H. M. TomlinsonBesprekingen

A thoroughly endearing book, written in a style for which many of us no longer have the patience but which works very well in the context.
For a well written review, see: https://nowheremag.com/2020/05/h-m-tomlinsons-the-sea-and-the-jungle/

Tomlinson was an official war correspondent for the British Army in France until 1917. He began writing for The Nation, where he unleashed his indignation toward the Army's obliviousness in its conduct of the war (one general, he reported, was astonished that the Germans hid in trenches and had "big guns."), and excoriated the British public for the attitude that the "Tommies" were the expendable dregs of society and their sacrifices inconsequential.

"What did they call the Nobodies? Slackers, cowards, rabbits and field vermin; mean creatures unable to leave their football and their drink." --- Their deaths "easily borne by Christian folk who are moved to grief at the thought of Polynesians without Bibles."

"The opinions of most civilians on the War were as agreeable as stained glass windows."

The pieces in the book run chronologically from 1914 to 1920. Most have the war as topic, but there are several descriptive vignettes which have some lovely lines such as this:

"The transient glittering of some seagulls remote in the blue was as if you could glimpse, now and then, fleeting hints of what is immaculate in heaven."

He throws shade at Ruskin: "Perhaps his language appears noble because the rhythmic pour of its sentences lulls reason into a comfortable and benignant sleepiness."

And boosts the poetry of Conrad Aiken.

"Our mutability, like the wind which bloweth where it listeth, is subject to sorceries having the necessity of the very laws which send zephyrs or hurricanes out of the immane."

Tomlinson's thoughts are permeated with history, by ghosts of men and ships, by the lost rural landscapes of his youth; he's held by "the spell of the imponderable", "lurking shallows and unknown landscapes." This isn't to suggest a bent toward mysticism, but an indication of a deeply contemplative nature, attuned to vibrations and patterns most of us don't notice. Will anyone ever again experience the tingling certainty he felt, while talking to a 110 year old man, that he was talking to a wizard?

"When I looked up, the forest across the creek regarded me with the large composure of a guardian of the unrevealed...".."It knew that it's aspect was sufficiently repressive."

On a steamy island in the South Pacific he stands at the dark edge of a mangrove forest and easily imagines a labyrinthodon rising from the muck.

On the stern deck of a steamer he watches a barque silently pass in the moonlight: "a gracious apparition in a delusive hour.".

The vastness of things forgotten troubles Tomlinson very much. The progress of civilization -- telephones, radios, talking pictures, automobiles -- inevitably involves the destruction of individuality and the loss of communal memory. Many things, he fears, will have to be learned over and over.

He's not a Thoreau nor does he pretend to be, nor any sort of philosopher. He's an observer and commentator who writes beautiful, gentle prose that encourages us to be aware,

These pieces originally appeared in various periodicals 1928-1930.

A great travelogue recounting a sea voyage from Britain to Porto Velho on the Amazon river system in 1909 - 1910. I found it through James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. It was published in 1912 and is free as an e-book. As much as I liked it, be warned that I sometimes struggled with the author’s florid Edwardian prose. He can wax poetical when describing the Amazon, but also when discussing not much at all. His sentences may run on and sometimes run backward. There are scattered words that are no longer used much, if they were then, and a few are not in the dictionaries I have access to. You may need to bear with him until he is well at sea. Here is a suggestive example:
From our narrow and weltering security, where the wind searched through us like the judgment eye, I know, looking out upon the wilderness in turmoil where was no help, and no witness of our undoing, where the gleams were fleeting as though the very day were riven and tumbling, that I saw the filmy shapes of those things which darken the minds of primitives.
===========================
Watch out for the story within the story that reads like a miniature version of Heart of Darkness.

The narrative of a voyage of the tramp steamer, Capella. to South America and deep into the Amazon basin, in 1909-10.½

Worked for the Straits Steamship Company. Henry Major Tomlinson (21 June 1873 – 5 February 1958) was a British writer and journalist. He was known for anti-war and travel writing, novels and short stories, especially of life at sea. He was born and died in London. Tomlinson was brought up in Poplar, London. He worked as a shipping clerk, and then as a reporter for the Morning Leader newspaper; he travelled up the Amazon River for it.
In World War I he was an official correspondent for the British Army, in France. In 1917 he returned to work with H. W. Massingham on The Nation, which opposed the war. He left the paper in 1923, when Massingham resigned because of a change of owner and political line. His 1931 book Norman Douglas was one of the first biographies of that scandalous but then much admired writer.

“The story of little ships coasting out of Singapore and Penang in peace and war.” The Story of the Straits Steamship Company. Henry Major Tomlinson (21 June 1873 – 5 February 1958) was a British writer and journalist. He was known for anti-war and travel writing, novels and short stories, especially of life at sea. He was born and died in London.

time reading program special edition. SOME PARTS really boring and some parts really interesting.½

a certain tediousness inherent in books of travel— a tediousness which is latent all the time, but which only shows its head when the writer allows himself to wander from plain fact. Indeed, nothing is harder than to write a discursory book of travel, and yet avoid this tediousness. Mr. Tomlinson certainly does not avoid it ; his account of "a journey to the beaches of the Moluccas and the forests of Malaya in 1923" is mercilessly padded. He is as ready as any Victorian papa of fiction, cast on a desert island, to deduce the marvellous ways of God from the tumbling of a coconut. No occasion comes amiss to him for moralizing ; he exudes the exasperating complacency of the Philosopher Looking at Life. All this would be very well if Mr. Tomlinson really was a philosopher ; had anything of the least interest to say about Life and God ; could deduce anything at all original from his coconut. But in his discursions he never once says any- thing of spiritual or intellectual interest. On the other hand, tie him down to actual descriptions of the husk of the coco- nut, and he is excellent. His passages descriptive of the cowl of the Red Sea could hardly be improved, and make fascinating reading. If only he would stick to that, and not keep digressing into pages of the" And now we see from that, dear children," type ; if only fie would confine himself to impressing one with the heat of the Gulf of Aden, and give up trying to impress one with the breadth of his own intellect ; if only, in short, he would emulate the style of the "directions for the navigation of the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, and the central track for steam vessels through the Red Sea, Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden," which he professes to admire, his book would be half its present length, it is true, but it would be very much more worth reading than it is at present, and would give one a far greater respect for Mr. Tomlinson.

In the fall of 1909, Tomlinson "chucked" his job at a London newspaper and signed on to the crew of the steamship Capella as purser. The ship was bound for the upper Amazon bearing a load of coal to the men building a railroad in the interior of the continent. This is his account of that journey, first published in 1912. In the beginning, I found The Sea and the Jungle a bit slow but once I became accustomed to Tomlinson's style the book picked up and I enjoyed the journey. He sprinkles his account with tales (some of the tall variety) told by his shipmates and later those told by some of the people he met after reaching the Amazon. This was worth reading for both his descriptions of life at sea and of the Amazon region as it was a hundred years ago.

A travel book unlike any other I've read. It describes the route of a cargo ship, a steamer that in 1909 carried a load of Welsh coal from Swansea to Pará, Brazil and then up the Amazon river and a small tributary to a site near the San Antonio Falls where it sat "in port" for a month while inspections were made and cargo unloaded. The return trip went via Barbados, past Jamaica and landed at Tampa, FL from where our narrator caught a train to New York and made his final way home. He's actually not much of a figure in the story itself- mostly an observer. It begins rather abruptly when Tomlinson is on his way to work, feeling bitterly oppressed by the daily grind, and stops to have conversation with a sailor on the street. This man invites him to take passage on the cargo steamer (it being short a few hands) and our narrator pretty much ditches his job, family and responsibilities in an instant to go along. From there the book is all about the journey. I liked reading it, but the descriptions can be so dense it's hard to keep track of what you're reading about sometimes. The author has interesting insights and musing to share about everything he witnesses. The few momentous events seem to occur to other people, and there are a number of tall tales and travel stories told by other people met along the way. It really does give you a vivid sense of place, the pitch and roll of the ocean, smothering heat inside the belly of the ship, characters of the deckhands (most did not speak English), the changes of weather, the sudden wall of greenery of South American jungle, glimpses of native people, birds and astonishingly gorgeous butterflies, fears of mosquitoes and disease, and a crazy story about this railroad being built deep in the rain forest headed who knows where.

Certain aspects of the book reminded me vividly of The Lord of the Flies, Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary and State of Wonder but it's hard to put my finger on exactly why.

from the Dogear Diary

Never having heard of H.M. Tomlinson, and never having read a travel book, it was Time Life's meager introduction which compelled me to purchase this volume for 75 cents. I both liked that it took place mostly on a ship, the Capella, and that the Amazon was visited.

The prose of Tomlinson was not at all that which I had expected it to be. I don't understand why he isn't more recognized. His writing is hauntingly poetic, eloquent, and descriptively detailed. He is never boring. His personality, his most intimate thoughts, his humor, are all offered to us. He gives us the illusion that he holds nothing back from us, hides nothing.

Here is an audio sample of his prose:

http://netherletterlog.blogspot.com/2011/01/introduction-to-tomlinson-read-by-aa...

I admire Tomlinson's rebellious spirit, which was an Orwellian (Orwell wouldn't write 1984 for another 39 years) result born of his eyes being opened to the chains of modernity. I can't help but notice that Tomlinson was ready to reemerge into society with a new spirit, after having been witness to the desolation of peril-haunted equatorial forests.

He often relates to us that he felt as if within the Amazonian foliage something dark and sinister and nameless sat in wait; that it could afford to wait, being timeless. He sees the building of the railway as futile, but praises the men who carelessly sacrifice their lives in the joint endeavor.

Back in England, Tomlinson notes that the trees seem as toys to him; all greenery seems blunted in contrast to the swelling Jungle.

I felt that Tomlinson was a very empathetic man—he tells us much of animals, and their treatment. Many had "pitiful ends". He tells us too of the "pitiful ends" of many of the workers who had been duped into coming to the Amazon by "the Company". It's postmodernist puerility to think that the cruelties Tomlinson reveals to us are a thing of the past. Horror goes on daily; and unlike many 'evil philosophies', I believe they are collective horrors. It is a defensive mechanism which supposes that the world is not tragic, that tragedy can only happen individually—that the holocaust was no more significant than the event of a single Jew being tortured by the Nazi doctors. I believe that this is the reason why Nietzsche's mind snapped at the moment he saw the old horse being beaten in the street; the reason Tomlinson saw himself reflected in the terror filled suffering eyes of the mortally wounded monkey which was to be dinner. Tomlinson was a Darwinian evolutionist, but no materialist, which explains the despairing beauty of his prose.

I know it cannot be, but I feel like I am the only one in the world now searching out the works of H.M.Tomlinson, the British writer and journalist (1873-1958). London River is his lyrical, gritty reportage of the lost world of the docks of London in the age of sail and the early years of steamers and tramps. It is marvelous to delve into, to savour and re-read. He reminds me a lot of Joseph Mitchell and they covered a lot of the same ground, though continents apart. Just about everything he wrote is out of print, though London River is available as an ebook as is Old Junk and, most highly recommended, The Sea and The Jungle. I've found several first editions online.

4533. The Sea and the Jungle, by H. M. Tomlinson (read 8 Feb 2009) This book was published in 1912 and is Tomlinson's first book. It tells of a trip he made on a steamer, the Capella, from Swansea, Devon, to Porto Vello, on the Madeira River (a tributary of the Amazon), Brazil. He tells of his rather exciting ocean voyage and then of the trip up the Amazon and his adventures on land. It seems like a trip much more fun to read about than to take--especially in 1909-1910, before refrigeration and insect repellant. The writing style is a bit ponderous and I cannot say I was enthralled while reading the book.

I picked up H. M. Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle at a booksale on a whim. I didn't know anything about it, but the cover looked interesting and it smelled nice. It is a travel narrative published in 1912 of Tomlinson's trip to the Amazon Basin, "Swansea and Pará of the Brazils," and a few other places as well.

It was quite an engaging read at first. Tomlinson is a sarcastic, slightly humorous, stoic writer who doesn't believe in God but does believe in some mysterious unnameable "Providence." The writing is very sound, though sometimes elliptical. I did enjoy the poetic feel of some passages very much; for example, this description of the ship's wake dazzled me: "Straight beneath the rail the wake is an upheaval of gems, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, always instantly melting in the sun, always fusing and fleeting in swift coils of malachite and chrysoprase, but never gone." I could just see the many-colored gems of the water tumbling over one another behind the ship...

Tomlinson openly compares his adventures to those of other travel writers of the times with an eye for the humorous and realistic. And his descriptions of the chains of everyday life... it could be seriously depressing if you dwell on it too much! His dedication is delightfully nasty: "DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO DID NOT GO." Nice!

I did get bogged down in the second half of the book. His descriptions and musings on the jungle can be quite densely lengthy at times, though I suppose that is the way the reader is supposed to feel. It was something of an effort to finish the book though. In the end you're comforted to see how much he longs for home... he can't despise us untravelled folk too much if he wants to get home so desperately, can he?

It's a humorous, poetic, cynical, wry, epic, and hardheaded book. Recommended.

A travel narrative classic about the first English "tramp steamer" to traverse up the Amazon river, going nearly 2000 miles. Great insights on life, the jungle, the early days of Amazon pioneer settlements. Some of the personal insights, themes of civilized man versus the wild man, mans exploitation of the environment and each other. Written with a very cheeky humor, parts are absolutely hillarious (fishing with dynamite is a highlite). Parts are very atmospheric, right out of Heart of Darkness, such as the story of the old man in the gin bar. Wonderful sense of place and time, natural lore and human emotion, well worth the journey. Authentic Indian Jones period.