Dead Letters Office

After early success with his tales of the South Seas, Melville met negative critical and popular reaction to both Moby Dick and Pierre. These huge works were tremendously ambitious. What amount of toil and hope went into them? Both sank quickly.

For the remainder of his life — almost forty years — Melville’s literary output was minuscule. It had become clear that he could not make a living from his writing. He got employment as a customs inspector in New York and worked at that job for nineteen years; so, in a sense, he carried on with life. But what was the state of his creative spirit? I think he addresses the intimate issue of failure in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a story he wrote shortly after Pierre’s devastating reception.

It’s significant that Bartleby is a copier, a man who writes words that have no feeling behind them. They’re devoid of creativity. If one writes without readers or appreciation, he may as well be copying out a list. Was Melville, in this character, expressing his personal sense of aimlessness and futility?

Bartleby is a man beyond depression. He is deep into apathy; his response to any demand (such as to do work) or kindly offering (to go to a warm place to sleep) is “I prefer not to.” For him life is hardly discernable from death — indeed, at the end Bartleby prefers not to eat, and he slips into death with hardly a ripple.  

The unnamed narrator, the “I” of the story, is Bartleby’s employer, an elderly lawyer who carries on with the daily routine of getting up, going to work, making a living. Toward Bartleby he feels an empathy which goes unusually deep. So deep, considering the troubles the clerk causes him, that Bartleby can be seen as an aspect of the elder man’s own self — or that of a customs inspector.

In the first paragraph of the story Melville’s narrator alludes to something that he knows about Bartleby’s past, though he doesn’t reveal what it is until the end. By setting up matters in this way, Melville is stressing the importance of the revelation. 

It is this: Bartleby had previously been employed in a postal Dead Letters Office. The narrator’s reaction is extreme: “Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?” He thinks how these letters — of love, of hope, of pardon — are burned by the cartload. “On errands of life, these letters sped to death.”

As a writer, Melville experienced this; he saw his work as going to a Dead Letters Office —  his words falling into the abyss of indifference. Sinking, burning — use what analogy you will, it is still death.

“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” the narrator writes at the close.

Humanity indeed: The great parade of those whose dreams are unfulfilled. With the story’s last word Melville moved from the narrow failure of a writer to the universal.