Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I wrote for a
copy.
My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains this
note:
"Finished reading _Casuals of the Sea_, a good book. H---- still laid up
with bad ankle. In the P.M. we sat and read Bible aloud to Celia before
the open fire."
My first impressions of "_Casuals of the Sea_, a good book" are
interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid from Pike
County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house by nightly
readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick (that was her
first voyage away from home) and in spite of persistent Bible readings
she fled after two weeks, back to her home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was
our first servant, and we had prepared a beautiful room in the attic for
her. However, that has nothing to do with Mr. McFee.
_Casuals of the Sea_ is a novel whose sale of ten thousand copies in
America is more important as a forecast of literary weather than many a
popular distribution of a quarter million. Be it known by these presents
that there are at least ten thousand librivora in this country who
regard literature not merely as an emulsion. This remarkable novel, the
seven years' study of a busy engineer occupied with boiler inspections,
indicator cards and other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the
first really public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened
to with respect.
Mr. McFee had written two books before "Casuals" was published, but at
that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. They were
_Letters from an Ocean Tramp_ (1908) and _Aliens_ (1914); the latter has
been rewritten since then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very
singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on
human folly by a man who has made it his hobby to think things out for
himself. And the new version is headlighted by a preface which may well
take its place among the most interesting literary confessions of this
generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, the
artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the whittling of
a paragraph:--
Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I
suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the
sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes--genuine
artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live
like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the
artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with
irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my
living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their
ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my
theme, the problem of human folly.
Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer because he
has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of
it ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London
twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful
machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering.
And unlike the other English realists of his generation who have
cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers
at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how
delightfully he flays it in _Aliens_) but he loves the middle classes
for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. His attitude
toward his creations is that of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own
phrase). He has seen some of the seams of life, and like McAndrew he has
hammered his own philosophy. It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but
not a soft one. Since the war began he has been on sea service, first on
a beef-ship and transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in
the British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the
desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and
a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the dumb-waiter shaft
to make room for him. It is a disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the
man who really has something to say.
Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new finds. How
the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell
Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar mage, Elsbury W.
Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on publishers' press sheets
does not dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are all only
raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in his little parable; even the
raft that Homer made for Helen must break up some day. Who in these
States knows the works of Nat Gould? Twelve million of his dashing
paddock novels have been sold in England, but he is as unknown here as
is Preacher Wright in England. What is so dead as a dead best seller?
Sometimes it is the worst sellers that come to life, roll away the
stone, and an angel is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me
quote Mr. McFee once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot
refuse facts."
William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an English
skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long
voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They settled in New
Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was
educated in the city schools of which the first pages of _Casuals of the
Sea_ give a pleasant description. Then he went to a well-known grammar
school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk--what we would call over here a
high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer.
At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate.
This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse,
Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office
of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His
father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an
apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred
pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the
money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else
is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at
the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will
find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out
in _Aliens_.
After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on
various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at
Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile
verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time
of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either
imitating Kipling or reacting from him.
His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives
and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by
socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to
live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at
first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic
Utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum
reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he
attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent
engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As
early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them.
In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room
of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance.
Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year
(1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The
reader of _Aliens_ will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he
reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin disguise. I suspect a certain
liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write some of
his best tales there? Some day some literary meteorologist will explain
how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley
(N.J.), Galesburg (Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.)
The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a fair
prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time
monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I
speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's
certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A
small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting
study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only
diversions of most of the profession. Art, literature, and politics do
not interest them. Picture postcards, waterside saloons, and the ladies
of the port are the glamour of his that they delight to honour.
I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable account (in _Aliens_) of his
induction into the profession of marine engineering has no faint colour
of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's mind. The filth, the intolerable
weariness, the instant necessity of the tasks, stagger the easygoing
suburban reader. And only the other day, speaking of his work on a
seaplane ship in the British Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating
things about the life of an engineer:
It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty of
work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot help
wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick.
Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of the
R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean,
when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as
my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my
friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or
the officers of the watch. I mean _work_, hard, sweating, nasty
toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most ships of the
naval auxiliary are the same.
I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment
of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession
have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to
toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet
auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of
his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to
superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the
navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not expect an
architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You do not
expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law courts
door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you
do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer
has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corresponding
precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in
other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind.
I blame no one. It is tradition, a most terrible windmill at which
to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to set down once at least the
peculiar nature of an engineer's destiny. I have had some years of
it, and I know what I am talking about.
_The_ point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has the
responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do it. He,
the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours of rest
and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port.
Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge
instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board.
When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described.
The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon these
laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of intellect as
well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, purposeful. His years at sea
have been to him a more fruitful curriculum than that of any university.
The patient sarcasm with which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his
acquaintance does not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target.
He has stood as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting _viva voce_--the
University of the Seven Seas.
If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I would deem
that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege of getting a
man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of course! But how he has
worked for his mastery of the art of life and the theory thereof! When
his colleagues at sea were dozing in their deck chairs or rattling the
bones along the mahogany, he was sweating in his bunk, writing or
reading. He has always been deeply interested in painting, and no
gallery in any port he visited ever escaped him. These extracts from
some of his letters will show whether his avocations were those of most
engineers:
As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston (Liverpool)
the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted against the
pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague Cheshire shores
dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an indulgent genie
were to appear and make me an offer I would cheerfully give up
writing for painting. As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend
more time in the Walker Gallery than in the library next door.
I've got about all I _can_ get out of books, and now I don't relish
them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I suppose, is that
character, not incident, is my _metier_. And you can _draw_
character, _paint_ character, but you can't very well blat about it,
can you?
I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst
of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how people
live, of ordinary human possibilities.
A----. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap
stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I
don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a blue curse
what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big
name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as
well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended.... To
hell with writing, I want _to feel_ and _see_!
I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the
amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some sort
who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter
him!
His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the
hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging
from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to
be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of
"futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in
the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London
journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time
to contribute to the _Atlantic Monthly_ pieces of styptic prose that
make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written
weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a
humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern
cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor
on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines.
When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his
engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was
interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too.
And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London Board
of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to
rest on his gauges.
In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local
colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the
United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither
_Aliens_ nor _Casuals of the Sea_, which he had been at work on for
years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his
manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the
United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he
was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war.
Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a
vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my
proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all
three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two
magnificent prefaces--to _A Personal Record_ and to _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_--Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to
every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of
letters. They can never be quoted too often:
"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the
miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs
deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the
undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile
which is not a grin."
That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich
family in _Casuals of the Sea_. Somewhere in that book he has uttered
the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps
cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the
cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in
store for us.
And there is one other sentence in _Casuals of the Sea_ that lingers
with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. It is worth
remembering, and I leave it with you:
"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such,
instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing
murderous blows."