Conrad and Melville

Joseph Conrad was as furiously critical of Herman Melville, a serious rival in maritime literature, as he was of Dostoyevsky.  Conrad’s unwelcome reputation as a nautical novelist helps to explain his vitriolic condemnation of Melville’s work.  He hated Melville’s romanticism, insincerity and mysticism, and didn’t want to be coupled with him as an exotic writer of the sea.  He refused an offer to write an introduction to Moby-Dick and called the novel “a rather strained rhapsody with whaling for a subject and not a single sincere line in the 3 vols of it”. When a friend mentioned the book, Conrad burst into a furious denunciation: “He knows nothing of the sea.  Fantastic, ridiculous.  Mystical my eye!  My old boots are more mystical.”

Melville’s Billy Budd, though written in 1891, was not published until 1924.  Conrad died that year, so he could not have known that posthumous novel.  But both Billy Budd and Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), novellas written six years apart in the 1890s, share the same nautical Zeitgeist.  Billy Budd takes place on a British warship during the Napoleonic wars in 1797.  Narcissus is set on a British merchant marine ship sailing from Bombay to London a century later in 1894.

The threat of mutiny occurs in Captain Vere’s ship Indomitable in Billy Budd and an attempted mutiny is suppressed by Captain Allistoun in Narcissus.  Both mutinies are fiercely crushed, which explains why the Master-at-Arms John Claggart was so brutal and Captain Edward Fairfax Vere so severe.  Melville and Conrad both use an older character, the Dansker in Billy Budd and Singleton in Narcissus, to comment on the developing action.  Striking similarities also exist between the naïve Billy and the innocent Lena in Conrad’s Victory (1915), between Claggart and the evil criminal Jones in Victory.

A passage in Moby-Dick (ch. 54, 1851) brilliantly foreshadows Claggart’s rabid hostility to Billy: “When a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance, he will pull down and pulverise that subaltern’s tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.”

Claggart has a shadowy background and cruel character.  He has joined the navy after appearing in court for “some mysterious swindle, and never alluded to his previous life ashore”.  The Master-at-Arms is “a sort of chief of police with the duty of preserving order on the populous lower gundecks”.  Well-equipped for his difficult and dangerous job, Claggart had within him “the elemental mania of an evil nature”.  By contrast, the quintessentially innocent “nude Billy might have posed for a statue of the young Adam before the Fall”.  Billy’s personal beauty had first moved Claggart against him, and his monomania, “like a subterranean fire, was eating its way deeper and deeper in him.”

Puzzled by Claggart’s strange behaviour toward him, Billy twice seeks the advice of the Dansker, the old Dane.  Addressing Billy by his familiar infantile name, the sage warns him: “He’s down upon you, Baby Budd.  Secretly down on him, he assuredly was.”

Melville describes the old man’s work and appearance:

There was a veteran aboard who because his years began to disqualify him for more active work had been recently assigned duty as mainmastman in his watch, looking to the gear belayed at the rail roundabout that great spar near the deck.  At off times the foretopman had picked up some acquaintance with him, and now in his trouble it occurred to him that he might be the sort of person to go to for wise counsel.  He was an old Dansker long anglicized in the service, of few words, many wrinkles, and some honorable scars.  His wizened face, time-tinted and weather-stained to the complexion of an antique parchment, was here and there peppered blue by the chance explosion of a gun cartridge in action.

Once a heroic figure in battle, the Dansker is now old and semi-retired.  “The first time that his small weazel eyes happened to light on Billy Budd, a certain grim internal merriment set all his ancient wrinkles into antic play.  His eccentric unsentimental old sapience, primitive in its kind, saw something that looked oddly incongruous in the Handsome Sailor.”  When Billy is confused by the attempt of the crew, cunningly manipulated by Claggart, to involve him in the mutiny, he returns to the Dansker, who says, “didn’t I say so, Baby Budd?  Claggart is down on you.  He’s at the bottom of these strange experiences.”

Fulfilling the Dansker’s prophecy, Claggart enters Vere’s cabin and unjustly accuses Billy of conspiring in the mutiny.  When Billy’s debilitating stutter prevents him from defending himself verbally, the mild-mannered man reacts violently.  Billy has a history of striking out when provoked.  On his first ship The Rights of Man, named after Tom Paine’s revolutionary book (1791), the butcher had “insultingly given him a dig under the ribs, and “Quick as lightning” Billy had let fly his arm and given the burly fool a terrible drubbing.  After his false charge, Claggart provokes his victim by “deliberately advancing within short range of Billy, mesmerically looking him in the eye and briefly recapitulating the accusation.”  Overcome with anger and frustration, Billy strikes and kills him: “Quick as a flame from a discharged cannon at night, Billy’s right arm shot out, and Claggart dropped to the deck.”

After Claggart’s death, Billy calms down and belatedly gives the captain an articulate defence: “I have eaten the King’s bread and I am true to the King.  I never bore malice against the master-at-arms.  I am sorry that he is dead.  I did not mean to kill him.”  Vere then asks the still-baffled Billy why Claggart had maliciously lied, “since you declare there was no malice between you.”  Billy cannot respond to this crucial question, but the answer lies hidden in the novel.

The hundreds of sailors packed into a cramped space for years at a time desperately need a sexual outlet and Billy, the angelically beautiful young innocent, is a tempting target.   Claggart, a sadist responsible for discipline on the ship, resents Billy’s perfection and seethes with repressed longing for him.  Since Claggart loves Billy but cannot allow himself to have sex with him, he torments instead of seducing him, provokes him when he cannot possess him.

In “Upon Appleton House,” Andrew Marvell wrote of the harsh character of the captain’s namesake: “Under the discipline severe / Of Fairfax and the starry Vere.”  In a strictly lawful but unjust decision, Melville’s Captain Vere overrules his officers’ plea for leniency and sentences Billy to death.  He believes “severe discipline” is essential after the brutal suppression of the recent 1797 mutinies at Spithead and the Nore off the south coast of England, and declares, “however pitilessly that law may operate, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it.”  The “tragedy of strict adherence to usage was observed”, and the passive tense suggests that Vere had no other choice and no power to resist.  But the execution of the handsome Billy for accidental manslaughter of the hated Master-at-Arms would break the common bond between the best-loved Billy and the adoring crew, and would surely be more likely to incite a mutiny than by giving him a milder and more humane punishment for the violation of discipline.

After he’d witnessed a sailor being lashed for dereliction of duty, Billy swore he’d never endure the savage punishment that foreshadows his hanging.  But the crew swings in their hammocks as Billy, suffering Claggart’s posthumous revenge, swings on the rope.  Melville concludes that “Billy’s agony mainly proceeded from a generous young heart’s virgin experience of the diabolical incarnate and effective in Claggart.”

In Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1979), Ian Watt gives a perceptive account of the history and character of Dansker’s fictional parallel:

Singleton is the most experienced sailor aboard.  He is instinctively alert to every stir of the sea and wind, which are “as much a part of his existence as his beating heart.”  This alertness makes him perform the first nautical action of the novel.  When the cable moves and the Narcissus comes to “unsuspected life,” Singleton is there to tighten the brake of the windlass [to lock the anchor chain in place]; and the first chapter ends with him growling the symbolic command: “You. . . hold!”  He is the lonely relic of an earlier, heroic age of seamen.

Like the Dansker in Billy Budd, Singleton in the Narcissus is old, wrinkled and laconic,

has a sunburnt face and rugged features, and is endowed with primitive wisdom and oracular confidence.  The white-bearded, stoical, experienced, dignified father-figure and superstitious prophet can read a popular novel by Bulwer-Lytton but cannot write.  He was “tall and fatherly, bearing high his head of a weather-beaten sage on the body of an ancient athlete.  With his spectacles and a venerable white beard, he resembled a learned and savage patriarch, the incarnation of a barbarian wisdom serene in the blasphemous turmoil of the world.”

Aged 57 and very old for arduous duties at sea, Singleton had sailed to the southward since the age of twelve and in the last forty-five years had lived no more than forty months ashore.  Like the Dansker whose face was peppered with gunpowder, Singleton “was old enough to remember slavers, bloody mutinies, pirates perhaps; who could tell through what violences and terrors he had lived!”  Yet he is still surprisingly strong and steers through a raging tempest for 36 hours: “Singleton had stuck to the wheel.  His hair flew out in the wind; the gale seemed to take its lifelong adversary by the beard and shake his old head.  He steered with care.”

But like the Dansker, the years have taken their toll and he’s also been weakened by his strenuous exertion.   He reached for his friend’s pipe, “missed, staggered, and suddenly fell forward, crashing down, stiff and headlong like an uprooted tree.  They helped him up.  He mumbled despondently: ‘I am getting old.’ ”

Again, like the Dansker who predicted that Claggart woud destroy Billy, Singleton has preternatural powers.  He possessed “a sharper vision, a clearer knowledge” than anyone else on the ship.  He insists that the Black man James Waite is not malingering to avoid work and predicts, “The man is dying I tell ye!”  When his prophecy comes true, “Singleton only was not surprised.  ‘Dead—is he?  Of course.’ ”

“He also claimed that Jimmy was the cause of head winds.  Mortally sick men—be maintained—linger till the first sight of land, and then die.”  He superstitiously but correctly predicts that the Jonah’s death would end the winds that halt the ship.  When Jimmy’s corpse is pushed overboard, the adverse winds drop and the ship is able to sail home.

The illegitimate and illiterate Billy had been humiliated when he signed on to the Indomitable.  When Singleton’s ship reaches London and he steps on unfamiliar land, he’s out of his natural element and quite useless.  He’s also humiliated when he signs off the Narcissus, “painfully sketched in a heavy cross, blotting the page,” and is hashly condemned by a menial clerk as “a disgusting old brute”.

The parallels between Billy and Lena, Claggart and Jones appear in Conrad’s last great novel, Victory.  Both Billy and Lena were abandoned in childhood.  Billy was a foundling; Lena never knew her mother.  Claggart is struck by the first sight of Billy.  When the gentlemanly hero Axel Heyst first sees Lena, he is struck by “the sensation of a new experience”. Billy is forcibly taken off his ship, The Rights of Man, and oppressed by Claggart.  Lena—forced to be an itinerant prostitute in a musical whorehouse—is sexually experienced but still retains her innocence.

On both ships “everyone loved Billy”.  The hotelier Schomberg, the repressed Heyst and the bisexual Martin Ricardo all love Lena.  But she is captured and oppressed by the musical dictator Zangiacomo, and sexually assaulted by Schomberg and Ricardo.  Billy and Lena are emotionally responsive, capable of tenderness and love.  Both are beautiful young victims, fragile and insecure, vulnerable and corrupted by evil.  Captain Vere can’t protect Billy; Axel Heyst rescues Lena from captivity but can’t protect her.  Both characters are trapped in a tragic destiny, dying sacrificially and nobly at the end of the novels.

Billy and Lena are both capable of astonishing physical strength.  Billy beats the butcher and kills Claggart.  In Schomberg’s hotel, Lena seemed small, weak and frightened, but when Ricardo first spies her on Heyst’s island “she loomed up strangely big and shadowy”.  Lena is able to resist Ricardo’s sexual attack and take away his knife.  Both Billy and Lena are redemptive heroes who oppose evil and achieve a moral victory.  The last words of the angelic Billy, who accepts his unjust punishment, are “God bless Captain Vere!”  Lena’s last words are “Oh, my beloved.  I’ve saved you!”

Perverse sexual passions seethe beneath the surface of Narcissus and Victory.  Both Clagg-art (rhymes with braggart and suggests sticking) and Conrad’s Jones are stiff and formal, ferocious and violent, and fatally threaten their victims.  Claggart is very different from the crude sailors, Jones feels superior to the men he swindles in Schomberg’s hotel.  Both educated and articulate men have a mysterious criminal background that forced them to do sadistic and undignified work far below their proper social status.  “Plain Mr. Jones” is neither a gentleman, nor plain, nor Jones.  He has feminine eyelashes and penciled eyebrows, and is called unnatural, vicious, depraved and disgusting.  Most significantly, both Claggart and Jones are satanic homosexuals.  Both men, as Jones says, have been “hounded out of society by a lot of highly moral souls.”  Claggart tries to repress and deny his homosexuality; Jones admits his perverse sexual tastes.  Claggart lusts for Billy; Jones has sex with his vicious and groveling “Secretary”, Ricardo.  Claggart enjoys implicating Billy in his own corruption; Jones accuses Heyst of being a secret homosexual.  Claggart, like Jones, is the quintessence of evil.  Ricardo repeatedly calls Jones a gentleman and connects him to the devil by alluding to King Lear: “The prince of darkness is a gentleman.”

Conrad would not have madly condemned Melville if he’d known how much their work had in common.

Jeffrey Meyers has introduced four Conrad novels and published Joseph Conrad: A Biography (1991).

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