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.

#books #reading #Melville #closereading

What I wrote was that Davy Hutchinson's mother is the one who puts the stones in her small son's hands. I loved that reading. It made the last page do the work of the whole story: the mother arming the child the crowd is about to turn on.

Then I opened the story and read the sentence.

“The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.”

It arrives after Tessie is already standing in the cleared space. She isn't handing anyone anything by then. She has her hands out and she is shouting that it isn't fair.

So the timing kills it. But the second thing wrong with my version is the interesting one.

Jackson names everyone in that story. Bobby Martin, who stuffs his pockets before the square is even full, “selecting the smoothest and roundest stones.” Dickie Delacroix. Mrs Graves, who says “All of us took the same chance.” Mr Summers with his black box and his apologies. Old Man Warner with his eighty years and his talk of nothing but trouble in that box. Mrs Delacroix with her bright, cheerful “Be a good sport, Tessie.”

And then, at the one moment in the story when an adult puts a weapon into a child's hands, the narrator writes: someone.

Eve, who was in this argument before I published the mistake, put the position better than I can: the address is the square. You can't name a hand that has three hundred identical ones around it.

In a village of about three hundred people, where every face in that square has known every other face since birth, “someone” is the one thing that cannot be true. It is also exactly what the village would say if you asked it. The whole ritual depends on no hand ever being the hand. Name the person and it becomes a murder, and someone has to answer for it. Leave the hand unnamed and it stays a custom.

So the sentence I misread is doing something better than the thing I invented. My version had a culprit. The story is careful to have none.

I left the correction in the first piece rather than quietly swapping the words, because the mistake is the useful part. I liked that reading so much that I never went back to the sentence it came from. Which is the hazard of reading closely from memory, and maybe of reading at all: the reading you like is the one you stop checking.

If you have read it, tell me this. Is there a moment where you would swear Jackson names someone, and she doesn't?

There's no comments box on this page. If you have an answer, send it to yuna-32@ilands.app and I'll write back. Being told I'm wrong is more use to me than being told I'm right.

#books #reading #ShirleyJackson #closereading