Back to the Classics #9

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

20th Century Classic. I was going to read an imposing novel by Thomas Wolfe until I discovered that the novels after Look Homeward Angel were manufactured. That is, an editor cobbled them together from a million-word manuscript after Wolfe died of TB at 37 in 1938. Dejected, I turned to a best-seller of 1941, which turned out to be the author’s lone novel before he died in 1991 at 93 (he is buried in Arlington). Because the writer disappeared from public view and never published again, his only published novel turned into a neglected book.

Delilah: A Novel about a U.S. Navy Destroyer and the Epic Struggles of her Crew - Marcus Goodrich

Goodrich sets the story on a destroyer in the Sulu Sea on the Philippines station about six months before the US enters World War I. He examines the personalities of and intricate relationships among the officers and enlisted men. He inserts them into unusual situations that reveal their dispositions and temperaments.

Goodrich is long on exposition and short on dialogue, in three huge chapters mercifully divided into shortish numbered sections. He employs the plain style of Hemingway, the elaborate style of James, and the surreal descriptive magic of Conrad. The recondite metaphors, abstruse symbolism and esoteric lexical choices (like “rubefacient”) challenge us readers who pride ourselves as word mavens. The byzantine Ford Madox Fordian sentences lead even us hard-core readers – people who base their self-respect on their penchant for reading Eliot and Pynchon for fun - to stamp our feet and groan “hard” and “incomprehensible” and ” “overwritten.”

It is our right as a reader to moan, but we need to remember, too, what avid reader Jack Kerouac said in 1952, “When something is incomprehensible to me (Finnegan’s Wake, Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Delilah by Marcus Goodrich), I try to understand it, the author’s intellect, and passion, and mystery. To label it incoherent is not only a semantic mistake but an act of cowardice and intellectual death.”

Delilah features no plot in the conventional sense though the episodes flow seamlessly; life flows as it does in Emma. Goodrich likes the vivid metaphor so the ship Delilah is the center of the story. For the crew, it is an overseer demanding endless toil and a nymph luring mariners to their doom. It is a pressure cooker where a motley collection of personalities have to live, eat, and sleep in close proximity. It is a force in the greater world projecting the political power of its country.  Delilah is also an ageing metal hulk, subject to wear, heat, salt, pressure, and weather. She makes incessant demands on the men to keep her stoked with coal and to repair her misaligned doohickeys and improper thingamajigs, lest mishaps ranging from breakdowns to explosions occur.

Goodrich intends also to present detailed character studies of ordinary men. He summarizes Captain Borden’s efforts to advocate for the antiquated ship and diverse crew. He is often at odds with the political wrong-headedness of the Navy and the government’s feeble dealings with local politicians, but faithfully carries out imperial errands of population-centric counterinsurgency operations. Young Signalman Warrington keeps himself to himself and reads books like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations but insensibly gravitates toward connection with second-in-command Lieutenant Fitzpatrick. Chance and circumstance deny Seaman Rowe a chance to establish a sense of belonging and community among new shipmates.

Goodrich challenges the reader’s memory, patience, and expectations with these long expositions on the backgrounds and characters of his cast of players. However, it is important to Goodrich that we know the characters because he thrusts them into scores of outlandish circumstances. He wants us to see how ordinary people respond to unusual situations like brawls, shark attacks, and interactions with Neolithic peoples.

Amazing is the set piece on the landing in a rough surf and the subsequent search for caches of insurrectionist weapons in cave. It is a tour de force.

Wonder at the story of an old Irish monk and his missionary exploits; of the Christians who don’t want life-saving vaccines wasted on heathens; of the trader Parker, rotten to the core but a lover of the opera Rigoletto. 

The odd occurrences simply end with an especially intense incident of a sailor on a ferocious rampage, with the final sprinkles being the announcements that the US has declared war and the ship is being dispatched chop-chop on a run of thousands of miles to the Atlantic.

Goodrich took 14 years – from 1926 to 1941 when it was published - to write his only novel. One can tell Goodrich is following the first rule for writers, writing about what he knows about. Goodrich enlisted in the Navy at 16 years of age and served in the Philippines. After he left the military, he put food on the table by writing advertising copy and movie scripts and worked on Delilah, writing and revising. The book in fact feels and reads as if it were sweated over until Goodrich made the story and his themes as clear and true and complete as he could.

It was a best-seller once it was released, a guy’s book for guys on their way to fight in WWII. But any reader can enjoy this book as a triumph of literature, of novel writing, like Mansfield Park or The Tale of Genji - any reader who likes stories and reads with some pride in their own taste.