Hornblower and the Sutherland

I have to marvel at C.S. Forester's ability to incorporate such detailed knowledge of wartime seafaring in such smooth, compulsively readable prose. I finished his second Hornblower book, A Ship of the Line, yesterday and the climactic battle was so gripping I stood reading it for twenty minutes at the train station. It's not a perfect book, even by the standards of pulp, but it's also a work of singular brilliance.

As I said earlier, as brilliant as it is, it's not right to class it with a masterpiece of prose like Moby Dick. Though Horatio Hornblower is kind of everything Captain Ahab wishes he could be, or possibly believes he is. Ship of the Line presents an even more consistent series of victories at sea for Hornblower in his new command of the Sutherland, formerly a Dutch vessel, a prize taken and refitted by the British. Hornblower cannily uses the ship's hull construction, with a bow curved in a way not characteristic of British ships, to pass himself off as an ally to unsuspecting prey.

Now he finds himself under command of Admiral Leighton, the husband of Lady Barbara, Hornblower's love interest from the first book, The Happy Return. Lady Barbara appears only briefly but she remains as a presence in Hornblower's mind, particularly in an interesting scene where he wrestles with his discomfort at the knowledge that she was probably responsible for getting him his new command.

The only problem I have with the novel is a strange jump from chapter 16 to 17. Sixteen is a brilliant description of the Sutherland's desperate rescue of another ship, Leighton's flagship, the Pluto, in the middle of a storm.

Bush was shouting something now, and pointing away over the quarter, and Hornblower followed the gesture with his eyes. The Pluto had vanished, and for a moment Hornblower thought she must have sunk with all hands. Then a breaking wave revealed her, right over on her beam ends, the grey waves breaking clean over her exposed bottom, her yards pointing to the sky, sails and rigging showing momentarily black through the white foam in the lee of her.

“Jesus Christ!” yelled Bush. “The poor devils have gone!”

“Set the main topmast stays’l again!” yelled Hornblower back.

She had not sunk yet; there might possibly be some survivors, who might live long enough in the wild sea to grab a rope’s end from the Sutherland’s deck and who might be hauled on board without being beaten to death; it had to be tried even though it was a hundred to one against one of the thousand men on board being saved. Hornblower worked the Sutherland slowly over towards the Pluto. Still the latter lived, with the waves breaking over her as if she were a half-tide rock. Hornblower’s imagination pictured what was happening on board—the decks nearly vertical, with everything carrying away and smashing which could. On the weather side the guns would be hanging by their breechings; the least unsoundness there and they would fall straight down the decks, to smash holes on the opposite side which would sink her in a flash. Men would be crawling about in the darkness below decks; on the main deck the men who had not been washed away would be clinging on like flies on a windowpane, soused under as the waves broke.

The desperate rescue is effected by a combination of luck and Hornblower's brilliance . . . then, the next chapter has a quiet scene in the Pluto's cabin and no mention is made of the disaster in the previous chapter.

Hornblower looked round the big cabin, the cushioned lockers, the silver on the table, Elliott and Bolton gorged with the vast dinner they had consumed, Sylvester with paper and ink before him, Villena in his gaudy yellow uniform staring idly about while the English conversation which he did not understand went on round him. On the bulkhead opposite him hung a portrait of Lady Barbara, a likeness so good as to be startling—Hornblower felt as if he might hear her voice at any moment. He caught himself wondering what they did with it when they cleared for action, tore his thoughts away from Lady Barbara with an effort, and tried as tactfully as he could to show his distaste for the whole scheme.

I checked to make sure the copy I was reading wasn't missing a chapter. It wasn't. I wonder if Forester intended to remove chapter sixteen at some point but never got around to it. Sometimes it does feel like Forester writes like someone whose experience is from playing video games of sea battles. There are vivid descriptions of mutilated bodies littering the deck peppered in but the action is so much driven by strategy there are many moments were it feels like visceral details are too hastily passed over. But what what great strategy driven prose it is.

Twitter Sonnet #1446

The chicken swam in yellow space to live.
The lettuce brushed the passing, rusty car.
A pumpkin carries many gifts to give.
The vine can walk but never very far.
With bread she stopped the choc'late river flow.
Her choice of drink deserved an olive tip.
At nine, the lounging cats were all aglow.
In varied lives they caught a savage grip.
We grasped for eyes but all we found were grapes.
The future Nelson fell from flying shrouds.
A forest's sun was changed when viewed on tapes.
Behind the clearer sky we hid the clouds.
The shadow waltz escaped from glowing stores.
Decisive seas dissolved the masted wars.

The Sea and the Hobby Horse

It's a rainy day here again and seems like a good time to talk about books I'm reading. I feel like it's been a while anyway. Currently I'm reading A Ship of the Line, the second Horatio Hornblower novel by C.S. Forester, and I've also been rereading Moby Dick. It's a pretty instructive contrast for ways to approach stories of seafaring. The Hornblower novel is like an extraordinarily good sandwich while Moby Dick is like a terrific feast prepared by a master chef over the course of a month utilising ultra-rare ingredients. But the stylistic difference could be described in other ways besides quality. A Ship of the Line is plot driven, compulsively readable. Forester does paint a picture but it's so much more about what happens next. Melville, with Moby Dick, is so much more about establishing mood and sensation.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

That's the kind of writing that couldn't be taught in a million years. Only instinct could show a writer how to so effectively move from simple descriptive prose to presumptions of instant mental associations, from traditionally composed renderings to colloquial, conversational injections. It has the peculiar sensation of a narrated film in which the pictures and sound are somehow embedded in the words.

Oh, I'm also still reading Tristram Shandy. I guess I've been slowly working my way through it for over a year. That's the real polar opposite of A Ship of the Line. Where the Forester novel is all momentum, Tristram Shandy is a deliberate project against momentum. And I do sort of admire that. Every time I pick the book up I laugh at something but, strangely, however funny it is, it never makes me want to pick it back up. I guess this is the surest sign it is postmodern before postmodernism was codified. When I set out to read what were formerly considered the four great, essential novels of the 18th century--Pamela, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and Tristram Shandy--I'd never have imagined the last would be the one that would slow me down the most, possible because, of all four, Tristram Shandy was the only one for which I've actually spoken to or heard of currently living admirers.

I have been kind of getting more into it lately. I'm just over halfway through and the protagonist has finally emerged from his mother's womb. An argument has ensued about the accident of him being baptised "Tristram"--his father wanted "Trismegistus" but the housemaid who was supposed to communicate this to the priest forgot the full name by the time she reached Mrs. Shandy's bedchamber. There's also some hints that the boy's nose may have been crushed by experimental forceps. My pace at reading has picked up a little bit lately now that I've started to suspect the author, Laurence Sterne, basically decided to role play as a man who has no penis. The fundamental joke of the novel is that it presents the symptoms, preoccupations, and desires of an intelligent author writing in such a condition. He never explicitly invites the reader to contemplate the possibility that he has no penis, but he does talk a lot about his Uncle Toby whose genitals were crushed by shrapnel from cannonfire and who, for the rest of his life, has a "hobbyhorisical" fixation on diverting all conversations to the subject of battlefield artillery or fortifications. Shandy, the fictional author, meanwhile, devotes whole chapters to button holes and an embarrassing accident with a chestnut and then separate chapters justifying the others. I feel like I get the joke and the intricacy of its execution is fascinating but, even so, I feel like I could zip through a dozen Hornblower novels before I finally finish Tristram Shandy.