Herman Melville was born in
New York City in 1819, the third of eight
children born to Maria Gansevoort Melville and Allan Melville, a
prosperous importer of foreign goods. When the family business failed
at the end of the 1820s, the Melvilles relocated to
Albany in an attempt to revive their fortune. In another string
of bad luck, overwork drove Allan to an early grave, and the young Herman
was forced to start working in a bank at the age of thirteen.
After a few more years of formal education, Melville
left school at eighteen to become an elementary school teacher.
This career was abruptly cut short and followed by a brief tenure
as a newspaper reporter. Running out of alternatives on land, Melville
made his first sea voyage at nineteen, as a merchant sailor on a
ship bound for Liverpool, England. He returned to America the next
summer, to seek his fortune in the West. After briefly settling
in Illinois, he went back east in the face of continuing financial
difficulties.
Finally, driven to desperation at twenty-one, Melville
committed to a whaling voyage, of indefinite destination and scale,
on board a ship called the Acushnet. This journey
took him around the continent of South America, across the Pacific
Ocean, and to the South Seas, where he abandoned ship with a fellow
sailor in the summer of 1842, eighteen months
after setting out from New York. The two men found themselves in
the Marquesas Islands, where they accidentally wandered into the
company of a tribe of cannibals. Lamed by an injury to his leg,
Melville became separated from his companion and spent a month alone
in the company of the natives. This experience later formed the
core of his first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, published
in 1846. An indeterminate mixture of fact
and fiction, Melville’s fanciful travel narrative remained the most
popular and successful of his works during his lifetime.
Life among these natives and numerous other exotic experiences abroad
provided Melville with endless literary conceits. Armed with the
voluminous knowledge obtained from constant reading while at sea,
Melville set out to write a series of novels detailing his adventures
and his philosophy of life. Typee was followed
by Omoo (1847) and Mardi
and a Voyage Thither (1849), two
more novels about his Polynesian experiences. Redburn, also
published in 1849, is a fictionalized account
of Melville’s first voyage to Liverpool. His next novel, White-Jacket;
or The World in a Man-of-War, published in 1850,
is a more generalized and allegorical account of life at sea aboard
a warship.
Through the lens of literary history, these first five
novels are all seen as a prologue to the work that is today considered
Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or The Whale, which
first appeared in 1851. A story of monomania
aboard a whaling ship, Moby-Dick is a tremendously
ambitious novel that functions at once as a documentary of life
at sea and a vast philosophical allegory of life in general. No
sacred subject is spared in this bleak and scathing critique of
the known world, as Melville satirizes by turns religious traditions,
moral values, and the literary and political figures of the day.
Motivated to the passionate intensity of Moby-Dick in
part by a burgeoning friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville
was unperturbed by the lukewarm reception that his grandest novel enjoyed
in the initial reviews. However, Melville reevaluated his place
in the literary world after the outraged reaction to his next novel, Pierre;
or The Ambiguities, which appeared in 1852.
The sole pastoral romance among Melville’s works, this self-described
“rural bowl of milk” became known as a decidedly bad book as much
for its sloppy writing as for its incestuous theme and nebulous
morals.
After the disastrous reception of Pierre, Melville
turned his attentions to the short story. In the following five
years, he published numerous fictional sketches of various lengths
in several prominent periodicals of the day. Most notable among
these works are “Bartelby, The Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno.” In
this period, he also published his final two completed novels: a
historical work titled Israel Potter; or Fifty Years of
Exile, in 1855, and a maddeningly bleak
satire of trust titled The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, in 1857.
In the remaining thirty-five years of his life, Melville’s
literary production cooled considerably, grinding nearly to a halt.
A brief stint on the national lecture tour gave way to more stable
employment as a customshouse inspector, a job he held for almost
twenty years before his retirement in the late 1880s.
A volume of war poetry, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the
War, appeared in 1866, and Melville
published the lengthy poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in
the Holy Land in 1876.
Toward the end of his life, Melville produced two more volumes of
verse, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888)
and Timoleon (1891).
At the time of his death in 1891,
Melville had recently completed his first extended prose narrative
in more than thirty years. However, this work would remain unpublished
for yet another thirty years, appearing in 1924 in
a limited London edition under the title of Billy Budd. Only
after Melville began to gain wider acclaim in the mid-twentieth
century did scholars and general readers begin to read Billy
Budd with serious care. Based in part on events Melville himself
experienced at sea, Billy Budd also incorporates
a historical incident involving Melville’s first cousin, who played
a role, similar to Captain Vere, as an arbitrator in a controversy
involving the trial and execution of two midshipmen on board the
U.S.S. Somers in 1842.
Melville’s first great literary historical proponent,
Lewis Mumford, saw Billy Budd as a testament to
Melville’s ultimate reconciliation with the incongruities and injustices
of life. According to Mumford, Billy Budd is the
placid, accepting last word of an aged man and an affirmation of
true religious transcendence. Later critics, such as Lawrance Thompson,
saw in Billy Budd a bitter satire that served only
to reconfirm Melville’s earlier acerbity. According to Thompson,
Melville’s cynicism and defiance appear all the more heightened
and corrosive for their more subtle means.
The last, long-delayed work of a long-silent author, Billy
Budd is a unique document in American letters. It stands
as one of the most ambiguous and inscrutable works of one of America’s
most ambiguous and inscrutable authors. The two major critical views—Billy Budd as
religious paean, or Billy Budd as jaded satire—have
only served to fuel the legend of Billy Budd. Standing
in such sharp opposition to each other, these two views persist
with equal vigor to the present, providing continuous debate for
readers the world over.
A Note on the Text
Melville worked on Billy Budd during
the final years of his life, and though he seems to have essentially
finished a draft of the novel, he never prepared it for publication.
When he died in 1891, he left it in the form
of an extremely rough manuscript with innumerable notes and marks
for correction and revision, some in his own handwriting, some in
the handwriting of his wife. Undiscovered until more than thirty
years after Melville’s death, the novel went unpublished until 1924.
Because of the indefinite state of the manuscript and the lapsed
time between Melville’s death and its discovery, there has been
a long-standing editorial controversy with regard to how the book
should be edited and arranged. As a result, there are many widely
varying editions of Billy Budd.
Editors working directly from Melville’s manuscript have
produced three separate editions of the novel: one prepared by Raymond
Weaver in 1924, one by F. Barron Freeman
in 1948, and two by Harrison
Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr.—a reading text and a “genetic
text”—in 1962. The Freeman edition is partly
based on the Weaver edition, and, to make matters more complicated,
the Freeman edition was reedited in 1956 by
Elizabeth Treeman, who claimed to have found more than 500 errors
in Freeman’s work. Editors have disagreed about issues such as how
authoritative the revisions in Melville’s wife’s handwriting really
are—Weaver, in fact, mistook Elizabeth Melville’s handwriting for
her husband’s, a mistake that earned him the scorn of subsequent
editors. Other disagreements concern chapter order, the inclusion
or exclusion of certain chapters Melville may have wished to cut,
and the name of Billy’s ship, which Melville’s manuscript calls
“the Indomitable” twenty-five times and “the Bellipotent”
six times. Most editors have gone with “Indomitable,”
but Hayford and Sealts conclude that Melville intended to change
the name to “Bellipotent.”
Today, the Hayford/Sealts reading text is generally regarded
as the best version of Billy Budd, though as perhaps
befits a novel of such deep thematic ambiguity, a truly definitive
text is impossible. Most commercially available editions are based
on the Hayford/Sealts reading text, including this SparkNote, which
utilizes the Library of America edition of the novel. Other editions
are likely to differ widely, in the several respects mentioned above.
