Life of a Vanishing Breed
MELLOW, JAMES R.
Life of a Vanishing Breed The Finest Kind: The Fishermen of Gloucester By Kim Bartlett Norton. 251 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by James R. Mellow Author, "Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein &...
...Even with these advances, the dwindling fleet of family-owned and -operated ships is in trouble...
...But Bartlett does remind one of the thoroughly local and occupational code of the Gloucester fishermen?words like "gurry," "lumper" and "kink...
...They've known starvation...
...With a remarkable eye for detail and an equally sensitive ear for dialogue, Bartlett covers the new breed of Italian fishermen—both the crewmen of the inshore fleet that makes day trips, and the offshore draggers that may stay out for two weeks, pursuing their catches off the Grand Banks and elsewhere...
...Reviewed by James R. Mellow Author, "Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company" It is difficult to think of a recent nonfiction book as painstakingly honest as this one—or of one that seems so interminably long...
...Readers who are looking for local color, the banal scenario of the usual film documentary, with a ship plowing the "wine-dark" seas toward the sunset, will be disappointed...
...Those tight ethnic enclaves have now all but disappeared...
...the hold-out money or "shack" that is kept secret from wives and from agents of the Internal Revenue Service...
...now it is the insurance companies...
...The language is as bullying and blowharding as I remember it from working on the State Fish Pier a good many years ago, although it is perhaps a bit too persistently colorful...
...They know what it's like to have nothing on the table...
...Of the latter (referred to in local terminology as "greasers"), one of Bartlett's native fishermen says: "These guys fish like our fathers did—hard...
...The Finest Kind has the ring of authenticity...
...The two qualities go hand in hand, unfortunately, in the genre Kim Bartlett has chosen—a prose documentary that spells out in patient detail the life of a vanishing hard-working breed...
...We've always had full bellies...
...Bartlett is descriptive with a vengeance—detailing every piece of equipment aboard ship and its operations, the routine of the crew's lives, the daily meals, the cast of the weather, and the varieties of the fish taken in the nets, from the prize cod down to the worthless dogfish...
...Despite its excessive length, The Finest Kind is a very good book...
...The Finns and Swedes preferred the back of the Cape, around Lanesville...
...The price of policies and the settlement of accident claims have become so high, many captains will hire as crewmembers only family and manageable relatives, who will be a little more reluctant to sue in case of injury or accident...
...Did the author tape these conversations, and did his fellow crewmen hype up their remarks for the occasion...
...The competition from big commercial trawlers that can take in 80,000 pounds, the influx of frozen fish from Canada, the cost of repairs and food—all have made fishing a hard and often unprofitable business for the small operator...
...Bartlett presents a very down-to-earth picture of the hard-working, hard-drinking crewmen: We hear about the heavy-handed horsing around in the local bars...
...The fathers, if they managed to fish during World War II and through the brief postwar boom when profits were high, bought expensive houses and moved out of the little national ghettos that characterized Gloucester in an earlier era...
...Before the War, the Italians all lived in "The Fort," still one of the last semiresidential holdouts against the blight of urban renewal that has turned downtown Gloucester and the har-borfront into a chaos of poorly planned and often transient commercial enterprises...
...The subtitle is somewhat misleading, for the book deals almost exclusively with the Italian-American fleet and its native-born and recent-immigrant crewmem-bers...
...Fishing is their whole life...
...The tourist sights—Dog Bar Breakwater, Halibut Point, Thacher's Light—figure merely as landmarks for laying a course or setting the nets...
...It is much to Kim Bartlett's credit that he does not sentimentalize his subject...
...In fact, his frankness about such admittedly local matters leads one to wonder whether the author will be entirely comfortable or welcome in Gloucester once the crewmen he has described so honestly read his book (a great likelihood, since the crew's reading matter on one of the trips he takes consists of The Gulag Archipelago, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Mother Earth News and the condensed novels of Reader's Digest...
...Actually, it was the grandfathers who lived, worked and died hard, like the "greasers...
...Another forbidding expense is insurance: In the old days, it was hidebound national suspicions that maintained the ghetto mentality...
...There are no pretty scenes in this book, no dramatic accounts of the sea itself—that is simply a continuous and unpredictable adversary...
...The Portuguese lived up on "The Hill," beyond Our Lady of Good Voyage Church...
...That's it...
...He writes like a man who is committed to setting down only what he has seen and heard for himself, though he makes one aware of the very real dangers—the fatal accidents, the ships lost at sea—that still occur in a hazardous profession...
...Only occasionally does he try to transcibe dialect or slurred speech?thicka fog," for example, or "goumba"—a mistake that could make a book unreadable in very short order...
...He is not interested in the past, but he does catalogue how things have changed: the spotter planes, and radar now used to sight schools of fish, the taped music that plays while the crew guts and processes the catch, the frozen-food industry that has opened up the market...
...the petty conniving and shafting that goes on between dealers and captains, captains and crewmen...
...This is an account of the hard-bitten, workaday life of fishermen, and the author has captured it with all the bluster and rawness of a Gloucester winter...
...Part of this, one suspects, is meant for the record and for authenticity...
...For us, it's a living...
...So, too, will romantics expecting to find the heroic and taciturn fisherman, setting his face against the awesome powers of nature...
...These guys are always hungry...
...Yet even for a very willing reader who was born and brought up in Gloucester, whose relatives were fishermen and who recognizes the names and places, The Finest Kind is too long by half...
Vol. 60 • December 1977 • No. 24
