“Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” cries Henry Preston Standish, the hero of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, as he struggles to stay afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exhausted and past hope of rescue. “But of course nobody was there to listen,” Lewis wrote, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.” Lewis died of a heart attack at the age of 41, broke, out of work and alone in the middle of New York City, a victim of Hollywood blacklisting, his three novels long out of print: a writer who’d lost his audience. No one came to rescue him. As long as a writer’s words are preserved, though, there is a chance of his work being rescued. In the case of Gentleman Overboard, it took over seventy years for someone to spot the book, lost in the ocean of forgotten books, and the rescuers came from three different continents. Lewis’s story of one man dying alone and forgotten is now being read by thousands who find it speaks to a sense of “shared loneliness.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Lewis was the second son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother Clara came to the U.S. with her family in 1887 at the age of two. His father Hyman arrived a year later at the age of thirteen, apprenticed to work for his older brother Samuel as a tailor. By the time Herbert was born, the Lewises were living in the Brownsville neighborhood around Tompkins and Lafayette Avenues. The area was then the heart of the largest Jewish community outside Europe, the first stop for tens of thousands of like Lewis’s parents, immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1890 and 1915, the number of Jews living in New York City jumped from under 100,000 to nearly one million. The name Lewis was Anglicized from Luria and Hyman and Clara helped ease their sons’ integration into American life by giving them solidly Anglo-Saxon names: Alfred Joseph, Herbert Clyde and Benjamin George.
For Herbert Clyde Lewis, Brownsville was the quintessential American melting pot — at least in hindsight. In 1943, he wrote an article titled “Back Home” for The Los Angeles Times about visiting his boyhood streets for the first time in twenty years. “As I walked slowly around the block and let the memories flood back,” he wrote, “it seemed to me that my old neighborhood was a miracle—the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth. Here, for the first time, people came from all the corners of Europe, the Near East and China — and lived side by side in close quarters and did not cut each other’s throats.” There was something in the air, he believed, “that made us feel maybe the other fellow’s beliefs and background were all right too.”
However rosy Lewis’s memories of his boyhood in Brownsville may have been, he left home early and quickly established what became a lifelong pattern of short stays and frequent moves. He quit high school at the age of sixteen, worked a variety of jobs with local newspapers, briefly attended both New York University and the College of the City of New York (finding “neither institution suited him”), then spent the winter of 1929-1930 in Paris. He returned to America in March 1930, took a job as a sports reporter in Newark, New Jersey, then moved nearly halfway across the world to Shanghai, China. He spent the next two years there working as a reporter for The China Press and The Shanghai Evening Post.
Living in China may have satisfied his appetite for travel at first. In early 1933, Lewis returned to New York, took a job with The New York World Telegram, switched to The New York Journal American, got married, and rented an apartment in Manhattan — one of the few times he kept the same address for longer than a year. His time in China provided the material for his first ventures into fiction, which were short but action-packed. “Tibetan Image,” for example, tells of fortune hunters forced to abandon a million dollars’ worth of silver fox pelts in the Gobi Desert when they are attacked by a pack of man-eating dogs. It appeared in Argosy magazine in November 1935 and was followed by others full of stereotypes of enigmatic, slightly sinister Chinese. He also tried to his hand at writing for the stage, collaborating with a former reporter, Louis Weitzenkorn, on “Name Your Poison.” In the play, a group of petty crooks take out a life insurance policy on a homeless derelict and then attempt — unsuccessfully — to kill him through a series of “accidents.” The show opened for a pre-Broadway run in late January 1936 and closed after six performances. The play needed “repairs” was the only explanation offered by its producer, who let his option lapse a few months later.
Although Lewis claimed he was happy with his job at the Journal American, a certain discontent with comfortable situations seems to have been part of his nature. As he later told Newsweek magazine, the idea for his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, came to him as he stood on the roof on his apartment in Greenwich Village one evening in late 1936. Lewis looked down on the street below and considered what would happen if he fell: “How would a man bridge that dizzy mental gap between the security under his feet and that world ‘down there’?” He decided to write a story to find out. To emphasize that mental gap, he chose as the subject of his experiment not an itinerant reporter like himself but with a man whose very being embodies security.
Henry Preston Standish, the gentleman of Gentleman Overboard, is as solidly fixed to the bedrock of the American establishment as a man could be. His family name evokes the English man of arms who sailed with the first Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the subject of “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Graduate of Yale, partner in a Wall Street investment bank, member of the Finance Club, Athletic Club and Weebonnick Golf Club, owner of a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side, faithful husband and loving father of two, Standish is the definition of a solid citizen. “He drank moderately, smoked moderately, and made love moderately; in fact, Standish was one of the world’s most boring men.” When Standish contemplates the prospect of a world without him, he thinks with regret that “New York City would be dotted with spaces that could never be filled by anyone but the real Henry Preston Standish.”
And yet, like Lewis, Standish feels an irresistible urge to leave and find something that was missing at home. In Standish’s case, the impulse hits him out of nowhere. One day, sitting in his office, he “suddenly found himself assailed by a vague unrest.” He feels compelled to get up, leave his office, and take a walk along the Manhattan waterfront in Battery Park. As he looks out at the water, “Forces beyond his control grasped him and shook him by the shoulders, whispering between clenched teeth: ‘You must go away from here; you must go away!’”
Standish does not understand this impulse. “There was no sane reason why he must go away; everything was in its proper place in his life.” At the same time, his instincts tell him “that he never would be able to breathe freely again unless he went far away.” Standish wasn’t the first character in American literature to feel this urge to escape. Fifty years before Gentleman Overboard, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn lit out for the Indian Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Perhaps what Lewis called “security” was just another name for Huck Finn’s “sivilization.”
But when Standish sees the last sight of New York slip over the horizon as he sails away on a cruise through the Panama Canal to California, he feels as if “all his weariness, all his doubts and fears, vanished magically into the sea.” In California, the sense of relief continues. Standish discovers “a certain zest to things now that he had not experienced back home before; all his sensations were intensified.” He decides to keep going, to take another cruise, this time to Honolulu. “Why, Henry?” his wife begs when Standish calls to break the news. “I don’t know,” he replies. Even after he reaches Hawaii, he delays his return, exchanging his ticket back to San Francisco for a berth on the Arabella, a freighter taking a leisurely three-week voyage from Honolulu to Panama.
Lewis then sets his experiment in motion. Early one morning, while most on the ship are asleep and Panama still at least ten days away, Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling on deck and falls overboard. Lewis has put his subject about as far away from the security of a comfortable life in New York City as one can get — two thousand miles from Panama, three thousand miles from Hawaii, along an infrequently-traveled route. Even here, though, conventions manage to reach out and control Standish. After he surfaces, when there is still a chance of his being heard by someone on the Arabella, he finds himself “doomed by his breeding”: “The Standishes were not shouters; three generations of gentlemen had changed the trumpet in the early Standish larynx to a dulcet violoncello.” Standish hesitates to cry out and the Arabella steams away, its crew and other passengers oblivious to his plight. Another twelve hours pass before his absence is confirmed—and, in a cruel irony foreshadowing Lewis’s own death, some onboard conclude that Standish’s accident was, in fact, suicide.
With cool precision, Lewis peels back the layers of “sivilization” as the hours pass and his subject tries to stay afloat, waiting to be rescued. Standish kicks off his shoes, then bit by bit removes his clothes, until he is naked, his eyes and lips scorched by the sun. At first, he feels embarrassed at making the Arabella turn around and rescue him; then pride in his “tremendous adventure” of staying alive until his rescue; and finally, when he realizes there is no hope, of regret. “And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.” Extraordinary experiences like his heart “having gone on beating thirty-five years without once stopping”; like never having gone hungry; like having been given everything he had ever desired. In the end, “there is one desire that will not be satisfied”: to live.
When Lewis finished writing Gentleman Overboard, his own situation was precarious. He’d been living beyond his means, borrowing money and falling months behind in his rent. Just weeks before Viking published Gentleman in May 1937, Lewis declared bankruptcy with debts of $3,100—over a year’s income for a newspaperman—and “no assets, except possible royalties” from the book. It would not be the last time that Lewis would find himself flat broke. Reviews of Gentleman Overboard began appearing soon after—the first on May 23 in The New York Times, the same paper in which his bankruptcy notice had appeared. Reviewer Charles Poore called the book “entertaining” and “a flight of fancy,” but sensed Lewis’s underlying design: “Standish seems to be undergoing an experiment rather than an experience.”
The book’s brevity seems to have led many reviewers to consider it insubstantial. “It is a good enough book of its kind, but it is one of those stories that might have been a masterpiece and is by no means one,” William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review. Only Arnold Palmer, reviewing the British edition published by Victor Gollancz in the magazine Britannia and Eve, saw the book’s length as a virtue: “He has told, with unusual skill and intensity, a story which ninety-nine writers in a hundred would have ruined by expanding into a full-length novel or compressing to the requirements of a magazine editor.” Evelyn Waugh on the other hand, writing in Time and Tide, thought it wasn’t short enough: “In spite of its brevity it is too long; a Frenchman could have told the story in 50 pages.” Viking issued a second printing; Gollancz did not.
Hollywood came to Lewis’s rescue. In August 1937, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had signed Lewis as a “term writer” — a staff writer with a contract for a term, usually six months at the then-lucrative salary of $250 a week. Lewis, his wife Gita and their infant son Michael headed for California, arriving in early September “in our original protoplasmic state,” as he wrote his brother Ben (on MGM stationery). By Christmas, Lewis could report that he was busy working on a remake of the silent movie Tell It to the Marines and expected to “be here for a long time.”
He was still struggling to pay off his debts, though. He wrote Ben that people were “pressing me for debts and making my life miserable by threatening to sue me and attach my salary.” “All the other writers live in big houses and entertain,” he complained, “and we live in a shack.” MGM shelved the remake of Tell It to the Marines and Lewis’s contract was not extended. He was able to get a job with RKO, collaborating with Ian Hunter on a pair of B-movie musicals starring the boy tenor Bobby Breen, Fisherman’s Wharf and Escape to Paradise, both released in 1939 and both forgettable. By the end of that year, Lewis quit RKO and moved back to New York City with a job offer from the J. Walter Thompson advertisement agency and the manuscript of a second novel in hand.
Lewis’s anti-war sentiments had been stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In Spring Offensive, Peter Winston, a young American out of work, unhappy in love and at odds with the isolationist mood in America, concludes “There was no place for him in his own country” and travels to England to enlist in the British Army. When he completes his training and deploys to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, however, he finds there is nothing to do in the months of stalemate known as the Phony War. He decides to make a small protest by sneaking into the no-man’s land between the Maginot and Siegfried lines and planting a packet of sweet pea seeds. As Winston crouches there planting his seeds in the early hours one morning, however, the Phony War comes to an abrupt and violent end. He finds himself stranded between the two sides, unarmed and with little chance of survival. Like Standish in his last moments, Winston loses all hope: “There was no one who wanted him anywhere.” A shell strikes and Winston is obliterated.
Lewis’s timing could not have been worse. Spring Offensive was published in late April 1940. Two weeks later, German panzers began rolling into Belgium, France and the Netherlands. By the end of June, France had capitulated. “For its own sake, this slender novel should have made its appearance well before the beginning of the actual Spring Offensive,” concluded The Saturday Review. Ralph Ellison predicted in his New Masses review, “little will be said of it these days in the capitalist press.” He was right: the book sank without a trace.
Lewis still had hopes for his career as a novelist, though. Convinced that his handicap had been trying to write while holding down a full-time job, he took his family, now including a baby girl, Jane, to quiet Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he wrote his third novel. Focused on the residents of a rooming house in Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve, Season’s Greetings is a love-hate letter to New York City. Lewis allowed himself a much richer prose style; the book is filled with vivid descriptions:
Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons.
Despite the vitality of Lewis’s writing, though, his subject once again was grim: “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” One of the residents is a German refugee without a single friend or acquaintance in his new country. Another is an embittered alcoholic, a third an old woman who has outlived her family. Although some of the residents do come together to create, for a few hours, a sort of community, Lewis refuses a happy ending for all. As his neighbours gather for an impromptu Christmas party, Mr. Kittredge, who began the day convinced “there was no purpose in living any longer,” finds that nothing in the course of the day has changed his mind. He quietly slips out to Washington Park with a rifle and commits suicide—alone and unseen: “Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.” Less than ten years later Lewis himself died alone and unseen in the Hotel Earle across the street.
Published in September 1941, Season’s Greetings received favourable but not glowing reviews. The New York Times’ reviewer called it “a story that pulses with feeling for the complex and comprehensive personality of New York.” The American Mercury did not care for Lewis’s change of style: “Overwritten in spots, it belabors its point, yet it holds the reader’s interest.” Once again, Lewis was a victim of bad timing. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, fewer Americans were in the mood to buy books about Christmas. The short biographical sketch on the back of Season’s Greetings mentioned that the author and his family had returned to New York and promised that “This time Mr. Lewis expects to stay home for good.” But it didn’t work out that way.
After working for The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter for about a year, Lewis tried again to make it on his own as a writer—without much luck. As Los Angeles Times’ film industry reporter Fred Beck later told the story, by late 1942, Lewis “was a small, sad man, shivering on the streets of New York.” A short story Lewis had written, “Two-Faced Quilligan,” had been rejected by 33 magazines and he worried that his family “would have salami for Christmas dinner.” As Beck put it, “Herbie wished somebody he knew would come along so he could borrow a buck.” Instead, Lewis came home to find an acceptance letter from Story magazine and a check for $50—enough for a generous Christmas and a month or two more. Soon after, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox had bought the movie rights for the story and hired Lewis as a writer for $500 a week. Lewis and family returned to Los Angeles.
Despite the turnaround in his financial situation, Lewis was never content in Hollywood. “Life is rather dull here,” he wrote his brother Ben in July. “It’s completely unreal going to the studio every day and writing scripts about make-believe people while the real people are cutting each other’s throats with gusto everywhere.” In November, he complained, “I look around me and see the things that success buys out here, and I don’t like any of them. Swimming pools get full of dead flies and uninvited guests. Big houses get full of live flies and uninvited guests.” Lewis wrote that he had decided to take a job offer with radio comedian Fred Allen and move the family back to New York. Fred Beck made the news public in The Los Angeles Times with a sly aside: “Fred Allen has a new writer, brand new, and I’m just wondering if everybody is now going to be happy now that they’ve got what they wanted.”
The answer was no. Lewis expected to replace several writers who were going to be drafted. They weren’t. After eight weeks with Allen’s show, Lewis decided “I was tired of taking money under false pretenses” and returned to Hollywood. Lewis continued with 20th Century Fox, which released the movie version of Lewis’s story, Don Juan Quilligan, in June 1945. As little as he cared for the work, Lewis desperately needed the studio’s money. In early 1945, he complained to Ben that “the Internal Revenue Bureau has attached my salary to make me pay off an old tax debt to Uncle Sam, which cuts down my fun, finances and practically eliminates (for the next few months) all the plans we had to send you our wedding gift.”
Lewis’s only break from the studio grind came in May 1945 when he, Dalton Trumbo, and four other writers were sent on a six-week tour of combat areas in the Southwest Pacific at the invitation of General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. “I’m really seeing the war on this 16,000-mile junket,” he wrote from Guam on June 16, 1945: “the planes, the fleet, the infantry, almost everything else.”
The war ended just two months after Lewis’s return from the trip. He sold more stories: “D-Day in Las Vegas” to RKO and “The Fifth Avenue Story,” which Lewis co-wrote with Frederick Stephani, to Liberty Films. Filmed as It Happened on Fifth Avenue, the story earned Academy Award nominations for the two writers in 1947. But by then Lewis’s life had begun to fall apart. He was drinking heavily and taking barbiturates to help him sleep. His son Michael remembers seeing his father “naked and completely comatose, in a chair” around this time. “My mother told me it was alcohol and seconal.” Gita Lewis had begun to work for studios as a writer herself. As Michael recalls, “my & my sister’s real parents” during this time were the full-time maids his parents hired. The couple separated in 1947.
Lewis’s professional life was also coming apart. In January 1947, he became a member of the editorial staff of The Screen Writer, the magazine of the Screen Writers Guild. Unfortunately, the Guild was about to become the focus of Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries into possible Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Working in support of the U. S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the F.B.I. interviewed dozens of witnesses and collected thousands of documents related to liberal political activities in Hollywood. An F. B. I. informant identified Lewis as a member of the American Communist Party.
Whether the allegation was true or not, Lewis had taken up with the losing side. He joined over 100 writers, actors, directors, and musicians signing a full-page advertisement protesting the House committee’s hearings — which only added to suspicions about his politics. A month later, Dalton Trumbo and nine other members of the Screen Writers Guild were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee. A group of the most powerful studio executives met in New York in December and issued a statement vowing, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States.” The practice of blacklisting had begun. “The swimming pools are drying up all over Hollywood. I do not think I shall see them filled in my generation,” Lewis remarked to a reporter, jokingly. But he did not take the experience so lightly. He suffered a nervous breakdown in mid-1948 and was unable to work for a year.
In September 1949, he returned to New York City for what would be the last time — alone. His wife Gita chose to stay in Hollywood. He took a job as rewrite man for The New York Mirror. “I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly and straightened myself out completely,” he wrote Ben from New York in October 1949, adding that he’d sold several of his stories to provide an allowance for Gita and the children. Michael Lewis recalls that “the four of us tried living together again as a family” in New York around Christmas 1949, but the marriage may have reached a breaking point. Gita took Michael and Jane back to Hollywood and moved in with Tanya Tuttle, wife of blacklisted director Frank Tuttle, who had gone to France in search of work.
In April 1950, Lewis filed for bankruptcy, citing over $26,000 in debts and unpaid income taxes. He moved into a room at the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village. Although once considered among the best residential hotels in the city, in 1950, the Earle was, in the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, who stayed there around the same time as Lewis, “a pigsty.” Lewis moved from the Mirror to Time magazine, but he was still broke. He apologized to Ben for not being able to help pay their father’s bills from a prostate operation.
In late September, he left Time—whether voluntarily or not is unclear. Three weeks later, he was found dead in his hotel room. Although his death certificate stated the cause was heart attack, some of his acquaintances believed Lewis had committed suicide — which, Dalton Trumbo wrote his wife, was “sad, but no more than to have been expected.” “The only food on which a drowning man could subsist was the hope of being rescued,” Lewis wrote in Gentleman Overboard. Perhaps he had lost hope of being rescued himself.
He passed on to his widow only the prospect of future sales of his writing — of which there were few. In December 1950, one of his early stories, “Surprise for the Boys,” was adapted for the CBS television series Danger. A few years later, a producer bought the rights to Lewis’s story “The Bride Wore Pajamas,” but the film was never made. Finally, in 1959, Gita, now remarried, sold his unfinished novel, The Silver Dark, to Pyramid Books, a paperback publisher. Despite a cover plug by novelist Budd Schulberg proclaiming it “A genuinely original and compelling novel,” the book was never reviewed and never reissued. According to WorldCat.org, just two copies remain in libraries.
The Silver Dark might have marked the end of Lewis’s story. His work was ignored in studies of American novels. His film credits alone kept his name alive in occasional reference books. His daughter Jane died in 1985 from complications related to diabetes; his brothers both died in the late 1990s and his widow Gita in 2001. Only Michael, with a handful of his father’s letters and one lone page from his journal, remained to remember Lewis.
In the spring 2009, I came across a review of Gentleman Overboard while browsing through the archives of Time magazine. “What would it feel like to fall off a ship in mid-Pacific?” the reviewer asked. “With as much calm authority as though he had fallen overboard himself, Herbert Clyde Lewis tells just what it feels like.” Having established this website three years earlier, I was looking for long-forgotten books with unique qualities and Gentleman Overboard sounded like a perfect candidate. I located a copy, read it and posted a short enthusiastic review. Without having seen the Newsweek article describing Lewis’s original idea, I referred to the book as an experiment:
What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply seeing what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard.
A few months later, I received an email from Diego D’Onofrio, an editor with La Bestia Equilatera, a small Spanish-language publisher in Buenos Aires. “I would like to ask you,” he wrote: “Which neglected book do you recommend me to publish?” Not familiar with La Bestia’s audience, I was reluctant to offer many suggestions, but replied, “If I had to pick one off the top of my head that is very accessible to a wide range of readers, I guess I’d pick Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. It should be relatively easy to translate and has a strong narrative line that should grab most readers very quickly.” Diego thanked me and said he’d order a copy.
Diego and his editor-in-chief Luis Chittaroni loved the book and in May 2010, they contracted for a translation and scheduled the book for publication. The Spanish title would be El caballero que cayó al mar (The Gentleman Who Fell into the Sea). The challenge of publishing a neglected book in another language is considerable, D’Onofrio later wrote. “Because nobody knows the author, not least the book, which is also not known in his native language … the only tool you have to sell the book is that it must be extraordinary in itself.”
By this standard, El caballero que cayó al mar performed exceptionally well. Its early reviews were consistently enthusiastic: “Simple y magistral. Sólo eso. Sencillamente eso,” Alejandro Frías proclaimed in El Sol de Mendoza: “Simple and masterful. Only that. Simply that.” Another reviewer called it “una perlita”: “a little pearl.” The book continued to win critical acclaim as its readership spread beyond Argentina. In August 2018, one of Spain’s leading critics, Ignacio Echevarría, praised the book in his monthly column for El Cultural and in September 2019, a feature on CNN Chile recommended it: “Con magistral sencillez, Herbert Clyde Lewis lleva el relato a una dimensión filosófica.” (“With masterful simplicity, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes the story to a philosophical dimension”). Eight years after the first publication of El caballero que cayó al mar, D’Onofrio reported, “It is the book with the most unanimous praise from our entire publishing house, which now has more than 90 books.”
Even as the Spanish translation was underway, Luis Chittaroni began to share PDF copies of the original Viking edition with acquaintances in the Argentinian literary community. The novelist Pablo Katchadjian in turn recommended the book to his friend Uriel Kon, an Argentina-born Jew living in Jerusalem and then starting up his own small press, Zikit Books. Looking for English-language novels that could be easily translated and published in Hebrew, Kon found the book matched his criteria perfectly: “Clear, elegant prose; a compelling, existential story; a book you can sit down and read in a night.” He arranged for a Hebrew translation and Zikit published האדוּ שבפל לים (roughly, The Nobleman Fell into the Sea) in June 2013.
The book struck a chord among Israeli readers. A feature review in Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers, called it “A miniature masterpiece that emerged from oblivion.” Zikit printed 1,00 copies — a number Kon considered “somewhat optimistic” at the time. That edition sold out in under two months and Zikit went on to sell over 7,000 copies. “There are around three to four thousand serious literary readers in Israel,” Kon estimated. “By that standard, this was a huge best-seller — a cult classic.” Standish’s predicament — lost and forgotten in a great ocean — Kon believes, “Resonated with many Israeli intellectuals who felt themselves isolated—not only as Jews surrounded by the Arab world but also unheard in a society dominated by conservative forces.”
In September 2019, Auteursdomein, a small Dutch press based in Amsterdam, published the English-language text of Gentleman Overboard under the simplified title, Overboard. This edition was sponsored by Dutch novelist Pauline van de Ven, who had come across Gentleman in a box of old books and ashtrays left by a distant uncle. As she writes in her foreword, “I read it without interruption from cover to cover and was impressed by the austere language, the strong images and the universal scope of the haunting story.” For van de Ven, the book’s power lies in its appeal to a paradoxical sense of “shared loneliness.” It belongs, she believes, in “same gallery of honor” as Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a another short novel about a prosperous businessman facing his imminent death: “It’s an existentialist masterpiece.”
Despite its rescue by publishers on three different continents, however, Gentleman Overboard remains out of print in the United States. Just three copies of the 1937 Viking edition are available for sale. The book’s success with readers in Argentina, Chile, Spain, Israel, and the Netherlands suggests the time is ripe for its reissue in its native country. There is still a chance for a new generation of American readers to discover Herbert Clyde Lewis’s “little pearl.” All it will take is the right person to listen.
My sincere thanks to Michael Lewis for allowing me to quote from his father’s letters and his own emails.