Sculptor at Sea

FO'CASTLE WALTZ--Louis Slobodkin--Vanguard ($2.75).

In the doldrum days between World Wars I & II, Louis Slobodkin, then a broth of a boy, now a ranking U.S. sculptor, decided to ship as a deckhand on the tramp freighter S.S. Hermanita, plying between the Port of New York and Latin America. Fo'castle Waltz is his 352-page total recall of this nautical episode.

Soon Sailor Slobodkin (self-described as "a fat, soft guy with glasses") found himself loading cargo, eating slop and doing soogie moogie (scrubbing paint work) with a crew as oddly assorted as flotsam & jetsam on a beach. There was a union-conscious Portuguese named Perry. "His cross eyes seemed to set the motive for all his movement--when he'd sit down, he'd cross his legs, cross his arms . . . . I never saw him standing with his legs straight. . . ."

There were a couple of seagoing prep-school boys, Al, an amateur boxer whose short upper lip made Sculptor Slobodkin distrust him, and Mush, who was unpleasantly popeyed. There was Georgia Boy, a snake-hipped harmonica player and dancer, who used to talk nostalgically about his "mammy." And there was Joe, whose father was a Yorkshireman, whose mother was a French Tahitian and whose English was a splendid massacre. Joe once referred to the "United Steaks Conscience, Washington, Disease" which, translated, turned out to be the United States Congress, Washington, D.C. Sometimes he would dream about his abandoned South Sea Eden: "No, sir, dere's no snakes, no sharks, nevaire 'ot, nevaire col'. . . . You don't have to work on de Island-- jist pick fruit off de tree. . . . Same when you're hungry for girl. . . . She's laugh and go wit you. . . . An' all de girls . . . is vierge [virginal]--all de time."

The highlights of Fo'castle Waltz (some of them are quite high) are the crew's dingy benders and revels among the bordellos of an Argentine port, the perilous voyage back to the U.S. (which the rickety S.S. Hermanita made in ballast with the pumps choked and the lifeboats rusted to the davits), and Author Slobodkin's one-man mutiny when he was fed up with cleaning sewage from the bilges.

Author Slobodkin has an artist's eye for significant detail and the kind of gossipy fluency that makes many women's letters easy reading. He has also managed to smuggle into print (suitably disguised) a verb seldom seen in polite English prose since Lady Chatterley's Lover. In fact, Slobodkin has assimilated himself so completely to the somewhat rancid life of his crewmates that some readers may feel that they have listened to a five-hour monologue by a seafaring stablehand.

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