14. Great Short Works of Herman Melville, pp. 466-505

Billy Budd, Sailor, 16-30

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Billy the naïf: "he had none of that intuitive knowledge of the bad which in natures not good or incompletely so foreruns experience, and therefore may pertain, as in some instances it too clearly does pertain, even to youth." And besides, "as a class, sailors are in character a juvenile race." This is the Adamic Billy again, one that we are urged to keep in mind throughout the story. Not that "Billy Budd" is a parable of the Fall any more than it is an analogue to the story of Christ (i.e., Billy = Christ; Claggart = Judas; Vere = Pontius Pilate). But it's also impossible to force those mythic paradigms out of any imaginative literate reading of the story.

Meanwhile, Claggart is moving into position to strike, though not without misgivings. He watches Billy "with a setled meditative and melancholy expression, his eyes strangely suffsed with incipient feverish tears. Then would Claggart look like the man of sorrows."  Yes, of course, the biblical "man of sorrows" is Jesus, which is why no attempt to force any biblical paradigm onto Melville's story works -- as a writer, he's far too deeply entrenched an ironist to get away with something so limiting. And "sometimes the melancholy expression would have in it a touch of soft yearning, as if Claggart could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban."

"But for fate and ban." What fate precludes Claggart from loving Billy? What bans him from doing so? The latter question is easier to resolve than the first: the ban on sodomy. And I suppose we could say that the fate that precludes him from acting on his desire for Billy is that neither of them was born to the opposite sex. This is one of the few places in the story where the sexual attraction of Billy for Claggart is almost fully unveiled. It's a daring moment on Melville's part, and one that an attentive reader should not miss. And yet, as with the parallels to the legend of the Fall and the passion of Christ, queering the story of Billy Budd, however necessary it is to an understanding of it, also limits the full imaginative impact of the story.

Billy is not unaware of Claggart's attentions to him: "He thought the master-at-arms acted in a manner rather queer at times." (It's possible that "queer = homosexual" was known to Melville, as the meaning seems to have emerged in the late nineteenth century, but I suspect he intends a more traditional meaning.) But he is undisturbed by Claggart's manner. Claggart's "occasional frank air and plasanat word went for what they purported to be, the young sailor never having heard as yet of the 'too fair-spoken man.'" (The quotation is from James Thomson's 1748 poem "The Castle of Indolence":  "The wise distrust the too fair-spoken man.") He also notices from some of Claggart's messmates "that peculiar glance which evidences that the man from whom it comes has been some way tampered with, and to the prejudice of him upon the glance lights." The implication is that Claggart has been sharing his mistrust of Billy with them, "tampering with" their opinion of Billy. In the end, Melville characterizes Claggart's attitude toward Billy as "monomania," "a subterranean fire [that] was eating its way deeper and deeper in him."

The only military engagement in the story now takes place: The Bellipotent encounters a French frigate which, being lighter and swifter than the warship, eludes her. And Claggart uses the aftermath to suggest that Billy's loyalty during the engagement may not have been so whole-hearted as it might have been. He goes to see Captain Vere, waiting until the captain notices him. We learn now that Vere is only distantly acquainted with Claggart, who joined the crew during its last visit home, and that "something in [Claggart's] aspect  ... now for the first provokes a vaguely repellent distaste." Claggart's manner in speaking also provokes Vere's impatience. Claggart doesn't name Billy outright, but meanders around to his point, referring to Billy as one who "had entered His Majesty's service under another form than enlistment." Vere gets the message, though: "Be direct, man; say impressed men." This gives Claggart the opportunity to hint at mutiny, which has the desired effect on the captain, though Vere continues to be irritated by Claggart's "supersensible and strained" and "somewhat ostentatious manner." He is reminded, moreover, of "a perjurous witness in a captal case before a courtmartial ashore." But when Claggart comes out with the name William Budd, Vere is thunderstruck.

Claggart parries Vere's incredulity by reminding the captain of Billy's breach of decorum, bidding farewell to his old ship when he came aboard the Bellipotent. "You have but noted his fair cheek. A mantrap may be under the ruddy-tipped daisies." For Vere has, indeed, noted Billy's "fair cheek." He congratulated Lieutenant Ratcliffe, who brought Billy on board, "upon his good fortune in lighting on such a fine specimen of the genus homo, who in the nude might have posed for a statue of young Adam before the Fall." And so the mythic paradigm and the homosexual subtext join up in one image. To say that Vere has been smitten with Billy is putting it mildly. But unlike the equally smitten Claggart, who channeled his desire into malice, Vere has accepted his desires, even considering the "thought of recommending him to the executive officer for promotion to a place that would more frequently bring him under his own observation, namely, the captaincy of the mizzentop."  

Vere warns Claggart that "in a case like this, there is a yardarm-end for the false witness," but Claggart doesn't back down. So Vere orders Billy brought before him. It's a lamb-to-the-slaughter scene, Billy expecting nothing but good from two men that he thinks are his friends: "To an immature nature essentially honest and humane, forwarning intimations of subtler danger from one's kind come tardily if at all." And when Claggart "briefly recapitulated his accusation," Billy is slow to react: "He stood like one impaled and gagged." Somewhat more startling is Claggart's expression: "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 the the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep." Urged by Vere to defend himself, Billy's efforts to break through his stammer result "in an agony of ineffectual eagerness to obey the injunction to speak and defend himself, [giving] an expression to the face like that of a condemned vestal priestess in the moment of being buried alive, and in the first struggle against suffocation." It is Billy's moment of astonished lost innocence, of violated virginity.

But the moment on which the story turns is told simply and directly, almost buried in the depths of the paragraph in which it appears: "The next instant, quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right arm shot out, and Claggart dropped to the deck." Significantly, "the blow had taken effect full upon the forehead, so shapely and intellectual-looking a feature in the master-at-arms." The illiterate sailor has pinpointed his attack on the very symbol of his adversary's superiority: his scheming intelligence. For Vere, Billy's assault on Claggart has a biblical parallel: "It is the divine judgment on Ananias!" he tells the surgeon who pronounces Claggart dead. (Ananias was struck dead by God for lying to St. Peter.) But then the terrible realization comes to him: "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!"

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? So with sanity and insanity.

Setting aside the fact that violet and orange aren't exactly adjacent in the spectrum, this is a nice metaphor for what follows next: the unraveling of the ambiguities not only of Vere's state of mind in ordering a drumhead trial instead of proceeding to port to hand Billy over to higher authorities, but also of the others in coming to a decision between justice and mercy. There is also the context of the event -- closely following the larger matter of the Nore mutiny and the consequent need to maintain order and discipline, "demanding from every English sea captain two qualities not readily interfusable -- prudence and rigor." 

So the trial of Billy Budd takes place in secrecy, involving only the three officers chosen as judges, the witness (Vere), and the accused. Because he is afraid "to awaken any slumbering embers of the Nore among the crew, a sense of the urgency of the case overruled in Captain Vere any other consideration." For the officers, Billy was "the last man they would have suspected either of the mutinous design alleged by Claggart or the undeniable deed he himself had done." And after the testimony of Vere as to the facts of the incident, Billy, asked to comment, replies simply, "Captain Vere tells the truth. It is just as Captain Vere says, but it is not as the master-at-arms said. I have eaten the King's bread and I am true to the King."

Vere affirms his belief that Billy is telling the truth, and Billy follows by saying, "Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. But he foully lied to my face and in presence of my captain, and I had to say something, and I could only say it with a blow, God help me!" But he has no response to the officer's question, "Now why would he have so lied, so maliciously lied, since you declare there was no malice between you?" Vere points out that the only person who can answer that question is dead.

And then Vere introduces a distinction that carries the day. The officer observes that there is no one else "who might shed lateral light, if any is to be had, upon what remains mysterious in this matter." Here, the attentive reader might wonder about the truth of the statement: What about Claggart's messmates, the ones whose opinions of Billy seemed to have been "tampered with"? But Vere argues against further investigation: "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? ... The prisoner's deed -- with that alone we have to do."

Billy is, in short, undeniably guilty of murder and insubordination, and hence, probably, mutiny. The nature of evil is not a matter for the court to consider, Vere proposes, and the officers reluctantly agree. But they still have to deal with, as Vere puts it, "the clash of military duty with moral scruple -- scruple vitalized by compassion." And here Vere argues that they have to decide between martial law, which sees only Billy's "overt act," and "natural justice," which would take into account "palliating circumstances."

But in natural justice is nothing but the prisoner's overt act to be considered? How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we believe to be so?

Every reader presumably feels the tug toward clemency, but Vere argues otherwise: "do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King." By accepting their commissions in the navy, they "in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents." They are, in short, not free to feel compassion in judging the case. Moreover, they are not responsible for the rigor of the law they must follow, and shouldn't listen to the voices within them that urge clemency, just as the judge in a trial mustn't allow his judgment to be compromised by the emotional pleas of "some tender kinswoman" of the accused: "Well, the heart here, sometimes the feminine in man, is as that piteous woman, and hard though it be, she must be ruled out."

Vere admits that in "a court less arbitrary and more merciful than a martial one," the question of Billy's intent -- the fact that he "purposed neither mutiny nor homicide" -- might be considered. "War looks to the frontage, the appearance. And the Mutiny Act, War's child, takes after the father. Budd's intent or non-intent is nothing to the purpose." And finally, Vere pleads the practical effect on the crew: "Your clement sentence they would account pusillanimous. They would think that we flinch, that we are afraid of them." Billy must, in short, be used as an example: "to the people the foretopman's deed, however it be worded in the announcement, will be plain homicide committed in a flagrant act of mutiny." It might be argued here that by admitting temporal concerns -- the recent mutiny -- and practical ones -- the effect on the crew -- Vere has just undermined the purity of his logic, that the law must be followed to the letter. It is an argument out of fear rather than logic.

It is also an argument that  produces a sentence born out of what we might call "the fog of war." Or at least that's how Melville puts it himself, citing "a writer whom few know" -- i.e., Herman Meville:

Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it. Much so with respect to other emergencies involving considerations both practical and moral, and when it its imperative promptly to act. The greater the fog the more it imperils the steamer, and speed is put on though at the hazard of running somebody down.

And so Billy Budd is run down. And so "the condemned one suffered less than he who mainly had effected the condemnation" -- i.e., Vere.

Claggart is "committed to the sea with every funeral honor properly belonging to his naval grade" -- coldly and formally dealt with. Billy faces death with a childlike innocence, "wholly without irrational fear of it, a fear more prevalent in highly civilized communities than those so-called barbarous ones which in all respects stand nearer to unadulterate Nature." Even the chaplain sent to counsel Billy recognizes and respects his innocence: "and since he felt that innocence was even a better thing than religion wherewith to go to Judgment, he reluctantly withdrew." (Melville is anti-clerical to the last.)

And so Billy goes to his hanging and shouts "God bless Captain Vere!" stirring the crew to an automatic echoing of the benediction. That he dies peacefully, without the muscular spasm that usually accompanies a hanging, intrigues the ship's pursuer who gets no satisfactory explanation from the surgeon. The crew view it as some kind of sign when the seabirds gather around the splash in the water when Billy's body is sent overboard, but Melville dryly observes that "to such mariners the action of the seafowl, though dictated by mere animal greed for prey, was big with no prosaic significance."

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.

In the ragged edges of "Billy Budd," Vere is mortally wounded in a battle between the Bellipotent and the French ship Athée (the Atheist), and his last known words are "Billy Budd, Billy Budd." An authorized naval chronicle published a few weeks after the execution reports that Claggart "was vindictively stabbed to the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath knife of Budd," who "was no Englishman but one of those aliences adopting English cognomens." But the spar from which Billy was hanged "was for some few years kept trace of by the bluejackets.... To them a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross."

The story ends with Melville's poem "Billy in the Darbies," here sung by Dwayne Croft in the Metropolitan Opera production of Benjamin Britten's opera:

13. Great Short Works of Herman Melville, pp. 429-466

Billy Budd, Sailor, 1-15

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The homoeroticism of Melville's story, like that of Moby-Dick, has been much commented-on in the past quarter century, so we might as well start with it. After all, Melville does, with his extended comments on "the Handsome Sailor."

It's especially striking that the first H.S. he discusses at length is a black man, reflecting Melville's genuine (and for his time unusual) open appreciation of other races. He recalls "a common sailor so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham -- a symmetric figure much above the average height." He goes on to note "the displayed ebony of his chest" and "his shapely head." But most of all he recalls him as the center of his company of shipmates, "such an assortment of tribes and complexions as would have well fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first French Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race." "Anacharsis Cloots" is one of those recondite allusions that Melville likes to indulge in, but it's not entirely irrelevant. Cloots was a radical Prussian nobleman who became a prominent figure in the French Revolution, voting for the guillotining of Louis XVI and himself being guillotined by Robespierre. In the context of "Billy Budd," which takes place on an English warship battling the French, where suspicion of disloyalty is rife, it brings in the right note of historical irony.

Melville the moralist is concerned to note that the attraction of the Handsome Sailor is not entirely physical:

The moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make. Indeed, except as toned by the former, the comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor in some examples received from his less gifted associates.

And so to our Handsome Sailor, "welkin-eyed Billy Budd." (Though the first specimen of the type Melville describes is a black man, Billy is a blue-eyed blond.) Twenty-one-year-old Billy is impressed onto the Bellipotent from the merchant ship Rights-of-Man, whose "owner was a staunch admirer of Thomas Paine." It's a sad loss for the Rights, where Billy magically brought order out of chaos: "a virtue went out of him, sugaring the sour ones." On the other hand, he once had to subdue a bully called Red Whiskers to gain respect: "Quick as lightning Billy let fly his arm. I dare say he never meant to do quite a much as he did, but anyhow he gave the burly fool a terrible drubbing." And he and Red Whiskers became fast friends. (History will not repeat itself on the Bellipotent.) 

Nathan Gunn as Billy Budd

Billy gets off on something of a wrong foot when he leaves his old ship, calling out, "And good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man," which earns him a reprimand from the lieutenant ushering him onto the Bellipotent, who took it as "a covert sally on the new recruit's part, a sly slur at impressment in general, and that of himself in especial." Billly, of course, is innocent of any such meaning: "To deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature."

 
In Benjamin Britten's opera, Billy is usually played by a bare-chested barihunk like Nathan Gunn or Simon Keenlyside, and in Peter Ustinov's film he was the not at all innocent-looking Terence Stamp. But Melville's Billy "looked even younger than he really was, owing to a lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face all but feminine in purity of natural complexion." He elicits "an ambiguous smile in one or two harder faces among the bluejackets." And he "showed in face that humane look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules." He is, he tells them, a foundling, with no knowledge of his paternity, left "in a pretty silk-lined basket" at the door of a good man in Bristol, so he's "a presumable by-blow, and, evidently, no ignoble one." But he is also illiterate, and, "like the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne's minor tales, there was just one thing amiss in him." In moments of stress, he is afflicted with a stammer." As Melville insists, this is a sign "that he is not presented as a conventional hero, but also that the story in which he is the main figure is no romance."

Simon Keenlyside as Billy Budd

The time, Melville now tells us, is the summer of 1797, just after the mutiny at Nore, an anchorage in the Thames, which was essentially a strike for better pay and other improvements in the conditions of sailors. "To the British Empire the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire brigade would be to a London threatened by general arson." 

The captain of the Bellipotent is Edward Fairfax Vere, "a bachelor of forty or thereabouts, a sailor of distinction even in a time prolific of renowned seamen." He is "the most undemonstrative of men" and "though practical enough upon occasion would at times betray a certain deaminess of mood." His nickname, "Starry Vere," which comes from a passage in Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," emphasizes both his aristocratic lineage and his "dreaminess of mood." In contrast to the illiterate Billy Budd, Vere has "a marked leaning toward everything intellectual" with  a "bias toward those books to which every serious mind of superior order occupying any active post of authority in the world naturally inclines." He is also a Burkean conservative, opposed to revolutionary ideas "not alone because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind."

Terence Stamp as Billy Budd

And then there's John Claggart, the master-at-arms, a job that is "a sort of chief of police charged among other matters with the duty of preserving order on the populous lower gun-decks." Claggart is "about five-and-thirty, somewhat spare and tall, yet of no ill figure on the whole. His hand was too small and shapely to have been accustomed to hard toil." Here we can compare Billy's "indurated hand dyed to the orange-tawny of the toucan's bill, a hand telling alike of the halyards and the tar-bucket." Claggart's "brow was of the sort phrenologically associated with more than average intellect," but there is an amber hue to his skin that not only contrasts with the "red or deeply bronzed visages of the sailors" but also "seemed to hint of something defective or abnormal in the constitution and blood." There is even something suspect about his birth, as there is about Billy's, except that in Claggart it lies in his accent, which suggests that he's not a native Englishman but acquired his speech "through naturalization in early childhood." There is something secretive, something "off" about Claggart.

About as much was really known to the Bellipotent's tars 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.

Meanwhile, Billy is making himself comfortable on the ship, but he is "horrified" when he watches another sailor being flogged for missing his assigned duty, and vows never to find himself in that situation. And there's some trouble "about such matters as the stowage of his bag or something amiss in his hammock" that brings a "vague threat" from one of the ship's corporals. But he finds a friend in old Dansker, who has a scarred cheek and a face "peppered blue" from having been near a fired musket, which has earned him the nickname "Board-Her-in-the-Smoke." The Dansker starts calling Billy "Baby," and when Billy confides in him the small trouble he's encountered, "laconically said, 'Baby Budd, Jemmy Legs,' (meaning the master-at-arms) 'is down on you.'" Billy protests that Claggart always says nice things to him, and the Dansker replies, "And that's because he's down upon you, Baby Budd."

The next day Billy spills his soup on the newly scrubbed deck, right in the path of Claggart. But the response from the master-at-arms is "Handsomely done my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it, too!" Which encourages Billy to think the Dansker is wrong. But after ignoring Billy's accident, Claggart speaks sharply to a drummer-boy who accidentally collides with him and gives him "a sharp cut with the rattan."

And now Melville explores Claggart's perverse and secret antipathy toward Billy as a kind of "natural depravity" that "folds itself in the mantle of respectability" and "is without vices or small sins.... In short, the depravity here meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual." He is a madman "of the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous, but occasional, evoked by some special object." And "whatever its aims may be -- and the aim is never declared -- the method and the outward proceeding are always perfectly rational."

Now something such an one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of an evil nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short, "a depravity according to nature."

Here it's good to recall what Melville wrote about Billy earlier: "Billy in many respects was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company." It's Billy's innocence and "his significant personal beauty" that stir Claggart's malice.

If askance he eyed the good looks, cheery health, and frank enjoyment of young life in Billy Budd, it was because these went along with a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent.... One person excepted, the master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd.

Claggart covets Billy's innocence but realizes he is incapable of it -- it's something he has never known, and therefore it torments him. Claggart's "motiveless malignancy," to borrow Coleridge's characterization of Iago, is an "elemental evil" within that he is unable to overcome: "apprehending the good, but powerless to be it."

Claggart has a henchman, a corporal known as "Squeak," who recognizes his master's obsession with Billy and does everything he can to feed it, "perverting to his chief certain innocent frolics of the good-natured foretopman, besides inventing for his mouth sundry contumelious epithets he claimed to have overheard him let fall." And "Claggart's conscience ... justified animosity into a sort of retributive righteousness," setting off a "clandestine persecution of Billy."

But other people have their eye on Billy, too. Namely the ship's malcontents who, assuming that as an impressed sailor, Billy shares their sense of the wrong done to them. One of them approaches Billy at night and tries to enlist him in their cause, but Billy, shocked by the very idea into a stammer, threatens that he will "t - t - toss you back over the r - rail!" He "instinctively" recognizes "evil of some sort." But though he knows he should report the encounter, he also realizes "that it would savor overmuch of the dirty work of a telltale. He kept the thing to himself." But he confides the gist of it to the Dansker, who once again repeats his warning that "Jemmy Legs is down on you."