Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (11 page)

This may have been the first time that readers could sample a collision of such radically different literary sensibilities as Ingmar Bergman and Jules Verne: the bleak, life-loathing (affirming, loathing, affirming, who knows anymore) sensibility of the great artist of domestic cruelty, Bergman, with the wondrous vision and spectacle of Verne, the adventure story mad scientist. Call it Scenes from a Marriage on a Mysterious Island, because
The Mrs Unguentine
is more landmass than boat, a garden of Eden with very little joy and not one dose of shame, where the only solution to the endless pain of love is to hurl oneself overboard, which Mr. Unguentine does, only to keep courting his woman from the deeps, or from the dead, it isn’t really clear. Faking his own death just to reset the romance and return to courting? Colossally cruel or intensely romantic, or maybe both? This was the highest drama, a marriage on the rocks set in the weird colors of, if not science fiction, then really strange fiction that hews as much to ship design and greenhouse invention as it does to characters. The aloof approach to the sanctity of marriage, what indeed at times can seem like a satire of bad marriage fiction (she wants to talk, he wants to work and be alone, she wants kids, he drinks, he hits, she lies, he disappears), lulls us into susceptibility for the deep magic that occurs on this boat, and it would prove to be Stanley Crawford’s perfect art in later books to stage his deeply human stories—stories about the failure to love properly or deeply or at all—in bizarre, defended, solipsistic worlds.

Crawford’s description of the dome, secreted into the text with bored, offhand logic, introduces a theme that would later become a long-standing obsession (in such books as
Some Instructions
[1978] and
Petroleum Man
[2005]): patriarchs who cruelly show their love through radical inventions and the construction of ingenious, if useless, systems. If these men cannot much speak or love or hug, if they can’t be basically kind and open and interested, they can impart information, a syllabus wrenched from an arcane mind, with the hopes that it will be received as the ultimate loving gift. As much as we hear of Mr. Unguentine’s failure at human interaction, the entire ship’s design seems somehow his best act of love. Every bit of rigging and composting is a shrine. He will take his wife away to sea and never explain why, or even speak. He will fashion a secret identity for himself that brooks no interruption or interrogation. But in return he will build her a more fascinating world than any she could expect on land, even while depriving her of the basic things she wants. It’s a complicated way to show love, full of spectacle, vain performance, and ego. The irony is so entirely
not
lost on Mrs. Ungentine that she’s crushed by it.

In Crawford’s memoir of farming,
A Garlic Testament
(1992), he remarks of himself that, as a young man, he “developed a craving for what I called the real.” It is his pursuit of this goal, in a body of work that is as rigorously inventive as it is obsessed with the human tragedy, that has marked him as a writer attuned to the most potent, and timeless, possibilities in literary fiction.

B
EN
M
ARCUS
, 2008