Time.news – A small grease spot is enough to slip out of life. Putting the foot wrong, missing a step, and finding yourself in the open sea with only one need in your body: learning to hope. Henry Preston Standish, the protagonist of “Gentleman Overboard” (Adelphi, 2023, 153 pp.) is a boring, ordinary man, “dull as a gray canvas”. A wife who loves him, two young children whom he adores “with a proud and melancholy love”, a successful job as a stock broker on the New York Stock Exchange and an apartment near Central Park. Impeccable clothes and impeccable thoughts. Living, every day, trying to never be ashamed of anything.
A man falls off a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean and meditates. The perfect novel. One hundred grotesque, hilarious, perfidious pages. Translated and edited by your most affectionate. It comes out January 31st. pic.twitter.com/N6EoE4OgXf
– Marco Rossari (@marco_rossari) January 17, 2023
A routine that suddenly breaks. Inside Standish something breaks. “The rejection of everything” he will explain to himself later, as he floats in the ocean he will watch the sunset light up and the ship, the Arabella, drift away.
Standish is a lonely, incomplete man, stuck and embedded in a bubble of perfection which, when it bursts, can only lead to an unexpected, almost sadistic, end full of black humour. An epilogue between reflections and jokes that apparently seem out of time, out of sync. Being polite, observing decorum, never raising your voice: qualities appreciated in a society like that of the 1930s, when the book comes out, but totally useless when a man’s only need is survival.
Standish doesn’t even scream when he falls overboard. The voice chokes in the throat, the hands remain helpless: those who have never done harm cannot, for sure, succumb to an undeserved and unjust fate. “God should be ashamed for allowing such iniquity,” he’ll find himself thinking. And it won’t be the only meditation that, over the hours, between swimming and being “dead afloat”, he will find himself doing.
Life, death, future, relationships. Everything emerges and then sinks back into the bowels of her mind. Always trying to hope. Always trusting. Always shutting out from the mind what, instead, is the fragility and ineluctability of life. After all, that boat will come back to pick it up, people will realize it’s gone, the lights, even at night, will identify it. Everything, then, will become a story to laugh about, an article to be published in a newspaper, an anecdote to come up with whenever the occasion seems propitious.
The reader of “gentleman at sea” can only follow this descending parable, in which irony turns into melancholy, trust into fear. Learning to hope is not easy even for the reader: it’s a tremendous exercise, cruel at times, but essential for turning the pages.
Marco Rossari, the editor of this edition, recounts at the end of the book the unfortunate existence of the author, Herbert Clyde Lewis, son of Russian immigrants in America, who wanted to make a living from writing and will never succeed. Between short acute notes, deceptive horizons and an untimely death, he will remain “in the water” for too long.
In the story, Lewis has a wave of affection for his ‘gentleman’. And perhaps for himself. He almost seems to feel a bitter tenderness knowing that the course cannot be changed. And it’s as if, even if he had wanted to, with the pen between his fingers, he couldn’t have done anything for him, writer and character. Standish “looked up at the sky that was as big as a man’s courage as the sea stretched out wider than his hopes”.
This little booklet will have the opposite fate: buried alive by the waters of time, it resurfaces forcefully today, saved, yes, by the waves of a sea, the literary one, placid but equally deadly. “The world needed that story” Standish thinks at one point as the water surrounds him. And, as Rossari recalls in the afterword, the world really needed it but “not at that moment”. Today, however, yes.