Aficionados of this blague will remember that Dr. M. occasionally revisits books that were notorious in the days of his unnaturally elongated adolescence. Here’s a small sample of the novels that Dr. M has reported upon: I the Jury, King Solomon's Mines, The Caine Mutiny, Blackboard Jungle, The Amboy Dukes, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Scaramouche. It’s quite the roster, isn't it, of time-sensitive material.
Some of these novels have worn astonishingly well. Others are merely astonishing: what in the world could I (or the drab Eisenhower-era sensibility, for that matter) have possibly found worthwhile in most of these colossally dated and inartistic fictions?
To extend my anti-nostalgia, I’ve now tackled, for the first time in more than fifty years, a novel that enthralled the heck out of me back then. It’s Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty, first published in 1932 but widely read at least through the 1950s. Why was I so infatuated? Certainly not because of the novelists’ skill. The story of the tyrannical Captain Bligh, the Byronic rebel Fletcher Christian, the mutiny, the open boat, and the settlement of Pitcairn offered the opportunity to engage all the important themes: family, power, sex and love, religion, sanity, rebellion, technology, colonialism and cultural conflict. But N and H fell far miles short of the mark – not only did they write gawky sentences, but they also left gaping holes in the plot, created disappointingly shallow characters, and failed to explore the opportunities for thoughtful commentary. The novel is swift and superficial and clumsy. It’s not for all time; it’s for the supermarket checkout stand.
Nevertheless, there’s little mystery as to why the novel captured this Brooklynites's youthful fancy. What adolescent would demand artistry from a novel that is awash with exoticism, romance, and sex?
Let us consider the following piece of reheated anthropological observation. Midshipman Byam (the story is cunningly told through the eyes of a juvenile narrator) attends a Tahitian entertainment at which young women perform a dance “believed by the Indians (i.e. Tahitians) to ensure the fertility of the crops.”
The dress of the dancers consisted of no more than a wreath of flowers and green leaves about their waists, and the dance itself, in which they stood in two lines of three, face to face, was of a nature so unbelievably wanton that no words could convey the least idea of it.
“No more than a wreath of flowers about their waists?” Does that mean…? Holy smoke. “Unbelievably wanton?" Exactly how wanton is that? What in the censorious world did these young ladies actually do? They didn’t…? No, they couldn't. “No words could convey….”
What grand openings did N and H leave to be filled by an inexperienced but lascivious imagination!
And how does Midshipman Byam deal with such provocations? Good luck for him as well as for all the randy young readers who identified with his circumstances. Byam takes as his eager concubine a young Tahitian woman. “Slenderly and strongly made, in the first bloom of young womanhood, and with her magnificent dark hair unbound, Maimiti made a picture worth traveling far to behold.”
OK, so I fell for it. Sure it was contrived and manipulative. But I was thirteen or so years old, living in concrete, subwayed, bepigeoned Flatbush where young ladies danced not in wreaths of flowers but in stiff and forbidding crinolines. Exactly how many fertility ceremonies had I attended? I was exoticism-deprived.
I’m just slightly embarrassed to admit that I did not just read Mutiny on the Bounty and call it a day. Not at all. Instead, I read everything that I could find about Bligh and Christian and Pitcairn Island and even about Norfolk Island, where the mutineers relocated after Pitcairn became overpopulated. I became something of an expert on the geography of these islands. I also took to reading about nineteenth-century sailing vessels, and though an arrant land-lubber, I could accurately, in those days, define taffrail, yardarm, orlop, lanyard, hawse-hole, gimbal, lanyard, poop, mizzen.
Nor was it all erotic displacement. Although I began with Nordhoff and Hall, I later read Cook and Bouganville and eventually moved on to the writings of Mead and Malinowski and others in that pioneering generation of anthropologists. Of course I didn't understand much and have long forgotten what I read -- but neither Maimiti "with magnificent dark hair unbound" nor that unbelievably wanton ceremony ever entirely evaporated from my susceptible, impressionable young brain.
Dr. Metablog uncovered some long buried memories of incipient pubescence. Another book read (in the stairwell of Hebrew school ("A Stone for Danny Fisher"), equally the match in trash of any on your list. I also loved Mutiny on the Bounty and read the sequel, Pitcairn Island. I believe they were two thirds of a trilogy, the third book of which escapes my memory (like almost everything else I once knew).
Posted by: Steve Lewin | April 01, 2008 at 11:37 AM