Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

In the Company of Dolphins: A Memoir
In the Company of Dolphins: A Memoir
In the Company of Dolphins: A Memoir
Ebook151 pages1 hour

In the Company of Dolphins: A Memoir

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Bestselling author Irwin Shaw’s lighthearted travelogue follows his family’s vacation sailing from St. Tropez to Venice in the 1960s.

As a boy, Irwin Shaw stared out across Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay and dreamed of owning a boat and sailing the oceans wide. Decades later, he determined that chartering a yacht was better than having no boat at all. With his wife and son, Shaw then set out to mosey about the Mediterranean, guided by a Scottish captain, his wife and daughter, and a Greek cabin boy.
 
From St. Tropez to Naples, and across the Adriatic to Dubrovnik and up to Venice, it was the trip of a lifetime, its only fault being that, eventually, it would have to end.
 
Written in 1964, this travel memoir is a portrait of a bygone age, when the sun-soaked Mediterranean was still emerging from the shadow of World War II and “vacation” truly meant detaching oneself from the world. Featuring cameos by legendary authors such as Françoise Sagan and James Jones, this endearing memoir is the next best thing to a Mediterranean cruise.
 
 
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 16, 2016
ISBN9781504038447
In the Company of Dolphins: A Memoir
Author

Irwin Shaw

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an acclaimed, award-winning author who grew up in New York City and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1934. His first play, Bury the Dead (1936), has become an anti-war classic. He went on to write several more plays, more than a dozen screenplays, two works of nonfiction, dozens of short stories (for which he won two O. Henry awards), and twelve novels, including The Young Lions (1948) and Rich Man, Poor Man (1970). William Goldman, author of Temple of Gold and Marathon Man, says of Shaw: “He is one of the great storytellers and a pleasure to read.” For more about Shaw’s life and work, visit www.irwinshaw.org.

Read more from Irwin Shaw

Related to In the Company of Dolphins

Related ebooks

Europe Travel For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for In the Company of Dolphins

Rating: 4.0499999 out of 5 stars
4/5

10 ratings3 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I found this pretty dull. One gets to know the author so little that it could have been written by anyone. Friends he meets on his journey are mysteriously referred to as "a writer", two writers", "three other writers" or "a famous actress". He occasionally references his son but never mentions a thing his wife does or says, both who joined him on the trip. Each chapter belongs to a brief port visit and garners usually less than five pages. On top of all that I do not recall a single dolphin, nevermind a company, but there was a brief meeting with a shark fin.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    See my full review on my blog Mystereity Reviews

    When I read the description of In The Company Of Dolphins, I thought it was a travel guide. I was completely mistaken, and I was not disappointed. In The Company Of Dolphins is so much more than a travel guide; it is a fascinating look back, not only to the exotic ports of call but also on the life and times of a brilliant author.

    The book, originally published in the mid 1960s, is a memoir of author Irwin Shaw's cruise around the Mediterranean on a chartered boat. As a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th century, he would look out at the boats moored in the harbor and dream of cruising the world. Decades later, his dream came true; he chartered a boat and sailed along the coast of Italy from St. Tropez ("...there is a whiff of Sodom and Gomorrah to it, and a little of a superb detention home for delinquent girls") to Monte Carlo, ("It is all very much like a camp for condemned millionaires") around Italy's boot to Yugoslavia and up to Venice.

    Shaw's style of writing is engaging; you almost feel as though you're sitting in a little cafe with him, listening to his stories of sailing around Italy and Yugoslavia. I was taken in from the beginning, and I enjoyed experiencing the beautiful locations not only through his eyes, but also through the romantic rose-colored glasses that comes only by looking back fondly on by-gone times.

    A short biography is incuded at the end of the book, and what an interesting life he led. Besides his many successful novels (including the WWII epic The Young Lions,) he was also a WWII veteran, having served in North Africa and Europe, and was a photographer who documented many important moments in the war, beginning with D-Day.

    In The Company of Dolphins is a captivating and engrossing memoir, and a perfect read during an afternoon at the pool.

    I received a copy of this book from the publisher in return for my honest opinion.

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A fascinating account of the writer Irwin Shaw and his family's adventures sailing round the Med, visiting places he'd always dreamt about visiting.His descriptions are vivid and mouth wateringly sumptuous, making me want to get on a bots straight away even though I'm not a lover of floating on water!Very highly recommended.I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Open Road via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

Book preview

In the Company of Dolphins - Irwin Shaw

PORTS OF CALL

part I

Sheepshead Bay

Gare de Lyon

St. Raphaël

part II

St. Tropez

Cannes

Antibes

Nice

Monaco

part III

Portofino

Rapallo

Portovenere

Viareggio

Elba

Porto Ercole

Anzio

Ponza

Ischia

part IV

Naples

Capri

Positano

Amalfi

Ravello

Paestum

part V

Calabria

Messina

Taormina

Crotone

part VI

Corfu

Paleokastritsa

Brindisi

Lecce

part VII

Dubrovnik

Split

Rab

Pula

part VIII

Trieste

Venice

Sheepshead Bay

A Biography of Irwin Shaw

I

SHEEPSHEAD BAY

When I was a boy I lived near Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. At that time, there were a good many private boats moored in the secure, narrow harbor. There was also a training stable for the horses of the New York City mounted police nearby, and my childhood dream was twofold—to own my own horse and to cruise the seas on my own yacht. The horse was to be a thoroughbred, more or less on the lines of Man O’War, the yacht was to be long, trim, nautically palatial. Decades later, when I lived for awhile on the edge of the Pacific in California, I owned a horse for eight months or so. He was wind-broken and after fifty yards his breath sounded like an express train in a tunnel; he shied at flying bits of paper and stumbled on even ground and trampled my feet when I put the bridle on him, but he was a horse and he was my own and I experienced a childish delight galloping him along the hard sand on the water’s edge. He cost me fifty dollars, but he was worth every cent of it. Recently, with Sheepshead Bay many years behind me, I cruised four seas on a yacht that, for six weeks at least, was more or less my own. It was no palace, and it was rented, or chartered, as they say in yachting circles, and it cost a good deal more than fifty dollars, but the pleasure I had in it at certain moments lived up to the dreams of the boy wandering along the wooden docks of distant Brooklyn.

It is one of the quirks of our age to believe that when desires like these are fulfilled, they finish by leaving a taste of ashes in the mouth. That is, the young man who has his heart set on having a movie star as his mistress is supposed after awhile to discover that it was not worth the trouble, that he is stuck with an annoying and unpleasant female who makes his life miserable. The man who slaves to accumulate a great fortune and high political power is supposed to be left disgusted and unhappy as he contemplates the evidence of wealth and potency he has accumulated. The young writer or scientist who dreams of gaining the Nobel Prize, in this view of things, is cynically disdainful of it when he gets it. The truth very often, I have found, is simpler than that. The young man is enchanted with his movie star. The rich man revels in his wealth and uses his power with ever-renewed delight. I am not on good terms with many winners of the Nobel Prize, but from what I have seen, they would rather have won it than not.

So with my dreams of fair boats, warm waters and foreign coasts. The envy I nursed in my heart for the salt water plutocrats of Sheepshead Bay proved, after four decades, to have been justified, and the pleasures I imagined them enjoying on their graceful craft turned out to be real. In this age of massed holidays, congested roads, transistor-noise, jet-speed, fumes and telephones, one feels a timeless exaltation on the deck of a boat chugging through blue water at eight knots, swept by the tonic wind, the small white ship splendid and solitary in the clean shining circle of the Mediterranean horizon.

Looking at maps is one of the most satisfactory of occupations. Some of the purest joys of the voyage came months before I set foot on board the ship, when, on winter evenings, I studied a large map of Italy which generously included the coast of France from Toulon east and threw in the entire coast of Yugoslavia for good measure. The trip was to take us from St. Tropez to Venice, a voyage calculated to satisfy, for one summer, at least, the pent-up passion for distant harbors of even the most ardent of Sheepshead Bay mariners. It was to last six weeks, and I meant it to be a long, rejuvenating escape from private cares and public insanities. The schedule of arrivals and departures was so crowded that I felt I was assured of being places just long enough to enjoy their beauties without having the time to be oppressed by their problems.

While I was unpracticed in the art of cruising, I was not completely uninformed about the dangers that might arise. I had many friends who had sailed and steamed for pleasure and from their experiences I had been warned about certain hazards. The chief hazard, it appeared, was The Other Couple, or The Other Couples. Wind and tide had done in comparatively few of my friends, but Other Couples had brought disaster almost every time. The Other Couple might be composed of your lifelong buddy and his best wife, or the most amusing woman in Europe and her charming husband—but, somehow, after two or three weeks of visiting some of the gayest and prettiest places in the world, in the most perfect summer weather, I was assured that the ship would put into port with its passengers brimming with mutual hatred, or, even worse, congealed in polite but awful boredom.

The reason for inviting The Other Couple or The Two Other Couples on board is usually a simple one—Money. Chartering a boat is expensive, and unless you are ready to go without tobacco and other luxuries for the rest of the year, dividing the cost seems like the most sensible plan to follow. But a vacation that ends in gloom and recrimination is expensive at any price, and I resolved to keep the passenger list down to myself, my wife, and my son, since, in an approximate way, we have proved over the years that we could live with each other under a great variety of circumstances, and we agreed that we most probably could survive a further six weeks in each other’s company. Holiday Magazine obligingly offered to play, at least financially, the role of The Other Couple, without actually having any of its officers filling any of the cabins or trying to tell the Captain what port to put into next.

Still, it is not as easy as one might think to stick to a resolution to stay alone, with one’s family, on a yacht. Once it is known that you have rented a boat, there is a general feeling among your friends that you will invite them to share your joy for long periods at a time. In the circles in which we move, at least, it is almost inconceivable that any family would choose, out of its own free will, to remain locked almost exclusively in each other’s company for six weeks at a time. Not wanting to appear hopelessly eccentric in the eyes of my friends, I invited quite a few of them to join us for different legs of the voyage, but cunningly asked them to meet us at times when I knew they would not be free and at places which I knew they could not reach. The only exception was a lady whom we have known so long and so well that we could treat her, without offense, as badly as any other member of the family, and who, besides, plays excellent tennis and could be depended upon to hold her end up staunchly in any game we managed to rustle up in our travels. And even she was not to meet us until Dubrovnik, two weeks before the end of the voyage.

GARE DE LYON

We started from the Gare de Lyon in Paris. This was several years ago and Paris was still rumbling with the uneasy repercussions of the unsuccessful putsch of the Generals, but the platform of Le Train Bleu, against all the dictates of geography, somehow was removed from all that. As you passed the gate you had a foot already in the blissful South and had entered a season in which people did not think of uprisings or wars. Startlingly shaped girls in slacks and sandals boarded the train with self-satisfied looking gentlemen who were obviously not their husbands, young men hurried past carrying water masks and flippers and spearguns, tennis rackets were tossed through windows, and many of the passengers were already bronzed, as though they had prepared conscientiously for the sun of the Midi which was to greet them in the morning.

The French are peculiar in their attitudes toward revolutions, wars, and the overthrow of regimes, parliamentary or otherwise. They are logical and violent and engrossed in politics, but rarely to the point of allowing disturbances in the streets and garrisons to interfere with their holidays. A Parisian newspaper, published at the time of the expected arrival of a fleet of paratroopers from Algeria to take over the government, bitterly pointed out that while some hundred thousand or so Parisians had applied for arms to defend the capital, more than a million had left, as usual, for their vacations. Americans are not really in a position to criticise this habit too severely. After all, it could hardly have been out of ignorance that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor early on a Sunday morning, a time consecrated to that long-standing

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1