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Bartleby, The Scrivener

I used to read a lot of short stories, but at some point, I noticed that as soon as I was nicely settled into a short story, it would end, so I decided to avoid them. But now, brochures for hearing aids and bathtubs with doors in the side have begun to appear in my mail and I have started to appreciate anything I live long enough to finish. Consequently, a taste for short stories has returned.

A Forgotten Favorite Pops To Mind

Last week, I was put on the spot to name my favorite short story, and out popped Bartleby, The Scrivener. To explain why, I mumbled something incoherent about shifting perceptions, although I could scarcely remember what the story was about, not having read it for many years.
I reread Bartleby this week, and I now have some idea why I like it.

Herman Melville

Hermann Melville wrote Bartleby in 1853 when his career has on a downward slope. Moby Dick had been published but was not nearly as well received as his earlier and now nearly forgotten travelogues like Omoo and Typee.

The Story

The Bartleby story is simple and absurd. The narrator, an ageing lawyer, has two scriveners (clerks). His first clerk, Turkey, is drunk every afternoon, and his second clerk, Nippers, can’t settle down to work until after noon. The narrator has been appointed to a remunerative new official position and he hires Bartleby to handle the extra load. Bartleby is an excellent scrivener, but soon he begins to utter his tag line “I prefer not to.” The old lawyer can’t deal with Bartleby any more effectively than he deals with his first two clerks. Bartleby refuses more and more work and the lawyer discovers that Bartleby has set up housekeeping in the office and prefers not to leave. The lawyer moves his firm out of the office. When Bartleby prefers not to leave for the new tenant, the landlord has him jailed. The narrator attempts to have special food supplied to Bartleby in jail, but Bartleby prefers not to eat and dies.

Themes

What is the story about? Is Bartleby clinically depressed? Is the lawyer a silly old pushover and codependent enabler of Bartleby’s affliction? Or is this an indictment of a social system and mindless employment?
The lawyer’s life is barren. He is esteemed for being steady and methodical but we have no hint that he has a satisfying family life or pastimes, his office is gloomy and shabby. Turkey and Nippers may be defective, but they seem livelier and happier than their boss. Bartleby is a pale wraith, reminiscent of the white whale, whose entire personality is condensed into his utterance “I prefer not to”, a contrast to the steady and methodical lawyer who does what is expected without recourse to preference.
The story ends with a rumor that Bartleby worked in the dead letter office, stripping letters of objects of value when the addressee could not be found. Could Bartleby have preferred not to prepare lawyer’s documents for addressees who could be found? Does the narrator secretly wish to step away from life? Or has life become defective?

I find the story haunting and enigmatic.  I admit that since I reread the story, Bartleby sometimes slips into my day dreams, softly asserting that “I prefer not to” when I have a disagreeable meeting to attend.

Read Bartleby For Yourself

Read it for yourself. I’ve posted Bartleby the Scrivener here.

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Easter 2010

We have had high wind warnings and advisories for the past few days and the weather service from has cautioned that the potential for wind damage increases as the trees leaf out. Here in the north half of Whatcom county, the trees are still almost bare. The cherries and pears are in bloom and the big leaf maples are decorated with their creamy yellow bell shaped flowers, but most leaves are still not much bigger than a thumbnail.

Windthrow

Even without leaves, a big leaf maple blew down into the cornfield this week. Foresters call a blow down ‘windthrow.’

Eighty Foot Fallen Maple

The twins and I went out this Easter morning with a tape to measure it. The trunk is about forty inches in diameter at the butt and eighty feet tall. For a big-leaf maple, eighty feet is taller than most mature trees, but sometimes a tall specimen reaches a hundred feet and more.

Stump Rot

This one fell because the stump was rotten. Over three-quarters of the stump was rotted away. All that was left was a few inches of outer shell that conducted water and nutrients up from the root system to the rest of the tree. From about eight feet up, the tree is hard and healthy. Big-leaf maples are subject to fungus attacks. It looks like the fungus entered from a broken sub trunk that died, broke off, and the stub rotted and infected the main trunk. Subsequently, the fungus devoured the interior of the stump. Sometimes those weakened old maples fall over on still days, so I was not surprised to see that this one fell on this windy spring week.

Seventy Years Old

When I was a ten-year-old, I remember this maple as a trunk a foot in diameter that had become rough and fissured as big-leaf maples are when they mature. It had the size and appearance of a twenty year old tree. Since I am sixty, that would make the tree seventy. Also, it grew on the edge of the last acreage that Grandpa and Dad cleared about seventy years ago. Maples often start growing on the fresh edge of the woods after land has been cleared, making a second argument for seventy years.

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Clearing Stumps

When my great grandfather and grandfather were buying their farms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the land had been logged, but not cleared. The loggers left behind brush, stumps, and tall snags.

South loft, pig barn

Although biggest evergreens were gone, the land was still forested with smaller firs, cedars, and hemlocks, and unmerchantable trees like vine maple, big leaf maple, bitter cherry, mountain ash (rowan), cottonwood, and alder flourished where the climax forest had been disturbed.

Judging Farm Land

Dad said that the old settlers judged the quality of land by the trees that grew on it. Land covered with big flourishing cedars and firs was good farm land. Cedars meant that the ground was well watered. Big firs meant the soil was rich and dry enough for early planting. Those were the rules my grandfather used to choose the acreage that became our farm.

The soil underneath the tangle left behind by the loggers was good, but preparing the land for farming was a struggle. Clearing land was hard work. The trees the loggers left behind were cut and hauled to the the mill if the logs could be sold and burned if they could not. The farmers hacked down brush, grubbed out the roots, and burned all the debris.

Daunting Task

Clearing stumps was a daunting task. If you are not from the Pacific Northwest, you may not realize how monumental those stumps were. Stumps big enough to hollow out and drive a car through used to be tourist attractions on the highway, but in the woods, they were not rare. I only watched the stump era end, but the stumps I remember were a dozen feet tall and a good ten feet through at the base. They were all marked by spring board notches that were at least six feet off the ground.

There were different ways of dealing with stumps. A temporary expedient was to plant around them, but that made cultivating and harvesting difficult and wasted good land. Like his neighbors, Grandpa started out as a stump farmer, sowing potatoes and oats between the towering stumps and snags; clearing the farm of stumps was a gradual forty year project. Grandpa bought the farm in about 1909 when my grandparents married and the last field was cleared in the late 1940’s, before I was born. According to Dad, most of the stumps were dug out by hand and pulled with a team of horses into piles for burning. Only the last few acres were cleared by bull dozer. When I was a kid in the fifties and sixties, there were stumps left in the woods and a few left in the semi-cleared margin around the woods.

Blasting

Grandpa blasted some stumps out with dynamite. At first, Grandpa hired an expert, a so-called powder monkey, to set charges and blow the stumps, but he soon learned to blast for himself. When I was a kid, a couple of sticks of dynamite still lurked on a shelf in the tractor shed. In the woods, here and there, powder boxes were still bolted five or six feet above the ground on trees; a large box for dynamite sticks and a smaller box thirty or forty feet away for storing blasting caps, keeping the sticks and caps apart as carefully as fire and gasoline. By the time I was tall enough to look into the boxes, they were all empty and I was never around for a blast.

The havoc after a blast could be more trouble than the stump, so Grandpa only blasted the biggest and most recalcitrant stumps. In his search for a better way, Grandpa invented a tool for burning out stumps. He bought a second-hand vacuum cleaner and fitted it with a set of metal nozzles where the dust bag had been attached, so that he had a blower that he could direct deep in the base of a stump. With forced air, he could start and keep a hot fire burning that would consume a stump in a day or two instead the weeks it would take without air. John Schaefer, my long dead consultant on nearly everything, said Grandpa’s stump burner worked better than anything else, but you had to have a long extension cord.

Effects

Transforming the forests of the Pacific Northwest into farmland released many tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For decades, there was always a hint of wood smoke in the air and I still treat work that does not carry the scent of wood smoke and sweat as slightly frivolous. Much of the timber that was burned would be used today. Alder, which my grandfather did not even think much of for firewood, is now a premium wood for cabinetry. What is right for one generation, changes for the next.