A confession: I’ve always loved the romance of travel. Not the romance within travel – the stranger on a train, sudden eye contact in a hotel lobby. But the sheer sense of adventure and possibility that naturally accrues to long-distance conveyances, and especially those from the Age of Steam – Pullman car express trains, ocean liners.
Ships in particular, because, well, oceans. Plus floating cities, and arcane dress codes, and days spent reading, and everything else that made me different from the other kids. My dad, who crossed the Atlantic on hospital and troop ships during WWII, never missed an episode of “Love Boat.” We poked fun at his insistence that he only watched that show for its nautical scenes, not for its pert cruise director, Julie. Nevertheless, when he put his money where his mouth was and took me to visit England on the Queen Elizabeth II, I was hooked.
A transatlantic crossing is different from cruising. There are no ports to visit, no discount diamond emporiums, no snorkeling excursions. Just the bygone pleasures of moving slowly toward Europe, or returning therefrom, with a good book, lots of fog, and eggs benedict for breakfast as companions.
This mode of travel is implicit in my book of poems. Its characters first appear on one shore, then another, as was the custom of the time. They ebb and flow between the social “seasons” appropriate to their wealth and status. But there are two poems in which ocean liners are more explicit, and to some extent they frame the book. The very first poem is a letter from an aspiring American heiress newly arrived in England in 1890, having crossed the Atlantic on the SS City of New York. When she was launched (ship, not heiress), City of New York entered a fierce competition for the fastest crossing in either direction, and she ultimately won the Eastbound “Blue Riband.” This was a time before jet planes, when the fastest crossing mattered, and in terms of real money. Her twin screws, eliminating the need to carry extra rigging for sails in case of all-too-frequent engine failure, made her the first express liner to incorporate this technological feature
And with respect to luxury, City of New York was a also gem, with her massive-domed dining room, electric lighting, hot and cold running water, and walnut-paneled public rooms. The poem is, I believe, historically accurate with respect to the description of the heiress who has recently experienced this sea-going marvel.
The title for the collection includes the word “voices” intentionally. One might – indeed should – always ask when encountering this word what voices are being left unheard, offstage, possibly discounted. The poems reflect the views of the kinds of people I encountered in Edith Wharton’s novels, and the concerns of my letter writers reflect the same concerns as those of her characters. With some important exceptions, where the marginalization of the correspondent is hopefully more clear.
But the voices of those at the great base of the socio-economic triangle that supported those few at its tip do, I hope, poke through. Although I made an explicit decision not to try to create an Upstairs/Downstairs split like the one reflected in, for example, Downton Abbey, which I never watched until after the book was completed.
In the case of the opening poem, the absent voices are those of the men shoveling coal below decks, the onboard butchers, cooks, and other people there to serve the passengers. Even less in evidence, though, are the voices of those families from Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Southern Italy who endured third-class passage to the United States to start new lives, and who were the steel heart – like beams in one of the magnificent new “sky scrapers” – behind the thin gold surface of the Gilded Age. Since our letter-writing heiress was sailing east, she would not have encountered these passengers headed to the coal mines of Appalachia or the mills of Pittsburgh, as Rose did in the movie “Titanic.”
And speaking of that ship, surely the most famous ocean liner of them all, she is the other one explicitly mentioned in the book (along with RMS Carpathia, which came to her rescue). Titanic’s sinking should perhaps have been a signal that the dream of limitless progress promised by the huge technological advancements of the age was destined to end. Or at least had its vulnerable points, just as the compartments dividing the hull of Titanic had not been entirely sealed off from one another. The mass murder of the trenches would, after all, begin a mere two years and a bit after Titanic went down.
Another confession: I do love the romance within the movie as well as the romance of the ship itself. It’s the kind of thing Edith Wharton loved as well. She might not have depicted Rose as having been swayed by Jack’s charm and talent. But then, the Undine Sprague of “The Custom of the Country” was perhaps even less well positioned as a divorcee than Jack to crash the first-class dining room of City of New York, where white gloves would always have been removed once at table. And where one would never have considered flirting with the cruise director. And where the servers would have returned quietly to their quarters once the cigars and port had been passed.
Titanic has been back in the news recently (which is destined to continue to happen long after I’m gone from this earth): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/science/titanic-shipwreck-archaeology.html
More about the great ocean liners: http://thegreatoceanliners.com/
https://www.greatoceanliners.com/
You can purchase my book here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/voices-from-the-first-gilded-age-by-ed-granger/