"Cliff Notes - Billy Budd" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

innocents with terrifying speed. Good and evil, innocence and
violence are the basic traits of human nature that Melville explored
from his first book to his last.

What in Melville's life brought him to these enduring themes and
turned them into a kind of obsession? They were partly a result of
the unhappy circumstances of his early years. Melville was born in
New York City in 1819 into a well-to-do, aristocratic family: his
father's family were prosperous Boston merchants and his mother was
a Gansevoort, one of the first patrician Dutch families to settle in
New York State. Both his grandfathers fought as distinguished
officers in the American Revolution. With this background, Melville
seemed destined for a life of fashionable ease until his father went
bankrupt in 1830, and the family was forced to move to Albany. Two
years later, Melville's father was dead, and the large family was on
the brink of poverty. Can you imagine how such a drastic change and
personal tragedy would have affected you at the age of 12? Melville
had to leave school and take on a variety of jobs he found dull and
degrading. The older he got, the more miserable he became. He had an
adventuresome spirit and a lively mind, but he was being cramped and
suffocated. So in 1839, at the age of 20, he signed on board the
merchant ship St. Lawrence and set sail for Liverpool.

You can already see how the theme of the fall from innocence comes
out in Melville's childhood. The big houses and easy lifestyle he
was used to as a child must have seemed like Eden compared to the
misery of being poor. But then think about the shock he must have
received when he first went to sea. Even though his family had
become impoverished, he was used to the company of well-mannered,
polite, and civilized people. Suddenly he was thrust among a bunch
of tough and dangerous sailors and was being bossed around by a
tyrannical captain and his officers, who had little patience and
much contempt for the "young gentleman." If you put on airs, you'd
be a laughing-stock. If you didn't do your job right, you'd be
severely punished. If you didn't learn the ropes--and fast--you'd be
picked on, beaten up, humiliated, maybe even killed.

The 20-year-old Melville did learn the ropes and he did survive his
first shipboard experience, but you can understand how his views on
human nature must have changed after getting to know the sailors
(many of whom were little better than criminals), the brutal
officers, and the terrible conditions of life on a ship in the mid-
19th century. This startling contrast between the innocence he had
known as a child and the violence he came into contact with during
his shipboard coming-of-age went into the vision of good and evil
that he expressed so many years later in Billy Budd.

And yet despite some of the horrors of being a sailor, Melville
could not resist the lure of the sea and shipped out again in 1841,
this time on the whaling ship Acushnet bound for the South Pacific.