“‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest.’”
My personal interest in “Derelict” from its earliest stages has led me to discuss it with many people, some of them A. B.’s, and this is the first criticism I have ever heard of the technic of the words used to convey the picture. I do not mean to say that Bramleykite Filling’s points are not well taken, technically, but I do say that qualified sailors, with literary judgment, have been carried over these delinquencies of technic, if that expresses it, by the very vividness but simplicity of the picture, which could not be so were there a false note in either sentiment or portrayal. Thus for this purpose a mainsail is a piece of jute bagging, if you please, or ordinary canvas, and a hawser is a flexible rope.
When The Scoop reached my hand with its entertaining and not unjust criticism, I besought Allison for a few lines of comment to add to my collection of “Derelict” treasures. In the same old characteristic way (same old black pencil; same old spongy copy paper) he wrote me the following note with which this volume closes:
Oct. 26, 1914.
Dear Hitch:
Bramleykite Pilling’s comments on “Derelict,” from the standpoint of scientific criticism, seem to me to be beyond any sort of reproach. He is evidently an actual, real water sailor who learned his nautics within the smell of bilgewater and the open sea. My own education as an able seaman was gained from years of youthful deep study of dime-novel sea yarns by Ned Buntline, Fenimore Cooper, Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., Billy Bowline, and other masters of the sea in libraries. I have, however, made two ocean trips from Norfolk to New York, time 23 hours. On both occasions I went sound asleep at the end of the first hour and woke up at the end of twenty-third hour. Under such circumstances I may have missed many important details of realism. I have also visited often the tomb of that fine old patriot-pirate and ex-Alderman, Dominique You, in the old French cemetery at New Orleans. As chief gunner for Jean Lafitte, he was some pirate; as chief artilleryman for Gen. Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans, he was some patriot. I feel stronger in my piracy than in my seamanship. I love criticism—especially of poetry. If there is a single verse, or, mayhap, one line, of “Derelict” that will hold, without leaking, anything of a specific gravity heavier than moonshine, it would surprise me. But it seems to, when it is adopted as a “real chanty”—and that’s the test, that it “seems.”
Y. E. A.
The Pocket
