Flashback, July 1924: TLS ‘Billy Budd’ Essay Further Fans Melville Revival

 

Literary critic John Middleton Murry, noting a curious addition to the recently published 16-volume Collected Works of Herman Melville, lavishly praised the novella “Billy Budd, Foretopman,” in the influential U.K. Times Literary Supplement, generating interest in this late-career return to form by the great but troubled 19^th-century American novelist.

The rise, fall, and revival of literary reputations has long fascinated me. But the case of Herman Melville (pictured) strikes me as especially compelling.

From bestselling author semi-autobiographical fiction set in the South Seas in the 1840s to more symbolic, ambitious fare that led his readers to abandon him in the 1850s, Melville had fallen into almost complete literary obscurity by the time of his death in 1891.

Yet roughly 30 years later, he would be propelled into the circle of American authors that college English majors are expected to read. Even the author with the closest similar critical and commercial trajectory that I can think of, F. Scott Fitzgerald, only had to wait less than four years after his death for a revival, when the Council on Books in Wartime handed out free copies of The Great Gatsby to American service personnel serving overseas.

At the behest of Carl Van Doren, a faculty member of Columbia University and literary editor of The Nation, Raymond Weaver—a colleague at the school—had written for the magazine an August 1919 essay coinciding with the centennial of the birth of Melville. The piece made Melville the subject of critical and biographical interest.

The boom gained further momentum stateside in 1921, as Weaver produced the first full-length biography of Melville, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, and Van Doren made the case for the novelist with a full chapter devoted to him in the critic’s influential study The American Novel.

While performing his research on Melville, Weaver had received from the novelist’s granddaughter pages from “Billy Budd” that had been stored in a family breadbox after Melville’s widow, faced with deciphering his scratch-outs, insertions, and shaky handy, had left it to others to edit.

Weaver set to work on the abandoned project. Even he sometimes lost patience with the material, making some questionable editorial decisions (believing the manuscript was essentially finished, when modern scholars have determined that Melville was still working on it) and some outright errors (e.g., rendering “innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute” as the nearly incomprehensible “innocence and infirmary, spiritual depravity and fair respite”).

When it was done, Weaver regarded it as more of a curiosity than a late-life masterpiece by one of America’s greatest authors.

Yet, flawed as Weaver’s work was, it still was enough to lead Murry to make the case for Melville as an essential American novelist.

In his TLS article, “Herman Melville’s Silence,” the English critic took note of the abrupt turn away from fiction—the “silence”—that the writer took after The Confidence-Man in 1857.

He found something infinitely poignant in the former bestselling novelist of the sea returning to maritime matter in Billy Budd. The novella constituted, he asserted, Melville’s “last will and spiritual testament.”

Murry—who was already deeply into the other critical work for which he is best remembered, securing the place of his late wife Katherine Mansfield in the critical canon—had a considerably higher estimate of “Billy Budd” than Weaver. After pondering the matter further, the American’s respect for this short work considerably improved.

With British admirers such as Murry, D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature, and John Freeman’s 1926 biography of Melville (which compares “Billy Budd” to John Milton’s Paradise Regained), the renewed American appreciation for the novelist was being reinforced across the Atlantic. It has remained a classroom staple since then.

In an essay published a few months ago in IM—1776, critic Lafayette Lee predicted: “As Billy Budd is further dissected and its subtleties slowly erased, it is likely to fall out of favor with the general public and return to the shadows from whence it came.”

I am not so sure about this. Readers have found so much to ponder and muse over here (e.g., including the 1951 Benjamin Britten-E.M. Forster novel and the 1963 film starring Terrence Stamp) that they will be sounding its depths about the innocent and doomed sailor for years.