SOURCE: “Keeping True: Billy Budd, Sailor,” in Melville's Later Novels, The University of Georgia Press, 1986, pp. 365–99.

In the following essay, Dillingham analyzes the characters of Billy, Claggart, and Vere as they reflect the novella's emphasis on the need for individual integrity.

A curious but little-noticed fact from Melville's last years furnishes a valuable clue to the theme of Billy Budd, Sailor. His granddaughter Eleanor remembered that he composed his final work on “an inclined plane that for lack of more accurate designation one must call ‘desk’; for though it had a pebbled green-paper surface, it had no cavity for inkwell, no groove for pen and pencil, no drawer for papers, like the little portable desks that were cherished as heirlooms in the late nineteenth century.” It was “open underneath” and rested upon a “paper-piled table” in Melville's room at Twenty-Sixth Street in New York. On one of the...