Books: Down to the Sea Again

THE DISTANT SHORE (309 pp.)—Jan de Hartog—Harper ($3.50).

One phenomenon of the bestseller lists these days is the plentiful variety of good seagoing fare. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny rolled in first, more than a year ago;* since then there has been a flood tide of such salty works as Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and Under the Sea Wind, Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel of convoys battling The Cruel Sea, and Commander Edward L. Beach’s Submarine! The latest sample of the true brine is Jan de Hartog’s The Distant Shore, a Literary Guild selection for September.

Author De Hartog, a sure-enough seafaring man, began his nautical career at ten, got to be a brass polisher on an Amsterdam tugboat. He polished up his languages too—so well that he is now the author of a bestselling novel in Dutch and a current Broadway play, The Fourposter, in English.

Meanwhile, he saw service in World War II on the rescue tugs covering the western approaches to Britain. The first and best half of Author De Hartog’s new novel is set in these troubled waters. His hero is the skipper of one of the “suicide” tugs that stole out virtually unarmed (in the early days of the war, Britain had no guns to spare), to rescue disabled stragglers of the convoys from the prowling wolf packs of the German undersea fleet. The U-boats sometimes let the lame ducks stay afloat in order to get a shot at the tugboats too.

Between his flirtation with death at sea and a busy affair on shore with a soulful but changeable girl, the captain ends his war in a moral frazzle. The skipper’s problem, which is meant to symbolize the problem of the whole war generation, is to escape “the terrible pull of the dead.” The pull drags the captain down to the ocean bottom quite literally, as a deep-sea diver, and there the lure of death almost claims his spirit. But at last a sensible miss hauls him up again, buffs the dull film of mysticism from his uniform buttons, and restores him to life—in this case, another tugboat job.

The Distant Shore, especially in its second half, is definitely outclassed by the destroyer-escorts and transports whose course it will cross in the fiction lists. But Author De Hartog’s prose is polished, and he knows how to tell a tale of men and ships at sea.

* And still heads the U.S. bestseller list.