Dec
19
SS Rio & Soseki Natsume
Filed Under Feuilletons |
Hooray. Now that the semester is finally over, I can drink in the morning hours. As true as that may be, I won’t (at least for today). Instead, I’d like to recommend a book: Soseki Natsume’s Spring Miscellany and London Essays, which is Soseki’s recollection of his stay in London, where he studied with W. J. Craig, a noted Shakespeare scholar who was the editor of the Arden Shakespeare. Soseki Natsume is best known in this country by his novel I Am a Cat of which narrator is - drum roll, please - a cat (see my post here). He had stayed in England between 1900 and 1902, and was not very happy during the course of his stay. The short pieces which are collected in Spring Miscellany were originally serialized in 1909 in the Asahi Newspaper. They are called shohin (little items), the Japanese counterpart of the European feuilletons. Particularly delightful is Soseki’s meditation on Thomas Carlyle written after his visit to the Carlyle Museum on Cheyne Row, Carlyle’s home in London. “It was here,” Soseki writes, “that Carlyle lived in austerity, like Cromwell, like the Emperor Frederick, in this house resembling a factory chimney, without even receiving the annual income offered him by Disraeli for the publication of his writings in which both Cromwell and the Emperor Frederick were celebrated.” Soseki wanders through Carlyle’s house, lightly pensive, comparing Carlyle to Schopenhauer, digressing as he walks. Not many writers can balance irony and sincerity as deftly as Soseki can, and his light-footed poise is evident even in these slight shohin pieces. (If you are in NYC, you can pick up a remainder copy of Spring Miscellany for two bucks at the Labyrinth Bookstore on 112th & Broadway.)
Tucked near the end of the book is Soseki’s letter to his wife, Kyo, on March 8, 1901. In the letter, Soseki is unnerved because he has been expecting a letter from her, especially as he knows that his wife must have delivered their baby. He asks Kyo if the baby is a boy or a girl (Tsune, his daughter, was born on January 26, 1901.) “SS Rio de Janeiro,” writes Soseki, “which set sail from Yokohama on February 2nd, has been wrecked off San Francisco, and I am very worried as to whether there was mail for me on that very boat.”
Inexplicably, when I read this letter about the wreck of SS Rio de Janeiro, I became intrigued. Probably for no other profound reason (which is often the case with me) than a coincidental tangent: in my previous post, I’d quoted a stanza from Brodsky’s “Rio Samba.” Apparently, on February 22, 1901, SS Rio couldn’t navigate through the dense coastal fog of San Francisco, and as the steamer neared the Golden Gate Bridge, she hit the jagged rocks near Fort Point and sank. It seems that even though the visibility was zero, the captain disregarded others’ warnings and decided to approach the harbor. 129 people died, and about 80 survived. The ship was filled with immigrants. “Chinamen,” said an eyewitness in the NY Times article, “were even more panic-stricken than the white women… [rushing] about the deck howling frantically.”
The same article mentions a certain Third Officer Holland, who, along with a man named J. K. Carpenter, was in a rescue boat. But the hull of the SS Rio crashed into the boat, splitting it in two. The report states that J. K. Carpenter had swum away and eventually rescued, but “the fate of Holland is not known, but he is supposed to have perished.” It seems that indeed Holland had been supposed as one of the deceased, until he surfaced, two days later, unharmed. Nobody knows how he had come to be numbered among the dead; he was pulled down by the suction, but took hold of a life preserver and swam to the surface, where he was rescued by an Italian fisherman. (I keep thinking about Dashiell Hammett’s Flitcraft in The Maltese Falcon.)
About nine months after the wreck, a diver named Sorenson found the sunken ship about a half mile from Fort Point. On board, it was reported, were $65,000 in general cargo and $400,000 in raw silk (I am going to resist making a Sebald parallel here, with the silk in RoS and Austerlitz - maybe another post.) Sorenson, according to the article, was entitled to 70% of everything recovered from the wreck. I wonder how much of that booty he actually ended up keeping, how much of that was recovered. There was even speculation that vast quantities of gold and silver were on board - $3 million worth - the rumors of which were never substantiated. Anyway, in 1990, the wreck of SS Rio was declared a possession of the State of California and became listed in the National Register as nationally significant.
I suppose Kyo’s letter to her husband was in fact among the mail which sank with SS Rio. If so, it’s most likely that the letter has since been long dissolved in the water, forever irretrievable. But maybe - who knows - the letter is preserved still, kept inside some black chest impermeable to water and time, sealed and locked away for all eternity. Who the hell can ever know of such things By the way, in the same letter to Kyo expressing his anxiety about his mail vanishing with the wreck of SS Rio, Soseki writes with pure delight and amazement of his experience attending a Christmas pantomime staged in a theatre on Drury Lane. He tells his wife of the wondrous stage effects, especially during a scene in which fifty girls dance in a submarine palace, their hair and costumes lit up, sparkling with thousand little red bulbs. “Just think!” Soseki writes to his beloved wife -
You have only just been looking at a palace beneath the ocean, and already it is covered over by the wonderful flower garden which succeeds it, and after this it is the sun shining on the sea, while finally we find blue-tinged mountains appearing and then turning into a snow-clad landscape.
(Bottom Image by Anthony Goicolea)
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