IN 1873, A POLISH LAD
of fifteen, walking in the Alps with his tutor, dismayed that gentleman by a
declaration of independence. He proposed to give up his country and career, in
order to take his chances on the sea. A few years later he was sailing on the
Mediterranean, that "nursery of the craft." Then he realized his
dream by becoming associated with the English flag -- incidentally learning the
English language. He went on far voyages, seeing little of Europe for a quarter
of a century. Finally, he accomplished his second transformation: the Polish
lad became a great writer of English. The boy was named Jozef Korzeniowski the
writer is known to fame as Joseph Conrad.
The adventurous spirit
thus manifest is characteristic of Conrad's mind and work. Romance is his great
word, genuinely romantic are his favorite heroes. He arrays them against the
manifold visage and challenge of the seven seas. He is primarily the
psychologist of mariners, he is Henry James on a South Sea Island.
Let us follow some of
his rovings. The real voyages of Jozef Korzeniowski concern us only as a basis
for the fictional adventures that his double, Conrad, has narrated. We know
that a dozen actual ships and scenes served as a springboard for his
imagination. The publishers of his tales have recently charted for us the
voyages undertaken by his dream-ships in seas that often Conrad alone has
adequately celebrated. We will cruise with these ships, not in chronological
order, but widening out from the author's favorite center. Usually his ports of
call are found in Malaysian waters and his ordinary beat is that of his hero,
Heyst "a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn round a point
in North Borneo." This point is approximately the scene of Almayer's
Folly, with which book we begin to cruise.
The original of
Almayer, inadequate and shiftless dreamer, had been studied along the muddy
banks of the Pantai, where the story unrolls. The breath of this poisonous
backwater eats into the characters and the sunset gold of the Pantai symbolizes
the vain greed of Almayer. Swathed in mist, the river hides a pair of lovers
and their canoe; it is a sleeping world, wherein all the ardent life of the
tropics is transferred to the beating hearts of Dain and Nina. Finally -- and
this is the actual voyage -- Almayer watches his daughter and her lover depart
in a violent brazen light; he watches the vanishing canoe that holds their
embracing figures, and he dies in his curses, unforgiving and abandoned.
The ardor and chivalry
of the Malays, their passionate pride, again fascinates Conrad in Karain. Our
circle now widens out to include the Archipelago around Borneo. Karain's mad
avenging journey, as he tells it, proceeds from the monster-shaped Celebes,
past "a great mountain burning in the midst of water," past myriad
islands that are scattered like shards from the gun of a demiurge, to Java,
with its stone campongs and its slavish population. Then on to unhealthy Delli,
where a blossoming thicket hid Karain and his brother-in-arms, the two
avengers; and there the deluded Malay kills his friend instead of the too
ravishing woman who should have been the victim.
This is an intensely
tragic voyage. The more epic and comic Typhoon is a tale of endurance and
conquest. Reaching beyond the Philippines, its scene is laid near the
northernmost point of the Malaysian circle. In the narrow dangerous China seas,
near Formosa, the Nan-Shan encountered one of the worst storms ever recorded.
She was saved by the dullness and obstinacy of her Captain MacWhirr, a man --
witness his name -- of no imagination. Just as his stupid dutiful letters home
are barely read by a yawning family, so does his imperviousness disgust Jukes,
the livelier chief mate. MacWhirr has never yet been in a great storm, but you
feel that, as a crustacean, he is prepared for one. He greets the
danger-signals with the obvious remark: that there must be "some dirty
weather knocking about." It becomes a Typhoon and knocks everybody about:
the officers scurrying on their duties from pillar to post; the cargo, namely
two hundred coolies, who presently begin sliding to and fro in a mass of boxes,
pigtails, and dollars. They are roped in like an unruly herd. Jukes plunges
down to the engine-room and from that gleaming Inferno the boat seems submerged
by the greatest blow yet; tons of water descend, sufficient to wipe out
everything; those in the engine-room stare at one another aghast; and through
the speaking-tube the captain's voice goes on unperturbed, attending strictly
to business.
When the Nan-Shan was
virtually a wreck and the wind fell, they were caught in the circular whirl of
the hurricane; but the captain and the boat kept their heads up and came to
anchorage, to the astonishment of Jukes, the reader, and all the seamen, in the
harbor. Mrs. MacWhirr, in a far-off, forty-pound house, stifled a yawn at the
captain's dull account of his voyage.
On the other side of
the Archipelago are the peregrinations told of in The End of the Tether. The blind
Captain Whalley touches bottom as mate of the coasting craft Sofala, which
beats up and down its sixteen-hundred-mile circular route through the Malacca
Straits. Needing the money for his daughter, Captain Whalley has descended to
this from much greater voyages. To hold his position, he has concealed his
oncoming blindness, depending on the eyes of his faithful Malay serang. But he
is suspected by his worthless officers, one of whom, near Pangu Bay, piles the
steamer up on the reef -- and the captain will not survive his charge.
Such is the third
Journey in Conrad's chief volume of nouvelles. The others of the trilogy are
Youth and Heart of Darkness, both of which are reminiscences. Who has not read
Youth, that record of gallantry, endurance, romance, and humor? It tells of
Marlow's very first voyage, beginning far out of our circle, but aiming for the
"white" of it, for that Bangkok which is the scene of Falk and from
which Conrad's own first command set sail. Marlow's boat was the Judea --
"all rust, dust, grime -- soot aloft, dirt on deck." But on her stern
she bore the imperative and romantic motto "Do or Die." And Bangkok
for Marlow promised all the thrill and wonder of the unknown East.
Bound first for an
English port to load on with coal, the Judea spent a week in getting to the
Yarmouth Roads. There was a gale; she shifted ballast; the crew were set to the
"grave-diggers' work" of righting her. After long delay in loading,
she had a collision with a steamer, and waited three weeks more. Another gale,
300 miles W. of the Lizards, tore up the old ship and the crew turned to
endless pumping. But still the battered craft threw out "like an appeal,
like a defiance, like a cry to the clouds without mercy, the words written on
her stern: 'Judea, London. Do or Die.'" And for Marlow, aetat. 20, the
faith, the endeavor, the imagination of Youth were in that cry.
Their deck-house was
blown away and they put back to Falmouth. Three times they put back to
Falmouth. The crew refused, and no wonder, to trust that leaky and bewitched
hooker, now six months on the road to Bangkok and not yet clear of England. You
ask if they ever reached Bangkok? Almost. They finally got to the Indian Ocean,
they neared Java Head -- when the coal caught fire. Still sailing for Bangkok,
"Do or Die," they fought that fire for days and just as they seemed
to conquer it, the cargo blew up. The ship herself blew up, after a steamer had
taken the wreck in tow. But the crew had saved all they could, and Marlow, in
charge of his own boat, presently sighted Java -- his first vision of the East,
"the East of the ancient narrators, mysterious, resplendent, and
somber." The Judea did and died; her second mate had begun to live.
From the year of grace
1900 dates the personal history of Lord Jim and the record of the pilgrim-ship,
the Patna. She was a rusty lean cosmopolite, who at some Eastern port took on
her cargo of eight hundred faithful ignorant cattle-like pilgrims. Her
officers, barring the untried Jim, were all scamps and bullies. Unlike the men
of the Judea and the Nan-Shan, these fellows are not true seamen; and that,
with Conrad, always spells disaster. His picture of the early part of the
voyage is one of his greatest pieces of descriptive writing. After clearing the
Strait, the Patna headed through the "one-degree" passage for the Red
Sea, borne down by an oppressive sun, sailing on a stagnant ocean. Under a
slender shaving of a moon, not far from where the Arabian Sea joins the Red,
something happened. A collision with a derelict shook the ship and the souls
upon her. The scared officers, believing her about to sink, took to the boats,
abandoned the Patna and her pilgrims.
In the record, shifted
and twisted from a dozen angles, we feel all of human dread and cowardice, all
of human pity for the doomed eight hundred, who yet were not doomed but
successfully towed by a French gunboat into Aden. The Patna was saved. Only her
officers were damned. The rest of the story, dealing with the "case"
of Jim; his wanderings like those of the accursed Jew, his atonement in savage
Patusan, will concern us later.
In a previous voyage,
described in The Nigger of the Narcissus we meet with foul weather off the Cape
and with that admirable cook, who at the height of the storm accomplishes the
miracle of making coffee. His declaration "as long as she swims I will
cook" becomes the motto of the desperate and dauntless boat. For here we
are in the presence of "the dumb courage of men obscure, forgetful, and
enduring." Throughout the windings of their limited and superstitious
souls there has passed the taut shiver of responsibility, of "Do or
Die." The Narcissus is no Patna. It is with admiration and fellowship that
Conrad bids these seamen farewell. It has been said that this story best "conjures
up the actual spirit of a voyage," the smell of the ocean, the ship moving
through the tropical heat.
We have already twice
swung around the Cape n Conrad's wake; his farther reaches take us into he
penetralia of the West African Coast. As a boy he had dreamed of the dark and
dreadful Congo. In the incomparable Heart of Darkness, under the witching spell
of the narrator Marlow, we are taken far up this river, which, resembling an
"immense snake uncoiled," buries its tail in the tenebrous wilderness.
Kurtz, that leader of men, has lost both his moral sense and his life. An
expedition has been sent to pluck him out. The steamboat crawled along the
gloomy silent Congo; it was "like traveling back to the earliest
beginnings of the world, when the big trees were kings." An uncertain
channel, a sluggish atmosphere, wonderfully conveyed in the telling, saurians
on sandbanks, and especially the "stillness of an implacable force,
vengefully watching." It had watched poor Kurtz to some purpose, for when,
after experiences with cannibals, ivory, attacks from the jungle -- when you,
I, and Marlow reach the heart of darkness, we find that its powers have driven
Kurtz to headhunting, megalomania, and the point of death.
Far-flung tangents from
the circle are traced by other voyages which may be briefly summarized. There
is the transatlantic venture by which the hero of Romance comes to peril and
thirst and the most adorable of stately senoritas on the Spanish Main. There is
the savage brute of a boat (Sydney to London) which slays a passenger every
trip and whose cruel anchor catches up and crushes the mate's sweetheart before
his eyes. There is the Ferndale (London to Port Elizabeth), on which occurs the
singular incident narrated in that obscure book, Chance. If Victory has most of
Stevenson in its scheme, Chance has most of Henry James in its method.
Gradually Conrad has become more interested in souls than in ships; also he
stays longer and more persuasively in the society of women.
That brings us to his
inland voyages, which are of two kinds, geographical and psychological. As
regards the first kind, for over twenty years Conrad scarcely saw the continent
of Europe, and the journeyings which traverse that continent -- such tales as Under
Western Eyes -- are to my thinking almost negligible. But the voyages of
discovery into the varieties of human hearts and situations demand fuller
treatment. They demand first of all some reckoning with the author's
philosophy.
Traveling always from
one place to another, shifting imaginatively from standpoint to standpoint,
Conrad has naturally come to view life as a great panorama, and art as an
adventurous cruise. Life is a succession of scenes and the "master of the
show" is the goddess Maia. Illusion is the word most frequently on
Conrad's lips -- illusions of youth, of hope, in fact the "darkness of a
world of illusions" in which his best-beloved romantic characters appear
as beautiful vanishing figureheads. Sombre and splendid, they come, they flash,
they go. "Ports are no good, ships rot, men go to the devil."
Conrad's pessimism becomes more sardonic and matter-of-fact in his later books.
But throughout he is saved by his absolute love of the sea and seamen, and by
his belief in a certain steadiness and sturdiness which is essentially
nautical. We have seen how he displays courage and character in his best
sailors. Again, the artistic compass by which he steers swings resolutely to
the pole of Truth. Sincerity and a kind of austere control guide this romantic
realist who can on the one hand define literary criticism as a high adventure
of personality -- exactly like Anatole France -- and on the other achieve
restraint in the deepest emotion of Lord Jim or Lena.
Conrad is professedly
not "literary " in the special sense. He lived only for the sea and
did not write a line until his thirty-sixth year. It is natural then that the
sea's rhythm should be found in his sentences, something of her swift
fickleness in his restless eye. He has often compared artistic creation to
voyaging. Each effort is like the "everlasting somber stress of the winter
passage around Cape Horn." Each story gets under way as leisurely as the
Judea. There are voyages into the consciousness of a hundred heroes, into the
thwarted spirit of Kurtz, into the self-deception of the Nigger, a voyage of
discovery to learn simply that Captain Whalley is blind, another outward
tragedy that ends in inner Victory. From this mental and moral Odyssey I will
detail only a few episodes, which will likewise serve as specimens of Conrad's
constructive technique. There are two main sorts: the voyage that flits from
one interest, group, or situation to another, using each cursorily as a port of
call; the voyage which proceeds from one psychological standpoint to another,
plumbing the depths of each soul, through its own narrative and confession.
Of the first kind, the
epic story of Nostromo -- regarded by some as Conrad's greatest -- is typical.
We know the immense labor that went into this presentation (based on almost no
experience) of a South American republic. The result, I believe, is a tangle, a
too intricate web. The adventurous interest is to find the pattern, which is
not zero as in musical comedy, but nearer infinity, as in Balzac. In fact,
Balzac's method rules. From an initial situation, in medias res, we travel back
to one set of people and then to another, with fresh digressions and dossiers,
eddies and whirlpools. We sink into the maelstrom of an individual experience
to emerge into the muddy froth of revolutionary parties. We are led astray by
an undated log-book, which produces much confusion of time and place. We are
frustrated by unclear sequences and contrary winds and we chart our course in a
dozen directions.
To this excessive ramble
one is justified in preferring the stiller depths of Lord Jim. Here Conrad
nearly attains his desired unity of effect, the atmospheric steeping which is
the essence of his romanticism. Here, at least, there is a single subject, a
mountain of a subject, which we cruise around and see through the eyes of
several observers. The author uses his pet device of first-person narration.
The reminiscent and gloomy Marlow first appears here and tells us, too
lengthily, nearly the whole story of Jim's failure and rehabilitation. But that
is only one point of view. There is also the inner circle of Jim's own
consciousness, gradually becoming distinct. There are the successive sidelights
thrown episodically by the self-sufficient Brierly, by the French captain, with
his touchstone of honor, by the merchant who retrieves and establishes Jim in
Patusan. There are the crowning lights thrown by Jim's dusky sweetheart and his
chivalrous brother-in-arms -- spotlights for the catastrophe.
Here again space and
time are introverted or confused, but the main end is gained and we have a
progressively ascending study of one temperament mirrored through several
others. . . In Chance, these others are quite evidently of the sort usually
chosen by Henry James: the first-person narrator, curious but limited in
knowledge, the dull conventional couple who guard the unfortunate heroine, the
viewpoint of the romantic captain who weds and saves her.
But it is in Victory
that we find the happiest amalgamation of the true Conrad with his cosmopolitan
masters -- for certainly his technique is much more exotic than English. With
Victory we are in the heart of Malaysia again and we are furthermore in the
hearts of the various actors in this passionate drama. The magnanimous
self-tormented Heyst is set off against the cupidity and villainies of old
Schomberg, Ricardo, and "plain Mr. Jones." With most of these we stay
for several chapters, while each expounds his attitude and outlook. They are
loosely enclosed within two outer rings of observation, that of the
semi-detached narrator and of the peripatetic Captain Davidson, who brings news
of Heyst and the girl on the island. The triumph of the book is the girl
herself, her gradual rise from a dull sulkiness -- Conrad is strangely fond of
sulky women -- to participation in Heyst's scheme for her rescue, and finally
to an overwhelming gratitude reaching the point of self-immolation. Her growth
in consciousness and effectiveness is a marvel of psychological portrayal, set
amid stirring deeds. The Spanish heroine of the Arrow of Gold (Doubleday, Page;
1919) is, on the other hand, already fully grown; almost as grown as her
creator, in her strange mingling of deep romance and disillusionment.
Mr. Richard Curie,
Conrad's biographer and critic, has found over ninety strongly realized
characters in his work. What a power of vision is needed to conceive sharply
all these diverse types! The creative mind has roamed from the duellist Feraud,
of Napoleon's time, to the chivalrous dark-skinned Dain, from caged and
restless English girls (Bessie Carvil, Flora de Barral) to the romantic Ninas
and Seraphinas of exotic strain. Literally from China to Peru Conrad has
voyaged and observed. He has depicted vast rivers and "those seas of
God" in all their myriad changes -- sunny smiles hurrying into darkness,
sluggish peace alternating with riot and cruelty. Much has he traveled in the
realms of gold -- so much that the deferent reviewer can see only two more
major adventures for him to undertake. The first would be to visit this
country, as he once proposed to do. May he long delay the great Departure, the
uncertain landfall of the second voyage!
E. PRESTON DARGAN.