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).
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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”).
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