Billy Budd, Sailor

By Herman Melville and Harrison Hayford

Hayford and Sealts's text was the first accurate version of Melville's final novel. Based on a close analysis of the manuscript, thoroughly annotated, and packaged with a history of the text and perspectives for its criticism, this edition will remain the definitive version of a profoundly suggestive story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226189048

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet who received wide acclaim for his earliest novels, such as Typee and Redburn, but fell into relative obscurity by the end of his life. Today, Melville is hailed as one of the definitive masters of world literature for novels including Moby Dick and Billy Budd, as well as for enduringly popular short stories such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Bell-Tower.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1962 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved Published 1962. Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10      18 19 20 21 22 23

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18904-8 (e-book)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-32132-5

ISBN-10: 0-226-32132-0

LCN: 62–17135

© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

BILLY BUDD

SAILOR

(An Inside Narrative)

BY HERMAN MELVILLE

Edited from the Manuscript with Introduction and Notes

by

HARRISON HAYFORD

and

MERTON M. SEALTS, JR.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO & LONDON

Breaking up of the ‘Agamemnon,’ an etching by Sir Francis Seymour Haden mentioned in the text, Chapter 9, Leaf 109.

Contents

Preface

Editors’ Introduction

Growth of the Manuscript

Plates I–VIII

History of the Text

Perspectives for Criticism

BILLY BUDD, SAILOR: The Reading Text

Dedication

BILLY BUDD, SAILOR

Notes & Commentary

Bibliography

Textual Notes

Preface

In Moby Dick Melville’s Ishmael says, If, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. As it happened, manuscripts were found in Melville’s own desk at the time of his death in 1891, manuscripts which have since been judged precious. The desk itself now stands in a Melville memorial room at Pittsfield; Yale and Harvard have ascribed honor and glory to the author; and Harvard treasures the manuscripts. The chief work among them, Billy Budd, has become a classic of American literature, and the world acknowledges itself Melville’s debtor.

Yet Melville’s executors—if literary scholars and critics may claim that title—have still not rendered an adequate accounting of those manuscripts, few of which have been well edited and some of which have not been edited at all. Even the manuscript of Billy Budd has not heretofore been exhaustively studied, and no definitive text has been established by previous editors. Although much thought has been devoted to its interpretation, critics have by no means reached agreement: what after the first quarter century of criticism (1921–46) had seemed to be virtually a consensus, that the work constituted Melville’s testament of acceptance, has been flatly contradicted during the decade of the 1950’s by those reading the novel as an ironic reiteration of all his lifelong quarrels and denials. Perhaps this inability of critics to agree upon the meaning of Billy Budd should not be a matter for wonder or regret; perhaps the capacity of the work to elicit continued interest from critics of various schools and to suggest various significances (Melville’s own term) should be taken for a sign that it is indeed a literary masterpiece. Perhaps, moreover, no final agreement among critics is either possible or even desirable. In any case, it is our hope that a comprehensive scholarly edition of the work will narrow the ground of disagreement and widen that of understanding.

The present Phoenix Edition, intended for the general reader and student, is an abridgment of our complete scholarly edition of Billy Budd, Sailor. Identical in both volumes is the material of pages 1–220, comprising the Editors’ Introduction and the Reading Text of the novel plus accompanying notes, commentary, and bibliography. Omitted from the Phoenix Edition are pages 221–432 of the complete edition, comprising a separate Genetic Text plus accompanying textual analysis, table, and discussion setting forth in detail what our study of the manuscript has revealed concerning the genesis and development of the story through its successive stages of growth. Since the manuscript itself, which Mrs. Melville characterized as unfinished, was never prepared for the printer, we give in the Reading Text the wording that in our judgment most closely approximates Melville’s final intention had a new fair copy been made without his engaging in further expansion or revision. Notes to the Reading Text gloss words, identify allusions, point out affiliations with possible sources and analogues in Melville’s reading and in his own writing, and offer explication of key passages with reference to the findings of scholarship and criticism, including our own investigations. The Introduction summarizes the development of the manuscript, reviews the history of the text, and indicates ways in which our work clarifies central problems of interpretation.

This edition has grown out of studies of Melville’s late writings conducted by the present editors over a period of some fifteen years. Analysis of the Billy Budd manuscript in particular was first undertaken in 1953, when Mr. Hayford’s preliminary examination confirmed a suggestion advanced by Leon Howard: that further study could lead to the establishment of a much more accurate text and to a sounder understanding of Melville’s process of composing Billy Budd than scholarship had yet provided. Active collaboration of the two editors began in 1955 with their decision to join in preparing a new edition to be based on an entirely independent transcription of the manuscript. The work of transcription occupied the full attention of both editors during extended periods of study at the Houghton Library of Harvard University, where the manuscript is now located; it is a joint and equal effort. Mr. Hayford took the initial responsibility for setting forth this transcription in the Genetic Text and for preparing the associated textual analysis. Mr. Sealts, following principles mutually agreed upon, prepared the Reading Text and the accompanying notes and commentary, drawing upon materials assembled by both editors. Each of us has contributed to the Preface and Introduction as well as to all other parts of the volume. The division of labor has thus been anything but absolute, with the editors remaining in close consultation with one another during every stage of an undertaking for which we assume undivided responsibility.

For reference by other students of Melville we shall deposit in the Houghton Library a full collation, prepared by Mr. and Mrs. Sealts, of the present Reading Text with the Genetic Text and with the previous texts of Raymond Weaver and F. Barron Freeman.

It is our pleasure to record the indebtedness we share with all students of Melville to Eleanor Melville Metcalf, who inherited the manuscript of Billy Budd, made it available to its pioneering editor, Raymond Weaver, and subsequently presented it to the Harvard College Library. Her generosity and interest have encouraged all scholars while favoring none. For authorization to edit the manuscript, and to make use of other Melville materials at Harvard, we thank Professor William A. Jackson, librarian of the Houghton Library, where Miss Carolyn Jakeman and Mr. William H. Bond have also been unfailingly kind and helpful during our extended investigations there.

We acknowledge with appreciation the further assistance of library staffs at Northwestern University and Lawrence College, at the Universities of Chicago, Minnesota, Washington, and Wisconsin, at the Widener and Newberry libraries, and at the United States Information Service and British Institute libraries in Florence, Italy. Mrs. L. J. Kewer and Mr. Thomas J. Wilson of the Harvard University Press have supplied us with valuable information concerning the publishing history of Billy Budd. For leave of absence to work on this project and for grants in aid toward research expenses Mr. Hayford makes acknowledgment to the College of Liberal Arts and the Graduate School of Northwestern University.

Among individual scholars who have offered encouragement, helpful information, and constructive criticism at various stages of our work we owe particular debts to Professors Leon Howard and Fred-son Bowers, who have been of great help in the determination of editorial procedures, and to C. Merton Babcock, Ben C. Bowman, the late Merrell R. Davis, Philip Durham, Alfred R. Ferguson, French Fogle, William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Hayford, Wilson Heflin, Lewis Leary, Jay Leyda, Perry Miller, C. Northcote Parkinson, Leland R. Phelps, Walter B. Scott, Jr., James Sledd, and Eleanor M. Tilton.

HARRISON HAYFORD

MERTON M. SEALTS, JR.

Editors’ Introduction

GROWTH OF THE MANUSCRIPT

The manuscript of Billy Budd as Melville left it at his death in 1891 may be most accurately described as a semi-final draft, not a final fair copy ready for publication. After his death Mrs. Melville, indeed, called the story unfinished. She had used exactly the same word in December of 1885 when reporting Melville’s retirement from his nineteen years of employment as a customs inspector: He has a great deal [of] unfinished work at his desk which will give him occupation. The unfinished work of 1885 may have included the short poem of three or four leaves on which he was working early in 1886, the poem that ultimately became the ballad Billy in the Darbies with which the novel concludes. The novel itself developed out of a brief prose headnote setting the scene and introducing the speaker of this poem. An understanding of just how the story took form during the last five years of its author’s life has been a major objective of our genetic study of the Billy Budd manuscript.

As Billy Budd grew under Melville’s hand, along with other works both in prose and in verse with which he was engaged, it passed through several distinct stages and substages of development that comprised three major phases, in each of which its original focus was radically altered. Our genetic analysis has followed the course of its growth from the surviving leaves of the ballad and its headnote to Melville’s late pencil revisions of his semi-final draft. It has established the fact that more than once, believing his work to be essentially complete, he undertook to put his manuscript into fair-copy form, but each time he was led into further revision and elaboration; what still further changes he might have made had he lived to continue work on the manuscript are of course conjectural. The following section outlines the main phases of the story’s development, as established by our analysis of the manuscript. The degree to which Billy Budd remained an unfinished work is a matter for critical evaluation in the light of detailed evidence assembled in the table and discussion accompanying our Genetic Text.

Early in 1886, when Melville took up, or perhaps began, the work that became Billy Budd, he had in mind neither the plot of a novel nor any one of the characters as they later emerged in the course of his writing. What he did have, in the initial phase of development now represented by four extant draft leaves (Plates I-IV), was a short composition in both prose and verse that in its complete form ran to perhaps five or six leaves. The focal character was Billy (Billy Budd in the prose headnote), a sailor on the eve of his execution—but a different Billy from the young sailor of the novel who is hanged for striking and killing his superior officer. This Billy was an older man, condemned for fomenting mutiny and apparently guilty as charged, though in his brief initial presentation Melville emphasized the sailor’s reverie as he faces death, rather than the events leading up to his condemnation. The prose sketch and ballad thus placed a character in a situation but stopped short of telling a story.

During the first two years of Melville’s retirement, 1886–87, a narrative about Billy Budd emerged out of this material. By November of 1888 Melville had incorporated the ballad and expanded the head-note sketch through several stages into a story that ran to something over 150 manuscript leaves. In constructing its plot he had entered a second phase of development with his introduction of John Claggart, whose presence resulted in a major shift of focus. Billy, no mutineer in this phase, reacts to a false charge of mutiny by striking and killing his accuser, Claggart; this is the act that leads to his condemnation here and in all subsequent stages of the story’s growth.

A third and final phase of development, during which the manuscript grew to its ultimate length of 351 leaves, began after November, 1888, when Melville set out (not for the first time) to put his story into fair-copy form. During the ensuing winter months or perhaps in the following spring he made another major shift of focus, which involved the full-scale delineation of a third principal character, Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere, who had previously figured only as the commander in whose presence Billy struck Claggart and by whom the summary sentence of hanging was imposed upon the young sailor. So minor was this commander’s part in the second phase of the story’s growth that only a few leaves stood between the killing of Claggart and the beginning of the ballad; in the third phase, by contrast, Billy’s trial, Vere’s long speech to the court, and the dramatized execution and related episodes intervene, and an analysis of Vere’s character is now provided in new antecedent chapters. The several stages and substages within this final phase of development occupied Melville until the end of his life, revision being still in progress when he died.

Thus, in the period of over five years between his retirement from the Custom House and his death, Melville had carried the work through a series of developments intricate in detail but clear in their general lines of growth. In three main phases he had introduced in turn the three main characters: first Billy, then Claggart, and finally Vere. As the focus of his attention shifted from one to another of these three principals, the plot and thematic emphasis of the expanding novel underwent consequent modifications within each main phase. Just where the emphasis finally lay in the not altogether finished story as he left it is, in essence, the issue that has engaged and divided the critics of Billy Budd.

Within these three broad phases of development, certain of the various stages and substages deserve further attention because of particularly important elements with which they deal and problems which they raise. To the initial phase, in which Billy was the only major character, belong the surviving draft leaves of the ballad and headnote; they are from the first substage of what we designate Stage A. (See Plates I-IV.) Although the situation then presented in the ballad was basically the same as that in its final version, with a sailor speaker already named Billy confronting his execution, there are conspicuous differences. The earlier Billy, as we have said, was an older Billy, for his musings included a dreamy reminiscence of days and ships no more and of a larger general muster of former shipmates from every shore (Christian Pagan Cannibal breed) than the later and younger Billy could have assembled. This Billy was more like the reminiscing sailors of Melville’s John Marr volume—John Marr himself, Bridegroom Dick, Tom Deadlight—where the ballad might well have appeared in 1888 had not the story that sprouted from its headnote already overshadowed it. That this early Billy was indeed guilty of mutiny seems clear from his expression the game is up and its subsequent revisions: first The little game, then My little game, and finally Our little game; all these phrases point to his actual implication in some sort of plot. (Even in the final version of the ballad the innocent phrase Ay, ay, all is up derives from the incriminating expression of the earlier versions.)

The single draft leaf (Plate I) surviving from the headnote, though a part of this same substage, is of later composition than the material in the ballad leaves which it was designed to introduce in the manner of similar headnotes: those to John Marr and Tom Deadlight in John Marr and also those to other poems Melville never completed or published. It was originally a single long sentence—like some of the headnotes, in the present tense. Much of its language has been carried over into the novel itself and is embedded in the physical description of Billy in Ch. 2, which similarly tells of his beauty, his genial temper, and his evidently noble lineage. In the headnote as in the ballad leaves themselves Melville presented a sailor older than the Billy of the novel. Initially he was not a foretopman—the foretop being a station for the younger men, as the novel was to explain—but Captain of a gun’s crew, a post for a more mature man. In this substage the historical and national setting remained unspecified, but according to the headnote it is wartime, the warship is already a seventy-four, and Billy has been summarily condemned at sea to be hung as the ringleader of an incipient mutiny the spread of which was apprehended. Whether he was in fact guilty, as seems clear in the ballad draft, the surviving leaf of the headnote does not actually state; in any case, his capital offense is different from what it later became following Melville’s introduction of Claggart.

From these four draft fragments antedating the novel itself it is impossible to be sure what main theme and dominant effect Melville had in mind for his ballad as it first stood. Presumably its general form was that of a rambling reverie, as in the other sailor poems on which he was at work. The general situation in all of them is the same: a sailor, usually an old sailor, is musing over bygone days and his own approaching end. Ships and shipmates of the past, the barbaric good nature and genial fellowship of sailors, and some sort of contrast between their simplicity and the way of the world are common thematic elements. The opening lines of the original ballad of Billy Budd are a characteristic variation of this last theme. As in the final version, the verse begins abruptly with Billy’s comment on the visit and prayer of the chaplain, who, since he is referred to only by pronouns, must have been introduced as a secondary character in the missing portion of the prose headnote.

Very good of him, Ay, so long to stay

And down on his marrow bone here to pray

For the likes of me. Nor bad his story,

The Good Being hung and gone to glory.—

(Plate II)

PLATE I

From Stage A (now Leaf 3v of Daniel Orme)

This leaf, which at Stage A began Melville’s draft headnote to the ballad, is all that survives of the prose of that stage. Compare its matter and phrasing with those of Leaves 38–39 of the final manuscript.

PLATE II

From Stage A: Leaf [347a] (Daniel Orme, 17v)

The earliest of three surviving draft leaves of the ballad, Leaf [347a], bearing a version of the opening lines, is a clear working copy of a still earlier draft. One or more clips once occupied the lower half of this leaf.

PLATE III

From Stage A: Leaf [347b] (Daniel Orme, 4v)

Leaf [347b] carries a version of the opening lines of the ballad later than that on [347a]. A patch once covered the canceled segment following the sixth line.

PLATE IV

From Stage A: Leaf [347c] (Daniel Orme, 16v)

Leaf [347c] opens with a later version of the last two lines of [347b]. A clip or patch was once pinned to the lower segment of the leaf.

PLATE V

Leaf [la] 352, top segment

Leaf [229d] .358, top segment

Leaf [135a] 353, top segment

These segments show the intervention of Mrs. Melville’s hand in the manuscript after Melville’s death, (a) retracing words of the canceled and superseded early pencil-draft title slip mounted on Leaf [la]; (b) recording her misconjecture that Leaves [229d, e, f] 358–360 might be a preface; and (c) calling for insertion of Leaves [135a and b] 353–354—the superseded chapter Lawyers, Experts, Clergy.

PLATE VI

Leaf 2

The opening leaf of the story carries Melville’s pencil notations of (a) the date when he began inscription of the Stage D fair copy sequence, to which the leaf belongs; (b) the date when he began a revision, at Stage X or E; and (c) the latest title.

PLATE VII

Leaf [80a] 363, top segment

Leaf 81, top segment

Leaf [80a] shows Melville’s notation on the cover of a folder for Ch. 7; Leaf 81 shows Mrs. Melville’s copy of the notation, on the first leaf of the chapter. Also in Mrs. Melville’s hand on [80a] is the notation Van Tromp, and on 81, in the last line, her alteration of a to the.

PLATE VIII

Leaf [334a] 361

Leaf 344, lower segment

Leaf [334a] 361 carries Melville’s rough notes, at Stage X, for what became Ch. 28 and 30. Leaf 344 ended the story at Stage B, when the ballad was followed by the news account; to 344 Melville later added the pencil-draft coda reproduced here, but during Stage X, when he reversed the order of ballad and news account, he canceled the coda. We have found no satisfactory reading of the last word in its second line.

The major effect here is one of irony, arising from Billy’s naively thinking it good of the chaplain to visit such a lowly prisoner and humbly to pray / For the likes of me. In his final version of the ballad Melville dropped his direct reference to the gospel story, perhaps after his prose elaboration (in what is now Ch. 24 of Billy Budd) of the encounter between Billy and the chaplain, though in the novel he retained and exploited in other ways his suggestive juxtaposition of the condemned sailor with the figure of Christ hung and gone to glory. Billy’s sailor-way of taking clerical discourse is compared in the novel to the reception of the Christian gospel "long ago on tropic isles by any superior savage, so-called; as for the chaplain, drawn as a worthy man possessing the good sense of a good heart, he is termed incongruous as the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War, where he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force." This same incongruity between religion and war, repeatedly stressed in Melville’s writings from White-Jacket through Clarel to Bridegroom Dick and Billy Budd, was evidently a major element in his original conception of Billy’s situation.

Nothing in the surviving leaves of the ballad or headnote suggests the presence of Claggart in Melville’s first delineation of Billy and his circumstances. When Claggart was either introduced or brought to the fore as the cause of Billy’s predicament, the second phase in Melville’s development of the work was inaugurated. This phase must have begun as a substage of what we designate Stage A; Claggart’s emergence at some point within Stage A can be inferred from the earliest surviving leaves of the final manuscript, those of Stage B, substage Ba, which were copied forward from Stage A. In the new phase, which established the story’s setting as the Revolutionary era, just after the mutinies of 1797 in the British navy at Spithead and the Nore occasioned by naval abuses, Melville presented Claggart—mostly from the outside—as a master-at-arms of the period. His original Billy, a mature Captain of a gun’s crew aboard an unnamed seventy-four, he modified into a young merchant sailor impressed into a British warship, called the Indomitable. Opposite Billy, Melville now set an antagonist, Claggart, who, conceiving a mortal dislike for him, begins to scheme actively against him. Billy, described as a model sailor, is brought face to face with the master-at-arms in their commander’s presence, where he responds to a false accusation of mutiny by striking and killing Claggart. Melville’s juxtaposition of the two characters as protagonist and antagonist evidently led him to heighten Billy’s youth, naïveté, heart, goodness, and brightness and to deepen Claggart’s antipathetic experience, sophistication, intellect, evil, and darkness. The characterization of Billy was probably carried nearly as far at this phase as Melville was ever to take it, but Claggart’s inner nature remained to be studied further in the final phase of the novel’s development.

Just how fully Stage A explored the relations between Billy and Claggart is uncertain, since no leaves later than the draft headnote and ballad actually survive from that stage. Probably in the early months of 1888, when Melville was selecting and engrossing the poems he would include in John Marr and Other Sailors, he inscribed a fair copy of the story that ran to something over 70 leaves. The surviving leaves of this fair copy, which we designate Stage B, are the earliest still standing in the final manuscript, having been retained and carried forward through the various subsequent copy stages. From the very earliest leaves among them, those of substage Ba, it is clear that by the end of Stage A the story and characters as just outlined were in fact present, and that Melville was then beginning his dramatization of actual scenes. In Ba, Billy’s impressment and farewell to the Rights-of-Man were described, Claggart’s understrappers were said to be stirring up trouble for Billy aboard the Indomitable, the interview on deck between the master-at-arms and the captain was related though not dramatized, and Claggart’s accusation of Billy and the latter’s fatal blow were given their location within the captain’s cabin. As the active antagonist, Claggart in the second phase

Reviews for Billy Budd, Sailor

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

Billy and Bartleby are old friends, portraits of bejeweled philosophy. Strange as it may appear, the selection which punched me in the jaw was Cock-A-Doodle-Do: a tale told by a fellow traveler (he drinks porter and reads Rabelais) about a magical fowl which is a fount of bliss, an actual agent of earthly happiness.

[jonri-4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read Billy Budd for a book club I belong to. (I didn't read the other stories.) I found it incredibly slow going. I wouldn't even attempt to read it without access to Wikipedia or some other such source. Especially at the beginning, it makes a lot of cultural references with which I was completely unacquainted, e.g., Anacharis Cloots, Kaspar Hauser and Titus Oates. This made the meaning of some passages incomprehensible without some research.The characters are all stereotypes. I found the plot unrealistic. I also found it just plain exasperating that we are not told what Vere said to Budd after Budd was condemned to death.

[jerry2book-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good v Evil and the law. Also, not a bad movie with Peter Ustinov.

[gordsellar_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I happened upon this in a used bookshop in Yongsan station, in Seoul, just as I was working on a story called "Ogallala" that has more than one nod in the direction of the novella "Benito Cereno" which is in this collection. So I figured that was a hint from the universe, and bought it so I could reread Benito Cereno before finishing my revision.

[tezz_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very difficult story to read, with Melville often distracted from the task at hand. However, if you can persevere the fabulous story manages to shine through the verbose prose.

[nikkles_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I had to read Billy Budd for school. That is not really a deal breaker for me, but I just did not get the point of the story and it really seems like it is suppose to have a point.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Magnifieke verhalenbundel. Ongelofelijk beklemmende sfeer, erg verwant aan Poe en in sommige opzichten vooruitlopend op Kafka. Vooral Benito Cereno is adembenemend.