Billy Budd, Sailor [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Shortly before completing Moby-Dick, at the age of thirty-one, married, with a one-year-old son, Melville bought a house and an estate of a hundred and sixty acres in the Berkshire Hills, two miles from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He renamed the house 'Arrowhead', and set up as farmer and author. As farmer he was a tolerable success. The estate prospered, paying its way and financing the author. But as professional author, ambitious to live off his literary earnings, the next seven years proved Melville a failure. Each new venture was repeatedly and harassingly frustrated. Within six years the productive half of the farm had to be sold; five months later Melville left on an extended trip, financed by his father-in-law, to England (where he visited Hawthorne), the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. At the age of thirty-six the last prose work to be published in his lifetime was completed. After the age of thirty-seven, an uncaring public were to hear no more, verse apart, from this wayward writer, this haunted, restless poet and supreme artificer - now recognized as giant among American men of letters, equal in his own sphere to Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, his European contemporaries. But the legend of a fallen Titan living out the long aftermath of his years in the twilight of the New York Custom House - a Bannadonna maimed by his own absorbed, excessive imagination - is less than a half truth. Moby-Dick stands as his memorial, his masterpiece, his flawed Bell-Tower; but, while admitting to Hawthorne (as for life hereafter) that 'he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated', Melville was far from armihilated: [9]