The narrator recalls a voyage that begins with a striking fear: the thought that a fall could happen, even on a ship designed to keep passengers safe. In the short novel A Drifting Gentleman, published in 1937, the moment of danger unfolds on page one, setting the tone for a narrative that refuses to glide smoothly toward conventional closure. The opening scene anchors the reader in a media-res immediacy, a bold strike that shapes everything that follows. The shipbound drama is born from a single, unsettling premise that lingers long after the deck fades from view.
Henry Preston Standish emerges quickly as the center of the tale. He boards the Arabella, a modest freighter routing from Honolulu to Panama, and is drawn as an impeccable gentleman. He is a Yale graduate, a stockbroker, and a 35-year-old man who thrives on sport and family life. He is married to Olivia, father to a daughter, and he inhabits a refined corner of Manhattan where duty often shadows desire. He lives by a creed of doing what must be done, even when reluctance accompanies the action. The social script around him is rigidly respectable, a world where dignity defines a man, yet the sea presents a different order where a fall from grace becomes possible and real.
The storytelling voice is a traditional omniscient narrator, delivered with a calm, almost whispered authority. The prose is direct and easily readable, and the narration occasionally breaks to tell stories about the journey, friends, and Standish’s own life. The result is a narrative rhythm that feels cinematic, as if the reader travels along with the characters and, at the same time, witnesses a broader metaphysical drift. During his hours in the water, Standish confronts a stark loneliness: an insignificant life adrift in a vast sea, a frightened man far from home. This dual awareness gives depth to the voyage and reframes the idea of safety as a fragile construction rather than a given. The sense of denial about death grows, culminating in a poignant discovery about what he truly endures.
The novel’s greatness lies in the way it tells its story. It reads like a screenplay, with fragmentation and temporal disarray shaping the experience rather than dictating it. The writer’s background in journalism and screenwriting shines through, imbuing the prose with a rhythmic, visual cadence that often resembles a storyboard in motion. The work’s structure supports a cinematic eye, where scenes snap into focus and then blur, mirroring a mind negotiating fear, fate, and memory. The narrative even hints at a Hollywood Oscar nomination in the writer’s craft, underscoring how tightly the text tracks to a visual sensibility. In the closing sweep, a chorus of characters—an innkeeper at a Waikiki hotel, Olivia in New York, Standish’s daughter Helen, and several others aboard the Arabella—finds themselves aligned at a keystone moment, suggesting life’s circular return and the revival of sensation through a melodramatic, almost musical, resonance.
Why should contemporary readers engage with this compact novel? Its length stays under the threshold of 150 pages, yet it delivers a compact, self-contained argument in which every element serves a precise purpose. The work invites reflection that transcends its era, offering a meditation on risk, pride, and the resilience needed when the self is tested. The sea acts not only as a setting but as a testing ground for questions about control and vulnerability. How often do people slip from secure footing into uncertain waters, only to find that some survive by sheer will, while others do not? The story keeps these questions in view, insisting that the moment of crisis can illuminate a deeper truth about human nature and social performance. In its quiet, unadorned way, it speaks to readers in both the United States and Canada who recognize the universal pull of a life lived on the edge of a breakable shoreline.
In sum, A Drifting Gentleman remains a notable work in small form. It blends the clarity of a contemporary novella with the sensibilities of early screen storytelling, offering a narrative that is both intimate and expansive. Its structure, its stylistic choices, and its emotional core converge to create a memorable voyage through fear, dignity, and the possibility of redemption at sea. The book’s final cadence suggests that life’s first sense—its basic impulse to continue—can endure even after the most destabilizing moments are endured, a truth that resonates across generations and borders. [Citation: Lewis, A Drifting Gentleman, 1937].