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Billy Budd and Other Stories
Herman Melville
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!’It is the end of the eighteenth century, and the navy recruits the eponymous hero – the ‘Handsome Sailor’ – to its fleet. Accused of mutinous behaviour, Billy Budd is forced to defend himself, but his fearful, silent response soon gives way to a terrible act of violence. The consequences are disastrous, and nothing can prevent the force of judgment and eventual justice upon him. Discovered among Melville’s papers after his death and published posthumously in 1924, ‘Billy Budd’ is a powerful tale of guilt and innocence, crime and punishment, and the cost of adhering to duty.From the author of ‘Moby Dick’, Melville’s allegorical tales are loaded with symbolism, and showcase his distinctive writing style and themes in shorter form.
BILLY BUDD AND OTHER STORIES
Herman Melville
Copyright (#ulink_4bb19c84-b61e-5ddc-b220-a2e24da1819e)
William Collins
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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2014
Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral right as author of the Life & Times section Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary
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Cover image: On deck of a Man-of-War, Eighteenth Century. Engraving, 1878 © duncan1890/iStock
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007558193
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007558209
Version: 2014-07-31
History of Collins (#ulink_88023023-c447-51ca-99d0-03423e2e0d69)
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Life & Times (#ulink_db4bd2f8-3111-574e-bbd8-fc3da74240d7)
Moby Dick
On the face of it, Moby Dick is simply a story about a whaleboat captain intent on killing a white whale that had previously maimed him and destroyed his ship. As a result, Herman Melville’s masterpiece was underestimated when first published in 1851.
In truth, Melville was exploring themes relating to belief systems and moral and ethical topics; the story itself was merely a vehicle by which Melville could address his philosophy. To that extent, Melville viewed the novel as a means of accessing the minds of people who might not ordinarily pick up a book about the kinds of issues he felt driven to discuss. Ironically, those same people entirely missed the allegory, and Moby Dick was perceived as nothing more than an adventure novel.
As a consequence, Moby Dick, although initially successful, was quickly forgotten, and Melville reached old age an unsung talent. Today the novel is hailed as one of the greats, after the book was resurrected in the wake of World War I. The story was seen as timely and illustrated what can happen when desire for vengeance is allowed to take control. By the close of World War II, the book had become symbolic of the struggle for power between nations.
Melville is now described as a romantic novelist, because Moby Dick evokes a bygone and masculine age, when men risked their lives on the oceans in the procurement of whale products. The eponymous whale, Moby Dick, is an albino male sperm whale. Sperm whales are toothed whales specialized to feed on giant squid, making them extremely dangerous to harpoon and kill. To a whaler, the male sperm whale was the ultimate adversary. Sailors used to carve designs and pictures into sperm whale teeth as trophies, which were sold as pieces of scrimshaw.
Sperm whales were particularly prized by whalers because their heads contain reservoirs of a substance called spermaceti oil, creating their bulbous foreheads. This oil was used by humans as fuel oil and many other substances used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. The oil had a high value until similar substances were derived from crude oil instead, thereby sounding the death knell for whaling.
For the whales themselves, the oil assists with their ability to dive to great depths in search of prey. It was this behavior that made the confrontation scenes in Moby Dick so thrilling, as the whale would dive for long periods, leaving the whalers in tense anticipation of what might happen next. Then the whale would suddenly erupt from beneath to wreak havoc on the wretched humans.
The whale, of course, was in its own environment, while the people were entirely reliant on technology to remain alive. At that time in history, the high seas were the most challenging places for people to live, so Moby Dick was the ultimate “man against the elements” tale.
While the main characters in Moby Dick are Christian Americans, the others comprise a world population in microcosm, encompassing many races and creeds. This has been interpreted as Melville juxtaposing Christian mores alongside those of a non-Christian mindset.
In the end, the narrating voice Ishmael is the sole survivor, clinging to flotsam after the whale has gone. It becomes apparent that the whale is representative of Melville’s idea of the Christian God. It has punished those who do not believe, and it has punished those who believe too much, for the obsessive Captain Ahab has perished with his crew.
Ishmael is representative of the moderate Christian—the meek who inherits the Earth, one might say. He came along for the ride and remained unharmed while hell raged around him, protected by his faith.
This premise is largely the reason the book became a classic in the American canon, because it is interpreted as a cautionary tale and a fable. The moral of the story is that those who keep their heads down will triumph in the end.
Herman Melville
Herman Melville found inspiration for Moby Dick by sailing on a whaler to the Pacific Ocean in 1841–1842. He then went AWOL from his ship and lived among the natives on the Marquesas Islands. After a number of weeks he boarded another whaler and traveled to Honolulu, Hawaii. He eventually returned to the U.S. mainland in 1844.
Melville was displeased at witnessing Christian missionaries in Hawaii forcing their faith on the natives, who had their own beliefs. Although he was a Christian himself, he saw that extreme righteousness was ethically questionable. This was the seed for Moby Dick, which questions the virtues of extreme beliefs.
Before Moby Dick, Melville had published a number of novels alluding to his seagoing adventures, but he never made a great deal of money from any of his work. During the writing of Moby Dick, he became a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated the book.
Melville spent the remainder of his working life as a customs officer for New York City. By the time he retired, few people remembered his past as an adventurer and novelist. He became an alcoholic, but his wife stuck by him and helped him recover. In sobriety he struggled with bouts of depression until his death at the age of seventy-two. It had been almost forty years since his writing career had ceased, but that hadn’t stopped him from continuing to write for his own pleasure.
In a way Melville’s own journey from adventurer, to novelist, to obscurity is part of the legend. Because he never tasted real success in his own lifetime, it is tempting to wonder what he might now think about the literary legacy he left behind. After all, Moby Dick is now regarded by some as the best American novel ever written.
Billy Budd
Billy Budd was published posthumously in 1924, long after the death of Herman Melville in 1891. The author had left the unfinished manuscript among his papers but it wasn’t discovered until 1919, some thirty years after it was begun.
Set in the late eighteenth century, the eponymous central character, a sailor, finds himself subject to a court-martial after accidentally killing a fellow sailor whilst being questioned about a rumour of mutinous behaviour. Billy is a good man, and the one witness to the event can testify that it was an accident, but despite this there are disastrous consequences.
In the novel, Melville addresses the different ways in which a person is viewed by society, and how this can ultimately determine their fate. Initially Billy is presented to the reader as a mild-mannered and affable man. He even blesses the captain who orchestrated his downfall, being too naïve to realize that he always held the power to save him.
However, later in the book we read a published account of the court-martial, which paints Billy as a scoundrel who deserved his punishment. In addition, a ballad written by one of his shipmates suggests that he wasn’t quite as innocent as the reader has been led to believe. The end result is that the reader finishes the novel unsure of Billy’s true character. Was he an honest man who got caught up in unfortunate circumstances, or a rogue who was responsible for his own undoing?
In many ways it is an early prototype for courtroom drama, altering the reader’s perception of the main character based on the evidence as it is revealed. Melville’s tale is partly an analysis of the moral judgment of others—emphasizing that it is human nature to oscillate between contradictory opinions of a person, whether in a court of law or otherwise—and it is this that makes the tale so intriguing.
And Other Stories
After the publication of his epic masterpiece Moby Dick in 1851, Melville experimented in short fiction, a style that had been popularized in America by Edgar Allan Poe. A departure from the maritime settings of his previous novels, Bartleby, the Scrivener explores the mundane existence of Bartleby, a Wall Street pen pusher. In Las Encantadas Melville employs the short story form in ten philosophical sketches, narrated by an anonymous voice and each exploring a different, and increasingly darker, side of life on the enchanted Galapagos Islands. In Benito Cereno Melville is back in familiar territory as he examines the life of a sea captain in the midst of a slave rebellion. Encompassing a range of themes and characters, Melville’s novellas showcase his distinctive writing style in shorter form.
CONTENTS
Cover (#ua72aa57f-e18e-516c-a4a9-dae70ea971d4)
Title Page (#u9ca2fefe-45f2-5229-a12c-8818ade86a6d)
Copyright (#u0d506190-4379-50b4-b294-57e8270dab25)
History of Collins (#ub1e1463d-fa56-547f-b366-93ce69aac788)
Life & Times (#ua661fdd8-733f-5577-adbb-101017c8a976)
BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER (#u3fb8878a-0c89-5c14-9cd2-fdb8e3ff0e4f)
BENITO CERENO (#u46a68f09-438c-5f14-82a4-d93cc70cc595)
LAS ENCANTADAS OR, ENCHANTED ISLES (#litres_trial_promo)
BILLY BUDD (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER (#ulink_41fc06fd-6882-5181-8548-2e7928588bd8)
I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations, for the last thirty years, has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom, as yet, nothing, that I know of, has ever been written—I mean, the law-copyists, or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and, if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners, for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of. While, of other law-copyists, I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist, for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report, which will appear in the sequel.
Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit I make some mention of myself, my employés, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings; because some such description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented. Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but, in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds. All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat; for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor’s good opinion.
Some time prior to the period at which this little history begins, my avocations had been largely increased. The good old office, now extinct in the State of New York, of a Master in Chancery, had been conferred upon me. It was not a very arduous office, but very pleasantly remunerative. I seldom lose my temper; much more seldom indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages; but, I must be permitted to be rash here, and declare, that I consider the sudden and violent abrogation of the office of Master in Chancery, by the new Constitution, as a —— premature act; inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-lease of the profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years. But this is by the way.
