Alan Gould

Bolero And The Sea

(A talk for the 2001 Sydney Writers’ Festival)

This piece was first published in Heat magazine

    I wish to examine a type of pathos.
   There is a story told about the great tea-clipper, Thermopylae which, whenever I re-read or re-tell it, makes my eyes prickle and prompts in me an obscure urge to sob. This emotion is not unhappiness.
   Thermopylae  was a paragon from that age which built the loveliest seagoing vessels ever to leave a slipway. With her green hull, gold mouldings, lofty white masts and square yards, her patent brace winch and patent reefing gear, her appearance was that of a thoroughbred among thoroughbreds, and on her maiden voyage in 1868 she broke the sailing records on each leg of her trip, including her 60 days from London to Melbourne which, I gather, is yet to be equalled.
   On one occasion in the 1870s she put out from Melbourne at the same time as a naval vessel, the HMS Charybdis, and times being what they were, the captain of Charybdis decided to make a race of it. As they cleared Port Phillip Bay, sail was crowded onto both ships but very quickly her Majesty’s ship was left far behind. Before he lost sight of her, the old naval gentleman had time to send up on his signal halyards a message to the skipper of Thermopylae. It read, ‘Goodbye. You are too much for us. You are the finest model of a ship I ever saw. It does my heart good to look at you.’
   Well, here is a story, a vignette rather, whose appeal is neither tragic nor dramatic. Why should it be emotive for one who regards himself as a fairly toughminded person? I have stood dry-eyed beside the corpses of both my mother and my father. Yet what prickles in my eye at this maritime story is an emotion, not sadness, not joy, though edged with both. At the same time it surprises me with its fierce, its delicate, its mysterious, valuing of these recovered moments from bygone lives.
   For they are  moments that are exact and remote. And they seem so tenuous, these instants with the rectangles of signal-bunting streaming in an elegant curve to leeward, with the two nineteenth- century skippers, spyglasses in hand and their respective ships leaning to the weather, so effaceable, when measured against the immense dark matter that we can suppose will one day come down upon time utterly.
   In what follows I want to anatomise this, my emotive reaction to a maritime story. This is because I suspect that if I probe the origin of my own emotion, I may be able to illuminate a little the complex attraction of maritime histories for writer and reader alike. Why does the sea insinuate itself so effectively into the human imagination?  How does the sea-itself and the sea-as-metaphor impinge on the way we feel about being in time?
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   From my earliest books I have written about maritime matters but I can claim no professional association with the oceans. I have been neither deepwaterman nor trawlerman nor oceanographer. Nonetheless, throughout my life the sea has been in prospect. My mother was born in a little town on a cliff overlooking the stormy Húnaflói in north-west Iceland, and as a girl moved to a house at Akureyri beside the serener Eyjafjord, again in the north of that country. Aged two, and again aged five, I was taken on extended visits to this, my grandparents’ house. That long tranquil fjord, edged with slate-grey hills and further mountains streaked by snow, lodged itself in my consciousness as one of the images by which I knew my place in the world. Aged five, I could step from this house, cross the Strandgaeti onto the black volcanic sand. There I would choose one of the several clinker-built boats — my favourite was painted grey with green gunwales — and occupy myself for hours pushing it out onto the mirror water until it came to the extent of its mooring line, then hauling it back, mesmerised by the smooth gliding movement of this object, so much bigger than I was.
   I knew the names of the two identical steamships that came and went from Akureyri harbour — the Hekla and the Aesir. Black-hulled, with white superstructures and short, raked red-and-black funnels, their arrivals and departures prompted in me some vague elation which was to do with distance and homecoming. By contrast there was the  antique steamer that never moved from its dock. Its black funnel resembled an oversized undertaker’s top hat, its many derricks slanted this way and that like diagrams in a geometry textbook, while the rust flowered along its every seam. I saw it in 1954, and again in 1977, and I have seen a photo of it at the same wharf, taken in 1920.
   Equally I watched the squat yellow trawlers chug back and forth with their serial numbers emblazoned on the small wheelhouses and drying cod swaying on lines rigged across their decks. O dreadful, when one of these became stranded on the sandbank and leant right over on its beam ends at an alarming angle, remaining there for what seemed  like several days. Part of the alarm in my five-year old mind was that, long after bedtime, whenever I peeped through the curtains, the distressed yellow trawler was always there, always visible, for I understood as little about the Arctic summer and the midnight sun as I did about boats floating off on a flood tide.
   But my mother, brought up beside this long arm of the Norwegian Sea, among seafaring folk, occasionally taking her part in the gutting and cleaning of the trawl at long tables set up on the wooden quayside, throughout her life was never at home with the sea. In this she was unlike my London-born, landlubber father who  could not be kept from Australia’s south coast surf. For him, for me too, the sea was a brilliant white lather enfolding the body in glorious sensation and movement. For my mother it was the place from which the drowned fishermen were brought home, a place of dread.
   I grew older with ships on my mind. I fashioned them out of plasticine, with meat skewers for masts and pierced paper for sails. I spent six years at a boarding school where, from high classroom windows I could watch the shipping on East Anglia’s  River Orwell. Here were  lovely old tramp steamers so high in the water that you could see their screws thrashing. Here were a pair of London barges in Pin Mill Bay, their sails lashed to varnished sprits, but occasionally loosed in lovely rusty canvas peaks of spritsail and gaff topsail. And here were the great freighters making upstream to Ipswich, downstream to Harwich and the harbours of the world, scattering the throng of dinghy sailors like whales scattering shoals of anchovy.
   I learnt to sail, first in an  old 27 foot whaler with a lug sail, a small mizzen, and a helm which, when put down in order to keep clear of a lee shore, alarmingly had no effect. Later I graduated to those cramped, sodden, leaping dinghies where some panicky senior boy yelled unintelligible instructions and the mainsail’s boom was liable to swing across suddenly, braining me en route. I was an able seaman in the Sea Cadet Corps, learning the procedure for bringing a motor-launch up to a jetty,  practising my semaphore, my knots, whippings  and splices. To this day I cannot leave a piece of rope alone, but must put an eye-, back- or short splice on it, or unravel its strands to turn up a grommet. By ocean liner, steamship, or ferry, I made some sea voyages, to Australia in 1966, to Iceland from Leith in ‘73, to Crete from Piraeus and back in ‘77, and during the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s did a great deal of sailing in catamarans, more dinghies, and the odd yacht.
   By then I knew that each time I stepped onto a boat or a ship, and felt the slight sway underfoot, the slow-rise and fall in an ocean swell, I had entered a realm of experience that was numinous for me. This was equally true when I handled the gear, took the strain on a halyard, vang, or mainsheet, set a spinnaker pole or pushed a boom out against the shrouds for the run home. It was not just these things of rope and sailcloth, metal and hardwood, but the lovely austere music of maritime vocabulary — cleat and clewline, windlass and halyard, binnacle and coaming, topsail, headsail and royal.
   Perhaps for this reason maritime matters were passing into my writing. I read a great many maritime books, technical, historical, though with the notable exception of Conrad, fictional accounts of seafaring did not attract me. I did not venture far with CS Forester, and gave up Patrick O’Brien after fifty pages, acknowledging in both cases that they were fine writers of maritime historical fiction, but not offering quite the thing I wanted. Conrad’s writing gave to time its texture, its intimacy, its usage. That was the elusive quality I looked for, the texture of an era.
   For many years now I have constructed plank-on-frame models of various ships including Thermopylae. I’ve made pen-and-ink drawings of nautical subjects, and loaded my shelves with books of marine art drawn and painted by far more confident hands than my own. Have I described here a monomania? Yes, I think so.
   And as for the ocean itself, I can sit on a dune, or watch from a ship’s rail, and its spectacle is reiterative without ever being repetitious. It moves like Ravel’s Bolero, remorselessly and lightly, running with small variations. I can look at the place where a wave folds on itself, enclosing emerald or sapphire into a white cave, and know I could never get my paintbox to contrive  that brilliant relief of colours, or pencil-hatch the momentary cleft with a dark of sufficient tact and intensity.
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   So much for the biographical component of how I come to write about maritime matters. But these details explain only the sea’s presence in my imagination, not the poetic  force  of maritime subject matter in the imaginations of people like me.
   Auden wrote in The Enchaféd Flood  that ‘the sea is the real situation and the voyage is the true condition of man’.  His point is that the sea offers itself not only as a compelling, but as an inevitable  metaphor for our lives. Why is that?
   Firstly, the sea, again like Ravel’s Bolero, embraces the contradiction that it is ever changing and always the same. It is an image equally for flux and for the eternal, and therefore a place where the momentary and The Everlasting may be reconciled. The American poet, Galway Kinnell, once wrote that ‘the sea is all we know of time;  it is the undermusic of eternity.’
   Secondly the sea has a surface that discloses itself in a constant shifting of glitter and glint, of pools of sunlight, moonlight, and that strange steely luminescence when no particular light source is evident. It also has depths that do not fully disclose themselves but where outlandish things are to be found. Here is another image of reconciliation, between the human conscious and sub-conscious, between the immediate matrix of impressions, attitudes, moods that make up waking life, and the astounding transformations these things undergo in the sub-conscious mind, for which we only have access in dream.
   Then again the sea can never be settled, but is the interval between the familiar and the exotic, the palpable and the possible, us and them.  Here  are our crude familiars. There, beyond the sea’s horizon, lie Lyonnesse, Cathay, Lilliput,  terra incognita. The sea’s horizon is thus an image for both ultra and ultima, and the deeps themselves create the trials by which we pass from here to there, both geographically and within our personal experience.
   For these trials the sea requires of us skill, attentiveness and courage, but in return it is utterly indifferent to our lives. It deals out fortune or misfortune to the brave and the fainthearted, the saintly and the criminal,  the seasoned and the careless mariner. This profound neutrality is the aspect of the sea that is pervasive in Conrad, and in this it offers itself, more closely than any other image perhaps, as a metaphor for human fate, fate that is not vengeful, simply grand, heartless,  incalculable.
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   I have identified here four ways in which we use the sea as a metaphor for existence. However, if I were to remove that word ‘sea’ and replace it with the word ‘history’ I think I would have in those qualities, not an exact, but a close match to enable me to describe the human relationship with time.
   For instance, history is a ground where the transient and the durable seek reconciliation. Events occur and almost immediately lie down in the sedimenatry layers of the past. Yet we know how all that has been done or will be done, all that is known or knowable, might in the long perspective be recoverable for history. Being of the present, we live at the edge of history and observe the frailty of all that lives in time. But we can imagine the immensity of a time that encompasses us. We see, and foresee, all things as being eventually within the scope of history, an ecology that embraces both place and time.
   Then again we allow history its surface and its depths. From the historical record a multitude of events glint superficially for us, Troy, Magna Carta, Titanic.  Equally we know that none of these words tell the whole story, and it is historians, and our own intellectual restiveness that will dive for the dark matter which gives to the past explanation at once more ample, more exact, and often more strange than we could have imagined.
   Just as surely, we know how unobtrusively, how remorselessly, the familiars of our present become the quaint and exotic things of the past. Clothing, manners, language, the very physiological pre-conditions of  attitude and feeling, drift from the recognisable to the exotic. ‘The past is another country,’ observed L.P. Hartley’s Colston. We know that to be true in the same thought that it breaks our hearts because we thought the past was where we had come from and that therefore it belonged to us.

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   Now let me return and try to account for the peculiar emotion that overtakes me when I contemplate the story about the Thermopylae  with which I began.
   The story is small, but exact, distant from us, but knowable. What fluttered on that signal halyard on that day in Bass Strait was the sensibility of one human being in one moment of time. He had seen a sight  that moved him beyond measure and he had run up an avowal of his affection. Maybe those flags disclose a temperament that was rather fond,  but they also declare how someone valued a thing. There are not many photographic snapshots that are as revealing as those messages in the International Code being run up and down from the peak of his spanker-gaff.
   What is moving is that this scrap of narrative from a book on shipping, this snapshot, is so chancy. Like the flash of a heliograph. No doubt it expresses a sentiment common enough among sailing folk of the time, and yes, it suggests a little about the sensibility of that epoch, a sensibility with reflexes quite other than our own, yet from which we come in direct line of descent. But the poignancy lies in it being this  naval gentleman, his life. And if that life went largely unrecorded, by  this account of a moment between two ships on the immense, unstable waters of Bass Strait, it is also not quite effaced.
   And I say that such vivid recovery of a moment in time both gladdens me and sharpens the pathos and value of existence itself. History is often glossed as a catalogue of tyrannies and wars, oppression and stupidity. Certainly our past contains these things. It also contains one person declaring his love for a thing and the attendant poignancy that both lover and beloved have been swallowed up by time. That is an emotion that juxtaposes the thought of an intimate self with an immense indifferent other. I believe that to be the relationship of humans with both history, and the sea.
   I might call this ‘the History Emotion’. It is the passion that intoxicates my heroine Sarah in The Schoonermaster’s Dance, leading her on a quest to recover the vital presence of her seafaring ancestor, Charlie Tilber. Of course the emotion by itself is not sufficient to meet the historical challenge she faces. Like a good historian, she brings to her quest a restive curiosity, a fine and daring imagination, hard work, a disciplined method. However, she also brings to it a singlemindedness that gradually causes her undoing as she loses interest in the present and the past comes to possess her wholly.  For this, I believe, is the danger inherent in ‘the History Emotion’, its pathological tendency.
   It may be the reason not all readers have liked Sarah, finding her selfish, obsessive, incapable of giving love. For me she is courageous, intelligent, high-minded, unworldly — and loveable for these reasons.  However, I locate the pathos and necessity of Sarah’s character in her recognition that, as humans, we will continue to recover lost lives, lost time, because to do so makes our own living more complete.
   That is the force of ‘the History Emotion’ and the sea and history come together in this, for both make us aware of being in one place beside an immensity that is around us and, in the end, entire.