|
Rudyard
Kipling
CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS Adapted by Malvina Vogel Illustrated by Ken Landgraf GREAT ILLUSTRATED CLASSICS ABDO Publishing Company. 2002. 239pp. ISBN: 1577656830 Age Range: 12 and up photos/CAPTAINS_COURAGEOUS-2.jpg Reviewed by Patrick
Killough
(1) biblio.com 10/29/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. review: By mistake I ordered and read this adaptation for young children weeks before I received and read the scholarly Oxford edition for adults of Rudyard Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. In my opinion, no adaptation, either in print, on stage, or on the silver screen (there have been three of the latter since Spencer Tracy's 1937 Oscar-winning portrayal of Manuel the Portuguese fisherman) is likely to be as good as its classic original. Which adapters or screen writers are likely to be in the same league as the 1907 Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling? Nonetheless, adaptations and retellings of JANE EYRE, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, THE THREE MUSKETEERS and other classics do occur. And some are much better than others. Among the three films, for instance, I liked the 1937 Lionel Barrymore, Freddie Bartholomew, Spencer Tracy, Mickey Rooney version for showing the hard, hard, back breaking, seemingly never ending work that went into fishing the Grand Bank from sailing vessels and rowboats. Each screen version, however, took liberties that I do not understand. Manuel in the 1937 film was killed. In one other version, boy hero Harvey Cheyne has no mother. In the third he has neither father nor mother! And on film 15-year old Harvey was usually portrayed as age 12. So how should we compare Malvina B.Vogel and Rudyard Kipling as reteller and original teller of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS? Ms Vogel, the Lord be praised, follows the Kipling story line more faithfully than any of the three films. Here is that simple story: one day in late May on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, spoiled 15-year old rich boy Harvey Cheyne, Jr., dizzy from smoking his first cigar, falls off an ocean liner through thick fog into the Atlantic Ocean. He is rescued by and spends the next three months aboard the 70-ton fishing schooner We're Here. In late August from the schooner's home port of Gloucester near Boston, Harvey telegraphs his railroad tycoon father in San DIego that he is alive. The parents rush in three days by private train to Boston, are reunited not with a spoiled brat but with a young, tanned, muscled, responsible, widely liked young adult. There is a brief concluding scene years later showing young Harvey well on his way to becoming a new generation of Stanford-educated, American M.B.A-type business tycoon. In the un-illustrated Oxford paperback edition, Kipling's text spreads over 157 pages distributed across ten untitled chapters. In the 2002 Great Illustrated Classics Library edition published by ABDO Publishing Company, Malvina Vogel presents in larger than average print CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS in 15 titled chapters -- e.g., 6: "The Cook's Prophecy," 8: "Squid O" and 14:"Two Captains Meet." Every right hand page has a full-page captioned pen and ink drawing by Ken Landgraf. So Vogel's retelling has only about 20% as many words as Kipling's telling. For the sake of her intended young (5th grade and higher) readers, Ms Vogel condenses, freely substitutes for Kipling's words and largely avoids technical seafaring or fishing jargon. Perhaps 50% at best of the Vogel text is made up of unchanged sentences of Rudyard Kipling. Ms Vogel also retells many scenes in her own words. *** A
sample comparison of the two authors: Chapter One: Harvey is speaking
to rather unadmiring men passengers in the liner's smoking room.
(1)
Kipling: "'Say, it's thick outside.
You can hear the fish-boats squawking all around us. Say, wouldn't it
be great if we ran one down?'";
(2) Vogel: "Say, the fog is real thick. You can hear the fishing boats ringing their bells when we get close. Wouldn't it be great if we ran one down in the fog?'"; (3) Kipling: "'Who'll stop me?; he answered, deliberately. 'Did you pay for my passage, Mister Martin'"?; (4) Vogel: "Harvey Cheyne tilted his chin up impudently. 'Do you plan to throw me out, Mr. Martin? You didn't pay my way.'" Ms Vogel preserves important roles for both of Harvey's parents; Junioe is no orphan. We meet all eight other individualized fishermen aboard the We're Here - including "Doctor" MacDonald, the black, Scots-Gaelic speaking cook, who can also foresee the future. With him we look into the future of both Harvey and his new friend and mentor, 16-year old Daniel Troop, son of the schooner's owner/captain. Ken Landgraf's 116 black and white drawings are not remotely Picasso-quality. They are romanticized; the same characters look slightly dissimilar from one frame to another. But for average American ten-year-old readers they probably bring the simplified text to easily imagined life. Not being a seaman myself, I cannot judge how true to life Landgraf's sketches are of schooners, rigging, tackle, dories, fishing costumes and such like. But ten-year olds probably do not care. Bottom line: judging from my own eight grandchildren, I can imagine myself or their grandmother happily reading aloud the Vogel-Landgraf version of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS to any of them from age three or older. The boys and girls would ask the meaning of words not understood. They would also enjoy talking about the drawings. In that sense, there may be a younger audience for this GREAT ILLUSTRATED CLASSICS edition than the publishers had in mind. This book is a solidly defensible "translation" of Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/404032821.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 10/30/2011 name of review: Why tinker with masterpieces? The Case of Rudyard Kipling's 1897 novel, CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. rating: *** review: Elsewhere, including on lunch.com I have reviewed the complete original text of Rudyard Kipling's 1897 novel CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. Today I am reviewing a 2002 abridged, altered, subtracted from, added to, but not badly distorted illustrated text published in 2002. The latter is styled CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS - Rudyard Kipling - Great Illustrated Classics - Library Edition - adapted by Malvina B. Vogel - Illustrated by Ken Landgraf - ABDO publishing Company. There is a huge market for other than the original versions of classic writings such as HAMLET, IVANHOE, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and THE THREE MUSKETEERS. Busy or lazy students reach for their Cliffs Notes or even for Classic Comics. Mothers teach their toddlers to read books with two short sentences on the left page and one big cartoon on the right. Seventy years or more ago when I was growing up in San Antonio and then in Shreveport, I throve on what I called "fat books," but what the publishers called "Big Little Books." They are probably collectors' items in late 2011. Some of them (texts on left, pictures on right) even allowed you to fan the right side with your thumb and watch a mini-motion picture unfold. There are many ways to "adapt" a text. Kipling's father John and Rudyard himself, for example, illustrated the texts of KIM, JUST SO STORIES and others. Kipling, like other writers, amended his manuscripts and even wrote different endings for American and British editions, e.g., for THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. I am not sure how convincing a rational basis I have for disliking a few elements in the Great Illustrated Classics Library Edition of Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. Please feel free to help me clarify my thoughts! There have been at least three filmed motion picture or television versions of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. I have watched them all: --
1937 (Spencer Tracy
won his first academy award as Manuel, the Portuguese fisherman who
pulled spoiled rich kid Harvey Cheyne -- played by Freddie Bartholomew
-- out of the cold North Atlantic);
-- 1977 with Karl Malden as fishing schooner Captain Disko Troop and Ricardo Montalban as Manuel); and -- 1996 with Robert Urich as Captain Troop. Each took tremendous liberties with Kipling's text. Each made major changes from Kipling's original version. Thus, in 1937 Manuel was killed off. In 1977 young Harvey was motherless. In 1996 Harvey was a double orphan, to name only the most pointless of the changes. Harvey was also notably younger in the filmed versions than in Kipling's pages: 12 versus 15. We know that the 2002 Great Illustrated Classics version was adapted for and aimed to satisfy children ten to 13 years old. We also know that there is a lot of technical seafaring and codfishing jargon in Kipling's original text. So much so that the Oxford World's Classics critical edition of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS has 25 pages of explanatory notes. So we are right to expect celebrated text adapter Malvina B. Vogel to avoid jargon as much as possible (especially, since the Library Edition does not include a glossary or maps). The black and white pen and ink drawings of illustrator Ken Landgraf adorn fully 1/2 of the pages that also include Ms Vogel's greatly compressed text: a Landgraf sketch faces every single Vogel page of text. That must appeal to youngsters, although the drawings are less then memorable for adults. Ms Vogel's way of retelling Kipling's simple story reminds me of how I retell a joke that I might have heard or read. First off, I adapt to my audience as I did yesterday evening with table mates during a church supper. I had read that morning a half dozen or more emailed jokes about church doings from a sister in law. I told two of them from a fresh but not very attentive memory. In
one a mother chides her son for being unwilling to get out of bed on
Sunday and go to church. The son says, "They all hate me; and I hate them. Why
should I go?" The mother's punch line: "You are 59 years old and you are the
pastor."
When I reread the emailed jokes last night I realized that I had unconsciously substituted wife for mother. No little difference for suspense and humor! And next time I retell and adapt, it will be mother, not wife. The story line of the 1897 Kipling novel is briefly told. One day in late May around 1895, spoiled rotten Harvey Cheyne, age 15, falls off an ocean liner taking him and his mother to Europe for Harvey to finish his studies. He is rescued in the fog by a fisherman of the 70-ton sailing schooner We're Here with home port Gloucester, Massachusetts near Boston. Harvey, despite his loudly expressed and rather imperious demands to be sailed forthwith to a nearby port and returned to his rich family, ends up working until late August as the lowest member ("second boy") of Captain Disko Troop's crew of nine. From Gloucester he then telegraphs his railroad tycoon father in San Diego. The latter and Harvey's mother race for three days in their private train to Boston. Reunited with their son, they find him a young adult, reformed, malleable and ready to work for his father, who insists, however, that he first attend the new Leland Stanford, Jr. University. The novel ends by jumping ahead a few years with Harvey now in charge of his father's tea clippers sailing from San Francisco to Yokohama. CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS has considerable depths -- none plumbed by the Vogel-Landgraf adaptation. Harvey's transformation from brat to man evokes the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. The We're Here is a floating monastery of (temporarily) celibate males who take novice Harvey to heart and literally "teach him the ropes" of the schooner while making him into a man. Author Kipling also criticizes the greed and selfishness of America's Gilded Age, contrasting two Captains Courageous: the soon to be obsolete fishing captain and the self-made captain of industry -- as well as America's M.B.A. economic future personified by young Harvey and Harvey's coming tycoon heirs. Adapter Malvina Vogel is far, far truer to Kipling's original text than are any of the three films mentioned above. Hurrah! But whenever she recasts a sentence in her more pedestrian words rather than Kipling's I wince. Who, after all, is she to change the words of the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907)? What really makes me mad, however, is when she makes a character utter words that he never did nor never would have in Kipling's original. Ms Vogel, I fear, succumbs to the same temptation of all three moviemakers: they want to make Harvey initially brattier and even more repulsive than Kipling made him out to be. There is latent good in Harvey, perceived and defended by at least one of the businessmen who appear in the smoking room of the ocean liner. Thus at the beginning of both novel and Vogel's far shorter version, young Harvey, cigarette dangling form his lips, wanders into the liner's smoking room where four or five adult males are discussing him and his mother -- warts and all. Mr Martin of New York tells Harvey to shut the door, stop letting the fog in and to stay outside himself. He is not wanted inside. In slightly different words in both Kipling and Vogel versions, Harvey reminds his critic that Mr Martin is not paying Harvey's passage and that Harvey has every right to enter the smoking room. Enter he does and lingers long enough to get sick on his first cigar. Apparently, he also closed the door behind him. But text adapter MalvinaVogel gratuitously makes Harvey say, "And if you want the door shut, shut it yourself!" Harvey, for all his faults, is at least superficially polite to adults, whom he calls sir, gentlemen or Mister Martin. The adapter, Malvina Vogel, has, for no defensible reason, added words that slightly distort Harvey's character to make a point. Similarly, the three movie makers all made young Harvey closer to 12 than 16 years old. It is hard to turn an immature, uncertain, self-centered 12 year old into a young, responsible man in three months working hard on a fishing schooner. Kipling did the more credible job of transformation. Ms Vogel also drops entire scenes important to adult readers. Thus in the Kipling original former U.S. Navyman Tom Platt rebukes amused Irishman Long Jack for interpreting Harv's earnest efforts to learn the ABCs of seamanship and cod fishing as "more'n half play actin'." Said Platt: "That's the way we all begin. ... The boys
they make believe all the time till they've cheated 'emselves into
bein' men, an' so till they die -- pretendin' and pretendin'."
This scene and others are dropped by adapter Vogel, including an important one toward the end of CAPTAIN COURAGEOUS when father and son discuss the former's past and the latter's future. If young Harve keeps on as he began, he will join the idle useless rich. "It rests with you Harve, you can take
cover behind your mama, of course, and put her on to fussing about your
nerves and your high-strunness and all that kind of poppycock. ... I
can handle you alone if you'll stay along, but I don't pretend to
manage both you and mama."
Too much marital tension for young readers to be exposed to? Perhaps that is how adapter Vogel reasoned when dropping this and a following scene. I am no expert on how to write books for children, though for decades I have made up stories for our two sons and eight grandchildren. I have learned that you have to eschew big words and bring the young auditors actively into the yarn. But if I happen to tell them verifiable history that they have a right to believe to be true, I do not feel justified, for instance, in telling them that George Washington had a wooden leg or that Joan of Arc was a sissy. To bring this meditation to an end: I salute adapter Malvina Vogel for hewing more closely to Kipling's text by far than do any of the three motion pictures of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. She accurately conveys Kipling's belief that a man becomes what he is meant to be through hard work and that all work has dignity. Malvina Vogel and illustrator Ken Landgraf offer young readers a fleeting non-alcoholic sip of Kipling's rum. If that first watered down taste proves pleasant, the readers may later reach for the original Kipling text. And perhaps that is as much as we dare ask of the Great Illustrated Classics Library Edition illustrated version of Rudyard Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/Reviews/d/Rudyard_Kipling_ CAPTAINS_COURAGEOUS_Great_Illustrated_ Classics_for_Children-1774860.html or http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview -Rudyard_Kipling_CAPTAINS_COURAGEOUS_Great_ Illustrated_Classics_for_Children-74-1774860-214778- Why_tinker_with_masterpieces_The_Case_of_Rudyard.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 10/31/2011 title of review: A Fishing Boat's Men Shape Up a Pampered Mama's Boy rating: * * * * review: Which version of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS am I reviewing? Not the original 1897 novel by Rudyard Kipling but a 2002 Great Illustrated Classics issue adapted by Malvina Vogel and illustrated by Ken Landgraf. It is called the Library Edition, bare-boned, no notes, chapter summaries, etc. There are as many pages of pen and ink sketches as there are of text. And the Vogel text is perhaps 85 % shorter than Kipling's original. Well-known adapter Vogel aims at readers ten years old and up. I, who am 76 years old and blessed with six grandsons and two granddaughters, have little doubt that the Vogel-Landgraf shortened, illustrated edition will be a hit with the youngsters whom it targets. The plot is simple enough: Around
1895 Harvey ("Harve") Cheyne falls off an ocean liner, is rescued by a
fishing schooner and spends three months learning to be a cod
fisherman. Back in the schooner's home port of Gloucester,
Massachusetts, Harve telegraphs his multi-millionaire father in San
Diego, is soon reunited with his parents and plans a sea-related
future. He has been transformed from a self-centered, pampered mama's
boy into a thoughtful, caring young man.
My review focuses on what there is for adults in the Vogel-Landgraf adaptation. I assume that you already know the original novel. It abounds in symbolism (sea and baptism, a bloody nose and the sacrament of Confirmation, a fishing boat as monastery with abbot (Captain Troop), prior (co-owner Uncle Salters) and eight (temporarily) celibate male monks who welcome novice Harve to their fellowship. Several religions and superstitions appear in the novel. CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS is also a critique of then rapidly rising destructive economic values of America's Gilded Age. All this is layers deeper than the simple tale of a spoiled rich kid growing up quickly through obedience and hard work, especially through male-bonded teamwork. Those depths are not there in the Vogel-Landgraf adaptation. Malvina Vogel adds sentences here and there, initially one that makes young Harve Cheyne look more impolite than Kipling did. She eliminates some key scenes. But she also does some things right, from an adult's point of view. Take the three film retellings of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. In the first, Manuel the fisherman who pulls Harve out of the Atlantic -- played for an Oscar by Spencer Tracy -- is killed off at sea. In the second Harve has no mother. In the third he has neither mother nor father. Admittedly, Kipling devotes relatively few words to the only two important female characters: Constance Cheyne, Harve's mother, and to Mrs Troop, the mother of the only other boy on the schooner We're Here. But those women exist and make a difference. To her credit Malvina retains them, and all other characters of the 1897 novel. And illustrator Landgraf sketches both of them, too. In the 1870s Kipling's own mother had told Kipling's Headmaster that her son had a soft feminine streak. In CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, Kipling says that Harve inherited brains from his self-made tycoon father and sensitivity from his mother. At novel's end, previously hysterical Constance wins the hearts of every man on the We're Here and overcomes her Unitarian disdain of Catholics to make a large bequest to Harve's savior Manuel's church on the hill in Gloucester. Kipling hinted at some strengths of character in Mrs Cheyne. And the Vogel-Landgraf team keeps her very much alive, caring and credible. -OOO- http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review. aspx?reviewid=1943794 or http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/captains-courageous -rudyard-kipling/1100404871?ean=9781577656838&itm= 1&usri=captains%2bcourageous%2b-%2bgreat% 2billustrated%2bclclassics =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 11/01/2011 title of review: A Retelling For Children Opens An Adult's Eyes rating: * * * * review: Rudyard Kipling's original 1897 novelistic way of telling CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS offered many things to many readers. It was short, nautical, cod-fishing oriented, about a spoiled rich kid Harvey (Harve) Cheyne, Jr., given a bloody nose and made to grow up quickly among a small multi-national body of fishermen good at their work. The nine other males, all lacing their speech with sea jargon, were gifted with plenty of gab to fill idle hours at night or during bad weather with tales of the sea. Kipling also wrote of the lost at sea boy's grieving mother and of his self-made multi-millionaire father. These simple elements are well translated for children ten years and older by adapter Malvina Vogel and illustrator Max Landgraf. But Kipling's original in addition to its simple plot had depths that fascinate and puzzle adults and keep scholars busy throughout their careers. --
CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS: the title refers to an early modern English
heroine named Mary Abree who fought against Spanish "Captains
Courageous" in the Netherlands. A major puzzle: what is the title's
relevance to a Kipling's story in which the only females to have any
roles worth mentioning are two mothers concerned for their teen age
sons at sea, along with one young woman grieving for her recently
drowned,fiance, yet another teen on whom a boy on Harve's schooner has
a schoolboy crush and finally a flock of Portuguese beauties in
Gloucester courted by Manuel -- the fisherman, who plucked drowning
Harve from the Atlantic?
-- Symbolism abounds in the novel -- secular, religious, supernatural, superstitious: the sea as baptism, Captain Troop's bloodying young Harve Cheyne's nose as analogous to a bishop's wake up slap at Confirmation, the 70-ton fishing schooner We're Here as small floating monastery full of hard working celibate male monks who welcome 15-year old Harve as a novice. -- Kipling also warned against the then already increasing contemporary excesses of America's Gilded Age led by ill-educated Captain of Industry Harvey Cheyne, Sr. and against the extra amoral self-seeking future edge that tycoons like Cheyne will gain when their offspring take degrees from Stanford and their great grandchildren flourish Harvard M.B.A.s. Kipling's text, though not long as novels go, is probably six times longer than adapter Malvina Vogel's. Fortunately for young readers, illustrator Ken Landgraf's sketches take up just as many pages as Vogel's shortened text. Vogel, unlike some of the three film versions of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, retains all of Kipling's major characters and Landgraf sketches each of them, including the barely mentioned girl friend of 15-year old Harve's year older teenage shipmate and friend Dan Troop aboard the 70-ton fishing schooner We're Here. There are several things that the 2002 Vogel-Landgraf Great Illustrated Classics version of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS have made me think about. I will conclude this review with just one of them. No matter which version of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS I have dealt with: (the original in both a scholarly and a non-scholarly edition, the simplified illustrated abridgment of Vogel-Landgraf and the three filmed versions), I have always found it hard to believe that a successful search for young Harve might not have been made. --
First: might not the liner that he fell overboard from, have halted and
begun to ask the numerous fishing boats on the Grand Banks if they had
heard of a boy being picked up from the sea?
-- Second, the fishing schooners, some more often than others, would put into Canadian or French ports in the Bay of Saint Lawrence for bait, supplies, new sails, etc. Kipling tells us that it did not take long for news of Harvey's rescue to spread through the regular "fleet" of 100 schooners out for three months of fishing. Why wasn't one of them, once it reached land, asked to send a telegram or write a letter at least to a newspaper about the happy event? In Kipling's Chapter Seven, an ocean liner traveling at 20 knots in thick fog cuts the fishing trawler Jennie Cushman in half. There are only two survivors. Harve Cheyne's We're Here picks up one, its captain. The nearby schooner Carrie Pitman rescues the Captain's injured son. The Carrie Pitman's captain then invites the father to join their depleted crew for the rest of the fishing season and to be with his son. The captain of the Carrie Pitman said in Kipling's words: "We're runnin' in fer more bait an' graound tackle." In her version, Malvina Vogel writes of the Carrie Pitman: "She was headed back to Gloucester for more bait." That is not likely. For Gloucester, Massacusetts, home port for 30 or 40 of the fishing schooners, is a thousand miles to the southwest. The Carrie Pitman would have gone somewhere much closer for bait and ground tackle. But she wherever she went would have been inhabited dry land: island or continent. QUESTIONS:
--
Why didn't 15-year old Harve Cheyne ask to be transferred forthwith to
the Carrie Pitman and get back to his parents as fast as possible?
-- Why didn't Harve's rescuer Captain Disko Troop not suggest the same thing? -- Or at least write a letter to be passed to a newspaper? I noticed this apparent gaffe by Kipling only when Malvina Vogel rewrote it as an impossibly bigger gaffe. I plan to read the simplified, illustrated Vogel - Landgraf edition to the three youngest of my six grandsons when my wife and I drive 75 miles south tomorrow to overnight with them. Later I will give it to them as a present. I do not doubt that they will eat it up and ask for more. -OOO http://www.amazon.com/Captains-Courageous -Great-Illustrated-Classics/dp/1577656830/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&i e=UTF8&qid=1319882453&sr=1-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 11/02/2011 Review Title: The Women in Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS Product Rating: * * * * PROS: Convincing retelling of the rapid conversion at sea of a mama's boy into a man. CONS: Unfamiliar setting: sailboats, cod fishing, nautical jargon. Dialects. Phonetic spellings. Forgettable pen and ink illustrations. BOTTOM LINE: If your child is 7 - 11 years old, he or she could do worse than read this adaptation of Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS as an early prelude to later devouring "the real thing." aohcapablanca's Full Review: I am not writing about the three versions of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS released in 1937, 1977 or 1996. Nor any oral recordings thereof. I am not even reviewing the original 1897 novel by Rudyard Kipling. My focus, rather, is an illustrated retelling of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS for children: not in Classic Comics or Cliffs Notes. No, this is all about a year 2002 239-page book by Malvina Vogel and Ben Landgraf. Facing every page of Vogel's text is a full-page pen and ink drawing by Landgraf. I am reviewing the so-called Library Edition of Great Illustrated Classics, the one without explanatory notes, study guides and such like. I do not usually review books for young children. I acquired the Vogel-Landgraf version of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. I found on-line an inexpensive copy of what I carelessly thought was the original Kipling novel. I then sent off for the full novel, but by the time the latter had arrived, I had seen the three film versions of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS and read Vogel-Landgraf. Something like that experience might be what happens to many young people as they grow into Rudyard Kipling. First they might read a simple illustrated retelling -- a Classics Comic, then watch a film version. Finally, they read the original Kipling. For CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS any reader would do well to read a scholarly edition with introduction, maps and notes. That is because, as many contemporary readers complain, the novel is all about fishing for cod on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland over three months in the mid 1890s. Jargon abounds about fishing, the rigging of schooners, sails, ropes, navigation and more. In addition, the nine-man crew of the 70-ton We're Here, home port Gloucester, Masschusetts, is multi-national, men of several nations and Kipling renders their talk phonetically and as ungrammatically as they would have spoken in real life. Malvina Vogel retells Kipling's short novel using about six times fewer words than the orginal. She leaves out scenes. She invents dialog. She makes avoidable errors, e.g. sending one schooner a 1,000 miles back to Gloucester at the height of the fishing season for more bait and equipment when French and Canadian ports are 800 miles closer. She does one thing right, in my opinion: she does not take wild liberties with Kipling's plot as do the three film versions. She does not kill off Manuel (as played by Spencer Tracy), the Portuguese fisherman who pulls spoiled young millionaire brat Harvey (Harve) Cheyne out of the fog-bound Atlantic after Harve has fallen off a passenger liner. She leaves young Harve both his parents. Ms Vogel keeps Harvey 15 years old versus the 12 of the films. Harve's 16-year old shipmate Daniel Troop remains the son of the skipper owner of the We're Here and is not gratuitously injured at sea. And every one of the Kipling characters, crewman, fishermen, French tobacco salesmen remain in the version for children and Ken Landgraf draws sketches of every of them, including every named female, but none of the numerous girl friends of Manuel. Now I have problems with Kipling's treatment of women in the orginal. Most of those problems are smoothed over in the Vogel text. But the illustrator makes sure we know who the females are: with one exception: the woman behind the title CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS. She is an early modern young English woman named Mary Abree who fought in the Netherlands against Spaniards described as "Captains Courageous." May Abree was literally a battler, an Amazon, a Joan of Arc. None of this is true of the women of the novel: (1)
Mrs Constance Cheyne, wife of Harvey, Senior and mother of Harvey,
Junior;
(2) 14-year old Hattie S. (3)unnamed fiancee of the drowned 19-year old the preceded Harve as a hand on the We're Here; (4) Mrs. Troop, wife of captain Disko Troop and mother of teenage Dan, who becomes Harve's best friend for life; and (5) the many Portuguese women in Gloucester wooed by Manuel. Few lines of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS are written about any women. I leave it to you to read into the roles of all of them except Mrs Constance Cheyne. But Constance's treatment disturbs me. On the first page of the novel, a New Yorker describes Mrs Cheyne as "a lovely lady, but she don't
pretend to manage him (Harve)."
After Harve is lost at sea, she falls into a three month state of hysteria, declines to near death and is surrounded, back home in San Diego, by her ultra-rich Captain of Industry husband with doctors, faith healers and others. But the instant she learns that Harve is alive, she recovers and insists that they race in three days to Boston in the personal luxury train car that bears her name. Constance Cheyne meets Captain Troop, Manuel and the others who saved Harve and taught him through hard team-work to grow into manhood. She invites them to dinner in the family train car. She serves them personally, marveling at their good table manners. To a man, they all adore her. Her visit to the We're Here and to Harve's bunk turns the little schooner into a "cathedral." There is something to this woman! On the other hand, she is mistreated by the two males closest to her. Cheyne, Senior apparently leaves Harve to Constance to raise as best she can. She constantly rebukes Harve for disobedience and freshness to adults. But he disdains her and thinks of ways to do whatever pleases him. At novel's end, Cheyne, Senior, a self-made, cut-throat businessman long ago orphaned in Texas, gives Harve two choices: remain a mama's boy letting his mother keep him a self-centered sissy or put himself in his father's hands and become a tycoon of industry. Constance is deliberately excluded from father-son deliberations of Harve's future. It is hard not to feel sorry for Constance Cheyne, though Kipling does not portray her as notably mistreated. Ken Landgraf's pedestrian sketches of Constance Cheyne do do begin until Chapter 13 (of 15). All told, she appears in eleven illustrations. She appears, in sequence, ill, depressed, elated, embarrasses Manuel by gushing over him for saving Harve, then fades into group scenes. Later today, my wife and I will drive 75 miles south to Greenville, South Carolina to overnight with our six grandsons, while their parents make a quick trip to Charleston for a religious ceremony. We will bring with us CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, including the 1977 Robert Ulrich TV retelling. I will read to the younger boys from the Vogel-Landgraf version and leave it behind with them to finish, if it proves attractive to them -- as I expect it to do. I have expended so many key-strokes on this children's version of Kipling's novel, written during his four-year residence in Vermont, because I rarely read children's books. And because this version plus the filmed versions have made me pause and reflect on why and how retellings of a classic take place. But, as Kipling might say, that's another story for another time. Read the Great Illustrated Classics retelling of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS to your youngsters. Let them learn about male bonding at sea, about growing into manhood fast when you have to, and about the first stage in a long process that brings seafood to their dining room. -OOO- Thank you, Patsy, for making this reviewable by me. =---==-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.epinions.com/reviews/Rudyard_Kipling_ Captains_Courageous_Great_Illustrated_Classics_epi http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/kipling_courageous.html |
