Name: Williwaw
ISBN: 9780910457347

Andrew Hoyem

Gore Vidal

A boat of the Army Transportation Corps fights through the fierce wind of the Williwaw, carrying two officers and a chaplain with its crew. Human nature and the elements move the men through their uncertain destiny.

Williwaw

Tim Pendry

Written when he was only 19 and published within a couple of years in 1946, this relatively short and terse novel shows a young man with exceptional talent, a remarkable first novel without any of the literary pretensions that can marr the first efforts of young men with writerly ambitions. At the time of writing, Vidal was an enlisted man who had served in the Aleutian islands as a first mate on a transport ship much along the lines of the novel before getting the chance to write it all down in a camp on the Gulf of Mexico while waiting for discharge. Interestingly, he did not actually experience a williwaw but he heard others' experiences of them. The storm in the novel crystallised from the experience of another major storm on land in the Gulf. Like all good writing, one has to remind oneself that it is fiction. The story is not complex - a bunch of men deracinated by war take a journey by a small transport ship along the Aleutians with a violent and unexpected storm and a tragic incident along the way. There is no hysteria, just truth-telling about men and manliness in the face of fear. Vidal writes well in many ways - as a describer of the environment, of men in close claustrophobic relationship to one another, of human vanity, of authority's fear of a loss of authority and of the way we hide our instincts under peer and superior's pressure alike. It is also interesting as a story of men against the environment set in a wartime system of bases and travel between bases with not a Jap in sight. The ship's gun has been stored in the hold because it is no longer needed. The real threat lies in the sea, the wind, failed machinery and accident. Writers like to write about war as violence and confrontation. Vidal was in the right place and at the right time to write about war as a logistical system well away from the enemy and still show it to be fraught with danger and psychological tension. I would be tempted to explore the cast of characters who are all finely drawn without obvious caricature but I think that might ruin the book for the reader who is best left to make up their own minds about the human dynamic that Vidal explores. What we have to remember though is that these men are mostly young, far from home, with disrupted lives, thrown together to cope without any meaningful female company and with the fear of early extinction, reliant on a generalised military order and discipline for structure. They were not put together by a human resources department looking for a compatible team but were thrown together as a team by luck and bureaucracy. The young captain has considerable experience of the sea but his two mates did not and have learned on the job. A competition for rare sexual favour from a rare girl in a port between a naive youngster and a cynical old engineer drives the story from below but equal weight is given to the themes of sailors against a harsh sea and of the vulnerability of passengers who dare not show their fears. The telling of the storm that nearly wrecks the ship (the 'williwaw' of the story) reeks of authenticity regardless of the fiction. I have an edge on this because I listened to my father speak of similar storms (and even paint one) as a former merchant marine himself. But Vidal never overplays his hand. The storm is central but it is played as incident and not as symbol or for the audience. Contact with it is based on an understandable misjudgement, it comes on fast and furious, it almost wrecks and it is gone but we experience just how close death was. And this is one of the triumphs of the book - Vidal deals with death and the prospect of death exactly as it should be dealt with in such circumstances. It is a near-perpetual risk at sea and in war inducing anxiety. It is faced not by choice but by necessity. Once passed, it is dealt with, forgotten. The dead are dead. There is no point in complicating things by going over what happened. No one wanted it to happen and if it could have been avoided, every effort would have been made to do so. It is a mentality without room for trauma and victims. Its pragmatism is alien to us now. The book is nearly faultless as narrative and style. Vidal demonstrated an understanding of human psychology beyond his years. And it stands as an indirect historical record of a peculiar point when America was still at war yet leaving behind a logistical system yet to be dismantled. Of course, because of the Cold War, it was not dismantled but extended. Vidal did not know this in 1946 and one wonders in retrospect how much of his political radicalism owed to that disappointment but we will have to read later books of his to find out.

Williwaw

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