At precisely those places where language had seemed to fail, to become hollow and pitiably ineffectual, he found a ferocious, mournful eloquence. That mood—of a stupefied outrage honing itself into an impulse to dismantle self-comforting illusion, at whatever cost—is, also, Melvillean.

 • • • 

Having written seven novels in about as many years, Melville turned to short fiction in 1853. His reasons were professional and, more precisely, financial. Melville’s early seafaring books—Typee, Omoo—had done well. They had been well received, and they had made their publishers, as well as their author, some money. But the 1850s had not been kind to the author, who, at the age of thirty-one, had moved with his young and growing family from New York City to a farmhouse in rural western Massachusetts, which he named Arrowhead. There he enjoyed the prospect of Mount Greylock to the north, began his famous fast friendship with a writer of considerably greater renown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and set about, too, reinventing the novel as an expressive vehicle. It was in Massachusetts that Melville labored over Moby-Dick, the “wicked book” that was also his most serious bid for entrée into literary history, a sustained performed derangement of the Romance into a wilder, more capacious version of itself. It is an unruly astonishment of a book, overbrimming with ambition, hilarity, pathos, and dread. It was also, without being poorly received exactly, not a success. His next book, Pierre, was more properly a disaster. (“Herman Melville Crazy” was the pithy headline of one review, whose author was evidently unamused by its satire of literary society or its incest plot.) But however stung Melville was by the underimpressed accounts of his work, his nearer problem was cash. These books had failed to make back their advances, leaving Melville in the debt of publishers increasingly wary of taking risks on an author becoming more unpopular book by book. (Indeed, the novel he offered to Harper & Brothers in June 1853 was rejected, though critics and biographers surmise portions of it were incorporated into the series of sketches called “The Encantadas,” which appeared in Putnam’s Monthly in 1854.) And at the end of 1853 a fire at the Harper warehouse had destroyed the stock of Melville’s unsold work, further damaging his financial prospects. By transforming himself into a writer of magazine fiction, Melville could hope to tackle a range of problems at once. He could keep himself in the consciousness of the reading public; he could restore something of his tarnished reputation; and he could make from his shorter pieces a more certain kind of money than was promised by novels.

Melville placed his work at Harper’s and Putnam’s, periodicals in which these two publishers “took their competition in the book market into the world of magazines,” as Graham Thompson puts it. They were important venues. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House had been serialized in Harper’s, while Putnam’s sought to distinguish itself with the publication of the strongest American fare. (Putnam’s would distinguish itself, too, by its escalatingly strong antislavery position.) And the work Melville placed there was indeed well received—or, at least, found for itself a less hostile reception than Pierre. It is not hard to see why. Even in those pieces that hew more closely to the conventions of mid-nineteenth-century magazine fiction, we find flashes of power, beauty, and arresting strangeness. Consider “The Bell-Tower,” among Melville’s most conspicuously Hawthornian tales, wherein the crowds gathered round the machinist Bannadonna’s tower listen in to his occult labors: “Strange sounds, too, were heard, or were thought to be, by those whom anxious watching might not have left mentally undisturbed, sounds, not only of some ringing implement, but also—so they said—half-suppressed screams and plainings, such as might have issued from some ghostly engine, overplied.” “The Encantadas,” especially, discloses a Melville yet working haunting effects, perhaps nowhere more vividly than in the eighth sketch, “Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow.” Here is how Melville depicts the moment of Hunilla’s departure from the island where, for months, she has passed her lonely widowhood, accompanied only by “ten small, soft-haired, ringleted dogs, of a beautiful breed, peculiar to Peru”:

With the sagacity of their race, the dogs now seemed aware that they were in the very instant of being deserted upon a barren strand. The gunwales of the boat were high; its prow—presented inland—was lifted; so owing to the water, which they seemed instinctively to shun, the dogs could not well leap into the little craft. But their busy paws hard scraped the prow, as it had been some farmer’s door shutting them out from shelter in a winter storm. A clamorous agony of alarm. They did not howl, or whine; they all but spoke.

The figuring of grief here, through an only barely inarticulate animal responsiveness, does more than remind us of Melville’s prodigiously fluent engagement with what Geoffrey Sanborn calls “the nonhuman world” of fish and fowl, creatures wild and domestic. It is also a moment of exceptional, stinging poignancy.

But however well-received these tales, and however decorously we imagine Melville to have instructed himself to behave in the company of the reading public he had ridiculed so mercilessly in Pierre, estrangement preoccupies the strongest of his short fictions. We feel it in the widow Hunilla from “The Encantadas” and in the orphan Marianna in “The Piazza.” But no one figure condenses that estrangement more fully than Melville’s law copyist, the cadaverous scrivener Bartleby. “Bartleby” first appeared anonymously in two installments in Putnam’s, in November and December 1853 (though between the two installments another periodical had revealed Melville as the author), and his fate, as an indelible American character, has proved curious. A bit more than 150 years later, during the occupation of Zuccotti Park at the edge of the Wall Street financial district that is this tale’s milieu, protesters found in Melville’s implacable clerk a fit literary emblem, an icon with which to summon a centuries-deep resistance to the orders of unavailing labor and subservience to capital.