Grove Koger

For several years now, I’ve been working on a readers’ guide to maritime literature—novels, stories, plays and poems about sailing, the sea, the seaboard, and island life. I’m thinking of calling it “Sea Fever,” a title borrowed from a wonderful short poem by John Masefield. One of the entries I’ve completed is devoted to the most famous novel by James Hanley, who was born September 3, 1901, and died in 1985.

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The Ocean (London: Faber and Faber, 1941)

James Hanley left school in Liverpool for the sea when he was thirteen, and was completing his first trans-Atlantic voyage when World War II broke out. He spent several years on British troopships, deserted in Canada to join the Canadian army, and saw service in France. After making one last voyage, Hanley retired from the sea and taught himself to write while supporting himself as a laborer. His first important work, the 1931 novel Boy, describes the assault and murder of a young sailor and was suppressed upon publication.

The Ocean appeared a decade after Boy, and is set in the lifeboat of a ship that has been torpedoed by the Germans far from land. The only sailor aboard, Joseph Curtain, reassures, cajoles, berates, and shames the boat’s four civilians into surviving their ordeal. The language of The Ocean is vivid yet spare, an impressionistic record of the men’s thoughts and experiences:  “The eye travelled and stopped at a line where sky and water met, where one patch of water danced, one line of light seared the heavy shadow of sea.”

Hanley has been compared to Joseph Conrad, although he was critical of what he saw as Conrad’s disdain for ordinary seamen and their lot. His many works won the praise of fellow writers, but the uncompromising nature of his vision has precluded popular appeal. The Ocean is at once his most approachable novel and his greatest claim to fame.

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Other sea-related works by Hanley include  The Last Voyage: A Tale (1931); Men in Darkness: Five Stories (1931); Stoker Haslett: A Tale (1932); Aria and Finale (1932; also published in Half an Eye: Sea Stories as “Captain Cruickshank”); Captain Bottell (1933); Stoker Bush (1935); Half an Eye: Sea Stories (1937); The Hollow Sea (1938); Between the Tides (1939; nonfiction); Sailor’s Song (1943); Towards Horizons (1949; nonfiction); The Closed Harbour (1952); Don Quixote Drowned (1953; nonfiction); and Herman Melville: A Man in the Customs House (1971; nonfiction)

For further information, I recommend Edward Stokes, The Novels of James Hanley (F.W. Cheshire, 1964); Frank Harrington, James Hanley, A Bold and Unique Solitary (Typographeum, 1989); and John Fordham, James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class (U Wales P, 2002).

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The painting on the cover of the book is Sea Ghost by Hanley’s son, Liam. The bird could easily be by George Braque and the landscape in the background is reminiscent of Ben Nicholson’s figurative works, but it’s an impressive piece just the same.