After you've shipped, once or twice or many times, you're expected to have a supply of ready-reserve sea stories on hand for the attentive. The sad fact is, you do. But the temptation to satisfy fantasies, the case with which life at sea can be embroidered, make it hard not to lie, and over the winter in House dining halls you finally grow flip about the whole business.

Employment Seasonal

For two summers I've shipped NMU--National Maritime Union--out of the union hall at 17th Street, New York. Last summer there were four or five Harvard men doing the same. The hall serves a large number of college boys in the summer, when jobs are plentiful; in the winter when the steady hands return and things tighten up, it may be months before someone in Group II (the best a college man ever achieves) could get a job. Most ship in the Steward's Department, where the money is; the more adventuresome may ship deck; no one ever goes through the engine room, which is hell in summer and on southern runs.

Eventually, almost everyone gets out. Once at sea, life expands at an enormous rate, but still not fast enough to contain expanding experience. The only way I know to express it is the way a friend described a day he had spent in Greece last summer, which ended with a round white Mediterranean full moon over the ruins at Delphos. He said that day was "More" than Cambridge days--it wasn't just more of his winter experiences, as though you added a hundred days here to make it, but it was on a different level altogether. Some knew what he was talking about, some didn't; and those who had recently known, like him, may have found life at school a little thin.

Yet, I see, I'm romanticizing the life from the first, and it's necessary to counteract the impression immediately. If one word could characterize the vast majority of the hours, it would be boredom. In the Steward's Department, life is usually like that of any large hotel. Deck is more interesting, but you still sleep eleven hours a day, and would sleep more if you could. I've never met an officer who felt he had chosen the right career; for the crew, it's just wage-slavery. Hours on end I've looked into the wake, occasionally thinking but mostly glad for the hypnosis: what some joker once called "the romance of the deep." Inevitably, a college "kid" or a "young blood" becomes a mascot, especially on a freighter with a small crew, about 60 all told. (The United States would carry over 1200 in crew though it never sails with all hands.) And then, immediately, you begin to hear the troubles of all the older men, and their bull as well. It's easy to become insensate, but finally the brutalities of the life just storm your mind.

Le Havre

An example: The America touches Cobh, Le Havre, Southhampton, and then overnight in Bremerhaven. The first time I shipped, I drove an elevator on the America, and when we hit Le Havre I was off with the first. It was three A.M. We had five hours before sailing. Everyone stormed into town, heading for Suzanne's, the combination bar and whore-house en face de la gare. Down the block is its rival, the Algiers Bar, open to Algerians only. The French government rules all such places closed until five in the morning, but the metal slats were kept down, while 'unimaginable scenes of riot' took place. God, it was like the movies, with the whores pouring in from all over town, down the dark streets in tiny cars; I'Amerique was in. And men you knew and in some strange way liked, threw fifties and hundreds of dollars away on 7-Up bottles they called champagne, for $13. I hardly want to become maudlin: they had the money, after all, to throw away. And there is such a vast emptiness in lives of transit that, once ashore, you ache for excess.

Education Respected

After that trip, I've sailed on deck, with what is usually considered a better class of people. It might be profitable to explain ship (union) politics, or the sickness of the shipping industry, or what one actually does on a watch. (For the last item, as an ordinary seaman: 4 hours lookout, 2 hours standby and general labor, and perhaps 2 hours wheel-watch). But I'm seeking what is specific to the summertime sailor's experience; of which an infuriating helpless sympathy is a large part. They condemn you and your innocence, and still worship your education; Beretta, an Able-Bodied who called me "Harbard," took me on exhibition to each and every woman in Antwerp whom he had (carnally) known. Then he sent me to Brussels, away from evil companions.

Surprisingly enough, the college sailor encounters almost no personal resentments. We are no economic threat, and most professionals admire the industry that sends us out to earn money in the summer--if indeed that is why we go. There is a lot of money to be made; I know student waiters who brought home $3000, and one boy, studying navigation at the NY State Marine Academy, was paid $5000 for one trip to Vladivostok.

Intelligence Present

I, for one, sailed for the experience more than for the money, and more than anything else, because I like the sea. The atmosphere has its own diseases, but you don't stay long enough to get them. You can feel grateful for what you do get, which is a relief from some of the sicker aspects of college life. The boats are, after all, a pretty total opposite to gay Harvard days. Obviously, the intellectual stimulants are gone, at least in the form we usually take them. But there are men with intelligence on ships, and you are asked to read bad novels and poems, and hear good conversation. The most biting comment I've ever heard from a Negro about his situation in America came from a fireman I met aboard the Archer. We had passed Bishop's Rock and were entering the Channel, when another US Line ship came by, and I was told to dip our flag in the customary salute. When I came forward again I passed him, and he pointed over the stern to that silk flapping thing, saying, "anywhere this flag flies is no place for the black man." He wasn't personally bitter, only very disappointed and very analytic.

Monomaniacs Common

The confinement of sea life makes people fix upon subjects with intensity, if only to keep sane. You meet men with the most immense knowledge of the Bible, say, or of internal combustion engines. You remember them for the sharpness of their mental edges; always, you remember them.

There isn't any experience, I suppose, to be gained aboard ship that can't be gained doing some land job. But whatever else you go, the ties holding you home and the connections that build themselves in insidious steppingstones, remain. This is entirely irrational, of course; but once at sea those ties disappear: the fact that home is as near as the wireless makes no difference. Even the largest ship is lost at sea; you, lost with it, are thrown on your resources. Your life becomes more elemental; not necessarily more primitive, as though you had gone camping, but more emotionally elemental. I noticed this first with my reactions toward others: they became plus-or-minus affairs, "I like" or "I don't like." You know no one completely or for very long, and yet nobody just brushes by, as in normal life. All you can learn is one facet quickly and deeply: it is all you have time for.