PARTISAN REVIEW
terrible consciousness of having finally fulfilled the destiny of "citi–
fied man"-to recognize oneself as Caesar and one's son as Christ.
Claggart is about thirty-five. He is tall and spare, with classic
features, except for a disproportionate heaviness of the chin. His
hand is rather too small and there is a sort of intellectual pallor on
his forehead. He has a trace of foreign accent and is thought in
these Anglo-Saxon surroundings to have some affinity with a Medi–
terranean culture. Strangely, Claggart is another version of Mel–
ville's self-righteous Liberal, the Confidence Man. He is the Con–
fidence Man plus an actively evil nature. The figure in Melville's
great satire was not the evil man so much as "the moderate man,
the inveterate understrapper to the evil man." Claggart is the Con–
fidence Man invested with "natural depravity" willed by paranoiac
guile and controlled by superior intellect. In his campaign against
Billy Budd, he employs all the devices of "confidence." Subtly obse–
quious, outwardly frank and friendly, he is a "fair-spoken man,"
speaking in silvery accents with a "confidential" tongue. Conduct–
ing himself with "uncommon prudence" and speaking with a phari–
siacal sense of "retributive righteousness," he sells his case to Captain
Vere. Billy Budd, says Claggart, is a "deep one"; under the fair
exterior there is a "man-trap." In his present unquiet position, this
is an argument the captain cannot ignore. Claggart has merely to
enunciate his charge and his case is won.
So highly "citified" is Claggart's depraved mind that, like the
mind of mankind, it generates a compensatory vision of Innocence.
And this vision is at the root of his ambivalent feeling toward Billy
Budd, finding its expression to some extent in a homosexual attrac–
tion. Billy Budd's "harmlessness" fills Claggart with both longing
and revulsion at the same time that Budd's physical beauty attracts
him. Like Milton's Satan, thinking of the Garden, Claggart is cap–
able of looking at Billy Budd and weeping "feverish tears." He
weeps at being unable to put off the burden of civilization and be
"harmless." But in less regressive moments he can feel the active
bitterness of the ambiguous attraction-repulsion which Billy rouses
in
him.
"To be nothing more than innocent!" Such a being is in
the deepest sense a mutineer, an Apostate from Cain's City. It is
very difficult not to agree with Claggart.
The weakness of
Billy Budd
is the central character himself.
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