I love few things more than browsing through antiquarian bookstores. I found quite a good one, “Paul Brown Books” in Old Mystic, Conn. And what better place to inhale the musty magic of antique volumes than a place named Old Mystic.
As most collectors know, you sift a lot of sand to find a piece of gold. This one came in the form of a 1932 treasure, I Cover the Waterfront. What a great title. It contains the first-person promise of eyewitness access to the darker and seedier edges of the continent.
The inside cover describes author Max Miller as a reporter for the San Diego Sun. “He calls the Pacific Coast his home, but he has really been foot-loose since leaving his birthplace, Traverse City, Mich., when less than a year old. He has been a newspaperman since grade-school days, a ‘veteran’ of the Army at 18, a wanderer in the south Seas after college studies, a pilgrim to China in 1927. Back again to his beloved waterfront, he says, ‘My book tells the rest of the story.'”
Organized in a series of loosely connected nonfiction yarns, I Cover the Waterfront became a bestseller and turned Miller into a national literary figure. From a distance of almost 70 years, it remains a vivid account of oceanside life, and an undiscovered treasure for journalists who love human interest. The “waterfront” is home to fishermen, con artists, publicists, celebrities, smugglers, and spies, a world that Miller explores with an improbable combination of sentimentality and cynicism.
Check out his lead:
“I have been here so long that even the sea gulls must recognize me. They must pass the word along about me from generation to generation, from egg to egg.”
He is in his sixth year as a waterfront reporter. “True, I am called a good waterfront reporter in this city, as if the humiliation were not already great enough in itself. I shudder at the compliment, yet should feel fortunate in a way that so far I have escaped the word veteran. When I am called not only the best waterfront reporter but also the veteran waterfront reporter, then for sure all hope is dissolved. And I need look ahead then, only to that day when the company presents me with a fountain pen and a final check.” A little melancholy for a writer of 28. But the grim mood does not last for long.
Most appealing is Miller’s evocation of a now antique literary sensibility, the story of a young reporter who aspires to book authorship. Penniless, he must pay his dues on a grueling newspaper beat, disdainful of his circumstances, but grateful to be writing for a living.
“A friend of mine once was knocked out by a flying squid,” writes Miller in an essay about the dangers of fishing for tuna. “He was a young fellow, an Italian. He was the chummer. This meant he had to stand on the edge of the bait tank and throw out live sardines to start the tuna biting. Once the tuna start biting, nothing will stop them. They will go after colored cloth or anything. But to get them started all clippers carry sardines in a bait tank of running water. This young Italian who was struck in the forehead by a squid was transferred unconscious to a line bound towards Panama. He was cared for by the ship’s doctor, but is back in town now with a white scar directly over his nose. He refuses to put to sea again on a clipper, and so works as a fish cleaner in one of the markets.”
The waterfront is filled with such off-beat characters, one of my favorites a man described by Miller as a “cripple.” The man “moves about the waterfront on a contraption of three wheels. They are too low to be off a bicycle, and the framework is like a skeleton, a skeleton of a vehicle long dead.” The man turns out to be an artist, but of a special kind. He drew, and sold to fishermen, imitations of popular cartoon characters, but drew them naked. It turns out to be a good metaphor for Miller’s view of the reporter himself.
Of special fun are the jabs at the newspaper business and its protocols. Newspaper trainers will cringe at this description of a weekly meeting: “If the editors forget about the meeting, it goes off rather smoothly. We reporters, who have seen enough of the office anyway for that day, hang around somebody’s typewriter until five telling each other how sore we are and how we are not going to show up at all for the meeting next Thursday if this sort of things keeps up.”
At one such meeting a copy editor gives a talk on lead writing: “Short, snappy leads,” he implores the staff, “that’s what we want ,” and offers this example: “Theodore Roosevelt is dead.” The copy editor says, “There’s a sample of brevity that can’t be beat, and I’d like to see more of you fellows around here try it.”
Miller and his cronies protest: “Try what? Oh, yes, try a story on Roosevelt dying. It’s too bad we don’t pay to attend these meetings. We really should pay something for all the advice we get here. It’s a shame we get all this inspiration for nothing. We really should chip in each Thursday and make a pot… But why doesn’t somebody hurry and tell us again about the greatest editorial ever written on Christmas. It’s not right to have us wait so long to have that editorial read to us again. Yes, Isabella Gladys Mary Johnson, there is a Santa Claus. You cannot see him or you cannot hear him, but he is with us all the time. Oh, why doesn’t somebody hurry and read that editorial to us again. Christmas is too long to wait….”
It turns out I Cover the Waterfront was a huge success, transformed into not one, but two movies. The better known was produced in 1933 and featured Ben Lyon as a hard-drinking reporter and Claudette Colbert as his love interest. Halliwell’s Film Guide describes the plot, which is nothing at all like the book: “A reporter uses a girl’s friendship to expose her father’s smuggling activities. In its time a tough, even daring melodrama.” Graham Greene called it “a bit raw and a bit sentimental and a bit routine, [but] the film does let life in through the cracks.”
What followed for Miller was the fulfillment of his dream, a life as a book author. A 1967 obituary in The New York Times reports that Max Miller wrote 28 books, one a year from 1932 to 1950. The books covered a wide range of subjects, but most focused on his favorite places: Alaska, Mexico and Southern California. He also wrote six books about his experiences at sea. Though a book blurb describes him as an Army veteran, his obit says he was a sailor, not a soldier, perhaps one of the few to serve in World Wars I and II and the Korean War.
Although none of Miller’s books remain in print, I found dozens of used copies of I Cover the Waterfront available from antiquarian book dealers listed on the American Book Exchange. [I purchased my copy for $3.00.]
As happens more often than one might think, Miller’s first book in a large body of work was his most successful. He kept a reporter’s instinct until his death at 68, some 40 years after penning I Cover the Waterfront.
“I always think,” he wrote, “that whatever isn’t recorded for the public hasn’t happened.”
