After Road of Ages, his 1935—and, sadly, now timely—allegorical fantasy about the Jewish need for a haven from global antisemitism, Robert Nathan’s next novel is a less ambitious, more consistently whimsical little tale about an impractical dreamer who gets the chance to live his dream.
Hector Pecket, the protagonist of Nathan’s 1936 The Enchanted Voyage, is a carpenter living in the Bronx. He is a failure at most everything he puts his hand to, certainly at providing financially for his and his wife’s needs. Yet he has succeeded in building something wonderful, if financially useless: a small sailing yacht. The boat sits in his backyard in the Bronx, to the amusement and pity of his neighbors, and he spends much time on it, imagining that he is sailing the high seas. His wife Sarah, finally determined to wring some profit out of her husband, sells the boat to the neighborhood butcher who plans to turn it into a hamburger stand. The boat is put on wheels for towing the next day, and the forlorn Hector spends his last night sleeping in one of its berths.
But that night a terrific thunderstorm fills the sails. The boat starts rolling, and Hector finds himself “sailing” through the Bronx. In the course of the book, Hector picks up a hitchhiking waitress and an out of work dentist; these two characters fall in love with each other. Together, they navigate the roads of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and get as far as Virginia before the boat finally sinks as soon as it enters an actual body of water.
If this sounds like a bittersweet little Depression-era fairytale, it is. But this is not to say that the darkness of the times never registers. The boat is described as “a little like an ark,” and we are told that its builder “believed that the land was no longer a safe place on which to live. . . . And he half expected a flood or some other catastrophe to put an end to humanity which was without kindness or reverence” (3-4). Indeed, the opening pages of the novel reflect the apocalyptic 1930s in its little silver mirror. Hector takes the measure of his fellow citizens:
He looked into the faces of men and women, and what he saw made him feel anxious and sad. It seemed to him that a new feeling had come into the world since he was young; that people no longer felt kindly disposed toward one another. Now that the bad times were over, and it was possible to work again, they seemed to be looking for someone to blame for everything. (7-8)
This anxious note surely includes an implicit look back at his previous novel, in which all the world’s Jews are hounded from their countries. Nevertheless, the historical moment is more abstract here. Hector observes how some are inclined to blame the rich for their troubles, and others to blame the communists, but Nathan mostly keeps the times in the background.
The humor and pathos of the book derive alike from Hector’s unflagging determination to see himself as a ship’s captain and his improbable voyage as a maritime one. He insists that his crewmates use nautical terminology, even if cars and trucks are passing them by on the toll roads. At one point he attempts to spear a farmer’s loose chicken with a harpoon.
A decade after the novel’s publication it was adapted by Twentieth Century Fox as the film Wake Up And Dream. The title is not the only thing changed. The screenwriter (not Nathan) pushed Pecket to the margins and made the story about a little girl’s search for her older brother, who is serving in the U.S. Navy. June Haver plays the waitress character and sings prettily in the movie.
The film isn’t entirely sure what to do with Nathan’s typically quasi-fantastical, quasit-realistic source material. By way of trying to solve this problem it attempts to echo The Wizard of Oz. The little girl character (Connie Marshall) is put in braided pigtails and given a terrier to add a hint of Dorothy, and at one point the soundtrack gives us “We’re Off To See The Wizard”—plus an eccentric hermit character who fills the role of Oz’s wizard here.
Nathan called the film “a wretched little thing,” but it’s merely innocuous. The fact is that the original novel is already a movie: a Frank Capra film, or a Leo McCarey, with Nathan’s down and out diner waitress who goes out on a rainy night to thumb a ride and gets picked up by a yacht. Just as Nathan’s earlier One More Spring was turned into a movie that wasn’t enough of the Charlie Chaplin movie that the original novel is, Wake Up And Dream fails because it isn’t the cousin of It Happened One Night or Make Way For Tomorrow that Nathan’s book is.
The subtext in the book that might have been developed into a more memorable film is not, as the movie has it, a child’s innocent faith in the goodness of the world. It is, rather, the relationship between Hector and his wife. Mrs. Pecket is willing to sell off her husband’s dream boat so that they have money to eat. Yet Hector has christened his boat the Sarah Pecket, after her. Their marriage, Nathan’s real subject here, is therefore a troubled displacement of dreams and expectations, a misalignment of impractical husbands and frustrated wives.
The book ends with the barest possibility of a renewed marital interweaving. 1936 was also the year that Nathan divorced his second wife and married his third; a note at the end of The Enchanted Voyage tells us that the characters are “not intended to portray any actual persons.”
investigations and fantasies 