At last a little bird nests in it. At last the post falls.” (My italics.)

It seems clear that this synopsis speaks for Melville. The story of abandonment and apprehensive waiting for messages is relevant to a writer in Melville’s situation—he laments the undelivered incoming mail (the world’s attention) and the outgoing mail (his writing) that does not get through. The nesting bird underscores not only the pathos of the disuse of the mailbox, but Melville’s sense of his ridiculousness: is he merely a white-stained post? And listen to the rhythm of the repetition of “at last” and “At last” and “At last”: it is incantatory, funereal, and about Herman Melville’s fatigue.

Melville had steeped himself in Shakespeare’s tragedies as he prepared to write Moby-Dick. In “Mosses,” he had said, “Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he [Shakespeare] craftily says, or sometimes insinuates, the things which we feel to be so terrifically true that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter or even hint of them.” Whenever he wrote of literature, Melville tended to write about the process of writing in general, and his own in particular; he does so above, homing in on his own relationship to Ahab, who—like Pierre—served as Melville’s dark mask. Now he ventriloquized from within his notion of Agatha, and later he would use Claggart and Captain Vere.

It is Hamlet who speaks in the outline of the Agatha story. Grass grows “rankly” around the rotting post; it is Hamlet who, lamenting religious injunctions against suicide, describing life as weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, bemoaning the need for silence (“I must hold my tongue”); it is Hamlet who calls the world “an unweeded garden” taken over by things rank and gross.” (My italics.) Melville was low enough in spirit to place himself in Hamlet’s garden, and in Agatha’s dooryard.

In October 1852, Putnam’s magazine invited him to contribute work. In December, he began to write the Agatha story. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t complete it, for he had said its essential elements to Hawthorne; and it was Agatha’s situation, not self, that was dark and alive to Melville. She was his emblem more than his story. But he did work at silence and undelivered messages that year, and did give Putnam’s the tale of Bartleby, published in 1853.

The mask through which Melville speaks in the story is that of a decent, pragmatic, elderly Wall Street lawyer (who practices not far from Melville’s boyhood neighborhood, and the Custom-House from which he retired in 1885). The narrator is proud to work for robber-barons and is as different from the copyist, or scrivener, Bartleby, as seems possible. And yet, like Bartleby, he is a victim of politics: as he has lost work as Master of Chancery because administrations changed, so Bartleby has lost a position, we learn, for similar reasons. Bartleby comes to haunt the lawyer and his chambers; Turkey and Nippers, matching opposites—one law clerk is torpid when the other is drunkenly inflamed, and vice versa—strike the motif of doubleness for the story, and it soon becomes clear that something in these opposites, the narrator and his scrivener, is also matched.

For against all wisdom, not to mention sound business practices, Bartleby is kept on, in spite of his refusal to work (“I would prefer not to”), as if the narrator required his presence. It seems that just as Melville finds his mask in the narrator—it is at this time that a campaign of family and friends fails to yield Melville a diplomatic appointment by officials in the new administration of President Franklin Pierce—so the narrator finds his darker self in Bartleby. Quite like Bartleby, who ends up dead, “his face towards a high wall,” the narrator has chambers (on Wall Street) that “looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft” at one end, and, at the other, upon “a lofty brick wall.” Like Bartleby (who is described, once, as “my fate”), he is in a blind alley of his life, and he looks upon “dead” walls.

In some ways, then, Melville writes not only of existential traps, but of the need to cope with or create or accede to the presence of metaphors of one’s interior being. He is speaking of aspects of the consciousness that makes fiction—the creation of alternate, mirroring selves—and it is selfish, needful, cunning, self-pitying, and sometimes even generous.

Bartleby, who starved away from an intolerable world—perhaps on behalf of the narrator who had digested too much of it—had been a clerk “in the Dead Letter Office in Washington.” The narrator, lamenting Bartleby and humanity, but probably also Herman Melville, speculates on “Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?” He considers what dead letters might carry—pardon, hope, good tidings—and concludes that “On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” For life, also read fiction.

Published by Harper Brothers into the mid-1850s, Melville also read Harper’s magazine, renewing his subscription in 1852. And it was in Harper’s that Charles Dickens’s Bleak House was published serially in America, from April 1852 to October 1853. There’s little reason to doubt that Melville saw those issues, including the issues of June and July 1852, containing the chapters (X and XI) called “The Law-Writer” and “Our Dear Brother.” In them, a man is shown to be very much about paper and pen and, like Bartleby (at one point described as “folded up like a huge folio”), is a parody of Melville’s profession.

The law copyist, or scrivener, lives in Cook’s Court, near Chancery Lane. (Remember that Bartleby’s employer was Master of Chancery and that, well into the mid-twentieth century, New York’s Wall Street was the equivalent of London’s Inns of Court.) The man who copies legal documents in Bleak House, Melville would have read, calls himself “Nemo, Latin for no one.” An advantage cited about Nemo is “that he never wants to sleep”; he is a haunted man. His landlady says, “They say he has sold himself to the Enemy,” the Devil; he is “black-humored and gloomy” and lives in a tiny room “nearly black with soot, and grease, and dirt”; his desk is “a wilderness marked with a rain of ink.” “No curtain veils the darkness of the night,” but Nemo’s shutters are drawn; “through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine might be staring in....” The filthy, ragged copyist, a figure of total despair, lies dead in his squalid room, the victim of an overdose of opium.

Melville, I suggest, read about Nemo before he wrote his story of Wall Street. He made Nemo his own, though he was drawn to him, I think, because the combination of despair, cruel laws, alienation, copying-out, and that “rain of ink” were irresistible. Bartleby turns his face to a dead wall because he cannot tolerate his life. In the Dickens, it is a broken heart, a lost history, a condition in life that is denied by the scrivener. In the Melville, it is human life itself that is denied. Dickens, when he drew his copyist in Bleak House, was angry at conditions in English life; Melville, under Dickens’s influence, saw his soul as “grated to pieces” by the great chore of living.

The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles, published in Putnam’s in 1854, appeals to the contemporary sensibility as much as Bartleby or Benito Cereno. Although these are long stories, or novellas, they are written for magazine publication and are necessarily concise. The energy that comes of such compression, coupled with Melville’s darkening vision and sexual and economic desperation—a third child was born in 1853, a fourth in 1855-results in a fiction that is grim (or effortfully funny, like “The Happy Failure” or “I and My Chimney,” also published in 1854), a fiction that appropriates wild symbology from the romance (for example, a tortoise on the back of which is emblazoned a memento mori), and the mythic, fablelike qualities one associates with certain contemporary writers.

The Encantadas are the Galapagos Islands, “cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot,” Melville calls them. They are described as a wasteland in the seas, where natural life is cruel and human life that drifts in even crueller. Instead of chapters, we have ten sketches; there is no central character, and no single story. The islands become a repository for attitude and mood. They are metaphors that link Melville’s somber music, which describes an island as “tumbled masses of blackish or greenish stuff like the dross of an iron-furnace,” yielding “a most Plutonian sight.” This is a suite about hell, the outer, physical hell that is analogue to a sad man’s interior hell—that, say, of the man who had, in discussing Moby-Dick, mentioned “the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled.” These sketches, from the former travel and adventure writer, offer a Swiftian scorning song about men who are more like dogs, and about islands that are more like ideas.