C. S. Forester and Hornblower
Beddow, Reid
BOOKS ?. S. Forester and Hornblower by REID BEDDOW T^he death of C. S. Forester on -1 April 2, at age sixty-six, leaves a void in the hearts of his admirers who compare him to Conrad in his...
...Still, it seems a pity that the legendary sea captain should overshadow other Forester novels of possibly greater quality...
...One has to be a lover of sea adventure stories really to appreciate Hor-ney...
...Hornblower's sword never becomes tarnished for Forester's admirers, notwithstanding the obviously copious quantities of salt air it must encounter...
...All his books, for all the repetition of the successful Hornblower formula, either through their carefully wrought wording, their crisply sketched characters, or their marvelous seascapes, remain delightful to read...
...He took pains to describe the numbing fear of his combatants, the horrible wounds caused by huge, ricocheting splinters in a close ship-to-ship cannonade, and the stink of gangrene...
...Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962), and, finally, The Hornblower Companion (1964...
...I wish Churchill had similarly summoned Forester...
...Not everything occurred on the bounding main...
...The thought of the great chronicler of the famous days of Nelson writing an official history of the Royal Navy's final, glorious moment on the world's stage is intoxicating...
...Then came Commodore Hornblower (1945...
...In Forester, war is not pretty...
...Such a captain "would languish ashore on half pay for life"—a frequent Hornblower dread...
...Horney fights best when heavily outnumbered...
...In Forester there is not the rich, grand structure of a Moby Dick (Hornblower is no Ahab), but the simpler yarnspinning of a seafight, like that in Beat to Quarters between His Britannic Majesty's 36-gun frigate Lydia and His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain's 50-gun ship of the line Nativi-dad, with the naval control of the Pacific at stake...
...Some were magazine serials before publication...
...So it is Hornblower who must carry the main burden of proof of Forester's accomplishment...
...According to Forester, Hornblower was the first fictional character to commit adultery in the then-staid Post...
...One is The African Queen, remembered today chiefly because James Agee wrote an admirable screenplay from it and Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn turned in memorable performances in the resulting film...
...Forester, born in 1899, was of the last generation of Englishmen educated to believe that England was the modern Athens and that the France of Napoleon or the Germany of Wilhelm II represented Sparta or Xerxes' Persia...
...Forester wove this faith into his nautical novels, and the American reader becomes charmed in spite of a respect for John Paul Jones...
...he suffers from seasickness...
...BOOKS ?. S. Forester and Hornblower by REID BEDDOW T^he death of C. S. Forester on -1 April 2, at age sixty-six, leaves a void in the hearts of his admirers who compare him to Conrad in his ability to evoke the harsh seductiveness of the sea...
...Despite his cocked hat and flowing boat cloak, Hornblower is a distinctly modern figure, full of fears and self-doubts and alienated from his fellow officers by a melancholy disposition and the burdens of command...
...It was Roosevelt who, after Pearl Harbor, summoned Samuel Eliot Morison from Harvard, commissioned him a rear admiral, and told him to write the history of the U. S. Navy at war...
...There are no fewer than eleven volumes in the Hornblower saga, and even Forester admitted that the old salt earned his keep—the eight million Hornblower books sold in the United States and Britain must have impressed even Neptune himself...
...England would never forgive the officer who lost the corpse of her greatest admiral, the victor of Trafalgar, before the representatives of Crown and Court, Commons and Lords, assembled, waiting, and in mourning on the nearby bank...
...Fortunately, his appeal is immediate...
...Therein, tucked between Tugboat Annie and Perry Mason, Hornblower would confound his archenemy Napoleon with a series of brilliant tactical moves demonstrating that Britannia, not frog eaters, ruled the waves...
...The safety of the realm, like that of the Greeks at Salamis, lay behind the wooden (or steel) walls of the fleet...
...Ship of the Line (1938...
...Yet the admirers, who included Hemingway, sometimes have difficulty in convincing literary persons of Forester's worth and the merits of his great hero, Captain Horatio Horn-blower of the Royal Navy...
...all were best sellers: Beat to Quarters (1937...
...Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) ; Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958...
...The author dangled this disturbing prospect before Horney, then relented, saved the barge, and sent him on to greater things: a knighthood, the hand of the Duke of Wellington's sister in marriage, flag rank, a peerage, the admirations of the nations, the formal thanks of Parliament—and, for a while, a French mistress...
...Horney, as the lower deck calls him, is no swashbuckler...
...Lord Hornblower (1946...
...Not all is stately ships under a cloud of sail or bands playing Hearts of Oak Are Our Ships, Jolly Tars Are Our Men...
...Prince of Wales on his way to the Atlantic Charter meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941...
...Flying Colours (1939)—these three comprise Captain Horatio Hornblower...
...Midshipman Hornblower (1950) ; Lieutenant Hornblower (1952...
...Between battles, Forester delighted in mocking Horney, and in one hilarious tale he made Captain Hornblower panic when the barge carrying Nelson's body to a state funeral began to sink in the Thames...
...Winston Churchill, in his memoirs of World War II, tells of his enjoyment in reading Captain Horatio Hornblower aboard H.M.S...
...Forester's admirers must be thankful for what he did write...
...I was persuaded early, and in the 1940s I would wait impatiently for the arrival of the Saturday Evening Post and the latest episode in Hornblow-er's exploits...
...Another is The General, a moving account of the stupidity of British military leadership in World War I, which was not popular in this country...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
