Reading Robert Nathan is one of the relatively rare times when I know what it must be like to be an Anglophile-bibliophile outside of the UK. His books are pretty easy to stumble across in the US and pretty tricky to find here – but on both my visits to Washington DC, I managed to come away with a couple of his books. I bought The Enchanted Voyage in 2015 and, as luck would have it, it’s a 1936 title.
Nathan’s novels are always pretty short and whimsical, and The Enchanted Voyage is no different. The font is enormous and even so it’s something under 200 pages – telling the story of Mr Pecket, a carpenter who is disliked by his wife and cheated by his neighbours. Or perhaps ‘cheated’ isn’t the right word, since he walks open-eyed into situations where he will build shelving (say) and be hectored into being paid rather less than the value of the wood.
But, as the opening lines tell us, Mr Pecket has one eccentric passion:
Mr Hector Pecket had a boat. He had built it himself; it stood squarely on the ground in the yard of his little home in the Bronx, very far from the water. But it would scarcely have floated anywhere else, for Mr Pecket had neglected to caulk it, and it had no keel. Nevertheless inland and to the eye, it was a boat; a little like an ark, but with a mast for sailing, an anchor, a windlass, belaying pins, a cabin, and a cockpit. It was named the Sarah Pecket, after his wife.
Mrs Sarah Pecket is not sensible of having received a compliment. Rather, she would live to have some household income – and sells the boat to a neighbour to run as a restaurant. She puts wheels on it, to transport it round the corner. In another sort of novel, we would have a lot of sympathy for Mrs Pecket. But in the fanciful and carefree world of Robert Nathan’s heroes, this is a crime – and we cheer Mr Pecket on when, in the middle of the night, he commandeers the boat and sails – no, rolls – away. The wheels move him on the ground, and the sail determines his direction.
Along the way, he picks up a disaffected waitress and a curious dentist – sure, why not – and they continue to trundle along with the aim of getting to Florida. But the real aim is just to get away from everyday life – the humdrum, the unkind, and the unimaginative. This isn’t an escape from reality – their boat is slowly wheeling along the roads, not floating off into the sky – but it is an escape nonetheless. There is a sort of Peter Pan esque tone to the whole thing. Emotions are broad and simple things in Nathan’s work, but there is something touching about seeing them so close to the surface.
This reading club year is really interesting, because by 1936 it seems to have been rather an open secret that a major conflict was coming. While plenty of politicians were famously trying to avert it, you get the sense from reading books of the period that the general population would not have been enormously surprised to have found themselves in the middle of a world war a few years later – at the very least, the prospect of it was a dominating conversation. So how would the topic find its way into the novels we’re looking at this year?
This is the nearest that The Enchanted Voyage gets to contemporary commentary:
Mr Pecket walked down the street, carrying his shelves and his tools. He looked into the faces of men and women, and what he saw made him feel anxious and sad. It seemed to him that a new feeling had come into the world since he was young; that people no longer felt kindly disposed toward one another. Now that the bad times were over, and it was possible to work again, they seemed to be looking for someone to blame for everything.
You – you have a sharp look, you dress too well. Doubtless it was you who made all the trouble in the world. Well, just keep out of my way after this.
And you, over there – you have no money and no work. To the devil with you. Perhaps you are a communist.
Interestingly, he is seeing this is as a period when the Great Depression is largely over – but senses that there are difficult things on the horizon too. In context, it hammers home Mr P’s dissatisfaction with the world, but it’s still very much of its time. Those are the sorts of details I love discovering in these club years.
Is Robert Nathan great literature? No, not really – but he is reliably diverting, with a joyful imagination and I love spending time in his eccentric and sweet worlds.
My old housemate, and dear friend, Kirsty has three abiding passions: dogs, lexicography, and talking about how great Josephine Tey is. It was she who gave me a copy of Brat Farrar (1949) last year, as part of a lovely package to cheer during lockdown, and I suspect it was me who got my book group to read it. It definitely came up during our discussion of Daphne du Maurier’s brilliant novel 
