[On March 19th, 1951, Herman Wouk published The Caine Mutiny. That’s one of many important American novels set on ships, so this week for its 75th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy Caine and four others, leading up to a weekend tribute to a colleague studying maritime meanings!]
On two things that make Herman Melville’s last novel one of his most interesting works.
I could have gone many different directions with this first post in the series, because, at least as compared to the other authors I’ll feature this week, Herman Melville (a former sailor himself, unsurprisingly) set a strikingly high percentage of his published books on and around ships. That includes his first seven novels—Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Omoo: A Narrative of Adventure in the South Seas (1847), Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849), Redburn: His First Voyage (1849), White-Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War (1850), and Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851); two entirely different and equally fascinating works published in 1855, the short story “Benito Cereno” and the novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile; his late poetry collection John Marr and Other Sailors (1888); and the subject of this post, the novella Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), which was left unfinished at the time of Melville’s 1891 death and first published posthumously in 1924.
That unfinished nature, and more exactly the multi-part, hesitant, even contradictory writing process to which it connects (as Melville had begun drafting the book in 1886 but was unable to finish before his death), adds a number of interesting layers to this novella. Most relevantly for this week’s series, the literary scholars who have studied Melville’s extensive manuscripts for Billy Budd most closely, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. (their 1962 edition is considered the best as well as most definitive), argue that Melville wrote the book in three distinct phases, and that in each phase he introduced an additional main character within his ship’s community: initially he focused on just the impressed and innocent young sailor Billy, as part of a potential poem (“Billy in the Darbies”) for John Marr (a poem which Melville eventually turned into the novella’s final chapter); then added in his antagonist, the dictatorial master-at-arms John Claggart; and finally introduced the complex third main character, the ship’s sympathetic but rule-bound captain Edward Vere. Which means that a main arc across this multi-stage composition process was a transformation of the story from an individual to a communal one.
That communal story, with its central focus on the rules and laws of ships at sea, was possibly inspired by an actual historical event: the mutiny that took place aboard the American naval vessel USS Somers in late 1842. Melville had a first cousin on board that ship, Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort, and through him would likely have learned of Philip Spencer, a young sailor hanged on board. Given that Billy does not actually mutiny in Melville’s novella (he is falsely accused of the crime by Claggart, strikes the superior officer in righteous anger, and accidentally kills him), that historical context could open up compelling questions of truth and whether it has anything to do with law and punishment. And if we extend that specific historical context to the broader, late 1880s debates over capital punishment on which historian H. Bruce Franklin focuses his own reading of Billy Budd, those questions and themes become even more pointed still. Ships are in many ways a world unto themselves, but they nonetheless feature and reflect our own world, something that this fascinating nautical novel certainly knows well.
Next nautical novel tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Nautical novels you’d nominate or other shipboard stories you’d share?
Leave a Reply