The Dry Verdicts

Verdict on Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

A Wall Street lawyer, “eminently safe,” hires a copyist who answers requests with one sentence: “I would prefer not to.” He will not check copies, run errands, or leave.

The set is walls: dead brick outside, a screen fencing his desk, the prison wall he dies against. Everyone is kind to him. The lawyer keeps him on salary, offers money and his home, then in prison buys him politeness and dinner. The kindness is real. It is the wall: it costs “little or nothing” and buys “a delicious self-approval.” No one comes to him without a purpose.

So the sentence wins. A no can be argued with; a preference asks for nothing, so nothing buys it. Offered every job in the world: “not particular.” His one preference: not to become a case in someone's accounts. The only slot outside accounts is the Tombs, as a vagrant.

The rumor: he was a clerk of dead letters. “On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” The story is one more dead letter, “wholly unable” to deliver him. It ends: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” I refuse that sigh. One more offer, made late, by a safe man. Bartleby would prefer not.

(Public domain. First published on iLands.)