Two Years Before the Mast

The Pilgrim

It's interesting that I've randomly chosen this famous memoir of a life at sea after an in-depth exploration of realism in Russian short stories. But this book, although a work of non-fiction (as memoirs once were in bygone days), reads like realist prose to me. It is unembellished, plain spoken realism written without frills, without clutter, without unnecessary adornment. And the simple words and economical phrasing and sentences add up to something far greater than its constituent parts.

Two Years Before the Mast (orig: 1840; this edition: 1911) by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

There were hundreds of books written in the nineteenth century that document ship journeys, explorations, hunting expeditions and the like, many of them self important, long winded, monotonous, self-aggrandizing tomes of little value. Fortunately for us, Dana's book is way better than that.

Richard Dana was a sophomore at Harvard when he came down with the measles. The disease affected his sight and made it difficult for him to study, so he decided he would take two years off to work as a common sailor aboard a merchant ship, believing the air and hard work would do him some good after his illness. He set sail from Boston in the summer of 1834 aboard the Pilgrim, a merchant ship that transported goods to the California coast and to return packed with cowhides. But of course, back in the days before the Panama canal, if you wanted to sail from the east coast to the west coast of North America with a boat full of stuff, you had to go the long way, all the way around Cape Horn at the very tip of South America, which took several months and exposed sailors to some very harsh and dangerous conditions. The tale of the journey back is hairier and more riveting than the journey out, when nature's great power, beauty and fury are aptly described with a sense of respectful awe.

He wrote about the perils and pleasures of life at sea and gives us character sketches of his fellow sailors with a keen eye and ear for detail and dialect. He also describes the indignities and abuses that merchant sailors were subjected to by greedy and incompetent captains, unscrupulous agents and predatory recruiters who lured the ignorant to perilous journeys, often stripped of their rightful wages and kept in servitude. In fact, exposing these wrongs was his primary purpose in writing the book, which became an enormous success, bringing the issues facing merchant sailors to the attention of a wide audience and making its author world famous.

Dana and the crew spent most of their time going back and forth collecting hides between Mexican ports at San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, San Pedro and San Diego, and each port as he describes it is very different than the cities we know today. Back then, they were sleepy, somewhat desolate places at the very edge of civilization in the final years of Mexican rule. He engaged in backbreaking work carrying thousands of hides from shore to ship for the journey back east, spent a few months ashore in San Diego curing and preparing those hides for transit with a group of Sandwich Islanders he came to love and respect, and walked through the small towns near the ports, meeting people from other cultures and observing their habits and ways of living. Two Years Before the Mast is a document of what life was like on the California coast in the years before America's final westward expansion and is of great value to historians.

At one point, Harvard educated guy that he was with bright hopes for his future, Dana expresses concern about rumors that his engagement at sea might last as long as four years, After having spent so much time aboard the Pilgrim learning and adopting the the coarse ways of sailors, he feared that he might not be able to re-enter polite society and thus become a sailor for life.  As it happened, his engagement lasted only two years and he was able to retain his agile mind and gentlemanly demeanor, thus managing to write a cohesive narrative without using the word "argh!" in every other sentence. Dana managed to escape this fate by switching ships and returning home on the Alert, a ship that was much nicer and better run than the Pilgrim, whose captain was given to gruffness and the occasional unprovoked flogging.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr.  1815-1882

Dana's writing is literature of the highest order. His natural style reveals a recognizably American voice--factual and unsentimental, yet full of emotional intensity.  Read Moby Dick right after this and you'll see what an effect Dana's account had on Melville and subsequently on American literature.

Here's a good example of his considerable descriptive powers. At one point, Dana is given shore leave and writes about witnessing the funeral of a child in San Pedro. This passage wouldn't be out of place in a realist novel:

"From the beach we returned to the town, and, finding that the funeral procession had moved, rode on and overtook it, about half-way to the Mission. Here was as peculiar a sight as we had seen before in the house, the one looking as much like a funeral procession as the other did like a house of mourning. The little coffin was borne by eight girls, who were continually relieved by others running forward from the procession and taking their places. Behind it came a straggling company of girls, dressed, as before, in white and flowers, and including, I should suppose by their numbers, nearly all the girls between five and fifteen in the place. They played along on the way, frequently stopping and running all together to talk to some one, or to pick up a flower, and then running on again to overtake the coffin. There were a few elderly women in common colors; and a herd of young men and boys, some on foot and others mounted, followed them, or walked or rode by their side, frequently interrupting them by jokes and questions. But the most singular thing of all was, that two men walked, one on each side of the coffin, carrying muskets in their hands, which they continually loaded, and fired into the air. Whether this was to keep off the evil spirits or not, I do not know. It was the only interpretation that I could put upon it."

This is a straightforward account, yet so vivid and evocative, describing an emotionally charged scene with sparse language and an objective, even tone. This passage, and indeed the whole book, is written in a journalistic style yet positively breathes with compassion for the suffering of others. 

However, Dana does use a fair amount of antiquated nautical jargon here when describing his duties as a sailor and the finer points of how a crew of men work together to keep their ship afloat. But using your eReader's dictionary or making an occasional visit to Wikipedia to decode these terms is kind of fun. You get the hang of the shop talk after a couple of chapters.

This 1911 edition includes his son's forward and afterword, plus Dana's account of his return to his old haunts in 1859. Between his and his son's follow-up efforts, we're brought as up to date as we can be about the fate of the places, the people and the ships he sailed on and encountered. We also learn of Dana's lifelong commitment to protecting the human rights of oppressed people in his law practice and we learn of his commitment to the abolition of slavery. This is a book written for all the right reasons, giving us a rare view into history and of one man's conscience. Historical forces forged the destiny of the right man for the job, and the result is a fantastic book that combines the very best elements of a personal and historical account. Well done, sir.

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Russian Short Stories Part 7: Two Anthologies

The title of this post indidcates that this is part seven in my series on Russian short stories, but it's really part eight if you count my essay about Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches from last March (and it certainly should be counted because it's an absolutely essential book). Beginning with the next post we'll step away from Russian literature and explore some other great books for the sake of variety. We'll return to Russia now and then, though.

Here are two excellent anthologies of Russian short stories to wrap things up.


Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian (1898) by Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol & Tolstoy

This is a brief but very good Russian short story anthology that begins with "Mumu" a heart rending story by Turgenev from Torrents of Spring (1872). Pushkin's "The Shot" (1831), which is good example of the genius of this essential and influential author. Also included is the scary "St. John's Eve" (1831) by Gogol which we explored earlier in this series, and "An Old Acquaintance" (185?), a lesser known piece from Tolstoy's early years--an intriguing choice given the number of great stories he had penned by the time this volume was originally published. You really can't go wrong with a compilation of stories by these guys. Short but sweet and highly recommended.

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Best Russian Short Stories (1917) Compiled and edited by Thomas Seltzer

"Everything is subordinated to two main requirements—humanitarian ideals and fidelity to life. This is the secret of the marvelous simplicity of Russian literary art."—Thomas Seltzer

In his introduction, American translator and publisher Thomas Seltzer claims this volume is the greatest collection of Russian short fiction available in English, and he'll get no argument from me; ninety six years later, it's still fantastic. This volume presents a wide range of Russian authors, including a number of names that were famous at the turn of the twentieth century and are now unjustly forgotten. That's a shame, because the lesser known selections are good stuff indeed. Seeing stories by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov juxtaposed by the works of Andreyev, Sologub, Saltykov, Gorky, Garshin and others gives us a mostly linear, highly condensed genealogy of Russian belles lettres from roughly 1830 to 1910.

It begins with "The Queen of Spades" (1834) by Pushkin, Russia's first writer to achieve rock star status. It's a ripping story with wickedly dry humor and a knockout ending. Although not characteristically Russian in form, there are hints of emergent realism in Pushkin that would find a voice in the work of Gogol, whose famous story "The Cloak" (1842) is also included. Turgenev's "The District Doctor", excerpted from A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), is a tale of a country doctor's unconsummated love for a dying patient. "The Christmas Tree and the Wedding" (1848) is a darkly funny, refreshingly brief and surprisingly focused story from Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy's "God Sees the Truth But Waits" (1872) is a dire, heartfelt story of forgiveness and redemption that foreshadows his parables and religious writings after Anna Karenina.

"How a Muzhik Fed Two Officials" (18??) is a piece of sledgehammer satire by Saltykov about two brainless bureaucrats stranded on a desert island who are saved from starvation and toil by a peasant servant. On the surface "The Shades: A Phantasy" (18??) is about a dream in which a post-hemlock imbibing Socrates leads a deceased and devoutly conformist tanner out of Hades and toward the light of logic, leaving a pile of vanquished gods slain by reason and truth. This piece has obvious parallels to pre-revolutionary Russia that the Tsar's notoriously dim-witted censors had obviously missed. Vsevelod Garshin's "The Signal" (1877) contrasts passive and active modes of resistance to authority in the form of two track walkers who work for the Russian railroad. Garshin writes in a concise, elegant, thoroughly realist prose that wastes no words yet spares few details. One of my faves.

There are three stories included by Chekhov: "The Darling" (1899) is one which we explored together recently. "The Bet" (1889) is a tale about a man who bets an acquaintance two million rubles that the latter would be unable to withstand fifteen years of solitary confinement. Rod Serling adapted this story in his screenplay for "The Silence", a famous episode of "The Twilight Zone" that aired in 1961. "Vanka" (1886) is a tale about a young boy writing home to his grandfather begging to return home from his apprenticeship for the many abuses he has had to endure. These stories are fine examples of how Chekhov was able to condense complex stories and characters in a few pages that might take other authors a whole book to unfold.

Fyodor Sologub's "Hide and Seek" (19??) is one of the most disheartening, eerie and freaked out stories you're likely to read about the death of a child. You should read it because it's well worth reading, but you might want to avoid doing so before you go to sleep at night. (I speak from a position of experience). I. Potapenko's "Dethroned" (18??) is a worthy effort, but this story about a high society woman's comeuppance seems a bit trite when presented alongside the moral gravitas of the other stories. Sergey Semyonov's "The Servant" (18??) is an earnest morality tale told with a nod to Tolstoy while still asserting its own voice. 

Maxim Gorky's stories can be hit-and-miss for brilliance, but this collection has two of his best works of short fiction, "An Autumn Night" (1895) and "Her Lover" (1897). Leonid Andreyev's "Lazarus" (19??) is one of the most pleasing discoveries to be found here. It tells what happened to Lazarus after he was raised from the dead by Christ. Time no longer has meaning for him and he wanders through the world of the living with a hollow, vacant and contagious stare that fils everyone he meets with a similar feeling of hopelessness and existential dread. This is another one of my favorite discoveries in the collection.

Artzybashev's "The Revolutionist" is a chilling story about a teacher whose conscience prompts him to take armed action against the military after witnessing a group of soldiers execute a young boy and watching a public whipping of a group of peasants. Lastly, in Kuprin's "The Outrage" (19??), a group of thieves goes before a Russian court to demand that they be represented against slanderous charges by the press that they, professional and honest thieves who take pride in their craft, were in any way responsible for recent pogroms against the Jews in their community. This is well wielded satire in the comic tradition of Gogol, delivering irony with much moral force. 

This is a GREAT collection and you should download it immediately and start reading. So says I.

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I hope you enjoyed our journey into Russian literature by way of the short story. As I've said, we'll return to Russia again as time goes by. Next time, I think we'll look at a vintage piece of non fiction.

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