"Bartleby": A Few Observations

By Frank Davidson*

Of the numerous attempts to interpret Melville's "Bartleby" I know of none that has started with what is nearest the story, "The Piazza," that poignant introductory essay to the little book of which "Bartleby" is the first narrative. This essay is to a high degree personal, with its references to the charm of the Berkshires, Melville's farm home at Pittsfield, his illness there in the 1850's, his nostalgic recollections of the sea and of a Tahiti maiden, his preference--like Bartleby's--not to follow custom, and his philosophy, which speaks of a dichotomous world, one part of which is inherently dark.

The essay reveals in an objective way the equivocal position of man with reference to nature, which, seductively appealing to his imagination with its outward beauty and its lavish promises, is meager in fulfillment; which shows even sinister in its inconsistencies, harboring secretly in the bulb of a beautiful flower a cankerous worm--worm and starry flower both white. The essay unfolds, too, a short drama of loneliness and disillusionment in which the narrator and a young girl are the cast, and is fit prelude to the entrance of Bartleby, Benito, and Hunilla in turn--all three tragic figures. Two of them have watched fair promises end in devastating disaster and their own activities and the world's reduced to an almost hopeless meaninglessness; the other, Bartleby, so far as we know, has been denied even the promise. His eyes, like those of Emerson's "sad-eyed boy" of "Illusions," have lacked "the requisite refractions to clothe the show [the magical world about him] in due glory," and he is affected "with a tendency to trace home the glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root."¹ Bartleby and Hunilla, like the elm that has survived the clearing of a forest where the old house stands, are "lonely through steadfastness."

The piazza from which the essay has its title is an extension of the old farmhouse. The narrator, occupant of the house, preferring not to follow custom or the conventional advice of his New England neighbors, has, with the piazza, given it a northern rather than a southern outlook. From this piazza he launches out on one occasion on an "inland voyage" that takes him through forest and mountain glen and, after he has had to abandon his horse, over "a dark road that led up" to a point "where path there was none, and none might go but by himself, and only go by daring." Blackberry brakes have sought to stop his progress, though he has "strained toward [only] fruitless growths of mountain laurel;" and he has been forced to climb "slippery steeps to barren heights, where stood none to welcome."

His journey brings him at length to a lone cottage, which has often attracted his attention and which artistic distance and his imagination have transformed into a fairyland with a fairy queen, at the end of a rainbow. On this particular occasion he has "dared" seek out and confront his beatific vision, which he finds no fairyland but only a rude cottage in a wide woodland, its one inhabitant a forlorn girl who sees few passers-by and whose brother, weary from his work in the forest by day, affords her but little company during his waking hours at home. He soon leaves his bench for his bed, "just as one at last wearily quits that too, for still deeper rest. The bench, the bed, the grave." Such the fairyland.

The girl, Marianna, namesake of her of Shakespeare's darkest comedy, but resembling, too, in primitive innocence, "some Tahiti girl, secreted for a sacrifice," has vainly tried by walking in the forest to relieve the monotony of the narrow life." "Better feel alone by hearth," she says, "than by rock." Like her visitor, however, she, too, has envisioned enchantment far off, near the foot of a mountain slope rather than on a height, a house, the sight of whose happy inhabitants, she feels, could bring her happiness and rest. The visitor recognizes the house as his own. "For your sake," he explains, "I will wish that I were the happy one of the happy house you dream you see; for then would you behold him now, and, as you say, this weariness might leave you." This brief drama of reciprocal disillusionment concludes with the narrator's reflection that "Launching my yawl no more for fairyland, I stick to the piazza. . . . Yes, the scenery [from the piazza] is magical. . . . But every night, when the curtain falls, truth comes in with darkness."

Throughout this introductory essay are expressions which perhaps hint of Bartleby's history or of what lay at the core of his tragedy: "lonely through steadfastness;" "cankerous worms whose germs lurked in the very bulb;" "where path there was none, and none might go but by himself, and only go by daring;" "empty chapels in the living rock;" "where Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to the wilderness;" "a huge cross-grained block, fernbedded, showed where, in forgotten times, man after man had tried to split it, but lost his wedges for his pains;" "Eve's apples; seek-no- furthers"; "up slippery steeps to barren heights, where stood none to welcome;" "the bench, the bed, the grave;" "truth comes in with darkness." These at least set the tone for the story.

Melville was, of course, no stranger to his time, with its revival of legends of lonely men--the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, Peter Schlemihl, or to contemporary American artists--lonely men, who with a penchant for seeking out truth or reality, wrote books about lonely men engaged in a similar quest. On May 1, 1841, the year of Melville's starting his long voyage on the "Acushnet," Nathaniel Hawthorne, then a participant in the communal experiment at Brook Farm after twelve years of comparative isolation in a "haunted chamber" in Salem, confided to his journal: "is truth a fantasy which we are to pursue forever and never grasp?"² In the autumn of 1850, Melville, then author of five books about quests for reality and well along on a sixth, met Hawthorne and, at some time during the next ten days, wrote a review of Mosses,³ in which he praised the work and its author highly, spoke of his own fascination with the intellectual depth of the stories as revealed in a "blackness ten times black," and implied a comparison with Shakespeare's "flashings-forth of the intuitive truth; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality."⁴ He confessed that this Hawthorne had "dropped germinous seeds into [his] soul,"⁵ and identified him with that character in Mosses who came to the Intelligence Office in search of truth. In a letter to Hawthorne in April, 1851,⁶ he gave several lines to Clifford Pyncheon, who, isolated for years in prison like Bartleby in the Dead Letter Office, tried vainly, like Bartleby, after release, to be one of a group. The scene in which Clifford attempted to throw himself from a window to join a procession of men in the street, Melville mentioned specifically as an impressive one and observed that Clifford is "full of an awful truth throughout" and represents "a certain tragic phase of humanity . . . the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiased, native, and profounder workings."⁷ He went on in the letter to praise Hawthorne himself for his ability to say "No." By the spring of 1851 he had read Twice-Told Tales, with its Young Goodman Brown, who went on a forest journey to know something of a truth about life, experienced it, and remained to his death a lonely and gloomy man.

On October 14, 1844, Melville arrived in Boston after his four years of whaling. Five days later, Ralph Waldo Emerson, another of his lonely contemporaries, signed an agreement in Boston for the publication of his Essays, Second Series, which appeared during the month. In one of these, "Experience," he dealt with the problem of reality more earnestly than he ever had before. Almost three years had elapsed since the death of his six-year-old boy, and bitter grief was still stalking him, its stimulus concealed in the mysterious combination of nature's bright promise and her subsequent denial, the theme of the first part of "Threnody" and the subject of a long paragraph in "Nature" of the new book of essays, where the thought expressed is remarkably like that of Melville in "The Piazza":

. . . there is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. . . . Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere.⁸

Early in "The Piazza" is an unacknowledged line from "The Problem."

It is quite evident that Melville had been attracted to Emerson before he wrote "Bartleby" in 1853. In a letter to Evert Duyckinck of March 3, 1849, he speaks of having been agreeably disappointed in hearing Emerson lecture, as he had, from report, expected "transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish," but had, to his surprise, found the man "intelligible" and marked by that "something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly [sic] perceptible."⁹ He denies oscillating "in Emerson's rainbow," as, it would seem Duyckinck had charged, preferring rather, he says, "to hang in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing."¹⁰ Before hearing the lecture he had "glanced at a book of his [Emerson's] once in Putnam's store." How much of Emerson he had read before writing "Bartleby" we do not know, but his impression in 1849 of his New England contemporary was most favorable: "a brilliant fellow," he calls him; "an uncommon man;" "for the sake of the argument," he suggests, "let us call him a fool;--then had I rather be a fool than a wise man."¹¹ Some other aspects of Emerson's thought than those I have mentioned would have been to Melville's taste; some of them, whether from Emerson or elsewhere, have a place in "Bartleby": his theory, for instance, of the double-consciousness--a man's ability to respond to a worldly and to a spiritual prompting--the worst feature of which, Emerson said in 1842, was that the two "really show very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other . . .;"¹² his attraction to the problems of Fate, of skepticism, and of the human will; his earnestness about absolute sincerity; his sympathetic attitude towards nonconformity, and his abiding interest in the relationship between the individual and the group.

Less than six months after Melville landed in Boston in 1844, Henry Thoreau went to Walden Pond, where, by living in solitude, away from men's institutions and their "lives of quiet desperation," he hoped to penetrate the mysteries of nature and life, if there were mysteries, and, before he proceeded too far in what life is supposed to be, find out what it really is. He would

drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world. . . . When we are unhurried and wise [he said], we perceive that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality.¹³

So far as we know, Melville never met Thoreau. He did, however, read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), and, in his story "The Apple-Tree Table," left some evidence of having looked into Walden.¹⁴ One critic has even seen enough resemblance between the two men to identify Thoreau with Bartleby.¹⁵

The name of Edgar Poe began to be linked with that of Melville as early at least as October, 1852, when a reviewer for Graham's Magazine said disparagingly of Pierre: "The author has attempted seemingly to combine in it the peculiarities of Poe and Hawthorne. . . ."¹⁶ And immediately upon the appearance of "Bartleby" in Putnam's Magazine (November-December 1853), a note in The Literary World's column of "Literature, Books of the Week, Etc." mentioned the story as a "Poeish tale."¹⁷ The Piazza Tales, after publication in mid-May, 1856, called out one allusion at least to Poe, that in connection with "Bartleby" and "The Bell Tower": "Perhaps the admirers of Edgar Poe," said the reviewer, "will see, or think they see, an imitation of his concentrated gloom in the wild, weird tale, called 'Bartleby'; in 'The Bell Tower,' as well, there is a broad tinge of German mysticism, not free from some resemblance to Poe."¹⁸ This trend of discovering similarities in the works of the two men continues still in the critical study of Poe by Patrick F. Quinn, who dwells at length on several definite likenesses between The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and Moby-Dick;¹⁹ in Harry Levin's The Power of Blackness,²⁰ dedicated to tracing veins of darkness in their intricate relationships through the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville; and in Edward H. Rosenberry's Melville and the Comic Spirit, in which the author states that the association of the narrator with the main character in "Bartleby" is not unlike that in Poe's "Raven."²¹ It may be added, however, that, though Poe and Melville can make a reader feel and share the desperate loneliness of a man, whether he be a "man of the crowd" or a Bartleby, the latter's loneliness has no terror in it but rather disciplined dignity. That Bartleby is Melville's double, Richard Chase suggests,²² Levin asserts, ²³ and Leo Marx seeks to demonstrate in detail.²⁴ Chase identifies the lawyer or narrator of "Bartleby" with the "successful, workaday, bureaucratized world, of the individual for whom the inner spiritual life becomes an obsessive object of contemplation"²⁵ and then, conditionally, with Melville himself; Marx, with a material-minded Wall Street society. Levin speaks of him as "an affable foil for his antisocial employee."²⁶ There is a strong possibility, it seems to me, that narrator and Bartleby are the two parts of one self, as the two William Wilsons of Poe's story are. But more of this later.

Whatever similarities may exist between the works of Poe and those of Melville, Melville makes no mention of his elder contemporary, not even when he inscribes his 1859 edition of Poe "To My Wife New Years Day--1861." William Gilman makes clear, however, that there had been opportunities between 1847 and 1849 for the two authors to meet at the Saturday evening parties of a mutual friend, Evert Duyckinck;²⁷ and Merrell Davis argues that it is quite possible that Melville heard Poe lecture in New York on the evening of February 3, 1848, on "The Cosmogony of the Universe" or saw a report of the lecture in the New York Tribune or a review of it in the February 12 issue of The Literary World, to which he subscribed.²⁸ Levin interestingly conjectures that when Melville signed his review of Mosses pseudonymously, "A Virginian," he may have had Poe in mind as one of "a plurality of men of Genius" in America mentioned in his article, or that when he wrote the epitaph to Bulkington the year before Poe's demise, he may have been thinking of Poe.²⁹

There are, as I have indicated above, reasons for thinking of "Bartleby" as the story of a divided self. The "double self" was no stranger to the thought of the Romantic period generally, sharply differentiating as it did the material and the spiritual natures of man; or to Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau in particular. Irving and Poe gave the concept literary form: the former in "The Doppelgänger" (1835); the latter in "William Wilson" (1839). Emerson engaged himself from 1833 to 1850 with the problem of the double consciousness of man and presented his views with force and vividness in "Experience" and "Fate." In the year preceding the publication of "William Wilson," Hawthorne wrote in his notebook:

A perception, for a moment, of one's eventual and moral self, as if it were another person,--the observant faculty being separated, and looking intently at the qualities of the character. There is a surprise when this happens,--this getting out of one's self,-- and the observer sees how queer a fellow he is.³⁰

In 1854, Thoreau announced a similar thought, in the chapter "Solitude" of Walden:

I . . . am sensible to a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However, intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; . . . This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.³¹

Emerson's theory of the double-consciousnessness is applicable to the situation in "Bartleby," as are the observations of Hawthorne and Thoreau.

And "Bartleby" is reminiscent in many details of Poe's "William Wilson": in each work the worldly aspect of the self is narrator and opens the story with a self- characterization; the double serves as foil, in coping with whom the narrator unwittingly and often ironically displays his own weaknesses; though seemingly inferior, the double has a true superiority or ascendancy of which the narrator slowly becomes aware; the narrator works out his strategy against his double with what he considers striking ingenuity, but, as he learns, it is by no means uniformly successful; the double's superiority in his relations with the narrator is due in part to his unassuming nature, his quiet austerity, and his calm speech; the narrator is so harried at times by his double as to desert him temporarily (In "William Wilson" the double follows the narrator and appears in times of crisis; in "Bartleby" the narrator is urged by his professional and social group to return and dispose of his double and, at last, in order to free himself, abandons the double to the mercy of the group). In each story little is known of the double's past; the narrator is instrumental in bringing about the death of the double (in "William Wilson" by violence; in "Bartleby" through social precaution and social pressure); the double, though he perishes, leaves a distinct impression on the narrator of his worth.

Students of Melville know that, with the publication of "Bartleby" in November and December, 1853, he suddenly forsook the form of fiction-writing in which he had engaged for seven years for another, and that, except for Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man, made no return; that after three years of the short-story he switched to poetry, much of which he published privately. They know, too, of difficulties along the way--of financial burdens, for example, which Melville could allay only by borrowing money or by prostituting his art, with its truth, to entertainment of a public not favorably impressed by that truth. Even at the age of thirty he had begun to realize his dilemma: Mardi had failed with the public; Redburn had succeeded. He pointed out in a letter to Evert Duyckinck the crux of the trouble that was to trail him:

"I hope I shall never write such a book [as Redburn] again--Tho' when a poor devil writes with duns all round him, & looking over the back of his chair-- . . . what can you expect of that poor devil? What but a beggarly 'Redburn'? And when he attempts anything higher--God help & save him! for it is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow balloon--for . . . a hollow purse makes a poet sink--witness 'Mardi'. . . . What a madness & anguish it is, that an author can never--under no conceivable circumstances--be at all frank with his readers.³²

Melville seemed so obsessed with the idea of frankness and truth in communication that he was sensitive to a slight deficiency of these virtues in two artists for whom he had the greatest respect, Solomon and Shakespeare: "the former," he complained, "a little managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism,"³² and the latter tolerated that "muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizebethan [sic] day. . . . "³³ And the great weakness he portrays in the otherwise noble Starbuck is submission to an orthodoxy that shackles him and prevents his proceeding to a truth which threatens to break upon his mind as he contemplates the doubloon.

In Melville's statement to Duyckinck about Redburn we get a view, four years in advance of "Bartleby," of a situation in the American literary world of the eighteen-fifties: that of the author who finds himself in pressing need of what Thoreau called the "true necessaries and means of life" but who rebels at the thought of acquiring them by prostituting his art of the demands of an untrained public taste. We have a suggestion, too, of writers who protest the circumstances but who continue to produce what the public will pay for. It is but a step from these to an artist who, having the probity and courage to refuse compromise, breeds such conflict with the physical and social self of which he is a part as to induce tragic consequences. One self must yield or perish. And back of this literary situation is a more profound one of which the literary is but a manifestation. This involves the individual in his relations to the group and what happens to the individual when he is convinced that the group-way of living is false and hollow and unwilling to acknowledge dark and sinister and even despairing natural aspects of man's condition; "this world of lies," as Melville calls it, where "Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands."³⁴ Emerson had written of the scorn that attends the self-reliant individual and had warned:³⁵ "For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure." His individual, however, was inhabitant of a basically positive universe and could entertain hope. But dare one face and utter the truth symbolized by the cankerous worm feeding on the starry flower, or by a dead wall--the truth that birth itself conceals the germ of annihilation. And can the individual who inclines toward such views have the strength to retain the mildness, firmness, honesty, calmness, and dignity that should characterize a man? The story "Bartleby" has as broad an application as I am suggesting here.

But the matter of the story seems personally applicable, too. As I have said earlier, the attorney-narrator and Bartleby may represent an antagonistic double, at least imaginatively, by means of which Melville can establish his view of the ironical situation of the artist and of the individual in a paradoxical world. The double-self may be Melville.

In 1851 he was airing his views to Hawthorne as he had two years previously to Duyckinck:

. . . Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth--and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister. . . . Dollars damn me; . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.³⁶

What the artist in Melville complains of here is exemplified in a letter addressed to him by Charles F. Briggs in the spring of 1854 from the office of Putnam's Monthly:

I am very loth to reject the Two Temples [a sketch Melville had submitted to the journal] as the article contains some exquisitely fine description, and some pungent satire, but my editorial experience compels me to be very cautious in offending the religious sensibilities of the public, and the moral of the Two Temples would array against us the whole power of the pulpit, to say nothing of Brown, and the congregation of Grace Church.³⁷

Between 1851 and 1856 the dilemma that Melville had earlier grown aware of through the contrasting response of the public to Mardi and Redburn became, in the words of Raymond Weaver, "most crucial." In March, 1851, Melville informed Evert Duyckinck of "the twilight of [his] eyes,"³⁸ an affliction suffered, too, by Bartleby. In June, while in the throes of seeing Moby-Dick through the press he wrote Hawthorne concerning what he feared was a decline in his literary ability; he had come, he said, "to the inmost leaf of the bulk and . . . shortly the flower must fall to the mould."³⁹ He and his family had Christmas dinner with Pittsfield friends, the Morewoods, and three days later Mrs. Morewood expressed her concern about Herman in a letter to George Duyckinck:

I hear that he is now so engaged in a new work [Pierre] as frequently not to leave his room till dark in the evening when he for the first time during the whole day partakes of solid food--he must therefore write under a state of morbid excitement which will soon injure his health.--I laughed at him somewhat and told him that the recluse life he was leading made his city friends think he was slightly insane--he replied that long ago he came to the same conclusion himself. . . .⁴⁰

She observed in the same letter that her husband disliked "many of Mr. Hermans opinions and religious views" and she expressed pity "that Mr. Melville so often in conversation uses irreverent language--he will not be popular in society here on that account. . . ."

Henry A. Murray's diagnosis of Melville in his Introduction to Pierre⁴¹ is quite in keeping with Sarah Morewood's impression and implies that Melville, while writing the book, was approaching the moment when he must make a decision about continuing his literary career. Murray compares him to an explorer who arrives at the Pole, "'to whose barenness only'" his compass points: "'there, the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.'" In such a state, Murray writes, "it is impossible for a man to reconcile this world with his own soul, and impossible to make a clean decision for one or the other. . . ."⁴² This is, of course, the situation of the narrator of "Bartleby," who, again and again, excuses his indeciveness in not firing the scrivener: "resolved as I had been," he says, "to dismiss him when I entered my office; nevertheless I felt something superstitious knocking at my heart and forbidding me to carry out my purpose. . . ." And, on another occasion he explains his vacilitation with: "Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine, touching the scrivener, had all been predestinated from eternity. . . . Others may have loftier parts to enact, but my mission in the world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to remain."

By 1853 Melville's mother, her family (the Gansevoorts), Lemuel Shaw and his friends, and Herman's brother Allan, alarmed about Melville's health, were doing all they could to divorce the physical-social Melville from the artist-Melville. They pulled every political string they knew to procure for him some appointment that would take him away from his writing. The wife recorded in the memoir she kept of her husband: "We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in spring of 1853."⁴³ In April of that year, his mother, urging her brother Peter to use his influence in Herman's behalf, wrote that "Herman would be greatly benefited by a sojourn abroad, he would then be compelled to more intercourse with his fellow creatures. It would very materially renew & strengthen his body & mind."⁴⁴

In the light of Melville's literary, social, and philosphical views, his skepticisms, his disillusionments in his quest for reality, the failure of Pierre, and the pressures brought to bear to separate him from his calling, it is little wonder that by 1853 Melville-farmer-and-family-man should be desperately trying to decide whether to withdraw himself from Melville-artist-and-individual to look intently "at the qualities of his character"; to get out of himself to see "how queer a fellow he is." In the story the narrator does not himself have his double remanded to prison and to death, but he does permit this to be done. His respect for Bartleby, however, persists; he can think of him in death as "with kings and counsellors," and, conscious of the ambiguities and inconsistencies in the very nature of things, the source of Bartleby's tragedy, his own, and that of mankind generally, speak pity for both Bartleby and humanity.

--Indiana University.

Notes

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