Read Again

In our suburb of Cleveland we were friends with a woman who had emigrated from Bavaria about 1910. She lived in a rowhouse (I think) with (certainly) grape vines trained along the rails of her back porch, a patch of vegetables including kale, and shelves of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I had no opinions then on condensing books, and I got through quite a few of the multi-book volumes.

This past weekend, the used book sale at a local church yielded a copy of The Captain, by Jan de Hartog. I read this in condensed form probably in 1967 or 1968, for it was published in 1966, Reader's Digest published the condensed version in 1967,  and my family left Ohio in the summer of 1969. It had been my impression that Reader's Digest called it Master After God, an expression that occurs in the book; but that is not so. Anyway, I decided that it was worth the $2 asked.

The bulk of the novel concerns the trials of a Dutch tugboat captain: first as relief captain on coastal tows off wartime England; then on a tug outfitted for rescue work on a couple of Murmansk convoys. I found in reading it that I probably remembered 70% of the plot. I believe that the prologue and epilogue, set in the 1960s were omitted by the condensers. Some of the matter from the 1930s may have been skipped as well. At least one sex scene made the cut, but I think other such bits certainly didn't.

Curiously, almost the only other book that I have reread at a comparable interval is Two Years Before the Mast; yet I don't know that I have ever been out of sight of land on a boat. De Hartog does not hold up as well as Dana, but he undertook a different task: not a narrative of sea service, but a novel, and a novel with a moral message embedded or tacked on. Would I purchase the book now if it had just been published? I suppose that the decision would depend on reviews, blurbs, and my schedule.  Will I read it again? Probably not.