Melville and I

Herman Melville is synonymous with Moby-Dick - a book which I thoroughly enjoyed despite being warned away from it by a friend – despite the author having several other novels and a collection of short stories to his name. It is the latter, entitled Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, which I have on my desk at the moment. Although I’m less than halfway through it, parts of the collection are shaping up to be very... familiar. There is a pervasive nautical theme, as you can tell from the title, and Melville’s grandiose and allusive style is just as magical as it was in Moby-Dick. On a less positive but entirely predictable note, these short stories are also sometimes very heavy going.

 

My least favourite story so far is The Encantadas, or, The Enchanted Isles, which is divided into a series of ‘sketches’ of various mystical isles, and betrays the author’s fascination with the sea. They almost feel like rough drafts for Melville’s magnum opus. Although occasionally engaging and characterful, these sketches more often seem like indigestible lumps of vaguely-factual, semi-autobiographical writing without any particular theme or plot to unite them. So, enough of them.

 

The story I’ve found most interesting so far is entitled Bartleby. It is not nautical.

 

Bartleby has a distinctly Dickensian feel about it. It is the story of a solicitor and his staff of three copyists, who are soon joined by a fourth, the Bartleby of the title. He is a lean, cadaverous young man, who works hard all day except for periodic window-gazings, and appears to subsist solely on ginger nuts. Bartleby is so other-worldly that his oddly-phrased refusals – ‘I would prefer not to’ – to carry out some mundane tasks leave his employer stunned. It is eventually discovered that Bartleby has been squatting in the office, and his continual refusals to perform commonplace tasks lead to confrontation. It is Bartleby’s quiet, passive refusal that is so remarkably haunting to his employer and to the reader. Frequently he ignores all calls and requests, and continues staring out of the window. He remains in the offices, ghostlike, even after he has been officially fired, leaving his angry but concerned former employer no choice but to relocate his offices.

 

Bartleby’s melancholy suggests some ancient trauma, and his quietly unyielding nature gives the impression of a man whose past experiences mean that he no longer fears retribution from any man. He is, to use a cliché, a lost soul. Eventually, the solidity of nineteenth-century society reinstates itself, and Bartleby is incarcerated in the pauper’s gaol. Unsurprisingly, this cannot long hold him.

 

This emaciated, haunted man cuts a romantic figure reminiscent of an abstemious Withnail. Melville shows that his majestic, orotund prose is just as at home in human mystery and tragedy as it is tumbling from the roaring, cursing beard of Ahab.