Billy Budd

Plot

The plot follows Billy Budd, a seaman impressed into service aboard HMS Bellipotent in the year 1797, when the British Royal Navy was reeling from two major mutinies and was threatened by the Revolutionary French Republic's military ambitions. He is impressed from another ship, The Rights of Man (named after the book by Thomas Paine). As his former ship moves off, Budd shouts, "Good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man."

Billy, a foundling, has an openness and natural charisma that makes him popular with the crew. He arouses the antagonism of the ship's master-at-arms John Claggart. Claggart, while not unattractive, seemed somehow "defective or abnormal in the constitution," possessing a "natural depravity." Envy was Claggart's explicitly stated emotion toward Budd, foremost because of his "significant personal beauty," and also for his innocence and general popularity. (Melville further opines envy is "universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.") This leads Claggart to falsely charge Billy with conspiracy to mutiny. When the captain, Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, is presented with Claggart's charges, he summons Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private meeting. Claggart makes his case and Billy, astounded, is unable to respond, due to a stutter which grows more severe with intense emotion. He strikes his accuser to the forehead, and the blow is fatal.

Vere convenes a drumhead court-martial. He acts as convening authority, prosecutor, defense counsel and sole witness (except for Billy). He intervenes in the deliberations of the court-martial panel to persuade them to convict Billy, despite their and his beliefs in Billy's moral innocence. (Vere says in the moments following Claggart's death, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!") Vere claims to be following the letter of the Mutiny Act and the Articles of War.

Although Vere and the other officers do not believe Claggart's charge of conspiracy and think Billy justified in his response, they find that their own opinions matter little. The martial law in effect states that during wartime the blow itself, fatal or not, is a capital crime. The court-martial convicts Billy following Vere's argument that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir more mutiny throughout the British fleet. Condemned to be hanged the morning after his attack on Claggart, Billy before his execution says, "God bless Captain Vere!" His words were repeated by the gathered crew in a "resonant and sympathetic echo."^{CH 26}

The novel closes with three chapters that present ambiguity:

Writing history

Created slowly over the last five years of his life, the novella Billy Budd represents Melville's return to prose fiction after three decades when he wrote only poetry. He started it as a poem, a ballad entitled "Billy in the Darbies", which he intended to include in his book, John Marr and Other Sailors. Melville composed a short, prose head-note to introduce the speaker and set the scene. The character of "Billy" in this early version was an older man condemned for inciting mutiny and apparently guilty as charged. He did not include the poem in his published book. Melville incorporated the ballad and expanded the head-note sketch into a story that eventually reached 150 manuscript pages. This was the first of what were to be three major expansions, each related to one of the principal characters.

Melville had a difficult time writing, describing his process with Moby-Dick as follows: "Taking a book off the brain is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole business in order to get at it with safety." The "scrapings" of Billy Budd lie in the 351 leaves of manuscript now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

The state of this manuscript has been described as "chaotic," with a bewildering array of corrections, cancellations, cut and pasted leaves, annotations inscribed by several hands, and with at least two different attempts made at a fair copy. The composition proceeded in three general phases, as shown by the Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., who did an extensive study of the original papers from 1953 to 1962.

In three main phases he had introduced in turn the three main characters: first Billy, then Claggart, and finally Vere. As the focus of his attention shifted from one to another of these three principals, the plot and thematic emphasis of the expanding novel underwent consequent modifications within each main phase. Just where the emphasis finally lay in the not altogether finished story as he left it is, in essence, the issue that has engaged and divided the critics of Billy Budd.

After Melville's death, his wife Elizabeth, who had acted as his amanuensis on other projects, scribbled notes and conjectures, corrected spelling, sorted leaves and, in some instances, wrote over her husband's faint writing. She tried to follow through on what she perceived as her husband's objectives but her editing was confusing to the first professional editors, Weaver and Freeman, who mistook her writing for Melville's. At some point Elizabeth Melville placed the manuscript in "a japanned tin box" with the author's other literary materials, and it remained undiscovered for another 28 years.

Publication history

After Raymond M. Weaver, a professor at Columbia University, produced a text that would later be described as "hastily transcribed", he published the first edition of the work in 1924 as Volume XIII of the Standard Edition of Melville's Complete Works (London: Constable and Company). In 1928 he published another version of the text which, despite numerous variations, may be considered essentially the same text.

F. Barron Freeman published a second text in 1948, edited on different principles, as Melville's Billy Budd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). He believed he stayed closer to what Melville wrote, but still relied on Weaver's text, with what are now considered mistaken assumptions and textual errors. Subsequent editions of Billy Budd up through the early 1960s are, strictly speaking, versions of one or the other of these two basic texts.

After several years of study, in 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., established what is now considered the correct, authoritative text. It was published by the University of Chicago Press, and contains both a "reading" and a "genetic" text. Most editions printed since then follow the Hayford-Sealts text.

Based on the confusing manuscripts, the published versions had many variations. For example, early versions gave the book's title as Billy Budd, Foretopman, while it now seems clear Melville intended Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative)'; some versions wrongly included as a preface a chapter that Melville had excised (the correct text has no preface). In addition, some early versions did not follow his change of the name of the ship to Bellipotent (from the Latin bellum war and potens powerful), from Indomitable, as Melville called it in an earlier draft. It is unclear of his full intentions in changing the name of the ship since he used the name Bellipotent only six times.

Literary significance and reception

The book has undergone a number of substantial, critical reevaluations in the years since its discovery. Raymond Weaver, its first editor, was initially unimpressed and described it as "not distinguished". After its publication debut in England, and with critics of such caliber as D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry hailing it as a masterpiece, Weaver changed his mind. In the introduction to its second edition in the 1928 Shorter Novels of Herman Melville, he declared: "In Pierre, Melville had hurled himself into a fury of vituperation against the world; with Billy Budd he would justify the ways of God to man."

In mid-1924 Murry orchestrated the reception of Billy Budd, Foretopman, first in London, in the influential Times Literary Supplement, in an essay called "Herman Melville's Silence" (July 10, 1924), then in a reprinting of the essay, slightly expanded, in the New York Times Book Review (August 10, 1924). In relatively short order he and several other influential British literati had managed to canonize Billy Budd, placing it alongside Moby-Dick as one of the great books of Western literature. Wholly unknown to the public until 1924, Billy Budd by 1926 had joint billing with the book that had just recently been firmly established as a literary masterpiece. In its first text and subsequent texts, and as read by different audiences, the book has kept that high status ever since.

In 1990 the Melville biographer and scholar Hershel Parker pointed out that all the early estimations of Billy Budd were based on readings from the flawed transcription texts of Weaver. Some of these flaws were crucial to an understanding of Melville's intent, such as the famous "coda" at the end of the chapter containing the news account of the death of the "admirable" John Claggart and the "depraved" William Budd (25 in Weaver, 29 in Hayford & Sealts reading text, 344Ba in the genetic text) :

Weaver: "Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this incongruous world of ours—innocence and 'infirmary', spiritual depravity and fair 'respite'."

The Ms: "Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this {word undeciphered} world of ours—innocence and 'infamy', spiritual depravity and fair 'repute'."

Melville had written this as an end-note after his second major revision. When he enlarged the book with the third major section, developing Captain Vere, he deleted the end-note, as it no longer applied to the expanded story. Many of the early readers, such as Murry and Freeman, thought this passage was a foundational statement of Melville's philosophical views on life. Parker wonders what they could possibly have understood from the passage as written.

Analysis and interpretations

Hershel Parker agrees that "masterpiece" is an appropriate description of the book, but he adds a proviso. "Examining the history and reputation of Billy Budd has left me more convinced than before that it deserves high stature (although not precisely the high stature it holds, whatever that stature is) and more convinced that it is a wonderfully teachable story—as long as it is not taught as a finished, complete, coherent, and totally interpretable work of art." Given this unfinished quality and Melville's reluctance to present clear lessons, the range of critical response is not surprising.

Some critics have interpreted Billy Budd as a historical novel that attempts to evaluate man's relation to the past. Thomas J. Scorza has written about the philosophical framework of the story. He understands the work as a comment on the historical feud between poets and philosophers. By this interpretation, Melville is opposing the scientific, rational systems of thought, which Claggart's character represents, in favor of the more comprehensive poetic pursuit of knowledge embodied by Billy.

In her book Epistemology of the Closet (1990/2008), Eve Sedgwick, expanding on earlier interpretations of the same themes, posits that the interrelationships between Billy, Claggart and Captain Vere are representations of male homosexual desire and the mechanisms of prohibition against this desire. She points out that Claggart's "natural depravity," which is defined tautologically as "depravity according to nature," and the accumulation of equivocal terms ("phenomenal", "mystery", etc.) used in the explanation of the fault in his character, are an indication of his status as the central homosexual figure in the text. She also interprets the mutiny scare aboard the Bellipotent, the political circumstances that are at the center of the events of the story, as a portrayal of homophobia.

Melville's dramatic presentation of the contradiction between the requirements of the law and the needs of humanity made the novella an "iconic text" in the field of law and literature. Earlier readers viewed Captain Vere as good man trapped by bad law. Richard Weisberg, who holds degrees in both comparative literature and law, argued that Vere was wrong to play the roles of witness, prosecutor, judge and executioner, and that he went beyond the law when he sentenced Billy to immediate hanging. Based on his study of statutory law and practices in the Royal Navy in the era in which the book takes place, Weisberg argues that Vere deliberately distorted the applicable substantive and procedural law to bring about Billy's death. Judge Richard Posner has sharply criticized these claims. He objects to ascribing literary significance to legal errors that are not part of the imagined world of Melville's fiction and accused Weisberg and others of calling Billy an "innocent man" and making light of the fact that he "struck a lethal blow to a superior officer in wartime." .

H. Bruce Franklin sees a direct connection between the hanging of Budd and the controversy around capital punishment. While Melville was writing Billy Budd between 1886 and 1891, the public's attention was focused on the issue. Other commentators have suggested that the story may have been based on events onboard USS Somers, an American naval vessel; Lt. Guert Gansevoort, a defendant in a later investigation, was a first cousin of Melville.

Harold Schechter, a professor who has written a number of books on American serial killers, has said that the author's description of Claggart could be considered to be a definition of a sociopath. He acknowledges that Melville was writing at a time before the word "sociopath" was used. Dr. Robert Hare might classify Claggart as a psychopath, since his personality did not demonstrate the traits of a sociopath (rule-breaking) but of grandiosity, conning manipulation and a lack of empathy or remorse.

The centrality of Billy Budd's extraordinary good looks in the novella, where he is described by Captain Vere as "the young fellow who seems so popular with the men—Billy, the Handsome Sailor," have led to interpretations of a homoerotic sensibility in the novel. Laura Mulvey added a theory of scopophilia and masculine and feminine subjectivity/objectivity. (Quote from Billy Budd, Sailor, Penguin Popular Classics, 1995, p. 54). This version tends to inform interpretations of Britten's opera, perhaps owing to the composer's own homosexuality.

The stage

Film

Television