For some latent psychological reason, still dimly unaware to me, I’ve returned to a few books from my college days. Perhaps it is a return to the womb. The magic of the books when first read did not reappear again, not to be recaptured, my folly. I was disappointed. I had thought they were crackerjack when I read them as a young man. And so for equally dim reasons, I thought I’d read books that were valued for youngsters, such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. By chance, a visit to a book fair revealed an edition from the Sixties with afterwords by critics, to explain what I couldn’t figure out for msyelf.
One book, The Sea Wolf, was inspired by a film of the same name, made in the Forties with Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield and Ida Lupino. It has a stupendously fierce performance of a Darwinian sea captain (Robinson) and the film has dialogue textured with philosophical questions. With all three books in hand I began to nibble away at them. The first read was London’s and what impressed me was his command of the sailing lexicon of the day — jibs, windlasses, spritsails, all the sailorly seamanship of the day that at times I just blew threw it to get at the narrative. London was a sailor and that art has greatly disappeared in the world today, for it is an arcane craft and skill much like cobbling a shoe by hand. I got through the book with its Darwinian view of man as expressed by Wolf Larsen, really London, and it did make me think.
Larsen refers to man and the collective as “yeast,” each spore struggling and in competition with others; one is fatigued by the struggle; however, it is a struggle going on now in each one of our bodies.Today’s evolutionary psychology poses many of the same questions with a different perspective so that I come away believing, thinking that we really are not in charge of anything, just flesh and bone capsules and captives of our genomes working their way through the millenias in random evolution. Evolution, apparently has no estimated time of arrival. (Parenthetically, I was a classmate of Stephen J. Gould at Jamaica High School, Queens, sadly deceased, who went on to become a world famous evolutionary expert.) Who knows what our next fellow will become?
The book that had me annoyed at first was Defoe’s. I imagine the style of the time, it was loaded with semi-colons; it was as if the reader, me, was being punctuated every few words. Growing tiresome, I blew the book off with the hope that I might try it later on in mid-day when I might be more alert and patient. I am rereading it now and I have improved in my attitude toward it. London’s prose was more fluent, Stevenson’s was limber with an occasionaly semi-colon thrown in to annoy me as well. Styles of writing and expression have their fashion.
So I knocked off London first, tried Defoe and put it away and finally entered the world of Stevenson and was able to get through it and then back to Defoe which I am reading now with a better attitude as I said. And as I am awash with the survival of the fittest, buccaneers and English individualists some observations are emerging.
In all three books the sea, islands in the sea, the natural elements, nature, man against nature and man against himself as well as man against society all form a constellations of motifs and themes for the authors to hang their hats on. From what I have read from the 30 or 50 pages in Crusoe, there is a strong flavor of utilitarianism, rugged individualism, thinking out of the box, doing for one self, of being a divergent thinker in a dire situation, like a prisoner plotting his escape and all the devious ways he concocts to make that so.
Dafoe’s Crusoe is more of an adventurous Thoreau, his thinking is purposeful, not that Thoreau’s is not. One becomes aware of a life force trying to sustain itself in every way imaginable. I am vaguely aware of Luis Bunuel’s film of Robinson Crusoe starring Dan O’Herlihy in the early fifties. I may even have seen it but I cannot recall for sure. There is a survival energy in the book that propels it, although I am only half through it.
In The Sea Wolf London brilliantly recreates how a seaman restores a boat with his own hands, his wit and his physical energy that I associate to The Flight of the Phoenix (1967) in which crash survivors develop and rig a new plane from the debris of the old and escape their being being marooned. The cannibalization of the dead into the resurrection of the new is something to behold and such are the pages and scenes in London’s description of how a shipwreck is put together once again by one man’s determined effort to be more than a yeast spore. It is altogether a masterly piece of prose.
Long John Silver is the best written character in Treasure Island. He is ambiguous, somewhat complex, fascinating to behold, brave and most cunning, an Italian Machiavelli in his dealings with individuals and small groups. As a child I saw a few versions of the film, one with Orson Welles and the other with Robert Newton, a famous scene stealer, whose eye-rolling and gravelly voice was compelling. After all, he played Sykes in Oliver Twist, with gusto. All the other characters pale beside this pirate captain, except for Jim Hawkins who to me is Robin to his Batman.
So I have all three books gestating in mind, and for some reason I feel all three, a little less with London’s book, to be a product of industry, that is, the book as an industrious effort, perhaps reflecting the times, the Industrial Revolution itself. I can imagine Defoe brilliantly running a wool factory, a captain of industry to use the old term.
I’ved entered the Eighteenth Century with two of these books and the Nineteenth Century with the other, maritime worlds to a degree and inhabited by industrious, struggling, energetic and purposeful individuals making their way across the earth like ants scuttling across a bread crumb. To a degree, fatiguing. It is as if I am reading outer directed as opposed to inner directed literature, which has its pleasures. We have worry, confusion, fear and all the other human emotions but existential angst does not make its appearance.
Perhaps these three books are statements of a different kind of humanity, like comparing the acting styles of Gable, Cooper, Peck, Stewart with Brando, Hopper, Nicholson, Pacino and DeNiro. To wit, I entered into a different climate of opinion. The age of Freud had not dawned. In other words same old mankind, different sauce.
