A recent succession of crazy winter storms in California has had me thinking of George R. Stewart’s 1941 novel Storm, a book I’d have
been unlikely to pick up had it not been urged upon me by a bookstore owner
eager to clear the shelves of his shuttering store. Its back cover featured an
illustration of San Francisco from the air (encouraging: local interest); the
dust jacket promised the story of a catastrophic storm slamming into the Golden
State (also encouraging: I’d recalled once reading that among the most powerful
hurricanes on record had occurred off California’s coast); and finally (amusing
if not so encouraging) the blurbs on the back were of the subtly ambiguous sort
one sometimes discovers to be backhanded: “I shouldn’t be at all surprised to
see it set a new style in fiction;” “It’s marvelous that the effectiveness of
the treatment equals the originality of the idea!”
Well, I thought, at least
it’s about San Francisco. Perhaps it’ll be entertaining.
A quick visit to Wikipedia, however, gave me two more pieces
of information I might hold against the book. First, Storm, featuring a
Junior Meteorologist fond of naming storms after his girlfriends, directly led
to the convention of using women’s names for hurricanes until the introduction
of a non gender-specific system in 1978. It’s perhaps unfortunate that the “J. M.,”
as he’s known in the novel, didn’t get overruled by his boss, the Chief
Meteorologist, more inclined to reference conquering historical figures such as
Hannibal, Marshal Ney and Genghis Khan - though one shudders at the directions that nomenclature plan could have taken.
Second, the troublesome “J. M.” bestows upon the menacing storm of the book’s
title the name “Maria,” which apparently inspired Lerner and Loewe to write “They
Call The Wind Maria,” the popular ear-worm from their musical, Paint Your
Wagon.
Once I opened the book, further disappointment: the two
elements that had drawn me to the novel scarcely figure into it at all. Most of
the action takes place in the Sierra Nevada, not in San Francisco. In fact nothing
notable about the city even features in Storm, which might have been
written by someone who’d never visited the place. Second, the colossal
hurricane I’d expected never occurs. Maria is a big storm, and drops lots of
rain and snow on California, which in most years the state needs badly. But
having experienced big winter storms in California, I can attest that Maria is
simply not that spectacular. In fact, there’s exactly nothing spectacular about
it. I kept waiting for ruinous disaster. There’s always a mildly suspenseful
hint of the possibility of things getting worse, but then – suddenly - nothing
happens. If Irwin Allen had taken this approach, only a floor or two of his tower
would have been an inferno, probably quickly extinguished by a competent and fast-thinking
team of custodians.
“Custodians,” though, actually lie at the center of Storm
– I mean, aside from the storm itself, which clearly serves as Stewart’s chief protagonist
and antagonist. Narratively following in the vein of John Dos Passos’ USA
trilogy, Stewart’s novel is a montage of anecdotes arranged together to
demonstrate how different people with different roles are affected by and react
to disaster. Readers will also recognize this arrangement as one common to
Hollywood disaster films: a set of stock characters populates the affected setting,
whether it be a capsized ship, a damaged airplane, or a town threatened by earthquake,
fire, tsunami, pandemic, zombie invasion, sharknado, or [insert-calamity-here]
. In Storm these characters
consist primarily of nameless workers whose jobs require them to battle the
storm’s ravages: snowplow drivers, telephone switchboard operators, linemen, an
airline pilot flying through the storm, an airport supervisor, meteorologists
(of course), plus a panoply of “ordinary people” including someone named Max
and someone named Jen - unmarried young lovers who drive from Reno to San
Francisco and disappear on the way back as though in punishment for sinful contamination
by the Barbary Coast. Stewart also conjures a few animal characters: an owl
fried on an electrical line, a coyote that tramps through the snow sniffing unusual
odors emanating from Man (this is the kind of novel in which “Man” must almost always be capitalized), and perhaps the
best drawn figure in the entire book, one of the few to merit an actual name, Big
Blue, a wild boar that gets swept into an overflowing creek, clogs up a
drainage pipe, and causes the railroad to be washed out. This poor porker
aside, most of Stewart’s portraits call to mind those featured on WPA murals or
socialist-realist propaganda posters: heroic workers whose individual
contributions serve the greater cause. The men are competent, courageous, burly
(we glimpse one reading an issue of Ranch
Life). The leaders among them hold titles like “the Chief” or “the
General,” the latter a retired military man in charge of flood control in the
Sacramento River Delta. Stewart seems largely uninterested in the women, who
tend to fret a lot, and his attitude seems well summed up by the Chief
Meteorologist’s declaration that “Storms are hussies!” Small wonder the J.M.’s sexist
naming system achieved such traction.
Storm is written in a style that wears a lab coat and
speaks with a philosopher’s voice. It’s marked by a slightly authoritarian and even
more slightly, almost affably pedantic ponderousness concerning the condition
of Man. Fortunately, Stewart limits his rhapsodizing about Man’s powerlessness
against Nature mostly to the initial paragraphs of each chapter, one devoted to
each of the 12 days from the storm’s birth in the western Pacific to its
petering out over the U.S. east coast. Occasionally, though, his high-flung meditations
turn on mildly provocative conceits: “As a crab moves on the ocean-bottom, but
is of the water, so man rests his feet upon the earth – but lives in the air.
Man thinks of the crab as a water-animal; illogically and curiously, he calls
himself a creature of the land.”
Several other strengths balance out and even outweigh the
book’s deficiencies. First, it’s a romp of a story; I gulped it down at one
sitting. It is also, despite taking a wide-angle view, extremely well sourced.
According to the jacket, Stewart spent a full two years conducting research for
the book, particularly in meteorology, and as in a mathematics problem set, he
has shown his work. In fact, Storm may well be the perfect gift for the Junior
Meteorologist in your family.
Stewart’s understanding of the formation of storms and of the globally linked
series of phenomena that produce weather appears formidable, at least to a lay
reader. Stewart fairly broadcasts understanding of this interconnectedness,
that a winter storm in California is also part of a larger weather system that has
no regional boundaries:
…even a perfect solution of the problem
would unfortunately have brought no comfort to the sweltering people of Uruguay
and Argentina. While Chicago newsboys were crying, ‘Six die of cold!’
twenty-two persons were treated for heat-prostration in Buenos Aires, and a man
dropped dead in the Plaza Belgrano.
Stewart also offers up numerous fascinating descriptions of
the interaction of air masses, reminiscent of the similarly granular and scientific
descriptions of tides and currents in Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the
Sands.
For those interested in regional history, Storm
contains an impressive wealth of detail about communications, transport and
emergency response systems in California prior to WWII. One will learn more
than one ever wanted to know.
Finally, Stewart’s vocation as a Professor of Literature –
he taught at Berkeley for years and wrote a study of Bret Harte - can’t help
but poke its head into his narrative, with frequent references to writers and
philosophers. Even Gertrude Stein’s “Pigeons on the grass, alas” gets turned to
parody when “Seagulls on the grass, alas” indicates a menacing shift in the
weather (though Stewart’s parody falls rather short compared to James Thurber’s
expert milking of this phrase in “There’s an Owl in My Room”).
Storm is an entertaining and engaging contribution, and
would likely have been better known had not its 1941 publication date coincided
with the U.S. entry into that other great storm, World War II. Though Stewart
employs metaphors of combat throughout, even explicitly acknowledging the role
of the First World War in influencing the vocabulary around weather, a reading capable
of finding direct metaphorical correspondence between the storm and the expanding
war would appear tenuous. Put another way, Stewart is seriously interested in weather, and besides, the book’s themes of
social cooperation and group effort in the face of calamity need no more explicit
tweaking for a reader to conform them to historical context. But in the novel’s
anticipation of “earth system science” – the holistic, stochastic view of
natural forces at work - Storm is especially apparent and even prescient.
Stewart displays a keen understanding of human interconnectedness and the
absurdity and danger of holding narrow views that ignore it or that shun
empirical evidence. If for no other reason than Storm’s depiction of
this visionary approach, the novel’s contemporary relevance outweighs its dated
aspects. But even those have their appeal; I could not help experiencing
nostalgia for a period I did not live through in wishing that writers still
produced novels like this one, fat with regional detail, defiantly optimistic,
and cognizant of global interrelatedness and of the imperative of recognizing
our entwined destinies. 30 years later, following what a more or less direct
path from Stewart, another Californian, Stewart Brand, would emphasize and popularize
these last themes through the image of the whole earth as photographed by the Apollo
space missions.
Views of the earth from space today reveal tens of millions
of dead trees in the Sierra Nevada, a result of the previous five years of drought,
and since California’s dry season approaches, I may be ready by summer’s end to
take on a subsequent George Stewart novel, with another succinctly encompassing
title: Fire. If for some reason that doesn’t provide enough in the way
of catastrophe, Stewart’s next, best known work, Earth Abides, is said
to depict the apocalyptic end of civilization. Cheers.
