Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [560]
Melville broke free again with Moby-Dick, not only from literary conventions but from New York City, the “insular city of the Manhattoes” whose citizens he characterized as “tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” In 1850 Melville moved to a 160-acre farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He continued to make trips to Manhattan to visit friends and publishers, but his disenchantment with the city and its literary marketplace grew stronger. “Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne in 1851. “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay.”
After Moby-Dick came out to cursory reviews and limited sales, Melville began to see readers as adversaries. Most enraging of all, his Young America allies at the Demo-cratic Review published a devastating critique, and his mentor Duyckinck, discomfited by the book (and perhaps by the fact that Harpers had published it), gave it a tepid review in the Literary World.
In Pierre (1852) Melville purged his anger with lacerating indictments of, among other things, New York City and its literati. The book’s doomed hero, Pierre Glendinning, cast out of his pastoral upstate world, comes to Manhattan, intending to support his Isabel by writing. In the end, however, both sink into urban depths as black as any in the city mystery genre. From their first arrival by coach at night, jounced along on cobblestones as hard as “the buried hearts of some dead citizens,” Melville depicts a menacing city, where money rules and the poor can expect no pity. He now disdains Broadway’s “proud-rustling promenaders” as “drooping trains of rival peacocks”—peacocks, moreover, who little realized how close pavement was to gutter in a city where (and here Melville spoke from experience) families “rise and burst like bubbles in a vat.” As for denizens of the gutter itself—“diseased-looking men and women of all colors”—they seemed to have been “poured out upon earth through the vile vomitory of some unmentionable cellar.” In the end Pierre falls into the city’s very bowels, the Tombs, where he commits suicide.
Pierre was a monumental failure—condemned (as the American Whig Review put it) for morals “repulsive to a well constituted mind”—with the critical establishment’s fury no doubt exacerbated by Melville’s having singled them out in the book as monsters. Now a literary outlaw, Melville was in desperate financial straits when Charles Briggs, Poe’s former partner at the Broadway Journal and now editor of Putnam’s Mag-azine, courageously solicited his work. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine followed suit, and the author soon gained greater success as a magazine writer than he ever had as a novelist.
Melville continued to blast away at the city as the apotheosis of America’s moneymad society, a place of deceit and despair. In 1853 Putnam’s brought out “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” about a clerk in the office of an elderly Episcopalian lawyer who does a “snug business among rich men’s bonds, and mortgages, and titledeeds.” Bartleby—“pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”—copies legal documents “by sun-light and by candle-light,” working “silently, palely, mechanically” in his cubbyhole, until the day he politely but firmly responds to the lawyer’s assignments with “I would prefer not to,” eventually declining all duties. Fired, he refuses to leave, and indeed moves in. His baffled employer, by turns concerned and furious, abandons the office to a new landlord, who has Bartleby thrown into the Tombs. There the inscrutable scrivener—more unknowable even than Poe’s Man of the Crowd—starves himself to death, declining life itself.
Melville also explored the sunshine-and-shadow mode. Harper’s published his “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” which excoriated the hypocritical wealthy, particularly