I’ve sailed a bit, almost like none, and I think cruise ships will take all possible safety precautions to prevent passengers from falling over. After prehistory, on my high school trip to Majorca, I thought: “What if someone jumps into the sea?” Or worse, “What if someone falls?” And he said to me, “It’s impossible to fall.” No, in the short novel A drifting gentleman (Periférica, 2023), the gentleman seems to slip off the deck into the sea and the ship continues on its course. This is the beginning of the media res of the novel, written in 1937, in which Herbert Clyde Lewis fulfills the first commandment of the narrative: impact on the first page. And yes, it does affect it to the point where the plot doesn’t go all the way down.
We’ll quickly find out who Henry Preston Standish is and how and why he boarded the Arabella, a type of low-passenger freighter from Honolulu to Panama. The author presents him as a complete gentleman, so much so that the character himself is overwhelmed with the thought that a man like him might have fallen from a ship. Yale graduate, stockbroker, 35 years old, engaged in swimming and handball. He is a family man who is married to Olivia, has a daughter, lives in a perfect Manhattan neighborhood, and “always does what he has to do, albeit reluctantly” (p.37). A life planned by the society of which it is a product: «[…] the world was full of dignity, and dignity was what a man needed” (p.18). But one can slip and fall into the sea.
The story is told by a traditional omniscient third-person narrator as a voice-over similar to a verbal storyteller, using direct, highly organized sentences with very high readability. He chooses a fragmented structure where this is interrupted by telling stories about the journey, his friends, and his own life, even though it means being in the water for almost an entire day. With these three elements, the reader both knows the reality of the story and accompanies the metaphysical dimension of the narration, because during his stay in the water he realizes his true loneliness: “I was an insignificant ball of life in a huge sea. World […] he was just a frightened man away from home” (p.33). In this sense, it is important to highlight Standish’s demeanor during his straying and how the thought and idea of death developed until he understood what he really suffered: the “sickness of complete denial” (81).
By contrast, what makes this short novel great is the way it tells the story. I think it responds to a structure and a cinematographic vision, because fragmentation and temporal disorganization are the defining features of what a cinematographic script is, on the other hand, there will be something functional in this writer as he works as a journalist and screenwriter. It was even nominated for an Oscar in this category in Hollywood. And this is fully confirmed by the fact that the narrative ends with all the characters (receptionist at the Waikiki hotel; Olivia in New York; daughter Helen, Mr. Prsik in Arabella, Captain Bell, little Jimmy Benson, Nat) paired. Adams) at a primordial temporal moment, for life is a circle, and in the final emotion the first sense of life is revived with a good melodramatic touch.
And why should you read this novel? Because it does not cease to be a minor quirk, not exceeding 150 pages, and presents an argument in which each element serves its own consistency and thus becomes a perfect narrative; because vital reflection is timeless and universal, and how many times have we slipped and fallen into the sea, albeit metaphorically? Of course, most of them managed to get on board, but we know that others unfortunately did not.