Sinking the Submarine Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Thinking about the Invisible Library over the past couple of weeks reminded me that I never got around to sharing a memorable passage in MacDonald Harris's Mortal Leap (1964) when I wrote briefly about that novel earlier this summer.

Harris's novel is about a man who, having lost his identity to a shipwreck while serving in the Merchant Marine during World War II, is given a chance at a new life when a woman claims him as her husband, a naval officer who died in the same battle; Harris uses the man's story--and his choice to allow this unexpected new life to become his own--to explore basic yet essential questions of identity, individuality, and purpose. It was brought to my attention by the Neglected Books Page, whose editor raved about it:

I first read Mortal Leap almost thirty years ago, and I remember how the narrative seized my attention. It was one of those books you begrudge the rest of your life for taking you away from. When you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, you feel as if you are hurtling forward along with the protagonist.

When I reread the book recently, it seemed even more powerful and affecting. I knew how it would turn out, but now the suspense was in seeing how Harris could make it plausible. What I saw this time around was how he manages to make this wildly improbable situation into a very basic lesson about being. So the man learns how to imitate Ben Davenant without getting caught–or at least, so he thinks. The man has made the leap and a new bar is in his hands. But he still has to confront the question, “Now what?”

I wasn't as taken with it as he was: the set-up was smartly conceived, and the narrative voice was strong and distinctive, but the book's second half, when the man begins to decide what sort of life he wants to lead, felt a bit flat--as the philosophical questions driving the narrative began to find answers, the story itself lost some of its inherent interest. Regardless, I'm glad I read it, and it's well worth the push the Neglected Books Page has given it--it's made me want to search out more of MacDonald Harris's novels.

But what has caused it to resurface in my mind tonight is a scene early in the novel, when the sailor, having fled the Utah home of his boyhood for a directionless life at sea, begins to use the dead hours in his bunk to become an autodidact. At each port, he takes on more books:

During those five years I read on the average two or three books a week, but I had never been educated properly or shown how to read books and I would get things all mixed up and twisted in my head. I never could get it straight that there were two Samuel Butlers and what the difference was between Malraux, Maurois, and Mauriac. I didn't read Conrad anymore because I had decided he was a sentimentalist. In San Francisco or Melbourne I would buy a box of books and when we got out to sea I would take them out one by one and read the first ten pages. If it didn't interest me I would throw it overboard or give it to Sailors' Relief. In this way I discovered Malthus, Ricardo, Gibbon, Veblen, Spencer, Bakunin, Kierkegaard, Vico, Mencken, Fourier. I didn't like Hegel or Kant or any author who got involved in abstractions, and any kind of speculation or general theorizing made me impatient; I wanted the books that had the answers. I read everything, biography and fiction, but it was the same with the novelists; I threw away books by tea-party fairies like Proust and read the naturalists, Zola, Crane, Dreiser, Celine, Steinbeck, Dos Passos. Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book.

Now, anyone who calls Proust a "tea-party fairy" is planting his feet firmly on my bad side, and though I have never been willing to commit the time to attempting Galsworthy (perhaps in part due to the influence of Anthony Powell, who argued that The Forsyte Saga "cannot hold a candle to Vanity Fair," and that Galsworthy "lacks the pitiless knowledge of human nature to be found in, say, Proust or James"), I'm fairly confident it doesn't quite deserve burial at sea. But I will admit to enjoying the image . . . rather than an Invisible Library, a submarine library, pages slowly swaying in the silent currents of the trackless deep, read in that pitchy blackness only by those fish with the good sense to have evolved their own light sources.

I have a water-damaged copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, victim of a careless roommate and a bathtub, that I'm happy to contribute. Anyone else have books with which to help me outfit a soon-to-be-scuttled submarine library?

"The grim shadow of self-knowledge"

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Apropos of the PJ Harvey song I wrote about a few days ago, here's Joseph Conrad's good friend Marlow on self-deception, from Lord Jim (1900)

I didn't know how much of it he believed himself. I didn't know what he was playing up to--if he was playing up to anything at all--and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief that no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

As I've been reading Lord Jim this week, I've also been reading MacDonald Harris's Mortal Leap (1964), a book that, coincidentally, opens with a young man being swept away to a life sea by his reading of Conrad, and which shares some thematic elements with Lord Jim; this passage from the book's opening chapter can serve as a sort of fervid companion to Marlow's cool appraisal:

[U]nder the scars, behind the wrinkle in the forehead, there were other ghosts, deeper and more elusive. Here was the mark where I murdered and fornicated, betrayed my friends and was betrayed by them; here I slept in strange rooms, the whore's cubicle, the prison cell, the psychiatric ward. Is there anybody who would like to have written on his forehead a record of the places where he has slept? We are all innocent, in the end, and all guilty. We move blindly toward our sins, and the things we do and the things we suffer for don't have much to do with each other. In the end there's no justice: the universe is not an auditing firm. Would we like it better if it were? If we had to pay for everything, down to the last cruelty, the last fornication, the last harmless lie? Let's leave the dark places where they are.

And the hearts of the world's Joseph Mitchell fans go pitter-pat . . .

MacDonald Harris's novel Mortal Leap (1964) is about Larry Backus, a sailor in the merchant marine who, having had his identity stripped away by a torpedo during World War II, finds himself claimed by a wealthy woman as her husband, a naval lieutenant on the ship amidst whose wreckage Backus, burned beyond recognition, was recovered. I'll have more to say about the book in coming days, especially about how the story of this autodidact is steeped in books to a degree beyond that of most novels, even those featuring proper intellectuals--but today I just want to quickly share a moment that made me break out into a broad smile.

Backus, still adjusting to life among the cultured and moneyed, has just caused a minor stir by putting catsup on his filet mignon. His father-in-law unexpectedly disrupts the awkward silence that ensues, revealing in the process that he, too, has had to earn his familiarity with money:

After a while Leo remarked, "Joe Gould when he was living in the Village always used to pour catsup out on his plate and eat it with a spoon. He didn't like the stuff but he said it was the only thing in a Village diner that was free."

"Who was Joe Gould?" I demanded, still a little truculent.

"A philosopher," was all he would say. A philosopher who ate catsup? That night after the other had gone to bed I locked myself in the study and looked him up in Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy, but he wasn't there.

If only the Internet had existed in 1964, perhaps the Wikipedia might have been able to come to the rescue!