From the Desk of Herman Melville

Alexander Slidell Mackenzie.
Case of the Somers’ Mutiny—Defense Before the Court Martial held at the Navy Yard, Brooklyn.
New York: Tribune Office, 1843.

Melville had a direct family connection to executions at sea aboard a warship. In 1842, a young midshipman and two of the crew were hanged for the crime of mutiny on an American naval brig. Melville’s cousin, Guert Gansevoort, the ship’s executive officer, presided over the drumhead court, and, in the ensuing court martial of his commanding officer, Mackenzie, Gansevoort was implicated in what many considered a miscarriage of justice. He was said to have brooded over the affair throughout his life, and it was a concern of the Melville-Gansevoort clan. This is an undoubted source for the story Billy Budd.

In his defense before the court martial, the commander Mackenzie makes the Vere-like statement: “Discipline is the first and second and third virtue in the naval code.”

George Gardner Rockwood.
Digital reproduction of his photograph of Herman Melville at Rockwood’s studio in New York City in October 1885.

Melville, age 66 and in failing health, retired from the customs service, after 19 years, on December 31, 1885. An original print of the photograph is in the Yale University Library.

Herman Melville.
John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces.
New York: The De Vinne Press, 1888.
Edition of 25. Of 19 known remaining copies, only one in private hands.

Melville selected De Vinne Press, one of the most prominent printers in New York, for this anonymous work, now considered a great Melville rarity. Theodore Low De Vinne, the owner, was a founding member of The Grolier Club. We Grolierites seem to coalesce around Melville.

John Marr is a collection of sailor monologues in verse, some with prose headnotes, and “Billy in the Darbies” initially may have been intended for inclusion. The final verse in this collection perhaps speaks to the mood of resignation and reconciliation in Billy Budd:

          “Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman sea—”

Herman Melville.
ALS to W. Clark Russell.
New York, February 9, 1890.

In 1888, Melville dedicated John Marr to W. Clark Russell, an American-born English writer best known for his nautical works.  The two never met, but corresponded for many years, with high mutual regard. Melville's unusual dedication, in the form of an "Inscription Epistolary to W. C. R.," commended Russell for thoroughly knowing "... the sea , and the blue water of it; the sailor and the heart of him; the ship too, and [its] sailing and handling; ... to this he adds invention in broader humane quality." Melville closes by "wishing from my heart the most precious things I know in this world – Health and Content."

In 1889, Russell reciprocated, dedicating his An Ocean Tragedy "To Herman Melville ... a further public avowal of my hearty admiration of your genius." In this 1890 letter, Melville expressed heartfelt appreciation: "... Nothing in the way of mere literary commendation ever gave me a tithe of the pleasure. And how highly do I estimate that kindly magnanimity which led you, in one point at least, so much to overrate me.  God bless you,  Herman Melville.”

Herman Melville.
Timoleon Etc.
New York: The Caxton Press, 1891.
Edition of 25. Of 19 known copies, one of two in private hands.
With Melville’s signature affixed to title page.

The title poem of Melville’s last published work plays upon Plutarch’s Life of Timoleon in 238 lines of self-reflective meditation on life and aging. Other poems in this collection recall Melville’s travels to Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific. Poetry became the driving force in his final years, and he planned additional volumes of verse: revising poems, drawing title pages, making tentative selections, and redrawing tables of contents. Melville died September 28, 1891, leaving many poems, prose pieces, and the unfinished manuscript leaves of Billy Budd on his desk. These materials were carefully preserved by his widow, Elizabeth Shaw Melville.

Dennis Marnon, editor.
Billy in the Darbies—A Facsimile from the Manuscript of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Houghton Library, 1991.

In 1991, the centenary of Melville’s death, the Houghton Library published this facsimile, describing it as a “striking visual record of how Melville worked—revising, expanding, rethinking, and changing at the late stages and in fundamental ways a story that engaged him on and off the last five years of his life.” For example, in a poetic monologue now titled “Billy in the Darbies,” Melville originally conceived of Billy as an older, guilty mutineer, but later revised and expanded its prose headnote into the novella of a hanged young sailor that ends with the poem. Textual scholar and fellow Grolierite G. Thomas Tanselle deemed the manuscript “a semi-final draft, not a final fair copy ready for publication.” Readers should approach and appreciate it as such.

Reproduced in actual size by photo-offset, this facsimile shows the last lines of the poem “Billy in the Darbies,” followed by a pencil notation: “End of Book/ April 19th 1891,” five months before Melville’s death.