R. Bruce Bickley, Jr. The Method of Melville's Short Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975. 142 pp. $7.75.

William B. Dillingham. Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977. 390 pp. $16.50.

Marvin Fisher. Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. 216 pp. $12.50.

When some cultural historian of the next century, blessed with a longer critical perspective than that we now possess, charts the shifting course of Herman Melville's literary reputation, one of his or her most interesting chapters is bound to be the account of responses over the years to Melville's magazine pieces of 1853-1856. Although Melville had written on occasion for the Duyckincks' Literary World and Cornelius Mathews' Yankee Doodle during the 1840's, he continued to resist overtures from other periodicals until the utter failure of Pierre (1852) kept him from placing a new book-length manuscript with Harper & Brothers in the spring of 1853. Later in that same year, burdened with debts and in need of another source of income, he began publishing anonymous stories and sketches in both Harper's New Monthly Magazine and its younger rival, Putnam's Monthly Magazine. From contemporary documents we know that Melville's authorship of certain pieces--especially those carried in Putnam's Monthly--was more or less an open secret in literary circles, and that "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "The Encaneadas" in particular provoked much favorable discussion. Between November of 1853 and May of 1856 fourteen of Melville's tales and sketches appeared in the two periodicals along with Israel Potter, the longer narrative that George Palmer Putnam brought out in book form in 1855 following its serialization in his magazine. In addition Melville also submitted "The Two Temples," which Putnam and his editor declined, and composed "The Piazza," written as a new title piece for The Piazza Tales (1856), a volume of four hundred and thirty-one pages that reprinted five of Melville's contributions to Putnam's Monthly through December of 1855. When Melville proposed this book to the New York firm of Dix & Edwards, which had bought the magazine from Putnam, he was already at work on The Confidence-Man (1857) and was no longer writing magazine fiction. But his financial condition, which had steadily worsened since purchase of his Pittsfield farm in 1850, was approaching a crisis in the spring of 1856 when The Piazza Tales appeared, and he hoped that its publication would soon bring in some much-needed "returns."¹

Although contemporary reviewers of The Piazza Tales hailed the book as a welcome recovery from the aberrations of Melville's Pierre, the volume sold slowly in spite of its generally favorable notices.² The years 1856 and 1857 were unpropitious for the book trade. Dix & Edwards dissolved partnership in 1857, apparently without paying Melville any royalties whatsoever for either The Piazza Tales or The Confidence-Man, and the plates of both volumes were sold for scrap after failing to attract bids at a publishers' auction, in 1857; as Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman remark, "no one would risk a dollar on Melville."³ Destruction of the plates of course precluded reissue of either volume, and not until the Melville revival of the 1920's was there a complete resetting of The Piazza Tales. During the sixty-five years intervening, while Melville's name was virtually forgotten by the general public, a number of his individual stories continued to enjoy a kind of subterranean reputation--something like that of Moby-Dick. Two of them, "The Lightning-Rod Man" and "The Bell-Tower," turned up in anthologies, reprinted in each case from the 1856 text of The Piazza Tales;⁴ others were long remembered from their original appearance in magazines. Henry Mills Alden, the veteran editor of Harper's (1869-1919), told Melville's literary executor, Arthur Stedman, that "Cock- A-Doodle-Doo!" (1853) was "about the best short story he ever read,"⁵ and in 1880 an anonymous contributor to the Atlantic Monthly named "Bartleby the Scrivener" as one of the articles in Putnam's that had excited his "interest, curiosity, and wonder" nearly thirty years before.⁶ A dozen years later, when most readers may well have forgotten who Bartleby was, an illustrator for the 1892 deluxe reprint of Prue and I by George William Curtis provided a portrait of the character to accompany an allusion by Curtis.⁷ And still later, in 1898, Henry James, writing for a London magazine, recalled his "very young pleasure" in "the prose, as mild and easy as an Indian summer in the woods," of Melville, Curtis, and Donald Grant Mitchell as he read their work long before in "the charming Putnam" of "the early fifties."⁸

Perhaps it is too much to suggest, on the basis of such occasional comments, that Melville might have been recognized much earlier as one of the masters of American short fiction had Stedman's 1892 edition of his selected works included a volume of the magazine pieces.⁹ But the times were not yet ripe in the 1890's for reassessing any aspect of Melville's literary work, and new printings of the stories were still thirty years in the future. Only after Raymond Weaver had published the first booklength biography--Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic--in 1921 did the stories become readily available to readers and critics. The Piazza Tales first reappeared in print in 1922 as a volume in the new collected edition of Melville published by a British firm, Constable and Company, and in that same year Princeton University Press brought together Melville's previously uncollected magazine pieces in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches by Herman Melville. In 1924 "The Two Temples," previously unpublished, was first printed from manuscript in BILLY BUDD and Other Prose Pieces, a volume added to the Constable edition with Weaver as editor. The appearance of these volumes and the reprinting of "Benito Cereno," "Bartleby," and "The Encantadas" (along with Billy Budd and a provocative introduction by Weaver) in Shorter Novels of Herman Melville (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928) not only drew attention to Melville's shorter fiction but also stimulated scholarly and critical interest in this phase of his career. The earliest investigations of Melville's use of source materials in his magazine pieces soon followed: Harold H. Scudder's "Melville's Benito Cereno and Captain Delano's Voyages" in 1928 and articles by Leon Howard and Russell Thomas on "The Encantadas" in 1931 and 1932.

The 1940's brought other new developments. The first interpretative essay devoted to a single magazine story or sketch, "Herman Melville's 'Tartarus of Maids'" by E. H. Eby, was published in 1940; small armies of close readers have since followed Eby's lead, explicating other tales and filling professional journals with reports of what they had seen there by way of imagery, symbolism, and allegory ("I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest . . .").¹⁰ Influential new books also began to appear in the 1940's--Egbert Oliver's annotated edition of The Piazza Tales (1948), Richard Chase's Selected Tales and Poems of Herman Melville (1949), and Jay Leyda's Complete Short Stories of Herman Melville (1949)--and by the 1950's "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby the Scrivener" had become standard fare in college anthologies. Commentators on the various stories continued to approach them as though they were enigmas to be solved; by pursuing Melville's indirection they sought to find direction out. Leyda was in effect summing up the first decade of interpretation in 1949 when he wrote of the stories as

an artist's resolution of that constant contradiction--between the desperate need to communicate and the fear of revealing too much. In these stories the contradiction is expressed on various levels of tension--the fiercer the pull, the higher the accomplishment. There is also a level. closer to the surface, of game, for in "The Tartarus of Maids" Melville gives one the impression of seeing how close he can dance to the edge of nineteenth century sanctities without being caught.¹¹

Beginning with the decade of the 1940's, there were notable achievements in Melville scholarship that by the 1950's were affecting the tenor of discussion concerning the short fiction. For a long time, as we now recognize, Melville's readers had assumed that much of his writing was transparently autobiographical. His own contemporaries, including the Melville family itself, took such books as Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket to be virtual transcripts of personal experience, and some readers then and now saw elements of Pierre and the magazine fiction in much the same way. Biographers as late as Arthur Stedman in the 1890's and even Raymond Weaver in the 1920's not only shared this conception but also echoed another idea traceable as far back as the contemporary reviews of Mardi and Moby-Dick: that indulgence in theological and metaphysical speculation had been Melville's downfall as a popular writer. After World War II, however, the publication of new biographical research steadily undermined the easy assumptions of earlier years about the supposed reflection of Melville's life in his longer works. The old tendency to read the stories biographically had nevertheless persisted, along with a continuing penchant for emphasizing their religious and philosophical dimensions. But criticism of the 1950's and after has grown increasingly more preoccupied with methodology, and for most recent commentators the question of what Melville has to say in the shorter fiction is inseparable from how he says it--from the form and technique of his narrative presentation. Thus the sources of a given story, whether in personal experience or in literary borrowings, may seem less important to the interpreter than its point of view and overall tone; Melville's epistemology may bulk larger than his metaphysics; the issues at stake in "Benito Cereno," for example, written six years before the Civil War¹²--may be the immediate social and political problems of Melville's day rather than cosmic good and evil, as earlier critics had supposed. Whether these new approaches to the shorter fiction have gone too far, have merely reflected changing fashions in modern criticism, or have at last uncovered the realities of Melville's own outlook in the 1850's remains to be seen. Our cultural historian of the next century may well decide that, in one way or another, they have in fact done all of these things.

In 1960 Richard Harter Fogle, who had published essays on "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno," and "The Encantadas" during the 1950's, incorporated his earlier articles in the first book-length treatment of the entire body of Melville's magazine fiction: Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). Fogle's readings of the individual stories take account of the best work that had been done over the first four decades of the Melville revival; such a synthesis was still feasible in relatively short compass at the beginning of the 1960's. Ten years ago, in tracing what readers and critics since Melville's day had said about a single story, I referred to Fogle's book as "the most comprehensive of recent discussions" and went on to place Fogle himself "among the least doctrinaire" of those critics who have dealt with the short fiction. In his readings, I continued (and I would still affirm),

he draws freely upon the insights of earlier commentators. . . . His distinctive approach grows out of his conviction that Melville's writing embraces several levels or layers of significance--among them the biographical--which for him are not mutually exclusive. . . . [His] general conception . . . has all the virtues and possible dangers of an all-inclusive eclecticism, [but] Fogle differs from most of his predecessors and contemporaries alike in a highly important way: because of his governing concern with the aesthetic values of Melville's writing, he repeatedly and rightly insists that to dwell solely on any component part is to risk doing less than justice to the comprehensive artistic whole. On this count, unfortunately, most writers . . . up to the present, whether their preoccupation has been with the life of the author, his metaphysical outlook, or other hidden treasure of their own devising, must plead guilty in some degree.¹³

Both in its own right and as a document of historical record, Melville's Shorter Tales stands as a landmark in Melville studies. Writing when he did, Fogle was cautiously determined not to overrate the tales "in proportion as they were underrated in the past"; indeed he pronounced them "very uneven in quality." "Melville," he declared, is "not a craftsman in the ordinary meaning of the term. . . . He is too heavy for the delicate fabric of the kind of tale he is trying to write; what he really has to say is at odds with the limits he has chosen to observe" (p. 12). But this conservative assessment of the stories and the artistry of their author has been vigorously challenged in commentary appearing since Fogle's book--most eloquently, I should say, by Warner Berthoff in The Example of Melville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), a book that has done much to redress earlier neglect of Melville's considerable achievement in prose over the forty years between Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. As Fogle had surveyed the whole range of the magazine fiction, so Berthoff in turn placed the work of 1853-1856 in the context of Melville's entire development as a writer, dealing briefly but incisively with individual pieces and praising "the high level of craftsmanship apparent through all this magazine work" (p. 59). Berthoff's judgment has been far more influential on subsequent treatment of the stories than the more detailed stylistic and structural analysis provided by another book of the 1960's: Melvilles Erzählungen, an untranslated monograph by Klaus Ensslen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1966). Ensslen's work is mentioned in only one of the three books of the 1970's under review here: The Method of Melville's Short Fiction (1975) by R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., which cites it without comment in a bibliographical footnote (p. x).

"Like Berthoff," Bickley writes in his Preface, "I am convinced that Melville's publications between 1853 and 1856 in fact show more discipline, if not a higher level of craftsmanship, than did the earlier novels" (p. xii). Like Fogle, he surveys all of the stories of these years, and like Ensslen he is particularly concerned with their style and structure. At the same time he is fully aware of other work of the 1960's and early 1970's, observing in his Preface that since the publication of Fogle's book in 1960, "scholarship on Melville's short fiction has proliferated almost too rapidly for acknowledgment and review, much less for proper evaluation. . . . Despite its volume and resourcefulness, however, I am convinced that the short story scholarship remains inadequate; hence this book." Its objectives, he continues, are to look specifically at Melville's experiments with literary techniques, the influences that affected these techniques, and the ways in which Melville's fictional methods "shaped his complex vision artistically" (pp. ix-xi).¹⁴

When Melville first turned from book-length fiction to shorter tales, Bickley believes, he used models such as Lamb's essays and the stories of Irving and Hawthorne for his own experiments with structure, narration, and characterization. In "Bartleby," for example, "Irving's presence is chiefly felt in the narrative technique and Hawthorne's in the story's metaphysical dimensions" (p. 27). Bickley's discussion of "'Bartleby' as Paradigm" is as rich as any chapter in the book, providing an effective introduction to the "two basic narrative personae" that he goes on to distinguish in the stories as a whole. A key passage characterizes these two personae as

the genial, sentimental anecdotist who enjoys painting sketches of character or social settings, or writing familiar essays about himself, and . . . the ironic protagonist who, in a sense, becomes the victim of his own story. Works in the first category include "Jimmy Rose" and "I and My Chimney," while 'The Fiddler" and "Cock-A-Doodle Doo!" feature the second type of narrative pose. "Bartleby" is paradigmatically significant because it illustrates both basic narrative postures: the lawyer is genial and an engaging anecdotist, but he is at the same time an ironic figure of incomplete perceptions. (p. 44)

Bickley's ensuing discussion is divided between examination of Melville's employment of "narrative personae" and "rhetorical irony" and--in the second half of his book--an extended study of the interrelation of "narrative form, epistemology, and vision" in the remaining pieces (p. 44). These are grouped either by structure (the three diptychs; the two third-person narratives; the ten sketches comprising "The Encantadas") or by theme ("The Happy Failure" and "The Piazza" as ironic "quest stories"). Each piece is under close examination only once, within whatever category it is assigned, without regard to dates of composition; here "chronology yields to methodology" (p. xii). The various classifications and juxtapositions are useful for purposes of comparative analysis, which is frequently illuminating. But none of the other stories receives the full-dress treatment accorded "Bartleby," and the ordering both of chapters and of material within chapters will strike some readers as arbitrary--particularly readers concerned with other aspects of the stories than their structural elements. In essence the book is another commentary on "Melvillean irony and narrative form," to borrow a phrase Bickley himself uses (p. xi, n. 3) in acknowledging his indebtedness to Paul Brodtkorb's Ishmael's White World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) and John Seelye's Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). But after all he has to say about "narrative form" in Melville, Bickley seems uneasy about the ultimate implications of "Melvillean irony." His discomfiture becomes especially obvious in the final chapters, those treating "form as vision." In these chapters the role of Melville's narrator is crucial--notably in discussion of "The Piazza" (1856), where Bickley locates "the real irony" of the piece in "the narrator's choosing to ignore the implications of his quest. . . . The quester lets Marianna keep her illusions, but his mistake lies in trying to keep his own as well. . . . [H]e would rather deny his discoveries than confront them and share them with others" (p. 129). In still broader tams, Bickley writes,

"The Piazza" also implies that the artist is denied final insight into the truth he would portray, in this respect the story as ironic quest parallels and subtly comments on the Piazza Tales and on Melville's short fiction as a whole. Even as Melville's narrators cannot define the "real" Bartleby, the truth about Cereno, or the ultimate meaning of the enchanted Galapagos, so must Melville acknowledge the limits of his own epistemology. As a study of the artist's ironic quest for the fairyland of art and for the realms of truth, "The Piazza" seems to represent Melville's whole career as a fiction-maker. (p. 126)

By this stage of his argument, through his discussion of narrative "methodology," Bickley has ostensibly cleared the ground for further definition of Melville's own stance as author and artist in relation to the roles of his various ironic narrators and protagonists. This, after all, is the ultimate engagement implied in Bickley's repeated use of such terms as Melville's "vision" and his reference to the "metaphysical dimensions" of Melville s stories. But the book stops short with discussion of "The Piazza," and a brief "Epilogue" fails, in my judgment, to keep that further engagement. Opening with purely conventional remarks about Melville's achievements in the short fiction, Bickley's "Epilogue" goes on to suggest only that the "vision" shaped by Melville's technical experiments with irony led him inevitably into an aesthetic and philosophical dead end with The Confidence-Man, where "indirection and theoretical irony" are carried "too far" (p. 133). Not until Billy Budd, begun some thirty years later, did Melville manage to recover his equilibrium as a story-teller, Bickley believes. He did so by returning to "the methods and themes of earlier days"--which is to say, by abandoning "the ironic confessional mode of his short stories, and the contradictory posing of The Confidence-Man" (p. 136). Perhaps so. But surely these controversial assertions seriously undermine Bickley's previous claim that through the methodological experiments of the middle fifties "Melville found new artistic strength" (p. 131). In his closing pages, instead of clinching the case for Melville's "continuing intellectual and artistic growth" that the Preface had envisioned (p. xii), Bickley thus draws back from the deeper abysses of "Melvillean irony," with its implication that "in this world of lies"--Melville's phrase of 1850--the ironic story-teller as well as his ironic protagonist "becomes the victim of his own story."

Given the work of Fogle and Bickley, is there justification for another book on Melville's short fiction? Marvin Fisher raises just this question in the Preface to his Going Under (1977), which describes the book as "an exercise" in both "cultural history and literary criticism." His answer is that he is meeting an unfulfilled need to emphasize the relation between Melville's stories and the culture of the period in which they were written. Comparing Melville himself with such story-tellers as James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson, Fisher values his tales primarily as apocalyptic criticism of "the moral and spiritual paralysis" of their time and place. They

reflect several very grave and distinctively American cultural dilemmas, and in the depths of their disillusionment suggest that mid-nineteenth- century America had betrayed the promises of its inception and fallen victim to its moral faults. They suggest apocalyptically that the social and political ideas of American life and the uniqueness and optimism of the American dream--rather than Melville's talent or intellect--were going under. (p. xi)

A subsequent paragraph explains another implication of the phrase "going under." Melville's social criticism, Fisher believes, was so drastic that to express his views openly would

dismay publishers and offend the majority of potential readers; thus, Melville devised a strategy . . . to publish some unpopular truths through the indirection of symbolism, allusion, and analogy. . . . He chose to go under as a literary strategy, to become our first major underground writer at a time when he could not even ascertain that there existed any significant readership capable of understanding or response. (p. xii)

In certain respects Fisher's book antedates Bickley's, though it appeared two years later. Fisher's vision of Melville as an "underground writer," deliberately challenging the social and political evils of his time, is a notion congenial to the American 1960's, when in fact a number of the component chapters were originally written and published. His conception of Melville's "literary strategy" shows minimal indebtedness to recent theorists of "Melvillean irony" such as Brodtkorb and Seelye, whose influence Bickley readily acknowledges, or to Edgar Dryden, whose analysis of "Hawthorne and His Mosses" is cited in Fisher's opening chapter (p. 2, n. 2) along with an essay by Seelye. In this aspect of the book I see a closer kinship between Fisher's approach and that of older critics: for example, Jay Leyda, in his Preface to Complete Stories, and Lawrance Thompson and William Charvat, who were writing on Melville in the 1950's. In Melville's Quarrel with God (1952) Thompson began with the premise that Melville "took wry and sly pleasure in the irony of disguising his riddle-answers behind the self-protective riddle--masks of his ingenious art; behind various subterfuges of rhetoric and symbol";¹⁵ Charvat, whom Fisher mentions twice in support of his two-fold notion of "going under" (pp. 72, 106), argued that Melville was subversive in treating both his materials and his readers. Thompson did not deal with the shorter fiction, but Charvat held that "under the surface" of the magazine pieces Melville turned their apparently sentimental themes into "devastating commentaries on the idea of progress and the defeat of individualism and the imagination."¹⁶ Fisher's book enlarges upon his own statement of the same basic thesis.

After an opening chapter on "Hawthorne and His Mosses," which Fisher reads as a self-portrait of the artist in America and a foreshadowing of the short stories in its "extravagant and audacious symbolism," "deceptively indirect narrative style," and "highly innovative use of allusion" (p. 12), Going Under discusses all of the tales and sketches except "The 'Gees," grouping them under six thematic headings. "The Piazza" and "The Encantadas" envision a "fallen world"; in them a major issue (and "a motif in most of Melville's stories") is that "where one stands determines his view of the world, of truth, and of reality, and his scale of values. . . . What he thinks he sees, however, may well be illusory. This concept of point of view as theme as well as technique not only connects Melville's separately published stories, but also joins him and his work with the twentieth century and constitutes a good part of his modernity" (p. 16). The three diptychs, which offer "a Pisgah view of Old World and New," Fisher takes up next as explicit social criticism. In "Temple First," for example, Melville "clearly describes the American Dream rendered nightmare by increasingly rigid social organization and materialistically rather than humanely ordered social forces" (p. 60). Again, although Eby's reading of "The Tartarus of Maids" as it appeared in Harper's "documents not only Melville's audacity but also the unsuspecting innocence and complacency of editor and audience," Fisher holds that Melville's "main aim" was in fact "to express imaginatively the emotional impact of what he felt to be a general crisis for humanity: the widespread existence of a mechanistic, life-deadening, freedom-denying set of values emphasized in America by increasing industrialization" (pp. 74-75). "The Bell-Tower," which "allegorizes mid-nineteenth-century America" (p. 98), links "The Tartarus of Maids" with "Benito Cereno" by bringing together "two very grave and distinctively American cultural dilemmas . . .--the dehumanizing quality of industrial labor and the denial of humanity inherent in chattel slavery" (p. 95).

The equation of the kind of wage slavery described in "The Tartarus of Maids" with the subhuman protagonist in "The Bell-Tower" or between "Bartleby" (who rebels against another kind of economic compulsion) and the slavery situation in "Benito Cereno" constitutes Melville's own version of "the hireling and the slave" argument used in the 1850s by such aggressive apologists for southern society as George Fitzhugh and William J. Grayson. Melville had announced this argument as early as Mardi and returned to it as late as Clarel. (pp. 103-104)

Fisher's vigorous analysis of "Benito Cereno" and its readers then and now is probably the high point of his book. For him it is "a remarkable study in the problems of perception" which has been badly mishandled by critics and classroom teachers (pp. 104-105). More than any other of the stories, it requires "a reader who can abandon the comfort of his social assumptions, relinquish the security of conventional wisdom, liberate himself from the confines of his culture, and gain the perspective of differing points of view" (pp. 106-107). Such readers did not begin to appear "until the 1950s," when with "the acceleration of the civil rights movement, the rise of black consciousness, and the published works of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Eldridge Cleaver" a few individuals began to recognize "that Babo is an underground hero. . . . Readers in the 1970s are better able to recognize the crippling deficiencies of Delano and Cereno and see Babo as the most fully developed example of manhood in the story--which itself becomes a kind of underground revenge tragedy" (pp. 108-109). Fisher's next two chapters treat "The Lightning-Rod Man," "The Apple-Tree Table," and "Jimmy Rose" as examinations of "aspects of Christianity in more subtle and covert terms than 'The Two Temples'" (p. 124) and group "The Fiddler," "The Happy Failure," and "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" as studies of "illusory failures and the failure of illusion." Although Fisher is not concerned with the genesis and development of either ideas or literary techniques in the course of Melville's magazine work, it seems somewhat strange to follow a chapter on three relatively late pieces with an analysis of three others that were probably the very earliest of the magazine stories. Here Fisher's touch appears much less decisive than it is in his unequivocal handling of "Benito Cereno," where he is equally sure of his reading and of the terms in which he wishes to present it.

The final chapter, "A House Divided," pairs another early story, "Bartleby," with a much later one, "I and My Chimney"; though Fisher admittedly finds it difficult to "offer a radically new or original interpretation" of either (p. 199), he regains his characteristic stride in concluding his book. Both tales as he reads them seem more relevant to cultural history than to literary criticism, and perhaps even more relevant for the social scientist. Melville's scrivener strikes Fisher as "an illustration of the Marxist concept of alienation" who "also fulfills Tocqueville's fearful prediction of the consequences of industrial employment in a burgeoning America (overlooking for the instant that the Wall Street office is not a factory but recognizing that it is as representationally American as the factory in 'The Tartarus of Maids')" (p. 181). In terms of "psychodynamics" Bartleby has become "incapacitated by having internalized the schism that frustrates authentic community, intellectual and emotional communication, and spiritual communion" (p. 192); he defends himself against society by what R. D. Laing calls "petrification" (p. 197). The narrator in a sense becomes Bartleby's double, and, though there is "no hint of a physical resurrection" for Bartleby himself, "there is a possibility that the narrator has accomplished in his record of mind, memory, and conscience the only immortality Bartleby was to have" (p. 199). As for "I and My Chimney," that story has "important implications which have not been adequately explained and a continuing relevance to the circumstances of American society which warrants further exploration" (p. 199) . Fisher rejects "the 'orthodox' interpretation" in terms of Melville's own biography, treats more sympathetically the "revisionist" reading as an explication of Melvillean epistemology, but ultimately concentrates on "the pattern of opposites and divisions" that he himself sees in the story (p. 200): church and state, states' rights and federalism, progressivism and conservatism, youth and age, new and old. "Put most simply, the chimney is the past" (p. 205). The wife, "ludicrously overdrawn," is the "new woman"; the old narrator is a "male chauvinist prig"; the bribable Hiram Scribe "seems a parody of Enlightenment rationalism." The old house of the story, like the American Union as Abraham Lincoln saw it, is "a house divided," and the troubled union of the ill-matched couple is "a fictional means of projecting these larger oppositions" that Fisher has identified (p. 206), divisions which have persisted in American society from Melville's day to our own.

On this note Fisher concludes his book, emphasizing in his final pages

the currency of the conflict that ultimately constitutes Melville's subject--a conflict in the American mind or character capable of crippling or immobilizing society, psychomachia become sociomachia. More profound and less sensational than the myriad schizoid characteristics of Poe's "House of Usher," Melville's tale of a house divided forecasts the moral paralysis, occasional flare-ups, and ultimate ruin of a domestic cold war--a fertile field for the kind of confidence man who would ask us to trust him to bring us together again. I wonder whether the increasing interest in Melville's short fiction is not due more to the half-realized awareness that his themes strike deep into the collective American psyche (to a level that makes them recurrently contemporary) than to the remarkably innovative technical means he employed. But both theme and technique ultimately served the same purpose: to project the other side of our assumptions and hopes, to deflate our vaunted superiority to Europe, and to assert our partiality and imperfection in what is from the start a fallen world of inevitable duplicity and recurrent deceptions. (pp. 212-213)

This representative passage effectively summarizes the argument of Going Under. There will probably never be a stronger presentation of the contemporary relevance, in cultural and social terms, of Melville's shorter fiction. Having said as much, I must nevertheless add my reservations about Fisher's book as about Bickley's: each is but a partial analysis of a subject as formidable as Melville's chimney and as difficult to reduce to any single formulation.

Before leaving Fisher's book I should like to consider briefly the treatment of Melville in another recent publication that points up issues raised by both Fisher and Bickley: The Feminization of American Culture by Ann Douglas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). The final chapter is entitled "Herman Melville and the Revolt Against the Reader"; a section of the chapter headed "The Magazine Pieces: Going Underground" (pp. 313-320) considers the short stories as Melville's response to readers who would have preferred warmed-over Typee to Mardi, Moby-Dick, and especially Pierre.¹⁷ Like Fisher, Professor Douglas acknowledges the work of William Charvat, whose "Melville" she calls "one of the finest essays to date on Melville and one which has guided my own approach" (p. 386, n. 28). She emphasizes "Melville's newly lowered estimation" of his "largely feminine audience" in his writings for the magazines, identifies "the central figure in most of them" as "the Ik Marvel' character" made popular by Donald Grant Mitchell but "descended from Irving's Geoffrey Crayon," and argues that through him Melville intended to reflect the taste of both editors and readers of the "feminine fifties." Melville's "distrust" of his narrator figure, she concludes, "never flagged," but he came nevertheless

increasingly to sense and exploit the hostility of this character to the very audience that he had been formed and maimed to serve. In Melville's two latest and in certain ways most interesting magazine stories, "I and My Chimney" and "The Apple-Tree Table," Melville puts himself behind the antagonistic possibilities of his sentimental male narrator, even while he grimly predicts the eventual success of those this personage both flatters and resists. (p. 317)

This is to say that, in the "eventual success" of the narrator's wife and daughters in the two stories, Melville himself was predicting the ultimate triumph of his own "feminine or effeminate" readers and editors, as Douglas calls them (p. 315).

What Charvat and Douglas have had to say about the intended audience and consequent editorial policies of Harper's and Putnam's lends support to Fisher's supposition that Melville "went underground" in the magazine stories. Douglas resembles Bickley in singling out "the narrator figure" of the tales as central to an understanding of Melville's own relation to the stories which that narrator is given to tell. Unlike Bickley, with his concentration on methodology, she interprets the narrative technique of the short fiction as a response to the cultural context of the 1850s and goes on to establish a positive link between Melville's use of the "mistrusted" narrator figure of the tales with the title character of The Confidence- Man, his next book, which Bickley had dismissed as both an aesthetic and a philosophical aberration. "Structure rather than content," she holds, was Melville's "most responsive register and indicator: every change in his sensibility showed up at once as formal instability and transformation" (p. 303). If this observation is valid, as I think it is, then the short fiction needs to be viewed not only against the background of its time and place, as in Fisher's book, but in relation to the whole body of Melville's own writing.

In Melville's Short Fiction (1977), William B. Dillingham shares one of the basic assumptions about Melville that appear in the books by Bickley and Fisher, but he takes a noticeably different critical approach and offers far different readings of individual pieces. Given the nature of American magazines and their audiences, Melville was indeed obliged to practice "the fine art of concealment," Dillingham agrees; in fact "he carried the technique even further" in his magazine writing than in Moby-Dick and Pierre. Though the stories may give an impression of slightness and perhaps ineptness that has deceived many readers from Melville's day until now, their seemingly bland surface is a screen masking their author's radical experiments in both genre and form.

He wrote as he did in these stories for two basic reasons: concealment and artistic experimentation. He camouflaged meanings because concealment had already become a characteristic of his nature as a writer, because the articulation of a private vision in coded language, as it were, served the ends of both therapy and art, and because the magazines he was writing for demanded palatable art for queasy minds. One motive furthered the other: "greater concealment led to greater experimentation. What appear to be inoffensive and somewhat amateurish sketches composed for the masses are in reality highly sophisticated and poetically compacted works often of unsurpassed originality. (DD. 7-8)

In observing that earlier critics--Fogle included--underestimated the short fiction, Dillingham concurs with the "overall evaluation" of their quality in Bickley's "refreshing book" while acknowledging that his own interpretations "disagree almost consistently with those in Bickley's study" (p. 6, n. 9). Although he too sees Melville as an artistic experimenter, there is no preoccupation in his book with methodology as such: "Structure was not an end in itself" for Melville "so much as it was a means to a still higher aim," Dillingham declares. "His first purpose throughout his short fiction was the delineation of character" (p. 10), and his typical mode of characterization--as both Bickley and Ann Douglas would agree--was to allow a narrator to characterize himself, on both "an overt and a submerged plane." Even the third-person narratives, "The Bell-Tower" and "Benito Cereno," are "impossible to understand . . . without coming to an understanding of the narrative voice" (p. 11). Fisher's name does not appear in Dillingham's Introduction, but their differences on one score are obvious enough.¹⁸ Believing that Melville's ultimate aim was character delineation, Dillingham unequivocally dissents from any assumption that "historical, social, political, economic issues" were "Melville's primary interests. A major premise of this book is that they were not. Wherever they occur they are secondary to the unfolding of character, an unfolding that takes place on the second plane submerged beneath layers of inoffensive wit, congenial reminiscing, and Irvingesque worldly maturity" (p. 11).

It is "Melville's ironic method," Dillingham explains, that determines his own methodology: approaching each story with a "close and persistent scrutiny" that will uncover "submerged characterizations." In some of the first-person narratives "this is the same figure we detected on the surface, but greatly filled out and deepened. In more cases than not the submerged characterization stands in contrast to the overt one. A stunning, revelatory irony results" (p. 12). The third-person narratives (treated in two of Dillingham's best chapters) combine

an authorial perspective with what may be called the world's view. The two have to be carefully identified and separated just as a narrator's words in the other stories have to be analyzed from the standpoint of both what they say and what they suggest about the speaker. Melville s own view is submerged in the image patterns, in allusions, and in dozens of subtle indirections. In "The Bell-Tower" the authorial view of Bannadonna is vastly different from that of the community for which he works, yet both opinions are blended into a single voice. Melville's most complicated and most sophisticated use of point of view is in 'Benito Cereno," where the narrative presents four separate ways of seeing the same event. Three of these represent aspects of the vision of the common and ordinary world with which Melville was almost constantly at odds. The most important view is, as always, the submerged one, underlying and undercutting the others. (pp. 12-13)

It is on the surface level, Dillingham insists, that Melville appealed to the editors and readers of Harper's and Putnam's by a wealth of contemporary allusions; here the stories indeed "furnish insights into the popular culture of mid-nineteenth-century America" (p. 15). He makes much the same point about Melville's frequent but superficial use of autobiographical material as a starting-point for several of the magazine pieces: this practice "does not result in a revelation of what Melville was like at this period of his life any more than the overt characterizations of his stories give the best and deepest insights into his characters" (p. 16). If Melville does reveal himself in the work of this period, Dillingham observes, it is only in "submerged autobiography," such as the concealed references to his relation with Hawthorne that "flicker in and out of the stories, especially 'The Encantadas' and 'The Piazza'" (p. 17).

Dillingham's fourteen chapters on the stories themselves are longer and more detailed than either Bickley's or Fisher's and give more attention to previous scholarship. Aware of what Leyda called the "various levels of tension" in individual pieces and dedicated to recovering what Melville himself "submerged" beneath their deceptive surfaces, he is never simplistic in his readings nor restricted in his diving to a search for only one stratum of material, whether biographical, metaphysical, or cultural and political. His breadth of concern resembles Fogle's, though his aesthetic valuation of the tales is notably higher. He has obviously profited from the studies of "Melvillean irony and narrative form" that influenced Bickley, but his consideration of technique remains subordinate to his sensitive response to Melville's use of language and his consistent emphasis on characterization. Moreover, Dillingham's apprehension of Melville the man keeps in perspective his comments on both the form and the content of the individual stories. Apart from "The Happy Failure" and "The Fiddler," taken together in Chapter 6, and "The 'Gees," treated only briefly in relation to "The Apple-Tree Table" in Chapter 14, he gives each piece a chapter of its own. Melville, he believes, conceived many of them in pairs, either as "bipart stories" (Leyda's "diptychs") or as "counterstories"--for example, "Bartleby" and "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" Paying more attention to chronology than either Bickley or Fisher, he treats the stories in the order of their first publication, though with certain exceptions: "The Two Temples," which Melville left unpublished; "Jimmy Rose," which is taken up after "I and My Chimney" though it was published four months earlier and was probably written long before that; and "The Apple-Tree Table," discussed as Melville's last story though it was written and published before "The Piazza." Although Melville scholarship so far in print has not recognized the fact, the editors of Harper's and Putnam's did not always published Melville's contributions in the order of their composition and submission,¹⁹ and for this reason there is occasional inaccuracy in Dillingham's comments on patterns of characterization and theme as they developed from story to story.

What those patterns involve is summarized in a brief "Conclusion" (pp. 367- 370) that follows Chapter 14. As Dillingham has analyzed the short fiction, it presents two recurrent types of character: those individuals who are dominated by fear and those dominated by anger. The fearful man, like the lawyer in "Bartleby," takes refuge in a superficial vision of the world and therefore sees too little; his opposite, the angry man, "sees too much, for it is his penetrating vision that creates and feeds his rebellious anger." Melville's Taji, Ahab, and Pierre in the earlier books are men of the latter type, but by the time of the short stories "their flame, if not their heat, has diminished." Here "anger is more likely to be submerged and reflected in actions that either totally puzzle or mislead the ordinary world," as the scrivener's silence, born of "obsessive resentment," baffles his employer. Bannadonna's rage is "channeled into his art"; the narrator of "The Lightning-Rod Man" "seethes beneath his alternating wit and pseudo-piety"; Babo's rage "is directed at far more than his white masters--they simply typify."

The anger of silence, which the world almost always misinterprets, is no less heroic and at the same time no less wrongheaded and destructive than the deafeningly loud roar of Ahab's rebellion. It is simply another form of the same disease, a disease that Melville dreaded perhaps even more than that of fear, for he was born with the germ in his soul. Through anger came the dignity and exhilaration of arrogance, but on the other hand it led to solitude, to a loss of compassionate human feelings, and finally to insanity and self-destruction. Melville admired the defiance that anger creates, but by depicting its negative results in his rebellious characters he kept himself aware that it cannot coexist with love. (p. 369)

Between the extremes of fear and anger is "a kind of emotional middle state," which Dillingham identifies as "fundamentally the one Melville worked out in his own life." The characters in his short fiction achieve such a position through "a willful changing of view" once they have stared overlong at "the white world that underlies life's variety and color." Like Melville himself as Dillingham interprets him, they are ironists. An ironist is thus

a person who realizes that sense perception is deceptive but who never loses faith in it completely. . . . An ironist perceives a level beneath the surface, but he does not separate himself from either; he functions in both realms.

The central experience of the ironist in Melville's stories is one first of dangerous encounter and then withdrawal to safety, submersion into himself or into the nature of existence so deeply as to almost drown and emergence back to the surface of ordinary life . . . but, as "The Piazza" makes clear, with a renewed sense of the need to keep his hold on ordinary life while never forgetting what he has seen. (pp. 369-370)

As for the stories themselves, irony "is not only their stylistic method and tone . . . but also a metaphor for their Weltanschauung." The short fiction, Dillingham concludes, constitutes "a disguised journal of Melville's plague years and a record of noble survival from the ravages of fear and anger." Not overtly but implicitly, in other words, it is both philosophical and autobiographical.

In Chapter 115 of Mardi, Melville's Babbalanja retells a very old story: in his version "nine blind men" confronting "an immense wild banian tree" disagree hopelessly over which of its many trunks is "the original and true one." Melville's critics, I sometimes think, are like the nine blind men. In the case of the short fiction they now appear to be approaching consensus on one point: Melville is an ironist, as the banian tree is a banian tree. But the nature and the objects of his irony seem as various as the predispositions of the critics who acknowledge its existence, and for whom the stories themselves are--to borrow Babbalanja's word--"a polysensuum."

Despite their disagreements over individual readings, most recent critics of the short stories seem to fall into one or two principal camps: those who see Melville employing his irony subversively but aggressively, directing it against the evils of his time and place, and those who see him fighting a kind of rear-guard action against the world outside and the world within, using his irony defensively or even therapeutically. Dillingham, whose interest in Melville's recurrent character-types leads him ultimately into a modernized form of biographical and even philosophical criticism, belongs to the latter group; Fisher, who reads Melville as a social activist speaking to social activists, takes his irony as thrusting aggressively outward. (Bickley--though I may be mistaken--seems to regard irony as an edged tool that may be turned against the writer who commits himself to using it, for whatever purpose.)

I am not "Posterity speaking by proxy," as Melville spoke of Hawthorne in 1850; I lack the perspective of our twenty-first-century historian. Even so, I venture to predict that the field of the short fiction will be divided for some time to come between critics of the school of Fisher and critics of the school of Dillingham, given the diversity of contemporary criticism. On balance, I find Dillingham's approach more responsive to the texture of Melville's writing as I read it than either Fisher's or Bickley's, though I have profited from all three books even while dissenting to some degree from what each of them says about particular stories. No interpreter of Melville, it seems clear, will ever pronounce the last word on any one of his writings, and certainly there will be other essays--probably other books--published on the short fiction between now and the next century. A flurry of articles will undoubtedly appear in the immediate wake of the Northwestern-Newberry volume that includes The Piazza Tales and other miscellaneous prose pieces, which is now in press; every major edition of any of Melville's writings, beginning with the Constable edition of the 1920's, has generated renewed interest in some aspect of his work. Not only will the forthcoming volume provide a standard text; it will offer for the short fiction in particular that "'hard-core' scholarship" so essential for really "knowing" Melville, as Robert Milder has recently reminded us;²⁰ the besetting sin of Melville studies is still the tendency to write interpretation and criticism before the facts are in--or, worse still, to ignore the facts even after they have been established and made readily available.

Although biographical details remain scanty, we now have more documentary evidence about Melville's circumstances in the 1850's, and especially his dealings with his publishers, than was available some years ago: new letters, for example, have turned up; the dating of other letters published by Davis and Gilman has been corrected; more documentary references and reviews have been located. On the basis of these documents, more can now be said about the composition and submission of individual stories, the money Melville received for them, and the response of his reading public than Charvat could say in the 1950's, or that critics following Charvat have said in the 1970's. The audience of Harper's and Putnam's may not have been as effeminate or obtuse as modern interpreters like to assume without necessarily knowing the magazines themselves as they appeared from issue to issue when Melville himself was reading them. Putnam's in particular, for all its timidity over "'The Two Temples," was in fact very receptive to Melville's work, under both George Palmer Putnam and his successors Dix & Edwards, and the magazine itself was not only "charming," as Henry James remembered it in after-years, but relatively sophisticated: no less a judge than Thackeray, speaking in 1855, called it much the best Mag. in the world."²¹ The next book on Melville's short fiction, besides taking into account the insights of Bickley, Fisher, and Dillingham, must also weigh these other considerations. We need from its author not only a sensitive reading of the stories themselves but a new consideration of Melville and his audience in the years following Moby-Dick, based on first-hand scholarship, and a fuller account of Melville's dealings with editors and publishers during this difficult period of his career, taking into account the documents now available. And whatever his assessment of the short fiction, our author must deal with it in the context not only of the 1850's but of Melville's own writing, exploring that continuity of theme and technique that runs from Pierre through the magazine work--not forgetting Israel Potter--to The Confidence-Man and beyond. Such a book will constitute neither "hard-core" scholarship nor "soft," but the work of a perceptive reader and writer who is equally at home with both.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

NOTES

1. Melville to Lemuel Shaw, May 22, 1856, as printed in Patricia Barber, "Two New Melville Letters," American Literature, 49 (1977), 421.

2. Hugh W. Hetherington, Melville's Reviewers British and American, 1846-1891 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 248-255, surveys the book's contemporary reception. Steve Mailloux and Hershel Parker, "Checklist of Melville Reviews" (Melville Society, 1975), pp. 65-68, covers both earlier notices of the tales as they appeared in magazines and subsequent reviews of The Piazza Tales. See also Merton M. Sealts, Jr. "The Publication of Melville's Piazza Tales," Modern Language Notes, 59 (1944), 56-59, and G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Sales of Melville's Books," Harvard Library Bulletin, 17 (1969), 195-215.

3. The Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 188, n. 9.

4. See Richard Colles Johnson, "Melville in Anthologies," American Book Collector, 21 (1971), 7-8.

5. Stedman, "Melville of Marquesas," Review of Reviews (New York), 4 (November 1891), 428-430, as reprinted in Merton M. Sealts, Jr. The Early Lives of Melville: Nineteenth-Century Biographical Sketches and Their Authors (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1974), p. 112.

6. Atlantic Monthly, 45 (June 1880), 858, as quoted in George Monteiro, "'Bartleby the Scrivener and Melville's Contemporary Reputation," Studies in Bibliography, 24 (1971), 196.

7. Curtis' reference to "Bartleby" had originally appeared in his "Sea from Shore," published in Putnam's Monthly for July 1854, after that magazine had carried Melville's story: the sketch was subsequently included in Curtis' collection Prue and I (1856 and nine rarer editions). Barton Levi St. Armand, "Curtis's 'Bartleby': An Unrecorded Melville Reference. "Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America. 71 (1977), 220, remarks that Curtis' allusion and the illustration of 1892 (by Albert Edward Sterner) "must have puzzled many contemporary readers, who were [by 1892] as unfamiliar with the tale as they were with its once-popular author."

8. The quoted phrases are from James' "American Letters," Literature (London), 2 (June 11, 1898), 676-677, as quoted in George Monteiro, "More on Herman Melville in the 1890s," Extracts I An Occasional Newsletter (The Melville Society), No. 30 (May 1977), 14.

9. In The Early Lives of Melville, p. 74, I conjectured that Stedman might have preferred a new edition of The Piazza Tales--possibly enlarged to include other magazine pieces uncollected by Melville himself--to Israel Potter, which had been mentioned as a possible addition to the four volumes issued in 1892 by the United States Book Company: Typee, Omoo, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick. The publisher's bankruptcy precluded the appearance of a fifth volume.

10. The steady proliferation of discussion since the 1940's is reflected in the chapters on Melville in successive editions of Eight American Authors: in the 1956 edition Stanley Williams was able to cover in two paragraphs the pioneering work on the short stories published up to that time; in the revised edition of 1971 Nathalia Wright's tightly packed review of subsequent scholarship runs to nearly five full pages. In 1967, when Howard Vincent edited a symposium on "Bartleby the Scrivener" for the Melville Society, a survey compiled for the volume by Donald Fiene listed 117 items bearing on that story alone which had appeared since 1856. That the accelerated interest of the 1960's in the short fiction has continued into the 1970's is evident from such annual surveys as the MLA International Bibliography and American Literary Scholarship.

11. Introduction to The Complete Stories of Herman Melville (New York: Random House, 1949), p. xxviii.

12. As early as 1950, Joseph Schiffman was arguing, in "Critical Problems in Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" Modern Language Quarterly, 11 (1950), 317- 324, that "Melville betray[s] his sympathies" in the story: by depicting in Don Alexandro Aranda and Captain Amasa Delano "the short-sightedness of those who thought slavery was acceptable to other people, Melville was condemning slavery" (pp. 321-322)

13. "Melville's Chimney, Reexamined," in Themes and Directions in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Leon Howard, ed. Ray B. Browne and Donald Pizer (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ. Studies, 1969), pp. 97-99.

14. Professor Bickley's book is the outgrowth of his earlier doctoral dissertation, "Literary Influences and Techniques in Melville's Short Fiction: 1853-1856" (Duke Univ., 1969); DAI, 30 (1970) 4935A.

15. Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press 1952), p. 3.

16. The Profession of Authorship in America: The Papers of William Charvat, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968), p. 258. Two essays by Charvat are the most systematic studies to date of Melville's relation to the reading public of his day: "Melville," left in manuscript at Charvat's death and first published in this volume (pp. 204-261), and "Melville and the Common Reader," read before the English Institute in 1957, first published in the following year, and reprinted here (pp. 262- 282).

17. An earlier version of her discussion of the magazine pieces was read before the Melville Society in December of 1973 and abstracted under the title of "Herman Melville and the Feminine Fifties" in Extracts, No. 17 (1974), p. 2. As early as 1971 Fisher was already referring to Melville as perhaps "the first major American writer to have written for an underground audience", see his "Melville's 'Tartarus': The Deflowering of New England," American Quarterly, 23 (1971), 80, and its adaptation in Going Under, p. 72.

18. Fisher's name appears frequently in Dillingham's footnotes, which offer a running commentary on the body of interpretation that has grown up about the various stories; Dillingham has read and sometimes taken specific issue with the earlier articles that Fisher brought together in Going Under, but Bickley's book "appeared too late" for him to consider it in detail (p. 6, n. 9). Dillingham's survey of previous criticism and scholarship, more comprehensive than the compilations of Bickley and Fisher, is one of the strengths of his book.

19. "Benito Cereno," for example, appears to have been already on hand at Putnam's when Dix & Edwards acquired the magazine in 1855; it was not published, however, until after "The Bell-Tower," which Melville submitted later in that same year. Harper & Brothers held a number of Melville's contributions for even longer periods. "The Happy Failure" and "The Fiddler," probably submitted as early as August of 1853, did not appear in Harper's until July and September, respectively, of the following year; "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids," paid for in May of 1854, was not used until April of 1855; "Jimmy Rose" and "The 'Gees" were apparently held from September of 1854 until November of 1855 and March of 1856.

20. "Knowing' Melville," ESQ, 24 (1978), 96-117; see n. 37, p. 116.

21. Curtis to Joshua Dix, September 7, 1855, as quoted in Laura Wood Roper, "'Mr. Law' and Putnam's Monthly: A Note on a Phase in the Career of Frederick Law Olmsted," American Literature, 26 (1954), 92.

*ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 25 (1st Quarter 1979): 43-57.

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