John’s unfinished memoir chapter about his writing career
I had a Scottish first cousin who has my initials, only his stand for James Maxtone Graham. His surname had no hyphen because, in the United Kingdom, double names are rarely hyphenated. Jamie, as everyone called him, is long gone, alas, but he was the man who, four decades ago, propelled me into writing my first book.
In fact, Jamie had several trades. He was a very successful dealer in antique fishing tackle, and did a brisk business selling to dedicated fishermen like himself. If he telephoned one of his regular customers and learned from his widow that he had died, he shifted gears effortlessly and asked if she would consider selling him some of her husband’s residue of reels and rods. At one time, he opened a tiny restaurant on the top floor of his Peebles house. He called it The Thirty-nine Steps because he discovered that there were exactly 39 steps from the pavement up to the floor where his one-room restaurant was located.
(Editor’s note: It has been occasionally said that this was the smallest restaurant in the world. This has never been confirmed.)
Additionally, he wrote articles for magazines, always American ones because they paid better than their British counterparts. Every spring, he would come to New York for two reasons: first, to make an annual circuit of his Manhattan editors and second, because he loved, more than anything, asparagus and shad roe. This was in the late 1960s, well before today’s year-long asparagus deluge arrives in New York from Chile; in those days, asparagus first appeared from New Jersey in the spring, as did also the delectable roe of shad.
In fact, the flesh of a shad is almost as good as its roe; but for Jamie’s and my annual spring lunch, it was the roe that starred. That meal was always consumed in the ground-floor kitchen of my family’s brownstone on East 78th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. Just the two of us were on hand. I had already cooked some bacon before adding to the greased pan four plump shad roes. In a separate pot on the stove were steaming some peeled spring asparagus. Two chilled bottles of Sancerre were parked on the kitchen table in a cooler.
The moment Jamie arrived, we opened the first bottle. After a glass or two, I removed two heated plates from the oven, dished up the shad roe, bacon and asparagus, and we started our annual feast. The food was delicious and the conversation, as always, brisk.
Earlier that year, Jamie had made a transatlantic crossing aboard the 1000th westbound sailing of Cunard White Star’s Queen Mary. He had written an article about the crossing for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. It generated, he told me during that lunch, more mail than he had ever received for any prior article. I have never forgotten his words and have remembered them to this day, almost forty years after he spoke them:
“You travel a lot by ship.”
He was quite right. Every summer, my wife Katrina and our four children and I used to cross the Atlantic — either to France and Switzerland via Cherbourg or England and Scotland via Southampton — always aboard SS France or one of the Queens. We would return westbound in late August, as Labor Day approached, after which the childrens’ schools would start their fall semesters.
But Jamie spoke for a very specific reason. One letter from the bundle his article had generated came from New York publisher Macmillan, written by a senior editor named Robert Markel. He was convinced that ocean liners crossing the North Atlantic were approaching the end of their usefulness; there seemed every probability that aircraft would soon supplant them. To commemorate their era, he had asked if Jamie would consider writing a book about ocean liners for Macmillan.
“I said to Markel,” Jamie told me, “That I write articles, not books; I would never finish a book. But you travel a lot on ships; why not go down and tell him that you might take on the job?”
It is worth noting that I was, in fact, at something of a loose end that spring because I had decided that I did not want to continue stage managing. I had been doing it for fifteen years and, although the work was exciting and sometimes even rewarding, it was also stressful. Worse, it was not always profitable; productions were often separated by weeks or sometimes months of unemployment. To be honest, I was keenly interested in finding something to take its place.
After devouring our lunch and draining both bottles of Sancerre, we said farewell. Jamie gave me Markel’s telephone number and address. The next day, I dialed it, made an appointment with his secretary, and, that afternoon, was ushered into his office. We talked at great length about Jamie’s article and the inevitable demise of ocean liners. He asked if I would consider taking on the job of writing the book that Jamie had rejected.
However tempting, it seemed a preposterous proposal. I was a neophyte who had never written anything for publication, save in the Brown Daily Herald many years earlier. I hastened to point out the problem:
“It’s very kind of you to talk about my doing a book for Macmillan, but you have no idea whether or not I can write.”
Acceding my point, Markel made a counter-proposal: “Here’s what I would like you to do. Go home and write me twenty pages about ocean liners and send them to me. Then I shall know whether your employment makes sense.”
It was some days before I finally sat down and, after a lot of effort, typed out Markel’s twenty pages. I dropped them off at his office and, shortly after I got home, received a telephone call.
“I have just completed page 14 and you have the job.”
I looked hastily at my copy. On page 14, I had dealt with the story of one of the two great English runners who later became protagonists of the 1981 feature film Chariots of Fire, Lord Andrew Lindsay. He had been invited as a guest on Queen Mary’s sea trials and was asked if he would run a mile around the vessel’s Promenade Deck. He accepted the challenge, wearing white tie and tails. His accomplishment was engraved on a silver plaque posted just above the advice that four times around Queen Mary’s Promenade Deck would constitute a mile. That silver plaque has since been removed; I often wonder where it ended up.
Regardless, I had apparently zeroed in on precisely the right choices for Markel, a heady combination of Cunard’s first class, a peer, and white tie and tails. “You’ve got the job. Come in and I’ll give you a contract.”
I was flabbergasted; although my twenty pages had been a time-consuming chore, I had seriously underestimated their impact.
I had a lawyer friend named Robert Montgomery — a senior partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind & Wharton, and a long-established show-biz lawyer — in whose office I appeared with my contract.
(Robert Montgomery and I had had many prior meetings, one of them related to “Mrs. Miniver,” a book written for the London Times by my aunt Joyce Maxtone Graham. Her nom de plume was a reworking of her maiden name — Anstruther — elided with the initial “J” to become Jan Struther. MGM had optioned the book and made it into a war film that was hugely successful but, if truth be told, only the palest carbon copy of Aunt Joyce’s far superior book.
MGM cast Greer Garson for the part of Mrs. Miniver, married to Walter Pidgeon; her daughter was played by Teresa Wright. Nominated for eleven Oscars, it won six: Garson took one, so did director William Wyler, Teresa Wright as best supporting actress, MGM as producer; four script writers shared another and Joseph Ruttenberg garnered the sixth for cinematography.
The film did incredible business all over the country and ran for a record number of days at Radio City Music Hall. It was hailed by the press. The New Yorker suggested: “Out of the rather casual jottings that were made into a best-seller called ‘Mrs. Miniver,’ a movie has evolved that might almost be called stupendous.” The New York Times review cautioned: “Perhaps it is too soon to call this one of the greatest motion pictures of all time.”
Louis B. Mayer was ecstatic and anxious to follow “Mrs. Miniver” up with a sequel. He paid Aunt Joyce to go out to Los Angeles for the summer of 1943 and stay in a house especially rented for her by MGM. She brought her two younger children, Robert, and Janet, as well as a maid. But nothing came of what turned out to be a tedious visit. The house was removed from any neighbors and the children used to spray water onto the roof to try and cool it down. Poor Aunt Joyce was distraught and produced nothing. That overheated 1943 summer was, in fact, the start of her long decline.
The movie sequel she never wrote appeared shortly thereafter, called “The Miniver Story.” It was not a good film and shared none of the original’s honors. Aunt Joyce never saw it and, long after her death, the rights to the book “Mrs. Miniver” came up for renewal. Joyce’s three children had been left those rights and I suggested that they ask Bob Montgomery to handle negotiations.
When Bob telephoned MGM’s office and identified himself, the woman handling negotiations demanded with obvious annoyance: “How on earth did you get involved with this?” The long and short of it was that he brokered a $20,000 extension of the rights, an epic achievement. The family was delighted and I was presented with a small refrigerator for my study as a reward for having put them in touch with Bob.)
Now I was back in Bob’s office, brandishing a Macmillan contract to write a book about ocean liners. Bob assigned me to one of his junior associates. At one point, that man asked me routinely if I had a name for my book. Without hesitation, I answered: “The Only Way to Cross.”
Book titles are often not decided until the manuscript has been completed. A great deal of debate, agony and thought is frequently expended on that final choice: authors, agents, publisher and even spouses often wrestle with the problem for weeks. But for some reason, my title just leapt nimbly into existence.
In fact, it proved a popular choice with two rival shipping lines. A two-page spread from the French Line showed their handsome vessel S.S. France steaming across the ocean. The single line of text beneath it announced triumphantly: “The Only Way to Cross.” I felt it a flattering tribute and made no fuss about it.
But there were several people at Cunard White Star who were adamant that the words of my title were in fact their property. One of them, a man who would ultimately be fired for corporate crookery, insisted repeatedly that I had stolen it from his company. My only response was: “Show it to me in print prior to October, 1972 (my publication date) and I will agree with you.” He was never able to do so.
I began my research on board the Queen Elizabeth, now mothballed and stationary in Fort Lauderdale, and newly renamed simply Elizabeth. I told Markel I would be sailing from New York to Southampton shortly after returning from Florida and that I hoped to submit my first chapter — about the design and launch of Mauretania — before Christmas.
As it happened, I spent two illegal nights aboard Queen Elizabeth, both of them in one of the same cabins I had occupied years before, when sailing on her. Of stewards, there were none. Though the space smelled slightly of moth crystals and mildew, nostalgic pleasure reigned supreme. Miraculously, the adjoining bathroom was working and fairly clean.
Over two days, I made my way around the vessel, chatting with many of the crew and the occasional officer. Rather typical of the vessel’s ultimate Floridian downfall, the relatively small number of visitors was discouraging; Florida is a busy place with so many warm-weather options that touring a laid-up liner, even the world’s largest, was apparently not a particularly appealing priority.
At the airport, as I was about to fly home to New York, I bought a large souvenir pin showing the vessel alongside in Florida. But only a glance at the artwork betrayed the lamentable shoddiness surrounding the entire enterprise. The vessel, with Queen Elizabeth imprinted blatantly on her flank, was unquestionably France; there, indisputably, were two winged funnels. I managed to obtain half a dozen of those pins from Floridian friends and presented them to various masters of both France and QE2.
I should share some of the physical limitations that governed my authorial baptism. It was in the days long before computers or internet. At home, I had an electric typewriter but that was all it was; it could not churn out pre-composed pages of text. I also had a much smaller Olivetti that was handy for travel.
When I worked, I would type out finished pages, then would later edit them in pen or pencil. Since my handwriting was terrible, I was determined to have every page pristine, so I would type out re-written portions of the chapter, cut them out with scissors, and paste them atop every illegible hand-written entry. As a result, every page of my first manuscript had been re-typed countless times.
My first task was to acquaint myself with some of the maritime history with which I would be dealing. Among the depressing things I learned was that Hoboken’s Public Library had, only weeks earlier, jettisoned their shipping files, photographs and clippings. It would have been a gold mine for the dozens of German and Dutch vessels which regularly tied up in the port.
But I was pleased to discover other resources. Among them were bound editions of a British publication called The Shipbuilder and Marine Engine-Builder, comprehensively illustrated and replete with incredibly detailed information. Over the years that followed, I purchased several used Shipbuilders for my maritime library. The first one I bought was about Mauretania; two others covered Normandie and Aquitania. They are remarkable volumes, well worth every penny spent.
Another invaluable purchase was all six volumes of Noel R.P. Bonsor’s incredible North Atlantic Seaway, illustrated with J. S. Isherwood’s ship profiles. When it first appeared, it produced a rave from Lloyd’s List: “It is not too much to describe it as a classic.” The United States Naval Institute Proceedings decided: “Obviously destined to be the standard work on the subject.” It has remained invaluable for years, packed with transatlantic shipping information available nowhere else.
I wanted to go back to the very beginning, to find out more about Samuel Cunard and how his first four ships delivered the mails and passengers first to Boston, then shortly thereafter to New York.
(The Massachusetts port had a harbor that frequently froze solid in winter. When Cunarders did not sail promptly, the company was heavily fined. Even though the city of Boston paid for creating a seven-mile channel to sea, Samuel Cunard made a bold decision that would add time to his crossings. New York was farther west and farther south but boasted a harbor that never froze. Moreover, New York was the pro forma capital of the United States, boasting not only the financial, cultural and commercial leadership of the republic but also superior connections with the Midwest. Not surprisingly, every vessel of every shipping line, whether British or continental, followed Cunard to New York.)
I also discovered that there were several organizations in Manhattan that would help me admirably. There was not only the Steamship Historical Society and the World Ship Society but, even more valuable, a host of ocean liner enthusiasts in all five boroughs. Unquestionably king of them all was Walter Lord, the man who, in 1955, had penned “A Night to Remember,” his immortal classic about White Star Line’s Titanic.
I cannot remember how I first met Walter but it was a fortuitous encounter for both of us. He lived in a sunny, book-filled apartment on East 68th Street, just east of Park Avenue, filled with Titanic documentation: framed front pages, posters and paintings. He wrote his books with a pencil on legal-sized yellow pads; the cardboard backs of completed pads were religiously saved. To my mind, they were useless for mailing things because they bent so easily; but Walter kept dozens of them stacked in a cupboard nevertheless.
His kitchen was up a flight of two steps and his desk sat atop that raised area overlooking the living room. He was delighted to have me use his library but had one iron-clad rule: books could never be removed from the apartment. Years earlier, his mother had borrowed a rare volume about the Krassin, a famous Russian icebreaker, and then mislaid it; he never forgave her.
(Krassin had an interesting history: she was built in England on the River Tyne. She was a remarkable vessel, with two funnels, three propellers, 327 feet (99.8 meters) overall with a beam of 70 feet (21.6 meters). Her original name had been Sviatagor, but in 1928 she was rechristened Krassin, named after the recently deceased People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade, L. B. Krassin. She served as an excellent icebreaker and was famously involved with rescuing survivors of the airship Italia from a northern corner of Spitzbergen after seven weeks of freezing isolation. Krassin also searched for the downed plane of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who lost his life in the same search.)
Walter and I became good friends. About once a month, we lunched together at a restaurant near his apartment. Every topic of those luncheon conversations was, consistently, Titanic. I can remember many of those meals and I shall never forget one when Walter suggested, almost whimsically, that if there were ever a magic time machine or some way to revisit the past, he would ignore Titanic and opt for Californian instead. He told me he would go to the chart room, drag her master, Captain Stanley Lord, off the sofa by his booted heels, march him to the bridge and make him bring his ship alongside stricken Titanic. I recall his exact words: “Hundreds of lives, perhaps more than a thousand, might have been saved.” But as it was, Californian remained ‘the ship that stood still,’ the title that his British colleague Leslie Reade adopted for his book about Californian’s failure to come to Titanic’s aid.
(Another very different moment of Walter’s Titanic research involved First Class cabin C-51. Its occupant was 19-year-old British passenger Margaret Graham, traveling with her mother and a governess named Miss Shutes. Margaret had ordered a chicken sandwich from her cabin steward. They were a White Star Line specialty, made in the pantry on fresh white bread, with thinly sliced white meat, butter, mayonnaise, salt and pepper; the crusts were always removed. I ate many of them aboard White Star tonnage and they were always delicious.
Miss Shutes asked a passing officer if there was any danger. He replied that there was not, but moments later she heard him confide to a colleague: “We can keep the water out for a while.” Miss Shutes recalled that Margaret was fearsomely upset by that alarming comment: the chicken sandwich in her hand shook so badly that it literally fell to pieces. This was Walter’s forte in his remarkable book, juxtaposing minuscule but cogent passenger dramas against his larger canvas of an epic shipboard tragedy. Incidentally, Margaret, her mother and Miss Shutes all survived in a lifeboat.)
My completed manuscript was enormous, standing about six inches tall. I summoned up the courage to ask Walter if he might consider writing a foreword for it. He consented to read the manuscript, and I was elated when he told me, several weeks later, that he had enjoyed it very much and would provide the requested foreword. Markel and I were both thrilled.
When his foreword finally arrived, two pages long, it surpassed every expectation. Herewith, two cherished extracts:
“On the Atlantic liner the stewards’ jackets were starched to the end, and all the memories are pleasant: the creaking woodwork…the noon whistle…the morning bouillon…the hum of the rigging… ‘Boots’…the clack of shuffleboard discs on the boat deck. Of course, there were less pleasing moments–cramped cabins in tourist, an occasional lost appetite–but these details are magically erased by the euphoria of something so generally good, clean and happy.”
Towards the end of his foreword, Walter refers to other books on the subject:
“But none of them recaptures the feeling of going by sea as this book does. John Maxtone-Graham has a superb instinct for not only the sights but the sounds and smell of ocean travel…This is an extremely personal book—Mr. Maxtone-Graham has his own opinions, make no mistake about that–but there is not a dull moment in it…Enough. The whistle is blowing; the stewards are calling “All visitors ashore”; and the sailing hour is at hand. Relax, enjoy the trip, and discover, or rediscover, the bracing delights of ‘The Only Way to Cross.’”
I was overwhelmed and moved by Walter’s enthusiasm. And what made it all the more remarkable was that every December as Christmas approached, my book was prominently displayed in the front window of Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue. In fact, Walter was somewhat mystified that “The Only Way to Cross” was featured annually while “A Night to Remember” sometimes was not. We soon discovered that the man charged with organizing that Christmas window was entranced by my book and hence always gave it preferential treatment.
I cannot resist telling the tale of Walter’s first appearance in Brentano’s on the day “A Night to Remember” first went on sale. Like all authors, Walter could not wait, prowling the shop amongst those stacks of his new book. But it was still early and there were, sadly, almost no patrons. But he finally did see one man engrossed in “A Night to Remember.” Like all budding authors, he could not resist inquiring gently of the man: “Are you interested in ocean liners?”
In an instant, the man snapped the volume shut, replaced it on the table and said to Walter in an irritated voice:
“As a matter fact, the author is a close personal friend of mine and is going to send me an autographed copy!” And with that, he stormed out of Brentano’s. One thing both Walter and I learned is that anyone browsing through a book is at a crucial tipping point, wondering whether or not to buy; interruptions of any kind tend to disrupt a positive decision.
Markel got his chapter by Christmas time and was very pleased with it. Mauretania was one of two vessels built by Cunard with a Parliamentary subsidy that had been voted after two German companies built record-breaking steamers at Stettin. North German Lloyd launched Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in 1898. Then Hamburg Amerika Line’s Deutschland of 1900, also from Stettin, surpassed the North German Lloyd vessel. Both had co-opted the Blue Ribband from Lucania and Campania. It was scarcely surprising that Parliament voted a subsidy to finance construction of two new Cunarders with the aim of recapturing the Blue Ribband for Great Britain.
In England that autumn, I spent a lot of time at London’s Science Museum to inspect history’s first marine steam turbine. It was the inspiration of that remarkable engineer, the Honourable Charles Parsons. Though Parsons did not invent the steam turbine, he was indisputably the first man to propose putting one in an Atlantic liner’s engine room. The turbine represented a remarkable advance in maritime steam power, moving on from the up/down cycle of a reciprocating engine to the extraordinarily fast rotation of a turbine impacted by steam driving its bladed wheels.
You could see it all beautifully in the Science Museum. Parsons’s casing had been cut away to expose the succession of vaned wheels that would rotate at incredible speed between the fixed blades lining the turbine’s interior, both cover and base. As the steam lost its clout, the vaned wheels’ diameters increased.
(Editor’s note: Turbinia’s turbine is on display at London’s Science Museum, and the ship herself is on display at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne. The story of Parsons’s bold, risky and ultimately very successful demonstration of Turbinia’s capabilities is told in great detail in “The Only Way to Cross.”)
I completed the Mauretania chapter on schedule by Christmas. Markel liked it as much as Walter had, and I pressed on. My next chapter was all about Olympic and Titanic. Given that Walter had already covered Titanic so splendidly, I seriously debated not dealing with the White Star tragedy at all. But I made a pivotal discovery—that writing a transatlantic history, one cannot not write about Titanic.
(Editor’s note: John is the author of “Titanic Tragedy,” published in 2011, and he also wrote the forward for, and edited, “Titanic Survivor,” the memoir of Violet Jessop, who survived the sinking of the Titanic along with other ocean-liner disasters. The story of his meeting and friendship with Jessop is told in great detail in his Titanic lecture, which can be viewed via the video section of this website.)
After Titanic, I wrote on, covering the first World War and its effect on the transatlantic liners. By January of 1917, U-boat losses on the North Atlantic were so disastrous that maritime painter Norman Wilkinson devised a scheme of disguise which he christened “dazzle painting.” Ocean liners’ superstructure, hull, funnels and even masts were covered with arbitrary, jarring designs in black and white. Another option was to paint on the side of a liner the silhouette of a destroyer. One can never be certain how well, if at all, dazzle painting or those silhouettes worked, but they did provide a measure of comfort to thousands of British Empire troops and, subsequently, thousands more American doughboys crossing a hostile Atlantic without a seat in a lifeboat.
I went on to deal with the postwar return to civilian crossings and the liners’ conversion from coal to oil. Perhaps the most significant event in the popularization of transatlantic steamship travel was Congress’s Dillingham Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, an early isolationist gesture that severely curtailed the westbound flow of immigrants. Companies with huge ocean liners designed to attract immigrants were caught short. So they starting beating the bushes on the other side of the Atlantic, offering cheap eastbound passage to Americans in what they called “Tourist Third Cabin.”
It was a huge success, convincing thousands of Americans who couldn’t have afforded first-class berths to visit Europe by the newly created class that some dubbed “White Collar Steerage.” A further incentive toward European travel in the 1920’s was of course Prohibition. Many Americans, delighted to be once again able to buy and consume alcohol, overindulged on their eastbound journey, collapsing in ships’ bars and having to be literally carried back to their cabins.
In the 1930s, Prohibition ended, but the American public had caught the transatlantic bug, and larger ships were launched. First were German twins Bremen and Europa. They were followed by French Line’s Normandie, the most handsome vessel ever built, with huge public rooms, striking interiors and splendid decor. The British meanwhile fabricated their two Queens, Mary and, later, Elizabeth.
(Editor’s note: the Normandie was one of John’s favorite ships, her streamlined art deco profile unmatched by any other. He wrote and lectured at great length about the ship, and her tragic end in New York Harbor, when a fire broke out during her conversion to a troop transport. In the course of his research, he was able to track down, and buy, the wheel of the Normandie, from a commercial diver living in New Jersey, who had removed it from the ship during the salvage operation. John had one half of the wheel restored to its original condition, and the other half left charred, to show the damage wrought by the terrible fire. When “The Only Way to Cross” was published in 1972, at the publication party on board SS France, he presented the wheel as a gift to the South Street Seaport Museum.)
In a chapter near the end entitled “Columbia, the Gem,” I discussed William Francis Gibbs’s incredible vessel, S.S. United States. In July of 1952, she swept the seas forever, knocking ten hours off Queen Mary’s record time.
I finished the book, but it still lacked a cover. I favored a splendid French maritime artist named Albert Brenet. Brenet had grown up in Le Havre and served as crewman on one of the last sailing vessels to cross the Atlantic. As a painter who traveled all over the world, he was encouraged by a fellow artist to create gouaches that he could finish up after returning to his Parisian studio. He created dozens of haunting canvasses of wooden sailing vessels and steel steamships, liners as well as warships, and also a plethora of locomotives. I always thought that one of Brenet’s most haunting canvases was a roundhouse filled with an assemblage of beautifully reproduced steam engines.
When I was in Paris, I called on him. My hope, which I had suggested to him in a preliminary letter, was to feature on the cover of “The Only Way to Cross” an ocean liner that was, in effect, a composite, her bow, hull and superstructure made up of recognizable elements from several famous contemporary vessels.
When we met in person, he did not embrace my idea. “People who admire my work,” he suggested tactfully, “would not approve of that kind of thing.” He volunteered instead to create a cover painting of Mauretania about to depart Cunard’s New York pier. He still had notes of his sight of the vessel when she first called at Cherbourg and said he would be happy to recreate it. I responded that I would be delighted, and we agreed on a purchase price of $200 for not only the publication rights for the cover, but for the original painting as well.
It still hangs on my drawing room wall in New York, a superbly evocative image. There is Mauretania’s quartet of black-topped, orange funnels, the whistle on the forward one spouting steam, her on-deck ventilators ranged below, a berthing officer alone on the bow, a crowd of passengers waving from the forward loop of the Promenade Deck, and below them her sheer black hull, fringed along the bottom by the waving hankies and hands of spectators and visitors on the pier. The sub-title, nested between Walter’s and my name, read: “The golden era of the great Atlantic express liners from the Mauretania to the France and the Queen Elizabeth 2.”
The only change that Macmillan requested was that a New York policeman who stood amongst the crowd of pier spectators be removed from the spine; potential buyers, they felt, might think it a police thriller. So the designer extended the wraparound end of the painting, sliding the image around to the back of the jacket. (When Barnes & Noble republished the book after Macmillan let it go, that policeman had somehow migrated back onto the spine!)
Albert Brenet lived to the age of one hundred, France’s most distinguished and beloved maritime artist. He had always painted standing up, so when he got older and unsteady on his feet, he stopped painting; sitting down to paint was not an option he entertained.
That back side of the jacket incorporated several flattering press comments as well. One, which arrived completely unsolicited, came from Anthony Burgess: “Wholly delightful and poignant…John Maxtone-Graham is to be congratulated on a marvelous and moving job. Beautifully written and altogether shipshape.” The Saturday Review offered: “Handsomely got up and splendidly evocative.”
Said The New Yorker: “The author recalls both frivolity and disaster and makes both vivid because his book is not so much nostalgia as truth-telling.” Gilbert Highet raved: “A beautifully enjoyable book, packed with unexpected and little-known facts and written with verve and charm.” And Helen Hayes, a dear friend from my stage managing days, said simply and fervently: “I devoured the book.”
One man whom I thought would be a natural was the famous British radio commentator Alistair Cooke. His weekly program was re-broadcast by the BBC in the U.S. every Sunday evening; he also introduced episodes of Masterpiece Theater. I asked Macmillan’s publicity department to send him a copy, requesting a blurb. There was no reaction. I had them send another but still, nothing but silence.
One day shortly thereafter, I was waiting to cross Third Avenue at East 68th Steet. The light was red, and a small crowd gathered waiting for it to change. I suddenly realized that waiting right beside me was Alistair Cooke in the flesh. I turned and asked him if he had enjoyed “The Only Way to Cross.” Just then, the light changed and we all started to cross. Cooke turned to me and exclaimed quickly: “I loved it!” Then he was off, gone like a flash. I was always strongly tempted to put his verdict in quotes on the back of subsequent editions but never did.
One of the nicest and most useful quotations came from someone whose name I cannot recall, who described my book as “the bible of the ship buffs.” “The Only Way to Cross” was published in October 1972, priced at $10 a copy. I am not sure of the first print run but supplies of books were quickly exhausted; I asked Markel if there could be another printed before Christmas passed us by. But apparently, supplies of the requisite paper were not yet in-house, so a second printing had to wait until late January.
My sister-in-law Judy Kanzler, who lived in Grosse Pointe Farms, ordered a hundred copies as Christmas presents. I told her I would sign them all and did so, incorporating just above my signature a phrase that has remained in the dedication of every maritime book I sign: “Bons Voyages, always!”
That same fall, coming home from a family vacation in Europe aboard France, I delivered my first shipboard lecture. I called on Commissaire Principale Hermel and asked him, since I had a lot of slides with me, if his passengers might enjoy a lecture about ocean liners. He responded with that famous but irritating French gesture, a shrug. The lecture proved a huge success, and the pattern of lecturing and writing aboard ship became my fixed routine.
(Editor’s note: For the last 40 years of his life, John made his living by writing books, and by lecturing, mostly aboard ships, but also at landbound institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the Harvard Club, and the New York Yacht Club. He lectured mostly about ships, but also about polar exploration, the British royal family, the Empire State building, and other topics. On ocean liner crossings, there are nothing but sea days, whereas today’s more common cruises are periodically interrupted by port days; he generally gave a lecture every sea day, and he preferred sea days to port days. He never circled the world on a single ship in one go, but he did take the long trans-Pacific leg of many world cruises, with many sequential sea days and opportunities to lecture. At the end of every lecture, John and his wife Mary, seated at a table near the exit of the auditorium, would take orders for signed copies of his books. Then, back home in New York he would package up the books, which he had bought at wholesale from the publisher, inscribe them, wrap them in brown paper, walk to the post office and mail them to the customer.)
Inevitably, the question arose of my next book. What should follow “the bible of the ship buffs?” It was in fact a family tragedy that pointed me to my next book. In 1963, my older brother Peter, who was a coffee planter out in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, had drowned. I decided to write a book about Peter’s life, called “Dark Brown is the River.” In an Author’s Note on the first page, I wrote:
“The protagonist is Peter, my brother, and the episodes of his life are rooted in fact… ‘Dark Brown is the River’ is a hybrid, quasi-novel because of its sometimes authenticity, yet quasi-biography since so much has been fleshed out. I have striven for honesty, neither whitewash nor the pointed finger. Out of extraordinary circumstances emerges, I hope, a remarkable human being. Were he able to read these pages, I think Peter would approve.”
(Editor’s note: “Dark Brown is the River” is taken from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, “Where Go the Boats.”)
I had flown to New Guinea from New York upon learning of Peter’s death from my father in Scotland, who had received a telegram at Cultoquhey, my family’s house in the Scottish highlands. (In the book, the first news of Peter’s death came in a cable that arrived at “Ardnavaric,” my substitute name for Cultoquhey. I changed every name throughout the book—Maxtone-Graham became Craig-Robertson, Jamie became Jock, my wife Katrina was Françoise, my father Duncan, my mother Margaret, his older brother, the laird, Torquil, and my twin Andrew. Our Yorkshire school became “Glenauld” instead of Sedbergh. Miles Barne became Hugh Roe, Peter’s firstborn son Mungo became Christian and his younger sister, born after he died, Susan. The cable had been sent by Tom Ryan, my substitute name for Peter’s closest friends in the Wahgi Valley, Bill and Anne Stokes.)
Peter had had two New Guinean wives, and several children. Among other things, my task in New Guinea was to sort out who would raise his children. My first choice, the Stokeses, was vetoed in no uncertain terms by the local Anglican priest, who didn’t want them raised by Roman Catholics. We argued over the matter for several days; I pointed out that Peter had never cared a thing about religion. But digging in his heels, the padre insisted that, churchgoing or no, Peter was still a Protestant; he could not be dissuaded.
In New Guinea, I learned more about the accident that had killed Peter. He had designed and built a small plywood skiff. One rainy morning, he decided that he and a visiting European friend would take it downriver and go hunting. They loaded guns and gear into the skiff and took with them Peter’s son Mungo, then aged seven.
They set off down the raging Wahgi River and, predictably, the overloaded boat foundered. Peter struggled ashore with Mungo and managed to deposit him safely on the bank. Then, attempting to go back to the skiff to retrieve his glasses, he toppled over and drowned in that raging torrent. His body was found far downriver the following day. (I saw the Wahgi River during the dry season when I was in the Highlands and it was no more than a placid trickle only inches deep.)
(Editor’s note: it may have been a shotgun, and not glasses, that Peter was trying to retrieve when he drowned. There are different versions of this story.)
The book was published in America by Macmillan. The endpapers were made up from Peter’s original map of Papua New Guinea, complete with sketches and drawings. One amusing touch was a bare-breasted mermaid with a native hairdo. He signed the map with a banner inscribed ‘Peter Pinxit.’
Flattering notices appeared. From The Detroit Sunday News: “…a fascinating book about a life that was written on the black keys.” The Washington Star’s critic wrote: “The first thing to be said about John Maxtone-Graham is that he writes with superlative command, and respect for the language…Splendid writer, moving book.” From Pawling, the writer Lowell Thomas wrote: “It is superb—one of the most enthralling novels I have ever read…I am in awe of what you did in the way of research. It is a great tale and I was overwhelmed…”
Publisher’s Weekly said: “This intriguing tale reveals perhaps more than one wants to know about the dwindling English raj in the tea/coffee plantation society of New Guinea. Peter Craig-Robertson, outrageous hero, restless, discontented dreamer alive to beauty, carves out a toehold on life, far from his upper-class Anglo-American family… Colorful, with the ring of authenticity as a tribute to a lost brother, it could make a fine movie.” There were other reviewers who also hoped for Hollywood interest. Stanton Peckham of The Denver Post was without question the most complimentary: “…very funny, sometimes wistful, even sad, but always delightful entertainment…The exotic settings, the mirth-provoking episodes and, above all, the marvelously modern rebellious character of Peter Craig-Robertson (or Peter Maxtone-Graham) make ‘Dark Brown is the River’ extraordinarily good reading…best novel of the year.”
My British Aunt Rachel praised the book, but had some notes for me in advance of a British edition: Don’t refer to Cultoquhey as a “small holding;” that expression means small working farm. Second, the house was not Victorian but Regency. Third, the word batman is not used in any Guards regiments; they are called instead servants or soldier servants. And the name I had chosen for Cultoquhey—Ardnavaric—should end “ich.”
My Aunt Oz wrote from Edinburgh: “I was delighted to get ‘The Book’…thank you very much. I must congratulate you on having made a fascinating story and you have done a big deal for Peter. I feel his life was one enormous ‘If Only’. I wish I had known him better, but he was not easy with the older generation, was he?”
A British publisher appeared, Robert Hale Limited, and circulated the volume throughout Great Britain and much of the Commonwealth. Once again, I was delighted with the reviews, some of which I will include here:
The Manchester Evening News described it as “authentic colonial stuff, this Peter Craig-Robertson is a classic drifter from the world of Somerset Maugham.” The Evening Echo Southend queried: “When is a novel not a novel? Truman Capote gave us one answer with his gothic recreation of a murder. Now Mr. Maxtone-Graham offers us another, with this quasi-novel, quasi-biography (his words) in ‘Dark Brown is the River.’ It’s all about his brother Peter, who becomes Peter Craig-Robertson for the sake of the story, and the incidents actually happened. Peter was obviously the black sheep of the family.” The Yorkshire Post described the book briefly as a “Panoramic tale of the puzzle that was an expatriate drifter who built a life in New Guinea at odds with his home conventions. Another search for identity, maybe; but through love, adventure and despair this seems real.”
Harper’s Bookletter commented: “This is an intriguing portrait—in the tradition of Maugham, Conrad or Greene—of an ordinary man living in extraordinary circumstances, a man who having lost a home early, can never quite belong anywhere…Peter, eccentric without trying, gains our sympathy as we become aware of a restlessness and loneliness that he could never identify. His death was as much an accident as was his life.”
Finally, a very nice letter I received about the book came from K.V. Ludvigsen in New Jersey; he had been a planter in Ceylon himself. “’Dark Brown is the River’ captivated my attention more than a book has done for many moons. I just loved it! It mirrored my life as a planter in Ceylon, especially the early days, and your research was impeccable as all the expressions relevant to planting were so accurate.”
After “Dark Brown,” I returned to writing about ships. My next book was about cruise ships, published by Macmillan, for which Walter Lord dreamed up for me a perfect title: “Liners to the Sun.” He was also kind enough to give it a little rave that appeared at the head of the flap copy: “The best news for ocean liner enthusiasts in thirteen years—a new book by John Maxtone-Graham.” On the back of the jacket, he expanded his praise: “The master is in top form. This time he covers the cruise ships, giving us the same engrossing blend of pertinent facts, charming trivia, and solid social history that made ‘The Only Way to Cross’ such a joy to read.”
Film critic Roger Ebert, often a fellow lecturer aboard Queen Elizabeth 2, added his own tribute: “A passionate, nostalgic salute to ‘the largest things on earth that move’ and a cheerful affirmation that the era of the great liners may not be quite at an end after all.”
Donald Westlake, the mystery writer, also penned a flattering blurb: “John Maxtone-Graham is an irreplaceably charming companion, whether aboard ship or, via this book, in my easy chair. ‘The Only Way to Cross’ made me eager to read ‘Liners to the Sun,’ and now ‘Liners to the Sun’ is sending me back to re-read the first volume again.”
Author Monica Dickens wrote in her distinctive voice: “Here it is, every last steel plate and bingo chip. Why do cruise passengers hate the hostess, what does your cabin steward do after hours, and who took all the hangers? Those who cruise will read it. Those who don’t, must—to see what they’re missing.”
It proved a long book and one that consumed several years of research and writing before it was published in 1985. I dwelt not only on the difference between crossing and cruising, but also on a new means of construction. Riveting was out, and welding was in, so I learned a great deal about the intricacies of welding. My second wife Mary and I embarked on a summer tour of European shipyards to see cruise ships under construction. First call was in Finland’s capital of Helsinki, where Song of America was being built. She was Royal Caribbean’s fourth hull, and an advance on their smaller original trio; we could see her superstructure from our hotel room window.
Welded hulls tended to be flat, curved only at bow and stern. And those curves, I was pleased to find, were still produced by men working with triple-rollered steel presses, two rollers up and one down. Flat steel sheets were passed back and forth between them, cumulatively imparted with exactly the right curves. Fortuitously, we were still in Helsinki when the penultimate bow section, its interior machinery already in place, arrived in the Building Hall and was attached to the hull. I also took the opportunity to walk the vessel’s length beneath the hull.
Then we pressed on to Alborg, in the south of France, where Tropicale, Carnival’s first purpose-built vessel, was under construction. The company’s initial trio of vessels had all been converted liners; now Carnival, just like Royal Caribbean, was fabricating their fourth vessel, a cruise ship built from scratch. She boasted the company’s first winged funnel, complete with a forward opening that insured swifter smoke evacuation through its winged vents.
Cruise ships differ from crossing vessels in one principal way: there are no separate classes; all passengers can go anywhere on board they wish. Mary and I sailed frequently aboard Holland America Line’s fifth Rotterdam, and the vessel appeared on Liners to the Sun’s cover, a canvas by an amateur artist friend called John Zupan, whose work I liked. He painted a bow view of the vessel tied up in Rio de Janeiro alongside the pier of the Touring Club do Brazil.
After “Liners to the Sun” came a non-ship book, which I titled “Safe Return Doubtful,” about the heroic age of polar exploration. My title came from a 1907 advertisement in London’s Morning Post, seeking volunteer crew for a polar expedition:
MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. LOW WAGES, BITTER COLD. LONG HOURS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS. SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN THE EVENT OF SUCCESS.
When the Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in England saw the quotation, he asked if I had ever seen the original in print. When I admitted I had not, he advised me that the piece, hailed by many as a masterpiece of “deadly frankness,” had in fact never been published in a newspaper, but rather had just been dreamed up by someone. But the conditions it implied and the spirit it conveyed were so evocative that I extracted my title from it regardless.
I signed with a different publisher, Viking, where my new editor was Alan Williams. One of his editing colleagues was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to whom I was dutifully introduced.
I did a great deal of overseas research in both the United Kingdom and Oslo. I referred earlier to “Safe Return Doubtful” as a non-ship book; actually, approaches to both poles involved ships of all kinds. Most were sailing vessels, although Peary’s backers finally built him a steamer, called the Roosevelt.
(Editor’s note: John wrote many books after “Safe Return Doubtful,” most of which are listed elsewhere on this website, with links to where to buy them. For some reason, his memoir did not include the writing of these books. It is likely that he simply ran out of time. His writing memoir concludes below with “Titanic Tragedy;” after that, his final book was “S.S. United States.”)
Another book, “Titanic Tragedy,” appeared in 2012, marking the centenary of Titanic’s loss, one of 90 books from both Atlantic shores marking that grim anniversary. I was anxious that it remain a book for reading, rather than for examining photographs. It contained only one illustration, an endpaper shot including both Olympic and Titanic at Harland & Wolffe. It was dedicated to the late Walter Lord, both mentor and dear friend.
In it, I dwelt on the work of Titanic’s two great M’s—Samuel Morse and Guglielmo Marconi. Morse invented his famous code, initially for railways, and Marconi was able to have ships transmit it without wires, hence inventing wireless. I also discussed at length the fleets of other liners on the Atlantic that forbidding night and the messages they exchanged.
I went on to discuss the Ocean Dock, the great Southampton terminus built especially for the White Star giants. And then the 7-week coal strike that had emptied the coal pipeline. Coal had to be brought from America and France, as well as pirated from five vessels moored in the port.
(Editor’s note: this is where John’s memoir of his writing ends.)