Djelloul Marbrook

There were more than a few writers at The Providence Journal whom I admired as a young probationary reporter. One of them was Jack M. Thompson, with whom I worked for a time in the Warwick bureau.

Jack had a way of turning a mess of notes into algorithmic prose: short, pithy sentences that didn’t fool around on the page. He also had a way of asking the one question that hadn’t been asked, which is the chief characteristic of a good rewrite man and editor.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that Jack became a rewrite man and then a professor of journalism. But all the while he had an another life. Rhode Island isn’t called the Ocean State for nothing, and all of us who worked there were conscious of the ocean.

Jack began building a sailboat in his back yard, like so many desk-bound men before him. In time we went our separate ways and lost touch, although I continued to cherish two distinct memories of Jack: pounding away at the teletype on deadline, flipping pages of his notebooks, sometimes with a phone on his shoulder—and coming to help me and my wife pack when we were leaving Rhode Island for another newspaper job. The latter was a singular act of kindness, because we had no money to pay for a mover.

One of our other colleagues in that office, the late Neild B. Oldham, actually helped me drive our belongings up to Concord, New Hampshire, where I had taken a job as city editor. Neild, a World War II sailor who had gone to college on the GI Bill, was not unlike Jack as a writer. Both men wrote terse, crystalline prose, the kind that enjoys a kinship with formalist poetry. It’s not surprising then that late in life the two men would collaborate in the writing of Right to Know, a mystery thriller. It would be hard to find two men who knew more about the public’s right to know.

Jack has written two books, Naked in the Rain in 2000 and Turtle Dove: One Man’s Odyssey in 2008. I’m an amateur sailor. My wife, Marilyn, and I lived on a 37-foot sloop for ten years and sailed in the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay. But Jack is a boat-builder and an experienced ocean sailor. So I’m not going to remark on his seamanship other than to say it’s obvious he agrees with Tristan Jones who famously said, Give me a man who calls himself a sailor and I’ll give you a goddam fool. Amen.

I’ve taken a long while to remark on Jack’s books, particularly Turtle Dove, because my initial response came out of left field and yet felt oddly familiar. I couldn’t imagine why this account of a twenty-year adventure seemed so familiar to me. Then one night as I watched Lawrence of Arabia for the umpty-umpth time it dawned on me. My initial response to T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the book on which the film is based, the book that is now taught in the world military colleges as a handbook on guerrilla warfare, was not to the adventures it related in detail but to the grammar and rhetoric of the book.

It stood as an early 20th Century exemplar of the English language. You could read it and say this is where the language stood between the great world wars. This is how a superior use of the language looked and sounded at that time. And that is exactly what men like G.B. Shaw and Winston Churchill did say about the book. Lawrence was a detail man. He had been, after all, an archaeologist. If you wanted to know how to use a semicolon, Seven Pillars was as good a guide as any and better than most. If you wanted to see a complex sentence in action, Lawrence, the man of action, was ready to show you. If you wanted an adventure tale, which Seven Pillars surely is, you had the bonus advantage of hearing it from a writer who had studied The Iliad and Odyssey assiduously.

Lawrence knew what all us young reporters at The Providence Journal learned, that you had better understand what you’re writing about. Don’t just trust the language of the person who told you in the first place because he may be full of it or he may be using you. We never doubt that Lawrence knew what he was talking about, although we may doubt his conclusions. We never doubt that when Turtle Dove, the sea ketch, groans among long rollers Captain Thompson knows exactly from which piece of his painstaking joinery the sound is coming, and few sailors can say that. (I once took three years to locate the source of a leak.)

Turtle Dove is actually a rutter. In style it bears some resemblance to a ship’s log, the day-to-day account of the ship’s life. Purchases, work orders, mishaps, guests . . . all are duly recorded as laconically as possible, because sailors are ever wary of tempting fate with flowery prose and more information than Poseidon needs to have. The log is quasi-legal record. Customs, the Coast Guard or even foreign bureaucrats might seize it. And buying a boat without a log is a dicey matter, a bit like buying a used car in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

A rutter is the log sailors’ kept before astrolabes and sextants. It was a running account of where they were, where they thought they were, what they saw, and what might be used as landmarks. Whales might have been described as dragons, and a certain demarcation line might bear the remark, Beyond here there be dragons, or maybe even the end of the world. A rutter was a kind of literary chart, and the better and more descriptive the writer the more valuable the rutter.

Today rutters in museums tell us a great deal about medieval seamanship and life aboard ships whose crews could not navigate by the stars and did not have the benefit of longitudes to locate themselves in the quadrants that are now a familiar feature of all maps and charts. Some of these rutters are as invaluable to our understanding of the times as ambassadorial letters or the accounts of such travelers as Marco Polo and Achmed ibn Madjid, who helped Vasco da Gama “discover” trade routes to the east.

The rutter as a literary device embodied an immediacy and authenticity that could hardly be matched. Seven Pillars is a kind of overland rutter. The precision of its language and the author’s sense of the uses to which language can be put are superb. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom were both published in 1922. Something can be made of this coincidence in that Joyce was a fun-filled navigator of the language, while Lawrence, who through his mother shared Joyce’s Irish heritage, was a keeper of the language, an adept. Joyce pushed words off the edge of literary maps, Lawrence recruited them for the purpose of serving up an immense slice of history, which reverberates today in our own misadventures in the Middle East.

Both men believed in the boundlessness of the English language, Joyce being the radical, Lawrence being the conservative in literary matters. In a sense, Lawrence ended a period in the history of the language and Joyce inaugurated another period.

There is perhaps more of Sinbad in Thompson’s story than Odysseus. Odysseus was already a hero when he began his famous journey home, and Poseidon had it in for him. But Sinbad, like Thompson, was a keen-eyed witness, a kind of reporter. Odysseus was more the subject of a great story than a storyteller, but Sinbad and Thompson are storytellers. They both have a sense of humor and innocent wonder. Having taken part in the destruction of Troy, Odysseus is both more jaded and mythical.

I’ve come to consider all this in rereading my old friend’s rutter, because it is an accurate gauge of the American language in the late 20th Century. A hundred years from now if anyone wants to know how our language was pressed into the service of marine nomenclature, sometimes slapstick humor, and one man’s determination to fulfill a dream come hell or high water he will do no better than to read Turtle Dove and see how a modest but exacting practitioner of that language employed it.

It’s an eerie feeling to savor that Jack and I have lived to see newspapers as an endangered species teetering on the edge of a new digital world. When I used to watch the young Thompson turning notes into stories I thought I was watching someone at the cutting edge of language. Sure, I knew that poets were hard at work at what would be called conceptual poetry, language poetry, the New York School, et al, but in that little office in Warwick, Rhode Island, across from our favorite watering hole, Father and Sons, the whole oral tradition of language was playing out. Stories were being told as succinctly and straightforwardly as possible, and doubt was being squeezed to the farther corner. I didn’t know it then, but it was the end of my youthful phase as a poet. I needed to reconsider whether I had anything at all to say, and I decided that I didn’t.

Jack followed a straighter path. He practiced journalism, he taught it, and he finally put it to use to describe his threefold dream: he wanted to build a log cabin, sail a canoe to Hudson’s Bay, and sail to the South Seas. Other men wanted fame, influence, money, perhaps all three, but the Jack Thompson I first encountered pounding out the stories he thought people needed to know to make wise decisions was never very different from the man who wanted to build and sail and see. If he had any epiphanies along the way they hardly compare with his steadfast and humble vision.

In some ways the thirty-six-foot Turtle Dove, with its practical spoon box and bowsprit to give it extra sail area, resemble the captain-author’s prose: spare, sturdy and pointed. Not elegant but eminently serviceable, Turtle Dove, as the account of her eight-year journey to more than forty countries proceeds, takes on the grandeur of The Odyssey, that forerunner of all Western adventures. She and her author tell the truth. He took twelve years to build her, so they know each other, and their story shows it by contrast, say, to all those stories we read with the queasy feeling that the author isn’t familiar with his own material and the material doesn’t like the author very much.

This is a story of commonsensical grandeur, a man’s determination to experience the world on his own terms—not to change it, but to taste it. There are comical mishaps, drenched berths and spirits, and Murphy’s Law always applies. But if you don’t read it for the fun and adventure of it, you ought to read it as a reliable report on the state of the language in the late 20th Century, and that’s why I think of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars when I think of Turtle Dove.—DM