Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

“TOILERS OF THE SEA” by Victor Hugo (Les Travailleurs de la Mer first published in 1866; many English translations)

 

            Eight years ago on this blog, I reviewed L’Homme Qui Rit (The Laughing Man) by Victor–Marie Hugo (1802-1885). In passing I noted that 50-plus years ago, as a schoolboy, I found in my school’s library an old copy of an English translation of Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea / Les Travailleurs de la Mer. I remember consuming some afternoons reading it and enjoying it before returning it to the school library. About four years ago, holidaying in Raglan, I found in a little second-hand bookshop an old Everyman’s Library copy of Toilers of the Sea and I snapped it up. I noted that it was printed in 1928, but it came complete with one of those original old Everymen’s Library orange-coloured wrappers. Indeed so well-preserved was this copy that I couldn’t help wondering if it had ever been read in the 90-plus years since it was printed. 

 

            Recently I got around to reading it, partly to recapture my schoolboy appreciation of it, but also to test how I would now react to Hugo’s prose.

            Consider, if you will, this paradox. If we are to judge by the number of films and TV adaptations made of his work, Victor Hugo is still the most popular French novelist of the 19^th century, rivalled only by Dumas. Les Miserables had, literally, been filmed more often than any other novel of any language before anyone decided to turn it into a musical. Notre-Dame de Paris / The Hunchback of Notre Dame has also been filmed and re-filmed in both Hollywood and Europe, including the crass Disney feature-length cartoon version. Even L’Homme Qui Rit / The Laughing Man has been filmed a couple of times. But how much is Hugo’s work popular more for the stripped-back versions of his melodramatic plots as depicted in the movies, rather than for the texts he actually wrote? In other words, how many people who have seen all the movie versions have ever read the novels themselves?

            The fact is, even in France, Hugo is now rarely seen as a great novelist by most literary critics. Of course he is still a figure of great historical interest, and left-wing commentators quote him with approval for his progressive beliefs – opposing the death penalty and the slave trade, promoting republicanism and universal suffrage as well as attacking the church. He is applauded for his poetry. He is honoured as the man who – after Chateaubriand – introduced Romanticism to France, especially in the plays he wrote early in his career (well do I remember having to study Hernani and Ruy Blas when doing an undergradute degree in French.) But he is not regarded as a serious novelist is the same way as Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola or even de Maupassant and Huysmans are. His novels, modern criticism says, are entertaining melodramas with an overload of preaching and orating and nothing resembling real human beings as their main characters.

            How fair is this verdict?

While enjoying the yarn as a yarn, I used my recent re-reading of Toilers of the Sea to make my own judgment.

 

Victor Hugo wrote Toilers of the Sea during the fifteen years (1855-70) that he lived on the Channel Islands, in exile from France after he had criticised the dictatorial Napoleon III.  (It was also there that, three years later, he wrote The Laughing Man.) The main thread of plot is simplicity itself. Gilliatt is a social outcast – a fisherman who lives alone, keeps to himself and is regarded with suspicion by the rest of the people of Guernsey, where the tale is largely set. Gilliatt falls in love  - at first sight – with the beautiful Deruchette, though he never speaks to her. Deruchette is the niece of the wealthy Mess Lethierry. The time is the 1820s, when steamships are still a rare and wondrous novelty. Lethierry prospers because he owns the steamship “La Durande”, which is able to ply between Guernsey and St Malo, the major port of Brittany, much faster than any sailing ships can. Lethierry can therefore deliver cargoes of fish and other produce to this important market more quickly than any rival can. But disaster strikes. In a thick fog and on stormy seas, “La Durande” is shpwrecked. All hands get away safely in a lifeboat, but the captain, apparently, stays nobly on the ship and perishes as it goes down. (Actually, we know that Captain Clubin is a treacherous criminal who has deliberately engineered the shipwreck in the belief that he will be able to abscond with his employer Lethierry’s wealth.) Yet, while the storm has smashed up most of the ship’s wooden superstructure, it has left jammed between two towering rocks out in the ocean, the mechanical heart of the ship – its iron engines, paddles and funnel. Lethierry is financially ruined. As people gather to commiserate with him, the beautiful Deruchette declares that she will marry any man who is able to salvage her uncle’s engine. Fired by his unspoken love for her, Gilliatt alone takes up the challenge. The second half of the novel is Gilliatt’s heroic, titanic, single-handed salvage mission as he battles tiredness, hunger, storms, huge waves and an octopus, rescuing what remains of the ship’s engine. In effect, everything that precedes Gilliatt’s lonely heroic endeavour is Victor Hugo’s build-up to this image of the solitary hero at his heroic work.

Of course it doesn’t end well. (Please remember, I am allowed to give “spoilers” while discussing a novel this old.) Gilliatt, after all the dangers he has overcome, makes it back to Guernsey with the engine he has rescued. But he discovers that in his absence Deruchette has fallen in love with another man, a handsome young clergyman called Ebenezer Caudrey. Nobly and heroicially, Gilliatt foreswears his love, steps aside and even arranges for Deruchette and Caudrey to marry. Then, as the happy couple sail off together, he climbs up an offshore rock and waits for the tide to rise and drown him. Just as Victor Hugo had a penchant for grotesque, outcast characters (the dwarf court jester Triboulet in his play Le Roi S’Amuse; the hunchback Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris; the mutilated Gwynplain in L’Homme Qui Rit), so did he have a penchant for suicide as an appropriately tragic ending to a novel (Gwynplain drowns himself rather than living without Dea; Quasimodo – apparently – dies of starvation as he clings to the corpse of Esmeralda).

In one sentence then, Toilers of the Sea is about a man who performs an heroic feat but whose reward is thwarted by Fate. In making this synopsis I have deliberately elided some side issues, such as the criminal dealings of the treacherous Captain Clubin with smugglers and with the embezzler and thief Rantaine.

 

Reported as I have synopsised it, Toilers of the Sea sounds like a novel of action and event, and at his best Victor Hugo can deal with action vividly. The episode of “La Durande’s” shipwreck is masterly, with the drunken helmsman losing control and the panic of the passengers, lost in the fog and fearful of the sea. Hugo’s descriptions of early steamships, and the almost magical effect they had on their beholders, are both credible and informative. We might not quite believe in Gilliatt never talking to Deruchette but nevertheless faithfully standing by her garden wall and frequently playing Bonnie Dundee on his bagpipes because he has heard her playing it on the piano. Indeed, to some modern sensibilities, this may sound suspiciously like “stalking”. Even so, it makes for a memorable sentimental tableau. Hugo was also adept at the cliffhanger though (unlike routine-cliffhanger-deviser Charles Dickens) he was not writing for serial publication. The biggest cliffhanger in Toilers of the Sea, and the one that holds us in suspense for the longest, concerns the disappearance of the criminal Captain Clubin. In the fog, he steps off the foundering “La Durande”, imagining that he will be able to swim safely to shore. Instead, we are told that his leg was grabbed by something… and we hear nothing further of his fate until near the novel’s denouement, a couple of hundred pages later, when Gilliatt confronts the “Devil Fish”, finds Clubin’s skeleton in an undersea cavern, and realises that the “Devil-Fish” killed him. Incidentally, Gilliatt’s fight with the “Devil-Fish” (clearly described as an octopus, though some mistaken postings refer to it as a giant squid) is brief, brutal and credible – a masterly example of narrative compression.

 

I could add to this list of good, vivid things that I found in Toilers of the Sea as I re-read it, firing the same sort of pleasure I had in it as a teenager.

But, to an adult reader, the negatives really do pile up. There is an odd naivete about Hugo’s Romantic-era writing (already falling out of favour when this novel was being written). Characters are presented in broad, unsubtle strokes, with Hugo all the while trying to nudge us into believing that they are of epic proportions. Their conversations tend to become long, windy orations. As I remarked in reviewing The Laughing Man, they resemble operatic arias waiting for somebody to compose the score.

Captain Clubin cannot be simply a cheat and a liar. He has to be a monster of titanic wickedness. Thus Hugo launches into a page dissecting his diabolical impulses: “ His conscience rejoiced in the sight of its own monstrous nakedness, as it stepped forth to take its hideous bath of wickedness. The long restraint of men’s respect seemed to have given him a peculiar relish for infamy. He experienced a certain lascivious enjoyment of wickedness. In those frightful moral abysses so rarely sounded, such natures find atrocious delights…” and so on and so on through a tiresomely long paragraph. (Part One, Book 6)

Gilliatt himself, chained to a rock and toiling away heroically, is frequently compared with Prometheus in his defiance of Nature, or Job in his suffering. Even before his long ordeal begins, we are told how wonderfully gifted he is in so many crafts – fisherman, carpenter, worker in iron, wheelwright, boat caulker, engineer – a paragon of practicality. So when he is alone on the barren outcrop of rock, surrounded by the sea and with few tools to hand “He put the forge in operation at once. Tools were wanting; he set to work and made them. For fuel he had the wreck; for motive force the water; for his bellows the wind; for his anvil a stone; for art his instinct; for power, his will.”  (Part Two, Book 2)

Verily, he is a superman. Indeed Hugo turns him into a force of nature -  “The very ocean seemed astonished. He passed to and fro across the tottering wreck, making the deck tremble under his steps, striking, cutting, hacking with the hatchet in his hand, pallid in the gleam of the lightning, his long hair streaming, his feet naked, in rags, his face covered with the foam of the sea, but grand still amid that maelstrom of the thunderstorm.” (Part 2, Book 4)

His endurance is extraordinary – almost beyond belief: “There was no form of distress with which he had not become familiar. He had been compelled to execute great works without tools, to move vast burdens without aid, without science to solve problems, without provisions to find food, without bed or roof to cover it, to find shelter and sleep.” (Part 2, Book 4)

What drives Gilliatt on? Apparently it is the triumph of the will, upon which subject Hugo’s rhetoric takes on a Nietzschean tone: “Exhaustion of the bodily strength does not necessarily exhaust the will. Faith is only a secondary power; the will is the first. The mountains, which faith is proverbially said to move, are nothing beside that which the will can accomplish. All that Gilliatt lost in vigour, he gained in tenacity. The destruction of the physical man under the oppressive influence of that wild surrounding sea, and rock, and sky, seemed only to reinvigorate his moral nature.” (Part Two, Book 2)

Unless such oratorical pronouncements put you under some sort of rhythmic spell, your rational mind will soon note the implausibility of many of the things Gilliatt is said to be able to do single-handedly.

At the other end of the unreality spectrum, Deruchette and Ebenezer Caudrey are so thinly characterised that they are little more than picturesque paper cut-outs. The novel’s ending, with Gilliatt giving Deruchette away in marriage, is both illogical and ridiculous. Isn’t Gilliatt the man whose titanic, solitary endeavours were inspired by his burning desire for Deruchette? Wasn’t she his motive for all that superhuman work devising tools, hauling loads, fighting storms, killing the octopus etc. etc? So are we meant to believe that this titan among men would so meekly surrender his desire in the face of a pale and timid rival?.... Ah, but then if the tale were to end with him marrying and settling into domesticity, wouldn’t that mess up Hugo’s Romantic and very theatrical image of the solitary, brooding Byronic (or Nietzschean) superman spurning society? Best allow him his solitary suicide by drowning which, to my adult reader’s eyes, now sounds awfully like an expression of teenage self-pity.

Now I grant you that Hugo could sometimes produce quite good splenetic satire, even if it is rather broad. Consider this portrait of a minor character, a sea captain: “He had enriched himself by serving all causes. No man in this world could have been more Bourbonist, more Bonapartist, more absolutist, more liberal, more atheistical, or more devoutly Catholic. He belonged to that great and renowned party which may be called the Lucrative Party.” (Part One, Book 5) Too often, however, Hugo’s satire is predictble and repetitive, especially when he launches into one of his anti-clerical rants. He is an equal-opportunity anti-clerical, taking pokes at both Catholics and Calvinists. But in his zeal to mock he sometimes reveals his limited understanding of such matters. For example, Ebenezer Caudrey is introduced into the novel in company with a clergyman whom Hugo calls a Puseyite, that is, one of those 19^th century Anglicans who wanted to insert Catholic liturgical practices into Anglican worship. Having established this, Hugo then has the clergyman talking like a hard-core Calvinist, lauding the work ethic and material profit and not for one moment raising the key concerns of Pusey’s followers. (Incidentally, this character is also anachronistic, given that the novel is set in the 1820s when the young Pusey had barely begun on his theological career and was little known in the Anglican church.)

This raises another negative matter in Hugo’s work. Regularly he veers away from his narrative to lecture us on sundry matters – about the superstitions of the Channel Islanders; about meteorology and the nature of winds; about engineering; about commerce; about heroes of the past. Apart from so often appearing “mugged up”, these interludes also often come across as bogus. Hugo is attempting to impress us with his erudition often on subjects about which he clearly knows little. Worst of all, however, are the long, long, long descriptions inserted into the text. Hugo cannot note the existence of a house without describing it in detail that flows over many pages, whether or not it is important to his story. When it comes to the wind and weather and seas that Gilliatt faces, the descriptions reach a baroque complexity, so long, so filled with vague evocations and blur words, that after a few pages one realises that he is talking about nothing at all. The appropriate word is bombast. I suspect that many readers simply skip these passages, which are in such profusion that they smother the story.

If I were to sum up the effect Toilers of the Sea now has on me, I would say that it tells a good melodramatic story, sturdy enough to hold the reader’s attention even if its characters are puppets; but that in the end its prose style is overblown, bombastic and unconvincing – and certainly not conveying any high philosophy about humanity, such as Victor Hugo imagines he is giving to us. Good reading for a literate teenager, perhaps.

All this may simply mean that I am out of sympathy with some of the conventions of Romantic-era novels, which were already passe when Hugo wrote Toilers of the Sea. While I stand apart from the addled camp aesthetic of Jean Cocteau, I can’t help citing his much-quoted witticism: “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo”. I get the point. Victor Hugo was always trying to live up to the image he had created for himself as the great oracle who confronts the mighty universe. What it leads to is verbal fudge.

 

For the Record: Unlike Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Toilers of the Sea has hardly ever been filmed, and never with any success. There were a couple of  film adaptations in the 1920s, when films were still silent; and a cheaply-made British film in the 1930s, where all the characters were given English names. Wikipedia tells me that in 1953 there was a Hollywood “adaptation” of the novel called Sea Devils, but a glance at a synopsis of its swashbucking plot and you find it has nothing to do with Hugo’s novel. Bizarrely, though, the characters are given the names from the novel.