In the First Watch

PERCHED in the mental conning tower of her London flat, Mrs. McFee ever preserved “an austere skepticism toward her son’s way of life" and the old lady’s maternal anxiety seems amply justified as we read the candid and delightful memories of her talented son.In the First Watch is a most engaging book, fresh as the breeze blowing the oily smells from the boiler room and lively as the winches when cargo comes aboard. The author does not say so, but Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle were among his authentic granddads. The beautifully literate engineer who drove the battered engines of the Framfield was the type, body, soul, and dungarees, of the rollicking salts who squared the yards generations before steam chased sail from the seven seas; but a certain underlying steadfastness came to McFee from the father who wrote his name with difficulty, but knew precisely what he was doing when he sat before his drawing board, and from the grave uncles, sailors ashore, who watched like lynxes over their ships and cargoes, and whose restraining influence hovered over the background of our hero’s adventures.

McFee came up through the engine room, not the fo’e’sle. He began as an oiler and quit as Chief. It was in the years of the World War, when he was on the death route carying chilled beef from Alexandria to Salonika, that he used to write the Atlantic of what life was like when torpedoes were about and the boilers needed help. Better letters never came from the sea. McFee has embalmed much of them in his books; but what a scholar he was I never knew till I read in this life’s story that Goethe, Gibbon, James, and Flaubert were on the bookshelf in the corner of his cabin which his shipmates eyed so eerily.

Not Daumier nor Rowlandson has a surer eye for character than he. Every figure comes alive: Captain Williams under the embarrassing encumbrance of his wife and baby; Chief Edes with his solid capacity and enigmatic background; Brown, who knew his way round with the ladies; the engaging Mr. Mair; Tinoso, the Spanish hustler in a town dead as a haddock, stick to the memory like oakum to a joint. There was fun to be had in port with the girls, but it was when the ancient tramp stood up to a gale that the wild joy of living took hold of McFee. Then a sense of responsibility steadied him, and thoughts of the novels he was going to write shone like meteors beyond the blackness.

“Mister, it was a beautiful life!” remarked the shellback bosun; and a beautiful book has McFee made of it.

ELLERY SEDGWICK