Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  6.

  So the Bellipotent, no less than the Pequod, was a floating symbol of Melville’s America—but the captain who rules over it is nothing like Ahab. Captain the Honourable Edward Fairfax Vere is a Burkean conservative, a learned man with that “bias toward those books to which every serious mind of superior order occupying any active post of authority in the world naturally inclines.” He understands the fragility of the standing order to whose defense he has pledged himself. He is a bulwark against the revolutionary furies that, “like live cinders blown across the Channel from France,” threaten to ignite fortress England, and “a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent” the minds of democratic dreamers.

  Much of the power of Billy Budd stems from the way Melville writes about this man, as if Vere were that part of himself that has given up the dreams of youth and given itself over to prudence. Melville takes seriously Vere’s conviction that society is held together by a delicate web of codes and constraints, and that even a small shock to the structure can send it tumbling into chaos. “With mankind,” Vere believes, “forms, measured forms, are everything.” Claggart, too, takes this view seriously, and thereby finds his opening. In his capacity as “chief of police,” he is obliged to report to Vere any hint of restiveness in the crew, and like many in his trade before and since, he resorts to entrapment in order to have something to report. To infiltrate and tempt the hired men, he employs an agent, a “tool for laying little traps” aptly nicknamed Squeak, a diminutive squealer who pokes and prods at this crewman or that with a promise of money or liberty and then runs back to Claggart with the news when anyone takes the bait.

  Claggart’s prime target is Billy. So Squeak arranges one warm night for one of his own minions to wake Billy with a whispered temptation. Bending close to the ear of the boy while he is still in the haze of half-sleep, Squeak’s man murmurs that some of the impressed sailors have hatched a plan to free themselves from involuntary service—and wouldn’t Billy care to join them? Billy, roused, shooes the man away with a stuttering no: “D—d—damme, I don’t know what you are d—d—driving at, or what you mean, but you had better g—g—go where you belong!” But, since “it never entered [Billy’s] mind that here was a matter which … it was his duty … to report,” he has given Claggart what he needs to accuse him of fomenting mutiny.

  The scene in which Claggart calls on Vere to make the accusation is a masterpiece of stagecraft. Having taken himself to the customary spot where petty officers are permitted to beg the captain for a moment’s audience, Claggart stands there “deferentially … with the air of a subordinate grieved at the necessity of being a messenger of ill tidings.” Vere, pacing the deck, notices him and is flooded with the “repellent distaste” one feels at some petitioner whose deference means that he is about to make a demand. Claggart does not disappoint him. To Captain Vere’s “Well? What is it, Master-at-arms?” he performs a danse macabre around his point, insinuating that he suspects at least one dangerous man among those “who had entered his Majesty’s service under another form than enlistment.” Vere barks back, “Be direct, man; say impressed men,” and with “a gesture of subservience,” Claggart gets to the point. Alluding to the Nore Mutiny, he reports “something clandestine” among the men and declares that the ringleader is “William Budd, a foretopman, your honor.”

  Vere is astonished. Claggart parries his doubt by pointing out that Billy’s charm is precisely what makes him dangerous. “You have but noted his fair cheek,” he tells the captain; Billy is the “mantrap … under the ruddy-tipped daisies.” But the charge strikes Vere as a calumny, and he minces no words in reply—“Stay … heed what you speak … in a case like this, there is a yardarm-end for the false witness”—and then follows up with a plan “practically [to] test the accuser” by compelling Claggart to repeat the charge face-to-face with Billy in the captain’s quarters.

  A man of “exceptional moral quality,” who strives to uphold both law and justice, Vere knows that Claggart is a liar and that Billy is incapable of lying. As the scene shifts to the cabin, the stage is set for the confrontation between them:

  With the measured step and calm collected air of an asylum physician approaching in the public hall some patient beginning to show indications of a coming paroxysm, Claggart deliberately advanced within short range of Billy and, mesmerically looking him in the eye, briefly recapitulated the accusation.

  Not at first did Billy take it in. When he did, the rose-tan of his cheek looked struck as by white leprosy. He stood like one impaled and gagged. Meanwhile, the accuser’s eyes, removing not as yet from the blue dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet color blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence, losing human expression, were gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep. The first mesmeristic glance was one of serpent fascination; the last was as the paralyzing lurch of the torpedo fish.

  Billy stands stunned and mute, with “an expression like that of a condemned vestal priestess in the moment of being buried alive,” while the captain, in a tone somewhere between commanding and beseeching, urges him to “Speak, man!… Defend yourself!” Then, recognizing the blockage in the boy’s speech, Vere tries to calm him: “There is no hurry, my boy. Take your time, take your time.” But these “words so fatherly in tone,… touching Billy’s heart,” only stymie the boy further until his obstructed passion bursts forth in the concentrated fury of a single blow to Claggart’s forehead and the master-at-arms falls dead.

  “ ‘Fated boy,’ breathed Captain Vere in tone so low as to be almost a whisper, ‘what have you done!’ ” With Billy’s help, and with the feeling of revulsion one has in “handling a dead snake,” he props the corpse into a sitting position. And then, in a brilliantly rendered scene of metamorphosis, Melville describes Vere’s transformation from father to lawgiver:

  Regaining erectness, Captain Vere with one hand covering his face stood to all appearance as impassive as the object at his feet.… Slowly he uncovered his face; and the effect was as if the moon emerging from eclipse should reappear with quite another aspect than that which had gone into hiding. The father in him, manifested towards Billy thus far in the scene, was replaced by the military disciplinarian. In his official tone, he bade the foretopman retire to a stateroom aft (pointing it out), and there remain till thence summoned.

  When, at Vere’s behest, the ship’s surgeon enters to confirm the death, he finds the captain agitated in a way that no one aboard has ever seen him. “Catching the surgeon’s arm convulsively,” Vere exclaims, making reference to the biblical story of Ananias, who having “lied … unto God” (Acts 5:3–5), suffers miraculous death: “It is the divine judgment on Ananias! Look!… Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!”‖

  7.

  Every reader of Billy Budd asks, Why? Why must Billy die? Why does Melville seem to side with Vere, who insists that the prescribed penalty be applied to the slandered boy? And why does Vere rush to punishment, since he sees Billy as God’s unconscious agent in ridding the world of the beast? The answers lie in the crystal clarity of the Royal Navy’s Articles of War: “If any officer, mariner, soldier, or other person in the fleet, shall strike any of his superior officers, or draw, or offer to draw, or lift any weapon against him, being in the execution of his office, on any pretence whatsoever, every such person being convicted of such offence, by the sentence of a court martial, shall suffer death.…”

  The march toward Billy’s execution is unbearable to watch. Yet that is what Melville now compels us to do. He takes us step by step through the convening of the drumhead court (against the preference of the junior officers that the “matter should be referred to the admiral”), through Billy’s testimony as defendant and Vere’s as sole witness, then finally to the verdict and the hanging:

  In the jugglery of circumstances preceding an
d attending the event on board the Bellipotent, and in the light of that martial code whereby it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places. In a legal view the apparent victim of the tragedy was he who had sought to victimize a man blameless; and the indisputable deed of the latter, navally regarded, constituted the most heinous of military crimes. Yet more. The essential right and wrong involved in the matter, the clearer that might be, so much the worse for the responsibility of a loyal sea commander, inasmuch as he was not authorized to determine the matter on that primitive basis.

  This contradiction between a “legal” and “essential” view of events is the key to Billy Budd. All our instincts incline us toward the latter and toward horrified awareness of its incompatibility with the former, and no one grasps the discrepancy better than Vere, who, standing before the judges of the court, articulates what we all feel: “How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?—Does that state it aright?”

  One of the judges, groping for some reason to defer judgment, wonders aloud if there is anyone in “the ship’s company … who might shed lateral light … upon what remains mysterious in this matter.”

  “That is thoughtfully put,” said Captain Vere; “I see your drift. Ay, there is a mystery; but, to use a scriptural phrase, it is a ‘mystery of iniquity,’ a matter for psychologic theologians to discuss. But what has a military court to do with it? Not to add that for us any possible investigation of it is cut off by the lasting tongue-tie of—him—in yonder,” again designating the mortuary stateroom. “The prisoner’s deed—with that alone we have to do.”

  Insisting that the transcendent question of good and evil be kept strictly apart from the business of enforcing the military rules, Vere choreographs the scene by placing himself before the porthole, his back to the officers of the court as he stands gazing out upon “the monotonous blank of the twilight sea.” He knows that the “critical ocean” (Melville’s phrase from Moby-Dick) dissolves all norms, and so he insists that his officers avert their eyes from the sea and keep them fixed on the cramped little world of naval codes and precedents in which they have agreed to expend their lives. This is the profoundest sense in which Billy Budd was, as Melville described it in its subtitle, an “inside narrative.” In a speech that plays a variation on St. Paul’s promise (Acts 17:28) that God is the medium in which “we live, and move, and have our being,” Vere concedes that “it is Nature” to feel sorrow and pity for the man they are about to convict:

  But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King’s officers … [our] vowed responsibility is in this: That however pitilessly that law may operate in any instances, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it.

  Vere does not deny—indeed, he insists—that a vast gulf divides natural from human law, and that good men will want to convert their outrage into some effectual action that might close it. With every moment the court hesitates, the men of the Bellipotent are building toward irrepressible anger. To keep Billy aboard while postponing trial, as some officers have proposed, would be (to use an anachronistic analogy) like keeping Nelson Mandela in prison, allowing the legend of the prisoner to grow into a revolutionary myth. To mitigate the sentence would be worse: “Why? they will ruminate,” says Vere. “You know what sailors are. Will they not revert to the recent outbreak at the Nore? Ay. They know the well-founded alarm—the panic it struck throughout England. Your clement sentence they would account pusillanimous. They would think that we flinch.”

  As if some mischievous philosopher has dropped by to divert us with an epistemological riddle, Melville opens the debate over Billy’s fate with a pair of rhetorical questions: “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other?”a The answers are implicit in these questions: no one, and nowhere. No one, that is, can make out a demarcation line between the vibrating colors of the rainbow. Even the tough-minded empiricist, having measured the light with his spectrometer, must rely on established norms to say this is violet whereas that is orange. The rainbow was Melville’s metaphor for culture. He was writing at just the time when, in William James’s phrase, the last vestiges of “tender-minded” faith in “the great universe of God” were fading away, and the metaphor of the rainbow amounts to Melville’s corollary of James’s remark that “we carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so,—though, if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them.” The stars know nothing. All knowing is the work of man. And so, for Melville, as for Vere, our fate as human beings is to live by norms that have no basis in divine truth, but that have functional truth for the conduct of life. These norms are the grammar of culture, and the culture that Vere has sworn to defend is that of the Royal Navy in time of war. Billy killed an officer. Billy must hang.

  As a young man, Melville had pushed against the norms in order to expose them as provincial and suppressive contingencies. If in one culture he found cannibals and polygamists, while in another he found faithful vegetarians, so much the better for an insolent young writer full of skepticism toward all authorities. But in the works of his maturity—Moby-Dick, Pierre, “Bartleby,” Benito Cereno—Melville wrote more and more about the cost of overturning the norms, however contingent they might be. By 1850 he already had become a reformed, if not repentant, romantic, who saw the fragility as well as the deformity of culture; the young Melville had written in outrage about poverty in Redburn, and about flogging in White-Jacket, but by the time he composed Billy Budd, he was not so much outraged as resigned to the disjunction between law and justice. Billy Budd was his farewell to what he had called, in Pierre, the “beautiful illusions of youth.”

  Since it was never published in its own day, we cannot know if contemporary readers would have recognized its pertinence to their own times. But to read Billy Budd today with some awareness of its contemporary context is to see that it arose from the same historical circumstances that produced such ephemeral books as Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1891) or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888)—books that described the world as a battleground between the powerful and the powerless, a world on the verge of some radical transformation. In the former case, we get a dystopian vision in which rich and poor are locked in a death struggle leading toward apocalypse; in the latter we get a utopian vision in which the conflict between wealth and poverty has been resolved in a paradise of social equality. In Billy Budd, Melville imagined a future of neither public doom nor deliverance. Instead, he wrote about two human beings who, just as they are being swept apart by the forces of history, experience a private moment of redemptive love.

  Billy Budd was a story, as Melville put it in a penciled note near the end of the manuscript, about “what sometimes happens in this incomprehensible world of ours,” where innocence is doomed by its own infirmity and evil earns “fair repute”—as Claggart does posthumously in the authorized naval account that, like the deposition in Benito Cereno, whitewashes what had actually taken place. In the official version of events that is disseminated throughout the fleet, Claggart becomes a man of “strong patriotic impulse” “vindictively stabbed to death by the suddenly drawn sheath knife of Budd,” ringleader of a mutinous plot.

  In this respect, Billy Budd was a book about politics—or at least about the manipulation of truth for political purposes. And ever since it became part of our literary heritage in the 1920s, it often has been cited in debates over the perennial question of what makes authority legitimate and what justifies resistance. Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it is one of
those texts that has generated a body of critical responses (from E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden, Albert Camus, Thornton Wilder, Eugenio Montale, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Yvor Winters, Roger Shattuck, and many others) so rich and varied that they may be read as a chronicle of modern intellectual life. In fact, charting the attitudes pro and con toward Captain Vere is one way to follow the contours of twentieth-century political thought. At times of high regard for constituted authority, Vere tends to come off as a heroic figure who, with tragic awareness of his responsibilities, sacrifices an innocent for the sake of the state. At times of public suspicion toward established power, Vere tends to be condemned as a despot whose callous commitment to the letter of the law, “however pitilessly” it grinds the innocent, is ultimately no different from Ahab’s doctrinaire will.

  In 1947, when many American liberals were still enraptured by the dream of utopia in its Marxian form, Lionel Trilling—in his only novel, The Middle of the Journey—invented a fictional character, loosely based on Whittaker Chambers, who is desperate to express his reasons for having left the Communist Party. He does so in the form of an essay on Billy Budd, arguing that Melville’s great work could no longer be understood by the modern progressive mind, blinded as it is to the “tragedy of Spirit in the world of Necessity.” Some forty years later, two prominent legal intellectuals—a left-leaning professor sympathetic to the “critical legal studies” movement that was attacking the law (even within America’s leading law schools) as an instrument of class oppression, and a right-leaning judge who saw the law as our bulwark against chaos—fought out their differences over Billy Budd. For the former, Vere is a man driven by half-articulated resentments to prosecute a defenseless victim; for the latter, Vere bears the “awesome responsibility” of “sole command of a major warship in a major war” and has no choice but to pursue capital punishment for a defendant who, “in the eyes of the law … was guilty of a capital crime.”