RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  And Lawrence saw it in his gaze, his pale blue eyes that took in too much light. ‘There is something curious about blue-eyed people … something abstract, elemental,’ he concluded. ‘In blue eyes there is sun and rain and abstract, uncreate element, water, ice, air, space, but not humanity … The man who came from the sea to live among men can stand it no longer … The sea-born people, who can meet and mingle no longer: who turn away from life, to the abstract, to the elements: the sea receives her own.’

  From his exile on East 26th Street, in a dark townhouse where his granddaughter would recall the fright of seeing a bust of Antinous covered by a veil to keep it from Manhattan dust, Melville escaped for Fire Island. He stayed there with his family in the Surf Hotel, which advertised itself as the only establishment at whose ‘very doors you may revel in the sand or sea’ and enjoy ‘all the beneficial effects of the Ocean, without the discomforts of a sea voyage’. Melville worked on Billy Budd in his room overlooking the ocean: the same shore where Wilde had swum, where Thoreau searched for Margaret Fuller, and where Auden and Isherwood would dally, too; a fractured, queer coast, a halfway place like Provincetown, between here and Manhattan and the open Atlantic.

  His memory was stirred not only by the sea, but by what had happened to his own cousin. As a junior officer in the US Navy, Guert Gansevoort had been party to the conviction of a young sailor, Philip Spencer, hanged for mutiny in 1842. Gansevoort had done his duty, but he was haunted by the episode for the rest of his life. Drawing on this family remembrance, Melville dived into his books like a library cormorant, reading Southey’s biography of Nelson and accounts of notorious naval mutinies. Looking back to an era that ended just before he was born, he invested the sadness and splendour of his life in the fate of a blue-eyed sailor. His story was simple, like Billy himself; but it had all the power of a parable.

  1797. The Royal Navy, busily engaged in fighting the Napoleonic Wars, is threatened by the enemy within. There are mutinies at Portsmouth and the Nore on the Thames estuary, sparked by the spirit of the French Revolution. Anarchy is about to be imported to British shores. There’s an apocalyptic vibration in the air.

  William Budd, sailing from Bristol, is impressed in the Narrow Seas off the English coast. He is seized from his merchantman, Rights of Man (named after Thomas Paine’s revolutionary text), and brought aboard HMS Bellipotent, commanded by Captain Edward Fairfax Vere. Billy, beloved of the ship from which he is taken, becomes the darling of the ship he joins. His besotted shipmates do his washing for him and darn his trousers; they all but swoon, and the carpenter makes him ‘a pretty little chest of drawers’, much as if they might set up home together. His perfection has only one flaw: a speech impediment which gets the better of him at moments of crisis. For all his beauty, Billy is as fated as the Ancient Mariner; his stammer is his albatross.

  As his powerful allure is transferred to Bellipotent – from the civilian to the military – Billy’s charm quells all quarrels. But his popularity is a challenge to John Claggart, the master-at-arms – the ship’s policeman. Affronted by a beauty he cannot possess, Claggart frames the Handsome Sailor as a scheming mutineer. He bribes an afterguardsman (the name is not coincidental) to meet Billy in the lee forechains, one of those secret places in the ship, and proposition him with sinful insurrection. Billy responds violently, stuttering, his honour outraged. But his innocence has been tainted. Confronted by Vere and accused by Claggart, Billy’s defect becomes fatal. Asked by the captain if this claim is true, the sailor’s stammer leaves him tongue-tied, unable to deny the charge. And as words fail him, Billy uses his fists. He lashes out at his accuser; Claggart falls to the floor, accidentally killed by the blow.

  The drama of the story lies in the meeting of these three men, these three symbolic powers. Vere, an introspective, educated man, perpetually looks out to sea, as if he might find the answer to some unexpressed question there. He is respected by his crew as a man who will lead them to victory against the enemy. Yet he lacks Nelson’s common touch; like Billy, whom he loves like all the rest, he is failed by his powers of communication. He cannot engage with his men, other than on an airy level – hence his nickname, Starry Vere, drawn by Melville from a poem by Andrew Marvell. Unlike Moby-Dick’s Starbuck, whose name implies the sky secured, Vere’s underlines his aloofness. Claggart too is detached and foreign, with his strange ‘amber’ complexion and uncertain background: there are hints that the master-at-arms may be fleeing some episode in his past. He is neither officer nor seaman; a disappointed man, a manipulator, a villain: all these we read into his brutal name. Like Ahab, he is the personification of impotent rage. In the 1962 film of Melville’s book, as watched by Newton in his apartment, Claggart declares, ‘The sea is calm you said. Peaceful. Calm above, but below a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who’s to tell me it’s any different here on board, or yonder on dry land?’

  Filled with signs and wonders, told slowly as if he had all the time in the world, yet shortened where Moby-Dick was long, Melville’s tale takes on the tone of another last work, The Tempest. With its ritualistic sparseness, it too could be played silently, in the way Britten’s operatic version of Billy’s story replaces words with music. Characters become types: Vere is removed from the natural world, too philosophical and internalised to see it; Claggart stands over the darkness, at the edge of the abyss; Billy is beyond them both, a natural child, his only flaw echoed by his own alliterative, childish name which stumbles over itself. He is eager to please and to report for whatever duty his masters demand of him, unquestioning, like a loyal dog.

  Not that there is any time left for questions. Starry Vere knows Billy to be innocent, but the king’s justice requires retribution: ‘Struck by an Angel of God. Yet the Angel must hang.’ Hoisted from the yardarm by his own shipmates, Billy dies crying, ‘God bless Captain Vere.’

  At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.

  Out of the silence that follows, a murmur of insurrection rises from the assembled crew – the very reaction this punishment sought to forestall. The swelling protest is arrested by the silver whistles of the officers, a sound as shrill as a sea hawk. Billy’s virginal body, hanging as a ‘pendant pearl from the yardarm-end’, is unsullied by the ejaculation experienced by other executed men (while Starry Vere stands watching, ‘erectly rigid’). He is then sewn into his own hammock and, weighed down with lead shot, tipped into the deep in a fulfilment of his song, an echo of Ariel’s, and Jonah’s: ‘Fathoms down, fathoms, how I’ll dream fast asleep … Roll me over fair! | I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds around me twist.’

  Where Icarus fell into the water, burnt by the evening sun, the rose-tanned Billy rises with the morning sun, before being lowered to the deep. The sea hawks circle over the spot, so near the ship that the crew can hear the crack of their wings and the ‘croaked requiem’ of their cries. And as Ahab is dragged down by the whale, and Ishmael bobs up out of the whirling maelstrom, clinging to Queequeg’s coffin, rising from the dead like Lazarus, Billy’s innocent body is hoist to the sky then consigned to the sea, both condemned and resurrected.

  Twentieth-century critics noted that Melville had read Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature and other accounts, and shaped his sailor out of Beli or Budd, the Celtic sun god of glorious death. Billy is a golden talisman found in the sea, miraculously untarnished. He is part god, part animal – the word victim signifies a beast for sacrifice – just as Lawrence, writing about Moby-Dick, saw Jesus the Redeemer as Cetus the Leviathan. ‘Everything is for a term venerated in navies,’ Melville writes at the end of Billy Budd. He tells us that the spar from which the Handsome Sailor hung is passed as a relic from s
hip to dockyard by sailors to whom ‘a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross’.

  There is a third and final death in this trinity. In an epilogue, Captain Vere is struck on deck by an enemy musketball. The ritual is complete. And as he lies dying, in an opiated stupor, Vere mumbles not ‘Kiss me Hardy,’ nor even ‘God bless the King,’ but ‘Billy Budd, Billy Budd.’ It is not an expression of remorse.

  Lodged in the archives at Harvard is the manuscript of Billy Budd. It is as much-patched as Billy’s trousers, its pages still pasted and pinned together, evidence that Melville revised his work ever more urgently, as if fearful that the story might grow to the length of Moby-Dick, yet knowing he had little time left in which to accomplish it. Racing across loose sheets of laid paper, Melville’s open and slanting longhand – forever catching up with itself – allows for fewer than one hundred words to a page, even as it expands to a novella; while the date, added to the top of the first page – ‘Friday Nov. 16. 1888. Began’ – begs an ending, perhaps his own.

  Melville was nearly seventy by the time he came to write Billy Budd. His eyesight, never strong, was failing, and he was ever more ‘the occasional victim of optical delusion’. (When I meet his great-great grandson, Peter Gansevoort Whittemore, in New Bedford, shaking his Melvillean hand and looking into his pale blue eyes, he tells me that the family’s only relic of the writer was a pair of his thick spectacles.) Perhaps that was what fed his imagination, those eyes that had seen too much. He was plagued by the memory of his son Malcolm, who had shot himself in his bedroom at East 26th Street with a pistol he kept under his pillow; his other son, Stanwix, had died of consumption in a San Francisco hotel.

  In these tragedies of children who had predeceased him, this Daedalus held his invention to himself, unwilling to let it go. Billy Budd, as pure and provocative as it is, is suffused with regret and glory. It has a double power, since it was not published for forty years, long after its creator made careful corrections and pastings and pinnings and crossings-out, each scissored slip subtly swelling its reach. Alluding to the love of the crew of the Rights of Man for their Handsome Sailor, Melville notes that they would even ‘darn the seat of his old trousers for him’, a line which he amended, perhaps because it gave too much away. Yet he hardly reined in the homoeroticism of his hero, whose entrance is announced by the impressing officer, suitably impressed himself: ‘Here he comes; and, by Jove – look at him – Apollo with his portmanteau!’ The author’s love of double-entendre had not left him.

  And if Billy Budd is a kind of folk hero, all but stitched onto a scrap of cloth or carved into a bit of whale bone, there’s an odd naïveté to his creator: the bawdy sailor turned autodidact like Shakespeare, for whom the whale ship was his Harvard and Yale. Melville’s writing, even now, at the end of his fitful career, had an unconstrained innocence and a coded knowingness, one which was let loose yet made more mysterious by the sea – like Billy himself. His story’s subtitle – ‘An Inside Narrative’ – admits as much, as if he were caught between Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose works he avidly read, and Virginia Woolf, who avidly read his works; the same prophetic quality which would cause Lawrence to declare Melville ‘a futurist long before futurism found paint’.

  The revisions and replacements and parentheses, the attached flaps and sliced scraps of stray words and gathered phrases play with the past and the future like the starman’s cut-ups, adding layer upon layer, harnessing a fleeting memory while achieving exactly the opposite effect. Supposedly taken from a broadside published in Portsmouth, Billy’s story might as easily appear in Lascar, or a novel by Genet or Burroughs, in The Tempest or on Mr Newton’s TV screens. There’s something of its innocence in The Great Gatsby, published the year after Billy Budd, whose hero is called ‘a son of God’ and dies outstretched on his pneumatic mattress-coffin, floating in his pool, ‘the holocaust complete’; while at the end of the century, in her film Beau Travail, Claire Denis would reset it in the Horn of Africa, where the sea becomes the desert and the sailors foreign legionnaires, performing a brutal, bare-chested ballet, choreographed to a soundtrack from Britten’s opera.

  As much as he covered his traces, Melville laid flagrant clues for future readers. If the published text – which he would never see – wasn’t enough of a giveaway, the manuscript betrays its intentions in its written hand. For page after page he rhapsodises over the elusive Billy, spilling words in his direction. He lovingly evokes ‘a lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face all but feminine in purity of natural complexion’, the sort of boy Owen met on English beaches; a boy ‘cast in a mould peculiar to the finest physical examples of those Englishmen in whom the Saxon strain would seem not to partake of any Norman or foreign other admixture, he showed in face that mild humane look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules’. He lingers over Billy’s body like a movie camera, ‘the ear, small and shapely, the arch of the foot, the curve in mouth and nostril, even the indurated hand dyed to the orange-tawny of the toucan’s bill, a hand telling alike of the halyards and tar bucket; but, above all, something in the mobile expression, and every chance attitude and movement’. And he constantly underlines the phrase the handsome sailor. The effect is similar to the cinematic manuscript of Frankenstein, in which Shelley replaced his wife’s description of the Creature as handsome with the word ‘beautiful’.

  Melville was making all these things up, even as he drew on Celtic myths and naval legends. Billy has no precedent; we do not know where he comes from, nor does his creator. When asked where he was born, Billy replies brightly, ‘God knows, sir,’ adding only that he was found as a baby ‘in a pretty silk-lined basket hanging one morning from the knocker of a good man’s door in Bristol’. The words ‘pretty silk-lined’ have been added afterwards, in an improbable detail reminiscent of Stephen Tennant’s tough sailors and their unlikely interest in ribbons, while the officer’s response is worthy of Wilde: ‘Found, say you?’

  Suffused as he is with strength and beauty, possessed of comeliness and power, Billy is primal and animal, and ‘Like the animals, though no philosopher, he was, without knowing it, practically a fatalist.’ And if no animal suspects its own mortality, neither does he. ‘Of self-consciousness he seemed to have little or none, or about as much of it as we may reasonably impute to the animal creation an intelligent mastiff a dog of Saint Bernard’s breed.’ Billy is with the beasts; he is wild, but ends up in chains. Like a bird, ‘he could not read, but he could sing, and like the illiterate nightingale, was sometimes the composer of his own song’. He stutters like a bird, too. He is the Lamb of God, an animal sacrifice. But he is also a natural force, a noble savage, a foundling: Melville compares Billy – known as Baby Budd – to Kaspar Hauser, a lost boy; but he could be Peter Pan or Mowgli. In early drafts, Melville seemed to indicate that his Handsome Sailor was black, a conflation of the Trafalgar veteran at Greenwich and another memorable sailor he’d seen in Liverpool on his first visit to England in 1839:

  The two ends of a gay silk handkerchief thrown loose about the neck danced upon the displayed ebony of his chest, in his ears were big hoops of gold, and a Highland bonnet with a tartan band set off his shapely head. It was a hot noon in June; and his face, lustrous with perspiration, beamed with barbaric good humour. In jovial sallies right and left, his white teeth flashing into view, he rollicked along, the center of a company of his shipmates.

  A black Billy would have been a wondrous cynosure, in the true meaning of the word, from the ‘dog’s tail’ North Star, the star around which all the others revolve. But our Billy moves among his mates like another luminary, ‘Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his constellation … A superb figure, tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against the thunderous sky.’ His heavenly body is the summation of his creator’s desires. And whether golden Adonis or dark star, human or animal, what was certain was Billy’s perfection, confirmed by a single fault, like Byron’s club foot. ‘T
hough our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can expect anywhere to see; nevertheless … there was just one thing amiss in him.’ Billy’s stammer belies his gender, yet he is made almost asexual by his innocent beauty.

  In 1828, Robert Dickson, a ship’s surgeon on HMS Dryad serving in the Mediterranean, noted a remarkable case in his logbook. He described eighteen-year-old Samuel Tapper, one of the able-bodied seamen, as having a ‘brown complexion – an active and hardy lad’. But Tapper had a secret, hiding in plain sight. ‘I had frequently requested to observe this lad (who is an excellent swimmer) bathe with the other boys,’ Dickson wrote. ‘Tapper’s breasts so perfectly resemble those of a young woman of 18 or 19 that even the male genitals which are also perfect, do not fully remove the impression that the spectator is looking on a female.’

  It was as if Darwin had fished a merman out of the Med; this intersexed sailor sporting like a dolphin, an Orlando in mid-transition, or even some new species in the process of evolution. There is more than a little voyeurism in Dickson’s observations. Having watched from afar as the boy bathed with his mates – who appeared to ignore Sam’s ‘curious formation’ – Dickson gained access to this alien body when Tapper was brought into the sickbay. On close examination, the surgeon discovered that the young sailor’s breasts were glandular, ‘not at all resembling the fat mammille of boys’. Dickson deliberated, in an objective, Enlightenment manner on the cultural context for his interest, evoking Shelleyan images of marriages of male and female, and a magical ability to change shape. ‘I have been chiefly moved to notice this case,’ he wrote, ‘having lately seen in the Royal Gallery at Florence the statue of an Hermaphrodite, (so called) perfectly resembling Tapper, in breasts and genitals.’