Benito Cereno

Life and its cruel minions have tamed us to see what it wishes. We may walk into a crowded room and think it unfriendly because its occupants are our verbal strangers when in reality each is as lonely and isolated as we think ourselves; we may concoct anecdotal evidence of the locals in our vicinity because our domicile must be distinguished from all other towns at all other times; and we may understand a person's weaknesses by the compliments he grudgingly distributes. Yet, in essence, this is nothing that should surprise us. We are geared and programmed to be benevolent because, whatever those selfish naysayers might believe – and they believe in nothing except deepest, coldest space – faith and goodwill remain our natural disposition. I might not wander into a dark alley for fear of the worst of human predatoriness; but I will trust the young and charming salesperson genuinely persuaded by the reliability of his products, if only until I politely bid him farewell. If trust is our starting point, suspicion is our quiet ally as the smoke of human ambition clouds our judgment. And in this German town several hundred miles from sand and sun I read over two thousand pages on the ocean and its perils, some so obscure as to remain the banter of old sea-dogs. And there is not a little of the incomprehensible in the bold designs aboard the San Dominick in this majestic tale.

We are taken back to 1799 and quite literally the end of the world – "the harbor of Santa Maria, a small desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chile." Here docks the ship of our protagonist, the American captain Amasa Delano, and his crew of sealers, ostensibly for water but also to experience the heartsease that the coast proffers to the brazen and far-flung. On that same horizon comes "a strange sail":

The stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colours; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying, was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations. Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated excitement, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.

Subsequent events reveal that doubts, while in most instances frivolous and self-perpetuating, do indeed have their place. However bleeding his heart might be, Delano's wits quickly notice the destitution of the ship he approaches: the nets are in disrepair, the mix of Africans and Europeans generally gaunt and sickly, and the overarching impression of the ship is of one marooned and "for days lain tranced without wind." At the helm in only the representational sense is the title character of our story, an emaciated Spaniard who in his nervous tics and sways reminds Delano of a "hypochondriac abbot." Yet there are other oddities aboard. Heat, water deprivation, and scurvy have conspired to wipe out all the Spanish officers save the captain, as well as a great number of the Europeans ("wholesale havoc" is the term used); but the Africans incur fewer fatalities. This inequity coupled with Cereno's erratic behavior begin to stab at Delano like the small daggers he thinks he espies glimmering beneath the Africans' clouts. There are also lapsed punctilios in Cereno's manners that suggest he may not be what he claims, neither a captain nor a nobleman of Spanish stock – but Delano wavers from this impression on more than one occasion. He keeps his men on board their vessel, The Bachelor's Delight; he then pursues his interest, including a desire to practice his excellent Spanish, in Cereno and the latter's rather motley crew, until some small happening helps him conclude that what he has hitherto observed may merit greater scrutiny.

The secret of the story of course will not be mentioned here, and it is for the most part a poorly kept one. What Delano ensures we see is the allegory of misrepresentation so artistically outlined as to hint at a massive intrigue. Time and again he returns to Cereno, who acts as the compass on a misty surface:

He recalled the Spaniard's manner while telling his story. There was a gloomy hesitancy and subterfuge about it. It was just the manner of one making up his tale for evil purposes, as he goes. But if that story was not true, what was the truth? That the ship had unlawfully come into the Spaniard's possession? But in many of its details, especially in reference to the more calamitous parts, such as the fatalities among the seamen, the consequent prolonged beating about, the past sufferings from obstinate calms, and still continued suffering from thirst; in all these points, as well as others, Don Benito's story had been corroborated not only by the wailing ejaculations of the indiscriminate multitude, white and black, but likewise – what seemed impossible to be counterfeit – by the very expression and play of every human feature, which Captain Delano saw. If Don Benito's story was throughout an invention, then every soul on board ... was his carefully drilled recruit in the plot: an incredible inference. And yet, if there was ground for mistrusting the Spanish captain's veracity, that inference was a legitimate one.

There is also a plenitude of lush detail: the shield-piece upon the stern recounting a flagitious scene; the clatter at tense moments of a sextet of oakum-pickers; the captain's valet Bobo, who is as much a valet as Delano is a seagull; the shaving methods peculiar to Spaniards; and four unusual, otherwise minor acts of violence that bespeak some terrible truth. Understanding the ethnic categorizations of both Europeans and Africans as the narrow opinions of Delano, an unworldly if eloquent man, may enhance your enjoyment, but it should not spoil the tale's momentum. And what is suspense if not the prolongation of a nightmare that afflicts us like any other plague? Although, from all indications, we would not want to be privy to the nightmares of Benito Cereno.

Billy Budd, Sailor

Life's real tragedy, we are gravely informed in a quite famous and now quite old French film, is that "everyone has his reasons."  To someone of stern principles this may seem to be a throwaway observation by one of the forefathers of our contemporary relativists who don't like principles because principles imply responsibility, the mortal enemy of modern man – yet this is not the true context.  Our reasons may be our own and they may be complicated, deranged, or volatile.  The mere fact that they exist, however, allows us to choose or reject interaction with the other inhabitants of our world.  I have my reasons for writing, and some may suspect they involve egotism, megalomania, and moral preachment, charges that could be leveled against any writer.  Nevertheless, any regular reader of these pages would correctly enumerate as the motive forces aesthetic bliss and the discovery of inner truth because those are the only reasons one should write at all.  That's why when a second-rate poet once accused this great genius of writing in two languages out of excessive ambition, he simultaneously betrayed his commensurate ambition and inferior talent.  So if everyone has his reasons, how can we possibly enact legislation to govern millions?   Where do we cleave intent from result?  A few questions for the thoughtful reader of this incomparable tale.

According to our narrator it is no uncommon occurrence on a large ship, especially one with high turnover and many fresh new tars, to find one seaman who distinguishes himself solely by his good looks.  Upon this man is conferred the unspoken title of "Handsome Sailor" (sailors generally abjure fancy appellations) and he walks among his peers exuding some of the magnetism which in our days we normally reserve for movie stars or divas.  While he is "invariably a proficient in his perilous calling, he was also more or less of a mighty boxer or wrestler," a perfect combination of "strength and beauty."  In short:

The moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make. Indeed, except as toned by the former, the comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor in some examples received from his less gifted associates.

This is, we remember, only a typical portrait; our man Billy does not appear to have any of the puncher in him.  But he works hard on his ship, the Rights-of-man, earns an inordinate amount of respect given his petty duties, and his captain is soon loath to part with him.  Yet as fate would have it, a larger vessel by the name of Bellipotent (a lovely bell-ringing pun) requests his services, and he is transferred despite his being the Rights' "jewel" and "peacemaker" – which brings us to a small aside.  There could not be a clearer Christian parallel than the use of these two epithets, but not all parallels signify anything more than the recurrence of circumstance.  Billy's ingenuousness – he cannot even read or write – extenuates the impact of his looks and converts him not unquickly into a pleasant reminder to his shipmates of their long-lost youth.  For that reason, we learn, does he incur the wrath of a man by the name of John Claggart.

Claggart holds a special place in the pantheon of villainy because we are allowed two glances into his person.  The first is in his outward appearance ("a man about five and thirty, somewhat spare and tall ... his hand was too small and shapely to have been accustomed to hard toil"), by which he is likened to Tecumseh, a cleric during the English Civil War, and some distant Greeks, probably Spartans, with whom he, as the Bellipotent's master-at-arms, may have shared some notions of naumachia.  He is also rumored to have been a chevalier who was Anglicized and stowed aboard to compensate "for some mysterious swindle" (as with many manifestations of the Devil, he neither has an accent in English nor really speaks like a native).  The untraceability of his origin corresponds to that of evil itself, and as evil cannot exist in a vacuum and must have a referent, so must Claggart come upon something to unleash the demons that dance around his soul.  He finds his bugbear in the comely shape of William Budd, who one day just so happens to spill his supper upon the deck and Claggart's path:

It is more than probable that when the Master-at-arms in the scene last given applied to the sailor the proverb Handsome is as handsome does, he there let escape an ironic inkling, not caught by the young sailors who heard it, as to what it was that had first moved him against Billy, namely, his significant personal beauty.  Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth.  Is Envy then such a monster?  Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody seriously confess to envy?  Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.  And not only does everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man.  But since its lodgement is in the heart not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.  But Claggart's was no vulgar form of the passion.  Nor, as directed toward Billy Budd, did it partake of that streak of apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David.  Claggart's envy struck deeper.  If askance he eyed the good looks, cheery health and frank enjoyment of young life in Billy Budd, it was because these went along with a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent.  To him, the spirit lodged within Billy, and looking out from his welkin eyes as from windows, that ineffability it was which made the dimple in his dyed cheek, suppled his joints, and dancing in his yellow curls made him preeminently the Handsome Sailor.  One person excepted, the Master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd.

The "person excepted" is Edward Fairfax Vere, the Bellipotent's captain, who one night will become the third party in a dark reunion in the first mate's quarters.  Of Vere much has been said, both in Billy Budd and in the story's expansive secondary literature, so we would be best advised to keep our comments short.  Vere is praised as a brilliant sailor, the best of his active rank, and a man of philosophical bent – which makes his opinions on Billy's actions all the more damning.  Vere also persists as the object of much speculation because of his "pedantic" and allegedly "aristocratic" disposition (at one point his person is described as "a streak ... of King's yarn in a coil of navy rope").   That Billy will at different junctures be suspected both of blue blood and foreignness renders his relationship to Vere and Claggart all the more crucial – and no more needs to be said.   

If style were all that mattered, Billy Budd might be the best-written prose work in the English language, no meaner than the sagas of a bowelless Scotsman and a melancholy Moor.  As it were, some of Melville's far less gifted associates have entrapped our poor sailor in a Christian allegory, which it is in a way so obvious as to divest it of any allegorical meaning, or a study of latent homosexuality, which we can safely say it isn't.  Proponents of gender studies, that claptrap of indignation, have never really understood what could bond a squad of non-related heterosexual men together in an army or a sports team, a plain term called camaraderie.  That there are no women in Billy Budd, or scarcely any in this masterpiece, confounds and upsets them profoundly, but there is little we can do for such minds.  The best way to understand our boy Billy is as a victim of what can be bluntly described as fate and more roundly described as man's manifold reasons for opposing the good that rests in all of us.  That is to say, there may be one instance of justice in the codex memorized by the judge in a now dimly-recollected law school classroom, and another embedded deep within the valves of his almighty heart.  Billy falls distinctly between both natural categories and could just as easily be absolved as condemned.  There is also that pleasing ballad ("Billy in the darbies") that concludes the story.  The attentive reader may ask himself why the rather unusual "darbies" is an anagram of "seabird," or why, for that matter, the poem's name an anagram of "I, Billy, death's brine."  And that same reader will not fail to notice that very singular conversation between the ship's purser and its surgeon.  Maybe heavenly phenomena should be not limited to the firmament.

Bartleby, the Scrivener

Each year, as life hems its sleeve more tightly around our wrist, we are greeted with tidings of differing sensation.  There are good tidings, pleasant reminders of our privileges; small disappointments that can be mocked to raconteurish ends; and occasionally even wonderful swoons of information, turning points.  If you are a family man, the best news you will ever receive will concern your children and their welfare; alone, or in a quiet couple, hints of love or respect, or even career success might be the most satisfying seconds of life.   But behind each glorious memory lurks the possibility of disappointment which makes that glory all the more fantastic and delightful.  The old aphorism about pessimists' never being disappointed is codswallop: they are always disappointed.  They are saddened by every detail and swerve of our existence and never content with partial success, and for that reason complete success is to them an alien concept.  Whenever someone quips that he does not like to be disappointed, I know immediately that I am dealing with a child.  I know as well that this person will never be happy with anyone or anything because, in his heart of hearts, there is something that he hates about himself. 

The best people on this earth – I am lucky enough to know a few – are happy at all times, fundamentally happy to be alive and healthy, happy that the sun still shines, that we have seasons, that we have fewer wars now than ever before, that the smallness of the world allows us to experience the lives of others in startling new ways.  Disappointments knock on their doors (they have a very distinctive knock), but they don't answer.  After a while, they proceed to a curtained window and watch the monsters skulk away, to knock at other doors.  Sometimes those monsters are ones we love that do not love us back – unrequited love, however selfish, remains the greatest of our disappointments – other times we lose people close to us for a variety of causes, mostly not of our own doing.  As we get older, the monsters tend to stop by more frequently; peering out the same trusted window, we see that they are more varied; sometimes they even come in pairs or threes, plying their trade like any cobbler or haberdasher.  But when we are young and life stretches out before us like that one woman you would give anything to possess, soul and body – and we all have one such person – we cannot allow our coils to be blackened and tarred.  We cannot evince signs of the grave, signs of refusal or indifference to life, because that would mean we were already dead.  This is the premise of arguably the finest short story in the English language.

Our narrator, as opposed to the titular character, is an older man, who "from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best."  He is an attorney at law in what we still call Manhattan, as well as the supervisor of a triptych of oddball characters rightly appropriated from Dickensian annals:  Turkey and Nippers, two Englishmen of sixty and twenty-five, respectively, and of varying tempers, and a young gopher called Ginger Nut.  Their names owe their eccentricity to the narrator's wish for life to be easy and happy; frivolous monikers are part and parcel of jesting with mortality.  Our story thus begins with a sort of caricature of the curious shifts in mood on the part of the narrator's staff: Turkey is well-mannered and diligent before lunch, but a wretched beast once fed; whilst Nippers only manifests the bare bones of courtesy in the afternoon.  The description of Nippers's testiness (which the narrator, in another effort to play down its moral consequences, labels "indigestion") is particularly superb:

[Nippers evinced] especially a continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked.  Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him.  He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment, by final pieces of blotting-paper.  But no invention would answer.  If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table-lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk, then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms.  If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back.  In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted.  Or, if he wanted anything, it was to be rid of a scrivener's desk altogether.

This last observation, after a series of comic asides, is quite obviously the truth, but our narrator still makes little noise of it.  When relating the insufferable behavior of Turkey, the narrator similarly obliges himself to lessen our expectations by likening his employee to an animal: "in fact, precisely as a rash, restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat.  It made him insolent.  He was a man whom prosperity harmed."  A more astute observer would have depicted Turkey's unwillingness to wear his employer's hand-me-down overcoat as a shallow form of pride based on the entitlement of age (especially since, we are told, he and the narrator are practically coevals); but it is the narrator's interest to preserve this sideshow atmosphere for what is to come.  Or, I should say, who.

Demand, that great overlord, progresses to the point that the office needs additional help ("There was now great work for scriveners"), so an ad is placed and quickly answered.  It is here that we first meet the subject of our tale:

In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer.  I can see that figure now – pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!  It was Bartleby.

From these first lines it is clear that Bartleby is already no longer among the living.  So when the narrator avers that the "mettlesome poet, Byron" could not have sat down with Bartleby to "examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand," he might as well have made Byron the register of all hedonism and sensation that life offers and Bartleby his spiritless counterpart.  By virtue of his name, however, one might be led to believe that Bartleby belongs in an office with a Turkey, a Nippers and a Golden Nut, but this is also completely deceiving.  The newest hire wishes for nothing but the opportunity to carry out his scrivener work unimpeded by the whims of his patron, who "in [his] haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance" elects to give Bartleby some additional, menial business.  And Bartleby responds with one of the most famous retorts in literary history – 'I would prefer not to,' begetting the following reaction:

I looked at him steadfastly.  His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm.  Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him.  Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.  But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-Paris bust of Cicero out of doors.

The precedent is now set and maintained throughout.  Bartleby cannot possibly accept anything more than the core task of his profession, the copying of documents, as if he himself were a shadow or imitation of life.   His only response to the narrator's requests never changes, and the latter expresses his frustration in a statement that rings truer today than one hundred fifty years ago: "nothing aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance."  After numerous roadblocks, the narrator alights upon a curious conclusion:

He is useful to me.  I can get along with him.  If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve.  Yes.  Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval.  To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.

The narrator, like the reader, is aware of the duality of his condition.  He should pity Bartleby, and rightly intuits that most others won't; and yet being a martyr has little benefit to himself or others.  Why should it be he that assumes the burden of this dead emotional weight and "mulish vagary"?  Why he and no one else?  For the sweetening of his own regrets and misdeeds?  Perhaps that is not symptom enough to take on this unmindful young man; perhaps the discovery of Bartleby's afterhours whereabouts will sway the narrator in another direction.

If you do not regularly read this author, the greatest artist America has ever produced, I would recommend rearranging your schedule.  More than Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Updike, and Salinger, Melville has no peers, no equals, no one who can touch him when he is at his best.  His greatest work, produced at the staggering age of thirty-two, might have four or five novels worth its value; his poetry is largely unread although equally magnificent; but his greatest contribution might be his short fiction, insofar as Typee, Omoo, White Jacket, and Redburn have an anecdotal quality to them that suggests an exotic necklace of bright beads rather than a wholesome, perfectly contained pearl.  But Bartleby is a pearl, the rarest of gems that has much in common with a Russian short story, also one of the best ever written.  And also one that might spring from the adage: Ah, happiness courts the light, so that we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.