A kind fellow, the lawyer visits him, seeking to restore his confidence and reawaken his manhood. “Nothing reproachful attaches to you being here,” he assures Bartleby. “And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass.” “I know where I am,” he replied.

Bartleby is a good story in itself: it also affords us a glimpse of Melville’s own drift of mind in this miserable year: the point of the story plainly indicates Melville’s present dilemma. People would admit him to their circle and give him bread and employment only if he would abandon his inner purpose: to this his answer was—I would prefer not to. By his persistence in minding his own spiritual affairs, those who might have helped him on their own terms, like Allan or his father-in-law or his Uncle Peter, inevitably became a little impatient; for in the end, they foresaw they would be obliged to throw him off, and he would find himself in prison, not in the visible prison for restraining criminals, but in the pervasive prison of dull routine and meaningless activity. When that happened there would be no use assuring him that he lived in a kindly world of blue sky and green grass. “I know where I am!” Whether or not Melville consciously projected his own intuition of his fate, there is no doubt in my mind that, as early as 1853, he was already formulating his answer. To those kind, pragmatic friends and relatives who suggested that he go into business and make a good living, or at least write the sort of books that the public would read—it amounts to pretty much the same thing—he kept on giving one stereotyped and monotonous answer: I would prefer not to. The dead-wall reverie would end in a resolution as blank and forbidding as the wall that faced him: a bleak face, a tight wounded mouth, the little blue eyes more dim, remote, and obstinate than ever: I would prefer not to!

During the next year, Melville settled down to a steadier round of work, and one of the best of his narratives, a series of sketches called The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, was published during 1854 under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor. Three other sketches followed; and finally, in July, 1854, he began to publish serially the story of Israel Potter, the Revolutionary beggar, for which he had gathered material in London five years before.

In The Encantadas Melville went back again to the ground he had ploughed so well before. He had gone ashore on the Enchanted Isles, the Galapagos, during the early part of his whaling voyage, and now, in his own sable mood—a mood reflected in the very choice of his pseudonym, Tarnmoor—the landscape of these islands corresponded to his inner state; and his description of the scene is as fine as anything in his earlier pages; if anything, there is more studious mastery. The final sketch, the story of Hunilla, who had been left in solitude on one of these islands, when her brother and her husband died, is poignant and terrible, all the more so because of the dark bestiality of the visiting crew, that Melville hints at, and then forgoes telling about, so moved is he by its inhumanity.

“One knows not,” Melville reflects here, “whether nature doth not impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to certain things. At least, it is to be doubted whether it is good to blazon such. If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men. Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid; but in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth where it listeth; for ill or good men cannot know. Often ill comes from good, as good from the ill.” He has returned to the ultimate moral of Pierre; and it holds good of the tales of the Enchanted Isles: out of its stark ugliness, he breathed beauty. With just as abhorrent an insight into the cruelties of life as he had in Pierre, Melville here had a firmer hand on himself: he ruefully confesses that “in nature, as in law, it may be libellous to speak some truths.” Within the dark rim of the horizon, the words move, like swift white sails on grey waters. The style is again accurate, pliant, subtle, bold; but it is never hectic nor forced, nor does it smell from the mothballs of old costume chests. There is not the faintest sign that his literary powers were falling off, or his voice sinking to a whisper.