Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis
Recovered Books/ Boiler House Press, 1 November 2021, ISBN: 9781913861230, Paperback, 186 pages.
Re-published in November 2021 after being “lost” for 70 years, Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard is a small gem for a readership that has been cast adrift on the turbulent seas of political turmoil and pandemic for the past year.
We meet Henry Preston Standish, an everyman – apologies, an every gentleman, as he is struggling to stay afloat in the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Honolulu and Panama, having fallen overboard a steamship. Lewis’ elegantly written text follows the consequences of Standish’s misfortune in a masterclass of narrative tension.
For much of his existence, life has flowed smoothly for Standish, indeed “hardly murmuring in his ears.” His parents are alive, he is married to a woman: “one of those well-groomed women who would be attractive and beautiful for many years to come”, and he has two children whom he loves “decently enough” (a descriptor my generation of helicopter parents could learn from). Like many of us, he does “all the proper things, without enthusiasm”. But everything changes for Standish one day in spring, when he is compelled by an inner voice which accosts him in the office of his brokerage business in New York to tell him: “You must go away, you must go away”
And go away he does. He leaves New York for San Francisco, then heads up the coast to Alaska, back to California and on to Hawaii. In Waikiki he makes the fateful decision to take a ticket aboard the steamship Arabella, delaying his return to New York, his family, and his job, with a visit to Panama.
The trip has been a salvation of a sort for Standish. Leaning against the rail of the Arabella he learns for the first time that “all the vexatious problems of his life were meaningless and unimportant”. The sea air even cures his smokers’ cough and, at 35, he feels at his physical peak. Early the next morning, yearning to recapture this lovely feeling, he heads to an opening near the Arabella’s hull, at the extreme starboard of the ship, where he slips on a grease spot. Like so many things in life: “the greasespot was deceptive…just looking at it you would never suspect it was dangerous. But apply pressure suddenly, as Standish had done, and you found yourself sliding on a surface as slippery as ice”. Standish skids and falls overboard.
How many of us in the last year and a half have found ourselves in a (metaphorically) similar situation? The pressure of the pandemic and political turbulence have forced a wholesale reconsideration of our circumstances and personalities. And this is where Gentleman Overboard comes into its own, as Standish’s nature and chances of survival are dissected as he struggles to keep afloat, whilst watching his hope of rescue, the Arabella, sailing towards the horizon, and away from him.
The book encourages self-examination: How would we each fare in a crisis when the norms and structures around us have fallen away? When and where do the habits bred in us to enable us to function in civilized society handicap our survival? Are your principles more important than your life? When do we abandon the superego and become pure id? Standish himself fails to shout loudly enough just after his fall to raise the alarm as he is more concerned “with shame than fear”. He is too dreadfully embarrassed to save himself. In catastrophe, who are we?
I’ve been trying hard to understand why this book had such an impact on me, and I think it is because it addresses the turmoil many of us have felt in the past years. There is the pandemic, of course, which has undermined societal norms. But also how we are raised to accept things that are harmful to us: Lewis’ description of Standish’s voice (“three generations of gentlemen had changed the trumpet in the early Standish larynx to a dulcet violoncello) had particular resonance for me as a woman (don’t be too loud, don’t cause a scene) and how silence and shame was a feature of the sexual violence exposed by the #MeToo movement and recent Epstein scandals.
I won’t tell you what happens at the end of the novel, but Herbert Clyde Lewis takes us there in stylish and compelling fashion. For such dark material the text is often humorous and understated, with sharp stabs of pathos which are even more effective because of the stealth of their attack.
The story of the author of the book is no less compelling than that of its protagonist. Herbert Clyde Lewis was born in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants. The patriarch of the family changed their name from Luria to Lewis and gave his son as solid a WASP name as Henry Preston Standish. Herbert went on to write under contract for MGM and RKO and was nominated for an Oscar for It Happened on Fifth Avenue. Put under investigation by the Un-American Activities Committee, he was labeled a Communist and blacklisted. Heavy-drinking, bankruptcy and a nervous breakdown followed, and he died, alone and penniless in a New York hotel room in 1950. He was forty-nine years old.
“The difference between life and death can be no more than a spot of grease. Either it is in wrong place or you are.”
The poet, George Szirtes, writes in the introduction to this volume that: “The difference between life and death can be no more than a spot of grease. Either it is in wrong place or you are.” For a book written 70 years ago, Gentleman Overboard speaks knowingly to the discombobulation of our current times.
