In 1853, six years after Brook Farm shut its doors, one year after Hawthorne published The Blithedale Romance, and one year before Thoreau published Walden, a friend of Hawthorne, best known as the author of novels about sea voyages, published in Putnam's Monthly Magazine an extraordinary story about business. In "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," Herman Melville took his readers on a journey to a world as exotic as the South Sea islands he had celebrated in Typee and Omoo--the world of a law firm in lower Manhattan.
In the twentieth century, literary critics and scholars have tended to emphasize meanings that lie below the surface in "Bartleby," but they have missed the surface itself. In their eagerness to explore the depths, they have missed the point that "Bartleby" is a story about business. Indeed, it is probably the subtlest and most suggestive story about business that any American has ever written. Among the dissenting voices of this period, none is more memorable than the voice of Melville's forlorn protagonist.
On the "superficial" level that most critics ignore--which is to say, on the level that immediately engages the reader--the subject of "Bartleby" is employee relations, specifically the relationship between a baffled manager and a staggeringly uncooperative subordinate. The story is narrated by Bartleby's employer. This gentleman introduces himself as "one of those unambitious lawyers who never address a jury, or in any way draw down public applause; but, in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds,"--in short, a man who has based his life upon "a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best."
"All who know me," the attorney boasts, "consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat; for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion."
The attorney manages a staff of three in an office "not . . . very arduous, but very pleasantly remunerative." His troubles begin when business takes so sharp a turn for the better that he finds it necessary to enlarge his staff.
Enter Bartleby--"a motionless young man . . . pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn"--exactly the job applicant who will command the interest of a manager whose deepest motive, no matter what he might claim, is to find a candidate who will not make trouble.
Bartleby begins as an exemplary employee. "As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents." What more could any manager want, especially when the new employee combines such splendid productivity with a character "so singularly sedate"?
A manager may expect the rebellion of a disgruntled, immature, or hotheaded employee, but few managers ever anticipate the rebellion of a reliable employee. In Bartleby's case, the rebellion comes without warning, and it announces itself "in a singularly mild, firm voice . . . [without] the least uneasiness, anger, impatience, or impertinence." There is no provocation. On a day like any other, the attorney gives an order like any other order and receives in return the astounding reply, "I would prefer not to."
Unlike a modern executive, the boss in "Bartleby" cannot consult a guide that promises to tell "How to Handle the Problem Employee." He must rely on his own instincts and experience, but nothing in his experience has prepared him for a gentle rebel. "I was turned into a pillar of salt," he confesses, "standing at the head of my seated column of clerks."
Even in circumstances that he regards as "unprecedented and violently unreasonable," the attorney does not rush to judgment. The "wonderful mildness" of Bartleby, the utter absence of anything that resembles insolence or hostility, causes his employer to tolerate behavior that he would not accept from a subordinate who displayed the least hint of animosity.
Any manager who has wavered over the fate of a marginal employee will sympathize with Melville's narrator as he flounders in an agony of indecision and rationalization. Irritation at the challenge to his authority is softened by pity and an appreciation of Bartleby's value to the business: "Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; . . . He is useful to me. I can get along with him."
But the list of tasks that Bartleby prefers not to undertake grows steadily longer, and the manager finds himself scheming to provoke the outright defiance that would justify outright dismissal. A trivial order is given, Bartleby prefers not to comply, and his employer imagines that the moment of truth has arrived:
"You will not."
"I prefer not."
Passive resistance has never been more perfect. Bartleby never refuses, but he prefers not to proofread his copy, prefers not to run errands, prefers not to say anything that might clarify or justify his rebellion. Asked to be "a little reasonable," he answers honestly that "at present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable." At last he announces that he prefers to do no more copying--prefers to do no work at all.
The bafflement of the manager in this encounter is the bafflement of a business mind brought into contact with a mind that declines to attend to business. But it is more. It is the bafflement of a good man--a reasonable, civilized, and charitable man--brought into contact with a spirit of suicidal negation. The comedy moves inexorably to a tragic conclusion.
In the end, reasoning that "since he will not quit me, I must quit him," the attorney moves his office to another location. Evicted by the new landlord, Bartleby "persists in haunting the building generally," until at last he is imprisoned as a vagrant. In jail, predictably, he prefers not to eat, although the attorney bribes a jailer to bring him food. As others might succumb to age or disease, Bartleby succumbs to his preferences.
Bartleby's rebellion is absolute. It begins as a rebellion against business and business values, but it goes much farther. The revolt against petty office responsibilities turns into a revolt against life itself. The refusal to attend to business charms almost everyone who reads the story, but Melville forces his readers to face the horror beneath the charm: The refusal to attend to business is a refusal to live.
Bartleby is a pure type--the perfect expression of what the twentieth century has come to call "a negative attitude." No guidance or counseling could save him; no modern principles of enlightened personnel management could change his fate. In the end, his employer can only say with a sigh, "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity." Melville seems to sigh with him.
An examination of other sources shows that financial worries were a major cause of anguish and frustration to Melville in this period. "Dollars damn me," he complained in a letter to Hawthorne in 1851, as he struggled to complete Moby Dick. His early novels had sold well, but he feared that posterity would remember him only as a "man who lived among the cannibals." What he felt "most moved to write," he realized with increasing bitterness, was "banned" because it would not sell. "Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."
The anger here contrasts strikingly with the good humor about money that permeates the early pages of Moby Dick. Long before Ahab limps onto the scene, Melville introduces a business perspective through his narrator, an ordinary sailor named Ishmael, who amiably acknowledges the role of monetary factors in his life: Whenever he is depressed, Ishmael tells us, he goes to sea, but "I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it." No, Ishmael explains, he always goes to sea as a sailor,"because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of."
The distinction between the sailor who is paid and the passenger who pays inspires Melville to indulge in a bit of genial philosophizing. "The act of paying," Ishmael declares, "is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills.... Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!"
An attitude of amused tolerance toward business still seems to prevail when Ishmael is interviewed by Bildad and Peleg, the owners of the whaling ship Pequod. The Quaker Bildad, Melville explains, had "come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends." The tone is not cheerful, however, when, one quarter of the way through the novel, speaking to the reader in his own voice rather than Ishmael's, Melville considers the task that remains: "Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!" he pleads. A few pages earlier, when Ahab ponders what he must do to keep his crew motivated, the word "cash" becomes a threat and an obsession: "I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash--aye, cash, they may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab."
It is necessary, of course, to distinguish Melville's attitudes toward money from the attitudes of the characters he invents. But there is little doubt that the business aspects of writing--the pressure to convert words into cash--were increasingly oppressive to him.