Books: Fun at Sea

LAST MAN AROUND THE WORLD—Stephen Longstreet—Random House ($3).

On the money he made from his first novel, Decade (TIME, March 4, 1940), Stephen Longstreet shipped on a de luxe world cruise. It turned out to be the last trip of that kind before the world ended. Out of the journals of this voyage he has made a book incomparably better than Decade, and vastly entertaining. Despite streaks of third-hand Times Square wit and Ben Hechtish newspapermannerisms, it suggests that Longstreet may soon be one of the most readable of U.S. writers.

It was a typical world-cruise crowd—”schoolteachers and retired white-collar workers and chain-store sell-outs … [their] ideas pure Technicolor.” There were also remittance-men, wanderers and drunks: “nice people . . . rich in leisure, meditation and gamy breaths” (see cut, p. 91; the drawings are Longstreet’s). There was a fine old fellow whom he calls Proust’s Pal (he had known Marcel quite well) who talked old-fashioned purple epigrams about books, homosexuality and English cooking. There were also Pamela Cohn, who thought of joining the Catholic Church but passed it up on a chance to meet Aldous Huxley, and a charming character called Big Boy.

Big Boy was a huge young derelict multimillionaire with a tireless hunger for “tomatoes” (women). He spent his time making bad “artistic” movies, an alcoholic stalactite of his liver, and arranging red-light expeditions at every port of call. Longstreet has a special, affectionate felicity with the dizzy-rich, and Big Boy is one of the most amiable who ever got onto paper.

In Haiti they called on a rich cream-colored Harvard classmate of Big Boy’s and saw a libidinous so-called voodoo dance. In England Longstreet talked to a nice tart and a nice Lord. In Paris there was a countess who admired gangster slang: “What do you know, you mug, about this gimmick?” In Germany he saw the old vicious guns of World War I scrapped in a field near Kiel, read in the papers of an America no American has ever seen, and talked to a brave old pastor who was ”headed as sure as Christ Himself” for a concentration camp.

Out of Rome Longstreet got some good notes on the Sistine frescos, and a Roman prince called him “you ol’ sonampipch” and “you ol’ basket.” A side trip alone, to Rumania, brings some of the best writing in the book. He liked Turkey very much, thinks it is “the land of the future, if it can keep out of the next war.”

In Tanganyika he sketched a woman who had authentically eaten two of her young and he made a drunken safari with Big Boy which lasted only as long as the liquor. He killed one lion, with extreme lack of pleasure. The beaters howled and threatened until they were given candy. Back in the hotel lobby “dying men, full of fever and Scotch, [sat] reading the stale London Times.”

He saw Kanchenjunga, “like a ghost in daylight,” Cambodia, all of whose women “look like caricatures of Katharine Cornell playing Ibsen,” and the jewel-like Dutch East Indies. To the Dutch “the islands are ledgers . . . and they are stern, fair rulers as long as their bank accounts grow.” The Singapore Esplanade was “full of polite white people melting slowly of the heat” while “somewhere … a great jungle fortress broods over many guns and secret airfields.”

In China Big Boy, full of hot wine, ate six newborn mice fried alive; he thought they were radishes. In Japan Longstreet got some good notes on the warlords (“cobra-eyed little drunkards”) and on Japanese criteria of female beauty, which focus on the neck. He remembered the New Hebrides by heart from Jack London.

After Hawaii came the long Pacific voyage eastward. They sat in the bar, or “[listened] to the world foam at the mouth” at the radio. And of course they had a masquerade. Longstreet came as Jo-Jo, the Dogfaced Boy. A nymphish Kansan came as “a nude Christian slave wearing light steel chains, Chanel Number Five and a coating of cold cream.” Sixteen ladies came as Marie Antoinette; three of them removed their wigs, put roses in their teeth and said they were Carmen. Sixteen men “were dirty under the nose and called themselves Hitler.” The ship’s staff dressed as Northwest Mounted Police and the brass band played the overture to The Magic Flute. Big Boy, in a lot of laundry supposed to represent an Arab, got D.T.s. Pamela, as a devil, kept losing her tail and trying to soul-talk. Someone turned up in an indecipherable mess of cheesecloth and was hurt and scornful because nobody knew he was The State of the World. It went on till dawn.

Not long after Longstreet got back home, the Queen Bee (as he renames the ship) was torpedoed 300 miles off Ireland. It jerked a tear from Longstreet, and may from many readers. But there are few tears in the book; it is the most enjoyable travelogue of the season.