Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  With this legal kidnapping, Melville lifts the story out of history into allegory. Although he fixes the date in the summer of 1797, the action seems to take place in a murky long-ago, “in the time before steamships,” when the idea of the rights of man was only just stirring. And though we hear of the recent death of Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar in the war against Napoleon (a passage that Melville omitted, then restored) and of actual uprisings in the British fleet, Melville showed little interest in achieving period-piece fidelity. Billy Budd was less a work of historical fiction than a kind of parable or fable.

  It had become the story of a boy doomed by his physical and moral beauty. When the bluff officer breaks into the dreamworld where Billy has been living on borrowed time, he takes him by force. And though the fatherly captain of the Rights-of-Man is powerless to save him, he cannot suppress a protest: “A virtue went out of him,” he says of Billy, “sugaring the sour ones.… Ay, Lieutenant, you are going to take away the jewel of ’em; you are going to take away my peacemaker!” To this cry of parental emotion, the lieutenant replies with a sneer, in the form of a blasphemous paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount:

  “Well,” said the lieutenant, who had listened with amused interest to all this and now was waxing merry with his tipple; “well, blessed are the peacemakers, especially the fighting peacemakers. And such are the seventy-four beauties some of which you see poking their noses out of the portholes of yonder warship lying to for me,” pointing through the cabin window at the Bellipotent.

  These words, meant to be jocular, are an ominous forecast of the world that Billy is about to enter. As he is rowed across to the waiting warship, we get a preview of where he is going when, “in a terrible breach of naval decorum … the new recruit jumped up from the bow where the coxswain had directed him to sit, and waving hat to his silent shipmates sorrowfully looking over at him from the taffrail, bade the lads a genial good-bye.” Then Billy sang out, “And good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man.” The conscripting lieutenant is outraged, having detected in the boy’s words “a covert sally … a sly slur at impressment in general, and that of himself in especial.” With a roar, he orders him: “Down, sir!”

  But Billy intends no coded defiance. Irony is beyond him. “The will to it and the sinister dexterity were alike wanting,” and he is equally incapable of recognizing irony when he encounters it from others. “A novice in the complexities of factitious life,” he says exactly what he feels, like a child bidding goodbye to a parent with emotion laid bare. He is a man of integrity in the root sense of being whole, undivided: “to deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature.”

  What we have here is a pure instantiation of Melville’s erstwhile faith that at sea men free themselves from the layers of pretense with which they conceal themselves ashore. Billy exemplifies what Melville had written long before in Mardi—that on the ocean, “the contact of one man with another is too near and constant to favor deceit.… Vain all endeavors to assume qualities not yours, or to conceal those you possess. Incognitos, however desirable, are out of the question.” Billy is not a character whom one would expect to meet in the incidental fiction of Melville’s younger contemporaries Howells or James; his portrait is not assembled out of distinctive features of speech or gesture or telltale preferences in what he eats or wears or wants. He has no sense of himself as a social being (“of self-consciousness he seemed to have little or none”) and no strategy for getting along in the world. In his transparent simplicity, he is like one of those speechless angels imagined by religious ecstatics—a creature who does not need the gross and cumbersome instrument of language to mediate between himself and the human world.§ With Billy, surface and interior are one. His inner self moves outward not through spoken words calibrated to the expectations of others but in the uncalculated form of spontaneous music: “He was illiterate; he could not read, but he could sing, and like the illiterate nightingale was sometimes the composer of his own song.”

  Like Adam before the fall, Billy is sensuously alive without having arrived at a defined masculinity or femininity; his body tends toward androgyny—combining the repose “which the Greek sculptor … gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules” with a delicacy suggested by his “ear, small and shapely, the arch of the foot, the curve in mouth and nostril … but, above all, something in the mobile expression, and every chance attitude and movement, something suggestive of a mother eminently favored by Love and the Graces.” A literary descendant of Adonis, he is also a forebear of the beautiful boy Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, whose “expression of sweet and divine gravity … recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.” Billy is Melville’s version of the sacred idea of beforeness: what man had been before he acquired the sense of boundary between himself and others (between what Emerson called the “Me” and the “Not-Me”), or the urge toward sex, with its concomitant strife and guilt, or the consciousness of death as dissolution and extinction rather than transition into some higher form of life. Billy is the Romantic dream personified—the dream of man restored to the integrity he had possessed before (again in Emerson’s phrase) man “became … disunited with himself.”

  Having dropped into the world from “a period prior to Cain’s city and citified man,” this child has no history, at least none of which he is aware. To the mustering officer’s question, “Who was your father?,” he can only answer, “God knows, sir”—explaining that he is a foundling, having been discovered in a “silk-lined basket [left] hanging one morning from the knocker of a good man’s door.” With this portrait of Billy as a visitor from the prelapsarian world, Melville was revisiting for the last time the heartfelt theme to which he had given voice in Moby-Dick:

  Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.

  Yet if Billy Budd is Melville’s reprise of “man, in the ideal,” he does have a defect: he stammers. “Under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeling,” he is afflicted by an “organic hesitancy” that will turn out to be his fatal flaw. He may be an emissary from Eden, but like Adam he is vulnerable to the mischief of Satan—and his story will be nothing less than the story of the fall of man.

  4.

  Once Billy has crossed over from the Rights-of-Man to the Bellipotent, the story properly begins. Satan is aboard, and his name is John Claggart. He is the “master-at-arms,” an office that bears the name of its original function of training men in the use of sword and cutlass, but that in the age of gunpowder has evolved into the job of doling out punishment for minor infractions and reporting to superior officers any sign of trouble in the crew. Dark-haired, with skin the amber “hue of time-tinted marbles,” Claggart seems once to have occupied a place of ease and leisure in the world ashore. Men below him construe his haughtiness as contempt, while those above him must endure his sycophancy. He is regarded by his inferiors with fear and hatred and by his superiors with suspicion and distaste, but he is very good at his job, to which he brings a “peculiar ferreting genius” for sniffing out sedition.

  Like Billy’s, Claggart’s history is obscure. “The two men,” as Hannah Arendt has written, “come, socially speaking, from nowhere.” And like Billy’s, Claggart’s physical delicacy suggests some past life in which he had not worked much with his hands. “He looked like a man of high quality … who for reasons of his own was keeping incog,” and so he is the subject of gossip. Perhaps he is a foreign-born nobleman, a “chevalier who had volunteered into the King’s navy by way of compounding for some mysterious swindle whereof he had been arraigned at the King’s Bench.” But all attempts to discover Claggart’s true identity are futile. “About as much was really known … of the master-at-arms’ career before entering the service as an
astronomer knows about a comet’s travels prior to its first observable appearance in the sky.”

  In Claggart, we meet Billy’s dark twin. He is the demon to Billy’s angel, and a terrible collision between them feels as inevitable as the working out of a Greek tragedy. When an old Danish sailor, using Claggart’s nickname, warns the boy that “Jemmy Legs is down on you,” Billy is bewildered. Claggart, after all, has been all smiles and compliments:” ‘Jemmy Legs!,’ ejaculated Billy, his welkin eyes expanding. ‘What for? Why, he calls me “the sweet and pleasant young fellow,” they tell me.’ ” “ ‘Does he so?,’ grinned the grizzled one; then said, ‘Ay, Baby lad, a sweet voice has Jemmy Legs.’ ” When Billy persists in disbelieving (“I seldom pass him but there comes a pleasant word”), the old sailor makes a point that is beyond the boy’s comprehension: “ ‘And that’s because he’s down upon you, Baby Budd.’ ” In Melville’s allegory, Claggart’s appointed role is to play the part of irony—or, to put it more broadly, to be the voice of the fallen world. The more he seems to fawn on Billy, the more his hatred grows; the more he witnesses Billy’s purity, the more he wants to corrupt it. He is Satan redivivus, intent on bringing down God’s favorite until the child crawls beside him in the dust.

  Although Melville had created in Claggart one of the most chilling representations of evil in literature, he could not explain his own creation: “His portrait I essay, but shall never hit it.” Claggart has been scarred by some irretrievable experience, but unlike Ahab or the Indian-hater of The Confidence-Man, he cannot be accounted for by some past trauma or wound. Melville puts the insoluble problem in interrogative form: “What was the matter with the master-at-arms?” It is a question, he says, that ought to lead us back to what St. Paul in II Thessalonians calls “the mystery of iniquity,” but since religion has lost its explanatory power (“the doctrine of man’s Fall … now popularly ignored”), Claggart seems nothing more than a brute fact without metaphysical significance. He is a version of what Coleridge, describing Iago, the satanic figure in Shakespeare’s Othello, called “motiveless malignity”—a monster of indeterminate origin, without a part to play in any larger design.

  In Billy Budd, Melville was dramatizing in advance Wallace Stevens’s insight that “the death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination.” Having lost the means to explain “elemental evil” (Melville’s phrase for Claggart), we can only stand before it, like Billy, bewildered and dumb.

  5.

  However timeless its theme, Billy Budd is set at a particular historical moment: at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, when the aftershocks of the French Revolution were still being felt, and England was regarded by some as the last bulwark against anarchy, by others as the bastion of reaction. The Bellipotent is a floating outpost of the British Empire, a weapon deployed to defend the old order at a time when (these are, once again, Emerson’s words) “the opinion of the million” was coming to a boil; and to keep it from spilling over required a “layer of soldiers; over that, a layer of lords; and a king on the top; with clamps and hoops of castles, garrisons, and police.”

  Aboard the Bellipotent, Claggart is “chief of police.” As such, he is the man on whom the captain relies to snuff out any spark of the rebellion that has been threatening to ignite the fleet. There have lately been uprisings put down and followed by executions, some in far-flung places, off Cadiz and in the West Indies, others just a few miles from Britain’s home shore, at Spithead (a small landmass between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight) and at Nore (a sandbank at the mouth of the Thames). “To the British empire,” Melville explains with a vividly persuasive analogy, “the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire brigade would be to London threatened by general arson.” Things have reached the point where officers “stand with drawn swords behind the men working the guns.”

  In this respect, Billy Budd, though set at sea in the distant past, was also a book about the time and place in which Melville was living when he wrote it. America, too, in the 1880s stood on the verge of war with itself—a nation, as one contemporary observer put it, where “workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection,” and where, when they try to organize, “a hireling army … is established to shoot them down.” This was not a sensationalist claim. After Federal troops had been withdrawn in 1877 from the former Confederate states, soldiers were redeployed—sometimes as state militiamen, sometimes as mercenaries—to keep order among restive workers in the North. Private armies of “security” guards patrolled America’s railroad yards and factories, while one New York newspaper editorialized that what was needed was a New World Napoleon—someone who knew that “the one way to deal with a mob is to exterminate it.”

  With wages suppressed and prices inflated by the trusts that controlled the nation’s commodities (oil, grain, steel) and services (railroads, shipping, urban transit), the vast majority of agricultural and industrial laborers possessed no rights at all. Tension between owners and workers broke out periodically into violence. Twelve people were killed by the Maryland militia during a wildcat strike in 1877 against the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Soon thereafter, nearly sixty died as strikers against the Pennsylvania Railroad were attacked in Pittsburgh by hired thugs. In March 1886, in a violent strike that took place not far from the Melvilles’ home, thousands of Manhattan streetcar workers demanded relief from seventeen-hour workdays, supported by crowds that blocked the tracks, which the transport company tried to keep open by using scab labor. In May of that same year, a rally in Chicago protesting the killing of a picket at a McCormick harvester plant ended with several police officers dead from a dynamite bomb, and with many more in the crowd shot by the police in reaction. Eighteen months later, four self-avowed anarchists, whose connection to the bombing was never established, were hanged.

  Melville left no letters, journal entries, or reported remarks by which we might know directly his response to these events. But in comparing Billy Budd to “a young horse fresh from the pasture suddenly inhaling a vile whiff from some chemical factory,” he left a clue. Billy Budd was his eulogy for the hopes of his youth, when he had written (in Redburn and White-Jacket) about poverty and fear as if these were rare European imports and aberrant in America. Billy Budd is about the loss of the democratic ideal. It is about a society where the “people” (the naval term for ordinary seamen) have turned sullen and the officers tense. Mutiny feels imminent. By the time Melville wrote Billy Budd, he had seen his country go from being the vanguard nation of what he had once called “divine equality” to a nation deeply divided between poverty and wealth. He had seen the party of abolition become the party of big business. He had witnessed the principle of inalienable rights perverted into a legal rationale by which giant corporations secured inviolable rights for themselves. In Melville’s youth, suspicion of government had been institutionalized in government itself; but, as Howells remarked with sharp irony about the Haymarket hangings, Americans were living now in a “free Republic [that] killed five men for their opinions.” Included in Howells’s body count was a fifth defendant who committed suicide in prison.

  Melville had seen the country he had once celebrated as democracy’s New Jerusalem (“the seed is sown,” he had written in Redburn, “and the harvest must come; and our children’s children, on the world’s jubilee morning, shall all go with their sickles to the reaping”) descend into what one contemporary called “European conditions” of misery for the many and luxury for the few. The city of his childhood had become the headquarters of oligarchic capitalism, where uptown millionaires (“Mammonite freebooters,” he called them in Clarel) hosted treasure hunts at their country estates, burying diamonds in the lawn and furnishing their friends with golden trowels. Downtown, immigrants lived in windowless rooms that doubled as sweatshops and had to go outside to relieve themselves into holes in the ground covered (sometimes) by a few boards. At Park Row, near where Melville had worked some fifty years earlier at a spare desk in his brothers’ law office, the newspaper ma
gnate Joseph Pulitzer erected a building that soared higher than the spire of Trinity Church, topped off with a gilded dome.

  Forty years before he wrote Billy Budd, Melville had written in White-Jacket that, for Americans, the

  Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; the Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

  But in Clarel, in the voice of Mortmain, he had warned himself, “Come, thou who makest such hot haste / To forge the future—weigh the past.” Aboard the Rights-of-Man, Billy Budd is a citizen of Melville’s “old imagined America”; but once he boards the Bellipotent, he becomes, like Melville himself, a stranger in a strange land.