All posts tagged Charles Marlow

Stories of the East by Leonard Woolf (1921)

Leonard Woolf’s first novel, the brilliant evocation of peasant life in Ceylon, ‘The Village in the Jungle’, was published in 1913. His second novel, the more conventional ‘Wise Virgins’, a thinly disguised account of his and Virginia’s Bloomsbury friends, was published the following year. There then followed a seven year hiatus while he concentrated on publishing the serious political and sociological works he wished to be remembered by:

International Government – 1916
The Future of Constantinople – 1917
The Framework of a Lasting Peace – 1917
Cooperation and the Future of Industry – 1918
Economic Imperialism – 1920
Empire and Commerce in Africa – 1920
Socialism and Co-operation – 1921

Then, in among all these serious works about international affairs and the future of imperialism (of which he was a fierce critic) the Hogarth Press, which he had set up with Virginia in 1917, published a slim volume titled ‘Stories of the East’. There are just three stories:

A Tale Told by Moonlight
Pearls and Swine
The Two Brahmans

1. A Tale Told by Moonlight

The setup

This has the influence of Joseph Conrad all over it, from the narrator within a narrator structure, through to the pretty insignificant story itself, which is jazzed up to try and make it about treatment and atmosphere which, in my opinion, doesn’t come off.

The narrator is staying somewhere in the English countryside with Alderton, the novelist. The other house guests are Pemberton the poet and Hanson Smith, the critic. The fourth member of the party is Jessop who the narrator starts the story by telling us is generally unpopular for his habit of being blunt to the point of rudeness and incivility.

After dinner these chaps stroll down through the fields to the river and lie around chatting as dusk falls. When it’s dark they hear footsteps coming along the river and realise it’s a young couple out for a stroll. Concealed in the darkness and on a bank over the riverside path, our chaps hear the young couple murmuring sweet nothings then the sounds of kissing, before they stroll on.

This puts our chaps in a sentimental mood and they share stories about first loves and wooing. All except Jessop who hears the others out then weighs in with his unsentimental withering opinion, which is:

‘Think of it for a moment, chucking out of your mind all this business of kisses and moonlight and marriages. A miserable tailless ape buzzed round through space on this half cold cinder of an earth, a timid bewildered ignorant savage little beast always fighting for bare existence. And suddenly it runs up against another miserable naked tailless ape and immediately everything that it has ever known dies out of its little puddle of a mind, itself, its beastly body, its puny wandering desires, the wretched fight for existence, the whole world. And instead there comes a flame of passion for something in that other naked ape, not for her body or her mind or her soul, but for something beautiful mysterious everlasting—yes that’s it the everlasting passion in her which has flamed up in him. He goes buzzing on through space, but he isn’t tired or bewildered or ignorant any more; he can see his way now even among the stars. And that’s love, the love which you novelists scatter about so freely…’

So Jessop ridicules all the soppy talk about love and moonlight and says real love is strange, uncanny, unpredictable, makes no sense, is the rarest thing in the world. He’s knocked around the world and only ever seen two cases of it, and he’s now going to tell us about one of them.

So all this has been by way of introduction and this it is so redolent of Conrad: the all-male company; after dinner, in the dark; all described by an unknown narrator who then introduces one of the party telling a story-within-a-story. Structurally, it’s identical with the famous setting of Heart of Darkness.

The story

Among Jessop’s many friends and acquaintances was a man named Reynolds, a novelist. They were at Rugby (public school) together. Jessop was living ‘out East’, in Ceylon, in the capital Colombo. Reynolds and he exchanged occasional letters until Reynolds announced he was heading in that direction and it was arranged he’d come and stay for a week.

He was a thin, weedy man who’s ‘stood aside’ from life, out of nervousness, a legacy of being bullied at school, knew all about people’s little tricks and mannerisms but didn’t know how they felt because he’d never felt anything except fear and shyness. So Jessop took him to all the expat clubs and they sat and talked about love and life and Jessop realised he’d never actually lived a day in his life.

So he determines to show him a side of life he hadn’t seen before, and takes him in a rickshaw out into the seedy, native part of town, to a dingy house which is a native brothel. Here they are greeted by ten or so beautiful young scantily-clad women, laughing and giggling. Poor Reynolds is terribly embarrassed at the bare boobs and golden bodies and doesn’t respond to their kisses or caresses so most of them gravitate over to Jessop who can speak their language and is prepared to listen to their stories about the native villages they come from and the arduous lives they’ve escaped to come to the big city. All except one.

She was called Celestinahami and was astonishingly beautiful. Her skin was the palest of pale gold with a glow in it, very rare in the fair native women. The delicate innocent beauty of a child was in her face; and her eyes, Lord, her eyes immense, deep, dark and melancholy which looked as if they knew and understood and felt everything in the world. She never wore anything coloured, just a white cloth wrapped round her waist with one end thrown over the left shoulder. She carried about her an air of slowness and depth and mystery of silence and of innocence.

Long story short, they fall in love and, Jessop insists, it was the real thing not the milk and moonlight version of English poets and novelists. It was something deep and inexplicable.

He looked into her eyes that understood nothing but seemed to understand everything, and then it came out at last; the power to feel, the power that so few have, the flame, the passion, love, the real thing. It was the real thing, I tell you; I ought to know…

So Reynolds becomes hooked and goes back to the brothel night after night in order to see Celestinahami. But Reynolds becomes so unhappy at the impracticality of the whole situation that he makes a feeble attempt to shoot himself. He buys a revolver but Jessop burst into his room to find him struggling with the mechanism which clips chamber shut and seized it out of his hands.

Then Jessop read him the riot act and this is the bit I didn’t really understand, or thought contradicted itself. Because Jessop tells Reynolds that the girl is nothing like he imagines:

not a bit what he thought her, what his passion went out to—a nice simple soft little animal like the bitch at my feet that starved herself if I left her for a day

BUT, at the same time, acknowledging that what Reynolds feels for her IS the real thing:

You’re really in love, in love with something that doesn’t exist behind those great eyes. It’s dangerous, damned dangerous because it’s real—and that’s why it’s rare.

So it’s real love, one of the only two times Jessop has seen ‘real’ love – and yet he’s perfectly aware that it’s love for something which doesn’t exist. Reynolds is utterly projecting something onto this girl which simply isn’t there. And yet this is what Jessop calls real love. See why I’m a bit confused?

Anyway, Jessop roughly tells Reynolds to either get on the next ship home or ‘practise what you preach and live your life out, and take the risks.’ So for the first time in his life, Reynolds takes a chance on life. He buys the girl out of the brother (for the bargain price of 20 rupees) and Jessop fixes them up in a nice cottage by the sea.

At first they were happy. He taught her English and she taught him Sinhalese. He started to write a novel about the East. But pretty quickly he comes to realise the truth. He comes to realise the vast difference in intellect and education and culture between them.

He couldn’t speak to her and she couldn’t speak to him, she couldn’t understand him. He was a civilized cultivated intelligent nervous little man and she—she was an animal, dumb and stupid and beautiful.

He loved her but she tortured him. She got on his nerves.

But the cruellest thing of all was that she had grown to love him, love him like an animal; as a bitch loves her master.

Because:

There’s another sort of love; it isn’t the body and it isn’t the flame; it’s the love of dogs and women, at any rate of those slow, big-eyed women of the East. It’s the love of a slave, the patient, consuming love for a master, for his kicks and his caresses, for his kisses and his blows. That was the sort of love which grew up slowly in Celestinahami for Reynolds. But it wasn’t what he wanted, it was that, I expect, more than anything which got on his nerves.

So, the story tells us, there are two types of love: the big visionary type which, it has been clearly explained, Reynolds projected onto Celestinahami; and the dog-like, slave-like master-love of Celestinahami. Neither sound to me like ‘the real thing’, which Jessop set out to describe.

She used to follow him about the bungalow like a dog. He wanted to talk to her about his novel and she only understood how to pound and cook rice. It exasperated him, made him unkind, cruel. And when he looked into her patient, mysterious eyes he saw behind them what he had fallen in love with, what he knew didn’t exist. It began to drive him mad.

And so the story hurtles to its inevitable, Conradian end. She takes desperate steps to try and keep his ‘love’, the most florid being to dress up like the white women she sees in Colombo, in stays and white cotton stockings and shoes. But the more she tries, the more she destroys the image Reynolds had of her, the more angry he becomes, the more wretched she.

Eventually Reynolds realises he has to leave and carry on his travels. He swears to Celestinahami and Jessop that he’ll be back, he considerately makes over the house to Celestinahami’s ownership, then one fine day sails away on a P&O liner.

I never saw Reynolds again but I saw Celestinahami once. It was at the inquest two days after the Moldavia sailed for Aden. She was lying on a dirty wooden board on trestles in the dingy mud-plastered room behind the court… They had found her floating in the sea that lapped the foot of the convent garden below the little bungalow—bobbing up and down in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and shoes.

I suppose this is all very well done, but very much in the manner of Conrad even down to the punchline. Just as in one of Conrad’s classic tales told by his sailor-narrator Charles Marlow, the storyteller ends his tale, there’s a pause, and then one of the company of listeners brings us back to reality with a down-to-earth comment.

Jessop stopped. No one spoke for a minute or two. Then Hanson Smith stretched himself, yawned, and got up. ‘Battle, murder and sentimentality,’ he said. ‘You’re as bad as the rest of them, Jessop. I’d like to hear your other case—but it’s too late, I’m off to bed.’

Commentary

The feel and structure of the thing are, as pointed out, very Conradian, from the double narrative structure through to the deliberately throwaway ending, designed to evince that mood of cynical, jaded, man-of-the-world indifference to what is, in essence a tragedy (reminiscent of the plot of Puccini’s opera ‘Madame Butterfly’).

And you don’t have to be a feminist to find the fundamental structure – or two narrative structures – objectionable. What I mean is the frame story, in which four comfortably-off men sound off to each other about love without much or any admission of the woman’s point of view – and then listen to a tragedy based around the innocence and ignorance of poor Celestinahami. The power imbalances in both these structures are there for everyone to see. And the worldly note of the throwaway ending may be designed to indicate the fundamental heartlessness of the world, but it highlights that none of the listeners has a word of lament over poor Celestinahami.

But what puzzled me, more than anything, was that the story, the first narrator, and then Jessop all promise some great revelation about The Truth of Love, and then it doesn’t arrive. Maybe the narrator and Jessop’s point is that such a thing doesn’t exist, and instead, what actually exists in the real world is more complex, unsentimental, irrational and almost unpleasant, than the moon-in-June sentimental clichés.

In which respect, then, it chimes very much with the heartless worldview which radiates from his wonderful if extremely bleak novel, ‘The Village in the Jungle’.

2. Pearls and Swine

The setting

The unnamed first-person narrator is staying at a hotel in Torquay. After dinner and a game of billiards he joins three other chaps sitting round the fire. They’re talking about India, which reminds him of the 15 years he spent out there. Two of the three – a stock jobber and a clergymen – have never been out East and so sound off with insufferably imperialist cant and clichés: the stock jobber says the Indians must accept our racial superiority; the clergymen says we are undoubtedly raising them up to our level of civilisation, not least through the work of earnest young missionaries, basing his views on:

‘I read the papers, I’ve read books too, mind you, about India. I know what’s going on.’

All this cant goads the third member of the group, a small man with dark skin and wrinkles round his eyes (the narrator recognises a fellow servant of empire) beyond endurance, and he bursts out with a Tamil proverb. When asked to translate he explains that it’s a polite way of indicating the foolishness of earnest young Englishmen who go out to idea full of naive ideas drummed into them by their School Board education and think that somehow, after just 18 months, they understand the place from top to bottom, from ‘Benares to Rameswaram’. Compared to the Tamils who have lived in India for at least 7,000 years, compared to the hundreds of races who share the continent (‘there are more races in India than people in Peckham’).

Mention of views and opinions provides the hinge or pretext for the little Anglo-Indian man to announce that instead of views, he will tell them some facts. And this is what he proceeds to do.

The story

This is the real point of the story. The Anglo-Indian gives a ten-page account of his time serving in southern India as government administrator of a peal fishery. This was based on a God-forsaken stretch of the coast which consisted of nothing but barren sand and scrub for hundreds of miles, without a town or village or river or fresh water. But off this coast were marvellously rich oyster beds and every year, for 6 to 8 weeks between monsoons, thousands of fishermen in hundreds of boats, come to farm the oysters, a varied crew including scores of different races of Indians, plus Arabs and their Black ex-slaves, a multicultural community devoted to one end, diving to bring up thousands of oysters every day, to leave them rotting in the sun for the flies to devour, in the hope they will reveal pearls of great price embedded in their flesh.

The British Imperial government taxes their catch, taking two-thirds of the pearls. And the small, dark intense storyteller once performed this role and now describes, in vivid and powerful detail, what it was like – the heat, the unbearable flies, the nauseating smell of thousands of rotting oysters, the babble of native voices. All the several thousand fishermen had to be confined in a compound for 6 to weeks, creating a madly unhygienic and disease-ridden environment.

So that establishes the ground base of the story. Into this environment come two more white men: one is Robson, a 24-year-old bright spark who passed the Civil Service exams and is overflowing with bright new ideas about reforming everything, who criticises the narrator for giving up on changing the East and instead letting the East change him.

He was too cocksure altogether, of himself, of his School Board education, of life, of his ‘views’. He was going to run India on new lines, laid down in some damned Manual of Political Science out of which they learn life in Board Schools and extension lectures.

Predictably, his body and mind are not prepared for the disgusting conditions of the compound, the heat and the flies, and he ends up vomiting lots of time every day, becoming sicker and sicker.

The other white man is (ironically) named White. He’s a drunk, a rummy, with a pinched face and sharp teeth with gaps between them. But he’s a white man so Robson and the (unnamed) narrator let him eat at the same table. White tells the others he went to public school, which is probable, failed in England and so came out East. But even here he has been bedevilled by ‘damn bad luck’ and tells sob stories about a succession of dubious-sounding jobs.

So that’s the setup: three white men in a huge barren hot inhospitable semi-desert next to the sea, trying to control thousands of native pearl divers from all across India and beyond. We expect trouble, if not tragedy.

Sure enough, things happen. First a fight breaks out between a group of Arabs and one of Tamils over a handful of oysters which fall out of a bag. By the time the narrator separates them one Tamil is dead and ten or so have been injured. Idealistic Robson, for all his fancy ideas of ‘Reforming The Empire’, turns out to be predictably useless, running around like a distracted hen and crying.

But the main event in the story is that White comes down with a severe attack of delirium tremens or DTs. He starts raving and threatening violence so the narrator has to knock him out with a rifle butt. When he comes round, the narrator ties him to his bed. His raving, his tormented hallucinations are a trial for the narrator but tip young Robson over the edge, reducing him to sitting and crying.

All this allows Woolf to write some highly enjoyable bravura passages of the different mentality of the old India hand, of how you come to adopt the native mentality, become more passive, and accept the vast impersonal forces which dictate life, your life, everyone’s lives.

One just did one’s work, hour after hour, keeping things going in that sun which stung one’s bare hands, took the skin off even my face, among the flies add the smell. It wasn’t a nightmare, it was just a few thousand Arabs and Indians fishing tip oysters from the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t even new, one felt; it was old, old as the Bible, old as Adam, so the Arabs said. One hadn’t much time to think, but one felt it and watched it, watched the things happen quietly, unastonished, as men do in the East. One does one’s work,—forty eight hours at a stretch doesn’t leave one much time or inclination for thinking,—waiting for things to happen. If you can prevent people from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the camp, or getting cholera or plague or small-pox, and if one can manage to get one night’s sleep in three, one is fairly satisfied.

And again, a meditation on the profound difference between East and West:

Things here feel so different; you seem so far from life, with windows and blinds and curtains always in between, and then nothing ever happens, you never wait for things to happen, never watch things happening here. You are always doing things somehow—Lord knows what they are—according I suppose to systems, views, opinions. But out there you live so near to life, every morning you smell damp earth if you splash too much in your tin bath. And things happen slowly, inexorably by fate, and you—you don’t do things, you watch with the three hundred millions. You feel it there in everything, even in the sunrise and sunset, every day, the immensity, inexorableness, mystery of things happening. You feel the whole earth waking up or going to sleep in a great arch of sky; you feel small, not very powerful. But who ever felt the sun set or rise in London or Torquay either? It doesn’t: you just turn on or turn off the electric light.

This is all rather wonderful. But White won’t stop raving, all through the night. He moves on from hallucinations to describing shocking, immoral, cruel and corrupt behaviour all through his life, which is worse, more demoralising. The narrator moves him from his bed and ties him to a pole near his official desk where he can keep an eye on him. Arabs and Tamils come to watch him silently. The narrator explains that he is ill, the heat has driven him mad, and they accept this as they accept everything and move away with the ‘calm patient eyes of men who watched unastonished the procession of things’.

For one long night White raves and then, as dawn arrives, he cries out and dies. The narrator cuts him down from the pole and lays him out. But at that exact moment he is called by some locals. An oyster boat is coming inshore with a dead body on it, an Arab who died in mid-dive.

Woolf creates a very deliberate and stark contrast between the two dead men: White is a symbolic figure, symbolising the absolute worst of white men in the East, a corrupt drunk and public scandal who dies with horrible indignity.

By contrast the dead Arab is brought ashore by his colleagues, his brother sits by his body quietly weeping, an Arab sheikh comes up, lays his hand on the head of the lamenting man, and quietly and calmly consoles him. He died doing his work, doing his duty as a man. Everyone – dead man, brother and sheikh – are drenched in dignity and honour as the dawn breaks.

At this point the little brown man finishes his story. As with ‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’ the ending is deliberately dismissive, realistic, indicating the place of this, just one more story among a million stories in the western realm of endless discourse.

There was silence in the smoking-room. I looked round. The Colonel had fallen asleep with his mouth open. The jobber tried to look bored, the Archdeacon was, apparently, rather put out.

This feels much better than the first story for two obvious reasons. The dichotomies or binaries are easy to spot and enjoy, namely: between the shallow pontificating of the stock jobber and the clergyman, and the little brown Anglo-Indian; then between young idealistic Robson and the narrator; and then between the dignified locals and the wildly undignified, drunken White. There is the deeper dichotomy between imperial rules and the ruled to unpick as well, if you want to.

But mostly what makes it enjoyable is Woolf’ couple of paragraph-length descriptions of the mentality of the East, the spirit of the East, so utterly different from the pampered ignorance of London clubland where the frame story is set. All very neat, well constructed and enjoyable.

The Two Brahmans

Description of Yalpanam, a very large town in the north of Ceylon, which always feels abandoned and sleepy as all the living goes on behind the high fences made of the dried leaves of the coconut palms which conceal the compounds in which sit the huts and houses.

In the north of the town is the section devoted to Brahmans, to most senior caste in India’s caste system, who must keep themselves from being defiled, losing caste and face in countless ways. For example they do no work for themselves, all their needs are catered to by lower cast workers devoted to trades such as fishing tending rice, digging wells and so on.

In order to avoid defilement, the 50 or so Brahman families in Yalpanam all live in the same part of town, on the northern edge abutting the big lagoon. And for centuries if not millennia they have all married off their sons and daughters to each other to preserve their purity.

The story spans four generations of two particular families, headed by two fathers Chellaya and Chittampalam whose compounds neighbour each other. To be brief, both Chellya and Chittampalam shame their families by undertaking manual work. They try to keep it hidden but words get out and the other Brahman families cut them off. Among other things, this means their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children, will not be accepted for marriage by anyone in the town. They’ll have to go to distant settlements to find Brahman families which have never heard of their shame.

Chittampalam is a miser. When the water in his well starts to become brackish he should have gotten an earth carrying caste member to dig him a new well. Instead, in order to save, money he dug it and carries the soil away on his head himself. People saw him and he lost caste.

But it’s Chellaya who gets the lion’s share of (this very short) story. He likes to spend his afternoons staring out over the big lagoon and slowly becomes obsessed with the fishermen who wade out into the water and cast their nets. It looks so idyllic, it looks so relaxing. So one day he shamefacedly asks one of the fisherman if he could show him how to cast a net. He comes up with a cock-and-bull story about having made a vow to some god to do it as reward for healing his son but nobody is fooled. So for a small payment the fisherman sells him a net and then on successive days, far away from the village, shows him how to cast it. But someone, inevitably, sees, and he, too, loses caste.

I was wondering how these two bad Brahmans were going to be brought into contact or conflict but they aren’t. Chittampalam dies soon after being discovered carrying earth and Chellaya a few years later. It’s their great-great-great grandchildren who are. Four generations later the male descendants of the two naughty Brahmans bear the same names, Chellaya and Chittampalam.

Everybody’s forgotten which one of them carried the earth and which one cast nets, but they are still shunned by the other Brahman families and still have to marry outside the town.

And so we reach the climax of this little tale. The descendant Chellaya and Chittampalam still live in the same compounds as their ancestors, next to each other. And Chittampalam has a very beautiful daughter and Chellaya has one son unmarried, who one day sees the beautiful daughter through the compound wall, and suggests to his father that he marries her.

So the two fathers meet up and are in agreement that it would be an excellent marriage. However there’s one sticking point, the same sticking point there always is in all these native marriages, the size of the bride’s dowry: the father of the girl wants the dowry to be small and the father of the boy wants it to be large.

Well, the denouement, climax or punchline of the story turns out to be that… each time they meet to discuss the dowry it isn’t long before Chittampalam loses his temper and calls Chellaya a fisher, Chellaya loses his temper and calls Chittampalam a pariah and they both storm off.

Chellaya’s son calms his father down and arranges for the two men to have another meeting a few days later, but the exact same thing happens, with negotiations which start sensibly ending in a shouting match and both men storming away. Oh well, they realise; like their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them, they will have to marry off their children to partners from some distant village which has never heard of their shame.

So the moral of the story, children, is that the sins or errors or mistakes of the ancestors continue to bedevil and stymie the wishes of their descendants. Silly, isn’t it? And yet it’s those values and traditions which give our lives their meaning and aren’t as easy to shake off as glib outsiders think.

In a poignant and symbolic coda, Chellaya’s son, lovesick for Chittampalam’s daughter, takes to going and sitting at the exact same spot where his great-great-great-grandfather Chellaya used to sit and watch the fishermen cast their nets.

Maybe it’s not just social conventions and transgressions which are passed down through the generations, but something deeper; something about gestures and longings and desires which are revived and repeated in every generation…

Thoughts

‘Pearls and Swine’ is clearly the best of the three stories, which is why Eland chose to include it in their paperback edition of ‘The Village in the Jungle’ but not the other two.

‘The Two Brahmans’ is fine as far is it goes, conveying not only the restrictions of Brahman life but, better, the sense of the yearning of the Brahman who wanted to become a fisherman, briefly standing for everyone who has a dream or desire beyond their station in life; but is too short to make a big impact.

‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’ is clearly the worst story, because of the unsympathetic character of Jessop the blunt cynic; because it is based – like so many turn-of-the-century stories, plays and operas – on the immiseration and suicide of an innocent young woman; but most importantly, I thought it didn’t live up to the promise to be some kind of meditation on the nature of Real Love. Didn’t strike me as being that at all, but instead a cliché, and an unpleasant exploitative cliché at that.

Credit

‘Stories of the East’ by Leonard Woolf was published by the Hogarth Press in 1921. I read ‘Pearls and Swine’ in the 2008 Eland Publishing paperback edition of ‘The Village in the Jungle’ which includes it as a kind of bonus. The other two I read online.

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by Simon on May 12, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Short stories

Tagged A Tale Told by Moonlight, Alderton, Anglo-Indian, Bloomsbury, Board School, Brahman, British Empire, brothel, caste, caste system, Celestinahami, Ceylon, Charles Marlow, Chellaya, Chittampalam, Colombo, Cooperation and the Future of Industry, DTs, Economic Imperialism, Empire and Commerce in Africa, English literature, fiction, frame narrative, Hanson Smith, Heart of Darkness, imperialism, imperialist, India, Indian Civil Service, International Government, Jessop, Joseph Conrad, Leonard Woolf, love, Madame Butterfly, marriage, master-love, narrative, opera, P&O, pearl fishery, Pearls and Swine, Peckham, Pemberton, Puccini, racism, Reynolds, Robson, Rugby public school, sex, sex worker, short stories, Socialism and Co-operation, Stories of the East, story within a story, suicide, Tamil, the East, The Framework of a Lasting Peace, The Future of Constantinople, the Hogarth Press, The Two Brahmans, The Village in the Jungle, Torquay, True Love, Virginia Woolf, White, white supremacy, Wise Virgins, Yalpanam

Posted by Simon on May 12, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/12/stories-of-the-east-leonard-woolf/

Falk: A Reminiscence by Joseph Conrad (1901)

Horror, ruin and everlasting remorse. And no help. None. I had fallen amongst a lot of unfriendly lunatics!
(Conrad demonstrates his usual gift for calm understatement)

Thus from question to question I got the whole story.
(Perfect expression of the way a Conrad story is often a piecing together of evidence by the narrator)

‘Falk: A Reminiscence’ is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, 30,499 words long. Conrad completed it in May 1901. Conrad usually placed his stories with magazines for obvious financial reasons (to get paid twice, once by the magazine and then by a book publisher when the story was published in a collection), but he failed to place ‘Falk’ because of its controversial subject matter (see below). So the story first saw the light of day in book form, in ‘Typhoon and Other Stories’, published by William Heinemann in 1903.

Quick summary

Like ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘Lord Jim’, ‘Falk’ has a frame narrative which establishes the setting. Like those narratives, it is told after dinner to a group of fellow seaman who can be trusted to understand its technical details and nuances.

Several of us, all more or less connected with the sea, were dining in a small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London…

The narrator of the text we read is not the narrator of the story. He is one of the diners, and watches and listens as a different diner tells the tale which makes up the text.

Then one of us, who had not spoken before, a man of over fifty, that had commanded ships for a quarter of a century, looking after the barque now gliding far away, all black on the lustre of the river, said:

‘This reminds me of an absurd episode in my life, now many years ago, when I got first the command of an iron barque, loading then in a certain Eastern seaport. It was also the capital of an Eastern kingdom, lying up a river as might be London lies up this old Thames of ours. No more need be said of the place; for this sort of thing might have happened anywhere where there are ships, skippers, tugboats, and orphan nieces of indescribable splendour. And the absurdity of the episode concerns only me, my enemy Falk, and my friend Hermann.’

This fifty-something man takes us back 20 years or so (to the 1880s) when he was a 29-year-old newly commissioned officer employed by the Dutch East India Company. He had been appointed ex-officio by the British Consul to take charge of a ship after her captain had died suddenly, leaving the ship’s affairs in a complete mess, bills scattered around the messy cabin, important documents for some reason stored in a violin case (p.83).

I was totally inexperienced, greatly ignorant of business, and hopelessly unfit for any sort of command.

The first half of the story leisurely describes this inexperienced young man’s efforts to bring order to a ship which had been left in chaos by his predecessor, who neglected his duties and kept a mistress on shore.

Delayed from sailing the narrator-captain takes to visiting another vessel, the Diana, and gets to know its skipper, Hermann, who has aboard his wife and four children.

Hermann had been trading in the East for three years or more, carrying freights of rice and timber mostly.

Also on Hermann’s ship is his niece, an orphan he’s been looking after for three years. The narrator makes it abundantly clear that this niece is a full-figured, buxom and attractive woman, in terms which are unusually explicit for the usually restrained and aloof Conrad.

The girl was of the sort one necessarily casts eyes at in a sense. She made no noise, but she filled most satisfactorily a good bit of space. (p.104)

Magnificent in her close-fitting print frock she displayed something so commanding in the manifest perfection of her figure that the sun seemed to be rising for her alone. The flood of light brought out the opulence of her form and the vigour of her youth in a glorifying way.

The title character of the story, Captain Christian Falk, is the owner of the only tugboat in the harbour. He is a rash, impetuous, touchy man and behaves with increasing animosity towards the narrator, for no reason the narrator can make out. This climaxes when, one morning before anybody’s up, Falk abruptly attaches his tow cables to Hermann’s ship, the Diana, and tows it out of the shallow harbour, down the river to the estuary mouth, ready to set sail (pages 94 to 96). What makes this odd is that he had promised and contracted to tow the narrator’s ship first, so this is a striking breach of their agreement. And the impetuous haste with which he does it damages quite a bit of the Diana‘s woodwork.

Anyway, in Conrad’s usual circumlocutory manner it takes some time for the basic fact of the story to come out which is that – Falk is in love with Hermann’s niece and thinks the narrator is a rival for her affections. His irrational animosity to the narrator is based on the completely erroneous idea that the narrator is in love with her, too.

When Falk confronts the narrator with this accusation, over a drink and a game of cards in Schomberg’s hotel, the latter has to tactfully explain that he visits the Diana so often, not to woo the niece, but because he is young and a little lonely and enjoys the reassuring domestic atmosphere aboard the Diana, what with the homely wife and Hermann’s little children. He enjoys being waited on, eating well and then sharing a pipe and a chat with old Captain Hermann (p.87) – the buxom niece is neither here nor there.

Thus the air is finally cleared between the two ‘rivals’ and Falk abates his hostility. The narrator goes so far as to say he will help Falk’s suit and talk to Hermann, mediating as a go-between.

All this has taken up about two-thirds of the story, and it’s only in the final pages that the core of the thing is revealed. Because Falk, from misconceived notions of honour and chivalry, in a visit to Hermann, with the whole family present, insists on making his big confession: years ago, when marooned on a stranded ship, he murdered a man and then took part in dismembering, cooking and eating his body. He is a cannibal.

‘Imagine to yourselves,’ he said in his ordinary voice, ‘that I have eaten man.’

Conrad’s telling of Falk’s telling of the story of the marooned ship goes into very great detail, with descriptions of all the key crew aboard the doomed ship and a gruelling account of how the ship’s crew ran low on water, and ran completely out of food, till the crew resorted to boiling boot leather and then eating wood.

But as you can imagine, Falk’s confession has a devastating impact on everyone present and has aftershocks on all the characters. Having confessed, Falk sees the Hermann family’s reaction, thinks he has blown his suit, makes his excuses and leaves, leaving the narrator and Hermann to talk through this staggering revelation.

But, to cut a long story short, it turns out the niece doesn’t mind, insists she wants the match to go ahead, and Hermann is talked into it for financial reasons. (He wants to return home to Europe, taking his family with him; the niece would have required a room of her own and thus doubled the fare; marrying her off to Falk solves his legal responsibility for her and saves a tidy bit of money, p.144.) The next day the narrator sees the ‘happy couple’ standing on deck together.

They met in sunshine abreast of the mainmast. He held her hands and looked down at them, and she looked up at him with her candid and unseeing glance. It seemed to me they had come together as if attracted, drawn and guided to each other by a mysterious influence. They were a complete couple. In her grey frock, palpitating with life, generous of form, olympian and simple, she was indeed the siren to fascinate that dark navigator, this ruthless lover of the five senses. From afar I seemed to feel the masculine strength with which he grasped those hands she had extended to him with a womanly swiftness. (p.144)

So they get married. The novel ends with a comic touch which is also a comment on the nature of stories, particularly in Conrad’s community of yarning, gossiping seamen i.e. how they get embellished, simplified and turned into legends. When he returns to the (unnamed) port, five years later, the narrator discovers he is n ow part of a much-told tale, about ‘a certain Falk, owner of a tug, who had won his wife at cards from the captain of an English ship’ (p.145).

Clever, deft and funny, it is one of Conrad’s very rare happy endings.

Primitive

‘Heart of Darkness’ is famous for the mood it creates of travelling back in time to the primitive barbaric origins of humanity (in the heart of Africa) and, in a striking passage at the end, for projecting this barbarism onto the London where its narrator, Marlow, is telling his yarn, a London which had also been, as he puts it, one of the dark places of the earth.

Anyway, it’s notable that this story too juxtaposes the comfortable after-dinner setting – posh chaps enjoying a cigar and a yarn – with the sense of their primitive ancestors looming, as it were, over their shoulders.

The wooden dining-room stuck out over the mud of the shore like a lacustrine dwelling; the planks of the floor seemed rotten; a decrepit old waiter tottered pathetically to and fro before an antediluvian and worm-eaten sideboard; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one’s mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks in the company of other good fellows; then, gorged and happy, sat him back among the gnawed bones to tell his artless tales of experience – the tales of hunger and hunt – and of women, perhaps! (p.77)

1) It’s an effective, imaginative trope in its own right but also very current at the time, the late-Victorian early-Edwardian era, in a civilisation ever-more aware of the gulf between its own haves and have-nots, and the yawning gulf between the West and the native inhabitants of so many of its colonised countries. The note of barbarism reminds me of the H.G. Wells of The Time Machine and The island of Dr Moreau.

2) But the description also, of course, neatly sets up the central event of the story, which is an act of desperate cannibalism, a reversion to primitive bestial pre-civilised behaviour.

Cosmic

Mention of Wells lets me slip in here an example of what I call the cosmic note in Conrad, the handful of moments in every story where he zooms out from his specific characters to make some comparison with the world, the solar system, the universe.

I don’t mean to say she was statuesque. She was too generously alive; but she could have stood for an allegoric statue of the Earth. I don’t mean the worn-out earth of our possession, but a young Earth, a virginal planet undisturbed by the vision of a future teeming with the monstrous forms of life and death, clamorous with the cruel battles of hunger and thought. (p.82)

Totemic figure

Heart of Darkness is a long study of the mesmeric figure of Mr Kurtz who the narrator approaches from multiple angles, gets various third-party opinions about, talks to at multiple moments, but whose mystery he never penetrates.

‘Lord Jim’ is a long study of the mesmeric figure of Jim who the narrator approaches from multiple angles, gets various third-party opinions about, talks to at multiple moments, but whose mystery he never penetrates.

Falk is a (not-so-long) study of the puzzling figure of Falk who the narrator approaches from multiple angles, talks to at multiple moments, gets various third-party opinions about, offers to help, but whose mystery he never penetrates.

He remained still for a time in the dark – silent; almost invisible. (p.130)

Spot the pattern? All Conrad’s themes – incommunication, the mystery of other people, the wafer thin line between civilisation and barbarism, between sanity and madness – he discovered early on were best achieved by an unrelenting focus on one, central, symbolic and mysterious figure.

The large and variegated cast

As usual what starts out seeming like it will be a fairly straightforward story concerning a handful of characters, ends up becoming very complex and referring to a large number of secondary characters:

– The 50-something captain-narrator, ‘a man of over fifty, that had commanded ships for a quarter of a century’.

– His crew – a mate, second mate, a Chinaman.

– Captain Hermann, German, a ‘Schiff-fuhrer or ship-conductor’, skipper of the Diana out of Bremen, ‘the simple, heavy appearance of a well-to-do farmer, combined with the good-natured shrewdness of a small shopkeeper. With his shaven chin, round limbs, and heavy eyelids he did not look like a toiler, and even less like an adventurer of the sea.’

– His wife Mrs Hermann, ‘an engaging, stout housewife… [wearing] baggy blue dresses with white dots… Her voice was pleasant, she had a serene brow, smooth bands of very fair hair, and a good-humoured expression of the eyes. She was motherly and moderately talkative.’

– Their four children – Lena, Gustav, Carl, Nicholas the baby.

– Hermann’s (unnamed) niece, 19, who they’ve carried about with them for 3 years, a figure of ‘much bodily magnificence’, ‘You could not call her good-looking. It was something much more impressive. The simplicity of her apparel, the opulence of her form, her imposing stature, and the extraordinary sense of vigorous life that seemed to emanate from her like a perfume exhaled by a flower, made her beautiful with a beauty of a rustic and olympian order. To watch her reaching up to the clothes-line with both arms raised high above her head, caused you to fall a musing in a strain of pagan piety.’

– Schomberg, a brawny, hairy Alsatian, ‘proprietor of the smaller of the two hotels in the place’, where everyone meets to drink and gossip. This character appears in ‘Lord Jim’. Conrad liked having characters occur in different narratives, the prime example being the storyteller Charles Marlow who narrates Heart of Darkness, Youth and Lord Jim.

– Mrs Schomberg who cooks and helps in her husband’s hotel.

– Captain Christian Falk, Scandinavian (the narrator can’t remember whether he was Danish or Norwegian, p.88), skipper of the only tug on the river, ‘a very trim white craft of 150 tons or more, as elegantly neat as a yacht.’

He had her manned by the cheekiest gang of lascars I ever did see, whom he allowed to bawl at you insolently, and, once fast, he plucked you out of your berth as if he did not care what he smashed. Eighteen miles down the river you had to go behind him, and then three more along the coast to where a group of uninhabited rocky islets enclosed a sheltered anchorage. There you would have to lie at single anchor with your naked spars showing to seaward over these barren fragments of land scattered upon a very intensely blue sea. (p.

– Falk had previously wooed a Miss Vanlo, a very ladylike girl who came out from Britain to keep house for her brother, played the piano to entertain Falk, but was sickly and died.

– Fred Vanlo, brother of the ill-fated Miss Vanlo, ‘who had an engineering shop for small repairs by the water side’.

– Old Mr Siegers, ‘the father, the old gentleman who retired from business on a fortune and got buried at sea going home’, invested in Falk’s business.

– Young Mr Siegers, ditto (p.101).

– Gambril, elderly seaman on the narrator’s ship. He also appears in ‘The Shadow Line’.

– Johnson, ‘formerly captain of a country ship, but now spliced to a country wife and gone utterly to the bad’, ‘sallow of face, grizzled, unshaven, muddy on elbows and back; where the seams of his serge coat yawned you could see his white nakedness’.

– Mrs Johnson, ‘the big native woman, with bare brown legs as thick as bedposts’.

– The Consulate’s constable, an ex-sergeant-major of a regiment of Hussars (p.109).

Plus the separate set of characters in the cannibal’s tale (see below).

The cannibal’s tale

Only towards the end, in the last major passage of the text, does Falk tell his story to the narrator, having himself rowed out to the narrator’s ship expressly for the purpose (pages 133 to 142). It happened ten years back, when he sailed as first mate on the first ship sent by his native town to the South Seas, the Borgmester Dahl. One fine day the propeller dropped off, they lost power and drifted away from the main sea lanes, becoming less and less likely to be spotted and rescued. At first they ration the food but then it gives out and they are reduced to eating leather or chewing wood.

The narrator subjects Falk’s account to characteristically Conradian analysis, invoking the basic needs of bare, forked humanity.

He wanted to live. He had always wanted to live. So we all do – but in us the instinct serves a complex conception, and in him this instinct existed alone. There is in such simple development a gigantic force, and like the pathos of a child’s naive and uncontrolled desire.

This extended passage goes into lots of detail. It could be excerpted from the rest of the tale as a description of the harrowing effects of starving at ease. Falk quickly paints the characters of the main crewmen, the obstinate captain, the chief engineer and so on. And doesn’t stint on the characteristically Conradian hyperbole and his favourite vocabulary of human extremes.

It is, of course, no ordinary accident, but one which leads to the ship drifting helplessly out of the usual shipping lanes as the men slowly starved and descended into despair…

Consternation and despair possessed the remaining ship’s company, till the apathy of utter hopelessness re-asserted its sway. That day a fireman committed suicide, running up on deck with his throat cut from ear to ear, to the horror of all hands.

The captain jumps overboard. they boil their boots to eat, skeletons aboard the carcass of a ship. More men commit suicide jumping over. Falk tries to grab and prevent a few but is haunted by the lost look in their eyes, but he resolves not to die.

His heart revolted against the horror of death, and he said to himself that he would struggle for every precious minute of his life.

The carpenter is the only other man of mettle, who’s kept his spirits up. Falk likes him, they form a kind of unspoken bond (as so many men do in Conrad) but one day, as he’s bending over the remaining water butt, he hears the carpenter sneaking up behind to brain him with a crowbar. Falk leaps out the way, punches him to the deck then barricades himself in his cabin. He has a revolver and the porthole of his cabin is next to the the only barrel of freshwater, in other words, if he can stay awake, he can nab the carpenter as he tries to sneak a drink. Next morning, after a tussle, Falk shoots the carpenter dead.

Starved spectres of men crawl out from their hiding places and they butcher and eat the carpenter. Even then, most of them died as the starving weeks dragged on. In the end only three others were rescued with him when the ship was finally spotted and rescued.

And, as usual, in Conrad’s hands the central figure of this harrowing tale assumes symbolic proportions, comes to stand for some kind of cosmic principle.

He had survived! I saw him before me as though preserved for a witness to the mighty truth of an unerring and eternal principle. (p.142)

And not just Falk. Earlier we heard the narrator comparing Hermann’s unnamed niece to a Greek goddess, stirring pagan thoughts. Now, having turned the cannibal Falk into the embodiment of the deep human will to survive and endure, he sees how these two emblematic figures are destined for each other.

She was eminently fitted to interpret for him its feminine side. And in her own way, and with her own profusion of sensuous charms, she also seemed to illustrate the eternal truth of an unerring principle. (p.142)

Falk’s build

Falk defeated the carpenter and survived, and is now such a fierce antagonist because he is big and strong; he has an odd head and face but his body is massive.

The wind swayed the lights so that his sunburnt face, whiskered to the eyes, seemed to successively flicker crimson at me and to go out. I saw the extraordinary breadth of the high cheek-bones, the perpendicular style of the features, the massive forehead, steep like a cliff, denuded at the top, largely uncovered at the temples. The fact is I had never before seen him without his hat; but now, as if my fervour had made him hot, he had taken it off and laid it gently on the floor. Something peculiar in the shape and setting of his yellow eyes gave them the provoking silent intensity which characterised his glance. But the face was thin, furrowed, worn; I discovered that through the bush of his hair, as you may detect the gnarled shape of a tree trunk lost in a dense undergrowth. These overgrown cheeks were sunken. It was an anchorite’s bony head fitted with a Capuchin’s beard and adjusted to a herculean body. I don’t mean athletic. Hercules, I take it, was not an athlete. He was a strong man, susceptible to female charms, and not afraid of dirt. And thus with Falk, who was a strong man. He was extremely strong.

‘Herculean.’ Hercules being, of course, a figure from Greek legend and thus fitting in with the classical hints dropped throughout the text – the niece’s pagan statuesque figure, the name of Hermann’s ship being Diana, use of the adjective pagan and other sneaky little references.

I saw the modest, sleek glory of the tawny head, and the full, grey shape of the girlish print frock she filled so perfectly, so satisfactorily, with the seduction of unfaltering curves—a very nymph of Diana the Huntress. (p.122)

The sirens sing and lure to death, but this one had been weeping silently as if for the pity of his life. She was the tender and voiceless siren of this appalling navigator…

As to Falk’s size and strength, the narrator speculates:

But maybe women liked it. Seen in that light he was well worth taming, and I suppose every woman at the bottom of her heart considers herself as a tamer of strange beasts.

As the feminist saint Sylvia Plath wrote:

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

The world in a story

One of the marvellous things about Conrad’s fictions is the effort he takes to describe not just the key protagonists, but to depict the entire world in which they move. Having such an extensive cast in every story helps achieve this, but so does a passage like this which tries to paint the wider society the characters move in.

We explored together on that afternoon an infinity of infamous grog shops, gambling dens, opium dens. We walked up narrow lanes where our gharry – a tiny box of a thing on wheels, attached to a jibbing Burmah pony – could by no means have passed. The constable seemed to be on terms of scornful intimacy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with Chinamen, with Klings, and with the sweepers attached to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate. We interviewed also through a grating in a mud wall closing a blind alley an immensely corpulent Italian, who, the ex-sergeant-major remarked to me perfunctorily, had ‘killed another man last year’. Thereupon he addressed him as ‘Antonio’ and ‘Old Buck’, though that bloated carcase, apparently more than half filling the sort of cell wherein it sat, recalled rather a fat pig in a stye. Familiar and never unbending, the sergeant chucked – absolutely chucked – under the chin a horribly wrinkled and shrivelled old hag propped on a stick, who had volunteered some sort of information: and with the same stolid face he kept up an animated conversation with the groups of swathed brown women, who sat smoking cheroots on the door-steps of a long range of clay hovels. We got out of the gharry and clambered into dwellings airy like packing crates, or descended into places sinister like cellars.

The usual Conrad hyperbole

Even in a relatively light-hearted story Conrad can’t help himself resorting to notions like madness, misery, terror, horror, despair, imbecility and so on. It’s second nature to him, these are the concepts and words which come readiest to his pen.

I was glad to make any escape on board that Bremen Diana. There apparently no whisper of the world’s iniquities had ever penetrated. And yet she lived upon the wide sea: and the sea tragic and comic, the sea with its horrors and its peculiar scandals, the sea peopled by men and ruled by iron necessity is indubitably a part of the world.

There was a sense of lurking gruesome horror somewhere in my mind, and it was mingled with clear and grotesque images

He stood up; he flung himself down headlong; he tried to tear the cushion with his teeth; and again hugging it fiercely to his face he let himself fall on the couch. The whole ship seemed to feel the shock of his despair.

Conrad knows his tendency to rush straight to the extremities of human experience is his biggest weakness and throws in a pre-emptive mention of it

‘What is it you said I was last night? You know,’ he [Hermann] asked after some preliminary talk. “Too – too – I don’t know. A very funny word.’
Squeamish?’ I suggested.
‘Yes. What does it mean?’
‘That you exaggerate things – to yourself. Without inquiry, and so on.’ (p.143)

He’s aware he does it but he can’t stop. His stories are made out of exaggeration, extremity and hyperbole. A cannibal!

Puzzlement

The hyperbole is an obvious quality that many readers comment on. But having just read ‘Lord Jim’, ”Typhoon’ and ‘The End of the Tether’, I’ve realised that deeper and more important than it, the core Conrad quality, is the way his characters, and in particular his narrators, are continually puzzled and bewildered by everything, and especially all other human beings. They are hopelessly bewildered by other people’s behaviour.

His manner was usually odd it is true, and I certainly did not pay much attention to it; but that sort of obscure intention, which seemed to lurk in his nonchalance like a wary old carp in a pond, had never before come so near the surface. (p.92)

I remember only that there was, on that evening, enough point in his behaviour to make me, after he had fled, wonder audibly what he might mean. To this Hermann, crossing his legs with a swing and settling himself viciously away from me in his chair, said: ‘That fellow don’t know himself what he means.’ (p.93)

Hermann seemed to be requesting an answer of some sort from her; his whole body swayed. She remained mute and perfectly still; at last his agitation gained her; she put the palms of her hands together, her full lips parted, no sound came. His voice scolded shrilly, his arms went like a windmill – suddenly he shook a thick fist at her. She burst out into loud sobs. He seemed stupefied.

She shook her head back at me negatively, I wonder why to this day.

His tales tend to focus around one person, a man – Almayer, Willems, Karain, Kurtz, Jim, Falk – and the text mostly consists of very lengthy and puzzled speculations about this man’s character and behaviour.

The narrators often cajole their auditors by asking rhetorical questions which demonstrate how the narrator not only doesn’t understand what’s going on, or understand the nature of the central protagonist, but just as often doesn’t understand himself, throwing out speculations and asking his auditors to agree:

How shall I express it? what else could it be?

As a footnote, the narrator thinks women are particularly impenetrable, which may be taken as a sexist thought. But really ‘they’ are only a bit more imponderable than all the men in the story:

It was impossible to make out women. Mrs. Hermann was the only one he pretended to understand.

In a nutshell, nothing is clear. This is another meaning of the comic ending where the narrator finds out that his rivalry with Falk has been turned into a legend. At the time everything is hopelessly confused and afterwards people turn the howling confusion of life into simple stories to comfort and amuse themselves.

Inarticulacy

Intimately connected with the inability to understand other human beings is the continual failure to communicate with each other demonstrated by all the characters, in a hundred ways, large and small.

His speech was not transparently clear. He was one of those men who seem to live, feel, suffer in a sort of mental twilight.

Schomberg tapped his manly breast. I sat half stunned by his irrelevant babble.

Falk had a low, nervous laugh. His cool, negligent undertone had no inflexions, but the strength of a powerful emotion made him ramble in his speech.

I heard Hermann’s voice declaiming in the cabin, and I went in. I could not at first make out a single word, but Mrs. Hermann, who, attracted by the noise, had come in some time before, with an expression of surprise and mild disapproval, depicted broadly on her face, was giving now all the signs of profound, helpless agitation.

And in fact the point of the entire story is a clumsy, maladroit communication. After a very long buildup, after all manner of confusions and misunderstandings – not least Falk’s eccentric decision to tow Hermann’s ship not the narrator’s, without telling either of them, leaving them both astonished – the bombshell at the heart of the story is delivered in one simple sentence:

‘I have eaten man.’

Leaving the narrator faint and Hermann dazed. It’s not only a dazzling revelation in its subject matter but also in that it is an extremely rare instance of someone speaking a simple blunt truth. All that foreplay leading up to this blunt admission!

More than coping with the horror, terror, imbecility etc etc which Conrad says he sees at the heart of human existence, the real subject of his fictions is the difficulty of making sense of the world and, above all, of other people.

Remembering the things one reads of it was difficult to realise the true meaning of his answers. I ought to have seen at once – but I did not; so difficult is it for our minds, remembering so much, instructed so much, informed of so much, to get in touch with the real actuality at our elbow.

The language barrier

His pronunciation of English was so extravagant that I can’t even attempt to reproduce it. For instance, he said ‘Fferie strantch.’ (p.107)

It is of course important that two of the three central figures in the story (narrator, Hermann, Falk) are not British, are not native English speakers. Hermann is German and Falk is Scandinavian and they are both described as struggling to express themselves in English (why are they talking English at all?). When they speak their own languages the narrator, confused already about what’s going on, struggles to understand.

At the sight of Falk, stepping over the gangway, the excellent man would begin to mumble and chew between his teeth something that sounded like German swear-words. However, as I’ve said, I’m not familiar with the language, and Hermann’s soft, round-eyed countenance remained unchanged. (p.90)

And although the narrator is described as a pukka Englishman he is, of course the mouthpiece of Józef Korzeniowski who, although all the literary guides tell you is one of the glories of early 20th century English literature, nonetheless doesn’t write English like an Englishman at all.

The English Edwardian novelists are H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, who are concerned with the micro distinctions of England’s class system and Edwardian scandals, or the suave Somerset Maugham or entertaining Saki or Kipling in his Sussex fairies mode – none of them describe anything like Conrad’s reports back from a universe of horror and moral collapse, none of them have his dramatically florid way with the language which he himself experienced at one remove and had so many of his characters struggle and fail to master.

Silence

The most complete lack of conventional communication is, of course, silence and it is no accident that the woman at the heart of the story, who the men gravitate around like the sun at the centre of her little solar system of men, the niece, never speaks. I wonder if Conrad had her saying this or that, maybe chatting to the narrator on his visits to the Diana etc – but then realised that she became a vastly more potent and symbolic presence if she said nothing, nothing at all.

Conrad reviews

Joseph Conrad reviews

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by Simon on November 27, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Short stories

Posted by Simon on November 27, 2024

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Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900)

‘It is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush – from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe.’
(Marlow in chapter 5)

Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
(Marlow, appalled at the inadequacy of legal procedures to capture the complexity of life, Chapter 4)

‘We never know what a man is made of.’
(Captain Brierly’s first mate, Mr Jones, after Brierly commits suicide, Chapter 6)

I was doomed to be the recipient of confidences, and to be confronted with unanswerable questions.
(Marlow feeling sorry for himself, Chapter 34)

It was a lesson, a retribution – a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think.
(Marlow reflecting on the massacre which ends the book and its connection to fundamental human nature, Chapter 44)

Lord Jim was Joseph Conrad’s next publication after Heart of Darkness (1899). Like Heart of Darkness it was first published as a serial in Blackwoods Magazine, in this case from October 1899 to November 1900, and then published in book form. However, Lord Jim is a lot longer than Heart of Darkness (around 80,000 words and 313 Penguin pages compared to Heart’s 38,000 words and 111 pages) and uses the same techniques of a story-telling narrator who mingles a main narrative with numerous flashbacks, to much more complex effect.

My review divides the text into three parts. These aren’t in the book, which is simply divided into 45 chapters, but, as you read it, there is very obviously a part one (aboard the Patna), a part two (in Patusan), a few chapters at the end concluding the narrative, which I’ve labelled part 3. And I suppose the first four chapters, told by an omniscient third-person narrator, amount to an introduction.

Plot summary: Introduction

The first four chapters are told by an omniscient third person narrator and give a potted biography of the central protagonist. Jim (last name never mentioned) is a sound-looking young man from a country parsonage who trains to be a merchant sailor, gets his seaman’s license, gets work aboard various ships out East till he is injured by a falling spar. Not fully fit, he gets a job aboard a notorious old steamer, the Patna, 1,400 tons, captained by a fat and foul-mouthed German captain and owned by an unscrupulous Chinese. It describes the fateful voyage of the steamship Patna, up to and including its accident before cutting away to the courtroom where an official enquiry into the accident is being held. At the end of the fourth chapter we are introduced to Charles Marlow, captain in the merchant marine, and his interest in Jim’s case. In the courtroom he is described as:

A white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear. (Chapter 4)

All this is preparation for what follows.

Plot summary: part 1

Setting

It’s after dinner out East somewhere, in the imperialist 1890s. On a veranda half a dozen professional white men have dined well and, as it gets dark, they call on one of their number, Charles Marlow, the only seaman among them, to give them one of his famous ‘yarns’, and so he does.

The Patna

The core of the story is simple. Several years ago there’d been a scandal among seaman out East about an old rustbucket of a ship, the Patna, which was contracted to carry 800 pilgrims to Mecca and which, en route to Aden, struck some underwater obstacle, split the hull and began taking water. It was the middle of the night, the pilgrims were all asleep, and the drunken cowardly crew panicked and fled the ship in a lifeboat. A squall came up at just that moment and the survivors, once the lifeboat was picked up next day and brought to Aden, insisted they saw the ship go down, quickly and mercifully drowning all the pilgrims.

The scandal derived from the fact that the ship very much did not go down, but remained half afloat, despite the holing and the squall, which merely blew it out of sight of the crew in the lifeboat. The next day the Patna was spotted by a French warship who cabled her up and towed the stricken ship to Aden, where all the pilgrims were successfully unloaded.

An official enquiry was held but the captain of the Patna, an obese German named Gustav, skedaddled, and the chief engineer had an alcoholic collapse and was confined to hospital. Therefore the main witness and accused in the case was the young mate, 23-year-old Jim, who cut a defiant but forlorn figure in the courtroom.

Marlow, captain of a merchant vessel, happened to be in the port where the public enquiry was being held and went along out of curiosity. He was intrigued by the character of this Jim fellow and, after bumping into him in the crowd outside when the court recessed for lunch, invited him to dinner at the Malabar Hotel where he was staying.

The Malabar Hotel confession

After dinner they go onto the terrace of the hotel and there follows Marlow’s very long, very intense account of the interview he held with Jim, not exactly like a police interview but more like a therapy session, or maybe a Catholic confession – but very long and exhaustive. Although he teases out of Jim all the unflattering details, Jim is so young and woebegone that he is pitifully grateful for being given the opportunity to get everything off his chest.

‘Last night already you had done me no end of good. Listening to me – you know… I’ve thought more than once the top of my head would fly off… You have given me confidence.” (p.142)

Marlow is motivated because, as he tells his listeners on the veranda, he is a connoisseur of people (he repeatedly describes Jim as ‘too interesting‘ to ignore). Which explains why he is so fascinated by, and comments on, every single remark, gesture and expression which crosses Jim’s face, analysing and re-analysing everything Jim says and even the silences when he stumbles, hesitates or falls silent. An approach which explains why just this first section lasts about 100 densely-packed pages.

The factual content of this vast text goes into more detail about events, retelling it in nailbiting real time, putting the reader on the edge of their seat:

The ship hit something, the forward bulkhead gave and started flooding with water; when Jim went down to check the main bulkhead protecting the rest of the ship he saw it bulging with the pressure and bits falling off the rusty iron. Back on deck the captain and three white crew were wrestling to free the lifeboat while Jim stood back, detached from them and stricken with conscience. He saw one of them, George, keel over as if in a faint. Finally, the three crew members release the boat and descend rapidly into the sea (all this without warning the sleeping pilgrims) and yell up for their mate, George to join them

The jump

And this is the big thing, from Jim’s perspective and for the entire moral framework of the book. Jim was not a coward. Jim realised his responsibility to the 800 innocent pilgrims. Jim realised someone ought to stay on board to organise an evacuation, no matter how chaotic, no matter there weren’t enough lifeboats for the entire 800. As he heard the cowardly crew yelling up from the darkness (it is pitch black night) below him, urging ‘George’ to jump, all these responsibilities flashed through his mind and yet…

The next thing Jim knows he is in the boat, he has jumped (p.88). While his mind is still processing this fatal step, a squall comes up and sheets of rain hide the Patna from view and, when it passes, they can’t see the ship’s lights and assume it sank.

In the pitch dark it takes a while for the others to realise Jim is not George and, when they do, they are not only furious at having lost their comrade, but also there’s much muttering about whether Jim will betray them when they eventually are rescued, with a strong undertone of menace.

Jim stays up all night gripping the boat’s tiller in fear of his life. Next day the boat is picked up by a passing ship, a ‘Dale Line steamer’, and taken to Aden where they discover to their horror and chagrin that the Patna didn’t sink but has been towed there, too. Then, a few days later, they are compelled to attend the enquiry, which is where Marlow comes in.

Romantic imaginings versus bitter reality

The point to grasp, the central theme of this long dense novel, is the discrepancy between Jim’s fond fantasies and the bitter reality of his actions. Again and again Marlow brings out the way that Jim, from his boyhood, revelled in romantic stories of the sea and imagined himself to be a brave bold sailor, a doughty captain, a swashbuckling buccaneer in the mode of Raleigh and Drake. As he underwent his training, as he served on various ships, as he took the crappy job on the Patna, all the time he reassured himself that when push came to shove, when the crisis arrived, he would be the hero, he would be the man of resolve, he would save the day.

And yet, in the event, when the crisis came, it was this very imaginative faculty which undid him. As he stood wavering on the bridge he imagined all too vividly the remaining bulkhead bursting, the water flooding in, the realisation and panic among the pilgrims, the screams of men, women and children as the gushing water frothed around them, a great confusion of brown bodies all screaming in their death agonies and…next thing he knew he was in the boat. Again and again he insists to Marlow that he never made a conscious decision. The thing just happened. He leaped and, with that one action, undid the entire basis of his self image, the heroic fantasies he had nurtured all his life.

By the time this very long confession-cum-therapy session has ended, all the other guests at the hotel are long gone to bed and on impulse Marlow makes Jim an offer: he’ll write him a letter of recommendation to a friend out East and help him do a bunk to avoid the findings of the enquiry. But Jim is offended:

‘You don’t seem to understand, he said incisively; then looking at me without a wink, ‘I may have jumped, but I don’t run away.’

Intense scrutiny

Several things are important. First, the book is so enormously long, dense and chewy because Marlow makes a mountain out of every word, hesitation, gesture and flicker from Jim, freighting them all with huge and portentous significance.

Hyperbolic language

Two, Conrad is very prone to hyperbole, to interpreting relatively mundane actions with extreme words like horror, madness, vengeance, Fate etc. Sentences like this occur hundreds of times:

I knew too much already to hope for the grace of a single uplifting touch, for the favour of hinted madness, of shadowed horror.

At around the same time (the later 1890s) Sigmund Freud was paying exorbitant attention to the dreams, memories and verbal slips of his patients, freighting them an immense load of psychological and, above all, sexual significance. Conrad’s Marlow subjects Jim and his story to the same kind of hyper-intense scrutiny except that, instead of sex, Conrad detects in every word and phrase signs of the horror, despair, futility and madness which he sees everywhere, in everything, on every page.

Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion.

Digressions

Third thing is that, being a discursive, after-dinner narrator means that Marlow is free to jump around in time, frequently interrupting the great Malabar Hotel Confession scene with memories of people he talked to at the time or later, in the same port town or miles away, inserting facts and perspectives on Jim’s account which he only learned years later and sometimes rambling right off the main story altogether.

For example, he not only tells us that one of the officials who sat on the Board of Enquiry, Captain Montague Brierly, shortly afterwards committed suicide (which is odd and distracting enough in its own right), but spends some pages retailing the account of the captain’s last movements given by his first mate, a Mr Jones. And not only this, but this digression involves some Conradian pondering on Jones’s appearance, character, motivation and style of talking.

Again, some years later he meets one of the French officers who went on board the abandoned Patna, supervised its cabling up and towing to Aden, and this passage includes nearly as much circumstantial detail about this man’s appearance and manner as he does about Jim’s.

Again and again the flow of Jim’s story is interrupted by digressions like this which not only take us to other times and places, but dwell on and analyse other people.

Other characters

Thus although the basic narrative consists of this intense colloquy between Marlow and Jim, it digresses so often onto the subsidiary stories of others that it slowly builds up into a kind of matrix of secondary characters, which themselves shed light not only on the factual content of the narrative, but 1) build up the sense of the wider world of ships and crews and ports, painting a broader picture of ‘Conrad’s world’, as well as 2) shedding direct or indirect light onto the central theme of how we humans are so often undone, undermined from our best intentions by the perversity of events, Fate, call it what you will.

Secondary characters mentioned or described, sometimes at length, in part one, in include:

– ‘that unspeakable vagabond’, Antonio Mariani, owner of Mariani’s billiard-room and grog-shop near the bazaar. It’s typical that Marlow hears Mariani’s version of events ‘a long time after’, ‘when he came on board one day to dun my steward for the price of some cigars’.

– the (unnamed) engineer of the Patna, an alcoholic who goes on a three-day bender before the official enquiry and ends up in the local hospital with powerful delirium tremens. It is here that Marlow, playing the detective, visits him to shed more light on Jim’s actions. The man insists not only that he saw the ship go down but, in his delirium, insists that it was full of reptiles, monsters, threatening him. He howls so loudly that the other inmates of the ward yell at him to shut up. (Chapter 5)

– Captain Montague Brierly, captain of the Ossa and one of the three men on the Board of Enquiry, catches up with Marlow after the first adjournment and spends a couple of pages lamenting how beastly the trial is and how demoralising it is for everyone in the merchant service that Jim has ‘let the side down’. He echoes Marlow’s insistence on the standards of behaviour demanded by ‘the craft’.

‘We’ve got all kinds amongst us – some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose.’ (Chapter 6)

– Mr Jones, first mate of the Ossa, vividly describes the last time he saw Captain Brierly on the bridge of the Ossa before Brierly committed suicide by jumping overboard, only a week or so after the Board of Enquiry. Jones describes Brierly’s concern that his pet dog be locked in the bridge so it didn’t follow him overboard, then expressed his contempt for the replacement captain appointed by the Company. (Chapter 6)

– An elderly French lieutenant. He is third lieutenant of the Victorieuse, flagship of the French Pacific squadron and the French gunboat which finds the Patna marooned and adrift. He’s one of the party who boarded the abandoned Patna. One afternoon in Sydney, after they have met ‘by the merest chance, in a sort of cafe’, he tells Marlow that he stayed on board the Patna for the entire 30 hours it took to haul it to the nearest English port, Aden, going on to say how impressed he was when the boats of two other British ships in the harbour took off all the 800 pilgrims in just 25 minutes (pages 107 to 116).

– Deckhand of the Sephora, a completely different ship which also got into difficulties and sank, who describes watching a member of that crew (a completely different crew), little Bob Stanton who looked like a bearded gnome, go back onboard to try and rescue a maid who refused to leave the sinking ship. She refused and they both drowned, an anecdote which sheds oblique light on Jim’s story (p.116).

– Selvin, chief mate of Marlow’s own ship, who nurses a fiery jealousy of his mousey wife which can drive him into homicidal rages (p.121).

– The Australian Captain Chester sees Jim stagger off after the enquiry’s verdict and asks Marlow whether he could persuade him (Jim) to come in on his dodgy scheme of buying a knackered old steamer to collect guano off a remote reef. Marlow says no and the digression could have ended there but, in Conrad’s hands, it has barely even begun. Because Conrad now bolts on the completely unnecessary detail that this Captain Chester has already secured one backer, a decrepit old captain named Robinson. Conrad then adds the lurid detail that this man acquired the nickname ‘Holy-Terror Robinson’ because he was involved in a scandal where he and six others were shipwrecked on Stewart Island and when, some months later, a Royal Navy ship spotted him on the shore, he was the only one left – with the result that there was lots of muttering about cannibalism. The relevance to Jim is that Chester admires the way Robinson didn’t care a fig for what others thought, rejected all accusations and got on with his life just fine, the total opposite of Jim, who is visibly shattered by the court’s verdict that his master’s certificate be taken away (pages 124 to 130). Then, later on in the narrative, Marlow tells us that the knackered old ship which Chester chartered to head out for this guano-deep island went down with all hands in a hurricane (p.135).

Hopefully these examples demonstrate how the net effect of hearing about, seeing and reading the stories of all these other characters is to build up the impression of a whole world, the world of the merchant marine in the 1890s, Conrad’s world, the world of ‘the craft’ – and to provide foils, comparisons and contrasts for Jim’s behaviour, never bluntly direct, but numerous sidelights and oblique angles.

Malabar Hotel second night

Next day Marlow attends the conclusion of the public enquiry and hears the magistrate read out their verdict: the German skipper (who has long since disappeared) and Jim (sitting humiliated in court) are to lose their seaman’s licenses.

After the court breaks up and empties, Marlow is temporarily delayed but then finds Jim down at the dockside and invites him back to his hotel room. He realises that the poor man has just lost the only profession he had, has nowhere to go, and is the talk of the town. Marlow, very compassionately, gives him refuge for one long day, not bothering him with talk but sitting and quietly writing letters and leaving Jim in silence as it gets slowly darker toward evening and then a tropical storm breaks out.

The tone and content is very different from the long night of the Confession. Now it is full of pregnant silences and the ominous symbolism of approaching darkness. Finally, after much stilted dialogue, Marlow explains that he’s written a letter of recommendation of Jim to an old friend, Mr Denver, who owns a rice mill in another country. Jim thanks Marlow for listening to him and giving him some confidence back. He vows to start over with ‘a clean slate’.

Intermezzo: Jim’s jobs

1) Six months later Marlow, docked in Hong Kong, gets a letter from Denver, a confirmed anti-social misanthrope (characteristically, Conrad gives us a pen portrait), saying Jim is turning out very well, very companionable, good worker. He (Denver) wonders what Jim did to abandon the sea, which tells us that Denver is utterly in the dark about the Patna incident. All is well.

But a few months later Marlow gets back from a voyage to find another letter saying Jim has absconded from Denver’s employ. In the same pile of letters is one from Jim himself explaining why: by a far-fetched coincidence the drunken second engineer from the Patna turned up in this distant place and also got a job at Denver’s mill. The engineer didn’t blab but he established a greasy rapport with Jim about ‘our little secret’, the suggestion of their exact moral equivalence, which Jim found impossible to bear.

2) So Jim moved on and got a job with a ship chandler’s company called Egstrom & Blake. Marlow calls in at the relevant (unnamed) port, calls in on the shop and he and Jim have a catch-up. Jim explains why he left Denver and says he’s doing OK as the runner to the two owners, Egstrom & Blake. He claims to be able to put up with the way the owners notoriously bicker and fight all the time, though Marlow secretly thinks he must find it all very humiliating.

A few months later Marlow calls by and is upset to discover Jim has done another bunk. Egstrom explains that some captains came by and were jawing in the shop in Jim’s presence and the Patna case came up and one of the old captains said what ‘scoundrels’ the Patna‘s crew had been and Jim froze. When the captains left, Jim gave Egstrom his notice despite all the latter’s reassurance and pleas. Marlow has to explain that Jim was one of the ‘scoundrels’, which Egstrom, like Denver, did not know.

3) And so Jim fled from job to job until he became notorious. He works for the Yucker brothers in Bangkok where Schomberg, the keeper of the hotel where he boarded, ‘a hirsute Alsatian of manly bearing and an irrepressible retailer of all the scandalous gossip of the place’, would tell anyone who cared to hear, all about Jim’s story. Jim leaves this berth after he gets into a fight with a drunken Dane who whispered something at him and who Jim threw off the veranda into the river (p.152).

4) Marlow takes Jim away with him in his ship. By now, as we can tell, he is heavily involved in Jim’s life, and next places him as a ‘water clerk’ with another ship’s chandler named de Jongh, ‘with his little leathery face’. (Chapter 13).

Plot summary: part 2

Stein

This big book enters part two when Marlow turns for advice about what to do with Jim to Stein, ‘a wealthy and respected merchant, lead partner in Stein & Co, ‘an eminently suitable person to receive my confidences about Jim’s difficulties as well as my own.’

Stein is an old hand, a German trader with a long and colourful life story in his own right, which (of course) Marlow gives us in full. He had in his time been merchant, adventurer, sometime adviser of a Malay sultan who he always referred to as ‘my poor Mohammed Bonso’ because he was assassinated at the end of a tumultuous eight-year civil war. We hear that Stein inherited his position from a venerable old Scot named Alexander M’Neil who was well in with the local tribe, which was ruled by a tough old woman queen. Nowadays he is owner of a trading firm in the Malaysian islands.

Marlow discusses Jim’s case with Stein who says he runs a trading post on the remote island of Patusan, forty miles up the river in the interior. The current factor or head of the trading post is a Portuguese named Cornelius, who is giving an unsatisfactory performance. Stein says why not send keen young Jim to replace Cornelius? And so is comes about.

Patusan

Jim comes to thank Marlow for getting him the post, takes some last minute equipment, including Marlow’s service revolver (although, characteristically, he forgets the ammunition) and sets off on one of Stein’s ships.

What follows is, once again, chopped up into a mosaic of accounts which Marlow only pieces together over the following years. Roughly speaking there are three elements or phases:

1. Jim arrives and discovers the trading post not some isolated cabin but embedded in a native town, which itself consists of various quarters or neighbourhoods, which are supervised by a couple of competing native rulers. I.e. he finds himself thrown into a complex political situation which it takes him some time to understand.

2. A full two years later, when much has happened in this complex situation, Marlow makes his only visit, staying for 4 weeks. and getting introduced to all the major players, interspersing his account of his trip with flashbacks to Jim’s arrival and the incidents which follow. In other words, you have to be on your toes to keep track of the multiple timelines involved.

3. Finally there is the disastrous denouement of the book – maybe I should call it Part 3 – which is conveyed in a completely different manner, because it consists of letters sent to one of the men who listened to Marlow’s account on the veranda. Yes, I’ll make that part 3.

The politics of Patusan

Briefly, Patusan is is divided between three communities each with their own rulers. The main town is ruled by a native Sultan but the real power resides with Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan’s uncles, ‘the governor of the river, who did all the extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of extinction the country-born Malay’. (Chapter 22).

On his initial arrival Jim is promptly arrested and imprisoned in this man’s compound. In a bizarre touch the Rajah gives him an ancient broken clock to fix. It is only on the third day that he plucks up the guts to jump over the wooden stakes which ring the compound, run down to the estuarine river which is at low tide, and make a great leap across it, landing in the mud on the other side before, after some exertion, making it up onto dry land, hurrying threw the settlement on the other side and throwing himself on the mercy of the Sultan’s rival, Doramin.

Two things: Conrad makes much of this leap, making it into a Leap To Freedom and directly comparing it with the ill-fated lap Jim made from the bridge of the Patna, his leap into shame and guilt.

Second, who is Doramin? Well, Doramin is the leader of the community of Bugis, settlers from abroad who have lived and thrived her for generations. He is an old man now and very fat (he can’t stand up unaided) but led his people in the long civil war which wracked the island. It was during this that he became close friends with Stein, and gave him a silver ring as token of their friendship. When he briefed Jim, Stein had given him this ring as proof of his (Stein’s) trust and told him to contact Doramin. This is why Jim knew he had to escape from the Rajah’s captivity, and why he leapt across the river into the Bugis side and made his way to Doramin, who recognised the ring and did, indeed, treat him well, and protect him from the Rajah.

We are introduced to his tiny wife and his son, Dain Waris, who is the apple of his father’s eye.

But there’s a third element in this uneasy ethnic rivalry. Up on top of a nearby mountain is the base of Sherif Ali, an Arab, leader of a band of ‘wild men.’

The battle of Sherif Ali’s compound

To cut a long story short, once Jim had got cleaned up, fed and water, found his feet and won Doramin’s trust he persuades him to let him lead his men in an assault on the hilltop base of Sherif Ali. As you can imagine this is described at length with many flashbacks and accounts from other people which Marlow splices together but, in brief, Jim supervises the hauling up the neighbouring hill of some of Doramin’s antique cannons, then orchestrates a dawn attack, with cannons firing from one hill onto Sherif’s compound at the same time as Doramin’s best warriors attack, led by Jim.

Lord Jim

Suffice to say that Sherif and his men flee and Jim establishes himself as the Power in the Land. He fortifies Stein’s compound and establishes himself as the White Man who will bring peace and justice to the town. In this capacity he judges cases and complains between Doramin and the Sultan’s people and gains the trust of the people and the two suspicious rulers. He is awarded the title tuan or Lord Jim. He acquires Tamb ‘Itam, a Malay servant who becomes a loyal bodyguard.

Cornelius

However, there is a big fly in the ointment. Jim has been sent to replace Stein’s current factor, the Portuguese Cornelius. Stein knows he is lazy and corrupt, routinely stealing the supplies Stein sends him to sell.

Initially Cornelius helps Jim but, when he realises the Englishman has been sent to replace him, becomes resentful and then starts to scheme and plot against Jim. He certainly refuses to pack up and leave. He can’t. He is too embedded in the place’s politics. He had worked hard to build up a position of trust and refuses to be thrown out and start again somewhere else. Also he has a daughter.

Jewel

Cornelius has a step-daughter. A native woman was made pregnant and had a child by a white man, a trader, who then abandoned her, so the baby girl is mixed race. Cornelius, when he arrived, fell for the attractive and loving mother and marries her, this becoming the girl’s step-father. When the mother died, he was left to bring up the girl, resenting her just as he came to dislike her step-father and be full of enduring resentment at her biological father, who impregnated her mother and then abandoned them both.

Rather improbably, given the immense world of harshly utilitarian facts about sailing, shipwrecks, enquiries and suicides which have characterised the narrative up to now, Conrad says:

Remember this is a love story I am telling you now. (Chapter 33)

Long story short, they fall in love and she becomes his woman (I’m not sure whether they get married or not). But she lives in fear that he, too, will leave, when his contract is up, when he gets some command from the mysterious world over the seas (none of the natives have ever left the island). She lives in terror of betrayal.

Jim names her Jewel.

Assassination attempts

Straying into James Bond territory, Jim learns that the Rajah is planning to assassinate him. Although he doesn’t realise it at the time, Jewel stays up night after night watching over him as he sleeps and to protect him from any assassination attempts. This passage ends with Jim confronting a pack of assassins sent to kill him, confronting them in one of the rotten outhouses, shooting one dead and uncovering the three others who were hiding. Instead of killing them as Doramin would, Jim marches them to the river and makes them jump across the muddy banks, sending them back to the Rajah.

As you might expect, once word gets round this escapade enormously increases Jim’s ‘face’, leading to folk stories that he is invulnerable to weapons, a god. All of which Jim exploits to make himself master of the place and establish peace and justice.

Marlow’s visit

As mentioned, it’s two years later that Marlow visits, for four weeks, being introduced to all the characters – the Rajah, Doramin and Dain Waris, Jewel, Cornelius, Tamb ‘Itam and so on – and, in the Conradian manner, with lots of flashbacks and interspersing of accounts from moments in that two year period which shed light on the characters or Jim’s rise; plus, of course, reflections on Stein’s adventures in the place, long before Jim arrived. As in part one, you need to keep your wits about you to keep track of all the different timelines, episodes and ramifications which throng the text.

1. Marlow has a set-piece interview with Jewel, who’s terrified Jim’s going to leave like her father, the white man who abandoned her mother.

2. And a similar interview with slimy Cornelius who says he wants compensation from bringing up Jewel, as a kind of dowry. Both echo or are based on the same technique as the epic interview with Jim back at the Malabar Hotel.

Marlow stays four Sundays, then the day of his departure is described at some length. How he gets a boat down the river with Jim to the sea to rendezvous with the ship that’s been sent to collect him. He observes how Jim has to deal with two inhabitants of the beach village who keep being pillaged by the Rajah’s people and realises how Jim’s power and implementation of justice stretches right across the island.

On the beach Jim and Marlow says goodbye and, he tells his audience (we are still on the veranda after dinner, remember, with half a dozen white professionals listening to this immensely long yarn), it is the last time he sees Jim.

Momentarily, Jim is tempted to leave with Marlow, to leap into another boat and betray a community of natives (as he did on the Patna) but this time makes the conscious decision to stay where is he trusted, where he has regained his confidence, where he can make a contribution. He knows that ‘out there’ in the white man’s world, his name is a byword for scandal and shame. Only here, in this island paradise, is he a man, is he trusted, does he have integrity. Conrad describes his last sight of him with characteristic verbosity but also great power and symbolism, starting by describing the two natives who are still talking to Jim, as Marlow’s boat is rowed out to the schooner waiting to take him back into the world.

Their dark-skinned bodies vanished on the dark background long before I had lost sight of their protector. He was white from head to foot, and remained persistently visible with the stronghold of the night at his back, the sea at his feet, the opportunity by his side – still veiled. What do you say? Was it still veiled? I don’t know. For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child – then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world… And, suddenly, I lost him… (Chapter 35)

And with that, Marlow’s epic narrative, the yarn he’s telling to the men on the veranda, comes to an end.

Part 3. The tragic climax

Marlow’s epic yarn comes to an end and Conrad describes it thus:

With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off the veranda in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret; but there was only one man of all these listeners who was ever to hear the last word of the story. It came to him at home, more than two years later, and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in Marlow’s upright and angular handwriting. (Chapter 36)

So the provenance, the nature of the text completely changes. The long speech of Marlow ends and we switch to the point of view of one of the auditors. It is over two years later when this man revives a bundle of documents from Marlow. He’s been singled out because, as Marlow writes in his covering letter:

‘You alone have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story, though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate. You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love sprung from pity and youth…’

He is never named and the narration refers to him as ‘the privileged man’ and then by the pregnant phrase, the privileged reader.

The documents Marlow has sent the privileged reader tell the story of Jim’s final tragedy and death. It’s actually quite a complicated story, full of the usual details and descriptions. As briefly as I can, Jim is well established as the master of Patusa with Jewel his wife and the devoted bodyguard Tamb’ Itam.

Into this picture comes a notorious pirate, an Englishman, a brute ironically nicknamed ‘Gentleman Brown’. After a downward turn of his fortunes this man persuaded the crew of his ship that there easy pickings on Patusan and they set sail East to visit it. On the way they ran low on food and were desperate by the time they anchored at the mouth of the river and Brown took most of the ship’s crew in a large rowing boat up the river.

They had expected a tiny settlement they could plunder and so were dismayed to find a reception committee. Word had been passed up the river and so as they arrived near the town they were greeted with shots from the native troops lined up to greet them. Brown’s men fired back, quickly beached the boat on the mud flats and ran up to a slight mound where they build a makeshift fort from dead boughs and trunks and branches and dug in.

It was at this point that Jim tries to negotiate. The locals, led by Doramin, are all for storming the little palissade or certainly for wiping out the band of pirates as soon as they try to make it back to their dinghy. But Jim quells all this and approaches the dug-in bad guys under a flag of truce.

Here something bad and strange happens, for as he gets talking to Brown, Brown unknowingly invokes ideas of integrity and honesty and moral firmness all of which, without him knowing it, push Jim’s buttons. Conrad manipulates the dialogue so that Jim, eerily and uneasily comes to realise there is some kind of moral equivalence between himself and this hoodlum.

The upshot is that Jim agrees the pirates can leave under a flag of truce and won’t be attacked. The fly in the ointment is Cornelius who has, by now, become a ‘motiveless malevolence’, to quote Shakespeare’s description of Iago. Over the 2 days or so that the pirates are holed up, Cornelius approaches and introduces himself to Brown and explains the political situation in the town. Cornelius’s motive is to create mischief and mayhem, and knowledge of the situation makes Brown all the cockier when he comes to negotiate with Jim.

Above all Cornelius tells Brown that a cohort of native warriors has been sent back down the river, to camp on a flat sandbank at a curve in it, to ambush them on the way back. the force is led by Doramin’s much-beloved only son Dain Waris. Now Jim, having concluded his deal with Brown that he and his men can leave peacefully, doesn’t tell him about this camp because he doesn’t need to. But when Cornelius tells him about it, Brown – estimating Jim by his own morals – guesses it’s a trap.

So the big moment comes and Brown and his men are allowed back down into their dinghy and set off rowing downriver and Jim, Doramin, the Rajah, think the job is done. But a few hours later, as they draw abreast of Dain’s camp, Cornelius treacherously shows them an obscure offshoot of the river which Brown detours into. It doesn’t help that a tropical fog has descended and shrouded the river and its environs.

It is in these circumstances that Brown silently leads his men to a position behind Dain’s camp, line up, aim their rifles, wait till they see figures moving around and then… let fly a series of lethal volleys. Dain’s men, taken completely by surprise, fall left and right and, as Dain comes running out of his tent, he is shot clean through the forehead and dies on the spot.

Their grisly massacre performed, Brown and his men retreat to their dinghy, push off and row back down the river to rejoin their ship anchored off the coast.

Meanwhile, messengers from the massacre quickly arrive at the main town and Jim is roused by the sound of weeping and wailing and lamentation. Once he learns what has happened he is not only appalled but realises what the death of Doramin’s son means – it is the end of his rule and authority. Worse, by counselling mercy and letting Brown and his men go, Jim is directly responsible for Dain Waris’s death. And, worst of all, he knows in his conscience that it was Brown’s appeal to something broken and corrupt in his (Jim’s) own life story, it was by establishing a horrible connection of moral failure between them, that Brown was able to play on Jim’s weakness.

That moment of moral failure all those years before on the Patna has come back to haunt him again. Realising he will never be free of it no matter where he goes, Jim ignores the desperate pleas of his wife Jewel not to abandon her (like her father did, like white man always do) and the urgent recommendations of his loyal bodyguard Tamb’ Itam to flee – and instead crosses the river and walks up to the grand compound of Doramin, who, in his vast obese way, is a crushed man. And Jim stands there with no excuses while Doramin raises his treasured 18th century pistols and shoots Jim in the chest, killing him instantly.

THE END. Except that:

The last word is not said – probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word – the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. (p.172)

Themes

Conrad’s texts overflow with mannerisms of style and approach, with clever techniques and vivid language, not to mention countless traces of the worldview of his day, the late-Victorian era, strewn throughout the story, characters and style. In other words, Conrad’s texts are almost too rich in themes and ideas. In what follows I’ve tried to marshal some obvious ones into a useful order.

Imagination

Imagination is a destructive force in Conrad. Like a male Madame Bovary, Jim had lived his youth awash with dreams and ideals picked up from popular books, in his case of manly heroism, imagining himself superior to the drunk middle-aged cynics he found himself among (‘those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure’), imagining that, when the moment came, his true mettle as doughty hero would be revealed to an admiring world.

At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea that he smiled… (Chapter 3)

Yet it was this very imaginative faculty which undermined him when the moment of crisis came: all-too-vividly he could imagine the main bulkhead bursting, the floods of water, the pilgrims in the hold screaming and drowning in a terrible mass of bodies and then the ship foundering and sinking amid the screams of men, women and their children.

On one level the novel is about Jim’s struggle to face the reality of who he really is, and the terrible gap between a man’s find fantasies about himself and the always disappointing and sometimes sordid reality.

Jim’s significance

Marlow knows how trivial the story is, how crazy it is to lavish 300 pages on such an incident:

The occasion was obscure, insignificant – what you will: a lost youngster, one in a million – but then he was one of us; an incident as completely devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap, and yet the mystery of his attitude got hold of me as though he had been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind’s conception of itself…’ (Chapter 8)

Conrad’s two voices

1. The third-person narrator

The first four chapters are told by an omniscient third-person narrator and are highly enjoyable, in fact I found myself mesmerised by Conrad’s long, lulling descriptions of ships and the sea, his addiction to repeating clauses with variations, often in sets of three, as rhythmic as waves on a beach.

They [the pilgrims] streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur, or a look back; and when clear of confining rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship – like water filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the rim. (Chapter 2)

Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. (Chapter 2)

It was they that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath. (p.189)

To us, their less tried successors, they [the early explorers of the Malay archipelago] appear magnified, not as agents of trade but as instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful. They recorded it complacently in their sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of strange nations, in the glory of splendid rulers. (Chapter 22)

But, abruptly, at the start of chapter 5, we join Marlow’s first-person narrative and it’s Marlow who proceeds to narrate most of the rest of the book (excluding the last two chapters, which are guided by an omniscient narrator but in which the privileged reader is reading letters written by Marlow, so his voice still dominates.)

2. Marlow as narrator

At the very end of Chapter 4 Marlow is introduced by the omniscient narrator in the classic Conrad setting. It is after dinner and half a dozen well-fed Englishmen are sitting in darkness on a veranda in the East somewhere, puffing cigars and deciding to listen to one of Marlow’s famous long yarns (Marlow is the only seaman among them, Chapter 12). But Marlow doesn’t just tell stories, there is a mystical, other-worldly aspect to his tellings which turns them into performances, in which he ventriloquises the past.

With the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and was speaking through his lips from the past. (Chapter 4)

Marlow’s Englishisms

The switch in narrator brings out lots of aspects of Marlow’s voice which I hadn’t quite realised before, chief among them that he is disconcertingly pukka, posh, English, given to defending British values of hard work and steadfastness, given to almost caricature English ejaculations.

‘I couldn’t help exclaiming, “What an extraordinary affair!”

He is concerned with the stereotypical British virtues of good form and what’s done and what’s not done, with late-Victorian values. He may question them, but he always returns to them. This gives the whole thing a peculiar almost vertiginous flavour because he actual content of his stories is so corrosively nihilistic. His stories drip with futility and despair and horror so it’s often plain weird when, after long paragraphs describing men going to pieces in the tropics, Marlow is made to say things like ‘It was all so dashed unfair’. It’s a startling gear change, a clash of worldviews, almost as if the jolly English chap phrases were bolted onto the unnerving and nihilistic narrative right at the last minute.

Jim’s Englishisms

This schizophrenia in the text is even more true of Jim. On the one hand he is the focal point of this immense 300-page narrative and Marlow and Conrad pile on his shoulders a vast freight of significance and meaning whereby his fate summarises all human nature, the plight of the human race, the cruelty of Fate and so on. There are countless passages which make Jim symbolic of the entire universe:

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. Of course, as with belief, thought, love, hate, conviction, or even the visual aspect of material things, there are as many shipwrecks as there are men, and in this one there was something abject which made the isolation more complete – there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke. (Chapter 10)

And yet every time Jim opens his mouth he sounds like a character from P.G. Wodehouse.

‘Dashed if I do…’
‘It was a dashed conundrum…’
‘What a bally ass I’ve been…’
‘By Jove…’
‘Amazing old chap…’
‘How beastly it would be to get a jab with a bally long spear…’
‘Confounded nonsense, don’t you know?’
‘Oh it was beastly!’
‘He was off his chump…’
‘I was deucedly tired…’
‘Glad to get rid of the bally thing…’

This and hundreds of other Bertie Wooster phrases trip from the mouth of this symbol of Nature’s wanton destructiveness in a disorientating clash of cultures and worldviews. Everyone remembers Conrad’s lush prose and complex narrative structures but they tend to forget that his protagonists often sound like Jeeves and Wooster.

Xenophobia

Alongside the bally English locutions goes a very English dismissal of all other nationalities. In his narrative Marlow takes a lofty disdain, not so much to the ‘natives’ but to all other Europeans who aren’t made of ‘the right stuff’. Here’s his opinion of the captain of the Patna:

‘You Englishmen are all rogues,’ went on my patriotic Flensborg or Stettin Australian. I really don’t recollect now what decent little port on the shores of the Baltic was defiled by being the nest of that precious bird.

‘Defiled’, eh? Marlow is casually judgemental of every non-Brit in the story, confident in the knowledge that his pukka English auditors will agree.

Comparing the two narrators

But not only is Marlow lavish of criticism, he is also incredibly prolix and profuse. A paragraph of Conrad’s narration intoxicates with its colourful imagery and beguiling rhythms. Marlow, in sharp contrast, is often prosey and long-winded.

‘Talk? So be it. And it’s easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after a good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight that would make the best of us forget we are only on sufferance here and got to pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious minute and every irremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go out decently in the end – but not so sure of it after all – and with dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbows with right and left. Of course there are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten before the end is told – before the end is told – even if there happens to be any end to it.’ (Chapter 5)

Reading this particular passage out loud, for the first time it occurred to me that Marlow might be an old buffer, a tubby, red-faced whiskery old cove that the others invite along because they enjoy his long – his very long – and very rambling yarns after a good dinner. As he himself puts it at the start of his narrative.

‘Charley, my dear chap, your dinner was extremely good, and in consequence these men here look upon a quiet rubber as a tumultuous occupation. They wallow in your good chairs and think to themselves, “Hang exertion. Let that Marlow talk.”’ (Chapter 5)

Multiple perspectives

As already mentioned, the book is made up of the subtle and complex interweaving of multiple perspectives. Marlow circles round the central figure of Jim almost like a detective piecing together testimony from a wide range of witnesses who all saw part of the story, but never the whole.

But unlike a detective Marlow knows, from the start, that there is no such thing as the ‘truth’ of what happened. He isn’t really interested in events, he is hypnotised by the prospect of trying to reach into that unplumbable mystery, the soul of another person.

These glimpses or perspectives come in two levels or types.

1. Direct encounters with Jim

Marlow’s direct encounters with Jim. Marlow first sees Jim at the inquest, then bumps into him outside the court building, where there’s the unfortunate incident of the ‘cur’. (The man Marlow’s talking to spots a mongrel dog wandering amid the crowd and complains to Marlow about such ‘curs’ being aloud to roam free and Jim, passing by at that moment, thinks the man is referring to him.)

This gets them talking and Marlow takes Jim for dinner at the Malabar House hotel where he’s staying. These conversations are recounted with a great weight of puzzled and verbose interpretation by Marlow, who repeatedly uses the image of a fog or cloud to explain how impenetrable he found Jim.

I don’t pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog – bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country. They fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation. (Chapter 6)

The muscles round his lips contracted into an unconscious grimace that tore through the mask of his usual expression – something violent, short-lived and illuminating like a twist of lightning that admits the eye for an instant into the secret convolutions of a cloud… (Chapter 10)

It was one of those bizarre and exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure. (Chapter 10)

I had another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being… And even as I looked at him the mists rolled into the rent… (Chapter 11)

The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture. (Chapter 12)

My mind floated in a sea of conjectures… (Chapter 7)

2. Other voices

At a second level, there is the long list of witnesses who share with Marlow their various and fragmentary parts of Jim’s story. Their primary use is to fill in facts about various events which Marlow doesn’t directly witness (most of the story, in fact) – but Marlow is every bit as interested in their motives, in their psychology and characters, as in the light they shed on the central case history.

Marlow is a tremendous gossip. He gives the impression of knowing everyone – from the Consul to the dodgiest wharf rats, from rancid barkeepers to disreputable captains – and having a story or to tell about all of them.

He pokes and pries into everyone’s lives. Why, for example, does Marlow end up at the bedside of the mate of the Patna to witness at first-hand the man hallucinating that swarms of reptiles are attacking him? Why do we find him listening to the confession of Jones, mate of the Ossa whose captain, Brierly, in a completely unrelated event, committed suicide? Because he pops up everywhere, poking around, being in the right place, listening to so-and-so tell their tale. Because people seem to tell him everything.

The result is that Marlow’s voice in fact contains scores of other voices, he is a cacophony of characters, a plurality of personages. Through Marlow’s urbane tones we hear the gossip and chatter of all kinds of other people. I’ve listed the main ones above. Here are some more:

Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so discomposing that for some time he listened, quite unable to make out what that apparition wanted…

Jones: ‘This was the last time I heard his voice, Captain Marlow…’

One of the hands told me, hiding a smile at the recollection, ‘It was for all the world, sir, like a naughty youngster fighting with his mother.’

And not only does he bump into them, hear gossip about them, but he is able – absurdly – to repeat their immensely long conversations word for word. The mate of the Ossa sees fit not only to talk to him about the suicide of stout old, reliable old Captain Montague Brierly but does so via an improbably detailed, word-for-word reconstruction of their last conversation before the captain jumped overboard.

The whole book is like this. One enormous suspension of disbelief about how much of a long ago conversation a man could possibly remember, let alone quote perfectly.

Dubious English

For the most part Conrad’s bending of English idiom stays within limits, his deployment of unusually lush vocabulary in luxuriously repetitive phrases, stays within semantically the acceptable bounds of English usage. But from time to time he oversteps the mark and the reader is brought up short, remembering all over again that Conrad was not a native English speaker.

He accepted the disappointing course of events with a sulky obstinacy which seemed to draw more together his little yellow old face; and as he went down he glanced askant here and there, never giving up his fixed idea. (Chapter 42)

Meaning rather than story

Marlow’s focus on seeking some impenetrable inner ‘meaning’ to Jim’s life explains why he tells the story, the actual sequence of events, in such a round-the-houses way. For example, it’s only casually, a good way into his first meal with Jim, that the reader discovers, almost by accident, the single most important fact about the Patna incident – which is that it didn’t sink. The crew, including Jim, abandoned her – but she didn’t sink. The reader is left to work through the implications of this, while also still trying to follow the dinner conversation. This casual revelation of the most important fact in the book, as an almost casual aside, struck me as a mimesis of how we often actually come across information in the world – partially, obliquely, not understanding its significance at the time.

And instead of a straight line, the narrative is more like a shape made in the froth on the top of a takeaway cappucino which the drinker undermines when they empty a sachet of sugar into it and give it a stir. The narrative is like a froth of countless bubbles which has been stirred.

To give an early example: Marlow tells us that Old Brierly was the leading figure on the three-man tribunal which looked into the fate of the Patna.

Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness. The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense; it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush – from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe. (Chapter 5)

These thought bubbles, the author’s editorialising, float u away from any sense of narrative movement, floating sideways like a balloon into a world of fanciful speculation about the meaning of life. The whole book is like this, bubbles sticking to and circling other bubbles in a vast foam.

Conrad’s worldview

The permanent risk of solitary collapse…

So what worldview emerges from the book? A relatively straightforward one: the world, or ‘life’, is treacherous and cruel. You never know when it is going to get you, pounce with a cruel smile on its face, and bring you to your knees. Death isn’t the enemy – the enemy is psychological collapse: it is humiliation and despair that will get you (and count the triplet clauses):

It is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary – the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life. (Chapter 2)

Lord Jim is twinned with Heart of Darkness not only because they both have Marlow as their narrator, but because they are both extended studies of the psychology of failure of one central figure. Mr Kurtz is the brightest and best Europe has to offer but unrestricted power turns him into a monster. Jim is a variation on the theme, tall (5’11”), blonde, blue-eyed, in his heart valiant and pure:

This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on… (Chapter 5)

Surely a model white man in every respect. Jim is, as Marlow keeps telling his audience, ‘one of us’.

His frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was one of us. (Chapter 7)
I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us… (Chapter 5)
Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic. I only knew he was one of us. (Chapter 21)

And yet it turns out that there is something… something… something nagging at Jim, wearing him away from inside, the idea Conrad returns to again and again, ‘the subtle unsoundness of the man’ (p.72) which undermines him no matter what he tries to do, intends to do, wants to do. The narrator doesn’t let this go uncommented:

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. (Ch 7)

… versus communal solidarity

Set against the tripwires and pitfalls of the individual life – as a bulwark against the unknown terrors and psychological collapse which haunt all Conrad’s characters, and eat away at Jim – our best protection is to cleave to the fellowship of a cause, in particular the community of European sailors or ‘the craft’ as Marlow keeps calling it.

In all Conrad’s tales of the sea, this community is made up of sailors, of the merchant marine. We know many of them are crooks and scoundrels but… at least there is a standard of behaviour people pay lip service to, aspire to, cling to. This is better than nothing. It is a guide rail in the darkness.

‘Haven’t I turned out youngsters enough in my time, for the service of the Red Rag, to the craft of the sea, to the craft whose whole secret could be expressed in one short sentence.’ (Chapter 5)
‘I wanted to see him squirm for the honour of the craft.’ (Chapter 5)
‘Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft?’ (Chapter 11)
‘We’ve got all kinds amongst us – some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose.’ (Captain Brierly)
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind (p.121)

Marlow repeatedly declares himself and his auditors all members of this community and craft:

‘of an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct.’ (Chapter 5)

‘Hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand?—trusted! Frankly, I don’t care a snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of Asia, but a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo of old rags in bales. We aren’t an organised body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency.’ (Captain Brierly, Chapter 6)

And then there is the work itself. It may not prompt joy but the work itself enforces a kind of purity which Conrad conveys very eloquently in numerous passages:

He made many voyages. He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread – but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. (Chapter 2)

Hard work, the moral standards enforced by the craft, commitment to its values, these are what we must cling to in order to remain:

a member of an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct… (Chapter 5)

Suicide and the perils of the imagination

When he was twenty Conrad tried to commit suicide by shooting himself through the chest with a revolver. He has Marlow make the assumption that all men of sense have felt a similar impulse, at some point or another, to just give in.

Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person – this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? (Chapter 7)

In one sense this huge, long, convoluted text repeats again and again the same nihilistic sense of futility and wish for death, suicide.

He had pricked the bubble. The blight of futility that lies in wait for men’s speeches had fallen upon our conversation, and made it a thing of empty sounds. (Chapter 13)

Mention of suicide recurs a surprising number of times, the suicide of Captain Brierly embodies it and is, somehow, an anticipation of Jim’s suicidal surrendering of himself to Doriman which he knows can end only one way, in his own death.

It may be that before and afterward his suicide attempt, Conrad found himself to be over-thoughtful, racked with anxieties and imagined terrors which the sturdy men of the sea he moved among seemed to utterly lack. Hence his admiration for the solid-as-a-rock, utterly imagination-free man, but his nagging worry that even the most solid-seeming of them may be undermined, may be rotten at the foundations.

‘Imagination’ is mentioned 17 times in the novel, and always in a bad light, as the enemy of man, as thronging his mind with perils and fears, as undermining his ability to ‘do the right thing’. Jim is a prey to fantasies and over-romantic ideas about The Sea, and about his own Bravery. In the event, at the critical moment he is overcome by unexpected fears, overwhelmed by the negative power of:

Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors… (Chapter 2)

It is because Jim’s vivid imagination foresees the bulwark giving way, the ship flooding, the screams of the drowning pilgrims, that he is carried away on a tide of panic of his own making – and jumps ship. The same ‘imagination’ which stoked his unrealistic dreams of heroic achievement fuels his panic in the fateful moments on the Patna. Either way, it is a disastrous faculty to give in to.

Jim as a universal case history

Marlow is attracted by Jim’s ‘case’ (attracted enough to speak for nearly 300 densely-printed pages about it) because he feels that Jim’s failure somehow reflects on all of us, on all men trying to keep on the right track.

Marlow refers to Jim as ‘one of us’ no fewer than eight times in the text, and once in the introduction. It is clearly an obsessive idea. Behind it lies the unexpressed notion that by penetrating into the heart of Jim’s mystery, Marlow can reveal something profound and deep about all human nature, and particularly about ‘us’, about the white professional men engaged in the craft of the sea.

Which is why Marlow’s feelings are profoundly ambivalent: Jim is so very like ‘one of us’ and yet his moment of cowardice shows the inhuman temptations and failures lurking within all of us.

‘Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me – me! – of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour. (Chapter 11)

This is the nagging worry that keeps Marlow returning again and again to this powerful symbol of the weakness potentially lurking in all of us, as if by repeating Jim’s story he can somehow inoculate himself against his unsoundness, against his failure… despite knowing that he never can.

Worldly wisdom

For all its pomp, Conrad’s worldview is pretty simple. What is impressive is how many ways Conrad finds to say the same thing. This is partly because almost every encounter – with the impressive cast of characters, with Jim himself, and most of all as Marlow reflects, repeatedly and at length, on the ‘meaning’ of Jim’s story – triggers lengthy ‘philosophical’ reflections or throwaway remarks which all amount to repetitions of the same three or four basic elements.

We never know what a man is made of. (Chapter 6)

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. (Chapter 16)

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. (Chapter 7)

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy! (Chapter 5)

Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion. (Chapter 10)

The wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency – the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends (p.134)

When young, I often read novels in order to track down and isolate passages like these as Guides to the Big Questions of Life. Now I appreciate that they are artistic effects, no more intrinsically meaningful than Conrad’s descriptions of the jungle or the river or the sea are meaningful. They are colours in a painting.

To try and be more precise: they only make sense or mean something in the context of the fiction. Saying ‘Life’s a bitch’ or ‘You never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head’ are thumping clichés. It is only in the framework of Conrad’s repetitive and incantatory prose that these expressions gain meaning and force. Red, on its own, is just red. But dabs of red in a painting by Monet or Klimt become deeply significant parts of an overall composition.

Obviously words convey meaning and so readers are free to take Conrad’s many, many ‘philosophical’ passages out of context and adopt them as t-shirt slogans or memes, but having read the same kind of negative and nihilistic thoughts, in scores of authors, thousands and thousands of times, nowadays they have hardly any emotional impact or resonance for me: I simply register them as part of the design.

Hyperbole

To read Conrad is to be plunged into a boiling cauldron of extraordinary rhythmical nihilism.

In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal – a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour… (Chapter 9)

Almost every paragraph describes some variation on the persistent theme that life is terrifying, that every situation triggers the most extreme emotions and reactions which are:

The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb… (Chapter 41)

It was all threats, all a terribly effective feint, a sham from beginning to end, planned by the tremendous disdain of the Dark Powers whose real terrors, always on the verge of triumph, are perpetually foiled by the steadfastness of men. (Chapter 10)

In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal – a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. (Chapter 9)

He must have had an unconscious conviction that the reality could not be half as bad, not half as anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the created terror of his imagination. (Chapter 10)

No point reading Conrad if you’re not prepared to submit to vast quantities of hyperbole and emotional extremity.

There is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness. When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. (Chapter 10)

I believe that, in this first moment, his heart was wrung with all the suffering, that his soul knew the accumulated savour of all the fear, all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human beings pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death… (Chapter 10)

On every page, almost in every paragraph, the same extremity, hyperbole, shrill and wailing.

I knew too much already to hope for the grace of a single uplifting touch, for the favour of hinted madness, of shadowed horror.

Therapy

You can’t help thinking that Conrad’s (early) prose works amount to an immense act of public therapy in which he obsessively described the wailing banshees of despair which thronged his mind, the futility and madness which underlies all human endeavour, and desperately tried to quell them with brave but unconvincing talk of ‘the craft’ and ‘one of us’ and so on. But anyone who’s read any Conrad knows that the banshees burst through, again and again, and talk of ‘the craft’ is weak…

If writing the texts was a form of therapy for Conrad, then his characters also find solace in talking. Marlow’s immense after-dinner interview with Marlow at the Malabar hotel is really a huge therapy session and its purpose is not just to elicit the ‘facts’ from Jim (the ‘facts’ are, after all, trivially simple), but to get Jim to utter his complex feelings in a way which (as he himself admits) he finds psychologically very helpful.

‘You are an awful good sort to listen like this,’ he said. ‘It does me good. You don’t know what it is to me. You don’t… words seemed to fail him… ‘You don’t know what it is for a fellow in my position to be believed – make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It is so difficult – so awfully unfair – so hard to understand.’ (Chapter 11)

But it’s not just the beneficial impact on the client: this huge text also vividly describes the dynamic interplay between therapist and therapee, and describes the changing moods, feelings, fleeting thoughts and impressions of the interviewer as much as the interviewee.

For Marlow’s narrative dwells just as much on his own fascination for this patient, for this type, this case, this victim, and minutely describes how his own feelings continually fluctuate from sympathy to fascination, from worry to aversion. One aspect of this is the way his questions are not neutral and supportive, but inflected with his own emotions.

‘A hair’s-breadth,’ he muttered. ‘Not the breadth of a hair between this and that. And at the time…’
‘It is difficult to see a hair at midnight,’ I put in, a little viciously I fear. Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me – me! – of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour. (Chapter 11)

The therapist gets angry, resentful, contemptuous, dismissive of his patient and then, at other moments, listening to Jim bewail his sense of abandonment and loss, Marlow is continually infected with the same feelings.

‘What do you believe?’ he asked with violence. A pause ensued, and suddenly I felt myself overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue, as though his voice had startled me out of a dream of wandering through empty spaces whose immensity had harassed my soul and exhausted my body. (Chapter 11)

The more you look, the more you ponder it, the more complicated and significant the interplay between questioner and questioned in that long evening on the terrace of the Malabar Hotel inescapably becomes.

Summary

Late-Victorian readers hoping for an adventure yarn set in the exotic Malayan islands were disappointed. More literary readers realised that Conrad was doing fascinating things with narrative, swirling it round and round to create an enormous vortex of narrative moments, viewed in sophisticated and complex timelines, bubbling with the froth of his luxuriant prose, dotted with an unending stream of solemn apothegms about life and horror and defeat.

Only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things. (Chapter 4)

I would have trusted the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes – and, by Jove! it wouldn’t have been safe. There are depths of horror in that thought. (Chapter)

When I was young I thought Conrad was offering profound insights into the nature of a Godless universe. Now I think he gives a rich and deep impression of offering profound insights into the nature of a Godless universe but is really about creating a huge, rich, dense, luxurious painting. He is a style and a manner, immensely powerful, luxuriating in despair, bewitching and persuasive but it is ultimately… only a style, a wonderful, deep and luxuriant late-Victorian style but it isn’t ‘the truth’. Nothing is the truth.

End! Finis! the potent word that exorcises from the house of life the haunting shadow of fate. (Chapter 16)

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by Simon on November 25, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature

Tagged 1890s, Aden, alcoholism, Alexander M'Neil, Antonio Mariani, Assassins, Bangkok, Blackwoods Magazine, Bob Stanton, British Empire, Bugis, Captain Brierly, Captain Chester, Captain Gustav, Captain Montague Brierly, Charles Marlow, Cornelius, Dain Waris, de Jongh, Doramin, Egstrom & Blake, fiction, French Pacific squadron, Gentleman Brown, Godless universe, guano, Heart of Darkness, Holy-Terror Robinson, Hong Kong, hyperbole, imperialism, Jeeves and Wooster, Jewel, Joseph Conrad, late-Victorian literature, Lord Jim, Madame Bovary, Malabar Hotel, Marlow, Mecca, merchant marine, metaphysics, Mohammed Bonso, Montague Brierly, Mr Jones, Mr Kurtz, narrative, nihilism, novel, one of us, P.G. Wodehouse, Patna, Patusan, public enquiry, Rajah Allang, Ruthvel, Schomberg, Sherif Ali, Sigmund Freud, steamship Patna, Stein, story, suicide, Tamb 'Itam, the Ossa, the privileged reader, the Sephora, Therapy, third-person narrative, tuan Jim, Victorian literature, water clerk, xenophobia, Yucker brothers

Posted by Simon on November 25, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/11/25/lord-jim-joseph-conrad/

Youth by Joseph Conrad (1898)

Youth is a shortish short story (30 pages) which Conrad completed in June 1898, notable because it sees the debut of Charles Marlow, Conrad’s alter-ego, the fictional narrator of this and his two most famous stories, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Marlow’s arrival marks a step change in the quality of Conrad’s writing.

Marlow enforces narrative discipline

Because the story is narrated by a character, not by the omniscient narrator he’d used in all his previous works, Conrad has to make a big effort to rein in the stylistic excesses I have described in previous posts. For example, Conrad’s short story The Return strikes me as being almost unbearable to read for its sustained note of manic hysteria. In The Return Conrad uses free indirect style to take us inside the mind of Alvan Hervey as his wife’s infidelity triggers what feels, trapped inside his head, like a nervous breakdown. In this respect, The Return is just another outing for the hysterical, panic-stricken, horror-obsessed nihilism which characterises all of Conrad’s fiction up to this point.

It is with immense relief that one turns to Youth because this hysteria is reined right in and Conrad’s stylistic excesses, though still noticeable at moments, are in general held in abeyance in order to foreground the practical, no-nonsense voice of bluff Englishman, Charles Marlow.

The plot

The plot is simple. The 20-year-old Marlow is second mate on the Judea, contracted to take coal from Newcastle to Bangkok. The boat encounters a number of problems which repeatedly delay its departure from England, then it hits storms off Africa, and then the coal in the hold begins to spontaneously burn as they enter the Indian Ocean.

Eventually the crew are forced to abandon ship, and Marlow docks in the East having commanded a 14-foot ship’s boat and crew of two for the last week of the ill-fated journey.

Style

The style is blessedly restrained. Both the character of Marlow and the nature of the ‘story’ i.e. a detailed account of the maritime problems encountered by the ship – dictate a much more factual style than anything Conrad had previously written.

We had been pulling this finishing spell for eleven hours. Two pulled, and he whose turn it was to rest sat at the tiller. We had made out the red light in that bay and steered for it, guessing it must mark some small coasting port. We passed two vessels, outlandish and high-sterned, sleeping at anchor, and, approaching the light, now very dim, ran the boat’s nose against the end of a jutting wharf.

Shorter sentences. Fewer subordinate clauses. Much more factual content. A lot less tautology or redundancy. A blessed relief, though the old Conrad is still there, straining at the leash:

O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight — to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret.

There was not a light, not a stir, not a sound. The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.

This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.

But the familiar lyricism, the repetition and apposition, is justified by the fundamental idea – that this is the character Marlow’s paean to the vividness and optimism of his naive and romantic youth. Well, just about justified.

Framing device

Youth starts with the identical setting made famous by Heart of Darkness, i.e. after a fine dinner in London, five mature and successful men of the world who have all experienced the sea sit and smoke cigars, chatting. The anonymous narrator is one of them; he sets this scene, describes the other men a little, and then lets Marlow begin his tale. This frame device, the tale-within-a-tale, does several things:

It distances the tale. No matter what happens we know that Marlow survived and is telling it to us now. Though we are caught up in the events he narrates, we are not actually lost in a moment-by-moment helter-skelter of hysteria with a totally unpredictable outcome, as we are in the key scenes of Almayer or An Outpost of the Islands.
Marlow is telling his tale to a suave and knowing audience. This has an important effect in toning down the hysterical style of the earlier novels and stories. Although Marlow is still given lines of improbable lyricism, Conrad is conscious of them, limits them, and excuses them – Marlow himself justifies them as he speaks them – because this is a tale of high spirits and boyish optimism.
Marlow is English. Unlike the protagonists of Almayer and Outcast and Outpost and Karain. It is as if hysteria is characteristic of the lesser Europeans, the Dutch and Belgians. Conrad emphasises Marlow’s Englishness by making him use the upper-class slang of the day – ‘Pon my soul’, ‘The deuce of a time’. And the Englishness of both the narrator and the audience guarantees a sang-froid, a stiff upper-lip mentality which limits and disciplines Conrad. Enforces restraint. And his prose is all the more effective for it.

For those who like patterns, Conrad published Youth, Heart of Darkness and The End of The Tether in one volume (in 1902), very conscious that the three stories represent a neat schema of youth, maturity and old age.

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by Simon on September 17, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature, Literature, Short stories

Posted by Simon on September 17, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/youth-joseph-conrad/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Charles Marlow

Stories of the East by Leonard Woolf (1921)

1. A Tale Told by Moonlight

The setup

The story

Commentary

2. Pearls and Swine

The setting

The story

The Two Brahmans

Thoughts

Credit

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Falk: A Reminiscence by Joseph Conrad (1901)

Quick summary

Primitive

Cosmic

Totemic figure

The large and variegated cast

The cannibal’s tale

Falk’s build

The world in a story

The usual Conrad hyperbole

Puzzlement

Inarticulacy

The language barrier

Silence

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Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900)

Plot summary: Introduction

Plot summary: part 1

Setting

The Patna

The Malabar Hotel confession

The jump

Romantic imaginings versus bitter reality

Intense scrutiny

Hyperbolic language

Digressions

Other characters

Malabar Hotel second night

Intermezzo: Jim’s jobs

Plot summary: part 2

Stein

Patusan

The politics of Patusan

The battle of Sherif Ali’s compound

Lord Jim

Cornelius

Jewel

Assassination attempts

Marlow’s visit

Part 3. The tragic climax

Themes

Imagination

Jim’s significance

Conrad’s two voices

1. The third-person narrator

2. Marlow as narrator

Marlow’s Englishisms

Jim’s Englishisms

Xenophobia

Comparing the two narrators

Multiple perspectives

1. Direct encounters with Jim

2. Other voices

Dubious English

Meaning rather than story

Conrad’s worldview

The permanent risk of solitary collapse…

… versus communal solidarity

Suicide and the perils of the imagination

Jim as a universal case history

Worldly wisdom

Hyperbole