"...indigestible transcendental pudding."

[anteros_lmc]

I’ve just started reading rather charming little miscellany called A Sea Chest: An Anthology of Ships and Sailormen, written by Miss C. Fox Smith in 1927. I haven't previously come across Miss Fox Smith but she appears to be the original AoS fangirl. And she certainly knows what she likes and what she doesn’t! Here’s her assessment of Marryat and Melville:

To the latter part of the period under consideration belong Marryat’s novels, which it is rather the fashion nowadays to despise. No doubt the Captain was not what we should now term a “highbrow”; but he had a wonderful faculty of observation, coupled with a sense of humour a modicum of which, I can not help thinking, Herman Melville would have been none the worse for. Melville has enjoyed an immense vogue since someone “discovered” him not long ago. I read him years since in his pre-discovery days; and thought then, as I still think, that he could be appallingly turgid at times, and that the glorious plums his books contain are sometimes buried in a sorry deal of indigestible transcendental pudding.

That’s you told Herman!

Comments

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I agree with her completely. I wonder what she would have thought of dear Basil Hall...

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

I'm now half way through the book and alas no mention of dear Basil. The opinionated Miss Fox Smith was primarily a chronicler of the merchant service so I suspect Basil was ruled out on account of his being RN through and through. Though Marryat was too of course.

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I do like her. She'd have been at home here.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Exactly what I thought! This book has got "fangirl" stamped all over it and I believe she wrote many, many more. I wonder if she wrote limericks too? ;)

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

I bet she did. Strikes me as a classy girl.

Jane Austen would have been a navy fangirl, too, had she been born a couple of centuries later. I can imagine her writing H/A fic.

[shepet.livejournal.com]

Judgment is final and binding :))

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I suspect Miss Fox Smith was not a woman to argue with!

[vespican.livejournal.com]

Pretty much agree with her thoughts about Melville.
Dave

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Yes, can't argue with that!