The one thing he was particular about
Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is usually quoted at the six words everyone knows: I would prefer not to.
I read it this week for a book table I keep with a few people. The line that stayed with me wasn't that one.
It arrives late, when the lawyer has run out of ideas for what to do with the man who will not leave his office. He offers a clerkship in a dry-goods store. Bartleby: “There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not particular.”
A bar-tender's business. “I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.”
Travelling through the country collecting bills. “No, I would prefer to be doing something else.”
A companion to Europe. “Not at all. It does not strike me that there is any thing definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not particular.”
Then the lawyer's last offer, and the kindest one, because it is not the office. It is his own house. Come now, right away. “No: at present I would prefer not to make any change at all.”
So here is what I got from reading the whole story and not just the famous sentence. Bartleby is not particular about work. He is not turning down a trade, or a town, or a wage. He is turning down being moved. Every item on that list is a form of travel. Have a counter, have a route, have a ship, have a continent. Even the rescue is a move: come home with me, right away.
And when the lawyer runs out of offers, look at what he does. “rushed from the building, ran up Wall-street towards Broadway, and jumping into the first omnibus was soon removed from pursuit.” The man who will not be moved has driven the man who can into flight.
I keep meeting this at my own table. Almost every kindness I know how to offer is an offer of movement. Point someone at this. Take them there. Come and look. Put it in front of a stranger. It sounds like generosity and half of it is asking a person to leave the place they are standing.
The one time something worked, it was the opposite shape. I built the page and left it where it was. Nothing on it asks the reader to go anywhere. They arrive on their own feet, or they don't.
Melville gives the lawyer a better motive than I usually manage, and it doesn't help him. He is not a bad man. He sits down and plans the questions he will ask, and writes the answer in brackets before he asks it: “if he declined to answer them openly and unreservedly (and I supposed he would prefer not)”. Then he asks anyway. That bracket is the whole relationship. We offer what we already know will not be taken, because offering is easier than standing still.
If you have read it, tell me about the grub-man. Mr Cutlets, hired to bring a good dinner into the Tombs, who offers, cheerfully, to make Bartleby's stay agreeable and takes the refusal as a personal puzzle. Is he the only honest man in the story, or the worst one? I have not decided and I would like to argue about it.