The final number of the first volume of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine appeared in June 1853. The magazine took stock and congratulated itself for encouraging Americans to pick up their pens: “from voluntary contributors” during the previous six months, the magazine reported, it had received “four hundred and eighty-nine articles, the greater part from writers wholly unknown before. They came from every state and territory in the Union.”1 More readers with literary ambitions subsequently responded to this announcement. But exactly what kinds of literature they sent to the magazine is not clear even from their own descriptions. “After considerable hesitation,” Philip Brown wrote in January 1855, “I venture to offer the accompanying sketch for publication in your magazine. I know it is quite inferior to the articles that usually appear in ‘Putnam’, but . . . it is what it purports to be, a true story told at the fireside,—and therefore does not need so much the graces of composition, as a more pretentious essay.” In October 1854, Eve Wilder asked whether the editors of Putnam’s were prepared to say, “‘Miss Eve, send on your stories, sketches, or what not, and we will try hard to find some merit in your productions.’”2 Simultaneously stories, sketches, tales, essays, articles, or productions, these magazine “what nots” appear only loosely and interchangeably attached to specific narrative effects.
Melville’s own vocabulary shows him embedded in the generic instability of this magazine world. The word “article” appears repeatedly in letters he sent to Putnam’s and Harper’s (C 248, 275, 281–82). In May 1856, Melville wrote to his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, explaining, “My immediate resources are what I can get for articles sent to magazines” (C 295). While he was comfortable enough when discussing Israel Potter to use “M.S.,” “story,” and “serial,” and to refer to the parts he submitted as “chapters” (C 268, 270, 264, 273), when he sent two stories to Harper’s in September 1854 Melville gave in to definitional uncertainty and stopped using literary terms at all: “I send you by express a brace of fowl—wild fowl. Hope you will like the flavor” (C 269). Like the other hopeful writers sending their material to Putnam’s, Melville was making his way through the dense foliage of short prose forms variably and imprecisely described as sketches, tales, essays, and articles, whose conventions developed fitfully in annuals and gift books during the 1820s and 1830s, and then in magazines during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. When he collected his Putnam’s “articles” for publication, Melville originally suggested Benito Cereno & Other Sketches as the title for what would become The Piazza Tales (C 285). By changing the title, he registered how the leaves of the branches of sketch, tale, and essay traditions overlapped as he grasped at them in his writing.
The one term never used in Melville’s letters or anywhere else in the 1850s is “short story.” In this chapter, I show that Melville succeeded where many other writers in the 1850s failed: building on the achievements of writers working in the 1830s and 1840s, he developed and combined sketch and tale traditions to help invent the short story. Melville was not alone in this project. There are parallel and comparative lines of development: in Russia, Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy; in Britain, George Eliot; all were magazine writers in the 1850s. What distinguishes Melville in this company is that the short form did not mark the beginning of his writing career. Melville came to magazine writing after he was a published novelist.
Melville had briefly been a newspaper writer before he was a novelist, when in May 1839 he published two “Fragments from a Writing Desk” in the Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser, an upstate New York weekly. But these pieces of stylized juvenilia bear little scrutiny. Melville first showed his adeptness as a magazinist in the summer of 1847, a year after Putnam published Typee, when he contributed nine brief satirical sketches to Yankee Doodle, a weekly humor publication edited by his friend Cornelius Mathews. “Authentic Anecdotes of ‘Old Zack’” parodied Zachary Taylor, best known at that point for his military career during the war with Mexico but soon to become president in 1848. As he would do through his later magazine career, Melville remained anonymous as the sketches were published through July, August, and September. Embedded in the squabbles between New York City’s literary Whigs and Democrats, the whimsical sketches linger over Taylor’s personal habits and score points from the quotidian punch and counterpunch of a local political milieu that now seems distant and alien. The sketches remain landlocked in their moment of publication.3 But Melville proved he could pull humorous satire from his writing bag in response to the commission from Mathews. Such a facility for style and genre would shape Melville’s later novels; it also foreshadowed the adaptability that would make him a magazine staple for Putnam’s and Harper’s in the mid-1850s.
The first pieces he wrote for Harper’s and Putnam’s in the spring and summer of 1853—“Bartleby,” “The Happy Failure,” “The Fiddler,” and “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”—were all very different in style, tone, and subject matter. What links them is a dexterousness with genre. The writer who adapted the sea narrative in Typee and Omoo, combined the sea narrative with allegory in Mardi and with natural history and the adventure story in Moby-Dick, and set about the domestic, the sentimental, and the gothic city-mystery in Pierre, brought to his magazine writing a similar restlessness with genre. The magazine writing is a bridge from Pierre to The Confidence-Man, where Melville would set about the unlikely fusion of metaphysics and southwestern humor.
Magazines accommodated Melville’s idiosyncratic talents because of a capaciousness in which distinctions between failure and success for individual pieces carried little meaning. Magazine production could legitimately be called an industry by the 1850s, but it remained understandably disorderly and speculative. Reputations were difficult to create and even more difficult to sustain. Magazines like Harper’s and Putnam’s were also distinctively miscellaneous. They included essays, fictions, reviews, travel writing, filler pieces, and visual as well as written material. To describe the situation as chaotic does a disservice to magazines like Harper’s and Godey’s Lady’s Book, whose operation was innovative and bureaucratically efficient enough to manage tens of thousands of subscribers.4 But as in other febrile areas of development—the settling of land, gold prospecting, manufacturing, and urban expansion—magazine production during this period worked in the haze of uncertain future developments.
What existed instead of the short story in the 1830s and 1840s was the legacy of Washington Irving’s success in combining the essay and sketch genres in his early magazine work for Salmagundi (1807–8) and then more famously in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819). The origins of these genres lay in the wit, philosophy, and morality of the British writers Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, the satire of Jonathan Swift, and the peripatetic narrators of Daniel Defoe and Oliver Goldsmith. Irving also drew on the Germanic folktale revitalized by Romanticism—and Romanticism’s transition into realism—in the tales of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Transferring these tales across the Atlantic, Irving opened up the American continent to tales of the fantastic, while ingeniously preserving the integrity of his narrator Geoffrey Crayon by having the fictional Diedrich Knickerbocker narrate “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” at another diegetic level. Irving’s genial and amiable style certainly influenced American magazine editors and contributors. Published collections of magazine pieces borrowed the idea of the pictorial sketch in their titles. Eliza Leslie gathered together her stories as Pencil Sketches; or, Outlines of Character and Manners (1833) and Fanny Fern collected her magazine pieces as Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (1853). Nathaniel Parker Willis’s debt to Irving is evident in his Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil (1845). When Willis offers the reader “a portfolio of sketches for a picture never painted,” Irving’s influence becomes visible as imitation.5
The Irving blueprint lived on in the figure of the educated, gentlemanly narrator, or the bachelor given to quiet disquisitions on seemingly random or obscure topics, especially in magazines like the Knickerbocker and later in Putnam’s too. In retrospect, often forgotten authors and editors who wrote or published material of this kind—Donald Mitchell, George William Curtis, Willis Gaylord Clark, William Cullen Bryant—look like part of a residual culture in a literary world changing rapidly around them. They were ill equipped for the literary future because, unlike Irving, they looked backward without carrying their influences forward in adaptions of the genres to which they were so attached; in their hands, the sketch and the essay ossified.6 But literary cultures rarely know their futures, and these men remained powerful actors in the magazine world in which Melville published. Amid this magazine world, Hawthorne and Poe are the best-known innovators before Melville. Hawthorne transformed the historical tale into a psychological exploration of contemporary New England’s relationship with its past; Poe created new genres (the detective story) and mastered others (sensation and comedy) while producing vivid and memorable characters and tales at the same time as diagnosing the literary qualities of the tale, or what would become the short story. But other lines of development emerged at the same time, and women writers proved some of the most popular and innovative inheritors of Irving.
Eliza Leslie’s Pencil Sketches, for example, is full of whip-smart social satire that dissects the foibles and weaknesses of urbanizing middle-class men and women. Leslie was already a successful food writer before she started publishing fiction and also wrote children’s stories and etiquette guides. After winning a fiction contest in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1832 she became a regular contributor to the magazine as well as to Graham’s Magazine in the 1840s. She edited the Violet and Gift annuals, took up a position as Sarah Josepha Hale’s assistant editor at Godey’s, and briefly in 1843 was the editor of Miss Leslie’s Magazine. A pioneer of female authorship, Leslie was clearly adept at moving between the demands of fiction and nonfiction genres. But while her social observations skewered the vain, the priggish, and the conformist, they offered little social distance; the world is not a dangerous or mysterious place, just one with minor irritations that do not threaten to disturb the natural order of things. Even in “The Travelling Tin-man,” in which an itinerant salesman is discovered to have abducted a black girl to take her to Maryland and sell her into slavery, order is restored when the benevolent white family foils the plan and adopts the girl themselves to replace their inadequate black servant.
In her sketches Leslie does, however, show a self-awareness about the readership of periodical literature shared by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, another important bearer of the short-form magazine tradition in this period. Leslie’s “The Escorted Lady” is the story of a wealthy older businessman who escorts the beautiful but vain, provincial, and self-absorbed Miss Fairfax from Boston to Philadelphia. Miss Fairfax constantly delays their progress, but the businessman forgives her and flatters her because of her beauty. Her intellectual deficiencies are highlighted by her boredom with books, especially novels. When the businessman gives her a book he adds an explanation: “In recommending this to your perusal, I can assure you that it is not a novel, but a series of instructive and entertaining tales. I think it will afford you much amusement.” Miss Fairfax takes the book “coldly” and is unimpressed: “When they are travelling with ladies under their care,” she tells a hotel guest, “instead of keeping always with them, and trying to make themselves agreeable, they go and talk all the time to their own acquaintances, and leave the ladies sitting alone by themselves, thinking it sufficient to put them off with a foolish story-book.”7 Leslie’s satire flatters the putative female reader of Pencil Sketches by showing that admirable rather than vain womanhood does not despise the “foolish story-book” but relishes it and reads it.
Female authorship is the subject of Sedgwick’s “Cacoethes Scribendi,” meaning “the itch for writing,” first published in The Atlantic Souvenir gift book in 1830. In a village deserted by men and where “every woman . . . was a widow or maiden,” Ralph Hepburn returns from Boston after “the season of the periodical inundation of annuals.” He delivers “two of the prettiest” to Alice, the daughter of Mrs. Courland. But it is Mrs. Courland who is taken with the annuals. She feels the call of authorship and persuades her three sisters to follow her. So obsessed is Mrs. Courland that she “divided the world into two classes, or rather parts—authors and subjects for authors; the one active, the other passive.” She is keen that the reluctant Alice become a writer too and sends a composition Alice once wrote at school to a periodical. The piece is accepted and when the magazine is delivered, Mrs. Courland “cut the string, broke the seals, and took out a periodical fresh from the publisher” to pass proudly to Alice. Who promptly throws it in the fire.8 Mrs. Courland forgets her author ambitions, remembers she is a mother, and consents to her daughter’s marriage to Ralph. Sedgwick was an experienced novelist by 1830; she wrote about history, about Indian encounter, and about domestic life with a seriousness and intensity that Leslie did not. In “Cacoethes Scribendi” she subtly demonstrates that female authorship requires artistry and is more than simply a response to the writing “itch.”9
Neither Leslie nor Sedgwick were straightforwardly sentimental writers. Sentimental or domestic fiction was certainly the most popular genre of magazine writing into the 1850s, and many of the best-selling women writers of the period—Fanny Fern, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—all published in magazines. But they were as different from each other as they were similar, and only a retrospective and masculinized critical temper impatient for the arrival of realism could characterize the period as one beset by scribbling women.10 Sentimental fiction’s roots were deep and well established in the transatlantic circulation of eighteenth-century writers such as Henry Mackenzie and Oliver Goldsmith. The sentimental tradition also leeched into the realism of Dickens that proved so popular in America. We now understand the cultural work achieved by sentimental fiction and its sensational sideshoot. Promoted and developed in the United States, the genre served—in the hands of a writer like Lydia Maria Child, for instance—the various causes of domestic morality and political reform, at the same time as providing popular entertainment.
More overtly sentimental in style than Leslie or Sedgwick, Child nevertheless still managed to address a range of difficult and controversial themes in her novels and her magazine writing.11 One of the most powerful examples is “Elizabeth Wilson,” Child’s stories of a fallen women, published in the Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in February 1845. As a young woman, Wilson is discarded by her lover for an older, richer woman. Her pregnancy ends with a stillbirth. She moves to Philadelphia for work and again gets pregnant, although there is no sense who might be the father. She gives birth to twins who are subsequently found strangled. Wilson denies killing them, but she is tried and executed after a pardon arrives too late to save her. When the story was published in book form, Child replaced a poem about Elizabeth’s ascent to heaven with a damning judgment: “The poor young creature, guilty of too much heart, and too little brain to guide it, had been murdered by law, and men called it justice.”12 The story foreshadows some of the more famous literary infanticides in nineteenth-century literature: Cassy and Lucy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Cora in Stowe’s Dred (1854), and Hetty Sorel in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Even if her style was unremarkable, Child helped diversify the subject matter of magazine fiction for later writers.
These are just a few examples of how innovative writers adapted Irving’s sketch and tale legacy. If the stories lack the kind of character development that will mark the short story as it started to incorporate more realistic modes of psychological representation, this is partly because the stories and their authors have an eye on more immediate concerns affecting women and women readers. They may not have taken Irving’s legacy forward in original formal directions, but they expanded the horizons of short magazine fiction in ways that were just as vital to its continued success. I choose these particular stories also because, however tangentially, they suggest motifs that reoccur in Melville’s stories. The itinerant salesman in “The Lightning-Rod Man” is reminiscent of Leslie’s “The Travelling Tin-man”; the strange village of H. in “Cacoethes Scribendi,” made up entirely of widows and maidens, is a precursor of Melville’s Devil’s Dungeon in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” The tragic tale of Elizabeth Wilson, whose sexual encounters the narrator reveals with little sense of Elizabeth’s consent, foreshadows the harrowing rape suffered by Hunilla in “The Encantadas.” I do not claim influence here, but writers drew on an archive of imagery that evidences their connections rather than their distinctions, even if ultimately it is how writers represent this imagery that distinguishes them.
As writers continued to absorb Irving’s legacy, by the 1850s his status as the premier American author was set in stone. Putnam and Irving both profited from the republication of his entire work in a new series in the late 1840s; Putnam’s share of the profits helped his publishing business achieve the status required to launch a venture like Putnam’s Monthly. But the 1840s also saw the beginnings of a backlash against Irving’s influence. His reliance on European models sat uneasily with young New Yorkers—bookish Democrats like Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews—excited by the gathering changes of the Jacksonian city and averse to the literary traditions of New England. They looked to make their names by identifying and promoting American voices, founded Arcturus as a rival to the Knickerbocker in 1840 (although the magazine ran for only two years), and then worked with John Louis O’Sullivan on the Democratic Review; Duyckinck became an editor for Wiley & Putnam (George Palmer Putnam’s earlier joint publishing venture) and finally fulfilled his ambition to produce a literary magazine worthy of national repute by having Wiley & Putnam finance The Literary World in 1847.13 Outlets now existed both for old traditions and new voices.
The differences between the generations were real enough, as were disagreements about the purpose and value of literature, whose backdrop was the political antagonism between Democrats and Whigs. Writers fit less easily into the two camps. Was Hawthorne, for instance, an inheritor of the New England tradition or a nationalist? He was a Democrat but published his work in the Knickerbocker as well as in Arcturus. Melville had cause to thank Irving at the start of his writing career. After dinner with him in 1847, Evert Duyckinck claimed that Melville “models his writing evidently a great deal on Washington Irving,” but Melville’s faith in Irving waned by the early 1850s. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses” he accuses Irving of imitating Oliver Goldsmith’s geniality. In the same letter to Duyckinck where he points out what “a great neighborhood” for authors is Pittsfield, Melville writes that “Irving is a grasshopper” compared to Hawthorne (C 181). He would reverse this assessment in a late unpublished prose poem, “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac,” which sympathetically rewrites Irving’s tale. But Melville was himself caught in the intellectual clash of old and new America; his writing prospered and suffered in its midst, notably at the hands of the promoter-turned-critic Duyckinck. In his magazine writing, Melville continued to work within the gravitational forces of taste cultures pulling against one another in the galaxy of American magazines, many of whom were caught between conformity and experimentation: on the one hand they must offer what was familiar to avoid alienating readers; on the other they must distinguish their content in order to create a commercial readership. Magazines found different ways to address this dilemma and generate audiences.
The New York Ledger bought up talent. Fanny Fern began her association with the magazine in 1855, and Robert Bonner, the Ledger’s owner and editor, advertised openly that Fern would be the country’s highest-paid magazine writer—at $100 per column—in the hope that readers would identify remuneration as a marker of quality. They did: four hundred thousand of them by 1860, by which time the Ledger also owned exclusive rights to E. D. E. N. Southworth’s fiction and claimed the imprimatur of other popular writers, such as Henry Ward Beecher, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The only fiction Charles Dickens published in America before publishing it in Britain—the three-part tale “Hunted Down”—appeared in the Ledger. The magazine paid Dickens the astronomical sum of £1,000.14
Harper’s New Monthly took a different approach by distinguishing the product readers held in their hands. The firm invested in the expensive process of engraving to offer more illustrations and produced a magazine slightly smaller than competitors like the Knickerbocker but with more pages—144 as opposed to the more usual 80, 96, or 112. With the advertising and distribution support of a large and successful publishing house, Harper’s quickly gathered a readership unconcerned by the reliance on British authors that other editors and owners despised. George R. Graham, the publisher of Graham’s Magazine, dismissed Harper’s as “a good foreign magazine” of which even “the veriest worshipper of the dust of Europe will tire,” while the American Whig Review thought the Harpers “anti-American in feeling as concerns literary development” and too keen on “pampering British writers” in their magazine.15 So successful was Harper’s, and so ready was the publishing house to support their new venture, that such “pampering” meant the magazine was able to buy, and not just reprint without payment, the work of British writers such as Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Lever, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Despite brickbats, the combination of quantity, quality, and publishing know-how proved a winning combination in Harper’s.
The articles of faith for Putnam’s were indigeneity and quality. For George Palmer Putnam, the best way to recognize and showcase the quality of American writing was in a magazine whose excellence was visible in both content and design. The magazine soon established the reputation Putnam desired for it. The editor and publisher David M. Stone forwarded a manuscript to Putnam from Mary Hubbel, who, he told Putnam, “is ambitious of appearing between your ‘green immortal’ leaves.” One Putnam’s reader, Theodore Johnson, claimed that the magazine, “among all periodicals of this kind is the best and most valuable,” not only because “it surpasses all of them by its popular character” but also because of “its typographical appearance and its excellent articles.” Quality alone, however, did not ensure the survival of Putnam’s beyond 1857.16
As they battled for market share and visibility, the capacity of magazines and editors to distinguish between imitative and innovative versions of the sketch and tale genres cannot be taken for granted. If magazine sketches were popular, writers—like Leslie and Willis—might follow Irving’s example and resell their portfolio in book form. Encouraging the voices of prospective writers—the Philip Browns and Eve Wilders of the mid-nineteenth century—also meant broadening the range of experiences represented in magazines. Consequently, as Kristie Hamilton notes, authors “who could achieve an appropriately modulated private voice made this genre a field of conflict and accommodation for competing formulations of American authorship and cultural legitimacy.”17 This understanding of the sketch suggests that the literary culture of magazines was not monolithic but diverse; its taste cultures less exclusive and more open in the face of the realities of magazine expansion and competition. As long ago as 1977 Marvin Fisher wrote about Melville “going under” in his short prose writing, but even in much more recent criticism of Melville’s magazine writing the belief persists that Melville stole the subversions of his writing into orthodox magazine forms.18 The truth is that magazines were much more tolerant of formal and ideological idiosyncrasy.
Melville’s short magazine pieces slice two ways into predominantly sketches and tales. In the first group are “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” “The ’Gees,” “I and My Chimney,” “The Happy Failure,” “The Lightning-Rod Man,” the multi-part sketches of “The Encantadas,” and the three diptychs—“Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” “The Two Temples,” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” The second group comprises “The Fiddler,” “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “Jimmy Rose,” “Benito Cereno,” “The Bell-Tower,” and “The Apple-Tree Table.” But Melville’s imaginative mixing and juxtaposition of genres in the cosmic inflation of magazine culture defies such easy categorization. Some of these pieces are patchwork quilts stitched together out of garish material; others blend genre distinctions seamlessly into the warp and weft of a single fabric.
The December 1853 issue of Harper’s contained several pieces of fiction in addition to “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” The first appeared a third of the way into the magazine, after two pictorial travelogues—Jacob Abbott’s memoir of a trip to Bethlehem and Calvin Philleo’s account of his visit to Plymouth, Massachusetts—and the pseudonymous “The Virginian Canaan,” a report of an excursion into rural Virginia that I come back to later. “Sweet Bells Jangled” is the tragic tale of Edward Angelo, a sensitive young man whose misplaced infatuation with the much less sensitive Boadicea Fleurry results in his death. The reputation of Harper’s fiction at this time was for sentimental conventionality. One or two stories per issue told tales about the stoical suffering that comes with love, poverty, illness, or family commitments; if suffering is alleviated, this usually occurs through sympathy, benevolence, or philanthropy—or more suffering; readers learn moral lessons, and inequalities of class and status are smoothed over in a bleak and redemptive, but static, moral universe.19 “Sweet Bells Jangled” added to the quota for December along with the next story, G. P. R. James’s “Four Sights of a Young Man,” which tells of the sad decline and suicide of William Hardy through the narrator’s four meetings with him.
“Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” was sandwiched between these two tales and the unattributed “Brackley House,” whose author we now know to be William Cowper Prime, and an installment of Thackeray’s The Newcomes. Prime’s story is a tragic tale of a family torn apart by feuding, and premature death strikes the central characters. Merrymusk’s death in Melville’s story, then, is only one of many in this issue of Harper’s. Swinging back and forth between sentimental and tragic stories and earnestly and lightheartedly informative sketches and travelogues, Harper’s sets a rhythm with which “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” is only partly in time; the story is notable in Melville’s earliest batch of short pieces because sentimental, tale, and sketch genres stand so abruptly against one another. The generic structure of “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” plays fast and loose with their conventions.
The piece begins in sketch mode with a first-person narrator who drills down from worldwide revolts against “rascally despotisms” quickly crushed in recent times, to the casualties of industrial-age locomotives and steamers, to his “own private affairs” and the landscape he sees from his position sitting on a log at the top of his hillside pasture (PT 268). The narrator’s eye ranges “over the capacious rolling country, and over the mountains, and over the village, and over a farm-house here and there, and over woods, groves, streams, rocks, fells.” This is no pastoral idyll, however; the narrator soon turns to the miseries of modern life—the accidents and stupidity that lead people to be “disembarked into the grim hulk of Charon” (PT 269)—and to which he feels himself connected by a creditor who pesters him for payment. He has also suffered a reversal of fortune: his charity—giving up a berth on a boat to a sick woman—forced him to spend a night on deck in the rain, which gave him a case of “the rheumatics.” The observational sketch mixes local knowledge of the countryside and the philosophizing of an educated man comfortable with classical allusion (Xerxes and Socrates follow Charon) but downtrodden by the intrusions of the fast-moving modern world, or the “gigantic gad-fly of a Moloch—snort! puff! scream!” that is the train (PT 270).
By the end of “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” the scene is quite different: the narrator visits the shack that is home to the poor woodsman Merrymusk and his wife and family and finds “the whole house was a hospital now” (PT 286–87). Merrymusk dies; his wife soon follows; the children quickly thereafter. “The pallor of the children was changed to radiance,” the narrator observes, and their “faces shone celestially through grime and dirt. . . . Far, deep, intense longings for release transfigured them into spirits before my eyes. I saw angels where they lay. They were dead” (PT 287–88). The sketcher is now firmly transplanted into the sentimental mode. Bachelor reverie turns into misty-eyed mourning for a dead family; from railing cantankerously against modernity the narrator is pitched into a death scene from which he creates a new outlook on life; no longer, he claims, is he prone to “the doleful dumps” (PT 288). Linking these two states is the incongruous comic tale of Signor Beneventano—christened by the narrator after the opera singer Ferdinando Beneventano—the cockerel whose “smooth and flute-like” crowing enraptures the narrator (PT 274).
So inspiring is this crowing that the narrator faces down his creditor. Heard but not seen, the cock also forces the narrator to abandon his hillside repose and go wandering at ground level to find the source of the bird’s “triumphant thanksgiving of a cock-crow” (PT 271). The bird’s owner, he learns, is Merrymusk, the poor woodcutter whose life of poverty is ameliorated by having the bird for comfort. The narrator describes how the bird “irradiated the shanty” where Merrymusk lives: “He glorified its meanness. He glorified the battered chest, and tattered gray coat, and the bunged hat. He glorified the very voices which came in ailing tones from behind the screen” where the sickly children lie (PT 284). Merrymusk does not think himself a poor man while he owns the bird; he considers himself “a great philanthropist” for giving “all this glorification away gratis” (PT 286).
There are several ways to read “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” symptomatically: as a satire on transcendentalism’s faith in nature to overcome material shortcomings, or as a piece of sexual innuendo charting the recovery of virility—the narrator, after all, is crowing at the end of the story after the cock dies along with the Merrymusk family; or as a piece of sentimental tourism that represents the nobility of poverty seen often in Harper’s while keeping readers at a safe distance through the gentlemanly and detached narrator.20 The story certainly made sense to one of Melville’s relatives in terms of spiritual uplift. Clearly reading it without irony, Melville’s brother-in-law John Hoadley wrote to Melville’s sister Augusta in December 1853, soon after Harper’s published the story: “Tell Herman I thank him with all my heart, for that noble spiritual lesson of hope,—enduring, triumphant,—never-desponding,—in the ‘Crowing of the noble Cock Beneventano.’”21 All of these readings emphasize the story’s unity of effect. Paradoxically, only the disunity of genre in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” makes such readings possible.
The dramatic effects of the story are achieved in the morphing between genres, not through Melville writing steadfastly in one generic mode. The narrator offers no explanation for why the cock’s crowing lifts his mood; the reader knows some change takes place when the sketch suddenly meets the new genre of bathetic comedy, which intrudes—like the cockerel—unexpectedly into the narrative. A similar impetus to infer meaning occurs with the coincidence of the narrator’s visit to Merrymusk’s home and the death of the entire family. Suddenly dropped into the sentimental occasion at the piece’s denouement, meaning seems expected. In this formal juxtaposition, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” wears its genres on its sleeve to generate meaning. If short stories like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno” build dense webs of irony, where meaning emerges through a careful elaboration of consciousness, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” patterns in bright blocks.
So why, in stories written at much the same time, does Melville write in such different ways? Why does he not write all his stories like “Bartleby, the Scrivener”? Sheila Post-Lauria suggests that Melville is instructing a particular audience in Harper’s and that “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” conforms to the sentimental structure preferred by the magazine and its readers: sharing the joy of the cockerel that ennobles the suffering of Merrymusk and his family morally redeems the narrator. But if the purpose is to instruct, why does Melville not use genre in a way more consistent with the sentimental instruction available in Harper’s? There may be angels in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” but there are no tears; distinctions are more obvious than similarities. Harper’s stories began, continued, and ended in the sentimental mode. So “Blind Man’s Wreath,” for instance, starts: “‘My boy, my poor blind boy!’ This sorrowful exclamation broke form the lips of Mrs. Owen.”22 A story Post-Lauria uses to show similarities with “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” opens with the following scene: “Just then a little child came running along—a poor, ill-clad child; her clothes were scant and threadbare; she had no cloak, and no shawl; and her little bare feet looked red and suffering.”23 Against the wide-ranging eye of the narrator in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” these stories begin in close-up and stay there to generate moral instruction.
Melville’s narrator comes out of a different tradition. The rural settlements of “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” that exist beside “a lagging, fever-and-agueish river,” and over one of which hangs “a great flat canopy of haze, like a pall” (PT 269), are not exactly Sleepy Hollow but bear a family resemblance. The slapstick cockerel would fit well in Laurence Sterne’s “cock and bull” story Tristram Shandy, a book the narrator is reading and whose “cock and bull” reference he would no doubt spot in his other reading matter: The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which Robert Burton coined the phrase. Rather than with the sentimental narrators of Harper’s, Melville’s narrator shares much more with the sketch narrator and the mischievous satirist as those figures emerge out of the eighteenth century, partly through Irving, and then twist themselves around each other’s tendrils during the nineteenth century.
Overstating the structural unity of “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” ignores how the genres of sketch, comic satire, and the sentimental bump against one another so loudly. There is no steadfast sentimental mode as one might find in the writing of Lydia Maria Child, for instance. The sentimental comes to the fore only at the story’s very end; the wrapping up enacted there is conventional but hardly offers closure in the light of what goes before. Merrymusk might claim spiritual wealth despite his penurious state, but the narrator, after hearing Merrymusk tell him this, then tells the same reader who will watch the sentimental climax only a page or so later, how he “returned home in a deep mood” and was “not wholly at rest concerning the soundness of Merrymusk’s view of things, though full of admiration for him” (PT 286). The detached narrator with whom the story begins, high on his hillside, is not brought down to earth nor incorporated so easily into the sentimental mode. As such, the story lacks the formal and generic security that assures its place in the conservative magazine world of Harper’s.
The sketch tradition was, in fact, alive and well in the pages of Harper’s and sat happily beside sentimental writing. “The Virginian Canaan,” which I mentioned above, attributed to “A Virginian,” was the work of David Hunter Strother, who wrote under the blatantly Irvingesque pseudonym Porte Crayon (literally, from the French, “pencil holder”) who appears as a character in this and the connected pieces Strother contributed to Harper’s through the 1870s. In the spirit of the eighteenth-century travelling sketchers, Strother both wrote and illustrated; the two forms were integral to his magazine persona. The pieces themselves are mainly adventure travelogues and transplant Irving’s wandering sketcher from Britain to Virginia and the South, where he finds friendship and excitement in backwoods escapades, regionalizing Irving’s style along the way. The component parts of Crayon’s identity are available in “The Virginian Canaan”: “Every day added to the treasures of Porte Crayon’s sketch-book. The author reveled in a poetic existence, basking on moss-covered rocks, among foaming rapids and sparkling water-falls; and if his haggard and unshaven countenance and dilapidated wardrobe presented a strong contrast to his mental beatitude, it only exemplified the more strikingly the predominance of mind over matter, and the entire disconnection that sometimes exists between the ideal and the material world.”24 Cerebral but at the same time a man in a physical environment, Crayon—just like the narrator of “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”—shows that short-form writing in American magazines drew on, and could accommodate, different traditions.
Magazines were unified neither generically nor philosophically in the 1850s. Magazines were collaborations, contained multitudes, and Melville fit not because he flew his ideas under editorial or reading detection systems by coating them with radar-absorbent irony—although the writing is often, of course, ironic—but because the delimiting of the air space in which he glided was enforced less effectively than it was espoused. Harper’s spoke of the “unbounded treasures of the Periodical Literature of the present day.” Although recognizing the impossibility of making all this material accessible to the magazine’s readers, Harper’s set itself the equally improbable task of placing “every thing of the Periodical Literature of the day, which has permanent value and commanding interest, in the hands of all who have the slightest desire to become acquainted with it.”25 Such confidence is almost as ridiculous as expecting the crowing of a cockerel to change one’s moral character. But that was the magazine world of the 1850s: boundless ambition trying to cope with “unbounded treasures.” It may seem that the bagginess of the novel is much more accommodating to experiment than the short story; that novels showcase writing, short stories formal precision. Yet without any agreed guidelines about what constituted a short story, the terrain for writing in shorter forms easily accommodated Melville’s switching from sketch to satire to sentimentality in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”
After completing his first batch of “articles” with “Bartleby” in mid-September 1853, Melville spent the following months, through April 1854, writing a series of multi-part pieces whose generic origin is the sketch and whose dramatic and intellectual effects result from contrasting different points of view. These pieces are Melville’s three diptychs—“Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and “The Two Temples”—and “The Encantadas,” ten connected sketches serialized in three parts by Putnam’s from March to May 1854.26
The diptychs fused pictorial and literary sketch traditions but offered few ways to move that tradition forward. They do not achieve what Irving achieves over the course of his multiple sketches or what Dickens and Thackeray achieve in their regular sketch contributions to newspapers and magazines: the depiction through a roving narratorial point of view of a social world distinguished by contrasts. The results in Melville’s diptychs are relatively static panels. In the jargon of narratology, the sketch “is a form in which catalyzers exist without cardinal functions.”27 The steady accumulation and consistency of narrative voice can offset this absence, but the diptych’s brazen shifts and binary contrasts are a generic dead end. Melville’s only novel twist is to set one panel in America and one in Britain in each of the pieces.
“The Encantadas,” the first written of Melville’s multi-part experiments with the sketch, is an altogether different proposition. “The Encantadas” offers a sustained experimentation with narrative perspective that makes the diptychs look like afterthoughts in the way they take up the same theme. “The Two Temples,” rejected by Putnam’s and unpublished in Melville’s lifetime, deals primarily with a narrator who observes scenes in a New York City church and a London theater and draws attention to the process of looking. From aloft in the church, he says, “I seemed inside some magic-lantern” (PT 304) and “through some necromancer’s glass, I looked down upon some sly enchanter’s show” (PT 306). The real “enchanter’s show” takes place in Melville’s representation of the Galapagos Islands, christened by Spanish travelers “the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.” In the shadowy half-light of the history and nature of these islands, where one encounters all manner of “ocular deceptions and mirages” (PT 142), Melville builds his own magic lantern whose narrative activity surpasses the static panels of the diptychs. As sketches he publishes in a magazine, “The Encantadas” also have their own mysteries; they provide “A Pisgah View from the Rock”—the title of the fourth sketch—from which to look at the place of the sketches in the magazine world and Putnam’s in particular.
Melville sent the first batch of sketches to Putnam’s on February 6, 1854, along with a terse and odd note: “Herewith I send you 75. pages adapted for a magazine. Should they suit your’s, please write me how much in present cash you will give for them” (C 256). Melville’s use of the word “adapted” here is ambiguous: it may simply refer to writing Melville thinks suited to a magazine, although he shows little confidence that Putnam’s is the magazine it best fits; but “adapted” also suggests writing changed from one form to another. In an earlier letter sent to Harper & Brother in November 1853, Melville claimed to have written three hundred pages of a new book: “partly of nautical adventure, and partly—or, rather, chiefly, of Tortoise Hunting Adventure. It will be ready for press some time in the coming January.” Melville then asks for an advance of $300. He duly received the advance within two weeks, despite the poor sales of his previous books and the word “Declined” penciled across the top of the letter (C 249–50). There was later correspondence about this project, but the book never appeared. The Galapagos Islands is home famously to giant tortoises. Melville clearly took an advance from the Harper firm and “adapted” either what was already written of the “Tortoise Hunting Adventure,” or what he intended to write, and sold the material again for publication in Putnam’s.
Melville’s motives in this episode are not clear. If he was intentionally duplicitous then he beat Harper to the punch: the firm would charge him for reprinting his own books after a warehouse fire in December 1853 at its Cliff Street premises. And like the narrator of “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” Melville had creditors to pay: John Brewster, from whom he bought Arrowhead with the help of a $1,500 mortgage charged at $90 interest each year; and Tertullus Stewart, from whom Melville took out a second mortgage. Melville paid Brewster after his windfall but not Stewart. Changes were also taking place in the Melville household. In September 1853 Melville’s sister Catherine married, and another sister, Helen, married in January 1854. This put a further strain on Melville’s finances and interrupted his work; he was now down to one copyist, Augusta, who was also occupied with household chores. It is possible Melville deceived neither the Harpers nor Putnam’s if the “Tortoise Hunting Adventure” and what Putnam’s published as “The Encantadas” were two different works. As Hershel Parker points out, when the first installment of “The Encantadas” appeared in March 1854—almost immediately after Melville submitted his “75 pages,” so suitable was the piece for Putnam’s—the tortoises were in full view and the Harpers must have noticed them. But there is no evidence of recrimination; Melville continued to publish work in Harper’s over the next two years, although Pierre proved his last novel with the firm. The biographical and chronological record goes cold at this point. Unlike the Galapagos tortoises, the truth of this magazine conundrum has no “citadel wherein to resist the assaults of Time” (PT 131). It is an epistemological dilemma that well serves “The Encantadas,” whose own epistemological concerns Melville uses the genre of the sketch to elaborate.
“The Encantadas” nods to the sketch tradition most visibly in the titles of each of the ten sections: “Sketch First,” “Sketch Second,” and so on. Certainly in the work of Irving, Dickens, and Thackeray, the sketch also nominally protects authorial identity through the use of a pseudonymous narrator: for Irving there is Geoffrey Crayon; for Dickens, Boz; and for Thackeray, Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitz-Boodle. “The Encantadas” is the only piece of Melville’s magazine writing to appear with authorial attribution. The three installments do not carry Melville’s name, however, but appear under the pseudonym “Salvator R. Tarnmoor.” As Geoffrey Crayon is to Irving, so, it seems, Salvator R. Tarnmoor is to Melville as he places himself in the lineage of the sketch tradition. And yet the value Putnam’s placed on anonymity makes the situation less straightforward.
The three issues in which “The Encantadas” appeared carry no other attributed pieces; more than this, “The Encantadas” is the only attributed piece by a living writer to appear in any issue of Putnam’s between the first issue of January 1853 and the final issue of September 1857. Putnam’s published “Old Ironsides” in May 1853 in honor of James Fenimore Cooper, who had died in September 1851, a piece the magazine’s publisher understood to be “the only posthumous publication of his writings which will be given to the world.”28 Putnam’s did not deal in attribution, real or pseudonymous. Francis Underwood, a prospective contributor, anticipated the reason for this in a letter sent to the magazine just as “The Encantadas” reached its readers: “As your contributors are anonymous, it follows, I suppose, that you pay for articles instead of reputations, and therefore, that a nameless man has an equal chance with Hawthorne or Longfellow.”29 Putnam’s was the residual incarnation of an earlier republican periodical culture where, as Jared Gardner puts it, there existed a “mutual contract inherent in anonymous periodical publication that bound the author to defend himself by words alone and the reader to judge the writer by the same criterion.”30 Melville reprinted “The Encantadas” in The Piazza Tales with the pseudonym removed, though whether this resulted from Melville’s request or the printer’s error is also unknown. Melville never addressed the issue in his letters to Putnam’s and the ghostly magazine avatar lasts but three months, from March through May 1854.31
What, then, to make of this pseudonym in a sea of anonymity?32 Without primary evidence on which to make an argument, conclusions are by necessity speculative, but one approach is to think about the peculiar qualities of the sketch pseudonym. Unlike other pseudonymous authors, the pseudonymous sketch author is also the narrator and a character in the narrative. Mark Twain does not appear in novels written by Samuel Clemens, nor George Eliot in novels by Mary Anne Evans. But Geoffrey Crayon is the “I” of the Sketch Book and Boz the “we” of Sketches by Boz. Salvator R. Tarnmoor is certainly the “I” of “The Encantadas,” a character in the sketches and more an alter ego than a pseudonym, one who creates an extra diegetic layer between content and anonymous author.
Melville registers the importance of a sketch tradition by using a pseudonym for “The Encantadas,” and Marvin Fisher is right to say that Melville “uses the resemblance to emphasize several important literary and pictorial contrasts between his portfolio of sketches and that of such a genteel predecessor as Irving.”33 The contrasts are not just with predecessors but with contemporaries. Salvator R. Tarnmoor stands out in the pages of Putnam’s like Rock Redondo in “Sketch Third” of “The Encantadas” as it climbs “two hundred and fifty feet high, rising straight from the sea ten miles from land” (PT 133). Conspicuously authorized, “The Encantadas” is unlike any other pieces in Putnam’s. Tarnmoor localizes the content of the sketches by attributing them to a specific character and to a specifically learned sailor, although he may be a “tar no more.”34 Just as Tarnmoor looks from Redondo Rock at the surrounding terrain from a great height, so the attribution makes us look hard at the rest of Putnam’s and prompts the question, What is the difference between a world seen from the anonymous authority of Putnam’s and the position of the sketcher Salvator R. Tarnmoor?
In some respects, the world looks the same because the magazine reader might have traveled this way before; the colorful, exotic, and often dangerous Galapagos existed already in the American imagination. In 1846, The Living Age, a popular weekly that republished articles from British and American periodicals, printed a review of John Coulter’s Adventures in the Pacific (1845). The reviewer reported:
Willing Crusoes are scattered throughout this vast ocean; and though many soon get tired of their island solitude and escape from it when opportunity offers, men are yet found who prefer it to such civilization as they can have access to. . . . One of such settlements Dr. Coulter fell in with, at the Galapagos, a group near the Equator, and not very far from the coast of Peru. On one of these islands a Spaniard of the name of Vilamil had taken up his quarters; having some claim upon the government, he was paid by a grant of black criminals, and permission to establish a colony in the Galapagos; which he did upon monopoly principles, with unfortunate results.35
The conflict over island resources was the object of a Harper’s report in September 1852, when the magazine informed its readers that “painful intelligence has been received of the massacre of the crew of the American sloop Phantom, and the destruction of the vessel, by the convicts of one of the Gallipagos islands, in November last.”36 The Friends’ Review in August and September 1854 reprinted from the National Era William Seward’s speech to the Senate urging the adoption of steam power to help the United States compete commercially with Britain, whose flag one meets, he says, “fixed, planted, rooted into the very earth” when one travels northward, southward, or even when “you ascend along the southwestern coast of America, [where] it is seen at Galapagos, overlooking the Isthmus of Panama.”37 In an age of scientific and natural history discovery, the Galapagos feature both as a destination—as in The Pioneer; or California Monthly Magazine article “A Trip to the Galapagos Islands”—or as a site of special geological or zoological interest. In December, 1850, for instance, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature reprinted an article from Fraser’s Magazine called “Facts and Wonders of the Tortoise Family,” in which Charles Darwin and the Galapagos tortoise feature prominently.38 The publication and reprinting of this material ensured that Melville’s writing was not freestanding; as with “Bartleby,” there existed a magazine base-camp from which he could set off.
The route Melville scales, however, leads in another direction. Even the title renders from another angle what might be a familiar world to the magazine reader. Not until the bottom of the second page of the first sketch as it appeared in Putnam’s is it clear that this island world is better known by a different name, and then only in an aside: “For concerning the peculiar reptile inhabitant of these wilds—whose presence gives the group its second Spanish name, Gallipagos—concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have long cherished a superstition, not more frightful than grotesque” (PT 128). Squeezed between the repetition of “concerning,” the Galapagos only interrupt Tarnmoor’s narration of a world known more readily to him as the Encantadas.
Melville’s reimagining of the islands is thoroughgoing and decidedly partial, especially in the way Tarnmoor’s narration privileges sources written before Darwin’s visit and publication of The Voyage of the “Beagle,” the one source most likely to have informed American readers about the islands. The only “eye-witness authorities worth mentioning,” Tarnmoor claims, are “Cowley, the buccaneer (1684); Colnet, the whaling-ground explorer (1798); Porter, the post captain (1813). Other than these you have but barren, bootless allusions from some few passing voyagers or compilers” (PT 143). The bogus population table for Albermarle Island in “Sketch Fourth” pokes in the eye scientific claims to know the islands. By disregarding and satirizing scientists like Darwin, Denise Tanyol argues, “Melville’s work wrests the Galapagos from the grasp of the naturalist, revealing that the marvels of the world are not to be easily mapped, counted, and classified.”39 Nor so easily managed and colonized. One of the pleasures of his journey, Darwin wrote, was that “the world ceases to be blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.” The world Melville creates—the “heaps of cinders” that look “much as the world at large might, after a penal conflagration” (PT 126)—is uninhabitable and far removed from the vibrant ecosystem Darwin imagined in his Voyage, whose conclusion expresses a colonizing spirit: “To hoist the British flag, seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilization.”40 Tarnmoor’s uninhabitable and mysterious Enchanted Isles are not such willing beneficiaries.
Tarnmoor’s narrative also charts an island territory that sits ambivalently in the midst of Putnam’s. In literary terms, the magazine followed Seward’s approach by raising the American flag in competition with the British and strived to claim the legitimacy of American writing. The magazine was also part of George Palmer Putnam’s larger publishing business, which, as Hester Blum shows, consisted of books and series whose purpose was to register, tabulate, and systematize knowledge of the world from an American perspective in works such as American Facts: Notes and Statistics Relative to the Government of the United States (1845), The World’s Progress—A Dictionary of Dates (1850, republished in 1852 as Hand-Book of Chronology), the six-volume Home Cyclopedia (1852–53), and in Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books, the series in which Putnam published Melville’s Typee. But while “The Encantadas” challenges Darwinian taxonomy, and by extension also mocks the ideological aim of Putnam’s and its parent company to see the world anew from an American perspective, this mocking is not so loud that “The Encantadas” departs from that aim; on the contrary, the eagerness with which Putnam’s accepted the sketches suggests Tarnmoor’s narrative fulfills the magazine’s purpose.
Putnam’s was a magazine of both the sciences and the arts; it valued material knowledge as well as the imaginative engagement of this material. So much so, Blum argues, that it operated in a way that could “accommodate both rootedness and fluidity.” Salvator R. Tarnmoor’s imaginative rendering of the geologically and zoologically captivating Galapagos Islands not only “underscores the importance of active labor over received knowledge”—knowledge like that found in American Facts—but is also part of a process to which Putnam’s Monthly was committed: transforming “existing materials into other usable qualities” in a process that “is never static or complete but always generating matter, printed and physical.”41 In this belief, Putnam’s was more forgiving of individuals like Melville who experimented with reimagining the world. The multi-part sketch is vital to this process and to the mobilization of Tarnmoor’s imaginative eye. Unlike the static panels created in the diptychs, “The Encantadas” generates fluidity and movement in ways that regenerate the sketch genre and also elaborate a way of seeing that is exceptional—like their attribution—in the pages of Putnam’s.
“The Encantadas” also goes beyond some other famous stories that test the boundaries of literary perspective. In “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for instance, Hawthorne condenses epistemological uncertainty into the symbol of the veil, whose appearance and continued visibility in the community trigger the search for explanation and meaning. In Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” the eponymous letter is hidden in plain sight, and only Dupin’s ratiocinative brilliance can find it. “The Encantadas” does not rely on symbolism; like “The Purloined Letter” it projects the issue of perspective onto narrative form. Unlike Poe’s story, however, which relies on the twin temporal sequences that will define the detective genre—the time of the crime and the time of the investigation—time in “The Encantadas” does not work so fluently; like the perspectives it presents, time is fractured in Melville’s twisting of the sketch form.
Melville’s sketches presented no problems to Putnam’s. As I noted earlier, the tastes of the editors operated respectfully of conservative transatlantic literary influences. This ambivalence even echoes in the magazine’s founding editorial: “The genius of the old world is affluent; we owe much to it, and we hope to owe more. But we have no less faith in the opulence of our own resources.” “No less faith” only just suggests “more faith.” And literary nationalism is more easily stated than enacted when the ideological consistency of the Putnam’s project had to withstand the periodicity of the publishing cycle and the judgment calls made in the acceptance of each article. The sketch form was a magazine staple and offered none of the potential problems in Melville’s structuring of “Benito Cereno,” about which George William Curtis complained to Joshua Dix: “It is a great pity he did not work it up as a connected tale instead of putting in the dreary documents at the end.—They should have made part of the substance of the story.”42 The multi-sketch form allows Melville to roam free but from within the confines of a recognizable genre; the ten sketches provide a structure—the simple movement from island to island—that prevents the narrative from spinning out of control; as sketches they require no resolution or forced unity. The multi-part sketch, then, is a structure simultaneously closed and open, or rooted and fluid. When “The Encantadas” arrived at Putnam’s there was nothing to which the editors might object. Melville’s uncertainty that the material would suit Putnam’s proved ungrounded.
One of the ways Melville generates epistemological fluidity in “The Encantadas”—of narrative voice, of perspective—is by opening the sketches from such a firm and clear point of view that immediately addresses and guides the reader. Sketch dues are paid in the first Spenserian epigraph—Irving’s Sketch Book is full of such epigraphs—but the first voice is authoritative, suggests a third-person (or first-person plural) rather than a first-person narration, and is heard as the response to a question phrased something like “So, can you describe the islands for me?” The answer is both pragmatic and ornate: “Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles” (PT 126). In one way like an instruction for an experiment or a recipe, in another it is also metaphorical; sensitive to its readers’ location—an urban scene more familiar to them—it is also otherworldly as the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor pull apart. This phatic opening establishes the perspective of the overview in the first sketch, “The Isles at Large,” and the balance of description and allusion continues as the first epistemological dilemma emerges: the unrelenting fixity of the islands—“to them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows” (PT 126)—and yet the “apparent fleetingness and unreality of the locality of the isles” that gives rise to the notion of them as the “Enchanted Group” (PT 128).
The first sketch establishes that what one sees of the islands depends on one’s position: “However wavering their place may seem by reason of the currents, they themselves, at least to one upon the shore, appear invariably the same: fixed, cast, glued into the very body of cadaverous death” (PT 128). The narrator stands both on shore and at sea. Where in the diptychs conflicting visions are separated formally in the two panels, here they are combined in a copious, delicate, and reflective narrative eye that takes the stuff of the travel narrative or the natural history and brings it into the impressionistic sketch. Vivid images are fused with history and superstition. The islands are at one moment like “split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun” (PT 126), and then the location for fleets of whaling ships and buccaneers; the “self-condemned” tortoises in whom “lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness are . . . so suppliantly expressed” (PT 129) are also, so legend has it, the transformed bodies of commodores and captains. The first sketch then offers the delayed gratification of the first-person narrator, Salvator R. Tarnmoor, whose “I” appears only in the penultimate paragraph and is located in yet another position: back in America, from whose cities he escapes into the Adirondack Mountains to recall “as in a dream, my other and far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the charmed isles.” Not just from shore and from sea does Tarnmoor imagine the Encantadas; he sees them, too, in the mansions where he socializes and where candles cast shadows on walls: out of the undergrowth of these shadows Tarnmoor sees “the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with ‘Memento ****’ burning in live letters upon his back” (PT 129).
The late arrival of the first-person narrator in “Sketch First” is a subtle adjustment of the sketch form. The shift of narrative position unmoors the seemingly authoritative and fixed point of view with which the sketch starts. Moving from the omniscient to the personal, Tarnmoor is now not just author of, but actor in, this account; one is moved from an outward-facing view of the world to an inward view of a narrator in whom an impression of that external world is burned like the letters on the tortoise’s back. If traditional sketches rely on what Amanpal Garcha calls “individualized figures of quirky, eccentric narratorial personas,” this figure is gone in “The Encantadas” because the movement from omniscience to Tarnmoor’s “I”—and the delay of this movement—undercuts the idea of the consistent point of view required to establish such a figure.43 Tarnmoor may trade in empirical reality combined with a sketcher’s subjectivity, but in later sketches other voices and stories intrude on his subjectivity—as I show later in this chapter—and his own subjectivity is continually exposed. In these conditions, any consistent position is circumscribed. The sketches in “The Encantadas” are less like quick and individual impressions than contemplations narrated retrospectively; less initial drawings than finished paintings worked up in the studio, or in the hills of the Adirondacks, where Tarnmoor can “recall” and “remember” and where he feels “the vividness of my memory, or the magic of my fancy” and reckons himself the “victim of optical delusion concerning the Gallipagos” (PT 129). Subjectivity here seems to be the object of analysis for Tarnmoor rather than the medium for telling the reader about the islands. Where Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon keeps the “enchanted region” of Sleepy Hollow at safe distance in the papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker, Melville’s Tarnmoor has himself “slept upon evilly enchanted ground” (PT 129).44 Out of sketches emerge a short story.
The dual components of Tarnmoor’s narrative subjectivity—as guide and rememberer—emerge more clearly in “Sketch Second—Two Sides to a Tortoise” and “Sketch Third—Rock Redondo.” The first of these begins with a general disquisition on the dark back of tortoises and their brighter underside, before halting formally—“But let us to particulars” (PT 130)—at which point the first-person narration again begins. “Rock Redondo” starts similarly: “Now, with reference to the Enchanted Isles, we are fortunately supplied with . . . a noble point of observation in a remarkable rock” (PT 133), which is the steep-sided, towerlike islet known in Spanish as Roca Redonda, in the northern Galapagos. Tarnmoor then recounts for the reader “my first visit to the spot” (PT 134) and a different “we”—his shipmates—who lower boats from their ship and make for the rock; as he climbs it, the first-person singular gives way to first-person plural: “Let us glance low down to the lowermost shelf,” Tarnmoor says. As he observes different birds, he makes the reader follow: “But look, what are yon woebegone regiments drawn up on the next shelf above? . . . Higher up now we mark the gony, or gray albatross . . . As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude” (PT 135). In “Sketch Fourth—A Pisgah View from the Rock” the multiplication of points of view increases still further as the second person joins in:
Suffice it, that here at the summit you and I stand. Does any balloonist, does the outlooking man in the moon, take a broader view of space? Much thus, one fancies, looks the universe from Milton’s celestial battlements. A boundless watery Kentucky. Here Daniel Boone would have dwelt content.
Never heed for the present yonder Burnt District of the Enchanted Isles. Look edgeways, as it were, past them, to the south. You see nothing; but permit me to point out the direction, if not the place, of certain interesting objects in the vast sea, which kissing this tower’s base, we behold unscrolling itself towards the Antarctic Pole. (PT 137)
All these shifts in perspective take place in views of, and from, a rock that is itself the viewing platform for the rest of the islands as well as the watery world “unscrolling” as far as the Antarctic. The impressionistic sketch becomes more like a Cubist painting juxtaposing impossible angles of vision.
Finally (if not in the final sketch), there is the story of Hunilla’s rescue in “Sketch Eighth.” The story is prompted by the unusual angle of vision of one of Tarnmoor’s shipmates. Having consumed “a dram of Peruvian pisco” and standing atop rather beside his handspike as he helps turn a large windlass, the “elevation of his eye” spots a fluttering handkerchief on Norfolk Isle. The “long cabin spy-glass . . . thrust through the mizzen rigging from the high platform of the poop” confirms Hunilla’s presence on the isle, from which she is rescued by the ship’s crew. Between the rescue and Hunilla telling her story to the ship’s captain, Tarnmoor inserts a paragraph of reflection that lays bare the sketch tradition in and against which Melville is working: “It is not artistic heartlessness,” Tarnmoor says, “but I wish I could but draw in crayons; for this woman was a most touching sight; and crayons, tracing softly melancholy lines, would best depict the mournful image of the dark-damasked Chola widow” (PT 152). To conceive of writing as drawing, or crayoning, was nothing new: the literary sketch had long used tropes of visual sketching. But in implying his inability to “draw in crayons,” Tarnmoor puts himself at one remove from sketchers like Irving’s incarnation of the Crayon-er.
If not crayons, then what? Instead of the smooth geniality one might find in Irving, Melville’s Tarnmoor retells Hunilla’s story in the stark, rough lines of tragedy as Hunilla watches the death of Felipe and Truxill, her husband and brother. To achieve this, the sketch uses the format of a story within a story common to the sketch, but in a way that manages to look two ways at once: from the narrator’s perspective as Tarnmoor relays the scene but also from Hunilla’s perspective as the tragedy unfolds. Setting out by raft on a fishing trip, Felipe and Truxill “perished before Hunilla’s eyes.” As if reinforcing the importance of showing this tragedy from Hunilla’s perspective, Tarnmoor’s narrative continues by repeating these final words before elaborating the visual manner in which Hunilla observes the tragedy. The accumulation of visual effects is worth quoting at length:
Before Hunilla’s eyes they sank. The real woe of this event passed before her sight as some sham tragedy on the stage. She was seated on a rude bower among the withered thickets, crowning a lofty cliff, a little back from the beach. . . . [U]pon the day we speak of here, the better to watch the adventure of those two hearts she loved, Hunilla had withdrawn the branches to one side, and held them so. They formed an oval frame, through which the bluey boundless sea rolled like a painted one. And there, the invisible painter painted to her view the wave-tossed and disjointed raft . . . ; and then all subsided into smooth-flowing creamy waters, slowly drifting the splintered wreck; while first and last, no sound of any sort was heard. Death in a silent picture; a dream of the eye; such vanishing shapes as the mirage shows. (PT 154)
The reader watches Tarnmoor reimagine Hunilla spectating on the drama playing out before her and the painting being painted before her eyes. The censure of Irving, John Bryant argues, may show that Melville did “not reject Irving so much as grow beyond him.”45 In “The Encantadas,” then, there exist not sketches but paintings; not smooth geniality but the heart-stopping realization of what the painting shows even as the narrator cannot: death. No wonder the narrator is reluctant to intrude further on Hunilla’s woe, or on her rape at the hands of passing whalemen evident from her blank responses to the captain’s questioning: “‘Señor, ask me not. . . . Nay Señor. . . . Ask me not, Señor.’” Tarnmoor “will not file this thing complete” because “it may be libellous to speak some truths,” but in truth he has already spoken it, and Tarnmoor’s painting of the encounter of a Chilean woman and western whaleboats speaks a truth more accurate than Darwin’s faith in the consequences of national flag-planting (PT 157–58).46
There is nothing smooth about “The Encantadas.” Not the recursive diegetic structure, the jagged angles of vision, the multiplying of perspectives during the course of meditations on perspective, or the stitched and sewn-together experiences Tarnmoor tailors from his several visits to the islands. When Tarnmoor describes the sea “unscrolling” toward the Antarctic, he is reminiscent of the narrator in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” who gazes at the machine that stands before him “rolled out like some long Eastern manuscript” and the paper it produces for uses “without end.” For Melville the sea had long been a scroll for his writing. That he turns here in “The Encantadas” to a paper metaphor reinforces a point I made in chapter 1: when writing for the magazine market, the material on which his writing life relied is close at hand when he wishes to reaffirm his sense of himself as a writer. In “The Encantadas” he shows no less ambition with genre than previously in his novels; here the sketch that Irving bequeathed to America crumbles. “The Encantadas” contains sketches but shows that sketches cannot contain the Enchanted Isles.
The form of “The Encantadas” is rarely now the primary focus of critical attention. Yet all that the story achieves is done with genre in mind and was first achieved in Putnam’s Monthly. The attribution to Salvator R. Tarnmoor may make the story stand proud in that magazine’s pages, but Melville was much more closely embedded in the sketches and other “what nots” among which he published. He was also much more closely entwined with Darwin. In Britain, John Murray published Typee and Omoo in the Home and Colonial Library series; the second edition of Darwin’s Voyage of the “Beagle” appeared in the same series. The two travelers who both passed through the Galapagos Islands also passed through Murray’s publishing house. It is perhaps no more than a serendipitous twist, but Albermarle Street in London was home to Murray’s premises. The same Duke of Albermarle who gave his name to this street also gave his name to Albermarle Island in the Galapagos, which two writers—embedded in each other’s own sources—brilliantly imagined in wholly different ways.
Around the same time Melville wrote “Bartleby” he completed two other stories, “The Happy Failure” and “The Fiddler.” Both remained unpublished until July and September 1854, respectively. Neglected for several months, perhaps filed away in someone’s drawer, perhaps lost temporarily in Harper’s offices, the fate of the two stories was to only just achieve the status of fleeting magazine stories. Harper’s even misattributed “The Fiddler” to Fitz-James O’Brien in four indexes to the magazine published from 1870 through 1885.47 Both pieces are studies in failure: of a drainage pump that is the result of a decade of labor in “The Happy Failure” and of an acting child prodigy who ends up performing in a circus in “The Fiddler.” One can read the stories as Melville’s ironic accommodation of his own failure as a novelist reduced to scratching around in the magazine world. Negative impressions of his real thoughts, his magazine sketches are “what nots” whose irony Harper’s is too shortsighted to notice.48 And yet in “Bartleby” he simultaneously wrote a story that inherited the same searching questions his novels explored; caught up in the magazine’s cultural form, Melville was able to take a generic dramatic situation and then deploy his artful design. In doing so, the familiar and expected become sufficiently less well known that they become intriguing but do not entirely confound. To read “Bartleby” as magazine fiction is to see how the magazine format disciplines and releases Melville’s creative energy.
One way to think about the story’s magazine qualities is to consider how it first declared itself to the world in quite an ordinary way. The nature of this ordinariness, suggested by the anonymity of its publication and the location of the first installment toward the end of the magazine, is better understood if one pushes the story back against some of the sources often claimed as influences. The most obvious is James Maitland’s The Lawyer’s Story, the first chapter of which appeared in the New York Tribune and New York Times of February 18, 1853. “In the summer of 1843,” Maitland’s tale begins, “having an extraordinary quantity of deeds to copy, I engaged, temporarily, an extra copying clerk, who interested me considerably, in consequence of his modest, quiet, gentlemanly demeanor, and his intense application to his duties.”49 In “Bartleby,” the lawyer likewise is in need of extra help and advertises for another copying clerk; he also is taken with the sedate, gentlemanly, and industrious qualities of his new employee. Both tales are narrated in the first person by a lawyer, and Bartleby shares his melancholy disposition with the scrivener in Maitland’s story. The similarities seem too particular to be the result of coincidence, although, unlike Bartleby, Maitland’s copying clerk is easily put out of the lawyer’s office once work dries up and the source of his melancholy is identified and resolved through the lawyer’s intervention. The Lawyer’s Story turns into a saga of family separation and lost inheritance very different from “Bartleby.” Even if Melville did read Maitland’s story, or at least the first chapter published in the Tribune and the Times, the larger question is, why did Melville think the relationship between a lawyer and a copying clerk would make a suitable subject for a piece of magazine fiction?50
The answer is that the particular nature of Maitland’s story matters less than its generic qualities. Having a lawyer at the center of a mystery is what the stories share. And with lawyers come clerks. In an essay on Melville in the February 1853 issue of Putnam’s, Fitz-James O’Brien looks back fondly to Typee, in whose island paradise Tommo and Toby “spend as agreeable a life as ever [a] town-imprisoned merchant’s clerk sighed for.”51 The second installment of “New-York Daguerreotyped” in the April 1853 issue, an essay about the commercial districts of Manhattan, drew attention to the architecture of the New York Custom House and how “utilitarian panes of plate glass . . . let in light upon the ‘attic cells,’ where custom-house clerks sit at their mahogany desks.”52 Clerks and the urban world in which they worked were common currency in magazine writing. This was partly because clerking was fast becoming the most common form of employment in 1850s New York City and partly because clerks—just as they did in Dickens—served as markers of status distinction for the readers of these magazines. Young clerks were also literate, committed to self-improvement, and eager consumers of the cultural capital one found in magazines.53 From “stalls nigh the Custom House,” Ginger Nut buys the Spitzenbergs that Turkey and Nippers use to moisten their mouths in “Bartleby” as they work at their own desks while performing the “husky” business of copying law papers (PT 14). In vividly imagining the drudgery of clerks who could only daydream of exotic adventures and who were desk-bound in their ill-lit cells, Putnam’s depicted the world of “Bartleby” even before Melville came to write the story.
To read “Bartleby” as magazine fiction, then, means recognizing how it sat comfortably alongside other tales, essays, and reports dealing in the same component parts; to read it, that is, as embedded in the magazine world as genre writing whose specific sources matter less than the broader literary and magazine tradition of lawyers and clerks on which it draws. The story also serves the aspirations of the magazine by bringing the details of New York City life to the page at the same time as expanding the reader’s knowledge of a particular part of a more familiar world of work. And “Bartleby” gives clerks and their acquaintances a story foregrounding the conditions giving rise to their daydreams rather than the contents of the daydreams themselves.
The importance of this clerking milieu is evident in the structure of the story. Bartleby does not appear in person until almost a third of the way through the first installment as it was published in Putnam’s. The lawyer-narrator’s painstaking introductions to himself and the idiosyncrasies of his other clerks—the aging Turkey, the younger Nippers, and the office boy Ginger Nut—make little sense in narrative terms. They make much more sense as a way of establishing the story’s generic credentials and the clerking environment familiar to the magazine’s readers. They also allow Melville to establish the tone of the story in a way that fulfills one other vital aspect of Putnam’s prospectus: “A man buys a Magazine to be amused,” the first editorial announced, “to be instructed, if you please, but the lesson must be made amusing.”54 For interpretations that privilege endings, Bartleby’s fate—imprisonment and death—negates the comedy of the lawyer’s narration. The portraits of his clerks, though, are comic sketches or caricatures and work primarily through exaggeration. So after his morning productivity begins to wane, Turkey grows “altogether too energetic” and has a “strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him” that causes him to spill his sandbox and to split his pens and throw them to the floor in a fit of passion as he tries to mend them. Of Nippers, the lawyer observes bathetically that “I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers—ambition and indigestion” (PT 16). The latter of these preoccupies the lawyer as he explains Nippers’s protracted struggles to find the right height for his desk.
Turkey also shows himself to be a fluent pacifier of the lawyer in moments that work by wry comic reversal. When he complains about the blots Turkey makes on his copy, Turkey offers old age as his excuse: “Old age—even if it blot the page—is honorable. With submission, sir, we both are getting old” (PT 16). And when the lawyer thinks about dismissing Turkey for “moistening a ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping it on to a mortgage for a seal,” Turkey makes an oriental bow and turns the situation to his advantage: “With submission, sir, it was generous of me to find you in stationery on my own account” (PT 19). In his dealings with Bartleby, the lawyer also shows himself to be capable of comic intent. When Bartleby refuses various other career options—a clerkship in a dry goods store, bartending, a traveling job collecting bills for merchants—the lawyer asks, “How then would going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation,—how would that suit you?” (PT 41). The magazine reader is left to recognize the lawyer’s irony.
The sketchlike qualities and moments of comic exchange in “Bartleby” fulfill Putnam’s duty to amuse and connect the story to the pieces Melville wrote for Harper’s around the same time. The figure of the bachelor narrator, this time in the guise of the elderly lawyer, also emphasizes the sketch mode so important to the story. When in the opening paragraph he draws attention to the “biographies” and “histories” of which literature is made, the lawyer confirms a literary heritage on whose traditions he must draw in order to regale his audience with Bartleby’s story. “Bartleby” came to publication, then, with specific generic qualities. This is not to diminish the quality of “Bartleby” but to see Melville writing “the other way” and to read the story as readers of Putnam’s Monthly encountered it in 1853.
To be sensitive to the way that a story comes into publication, however, does not mean discounting qualities that allow it to withstand the pressures of obsolescence. The capacity for a story like “Bartleby” to be transformed from ordinary magazine fiction into canonical text across a hundred years may even be a consequence of the manner of its coming to publication. As well as writing within a tradition, Melville writes a story that goes beyond it. The story fulfills the charge Putnam’s set itself of offering “a running commentary upon the countless phenomena of the times as they rise,”55 but the ambition of the story is to open up a new world: as the lawyer-narrator immediately suggests, “Bartleby” is about that “interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners” (PT 13). Part of the story’s enduring quality results from the techniques Melville deploys to examine this new world.
Here the lawyer-narrator distinguishes Melville’s clerking story at the same time as he performs the generic functions that establish the sketch and comic elements of the story. As well as a sketcher, the lawyer is a tale teller. “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is not simply a sketch, however, because the story relates—despite the narrator’s opening gambit—the partial story of a particular and specific character rather than the lives of that “somewhat singular set of men” in general. In Dickens’s sketches, beadles, curates, workhouse masters, and various other characters may have names, but more important are the generic qualities that define their roles; the sketches narrate once what Dickens infers to be occurring in similar ways in various locations. Dickens’s constant use in his sketches of the first-person plural pronouns “our” and “we” dramatize characters and events in such a way that they become shared experiences. Such a phatic style endeared readers to the author and his work.
Melville’s lawyer-narrator is entirely different, and his first-person narration quickly veers from sketch to tale mode. The descriptions he offers of the idiosyncrasies of Turkey and Nippers are more elaborate than is necessary for most tales, although the predictability of these eccentricities means both characters remain static through the rest of the story. The inability of the narrator to adequately define Bartleby in the same way, however, undermines his reliability as a narrator. The lawyer is a first-person narrator who lacks the confidence and sureness of a sketch narrator like Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon; he too readily draws attention to the storytelling process in his addresses to the reader and so differs from the first-person narrators Hawthorne uses sparingly in his tales. The lawyer-narrator is more reminiscent of the first-person narrators one finds in the “Poe-ish” tales to which “Bartleby” was first compared. Here narrators are not separated from the story but integral to its unfolding and themselves become the central characters.
Without a sequence of sketches in which to find familiarity and comfort in the lawyer-narrator’s voice, the reader’s relationship with the narrator is insecure. The narrator has to resort to his colleagues and acquaintances to prove his credentials: “All who know me,” he assures the reader, “consider me an eminently safe man”; while “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” (PT 14). “Prudence” and “method”: little “poetic enthusiasm” indeed. And a recommendation from Astor—nicknamed “Old Skinflint” and despised by many in New York for his greed—is hardly a recommendation to cement the reader’s trust in the narrator. The lawyer is a man whose reputation he protests too much.
Given his already questionable status, the narrator’s shifts in register also fray rather than stitch neatly together the qualities of his personality. He becomes the essayist when he posits, “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment” (PT 23).
There are other sections, too, where the narrative presses beyond the sketch; rather than impressions of a scene, what the narration imagines is the unfolding of a consciousness. The narrator turns lyrical when he remembers “the bright silks and sparkling faces” he has seen that day “in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway.” All “happiness courts the light,” he suggests, “so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none” (PT 28). He even shows himself capable of the kind of self-questioning and shifts from first to second person appropriate to a dramatic soliloquy. When Bartleby affirms his decision not to leave the narrator but to “abide” with him, the lawyer is forced to ask what he can now do. His answer, in iambic pentameter, is: “Rid myself of him, I must; go, he shall.” He continues: “But how? You will not thrust him, the poor, pale, passive mortal,—you will not thrust such a helpless creature out of your door? . . . [S]urely you will not have him collared by a constable, and commit his innocent pallor to the common jail?” (PT 38). For two paragraphs the lawyer narrates this interior battle from within; in the language of self-examination he pulls aside the curtain on his gentlemanly, bachelor persona to show an ailing, conflicted conscience whose shape is even more ragged for being retrieved by this retrospective narration; the passage of time only exacerbates the vividness with which the “bright silks” and the “misery” stand in juxtaposition.
One of the dilemmas when thinking about Melville is why a writer now so revered was so routinely ignored or undervalued when he was writing and publishing. What do we see in his work that readers did not in the 1850s? The question, though, can be usefully turned the other way: What did readers of his work in the 1850s see that we do not? Apart from the comparison to Poe in The Literary World, there is little evidence of any reaction to “Bartleby” as it appeared in Putnam’s Monthly. When it was reprinted in The Piazza Tales reviewers certainly saw the humor, but one word that reoccurs in the reviews is “quaint.” The New York–based journal The Criterion described “Bartleby” as “a quaint tale, based upon living characters.” The Boston Evening Traveller wrote of the “quaint explanation” of Bartleby’s silence, while the New York Tribune noted a “quaintness of expression” across the collection as whole. These positive connotations of quaint stand in contrast to Godey’s Lady’s Book, whose disparaging review suggested Melville’s “style has an affectation of quaintness, which renders it, to us, very confused and wearisome.”56
The modern meaning of quaint suggests something pleasantly old-fashioned. In all of these reviews, however, the word is used in an archaic sense to indicate something elaborate, detailed, and artfully designed. This is the sense in which Melville uses the word in his own novels: “the quaint old arms on the panel” of a carriage in Pierre, for instance (P 19), or the tattoos in Typee that Tommo compares to “quaint patterns we sometimes see in costly pieces of lace-work” (T 78). Perhaps more apparent when “Bartleby” was set alongside his other stories in The Piazza Tales rather than buried in the miscellany of a magazine, readers of the 1850s saw quite clearly the intricacies of Melville’s writing that distinguished it—for good or bad—from other writing.
To read “Bartleby” as magazine fiction, then, also means recognizing how Melville embeds these “quaint” designs in the story’s generic dimensions. So the lawyer-narrator’s effort at the beginning of the story to describe Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut sketches and establishes their characters; it also elaborates the characters with detail—the multiplying of their eccentricities—without making them more than supporting characters or exceeding the purpose of a sketch. The lawyer’s delineation of his office space likewise locates the reader in the familiar territory of Wall Street and a white-collar working environment. It is then embellished with details—the white wall of the light shaft, the wall black with age at the other side of the chambers, the demarcation of space, and Bartleby’s place behind his screen—that go beyond the information needed to position the reader without threatening the reader’s familiarity with the scene. The brief references to John Jacob Astor and the Colt-Adams murder might, in retrospect, add contextual weight to the story, but they work as topical asides for the reader of the 1850s without intruding on the central characters or the story’s development. All these details reward interpretation without impeding the story’s ordinariness that so fit it for the magazine form.
Finally, and most wondrously of all of course, there is the design of Bartleby himself. Melville’s master stroke is to keep the reader constantly at one remove from the scrivener, whose character becomes all the more mysterious and intriguing because one only ever encounters him from within the partial and retrospective imagining of the lawyer. In trying to understand Bartleby, the reader is continually confounded by first having to try to understand the lawyer. Both are revealed iteratively: through Bartleby’s refrain of “I prefer not to” and his repeated refusal to work; through the lawyer’s repeated descriptions of Bartleby as pallid; through the accumulation of incidents—Bartleby’s eating of ginger biscuits, his locking himself in the office, his unchanging demeanor—that the lawyer struggles to understand; and through Bartleby’s capacity to withstand the lawyer’s attempts to be rid of him. In these recurrences the reader follows the lawyer in looking for meaning, only to have that expectation deferred or denied. Unlike the copying clerk in Maitland’s The Lawyer’s Story, and even though his profession is central to his identity and gives him his place in this generic story of lawyers and clerks, Bartleby’s melancholy disposition and mysterious personality are never supplanted or explained by hard facts and family history.
In place of these, Melville brings together a series of details, actions, and observations and holds them in relation to one another in a way that refuses to tell the reader what to think. Coming at the end of the story, Bartleby’s tragic death appears to be the result of prior events. And yet the lawyer’s narration does not connect the causal chain for the reader to show why Bartleby dies. The rumor of his previous employment in the Dead Letter Office tantalizes. The lawyer himself is moved to say, “When I think over this rumor, hardly can I express the emotions which seize me” (PT 45). But just as the prospect of clarification seems at hand, the lawyer deepens the mystery still further in his conjectures about dead men, dead letters, and the effects they may have had on his former scrivener. What is reiterated is the partiality and incompleteness of the lawyer’s perspective. The rumor about the Dead Letter Office is the final addition to the story’s elaborately constructed design. Bartleby is truly quaint in the nineteenth-century meaning of the word, and Melville’s artful design of his character (and of his character’s demise) becomes part of the larger design of a story intended to function as magazine fiction.
“Bartleby” was one among many stories of lawyers and clerks who, in various forms, were common enough in American magazine culture. Harper’s published the sensational “Dark Chapter from the Diary of a Law Clerk” in October 1852, while the same magazine also published several lawyer’s tales, such as “The Gentleman Beggar: An Attorney’s Story” (October 1850), “Jane Eccles; or, Confessions of an Attorney” (April 1851), and “Reminiscences of an Attorney” (August 1851). None of these magazine stories comes close to achieving the degree of narrative complexity Melville creates in “Bartleby.” Working with the sketch and the tale, he adjusts and adapts their forms to open new possibilities for the short prose story. The personal impression of the sketch becomes the self-examination of the short story; the character type of the tale, even the more complex characters one finds in Hawthorne’s tales, evaporates in the indefinable Bartleby; the familiar and confident voice of the sketch narrator gives way to the unreliable narration of the multivocal short story; the resolution of the tale’s ending becomes the open-ended ambiguity of the short story. At all points history intrudes into the scene—not only Astor, but Colt and Adams, the Tombs, Sing-Sing, Monroe Edwards, Wall Street, the Halls of Justice. Out of the “what nots” of magazine genres, Melville forges a blade against whose razor-sharp edge the outmoded sketch and tale could not compete.
The rich criticism of Melville’s writing for Harper’s and for Putnam’s is usually preoccupied with more urgent matters than the genre conventions of the midcentury magazine: politics, history, the ideological tapestry of midcentury America beyond the magazine. But thinking about genre shows that one of the reasons stories like “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Encantadas” live longer in the critical memory is because they bury their generic past in the moment Melville engages it; the pieces most open to continuing interpretation and analysis are the ones whose relationship to genre is adaptive rather than derivative. Melville’s magazine writing gives up rewards in proportion to the distance of travel between convention and iteration, between the genre with which Melville engages and the execution of his version.