Book review: “Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)” by Herman Melville, illustrated by Barry Moser

Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) is both mythic and intimate, and so, too, are the woodcuts that Barry Moser has created for the centennial edition from the University of Chicago Press.

Consider the scene near the end of the book when the plank holding Billy’s body is tilted, sending its hammock-bound burden into the deep.  Melville reports that, for the second time, a “strange human murmur” arises from the crew of the 74-gun Royal Navy ship Indomitable and blends now

with another inarticulate sound proceeding from certain larger sea-fowl whose attention having been attracted by the peculiar commotion in the water resulting from the heavy sloped dive of the shotted hammock into the sea, flew screaming to the spot. So near the hull did they come, that the stridor or bony creak of their gaunt double-jointed pinions was audible. As the ship under light airs passed on, leaving the burial-spot astern, they still kept circling it low down with the moving shadow of their outstretched wings and the croaked requiem of their cries.

Moser’s last image in the book is on the page after the final page of Melville’s text, and it shows one of these large birds hovering over the site of Billy’s watery burial, the ship now far in the distance.

 

“The croaked requiem”

It is a study in contrasts with its thickly black and white sea, its slanting gray sky that may be rain or simply the darkness of approaching night. and its ink-black sky. The large bird is a similar collection of contrasts but presented in a manner that gives immediacy and particularness to the creature. You can almost hear the “bony creak of [the seabird’s] gaunt double-jointed pinions” and “the croaked requiem” of its cry.

Melville had worked on Billy Budd during the final years of his life, leaving it unfinished at his death in 1891. His difficult-to-read handwritten version was rediscovered a quarter of a century later and published in 1924 in London. That edition, however, had been poorly transcribed, and, over the past century, several attempts have been made to put the novella into as good a shape as possible.

This edition employs the text prepared in 2019 by John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Ohge for the Melville Electronic Library.  As a note on the text points out, the roughness of Melville’s manuscript includes the use of Indomitable as the name of Billy’s ship most of the time, but, in six other cases, it’s called the Bellipotent.

The Power of Melville’s Writing

What’s clear, however, is the power of Melville’s writing, despite the work’s lack of final polishing.

He describes Master-at-arms John Claggart, Billy’s nemesis and false accuser—and the young man’s inadvertent victim—with a kind of creepy verve. The man, the equivalent of a police chief on the vessel, is about 35, thin and tall with a strange, broad, protruding chin.

It served Claggart in his office that his eye could cast a tutoring glance. His brow was of the sort phrenologically associated with more than average intellect; silken jet curls partly clustering over it, making a foil to the pallor below, a pallor tinged with a faint shade of amber akin to the hue of time-tinted marbles of old. This complexion, singularly contrasting with the red or deeply bronzed visages of the sailors, and in part the result of his official seclusion from the sunlight, though it was not exactly displeasing, nevertheless seemed to hint of something defective or abnormal in the constitution and blood.

Moser’s woodcut of Claggart views his subject from a lower vantage, as if the artist is seated, looking up at the man who seems to fade into the frame out of a deep inky darkness. In Moser’s image, the Master-at-arms is two long rows of shiny buttons rising to that thick, odd chin and the nostrils of a thick nose and one eye seeming to be squinting and the other, almost completely lost in the black dark, showing only the hint of an enigmatic, runic gleam.

The Tennessee-born Moser, now in his mid-80s, has illustrated nearly 300 works, including the Bible, Dante’s Inferno, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which won the National Book Award for design and illustration in 1983.

 

A Greek tragedy

The mythic nature of Billy Budd has to do with the young man himself—so agile and attractive that he is the sort called by fellow seamen the Handsome Sailor—and his ship and crew and captain, all caught in the vise of circumstance and naval rules and isolation and recent dangerous events and the reality of war.

When Claggart dies by Billy’s hand accidentally, everyone on the ship, from Captain Edward Vere on down to the cabin boy, knows that he is innocent of intent. They also know that the Master-at-arms was an evil man with a jealous animus toward Billy.

But each knows that, given the threat throughout the British fleet of mutiny, there is no way that Vere can ignore the killing of a superior officer by a plain seaman on a ship in the midst of a war.

Billy Budd is a Greek tragedy, a story of a human being crushed by the blind, deaf, impersonal movement of events.

 

Billy as a Vestal Virgin

Melville hints at this when, in the moments before Claggart’s death, he compares Billy to a Vestal Virgin. Claggart has accused Billy for fomenting mutiny, and the young foretopman is astonished and struck dumb with the stuttering that always afflicts him in moments of confusion away from his action as a seaman.

“Speak, man!” said Captain Vere to the transfixed one, struck by his aspect even more than by Claggart’s, “Speak! defend yourself.” Which appeal caused but a strange dumb gesturing and gurgling in Billy; amazement at such an accusation so suddenly sprung on inexperienced nonage; this, and, it may be, horror at the accuser’s eyes, serving to bring out his lurking defect and in this instance for the time intensifying it into a convulsed tongue-tie; while the intent head  and entire form straining forward in an agony of ineffectual eagerness to obey the injunction to speak and defend himself, gave an expression to the face like that of a condemned Vestal priestess in the moment of being buried alive, and in the first struggle against suffocation.

Here is Melville’s mythic story in all its intimate details: Billy’s “dumb gesturing and gurgling,” the “intent head and entire form straining forward” and the expression like that of a Vestal priestess “in the moment of being buried alive.”

Moser has no woodcut of Billy at this moment. But he does have one of what takes place a few moments later when, strangled by his words, Billy blindly lashes out his fist which slams into Claggart and kills him.

 

What he suddenly has to face

The Moser image of the dead Master-at-arms has the man’s black blood indistinguishable from his dark coat except for the two rows of shiny buttons. For the reader, who has watched Claggart’s schemes against the young sailor develop over the previous sixty or so pages, it is a fitting end to a villain.

Yet, even at this moment, the reader suspects—nay, knows—that, however innocent Billy is of this accident, his story will have no happy ending. Captain Vere is aghast at what he suddenly has to face and what he suddenly has to do.

And it’s no wonder that, long after Billy’s execution, long after Vere has been wounded in battle, and not long before his own death, “he was heard to murmur words inexplicable to his attendant—’Billy Budd, Billy Budd.’ ”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

11.13.25

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 11.18.25.