The difference between life and death can be no more than a spot of grease. Either it is in the wrong place or you are. One can find oneself at the inside-out edges of life without even trying, like Henry Preston Standish, the central character of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, who slips and falls into the Pacific. Not man overboard, you understand, but gentleman, a very proper, decently married-with-children, financially-very-comfortable gentleman.

Being a gentleman does not always help, and it doesn’t help Standish who cannot bear to think of himself as any less than the modest, sober, uncomplaining sort of person his background has prepared him to be. If he could bring himself to shout for help somebody might hear him but that would be somewhat embarrassing. Eventually he thinks he should try but no sound comes out of his mouth. Meanwhile the ship is steadily moving away.

There is something inevitable about all of this. Maybe, if your domain is sobriety, you should not risk leaving it. Maybe, if you throw open the door, you should think twice before walking through it. But then what’s the point of throwing the door open?

That seems to be the core question of Gentleman Overboard but something keeps nagging at us as we wait, and keep waiting, for the boat to turn around and pick up Standish. It is the spectre of existential loneliness, of being, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner finds:

Alone, alone, all, all alone
Alone on a wide, wide sea

Or, as Stevie Smith’s drowning figure, in her poem Not Waving But Drowning puts it:

I was much further out than you thought,
And not waving but drowning.

The others, meanwhile, speculate:

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
they said

Standish was fine. His heart was sound enough. The other passengers continued with their lives and kept speculating about his absence. But the heart of his author, Herbert Clyde Lewis, did give way, at the age of 41, in a lonely room in New York in 1950.