A few years ago, Paul Giamatti, the actor, went to Wyoming to visit a friend. After a flight to Cheyenne, he picked up a rental car and started driving north. The car had Sirius XM satellite radio, and Giamatti, hunting for a channel that would sustain him across the empty spaces, settled on Radio Classics, which airs programs from the so-called golden age of radio, before the medium was shunted aside by television as a place for storytelling. That day, Radio Classics was airing episodes of “Fort Laramie,” a drama from 1956 about the lives of U.S. cavalry officers at a frontier outpost in the late eighteen-sixties, featuring Raymond Burr as Captain Lee Quince. Coming out of the dashboard was a figurative Wyoming in counterpoint to the literal one that Giamatti was seeing through the windshield. He settled into the narrative, as into a kind of aural cruise control, and felt a pleasure akin to what he experienced when he listened to recitations of Edgar Allan Poe stories on cassette when he was a boy.
That pleasure came to his mind this past March, when he got a request from Bernard Schwartz, the director of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, in Manhattan. The coronavirus pandemic had led the Poetry Center to suspend its literary events series, which has run more or less continuously since 1939, and Schwartz was putting together an online events program, which would feature performers reading works of literature aloud. Schwartz asked Giamatti if he would read “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Giamatti said yes . . . but. New England was battened down against the coronavirus, and he was on Cape Cod, without a microphone. Schwartz was undeterred. “He said, ‘Can you just do it on the phone? Do it as bootleg as you possibly can,’ ” Giamatti recalled, in a Zoom conversation. So he set up his phone on a bed or a desk and read a few pages at a time. Over four or five sessions, combined to make an hour and a half of recorded time, Giamatti transformed Herman Melville’s story of a Wall Street attorney’s struggle with a balky copyist into a comic performance, with the scrivener’s solemn “I would prefer not to” offset by the raconteurial relish that Giamatti took in reading the story aloud.
The experience of presenting Melville this way itself recalled a pleasure from Giamatti’s childhood, when he came to know Melville’s work and life story. Growing up in New Haven, where his father was a literature professor at Yale, Giamatti was fascinated by whales. “I had a beautiful children’s picture-book version of ‘MobyDick’ ”—the one by Felix Sutton—“and I was interested in Melville because I was fascinated by the whaling,” he said. Some years later, he read “Moby-Dick,” “The Confidence-Man,” and “Pierre” and was taken with Melville’s life story: his travels in the South Seas as a young man, his early fame as a writer, the commercial failure of “Moby-Dick” in 1851, his subsequent career as a customs inspector in lower Manhattan (“such a weird way of extinguishing yourself,” Giamatti said), and his last years, when he would tell stories of his seafaring adventures to his grandchildren as if they were fairy tales. “I remember one anecdote about taking one of his grandchildren out for a walk and forgetting the kid,” Giamatti said.
Like so many people, Giamatti first read “Bartleby” in high school, and he still thinks of Bartleby (whose age Melville does not specify) as a stiff-necked teen-ager, who tells the lawyer he works for that he’d prefer not to do what he’s asked—to check a document, to move out of the law offices and into proper lodgings—for no reason other than that he’d prefer not to. Giamatti’s Bartleby is as stiff-necked as ever. But the experience of reading the story into his phone brought out aspects of the story that Giamatti hadn’t noticed when he was a teen-ager. There’s the oral quality of the telling: while working in San Diego, years ago, Giamatti took part in a public reading of Melville and chose, “just randomly,” a section of “Bartleby”—“and I was amazed at how beautifully it reads out loud. Melville didn’t write it to be read aloud, but it really works well as a dramatic monologue.” There’s the complexity of the narrator: “The guy is just this kind of oblivious asshole, but his voice is amazing. And the nuances are incredible.” And there’s the humor of the story: the scruffy clerks Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut; the fussy, self-justifying lawyer-narrator; and the physical comedy of office life, as in the episode where the narrator, exasperated by Bartleby’s refusals and distracted by the other clerks’ comings and goings, puts up a “high green folding screen” so that he can give orders to Bartleby without looking at him. Here Giamatti, in conversation, from memory, drew out the end of the episode deliciously: “And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined.”
Giamatti is associated with the stiffened diction of the American past from his title performance in “John Adams,” the HBO dramatic series about the second President, and he is linked with lower Manhattan through his performance in the Showtime series “Billions,” as Chuck Rhoades, a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has made a career of investigating white-collar financial crimes. In “Bartleby,” as in those productions, Giamatti’s voice is the opposite of sonorous: sly, excitable, easily astonished. When the narrator calls Bartleby an “intolerable incubus,” Giamatti rolls the words off the tip of his tongue. He makes Bartleby’s declaration—“I would prefer not to”—a sotto-voce refrain. And he lingers a bit on Melville’s Dante-like similes, as when the narrator recalls the morning when he went to the law office unexpectedly and found that Bartleby had spent the night there: “I was thunderstruck. For an instant I stood like the man who, pipe in mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by summer lightning; at his own warm open window he was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, and he fell.”
The first of the 92nd Street Y’s newly commissioned recorded readings was released in October: Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Gilead,” read by Ethan Hawke. “Bartleby, the Scrivener” was posted last month, a hundred and sixty-seven years after the story was published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. On December 3rd, Giamatti will take part in a video conversation with Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia professor and author of a biography of Melville. And the 92nd Street Y will soon release recordings of William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” read by John Lithgow; Saidiya Hartman’s “The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance,” read by André Holland; and Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” read by Maggie Siff, who stars opposite Giamatti on “Billions,” as Rhoades’s wife, Wendy.
With the fifth season of “Billions” in circulation and the sixth early in development, Giamatti is between projects. He likes the idea of another audio-only project. He provided the narration for an audiobook of Philip K. Dick’s novel “A Scanner Darkly,” and, as a listener, he has spent time with the almost forty-hour audiobook of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” one of his favorite novels. He can envision reading another classic work of literature straight into his phone. But he’d prefer not to. He’d prefer to take a role in the reinvigoration of the radio-drama form—ideally, by getting several actors together at the microphone and working from scripts that would leave room for the listener’s imagination, aided by a sound-effects expert who would make guns blaze and rain fall. “There’s something very intimate about it,” he said, of the form. “We don’t do enough radio dramas in this country. They still do a lot of it in England—and they do it really well,” he said, mentioning “The Archers,” which has run for decades, and the productions of BBC4 in general. In any case, Giamatti is ready to listen: he bought a new car a few months ago, and it’s the first car he has owned that has satellite radio.
