I Would Prefer Not To

As a writer, I know this: Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener is either the most depressing thing ever written or the most inspiring. Though Melville was only 34 when he published it and lived on for 38 more years, it reads like his suicide note. On the other hand, the love that’s now lavished upon Melville vindicates him against the very despair he articulates in Bartleby’s pages.

Melville’s life history attests that he composed Bartleby at an inflection point in his career, when his work had turned more ambitious and had been rewarded with diminished sales. In 1851, Melville had published his sixth and most ambitious novel to date, Moby-Dick, and it sold badly. Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco: “During Melville’s lifetime, Moby-Dick never came close to selling out its first edition of 3,000 copies, and when, in December 1853, the unsold copies burned up in a fire in the publisher’s warehouse, few noticed and fewer cared.” (Delbanco, pp. 6-7) Melville reacted with bitterness, which he expressed in his next novel Pierre:

Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room, when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and the profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened the chances for bread; that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation and cash. But the devouring profundities, now opened up in him, consume all his vigor; would he, he could not now be entertainingly and profitably shallow in some pellucid and merry romance. Quoted at www.melville.org

Compared to the meager arts coverage in today’s dying, philistine newspapers, of course, the critical response to Moby-Dick doesn’t look so bad. (www.melville.org has culled a bunch of reviews from Melville’s day.) The critics cavil obnoxiously and find Melville incomprehensible, but not infrequently they also hail his genius. Nonetheless, Melville was seriously discouraged. He withdrew from public life and from writing prose fiction, choosing instead a long downward slope of decades spent “clinging like a weary but tenacious barnacle to the N.Y. Custom House,” as a contemporary put it. (Delbanco, p. 291)

Melville published Bartleby in 1853, two years after Moby-Dick, at the beginning of this period of withdrawal. According to John Clendenning, Bartleby and other Melville stories like Benito Cereno suffered a fate similar to that of Moby-Dick:

The novel, either ignored or misunderstood by critics and readers, damaged Melville’s reputation as a writer…. The public was ready to accept unusual and exciting adventures [of the sort Melville had written before Moby-Dick], but they did not want ironic, frightening exposures of the terrible double meanings in life…. [T]he haunting and disturbing question of the meaning of life that hovered over the stories also displeased the public. pbs.org (retrieved April 29, 2013)

Bartleby depicts a withdrawal from life that parallels Melville’s own. As a scrivener, or copyist, in the days before typewriters and photocopiers, Bartleby seems like an inevitable symbol for the writer in general. His marked isolation (described as “his hermitage” within the Wall Street office and at other times as “his dead-wall revery”) resembles the solitary condition of the fiction writer, perhaps more than that of an actual copyist. Like a serious fiction writer, Bartleby makes a quixotic refusal to provide a marketable service to the world, and he does so literally, not figuratively: when his boss asks him to do something, he replies, “I would prefer not to,” a refrain that is repeated in various forms close to 40 times by my count, and which evolves iteration by iteration from comedy to tragedy. Ultimately, Bartleby refuses not only to work but to eat, and he dies in prison like an unmedicated schizophrenic. The lovely and harrowing final passage reveals that Bartleby once worked in a dead letter office. “Dead letters!” Melville writes. “Does it not sound like dead men? … On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” It seems impossible that Melville did not draw a parallel between a dead letter—a letter meant for someone that never finds its intended recipient—and Moby-Dick, which sailed forth but was refused popular harbor. One thinks of Kilgore Trout in Slaughterhouse Five describing his obscure writing career as years of making love to an open window.

Bartleby the Scrivener is a suicide note that nobody cared to read, and yet its despair completely misjudges the eventual reception of Moby-Dick. Andrew Delbanco writes of the happy ending that Melville didn’t live to see:

Moby-Dick was not a book for a particular moment. It is a book for the ages…. And so Melville emerged in the twentieth century as the American Dostoevsky—a writer who, with terrible clairvoyance, had been waiting for the world to catch up with him. Ever since, he has routed his rivals in the competition for readers. Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work, p. 12

It ought to be inspiring, anyway. Melville did persevere against the neglect he encountered—because Moby-Dick eventually found an audience, but also because he did continue to write. He answered the perceived neglect of Moby-Dick initially with more novels, with satire, with Bartleby the Scrivener, then with poetry, and at some point with Billy Budd, a posthumously published story that is one of his most revered.

Ultimately, every writer must do what Melville did. He must say what he has to say regardless of what readers and critics say or don’t say back. He must do it even if they shower him with ignorant praise. He cannot shut up. He prefers not to.

Up Close in the New York Times

For a recent New York Times profile of Austin Ratner, follow this link.

Peloothered

Intoxerated by Paul Dickson


Ah, the holidays. The end of the year. When you celebrate by a cozy fire with the shiver of time in your fillings. When you cozy up to those you love best and those who therefore make you crazy. In other words, time to drink.

Melville House Books's "Definitive Drinker's Dictionary," Intoxerated, a fun compendium of annotated synonyms for the word drunk, provides the literary drinker with a smidgeon of words to go with his smahan of whiskey. (Smeahán being Irish, according to the OED, for a drop of whiskey; see James Joyce's wonderfully woeful drinking story, "Counterparts.")

Herman Melville himself, however, took a somewhat dryer approach when he launched American literature "on the high seas" (one of many sailing metaphors for drunk according to Paul Dickson's book). Having adopted some of the abstemious spirit of old Nantucket, perhaps, Melville introduces alcohol in chapter 3 of Moby Dick with a barkeep named Jonah who "dearly sells the sailors delirium and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison." One sailor there in the Spouter Inn abstains from drink, and when the sailor (named Bulkington) reappears in chapter 23, "The Lee Shore," it's as the type who eschews the false comforts of shore for the raw, cold, hard truths of the ocean. Under the terms of the allegory that spans chapters 3 and 23 of Moby Dick, alcohol counts among the false comforts.

Certainly, alcohol blunts reality, not least the reality of one's own self; isn't that why people need it? The many euphemisms for drunkenness are a further evasion. But as much as drinking is an honorable literary pastime, the many euphemisms for it appear relatively uncommon in literary works, perhaps because such works deal in undiluted truths, and in novels and stories alcohol is either the antidote to realities too acutely perceived or the disinhibiting solvent that liberates a character from his blinding fear.

Ernest Hemingway's hard-drinking characters in The Sun Also Rises seem to chase from bar to bar partly in flight and partly in search of liberation from self-deceptions much deeper than mere intoxication. Drinking in that novel is like a portal through which a tortured soul might claw back some semblance of pleasure, aggression, instinct, sincerity. Perhaps as a consequence, Hemingway relies mainly on the self-sufficient term "drunk," which is like onomatopoeia for the sound of the soul denting its rear fender on the telephone pole of life. There's one exception in the dialogue toward the beginning of part II: when Jake judges Bill much drunker than he is and calls him "pie-eyed" (p. 78).

Euphemisms for drunkenness are equally scarce in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A multi-faceted Shame has driven the mental patients in that book into the unhealthy safety of Nurse Ratched's psych ward, and alcohol enters as a sort of holy reprieve from Shame. Drunkenness sets up a cataclysmic change in Chief Bromden that ultimately emancipates him from fear:

As I walked after them it came to me as a kind of sudden surprise that I was drunk, actually drunk, glowing and grinning and staggering drunk for the first time since the Army, drunk along with half a dozen other guys and a couple of girls--right on the Big Nurse's ward! p. 260.

Daisy Buchanan appears “drunk as a monkey” on p. 70 of The Great Gatsby, and the phrase is duly noted in Dickson’s Intoxerated, but otherwise F. Scott Fitzgerald too treats inebriation with a certain sobriety. Alcohol flows through his novel’s pages as through a human bloodstream. It’s the medium through which the characters think, a disorienting twilight between dream and reality. Of note, neither Daisy nor Gatsby are heavy drinkers (see pp. 71 and 91). They are not content to live in dreamy drunken twilight, but strive to escape into a hypothetical place where dreams turn solid and come true.

In Joyce’s story “Counterparts” and in others in Dubliners, alcohol seems to purify the element of self-destruction in characters, but the penultimate story, “Grace,” celebrates a bit of drinking, even to excess. In a spirit of self-sympathy rather than self-destruction, Joyce makes use of one of those funny synonyms for drunk: Mr Cunningham calls Tom Kernan "peloothered" (Dubliners Viking Critical Library edition, p. 160; Dickson may want to add this one, as he has "plootered" but not "peloothered" on p. 134!). Kernan was so peloothered that he fell down the steps to the lavatory and bit the end of his tongue off. The funny euphemism seems to handle Mr Kernan’s indignity with a certain care and gentleness—perhaps because Kernan and his friends have already made their peace with instinct. "Glasses were rinsed and five small measures of whisky were poured out,” Joyce writes on p. 167. “The new influence enlivened the conversation." And on p. 169 comes one of my favorite lines on drinking: "The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude." “Grace” is a wonderful story about moderation, and it very consciously applies the principle of moderation to moderation itself. In other words, to be perfectly moderate, and not too abstemious, you must also be immoderate now and again.

When I arrived in Connecticut for Christmas, my brother-in-law had a nice bottle of sipping tequila, a Centenario añejo, waiting for me. It stood me in good stead through four and a half hours of assembly of a “wired control robotic arm kit” for my older son, and through other minor holiday travails. So let’s raise a glass and face the New Year ah-wat-si (“crazy-brave,” according to the Blackfeet Indians, Dickson p. 16), if not completely jugged, lock-legged, and shot in the mouth. :*)

The Second-Highest Heaven (Big Bang Part II)

Darrel Abel was born in Lost Nation, Iowa in 1911. He taught American literature at Purdue for many years, and at some point, working from the obscurity of Lisbon Falls, Maine, he produced a rather lovely little paper called "Robert Frost's 'Second-Highest Heaven'," which he published in 1980. The paper's title refers to a piece of Frost's prose on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Frost wrote:

Everybody votes in heaven but everybody votes the same way, as in Russia today. It is only in the second-highest heaven that things get parliamentary.

Abel goes on to quote one of Frost's letters, which expresses a similar sentiment:

whatever great thinkers may say against the earth, I notice that no one is anxious to leave it for either Heaven or Hell. Heaven may be better than Hell as reported, but it is not as good as earth.

Frost was an American who knew the pioneer's feeling of diminution before the vast inhuman wilderness, "An emptiness flayed to the very stone," as he describes an abandoned, clear-cut piece of land in his brilliant 1923 poem "The Census-Taker." Like his predecessors Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville, he saw in the American situation a figure of the human situation in the universe itself. And like those former masters of American modernity, Frost refused despair any lasting purchase. They refused despair not because they were plucky and upbeat, but because they saw too deeply to ignore the true proportions between chaos and beauty, emptiness and humanness, in this complex, mysterious world of ours.

As Abel points out, Frost's famous poem "Desert Places" consciously rebuts Blaise Pascal in his terror at the emptiness between the stars. Here is Pascal worrying about space in his Pensées. You've heard of "penis envy" and "castration anxiety"--call this pensée anxiety:

When I consider the short duration of my life, an eternity that stretches behind and before, and the little space which I fill and even see, engulfed in the immensity of spaces I know not and which know not me, I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.... The eternal silence of the infinite spaces--it frightens me. Quoted in "Robert Frost's 'Second-Highest Heaven'" by Darrel Abel, Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 16: Iss. 2, Article 3, 1980

The Big Bang can amplify the terror Pascal describes, which is in the first place not so easily dismissed. Paul Tillich, according to Abel, called such cosmic queasiness modern man's "real vertigo in relation to infinite space." Big Bang astronomy of course implies that those spaces, those desert places are not just infinite but stretching out, and so they're diminishing our physical stature in the cosmos. (To diminished stature, I say, so what? Short people achieve amazing things nowadays. Who cares how big or small we are in relation to the cosmos? Why should an electron care if it's smaller than the atomic nucleus? And would my funny bone feel any better if my elbows were the size of the Horsehead Nebula?) The vertigo is the more horrible thing; the Big Bang theory creates it by explaining so much without successfully delivering us from the painful tautologies with which we began our search for knowledge. It's the intellectual equivalent of whirling around and around.

Infinity and eternity aren't problematic because they're big (and they're not always big--a finite space may be infinitely subdivided), but because they're at once inescapable and nonsensical aspects of the cosmos. Mathematics seems to acknowledge as much since the symbol for infinity, ∞, also means "undefined." (As in 20 divided by zero = ∞.) The universe appears to have begun at a point in time. But how does something come from nothing? What was before? Something else? Some other universe? None of the alternatives appeal to common sense, and so the Big Bang theory pictures a universe whose perfectly comprehensible laws lead to perfectly incomprehensible conundra of origins and endings, limits and infinity. That's how I interpret Tillich's vertigo, and the theme of Frost's poetry--in Abel's words, "man's lostness in space." Not only do we not understand the limits of the universe in time and space, but it seems they are constitutionally inaccessible to understanding. They are non-parameters, they are outside reason and experience, yet reason and experience lead us straight to their door.... This is a miserable and untenable state of affairs.

In the last decades, the mental health field has often and without good reason blurred the traditional medical dividing line between symptom and diagnosis. I would argue that pensée anxiety, Tillich's vertigo, Big Bang-o-phobia, etc., is not a diagnosis. It's not even its own symptom. Rather, it's but one instance of a more commonplace problem I call "under-the-hood nausea." (For a fuller discussion of under-the-hood nausea, here is another blog I wrote on the subject. Under-the-hood nausea, in turn, is but a manifestation of neurosis.)

Science reaches out, by instruments and inferences, into planes of reality that exist on different scales from our own. This is what creates under-the-hood nausea. The Big Bang was named by Fred Hoyle, an important physicist who happened to despise the theory and applied the phrase "Big Bang" in derision. But the theory is perhaps rightly named in the sense that it bashes you over the head with under-the-hood nausea like nothing else. It's looking under the hood of the cosmos, and just as looking inside the body at the guts makes some people feel sick, looking under the hood of the cosmos can fill you with vertiginous questions: What is infinity? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a god? If there is, can I still masturbate? Why are so many cosmologists named George?

Scientists must look at reality on every plane, at every magnification, but if we can't relate our findings to our own scale, our own plane, then the work of comprehension isn't done. If we can't interpret and appreciate our knowledge in human terms, then the science may have the effect of urging us on in our despair--despair which belongs to our own homely little world of birth and death and not to the vacuous spaces between the stars. Help me, Mr. Frost:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Wittgenstein was a very fine doctor for treating sickening cosmic questions. He suggested that such questions must have bad syntax--just like the meaningless proposition twenty divided by zero. If you look out into the cosmos and feel despair, remind yourself that despair is 100% human. If our understanding of physics is too incomplete right now to relate the cosmic to the quantum to the human scale of affairs, our psyches do it for us in a crude way--with despair. Yet the more we look, the more order we see in the universe. In that sense, the universe appears to be a more and more hospitable place the more we learn about it--a more human place, since humanity and life are founded on a principle of order and the development of more of it.

Fred Hoyle, the Big Bang skeptic, discovered how heavy elements are forged in the furnaces of the stars and he did it by an anthropic inference: we exist; we're made of carbon; therefore nucleosynthesis of carbon must occur; therefore stars must have a way of doing it; therefore certain isotopes of helium and beryllium must react quickly to form an excited conformation of carbon-12. He was right. Multiple generations of stars must refine lighter elements in their breasts to make heavier ones like carbon. The stars are our mothers and fathers. The universe has music in it. It has despair in it. But it's all ours.

Like the joke says:

There was a costume party where everybody was instructed to dress as an emotion. The party hosts greeted the first guest, who was dressed from head to toe in red, and asked him, "What emotion are you supposed to be?" He said, "Rage." The next guest was dressed all in green--green tights, green leotard, a green hat. When they asked what emotion she was supposed to be, she said, "I'm envy." Then a guy came to the door completely naked, with a pear stuck on the end of his penis. The hosts asked, "What emotion are you?" He said, "I'm fuckin' despair."