The perfect gift for the Bartleby in your life?

Okay. I'll bite. To those of you who reached this site by searching for "desk accessory for bartleby the scrivener" (11 of you this month), "bartleby the scrivener desk accessory" (5), "bartleby scrivener desk accessory" (2), "bartleby the scrivener, a desk accessory" (1): what was it you were looking for?

I apologize if this query, which is sure to draw even more of you searchers to this site fruitlessly, is somewhat of a violation of the unwritten rules of the Internet, but you've really piqued my curiousit. I've now done a fair amount of searching myself trying to figure it out, but I've gotten nowhere, so I'm left helplessly trying to imagine what Bartleby might have needed on his desk.

Punching the clock

{Lee Marvin in Point Blank (1967), based on Richard Stark's The Hunter (1962)}

I've written before about my wish that we had more good fiction about work. Like it or not, work is the focus of much, if not most, of our energy and time, yet with a handful of great exceptions-- such as the refusals of Bartleby, the farmers' camaraderie of Wendell Berry, and the occasional scene in Tolstoy--literature has tended to give short shrift to the working life.

That's just one of the many reasons I've enjoyed the five Richard Stark novels I've blazed through in the past two weeks in between sections of Tom Jones. In each of the novels, Stark (who is one of Donald Westlake's many identities) concerns himself with such seemingly mundane details as finding a good job, getting to know the other workers, and doing the work. He doesn't stint on detail, and he doesn't touch on much outside of the job.

Since, however, Stark's main character in these novels is a bank robber, Parker, a work day--or a novel--might begin in as dramatic a fashion as this, from Firebreak (2001):

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

That's, of course, where the novels draw their interest: they're carefully crafted crime novels, as thrilling as any in the genre. But I'm not joking when I say they're novels about work, as well. With the essentially amoral Parker as their focus, in a sense the books' only moral center is their acting out of the old saw that any job worth doing is worth doing well, and that care and attention to detail will be rewarded. Parker's attention to detail would be fanatical if it weren't so methodical, put solidly in service of his twin imperatives: do the job well and stay alive. One of his fellow heisters notes his tenacious attention in Breakout (2002):

Williams nodded, grinning. “There’s always another detail, huh?”

“Sooner or later,” Parker said,” you get to them all.”

So what we get from Stark is a picture of a professional at the top of his game, fully engaged with his craft, written by someone who is working with similar care; Stark's adherence to the working values that he shows us Parker living by is what lifts these books above the ordinary. In the second Parker novel, The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), Stark uses a throwaway line describing a mechanic to signal his appreciation of craft. Parker brings in a beater semi for some special repair work, and:

When the mechanic came in at seven o'clock, he looked at the truck in disgust. He got interested, though, being a professional, and worked on it till nine-thirty.

Parker is the epitome of the interested professional, and thus the best partner, the best planner, the one most likely to anticipate trouble, whether it comes from the known obstacles, such as police and alarms, or from the unexpected, such as the stupidity or cupidity of his colleagues. He's also, while quiet himself, a necessarily astute student of human nature; like the most skilled boss, he knows who and how to push those he's working with--yet he also knows when to hang back and let someone more skilled take over. This exchange between Parker and a cop, from Breakout (2002), presents in more explicit form than usual Parker's thoughtful perceptiveness, which Stark subtly never lets the reader forget:

Putting the microphone back on its hook, Turley said, “I'll look like a real idiot, once I finally do bring you in.”

Parker said, “I didn’t take your gun.”

Turley looked at him sideways, looked at the road ahead. “Meaning what?”

“I’m not out to make you feel bad about yourself,” Parker told him. “It’s just that it’s time for me to get to some other part of the world.”

“And you figure,” Turley said, “if I’m your chauffeur, but you don’t disarm me, I didn’t lose my weapon to you, that way I’ve still got my dignity.”

“Up to you,” Parker said.

“And I’ll be easier to control,” Turley said, “if I’ve still got my dignity.”

“Up to you."

Turley laughed, not as if he meant it, and said, “Here I was telling you all about game theory. We could have had some nice discussions, back in Stoneveldt [Prison].”

“I don’t think so,” Parker said.

Stark's insight into human nature isn't always limited to Parker's search for advantages; one of the most memorable moments in Breakout is when an adulterous businessman, on being woken by intruders, is momentarily but genuinely relieved to discover that they are not private detectives sent by his wife, but merely murderous bank robbers. It's a small moment, passed over quickly, but it's indicative of Stark's deep attunement to people and their thought processes.

Stark has said that he doesn't plan his novels in advance; instead, he puts Parker into a situation and watches how he gets out of it. That sense of initial contingency somehow suffuses the books despite Stark's multilayered, near-perfect plots. As we watch unexpected complications pile up, we quickly begin to understand, and appreciate, Parker's mania for control and detail. It is as much a general approach to life as it is to crime (or work): take care with what you can, which will in the long run free more of your attention to dealing with what you cannot. In fact, it is that determination to focus, that relentlessness, that makes Parker a compelling character. He will never stop looking for angles, never stop thinking about risk, never stop covering contingencies--because he knows that the minute he does that, he's inviting death into the heist.

In the early books, Stark seems to be explicitly trying to render Parker unpleasant: he's more violent and brutal than he would later become, more likely to kill, and he has no real existence outside his work. Though the books are narrated more or less in a close third person from Parker's perspective, we are never privy to his emotional life; it's as if he is as much a decision-making matrix as a human, never looking beyond the immediate prospect. And in the section of each book where Stark shifts his narrative perspective to some of the peripheral characters, Parker becomes almost a void, so quiet and inscrutable as to be nearly invisible.

In the later novels, however, Parker has, if not softened--he's still unapologetically ready to kill to save his own life--then at least grown a bit. He's got a long-term girlfriend, for example, and even a home. In addition, though he would dispute the fact, he is clearly far more likely to leave people alive in his wake than strict risk accounting might demand; though plenty of people still die, there is no wanton killing, and no one who is killed could be classed an innocent.

Does it make sense that this taciturn, pitiless man might, having however improbably found happiness outside of his work, desire to limit the destruction within his work? Or is it a cop-out on Stark's part? Is he getting too fond of the character, and thus softening him--or, worse, making it easy on him, so we don't have to see him make ethically unacceptable decisions? After all, though most of us gave up looking for explicit moral lessons in fiction in childhood, we are still looking, in one form or another, for truth. It thus seems far more important that Parker--along with those around him--be perceptively, believably rendered than that he be ethically acceptable.

Is, then, the slightly softer Parker convincing? Is he true? On the basis of a couple of novels, I'd say so, but for a more definite judgment, I'll have to wait until I've read more. For now, I think I'll join with Elmore Leonard--who said, "Whatever Stark writes, I read"--and enjoy the ride.

Two of the people in this photo are celebrating their wedding anniversary.

If you surprise your wife on a Friday morning by announcing that you've spent four months secretly planning a trip to New York to celebrate your seventh wedding anniversary, and that you're leaving that night, it's even more fun, when she asks what you're going to be doing in New York, to be able to tell her, "We'll be going to International Pickle Day!"

We ate a lot of regular pickles, some pickled beans and radishes, some kimchi, some more pickles. And here, I suppose, is this post's tenuous connection to this blog's ostensible purpose: in reading the International Pickle Day materials, I learned two new terms for cucumbers: curvey describes a type of cucumber that is destined for pickling (56% of the nearly 3 billion grown annually in the United States), while slicer refers to a cucumber that is to be shipped to groceries and sold as is. I also learned the Dutch phrase in de pickel zitten, which means "to sit in the pickle"--the rough equivalent of our "to be in a pickle."

It was a great trip. We saw friends, had good food and drink, talked about books and music, heard stories of bad workplaces. Which leads me to think, once again, that there really isn't enough fiction about office life, relative to the amount of time and emotion we spend there. Though maybe Bartleby the Scrivener is enough?

Bartleby reminds me that there were of course books on the trip, too. We met our friend Bernice at the Brooklyn Book Festival, where I couldn't resist picking up some of the beautifully designed novellas published by Melville House. And my current Prince fixation led me to pick up a book on his album Sign 'o' the Times by my friend Maura's sometimes co-blogger Michaelangelo Matos, who won me over with this line:

The only music from 1987 to match it for sheer libido isn't an R&B record-it's Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, cock-rock metal with a disco rhythm section.

At the Book Festival, we also saw a panel featuring Ed from the Dizzies, along with Rob Sheffield and Chuck Klosterman--the last of whom came out with an unforgettable (if possible untrue?) line:

Even with something you absolutely love, if you think about it long enough, you can make it seem horrible.

Oh, and we wandered the Strand, where I picked up Mary Ann Caws's impressionistic, digressive volume on Proust in the Overlook Illustrated Lives series, from which I gleaned this anecdote:

At the moment when [Proust's brother] Robert was about to marry Marthe in the nearby church of St. Augustin, Proust, panicked as usual over the notion that he might be cold, stuffed his tuxedo with a great mass of thermal wadding, placed several mufflers around his neck, and three overcoats over the tux, and so attired, was too massive to get down the aisle and had to stand aside. "To each row in turn he announced in a loud voice that he had been ill for months, that he would be still more ill that evening, that it was not his fault."

Proust as Monty Python character--now that's a side of the man I would never have expected to see.

All in all, a lovely whirlwind trip. Now back home, and back to regularly scheduled blogging. And, you know, work and all that stuff, too.

A writer's purpose

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.

Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, and it should never be undertaken . Writers engrossed in any literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes and, unless these self-flatterers are content to dismiss such activity as their contribution to the war effort, they might as well be peeling potatoes.

From Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891), collected in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

He had stood behind that tree during the interview between the father and son. He had even smoked there. I found the ash of a cigar, which my special knowledge of tobacco ashes enabled me to pronounce as an Indian cigar. I have, as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco.

From Herman Melville’s "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), collected in The Piazza Tales

At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.

. . . .

[Several days later] I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.

“Why, how now? what next?” exclaimed I, “do no more writing?”

“No more.”

“And what is the reason?”

“Do you not see the reason for yourself?” he indifferently replied.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

The goal of every culture is to decay through overcivilization; the factors of decadence, luxury, skepticism, weariness, and superstition,—are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

. . . .

Yet to live in a decadence need not make us despair. It is but one technical problem the more which a writer has to solve.

Note 40, by editor Leslie S. Klinger, to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891), collected in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

Holmes first mentioned his monograph, without disclosing the actual title, in A Study in Scarlet. He refers to it again in The Sign of Four, giving the full title of his monograph as “Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos: An Enumeration of 140 Forms of Cigar, Cigarette, and Pipe Tobacco, with Coloured Plates Illustrating the Difference in the Ash,” and remarks that Francois le Villard of the French detective service was translating the work into his native language.