Billy Budd, Sailor
Product Description
General FictionLarge Print EditionIf Melville had never written Moby Dick, his place in literature would have been assured by his short fiction. Billy Budd, Sailor is his last work and his masterpiece a brilliant study of the tragic clash between social authority and individual freedom, human justice and abstract good. In Bartleby the Scivener, a Wall Street law clerk takes passive resistance to a comic and tragic extreme. Completing the beautiful collection are:… More >>
This is a good book if you are not reading to be entertained by a story, but if you want to understand what Melville is really talking about and get a lot more out of it then you ever thought possibly, true some parts are slow but if you look at what Melville is doing with the language and references it is really a very good and well-written book.
Rating: 5 / 5
Melville’s posthumous long story of the handsome sailor is the only tragedy that he wrote. I see it in the neighborhood of Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince of Homburg (the Prussian officer who wins a battle after disobeying an order) or Michael Kohlhaas (the role model for the hero in Doctorow’s Ragtime).
It is the story of the interaction of an imperfect trinity:
Claggart, aka Jemmy Legs, the master-at-arms or police chief on an English man of war in the late 18th century is ‘down on’ pretty boy Baby Budd. The man is the evil ghost who drives the narrative with his unexplainable hatred for the innocent Billy. We are free to form our own theory about it, and closet attraction is a frequent interpretation.
Billy is an incarnation of Kaspar Hauser, an illiterate foundling with a happy disposition, who is easily everybody’s friend. Claggart builds up a bogus accusation of mutinous intentions against him and reports him to the captain. Billy is too naive to even understand what is brewing. He has the additional problem of stuttering under pressure.
The captain is a fatherly skipper in a difficult time. The Napoleonic war is on. A mutiny on English ships has just been suppressed. The crew of his ship is to some extent impressed, hence upfront suspect of not taking it gladly. The captain likes Billy. When the accusation is brought to him, he has the well- meaning but in effect stupid idea to have Billy confronted by Claggart ‘to see how he reacts’. Of course Billy can not handle the pressure, is short of words and hits his accuser, who unfortunately dies.
Under the circumstances, capital punishment is the only possible course to take, thinks the captain, though everybody knows that this is not a case of premeditated murder. He is the father who gives in to the system to sacrifice his son. Tragically, he seems to long for this sacrifice.
We need to be aware that this text is incomplete and that we do not in all unfinished parts know what the intentions were. Actually, this turns out to be less of a disadvantage than one might think. Texts do not need to be complete. What the author would have done with it is a legitimate question that can add value.
Regrettably, this completes my Melville excursion. Next time in another 20 years? And what now? Kleist maybe?
Rating: 5 / 5
Herman Melville is one of the lesser known authors.Still his style and skill are not to be ignored.Whenever you wish to explore the development of the United States , and the regionalisms of the sailors of the northeast ,read him . Exciting
and educational ,and extremely well written.
Rating: 4 / 5
The first time I encountered Billy Budd, I was merely 16 years old and incredibly disappointed with Melville’s classic. It was unlike anything I had previously encountered, much to my relief. I was turned off by, in my estimation, its excessive length and wordy sentence structure. I was so turned off, in fact, that I left a less than stellar review of the novella on Amazon. An avid and appreciative reader of classics, I preferred more straightforward reads such as Mark Twain’s Huck Finn or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
The second time I approached Billy Budd, it was six years later and in an upper level American Literature course. Though I had read it before, I gave it a second try because I had recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Melville’s short stories The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids and Bartleby. I was astounded at my changed perspective. No longer was the story cumbersome and confusing; I found that it was a beautifully written, intricately symbolic masterpiece. The story had meaning and each page felt significant, which had gone unnoticed and unappreciated with my first reading.
Though I can’t find my old review, I wanted to update my remarks, if not alter them completely. Time and growth allowed me to understand and appreciate this classic. Life is all about timing. If you didn’t enjoy this the first time around, perhaps you should give it another try, too.
Rating: 5 / 5
… and my contribution, I admit, raises more questions than it answers.
Is Billy Budd a Political Allegory? Or is it an oblique admission of latent homosexuality? Or a cautious hatchet-job on a domineering father-in-law? Or a somber biblical morality tale, with Captain Vere standing in for Pontius Pilate? Or simply a prose prologue to a ballad in verse, which spilled uncontrollably out of its frame?
None of those interpretations is as indefensible as it might seem. Literary scholars have advanced all of them in their full armor of earnestness post-modernism. Possibly it’s the elusiveness of a final interpretation that has made Billy Budd, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, so dear to the critics. Among the writings of Herman Melville, Billy Budd certainly remains the most fraught with ambiguities and uncertain implications.
I hadn’t re-read Billy Budd in decades — not since college, when I wrote a very long and stuffy term paper on Melville’s treatments of the military — and I didn’t foresee reading it now. But one of my nieces graduated from law school last month and, at a family celebration, I found her telling me about one of her favorite professors, who structured a whole class around discussion of ‘justice’ as depicted in Billy Budd! It turns out that there are reams of opinions, by lawyers and law students, about Billy Budd! That it’s a ‘classic’ of legal literature, although my niece suggested a widespread reliance among students on Cliff Notes! Whoda thunkit?
Denizens of literature departments have been predisposed to read Billy Budd as a personal revelation of Herman Melville’s conflicted sexual identity. The story IS dedicated, conspicuously, to an old shipmate, Jack Chase, whom Melville had long previously portrayed in his complex novel Redburn. That novel vividly revealed Melville’s ‘alarm’ at the discovery of homoerotic attractions. In Billy Budd, the nameless narrator explicitly probes the antipathy of the hostile petty officer, Claggart, for the handsome sailor Billy in terms of latent homoeroticism. The opera Billy Budd, by Benjamin Britten, commits the story utterly to such an understanding. Nevertheless, I find this train of thought a stub line, a siding where the engine gets to idle. There’s too much of the text that focuses on law and discipline, on the historical mutinies that contextualize the tragedy of Budd’s execution. Herman Melville was not just spinning word-wheels. He was too deep and deliberate a writer. Some readers have complained that the “story” of Billy is postponed too long by the narrator’s ruminations; in fact, some fifteen pages pass before Vere and Claggart are introduced. Whatever more it may be, Billy Budd is a story about the sociology of life on a sailing ship-of-war. The pluses and cons of naval discipline mattered to the old sailor, even in his obscure niche as a customs officer.
So then, shall we plump for the ‘political’ or ‘historical’ interpretation? Billy Budd, according to the text, was conscripted in 1797, in the context of the British naval actions against revolutionary France. Melville wasn’t born until 1819. Why then did he set his narrative so long before his own experience on a US military frigate? The merchant ship from which Budd was snatched was christened “The Rights of Man”, and much is made of Billy’s ‘farewell to the Rights’ when Claggart accuses him of mutinous intentions. Could we construct an allegorical interpretation, with the Handsome Sailor representing Democracy in its infancy? [If any grad student takes this possibility seriously and writes a thesis on it, I want footnote credit!]
Melville’s father-in-law was the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Lemuel Shaw, one of the most influential jurists in the history of American business law. Melville scholars have brunted the notion that Captain Vere is a guarded portrayal of Shaw. That would, I think, imply a mixture of admiration and resentment on Melville’s part toward his much more successful father-in-law. A tinge of inferiority perhaps? I’ll wager Shaw was intimidating over the dinner platters during family visits. The narrator of Billy Budd — unnamed and not to be automatically regarded as the author — insists that Starry Vere is a paragon of virtue and duty, yet at several points inserts doubts about Vere’s deeper character, including a speculation about his sanity! The admirable Vere is despicably inadequate in his handling of the confrontation between Budd and Claggart; both the readers and the sailors on the deck of his ship can be heard to mutter against him. He cloaks himself in patriotic sanctimony but he deserves no adulation for wisdom here. Of course, he stands as a synecdoche for naval authority, for the tyrannical discipline against which Melville had strenuously protested in his early novel White Jacket. What happens to innocent, honorable Billy Budd is a potent example of what was hopelessly flawed in hierarchical society. The reader might be excused, I think, for perceiving Billy as “Democracy” martyred by self-righteous Conservatism.
And how about the Morality Tale? There are flashes of biblical imagery. There is the weird, mysterious description of Budd’s execution by hanging, when his body doesn’t twitch and jerk, as if he were sublimated into death without suffering. Surely Melville, whose whole life had been an agony of religious impulse in conflict with disbelief, had something in mind, some intended meaning. After all, he COULD have written a different story, a more palatable denouement. Honestly, I find less concern for metaphysics, for questions of God, in Billy Budd than in Moby Dick or in Melville’s book-length poem Clarel. I’d argue that in Billy Budd, God no longer has a role. Perhaps that’s the message.
Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever made much of the thirty-one line poem that concludes the text of Billy Budd. It turns out that Melville had sketched several such nautical ballads, and experimentally prefaced them with brief prose accounts. These were found in his papers in various stages of incompletion. Billy Budd, please remember, was ‘unfinished’, published many years posthumously, and subject to the decisions of various editors. There are assorted ‘definitive’ editions. The ballad Billy in the Darbies strikes most readers as an odd anticlimax to the novella, but if you read it on its own terms, it’s as bleak a death-wish as you might find at the end of a Viking saga. The comfort of a burial at sea — “Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.” — was denied to Herman Melville, the dutiful husband and conscientious office-holder.
Rating: 5 / 5