Sealts, Jr. They show us, for example, that Melville worked through stages of imagining. First; there was the poem, about a sailor who was to be hanged for plotting a mutiny. Then came Melville’s further interest in Billy in the context of the eighteenth-century British navy’s concern with mutiny as a threat to fleet-wide order. Claggart, Billy’s nemesis, was born in further reworkings and then was made more complex, as is true of Captain Vere. The more Melville worked at this (apparent) first fiction in years, the more he thought about the nature of fiction, and the more he sought to deepen (and darken) his characters. The “inside narrative” will tell of inner, psychic events, and not merely physical ones.

Surely, he did mean much of the allegorizing that readers in the classroom parade before one another. Billy, impressed from the merchant, Rights-ofMan, does, after all, cry out “Good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man.” Vere does, after all, stand for verity. Billy, as he is hanged, does die as sun shoots through clouds to create “a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision.” Melville does liken Claggart to Satan (“the scorpion for which the creator alone is responsible”). And he does liken Billy much to Adam as well as to Christ. Vere, who we are told cannot help but enforce the laws, must hang Billy for killing Claggart, even if the punishment is not fair—for it is just. Billy blesses Vere, we are reminded as we are told that Billy Budd is Melville’s fiction of reconciliation: left unfinished at his death, it is there to tell us that Melville has accepted fate’s cruelty and his own cruel fate.

I would suggest, however, that the novel sustains Melville’s preoccupation with fiction, that it creates dark characters for his sane madness, and that he is equally concerned with the mail getting through, and with his participation, to whatever degree, in a suicide.

Melville was a stem and difficult father and, when he wrote, he was removed, cranky, impatient, and selfish. We know little of his particular relationship with his son Malcolm, who in 1867 was eighteen years old. We do know that Malcolm was his firstborn, and that he owned a pistol. Roistering one night after work at an insurance office run by his uncle’s brother-in-law, he returned home very late, and didn’t emerge from his room the next day. That evening, Melville forced the door to find that his son was dead. He had shot himself in the temple—an accident, the Melvilles insisted. What part the troubled father and husband played, or thought he played, in the suicide we cannot know.

But if we read Billy Budd with suicide and parental guilt in mind, interesting considerations arise. Dansker, the voice of insight among the characters in the novel, calls him Baby Budd. The mutiny act, which necessitates Billy’s death, is described as “War’s child,” which “takes after the father.” In the next chapter, Captain Vere is described as “old enough to have been Billy’s father.” And so, when Billy goes to his death crying, “God Bless Captain Vere!” it is as if a father is exculpated by a son who, because of man’s laws and God’s dispositions, he is required to sentence to death. It is possible that some of the electricity of the Vere-Budd relationship is the result of the father-son analogy that subconsciously galvanized Melville into writing the novel.

In this, another tale of shipboard levels and kinds of perception, Melville is again obsessed with silence, as well as with ways of telling the truth. Billy, “under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeling,” stutters, “or even worse.” The “even worse” is his choked agony of silence when, falsely accused by Claggart, he cannot speak and, lashing out, kills his accuser. It is silence that leads to Billy’s death, and it is silence—the failure of mail to get through—that still haunts Melville. I see little reconciliation here. He still quarrels with silence, and—remem—ber the serpent “for which the creator alone is responsible”—he still quarrels with God.

But Melville too is a creator. He thinks hard of that for which he’s responsible. So in chapter 2 he worries about the form and function of his art, discussing Billy—“he is not presented as a conventional hero”—and his story, which “is no romance.” He is speaking of what’s actual, I think he says here, not of the symbolic. His subject, he tells us, really is death and silence and inexorable laws. In chapter 11, making Claggart an Iago, he worries that he errs in the direction of the Gothic, or that his reader will, and he discusses “realism” and “Radcliffian romance.” Chapter 13 reminds us that profound passion can be enacted “among the beggars and rakers of the garbage”; he is worrying about the effectiveness of his writing tactics, the ways of fiction are very much on his mind. In chapter 28, toward the novel’s end (and his), he all but declaims or apologizes: “Truth uncompromisingly told will have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.” As he writes about Billy and Captain Vere and Claggart and Dansker, he writes about how he writes.

In 1851, Melville wrote to Hawthorne that “I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities.” Now, thirty years and more later, writing of Vere’s end, he may speak of his deepest self: “The spirit that ...