9 Jamie Dopp

From Tank to Deep Water
Myth and History in Samantha Warwick’s Sage Island

One of the most famous Canadian literary works about swimming is A. M. Klein’s 1948 poem “Lone Bather.” The poem describes a man who seeks refuge from city life by going to a deserted pool for a swim. He dives from an “ecstatic diving board” and “lets go his manshape” as he hits the water. The imagery of the poem emphasizes the fantastical transformations the man undergoes while in the water, where he becomes “mysterious and marine,” a “merman” whose thighs “are a shoal of fishes.” He enjoys a deep sense of freedom until he is forced by “a street sound throw[n] like a stone [. . .] through the glass” to return to the world and his regular life. As he towels off, the man rubs away “the bird, the plant, the dolphin” until he becomes again “personable plain” (Klein 1974, 321).

Representations of swimming in literature often contain mythic resonances similar to those of “Lone Bather.” According to these representations, swimming is an activity that takes a human being out of his or her natural element, thus offering a break from everyday existence and creating a space of temporary freedom. Such texts often use imagery that hints at connections between ourselves and other water creatures as well as between our modern and ancient selves. These connections, in turn, allow us to make contact with something timeless or more meaningful within ourselves—a process often figured by the surface and depth imagery evoked by water itself. Think of Maggie Lloyd in Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel escaping from her oppressive suburban life in 1950s Vancouver to the interior of British Columbia, where she rediscovers her strength in part by swimming in a secluded lake, an activity that “transforms her” and helps her to forget “past and future” (1990, 130). Or consider Lisa Marie at the end of Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, who swims out into the ocean in an attempt to resolve the mystery of her brother Jimmy’s disappearance by contacting the underworld of the dead (2000, 372–73). Or—in perhaps the most famous Canadian literary example of all—the unnamed protagonist in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, who dives below the surface of a northern Ontario lake to make contact with the hidden truths of her own life (2010, 147).

The opening of Samantha Warwick’s Sage Island portrays swimming in a way that is within this tradition. The epigraph to the novel, from Richard Angell’s The Long Swim, begins: “The feeling within you, the urge to crawl out of your skin and get away, get away, is so strong that it couldn’t be uniquely personal.” The prologue elaborates on the feeling evoked by Angell: “That feeling when you first enter the water, straight as a needle; that underwater glide, the flying, weightless sensation of being suspended—free.” The prologue goes on to describe a swimmer’s hand as an “amphibious paddle” and swimming itself as a return to “prehistoric simplicity.” Like Klein’s lone bather taking his respite from the complexities of the modern city, the swimmer in Warwick’s prologue becomes “a drifting speck, divorced from the patter of thought and city scream”—an experience that “wipes the mind’s slate clear” and creates a “tabula rasa” (2008, 1).

The protagonist of Sage Island, Savanna Mason, attempts to redeem her life by an act of swimming with recognizably mythic dimensions. She travels far away from home to swim in a long-distance ocean race called the Wrigley Ocean Marathon. The extreme nature of the challenge seems to allow her to shed her previous sense of failure and embrace a positive new identity, in the manner of a traditional hero completing a quest (see Campbell 1949). And yet, in important ways, the novel complicates—or makes problematical—the mythic meaning of Savi’s act. Much of Sage Island, in fact, foregrounds how the historical environment of the United States in the 1920s conditions—and limits—her attempt to redeem herself through swimming. The limitation of myth, according to Roland Barthes, is that it is “constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things” (1972, 109). Sage Island, however, emphasizes that the mythic dimensions of swimming are only made available by—and are deeply intertwined with—the historical quality of the thing.

The events leading up to Savi’s involvement in the Wrigley Ocean Marathon are conveyed in a series of flashbacks that help to establish Savi’s character and motivation. As a seventeen-year-old, Savi is a competitive swimmer from New York City who is in the running for the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. At the Olympic Trials, however, she finishes in a tie for the final team spot and is ruled to have lost on a “Judges’ Decision” (Warwick 2008, 36). After a period of disappointment, she regains her sense of purpose—as well as her enthusiasm for swimming—when a rich patron, Peter Laswell, supports her in a bid to become the first woman to swim the English Channel. Mere weeks before her attempt, however, Trudy Ederle, the same woman who had beaten Savi on the Judges’ Decision at the Olympic Trials and who has gone on to become an Olympic medalist, swims the channel herself. Laswell withdraws his support for Savi because a second swim would lack “punch and originality” (162). He also, not coincidentally, commands his son, Tad, to end the romantic relationship he has begun with Savi. Hit by this double loss, Savi sinks into a deep depression. In the midst of her desolation, she learns of the Wrigley Ocean Marathon, a long-distance swimming race that is to take place off the coast of California. The main narrative of the novel consists of Savi’s preparation for and participation in this race—an act she hopes will redeem the multiple failures of her life.

Interestingly, the backstory does not describe Savi’s first encounter with swimming. There is no childhood scene of discovery, nothing comparable to, for example, Johnny Weissmuller’s blissful account of swimming for the first time in Lake Michigan, at Lincoln Park, Chicago, when he was eight or nine years old (1930, 132). In fact, one of the notable aspects of Savi’s early career is how little joy or childlike pleasure it contains. What beauty she perceives in swimming has to do with the artificial environment of “the tank.” The Olympic Trials, for example, occur in a “deluxe facility in New York” with “marble lips” and “brass bars” that give it a “Renaissance appeal.” But this same environment tends towards harshness. At the Trials, Savi recalls a sickening “humidity,” a “violent blaze” of reflected light on water, and “shrill whistle-bursts” that “split through the noise” (Warwick 2008, 25).

The flashbacks suggest that Savi’s motivation for swimming comes from a desire to escape the oppressive conditions of her life. Her everyday life is defined by work in her family’s bake shop and the constrained role available to her as a young woman in the 1920s. Early on, the novel draws a contrast between her own limited choices and the relative male privilege enjoyed by her brother, Michael, who blithely drops out of college (which Savi wouldn’t be allowed to attend) and takes off to Paris to find himself (14). Later, as she clings to the remnants of her swimming career, Savi recognizes that swimming is all that stands between her and an “ordinary life.” The thought of being reduced to a traditional woman’s future, married with children, makes her, she says, “perfectly sick to my stomach” (56). Competition, in contrast, gives her a thrill. One of the most powerful passages in the early part of the novel has to do with the physical experience of being in a race: “I felt a burst in my centre, a burst like the magnesium flare of flash powder. I carved into the water and ploughed into the tumble and chaos of a one-hundred-metre sprint” (30).

The backstory suggests that the thrill Savi feels is a result of the contrast that competition offers from her ordinary life. The thrill is further intensified by the exceptional nature of competitive swimming for young women at the time. As Savi’s best friend and fellow-swimmer, Maizee, puts it, there are few girls who swim competitively at all in this period, much less who swim as fast as they do, which makes it feel as if they’re participating in “some top-secret operation. Operation Girls’ Team—as though it’s still taboo, all that stuff about the strain not being good for us” (22).

Maizee’s comment reflects the sexism that Savi encounters throughout her career. Sexism challenges her as a woman in everyday life but also specifically as a female athlete. Allen Guttmann describes the post–World War I era as a time of “stops and starts” for women’s sports, just as it was for the women’s movement more generally (1991, 135). The complexity of the broader social situation is perhaps best embodied in the dominant female figure of the 1920s, the flapper, who represented a resistance to traditional female behaviour, with her scandalous dress and claims to greater social freedom. These claims were enabled by the social changes for women of that era, such as women working outside the home, acquiring the right to vote, and so on. Yet the flapper ultimately reinforced the stereotype of a woman defined almost entirely in sexual terms: flappers were not emancipated career women; they were party girls. As Barbara Harris describes the life of the flapper, “When her dancing and drinking days were over, she settled down as wife and mother” (Harris 1978, 140-1). Warwick reflects this aspect of the historical environment by making Maizee a flapper. Maizee seems more rebellious (and wiser) than Savi at first, but after her own swimming career stalls, she meets Robert Bobrosky Jr., the son of Peter Laswell’s business partner, and reverts to the traditional female role. By the time Savi arrives on Catalina Island, Maizee is “already engaged to Bobrosky after only two months of courting” and is learning Spanish for her honeymoon. One of her first phrases, appropriately, is “Me he perdido”—meaning “I am lost” (Warwick 2008, 182).

Tensions between the seeming emancipation of women in the 1920s and resistance to this emancipation can also be seen in the career of the woman who is Savi’s archrival in the novel, Trudy Ederle. From the time she swam the English Channel in 1926 until her place was taken by Amelia Earhart in 1928, the historical Trudy Ederle was the most famous sportswoman in America. The authors of America’s Girl: The Incredible Story of How Swimmer Gertrude Ederle Changed the Nation see Ederle as one of the “brash women” who swam the Channel “to try and strike a blow for their gender and show everyone that the weaker sex wasn’t so weak at all” (Dahlberg, Ward, and Greene 2009, 3). At first glance, Ederle was wildly successful: her crossing time of fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes beat the record time of the five previous male Channel swimmers by about two hours (Guttmann 1991, 148; Campbell 1977, 58). Ederle’s subsequent fame, however, was sustained in part by the crafting of her image as a “normal” American girl despite her physical prowess. For example, in an article about her in Evening World, “she was shown doing housework and talking about how cooking was one of her favorite things” (cited in Dahlberg, Ward, and Greene 2009, 4). Ederle’s explicitly marketed wholesomeness was even expressed in verse in the Evening World article: “She loves home and family / She’s everything the converse of the flighty flapper” (4). At the same time, her feminized image was designed to counter the prejudice against women and strenuous physical activity—the idea that even if such activity did not prove directly injurious to a woman’s “weaker” constitution, it was likely to make a woman into a muscle-bound amazon unattractive to men. Even so, press accounts of Ederle tended to combine praise for her physical prowess with snide comments about her lack of feminine allure. A piece in The Literary Digest, for example, praised her “strapping, wholesome, fun-loving” nature but ended by suggesting that her “muscles of steel . . . would never lure a good sailor-man on the rocks” (quoted in Guttmann 1991, 147).

Savi’s choice of swimming as her means to escape her life is affected by both personal and historical circumstances. The main personal reason for her choice is a simple one: she’s good at it. Higgins, her crusty old coach, tells her that she has “physical intelligence”—and, Savi tells us, this “lit a fire in my rib cage” (Warwick 2008, 9). History, however, also plays a part. At the time of Savi’s story, swimming was one of the few competitive activities open to women. It was also, importantly, an Olympic event. There were, in fact, only four events open to women at the 1924 Olympics—swimming, diving, tennis, and fencing (Guttmann 1991, 164); there were no track and field events, no gymnastics, and none of the “combat” sports for which resistance against women’s participation was especially strong and long lasting (wrestling and boxing were only introduced in 2004 and 2012, respectively). At the Paris Olympics of 1924, of the 2,956 participants only 136 were women (Senn 1999, 41). What drives Savi early on is a desire for something like the fame and fortune traditionally available through Olympic success. To achieve that fame and fortune, she needs to find a way to be one of the few women allowed to compete at the Olympics—and swimming is her best option.

After Savi’s Olympic hopes are dashed, she swims in the other events available to her—two Hudson River swims, the English Channel swim (aborted), and, finally, the Wrigley Ocean Marathon. Each event rekindles her competitive spirit. Of the river swims, for example, she says that she is “exhilarated by [. . .] the chase” (Warwick 2008, 43). The progression of events also takes her away from the artificial environment of the tank and into deeper and deeper water—both literally and metaphorically. The natural environment in the Hudson River exhilarates her in a way that takes on mythic qualities: “I felt wild in the river, as though I had regressed to a primal state of simplicity, where humans lived in the ocean, travelled by sea, and could breathe underwater” (43). When she begins training for the Wrigley Ocean Marathon, mythic associations become even more pronounced. In the ocean, she realizes, there are no “borders” or “concrete walls” (19).

Savi’s journey from the tank to the borderless environment of the ocean has the characteristics of a traditional hero journey, in which a hero leaves the familiarity of home to face the challenges of an unknown place (e.g., the wilderness, the underworld) as part of a quest for glory and self-knowledge. Key to Savi’s heroic journey is how the extreme environment of the Catalina Island swim allows her to shed her former self. As she puts it during the last stages of the swim, “I must exhaust my former self, exhaust her out, [. . .] the dread, the failures, the not-being-good-enough” (212). In The Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell suggests that in hero myths, the annihilation of the old self is always necessary for rebirth and renewal, and crossing the threshold into the place where the hero’s trials are to be found is “a form of self-annihilation” (1949, 77). Sage Island suggests that this is what happens to Savi during the Wrigley Ocean Marathon. Indeed, her moment of personal redemption is described in classically mythic terms:

This monotonous repetition of stroking through wild, open water—a primal sense of peace, cleansing atonement, the peeling, stripping, moulting out of myself, out of my skin, an estrangement from all things human, social constraints, expectations, the disease of materialism, sex. The clearing out of everything, wipe the mind’s slate clear—tabula rasa. (Warwick 2008, 212)

This description of Savi’s epiphany—with its repetition of the phrase “tabula rasa”—directly echoes the opening of Sage Island. The climax, then, brings the novel full circle back to the mythic portrayal of swimming in the prologue.

Even with its mythic climax, however, the novel makes clear that history has an important role to play in Savi’s heroic act. The obvious indicator of history has to do with the fact that Savi’s swim takes place as part of the Wrigley Ocean Marathon, a historical competition organized by William Wrigley Jr. (of chewing gum fame) that took place in January 1927. The competition involved swimming the San Pedro Channel from Santa Catalina Island to the mainland of California just outside of Los Angeles, a distance of twenty-two miles—the same distance as the English Channel, but with especially treacherous currents and even colder water. Wrigley’s idea was to hold the race to generate publicity for Catalina, which he owned and was trying to develop into a year-round tourist destination. To lure swimmers to the race, he offered a prize of $25,000 to the winner and $15,000 to the first woman to finish (Campbell 1977, 65–67). Money turns out not to be Savi’s primary motivation; indeed, it is part of her overall journey that she becomes less concerned with traditional fame and fortune and more concerned with self-renewal. Her focus does not, however, alter the fact that material conditions profoundly shaped the Wrigley Ocean Marathon. The race itself would not have happened without Wrigley’s promise of prize money, and, given Savi’s life circumstances, she almost certainly would not have participated without the lure of a cash reward.

Wrigley’s offer of prize money (today worth about $350,000 and $200,000, respectively, according to dollartimes.com) shapes the environment of the marathon in other ways as well. When Savi arrives at Catalina Island to train, she discovers a carnival-like atmosphere seemingly filled with hucksters and schemers. Like many heroes arriving in a wild place away from home, she finds it difficult to tell friend from foe. One of the first characters she meets is Loot, a shell-shocked veteran of World War I, whom she misunderstands as a threat (Warwick 2008, 5). Conversely, she is befriended by a journalist named Bea, who seems to have her best interests at heart but who, it turns out, is secretly working to undermine her on behalf of another competitor (149). The lure of prize money suggests a heightening of the competitive stakes. Savi recognizes that many of the competitors in the marathon are desperate, like herself, and wonders if “this whole event is fuelled by failures wanting to redeem themselves” (52). This contributes to an aura of ruthless competition. Finally, the disparity between prizes for men and women suggests a continuation of the sexism Savi has encountered before. That disparity and her experiences on Catalina Island give Savi the message that “women are not yet viewed in the same league as men” and that their presence in the race “is a bit of sideshow” (62).

The darker side of the commercial element in the Wrigley Ocean Marathon is perhaps most dramatically conveyed by the sub-plot involving the historical George Young, the seventeen-year-old Canadian who was the winner, and only finisher, of the Catalina Island swim. As the novel indicates, Young was exploited by a man who acted as his agent and who took 40 percent of his prize money and later earnings (Campbell 1977, 65; Warwick 2008, 65). Bea, despite her ulterior motives, accurately points out that Savi and George Young have backgrounds that are “remarkably similar.” Both come from working-class families, both quit school at “about fourteen” to work, both started swimming out of “no-name tanks,” and both—by implication—have tried to parlay their gift for swimming into better lives (Warwick 2009, 83–84). Without saying it directly, Bea suggests that Savi’s background makes her vulnerable to exploitation in the same way as George. The obvious proof of this is in Savi’s own past—how easily she was seduced into the world of the Laswells, including the bed of Tad Laswell, and how summarily she was dismissed again, as competitor and lover, when her project to swim the English Channel fell apart.

Wrigley’s decision to hold a swimming event to promote his resort is itself shaped by history. According to Bruce Wigo, president of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, swimming was “the most popular recreational activity in America in the 1920s and 1930s” (quoted in Sherr 2012, 33). The popularity of swimming was related to the fact that major team sports had not yet become dominant in America (this would come with the help of radio, movies, and television); as a result, certain individual athletes, like marathon runners and swimmers, were accorded a status higher than they are given today (Campbell 1977, 10). Wrigley’s idea was probably not only to generate publicity but also to create a new hero through his event, someone like Trudy Ederle after her English Channel swim, a new hero who would then be forever associated with Catalina Island. To some extent, this did happen: George Young, after his victory, was dubbed the Catalina Kid, and Wrigley made a considerable profit—in part, because of him (Campbell 1977, 68).

The extreme nature of the Catalina Island swim also reflects the transitional nature of sport in the Roaring Twenties. A key aspect of sport in this era was the celebration of extreme physical challenges, firsts of all kinds, and feats of daring do—activities that had their roots in earlier versions of sport but that would give way to more professionalized (and sanitized) competitions by the middle decades of the twentieth century. David Leach suggests that during the earlier years of the century, things like “placing the first mountaineer atop the world’s highest peak” took on the character of “national urgency for glory-hungry governments in the United Kingdom and elsewhere” (2008, 116). It is worth noting that the Wrigley Ocean Marathon occurred within living memory of the first expeditions to the North and South Poles (Cook and Peary to the North in 1908 and 1909 and Amundsen to the South in 1911) and only a year before Amelia Earhart’s pioneering flight across the Atlantic in 1928. This was also the heyday of Houdini, who died at the age of fifty-two in 1926. This transitional sporting culture also helps to account for the emergence of Johnny Weismuller as perhaps the first crossover athlete–Hollywood star. Weismuller won swimming medals in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics before going on to gain a different kind of fame with his portrayals of Tarzan, a historical background that is subtly hinted at by Weismuller’s cameo appearances in Sage Island.

One way to read Savi’s tabula rasa moment in Sage Island is that it represents a transcending of the material conditions that made her swim possible, a common experience of athletes in general. When an athlete steps onto the track or court, or into the water, anything outside the space of competition seems to disappear. The politics of the Olympics may be corrupt, but the track is still the track, the pool the pool, and so on. And doesn’t a great athletic performance achieve a timelessness of its own? In The Joy of Sports, an early classic of sports criticism, Michael Novak supports this idea. Although “corruptions of various sorts” exist in sports, he argues, the lasting value of sporting activities has to do with something fundamentally religious: “The hunger for perfection in sports cleaves closely to the driving core of the human spirit” (1988, 27). Perhaps Savi’s tabula rasa moment expresses her moment of contact with the “core of the human spirit.”

According to Joseph Campbell (1949), the final phase of the hero’s quest involves a rebirth of the self. This rebirth is accompanied by a series of boons. Something along these lines happens in Sage Island: after Savi is pulled from the water, she ends up in the hospital, where she receives a number of visitors. Her brother, Michael, arrives to effect a personal reconciliation, bringing with him a letter of best wishes from Maizee (Warwick 2008, 219). Sol also appears. The subplot involving Solomon—the doctor on Catalina Island who becomes Savi’s navigator, protector, and potential love interest—intersects with Savi’s hero journey in a complicated way. That Savi “wins” Sol as one of her boons might seem problematic at first: a strong woman on a hero-like quest fails to finish her swim (despite her tabula rasa moment) and is rescued from near death by a strong male. Sage Island, however, mitigates against a stereotypical reading of these elements. Sol is clearly a better choice of possible mate for Savi than Tad; in various ways, he represents the possibility of a relationship of equals. The novel remains silent on what the actual shape of their future relationship will be. The last words Savi and Sol exchange are, in fact, about Loot—who, as it turns out, is the brother of Sol—and the reason for his presence on Catalina Island (it seemed like a good place to care for him out of “the path of the authorities” [227]). The novel’s last scene takes place on the beach after Savi has been released from hospital. After their exchange about Loot, Sol and Savi fall silent, lie back on the sand to watch the sky, and share a cigar—not a stereotypical “happily ever after” moment.

The mention of Loot at the end of Sage Island is a reminder that, far from being timelessly mythic, the boons Savi receives are shaped by history. A shell-shocked soldier in a novel of the Roaring Twenties is, of course, not surprising; it is a reflection of the historical environment of the time. (Savi remembers seeing comparable figures on the streets of New York.) Loot’s character, however, takes on special significance in relation to Savi’s quest. That Savi travels so far away for the Catalina Island swim only to immediately encounter a disabled veteran is a reminder that history cannot be escaped, even when one is on a mythic-like journey for self-renewal. The interactions between Loot and Savi also subtly point to different forms of heroism. To what extent is Savi’s quest for personal redemption comparable to the experiences of a returned soldier like Loot? The novel does not force the comparison, nor does it use it to diminish what Savi ultimately achieves, but the presence of Loot is a reminder of the larger frame of history in which Savi’s personal journey takes place.

The hand of history is more directly visible in the most tangible boon Savi receives. This comes from Rhea James. Rhea is a swimming coach who has been on the periphery during Savi’s training period for the race. It turns out that she is affiliated with a girls’ college on Santa Monica Bay. After watching Savi swim, Rhea invites Savi to join the college’s swim team, to compete with the team in long-distance swimming competitions, and to attend the college on a scholarship (226–27). Rhea’s offer addresses a number of issues for Savi at once, especially those related to the opportunities available for women (or not) in the 1920s. It is also a reminder that opportunities to compete do not appear in a historical vacuum: the development of competitive sports for women is related to improvements in opportunities for women more generally. Finally, Rhea councils Savi on the importance of women supporting one another. She asks her not to resent Trudy Ederle too much; after all, she reminds Savi, it was Ederle “who lit the fire under you that ultimately brought you here,” and Savi might be “surprised how tight-knit the swimming fellowship is” (225–26). The implication is that a key to progress for women is for women to act in concert, even if part of that acting involves competition against one another in sporting events.

One thing that the novel is interestingly silent about at the end is prize money. Although Savi fails to finish her swim, the novel hints that she represents one of the two historical swimmers—both women—who came nearest to finishing after George Young. These two women, Margaret Hauser and Martha Sager, managed to swim for just over nineteen hours, the same length of time as Savi swims in the race (Campbell 1977, 67; Warwick 2008, 225). In recognition of their accomplishment, Wrigley awarded them each $2,500. The lack of mention of such a prize for Savi serves a number of potential purposes. From a novelistic point of view, it makes the scholarship offer from Rhea more meaningful and avoids the anti-climax of Savi being offered financial support after she has just won a sizable sum of money. Thematically—and perhaps more significantly—it reinforces the novel’s resistance to a triumphant ending of the kind found in most sports fiction. As Michard Oriard puts it in Dreaming of Heroes, sports novels tend to conclude “with a big game . . . in which the hero achieves his greatest triumph” (1982, 35). Savi does not win her big game; she does not even win a second-place-style consolation prize. She certainly does not get to be like the conventional hero-athlete who “simply glories in his new adulation with a sense of self-completeness from the task fulfilled” (38). Instead, Savi’s meaningful failure shifts emphasis from the end of her journey to the journey itself. What turns out to be most important to her is not winning the Wrigley Ocean Marathon but what she learns—and who she meets—during the process of competing.

Savi’s heroic failure, then, can be read as consistent with the classic hero model, which suggests that the middle of the mythic journey is where maturation—the making of a true hero—is found. Yet the mythic dimensions of Savi’s swim are not the product of a timeless potential inherent in the water she swims in. That Savi chooses swimming for her self-journey is, in large measure, a result of historical circumstance, and the historical and material conditions of the Wrigley Ocean Marathon both make her swim possible and shape the rebirth that comes from it. If Savi takes to heart the lessons of losing, and works even harder, she may triumph at the next big event. Rhea James hints that a future victory for Savi might occur at a Lake Ontario swim the next August starting in Toronto. Even if this turns out to be the case, however, history will have its say. The sponsor of the event, according to Rhea, will be none other than William Wrigley Jr. (Warwick 2008, 227).

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