Herman Melville, a Poet of the Civil War

Writing and research can take you down some unexpected alleyways. 

For the last two-plus years, I’ve been involved in a writing project about the Civil War. Along the way, I learned that stories passed down as family lore turned out to be, well, stories of the fictional if well-meaning kind. History can teach you a lot about where you came from.

 

Part of my research has been reading novels and poetry about and from the Civil War. As I started, two poets who immediately came to mind were Walt Whitman (“O Captain! My Captain!”) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (“Christmas Bells” and “A Nameless Grave,” not to mention his poems on slavery). One poet I did not consider, simply because I was ignorant of his poems, was Herman Melville (1819-1891). 

 

In this case, my ignorance was rather profound. Only when I saw a listing in a promotional advertising flyer for Melville: Complete Poems from the Library of America did I discover that Melville was not only a novelist but also a poet. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday readings

 

Old Man’s Watch – poem by Paul Wittenberger at Paul’s Substack.

 

Musee des Beaux Arts – poem by W.H. Auden at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

At Dorr Point – poem by Kevin Farnham at society of Classical Poets.

 

A King Among Fools and Flatterers – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Convergence of the Twain, poem by Thomas Hardy – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Going for Ice Cream – poem by Sara and Sonia Barkat at Everyday Poems. 

 

“Bartleby, The Scrivener” by Herman Melville

In two installments in November and December of 1853, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine published a longish short story by Herman Melville (1819-1891). “Bartleby, The Scrivener” gained little notice at the time, but eventually it came to be regarded as an iconic American short story. Even today, it’s recognized as a great short story, at least as far as the BBC and Literary Hub are concerned, putting it in a best story list in 2019 and 2020, respectively. 

It’s a strange story, and it’s no surprise that it didn’t find an immediate audience when it published or when it was included in a short story collection by Melville three years later. At the time he wrote it, Melville was immersed in (or sinking under the weight of) writing Moby Dick. A well-received writer in the 1840s with works like Typee, Melville’s popularity was on the wane in the 1850s. The literary recognition of his works didn’t really begin to recover until the 1920s, three decades after his death, with the posthumous publication of Billy Budd in 1924.

“Bartleby, The Scrivener” concerns a law practice in New York City. The narrator is an attorney who is the head of the office, and he employs two scriveners and an assistant (errand boy). A scrivener, or scribe, focused mostly on copy out legal documents – arguments, court submissions, and briefs. In addition to copying (and often making several copies), scriveners also worked as a team for proofreading. Because of the volume of work, the attorney must hire an additional scrivener, and one day Mr. Bartleby presents himself. The attorney is so impressed with his quiet demeanor (the story provides details on the quirks and attitudes of the other three employees), the attorney makes room for him in his own office, setting up a screen to afford some privacy.

Herman Melville

All goes well, until Bartleby is asked to do some proofreading. His response becomes the most repeated line in the story – “I would prefer not to.” While he first limits the line to proofing, Bartleby soon uses to explain why he won’t run an errand and other simple activities in the office. Eventually, he stops working altogether. When asked to do the copying he was hired to do, his response is the now-familiar “I would prefer not to.”

The attorney will consider every means possible to get rid of Bartleby, but the reader soon knows, if the attorney doesn’t immediately, that he has stopped into a mid-19^th century Twilight Zone. And whatever happens, it will not likely end well. It’s such an unusually odd story for the times that its literary value would only be recognized when writers like Franz Kafka and Albert Camus read it and were enthralled by it.

Some critics have seen allusions in the story to Melville’s life and especially his frustrations with writing Moby Dick. Different critical interpreters have focused on the narrator, Bartleby, the legal profession, the changes in business in the mid-19th century, and as a story anticipating the coming cataclysm of the Civil War. It’s a lot of weight for a short story to carry. It’s known that it was inspired by a rather innocuous account of a law office and the work of a scrivener that Melville had read, but that account portended nothing unusual. 

To read it today, with the intervening literary cultures of modernism and post-modernism informing what and how we read, it’s an entirely believable story. Perhaps it’s because the figure of the worker who refuses to work, or the employee who manages  to evade most of not all assignments, is someone we know or have known (the character of Wally in the comic strip “Dilbert” makes an art out of evading work).

Edgar Allen Poe wasn’t the only writer penning strange stories in the 19^th century.

Van Wyck Brooks’ “The Times of Melville and Whitman”

Van Wyck Brooks published three related works of literary history over the span of about a decade (while he was publishing other works as well). The World of Washington Irving depicted U.S. literary culture, and some history, in the first 20 years or so of the 19^th century. The Flowering of New England 1815-1865 showed the seeds that were being planted for a national literary culture, although it was still largely a regional phenomenon.  New England Indian Summer 1865-1915 concerned the lingering influence of New England on national literary culture, but a major shift was underway.

We are more than familiar with the writers and poets who emerged from New England during the 19^th century described in these books, because they became part of the American literary canon. Irving. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Emily Dickinson. Henry David Thoreau. Henry and William James. And many more.

But the geographical center of the country was shifting, and the literary cultural center was shifting at the same time. As the United States expanded westward, its writers and poets followed.

T

Mark Twain

his is the world described by Brooks in The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947). It is the world of pre-Civil War San Francisco, which drew writers like Bret Harte and Mark Twain. This is the world of Herman Melville, whose Typee: A Peek at Polynesian Life captivated readers across the country and well beyond to Europe, years before he wrote Moby Dick. This is the world of Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass transformed American poetry forever.

Twain, Melville, Whitman: America’s writer, the Great American Novel, America’s poet. Between them, they created what became known as an American literature.

Herman Melville

Brooks particularly highlights the role of Twain. “Mark Twain, with his fathomless naivety prepared the ground, as Whitman did, for a new and unique American art of letters,” he writes, “in a negative way with The Innocents Abroad, in a positive way with the Western writings in which he contributed to establish and foster this art.” Those “Western writings” included Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn.

But the new national culture still had its New England influence. Melville was influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne (and also by Shakespeare, especially in Moby Dick, Brooks says). And Whitman’s poetry, as heavily influenced by his political work, his newspaper work, and the growth of trade and industry as it was, was also influenced and promoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Walt Whitman

Literary culture broke out of the essential regionalism of New England and simultaneously become more geographically western and national.  

Brooks wrote a time when there was still a sense of national consciousness among the political, literary, cultural, and business elites. Six decades later, that sense is largely gone. In academia, the idea of a literary canon is considered quaint and rather prehistoric, and would likely result in protests by students and professors alike.

But to read a work like The Times of Melville and Whitman from today’s vantage point is to see how much has been lost. And we are the poorer for it.

Related:

Walt Whitman Built Free Verse and Freedom into His Poetry – Investors Business Daily.

Walt Whitman in Brooklyn – Newspapers and “Leaves of Grass” – Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top illustration: The great comic scene of the buffalo climbing the tree in Twain’s Roughing It.