‘Gentleman Overboard’ by Herbert Clyde Lewis   (1937) – 152 pages

I have often asked myself, “Is there no more to United States literature than what I have already discovered? ”Somehow it seems that the limited United States literary history is set in concrete with the same old names recurring over and over again. Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. It is rare to find anything written about any other writers. The last great United States literary figure who I discovered was Dawn Powell, and that was almost thirty years ago. Is there no one or nothing else in the United States literary past to uncover? Whereas in the British and Irish Isles, every three weeks or so a formerly neglected author will be at long last remembered, in the United States it’s nearly always the same old, same old names.

However this week I have discovered a new long-neglected author and novel from the United States. That author is Herbert Clyde Lewis, and his novel is ‘Gentleman Overboard’ which was written in 1937. It was republished recently by Boiler House Press after being out of print for 70 years.

‘Gentleman Overboard’ is the seemingly simple story of a businessman from New York falling off his ship as it sails from Hawaii to Panama, and thus he is left floating in the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean.

In the novel, Henry Preston Standish is a thirty-five year old quite successful manager at a New York brokerage firm who lives in a well-appointed apartment in Central Park West in New York City with his wife Olivia and their two small children. Adventure was missing from his life so he goes on this long cruise vacation by himself. Little did he know that he would wind up floating by himself in the Pacific Ocean with no ship in sight.

“Of all the idiotic tricks since time began, he decided rather heatedly, falling off a ship into the middle of the ocean was by far the most colossal. It was so stupid, so absolutely without reason or precedent, so out of place for a man in his position!”

It may seem an obvious story, but here is a man floating in the ocean with little hope of rescue contemplating his fate and his entire life. Meanwhile those on the ship wonder what happened to him. It becomes existential, something we can all relate to. The novel is written in clean spare affecting prose.

Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s

The author Herbert Clyde Lewis wrote three novels as a young man between 1937 and 1940, ‘Gentleman Overboard’ the first. His novels received favorable reviews but met with limited success. He and his wife then moved to Hollywood for him to work as a screenwriter, and one of his scripts, ‘It Happened on Fifth Avenue’, did receive an Academy Award nomination in 1947. However by then he had sided with those Hollywood figures who had been blacklisted for possible Communist infiltration in the film industry and faced blacklisting himself when an FBI informant identified Lewis as a member of the Communist Party. He was drinking heavily. He moved back to New York alone without his wife. He filed for bankruptcy and was found dead in his apartment at the age of 41 in 1950.

‘Gentleman Overboard’ is a lost gem of a short novel that has now been found again. It is a welcome addition to the United States literary canon.

Grade:   A