Book Review : Sea Adventures Teach Young Man About Life

Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn by Paul Watkins. (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95; 280 pp.)

It is something to be labeled “an adventurer” at the age of 25, but already Paul Watkins, author of “Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn,” carries this description. When Watkins was only 15, he camped out in the Ardennes in the dead of winter. He has already journeyed to the Spanish Sahara and explored Lapland on foot. He makes his own longbows. And--he’s been to Yale.

You can sense the bewilderment behind the public-relations blurb that comes with this book: In the age of Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, how is a publishing house supposed to market a young man who researched his second novel by shipping out four consecutive summers on a New England scallop trawler? How is one to deal with Watkins’ own dismissive contempt for Establishment culture?

James Pfeiffer, the 20-year-old hero here, lives in Newport, R.I., and his encounters with the ruling class come in two ways: On the streets and in the cafes, he sees the summer “Gatsby Boys” everywhere, and is aware that, since America is upwardly mobile, this image, this actuality, is surely what he should be striving for. James’ father, captain of his own scallop trawler, has moved his small part of heaven and earth to be sure that his own two sons don’t have to earn their living from the unforgiving sea. James and his brother, Joseph, are both under obligation to be “getting ahead” in the American system.

Joseph “goes for it” in the most pathetic way possible, investing in solar-powered Rolodexes, losing his shirt, and then selling used cars to pay off his debts. But that’s not how the great robber barons of the East got their beach-side mansions; James knows this, and knows enough to turn his back on all of it. He deliberately gets thrown out of college and, against his father’s wishes, goes to sea--first with some cutthroat Portuguese, then with a decent crew on a decent boat, where the pay is minimal, the risks are all-encompassing, the working conditions disgusting but where, at least, life can be engaged--as distant as possible, in a spiritual sense, from “the lawns of Newport’s mansions . . . crowded, always crowded with parties in the summer.”

Capture the Elegance

The sea here does not seem to be used in any highfalutin literary sense, and this novel owes far less to Melville than to writers like Cmdr. Edward Ellsberg or Hans Otto Storm. The idea, in these pages, would seem to be to capture the raw elegance of the human experience itself; the relationship of humans to life, of life to fear, and of fear to death. Young James is mesmerized by the workings of the trawler, the way the bunk room looks and feels, the sights and sounds and smells of the ocean-gook that the dredges bring up from the bottom and deposit on the deck: Scallops and monk fish are kept; the rest is scrapped or tossed back into the water.

But the ocean doesn’t play around. It yields up bubbles with live crabs trapped inside, and a half-dead shark who takes a mean nip out of a crewman with disastrous consequences, and a floating corpse studded with barnacles on his survival suit that is still plainly labeled: “Relax! Remember--You Cannot Sink.” The ocean, no matter how spooky, seems genuine, authentic--worlds away from treacherous girls who marry middle-management types, or solar-powered Rolodexes, or the thousand back-yard compromises James has seen his parents make over all the years.

But, guess what? Life on the sea, or at least life on an off-shore fishing boat, turns out to be just as corrupt and dehumanizing as land-based existence. The “plot” that the author uses to further this view seems contrived and artificial--it’s drug-smuggling again, and these “adventures” are told secondhand and seem, in their narration, to be as thin and worn out as an old dish towel.

But the scallop-trawling itself, the night visions of breaching whales, and silent, surfaced submarines, and luxury yachts with humans who seem to live in another parallel universe, are dazzlingly rendered. Paul Watkins is not a dilettante but a human being who takes life seriously, an author whose work should be read with great respect.