Customer Reviews

The Great Short Works of Herman Melville

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This edition of Melville's short fiction is, I think,
the best...certainly a real bargain at this price.
In this one volume, the reader gets all of Melville's
short fiction -- plus the novella, *Billy Budd, Sailor*
(the Harrison Hayford/Merton M. Sealts, Jr. "definitive"
Reading Text published by the Univ. of Chicago in 1962).
The collection is edited and has an excellent
"Introduction" by Warner Berthoff.
The selections are each preceded by a very informative
"Note" which tells you when the piece first appeared
and in what periodical. Berthoff also supplies in each
"Note" delicious suggestive context insights...which
help the appreciative/analytical/interpretive process
begin to percolate.
The 1st selection is "The Town-Ho's Story" (a
chapter from Melville's novel *Moby-Dick*). But
this chapter was printed in *Harper's New Monthly
Magazine* in October 1851 (according to Berthoff's
"Note")as a portion of a work-in-progress.
The collection presents the pieces in the CHRONOLOGICAL
order of their publication in various magazines.
But it also contains "The Two Temples," which
Berthoff says was rejected for publication. So,
the collection contains all of Melville's "short"
fictional pieces, including prose pieces meant to
accompany poems. These pieces in the collection
include: "The Marquis de Grandvin," "Three 'Jack
Gentian Sketches,'" "John Marr," and "Daniel Orme."
The collection concludes with *Billy Budd, Sailor."
All of the *Piazza Tales* are in this collection
along with "The Piazza " piece, itself.
This is a fine collection. The Northwestern/
Newberry editions of Melville's works are nice,
but expensive. And you would have to get 2
separate volumes to also get the *Billy Budd,
Sailor* which you get included in this one
volume.
However, what the N/N edition of Melville's
prose pieces gives you which this collection by
Berthoff does not (their title is: *The Piazza
Tales and Other Prose Pieces: 1839-1860*)are:
"Fragments from a Writing Desk" (1839),
Melville's inspired essay of idolatry and
insight, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (17 and 24
Aug. 1850), many other uncollected pieces,
Melville's reconstructed lectures from his
stint as a public speaker/"performer" (Yikes!)
"Statues in Rome," "The South Seas," and
"Traveling." There are also copious notes,
scholarly information, photo facsimiles,
and other helpful items in the N/N edition.
But, unless you are a scholar, a Melville
fanatic, or financially unfrugal, BUY this
edition by Berthoff and published by the
Perennial Library of Harper & Row.
* * * * * * * * *

This is worth buying if only for the masterpiece that is Bartelby the Scrivener. One of the all time great short stories, it tells the story, narrated by an employer in a Wall Street Law office who finds a peculiar scrivener called Bartelby in his employ.

Bartelby is initially a quiet and efficient copyist, but when asked to undertake extra work, he deflects it with the simple rejoinder 'I would prefer not to.' He repeats this mantra, over and over, calmly and without malice. 'You will not?' thunders his employer in frustration, 'I prefer not,' says Bartelby. And with that simple 'I prefer not', Bartelby strikes a blow on behalf of all the inconspicuous millions who find themselves wasting their lives, their creative human potential, in drab, workaday office jobs, counting down the months of their lives staring at a computer screen, the sterile hum of life passing them by. All the tedium of office life is in Bartelby - anyone who has worked in such an environment will recognise the compulsive snacking, the drab natureless view out the window, the modes and systems of the company affecting the consciousness and behaviour patterns of the staff. Bartelby, simply and effectively, questions all of this with his quiet actions, heading off in another direction from the common herd, unpicking the knot at the end of the string that binds all corporate paperwork together. Hurrah for Bartelby, whose quiet, tragic existence unravells the whole rope, and hurrah for his legacy - for without Bartelby there would be no Camus, there would be no 'Something Happened' by Joseph Heller, no 'And Then we Came to the End' by Joshua Ferris, the masterful debut office novel published this year.

To read Bartelby, to devote a valuable hour of your life to Melville's pioneering existentialist story, is to momentarily glimpse a chink in the darkness, a sense of what might and could be, instead of the living death that a great many people trudge through, like the dead in T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Wasteland', trudging over London Bridge on their way to work.

This is the beginning of American literature. And these short works I think tell the tale more clearly than that confusing (though still great) big book Moby Dick. Melville wrote from an outsiders perspective and he was an outsider as perhaps all Americans were because we did not yet have an identity as a people. Melville explores our institutions of justice and our ability to comprehend life through them in Billy Budd in the way a foreigner would examine justice and understanding in a land whose logic he was unfamiliar with. He seems to ask "how will our sense of justice be different than France's or England's and therby make us a different nation than theirs?" or even more simply "Is real understanding(of ourselves, or others) ever possible?" Melville is very much the anti-idealist in a work like The Piazza in which one valley dweller imagines existence on the upper slopes to be grander than his own only to travel there one day and be made aware of the opposite. So there is no dreaming colonist in Melville, in him we have a measured study of ourselves as we were in his day, and perhaps still are, a dreaming people,a restless people with only the vaguest notions of what life and its true nature is. The strangest story in this collection is Benito Cereno which is perhaps the work which most defines a democratic nation's uneasy alliance of peoples and points of view. In that work there is no one defining perspective, only differing views of one event that remains disturbingly unclear as all of Melville's worlds are. In Melville we have an author defining what we are or perhaps more importantly what our problems will be in the future. Interesting short works full of that rare kind of insight that does not seem to be trapped in its time but somehow seems to have seen what is to come. There is the idea that a new nation has of itself and a confidence that in the works of Melville is challenged. The mystery in these works is the mystery at the heart of existence and life remains inscrutable even here in this new land with its new ways. In Moby Dick the innocent Ishmael is the only one spared, in Billy Budd(Melville's last tale) the innocent is the one sacrificed. Melville's vision is not a comfortable one. The strange Bartelby,the Scrivener is a tale where personality is consumed by an impersonal system. The story strikes an odd alienated tone which will later be taken up by Kafka and Pynchon and countless others.

Melville is, of course, best known for his epic novel Moby Dick, but he also wrote some great short fiction, including Billy Budd and Bartleby.

In Bartleby, he may have written one of the first significant pieces of literature to give voice to the dehumanizing aspects of the modern industrial compartmentalized workplace. Has there ever been a less desirable job title than scrivener? They were employed by lawyers to transcribe legal documents, and if that isn't inhuman enough, the office in which Bartleby works has windows which face the brick walls of surrounding skyscrapers. Bartleby mystifies his employer, our narrator, first by refusing to assist in proof reading documents, averring "I would prefer not to." But in short order he is preferring not to do most anything, including leave the building after he is fired. Bartleby is finally removed by the police and starves to death in the Tombs, preferring not to eat.

Melville keeps Bartleby, like Moby Dick, shrouded in mystery. The only explanation offered for his behavior is that he was forced to leave his patronage job in a dead letter office when administrations changed over. This leaves the reader free to freight Bartleby with any significance one desires and makes him a truly haunting figure.

GRADE: A

Not only did the Great short Works of Herman Melville offer some intelligent reading, but offered some insight into an emerging America. In this collections of Melville's masterpieces, one may find commentary on American's changing position and economy. A partiular example may be found in the story "Bartleby, the Scrivner, the story of Wall Street." Here, Melville shows how America's mind is turned toward wealth and starts to reject the traditional and religious ways of life once known to New York City. Not only does the story of Bartleby show Melville's ability to comment on a changing nation, but the other stories of the book carry a similar feel. Through its wonderful collection, the Great Short Works of Herman Melville captures the essence of Melville, the man.

This book includes one of my favorite works by Melville (or anyone, for that matter), "Bartleby The Scrivener". It tells the story of the document copier (or scrivener) Bartleby as narrated by his increasingly perplexed, unnamed employer. Unlike Mobey Dick which is so symbolic and philosophical, I gave up on page 13 or so, this story is strangely accessible and contemporary. The alienation that Bartleby feels for his job, his fellow employees, and the narrator is, at once, sad and humorous. Today, when it seems a job can easily become interchangeable with who we are, the fact that Bartleby is, at first, reluctant to do what's asked of him and later would "prefer not to" do anything at all is a bitter, if accurate, portrayal of the kind of ever-threatening psychosis that nibbles around the edges of the world of work from time to time, whatever it is we do to make a living. What's the word? Yeah; there's an existential quality to this tale that fits just as securely in 2007, as it does in the mid-19th century, the story's actual setting. Like Bartleby, I sometimes find myself fading away before the tasks I am asked to perform on the job; "I would prefer not to..." comes to mind pretty often, but, of course, I push on because at the time it all seems to mean something. And it does....Doesn't it? Melville was on to something.

Now that Moby Dick is apparently in one of its periodical down turns, being mostly read by only die hard American lit majors, it is through his short fiction that Melville retains his position in American letters. Although Moby Dick is his most important work (and one of the most important works in American fiction) his shorter efforts do not suffer in comparison. Of the four selections in this volume, "Bartleby", "Benito Cereno" and "Billy Budd" are all first rate and should be put on the same shelf as Moby Dick; only "The Encantadas", a strange combination of travel guide, adventure story and philosophical musings, pales in comparison with the other three. But even this story holds the reader's attention as Melville weaves Biblical, Shakespearean and Manichean elements to give a mid-nineteenth century description of the Galapagos Islands.

"Bartleby" is arguably Melville's finest short work. Within its forty odd pages the author masterfully draws the portrait of a man beaten down by society and the despotic business practices of former employers. Bartleby refuses to fight his predicament and instead retreats into himself and ignors his current employer's demands. "I would prefer not" is his stock reply. The character of Bartleby is seen as one of the first examples of the alienated hero in literature, a character type that would be more fully considered by Camus, Sartre, Kafka and others. "Benito Cereno", a story of a ship taken over by a group of slaves, combines an increasingly suspenseful plotline with some sociological explorations of slavery. Although written from a mid-nineteenth century point of view and with enough racist statements to make even a KKK member blush, Melville makes it clear that slavery is an institution that contaminates both slave and master alike. The character of Benito Cereno, the ship's captain, in many ways resembles that of Bartleby: both have essentially resigned themselves to their fate and recognize the futility of offering resistance to the machinations of a fickle universe.

Melville continues his dark musings on the nature of good, evil, alienation and a seemingly aloof diety in his novella, "Billy Budd, Foretopman." Although not as monumental as Moby Dick, this work poses many of the same questions and deals with the same set of philosophical concepts as the larger novel. Rarely in literature has the ideas of innocence, evil and justice been so concisely considered and personified: Billy, the innocent Adam; the devilish Claggard; and Vere, the deistic captain who must look helplessly on as an innocent man is condemned to death, bound by the laws of the Navy which he serves.

In addition, all of the short works in this volume bear some relation to one another. Each of its protagonists shares a certain resignation in face of a fate over which they have no control; each story is full of ironies which requires the reader to read carefully and pay particular attention to Melville's symbols and themes; each story is open to a myriad of interpretations; and each story is written by a man, although in decline with his contemporary critics and reading public, was in his creative prime.

a great collection! when it comes to Melville, i usually prefer annotated editions, but, this particular version does not include either 'The Confidence Man' or 'Moby Dick', thus, i believe i will be just fine. If you've already read 'Typee', 'Pierre', or either of the two above mentioned titles, then this collection may just be for you. It's worth it alone just for 'Billy Budd'. My one complaint? The cover artwork depicts ol' Herms to be a distant relative of Leonardo da Vinci, and while ol' Herms was a genius (although not on Leonardo's level), i think Perennial could have offered a better looking picture than the one they chose to use... talk about your old man and the sea...