Books

Phoenix Bay, Alaska, 23-aug-2020 — Bill Buckley and I parted company with me having a much lessened opinion of the man, not that it was too wonderful to begin with.

Bill, in all his interviews and promotion for the book, including his article for the New Yorker, which I read almost forty years ago and still remember, fails to mention other people on the boat: the professional captain, the cook and the stewart. Then there is the video camera man, the audio person and the producer. Somewhere in the book another man appears as mechanical maintenance crew.

The video people were only there for the first of the legs, but, my gosh, there ten people on that boat at one point, and a minimum of six, not three.

Good ol’ Bill does get points for coming clean on the number of personnel. He also tells us about the two fifty-five gallon drums of fuel he had mounted on the deck so the boat could motor whenever there was little wind.

About certain things, I don’t know what to say. Bill tells us about the column he needed to write, and then includes the entire column, which had nothing to do with anything else in the book. Fill,fill,fill!

It is a flashbulb look at the technology of the time through Bill’s fascination with programmable calculators. I programmed the same devices for graduate students to perform statistical calculations. To read this now is humorous.

Like technology now, most of the technology onboard works most of the time.

He also takes another pass, he took a first unsuccessful pass in his previous book about sailing across the Atlantic, at explaining celestial navigation to the reader. He manages to get more than one chapter out of the topic this time with no more success.

By the time I got to the end of that book, which was complete with stories of breaking the lock off his boat, which was being held by a contractor for non-payment, I couldn’t wait for it to end.

But then, I was never that good at self promotion or self aggrandizement. If you won’t tell the world how great you are, who will?

In the Salvation Army second-hand store in Kodiak, I stumbled upon Robert Graves’ autobiography, principally about his experiences in the first world war, ”Good-bye to all that.”

Graves came from money and breeding. It takes a while to understand how different a world he lived in, the British conventions on military life and the little value life held for the British.

The book has triggered nights of bad dreams.

Graves wrote the book in ’29, while living in Spain. He edited it 28 years later adding names of people who had since died and making some accuracy improvements. There is no notation of what was changed where in the text. My copy was the thirty-fifth printing of this edition.

In the beginning of the book, he speaks of learning to write and of his and his teacher’s devotion to removing extra words, very much Hemingway, who was a contemporary.

With his simple writing, there are no adjectives or adverbs to heighten any description. The horror speaks for itself. The first corpse he finds is lying in a trench as Graves is taken on a tour as a new arrival. The man lies face up. Graves initial response is to the man’s uniform not being to proper dress standard. And, why is one foot naked? Because, his guide explains, his foot is naked so he could use his big toe in the trigger guard to kill himself. When they turn him over, the back of his head is missing.

Graves’ descriptions of schoolmates includes the year they were each killed during the war.

The First Battalion, which Graves reveres, was 800 men. 15,000 men passed through almost all leaving as casualties. A soldier served until he was dead, too badly wounded to serve, or the war ended.

Graves mentions in passing that he has a servant who polishes the buttons on his uniform.

Graves talks about how prior to the war one bought a commission in the military. How officers paid for their mess… officers came from the monied class, but were four times more likely to be killed than a soldier.

The writing is good. It’s interesting. The effect is cumulative and therefore much more powerful.

He takes no pains to point out the military’s foibles and failings. The reporting is factual, nothing more is necessary.

The Britsh books of the thirties that I read, mostly mysteries, Dorothy L Sayers, for example, take place in this post Great War world. Sayers’ protagonist, Peter Wimsey suffers from PTSD from the war.

Graves talks about the useful life cycle of an officer as the toll of war builds. Most will end up with what we call PTSD (neurasthenia, Graves calls it), as he did. Some will become alcoholics, make poor decisions because they are drunk and will lose many more men than they should.* Graves refers to two-bottles-per-day men.

Anger builds reading Graves and an understanding about, perhaps, why the war wasn’t won until the Yanks showed up, though Graves never mentions the Americans.

(It was a joke twenty-five years later during WWII that the Brits would fight until the last American. )

The forward to the book, by some great expert on such things, describes the book as humorous and satirical. At one time, I would feel myself a rube for not seeing what obviously must be there. Now, I wonder about the reviewer’s need for sophistication and his academic sneer.

According to the forward, Graves was uniformly disliked by his peers and beloved by his men. Graves was certainly a name dropper, but came from and rubbed shoulders with the elite and high achievers. He was also not afraid to call upon the famous.

He attended schools that produced the UK’s leaders and was comfortable around them. Until I started hiring for my company, I had no idea the difference the school one attends makes.

Other than knowing he wrote I, Claudius. I knew nothing about Graves. He was, both by his admission, and count of his works, a writer. Someone who wrote easily, confidently and compulsively.

Jennifer and I motored 43 miles today in mirrored waters. Jennifer is setting us up for the jump to the mainland on Wednesday. We need to be somewhere sheltered when weather arrives this weekend.

The straits and passages we have been travelling are beautiful, but the shorelines attest to how dangerous they are in rough weather.

Phoenix Bay is, to our eyes, one of the nicest places we’ve anchored. There are no salmon streams, the bottom is uneven and the shore rises quickly. It is silent and devoid of biting insects. It is open to the northwest, which is why we will leave here tomorrow. Chances of sharing the anchorage are small.

The water, tonight, is pond-like. A sea otter swam by after dinner ignoring us. The eagle and the raven that were here when we arrived are silent now at 7.45 pm.

Tonight, I will enjoy the silence. I’ll read some more and doze before going below to bed. The summer is over here. Leaves are starting to turn and it will be in the forties tonight. It has been the best summer weather here in years. The last two weeks have been rain-free and sunny.

Rain returns Wednesday, this weekend’s weather brings forty-knot winds in the strait we will cross that day.

Here’s to safe harbors and smooth sailing.

58°24.261N
155° 18.800W

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*I was in a restaurant in Kensington in London around 1990. A man, who would have been a little older than I am now was describing how he was sending his men into battle in the second world war. Truly a meat grinder. His words seem to indicate that there was little point in having these men die, but it was somehow more convenient for him to fight on that day and place and he seemed not to care that there had been no real purpose to sending them to their deaths.

I was transfixed, and am still shaken by that conversation thirty years later.
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