Mid-Twentieth Century
Mid-Twentieth Century
Herman Melville.
Billy Budd.
Introduction by William Plomer.
London: John Lehman, 1946.
The first separately published edition of the novella. The dust jacket designed by Keith Vaughn presents the text of the “Billy in the Darbies” poem on the back. Plomer, the British-South African novelist and editor, describes the “finished” text as “the same as that of the Constable edition, but for a few small emendations, some of them Weaver’s and some mine.” The introduction concludes that “Billy Budd is true to the great heart of Melville: as his ‘last word,’ so carefully wrought, it stands like a monument.”
Melville’s Billy Budd. The Complete Text of the Novel and of the Unpublished Short Story.
Edited by F. Barron Freeman.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948.
Based on Freeman’s 1942 Harvard thesis, this second scholarly transcription of the Billy Budd manuscript leaves includes what Freeman deems a previously “undiscovered” variant of a short story, “Baby Budd,” “embedded in the manuscripts of the novel,” and culled from “cut, pinned or pasted pages.” Harvard discontinued sales and published the 1953 pamphlet Corrigenda documenting over 500 mistakes.
The rather quaint engraving which appears on the dust jacket and title page is from Melville’s collection of prints. Freeman notes that “the original bears no name, date or other clue to identity ... it depicts a young officer rather than a seaman.”
W. H. Auden.
The Enchafed Flood or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea.
London: Faber & Faber, 1951.
Auden had published his poem “Herman Melville” in 1939, presented elsewhere in the exhibition. These essays were given as lectures in 1949 at the University of Virginia. Auden presents the Claggart-Billy opposition not as “strength/weakness, but innocence/guilt-consciousness.” Claggart, the Devil to Billy’s Adam, must either corrupt innocence or annihilate it.
Jay Leyda.
The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville 1819-1891, Volume 2.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951.
The experimental plan of the Log was to assemble chronologically all available documentable facts related to Melville’s life and writings and put them together in such juxtaposition as to present the subject’s life as lived, thereby providing material for future biographers and critics. It remains a significant contribution to Melville studies.
Herman Melville Selected Tales & Poems.
Edited by Richard Chase.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950.
Billy Budd and Other Stories by Herman Melville.
Edited by Rex Warner. Chiltern Library Edition.
London: John Lehman, 1951.
Mid-twentieth-century interest in Billy Budd and Melville’s other short fiction and poetry continued to grow on both sides of the Atlantic, evidenced by these affordable editions. Richard Chase of Columbia University used the Harvard Freeman text and argued that the novella should be read with the “small body of great tragic literature,” such as Sophocles’ Antigone. Publisher John Lehman in The Chiltern Library edition reverted to its 1946 Plomer text. The editor contended the reader of Moby-Dick would find “the same mystical profundity, energy and eagerness,” as well as “economy and precision.”
Floyd Stovall, ed.
Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism.
New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1956.
Intended primarily for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in American literature, this survey covers Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Henry James—and Melville in the chapter by Stanley Williams, who directed doctoral dissertations for a generation of Melville scholars at Yale. Williams began with the caveat: “No complete bibliography of Melville can come into being until after the subsidence of the present wave of biographical and critical writing.” What followed was an essential rendering to date of bibliography and manuscript, scholarly editions, reprints, selections, letters, journals, biographies, criticism, introductions to trade editions, book chapters, and articles.
Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, eds.
The American Tradition in Literature Revised.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1961.
By the late 1950s, Billy Budd had become a standard assignment for college literature courses in the United States. This widely used textbook was the first anthology to include the Harvard University Press corrected Freeman text, presented in the foreword by the editors as a “testament of reconciliation.”
My heavily underlined copy is an example of one 19-year-old joining Herman Melville in his unfinished search for meaning in a world of innocence and authority.
Herman Melville.
Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), Reading Text and Genetic Text.
Edited from the manuscript with introduction and notes by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.
The third scholarly transcription of the Billy Budd manuscript offered a broadened analysis and a new title. Weaver and F. Barron Freeman had taken the title Billy Budd Foretopman from a rejected title page. Instead, Hayford and Sealts used an expanded title and subtitle they found inscribed in the top margin of the first manuscript leaf. In the preface, the editors declare that the manuscript leaves had not been exhaustively studied and that no authoritative text of the “semi-final draft” left at Melville’s death had been established. The “Genetic Text,” the editors assert, is an “exact transcription” of the words (if not the placement) on each leaf, with symbols indicating Melville’s deletions and insertions. A note explains the genesis and development of the story through eight successive stages over five years. The “Reading Text,” an edited version of the Genetic Text, in the editors’ judgment most closely approximates “Melville’s final intention had a fair copy been made without further expansion or revision.”
In the same year, the University of Chicago Press also published the Hayford-Sealts reading text as a Phoenix paperback, with distinctive cover art, but without their groundbreaking genetic transcription.