Word: mcfee
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...FIRST WATCH (334 pp.)-William McFee-Random House...
...Author McFee's memoir of his youth waddles along like an old tramp steamer, picking up a memory here, unloading a prejudice there, sleepily reviving the log of McFee's "first watch" (1906-11) as ship's engineer and as author. In retrospect, McFee isn't sure which of his two callings has meant more to him; he seems equally grateful that during the period of this piece he wrote most of Casuals of the Sea, and got his chief engineer's certificate. He also seems amazed at what a fine, steady chap young...
First Watch exasperatingly keeps promising that McFee will soon swallow the anchor and embark on his great American adventure. Yet just as he finally does sail for the States (where he wrote most of his 23 books, and where he is still living and working, at 66, as a book reviewer for the New York Sun), McFee ends his story. When he daydreams of gimbal lamps and fiddley gratings, he illustrates his abiding fault: maundering. But when he describes a desperate journey on a sinking ship, he exemplifies his talent for hard factuality in a handsome style...
...popular writer (as 'Bartimeus' he is the author, etc - )." In the preface to Steady as You Go by "Bartimeus" I note that his correct name is given as Capatin L. da Costa Ricci, C.V.O., R.N. Who is right? - TIME, or the writer of the preface-William McFee. Engineer-Lieutenant, R.N.R...
Through the story which Spenlove tells to socialite Mrs. Colwell, Author McFee portrays the stanch stuff of the British aristocrat, one Captain Remson, who suffered many cruel misfortunes after his unjust dismissal as a young officer from a crack British steamship line. The worst of these was his marriage to a beautiful U. S. heiress, a friend of the woman to whom Spenlove tells the story. (Captain Remson's wife had been too corrupted, apparently, by the slack code of U. S. high society to understand an English gentleman.) Remson finally ended up in the South American jungle, where...