"Too Good to Be True": Subverting Christian Hope in Billy Budd

"Too Good to Be True": Subverting Christian Hope in Billy BuddAuthor(s): Lyon Evans, Jr.Reviewed work(s):Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Sep., 1982), pp. 323-353Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/365081 .

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"Too Good to Be True": Subverting Christian

Hope in Billy Budd

LYON EVANS, JR.

I W HEN Herman Melville's large collection of theological

books was sold for scrap paper following his death, a fruitful source of research was lost to future generations of scholars.1 Yet even without these books, the evidence of his own works clearly shows that Melville was familiar with the advanced theological thought of his day and that he largely accepted its skeptical, freethinking conclusions. Thus in The Confidence-Man (1857), when the cosmopolitan refers to the Bible as "the very best of good news," a voice calls out from the darkness of the gentleman's cabin, "Too good to be true."2 Later the cosmopolitan deftly undermines the distinction between divinely inspired Scripture and the so-called Apoc- rypha, and the same voice cries out, "What's that about the Apocalypse?"

The first quotation indicates Melville's skepticism about the Bible's truth-claims; the second alludes to the belief, widespread in Melville's day, that the discreditation of the Bible's divine authority was apocalyptic for Christian faith. In Clarel (1876), Melville deals explicitly with this crisis. A young di- vinity student journeys to the Holy Land to try to regain his lost faith. Instead he finds only a spiritual wasteland that is devoid of Christian hope. Rolfe, an American who travels with

1 The "preponderance" of "theological" works in Melville's collection was reportedly regarded by book dealers as a "dead loss." See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 6.

2 The cosmopolitan is alluding to the literal meaning of the word "Gospel," which is "good news."

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Clarel, observes that "Zion like Rome is Niebuhrized"-by which he means that the Bible is no longer read as sacred but as purely secular history, like Niebuhr's history of ancient Rome. Personages in the Bible, Rolfe states, are no more real to him than the characters in the novels of Walter Scott. Mar- goth, a cold positivist, points out numerous errors of fact in Scripture and dismisses the biblical miracles as mere supersti- tion. The principal spokesmen for Christianity in the poem, including Derwent, a Broad Church Anglican who seeks to reconcile science and religion, are all discredited. Clarel is left at the end with his faith unrestored; the reader is left with the disturbing prediction that the Christian era is drawing to a close.

There is no retreat from this skepticism in Timoleon (published in 1891, the year of Melville's death). In a gesture that recalls Pierre at the Memnon Stone, the protagonist of the title poem calls on the gods to reassure him of their existence; the gods remain silent. In "The Night-March," an army marches through darkness over a boundless plain, with "no chief in view"; in "The Margrave's Birthnight," toil-worn peasants celebrate Lord Margrave's birthday, but the lord is absent and his throne is empty. In "The New Zealot to the Sun," Melville characterizes religion as a "sorcerous weed" that "energizes dream- / Transmitted, spread in myths and creeds"; in "The Age on the Antonines," he contrasts his own era, in which "faith declines," with the "halcyon Age" of the pagan Roman Empire, when men accepted the finitude of life and did not vainly yearn for a paradise beyond the grave.

These instances and more indicate that to the end of his life, Melville rejected supernatural Christianity. Like other late Victorian "honest doubters," Melville may have longed for a "home reserved for us in Heaven" (as he put it in Clarel), but he was too much of a skeptic to yield to what he regarded as mere illusion.

In view of his skepticism, so prominent in Melville's works, the meaning of his last book, the short novel Billy Budd (1891;

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"TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE"

published 1924)3 is puzzling. Melville's story of the innocent "Handsome Sailor," who is persecuted by the villainous Clag- gart and unjustly condemned to hang yet evidently redeemed in a martyrdom that recalls the Resurrection of Christ, seems anomalous in relation to his other works. The explicit par- allels between Billy and Christ (in Billy's prelapsarian innocence; in the hanging scene, the imagery of which is drawn from the New Testament accounts of Christ's Resurrection; in the supposed supernatural character of Billy's death) are no less baffling. We are left wondering if the story signals Melville's late conversion to Christian acceptance, as some critics contend, or whether, as others have argued, Melville was more cynically seeking to show that ideal innocence and goodness like Billy's and Christ's cannot survive in a corrupt world.4

Both alternatives can be circumvented if attention is given to the advanced theological thought of Melville's day. Starting with the assumption that the Bible was a historical text, the work not of God but of men, the so-called Higher Critics used the methods of historical scholarship developed in the nineteenth century to elaborate a radically new conception of the Bible and of biblical history.5 They showed that the Gospel

3 Herman Melville, Billy Budd: Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Milton R. Stern (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975). All future page references are to his edition. Stern's edition is used instead of Hayford and Sealts's because of Stern's inclusion of material, long familiar from earlier editions, that Hayford and Sealts exclude and because Stern restores most of Melville's original wording. As Stern points out in his statement of editorial principles, Hayford and Sealts change some of Melville's words in the interest of "grammatical propriety" and "consistency" (p. 149). Given Melville's use of duplicitous irony in Billy Budd, which this paper will help to illuminate, I believe it is important to attend to what Melville actually wrote. Some of the text's historical errors, for example- one of which Hayford and Sealts correct (p. 110 n.)-may be Melville's way of indicating that his narrator is a poor historian.

4 For the first interpretation, see, e.g., E. L. Grant Watson, "Melville's Testa- ment of Acceptance," New England Quarterly 6 (June 1933): 319-27. A well- argued statement of the "ironic" interpretation is given in Lawrance Thomp- son, Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 355-414.

5 A good account of the Higher Criticism can be found in J. Estlin Carpenter, The Bible in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1903). Still

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writers idealized Jesus' life, suppressed and distorted compromising evidence, borrowed freely from one another while also changing received material to suit their polemical purposes, and overlaid the life of Jesus with supernatural miracles and myths, disbelieved because of the Higher Critics' commitment to science and rationalism. The new Christ disclosed by advanced scholarship was not a saint but a man, complex and contradictory: a "fighting peacemaker" who preached love in the Sermon on the Mount but who violently overturned the tables of the money-changers in the Temple; the heralded Messiah who nonetheless cried out on the Cross his fear of betrayal, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" In the new view the purely religious Christ gave way to a politicized Jesus who, some theorized, may have been executed for his involvement in Jewish nationalist intrigues against the Ro- man rulers of Palestine. Judas's and Pontius Pilate's roles and motives in Jesus' betrayal and death could not, it was argued, be definitely established; the biblical accounts of the empty tomb and Christ's supposed Resurrection were regarded as highly dubious. The historical Jesus and the context in which he lived and died were thus regarded as being remote, problematic and largely unknowable.

In view of Melville's knowledge of the Higher Criticism and his endorsement of their views in his other works, it is difficult to see how Billy Budd can be meant to be a Christ- figure in the traditional sense. But if one theorizes that Mel- ville intended Billy Budd as a parody of the Gospels, in which the surface piety is undermined on the second, ironic level of meaning, then Billy Budd may indeed be found to resemble Christ-not the idealized Saviour of the waning age of faith but the problematic man of the Higher Criticism. Looked at this way, Billy Budd would not be an innocent saint persecuted in a corrupt world but rather, like the historical Jesus

readable, and with lively biographical sketches of such figures as David Fried- rich Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Ernest Renan, is Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1964). A more recent scholarly study is Stephen Neill's The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

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whom he may have been intended to resemble, no saint at all. An obvious place to begin an inquiry into such an ironic

strategy in Billy Budd is with the narrator, who, as Lawrance Thompson correctly pointed out thirty years ago (but without grasping the full implications of his insight), is himself a kind of character-a naval historian with a bias in favor of consti- tuted authority. The narrator on several occasions clearly says he is writing a history. "The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction," he writes, "can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact" (p. 131). His ostensibly factual narrative is set in the time of the French Revolution (1797), of which the narrator writes, "That era appears measurably clear to us who look back at it, and but read of it" (p. 44). The vantage-point from which the narrator looks back on the earlier age-the time of his and his contemporaries' "grandfathers"-is that of post- Civil War America, as he makes clear when he nostalgically recalls the great sailing ships of old (supplanted by the more prosaic ironclads) and when he observes that the "dandified Billy-be-Damn" of the time before steamships is "an amusing character all but extinct now" (p. 4).

That the narrator is so distanced in time from the events he writes about can be taken to explain one of the story's striking aspects: the limited extent of the narrator's knowledge and his frequent recourse to speculation and hypothesis to fill in the lacunae in the narrative. The most prominent instance of this occurs when the narrator says he knows nothing of Captain Vere's final interview with Billy following the sailor's conviction. "Beyond the communication of the sentence," the narrator writes, "what took place at this interview was never known"; what he offers is merely his own conjecture (p. 112). There are, however, numerous other instances of the same procedure, as when the narrator says he knows nothing of Claggart's or Billy's earlier lives and merely speculates about them (pp. 16, 42). Elsewhere the narrator's language is curiously tentative and qualified, as when he writes, "What [Clag- gart] said. .. was to the effect following, if not altogether in

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these words" (p. 85). Finally, there are omissions in the story that are never explained. "At sea in the old time," writes the narrator of Billy's hanging, "the execution by halter of a military sailor was generally from the fore-yard. In the present instance, for special reasons the main-yard was assigned" (p. 124). The narrator never reveals what these "special reasons" were; nor does he indicate what the "special orders" were that the surgeon carried out in supervising the execution of Billy (p. 126).

Critics of Billy Budd, when they have noted such peculiari- ties at all, have tended to dismiss them as mere Melvillean quirks, instances of the author's supposed inconsistency in the point of view, such as one ostensibly finds in Moby-Dick. If we attend to the fact that the narrator is writing of an event long past, however, then our own doubts as readers will center less on Melville's artistry than on the narrator's reliability. If the narrator's knowledge is limited, then we as readers must subject his statements to careful scrutiny, not simply take them for granted.

Let us proceed by considering what the narrator reveals about himself. "In the time before steamships," he writes, the sailors on the docks would "quite surround some superior figure of their own class" (p. 3; my emphasis). The narrator here indicates that he was not a sailor himself, that he be- longed to a different class. Subsequent statements disclose that he was either an old naval officer or (more likely) a landsman sympathetic to the officers' point of view. An opponent of the French Revolution, the narrator associates the mutinies in the British navy with "the enemy's red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt" (p. 22). While conceding that the im- pressments that brought on the mutinies were unjust and cruel, he nonetheless insists that the practice was necessary in wartime because "Its abrogation would have crippled the indispensable fleet" (p. 31). Such calamities as the Nore Mutiny "can not be ignored," the narrator writes, "but there is a con- siderate way of historically treating them"-that is, with dis- cretion (p. 23).

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No common sailor, as these remarks make clear, the narrator was also highly romantic. Not only does he wax nostalgic for the great wooden warships of "the time before steamships," but he praises Admiral Nelson for his "love of glory" (p. 27) and hails his "most magnificent of all victories" at Trafalgar, "crowned by his own glorious death" (p. 28). How his pro- officer, romantic perspective influences his telling of the story of Billy Budd is suggested by the narrator's characterization of the sailors as a class. "Are sailors .. . without vices?" he asks. "No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality...; frank manifestations in accordance with natural law" (p. 17). Such a statement is at odds with the testimony given in White- Jacket (1850), Melville's earlier novel of life on a man-of-war. The warship, the book reveals, attracted the lowest class of men, those who enlisted mainly for the regular allotment of grog and who got drunk whenever they could. The common sailors are described as engaging in acts of petty harassment, cruel pranks, and thievery-hardly evidence of "exuberance of vitality" but rather (as the narrator of White-Jacket, himself a common sailor, makes clear) of "crookedness of heart."6

Again in White-Jacket, the narrator alludes to horrors too appalling to mention-sodomy is evidently intended-and he refers to the Neversink as "the home of moral monsters" and to men-of-war as "those wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep" and "floating Hells." Yet the naive narrator of Billy Budd states serenely, "as a class, sailors are in character a juvenile race. Even their deviations are marked by juvenility" (p. 78).

What is curious about the narrator's idealization of the sailors in Billy Budd is not only his blindness to life on a man-

6 Reading Billy Budd in relation to White-Jacket is justified by Melville's dedication of the story to Jack Chase, who served with Melville on the U.SS. United States and who appears as a major character in White-Jacket. Moreover, Melville clearly alludes to White-Jacket in his late poem, "Bridegroom Dick," in John Marr and Other Sailors (1888). Melville was already at work on Billy Budd when the volume of poetry was published.

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of-war but his ignorance of the implications of his own darker evidence. In speculating on Claggart's unknown past, the narrator writes that "insolvent debtors of minor grade, together with the promiscuous lame ducks of morality, found in the Navy a convenient and secure refuge." Seamen, he adds, may even have been "culled direct from the jails" (p. 43). As we will see, the narrator's two views of the sailors aboard the Belli- potent, and his blindness to the incongruity, are characteristic. Much as the Higher Critics' discovery of contradictions in the biblical lives of Jesus served to undermine faith in the Gospels' historical accuracy, so does the disclosure of contradictions in Billy Budd call into question the narrator's veracity.

Given his view of sailors as a class, it is not surprising that the narrator's depiction of Billy Budd is likewise idealized. The sailors may have been exuberant and juvenile, but Billy was something more-he was the "Handsome Sailor," a heroic type of the "time before steamships," a "superb figure" and a virtuous natural man. "In many respects . .. little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam pre- sumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company" (p. 17), Billy was "one to whom not yet has been proffered the questionable apple of knowledge" (p. 16). Indeed, writes the narrator, virtues "pristine and unadulterate," such as Billy had, derive not from "culture or convention" but are "transmitted from a period prior to Cain's city and citified man" (p. '7).

Elsewhere, however, the narrator admits that Billy had a flaw-his stutter-which is "a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden"-that is, Satan-"still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth" (p. 19). But if this is true, then Billy was no prelapsarian Adam but a mere human after all.

The narrator seeks to minimize the significance of Billy's stutter by comparing him to "the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne's minor tales" with "just one thing amiss in him" (p. 19). But unlike the beauty who was marred only by the imperfection of a birthmark, Billy's stutter was not his sole

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flaw. On the Rights of Man, Billy brought peace-by drubbing Red Whiskers for half a minute. After being offered the guineas by the afterguardsman, Billy told the Dansker only a

"partial" account of the encounter, which the narrator refers to as a "version" (p. 76); later, at his trial, he lied to the

judges when he denied any knowledge of a mutiny plot. And of course Billy killed Claggart. Evidently the narrator has such "flaws" in mind when, after elaborating the qualities of the Handsome Sailor, he adds, "Such a cynosure, at least in aspect, and something such too in nature, though with important variations made apparent as the story proceeds, was welkin- eyed Billy Budd" (p. 5; my emphasis). The word "variations" indicates that Billy's departure from the Handsome Sailor type involved more than just his stutter.

As he proceeds, the narrator does not suppress these variations, but he does try to minimize their significance. In effect he denies his initial statement that the variations were "important." Thus Billy's failure to report his suspicious meeting with the afterguardsman to his superiors and his lie about the incident at his trial are glossed over as manifesting Billy's "innate repugnance to playing a part at all approaching that of an informer against one's own ship mates" (p. 102). But such a motive hardly squares with the narrator's claim that "of self- consciousness [Billy] seemed to have little or none, or about as much as we may reasonably impute to a dog of Saint Ber- nard's breed" (p. 16). To conceal and dissimulate, for what- ever reason, surely requires a degree of self-conscious reflec- tion and calculation. Similarly, to recoil in disgust from the afterguardsman's bribe because he "instinctively knew [it] must involve evil of some sort" (p. 73) implies that Billy was like Adam after, not before, the Fall.

The conceptual confusion in the narrator's exposition stems from his idiosyncratic elaboration of the type of the Handsome Sailor. He begins his narrative by recalling having seen an exemplary Handsome Sailor on the docks of Liverpool "now half a century ago," surrounded by his admiring shipmates (p. 3). As viewed by the narrator-himself no sailor-the Hand-

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some Sailor, popular with his fellows, was largely a physical specimen. The narrator then embellishes this portrait of the Handsome Sailor with heroic, epic qualities.

Invariably a proficient in his perilous calling, he was also more or less of a mighty boxer or wrestler. It was strength and beauty. Tales of his prowess were recited. Ashore he was the champion; afloat the spokesman; on every suitable occasion always foremost. [Pp. 4-5]

The narrator then adds to his description a final, crucial characteristic:

The moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make. Indeed, except as toned by the former, the comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor in some examples received from his less gifted associates. [P. 5; my emphasis]

The narrator's assertion of an innate correspondence between the Handsome Sailor's outward appearance and his inner moral nature is based not on personal experience-again, the narrator was no sailor-but on an inference. As his qualifier indicates, the narrator cannot imagine why the Handsome Sailor would be popular with his less gifted fellows unless his "moral nature" were as attractive as his physique. This con- clusion as well as the preceding description reveals the narrator's romanticism and naivete about sailors, which reference to Melville's sea novels confirms. Not only is there no mention of a Handsome Sailor endowed with all these heroic qualities in any of them, but the implication in Red burn (1849) as well as White-Jacket is that young and handsome sailors were "popular" for sexual reasons, not because of their supposed goodness (in Red burn, the handsome Harry Bolton takes Red- burn to a male brothel in London). As an article of wisdom, the assumption that moral goodness is a corollary of physical beauty is highly dubious; a main theme of The Confidence- Man is precisely that there is no necessary symmetry between a person's outward appearance and his inner moral nature.

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With his limited knowledge of life on a man-of-war, the credulous narrator of Billy Budd ignores this truth. Because Billy was young and athletically handsome-in appearance an Adam before the Fall, a bronzed Apollo-he must also have been morally unblemished. The narrator insists that "the story in which [Billy Budd] is the main figure is no romance" (p. 19), but in simplifying and idealizing Billy's character to make him conform to the type of the Handsome Sailor, he gives us precisely that-a romance.

II If Billy in the narrator's account is the hero, then Claggart,

the master-at-arms (or ship's police chief) is the villain. Al- though Claggart's face was "notable"-handsome and intelli- gent-the narrator tells us it resembled that of Tecumseh, the rebellious Indian chief, and of the Reverend Titus Oates, treacherously involved in a "Popish plot" against Charles II (pp. 40-41). These highly fanciful comparisons, another indication of the narrator's hostility to foes of established authority, are predicated on, rather than determinations of, the narrator's conviction that Claggart was "the direct reverse of a saint" (p. 58).

Similarly, although he admits that Claggart on entering the navy quickly evinced "superior capacity," a "constitutional sobriety," an "ingratiating deference to superiors," and a "certain austere patriotism" (p. 45), the narrator prefers to down- play these favorable qualities and concentrates on the supposed seamier side of Claggart's background. He cites a "rumor" circulated among "certain grizzled sea-gossips of the gun-decks and forecastle" that Claggart entered the navy to escape being tried on charges of swindling. Although he con- cedes that "nobody could substantiate this report" (p. 42), he says it was given a "vague plausibility" by the fact that during this period of British history, the navy was a refuge for petty debtors and scoundrels. Sailors, he says, may even have been "culled direct from the jails." But nowhere does the narrator suggest that he has any evidence linking Claggart to such

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practices. For that matter, he is not even sure that the British government did draft criminals into the navy (p. 43). At any rate, the narrator says finally, "the less credence was to be given to the gun-deck talk touching Claggart, seeing that no man holding his office in a man-of-war can ever hope to be popular with the crew" (p. 44).

Unable to prove that Claggart was either a criminal or a reprobate, the narrator cites the testimony of a grizzled old sailor called the Dansker to support his view of Claggart's villainy. When Billy's gear is disturbed by unknown parties, thus getting him into trouble with his superiors, the Dansker tells him, "'Jemmy Legs' "-meaning Claggart- "'is down on you'" (p. 52). "Yes, why should Jemmy Legs, to borrow the Dansker's expression, be down on the Handsome Sailor?" asks the narrator, picking up on the idea (p. 57). But the authority of the Dansker's opinion is called into question, first, by the narrator's previous statement that sailors' gossip about the master-at-arms was not to be credited and, second, by the scene in the mess, when Billy spills the soup in Claggart's path. When Claggart does no more than banter with Billy and "play- fully" tap him on the backside with his rattan, Billy exclaims to his messmates after Claggart has left, "'There now, who says that Jemmy Legs is down on me!'" (p. 56). A sailor named Donald then demanded "with some surprise," " 'And who said he was, Beauty?'" The narrator adds, "Whereat the foretopman looked a little foolish, recalling that it was only one person"-the Dansker-"who had suggested what to him was the smoky idea that this Master-at-arms was in any peculiar way hostile to him" (p. 56).

Although this disclosure indicates that neither Billy nor Donald thought the master-at-arms disliked Billy, the narrator is bent on reading Claggart's behavior in a sinister light. Thus Claggart's bantering words to Billy, despite the "low, musical voice" in which they were delivered, are called "equivocal," and described as having been accompanied by an "involuntary smile, or rather grimace" (p. 55). The sailors are said to have laughed with "counterfeited glee," although no reason is

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given to indicate why the laughter was counterfeited, and indeed, the reaction of Donald suggests that his at least was genuine.

As evidence that Claggart hated Billy, the scene in the mess is curiously inconclusive. That the narrator relies on it so heavily, despite the compromising words from Donald, shows how little hard evidence he has to support his contention that Claggart was a villain. Going on to admit that he knows of no "romantic incident" implying that Claggart had prior knowledge of Billy, which might have given the master-at-arms a reason to hate the sailor (p. 57), the narrator next makes something of an imaginative leap. He accuses Claggart of hating Billy with a "'Natural Depravity: a depravity according to nature'" (pp. 59-60).

The inspiration for this idea, the narrator states, came from an "honest scholar, my senior," now dead (p. 58). Like the narrator, the scholar was intrigued by the inner character of a man "so unimpeachably respectable that against him nothing was ever openly said though among the few something was whispered, 'Yes, X-- is a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady's fan.'" The key to acquiring a deeper understanding of such inscrutable characters-like Claggart-the scholar said, lies in rejecting mere " 'knowledge of the world'" in favor of what he called a "'finer spiritual insight,'" such as was possessed by the Hebrew prophets, who shed light into "'obscure spiritual places'" despite being "'mostly recluses'"

(P. 59). We have seen how dependent the narrator is on his bookish

learning in his rendering of the Billy Budd affair. Billy is compared to "the heroine in one of Hawthorne's minor tales" as well as to Adam, Hercules, Apollo, Achilles, and Hyperion. Claggart is said to resemble Tecumseh and Titus Oates, the latter hardly a household name. The cause of Claggart's supposed hatred of Billy is described as being "as much charged with that prime element of Radcliffian romance, the mysterious, as any that the ingenuity of the author of the Mysteries of Udolpho could devise" (p. 57). Even the reference to the

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sailors laughing "with counterfeited glee" is taken from a text, Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" (pp. 55-56 n.). Given his reliance on the mediation of books, it is not surprising that the narrator now turns to the authority of one as well suited to his purposes as Plato, father of the Archetype, whom he credits with being the author of the theory of Natural Depravity (p. 59). The irony lies in his insistence that such mediation-itself inspired by an "honest scholar"-constitutes a "finer spiritual insight," superior to mere "knowledge of the world."

The key element in the narrator's definition of Natural De- pravity is that the naturally depraved man is, in his "outward proceeding, ... always perfectly rational" (p. 61; my emphasis), always folded "in the mantle of respectability" (p. 60). Such a definition, of course, fits Claggart like a glove; the narrator admits as much when he writes that Claggart was "secretly down on" Billy (p. 57; my emphasis). But that very secretiveness makes it impossible for the narrator to know what Claggart was thinking and feeling; he cannot deduce the inner man from the outward physical appearance. Hence "his portrait I essay, but shall never hit it" (p. 40).

To be sure, following the incident with the soup, Claggart does seem disturbed by Billy's presence. The narrator describes him as giving Billy an ambiguous "immitigable look, pinching and shrivelling" (p. 80). Since Claggart's glance is ambiguous, however, the narrator's attribution of motives to him is mere conjecture. Although the narrator hints at a sexual motive in the scenes where he describes Claggart as in- wardly seething, simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Billy's supposed beauty and innocence, it is really the narrator who is obsessed by Billy's beauty, as his rapturous descriptions of Billy's "comeliness and power" make clear. The implied comparison of Claggart to Jago and to Milton's Satan are similarly fanciful, like the comparison of Claggart's visage to Tecumseh's and Titus Oates's. The narrator projects his book learning and his obsessions onto Claggart's equivocal portrait and offers them as instances of his "finer spiritual insight."

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It is the narrator's commitment to his dualistic scheme

(Billy as ideally innocent, Claggart as a depraved villain) that blinds him to other possibilities allowed for by his own evidence. Thus he fails to consider whether someone other than

Claggart may have been responsible for sabotaging Billy's gear. In White-Jacket, it was the common sailors who engaged in such malicious pranks. The narrator suggests such a motive when he reports that one sailor said to Billy, "'Is it your bag, Billy? . .. Well, sew yourself up in it, bully boy, and then you'll be sure to know if anybody meddles with it'" (p. 50). Sailors were sewn up in canvas when they were dead; the reference to Billy as a "bully boy" reminds us that Billy beat up Red Whiskers on the Rights of Man, which could have given the sailors of the Bellipotent reason to dislike him.

If the narrator too readily assumes that Claggart was responsible for sabotaging Billy's gear, he also leaves the impres- sion that the afterguardsman who tempted Billy with the guineas worked for Claggart. But there is no convincing evidence in the text to support this assumption.

When Billy tells the Dansker his "partial and anonymous account" of his nocturnal meeting, the Dansker repeats his warning, "'Jemmy Legs is down on you."' To Billy's query as to what Jemmy Legs has to do with the afterguardsman, the Dansker replies cryptically, "'A cat's-paw, a cat's-paw!'" (pp. 76-77). A cat's-paw can refer to a wind gust on the ocean as well as to an agent. The narrator acknowledges the ambiguity when he writes of the Dansker's remark, "whether it had reference to a light puff of air just then coming over the calm sea, or a subtler relation to the afterguardsman, there is no telling" (p. 77).

The narrator writes of the afterguardsman that with his "genial" and "rattle-brained" appearance, he seemed to be "the last man in the world ... to be overburthened with thoughts, especially those perilous thoughts that must needs belong to a conspirator ... or even to the underling of such a conspirator" (pp. 73, 76). The afterguardsman's inner moral nature thus bore no relation to his outward physical appearance.

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Whether the afterguardsman was an agent for Claggart or for others (such as a faction of sailors that disliked Billy) is never established, as the narrator all but admits when he says he does not know what "that equivocal young person's original design may .. .have been" (p. 82).

Moreover, while the afterguardsman may have been trying to frame Billy in offering him the guineas, it also is possible that he was a real plotter. This becomes plausible if the context of his scene with Billy is taken into account. At the time of the narrative, the English navy, full of impressed men, was seething with unrest; the calamitous mutiny on the Nore had recently been put down (p. 23). In their nocturnal meeting the afterguardsman tells Billy," 'We are not the only impressed ones [on the Bellipotent], Billy. There's a gang of us"' (p. 71). The narrator writes of Billy's ship, "very little in the manner of the men and nothing obvious in the demeanor of the officers would have suggested to an ordinary observer that the Great Mutiny was a recent event" (p. 33; my emphasis). The careful language does not exclude but rather seems to invite speculation that a plot was secretly being planned and that the officers were discreetly on the lookout for signs of such activity. The narrator's statement that "certain other individuals included like [Billy] among the impressed portion of the ship's company ... were .. . apt to fall into a saddish mood which in some partook of sullenness" (p. 12) also suggests a context ripe for mutiny. In such an environment, the afterguardsman's involvement in a mutiny plot cannot be ruled out.

If the sabotaging of Billy's gear and his temptation by the afterguardsman cannot be traced to Claggart, another piece of evidence can be interpreted as actually exonerating Clag- gart of the charge of hating and framing Billy. The narrator states that Claggart's "understrapper," a corporal called Squeak, "pervert[ed] to his chief certain innocent frolics of the good natured foretopman"-that is, Billy-"besides invent- ing for his mouth sundry contumelious epithets [directed against Claggart] he claimed to have overheard him let fall" (pp. 66-67). The narrator writes, "The Master-at-arms never

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suspected the veracity of these reports" (my emphasis). If this is true, then Claggart would have had good reason to give Billy a "pinching and shrivelling" look. Moreover, if he never suspected the accuracy of the reports about Billy brought to him by Squeak, then the master-at-arms may very well have believed that Billy was involved in a mutiny plot. In that case, Claggart would not have hated Billy with a Natural Depravity at all but, in taking the charges which he believed to be true to Captain Vere, would have been motivated by a sense of loyalty and duty. Such a scenario would be consistent with the narrator's report that Claggart had evidenced "a certain austere patriotism," and it would make of him not the Judas of the Billy Budd affair but a victim-possibly even a hero.

To be sure, the very incompleteness of the narrator's account means that Claggart cannot be definitely absolved of the charge of maliciously hating and framing Billy. But neither is the narrator's case against him particularly per- suasive. Both interpretations are allowed for by the narrator's own evidence.7

III Once Claggart's hatred of Billy is called into question, then

the master-at-arms' warning to Captain Vere at the mainmast cannot simply be dismissed as a malicious lie. Accusing Billy

7 Critics have noted the similarities between Billy Budd and the Somers mutiny scandal of 1842, in which three seamen were charged with plotting a mutiny and hanged at sea. Melville's admired older cousin, Guert Gansevoort, had his naval career ruined for his part in the affair (he brought the charges to Captain Mackenzie), after being attacked in a pamphlet by Fenimore Cooper. If one assumes that Melville believed Gansevoort to have been unfairly ma- ligned, then it is plausible to associate Gansevoort with Claggart and to theorize that under the guise of damning Claggart, Melville is really exonerating his cousin, who, like Claggart, may have been motivated by a "certain austere patriotism." See Charles R. Anderson, "The Genesis of Billy Budd," American Literature 12 (1940): 329-46.

The theory that Squeak, not Claggart, was responsible for framing Billy is given extratextual support by Anderson, who notes that in 1889, while Melville was working on Billy Budd, an article on the Somers mutiny appeared in Cos- mopolitan magazine. In "The Murder of Philip Spencer," Anderson states, author Gail Hamilton exonerated Gansevoort of responsibility in the deaths of the three sailors and shifted the blame to his subordinate, a purser's steward (p. 341).

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of being "'for all his youth and good looks, a deep one,'" Claggart goes on to say,

"Not for nothing does he insinuate himself into the good will of his shipmates, since at the least all hands will at a pinch say a good word for him at all hazards.... It is even masqued by that sort of good humored air that at heart he resents his impressment. You have but noted his fair cheek. A man-trap may be under his ruddy- tipped daisies." [Pp. 87-88]

If Claggart is not lying, then his distressed words can be explained as indicating the disparity between his pleasant im- pression of Billy and the negative reports brought to him by Squeak. But there is another possibility not excluded by the text-namely, that Billy really was a "deep one" and was more deeply implicated in a mutiny plot than the narrator knows about or is willing to admit.

The most damaging evidence against Billy comes in the trial scene. When a troubled judge asks Billy why Claggart should have " 'so maliciously lied' " in falsely accusing him of plotting a mutiny, the narrator writes of Billy's response:

At that question unintentionally touching on a spiritual sphere wholly obscure to Billy's thoughts, he was non-plussed, evincing a confusion indeed that some observers, such as can readily be imagined, would have construed into involuntary evidence of hidden guilt. [P. 103; my emphasis]

The narrator interprets this guilty response as an indication that in his childlike innocence Billy could not comprehend Claggart's ostensibly malicious moral sphere. But this interpretation presumes precisely what is at issue: Billy's innocence; and besides, Billy himself lied, in denying to the judges any knowledge of "incipient trouble" on the ship. It seems an instance of Melvillean irony when the narrator describes Billy's protest of innocence as manifesting "the impulsive above-board manner of the frank one" (p. 102). Not only is Billy not entirely frank, but the trial itself takes place below deck, not above board.

Billy's evidence of "hidden guilt" at the trial puts his other

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behavior in a more suspicious light. Thus the narrator reveals that Billy willingly followed the afterguardsman to the site of their secret meeting. Convinced as always that Billy was innocent, the narrator states that "Billy, like sundry other essentially good-natured ones, had some of the weaknesses in- separable from essential good nature," in being unable to say no to "an abrupt proposition" (p. 69). But the narrator admits he does not know Billy's motive in following the afterguardsman when he adds, "However it was, he mechanically rose, and . . . betook himself to the designated place" (p. 70; my emphasis).

The narrator describes Billy as rebuffing the afterguardsman when he is offered the guineas and asked to join a plot. But additional scenes are given in which the two men pass each other and exchange glances that may or may not have hidden meaning. It is Billy himself who seeks out the afterguardsman the day after their late-night meeting (p. 73). "Not- ing that Billy was looking at him, [the afterguardsman] there- upon nodded a familiar sort of friendly recognition as to an old acquaintance" (p. 76). In subsequent casual meetings the afterguardsman gives Billy "a passing pleasant word or two" but on "these occasions" makes no mention of his "original design" (p. 82). The reference to "these occasions," however, makes us wonder if there were others in which the "design" was discussed. Moreover, even the narrator is troubled by the fact that Billy keeps the knowledge of his meeting with the afterguardsman to himself, does not report the incident to his superiors, does not go up to the afterguardsman and "bluntly demand ... to know his purpose in the initial interview," and does not sound out his fellow impressed sailors as to the afterguardsman's intentions (p. 82). The narrator states that "something more, or rather, something else than mere shrewdness is perhaps needful for the due understanding of such a character as Billy Budd's," but that "something else" is not Billy's prelapsarian innocence.

To be sure, Captain Graveling's testimony to Lieutenant Ratcliffe that Billy was the "jewel" of his men on the Rights

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of Man cannot be ignored. According to Graveling, his ship was a "'rat-pit of quarrels'" until Billy came and brought peace by drubbing the "buffer" or leader of the gang, one Red Whiskers, for "'about half a minute."' Adds an admiring Graveling, "'And will you believe it... the Red Whiskers now really loves Billy-loves him, or is the biggest hypocrite that ever I heard of. But they all love him"' (p. 8; my emphasis). A hint of Melvillean irony flickers through the high- lighted passage. Taking into account not the narrator's idealization of sailors but the more hardened view of them given in Redburn and White-Jacket, it is not very likely that the

gangleader of the ship, soundly beaten in a fight, and in front of the other men, would subsequently love the person who had whipped him. Captain Graveling says of the sailors of the Rights that "'Anybody will do anything for Billy Budd; and it's the happy family here"' (p. 8). But one must wonder whether the family was happy because Billy brought love to the quarreling Rights or because he enforced peace with his fists. Captain Graveling testifies to the more benign view, but Lieutenant Ratcliffe points out the incongruity when he notes with amusement, "'Well, blessed are the peacemakers, especially the fighting peacemakers!'" (p. 8). Ratcliffe's words link Billy to the Jesus who used violence against the money-changers, and with the same effect achieved by the Higher Critics: Billy's moral nature as well as the purity of his motivation is called into question.

There is a further irony in the narrator's characterization of Captain Graveling as a "respectable man" (p. 6). The whole point of the "honest scholar's" anecdote is that "respectability" is no sure sign of authenticity (p. 58). The narrator himself calls respectability "that manufacturable thing" (p. 17). If Graveling is "respectable," then his veracity is not certain, and his account of Billy's tenure on the Rights is called into question.

The narrator also says of Billy that he "at last came to be called" Baby Budd (pp. 5, 52)-as if to suggest that everyone on the Bellipotent recognized his innocent, childlike nature.

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But only the Dansker ever calls Billy "Baby," and even the Dansker's use of the term carries no assurance that he felt Billy had a morally innocent nature. The narrator writes, "There was a vein of dry humor, or what not, in the mast-man; and, whether in freak of patriarchal irony touching Billy's youth and athletic frame, or for some other and more recondite reason, from the first in addressing him he always substituted Baby for Billy" (pp. 51-52; my emphasis). By means of his qualifying phrases, the narrator all but admits that he does not know why the Dansker called Billy "Baby." Thus as a guide to Billy's moral nature, "Baby" is no more reliable than "Handsome Sailor."8

Other aspects of the story are similarly equivocal. Thus the scenes of Billy with the Dansker depict Billy as being surprised at the idea that Jemmy Legs was "down on him," as if to suggest that Billy was ingenuous. But when the narrator's embel- lishments are set aside (as when he writes, "'Jemmy Legs!' ejaculated Billy, his welkin eyes expanding"), the words them- selves tell us little about Billy except that he was surprised (pp. 52, 77). Moreover, the failure of the narrator to tell us about Billy's so-called "innocent frolics" also raises questions. The narrator assumes that Billy's spilling of the soup in front of Claggart was an accident, but it could have been another "frolic." The narrator himself suggests this possibility when he speculates that Claggart thought Billy's spilling of the soup was deliberate (p. 66). Finally, the narrator states that Billy, "horrified" by the sight of an afterguardsman being flogged, resolved never to do anything that "might merit even verbal reproof" (p. 49). The narrator seems to take this as a sign of Billy's innocence, but it can also be read as indicating a de- cision by Billy to play the role of a cheerful innocent with his superiors in order to stay out of trouble with them. Aspects of his true nature-such as his "frolics," and perhaps also his resentment at being impressed, and his "epithets" directed

8 The ambiguities of Billy's names-he is also called "Beauty" (pp. 56, 71)- can be related to the problem of determining the significance of Jesus' different names-Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man, Servant of God-in the Gospels. See, e.g., Neill, The Interpretation of the New Testament, pp. 129-30.

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against Claggart-could have been concealed from all but a few of his fellow sailors but discovered by Claggart's spy Squeak.

While such an interpretation is but speculation, it is no more so than the narrator's. That alternate readings of the same evidence are allowed for by the text-once the narrator's reliability is called into question-shows how open and vari- able is meaning in Billy Budd. But this variability cannot be resolved into a single, determinate account of Billy's character, because the different scenes of Billy that the narrator

gives us do not add up to an integrated human being. Like the rendering of Jesus in the Gospels-saintly in one scene, enigmatic or violent in another-Billy Budd's behavior as well as his moral nature is contradictory and baffling. The narrator writes of Billy, "something about him provoked an ambiguous smile in one or two harder faces among the blue- jackets" (p. 14), but what this "something" was cannot be known, only speculated about. The one thing we can be sure of is that the narrator's idealized portrait of Billy bears little relation to the original; it is literally "too good to be true."9

IV By this point the question naturally arises concerning the

motives behind the narrator's bias-why he insists against his own evidence that Billy was ideally good and Claggart a depraved villain. The answer has to do both with the narrator's narrative method and with his other biases-his sympathy for the officers' class and his deference to established authority,

9 In "Billy in the Darbies," the ballad that concludes the story, Billy is quoted as saying "'Ay, ay all is up"' as he awaits hanging (p. 136). In their edition of Billy Budd, Hayford and Sealts sound like the narrator in calling these words "innocent." They state that in Melville's original conception (given in a prose sketch and verse found among his papers), Billy was an older sailor who was guilty of plotting a mutiny. The incriminating words, "Ay, ay all is up," they theorize, are a vestige of the earlier version. But since the story in its final form allows for the possibility that the younger Billy also was guilty, then the words may indeed amount to an admission of guilt-comparable perhaps to Jesus' dying words on the Cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" See Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., "Editor's Introduction: Growth of the Manuscript," in Billy Budd: Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 3.

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manifested in his opposition to the French Revolution and in his belief in the necessity of impressment to prevent the crippling of the "indispensable fleet."

As we have seen, the narrator does not so much write an account of Billy Budd's life as assemble it. He begins with a number of self-contained scenes or set-pieces, such as Billy being impressed, Billy spilling the soup, Claggart and Vere at the mainmast, and Billy's trial and execution (I identify about a score of such scenes). In addition he has descriptions (or actual portraits) of Billy and Claggart, testimony by such characters as the Dansker and Captain Graveling, stray dialogue, such as the sailor advising Billy to sew himself up in his bag, and other information, such as the sailors' gossip about Clag- gart and Claggart's actual naval record. This heterogenous material is organized into a continuous narrative in which the contradictions are glossed over (but not entirely eliminated) by the narrator's unifying perspective.

This method of the narrator's (which is, of course, an in- vention of Melville's) closely corresponds to the method of the Gospel writers as discovered by the Higher Criticism.'0 Moreover, like the authors of the Gospels, the narrator of Billy Budd conceals his method of composition as well as his limited knowledge and offers his heterogeneous text as an infallible guide to truth-an "inside narrative." In Billy Budd as in the Gospels, however, the lingering presence of the contradictions makes possible the discovery of the respective "confidence games" and also allows for the elaboration of alternative scenarios derived from the same evidence.

There is something else that justifies my belief that the narrator of Billy Budd assembled his narrative from disparate sources; namely, Melville himself used such a method in many of his own books. Thus in White-Jacket, Melville borrowed

10 Edward W. Said writes, "Higher Criticism attempted generally to redis- pose the unitary text of the Bible, or parts thereof, into a set of disparate documents with miscellaneous histories." See Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 214. In Melville's time, scholars theorized that Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark and from a missing "sayings" text called the "Q" Document. See Neill, The Interpretation of the New Testament, pp. 112-22.

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from and quoted-without attribution-no fewer than twelve secondary sources relating to life on a man-of-war.11 Besides parodying the Gospels, then, Melville in his duplicitous narrative strategy in Billy Budd seems also to be parodying his own role as a "confidence man" of writers.12

In the Gospels, the disparate material is organized around the assumption that Christ was the chosen Messiah; the unifying element is the divine word of God. In Billy Budd, the unifying element is Captain Vere. It is Vere who first characterizes Billy as innocent and Claggart as a villain. At the trial Vere testifies that Billy was not involved in a mutiny plot and that Claggart's accusation was a lie (pp. lo0 ff.). This testimony, which the narrator-out of deference to Vere's posi- tion as the ship's captain-accepts without question, serves as the framework of his narrative. Committed as he is to up- holding the authority of Vere, the narrator forces the contradictory evidence into the Procrustean bed of Vere's dualistic interpretation. In his testimony Vere terms Claggart's supposed lying a "'mystery of iniquity"' explicable only to "'psychologic theologians'" (p. 104). The narrator becomes one in developing his theory of Natural Depravity, a supposed instance of a "finer spiritual insight" such as was possessed by

1i Harrison Robertson, a shipmate of Melville's on the U.S.S. United States, prototype of the fictional Neversink, wrote with respect to White-Jacket: "The author probably has made up his book, not from personal experience wholly, but has patched together scraps picked up from some other person's journal, or conversation" (my emphasis). See Willard Thorpe, "Historical Note," in White-Jacket: or the World in a Man-of-War, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1970), pp. 411, 417-24.

12 Melville assumed such a role throughout his career. In the preface of his first book, Typee, Melville wrote, "[t]he author . .. has stated matters just as they occurred ... trusting that his anxious desire to speak the unvarnished truth will gain for him the confidence of his readers." But according to Harri- son Hayford, "Melville borrowed-in harsh English, stole-materials from books by earlier visitors to the Typee valley.... Indeed, many of Melville's striking incidents in Typee valley turn out to be artfully dramatized from episodes or information" in books by Charles S. Stewart and Captain David Porter. See Hayford's afterword to Herman Melville, Typee (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 313-14.

Melville's use of authorial duplicity in his fiction is explored in Edgar A. Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), esp. chaps. i and 5.

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the Hebrew prophets. In developing his archetype of the Handsome Sailor, the narrator again follows Vere's lead. When Claggart at the mainmast accuses Billy of being a "'dangerous man,"' Vere replies, "'the young fellow who seems to be so popular with the men-Billy, the Handsome Sailor, as they call him?'" (p. 87). The narrator assumes from this that there was a Handsome Sailor type and that the men recognized Billy to be one.

Reference to the scene of Claggart and Vere at the mainmast brings me to another important aspect of the story. Given the finitude of the narrator's knowledge-a key assumption of this paper-then the account of what Claggart and Vere said to one another at the mainmast had to have come from Vere; these two were the only ones present. The narrator poses as an eyewitness to the scene at the mainmast, but he achieves this effect by combining two different sources. Sailors aloft and officers nearby saw Claggart approach Vere, but their words to one another were "beyond earshot" (p. 90). The dialogue, however, is surely from Vere, who, at the trial, "concisely... narrated all that had led up to the catastrophe, omitting nothing in Claggart's accusation" (p. 1oi). This explains the narrator's statement that what Claggart said "was to the effect following, if not altogether in these words" (p. 85). The narrator cannot give Claggart's exact words because Vere's testimony at the trial was itself a paraphrase of what Claggart ostensibly said.

Given the central, organizing presence of Vere in the narrative of Billy Budd, the question of his veracity becomes all important. Let us consider Vere's account of what was said in the meeting with Claggart. When Claggart made his accusation against Billy, Vere testifies that he replied with "un- feigned astonishment. . .'mean you . .. Billy, the Handsome Sailor[?]'" (p. 87; my emphasis). Despite the fact that Claggart outlined the charges against Billy (discreetly unspecified by the narrator) and promised that "substantiating proof was not far" (p. 89), Vere is more alarmed by Claggart than suspicious of Billy. Given Claggart's status as the ship's police chief, the

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recent outbreaks of mutiny in the fleet, and the large numbers of impressed men on his own ship, Vere's reaction seems un- likely. One can hypothesize that Vere was out of touch with reality on board the ship, that he was living up to his nickname, "Starry Vere," which suggests a self-absorbed, un- worldly dreamer. Vere was given the nickname by his cousin, because "Fairfax" (Vere's middle name) appeared with "Starry Vere" in a poem by Marvell called "Appleton House," the name of Vere's ancestral home (p. 34). The nickname thus had no necessary connection with Vere's character. Indeed, Vere was a war hero (pp. 34-35) who is also termed by the narrator a "martinet" (p. 130). Furthermore, Vere is said to have fa- vored "unconventional writers like Montaigne, who ... in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities" (p. 36)- another indication of a realistic, not a dreamy, attitude.

Just as with Claggart and Billy, then, the narrator's rendering of Vere invites contradictory interpretations. Perhaps Vere was not as naive as his own testimony makes him out to have been; perhaps he qualified or even falsified his testimony to achieve his own ends. Clearly, Vere wanted a speedy trial followed by a swift execution. His assertion that Billy was innocent and Claggart a liar had the effect of securing that result with the fewest possible complications or delays. If Vere had disclosed his doubts about Billy's innocence, he would have invited the kind of protracted inquiry that he had to dissuade the judges from conducting as it was. The narrator writes that Captain Vere "necessarily appear[ed] as the sole witness in the case" (p. 1o0), but this is not true if Claggart's charges against Billy are taken to be relevant. The "substantiating proof" Claggart was prepared to disclose and the role of his subordinate, Squeak, might have surfaced if witnesses had been called.

Vere precluded this line of inquiry by insisting that only Billy's act of killing Claggart was relevant to the trial. His manipulation of the judges was thus a classic "'cover-up." Moreover, his assertion that Billy was innocent, Claggart a liar, and Billy's killing of Claggart an accident was precisely

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"TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE"'

the testimony best suited to secure Billy's acquiescence in his own conviction. Vere testified to Billy's innocence while Billy was in the courtroom; only after Billy was taken away did Vere argue that Billy must hang (pp. 104 ff.). That Billy sup- ported Vere's testimony thus does not necessarily prove its truth. Thinking perhaps (though wrongly, as it turned out) that it would secure for him a lighter sentence, Billy would have had good reason to concur in the captain's characterization of him as an innocent victim.

Vere's courtroom cover-up has other implications. Since only Billy, Claggart, and Vere were present in Vere's cabin when Claggart was killed, we have only Vere's word for what happened there. This scene, too, is presented as if by an eyewitness, but like the one at the mainmast, it is demonstrably a dramatized reconstruction based in part on Vere's testimony. The evidence is the exactitude with which the narrator describes Vere's entry into and departure from his cabin: "'Shut the door there, sentry,' said the commander, 'stand without, and let nobody come in'" (p. 92); "Then going to the cabin- door where it opened on the quarter-deck, Captain Vere said to the sentry without, 'Tell somebody to send Albert here'> (p. 94). The sentry's testimony sets the outer scene; Vere's courtroom testimony supplies the scene within.

With the episode in Vere's cabin we reach a barrier to knowledge beyond which we cannot pass. We cannot be sure that Billy's killing of Claggart was accidental, or even that Billy killed Claggart at all. Whether Vere testified truthfully at the trial or lied for his own private reasons cannot be known, only speculated about. (For example, it is possible that Vere opposed the calling of witnesses because he feared what might be revealed: his own complicity in Billy's framing, perhaps.) * What is evident from the foregoing is how closely the trial

of Billy Budd resembles that of Christ as discovered by the Higher Criticism; the truth about each (what was the real reason that Jesus was brought to trial and executed?) remains obscure. Moreover, like the Pontius Pilate of the Higher Critics, Captain Vere-a central figure in the drama-is prob-

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lematic and largely unknowable. Like Pilate's, Vere's words and actions take place against a backdrop of dimly perceived political turmoil and intrigues; like Pilate, Vere protests the defendant's innocence but acquiesces in-or instigates-his execution. The narrator depicts Vere as taking a fatherly interest in Billy and gives a sentimental account of Vere's final interview with him following Billy's conviction. But this scene is merely the narrator's conjecture. "What took place at this interview," he writes, "was never known" (p. 112).

A more cynical reading of Vere's attitude toward Billy can be gleaned from Billy's cryptic words at the trial, "'I have eaten the King's bread and I am true to the King'" (p. 102). These words have both patriotic and Christian overtones; they suggest that in the interval between Claggart's killing and the start of the trial, Vere may have used an appeal to flag and Cross to help win Billy's acquiescence in his own conviction. Later, in the final interview, Vere may have used similar patriotic and religious appeals to help win Billy's acceptance of his impending death. Billy's passivity and his final words- "'God bless Captain Vere!"'"-suggest that Vere's persuasion was successful.

Such a strategy in the context of his other behavior would make of Vere not a true believer but a skillful manipulator of patriotic and religious forms. " 'With mankind,'" the narrator reports Vere as saying, "'forms, measured forms are every- thing; and that is the import couched in the story of Orpheus with his lyre spellbinding the wild denizens of the wood'" (p. 130). The narrator cites these words in the context of Vere's imposition of shipboard order and discipline following Billy's hanging; they imply that Vere, the Orpheus, used such "measured forms" to keep the common sailors, the "wild denizens of the wood" or undisciplined natural men, from reverting to the state of nature, characterized by strife and disorder and represented in his own time by the anarchic French Revolu- tion. But if Vere used appeals to patriotism and religion to secure Billy's acquiescence in his own death, then these could

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be regarded as "measured forms" as well-in the sense that, like discipline, they help to uphold established authority.

Another "measured form"- -Vere's courtroom testimony-is accepted without question not only by the judges but also by the credulous narrator; he too is spellbound by "Orpheus' lyre" (Lawrance Thompson pointed out long ago the pun on "liar"). Blind to Vere's cover-up at the trial, the narrator also overlooks the adroit stage-managing of Billy's hanging, which seems intended to serve as an object lesson to the men of the captain's absolute power and as a warning to any would-be mutineers among the crew, whose leader Billy may or may not have been. Ignoring these darker resonances, the narrator is uplifted by the supposed spirituality of Billy's repose as he awaits hanging and inspired by the picturesque backdrop of the predawn setting (the postponement of the trial until day- break may have been another of Vere's "spellbinding" ges- tures). When Billy is described as "ascending and taking the full rose of the dawn," he is being expressly compared to the resurrected Christ; and the narrator is further awed by the fact that Billy's body at death unaccountably showed no spasmodic movement.

The supposed supernatural character of Billy's death is one of the most mysterious elements in Billy Budd, but it becomes explicable if the story is taken to be not a homage to the Gos- pels but a disguised parody of them. The clue is given in the short chapter called "A digression," in which the purser questions the surgeon about the unnatural manner of Billy's death. The surgeon's cryptic disclosure that the execution was "'sci- entifically conducted .., under special orders'" (p. 126) suggests the possibility that Billy was administered a drug-much as the dying Vere was given a "magical drug which sooth[ed] the physical frame" (p. 132). This hypothesis, given further credence by the description of Billy in chains, lying "without movement... as in a trance" (p. 118), relates Billy Budd to the

effort, widespread in Melville's day, to explain Christ's Resur- rection naturally, for example, in the theory that Christ,

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drugged and taken from the Cross still living, was apparently resurrected because he was never really dead.

A scientific explanation for Billy's unnatural death not only undercuts the purser's effort to explain it as "'a species of euthanasia' "-a peaceful, painless death; it also ironically dis- credits the sailors'-and the narrator's-posthumous worship of Billy, since his transformation into a saint is seen to rest on a delusion and to constitute a fraud.

It is central to Melville's ironic design in Billy Budd that the reader discover this imaginable fraud through a method of reading and exegesis analogous to that of the Higher Criti- cism. Just as the advanced biblical scholarship of Melville's day undermined the divine authority of Scripture, so does the discerning reader of Billy Budd discredit the authority of Captain Vere, who would have been responsible for the drug- ging as well as for the other elements in his stage-management and cover-up. This is the significance of Vere being felled by a shot from the Athee. He is deposed not only as the captain of the Bellipotent but in his God-like authority in the narrator's "craft." Like the French radicals who overthrew Church and State in 1789, Vere is subverted by readers who "plot" to overthrow him-by seeking to rewrite the "plot" that Vere authored in the trial and execution of Billy Budd. The disorder and chaos that resulted from the political act of rebellion in France is thus analogous to the epistemological disorder- the fall into doubt and proliferation-that follows on the act of rebellion against Vere's authority in the text. The movement of Billy Budd in this regard resembles that of Pierre, in the sense that in the earlier book, Pierre's denial of the authority of his father (and of God the Father) plunges him into a nightmare of ambiguities.

Pierre, however, ends in exhaustion and madness; in Billy Budd, Melville retains his sanity and his control. Although he is arguably motivated by a perverse spirit of revenge against his unwitting readers, his text, like The Confidence-Man, is an intricate puzzle (with more elements than I have been able to suggest here), a kind of Nabokovian game in which the

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pleasure lies in following the clues that lead everywhere and nowhere.

Besides the game itself, Melville in Billy Budd also offers an austere but serviceable philosophy of life. Precisely because Christ's life is largely unknowable, Melville implies, there are not sufficient grounds for finding hope of consolation in it. Melville's skepticism is indicated in his suggestion that "knowledge of the world" is the only true insight, that there is no "finer spiritual" one. Billy Budd is thus a kind of "testament of acceptance" after all: acceptance, that is, of life as it is, taken straight, without the "magical drug" of false religious optimism. Mordant and unyielding to the last, Melville pro- duced in Billy Budd not an anomaly but the capstone of his career. Like the White Whale, it is strange and awesome to behold.

Lyon Evans, Jr., formerly a newspaper reporter and editor, is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Iowa State University. He is presently at work on a study of Melville's poetry.

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"Too Good to Be True": Subverting Christian Hope in Billy Budd

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