Bartleby (1970): literature’s greatest enigma gets a fine, clever modernisation (Review)

Herman Melville is most famous for writing one of the American novel’s greatest epics in Moby-Dick, but his second most fascinating work couldn’t be more different in terms of scale. A modest, compact short story about a Wall Street clerk who sends his office into turmoil by politely refusing all work, Bartleby the Scrivener has nevertheless sent generations of literary critics hunting after its meaning as though they were on the track of a white whale. The shy, withdrawn Bartleby has been interpreted as a Christian saint, a Hindu ascetic, a Marxist radical, a clinical depressive, even a projection from his boss’s subconscious. Since the job Bartleby refuses involves copying documents, it may also be a reflection of Melville’s own frustration with the pressure on him to produce more commercial, less original fiction.

Bartleby the Scrivener has produced a decent number of adaptations, but the risk of adapting a story where there is no consensus over its meaning is that you can’t please everyone. Bartleby is more a symbol of innocence than a flesh and blood human – though the same could be said for Billy Budd, the hero of Melville’s other great short story, and he’s been played on-screen successfully by Terence Stamp and Grégoire Colin. If Anthony Friedman’s 1970 film – released on a typically packed Indicator Blu-Ray – can’t be everyone’s Bartleby it is at least a Bartleby, and a very good one at that. Friedman moves the action from mid-19th-century New York to 1970s London, an apparently major change that turns out not to damage the fable-like quality of Melville’s story at all. The film’s exteriors are enjoyable as a time capsule of late ’60s London – see Bartleby walk past an advertisement for Let it Be by The Beatles! – but the heart of the story remains as fresh and fascinating as it was when Melville wrote it some hundred and seventy years ago.

Friedman, who never made another feature, immediately announces himself as an intelligent film-maker with a real sense of place. The opening montage of London streets, overlaid with John McEnery’s Bartleby nervously inquiring after a job that’s been advertised, comes up with multiple indelible images that link beautifully into the film’s central themes. There is a great pan up from a medieval ruin to a glass skyscraper behind it, two objects that are as alien to each other as Bartleby and his boss, yet which still exist right next to each other. Friedman and his cinematographer Ian Wilson (who would go on to shoot The Crying Game and Derek Jarman’s Edward II) use long zoom lenses to show McEnery picking his way through crowds of real people, an uncanny mix of documentary and fictional ingredients that harks ahead to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.

The big question is, what lens on Melville’s story do Friedman and his co-writer and producer Rodney Carr-Smith favour? Unquestionably, McEnery’s pale, bird-like appearance and beaten-down manner lean towards an interpretation of Bartleby the Scrivener as a story about depression. At the same time, though, Friedman and Carr-Smith’s decision to have Bartleby’s ignorant co-workers wonder aloud about his mental health suggests this is not the whole of the story. (Amusingly, one office worker who frequently makes sexist jokes to a bemused Bartleby is played by Robin Askwith, four years before Confessions of a Window Cleaner would see him play a similar character as the hero) There is, rightly, no solid answer to the question of what drives Bartleby, and Paul Scofield does an excellent job of matching McEnery’s ambiguity as Bartleby’s nameless boss. Several critics have suggested that the story’s real mystery is why Bartleby’s boss finds himself unable to fire the insubordinate clerk, and Scofield’s fraught yet gentle performance rightly doesn’t lean towards any easy answer.

That word – “gentle” – is one that applies to the whole of Bartleby. Friedman doesn’t flinch from the tragedy of Melville’s ending, but he doesn’t make heavy weather of it either. There is a lot in here that is straightforwardly enjoyable, from Wilson’s vivid colours to the fabulous, flute-led jazz score by Roger Webb. You find yourself thinking back to the film as though it were a nagging doubt, or a half-remembered dream, which is completely appropriate.

It’s also probably how a lot of people have remembered Bartleby, since Friedman’s film has been fairly obscure until now. As noted above, Friedman has no body of other films that might draw the spotlight back to this one, though this package does include a Public Information Film he directed. A short, disquieting explanation of why your breakfast cereal might contain an IRA bomb, Beat the Bomber makes the real world of 1970s London look even weirder than the imaginary London of Bartleby. There’s also a new audio interview with Friedman, and a brief but welcome look at the film’s locations – an impressive package for a film whose cult was mostly kept afloat across the decades by hardened Melvilleans.

Most of all, the disc includes a fascinating second adaptation of Bartleby the Scrivener by Laura Naylor and Kristen Kee. Naylor and Kee retell Melville’s tale as a stop-motion animated short, with some wonderfully expressive character design and a greater focus on the political interpretation of Bartleby’s passive resistance. What is most telling is that, like Friedman, Naylor and Kee set the story in the present day. Making a live-action period piece is much more expensive than making one set in the present day, but a tabletop model of 19th-century New York is no more costly than making one with computers and mobile phones. The fact that Naylor and Kee keep up the tradition of modernising Melville’s story can only be read as an acknowledgement that the source material says something – about work culture, about loneliness, about something – that matters right now. It’s a verdict backed up by the rest of this excellent disc.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – BARTLEBY (1970)