HANGING WITH BILLY BUDD
by
William Russo and Jan Merlin
Smashwords Edition
Long Time Ago Books
Copyright © 2005 by William Russo & Jan Merlin
Library of Congress Number: 2008901790
ISBN: Hardcover 9781436325172
Softcover 9781436325165
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Poem
Novella
Play
Opera
Television
Movie
Musical
Radio
Billy in Camouflage
Billy in Darbies
Presentations
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography and Sources
1. POEM
When he retired from his job as a clerk along New York’s Battery Park of docks in 1886, Herman Melville wrote a poem about a sailor on the eve of his harrowing execution while aboard his erstwhile ship. The inspiration came around the time of great personal grief for the writer who had been in an eclipse of publishing for decades.
During the same year, Melville’s son, Stanwix, died of debilitating tuberculosis in San Francisco, far from the home he’d left; his father met the train bringing his son’s body for burial. Melville, now fully distraught, wrote verses about a young sailor, executed but not forgotten, and the unfairness of his death. Each of his sons had died too soon, neither able to seek success, leaving their father alone to his failings. A niece, a sister-law, assorted relations… all died. He continued to live with his wife in a house filled with mementos of the dead. And how much longer might he be there himself?
Billy Budd was born.
By December of 1889, living in reclusive retirement, Melville acknowledged in a letter how his “vigor sensibly declines…” Brooding about former sorrows, he’d begun re-writing his mournful dirge of a failed dead youth: it was angelic beauty done in by the beastly world. The poetry grew to be a short story, and then a novella. He called the first draft “Billy in the Darbies.”
Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay
And down on his marrow-bones here and pray
For the likes just o' me, Billy Budd.—But look:
Through the port comes the moonshine astray!
It tips the guard's cutlas and silvers this nook;
But 'twill die in the dawning of Billy's last day.
A jewel-block they'll make of me tomorrow,
Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end
Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly—
O, 'tis me, not the sentence they'll suspend.
Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up too
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.
On an empty stomache, now, never it would do.
They'll give me a nibble—bit o' biscuit ere I go.
Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;
But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,
Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!
No pipe to those halyards. —But aren't it all sham?
A blur's in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.
A hatchet to my hawser? all adrift to go?
The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?
But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
But--no! It is dead then I'll be, come to think.—
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
Billy Budd nowadays represents a cottage industry.
An abundant number of literate folk have chosen to feed off Billy’s waterlogged carcass. From stage plays to operas, from television and radio enactments to a Broadway musical, Melville’s Handsome Sailor was in the business of showing off his mizzenmast techniques, charming not only his comrades aboard ship, but striking chords of compassion in a century-lode of readers.
The task of resurrecting the tale periodically rises from creative spirits inspired by Melville’s odd triangle on a 1797 ship to carry his story to new frontiers. Some of Melville’s set-up remains perfect, not in its abstract telling, but in its visceral archetypes that struck a nerve in a series of generations. Whether the appeal was its measure of sexual involvement, clearly hinted at by Melville, or some darker examination of human conscience, the basic plot was inviolate. No amount of scholarly patter or convoluted logic could loosen its gut-wrenching appeal. The idea of the story could not be ruined by retelling, rationalization, or reckless abandon by overeager graduate students wanting to bolster their intellectual credentials.
Oil portrait of Herman Melville, circa 1847, by Asa W. Twitchell.
2. NOVELLA
Herman Melville’s narrative style is not reader friendly, and it’s doubtful that had he lived long enough to amplify the text in another version, it would have grown more convoluted and abstract. There is the possibility he would have added events to the story, not merely observations. Nevertheless, his main characters were set, beyond damage, analysis, and rationalization. These four, the impressed seaman William Budd, Master-at-Arms John Claggart, Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, and sail-maker, The Dansker, struck a profound chord in the psyche. Whatever frosting applied to them, they remained able to shake off the adornment of their creator—and later, the gloss applied by generations of literary critics.
Melville transcended two disparate American Ages—from the Romanticism of Hawthorne to the stark Realism of William Dean Howells. He was twelve-years old when his bankrupt merchant father died. His poverty stricken widowed mother had to move to her brother’s farm in Albany, where she and her brood of eight were not truly welcome; Peter Gansevoort blamed her for marrying a bankrupt. Depending upon charity, her family worked on the farm. At twenty-one and eager to be on his own, her third son, Herman, left to serve aboard various ships.
When he was cabin boy on his second ship, the whaler Acushnet, he and another sailor, Tobias Greene, deserted at Nukahiva in the Marquesas atoll after eighteen months at sea and lived among cannibals for several weeks before being rescued. The whaler, Lucy Ann, a worse ship than the other, took them to Tahiti, where Herman joined its crew in a mutiny for lack of pay and was jailed there. Escaping with another prisoner shipmate, John Troy, they found employment as disguised field workers. Several weeks later, he shipped aboard whaler Charles and Henry, for Hawaii. He worked in Honolulu as a store clerk for two months, later signing on as an ordinary seaman with the U.S. Navy. When the strict frigate USS United States made port at Boston, Melville was discharged and returned to his uncle's farm where the stories of his adventures made the family encourage him to write about them.
Through the help of his older brother Gansevoort Melville, a diplomat who had literary contacts in London, his travel book, Typee, was published in both England and America. Herman’s younger brother, Allan, took over as his agent when Gansevoort died in 1846. Having acquired some fame and success, the confident writer followed it up with Omoo.
When Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, was attracted to the somber but poetic and handsomely bearded young man, Herman felt bold enough to ask for her hand in marriage. His new father-in-law graciously helped the couple to start their lives together. The newly weds took up residence in New York City for three years while Herman taught at New York University.
The soon-to-be young father penned Redburn, and after pleading he needed a break, sailed off alone to Europe for relaxation, and on his return published Mardi. The family grew when his wife was delivered of a fair-haired son, Malcolm.
Melville was writing White-Jacket, based upon his Naval service and said in it, “The sins for which the cities of the plain were overthrown still linger in these wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep.” His protagonist was Jack Chase, captain of the maintop, and his mentor on the frigate. The book was specially dedicated to him, a man who was like an older version of Billy Budd.
Because her husband neglected her for his writing, Elizabeth asked to live nearer her former family, and they moved to a farm they bought near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which they called “Arrowhead.” Melville worked hard at a new novel, so happily absorbed he once shouted, “Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!”
A lion of America’s burgeoning literary scene in New England, Nathaniel Hawthorne, spent his summers nearby in Lenox, Massachusetts, and soon befriended the younger writer. Melville, flattered by the attention, showed the successful man his current manuscript, and the two became companions. Because the older advised the younger writer about his work and how to improve it, Moby Dick was dedicated to Nathaniel when finished. Herman was enamored of the man; he proposed they visit the Berkshires, which in the distance presented one notable prominence resembling a whale.
During a famous picnic with some of the literary lights of the day, Hawthorne and Melville went off with a half-dozen others and climbed Monument Mountain, where Herman dangled from a ledge to show Nathaniel how unafraid he was of heights after years of climbing masts. He was thirty-two years old then and Hawthorne was forty-five. Herman’s exuberance often led him too far with his affection, and the older man eventually rebuffed him, but for a time they grew close. They were far from being shipmates aboard some darkened grungy ship; the always-distant Hawthorne maintained his cool demeanor in no uncertain terms. Letters subsequently replaced meeting one another.
Melville took up his pencils and yellow sheets of paper, hunching over them with determination. His creative work alternated with building a family. Elizabeth bore another child, a son they named Stanwix. The book Pierre was written and published. A daughter, named after her mother, was born, and Herman wrote and published Israel Potter. Soon, another daughter arrived; Frances was their last child.
During the 1850s Moby Dick was not what readers expected and for the next few years Melville found himself struggling. He wrote The Piazza Tales, to no avail. None of the new books was selling. His earnings dwindled to almost nothing. Fearing for his health, he went to Europe again and to the Holy Land; a poem he wrote about the trip reflected his mood. The work he turned out made no money; he tried the lecture circuit until that, too, failed him.
Desperate, the Melvilles sold their farm, hoping to do better in Washington, D.C., but no one there could aid him to find a government position other than as a minor customs official elsewhere and he had to move his family to New York City. The second half of his life brought him to drop anchor permanently in a three-story New York “brownstone” at 104 East 26th Street, which once belonged to his younger brother.
The family repaired the place and paid off its debts to settle within a squat even row of homes. All those houses shared individual miniature back yards, strung together with horizontal shrouds of laundry lines threaded through pulleys beside rear windows. The sagging lengths of each extended to tall wooden poles at the backs of the opposite identical low dwellings. Stoops of chipped cement stairs and rococo iron hand rails before each led down to a cobblestone street. The scanty income from his wife Elizabeth’s family legacy was almost all they had to sustain them during his last unfulfilled decades. Herman surrounded himself with the venal drabness of the bustling American metropolis… where he could pretend the flapping of laundry over the forlorn back yards were those of sails billowing in a wind.
Trapped in what he called “mast-hemmed Manhattan,” Herman Melville worked in the Customs House office located at 470 West Street, which he scornfully called, “The District of Lice.” He had to walk many blocks to reach the newest crowded dockside section of Manhattan. The office was at the foot of Gansevoort Street, named for his mother’s wealthy forebear, General Peter Gansevoort, a Revolutionary War hero who stopped the Redcoats and Indians at Fort Stanwix in Rome, New York. The Gansevoort Dock extended into the river from the street’s end and it was there that Herman Melville often rummaged through luggage, stamped duty on parcels, collected fees and sent dispatches, while serving as the “outdoors” agent.
Routine work freed his mind to think of graver matters, such as considering offers of money and sly requests for special favors like a man with integrity. He suffered from arthritis and the agony of his self-imposed punishment: drudgery in mental work. Like a penance, he withstood workdays in harsh weather among the docks, held fast by dreary monotony. He paid that bribe annually for the privilege of being the Deputy Inspector at the edge of the polluted Hudson River, originally named North River by the Dutch. He was among myriad columns of rakish masts webbed to furled sails and spars, sooty black stacks belched smoke and clippers and other wooden ships were belayed to iron stanchions with thick manila rope. He could inhale deeply of their bracing scents of tar and salt-scrubbed decks and coal dust… and savor the cleaner sea wind blowing in from the outer bay. One observer called Melville at work “a weary but tenacious barnacle” clinging to his job.
The world of America during these years was one in which workers challenged conglomerates, where those who dared to unionize for pay and decent working conditions were subjected to violent retribution. Witness to this, thought later scholars, led Melville to reinterpret his sea stories in a political light. Whatever he witnessed, Herman seemed unhinged by two decades of barren work, watching the world he once depicted in literature metamorphose into towering brick forests.
Melville’s unmanageable oldest son Malcolm, only seventeen years of age, killed himself with a pistol in his upstairs bedroom. Herman’s wife and daughters, Elizabeth and Frances, began to fear the worst for Herman’s sanity and health. Herman still kept in touch with Nathaniel though their exchange of letters lessened. The atmosphere in the house grew more stifling. Three years later, Stanwix “who failed at everything” ran away to seek work at sea, following in the footsteps of the father he was escaping.
Always reading voraciously when he wasn’t at his Customs job, he alienated himself from wife and daughters and resented the approach of strangers. Melville looked askance at anyone having the temerity to praise him for his books. They were stealing his time. Pulling his wide hat brim down and lowering his head, he avoided recognition, preferring not to be cordial. He observed ironically to Hawthorne in a letter, “All fame is patronizing. Let me be infamous: there is no Patronage in that.” Melville began to write a long Poem, Clarel, referring to the old writer as “Vine” in it.
Bent over quires of yellow paper at his desk, he sought solace. His wife did her best to assist him, sorting pages, delivering cups of tea and coaxing him to meals… but he resented intrusion by anyone. She was lonely; her suggestions to see friends were brushed aside. Just scribble…scribble…write, because he had so few hours for it.
Those inheritances from dead relatives eventually supplied enough money to enable the sixty-six year old writer to decamp from Customs, which paid him four dollars per day. Upon his retirement, he had not received a royalty check in ten years; his only writing since had been poetry, short verses… not narratives of epic journey. He got a faint glimmer of an idea, and Melville was off to his seas again with pen and pencil in hand. Five years later, he noted on the manuscript that the first elemental part of Billy Budd should be the final segment of the novella. The limitation on his writing had been extended… it was never abandoned. A writer fills pages because he must, not because he wants to…
The messy yellow pages were stored away by his wife in a tin breadbox, where they rested for thirty years. When removed from their crypt in modern years, Billy Budd was fresh as the new literary movements of the 20th century. For nearly another thirty years, scholars debated its color-coded scrawls, the revisions, the halts and re-wordings. For twenty more years they neglected to see that Melville had written a short poem titled “Baby Budd” and then used his verses for a longer story version. What he planned for its finish is unclear. Upon each reading, Melville seemed to pour more of his soul into the text. It grew with each re-telling, like the seminal myth he attempted to depict.
No one can guess exactly why Herman Melville wrote so little after publishing Moby Dick and Pierre in the decade before the Civil War. Without doubt, writing continued to absorb him. He tackled smaller projects through the 1860s, he had to support a family, and meet responsibilities until he retired from working. We cannot be sure how long the tale of a doomed sailor festered in his mind. Surely, it had some roots in the deaths of his sons, Malcolm and Stanwix--possibly having its germination in 1842.
The sorry case of the USS Somers intrigued Herman, having deserted duty himself by jumping ship and living among tribes of the South Seas. The notion would have been further aroused when he discussed it with his first cousin Guert, who was present at the drumhead court-martial on the Somers. The character and plot for his final project may also have arisen from watching a lithe and handsome foretopman clamber up the ratlins in the shrouds of the ship’s rigging during his voyages.
Melville followed notorious war and conspiracy trials regarding Lincoln’s murder and the Andersonville prison scandal in the aftermath of the Civil War with much interest. Popular periodicals in the 1880s printed accounts of the Somers case even forty years after the event. The plot for Billy Budd must have simmered within him as he patrolled along the littered piers, avoiding rats and pigeons while studying the ships in port...
The timing of two articles on the notorious American Somers mutiny case juxtaposes closely with the start of Melville’s manuscript of Billy. With his cousin Guert so intimately involved in the case, he knew he had information not readily available to the public. Indeed, since Gansevoort had long since been dead, the likelihood of revealing secrets or being challenged about facts was long past. The June 1888 issue of American Magazine, a popular anthology of essay and memoir, had an article by Lt. H.D. Smith about the Somers case. A more sensational piece was by Gail Hamilton, a pseudonym for a female writer, in the later 1889 issue of Cosmopolitan. Her lurid contribution was titled “The Murder of Philip Spencer.”
Was that what inspired Melville?
Melville’s elder cousin, Guert Gansevoort served as First Officer in 1842 on the USS Somers, a training vessel with 120 young men jammed into its small spaces. Their mission was to deliver dispatches and become men of the Navy. Named after a hero of the war at the Barbary Coast and the Marines, the ship was only 100 feet in length and a quarter of that across. Captain of the vessel was Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, a forty-year old career officer. A cut above most, Mackenzie was an intellectual with pursuits in writing and considered profoundly learned for his rank. He published books about his foreign travels; his brother, taking a stepfather’s name, was Senator John Slidell, of the United States Senate.
Twenty-five year old New Englander, Lieutenant Gansevoort of the Somers, was commissioned in 1837, following in the footsteps of his heroic Revolutionary War grandfather. Duty aboard ship hardly called for heroic exertion; he was nursemaid to dozens of teenage apprentice boys who volunteered to serve in the fleet.
Disciple on the Somers was fiercely delivered by strokes of the cat-of-nine-tails. The numbers of punishing claw marks received by the green crew staggers belief. Within a six-month period, the Captain ordered 2, 265 lashes meted out to boys ranging in age mostly from 12 to 15. Two months out of New York, the ship was off the coast of Africa.
As it headed home from Liberia, Lt. Gansevoort reported to Captain Mackenzie that some of the young sailors were planning a mutiny; they hoped to seize the vessel and sail the Caribbean as pirates. They also planned to throw officers overboard when taking over.
Chief among the belligerents was twenty-year old Philip Spencer, who was tossed out of college for drunkenness and other delinquent behavior and was the despair of his father, Secretary of War John C. Spencer. As a last resort, to discipline his wayward son, the boy was made to serve as a midshipman in the Navy by his exasperated father. Now he seemed to be the ringleader of a potential mutiny, and Gansevoort brought this news to his captain.
Stunned that 100 inexperienced sailors likely threatened ten officers, Mackenzie ordered Gansevoort to keep tabs on Spencer and report any suspicious behavior, which he did. Spencer was observed to study maps of the Caribbean and take interest in the ship’s chronometer. Those actions convinced Gansevoort the boy was ready to commit mutiny.
When Captain Mackenzie confronted midshipman Spencer about the charge, the young man flatly denied it. As a serious situation, Spencer argued that his action was a joke and a misunderstanding. Alas, this was not accepted. Spencer was put in irons, isolated from the crew, and kept under surveillance. The Secretary of War’s son had his personal belongings searched, and evidence was gathered to indict several others of the crew whose names were on a list of Spencer’s supporters. The list had been written in Greek letters and kept in his neckerchief.
Mackenzie ordered his officers to carry pistols and swords while they ferreted out conspirators. Three were finalists. Though they could have been held in irons for trial ashore, Mackenzie imposed martial law. He ordered Lt. Gansevoort to conduct a trial and come up with a verdict and recommendation for a sentence. In short order, Gansevoort produced the requisite verdict: guilty. The three sailors, including Philip Spencer, were given a sentence to be put to death immediately by hanging.
On December 1, 1842 a musket signal was fired from the quarterdeck, and assigned shipmates hoisted the three men by their necks in nooses to the yardarms to dangle in the breeze for several hours. When their grotesque dance ended, Captain Mackenzie bade the crew give three huzzahs, which they faithfully did. At dusk, the deceased were committed to the briny ocean, sewn snugly into their weighted hammocks. A print exists of the ship underway in full sail with men hanging from a yardarm.
After docking in New York City, Mackenzie’s behavior and actions underwent naval review; he was found to have acted properly. Secretary of War Spencer did not intercede or cast any influence over the proceedings in which Gansevoort testified about the event. Later, he and Melville spent much time together. Did Guert reveal Philip Spencer’s to Herman? Relatives insisted Guert never spoke of the episode, refusing to dignify inquiry.
Though Guert Gansevoort died in 1867, whatever Herman knew about the case, he chose not to speak of it until he began writing Billy Budd after he retired from the Customs House. It is commonly accepted that the inspiration for the tragedy of Billy Budd originated from his own experience in the Navy and his older cousin's service on board the brig Somers. Melville’s tale defends the decision of Captain Vere and his officers because Naval law governed them. The story was not so much concerned with the innocent sailor as it was about the guilt-ridden decision that had to be made. Melville could have been trying to expiate his family member, Lt. Guert Gansevoort, who was despised by the civilian public to the end of his life even though the Navy found no fault with his actions.
Herman Melville
Melville set his story of Billy in the British Navy at the time of notorious mutinous actions on the Spithead and Nore, rather than the episode involving his cousin. For British citizens, librettists Eric Crozier and E.M. Forster, the choice raised ethnocentric patriotism. Though Melville put only this one tale in a historical era, the two English writers made much of the war against the French for the backdrop. It seemed to raise long-simmering hackles of rancor between those two nations.
For Melville, history was merely a backdrop that needed to be somewhat accurate, but not too fastidiously. He used facts and altered some to suit his storyline. After all, he was writing fiction. To some extent he recalled testimonies of sailors he met as a young man, who’d fought the Battle of Trafalgar, and their memories made him think of Nelson as model for a Captain “Starry” Vere. Those braggadocio accounts fit in perfectly with the half-truths he distilled from several histories of Spithead and Nore.
Researching his opera libretto for Benjamin Britten, Eric Crozier was shocked by what he learned about the conditions sailors faced in the British Navy at the end of the 18th century. Melville, who served under the same squalid conditions, would have been amused by their dismay. Of course, he volunteered to serve, but the British practiced the worst kind of gang-based impressments, dragging men to ships after kidnapping them. Convicts and criminals were likely shipmates.
Merchant vessels and war frigates fared not much better than the horrors aboard slave ships. Men were herded into meager living compartments in the hull reserved for their canvas hammocks, and where their fetid air prevented the entry of the clean atmosphere hovering above the main decks. Meals were limited; hardtack and wormy diets were guaranteed to undermine health. Whenever men complained, the officers used the cruelest manner to maintain order, including flogging. A ship’s captain had to be strict; his total power was invincible.
Herman Melville knew that sailors impressed from other vessels provided shipmates bearing morsels of news. All sailors knew of tight ships and detested them, though the discipline was for the good of all. Melville’s plot had a war background, but by not tying it to the United States Navy or to his cousin’s ship, there were enough similarities to serve his purpose. He intensified the nature of his story of the young sailor, beginning revisions in March of 1889, and gleaning the popular press reports for ideas to enlarge his theme. He was concerned about his mortality. He wrote, “Certain matters are yet incomplete, and which indeed may never be completed.” With strength failing him, he pushed himself to arrive at a resolution for his expanding tale.
One phrase could be significant for the textual meaning. When the Broadway musical was being considered for Broadway production, its original name was “Billy Be Damn.” Billy uttered that argot phrase from the past when he was lured into discussing a mutinous conspiracy. During the 1849 Gold Rush to California, when Melville was home in New England, behaving as a responsible married man and not heeding the stir of men seeking adventure, the exclamation was in common usage as an epithet. It stemmed from a reference to a stubborn goat: hence, the Billy goat. It was interesting for Melville to transpose landlubber jargon to the sailor, but shows how easily it occurs; men of any strata of society exchange slang readily with another.
Etymologists studying the phrase conclude it arose from “Billy-be-dang,” another euphemism for a curse, tied to the “Puffing Billy” locomotive. One of its first appearances in print occurred in 1882. Easily dismissed as “frontier gibberish,” it was the least offensive language he heard while working on the Manhattan docks. He could not have missed that the reference was most notably used to describe Satan. In all probability, “Billy be Damn” and “Billy-O” were terms applied to the image of Satan or the Devil in the anima bruta of a goat. Was Melville hinting of a dual nature in Billy, or was he merely pointing out that the Handsome Sailor was the goat of Claggart?
Since the novella was rediscovered in 1924, scholars of literature have pored over Melville’s text in hopes of unlocking meanings among its intricate philosophical and allegorical images. Each dissertation and scholarly treatise sought a Rosetta Stone in the drafts, in the found manuscript pages that hid what Melville intended by his final fictional work—first poem, then short story, on to a novella, perhaps to be expanded even further into a fully-blown novel.
William Plomer wrote the introduction to the 1947 publication of Billy Budd. One of England’s most respected writers, he belonged to a clique which trod in the elite footsteps of the Bloomsbury Group. These modern British had aristocratic literary heritage; Auden and pacifist Isherwood were typical. Plomer was also a tie to the past, having won the respect and association of the last giant of the Edwardian era: E.M. Forster.
Plomer concluded: “By the year 1866, when Melville was forty-seven, the great flowering of his genius was over.” When he retired from his customs inspector job, he had only five years to live. “In November, 1888, he began Billy Budd, which was not finished until a few months before his death.” If it was actually a finished product, bizarre assumptions made by nearly every critic and historian still continued. Each succeeding generation for fifty years found the manuscript open to reconsideration… and Melville’s drafts were in a constant state of flux.
The author’s technique was to complete a text, then expand it and stretch to a new length. He started with a short story, wended his way to novella, put it aside—and promptly died. Had he lived the story might have undergone another metamorphosis, perhaps becoming the length of Moby Dick.
Plomer reported that Raymond Weaver, one of the first major editors trying to cull something from the messy manuscript, claimed it was “incredibly crabbed, and written in pencil.” He alerted readers to the problem of text edits: “Such is the state of the Billy Budd manuscript that there can never appear a reprint that will be adequate in every ideal. In the first place (though this is not the worst difficulty) the script is in certain parts a miracle of crabbedness: misspelling in the grand manner; scraps of paragraphs cut out and pasted over disemboweled sentences; words ambiguously begun and dwindling into waves and dashes; variant readings, with no choice indicated among them. More disheartening than this even, is one floating chapter (Section IV) with no numbering beyond the vague direction “to be inserted.” The manuscript is evidently in more or less tentative state as to details and without some editing would be in parts unintelligible.
Plomer concluded that Weaver thought the book was meant as Melville’s “last word upon the strange mystery of himself and human destiny.” He saw this story as a means to “justify the ways of God to man.” Plomer, instead of that approach, saw the tale as a “final protest against the nature of things… that is to say, against fate and against human institutions, of which the apparent necessity is itself ascribable to fate.” He said: “Melville is nothing if not a determinist in this story we see Budd himself as nipped in the vice of fate.”
The British editor believed the American writer tried to accomplish two points with his final story: First, Melville tried to “understand evil by exploring the unconscious.” And second, he expressed his belief in the “virtues of aristocracy.” Taking a staunch British position, derived from life in a class society, Plomer noted that Vere and Budd are of “noble descent.”
These concepts appealed to E.M. Forster who found the endeavor worthy of a late career change. Forster, seduced by Billy’s character, took on writing a libretto at the same age Melville wrote Billy. No wonder he brought that slender book, Plomer’s small black-covered edition, to the attention of Benjamin Britten. They waved it under the nose of Eric Crozier when he arrived at their behest. They insisted, if not demanded, he read the text—and agree to help make an opera of it.
Researching to prepare the libretto for Benjamin Britten, Eric Crozier traced the great author’s line of thought and creation, using the experience he and E.M. Forster shared as writers. “Billy Baby” thrived like a child. Crozier figured out how Melville “began by writing a primitive ballad that is meant to be spoken by an able seaman awaiting execution, “Billy in the Darbies” (a slang term for being in fetters or handcuffs). The subject haunted him, not least because his cousin, First Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort, was ordered by Captain Mackenzie to hold trial and condemn a popular young sailor and two shipmates in peacetime for suspected mutiny.
During his methodical approach to Billy Budd, Melville considered the impact of his ballad; its musicality laid the cornerstone to all future Budd clones. Crozier found that the author added a preface to his ballad “telling how Billy had fallen victim to the insane malice of the ship's master-at-arms.” Melville liked to test the validity of each component by seeing what more it sustained or required to be expanded. As a result of the early attempt, he was prepared to launch the next step.
What put Melville back into the news and minds of his future adapters occurred as a result of an event late in 1948, just before Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman began their play, and would gave impetus to the opera libretto for Britten. Headlines blared forth, shortly before Christmas of 1948: “Literary Find Is Reported at Harvard.” Nearly sixty years after Melville’s death, “a former Harvard instructor has discovered a heretofore unpublished and unknown short story by the famed author of Moby Dick, it was announced today.” The literary discovery of “Baby Budd Sailor” by F. Barron Freeman was purely an accident. He had entered a professorship with Cornell University’s faculty while visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts, and editing a new version of the novella entitled Billy Budd, Foretopman.
While rummaging through various pages, confusing to nearly everyone who studied the manuscript notes, he presumed he saw an aborted short story version of the Budd tale. As might a cryptographer, Freeman tried to figure out Melville’s system, since the man used both pencil and pen, and marked different colors with crayons on segments of his work.
The complexity must have been clear to the author but confounded everyone until it was realized each set of color-coded notes formed a separate version. According to UP news reports, “On the basis of parallel tabulation of the multiple sets of numbered pages, Freeman was able to put together the story, which read about 12,000 words.”
“Baby Budd, Sailor” continued to mature when Melville was able to devote full time to writing. According to Crozier, the American novelist was closer to the epical style of his early days, enjoying one last supernova of creativity. “Finally he rewrote the story at three times that length, Billy Budd, Foretopman. When he died in 1891, his desk contained 362 small sheets of yellow paper, covered with crossings out, rewriting, and insertions, mostly in pencil, some in ink, and with one chapter marked: “To be inserted.” His wife didn’t attempt to put together a fair copy while it was in progress… and who, anyway, would have wanted to read it? Moreover, why did anyone think he was done with the story? If it was still on his writing desk, even if illness or anything took him away was forced upon him, Melville certainly intended to keep working on his Handsome Sailor’s spiritual voyage.
What frustration must there have been in the final months of Melville’s life because he didn’t complete what he started? We’ll never know the angst the writer felt to know his notes, ideas, and plans sat unassembled on a desk while he sank into eternity’s fathoms.
After his death, it was all for naught. His widow efficiently cleared his desk and packed up the sheets of paper into a bread tin. At least, having dealt with her husband’s obsession, she did not cast the unfinished manuscript into the embers of the fireplace hearth, but saved it. Whether she knew or hoped that she protected his work from oblivion, she took it as a secret to her grave, which was reserved for her next to his.
The jottings that were Billy Budd remained in the box for thirty years.
Retrieving the value of one’s national past lay hold of America in the decade after the First World War. Melville was to be summoned from the shadows by a group of artists and scholars who took their search for meaning seriously. In the 1920s, the “Lost Generation” wanted to find their cultural and psychological roots. Melville’s granddaughter decided to edit her illustrious and forgotten ancestor’s notes about a trip he’d taken to London into a book, and she accidentally ran across the unknown novella while searching through everything in storage. Robert G. Newman in Journal of Melville Studies, described the serendipity: “In 1921, in the attic of Eleanor Metcalf‘s home in Wellesley, a tin box was discovered containing the manuscript of Melville’s novel, Billy Budd.”
The novella took over its own life. Ignored at first, only a few years passed before notable literary critics like Carl Van Doren saw the error of his ways. A version of Billy Budd Foretopman joined the Piazza Tales, which were other short works by Melville. By 1929 Van Doren was issuing public apologies for not seeing the masterpiece a few years earlier during his examination of Melville’s papers. The consensus was that for the last forty years of his life the man who wrote Moby Dick became an embittered psychopath, uncommunicative and moody, soured by literary failure and the death of his sons. Melville had assured his father-in-law earnestly, “It is my earnest desire to write those sorts of books which are said to fail.”
His prophecy came true.
Within a few years of World War II, the impetus for enhancing life moved thousands of military veterans who took to the arts with a renewed vigor, not heretofore seen. In every phase of life, the returnees took their stand. It was the same in scholarship as in theatre, opera, and film. War weary talents renewed missions to prove the culture they defended was ordained. So, too, scholarship about 19th century American writers blossomed. New insights into Melville and Hawthorne put them, more than ever, into the forefront of literary study. Colleges and schools followed the trickle-down fascination.
Two groups of independent writers, on either side of the Atlantic, took up the cause of Billy Budd in 1948. The veterans saw the drama as universal to their own experience in service to their countries, and were concerned with justice and law in their homelands. In England, one of the foremost authors of the twentieth century teamed up with one of the most talented composers of opera, using the Budd novella as a cautionary tale about the outsider, beloved by his peers, but crushed by an unbending system that could be used against any innocent soul. In America, two veterans, collegiate alumni, stumbled across the same novella and collaborated on making a play script of it. Billy Budd was to be represented by these four artists and by those they involved, as the epitome of pacifism and youth against a world of corrupt adults. For many it also became a clarion call for the end of sexual repression.
Another man of letters of the same era, Walt Whitman told in his poem “The Untold Want,” of “life and land ne’er granted.” Like those sailors of Melville’s fiction, dozens of artists in the 20th century grabbed hold of the Handsome Sailor, joining in the reprise of “Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.”
Dr. Edwin Shneidman, foremost Professor of Thanatology and distinguished expert on suicide, conducted a blind study with psychologists in 1976 at the University of California at Los Angeles. Those examining the letters didn’t know they were reading about Herman Melville and his son. Dr. Shneidman had already done a blind study with the staff of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center earlier in 1972. The inventor of psychological autopsy, he provided professionals each time with copies of letters from Melville family and friends, having all identities blacked out.
Without knowing who were concerned, the experts studied the letters for causes and effects. They decided “near unanimous” that Malcolm’s death was not an accident. The boy had been out till 3am in debauchery with his friends. As a result, the boy was worried about his father’s reaction to his loose sexual mores. Shneidman said Malcolm was in “terror of (and the need to protect himself against) his father’s rage to come.” Whether this rage was likely or imagined, really did not matter—if the boy believed his father, a stern taskmaster, would become unhinged or violent.
Under the heading of his treatise “Some Reflections on Claggart’s Death and on Malcolm’s Suicide,” the professor contended in 2006, “Claggart dooms himself. Either he will survive the confrontation with Billy and then be hanged for falsely accusing him of fomenting mutiny, or he will taunt Billy into killing him. What a clever, devious, devilish, original way of plotting and arranging for one’s own death.”
Shneidman, with an insightful acumen of literature, drew some conclusions too about how writing Billy Budd was the product of Herman Melville’s remorse over the death of his son. This led the professor of suicidology to analyze: “Now comes the intriguing part. If Billy—the innocent one—is Melville’s expiation, a quarter of a century after the deed, of Malcolm’s suicide, then who (in this disguised drama of remorse and philosophic entanglement) is Claggart?”
Shneidman believed Herman saw his son as the victim of the wayward vices of New York associates. Though the writer himself sowed his wild oats in the South Pacific years earlier, he saw the same temptations fouling his innocent son in the giant metropolis of the big city. He blamed all these influences and rolled them into the personality of Claggart.
“I propose that he is a composite. First of all of the evil boys, young men with vices, Malcolm’s fellow clerks at the Atlantic and Great Western Insurance Company. Carnality outran repression. They represented the unspoken evil of mid-nineteenth-century congenial, hypocritical America. Unspeakable things had happened that night. Malcolm needed to silence himself, somehow to place himself beyond the reach of a father’s interrogations. They did it. They led innocent Malcolm astray, kept him out until three in the morning, partying (and probably whoring) in Yorkville and Germantown, on the fateful night in September, 1867.”
With his frequent examinations of literature in terms of suicide psychology, the professor of Thanatology was convinced: “Billy and Malcolm were creatures with the ease of a gentle nature. Billy Budd is Melville’s disguised (unconscious?) concession of culpability and grief over Malcolm’s suicide. He is Captain Vere, and Malcolm–Billy is his marked-for-tragedy son.”
As an emeritus professor at the University of California, year after his initial finding, Dr. Shneidman expanded on his medical and literary view to the Leviathan Journal of Melville Studies: “Whatever the merits of the above speculations (some bordering on free association), what remains clear to me, as a long-time amateur student of Melville and as a life-long professional thanatologist, is that it does not seem likely that Melville could have written Billy Budd without Malcolm’s suicide filling his mind and causing him pain. That’s what the narrative is about. Billy Budd can be read as a belated psychological autopsy of Malcolm’s death—an extended posthumous note, the true contents of which are beyond the risk of any public interrogation. In this spooky sense, Billy Budd is Malcolm’s suicide note.”
Malcolm had been an indolent youth. Like many such fellows, he liked to party at night with friends. This brought consternation to his mother, who stayed up hours in worry; his father felt the boy would reap the punishments of his own labors. If he lost his job, so be it. That was the lesson.
Young Malcolm, apprehensive, loathed spending time at home, and kept a loaded pistol either on his bed stand or under his pillow. After his shocking death, family members tried to rationalize that the gun accidentally went off under the pillow while the boy rested in his bed. The original decision by authorities was suicide. They ignored information about frequent attempts to contact Malcolm all day by his mother, or that his sister knocked on his door early in the morning to warn of his job obligation, to be answered with a mumble. Speculations of literary scholars suggest Melville ceased writing long novels after the death of his elder son… and was impelled to write the shorter one after the later death of Stanwix.
A myth has been perpetuated that during Melville’s decades of silence, he was largely forgotten and ignored. Writers who disappear and no longer produce new fiction are as discarded as yesterday’s headlines. Such a rule endures in the 21st century, and Melville’s self-imposed reclusive status was responsible for his lack of recognition, but perhaps that was not so great as common belief would presume. Checking news accounts of those thirty years of silence produces a large body of references to Herman Melville… and recognition by a variety of authorities across the country that he was one of the important American writers long before his 1920s Renaissance.
Thirty years after his controversial memoir/novels about a sailor stranded in the South Seas, Melville were still to be found. His books were in a category with Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, and other novels that glorified the life of indolence, far from civilization. They were the lasting reminders of a romanticized view of Nature in American literature. In 1875, what did him in was the opinion that his novels were not supposed to be read by young people, especially impressionable male readers. Interestingly enough, Moby Dick was never mentioned in the latter part of the 19th century; the classic Melville tales of the era usually meant Typee, Omoo, White Jacket, and Redburn.
Melville presented highly charged sexual situations. One Wisconsin columnist deplored that the man who lived among the cannibals, however impressive as a writer, depicted romance “under the equator, but his tones are too sensuous for young folks, too full of the languid luxuriance of the South Sea, the mystery of unknown islands, and the soft air of tropical lands where nature supplies the wants of man without man's labor or exertion.”
The best advice for young people then was to read about Pitcairn Island and the Bounty, or to stick with Dafoe and Robinson Crusoe. However, those were apt to awaken many to the deeply forbidden nature of Melville. He was to be read in secret, not openly discussed in polite society.
The former New England sailor had been cited as a travel expert in an age when foreign climes in American literature reached a most popular and unliterary apex. Typee was an astonishing window to an early paradise theretofore unknown. No one else had given such steamy accuracy to descriptions as Melville. The world he offered armchair travelers proved more titillating than staid lectures describing the coast of North Africa to Americans at their country’s Centennial. Hardly a forgotten writer, he was listed along with Cullen Bryant, Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Whittier, and Longfellow, and in 1878 was declared one “of the brightest men in the literary Galaxy” to be alive at a good old age.
Then, as now, one of the great arbiters of American writing, the New York Times referred to Melville in 1884 as one of the “poets of the deep.” Its reviewer noted, “Their names may be counted upon the fingers of one hand, they are Herman Melville, and I rank him first…” His reasoning included that Melville was foremost among them to “know the few pleasures, the lone hardships of the life, whose intimacy with nature at sea ranges from her wildest to her sweetest moods, from the black hurricane of the North Atlantic to the moonlighted calm of the Doldrums.”
The fraudulent notion of a forgotten Melville came from the first of a few obituaries, in October of 1891. Good copy, but yellowing journalism may have made for the lurid conclusions it provided. The early death obits lamented how Melville “died the other day, this one time monarch of the pen,” and a single New York paper gave him a four line obituary. A noted critic felt moved to write of the event, and declared, “It is impossible for Robert Louis Stevenson to wrest from Herman Melville the laureateship of the great South Sea. But what a fate! Famous at noon, forgotten at evening.”
The obituary included the notation, “Forty years ago the critics of America and England united in declaring that Herman Melville was the greatest descriptive and fiction writer of the time. As a youth he had roved far and seen much. In 1837, when but eighteen, years of age, he voyaged from his native New York to Liverpool and back as a sailor before the mast, and enjoyed the experience so much that in 1841 he re-shipped on a whaling vessel.”
Among the repeated refrains about Melville were the stories of his dwelling for months among the natives before returning home to Massachusetts and his marriage to the daughter of a Chief Justice. He published his first book in 1847, Typee: a Peep at Polynesian Life. It was a great success and was followed by Omoo, another popular adventure narrative. The author's praises were on every tongue, and an English reviewer announced, "Melville is the phoenix of modern voyager… sprung, it would seem, from the ashes of Captain Cook and Robinson Crusoe.” European journals called him a literary idol and “a man of whom America, has reason to be proud as one of her greatest giants in literature.”
Melville’s obscurity, it was said, commenced with the end of the American Civil War, when he chose to drop “out of knowledge of the readers and writers of the United States, though retained his hold on the affections of the British, among whom his books are still standard.” An example of how far Herman Melville had fallen is illustrated by the anecdote often repeated after the Civil War: “When a visiting English writer a few years ago inquired at a gathering in New York of distinctly literary Americans what had become of Herman Melville, not only was there not one among them who was able to tell him, but there was scarcely one who had ever heard of the man. Albeit that man was then living within a half mile of the place of the conversation.”
Though a cornerstone of Melville’s legend, that story is likely spurious. Melville was not completely forgotten. Other obituaries indeed picked up on the theme of his obscurity, repeating the disinformation until it became fact. In November of 1891, another Middle American newspaper lamented, that Melville “was a personage as prominent thirty years ago, but he had outlived his contemporary fame, and his death within the past month has been almost unnoticed. Yet, History is likely to give him a plan among America's principal poets.”
Melville’s “profound silence,” as Crozier called it, was allegedly from being ignored and misunderstood by the public. His works were considered racy and not for polite society by the standards of the day. They were close to being banned. This supposedly left him bitter over the unfair judgment of his work. As a result of his depression, scholars insisted he was driven to inward contemplation; he was more and more morose and sullen, a man difficult to know, and he shunned society.
“His first book, Typee, came out in 1845 and his ninth and last in 1857. In that brief span of little more than 12 years Melville did almost all of his writing. Moby Dick, one of the landmarks in American literature, appeared in 1851, and all of the 15 short stories were done in the four-year period from 1853 to 1856.” After that came his voluntary withdrawal from the literary world, until Billy Budd rejuvenated him.