Kenneth Speirs
LOVE AND WAR: THE COURSE OF HEALING IN HERMAN MELVILLE'S BILLY BUDD
True victory lies in your role in the conflict, not
in coming through safely: it consists in the honour of battling bravely
not battling through.
--Montaigne, Of Cannibals
Seized by the apprehension that I need room, but that I need bearings within that space, and above all, that I need to be unswervingly loyal to the entire story, I want to begin by bringing before us now three dates that provide the coordinates of a kind of triangle-of-time within which I want to work as a way to better understand what that radical act we call healing might have meant to Herman Melville, and how he might have used his final creation, Billy Budd, to do some of that work. The three moments in time that I want to ask you to hold before you are: June 1, 1851; September 28, 1891; and August 1, 1919.
I begin with the middle date, which is really the end, or one end. September 28, 1891, a cold, contrary day in New York City, with more fall in it than summer. Herman Melville, nearly two months past his seventy-second birthday, dies in an apartment on east 24th Street in Manhattan, of "Cardiac dilation" as the death certificate states. Billy Budd--his final work, his project for the last five years of life, his first effort in prose in over thirty years--is left unfinished on Melville's desk. Buried a few days later beneath an aged maple in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, Melville's small, simple gravestone sits amid austere monuments and grand mausoleums. Pictured on his grave is a scroll, a writer's scroll left mysteriously, unaccountably blank. What do we make of this silent stone? Is this the darkest of dead letter offices, a mum glance to posterity, or is it suggestive of something else? Is the utterly blank scroll on Melville's grave, like the whiteness of the whale, an invitation to further interpretation, an ending containing innumerable beginnings? But I get ahead of myself.
The few obituaries were brief, the extent of Melville's obscurity as discernible in what was written, as what was not. Some misspelled Melville's name; some expressed surprise, believing Melville to have died many years before. In some ways he had, for as all of the few obituaries noted, Melville's popularity had ended, he had written himself out--he had essentially disappeared--sometime shortly after the publication of Moby-Dick in the fall 1851; a full forty summers then are left, like the gravestone, mysteriously silent, unaccountably blank.
Melville had premonitions of this disappearance, which he shared in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne on June 1, of 1851--the second coordinate of the triangle-of-time I endeavor to create before you. Here Melville writes:
I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. (1 June 1851)
With staggering honesty Melville faces his own imminent silencing, his own imminent blankness. Shortly the flower was to fall to mould. Having seen through seven novels in as many years, facing the severely dwindling interest of editors and readers alike, amid concerns about his physical and mental health, Melville, not yet thirty-three years old, is soon finished with the novel, and in a manner of speaking, finished with the world. And then begins the long decline of his reputation, which plunged so steeply that by the time the Cambridge History of American Literature was published in 1917, he was consigned a few perfunctory sentences, mainly in the section on "Travelers and Explorers."
Curiously enough, in the same letter to Hawthorne in June of 1851, Melville also speaks of the things that would endure after he had fallen to mould, of the things that would emerge out of the conflict evidently, considerations of his own likely silencing compel him to think of his own ultimate legacy--of the abiding voice battling through the struggle with oblivion. The fullness of Melville's gaze is able to contain both sides of the silence--the falling to mould, and the voice emerging out of blankness. He speculates that the silence shortly to descend upon him would last until a certain, identifiable moment in the future; he explains:
When I speak of posterity, in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of them, in all likelihood. (1 June 1851)
With amazing prescience Melville senses that he will shortly be silenced and that this silence will linger about the eyes until he goes down to those born the moment following his "giving up the ghost." It is to them, that Melville belongs. It is upon them, that Melville depends. It is for them, that Melville waits and privately now, writes.
To follow the projection of Melville's eerie divination brings us, then, from the letter of 1951 and the obscurity that followed, through death in 1891, and finally to the third date that completes this triangle: August 1, 1919, the centennial of Melville's birth, and nearly thirty years, or one generation, after Melville has given up the ghost. The babies born the moment immediately following Melville's death are now of age; remarkably, Melville's story did indeed, as he prophesized, come down to them, the Egyptian seeds eventually grew to greenness again. "When the story-teller is loyal," reads a line from an Isak Dinensen story, "eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak." August 1, 1919, marks the end of the struggle with silence Melville foresaw in 1851. Like Melville's gravestone, this date marks both a beginning and an ending, for on the day following the centennial celebration, Professor Raymond Weaver publishes an appreciation of the little known writer Herman Melville, whose odd, strikingly original work, Moby-Dick, he had recently unearthed at a used bookstore. Soon after, the posthumous treasure Billy Budd is disinterred--a spark, a flame, more lost works are uncovered, the refashioning of taste still today burns feverishly. And so Melville is transformed, almost overnight, from a forgotten writer of sea-tales into our enshrined author. And so, a kind of trinity of sacrifice, death, and redemption materializes, and thus the course of healing is complete.
These three dates, and the events they designate, help me suggest something about the meaning and nature of healing as Melville imagined it. Joyce Carol Oates helps me here too, though her terms, you will notice, are a bit different. In her essay "On Boxing" Oates is curious about the moment when, after the final bell, the combatants embrace; she wonders "if the boxing match leads irresistibly to this moment: the public embrace of two men who otherwise, in public or in private, could never approach each other with such passion." She puzzles over the persistent intermixture of love and war, of struggle and transcendence, and concludes that"...to suggest that men might love and respect one another directly, without the violent ritual of combat, is to misread man's greatest passion--for war, not peace. Love, if there is to be love, comes second."
It is fitting, then, that Melville chose to set his last, unfinished work--his testament of love, forgiveness and sacrifice--against the backdrop of war. Situated at the end of the eighteenth-century, the action of Billy Budd takes place within the larger context of the French Revolution. What's more, within this background the action of the work itself brings the violent ritual of combat to the fore as Melville presents in Billy and Claggart the spectacle of the epic battle between innate innocence and innate depravity, a parable of Good versus Evil.
To turn to criticism of Billy Budd is to confirm an old truism: war begets war, for Billy Budd is without question Melville's most divisive and contested book. Robert Milder, in the Introduction to a recent collection of critical essays on the work, notes that "...nothing in Melville studies approaches the antagonism with which rival camps have regarded one another.(1). Are we outraged, or exalted at Billy's execution? Is Vere "an anguished but duty-bound representative of the state"?, or a "myopic servant of the god Mars"?(2) Do we respond to Billy's "God bless Captain Vere!" with a "shiver," or a "gag"?(3) As Milder rightly observes: "The humbling reality, in any case, is that Melville seems to contain both emotions not simply at once but as one," and that the history of Billy Budd criticism"...is the disheartening spectacle of two parties almost constitutionally unable to appreciate each other's hold on the truth and thereby rise to the fullness of Melville's."
This disheartening spectacle might have been avoided altogether, for careful readers find sufficient direction in Billy Budd for following Melville's lead and finally rising to the fullness of truth that is contains. Billy Budd is a masterpiece of ambiguity. "Truth uncompromisingly told," Melville asserts near the end of the story "will always have its ragged edges." (4) Many critics, however, have found too much room in Melville's ambiguity, and thus have rushed to impute on it too rigid or predetermined an arrangement, leaving the ragged truth too neatly packaged. These partial readings press too hard on particular systems of value, screening out and smoothing over the distinguishing richness and roughness of Billy Budd. It is not hard to see how such readings have led to the antagonism that characterizes criticism of the work. What's more, these partial and partisan readings fail to acknowledge that Melville, while he provides room, also skillfully plants bearings within this space. To listen for, and maneuver with, these bearings is to permit the ambiguous silence at the heart of this profound work to tell its own story. Melville has indeed come down to us, but how can we now, in turn, rise to the fullness of his ragged truth? I want to look closely at the directions Melville supplies in Billy Budd, and to demonstrate the need to attend to them as a way to better understand the fullness of Melville's truth, and thereby to better see the possibility for healing it holds out.
Melville gave Billy Budd the parenthetical subtitle (An Inside Narrative), underscoring the need to attend closely to the characters and events it describes. In a story that has much to do with attempts to remove mystery, to recover the relationship between cause and effect, Melville is careful to remind us that to remain loyal to the details of "the inner life of one particular ship and the career of an individual sailor" is to increase our chances. On the other side of inside, Melville is at pains to give us a larger context; the work opens with several chapters on the historical moment, all of which clearly situate the action of the story within a broader context of revolutionary struggle. The historical material is clearly meant to inform the story, but not determine it. In short, what we might call the Inside and the Outside narratives are both very real and alive, and our reading, if it is to remain loyal the the entire story, and if it is to rise to the fullness of Melville's truth, must contain both of them not simply at once but as one.
What's more, Melville guides our glance so that it continues to radiate out beyond the particulars of Budd's story itself, beyond the historical conditions, until it encompasses nothing less than a narrative re-enactment of the Fall of Man. Evidence for this kind of reading does not have to be scrambled for; Billy as Adam, or "one to whom not yet has been proffered the questionable apple of knowledge," Claggart as the serpent--these are readily at hand. Melville's method, then, is one of contraction and expansion, distillation and magnification, crescendo and decrescendo. In this way, much of Billy Budd reads as a polemic against both specificity and omniscience. To read on one side to the exclusion of the other, is to miss the fullness of truth the story contains. The flush of our involvement with the deeply stirring experience unfolding by degrees before us on board the Bellipotent, depends, then, on registering the quickening intimations to the larger, perhaps universal circumstances as they well up through the details of "the inner life of one particular ship and the career of an individual sailor." The spirit of Melville's efforts to guide us to this challenging place is captured memorably in the famous description of Billy's voice, which we learn is apt to develop "an organic hesitancy." Reminiscent of the Egyptian seeds that Melville likens himself to in the earlier letter to Hawthorne, this quality of Billy's voice--its "organic hesitancy"--contains a kind of mobility and a kind of stasis, a pulling in two directions not simply at once but as one.
It is this ability to hold together the particular and the historical, the human and the mythical, the inside and the outside, that accounts for the fullness of truth in Billy Budd. "Truly to enjoy bodily warmth," Ishmael explains "some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself." Ishmael helps us see that Melville's quest for the fullness of truth takes him into several realms; his search for larger meaning is only complete when grounded firmly in particulars, which, in turn, is only satisfactory when connected to mythical truths.
As if resolved not to let his point pass lightly, Melville, after inviting the kind of reading outlined above, does all he can to undo or subvert the very continuity that an insistence on one kind of reading always depends. "No consideration of the nature of character in Billy Budd," as Barbara Johnson rightly notes, "can fail to take into account the fact that the fate of each of the characters is the direct reverse of what one is led to expect from his 'nature.' Billy is sweet, innocent, and harmless, yet he kills. Claggart is evil, perverted, and mendacious, yet he dies a victim." (5)
To trace these reversals to their respective causes is to see how Melville is laying down further direction for following his lead and rising to the fullness of a kind of truth that contains divergent emotions not simply at once but as one. Claggart and Billy arrive at the crucial moment a reversing what is expected from their natures due, in large part, to their inability to see anything in the world except a reflection of themselves. For example, Claggart sees Billy not as an innocent with fair cheeks, but rather as an example answering to his own malice. In this way, to note Billy's "fair cheek" leads him to conclude that: "A mantrap may be under the ruddy-tipped daisies" (1400). Similarly unable to see anything but a mirror of his own reflection, for Billy Claggart's "frank air and pleasant word went for what they purported to be." "To deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature."
To rise to the fullness of Melville's truth--to contain divergent emotions not simply at once but as one--is to apprehend over time that, within the world of Billy Budd, the French Revolution, once thought to be entirely evil, functions in a larger design to bring about an ultimate good: the rights of humankind over despotic custom. I suggested earlier that over time Melville's silencing--his long neglect and death in utter obscurity--also function, as he prophesized with his pen, in a larger design to bring about an ultimate good: the final recognition of his achievement.
The sacrifice of Billy has its place in this larger design as well. Written at the end of the nineteenth-century, at the end of a life--looking back over both--Melville situates the tale at the end of the previous century, and has in mind a reader of the next century. But is this enough to guide us to understand why, at the age of sixty-six, having just resigned his post of nineteen years at the New York Customs House, Melville decided, perhaps needed to take on a serious literary venture in prose and begin writing Billy Budd? And this despite the unmistakable fact that he had no audience? He must have known that death approached, and that most likely this last piece of writing would go unread. Dead and unread, until of course, that most likely this last piece of writing would go unread. Dead and unread, until of course, we apprehend, long after Melville did, that there is a larger design, a design that prefigured his going down to those "born in the moment immediately ensuing upon [his] giving up the ghost." To look at this design, as it is laid out in Melville's life and dramatized in Billy Budd, is to understand that this ultimate good can come about only through suffering and tragic action; the central theme running through Melville's life and through much of his work, especially Billy Budd, may be put as the possibility of love and forgiveness through sacrifice; but there are no short cuts, no easy solutions. Truly, if there is to be love, it is true that it must come second, emerging only after war, after struggle. The war may rage through half a life, and in death for half a life-time, as it did for Melville, but as he understood, this is the ineluctable course of healing.
His last words to the world confirm this. In the closing scenes of Billy Budd Melville turns to the imagined spectacle of two men meeting the inevitable with generosity and strength. The Vere who had argued for coolness in the trial scene is humanized by sorrow and bent by the weight of a judgment made with full awareness of tragic sacrifice. Billy's role is even greater still; Billy is to forgive. A radical idea, so blankly simple, yet so transcendent. It is an idea that we can meet if we respond, as Melville says, to "the rarer qualities of our nature--so rare indeed as to be all but incredible to average minds" (1418). In Billy's "God bless Captain Vere" we hear the fullness of a truth that is able to affirm life in an otherwise blank death. For a moment, with these words, the injustices of the human world and the silences of the divine seem suspended in a mood of hushed contemplation, as if Melville were marveling at what victimized human beings were capable of achieving and forgiving. Melville was now truly finished with the world; the Egyptian seeds of his mysterious and profound works of art will, over time, grow to greenness, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
NOTES
1. Robert Milder, "Introduction" to Critical Essays on Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989) 1.
2. Robert Milder, "Herman Melville" from Columbia Literary History of the United States, editor, Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 446.
3. Joseph Schiffman, "Melville's Final State, Irony: A Re-examination of Billy Budd Criticism," American Literature 22 (1950): 129.
4. All quotes from Billy Budd taken from The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 3, The Library of America, (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984) 1431.
5. Barbara Johnson, "Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd," Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979): 567-599.