332
PARTISAN REVIEW
plays"l conceived in political settings, and both deal with problems of
authority.
"Pray for those who must make choices," Captain Vere begs of Billy
Budd at the end; and it is clear that the playwrights have read Sartre
as well as Melville. But they have not existentialized too much. They
have only, I think, concentrated Melville's meaning, as any play based
on the story would have to do, and as that remarkable and slightly
vaporing story might better have done itself. Nor have they remained
indifferent to the mythical l'esonance of the original. The play is not
better
than Melville's novel but it is worthy of it.
By setting his story in the atmosphere of the French Revolution
and the Great Mutiny, by introducing a hundred details such as the
fact that Billy's former ship was named
The Rights of Man,
Melville
must have intended in part a political-moral tale turning on the choice
between order and justice. At the same time, his
Billy Budd
is no
smug conservative tract. The actual choice looms as tragic, indeed
excruciating; and, as Newton Arvin, Richard Chase, and other critics
have shown, it opens out into a large domain of other meanings, meta–
physical, ritualistic, and sentimental. In the tragedy of his primitive in–
nocence Billy Budd re-enacts the fall of man; his associates mean–
while feed upon his spiritual vitality like communicants upon the Host;
finally there is the homo-erotic celebration of what Chase calls "that
peculiarly American God, the beatified boy."
The play, as I say, is deaf to none of these overtones,
in
either the
writing or the production. Acted by Charles Nolte, Billy Budd is not only
the beatified but the beautified boy; yet the effec.t
()f
Nolte's perhaps ex–
cessive good looks is offset by the dignity of his performance and the
warmth of his voice (I can still hear him drawling to Claggart: "Why
should I be afraid of you, sir? You speak to me friendly when we
meet.") In the conception of the part, however, as in that of Claggart
(equally well performed by Torin Thatcher), lies the main difficulty of
the play. For Melville, the two represented between them pure innocence
and pure depravity, absolutes with which neither morality nor, as a
rule, drama, has much to do. By relating the story in his indirect and
retrospective way, Melville was able to avoid, or perhaps only evade, the
difficulties. But the playwrights, because they must prescnt the two
men in the flesh, try to attach to each a rudimentary psychology. This
will not stand very close scrutiny. Billy is simply made boyish and Claggart
is given a kind of Byron complex: the rueful air and rhetoric of one
1. The term used by Coxe and Chapman to describe their piece in a note to
the text, published by the Princeton University Press at $1.50.
