It happens to every creative writer if they write long enough. And the more prolific the writer, the more often it occurs. An idea comes along, it is pursued and it gets written. At that point, however, it becomes clear that it is not complete. Something is missing and it needs to gestate until that missing portion can be filled. Meanwhile, another idea comes along, is pursued and written and it, too, is incomplete. And that’s when the peculiarity of the writer’s mind goes to work in the back of the subconscious.
The two completed but incomplete works do not really fit together easily, but it is clear to the author that the same basic core was being pursued down different avenues. Any writer worth his salt is going to allow that similarity to bubble around in the subconscious for awhile and then when the time is right set to work on trying to fashion a way to unite the two. For a writer working in genre fiction, this process is relative easy; you may have two stories about two different murders, but they can be fused together. Melville, however, face a different problem. His idea about the Bachelors’ Club and his idea about the paper mill were both already limited by their construction. That is to say that neither pursued a convention plot or storyline. These are less two stories than the two sketches and without a plot to either separately, there was little chance of united them collectively.
Melville obviously could sense that they were united thematically and with a little work of his genius he could introduce allusions, symbols and various other literary techniques to more strongly bind them together. Maybe he did it because he was just in an experimental phase of his career or maybe he did it as some sort of practical joke on the academic world or maybe he did it because he simply needed to meet a deadline or a quota. Whatever the stimulation, the decision by Melville to publish as one these two incomplete sketches adorned with a host of potential accoutrement to deepen the connection was a stroke of genius. “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” may possibly have been a joke perpetrated at the expense of snooty academic types who had recently revealed their ignorance by failing to recognize Moby-Dick as the masterpiece it is, but over the course of time, that joke—if, indeed, it was intended to be so—has become a gift to academics and scholars.
If one chose at random ten different essays or term papers on the meaning of this Melville work, the odds are overwhelming that there would be at the very least five interpretations significantly diverging from each and other and probably more. Pick the right ten academic papers on the right day and you could very well come discover ten different interpretations. Melville has always been a treat for scholars because he puts in so much it is very easy to take out something different from the guy working next to you. This ability expands exponentially with “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” because the ties that bind are so ambiguous. The work lacks only the precision to detail that normally accompanies Melville’s writing. Generally speaking, he is not a writer prone to leave things to chance.
And perhaps therein lies the explanation behind this rather extraordinary atypical and unique entry in the Melville canon. This is one of three such experiments in uniting two different works into one coherent unit. And they were all written over the same two year period; Melville’s "Beatles go psychedelic" era, if you will. Once he came out of that period he never went back to revisit; much like the Beatles put their psychedelic music behind them. Sometimes creative artists just reach that point where it’s time to take a break from the routine and indulge themselves a little bit.
