Billy Budd and Other Stories

BILLY BUDD AND OTHER STORIES

By HERMAN MELVILLE

Billy Budd and Other Stories

By Herman Melville

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4642-0

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4669-7

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CONTENTS

Biographical Introduction

Billy Budd, Foretopman

Preface

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

Billy in the Darbies

Daniel Orme

The Piazza

The Encantadas Or Enchanted Isles

The Bell-Tower

Benito Cereno

Bartleby: The Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street.

Biographical Introduction

HERMAN MELVILLE

Much of Herman Melville’s writing appears to chase after something. In concrete terms, this is seen in the pursuit of the whale in Moby Dick, but there is also a spiritual dimension to Melville’s writings which can be seen in metaphysical musings such as his description of the oil-painting at the Spouter Inn. Melville writes,

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three, blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet there was a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it… But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? Even the great leviathan himself?

Here, we see that the search for the whale is actually a search for sublimity, a concept coined by Longinus, a Greek rhetorician who is thought to have lived in the first or third century AD. The sublime differs from the beautiful, because it inspires awe as opposed to mere admiration. The sublime is great, terrible and even, at times, unknowable, much like the whale that Ahab pursues in Moby Dick.

However, Melville did not begin his career with the same kind of philosophical preoccupations that abound in Moby Dick, now acknowledged to be his masterpiece. Instead, his first two books, Typee and Omoo tended to be very factual and were based on his first-hand knowledge of seafaring life. As Melville grew as a writer, he started to deviate from what he strictly knew and to write about other things, embroidering his sometimes fanciful narratives with his ideas about politics, ethics and eventually, metaphysics. However, since his reading public was not very receptive to such meanderings, he forced himself, at first, to return to the kind of real life narrative with which he had begun. Eventually, though, the thinker within the artist burst forth with great intensity in Moby Dick and The Confidence Man, the last two novels published in his lifetime.

Born in 1819, Melville came from a well-known Boston family with revolutionary heroes on both sides, something he acknowledged to be proud of. However, given the illustriousness of his ancestors, Melville’s childhood was relatively shabby-genteel. At first, he was sent to the New York Male School along with his brothers, but by 1830 his father was faring well and decided to move to Albany to go into the fur business. This venture was unsuccessful and Melville’s father died in 1832 after a mental and physical breakdown. Melville was pulled out of school at the age of twelve and forced to start working as a bank clerk.

For a while, Melville drifted from one job to another, working in the family business or on his uncle’s farm and occasionally teaching in various district schools. Finally, in 1839, he embarked on his first seafaring voyage on a merchant ship carrying a load of cotton, an experience which would inform the writing of Redburn ten years later. When he returned to the States he thought of going west with his uncle, a venture which proved fruitless due to a business recession. Finally, in 1840, Melville boarded a whaling ship and didn’t return home until 1844, at which point his sailing yarns enchanted his family so much that they encouraged him to write them down.

The result of these labors was Typee, the first of Melville’s novels, and also the one that would prove most popular in his lifetime. Typee was largely autobiographical, its protagonist, Tommo, exposed to the same experiences that Melville had in his whaling voyage. A couple of years into the voyage, Melville and his friend Toby Greene decided to leave their ship, the Acushnet, in the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. They were captured by the Typee tribe who were said to be cannibalistic, but who treated Melville and his friend with all the signs of hospitality. When Melville injured his leg, Greene was allowed to leave the island and go in search of medical assistance. Melville stayed with the Typee for three weeks until an Australian whaler rescued him.

Typee introduced a cannibalistic theme which Melville would return to in many of his future writings, including the character of Queequeg in Moby Dick. There’s a certain ambivalence evident in Melville’s view of these people. On the one hand, there’s an idyllic feel about the island and the people; the simplicity of their life appeals to Melville and he seeks to learn from it. However, he can’t get over certain other aspects of their culture, disliking their tattoos and modes of inebriation. Then, he comes across a pile of bones that he suspects might be human and suddenly, he’s ready to leave the island. In the book, the character Tommo, pursued by the men of the tribe, only just manages to escape by the skin of his teeth.

At first, Melville had some trouble publishing Typee as the tale seemed too fantastic to be true. However, Toby Greene eventually came forward and testified to the accuracy of the narrative. By this time, Typee had become very successful and Melville had agreed to write its sequel, Omoo, which followed as similar pattern as Typee, except that it was set in Tahiti and was concerned with the examination of a state that lay in-between what Melville considered the primitive and the civilized.

In 1847, after the publication of Omoo, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, who was chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. They were to have two sons and two daughters and Melville’s relationship with his father-in-law was a close one. It was to Judge Shaw that he dedicated his first book, and it was he who helped the struggling couple buy a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Melville’s correspondence with Judge Shaw indicates that he felt free to open up to the older man about his literary ambitions, including the fact that he seemed to like writing books that were destined to fail, on account of what the reading public considered their redundant philosophical veins.

In 1849, Melville produced Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, his third book, which was wildly different from his first two and which showed glimpses of what was to come in terms of Melville’s final writing style. Unlike Typee and Omoo, Mardi was entirely fictional. The narrator, Taji, visits the allegorical archipelago of Mardi where he kills a priest who is taking a white girl, Yillah, to be sacrificed. When the girl disappears, he joins forces with a poet, a historian and a philosopher from the court of Mardi and wanders about the islands looking for the girl, who is never found. In this case, the journey becomes far more important than the destination (something we would also see in Moby Dick) and provides room for Melville’s commentary on various parts of the world which are represented as various islands. The theme of the book is reminiscent of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels where the protagonist’s foreign adventures allow the author to satirize current events. However, unlike Gulliver’s Travels, Mardi was unsuccessful and Melville was advised to write about what he knew rather than indulging in flights of fancy.

Rather than wallowing in his troubles, Melville temporarily put aside his dream of writing a book that was more than merely factual and produced two works that his readers would no doubt appreciate. Redburn appeared in 1849, the same year as Mardi, and documents a young man’s experiences and growth in the Merchant Service. It is a coming of age book in which the young protagonist encounters several trials and tribulations onboard, but eventually walks away from the experience as a mature adult. White-Jacket, on the other hand, was a politically important work because of the stand it took on flogging, a common practice in the United States Navy at that time, and was instrumental in its legal abolition by Congress.

At this point in Melville’s life, he became acquainted with Nathaniel Hawthorne. This event would influence the course of his future writing. It all started when Melville reviewed Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, which he praised to the skies, comparing Hawthorne to Shakespeare and lauding his grasp of Puritanism. Hawthorne, undone by Melville’s unabashed eulogy, threw off the yoke of his reserve and thus began an important literary alliance. Hawthorne was older than Melville and it’s possible that Melville saw him as something of a mentor. For a while, Melville had wanted to take more risks with his writing, but the reception of Mardi had thrown him off course. Due to Hawthorne’s influence, Melville once again decided to brave public opinion and this was how Moby Dick was born.

At first, Melville did not intend for Moby Dick to stray so widely from his previous true-to-life narratives.  He had not yet exploited his experience onboard a whaling ship, and so he thought of this as another aspect of sea life that he could present to his readers. In fact, he commented on the idea while in the early stages of writing, saying, It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know ... and to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the things, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves (Cohen). This indicates that Melville didn’t have any clear idea of writing an epic; in fact, he thought of this project as beginning with a handicap, since whales were not thought of as romantic creatures that immediately strike the fancy.

However, Melville’s interaction with Hawthorne set the book on a different path, and Melville was overcome by a flurry of creativity which caused him to combine his knowledge of whaling and his experiences on a whaler with his reflections on all and sundry, in a quest to discover, one might say, the meaning of life itself. Tony Tanner compares Melville to Homer, arguing that America was, at this time, ripe for the generation of its own epic and myth (viii) since all the frontiers had been overcome and the dominance of England had been repudiated. This America had achieved the means necessary for survival, which made intellectual and cultural development possible. In other words, circumstances in Melville's life mirrored those of his homeland: he had been successful so far but he still had a long way to go to become all that he could be.

The plot of Moby Dick is by now known to most of us, revolving as it does around Captain Ahab’s need for revenge on the whale who destroyed his ship and claimed his leg, and his subsequent downfall as a result of his obsession. The narrator, Ishmael, in this case is merely an observer – someone who must live and learn based on what he sees in others. Queequeg the cannibal plays an important role, but it must be noted that the ship is a microcosm, with men of different nationalities and backgrounds working together, not unlike the melting pot of America itself, and the whale lurking in the background like a threat of things to come.

Moby Dick was not well received, Melville’s audience being predisposed to appreciate work that was less reflective in nature. However, Melville didn’t succumb to public opinion at this time but went on to write Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, a romance with religious and philosophical underpinnings. Pierre’s failure, however, led him to publish some short fiction in magazines which did fairly well. It was not so for his last great finished work, The Confidence-Man, a darkly comic, sometimes confusing work based on the idea that life is a kind of joke or, perhaps, a con, where the arrival on the scene of one confidence-man leads to the popping up of several others.

In the next few years Melville did some traveling, wrote some verse and even had it published to meet, yet again, with failure. He had family problems, some of his relations even went so far as to claim that he was insane. In addition, both his sons met with untimely deaths. He started working at a customhouse and continued to do so until 1885, after which he started work on Billy Budd, the story of a sailor who is hanged at sea for mutiny, in which he probed the delicate ethical questions surrounding such an arrangement. Billy Budd remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1891.

By the time Melville passed away, his reputation had waned considerably, but it was revived in the 1920’s due to a greater interest in myth, prompted by the writings of Sigmund Freud. Moby Dick, as one can see, is a wonderful example of myth-creation as well as a collection of folklore that Melville culled from various sources. In 1921, Raymond Weaver wrote a biography on Melville and essays on Typee, Omoo and Moby Dick were featured in D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature. Since then, Melville has taken his rightful place in the literary canon and his much neglected Moby Dick has become an American classic. Dedicated to Hawthorne, Moby Dick was, at first, appreciated by very few, something which Melville had anticipated to a certain extent. However, it was, at least, appreciated by Hawthorne, and as history now documents, Melville was justified in writing to Hawthorne to say, A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb (Cohen).