Mark Helprin’s Tale of Love and Leadership

For when the times require someone out of step with the times.

(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The Oceans and the Stars
The Seven Battles and Mutiny of Athena, Patrol Coastal Ship 15
A Sea Story, a War Story, a Love Story
by Mark Helprin
Overlook, 493 pp., $30 (hardcover) / $19 (paperback)

MARK HELPRIN—AUTHOR OF EIGHT NOVELS over the last half-century, including the 1983 bestseller Winter’s Tale, and three collections of short stories—stands apart from the most highly touted novelists of our time, to whom he pays scant attention. He has instead absorbed lessons in how to write and how to live from the likes of Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoy, Mozart, Beethoven, and Verdi, and his novels bear the marks of grand opera: heroic men and women, spiritual aristocrats, swept up in trials of love and courage befitting their stature, with their ordeals, tragedies, and triumphs rendered in language of crystalline beauty unembarrassed by surges of impassioned magniloquence.

In Helprin’s latest novel, The Oceans and the Stars, just released in paperback, he refines his perennial theme of war and peace—specifically, what the willingness to kill and die for one’s country means for fighting men in modern America, where peaceable comforts are the norm and the rigors of war are left to a self-selecting few. (A congenital spinal malformation disqualified Helprin himself from service in the American military, but he was fit for duty in the British merchant navy and the Israeli army and air force.) Navy Capt. Stephen Rensselaer, at 52 childless and recently divorced, is an Annapolis graduate, former SEAL, decorated veteran of the Iraq war, Harvard Ph.D. with a dissertation in nuclear strategy, experienced commander of various ships at sea, present assistant to the secretary of the Navy, and prime candidate on the promotion list for admiral. He runs afoul of the president of the United States, who owes his exalted position to having been shot by a madman while a candidate, and whose principal maritime policy ambition is “to get rid of those little boats and get more big ones.” The Patrol Coastal ships that the president wants to deep-six, one of which Rensselaer had commanded, are the Navy’s smallest ships—not boats, which are smaller still, a nicety lost on the president—and they are particularly valuable in shallower waters, as in the Baltic and the South China Sea around the Philippines. Pressing the case for this class of ship gets Rensselaer the presidential boot from the Pentagon and reassignment first to oversee the fitting out of the very last Patrol Coastal ship to be built and then to take over its command—a distinct step down for an officer with his exemplary record. He is expected to resign rather than accept the demotion.

Instead, he moves to New Orleans, where the Athena is under construction, and enjoys the prerogative to design certain key features of the ship according to his own specifications, which combine technical innovation with the best the old school has to offer. Helprin, who has written extensively on naval matters in his left-handed role as policy commentator, devotes a ten-page divagation to the vessel’s winning qualities, a passage which “those interested primarily in the story” can skip if they choose, but which “those who might be intrigued by the genius of this little ship,” fast and lethal and “meant for daring,” will find rewarding. A high-end music system is included in the package, to animate the combatants’ souls as militant bagpipes once did on the battlefield, and at appropriate moments in the action it will play the heartening strains of the slaves’ chorus from Aida, Glenn Gould led by Leopold Stokowski in the Emperor Concerto, and Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand Dances.”

And there will be enemy action, for war breaks out when Iranian forces sink an American tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and murder the swimming survivors. The conflict interrupts a peacetime idyll for Rensselaer and the woman he meets on a streetcar and falls in love with: Katy Farrar, a successful tax attorney fed up with her pointless work (“a game, like a psychotic, OCD-version of a pinball machine”), a divorcée unwillingly estranged from her adult children, a fastidious traditionalist and splendid misfit who finds in Rensselaer the perfectly fitting partner. “It was strange, but she felt that both he and she would have been essentially the same had they lived in any era of history, never quite fitting in if only because they were quietly adamantine in regard to what they believed was beautiful, right, and true, and their conviction was thoroughly independent of the pressures, fashions, and disappointments of their life and times. It bound them together more than they had been bound to anyone else in all their lives.” He has brought along his duffel bag and is on the way to war when he asks her to marry him.

Rensselaer, like other Helprin heroes, carries his feeling for the beautiful, right, and true even into the heat of battle; and although his crew have their doubts about his good sense and indeed his sanity at times, his eccentric reasoning and his shrewd intuitions are ever on the money. A born leader with a lifetime’s invaluable and irreplaceable experience, which has made his intellect subtle and schooled him in instinctive decisiveness, he proves exactly the man this moment requires.

Under Rensselaer’s tutelage, Athena’s crew of thirty realize the incomparable seriousness of what they are about: “Knowing that in a few hours they might be dead, maimed, wounded, or adrift and doomed to starve or drown, the crew had the concentration of mind and movement in which things are done with speed and grace and not much talk: the intensity almost seemed to say that this was real life and all else was illusion.”

Enemy captains are at a disadvantage in command that bespeaks a larger, cultural failure of mind and character: “For the captain of the Sahand was like someone who had been hurt and never gotten over it. He was perpetually alert, and perpetually reckless. With the consuming aggression of someone aggrieved, something in him made him always want to strike.” This Iranian captain’s nature, which reflects his nation’s sense of perennial obsessive grievance, leads him into a trap of Rensselaer’s contriving.

A more formidable foe is Hadawi, a terrorist leader who storms a French cruise ship off the Somalian coast and sets about killing one passenger every hour: He makes no demands, for he wants only to appall the civilized world with this horror show. He boasts that he is a graduate of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where he learned how despicable the cowardly Western mind is; as far as confronting the threat of militant Islam is concerned, this college is a notorious hotbed of cold feet, to borrow a phrase that described All Souls in the ’30s. Hadawi’s religious fanaticism goads him into everlasting audacity that fails to take basic facts into account:

But Hadawi was more a political than a tactical commander, and he operated less according to foresight and calculation than by drawing upon emotion, commitment, daring, and faith that everything was so much in the hands of God that his impulses of the moment would carry him through. . . . Thus, other than posting the technicals, the four sentries, and the machine-gunners in the tower, he had given no orders and made neither plans nor preparations to counter an assault.

Although Rensselaer could not know this, and certainly would not rely on it, at a gut level he sensed it, and thought it might be a salient factor of battle that would allow him to confound the odds.

This contest between prudence and prophecy, however, is not as clear-cut as it might first seem, for Rensselaer understands that even the best human virtue can’t guarantee victory in battle. “To stretch the point, it may be said that he and Hadawi were somewhat the same in that he was relying upon God to have caused Hadawi to rely upon God even more so. And such a thing was not unusual in war, for prior to battle the outcome is known and decided only in heaven. Some may scoff at this, but no doubt only because they have neither waited for a battle’s beginning nor survived its end.”

Rensselaer’s wisdom here reminds one of General Kutuzov, Tolstoy’s military hero in War and Peace, whose prudence saves Russia from Napoleon’s rash assault by sound common sense and leaving what generalship cannot control to the incalculable will of God. Tolstoy’s God was on the side of Russia, as Helprin’s appears to be on the side of the United States—although political imprudence in the highest reaches of government and in the general demeanor of the populace does its best to confound any divine helpfulness. In The Oceans and the Stars Helprin revives the Tolstoyan outlook on war and peace (minus the theoretical and theological excursus on historical determinism that many think mars Tolstoy’s masterpiece), and has written as beautiful, right, and true a novel as one can hope for today.