Herman Melville began writing the manuscript that became Billy Budd, Sailor in 1886 near the end of his life. Although distinct parallels exist between the story and the historic Somers mutiny of 1842, in which Melville’s cousin was involved as an officer aboard the warship, the author did not begin his final work of prose fiction with the idea of dramatizing that incident. Indeed, the Somers mutiny is but one of a multitude of diverse historical and literary sources from which he drew. Not quite complete at the time of his death in September 1891, the novelette remained unpublished until 1924, soon after its first editor, Raymond Weaver, acquired the heavily revised handwritten manuscript, quickly edited it, and added it to the standard edition of Melville’s Complete Works, which he had prepared for Constable in London two years earlier. Although several later editions appeared over the next four decades, not until 1962 was a thoroughly researched scholarly version of Billy Budd finally published, edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., after their exhaustive study of the manuscript and related documents.
Their edition includes a “reading text” for general readers and a “genetic text” for scholars that reproduces as nearly as possible Melville’s complex manuscript in printed form with all its overwritten, inserted, and patched-on segments incorporated via a system of editorial marks and symbols. Read in conjunction with the editors’ history and explanations of the text, the genetic text reveals that Melville composed Billy Budd in three stages beginning with a poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” that ironically closes the final version; he moved next to the section that describes John Claggart, and finally to the long concluding portion that emphasizes Captain Edward Fairfax “Starry” Vere. Most readers will be satisfied with the reading text alone, but serious students of Melville’s novelette will need the invaluable genetic text with its accompanying charts, tables, and other data for a fuller, richer understanding of what he had in mind when he drafted his cryptic “inside narrative.”
The importance of that genetic text notwithstanding, however, the straightforward one has sufficed for most readers of Billy Budd, and it will continue to do so because their interest is first in the story and its components, and only afterward in how technicalities of its composition can affect interpretation. The basic story is simple enough. At 21, an experienced but innocent British sailor is impressed onto a 74-gun battleship, the Bellipotent, from a merchantman, the Rights of Man, on which he was the favorite of both captain and crew. Billy was a foundling believed to have been of noble birth. This “Handsome Sailor” is soon equally admired aboard the Bellipotent by all but John Claggart, master-at-arms, also perhaps highly born. The influential narrative voice, which goes beyond merely telling the story, proposes that Claggart’s antagonism to Billy is caused by the officer’s “depravity according to nature,” as if he were a manifestation of the biblical “mystery of iniquity,” although hints are also given of other, more earthly, possible causes, such as envy and homoerotic attraction (75, 76, 108). In subtle, devious ways he implicates Billy in petty offenses without the sailors realizing who is harassing him or why; when an old Danish tar suggests it is the master-at-arms, Billy is incredulous because he knows he has done nothing to deserve such treatment.
Ultimately, Claggart, unable to suppress his bitterness toward Billy any longer, speaks with Captain Vere, falsely charging the innocent sailor with attempting to instigate a mutiny, and the skeptical captain sees no alternative to having Billy respond to the charges. Both illiterate and inarticulate, Billy usually stutters but under pressure cannot speak at all; therefore, uncontrollably outraged, he strikes Claggart in the captain’s quarters with one heavy blow of his fist and kills him. Moments later, Vere musters a drumhead court from among his officers; insisting that martial law necessitates finding Billy guilty of fatally striking an officer, the captain persuades the court to overcome sympathy for the sailor, and Billy is hanged the next morning. The dreadful episode leads to fanciful accounts by the crew, the official record, and the press; ironically, the coda is “Billy in the Darbies,” and as may be expected, it no longer reflects Billy as presented in the preceding narrative.
But Billy Budd is considerably more than the story of a sailor falsely charged and executed. As noted above, the narrator specifically identifies two of the three central figures with moral principles, Billy with good and Claggart with evil. The third primary character, however, Captain Vere, is treated far more ambiguously; at some points, the narrator appears sympathetic with his attitude and values, whereas elsewhere he implies that they are questionable at best.
To a much smaller degree the same may be said of the narrator’s portraits of Billy and Claggart. Although Billy is the “Handsome Sailor,” innocent and able, he is also simple-minded and animal-like on the order of a songbird or a loyal dog. Claggart has an evil nature among other dishonorable qualities, but he is also an ambitious and capable officer; he has a heart, too, and “could even have loved Billy but for Fate and ban” (88). As for Captain Vere, he is a meditative intellectual with ability and integrity but little imagination; he reads voluminously but only such expository works as history and philosophy; his books include no fiction, drama, or poetry. At some times he is like a father to Billy, reflecting the author’s own love for his two sons, who died young, but at others he is a strict authoritarian, the voice of martial law; for Vere “forms, measured forms, are everything” (128). His death comes when he is shot in battle, and his last words are “Billy Budd, Billy Budd” (129). If Billy is perceived as a sacrificial Christ-figure in his innocence and goodness, and Claggart as satanic, then Captain Vere may be regarded as godlike. With this in mind, some readers consider Billy’s final words at the yardarm, “God bless Captain Vere!” (123), indicative of Melville’s own ultimate testimony of acceptance after a lifetime of uncertainty and, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne, anticipation of annihilation after death.
But this idea of Melville’s symbolically announcing his acceptance of Christian truth, with “lamb-like” Billy taking “the full rose of the dawn” at his hanging, is far from unanimous (44, 124). Instead, despite the seemingly allegorical symbolism of the novelette, doubters perceive deep irony underlying the story. They emphasize the ambiguity that Melville purposefully invested to a limited extent in Billy and Claggart, to a much greater degree in Vere, and particularly in what critics have called the narrator’s “smoky” language. Among other stylistic devices, this includes abundant double negatives (“never injudiciously so,” “it was not improbable that” [60, 113]) and diction suggesting a lack of commitment (“may . . . seem somewhat equivocal,” “a rumor . . . nobody could . . . substantiate . . . would . . . have seemed not altogether wanting in credibility” [64, 65]). Such language is typical of Hawthorne’s intentionally suggestive usage, and Melville’s allusion to the symbolism in “The Birthmark” early in Billy Budd (53) implies that he may have been rereading Hawthorne’s tales as he composed his novelette.
The narrator’s subtle vagueness also complements the theme of prudence woven through the work. Implicitly comparing Captain Vere’s aims, values, and capabilities with those of the British naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson, the narrator discusses prudence as a questionable asset for a true military leader, in contrast to fervent patriotism, “love of glory,” and intrepidity in battle (58). Captain Graveling of the Rights of Man, from which Billy is impressed, prudently holds his tongue on losing the beloved “Handsome Sailor” from his crew. Similarly, experience has taught the Old Dansker, whom Billy consults about apparent harassment, the “bitter prudence that never interferes in aught and never gives advice” (86), and on recognizing Vere’s anomalous behavior while standing over the dead Claggart, the “prudent surgeon” is disturbed, but he nonetheless says nothing (100). Vere is prudent, too, when he orders Billy’s execution to squelch the possible threat of mutiny. Finally, Billy’s own prudence leads him to lie when asked in the trial if he has heard whispers of mutiny aboard; although an afterguardsman did attempt to bribe him to cooperate in such a venture, he denies it to protect himself, to avoid implicating others on the crew, or perhaps both.
Apart from Moby-Dick, none of Melville’s writings has received more critical—and more controversial—attention than Billy Budd because of its power and ambiguity. In recent years the novelette has been subjected to deconstructive, historical, psychoanalytic, sociological, political, and new-historicist readings, among others, that continue to throw more light on it, but additional light casts new shadows that further obstruct definitive interpretation. Consequently, “the deadly space between” (74) the knowable and the inscrutable in Melville’s “inside narrative” is never likely to be fathomed or bridged to the satisfaction of all readers. As the narrator acknowledges, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges” (128), and so it is with the enigmatic Billy Budd, Sailor.
Sources
Adler, Joyce Sparer. “Billy Budd and Melville’s Philosophy of War and Peace.” In War in Melville’s Imagination, 160–185. New York: New York University Press, 1981.
Marovitz, Sanford E. “Herman in the Darbies: Melville’s Dead-Wall Meditations on Readings from Europe in Billy Budd, Sailor,” Essays in Arts & Sciences 32 (Fall 2003): 61–73.
———. “Melville Among the Realists: W. D. Howells and the Writing of Billy Budd,” American Literary Realism 34 (Fall 2001): 29–46.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Milder, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.
Parker, Hershel. Reading Billy Budd. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
Sealts, Merton M., Jr. “Innocence and Infamy: Billy Budd, Sailor,” In A Companion to Melville Studies, edited by John Bryant, 407–430. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Stafford, William T., ed. Melville’s Billy Budd and the Critics, 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968.
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