BILLY Budd, Foretopman, Herman Melville’s mysterious, lyrical tragedy, is a contemplation of the unaccountable extremes of human character—of goodness appearing as naturally as a sunrise, and of evil inhabiting a human soul also naturally, we might say, or at least without necessity or even clear advantage. Into this curious and immensely affecting reflection on the human condition, Melville has imagined details of great and challenging singularity. He also, as a storyteller, has provided a miraculous plot that will tie the characters together on the level of action, without which the tale would be a philosophical daydream, an assertion rather than a drama. Billy Budd, a young sailor of remarkable beauty, good nature, and loyalty, is accused by the master-at-arms, a sort of naval MP, of intention to mutiny. The sailor, who under stress suffers from a stutter or speech pause, is unable to express his innocence and outrage and strikes out at the accuser, killing him by a blow. According to maritime law, he must be hanged and his body consigned to the sea.
Ah, but who is Billy Budd? He is a curiosity indeed, almost defying credible description. He is the Handsome Sailor, he is Apollo with a portmanteau, he is Baby Budd, Beauty—all of these things as he comes swinging onto the English ship Indomitable, wearing a silk handkerchief, a Scotch tam with a tartan band, aged twenty-one, an able-bodied seaman, fit to climb the great sails, as if ready to fly. Billy is also from the first a creature of inborn moral sweetness. He is free and innocent, a beautiful changeling from nowhere. In fact he is an orphan, an illiterate, reminding one of a freshly hatched, brilliantly colored bird. His only flaw is the one mentioned, the Englishman’s stutter or pause when under stress. For the rest, he brings a glow of peace and physical perfection by his presence.
Melville gives evidence of a compositional strain to bring credibility to his extraordinary youth, to the extremity of his perfection accompanied by the purest naturalness. The pictorial Billy: “a lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face, all but feminine in purity of natural complexion.” And again: “Cast in the mould peculiar to the finest physical examples of those Englishmen on whom the Saxon strain would seem not at all to partake of any Norman or other admixture, he showed in his face that humane look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to the heroic strong man, Hercules.”
John Claggart, the master-at-arms, is a mirror opposite to Billy Budd. His unaccountable but concentrated hostility to the universally loved Billy is again a conundrum, an exceptional circumstance. Claggart exhibits the strange and troubling “motiveless malignity” that Coleridge in a sort of psychological resignation falls back on as the explanation for Shakespeare’s Iago. Like Billy, Claggart has no known past, no baggage of previous circumstance traveling with him. He has entered the navy at thirty-five, causing his shipmates to imagine some cloud of disrepute driving him. Once aboard, Claggart reveals a calculated adaptability that serves him well. “His constitutional sobriety, his ingratiating deference to superiors, together with a particular ferreting genius . . . capped by a certain austere patriotism, abruptly advanced him to the position of master-at-arms.” His nature, the appalling traps he sets for Billy by the use of weak and corrupted conspirators, his sniveling denunciation of the young sailor to Captain Vere—none of this can be seen as useful to Claggart, since he has nothing to fear from Billy and nothing to gain from his destruction. In the end, Melville will need, in the absence of plausible causality, to rely upon assertion as the source of Claggart’s deformation. The master-at-arms’ character is said to be “not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books, or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short, ‘a depravity according to nature.’ ”
The third character, Captain Vere, sometimes called Starry Vere, is a rare being, but not one of as extreme definition as are the other two principals. Vere is fair-minded, bookish, decent, thoughtful, reserved. In the end he is bound by marine law, the letter and the precedent of it, to allow Billy’s execution, even though the circumstances violate his sense of justice. Billy, in striking Claggart, his superior officer, has fallen into the rigorous jurisdiction of the law of the sea. That the blow should have killed Claggart is a circumstance beyond reprieve.
The Britten opera opens with a brief flash-forward of Vere as an old man lamenting with sorrow the happenings on the ship Indomitable in the year 1797, during the French Wars and “in the difficult and dangerous days after the Mutiny at the Nore.” The mutiny referred to took place at Spithead when the crew seized the ship and sent the officers ashore in protest against the brutal conditions prevailing in the British navy. The Great Mutiny, as it was called, was a threat to Britain’s sea power and also was felt to connect with the tide of revolutionary feeling spreading from France and from Napoleon’s conquests. After the prologue, the opening scene of Britten’s opera is a picture of the gross and cruel servitude practiced on British ships. The Indomitable has been called to shift from mercantile seagoing to serve as a man-o’-war in the naval battles with the French. For this purpose, men are dragged off the street or from merchant vessels and impressed into service. A novice, frightened or inexperienced, is forced on board and brutally flogged for merely slipping on the deck.
Billy Budd, not a recruit but an able-bodied seaman by choice, is sent to the Indomitable from a homeward-bound ship named Rights 0 Man, referring to Tom Paine’s famous radical work. Billy is willing to serve, and as he boards his new berth he cheerfully waves goodbye to his departing vessel, calling out, “Farewell, Rights o’Man” a harmless salutation that Claggart chooses to regard with suspicion, as if the goodbye signified a mutinous, rebellious nature.
The tragedy, the tale of dark treachery, annihilating the bright innocent, Billy Budd, takes place entirely on the ship. A ship afloat is by its very structure a profoundly resonant dramatic device. It is, first of all, a man-made intruder that sets against the elements, the winds, the storms, the calms, the uncertainty of its human and mechanical equipment. The great age of ocean explorations, centuries before the Indomitable—the age of, for instance, Columbus, now undergoing a vulgar and provincial downgrading—is scarcely imaginable to us today. Even the eighteenth-century vessel of Melville’s fiction is under sail, without power, demanding every sort of daring and perseverance. Billy Budd, manning the great topsail, is therefore a romantic vision of strength and the spirit of adventure.
A ship against the elements is one thing, but it also contains the dangerous human drama of beings brought together in a random way, strangers of no previous acquaintance, each trapped in a void, with no exit possible until the voyage is completed. A ship at sea is, then, a prison, and as in landlocked prisons there will be a hierarchy of fixed positions, men in power over others, tempting to tyranny on the part of the powerful and to baseness as the lower orders struggle to survive. Such a base one is Squeak, a ship’s corporal, a miserable creature who does Claggart’s bidding.
Billy Budd is the final representation of Melville’s genius. The manuscript was left in a trunk at the time of his death in 1891 and did not see publication until 1924. The early success of his seafaring novels had not prepared the public for the immense rhetorical and imaginative complexities of Moby-Dick, and indeed he ceased to have a public. Twenty years near the end of his life were spent as an inspector in the Customs House in New York City. Melville knew neglect and despair, and it is fitting to look at his last work of fiction as somehow a summation of the state of mind to which his experience of life had brought him. The conflict between simple, unaffected beauty and goodness and chaotic, willful destructiveness does appear to find a promising resolution that is not overwhelmed by Billy’s death. His purity seems to live on and is given a transcendent force in the description of his last moments, moments that recall Christ’s crucifixion. “At the same time it chanced that the vapoury fleece hanging low in the East, was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision; and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of dawn.”
The libretto used by Benjamin Britten for the powerful opera he created out of Melville’s story bears the name of Eric Crozier, a frequent collaborator of the composer’s, and also the name of the distinguished novelist E. M. Forster. It is difficult to find the Forster voice in the libretto, although the novelist’s attraction to this story of male beauty and innocence is easy to grant. In the original tale there is very little dialogue, and its formal dimensions are largely discursive and reflective. A libretto, with its violent condensations, its transposal of the dilatory expansiveness of prose fiction, must meet the demands of the stage and, most perplexing of all, the demands of the singing voice as the vessel of plot action, feeling, interpretation, poetry, and character. Sometimes the dialogue of the Billy Budd libretto is a bit more “matey” than would be true of Melville, even though here the setting is an English ship. Melville’s wonderful “God bless Captain Vere!” is fixed in the mind of generations of readers and the change in the libretto to “Starry Vere, God bless you!” is a bit of a jar to the student of literature. But that is a trifle.
It must be said that the Billy Budd libretto works. The story is told, the tragedy unfolds, the ship is used as a powerful visual enclosure, and the work is a triumph of musical theater in the highest sense. We may note the practical dilemma of having as a hero a baritone whose outstanding feature is a striking, dominating physical beauty. Heroines in opera are offered as beautiful, fascinating, and seductive, and to achieve this, much use is made of blond wigs and flowing, concealing garments—a transformation is at hand, often quite imperfect. But a beautiful young man is something else—a beautiful young man with a superior singing voice. That we must leave to chance.
The opera is set in two acts, and the musical and dramatic tension is unrelenting, broken only by a few rhymed sea chanteys of what might be called a mixed national character, since they pair “Genoa” and “Shenandoah,” “Nantucket” and “bucket”—that sort of thing. And there is a break from the dilemma of character when the ship suddenly has a chance to engage the French in battle. Due to a mist and an unsteady breeze, the chase is lost, but the scene is an interesting diversion in itself. It reveals the contrary nature of the sailors, surly and discontent at one moment but patriots eager to uphold the honor of the British navy at the next moment.
The ending of the opera is somber, as the voices of the crew rise in an ominous grumble of revulsion at the fate of Billy. But the angry, threatening voices die away, as they must, and we move to Vere’s final despairing epilogue. In Melville’s story, the captain is wounded in battle and dies murmuring, “Billy Budd, Billy Budd.” Still, the flash-forwards to Vere as an old man, reflecting upon the curious drama on board the Indomitable, finally seem a proper addition. Vere is the moral center of the tragedy, an Englishman of the finest stripe, his whole being illuminated by a flame of conscience and culture. In that way he is a contrast to Billy and Claggart, who are what they are, helplessly.
At one point Melville makes an interesting conjecture, saying that only Claggart and Captain Vere truly understand the challenge represented by Billy’s nature. To Claggart the amazement of the young, handsome sailor is to “be nothing more than innocent!”—just that and nothing more, an unimaginable condition to a complex and devious soul. The violent happenings on the Indomitable are part of the eternal heartbreak of human experience. Out of a difficult and profound moral dilemma, Benjamin Britten in Billy Budd created a work of great beauty and immense emotional power. A grand opera in every sense.
1993