Williamson, Scott Graham A Convoy through the Dream
Downbeat post-War reflection on World War 2 in general and merchant mariner life in particular. The novel is set in 1944 aboard the fictitious Liberty ship S.S. WILLIAM BENSON and follows 3rd Wireless Officer Eric Clark – a moody and introspective ex-academic who had done a government stint in Washington, D.C. before deciding that he wanted to really experience the War – as he makes his first sea voyage across the Atlantic in convoy and through the Mediterranean. Williamson’s physical portrait of the WILLIAM BENSON is of particular interest, and indeed early shipboard passages read like a Cook’s tour of a typical Liberty ship. His portrait of actual shipboard life, however, is searing, and decidedly not the sort of prose that would have been published during the War. In one long passage Clark sourly muses about the “comradery of blind hatred” that defined the daily lives of his fellow ship’s officers:
“During these twenty-two days aboard the S.S. WILLIAM BENSON his awareness of the men with whom he lived had changed considerably. But what seemed to him more important than his changing view of each man as an individual was his changed perception of the organism of the group.
What had at first appeared to him as a closely knit body of men, inevitably unified by the factors of confinement, interdependence, and extreme danger, now appeared to be a thing wormholed by petty hatreds and spiritually unified only in-so-far as two or more individuals could share prejudices. He could not at this moment think of a single instance of friendship between any of the officers that was based on mutual approval of something. Yet there were innumerable friendships of mutual dislike ...
In this little society of fourteen men there were cliques and countercliques, fissures and cross-fissures. All the merchant marine officers were against the Armed Guard Commander because he was a navy man. ‘The Navy’s bad enough,’ they said, ‘but these gun crews are the wastebasket of the Navy. This is where they throw their misfits.” Also they said that he prowled the decks most of the night and that even when he went to bed he would never turn his light out. They implied that this was because he was a coward. Whenever he came suddenly into the saloon, the men stopped talking, gulped down their coffee, and left him alone. This drove the lieutenant into closer association with his own gun-crew boys. He even played cards with them in their mess room. This just went to prove further, the merchant officers said, the slipshod, inefficiency of the navy gun crews.
Nearly everyone was against the steward. They said that he was saving perishable foods such as fresh fruit, and that later he would just have to throw the stuff overboard; that the meals were monotonous; that he used fancy French and Italian names for ordinary chow; that he ate in his own cabin because he wanted to eat steak every day and only put it on the menu twice a week; that he was dirty; and that he was nothing but a goddam guinea.” – pp. 95-96.