Appropos of nothing to do directly with the law… but it is such a wonderful book anything we can do to encourage people to read it and support the publisher who fell in love with the book.
Datebook report..
Green Apple Books co-owner immersed himself in British book until it was published in U.S.
It’s 5,300 miles from San Francisco’s South End Rowing Club to Suffolk, England. But it was at the Rowing Club that Pete Mulvihill, co-owner of San Francisco’s Green Apple Books and intrepid open-water swimmer, first heard about Suffolk author Roger Deakin’s cult aquatic classic, “Waterlog.”
“I went online and bought a copy from a British dealer,” recalls Mulvihill, “because it had never been published here.” He read “Waterlog.” He liked it. A few weeks later he was on a phone call with Craig Popelars, publisher at Tin House books in Portland, Ore., and a fellow swimmer. Read “Waterlog,” Mulvihill advised. Popelars did. He passed the book on to others at Tin House. “And,” Popelars says, “we just fell in love with it.”
All of which explains why a 22-year-old, exceedingly British book is now arriving in America. The Tin House edition of “Waterlog” features an introduction by Bay Area writer Bonnie Tsui, author of “Why We Swim,” and an afterword by distinguished British nature writer Robert Macfarlane.
“A real Renaissance man,” says San Francisco poet August Kleinzahler, who knew Deakin in London in the early 2000s. Born in 1943, Deakin studied at Cambridge and then went on to a successful career in advertising, with detours into documentary filmmaking, music promotion and — a lasting passion — environmental activism. But in his 50s, he found himself at a low ebb, battered by a breakup, missing his son who had relocated to Australia. Inspiration came from an American literary source: the John Cheever short story “The Swimmer,” in which protagonist Ned Merrill paddles from pool to pool across leafy, suburban New York. Deakin would do Ned Merrill one better. He would swim all over Great Britain.
“Waterlog” follows this obsessive yet endearing quest. Deakin begins by swimming the moat at his 16th century Sussex farm. Then it’s on to the Isles of Scilly, to Hampshire, to Kent. He swims the English Channel, the North Sea, the River Test and the Great Ouse, where he meets Sid Merry, one of Britain’s dwindling band of eel trappers. There are digressions into the swimming life of George Orwell and the architectural elegance of the Penguin Pond at the London Zoo.
“Deakin’s curiosity was so wide-ranging,” says Bonnie Tsui, who first encountered “Waterlog” while researching “Why We Swim.” “He was all about the physical experience of the place, but also so curious about history and culture.”
For Tsui, “Waterlog” reinforces the connections she feels between swimming and writing. Swimming, she says, “quiets my mind for when I sit down and write. Or it can be the time when I’m actively thinking about what I’m writing.”
Tsui is not alone — a surprising number of Bay Area writers are serious swimmers. Novelist Andrew Sean Greer credits his bay swims with helping him “break to the other side” of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Less.” “I was worried and struggling with the book and I … swam my way out of it.” China Beach is the favored swim venue for poet and translator Denise Newman. “Swimming, especially cold-water swimming,” Newman says, “is similar to writing in that it’s solitary, and it summons complete presence. The water is much like language to the poet; you need to work against it and at the same time trust that it’ll hold and that there’ll be enough words for all the thoughts and feelings.” And the University of San Francisco pool inspired Kleinzahler’s poem “The Swimmer,” which ends, “there is nothing, nothing at all in the world, but water.”
“Waterlog” was an enormous success in Great Britain, making the author famous as the avatar of British “wild swimming” — swimming anywhere you want to. But Deakin didn’t have long to enjoy his triumph. He died of a brain tumor in 2006. His other two books, “Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees” and “Notes From Walnut Tree Farm” were published posthumously.
Tin House publisher Popelars hopes “Waterlog” will inspire some of the same devotion in America as it has in Britain. “Sometimes,” he says, “you just have to stick your neck out there as a publisher, and just say, ‘This is something we would be very proud to publish.’ ”
In fact, Popelars and Green Apple’s Mulvihill have done more than stick their necks out for “Waterlog” — they plunged into cold water for it. Earlier this month, the pair celebrated the book’s publication with a Deakin-inspired, 600-mile-long swimming road trip, leaping into lakes and rivers from Portland south to San Francisco. How did it go? “We think Roger would have been proud of us,” says Mulvihill. “He was right — there is something mind-altering about immersion in the natural world. Wild swimming is both an escape and a coming home.”
“Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain”
By Roger Deakin
(Tin House; 370 pages; $27.95)
“Waterlog” U.S. Publication Celebration: Virtual conversation between publisher Craig Popelars, Green Apple Books co-owner Pete Mulvilhill and author Bonnie Tsui. 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 25. Free. Hosted by Green Apple Books via Zoom. www.greenapplebooks.com
