Writing Life

Yesterday I mentioned that visiting a place where antiquities are sold can be like taking a tour of one’s own past. But the experience can also provide one with an opportunity to tour a lot of other people’s pasts as well. On Saturday, Julie and I attended a rare book sale in Sacramento. Wandering through aisle after aisle of old books made us feel as if we were taking a literary tour under the guidance of the Ghost of Libraries Past. Almost every one of the books on display was once part of someone’s personal library. These books weren’t purchased as investments; they were purchased in order to be read. And almost every book there, if you picked it up and considered it in the proper frame of mind, seemed to give off emanations of its former owners. In some of them I found old inscriptions. In some of them I found old bookmarks. In some of them I found greasy fingerprints. In some of them I found old bookplates. At one point Julie saw a book she wanted to buy, but when she picked it up and opened its pages, it emitted a strong reek of cigarette smoke. She opted to put down the book and wait until she could find a copy that didn’t smell like an ashtray. I particularly enjoyed seeing so many well-worn children’s books – that’s usually a sign that they were also well-loved.

In addition to rare books, the vendors at the event offered postcards, letters, and other ephemera for sale. Julie, who loves old ocean-liner lore, purchased, for five dollars, a letter written on the stationery of the R.M.S. Oceanic, a White Star passenger liner. The letter is dated August 12, 1913. At that time, the Oceanic was on its way from Europe to New York and was just one day away from its destination. The author of the letter is a woman, probably in her twenties, who affixed only her initials to the letter: BB. The letter was addressed to a friend of hers, but therein lies another bit of mystery. The envelope in which the letter was posted is addressed to Eugene [middle initial indecipherable, probably an M or an N but also possibly a W] Roland, whose address is “307 Commercial Bldg., Oakland, Calif., USA.” But the salutation on the letter is “Dear Pettie.” I don’t know if Eugene and Pettie are the same person.

BB begins her letter by noting “I’ll probably see ‘Sandy Hook’ at one-thirty tomorrow, but no telling when we will land and get through customs.” Sandy Hook is a large spit of land whose surrounding waters, for centuries, have served as an anchorage for ships entering Upper New York Harbor. The fact that BB knows that she’ll be delayed in Sandy Hook for a while suggests that this is not her first Atlantic crossing and that she is familiar with the details of arrival.

The letter continues: “You must excuse my [hand]writing, for we are just getting over a storm. Sunday afternoon a heavy wind came up, with rain. Yesterday it was worse, and this morning it was really very bad. Even the Captain’s report says ‘heavy winds & squally.’ The decks looked quite deserted and many who were sitting & lying were afraid to move for fear of the consequences. Yesterday somebody was sick right in front of my [deck]chair, so I ‘visited’ for a while! And to think that through it all I have felt perfectly dandy. I have decided that I really am a good sailor, and I’m so glad, for I love the sea. Watching the waves & feeling the wind – strong wind – is such good sport.”

What I like about that passage is that it provides a detail about ocean-liner travel that I never considered before. When she writes “even the Captain’s report says ‘heavy winds & squally’” BB lets us know that such reports are generally not to be trusted, that they tend to minimize danger. Nowadays most travelers are familiar with the way that airline pilots sooth their passengers by describing heavy turbulence as “a bit of weather.” BB’s letter is proof that old-time passenger liner captains were just as prone to euphemism as contemporary airline captains.

Although bad weather doesn’t bother BB much, many of the other passengers do. She writes, “there is the awfullest conglomeration of people aboard – there is a little of every kind represented. Fortunately for me, my room mates are the wife & niece of a minister and are returning from Zurich, so of course we were glad to know each other. Then there is a party of five from Minneapolis who were on the ‘Scotian.’ So we have rather kept to ourselves. It has been fun separating the sheep from the goats, and the goats are largely in the majority! You should see the sword-swallower who sits next to me at table. I generally look out the porthole in the opposite direction, but I can HEAR him just the same. Next trip over, I go on a one-class boat like the ‘Scotian,’ where you have the whole boat to roam over, and are apt to meet nicer people.”

Apparently “sword-swallower” was a slang term for a loud eater. The ‘Scotian” must be the S.S. Scotian, a 515-foot ocean liner that plied the seas between 1898 and 1927. It was probably the ship that BB voyaged to Europe aboard.

BB tells Pettie that she has “surely seen some rich things aboard here, with which I will amuse you someday.” Sadly, she doesn’t elaborate. She does, however, mention that “There have been some fast & furious love affairs, but none for yours truly. I have hardly spoken to a man except those in our crowd – none eligible – or men that they have introduced to me. I have been VERY, VERY good. One fellow, a Yale man, was quite interesting, and I had an entertaining afternoon [with him], but immediately thereafter he was taken sea-sick, and has only now come on deck, still looking yellow and decidedly uncommunicative – and tomorrow we land! One more dashed hope. I fear I have made no conquests on this trip – and why is it I have had absolutely no desire to do so? Why can’t I disremember somebody way, way out in California? Would you mind telling me? And why, moreover, am I trying to write on my lap, with the ship careening around, to that disrememberable person? And do you suppose there will be any mail for me when I get to New York?”

Aha! It appears clear that, at one time anyway, BB and Pettie were more than just pen pals. She makes it clear that the reason she has no desire for romantic conquests is because she hasn’t be able to get “somebody way, way out in California” off her mind. So where do she and Pettie stand now, in August of 1913? Are they still romantically involved? Are they engaged? Are they ‘just friends’? Alas, the letter doesn’t disclose this information. But the fact that she mentions her entertaining afternoon with the Yalie suggests to me that she considers herself officially unattached.

Having failed to make any romantic conquests, BB appears to have confined herself largely to her deckchair and her books. She writes, “The most exciting thing I have done these long days is to READ. In a day and a half I read the WHOLE of ‘Les Miserables’! I could hardly drag myself down to eat when I was in the most exciting part. It surely is a great book…Then I read ‘Trilby,’ and have just finished my life of Napoleon. You can see how deeply France and Paris affected me. And there’s a lot more I’m going to read before I forget this trip.”

At one point, BB feared that she might die before the voyage was over. She contracted a terrible sore throat that the ship’s doctor refused to take seriously. He “gave me some potash tablets to suck,” she writes. But her sore throat “kept getting worse all night, and I was scared stiff for fear I had caught something dangerous from some of these foreigners aboard. Got up in the morning, tried to swallow some coffee, but it hurt so [much] I absolutely couldn’t. So I went to my bunk, had a good cry to myself & then had them send for a doctor who was among the passengers. He looked down [my throat] almost to my stomach and assured me that I HADN’T diphtheria or anything but a congested throat. He chased me up some gargle & left me feeling much relieved mentally. Later on an osteopath offered his services & I gladly let him rub me. Among all of them, I got much better by night & now my throat is entirely well. I hope I don’t have another throat like that again, and so FAR AWAY from home & among strangers. NEXT TIME, I don’t go alone, either!”

BB concludes her letter with an epilogue of sorts written on August 13. She writes, “Everything is in commotion now, suitcases & trunks in the passages, & everybody running around trying to get ready to land. Speculation as to just when we will sight land is rife. All morning we have been seeing ships pass. The big sail boats are the prettiest. It’s good for you that you weren’t here last night, you would have gotten yours! Such a magnificent sunset I never saw before, and the moonlight on the water! Well, there’s nothing like it! And it didn’t go to waste as far as some of them were concerned. Oh, it was lovely.”

Maybe I’m overly inclined to read sex into everything, but it seems to me as if this passage contains references to various erotic goings on. BB must have witnessed at least a few couples making out on deck during this final, moonlit night of the voyage. Moreover, she seems to be telling Pettie that she herself was feeling so frisky she might have done serious harm to his person, his reputation, or perhaps both, if he had been aboard the ship the previous night (“It’s good for you that you weren’t here last night, you would have gotten yours!”).

She closes her letter by saying, “It’s pretty hard writing, so I’ll finish this now. It will go off on the mail lighter [a boat for removing cargo from large ships], and so will land before we do. Just think, before many hours I shall again be on the same, exactly the same, piece of earth that you are! Did you feel me when I landed? Good-bye, for now, Ever with Care, BB.”

It is unlikely that I will ever be able to identify the author of this letter. Such is the case with so many of the letters and travel diaries Julie and I own that were written aboard ocean liners. Julie always finds it frustrating when she cannot discover what happened to the writer after the voyage concluded. To achieve some sense of closure she always looks to the ocean liner itself. All of the great liners had definite conclusions – and many of them were tragic ones. Such is the case with the R.M.S. Oceanic. It was built, between 1897 and 1899, for the famous White Star Line, the company that owned the Titanic. It made its maiden voyage for White Star in September of 1899, at which time it was the longest passenger liner in the world, at 704 feet in length. She was built to accommodate 1,700 passengers and 350 crewmembers. In 1901, in heavy fog, she accidentally rammed another ship, the S.S. Kincora, and killed seven people. In 1905, according to the Wikipedia (where I gathered all of this information), she became the first White Star ship ever to suffer a mutiny, when 35 stokers led a rebellion to protest their harsh working conditions. In 1912, she was one of the ships that helped retrieve the dead bodies of the Titanic’s passengers and crew from the frigid North Atlantic. Almost exactly one year after BB’s voyage, on August 8 1914, the Oceanic was commissioned into the Royal Navy. Its naval stint lasted exactly a month. On September 8 1914, she crashed into a reef in the treacherous waters near Foula, the most remote and desolate of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. As a result of a navigational error, she was wrecked in calm seas, becoming the first Allied passenger ship to be lost in World War I. The ship’s crewmen were rescued by other ships in the area. The Oceanic itself remained stuck on the reef until the night of 29 September, when a ferocious storm struck the region. The residents of Foula Island awoke on the morning of September 30 to find that the Oceanic was gone. At some point in the night it had slipped from the reef and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. According to the Wikipedia, “The disaster was hushed up at the time, since it was felt that it would have been embarrassing to make public how a world-famous liner had run aground in friendly waters in good weather within a fortnight of beginning its service as a naval vessel. The revelation of such gross incompetence at this early stage of the war would have done nothing for national morale.”

I can only hope that BB’s life wasn’t as turbulent and tragic as the life of the ship that brought her back to America in 1913. On the back of the envelope in which her letter was sent is a handwritten notation indicating that it was received in Oakland on August 18, 1913, just five days after it was posted. How it ended up at a Sacramento rare book sale nearly a hundred years later is anyone’s guess. But I’m glad it did. Reading it gave me an opportunity to take a tour of a brief but fascinating moment in the life of a most undisrememberable person.