This Day in Literary History (Dana Goes ‘Before the Mast’)

August 14, 1834—Richard Henry Dana, Jr., shipped out from Boston to the Pacific on the brig Pilgrim in an attempt to aid his failing eyesight. But it was actually his powers of observation that made the Harvard undergrad’s account of that voyage, Two Years Before the Mast, one of the early American classics of nonfiction.

Much like the later muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair, Dana discovered, to his chagrin, that, despite a life of considerable accomplishment, he remained best known for a book written in his mid-20s that alerted Americans to the desperate work situations of a subclass they had inadequately followed before (in Sinclair’s case, the fetid Chicago stockyards where immigrants toiled; in Dana’s, the ships where flogging was as common as it was appalling).

Dana’s fame rested on this memoir for an excellent reason: it was one of the first, premiere examples of American literary nonfiction. Similar to Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs four decades later, it dispensed with the flowery prose so characteristic of its time for a style as clear as a prism, especially appropriate for a realistic, unpretentious picture of a sailor’s life. 

Years ago, a professor of mine recounted how, fired up by reading required when he was a student, he had decided to leave school and join the merchant marine. A recruiter asked why he was so interested in joining. “I just read Moby Dick,” my professor said.

The recruiter rolled his eyes, sighing. “You romantic college boys!” he said at last, before telling him to get the hell out of there.

Dana didn’t make the same excuse. A bout with measles severely strained his eyes (which, given his intense legal studies and lack of electric lighting in that time, were probably already suffering). An “entire change of life, and …a long absence from books and study,” would be just the thing he needed, the Harvard junior determined.

Dana’s privileged background (his father and namesake was a poet, novelist, and literary critic and editor; a more distant ancestor, a member of the Continental Congress and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court) cut little ice on his small boat, where he grew used to his sometimes rough fellow crew members: “You think, ‘cause you been to college, you know better than anybody,” one jeered early in the voyage. “You know better than them as ‘is seen it with their own eyes.”

But, like his near-contemporary and fellow Harvard man, historian Francis Parkman, Dana was ready to take on a stiff physical challenge. (Parkman’s trip west would produce another nonfiction chronicle of the 1840s, The Oregon Trail.) For all the seasickness he experienced at times on this trip around Cape Horn and back, he does not appear ever to have experienced again the ocular problems that drove him to the sea in the first place.

In one sense, Dana’s account can be read as a snapshot of California at the moment before it changed utterly—a few years before it was ceded from Mexico to the United States as a result of the Mexican War, and before the gold rush transformed it from a sleepy coastal territory to a bustling American state. But it continues to be read in the spirit in which it was originally composed—as a “view from the forecastle,” showing the way of life of the common sailor.

Dana paints a clear picture of the routine life of the sailor of his time—how he dressed, how he occupied his work hours, how he interacted with officers. But readers, then as now, were more likely to be struck by the seaman’s life under extreme circumstances.

Here, for instance, is how Dana rendered the impact of the death of one of his shipmates early in the voyage:

Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea. A man dies onshore—his body remains with his friends, and ‘the mourners go about the streets,’ but when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event and a difficulty in realizing it, which give to it an air of awful mystery. A man dies onshore—you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot. You are often prepared for the event. There is always something which helps you to realize it when it happens, and to recall it when it has passed. A man is shot down by your side in battle, and the mangled body remains an object and a real evidence; but at sea, the man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then, too, at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night-watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.

Even more unforgettably, Dana depicts the brutality of his captain. A strong hint of this is given in the latter’s address to the men upon shipping out (“If we pull together, you’ll find me a clever fellow; if we don’t, you’ll find me a bloody rascal”). But the true depths of the captain are revealed when he has not one, but two men flogged at the same time—the second for the mere “crime” of questioning what the first man’s offense was:

“Nobody shall open his mouth aboard this vessel, but myself,” shouted the captain…. “If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it!—because I like to do it!—It suits me! That’s what I do it for!”  

True to his comparatively conservative instincts, however, Dana—the subject of severe corporal punishment himself in school—was reluctant to advocate more stringent anti-flogging legislation. He felt that the extreme conditions of the sea—including the possibility that men might mutiny against their commander, then lie about it afterward—warranted one man retaining necessary authority, and that current laws and regulations should be enough to keep them in line. To a modern reader, his ultimate solution—the mutually civilizing impact of Christianity upon a brutal captain and a coarse crew alike—is likely to seem disappointing. But the richness of detail in the account of the awful incident involving the captain remains, impossible to expunge—even for Dana himself.

Much of the immediacy of Dana’s account owes to its source: his own diary. There was just one problem, however: he lost this shortly after he disembarked in Boston. This meant he had to reconstruct everything from letters, notes, and his recollections. Nobody, however, seems ever to have questioned his account of events (unlike, for instance, John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie, much of which, we know now, was composed in a hotel, well off the road where everything was supposed to be happening). It may well have been that the physical act of writing his thoughts down the first time was enough to implant these in his memory.

Many people know of Two Years Before the Mast only from the 1946 film starring Alan Ladd. This is unfortunate, as the movie—well, how shall I break this delicately?—doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the book. A woman, for instance, has no real part in Dana’s account, and the author onscreen is portrayed by Brian Donlevy—a no-nonsense, forty-something Irish-American who had little in common with the sensitive, twenty-something, Boston Brahmin Dana.

Upon his return to shore, Dana carved out a thriving specialty in maritime law. Except for a two-year stint in the state legislature, he never achieved the political success that his background seemed to practically entitle him to. ''My life has been a failure compared with what I might have done,” he noted years later. “My great success -- my book -- was a boy's work, done before I came to the bar.''

This was a short-sighted—and unforgiving—assessment of the value of his life and work. To start with, Two Years Before the Mast influenced much later American maritime literature, including the greatest work of all, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

But more important, the physical toughness that enabled Dana to survive difficult, even brutal, conditions at sea also prepared him for one of his greatest successes on land: the anti-slavery movement. Though not an outright abolitionist, he became one of the founders of the Free Soil Party in 1848. A bitter critic of the Fugitive Slave Act, he acted, often without fee, as lawyer for escaped slaves trying to remain free—a stand that led to a violent attack by an opponent in the streets in the 1850s.

Dana regarded this advocacy as the “one great act” of his life. Fans of his book about the sea, though, would amend this by taking out the word “one” in that phrase.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Shane,’ With a Villain for the Ages)

[Wilson is trying to goad Torrey into drawing on him]

Jack Wilson (played by Jack Palance, pictured): “I guess they named a lot of that Southern trash after old Stonewall.”

Frank 'Stonewall' Torrey (played by Elisha Cook Jr.): “Who'd they name you after? Or do you know?”

Wilson (pulling on black gloves to match his black hat and vest): “I'm saying that Stonewall Jackson was trash himself. Him and Lee and all the rest of them Rebs. You, too.”

Torrey: “You're a low-down lyin' Yankee!”

Wilson: “Prove it.”

[Torrey draws, but Wilson is faster. Torrey stops, and for a split second it is quiet. Then the explosion from Wilson’s gun resounds in the air, and Torrey is propelled back into the mud, dead.]—Shane (1953), screenplay by A.B. Guthrie with additional dialogue by Jack Sher, based on the novel by Jack Schaefer, directed by George Stevens

I’ve wanted to write about Shane, among the most satisfying of westerns, for awhile now, but the 60^th anniversary of its premiere passed without my noticing it. One would think that today, the centennial of the birth of star Alan Ladd, would provide reason enough for a post. But I’ve never been that enamored of the onetime Paramount idol.

The release of the movie on Blu-Ray, however, allows for a broader consideration of its virtues, particularly the importance of this pivotal shattering scene.

Critics came up with the umbrella term “American Trilogy” to group together three films made by director George Stevens in the first half of the Fifties: A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), and Giant (1956).  That would not be a particularly helpful label if it were merely meant to distinguish these somber postwar dramas (all made after he was part of the U.S. Army Signal Corps unit that photographed the liberated Dachau concentration camp) from his frothier pre-war fare of musicals and rom-coms. But the term does recognize that each of the three films examines a major defect in American culture.

In the case of Shane, that defect was violence and its cost to both the individual and the larger community. That trait has long been associated by European intellectuals with both American civilization as a whole and our first indigenous artform, the western. D.H. Lawrence gave a highly problematic interpretation of the wider implications of this in his essay “Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels,” in the British novelist’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923):

“Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.”

The epitome of this in the Western (or, at least, the early, literary version of it) was Cooper’s Deerslayer, a.k.a. Natty Bumppo, whom Lawrence described as “A man who turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white.”

The shorthand that Lawrence used for Natty—“a saint with a gun”—applies perhaps even more so to Shane. He is the mysterious stranger come down from the mountains, eager to help the Starrett family but not to talk about his past.

More than perhaps any other Ladd role, this one might have been tailor-made for him. Audiences carried expectations, from his film noir work of the prior decade (This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia), of a man handy with a gun—which, it turns out, exactly describes Shane. Moreover, Ladd's minimalist acting could be interpreted as stoicism—the exact opposite of the central figure in the sequence above, Wilson.

Woody Allen summed up the nature of the achievement of then-unheralded actor in this role: “If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil, it is Jack Palance.” For a medieval literature class, a college professor of mine, wanting to convey the terror spread by Grendel, likened the Beowulf monster to Wilson.

The Fifties may have been the apotheosis of the Western on film because it was the heyday of the psychological western, a subgenre that emphasizes heightened states of greed, jealousy, rage, and above all, fear. Shane does not have to take a back seat even to other exceptional examples of this kind such as The Gunfighter, High Noon, The Man From Laramie, and The Searchers, and the treatment of Wilson demonstrates why.

This bit of dialogue I've quoted above is only part of a tense four-minute confrontation between the villain and the hapless Torrey. (If you can put aside the annoying subtitles in this YouTube excerpt, you'll have a pretty good idea of what follows here.) It has been more than adequately prepared for, with the homesteader, stoked on whiskey-fueled courage, vowing to the rancher Stryker that he wouldn’t be driven away—and, in the same saloon, with a dog moving stealthily out of the camera frame to get out of the way of sinister Wilson, a malign presence from another realm.

Would that Torrey had shown more sense. Despite Shane’s warning to be careful of Wilson, the proud ex-Confederate gets drawn into a confrontation with him. We never get a close-up of Torrey, but Stevens allows us to infer his mounting fear through the scene’s composition, with the blustering little man caught between the taunting, black-hat-wearing stranger and his own, sensible Swedish friend, whose call—“Torrey…Torrey…Torrey!”—has to be ignored lest he seem a coward.

And now, perhaps the most expertly choreographed, symbolic cold-blooded killing in all of cinema follows, with Torrey gingerly stepping across and slipping in the treacherous mud, surely aware that he is now, literally, in too deep, as the far taller Wilson, with the sleek grace of a panther, follows him on the dry plankboard above, closing off his path, stalking his prey. Wilson is far physically superior to Torrey, even without a gun. The fact that Wilson has observed the central legal nicety—letting Torrey draw first so Wilson and Stryker can claim self-defense to the sheriff—doesn’t change the fact that we are not watching a shootout but an execution.

The tension building for the entire scene, starting with the ominous thunder and darkening sky, now ends with a sickening sound and sight—the loud report of Wilson’s gun, followed by Torrey’s sudden jerk backward (accomplished by a harness-and-pulley underneath actor Elisha Cook Jr.’s outfit that yanked him six feet back). “You know, the one thing I wanted to do with Shane,” the director recalled some years later, “was to show if you point a .45 at a man and pull the trigger, you destroy an upright figure.”  It’s impossible to imagine anyone watching this scene without being jolted, with their perspective on every subsequent action in the film from here on drastically changed—including Warren Beatty, who, more than a decade later, consulted with the veteran director to see how he could pull off something similar with Bonnie and Clyde.

Stevens had balanced this technical gizmo with some human sleight-of-hand. Just before the scene was shot, he took Cook aside and hissed, “You know, I've got you eight weeks on the picture, and I'm stuck with you. You're the worst actor I ever saw in my life bar none.” This piece of manipulation, along with the mud Stevens made the actor walk through, got the director what he wanted: fear and fierce anger, the combination that gets Torrey killed.

A monster like Wilson of nearly mythic proportions requires a hero of similar epic qualities. But gunfighting takes something out of a man—if not his life, then his soul. There is some debate whether, in the film’s great ending, Shane is riding off away from the Starrett house and into the mountains to die from his wound in the gunfight with Wilson and his confederates. In one sense, it doesn’t matter—if he doesn’t die here, he’ll die someplace else, profoundly alone and removed from the community he’s permitted to live through his own self-sacrifice.

There’s nothing in the slightest romantic about Torrey’s miserable murder in the mud, anymore than there is in Shane’s last explanation for his nomadic career and sudden departure to the little boy who’s grown to worship him:

“Joey, there's no living with... with a killing. There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks. There's no going back.”

A brand…a mark of Cain, making its wearer an outcast in the community he wishes he could join. In George Stevens’ frontier America, the “winner” of a gunfight gains nothing but isolation—and, perhaps, the satisfaction that he has rid the world of a menace to all order and goodness.