How big, how fast, how comfortable
NORMANDIE:
France’s Legendary Art Deco Ocean Liner
by John Maxtone-Graham
259 pp. Norton $100
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
John Maxtone-Graham wrote Normandie for lovers of ships, those who take pleasure in the sleek lines of a well-designed hull, who understand how design and function combine to create the unique and quirky personality of each ship.
For such aficionados there will be no deliberating over the $100 price tag. This book is a must-have. The nautically inclined will navigate through the plentiful detail and finish energized and enthusiastic.
As a landlubber who doesn’t know starboard from port, I drowned in details in places, but I’m glad I hopped aboard. I disembarked impressed with Maxtone-Graham’s ability to compile massive amounts of information into a unified, sequential story of Normandie. (One such detail: she was never referred to as the Normandie.)
As financier Sanford Weill said, “Details create the big picture,” and details are Maxtone-Graham’s forte.
Normandie was to be a star, an entertainer, a speed setter, a money getter, built to answer the questions, “How big, how fast, how comfortable” can we make this ship? She fell shy of such high expectations, never quite managing to match the vision of her French Line owners.
While this is Normandie’s story from bow to stern, herein lies the larger theme in the book: It is the era, the economy, the mindset, intangibles and unexpecteds that shape the ship’s life and death. Normandie is as much a story about society in the 1930s as it is about the ship.
Clearly a devotee of ships, Maxtone-Graham has written more than 20 books and spends six months a year at sea as a shipboard lecturer. He spotlights Normandie from her initial design in an era when ocean liners were the epitome of luxury to her sad finish lying on her side in a pool of her own waste, a casualty of WWII without ever entering the fray.
Sandwiched between Depression deprivation and World War II strictures, flaunting a glittering Art Deco interior that clearly spelled first class, Normandie struggled to rekindle the levity of pre-Depression days.
She was designed to lure the new demographic of transatlantic traveler—Americans—who would fill the gap left when European immigration was constricted. Normandie never attracted the number of first-class travelers for whom she was built; she didn’t extend a friendly enough invitation to second and third class, so she seldom sailed at full capacity. Still, she carried stars and stowaways, and all types in between, during the years she steamed from Le Havre to New York.
It is difficult not to anthropomorphize Normandie; Maxtone-Graham does it with finesse. It is impossible not to feel her breathe, hear her sing, celebrate her elation as she wins the blue ribbon from competitor Queen Mary for fastest transatlantic passage. It’s impossible not to wince in pain at the details of her early demise.
Charting Normandie’s progress from the moment she was a twinkle in the eye of her designers to her last moments as she was hauled out of the harbor in pieces, Maxtone-Graham uses simile to reinforce the human qualities of the ship.
“Normandie was poised to venture from the shipyard like a toddler braving its first excursion beyond the nursery,” he says of her launch.
Descriptions of Normandie’s Art Deco interior border on the attention given to a high-society wedding. His style is as elegant and rich as the ship itself: Art Deco-style description.
“Like peonies blossoming atop indifferent stems, First Class’s elevators arrive at Promenade Deck caged within stunning wrought-iron grills, the black ironwork accented with bronze scallop shells.”
With war raging in Europe, priorities shifted rapidly. Normandie was held at New York Harbor’s Pier 88, searched for wartime contraband, and denied return passage to France.
She is prepared to change roles; her glittering interior is dismantled and painted battleship grey. In conversion to battleship from beauty, ordnance replaces fountain and statue; the Salle à Manger becomes the troop mess room.
And then a careless spark from a workman ignites a flame that spreads beyond the ability of the greatly diminished crew to control, and the greatest ship of that day is mortally wounded.
“Lying like a beached whale—clichéd, but there is no other image,” Maxtone-Graham says of her final moments as she lay on her side in New York Harbor after her 70th transatlantic journey.
The weaknesses are few and easily forgivable, mere annoyances amidst Maxtone-Graham’s lush prose: his penchant for the word “patently,” which he uses far too often, and his predilection for addressing readers, either to invite them along on a tour of the ship or to urge them to hang in through a detail-dense description.
As for the detail itself, some will relish it, others will skim. I found myself doing some of each any given point. All will admire his incredible attention to the facts— height, weight, price, amounts, speeds, depths, volume—camouflaged within rich writing full of captivating imagery, the way one delivers medicine in a spoonful of honey.
Nearly 300 photographs and diagrams illustrate the text, alleviating the statistical sting. The photographs could be a book unto themselves. Carefully chosen, many from the author’s own collection, they illustrate every aspect of the text and are a visual reminder that life’s vicissitudes are swift and unexpected.
Ruth Douillette is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books.
See her blog at Upstream and Down~.
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