Banality, after all, is not an incidental part of us but a key aspect of our humanity. If we over-identified with Standish the nature of his predicament would change, as would the ambience of the book. In fact it is precisely the banality that intrigues us and invites a certain fellow feeling, albeit at a slight distance. That does not mean the reader is invited to mock him. In other respects his thoughts continue to be essentially banal. To tell the truth, he is nothing special except in one respect: that on one particular day a vague, niggling discontent – his one authenticating individual choice – had led him to be where he is, on a ship in a rarely frequented part of the Pacific Ocean, his foot on the grease. Standish is not different: he remains who he is, neither a figure in a melodrama nor a hero in a miraculous adventure. Their lives go on: ordinary lives much like Standish’s.
Other passengers and crew are seen clearly and briefly. The consciousness is single but there are other people, it is just that they are elsewhere. But the heart of his author, Herbert Clyde Lewis, did give way, at the age of 41, in a lonely room in New York in 1950.įor a book that begins with an accident then simply follows its immediate consequences through to its conclusion, Gentleman Overboard is a masterful piece of narrative tension whose chief area of concern is one single consciousness, that of Standish, and it carries the concern through without settling for the easy profundities one might expect given the situation. The other passengers continued with their lives and kept speculating about his absence. It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, they said I was much further out than you thought, And not waving but drowning. Or, as Stevie Smith’s drowning figure, in her poem Not Waving But Drowning puts it: It is the spectre of existential loneliness, of being, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner finds:Īlone, alone, all, all alone Alone on a wide, wide sea That seems to be the core question of Gentleman Overboard but something keeps nagging at us as we wait, and keep waiting, for the boat to turn around and pick up Standish.
But then what’s the point of throwing the door open? Maybe, if you throw open the door, you should think twice before walking through it. Maybe, if your domain is sobriety, you should not risk leaving it. There is something inevitable about all of this. Meanwhile the ship is steadily moving away. Eventually he thinks he should try but no sound comes out of his mouth. If he could bring himself to shout for help somebody might hear him but that would be somewhat embarrassing. Not man overboard, you understand, but gentleman, a very proper, decently married-with-children, financially-very-comfortable gentleman.īeing a gentleman does not always help, and it doesn’t help Standish who cannot bear to think of himself as any less than the modest, sober, uncomplaining sort of person his background has prepared him to be. One can find oneself at the inside-out edges of life without even trying, like Henry Preston Standish, the central character of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, who slips and falls into the Pacific. Either it is in the wrong place or you are. The difference between life and death can be no more than a spot of grease.
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