Word: mcfee
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...Shakes a Gallant Mast As I heard Joseph Conrad, hunched down in his chair, puzzled by the questions that were thrown at him, say again that English had chosen him for a medium of expression, that he had not chosen English, I wondered if America had not chosen William McFee. This younger novelist of the sea is becoming of the United States in everything but appearance, speech and literary style...
...William McFee was born in London. Most of his life he has spent in ships as a seagoing engineer. He has shown me the engine-room of a fruit vessel with as much pride as the script of a new novel. His stateroom, however, was always filled with a store of books, books piled here and there, until there was scarcely a place to sit, and McFee in the midst of them, spinning a yarn to the captain, explaining with pride to his visitors the glories of the ship...
...William McFee is the ship's engineer of a tramp steamer travelling hither and yon over the Seven Seas. This man of machines, who loves the intricacies of boilers and turbines, is at the same time a writer and a thinker of unusual merit. With the eyes of a poet, he surveys the life about him, on shipboard, in unfrequented corners of the earth, and then, in his spare time, he gives his impressions to the world through essays and short sketches that have a scholarly tone reminiscent of Lamb, yet enlivened by a virile strain inseparable from...
...been said, that Mr. McFee writes about the sea. This is really a very incomplete estimate of his range, for he wanders about, the world of men and geography quite indiscriminately, drawing upon all varieties of material for his subjects. Now an Assyrian restaurant proprietor seizes his attention; a moment later, he will be discussing the latest New York "best seller". His scope is indefinite. Nor is he a vague romantic, blinded by fancy to the disagreeable realities of situations and personality, for he treats each new topic with a calculating steadiness that is pleasing, as much in its solid...
...letter themselves are whimsical, rambling and discursive accounts of the life of asteamphi engineer on the Seven Seizes, the routine of the ship illumed by McFee' day Scottish humor, glimpses of people shipmates, stevedors, and the vast motley collection of people met by he sailorman ashore, and also the auhers thought, his views on art, on books and all the magnified impressions of a full life...