The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

In this mixed-up time of affluence and insecurity it is bracing to read of the Elizabethan hardihood of SIR FRANCIS CHICHESTER. He steps out of Hakluyt’s Voyages, a man with one lung who confidently proposes to make the fastest voyage around the world ever made in a small craft, alone. What he may lack in heft he makes up for in reflex and experience: he has repeatedly sailed across the Atlantic in self-steering yachts of his design, and in 1929 he completed the second solo flight, England to Australia, yet he was admittedly terrified at the thought of rounding Cape Horn. Of the eight yachts to have attempted it, six had been capsized or somersaulted. “I hate being frightened,” he writes, “but, even more, I detest being prevented by fright.” How he prepared and pulled through is told in his own words in GIPSY MOTH CIRCLES THE WORLD (Coward-McCann, $5.95).

Saltwater readers will remember the sailing exploits and brave improvisations in this chronicle; what fascinate me are his exploits in endurance and psychology. The Gipsy Moth IV, as the numeral indicates, was a boat built to capitalize on earlier voyages and past mistakes, and regardless of expense. On the day of the launching she stuck on the greased ways; her skipper jumped down to lend a shoulder, and when the Moth hit the water, the ripples from a passing ferry made her rock fore and aft. “My God,” Francis and his wife, Sheila, exclaimed, “she’s a rocker!” The Moth was a 53-foot ketch, 39.5 feet at the waterline, capable of a theoretical speed of 200 miles a day, using her powerful self-steering gear when her skipper was otherwise employed. During her trials on the Solent there were two developments: she was “horribly tender,” lying over as much as 80 degrees, which meant heavy additions to the keel; and in one rough run the skipper skidded on a metal skylight and crashed on his thigh, with pain and partial paralysis which were to trouble him for months.

With his crippled leg, his bottles and tins banging in the cupboards as the Moth heels over, Chichester takes his leave of Plymouth on August 27; his boat is light (six skins of mahogany form the hull, the total 7/8 inch thick) and maneuverable with only the mainsail set. In the turbulence of the Channel the skipper is seasick (so at times was Nelson), eats little or nothing at the outset, keeps dry in his one-piece deck suit, and has his first good sleep of four consecutive hours on the seventh day.

He coasts too close to Madeira, and in squalls the Moth gets out of control; it takes him two and a half hours to jibe, one hour before midnight and an hour and a half afterward, by which time he is weak from fatigue. He dozes, to find on waking that the boat is heading back north. Caught, later, in a sudden night squall the big genny (the size of a room 20 by 30 feet) is blown overboard; with all sails lowered and the boat stopped, he hauls the genny inboard, foot by foot. He revives his spirits with brandy and with John Masefield’s thrilling account of the clipper Bird of Dawning racing up the British Channel.

The Moth enters the tropics, and her naked skipper breakfasts on flying fish, delicious when fried in butter. He logs 194 miles in a day and figures out that he has just made “the longest six-day run by any singlehander.” On the evening of September 17, he sits in the cockpit in smoking jacket, new trousers, and black shoes, celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday with a champagne cocktail. After toasting his wife and son, he looks inward: “People keep at me about my age. I suppose they think that I can beat age. I am not that foolish. . . . Our only purpose in life ... is to put up the best performance we can — in anything, and only in doing so lies satisfaction in living. ... I see that action appears a necessary ingredient for deep feeling. This sort of venture that I am now on is a way of life for me.” In his exploration of solitude he is much more articulate than Admiral Byrd.

But after that lovely evening the sea buffets him. He fights a losing struggle to keep the Moth heading, close-hauled; the eggs go bad, and he jettisons fourteen dozen; he worries about his water supply and the rain he had hoped to collect from the mainsail, busts his self-steering gear, nearly breaks a rib and does break a tooth, tries to cement it back and ends by smoothing the ragged edge with a file.

Living at a perpetual angle of 30 degrees, Chichester is schooled in the vulnerability of the Moth in the gales he encounters in the Roaring Forties. At Sydney he has a respite and his boat a professional refitting. But the worst is yet to come and he dreads it. Two days out, the tropical cyclone Diana churns up the Tasman Sea, and a gigantic wave rolls the Gipsy Moth right over, until the mast is between 40 degrees and 60 degrees below the horizontal. Chichester is in his bunk when the contents of the cabin are flung down on him, one serrated-edged cutting knife embedding within inches of his head. The recovery must be read in his words; it took days, pumping, picking up, and patching, on a diet of honey and water. It is characteristic that the log simply notes, “January 30. About 22.30. Capsize,” and that when he gets through by radio to Sheila in Sydney, he complains of the horrible smell of spilled beer and wet vitamin tablets stuck to the cabin roof but keeps repeating that no assistance is needed.

Intrepid, resourceful, and lucky are the right words for this solo voyage of 29,630 miles, which shattered all records. The text is vivid, selfaware, gay, and glorying in the elements.

I know of no other people on the globe who have survived the losses the English have taken since 1914 and still have enough gimp to laugh at themselves. The Viennese have turned dour, so have the French. In the face of staggering debts, devaluation of the pound, congested roads, and irresponsible adolescents, “England,” so say those witty commentators DAVID FROST and ANTHONY JAY, “is still the world’s leading manufacturer of cricket bats, Union Jacks, sheet music, of God Save the Queen, souvenir paperweights of the Tower of London, and second class railway carriages.” Yes, and I would add, London continues to be the best-dressed capital, owns the handsomest cars, supports forty-five plays to New York’s fifteen, has lured the slickest gamblers from Las Vegas and the best chefs from Paris, and treats its home audience to the most intelligent television on the screen. If all this is a delusion of grandeur, who pays the bill?

In their witty book THE ENGLISH (Stein and Day, $5.95) Mr. Frost and Mr. Jay have examined their homeland as if they were irreverent anthropologists from another planet. They are quite aware of what they call the derelict empire with its impotent army and doubtful currency, and of how little these imponderables have dented the Englishman’s attitude toward sin, money, women, love, food, politics, and travel. One docs not have either to like or detest the English to find this an amusing book.

The authors tell us that five million Britons visit the Continent each year, and that “the barbarity subdued and the difficulty overcome — this is what makes an Englishman’s holiday abroad marvelous,” as witness these comments: “The only one for sixty people; no bolt on the door, naturally. . . .” “Look at that! They don’t even bother to go behind the hedge!” “Everywhere you turn there’s someone standing with his hand out for money.”

Messrs. Frost and Jay are quite as realistic about the English menu before it was improved by the American invasion and the French chefs: “For us, food was leathery meat, watery greens, leaden suet puddings, stewed tea, pink blanc mange, and tapioca. It was epitomized by the seaside boarding house waitress bending over a customer with the magic words ‘Gravy, sir. One lump or two?’ ” These boys — David Frost is one of the stars of That Was the Week That Was — are glib and so clever that one can see why their book was a smash hit at home. But they are not without their serious side. “England,” they conclude, “has all the qualifications to play the role of Athens. Why on earth then does she insist on crippling herself without point or purpose by trying to be a mini-Rome?”

BRIGID BROPHY, her husband, MICHAEL LEVEY, and CHARLES OSBORNE have concocted what the English would call “a wicked book,” FIFTY WORKS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE WE COULD DO WITHOUT (Stein and Day, $4.95). Their demolition technique is based on two principles: find a defect in a long-revered classic, and then jump on the thing until it is dead; and, second, the most amusing way to push down an esteemed author is to push up a minor writer in his place. But unfair or otherwise, their attack has produced some splendid fireworks, and the fifty works which they have blasted are of such varied assortment that every reader is bound to find among them some old enemies and smile as they are blown sky-high.

The list begins with Beowulf, which is rated “a fine example of primitive non-art.” Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is dynamited for its “punishing length, utter confusion and unremitting tedium . . . and monotonous rhyming verses which run endlessly on . . .” (I agree). Moby Dick is “American literature’s . . . false prophet in fake biblical prose” (unfair). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland gets the hand grenade because Lewis Carroll, as they see him, was “kinky about little girls, and he was an extremely dull, humourless man” (partially debatable). Their short rejection of Huckleberry Finn betrays a fundamental lack of understanding, and they complain about everything in Hamlet except that the play works on the stage. A Farewell to Arms is written off because Hemingway had not learned his lesson from Gertrude Stein and did not possess her exquisite choice of words (this is plain silly; see Stein’s monumental monotony, The Making of Americans). Arbitrary and malicious as they are, the trio are protesting against the thoughtless acceptance of “classics,” established by tradition and perpetuated by the reluctance of teachers and examiners to alter a system which everyone has learned to endure.

The drawings and the witticisms in Punch are the distillation of English humor, and both have had a propitious influence on the New Yorker as the New Yorker has had upon them, a reciprocity celebrated by Harold Ross in his entertainment of the Punch board in New York. What Bateman’s cartoons did to distract his countrymen in the First World War, NORMAN THELWELL’S do today. His illustrated books, Up the Garden Path, Thelwell’s Riding Academy, and Top Dog, have each seized upon an Englishman’s hobby and made it hilarious. And now in THELWELL’S COMPLEAT TANGLER (Dutton, $3.50), the artist has exposed the foibles and the hazards of the fisherman. They are all here: the coarse fisherman, the poacher, the salmon angler, the dry fly man, “interested only in water as clear as gin — and twice as expensive.” Here is the brotherhood and the lack of it; the etiquette which can so swiftly be fouled up by competition. Here is the well-dressed angler who has embedded his fly in the back of his new tweed, and the spinner who has lodged his lure in a sheep’s wool and is running to catch up. Mr. Thelwell’s sense of the unlikely and the absurd is delightfully depicted.

MRS. BENEKER by VlOLET WEINGARTEN (Simon and Schuster, $4.50) is, as the title implies, a portrait novel, and its success depends on the swiftness and sympathy with which the reader is engrossed in the heroine’s life. Mrs. Beneker if you met her at a cocktail party would appear a well-turned-out suburban wife. She is in her late forties, and with her children grown and sex subdued, she has resumed the intellectual curiosity she enjoyed in college. But for all this outward conventionality one could not imagine what goes on in her mind — and this is the fun of the book.

She is a very friendly soul and like most of us wants to be loved; she is given to saying what she thinks; she can neither check nor disguise her impulsiveness; and her recurring problem is how to behave decently in situations where she has been caught off balance. She gets a kick out of Religion G, the course in General Studies which she has been taking at Columbia, and Professor Serota in his sophisticated way makes her feel quite secure in her agnosticism, until her beloved son Tommy is critically injured in a smashup; then her panic reaction drives her to her knees. For her daughter Norah (who has just presented her with her first grandchild) she has achieved an affectionate tolerance, but Tommy baffles her: she puzzles in private over the books he brings home from Harvard, Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther and Tolkien’s Lard of the Rings; she dislikes his girl, Carla, and she cannot understand the apathy which causes Tommy to drop out. She suspects that Mr. Beneker is having an affair, cannot conceal her jealousy, and having shown her hand, cannot find complete assurance in his explanation. Essentially kind, uninterested in things or money, surprising in the help she gives to other women, Mrs. Beneker in her imaginative way is searching for herself, and within the limits of this deft and lively book she proves to be an attractive, very human woman.