Leviathans

THE SWAY OF THE GRAND SALOON by JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN 599 pages. Delacorte. $15.

The reader wonders, as he pages with almost guilty pleasure through this grand, swaying history of the great North Atlantic steamships: can the $15 hardback leviathan survive in an age that buys its books from newsstands, reads them in an hour, and discards them like banana peels? The Sway of the Grand Saloon is huge, solid, stately, absurdly lavish, its noble dust jacket encrusted with gilt. Its whorled endpapers are the work of Niebelungian trolls who never see the sun. Its paper, far from being recycled, might be made by the supplier of Cunard table linen.

But before John Malcolm Brinnin's monstrous work is seized by chanting ecologists, the unrepentant book lover will wheel his barrow to the store and bring home a copy. One reason for doing so is that it contains not one scrap of information that is essential, or even useful, to civilization's forward lurch.

Everything that Brinnin writes about is defunct. The big liners were killed, of course, by the jet plane, a device that condensed the leisured misery of a five-day crossing into seven hours of concentrated nullity or wretchedness. Oddly, however--the same is true of the process that makes frozen orange juice--something was lost in the squeezing. Blush and call it romance.

Although Brinnin is a registered poet, he finds this quality hard to pin down. But he knows it was there, and even a reader who never saw the Mauretania or the Bremen is inclined to accept his word. One of the narrative's fascinations is that for anyone whose forebears arrived in the U.S. within the past 150 years, a bit of family history is fleshed out. Brinnin is eloquent about the horrors of steerage, and he makes even the magnificence of first class on the old sail-equipped sidewheelers sound impressively grim.

Brinnin sets it all down, from the packet Savannah, which reached England under sail in 1819 using its steam engine mostly for public relations puffery, to (and down with) the Titanic and the Lusitania, and finally down to (but not with) the excellent but irrelevant Q.E. 2. The author proves again that the sea, at least when perceived from an armchair, is morally instructive. A repeated theme is that of pride brought low. The star of the American-owned Collins Line was the Arctic, an opulent sidewheeler launched in 1850. The ship was four years old when, steaming at full speed through fog over the Grand Banks, freighted with "manhood in its strength and daring, and woman in her trust and beauty, and youth with its sunny gladness," as a preacher wrote later, the Arctic collided with a small iron-hulled French steamship and sank. Crew members commandeered all but one of the lifeboats, and most of the 233 passengers, including the owner's wife and two children, drowned. Two years later the Collins Line's Pacific steamed into an ice field and disappeared without a trace. But nothing could alter the drive for more speed. A captain of the day expressed the view that the way to deal with fog was to steam as fast as possible, thus getting "sooner out of it."

Emily Post, the book reports, eventually took note of the special circumstances raised by ocean travel. "The Worldlys always have their meals served in their own 'drawing-rooms,' and have their deck chairs placed so that no one is very near them," she wrote; however, "none but the rudest snob would sit through meal after meal without ever addressing a word to his table companions."

Brinnin's crossing sometimes seems too leisurely. But with his last paragraph, the author succeeds finally in pinning the romance of it all to the page. The Cunard Line's Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth are to be sold and turned into dockside catchpennies. But for one last time, on the Great Circle route between Liverpool and New York, they approach each other and pass in the night. A few middle-aged ship lovers on the Elizabeth think sentimental thoughts as they watch the Mary rush by, while necking teen-agers snicker. "As the darkness closes over and the long wakes are joined, the sentimentalists stand for a while watching the ocean recover its seamless inmensity. Then, one by one, like people dispersing downhill after a burial, they find their way to their cabins and close their doors."

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