Fighting Off Larkin: Seamus Heaney and "Aubade"

Seamus Heaney (Photo by Nancy Crampton)

I’ve just finished reading Michael Cavanagh’s absorbing Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (2009). For me, the most interesting part is its consideration of Heaney’s great essay “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B, Yeats and Philip Larkin,” included in Heaney’s 1995 collection The Redress of Poetry. Cavanagh calls it, among other things, “Heaney’s denigration of Larkin.” This seems harsh. Yes, Heaney’s essay attacks Larkin’s “Aubade” for accepting “the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death” and denying “the ecstatic presence of the supernatural.” But it also praises “Aubade” for its “high poetic achievement,” and, in a most original analytic move, tries to use that achievement to argue that “Aubade,” for all its bleakness, is really “on the side of life.” Heaney says,

Still, when a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit. In this fundamentally artistic way, then, Larkin’s “Aubade” does not go over to the side of the adversary. But its argument does add weight to the negative side of the scale and tips the balance definitely in favour of chemical law and mortal decline. The poem does not hold the lyre up in the face of the gods of the underworld; it does not make the Orphic effort to haul life back up the slope against all odds. For all its heart-breaking truths and beauties, “Aubade” reneges on what Yeats called the “spiritual intellect’s great work.”

Cavanagh sees “Joy or Night” as a departure from Heaney’s “insistence on the reality principle.” But, to me, Heaney isn’t a realist; he’s a transcendentalist. He believes in the supernatural. Larkin doesn’t. For him, “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are” (“Big Victims,” included in Larkin’s 1983 collection, Required Writing). I’m with Larkin. Nevertheless, I admire the hell out of Heaney’s “Joy or Night.” It’s one of the most spirited arguments I know of on whether “death is no different whined at than withstood.” 

July 11 & 18, 2022 Issue

I relish Joy Williams’s brisk, quirky, humorous, concrete writing style. There’s an excellent example of it in this week’s issue. Called “Mine Field,” it’s an account of a road trip she took through a breathtaking western landscape scarred by mines. Here’s her description of the route:

Lately, I’ve been taking another route (only about nine hundred and fifty miles), up 77 through Globe and the twisty, magnificent Salt River Canyon and the White Mountain Apache lands to funky Holbrook, a city that still primarily sells rocks, then on through Navajo and Hopi lands into Utah and strutty Moab (which has truly jumped the shark) toward Colorado Springs and the shrinking Colorado River, through the lovely Yampa Valley, past sprawling Steamboat and through the forbidding Rabbit Ears Pass and into Wyoming, the Meadowlark State.

Globe, Salt River Canyon, White Mountain Apache, Navajo, Hopi, Utah, Moab, Colorado Springs, Yampa Valley, Steamboat, Rabbit Ears Pass, Wyoming, Meadowlark State – there’s poetry in those names! The entire piece is like that. Despite its bleak message (“But we are also realizing our powerlessness to preserve or protect anything—children, the Earth, our instinct to harbor and honor the holy”), I enjoyed it immensely. The last paragraph made me smile:

If you’re weary (and who can blame you, with all that’s going on) and just want a suggestion for where to stay on this particular route, try the dear and simple Recapture Lodge, in Bluff, Utah. If you make it to Laramie, Wyoming, the vegetarian restaurant Sweet Melissa and its attendant bar, Front Street Tavern, should not be missed.

Ada Limón's Memorable "Overpass"

Ada Limón (Photo by Carla Ciuffo)

I see in the Times that Ada Limón will be the next poet laureate of the United States: see Elizabeth A. Harris, “Ada Limón Is Named the Next Poet Laureate” (The New York Times, July 12, 2022).

Limón’s “Overpass” (The New Yorker, December 4, 2017) is one of my favourite poems of the past decade. I like its not-quite-prose-poem form, its natural tone, and its artlessness almost akin to conversational speech. Most of all, I like its subject – the look down from an overpass, the steel guardrail, the creek, the unforgettable image of the decaying raccoon carcass, the white bones of his hand “totally skinless,” the sunlight “showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers still clinging.”

Here’s the poem in full:

The road wasn’t as hazardous then,
when I’d walk to the steel guardrail,
lean my bendy girl body over, and stare
at the cold creek water. In a wet spring,
the water’d run clear and high, minnows
mouthing the sand and silt, a crawdad
shadowed by the shore’s long reeds.
I could stare for hours, something
always new in each watery wedge—
a bottle top, a man’s black boot, a toad.
Once, a raccoon’s carcass half under
the overpass, half out, slowly decayed
over months. I’d check on him each day,
watching until the white bones of his hand
were totally skinless and seemed to reach
out toward the sun as it hit the water,
showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers
still clinging. I don’t think I worshipped
him, his deadness, but I liked the evidence
of him, how it felt like a job to daily
take note of his shifting into the sand.

July 4, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Annie Proulx’s marvelous “Swamped,” a celebration of her love of the complex world of swamps. Blue herons (one of which fatally stabs a man in the eye), mayflies, alligators, wood warblers, owls, dragonflies, a large bobcat, the Okefenokee Swamp, sphagnum moss, the Great Black Swamp, the Yellow Emperor moth, the Maumee River, the Limberlost Swamp, mangroves – just some of the fascinating creatures, plants, and places appearing in this cabinet-of-wonders personal essay. My favorite parts are Proulx’s accounts of her own swamp experiences. This one, for example:

My most intimate swamp experience came one summer when I lived in a remote and ramshackle house in Vermont with a beaver-populated swamp half a mile down in the bottomland. I went to the swamp almost every day by a circuitous route through the woods, passing a patch of pitcher plants and two or three sundews, across a brook, following the beavers’ tree-drag ruts to an old stick dam. There were trout in this swamp and beautiful painted turtles. I watched the amazing acrobatics of dragonflies with disbelief that they were actually doing what I saw them do. Even when I sat on the back porch high above the swamp I thought I could catch the green smell of bruised lily pads.

Once, after weeks away, I came back to the house in the late afternoon. I had started reading Norman Maclean’s story “A River Runs Through It” on the plane ride home and decided to read to the end before I went inside the house. It was an utterly quiet, windless day, the light softening to peach nectar. I read the last page and its famous final line, “I am haunted by waters.” I closed the book and looked toward the swamp. Sitting on a stone wall fifteen feet away was a large bobcat who had been watching me read. When our eyes met, the cat slipped into the tall grass like a ribbon of water, and I watched the grass quiver as it headed down to the woods, to the stream, to the swamp.

That “I thought I could catch the green smell of bruised lily pads” is very fine. The whole piece is terrific. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Rereadings: Peter Schjeldahl's "Let's See"

This is the third in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Peter Schjeldahl’s delectable Let’s See (2008). 

I say “delectable” because, for me, this book is like a deluxe box of Godiva chocolates – seventy-five of Schjeldahl’s New Yorker art pieces, including passages that, when I first read them, went straight into my personal anthology of great art writing. This one, for example, on the work of Caspar David Friedrich:

The pictures don't give; they take. Something is drawn out of us with a harrowing effect, which Friedrich's use of color nudges toward intoxication. What at first seem to be mere tints in a tonal range combust into distinctly scented, disembodied hues: drenching purples and scratchy russets, plum darks and citron lights. One doesn't so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine. Friedrich is an artist of dusky fire, of twilight that sears. It is well worth sticking around for his shuddery pleasures, laced with something cold and weird.

And this, on Manet:

But his bouquets are substantial presences in penetrable space. “I would like to paint them all,” Manet said of flowers. So he did. Every blossom feels at once unique and suffused with the memories of a million kin. When a bright-yellow petal curls down around a salmon-colored shadow, it’s as if a bard of roses were singing a secret of the tribe. The glass vases abolish mystery. We observe the sustenance of cut stems, crazed by refractions through the wettest water you’ve ever seen. Each of Manet’s paintings raises its subject into a present time that forgets the past and ignores the future. Each is a lesson about dying: don’t. Only be alive.

And this, on Fra Angelico’s The Annunciatory Angel: 

The androgynous angel, in pink robes with a slash of blue, leans forward as if into a gust of wind, one hand on his chest and the other beginning to advance in a gesture of offering. The face is intent but serene. A swiftly brushed wing, of brown feathers, merges with the gilt background, above a swath of patterned floor in convincing perspective. The delicately roughened surface texture gives sensuous immediacy—suddenness, even—to a figure that feels less lit and shaded than made of materialized light and shade.

Schjeldahl’s style is exquisite. One of its hallmarks is brilliant epigrammatic compression. Examples in this collection abound:

On Henri Matisse: “His contours are like the borders of wetness left by waves on a beach.”

On Vija Celmins: “She divorces the subject from experience, then returns it to experience as painting.”

On Willem de Kooning: “One senses spontaneity at a filtering remove; it’s like hearing jazz over the telephone.”

On Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: “He is a positivist of silk and skin. If one can’t touch it, the hell with it.”

On Joan Mitchell: “There isn’t a wrong note in her cadenzas – only a swarm of piquant, fugitive grace notes falling like loose change.”

On Cézanne: “Cézannes can seem to have as many centers of attention as they have brushstrokes.”

On Robert Bechtle: “Bechtle zeroes in on the always seen and never noticed – without giving it importance.”

On Jackson Pollack: “If we want to be precise about what Pollock did – drawing in the air above a canvas with a paint-loaded stick – the mot juste is ‘dribble.’ ”

Another aspect of Schjeldahl’s signature compression is his use of zero articles, creating delicious mash-ups of verbal color and texture, enacting the art he’s describing:

Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint.

Warm colors yearn forward; black bites back; silver is everywhere and nowhere; all, as thick substance, configure a wall-like surface.

Wet resin turned clayey oils pellucid. Colors—greenish-brown chiaroscuro background, pale peachy flesh with bluish insinuations—sang. I think I went, “Ah!”

In this book, notwithstanding the occasional gripe (“Why, oh why must she have a goddamn movie magazine open on her lap?”), the governing principle is pleasure: “the indispensability of pleasure”; “living pleasurably”; “One work after another attains a sublimely pleasurable stillness and silence”; “Even when I’m disappointed with the spirit of one of his works … I can’t help but get pleasure from it.”

To end, I’ll quote from one of Let’s See’s best pieces, “Vermeer,” in which there’s a line that could serve as Schjeldahl’s credo: “Pansexual heat glowed in dim rooms that smelled of dust and varnish.” No, just kidding. That’s from his terrific “Thomas Eakins.” Here’s the “Vermeer” line: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look.” 

The pleasure of Schjeldahl’s work is the pleasure of looking through his enthralled eyes. I love him.  

Mid-Year Top Ten 2022

Photo by James Nachtwey, from Luke Mogelson's "The Wound-Dressers"

It’s time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Top Ten Reporting Pieces

1. Luke Mogelson, “The Wound-Dressers,” May 9, 2022 (“A Ukrainian soldier approached me to say that he’d found another victim. I followed him into the basement of a yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood had leaked from his mouth and nose. The soldier crouched and felt under his skull. ‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ he said”).

2. Ed Caesar, “Sanctuary,” June 27, 2022 (“Inna, Sasha, and Oliviia loaded their bags onto the bus. Inna knew that it might be the last time that she and the girls saw Maksym, but there was no emotional soliloquy from either husband or wife. ‘It wasn’t a movie scene,’ Inna told me. ‘I was concentrated on what is coming—on my tasks. But we both knew what was going on’ ”).

3. Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege,” March 21, 2022 (“War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. I told them to fuck off,’ he said”).

4. Joshua Yaffa, “The Captive City,” May 23, 2021 (“An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. ‘This was happening one metre away,’ Fedorov said. ‘What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?’ ”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28, 2022 (“Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air”).

6. Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In,” May 30, 2022 (“I was two minutes late for my treatment. ‘Oh là,’ the therapist clucked, looking at her watch. She instructed me to undress—the spa provided a disposable G-string—and to sit on a table covered with a plastic sheet. Without further discussion, she began daubing my back at strategic points with steaming, tawny mud. When she had finished, she eased me into a reclining position and folded the sheet around me, forming a sort of Hot Pocket in which the mud was the cheese and I was the ham”).

7. William Finnegan, “Big Breaks,” May 30, 2022 (“The only time the waves seem to have any heft at all is when the rider gets deeply barrelled. Suddenly, we’re in a blue room with walls of rushing water, and we’re being pursued by a horizontal waterfall and a fire hose of mist”).

8. John Seabrook, “Green Giants,” January 31, 2022 (“The pits were a mechanical Pamplona of nitromethane bulls, their belching tailpipes and fiery exhaust wrinkling the air, and their pit crews almost feral with the oddly fruity aroma of the fuel and the acrid stench of the smoking, treadless tires that the guys called slicks”).

9. Rebecca Mead, “Norwegian Wood,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“I put my bag down on a blond-wood coffee table by the window, and settled into a low swivel chair, its comfortable backrest fashioned from bent-wood strips. In December, Brumunddal enjoys less than six hours of daylight; had I sat there long enough, I could have watched the sun rise and set with only the barest swivel to adjust my line of sight. The room was quiet and, despite the lowering skies, it was light. With its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a narrow blond-wood desk; a double bed made up with white linens and a crimson blanket—it had the virtuous feel of a spa”).

10. Joshua Yaffa, “The Great Thaw,” January 17, 2022 (“Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. ‘Look, its footpad is very well traced,’ Fedorov said. You can see its toenails’ ”).

Best Personal History Piece

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three,” February 7, 2022 (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”).

Best Cover

Faith Ringgold, “Jazz Stories: Somebody Stole My Broken Heart” (March 28, 2022)

Best Critical Piece

Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”).

Best “Talk of the Town” Story

Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 (“Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading ‘Alone Ave.’; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops”).

Best Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, "Postcard from Kyiv” (January 31, 2022).

Best “Goings On About Town” Review

Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: All’Antico Vinaio,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged from the basement at regular intervals, shiny with olive oil and sparkling with coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from a dense landscape of air bubbles as the loaves were sliced horizontally, ends slivered off and passed to patiently waiting customers”).  

Best newyorker.com Post

Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege of Chernihiv,” April 15, 2022 (“It was a gray, drizzling morning when I pulled up to the site of the attack. What was once the pharmacy was now a burnt-out shell of red brick. One building had taken a direct hit, leaving an entire wall ripped open, with apartments inside exposed like a doll house”).  

Best Short Story

Kevin Barry, “The Pub With No Beer,” April 11, 2022 (“ ‘It could be one of forty-two things that’s wrong with me,’ Frank Waught half whispered to a pint of Smithwick’s”).

Best Photo

Photo by Dina Litovsky, for Helen Rosner's " 'We Watch the News and We're Crying,' " newyorker.com, March 8, 2020.

Best Sentence

One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of it being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon. – Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup”

Best Paragraph

I braced myself. The water pressure was intense—almost strong enough to clean a sidewalk. I could taste the salt. The therapist was yelling instructions, but I could hardly hear them over the roar of the spray. She started with my ankles, working methodically up the line: calves, thighs, butt, triceps, shoulders. As she power-washed my back, I fixated on a single thought: Please don’t hit a mole! – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

Best Detail

In “Blue-Eyed Marble Box,” from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples. – Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett” 

Best Description

Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly. – Alex Ross, "Moonlight”

Best Question

Why did Laphroaig suggest thick-sliced bacon? – John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three”

Seven Memorable Lines

1. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said. – Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege”

2. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol. Merriment is medicinal. – Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere”

3. A barking fox kind of gags and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s enjoying it. – Ian Frazier, “Stir-Crazy”

4. Gorgeous? Oh, yeah. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out”

5. Any writer would have trouble wringing interest out of “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Titanic,” “Friends,” and Pauly Shore. – Frank Guan, “The Decade of Disquiet”

6. I filled a cup and tried it. Rotten eggs and cabbage soup—yes. But chalky, too. I felt like I had licked a blackboard. – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

7. There seem to be more kinds of foam mattresses than there are craft beers from Brooklyn, but don’t be fooled by proprietary terms like “Ambien-injected kosher crypto-foam.”  – Patricia Marx, “Tossed and Turned”

3 for the Sea: People

This is the seventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of people. 

There are dozens of people in McPhee’s Looking for a Ship – dispatchers, crew members, pilots, pirates, and stowaways. McPhee sketches many of them. But one man stands out: Stella’s captain, Paul McHenry Washburn. McPhee calls him “the most interesting person on the ship.” Here’s our first glimpse of him:

We hear a door open and close. Another opens. Captain Washburn comes into the wheelhouse. “Good morning, good morning,” he says. The first salutation may be for us, the second for the ship. The captain routinely talks to the ship. 

A few pages later, McPhee describes Washburn in more detail:

Now about to dock in a foreign city, he is wearing his more-or-less dress blues. His shoes and trousers are dark and naval. His white short-sleeved shirt, open at the collar, has epaulets striped with gold. There is gold braid on his visor. His glasses are rimmed with gold. As he moves back and forth on the bridge, he takes things in with the comprehensive gaze of a boxer. He leans forward like a boxer, his mouth and jaw set firm. His body is chunky, his paunch under control, like a trimmed spinnaker. Wisps of gray edge his cap. His face – beardless, full-featured – appears to have been the site of an epic battle, wherein the vitriol he speaks of has at last been subdued by humor.

McPhee tells Washburn’s family history (“Captain Washburn’s family name derives from Great Washburne, near Evesham, in the English Midlands”); he tells about the old skippers that Washburn sailed with when he was young (“The captain learned from Leadline Dunn, from Terrible Terry Harmon, from Dirty Shirt George Price”); he tells about his life (“Aged thirteen, fourteen, and upward, he rode freights as a hobo”); he visits him in his office on the boat deck, and listens to him talk (“Straightening up with a sheet of paper in his hand, Captain Washburn looks out a window past a lifeboat in its davits and over the blue sea. After a moment, he says, ‘I love going to sea. I do not love that sea out there, That is not my friend. That is my absolute twenty-four-hour-a-day sworn enemy’ ”); he visits him at his home in Jacksonville (“In the captain’s home, across town, the numerous religious calendars are outnumbered by the golfing trophies he has won in the pro-am tournaments of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes”); he plays golf with him (“Washburn tees up at Baymeadows, a quiet place under pines and palms”).

As ever with McPhee, action is character. Here he shows Washburn docking Stella: 

Now, in Buenaventura, the admiral decides to dock the ship himself, to ignore the hurt feelings of the pilot, to keep at a safe distance the incompetent tugs and reduce their crews to spectators, to rely on his own eye and his commands through the engine-order telegraph to solve this problem in very tight large-scale parallel parking. As an automobile driver, he may not know where he is. To watch him as a golfer, though, is to notice that the closer he gets to the pin the abler and more precise he becomes. Which of these characteristics will predominate here remains to be seen. His commands fall like rain, and in the same steady rhythm, with no revisions. With a few adjusting motions fore and aft, he goes into his berth as if were closing a drawer.

Those last two lines are inspired!

O’Hanlon’s Trawler is a boatload of distinctive “characters” – nine of them in total, including O’Hanlon. One way these men reveal their personalities is by their talk. O’Hanlon has a wonderful ear for dialogue. Here’s skipper Jason Schofield explaining to O’Hanlon what will happen if the Norlantean’s engines fail during the hurricane:

“Then what? Then what! Then, Redmond – we drown. It’s so simple. There’s no argument. I like that. I like that a lot. There’s no uncertainty about it. No bullshit. There’s no maybe this and maybe that, and on the other hand, and if you look at it from a different point of view, or perhaps percentage this and percentage that, and you could say it’s his rotten childhood or his bent social fucking worker or his great-fucking-granny, or come on, that Hitler, he only had one ball, so of course he had to invade Poland. No! Here there’s no bullshit! That’s not what it’s like here! You make a mistake? Simple. You drown.”

And here’s Robbie Stanger, “boss of the Greenland-halibut gutting unit,” talking to O’Hanlon on what it’s like working for Jason: 

“You’ll not know. You’ll think Jason’s the norm. Because you canna know any different unless I tell you. Well – he’s not. It’s true, maybe he doesna shout at us as much as usual because you’re on board. But he’s a focking miracle, really. That’s what he is. The real exception. I know you Redmond, your type, first-timers, people who want to be trawlermen, you know, straight out of college in Stromness, aye, and if not even their fathers were at the fishing, they’re starry-eyed, they talk about love-of-the-sea. Jeesus. So I’m telling you, being on a trawler, Redmond, you probably think the only problem is the weather. The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don’t – and you die all together. No, no – it’s the skipper. Because most of them are madder than the weather. More violent, you could say, more unpredictable. Now dinna get me wrong. I’m sure I’d be the same. Millions of pounds in debt. Like Jason. And then Jason has a wife and child at home to look after, and another on the way. I shouldn’t wonder. And there again, his father-in-law, the greatest Orkney trawlerman of the ;ast generation – skipper of the Viking, the Viking for Chrissake! And we all know what he says to himself every waking minute of every focking day – ‘my daughter, the loveliest daughter in the world’ (along with her sisters, of course, if she has any sisters) ‘– that Jason she married, is he a real man or just a no-good-slack-arsed-focking southerner?’ Aye. The strain of it. Being a skipper – that’s not for me. I’d go mad too, I know I would. But here’s the thing, Redmond. Jason, he’s quick as a focking ghost, one problem and he’s out the brown door of that wheelhouse quick as a focking ghost – and I’m telling you now, he’s sane.” 

Some of the book’s most absorbing (and humorous) dialogue is between O’Hanlon and his friend Luke Bullough. Bullough is a biologist at the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, and a member of the Aberdeen lifeboat crew. O’Hanlon says he’s “probably the toughest (and certainly the most modest) young man I’d ever met,” “a man with a vast experience of the real sea: as a research diver in Antarctica; as a Fisheries Patrol officer in the Falklands; on trawlers and research ships in the North Atlantic.”

O’Hanlon and Bullough are both talkers; they talk to each other about all kinds of things – fish, sex, marriage, evolution – but especially fish. Bullough loves fish. Here he’s talking to O’Hanlon about a lumpsucker:

“Aye! And guess what? The female makes her way up and ashore in April and lays up to 300,000 pink eggs between the mid-tide and low-water level, spread over a rock. And then? She fins it back out to sea, gone, buggered off, excuse me, she deserts and saves herself! And guess who stays and aerates the eggs? Who takes no food from April to November, his stomach distended with nothing but water? The male! Poor sod. So who’s in guard position when the tide is out and here come the gulls and crows and rats? Who’s not left his post (if he hasn’t been pecked or gnawed to death) when the tide comes in and he does his main job, aerating the eggs with his fins, bringing home that critical extra oxygen? Eh? The male! He stays there when the tide sweeps in with those hungry big, big fish! That’s the kind of father I’d like to be!”

Dialogue in Raban’s Passage to Juneau is sparse. Raban is sailing solo. The only chance he gets to speak to anyone in person is when he’s ashore. Most of those conversations are brief. Nevertheless, he does meet a variety of people: the Seattle electrician (John Munroe) who re-wires his boat; the lock-keeper at Ballard Locks; the captain of the ferry Vancouver Island Princess; two Sidney customs officers; the clerk in the Sidney bookstore; the yachtsman in Sidney marina; the mill-worker in Crofton; two Crofton beachcombers; the retired couple (“the Schmales”) at the Jolly Roger resort; the two brothers on the dock at Vananda; the bank clerk in Vananda; the woman in Vananda who asks for help to bury her goat (Raban refuses); the Vananda wharfinger; the resort owner on Blind Channel; the Indian fisherman on Minstrel Island; the manager of the Minstrel Island hotel; two members of a Minstrel Island logging crew; John and Wendy Walders, owners of the floathouse on Potts Lagoon; the pilot of the floatplane that flies Raban from Potts Lagoon to Port McNeill; the Raban family in Market Harborough – Raban’s mother, father, and three brothers; Raban’s wife (Jean) and daughter (Julia); Owen, the young man in Bella Bella who invites Raban to a party; the biologist in Klemtu; two Port Simpson men repairing a gill net; the man in Port Simpson who challenges Raban to a fight; the owner of a Port Simpson troller; the gill-netter in Revillagigedo Channel; the duty officer in Ketchikan; the couple (Simon and Monique) in the Ketchikan hotel dining room; the young woman on the Ketchikan boardwalk (“Yawannadate?”); Gloria, the Ketchikan cabdriver; the Compass Rose couple (Derek and Linda); the captain of the research vessel John A. Cobb; Bruce Finney, a scientist on the John A. Cobb; the kid named Rebecca on the Juneau dock; the fisherman named Joe on the boat docked next to Raban’s in Juneau.    

Compiling this list of people in Passage to Juneau expands my appreciation of the book’s circumstantial richness. So many scenes, incidents and images! 

For me, the most significant people in these three books are the authors themselves. Their “I”s are present on almost every page. What are they like as characters? Can these works be read as self-portraits? What are the implications of their first-person perspective? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.