The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Herman Melville · a prose narrative with a closing ballad · about thirty thousand words · left in manuscript at Melville’s death in 1891, first published in 1924 · scored on the reading text of Hayford and Sealts (1962), read in Weaver’s text of 1924, the only one in hand
Mode
Historical tale as inside narrative; sea story, moral essay, trial and passion in one telling
Mythos
The Fall, with Adam before it, the serpent and an angel’s blow; Abraham and Isaac; an execution at dawn under the Lamb, and a relic of the Cross
Phase
The summer of 1797, from an impressment on the Narrow Seas to a hanging at dawn, with three sequels
Presentation
Fiction; a dedication, a narrative in short chapters with an inset digression, three sequels and a closing ballad of thirty-two lines
Register
From a gun-deck comedy of soup and nicknames to the moral essay, the speech before a court and a sailor’s ballad; a narrator who hedges, digresses and declines to judge
Scale
One ship, three men, one blow, a nation at war
Governing Proposition
A foundling sailor, impressed from a merchantman named for Paine’s book, is falsely accused of mutiny by the master-at-arms of a man-of-war; unable to speak, he strikes his accuser dead, and the captain, who believes him, has him tried by a drumhead court and hanged at dawn. The wager of the narrative is that a state at war will kill the innocent through its forms, knowing what it does, and that only the forms the people make for themselves, a relic and a ballad, keep the truth the official record inverts.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The narrative does not open on its hero. It opens on a type, the Handsome Sailor of the days before steam, and on one instance the narrator remembers from half a century before: a black sailor under the dock wall at Liverpool, “of the unadulterate blood of Ham”, walking at the centre of his shipmates while the street stops to look. Such a man is the champion ashore and the spokesman afloat, and in a gale he rides the yardarm-end, “tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against the thunderous sky”. Only then comes Billy Budd, twenty-one, taken by the press from a homeward-bound merchantman whose owner had named her for Paine’s book. As the boat pulls away he stands up, waves his hat to his old shipmates and salutes the ship: “And goodbye to you too, old Rights-of-Man!” The lieutenant hears satire. There is none in him; he has no double meaning to give.
At the muster the officer asks his place of birth. “Please, sir, I don’t know.” Then his father: “God knows, sir.” He was found as an infant in a basket hung on the knocker of a good man’s door in Bristol. He cannot read; he can sing. The narrator sets him before the Fall in so many words, an upright barbarian such as Adam might have been before the serpent came into his company. And he gives him one flaw. Under sudden strong feeling the musical voice catches and stutters, and the narrator names the author of the defect: “the envious marplot of Eden”, who slips his card into every human consignment to the earth. The avowal is made at once, the narrator says, so that no one will take the story for a romance.
Melville worked on it from about 1886 until his death on 28 September 1891, a retired inspector of customs writing for no public, thirty years after his last published novel, and he left it in manuscript, dedicated to Jack Chase, captain of the main-top of the frigate United States in 1843. The proportions are unusual. The first third is portrait and essay, the middle third prepares, and the last third holds everything that happens: the spilled soup comes a third of the way in, the blow at sixty-three per cent, the hanging at ninety, and the ballad in the last hundredth. A sixth of the whole is the narrator’s essay. As the action comes the sentences shorten, from forty-three and a half words on average in the chapter on Nelson to twenty and a half in the chapter of the blow.
Movement II
The year is 1797, the summer after the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, when the fleet that was England’s right arm had run up the red flag. The narrator weighs that alarm in one comparison, “the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade would be to London threatened by general arson”, and then turns aside to Nelson, warning the reader that the digression will be a “literary sin”. He introduces the captain, Edward Fairfax Vere: a bachelor of about forty, brave, bookish, grave in manner and dry in company, called Starry Vere after a line of Marvell that a kinsman quoted at him. His settled convictions stand against the new opinions from France, not because they threaten his class but because he thinks them at war with the peace of mankind.
Then the master-at-arms, John Claggart, a chief of police on the gun-decks, pale among sunburnt men, with a past nobody knows. One noon the ship lurches and Billy spills his soup across the scrubbed deck just as Claggart passes. Claggart taps him from behind with his rattan and says, in a low musical voice, “Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it, too!” The mess laughs because a superior has made a joke, and Billy laughs with them. He has already been warned. An old Dane, a Nelson man with a scar like a streak of dawn across his face, has told him, and will tell him again: “Jemmy Legs is down on you.” Billy cannot believe it. The master-at-arms always has a pleasant word for him.
Why should the master-at-arms be down on him? The narrator refuses to invent a history between the two men; there was none. To reach Claggart from a normal nature, “this is best done by indirection”, and the indirection is an old scholar’s talk of a man not to be cracked by a lady’s fan, and then a definition from Plato: “a depravity according to nature”, a madness that uses reason as its instrument and hides its aim. The next chapter stands under a line of Milton, “Pale ire, envy and despair.” Claggart envies an innocence that hardly anyone else on board can measure as he does, and despairs of sharing it. At times his look follows the sailor with something like tears in it, a “soft yearning”, as if he could have loved him but for fate; then the face shrivels like a walnut.
Movement III
On a warm night Billy is woken on deck by a whisper and called to the lee fore-chains, a platform hung outside the bulwarks over the sea. A man of the afterguard tells him that they were both impressed, that there is a gang of them, and holds up two coins that glint in the dark. Billy’s voice fails him as it always does under feeling: “D-D-Damme”, he begins, and stammers a threat to throw the man over the rail. The man is gone. Billy will not report him, from a sailor’s horror of the telltale, and he tells the old Dane only part of it. The Dane hears enough. It is the same answer as before, with one word added: the stranger is a cat’s-paw.
After a fruitless chase of a French frigate, Claggart comes to the mainmast, cap in hand, and asks to speak with the captain. He speaks of disaffection among the impressed men, in a voice “silvery and low”, and Vere, who distrusts the man before he has finished, orders him to name the danger. “William Budd, a foretopman, your honour.” Vere cannot believe it of the sailor he had thought of promoting, the Handsome Sailor who had seemed to him, at first sight, a statue of young Adam before the Fall. He warns the accuser that a yardarm waits for the false witness, and resolves to test him quietly, in private. He sends for Billy to come to the cabin.
There Claggart repeats the charge to Billy’s face. His eyes change colour as he speaks, and his last look is the hungry lurch of the “torpedo-fish”. Billy cannot answer. Vere lays a hand on his shoulder and tells him to take his time, and the kindness makes it worse: the face struggling to speak is “as a crucifixion to behold”. Then, “quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night”, his arm shoots out, and Claggart falls dead. Vere covers his face, and when he uncovers it the father in him is gone and the disciplinarian has taken his place. To the surgeon he cries, “Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!” The surgeon goes out wondering whether the captain is unhinged, and the narrator will not settle it: “one must determine for himself by such light as this narrative may afford”.
Movement IV
Vere calls a drumhead court of three of his officers, in the cabin where the body lies behind one door and the prisoner behind another, and appears before it as the only witness. The narrator states the case exactly: in the light of the code by which it was to be judged, “innocence and guilt, personified in Claggart and Budd, in effect changed places.” Asked whether the captain’s account is true, Billy answers that it is, and that the master-at-arms lied: “I have eaten the King’s bread, and I am true to the King.” Of the blow he says, “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him.” Asked whether he knows of any trouble brewing in the ship, he thinks of the man in the fore-chains and says no.
The officer of marines asks the question no one can answer: why should Claggart have lied? Vere stands. It is “a mystery of iniquity”, he says, a matter for theologians, and in any case inquiry is cut off by the dead man’s “lasting tongue-tie”; the court has only the deed. Then he argues his officers out of their scruples. Their hearts are moved, and so is his. “But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King.” Before a more merciful court the plea that Billy meant neither mutiny nor murder would weigh. “At the Last Assizes it shall acquit.” But the Mutiny Act is the child of war and takes after its father, and a crew that remembers the Nore would read mercy as fear. The narrator sets beside the case, without comment, the hangings on the American brig Somers in 1842. The sentence is death at the yardarm, at dawn.
Vere tells Billy the sentence himself, alone. What passed between them was never known, and the narrator ventures only a conjecture: that the captain told him everything, and that he “may in the end have caught Billy to his heart, even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac” on the brink of the sacrifice. The scene itself is withheld: there is “privacy at the time, inviolable to the survivor”. The senior lieutenant, the first to meet Vere coming out, sees in his face the agony of the strong, and the narrative suggests that the condemned man suffered less than the man who condemned him. Vere tells the assembled crew what has happened, without the word mutiny, and the murmur that rises is cut off by the boatswain’s whistles.
Movement V
Billy lies in irons between two guns on the upper gun-deck, among cannon and carriages painted black, his white clothes glimmering “like a patch of discoloured snow in early April lingering at some upland cave’s black mouth”. He sleeps like a child. The chaplain comes, finds him at peace and withdraws, and returns in the small hours to speak of death and salvation, and the sailor listens out of courtesy: “It was like a gift placed in the palm of an outstretched hand upon which the fingers do not close.” The chaplain kisses him on the cheek and goes, judging that innocence is a better thing than religion to go to judgment with. The narrator draws the conclusion the chaplain cannot act on: he is “the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War”.
At dawn all hands are called to witness punishment. Billy’s last words come wholly unobstructed, “God bless Captain Vere!”, and the crew echo them with one voice, while Vere stands rigid as a musket in the rack. The low cloud in the east is shot through with light like “the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision”, and “Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.” At the yard-end the body does not move. Days later the purser calls it willpower and the surgeon will have none of it: “Euthanasia, Mr. Purser, is something like your willpower”. A murmur rises from the crew and is piped down; at the burial the sea-fowl circle the place “with the moving shadow of their outstretched wings and the croaked requiem of their cries”; the drum beats to quarters early and the men go to their guns. Vere’s maxim stands over the morning: “forms, measured forms, are everything”.
The story ends with his life, the narrator says, but truth told without compromise “will always have its ragged edges”, and “Three brief chapters will suffice.” In the first, Vere is shot in an action with a French ship and dies ashore, murmuring the sailor’s name. In the second, a naval chronicle reports that the master-at-arms, a respectable patriot, was “vindictively stabbed to the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath-knife of Budd”, an alien under an English name. In the third, the sailors follow the spar from which he hung, from ship to dockyard, and “a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross.” A foretopman of his watch makes verses that are printed “rudely” at Portsmouth, “Billy in the Darbies”, the condemned man speaking in his irons the night before. The last line of the work is the sailor’s: “I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist.”
Act III · The Twelve
Most of the whole resists the subtractive test. The stutter is planted early, the work of “the envious marplot of Eden” (ch. II); it returns in the fore-chains as “D-D-Damme” (ch. XII), and in the cabin it is the blow itself: “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him.” (ch. XVIII). The soup, the Dansker’s warning and the afterguardsman’s guineas are each required, and so are the sequels, “Three brief chapters will suffice.” (ch. XXIV), which carry the verdict of record and memory. What does not resist is part of the essay: most of the Nelson chapter, by the narrator’s own account a “literary sin” (ch. IV); the sailors as “a juvenile race” (ch. XIV); the Somers paragraph; Vere introduced a second time, “to fill out that sketch” (ch. VI). Perhaps a twentieth could go; from the soup to the burial there is no slack.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a state at war will kill the innocent through its forms, knowing what it does. Under its code, “innocence and guilt, personified in Claggart and Budd, in effect changed places” (ch. XVIII). Vere names the mechanism, “But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King.”, and its limit: “At the Last Assizes it shall acquit.” Beside it stand evil without motive, “a depravity according to nature” (ch. X), and a church that serves the guns (ch. XXI). The dilemma is left whole, and law schools have argued it for half a century. Held off the top because innocence and depravity are drawn so purely that the case nears a thought experiment, and Claggart is defined more than shown.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The height comes at the summit of the action: the blow, “quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night” (ch. XVII); Vere’s “Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!”; the sailor in irons “like a patch of discoloured snow in early April lingering at some upland cave’s black mouth” (ch. XX); “Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.” (ch. XXII); the sea-fowl over the burial, with “the croaked requiem of their cries” (ch. XXIII); the ballad’s last line. The opening lifts too, the Handsome Sailor “tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against the thunderous sky” (ch. I). Held below the top on frequency: the first third stays at the level of portrait and argument, and the heights crowd into the last.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, not merely evoked. Billy is Adam before the Fall, a foundling who answers the question of his father, “God knows, sir.” (ch. II). Claggart is the serpent, his chapter set under Milton’s “Pale ire, envy and despair.” (ch. XI). Vere is Abraham, who “may in the end have caught Billy to his heart, even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac” (ch. XIX). The action enacts the pattern: an accusation, an angel’s blow, a trial, an execution at dawn under “the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision” (ch. XXII), and a relic: “a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross.” (ch. XXVI). The particular holds: 1797, the Nore, the Articles of War, a surgeon arguing about spasm. Held a step down because the narrator names the myth as often as he builds it, and Billy is thinner than the figure he carries.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the nautical romance of Marryat and Cooper, Melville’s own White-Jacket, the ballad and the historical tale. The turn is a story that refuses the romance’s settlement and says so: “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges” (ch. XXIV). Its narrator will not decide whether the captain is sane (ch. XVII), gives the last scene between captain and condemned man only as conjecture (ch. XIX), and ends three times. White-Jacket argued against the lash; this book seats the reader on the court and gives no verdict. The stake was real but private: a retired customs inspector writing for no public, thirty years after his last published novel. Held near the bar because the instruments are inherited, the essaying narrator, the digression and the ballad, and because the greater break in Melville’s own field was Moby-Dick.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The form stages speech failing: the stutter; an accusation made in a voice “silvery and low” (ch. XVI); a court where the dead man’s “lasting tongue-tie” cuts off inquiry (ch. XVIII). The three endings are the instrument of the knowledge. Told straight to the hanging, the story is a martyrdom. With the naval chronicle, where the master-at-arms is “vindictively stabbed to the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath-knife of Budd” (ch. XXV), and the ballad after it, the work knows that the official record inverts the truth and that the people keep it in a song printed “rudely” at Portsmouth. The withheld interview is formal knowledge too (ch. XIX). Held off the top because the essay chapters are containers more than instruments, and the draft’s joins show in the order of the opening.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over a century. E. L. Grant Watson’s “Melville’s Testament of Acceptance” (1933) and F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) were answered by ironic readings, Phil Withim’s “Testament of Resistance” (1959) among them; Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), Barbara Johnson’s “Melville’s Fist” (1979), Richard Weisberg’s The Failure of the Word (1984) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) each found the work answering its question. Its own questions are still argued: whether Vere is right or the surgeon’s doubtful man; whether “God bless Captain Vere!” is forgiveness or discipline’s last work; what passed in the closeted interview; what Claggart’s “soft yearning” is (ch. XV). Some of the openness comes from the unsettled manuscript, and it counts, being Melville’s. Held a step below the top because part of the argument has been about the text rather than through it.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is American fiction, and with it the fiction of law and judgment. The force is a reorganisation of what a short narrative could argue: the trial as moral philosophy, positive law set against natural justice, and neither allowed to win. The reach was delayed thirty-three years by its maker’s death, and delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Benjamin Britten’s opera (Covent Garden, 1951, libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier); a Broadway play by Coxe and Chapman (1951); Peter Ustinov’s film (1962); Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999); and a central place in the study of law and literature, from Robert Cover’s Justice Accused (1975) on. Held near the bar because its pressure on later fiction, as distinct from opera, film and jurisprudence, is less documented.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed on form first, with no discount for age. The form is wholly legible: nothing that carried meaning is lost, and the manuscript survives. Presence is the charge: unseen for thirty-three years, from Melville’s death to 1924, then continuously in print, taught and anthologised for a century, and kept in view by an opera in the international repertoire. It has outlived impressment, the Mutiny Act and the Nore, and is read for what they pressed upon. For thirty-eight years it was read in Weaver’s text, under another title, with the wrong name for the ship, a leaf Melville had set aside printed as a preface, and words misread; since 1962 the text has been sound. Britten’s opera keeps Weaver’s name for the ship, so the restoration has not reached all the work became. Held below the top for the absence and the long corruption.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on Melville’s English as the reading text establishes it; Weaver’s misreadings are not charged. The construction is exact: the stutter planted in the second chapter pays off in the cabin, and “Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it, too!” (ch. IX) carries Claggart’s motive in a proverb. The surgeon punctures the ascension: “Euthanasia, Mr. Purser, is something like your willpower” (ch. XXII). The late prose can reach a perfect image: “It was like a gift placed in the palm of an outstretched hand upon which the fingers do not close.” (ch. XXI). Charged: the unrevised surface of a draft left at death. Sentences open on “But” in long runs, more than seventy run past sixty words, the hedging (“it may be”, “perhaps”, “not improbably”) becomes a tic, and sermon sometimes stands where scene would serve.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs the whole: the forms of the state, set against Nature. Vere states it, “forms, measured forms, are everything” (ch. XXIII). The two most distant elements obey it: the Handsome Sailor at Liverpool in the opening chapter and the ballad at the close are both the people’s own forms of homage, set against the official ones, the chronicle, the drumhead and the drum that beats to quarters to dissolve a murmur. The range is wide: gun-deck comedy, a metaphysics of depravity, a trial and a sacrament. Charged for the maker’s seams: Vere’s kinsman is “Lord Denton” (ch. V) and later “his cousin Jack Denton” (ch. XVIII); the surgeon’s doubt of Vere’s sanity is raised and never answered; the narrator’s sympathy for Vere sits uncertainly with the irony around him. These are a draft’s undecided points, not a law broken.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Many orders are held in one ship and one summer. The state and its law: the Articles of War, the Mutiny Act, the drumhead. History: the Revolution, Spithead and the Nore, Nelson and Trafalgar, all arriving through one deck; “the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade would be to London threatened by general arson” (ch. III). The sacred: the Fall, Abraham, the Crucifixion, the chaplain. Labour: the tops, the gun-decks, the watches. The natural order: the sea, the fowl, Nature against the King. Consciousness: Claggart’s envy and Vere’s agony, held at a distance. The family as absence: a foundling, a bachelor captain. They are integrated, the ship a world with its state, church and people. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the band a short form allows: no women but a name in the ballad, no land, no ordinary life, and a canvas that is a single case.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.3, then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 9.2. A century of schools each finding the narrative answering its question, with its own questions about Vere, the benediction and the closeted interview still argued; a disclosure, which holds, that a state at war will kill the innocent through its forms, knowing what it does; and a myth of the Fall, the sacrifice and the Cross built into the action while the year, the law and the ship stay exact.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3: the state, history, the sacred, labour and the natural order are held in one ship, but there are no women but a name in the ballad, no land and no ordinary life, and the canvas is a single case, as a short form allows. Next above it, The Inevitable, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6: an essay sixth of which perhaps a twentieth of the whole could go, a turn made with inherited instruments and a private stake, and a reach delayed thirty-three years and carried more by opera, film and jurisprudence than by later fiction.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.9.
Basis · Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), which he worked on from about 1886 until his death on 28 September 1891 and left in manuscript. It is scored as one work as he left it, the dedication to Jack Chase, the narrative, the digression, the three sequels and the closing ballad, “Billy in the Darbies”, with every layer of his revision part of it. The text judged is the reading text established from the manuscript by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (University of Chicago Press, 1962), the standard modern text. It is in copyright and was not in hand. The text read is Raymond Weaver’s, first published by Constable in 1924 under the title Billy Budd, Foretopman and revised in 1928, in the Standard Ebooks transcription (2020); F. Barron Freeman’s text (Harvard, 1948) is a further witness. Weaver’s and Freeman’s texts are treated as evidence of the manuscript and of how the work came down, not as the work: their titles, divisions, names and misreadings bear on its survival alone and are charged nowhere else. What Melville left unresolved, among it the two names for Vere’s kinsman and the surgeon’s doubt that is never answered, is his, and is charged where it falls. Measurements were taken by script on Weaver’s text and are given here as proportions and rounded figures. Quotations are from Weaver’s text, checked against the file character for character, and only words that stand in the reading text as well are quoted: nothing on this page is quoted from Weaver’s “Preface”, from his name for the ship or from his readings where the reading text differs. Citations are by chapter in Weaver’s text, I to XXVI, with the digression inside XXII; the reading text divides the work differently. Facts that could not be verified, among them how the manuscript came to Weaver, where it is kept, the stages of its composition and the reading text’s own readings where they differ from Weaver’s, are not given.