For nineteen years, until his retirement in 1885, Herman Melville would awake, slick back his dark hair and unsnarl the snags from his beard, don a uniform of dark navy pilot cloth and affix to his chest the brass badge of a U.S. Customs Inspector. Operating at the Lower Manhattan docks, Melville’s task was to examine ship manifests against unloaded cargo. “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” said Ishmael in Moby-Dick. “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
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Before penning those watery books Typee, Benito Cereno, The Confidence Man, and Billy Budd (and of course the one about the whale), Melville had been a sailor on the St. Lawrence in 1839, a harpooner aboard the Acushnet in 1841, even a mutineer briefly on the Lucy Ann a year later. In middle age, though, the only seaway Melville encountered was the brackish Hudson and his journeys consisted of tabulating the wool unloaded from Manchester, rum from Havana, and tea from Calcutta.
Melville came to this profession was after his most famous books had already been published, albeit to scant acclaim, with The Boston Post appraising Moby-Dick as “not worth the money asked.” Devastated by the criticism, he now rather engaged in the methodical examination of ship manifests, saving his leisure time to poetry, which also went unappreciated. Whatever his contemporaries thought of Melville’s prose, at least his coworkers respected his dedication and honesty, the later a rare commodity in government work during the late nineteenth-century. Despite being respected by his colleagues, the author of Moby-Dick worked for six days a week in the domed and columned Merchant’s Exchange Building at 55 Wall Street and was paid $4 a day, never receiving a raise in two decades.
If writing is work, there is also the vocation about it, the sense that should never be forgotten that it’s not just labor, but a privilege.
My own time in the federal government was blessedly briefer—rather than nineteen years I only served six months after my January 2020 Constitutional oath delivered at the United States Postal Service headquarters in L’Enfant Plaza. Though I’m no Melville, a not dissimilar professional dissatisfaction both drove us into the writers’ bane of the necessary day job.
In my case it wasn’t a withering review from The Boston Post, but rather the ample disrespect, nonexistent benefits, and abysmal pay of university adjuncting, and so I answered a LinkedIn ad for communications at the USPS where I became the editor of the southeastern regional employee newsletter, overseeing a staff of seven while revising stories about counterfeit coupon schemes in Atlanta or dog bite prevention programs in Charlotte. My acceptance precipitated an existential crisis since the job was so distant from what I’d been trained to do. Surely, I’d be the rare specialist in seventeenth-century literature drafting articles about relay box arrow key security or maintenance of the Gruman LLV (i.e. the Long Life Vehicle of the white postal truck, as civilians call it).
When I told a grad school friend that I’d be working for the USPS, he said to me “That’s some real Herman Melville shit.” And so, for the twenty-four weeks that I was “#PostalProud,” my official federal password was “CallMeIshmael” with some random numbers stuck on the end. Every morning, I drove to a brutalist mail sorting plant in the DC neighborhood of Brentwood and sit in my sterile cubicle for the next eight hours deleting emails all day.
Because I’d been spoiled by academe, where maybe one can work sixty hours a week, but at least they are hours of your own choosing, I’d never experienced the fluorescent-lit, dry-aired, sterile, cage of boring office work. The job was easy and boring—forty minutes of weekly work stretched into forty hours. My manager—as so many are—was a jackass, the sort who when we went to a ceremony in downtown Washington blew cigarette smoke onto me while we headed toward the Farragut West Metro station, the White House looming behind us, while complaining about how soft younger people are or who questioned why in a headline that I wrote about post offices in South Carolina collecting stuffed animals in a friendly competition why I would use the word “menagerie,” since it was “obscene” (later I realized he’d confused it with “ménage à trois”).
Like Melville scribbling verse in his notebook, I didn’t let mere employment get in the way of my work. During my time there, I finished two books and tried to keep up with two essays a week, mostly written during my off-hours, though occasionally while at the Processing and Distribution Center, surreptitiously printing things off and then retyping them when home, since I couldn’t email documents to a private account on a federal computer (that and Signal Chat are reserved for members of the current administration).
When a group of terminally online tankies harassed me on Twitter because they disagreed with an essay I wrote for Poetry about the English Marxist poet Sean Bonney, I was accused of working for the CIA, to which I took some grim satisfaction, as I did have the lowest level of security clearance, albeit not as a spy but as a glorified mailman with a thesaurus.
During the long hours I spent slowly circling the windowless, concrete halls of the building, sometimes sneaking off to a depressing shopping center on Rhode Island Avenue, I’d entertain Walter Mitty fantasies of being a gonzo journalist researching the sublimity of bureaucracy (my own unnecessary job aside, I was—and am—impressed by the actual organizational ballet of the USPS). Much of this was the disjunct between how I’d conceived of myself—as a teacher, a writer—and the work that I was now doing.
No doubt there may be an ugly elitism in that perspective, but in this particular position—unlike the actual handlers, clerks, and carriers who provide an unimaginably important service which is unironically one of the genuine achievements of American civilization—my work could be categorized as what the anthropologist David Graeber astutely and succinctly described as a “bullshit job.”
Labor is the curse of the writing class. Unless you’re independently wealthy, of course. Most writers have always had to suffer unrelated toil just to be able to pay the bills. There have been some brief historical exceptions to that state of affairs; the ascendancy of higher education in the years after World War II gave writers a home in the academy that was largely nonexistent before. Colleges and universities, contrary to fevered denunciations from reactionaries, are not collectives of sloth, but traditionally the protections of tenure did make them sights of independence free of the Panopticon manager tabulating how many minutes they took for lunch.
Concurrently with the ascendancy of higher education came the triumph of American mid-century publishing when writers could actually make a living from advances and royalties. Those were always exceptions, however, even during the halcyon post-war days, and so most writers have always had other jobs, and ones that are sometimes quite distant from writing.
Excluding the literary adjacent work of editing (like Toni Morrison at Random House) or being a professor (everyone), there have been writers in all kinds of bizarre positions, from William S. Burroughs (despite the trust fund) working as an insect exterminator to Octavia Butler’s job as a potato chip quality control expert. Joseph Heller was a blacksmith, James Joyce worked in a movie theater, and Jack Kerouac was a dishwasher (as was I, for a period—satisfying work). Government positions, especially during the era of political patronage, was a common means of employment.
Walt Whitman was a proud government bean counter during the last days of the Civil War and into the following decade, working variously for the Army Paymaster’s Office and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Nathaniel Hawthorne also held the position of a U.S. Customs Inspector working in Salem, but unlike his friend Melville he actually wrote about the experience, exclaiming in the famous meta-fictional prologue to The Scarlett Letter that “Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.” Meanwhile, Hawthorne’s description of his workplace being “cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint” was an apt summation of my experience, though I imagine that the processing plant smelled more like weed than the custom house did.
In fact lots of writers were postal workers, including Anthony Trollope, William Faulkner, and Charles Bukowski. Faulkner was briefly a postmaster in Mississippi, though he sent the most amazing resignation letter which read that “I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.” Bukowski was a carrier in Los Angeles, though unlike Faulkner he never got in trouble for his inveterate drinking on the job. “Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job,” writes Bukowski in Post Office, “it takes a wise man to make it without working.” Maybe—my problem at Brentwood was that there was no real work, making me wonder why I had been paid so poorly for teaching when that was so much harder. I discovered that indolency is the purgatory of the workaholic. Despite that, there were writers who had day jobs that, apparently, they loved.
Strangely some of the most famous examples are of accountants and insurance salesman. T.S. Eliot worked for Lloyd’s Bank and Wallace Stevens was a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, supposedly stomping out the meter of his poems as he composed in his head while walking through the glum Connecticut morning streets. They do feel like the exception though.
Thank God we’ve got our poets and novelists working on assembly lines and in fields that can affix those moments in verse like Nabokov pinning a butterfly to a board.
A different insurance agent, Franz Kafka, wrote in his diary that “My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature.” Few have been able to express the soul-crushingness of corporate anonymity quite like Kafka (can you imagine him seeing a cubicle!), but lots of writers drew inspiration from work itself. We are human and should let nothing which is human be foreign to us, even filling out requisitioning forms or performing data entry in a spread sheet.
William Carlos Williams used his physician’s prescription pad to first write some of the most crystalline modernist verse, Frank O’Hara composed his Lunch Poems while working as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, Paul Lawrence Dunbar composed in his head while operating a Dayton, Ohio elevator, Agatha Christie developed her deep knowledge of poison while earning her living as a pharmacist, while Harper Lee was an airline ticketing agent plotting out To Kill a Mockingbird in her head. Even Vladimir Nabokov organized the butterfly collection at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, though that’s an example of work that’s even more ethereal than poetry.
Which raises the question of the relationship between work and writing. Is the later equivalent to the former? At the most obvious level, of course. Writing is tiring, stressful, and often disappointing, like any job. There is, for us lucky few, a remunerative quality to the craft which identifies it as labor, with Stephen King arguing in On Writing that if you “wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce and if you then paid the light bill with the money” then you are a genuine writer. Even though how we think about the literary life is gauzy and sentimental, it’s still a job where you put your hours in.
But, if writing is work, there is also the vocation about it, the sense that should never be forgotten that it’s not just labor, but a privilege. To put some words after the other and then have another human being spend a few minutes with those words, whether in agreement or disagreement, is an incomparable honor. To be able to arrange these blocks of words, engineer those sentences, and build those paragraphs so that an order emerges, no matter how shoddy, is the closest thing to mysticism that I can imagine, so that to merely call it a “job” seems a diminishment (though I appreciate the checks).
Which is not to say that somebody can’t feel the same about being a janitor, or an insurance salesman, or a potato chip inspector. Yet there are moments when the labor of writing and the vocation of work can coincide. “The people I love the best/jump into the work headfirst,” writes Marge Piercy in a poem from her 1982 collection Circles on the Water. “But the thing worth doing well done/has a shape that satisfies.” There can be an ecstasy in work—not just the taste of bread, but also the odor of roses.
Most people don’t like their jobs, or at least many don’t, which means that any moments of transcendence, ecstasy, or beauty, caught in the midst of a day job are precious, and thank God we’ve got our poets and novelists working on assembly lines and in fields that can affix those moments in verse like Nabokov pinning a butterfly to a board. Robert Pinsky’s tailor’s litany of the “presser, the cutter, /The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, /The treadle, the bobbin;” Elizabeth Bishop describing a filling station’s “oil-soaked, oil-permeated…over-all/black transparency;” Susan Meyers’ mother washing dishes at the window, “Not wanting to give up the gloss/of the magnolia, the school traffic humming./Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings/of the mail truck at the curb.”
As for me, I abandoned my own figurative mail truck a half-year after I started. The president of the United States at the time, who is unfortunately again the president of the United States, had appointed a new Postmaster General, and despite the global pandemic that was at that time approaching a million deaths, we were about to be ordered back to the office. Not only that, but a newsletter photo collage that I had to make with various scenes from local postal events had been edited to include said president, the purposefully apolitical department already seeing a bit of the bad old patronage politics of Melville’s day creep back in.
And so, at my half-year review, I had the satisfaction so rarely enjoyed of being able to tell my manager that I was done, my only regret being that I couldn’t answer with that beloved refrain from Melville’s titular character in Bartleby, the Scrivener, the disaffected office clerk who answers any requests for work with a simple “I’d prefer not to.”