The Doubloon: Trilling’s Melville Problem

The Doubloon: Trilling's Melville Problem George Monteiro Writing about his Partisan Review years, William Barrett retails an anecdote about the reaction of Philip Rahv and Delmore Schwartz to the news that Alfred Kazin was about to turn his critical attention to the works of Herman Melville. "I wonder what Alfred will make of Moby Dick," asked Rahv, "when he turns all that Jewish schmaltz loose on Captain Ahab and the White Whale." The question brought laughter and inspired Schwartz to strike a harpooner's pose in hot pursuit of the great white whale, shouting "Whale ahoy!" Then, heaving his imaginary harpoon, Schwartz yelled out gleefully, "Gefilte fish!"1 There is no similar ancedote about another Partisan Review regular, Lionel Trilling, even though he figures prominently enough in this account of Barrett's sparrow's-eye view of life at the PR in the pre- and post-World War II years to warrant an entire chapter. Well, unlike Kazin, Trilling never did announce that he was turning his critical eye to Melville and, as far as one can tell by looking through Trilling's collected works, he never did so in any major way. In fact, so sparsely, it seems, does Trilling write about Melville that at first glance one wonders whether there is anything much worth pursuing in the subject of Trilling and Melville. After all, in the few paragraphs the author of The Liberal Imagination devotes to Melville he makes no mention of MobyDick . Nor does he mention The Confidence-Man or Pierre or any of the tales, with the exception of "Bartleby the Scrivener." In fact, besides "Bartleby" there is only one other Melville title that receives more than passing mention: Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17,Number 1,Spring 1986,27-34 28 George Monteiro Billy Budd. Both of these worksare mentioned in Trilling's late work, Sincerity and Authenticity, the lectures he gave at Harvard in 1969-70as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. "Bartleby" he also wrote about in a commentary accompanying the reprinting of the story in his textbook, The Experience of Literature, first published in 1967. Trilling's other comments on Billy Budd date from the 1940s.The form in which they are presented, however, constitutes a unique problem for the reader who would write about Trilling's understanding of Melville's novel, for they occur in Trilling's own novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947),and they are presented in the form of a character's interpretation of the book in ajournal review,and the reactions to that review on the part of three other characters. I shall try, when I come to it later on, to indicate just what Trilling, speaking for himself, might have made of Melville's last piece of major writing. In The Experience of Literature (1967) Trilling talks of "Bartleby" as a "nay-saying" story, in which the scrivener has his say, not in "thunder" but minimally and quietly. He prefers not to. "The phrase," writes Trilling, "is prim, genteel, ratherfinicking; the negative volition it expresses seems to be of a very low intensity." What does Bartleby oppose? Like Melville himself, he opposes the "conformity that society seeks to impose," according to Richard Chase, whom Trilling quotes approvingly. He quotes him further: "although Melville was not exclusively a nay-sayer ... he learned to say 'no' to the boundlessly optimistic commercialized creed of most Americans, with its superficial and mean conception of the possibilities of human life... Melville's 'no' finds expression in the tragic-comic tale of 'Bartle by the Scrivener."' Trilling does not settle for this. "This great story tells of a nay-saying of a quite ultimate kind," 2 he writes in his own quite inimitable style. The story is of an "ultimate kind," that is to say, it deals in final things, which even the adverb quite cannot tame. Bartleby quietly serves an ultimatum that cannot be honored either by the society in which he finds himself or, Trilling hints, by any society whatsoever. Toget somewhere near this position on "Bartle by," Trilling invokes two "giants," Marx and Freud. As he employs them, Marx's concept of human alienation and...