Melville’s Billy Budd at 100
September 12 – November 9, 2024
Second Floor Gallery
Melville, at his death in New York City in 1891, left on his desk various poetry and prose manuscripts and other material, including the manuscript leaves—“extensively revised, difficult to decipher, and sometimes internally inconsistent”—of what we now know as Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). It is the tale of a young “Handsome Sailor,” impressed into the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth century, falsely accused of mutiny, and hanged after an onboard drumhead trial, conducted by Captain Vere, for striking and killing his accuser, Master-at-Arms John Claggart. Through the story and its concluding poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” we join the author and his (sometimes omniscient and often seemingly detached) narrator, many decades after the events of the novella, in the “inside” search for what Robert Penn Warren refers to as the “truth hidden in Time.” Each reader, Melville asserts in the text, “must determine ... by such light as the narrative may afford … the inner life of one particular ship and the career of an individual sailor, ... despite the obscuring smoke.”
After Melville’s death, his wife Elizabeth Shaw Melville, who often had assisted in proofing and fair copying his writings, carefully preserved his unfinished manuscripts until her death in 1906, leaving them in the care of her granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf. At a Columbia University faculty gathering in 1919, Carl Van Doren asked his younger colleague Raymond Weaver to write an essay for The Nation commemorating Melville, and Weaver immediately recognized the need for a biography. When Weaver visited Melville Metcalf seeking family information, she granted him access to Melville’s papers. Among the trove of manuscripts and notes were the manuscript leaves of the unfinished Billy Budd.
There are no known external comments by Melville on his composition, its process, or his publication intentions, if any, for Billy Budd. In 1889, however, during the stages of work on the manuscript and various poems, he wrote to an admirer that what little “vigor” he had left, “I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete and which indeed may never be completed.” Additionally, an appended manuscript leaf may be taken as a coda: “Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this [one undeciphered word] world of ours—Innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute.”
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Herman Melville tells us “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”* This maxim describes my book collecting, ranging from targeted prizes to opportunistically welcome surprises. In recent decades, the works of Melville and Robert Penn Warren have been my primary focus, with emphasis on their poetry. An early Warren poem sequence was my Grolier Club “New Members Collect” presentation in 2017. I now offer a personal bibliographic journey with Billy Budd, begun in the 1960s and expected to extend uncompleted well beyond 2024. The tragic novella and its concluding poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” provide the reader no consolation of a single explanation, demanding that our individual searches continue.
My two-fold impulses prompting this centennial exhibition—and its companion catalogue, broadside with the art of Barry Moser, and symposium—are, firstly, to present the various editions and other materials in a manner that reflects the depth and breadth of the approaches to the novella and their cross-fertilization and, secondly, to encourage unmediated close readings of Herman Melville’s unfinished masterpiece.
W.P.J., August 2024
*Moby-Dick. Chapter 82, “The Honour and Glory of Whaling”
"Billy in the Darbies," graphite drawing by Barry Moser.
Melville’s Billy Budd at 100 |
Melville’s Billy Budd at 100 |
