Painting Fakes

I’ve recently read Melville’s Billy Budd and other tales . Melville, ex-sailor and adventurer, had a lot of success with his rollicking sea adventures. However from the publication of Moby Dick onwards he sailed into murkier moral and symbolic territory, lost most of his readership, and spent the latter part of his life working as a customs inspector. Most of these stories come from that later period, when he was struggling to make a living as a writer and with the nature of good and evil. Billy Budd itself was first published 40 years after his death and it shows – no living author would allow a story to be published with that many digressions! Yet the story is the best and (digressions excepted) most gripping example of the moral landscape Melville painted in a number of stories in this collection. Billy Budd himself is the “handsome sailor”, an innocent, a peacemaker and source of admiration. His opponent, Claggart, is a man “naturally depraved” who takes a dislike to Budd and...