Down Where It’s Wetter

Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is a famous old book that I was sure I’d read. I’m not certain how this belief settled in, but it can happen. As the years pass. As the brain cells die.

With time, an appreciation of Julie Christie can be confused with a comprehensive knowledge of the complete works of Thomas Hardy. I feel like I’ve read a great deal more William Thackeray than I have (none) because I’m such a big fan of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. By the time I saw all the episodes of the Soviet screen adaptation of War and Peace, I could have sworn I’d read the novel several times, possibly in Russian. But when I tried to figure out how many of the various movies, television series, animated adaptations, and spinoffs of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea I’d viewed over the years, I realized, to my surprise, that I’d no more seen it than read it.

I even had the name wrong. Verne used the phrase “under the seas,” not “sea,” in reference to the underwater distance covered in the course of Professor Aronnax’s adventures on the Nautilus. Like most people who think they’ve read this classic of science fiction but haven’t, I assumed the book’s title referred to the depth to which Captain Nemo’s submarine could dive. Not really a possibility, not even in a speculative tale. A league is approximately three nautical miles. Do the math.

The best explanation I can come up with is osmosis. It was one of those books that were very much in the air when my father was a boy (it’s his illustrated edition that I have). It was still in the frame of generally understood cultural references — meaning it would have been an acceptable phrase in a game of charades — by the time I was old enough to hear people talking about titles everybody has read.

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea was never not popular. First serialized to Parisian acclaim in 1869–70, it became one of the best known of Verne’s multi-translated and internationally celebrated adventure stories — the Voyages extraordinaires — which also included Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Profits accrued more to publisher than to author (hold the presses), but when my father read the Scribner’s hardcover that I have inherited, Jules Verne would have been as recognizable a name as Charles Dickens.

There are many advantages to reading a book, as opposed to thinking you have: Trivial Pursuit scores. Erudite cocktail party banter. And surprises. Here’s an observation that as a non-reader of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea I’d never have guessed but that as a reader I couldn’t shake: Captain Nemo (secretive, inventive, rich, irritating) is Elon Musk. To a T.

Aptly, therefore, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea begins with misinformation. A sea monster has been spotted in various oceans by various ships. Trade is imperilled. Shipping stocks tumble. Our heroes — Professor Aronnax; his faithful retainer, Conseil; and Ned Land, the Canadian master harpooner (not a description one gets to use often enough) — set out on a United States Navy frigate to confront the mysterious creature. And eventually they do, some 200 miles off the coast of Japan. Only it turns out not to be a creature.

After the kind of nautical catastrophe you might expect if ever you try to ram a submarine with a frigate in the shark-infested waters of the North Pacific, Professor Aronnax and his two confreres end up being rescued by Captain Nemo. Good news, bad news.

They don’t get eaten by sharks. But Nemo, as a result of his insane obsession with secrecy, can’t let them go. They are to be held captive on the Nautilus (and this definitely rubs the Canadian master harpooner the wrong way) forever. The novel, all twenty thousand leagues of it, is the duration of our narrator’s captivity.

“For the fun of it” is a perfectly good reason to read Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. That’s why my father would have read it, and part of the fun of blowing the dust off his old copy was catching a glimpse of then. The story would have been more adventurous than preposterous to a reader unfamiliar with underwater breathing regulators or nuclear submarines. More fantastical than impossible. My father was only a generation away from the wide-eyed age of discovery in which Verne’s classic was written. I could feel the passage of time when I finally turned his pages.