Writer on Board

In the everything-everywhere world of travel writing—which accommodates Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and Rick Steves’s column in your shrunken Sunday travel section—the cruise story written by a well-known author occupies an uncomfortable place.

In essence, it is no different from the classic travel story: a writer observing an alien world. He or she is dropped into a foreign realm where the language (in this case) is familiar but the customs are not. In fact, the rituals and behaviors are far removed from what the writer is used to.

In the contemporary installment, the famous author, rather than trying to meet the locals, watches them from a distance—or, as David Foster Wallace once did, retreats to his cabin in horror. A feeling of loneliness and/or separateness sets in—the result of a congenital aversion to conga lines, or sometimes simply other people—and produces a bout of introspection that becomes a prominent feature of the story. And an unfortunate one, since travel writing historically has been about the Other, not the Self. When not turned inward, the famous author employs a mix of condescension and ridicule, two attitudes that would not be allowed, especially in these hypersensitive times, if the cruise ship were another country.

The most recent writer to try his hand at this form is Gary Shteyngart, who sailed on the inaugural voyage of the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world. Finding “A Meatball at Sea” in the May issue of The Atlantic, I wondered—like many readers, I imagine—what could possibly be said by a celebrated author about life on a cruise ship after Wallace’s “Shipping Out,” (later known as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”), which appeared, complete with footnotes, in Harper’s in 1996 and quickly moved from hatchet job to literary phenomenon, adored and admired by people who would never dream of taking a cruise.

Shteyngart shares with Wallace a keen imaginative intelligence, but works, as the title of his story suggests, in more of a comic vein. Also, unlike Wallace, he is a sometime travel writer, penning stories for glossies like Condé Nast Traveler. This was conceivably an advantage for the Icon assignment, as he was accustomed to being alone among strangers, but it also could have contributed to a feeling of inadequacy. True travel writers, at least in the popular image, are walking the Empty Quarter (Wilfred Thesiger) or riding bicycles to India (Dervla Murphy); they are not standing in line at the midnight buffet. A travel writer on a cruise ship is like a Formula 1 driver in a bumper car.

I know because I’ve been there. In my nearly two decades as a newspaper travel editor—in Florida no less—I found myself on a number of cruises. It was not my favorite assignment, but I could never dismiss the experience outright.

For one thing, I came to it with a love of ships. Unlike most writers, I had crossed the Atlantic three times on passenger liners: the QE2 (from New York to Southampton in 1975, thanks to a short-lived youth fare), the Mikhail Lermontov (from Tilbury to New York in 1976, coming home from a year in France), and the Stefan Batory (from Gdynia to Montreal in 1982, after two tumultuous years in Poland).

I loved how life on land, all its obligations and worries, slipped from mind the moment you stepped off the gangway—replaced by a world of deck chairs and promenades, lounges and ballrooms, stewards and travelers. I loved the barely perceptible movement of the vessel as it inched away from the pier (in Gdynia, a small band on the quay had played a heartrendingly slow version of Michał Ogiński’s polonaise “Farewell to the Fatherland”) and the tranquil, incremental diminution of land, as fellow passengers watched from the railings. Most departures have poignancy; on ocean liners, it was not only prolonged but also shared, which made it momentous, and even more meaningful.

Days at sea were never boring. There were books in the library, or the ones you had brought. For the Lermontov, I had purchased an English translation of A Hero of Our Time, a novel I remember nothing about. But I remember vividly the awe of being surrounded, day after day, by nothing but water, a vista washed clean of buildings and trees and telephone poles. The world, not just my cares, had fallen away, and in its place an undulating blank slate stretched to the horizon. The middle of the ocean, I discovered, is the perfect place for contemplation, which is exactly what people departing from, or heading to, long sojourns require.

At night, the sea presented an even more thrilling, if harrowing, sight—its cold, dark immensity making our ship, ablaze with lights, appear even more precious and vulnerable.

Inside, there were conversations in dimly lit lounges with fellow passengers: students, backpackers, Peace Corps workers, diplomats changing posts, retirees killing time, and—westbound—immigrants giving the voyage an Ellis Island aura. The transatlantic liner was not just a means of transportation; it was also an education.

Arrivals were as quietly dramatic as departures. If the destination was a place you knew, you saw it born, piece by familiar piece, out of the water; whereas new ports rose with a slow and tantalizing mystery. Often—certainly in Manhattan—you docked in the hum and crush of the city.

My fascination with ocean travel led me to the works of John Malcolm Brinnin. A poet and critic, most famous perhaps for his eyewitness biography Dylan Thomas in America, Brinnin conducted a lifelong love affair with ships that began during childhood summers spent in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he watched vessels like the Britannic sail in and out. In his 81 years, he crossed the Atlantic more than 60 times on ocean liners and wrote two indispensable books about them: The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic and Beau Voyage: Life Aboard the Last Great Ships. The latter book combines black-and-white photographs with prose of an effervescent eloquence, beginning with an autobiographical first chapter and ending with a gripping account of the last meeting, midocean, of the Queen Elizabeth (the “largest ship in the world”) and the Queen Mary (“the next-largest ship in the world”) on September 25, 1967: “Together the great ships, more than 160,000 tons of steel, are closing the gap that separates them at a speed of nearly 60 miles an hour. … The huge funnels glow in their Cunard red, the basso-profundo horns belt out a sound that has the quality less of a salute than of one long mortal cry.” He goes on to describe the two captains, standing at attention on their respective bridges, and doffing their caps. I heard Brinnin read this passage as part of his keynote address at the Key West Literary Seminar in 1991, and in the auditorium there was, just as he had described on the Queen Elizabeth that night, “an almost reverential sense of breath withheld.”

Brinnin lived in a time when even the largest ships in the world had majesty and grace. The Icon of the Seas—which I haven’t been on, but have seen from afar—replaces grandeur with bulk, not to mention a disorienting tumbling out of its insides. The popular epithet for modern-day cruise ships—“floating condominiums”—I first heard uttered by the captain of the QE2 as he stood, one morning in the early aughts, surrounded by behemoths in Port Everglades.

But like all passenger vessels, cruise ships carry life, which alone makes them a worthwhile subject. And, to give the subject added appeal, the life is contained. Normally, a travel writer travels alone, and the people met in the first place visited are soon replaced by people in the succeeding ones. The beauty of a cruise is that the writer travels with an unchanging cast of characters, who make their entrances and exits, take on leading and supporting roles, just like in a play. So the resulting story has, or can have, a wholeness that is rare in travel writing.

Mark Twain discovered the potential of the cruise story when he sailed to the Mediterranean on the Quaker City in 1867. He wrote weekly letters from the voyage, or cruise, that were published in the Daily Alta California and later used as the basis for his book, The Innocents Abroad. Admittedly, and somewhat disappointingly considering its title, the book is more about the sights on land than it is about the people on the ship. Early on, Twain introduces us to a few of his fellow passengers—the Oracle, the Interrogation Point, the poet—and, as the names imply, pokes gentle fun at them. But they are not, for the most part, frequently recurring presences throughout the text. Even on excursions, Twain is often alone with his thoughts and occasionally irreverent opinions; it is a book with much more description, and reflection, than conversation. This had less to do with his socializing skills and more to do with the nature of travel books at the time, whose job was to show the world’s wonders to the folks back home. (He comments humorously on the propagandistic power of travel books, whose romanticized images of places often colored, if not eclipsed, travelers’ real experiences in them.) The book’s Conclusion, written one year after the trip, contains the now famous aphorism: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” Twain tells us that he was “on speaking terms” with all of the Quaker City’s passengers, “eight or nine” of whom “are my staunch friends yet.” David Foster Wallace he was not, but neither was he at the time a famous, or even an unknown, novelist; he was basically a newspaper stringer, with a remarkably plum assignment to sail to Europe and the Holy Land.

Sixty some years later, Evelyn Waugh took a much less dutiful approach. “I soon found my fellow passengers and their behavior in the different places we visited,” he writes in “A Pleasure Cruise in 1929,” “a far more absorbing study than the places themselves.”

Waugh was also visiting the Mediterranean, on the Norwegian ship the Stella Polaris, not long after the publication of Decline and Fall. (There is a memorable moment, before boarding the ship, when he is mistaken for his then more famous brother Alec.) He writes at length about one type of passenger, “the middle-aged widow of comfortable means,” and, a few pages later, after “deck games broke out all over the ship,” he notes differences in national character. There is a hilarious scene of people giving toasts in various languages on Norwegian Independence Day.

But as in The Innocents Abroad, the main action occurs on land; the difference here is that Waugh often takes as much interest in the clutter and hustle surrounding the sights as he does in the sights themselves. There is more dialogue than in Twain’s book, and most of it is heard on shore. The touts who advertise the landmarks, in addition to less reputable places of interest (the Church of San Severo and “a house of evil character”), provide the author with fine comic material. He presents an excellent example (if you can forgive his superciliousness) of how travel writers can educate readers, with digressions on history and art, while also entertaining them. His depiction of the poorly attended Spanish-American Exposition in Seville—“silent rifle ranges with heaps of ammunition lying undischarged and mountains of bottles unbroken”—is a masterclass in illuminating detail.

As the Stella Polaris makes its way to England, Waugh finds himself in a reflective mood. (A ship needn’t be in the middle of the ocean to provoke contemplation.) On the last night, waking in his cabin, he hears the ship’s foghorn, “a very dismal sound, premonitory, perhaps, of coming trouble, for Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.”

Twenty-eight years later, Waugh would set most of a novel—The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold—on a ship.

It seemed natural that the airplane-adverse Paul Theroux, in his “Grand Tour of the Mediterranean,” would take a cruise, and the account of his time on the Seabourne Spirit makes for one of the most enjoyable chapters in The Pillars of Hercules (1995). Theroux tells readers at the start that he is a guest of the cruise line, or, as he calls it—perhaps because it sounds more respectable for someone in his line of work—“the shipping company.” He cites Waugh as an antecedent, noting that he took his wife along (a fact that goes unmentioned in Waugh’s story). He then devotes the next few pages to Waugh, offering a selective sampling of his least charitable comments: “Germans are ‘ugly.’ Paris is ‘bogus.’ Monte Carlo is ‘supremely artificial.’” It is as if Theroux is addressing his critics: And you think I’m grumpy! But ultimately, he commends Waugh’s story for its eccentricity, humor, and originality.

Because he spent much of his early career in England, I have always thought of the travel writer Theroux as having taken his tone from the travel writer Waugh. The former’s summation of Greece—“these tetchy people and this insubstantial landscape and the theme park culture”—sounds like nothing so much as an American channeling of the latter.

On the Seabourne Spirit, Theroux has fun with his fellow passengers’ appetite for one-upmanship (“This is our eighth cruise” … “Did you do the Amazon?” … “Vietnam was very unique”)—and sprinkles variations on these volleys throughout the chapter. He also notes one man’s repeated references to Rio J. DeNiro. Because he’s on a luxury cruise, surrounded by the successful and the wealthy, he’s in the safe zone of punching up.

But he clearly enjoys the ship, savoring the sybaritic respite from his low-budget journey around southern Europe and the Levant. Heading off on an excursion, he reflects that “every daily disembarkation for a tour was like a rehearsal for the final disembarkation, the day when we would leave the comfort of the Seabourne, and that was too awful to contemplate.” He appreciates the sense of community the ship has built and gives us, along with the boastful litanies, more endearing snippets: “‘How’s that lovely wife of yours, Buddy?’ ‘Say, is your mother any better?’ ‘Lovely day. How’s the leg?’”

Theroux is a good listener, a category that includes eavesdropper, and he mingles well; these are two important qualities in a travel writer. Far from being a curmudgeon, a label he’s often saddled with, he is genuinely interested in people; if he shows their foibles, it’s partly because he’s had the curiosity to draw them out. One of his favorite verbs for his preferred m.o. is buttonhole. Over the course of the cruise, he befriends a playfully overweening man from Montreal, who gives him good quotes (“Never trust an Englishman who doesn’t shine his shoes”) and then, before his departure, gifts him with his Household Cavalry tie—admitting, after Theroux explains that he’d feel like an imposter wearing it, that he was in a lesser regiment.

Only once have I felt regret on leaving a cruise ship, and it was also in the Mediterranean. The Aegean Odyssey, run by the now-defunct British company Voyages to Antiquity, started in Rome (Civitavecchia), called at Sorrento and Agropoli, nosed around Sicily, and then entered the Adriatic, with a stop in Dubrovnik and a final docking in Venice. It was my first Mediterranean cruise—I had known only the Caribbean—and my first experience as a nonpaying guest. My newspaper, which had laid me off a couple years earlier, at the start of the newspaper crisis in 2008, had always footed the bill.

It was also my introduction to high-minded cruising. The first night’s lecture was given by Mary Beard. The library contained sections on classical literature and history—shelves labeled “Ancient Egypt,” “Byzantium,” “Roman Empire,” “Maritime”—and offered a well-curated selection of travel writing that included works by Nicolas Bouvier, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris, and Martha Gellhorn. Goethe’s Italian Journey was available, in English translation, and instead of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, there was Peter Mayne’s A Year in Marrakesh—a substitution that seemed to say everything you needed to know about the ship. Spread out on tables were recent issues of The Spectator and The Oldie.

The passengers were well-off but not affluent—the ship provided no luxuries—and represented all of the major English-speaking countries. Most were retired: doctors, teachers, government officials. Mealtime conversations took me back to my ocean liner days. It was the bookish soul’s idea of what a cruise should be, and I hated having to pack my bag and disembark in Palermo (owing to a previous commitment). No one presented me with a parting gift, but I left with what I hoped was a publishable story.

This one I’d have to shop around. My eight previous cruises had all been taken for my newspaper, where my stories about them appeared in the Sunday travel section. The first, in 1990, was on the Club Med 1, a ship with automated sails and the best bread I’d ever eaten at sea. The next was on the Norway, which in a previous life had been the ocean liner France. I thought it wise to ease into cruising. Soon enough, though, I found myself on more everyday vessels, bombarded by strains of “Hot Hot Hot.”

My cruising apotheosis came in 1996 when I boarded the Carnival Destiny. The line had been dubbed “the Kmart of cruising,” but that year it had launched the largest cruise ship in the world, a celebrated event that gave it distinction if not cachet. At more than 100,000 gross tons, the Destiny was bigger than the Queen Elizabeth. (By contrast, the Icon of the Seas has a gross tonnage of nearly 250,000, a figure that would make John Malcolm Brinnin weep.) The story I wrote about my week on it, after running in the paper, appeared in my book, A Way to See the World.

All of which is to say that I picked up “A Meatball at Sea” with obvious interest. Shteyngart was tilling a field I had once worked, and I was curious to see what he did with it.

Early on in the piece, I found something I could relate to: the author’s “terrible surprise” on entering his cabin. In his case, it was the absence of a sea view—his “suite” had windows that looked inward—in my case, it was the presence of a roommate.

My cabin on the Carnival Destiny had no sea view either, for the simple reason that it had no windows. As always, I had booked a shared, inside cabin. My newspaper gave me a budget at the beginning of each year, and it was in my best interests to stretch it as far as I could. And on every previous ship, I had had the cabin to myself because, other than writers, who goes on a cruise alone?

Norman did. Thirty of them to be exact. This cruise, he bragged to me in introduction, was his ninth maiden voyage on a Carnival ship. As I took him in—his long thick beard, his long salt-and-pepper hair, his pre–middle-age paunch covered by a yellow Carnival T-shirt—this seemed much more surprising than the fact that he traveled solo.

After our first night together, I asked at the purser’s desk if I could change cabins. The woman recognized Norman from my description, and, with eyes full of understanding, gave me the key to an empty cabin. This one also came without windows, but it was the most beautiful cabin I had ever seen.

The Icon’s departure gets surprisingly little attention from Shteyngart, a single sentence that notes the skyline at sunset (“apocalyptic”) and the ceremonial fireworks—both of which could have been viewed from land, where Miami sunsets are frequently dramatic but never, in my estimation, apocalyptic. Perhaps that was the effect produced by being on the Icon. Strangely, there is no mention of the scene on board—passengers leaving PortMiami crowd port side for the drone’s eye view of Miami Beach, which unfolds like a moated, miniature Art Deco village—or that on the paralleling MacArther Causeway. For the Destiny’s departure, cars pulled over so everyone could get out and take pictures of the ship, and I doubted Miamians had grown so blasé in the subsequent 28 years that they drove right past the inaugural sailing of the latest largest ship in the world. It’s a fascinating sight, those car doors open along the causeway, one of the rare times in travel when the locals take photographs of the tourists.

Once at sea, Shteyngart does a good job of exploring the ship. He introduces us to its various realms: Central Park, Thrill Island, the adult zone Hideaway, the children’s neighborhood Surfside (the name, interestingly, of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s former hometown north of Miami Beach). He discovers an area reserved for higher-paying guests that elicits thoughts on his life in America and his ongoing failure—“despite my hard work and perseverance”—to be admitted into the world of the elites.

Self-examination pops up occasionally, taking the focus away from the ship. It seems entirely appropriate that Shteyngart got an inward-looking suite. But he is following the lead of not just Wallace but also Lauren Oyler, whose “I Really Didn’t Want to Go: On the Goop cruise” appeared in Harper’s in May 2023 and revealed more about Oyler than it did about Gwyneth Paltrow. Here, the introspection leads to a memory of watching The Love Boat as a boy on his grandmother’s Zenith, and it prompted me to wonder: Is travel writing attractive to novelists—at least the ones who don’t write autofiction—because it allows them to undisguisedly put themselves in the story? Do they see it simply as memoir with scenery? Fortunately, good ones like Shteyngart are able to use their personal lives to make pertinent points. “Still,” he writes, “this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.” He puts on a T-shirt that reads: DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL, hoping that it will invite conversation. It doesn’t. He’s up against something every writer who’s ever been on a cruise ship knows: it’s not easy being onboard alone.

But the difference he highlights is not this one—the strange and (for others) suspicious fact that he’s a solitary man on a ship overrun with families and friends—but that he’s an ethnic immigrant at sea with Middle America. Shteyngart is an avid reader of this America: the titles on its book jackets (The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kenndy Jr.), the slogans on its T-shirts (FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS). But after a slow start, he manages to engage with some of his fellow passengers, while letting us in on how difficult this is for him. “Do it, I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate.” I’ve said words like these to myself on assignment—and while reading Bill Bryson (God help us if that introvert ever takes a cruise). But I’ve never written them in a story. I never thought readers would be interested in my struggle with shyness.

Travel writing these days is full of writers (and not just novelists) inserting themselves into their tales; doing so gives their stories added texture and makes them relatable, at the least more revealing. In the best instances, it adds a rich interior journey to the story. But I come from a newspaper background, where space limitations made me prioritize, which meant—in an environment where most of my colleagues couldn’t use the word I—focusing more on the observed than on the observer.

The majority of the people in Shteyngart’s story fit into predictable, sometimes overlapping, categories: the retirees, the servicemen and women, the party animals, the staunch Republicans. It’s an accurate overview of the population of a large cruise ship in the Caribbean, but like all overviews, it leaves out the singular and the unclassifiable. The Destiny’s passenger list was a little more than half that of the Icon’s, and yet I found among its ranks a writer for Vogue, a Japanese tour operator, a French-Canadian high roller, a Hall of Fame third baseman, a union sheet metal worker from Chicago, a Polish group from New Jersey, a budding standup comedian from Manhattan, a septuagenarian from Louisiana who dressed every day in suit and tie, the Hispanic members of a California SWAT team, and of course Norman. And most of them did me the favor of popping up repeatedly throughout the cruise. Only a few of Shteyngart’s chosen passengers do this, and one of the couples that does stands him up toward the end.

Sending someone on a cruise who has little experience with the kinds of people who cruise can result in fresh insights, amusing encounters, meaningful connections—all the good stuff of travel, and the writing about it. But it also runs the risk of accentuating differences and deepening an already sizable divide. Toward the end of his cruise, Shteyngart, in an obvious gesture of surrender, quotes emails he’s been receiving from friends back home expressing their sympathy for his plight. Like the “terrible surprise” of his suite, this gave me pause, and not because he was once again pulling us away from the life of the ship. I thought: He’s taking a $19,000 trip for free, one that many Americans would love to go on, before writing about it for an esteemed magazine that will surely pay him a handsome sum—and people are commiserating with him?

Well, yes, because he’s working in travel literature’s slum. In closing, Shteyngart makes an impassioned plea for the death of cruise stories. The people who write them, he states, don’t need to be reminded of their “inherent loneliness” (because, as everyone knows, writers suffered “difficult childhoods”), and the people who are written about in them—the passengers—have no “interior life” (because the United States hasn’t given them the “education and upbringing” that would produce such a thing). Even if you agree with this sweeping, remarkable statement, you should know, and so should Shteyngart by now, that not just born-and-raised Americans go on American cruises.

“A Meatball at Sea,” as its title declares, is not a story about a cruise. It’s a story about a writer on a cruise, and it puts Shteyngart squarely in the Wallace camp, far from that of Theroux and Waugh and certainly Twain. If this is the type of story he wants to abolish, I’m all for it.

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