Titanic Survivor

The author was a stewardess who not only survived the sinking of the Titanic, but also that of its sister ship, the Britannic.

As dranatic as these events are, they form only a minor part in the life by a remarkable woman. Violet Jessop was born in Buenos Aires to Irish parents, spoke Spanish, had a pet armadillo, and lost part of a lung due to TB during her early years in Argentina. Her brothers and sisters suffered numerous illnesses, some of which were fatal: scarlet fever, diphtheria, meningitis, smallpox, rheumatic fever, and malaria.

She was 16 when her father died. Her mother moved the family to England, and went to work as a stewardess on a steamship line. Eventually Violet followed, and thus began a 42-year career at sea, during which she became the family breadwinner. She worked for several lines -- the White Star, the Red Star, and the Royal Mail -- and saw a good deal of the world. 

Titanic

Three chapters are devoted to her experiences on the Titanic. She has kind words for Thomas Andrews, "beloved designer" of the ship because of the consideration he showed for the crew in his plans.

Violet was in lifeboat 18. As she was boarding it, a baby was thrust into arms, and later once she was aboard the ship that rescued survivors, the Carpathia, a woman snatched the baby away from her without a word. In an epilogue we learn that just before she died, she received a mysterious phone call from a person who claimed to be that child.

Britannic

Four-and-a-half years later, during WWI she signed up as a nurse, and eventually found herself on the Britannic. It was being used as a hospital ship when it hit a mine and sank in the Aegean Sea. The captain kept her under way after the explosion, trying to make for shallower water, without realizing that the propellers were chopping up lifeboats and people in the water. Violet's head was struck three times by a prop,

Two chapters are devoted to this and the aftermath. Violet suffered a fractured skull (which she did not discover until years afterward) and a "leg pierced to the bone, which took nearly three months to heal." Twenty-eight lives were lost.

Life at Sea

What I enjoyed most about the book were Violet's observations of shipboard life. She relates a number of amusing anecdotes involving crew and passengers. A drunken steward hid under a passenger's bed. During Prohibition a woman  took advantage of her ample bosom to smuggle ashore "a quart of champagne in her 'balcony'."

Then there was the time when a passenger died while at sea, and a friend kept company all night with the body and the widow in her cabin, until the ship rolled and the body fell off the bed and pinned her to the floor.

But eventually the long hours and hard work took their toll on Violet. She wearied of the "exacting demands" and "aggravating ways" of passengers. 

And because she was attractive she had to put up with the unwelcome attentions of both passengers and crew. She turned down several offers of marriage. A steward ran amok with a knife after she refused to kiss him. A ship's captain, after being rebuffed, dismissed her for being a flirt. During the WWI she ate great quantities of garlic-laden salami to discourage an ardent Danish sailor.

Ironically the one man she was interested in, a gifted mechanic from Australia, was too shy to make a formal proposal.

The Book

Her memoir went unpublished, but the year before her death she was visited by John Maxtone-Graham, who was conducting research about the golden age of transatlantic liners. He took on the task of editing Violet's book, and has provided many useful details about her life.

One chapter has gone missing, and there is no mention of a marriage, which Maxtone-Graham learned from Violet's niece. She married "so briefly and disastrously that not even her husband's name remains extant with the family."

It includes 24 pages of black-and-white photos.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Purports to be a firsthand account of the Great London Plague of 1665, though the author's name does not appear on the title page of the first edition. The book was published in 1722, half a century after the events described. Only near the end do we learn the initials of the narrator, H.F., and that he is dead and buried.

In other words the narrator is a fictive one, which makes the book a sort of novel. In the introduction to this edition, Anthony Burgess calls it “a cunning work of art, a confidence trick of the imagination.” 

 

Defoe was only five years old at the time of the plague, and the account may in fact be based on notes made by his uncle, Henry Foe. It is mostly reportorial in nature, and according to Anthony Burgess, “the most reliable and comprehensive account of the Great Plague that we possess.”

 

Burgess also calls Defoe "the first really modern writer" because of his "plain and dignified style," which avoids "literary artificiality." However, it must also be said that the book is disorganized and repetitious, making it something of an ordeal for modern readers. Burgess implies the "clumsiness" is intentional.

 

Timespan

London was visited numerous times by the plague. This one began in late 1664, but the number of deaths remained low until June of 1665, at which time “the richer sort of people” began fleeing the city. In July and August the number of deaths increased dramatically, with the highest weekly total of 7000 reached in September. The numbers then abated until the plague was “reckoned to be quite ceased” by the following February.

Symptoms

 

The disease was puzzling because it affected people in different ways. 

“Some were immediately overwhelmed with it,” says H.F., “and it came to violent fevers, vomitings, insufferable headaches, pains in the back, and so up to ravings and ragings with those pains; others with swellings and tumours in the neck or groin or armpits, which till they could be broke put them into insufferable agonies and torment; while others...were silently infected, the fever preying upon their spirits insensibly, and they seeing little of it till they fell into swooning and faintings and death without pain.”

Some were “walking putrefied carcases whose breath was infectious and their sweat poison, and yet were as well to look on as other people, and even knew it not themselves.”  Some did not realize they were infected until hours before they died. 

Not everyone died who was infected, and in the later stages of the epidemic people recovered faster and the disease did not seem so virulent. “If it was catched it was not so mortal.” 

Defoe, through his mouthpiece H.F., gave the total number of deaths in London as 68,590 based on the weekly “bills of mortality,” but believed this was not an accurate count and that the true figure was much higher.  A figure of 100,000 is commonly quoted today, about a quarter of London's population at the time.

He is generous with praise for city officials, but in the end offers the opinion that one of the methods used, enforced confinement, was ill-advised.

Transmission

H.F. says the infection was “spread by certain steams or fumes, which physicians call effluvia, by the breath, or by the sweat, or by the stench of the sores of the sick persons.” Some thought the plague could be spread by a mother's milk, or that an infected baby could transmit the plague by suckling.

It was also believed to be spread by clothing, and brought into houses by servants returning from errands. Animals were suspected, and as a result “forty thousand dogs and five times as many cats” were destroyed, as well as a “prodigious multitude” of mice and rats killed by poison.

The poor were “more subject to be infected” because they lived in closer quarters and less sanitary conditions, and because they had not the means to flee the city. “They died by heaps and were buried by heaps.”

Lockdown

Since there was only one pest-house in London, the city ordered that any home with an infected person be locked up for four weeks.  All members of the household, including servants and those showing no signs of the disease, were kept within. The city hired two watchmen to guard it night and day to prevent people from leaving. The house was identified by a red cross on the door. 

“All plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such-like causes of assemblies of people” were “utterly prohibited.”  “Public feasting” was banned, but taverns stayed open with the imposition of a 9pm closing.  

Churches remained open, and the Government “appointed public prayers and days of fasting and humiliation, to make public confession of sin and implore the mercy of God to avert the dreadful judgement which hung over their heads.”

 

Dead-carts were sent out daily to collect bodies. Some streets were too narrow to admit the carts, and the bodies had to be brought out by wheelbarrow.

Remedies

Many believed that the smell of pitch, tar, rosin, or brimstone, would keep them safe. Others “carried bottles of scents or perfumes,” and always had “preservatives in their mouths and about their clothes to repel the infection.” 

Houses visited by the plague were purged by burning “perfumes, incense, benjamin, rozin, and sulphur in their rooms close shut up, and then let the air carry it all out with a blast of gunpowder.” Shopkeepers sought to disinfect coins by having them placed in a pail of vinegar.

The gullible were preyed upon by quacks and mountebanks, who peddled philtres, plague water, anti-pestilential pills, as well as “cordials against the corruption of air,” and “papers tied up with so many knots, and certain words or figures written on them, as particularly the word Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid.”

Second Wave

When the plague waned in the fall, people began “running rashly into danger, giving up all their former cautions, and all the shyness they used to practise, depending that the sickness would not reach them, or if it did they would not die.” Physicians warned that this could bring about a relapse of the danger upon the whole city, which might be more serious than what had been experienced so far. 

“But it was all to no purpose; the audacious creatures were so possessed with the first joy and so surprised with the satisfaction of seeing a vast decrease in the weekly bills, that they were impenetrable by any new terrors, and would not be persuaded but that the bitterness of death was past; and it was to no more purpose to talk to them than to an east wind; but they opened shops, went about streets, did business, and conversed with anybody that came in their way to converse with, whether with business or without, neither inquiring of their health or so much as being apprehensive of any danger from them, though they knew them not to be sound.”

The result was a upsurge in deaths.

Crazy Stuff

Physicians thought that the danger of death was great if buboes were not lanced, but some were so hard that they could not be cut and so were burnt with caustics. 

Some proposed that the breath of infected persons would leave a scum on warm water, and cause a chicken to lay rotten eggs.

A man named Solomon Eagle ran naked through the streets with a pan of burning charcoal on his head.

In one incident, a man who had passed out from drink was picked up, and awoke just before he was about to tossed into a mass burial pit. Anticipating a Monty Python sketch by nearly 300 years, he says, “But I an’t dead though, am I?”

Oxford University Press Edition

This edition contains a very informative “Medical Note” as an appendix. It's not long and worth reading. It suggests that all three forms of the plague – bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic – were present in London, which would explain the differing ways it was manifested.

 Amazon gives you a free look.

The Plague Today

It's now generally believed that the plague was spread by the bite of fleas whose main host was rats. Other animals known to carry the plague are squirrels, prairie dogs, chipmunks, and marmots. 

Every year a few hundred people die from it in scattered places, including the United States. Apparently there are no reliable vaccines, but antibiotics can be used successfully if the disease is diagnosed quickly enough. However, its flu-like symptoms can make this problematic.

Reading Defoe's work, one sees many similarities between the London plague and the pandemic now sweeping the world, Covid-19. Lockdowns, social distancing, financial assistance to those afflicted, cockeyed remedies, a second wave, even crime. (In London thieves broke into houses to steal the clothes off dead bodies, while today criminals are able to use safer methods thanks to the internet.)   

Other Plague Novels

The Last Man by Mary Shelley 1826

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London 1915

The Plague by Albert Camus 1947

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart 1949

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson 1954

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton 1969

The Stand by Stephen King 1978

Interestingly, both The Last Man and The Scarlet Plague are set in 2073.

Click here to see my remarks on The Scarlet Plague and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

Flush

A slim novel at just over 100 pages, this book by Virginia Woolf is about a dog named Flush, its owner an invalid involved in one of the most romantic love stories of all time, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 

That's her picture on the cover from a sketch by her brother, Alfred. Woolf's inspiration for the book came from two poems that Barrett Browning wrote about Flush.

The dog is a spaniel, a gift from friend and fellow writer, Mary Mitford. The bond between Flush and his new master is strong. "He could read signs that nobody else could even see." But the bond is tested when he notices a change in her behaviour after she starts exchanging letters with someone. He could see "how strangely his mistress was agitated as she wrote, what contrary desires shook her." A hooded man arrives, a usurper whom Flush savagely bites, not once, but twice.

At this juncture in Flush's life, an epochal event occurs. He is stolen by a gang of thieves and held for ransom. This gives Woolf the opportunity to describe a London slum through the eyes of a dog, which she does with as much skill as Dickens. Flush is returned at last, only to face a greater crisis. He and his mistress steal out of the house and undertake a great journey.

They arrive in Italy where life is quite different from London. Barrett Browning's health improves, and even Flush becomes used to the change. His snobbishness wears off. He goes out on his own for hours without a leash and "speaks Italian to the little dogs." He eats grapes and macaroni, and is afflicted with fleas.

More great events follow. His mistress becomes "two people," and when the entire family returns to London, his chief desire is to leave. Back in Italy he and Barrett Browning grow old together.

Notes

Flush is accompanied by eight pages Woolf's notes, the longest of which concerns Barrett Browning's devoted maid. Woolf writes, "The life of Lily Wilson is extremely obscure and thus cries aloud for the services of a biographer." She married an Italian and remained in Italy after Barrett Browning died. "She was typical of the great army of her kind -- the inscrutable, the all-but-silent, the all-but-invisible servant maids of history."

This edition includes a five-page biographical note about Woolf, and a useful introduction which talks about Woolf's lifelong interest in animals, "real, imaginary, and metaphorical." Her nephew, Quentin Bell, is quoted as saying, "Flush is not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by a someone who would love to be a dog." 

The novel also has a more serious side, for example in the parallel between walking a dog on a leash, and women's subjugation to "the confining social laws of patrimony."

Other Doggy Treats

I enjoyed Flush because it was unusual, intelligent, and not afflicted with sappy sentiment. Here are some others that I've enjoyed. 

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung.  An abandoned four-year-old in Moscow is raised by feral dogs.

The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov.  A Russian surgeon transplants human glands into a dog and turns it into an idle, slovenly, and foul-mouthed Commissar "for the elimination of vagrant quadrupeds."  Written in 1925.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas. A semi-fictional memoir about the author growing up in Wales.

The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams, author of Watership Down.  Two dogs escape from a place where experiments are carried out on animals.

 

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis. A man chases after his runaway wife to get his car back, following her all the way to Central America in a broken-down bus called "Dog of the South."

 

Skookum's North by Doug Urquhart.  "Paws" was the name of a cartoon strip that ran for many years in northern Canadian newspapers. The main character is Skookum, the lead dog of a team owned by Marten Fisher. They live in Fort Doggerel.

Valley of Genius

The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley, as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made it Boom

by Adam Fisher

An oral history about Silicon Valley gleaned from over 200 interviews, chopped up and re-organized by topic, making it read like a group chat.

The result is an insider's perspective, racy and insightful, its only drawback the number of times you'll have to refer to the 28-page Cast of Characters at the back of the book. Published in 2018, it logs in at 494 pages and includes 16 pages of colour photos.

Apple and Steve Jobs get the most coverage with seven chapters, Atari is next with three, and Google with two. Adding a gossipy flavour are mentions of George Lucas, Douglas Adams, William Gibson, Joss Wheedon, Wavy Gravy, R.U. Serious, the Duke of URL, and the names of people who attended the Stanford memorial service for Steve Jobs (and those who didn't).

Xerox PARC
"Everybody says Steve Jobs ripped off Xerox PARC. He didn't, Bill Gates did."

Atari
In 1981 the company's gross was more than the entire movie business in Hollywood. At one point they had 10,000 employees but only 200 by 1984.

"It was like the fall of Saigon. People were dropping equipment into the trunks of their cars from the second story."

Apple
The Apple I was "mostly made with parts from Atari."

General Magic
Despite the company's failure, "iPhones, social media, electronic commerce, it all came out of Magic."

Pixar
"But the Disney execs kept pushing us to make these [Toy Story] characters more edgy.... And so we ran into story problems along the way.... The characters, especially Woody, were just repellent. Woody was just awful, awful, awful!"

Wired
"Everyone was sleeping with everyone at Wired."

Netscape
"All of us who worked at Netscape in the early days were terrible to each other. We were all really abrasive people. We did most of our negotiation by screaming and insulting."

Cyberculture
“... about twenty-five pianos stacked against a part of the freeway, and at one point the pianos caught on fire and the Highway Patrol shut down the freeway because the flames got high enough that they were coming over the top of the freeway, fifty feet above us.”

eBay
Items offered for sale included a kidney, a rocket launcher, and someone's virginity.

Google
“You show up in a suit? You're not getting hired.”

Napster
“Napster was the first case where you've got young founders, and the VCs came in with the 'adult supervision,' and it was an utter disaster.”

iPod
It “freed Apple from the PC wars.”

Facebook
“Zuckerberg's first business cards read, I'm CEO...bitch.”

iPhone
“We're not making a phone. We're making a laptop killer.”

Twitter
“It's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine -- and fell in.”

Steve Jobs 
His last words: “Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!”

Yellowknife: A Novel Trip Through the Absurd

Yesterday a friend kindly sent me a recent review of my novel, Yellowknife. Written by Grace Guy, it appeared in the August 16, 2019, edition of the Yellowknifer, a newspaper published in Yellowknife, the capital of either the Yukon or the Northwest Territories, depending on your point of view. Here are a few excepts:

I cannot begin to tell you how much fun this book was to read. Written in the snappy, fast-paced, and detail-oriented way I find familiar from mystery or spy novels, Yellowknife: A Novel brings an international flavour to the local, combining the wild fantasies that some Southerners have of the North –- people cross-country skiing down Franklin Avenue to go to work –- with some more familiar exploration of the Yellowknife homeless community and the inescapable bureaucracy.

Told in four parts and spanning the separation of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife: A Novel twists the absurd perceptions some people have of the North with the truth, making the novel feel like it was set in a fantasy version of Yellowknife as opposed to the real thing. For example, there is a moment from Moyeg G. Vassanji's 2006 novel Nostalgia in which a character remarks that he is from “Yellowknife, Yukon Territory.” These odd “Nostalgia moments” are so common in Yellowknife: A Novel that it makes them feel intentional and adds a surreal quality to the novel.

Most of the novel is hilarious, usually because of the odd situations and dialogue instead of specific jokes being made, while at the same time having moments that are astonishingly beautiful or strange, making this mixed-bag of a book worth reading – both as someone who grew up here, and as someone re-discovering the history of the North.