A sudden passion of anxious impatience rushed through my veins, gave me such a sense of the intensity of existence as I have never felt before or since. I discovered how much of a seaman I was, in heart, in mind, and, as it were, physically – a man exclusively of sea and ships; the sea the only world that counted, and the ships, the test of manliness, of temperament, of courage and fidelity – and of love.
(The narrator’s feelings in the early, optimistic, part of ‘The Shadow Line’, p.40)
When I turned my eyes to the ship, I had a morbid vision of her as a floating grave.
(The narrator’s feeling after weeks of being becalmed on a plague ship, page 92)
Conrad’s first novel was published in 1895 when he was 38 years old. By 1917 when ‘The Shadow Line’ appeared, he had published ten novels, six novellas and twenty-five or so short stories, so had a lot of experience under his belt. ‘The Shadow Line’ is often taken to be the masterpiece of Conrad’s late period, although he was to go on and publish four more long novels before his death in 1926 (aged 66).
Conrad coined the phrase ‘shadow line’ to mean the dividing line between youth and maturity, ‘that twilight region between youth and maturity’. A simple summary of the story is that it’s a first-person narrative by a young merchant officer who assumes his first command of a ship as captain, and the series of unfortunate and then disastrous events which follow.
Date: in the Officers’ Home the narrator and Giles read papers which are full of details of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee, which was in 1887. The settings of a lot of Conrad’s stories are much earlier than you assume.
Synopsis
Part 1. In port
The narrator has been mate aboard a merchant ship operating around the Malay Peninsula for 18 months when he impulsively quits his job, citing an obscure feeling of ‘life emptiness’ (p.49).
He arranges to catch a ship home but has 4 days before it leaves so goes to stay in the Officers’ Home. Here the sullen steward tries to keep a letter from him which turns out to be a request to go and visit the harbour master about a possible command. The steward had wanted to hide it because he wanted the command to go to the long-term resident of the Home, a captain named Hamilton who hasn’t paid his bill for ages. This situation and the subterfuge of the steward and the encouragement of old Captain Giles to confront the steward and ask for the message and then the way the steward feels almost suicidal when his little deceit is discovered and Captain Giles has to go and comfort him – all this may appear extremely tangential to a story about a young merchant seaman being given his first command, and yet it takes up a third of the entire narrative, up to page 45 of this 130-page text.
Some of the descriptions of this behaviour (the steward’s, Captain Giles’s) barely make sense and the immense amount of time spent describing this trivial incident warns the reader that the sometimes incomprehensible element in Conrad’s imagining and writing are very dominant here; and, more importantly, give you a strong sense that he’s padding his story out.
Anyway, the harbour master has been looking for him because a British ship’s captain died in Bangkok, there’s a vacancy for the captainship and his previous captain, Kent, strongly recommended him, despite being a bit upset that he’d chosen to leave.
So old Captain Giles helps him pack up his stuff, get some coolies to carry it down to the docks, where he jumps into the steam launch which takes him out to the ship which the harbour master has arranged will transport him to Bangkok. He is aboard it for four days and the captain never ceases his antagonistic hostile attitude because waiting for the narrator, delayed their departure by three hours.
Part 2. His disastrous command
They arrive in Bangkok, he leaves the transporter ship and steps aboard his command.
Putting my foot on her deck for the first time, I received the feeling of deep physical satisfaction. Nothing could equal the fullness of that moment, the ideal completeness of that emotional experience which had come to me without the preliminary toil and disenchantments of an obscure career.
He quickly meets Burns, the first mate, a nervous wanting man who puts him at permanent unease. Burns tells him the story of the old captain’s infatuation with a white woman in Haiphong which kept them there long past their time, how he came onboard after a week’s absence looking ill, and declined quickly during the subsequent voyage, dying in his cabin chair about noon. Towards the end he was full of hate and spitefully told Burns he wished the whole ship would go down with all hands. Now Burns is sullenly convinced the narrator has taken the vacant post which he coveted.
So bad karma but worse is to come, namely 1) endless delay due to ‘silly commercial complications’ in getting the ship loaded and underway, during which 2) the tropical heat brings a lot of the crew down with illness. The steward goes ashore with cholera and dies within the week. Burns is afflicted and, sullenly, resentfully, has to be taken ashore.
Finally after 6 weeks stewing in the humid heat, the captain insists Burns, still too ill to walk unaided, is returned to the ship and they are towed downriver to the estuary. He is excited, sleeps and wakes to the first day of his command etc, but the ship is still cursed. There is virtually no wind and so, like Coleridge’s ship:
Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor breath nor motion
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean
And they haven’t escaped the contagion. Two more of the crew come down with severe fever. The narrator makes a point of keeping burns, confined to his bed, informed of their lack of movement and is dismayed when the mate attributes it to the evil curse of the late captain.
They just can’t escape from the Bay of Siam. In particular the large mountain of Koh-ring stays within sight day after day, as if they’re bewitched, as if they’re under a spell, and Conrad very deliberately deploys words like magic, spell, bewitched, supernatural evil, evil spell, evil powers, purposeful malevolence, fiendish and so on to create a spooky atmosphere. Meanwhile the disease moves through the entire crew, except for healthy Ransome and the narrator, weakening them and leaving them with ‘a hunted, apprehensive look in their eyes’. Conrad lays on the ghost ship vibe with a trowel.
Eventually you realise that there is precious little plot here, instead the narrative is following the classic Conrad parabola from reasonably sensible, real-world affairs and business, larded with a bit of youthful naivete, which is then slowly and steadily crushed, as the sense of doom and fatedness and futility and slow-mounting horror takes control, until the narrator ends up having visions of the ship as a floating grave and wonders whether he’s going mad.
There were moments when I felt, not only that I would go mad, but that I had gone mad already; so that I dared not open my lips for fear of betraying myself by some insane shriek… (p.100)
It is the usual Conrad hysteria breaking through, the same terrifying hysteria which dominates the end of The Secret Agent.
Next thing that happens is he discovers four of the vials in the medicine chest which should contain quinine are full of some nondescript white crystals. Burns accuses the captain of selling off the quinine ashore for a pretty penny. This only moderate incident is made the peg for the narrator to blame himself immoderately. it feels willed, it feels as if Conrad needed a pretext to place the narrator in the next stage of his transition from youthful optimism to more weathered manhood.
The person I could never forgive was myself. Nothing should ever be taken for granted. The seed of everlasting remorse was sown in my breast. ‘I feel it’s all my fault,’ I exclaimed, ‘mine and nobody else’s. That’s how I feel. I shall never forgive myself.’ ‘That’s very foolish, sir,’ said Mr. Burns fiercely.
And you’re inclined to agree with Burns, the emaciated obsessive. But the narrator goes on becoming more hysterical. He quotes from the journal where he knocks off standard Conrad expressions of horror and futility:
All sense of time is lost in the monotony of expectation, of hope, and of desire… I emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed. Even as I have been decoyed into this awful, this death-haunted command… we were lost in the darkness… (p.97)
What doesn’t help is sick, emaciated Burns’ conviction that the ship really genuinely was cursed by the previous captain and that only when they pass the precise point on the map where burns buried his body at sea, only then will the spell be broken. Privately the narrator is now having Ancient Mariner visions of the entire ship’s crew dying, of it becoming a ghost ship, ‘my appalling vision of a ship floating with a dead crew’. Publicly he tries to keep control of himself and give orders in a calm, rational way.
It feels again and again in these stories that Conrad is giving way to the acute depressions which crippled him in real life. The stories, often with the thinnest of plots, are only as long as they are because draped in cascades of prose which repeats the same idea of horror and futility and anguish and despair again and again:
The memory is now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a sort of infernal stimulant
Hundreds of sentences like these drown the reader in thick dark despair. For fifteen days the sick crew endure this hell of being completely becalmed and very ill. Conrad pops in a sentence or two explaining why this was the shadow line, the transition from youth to maturity.
It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day [when they set sail, 15 days earlier] is infinitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow. (p.106)
There’s little plot, just an ever-deepening intensification of the jet black atmosphere; literally, because, on that night, some kind of cloud covers the sky and stars and the narrator feels they’ve descended into hell.
The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one’s hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance. There was in it an effect of inconceivable terror and of inexpressible mystery… the closing in of a menace from all sides.
Anyway, wading through this hysteria the actual events are that the sky grows pitch black, then there’s an intense downpour of rain which extinguishes the last lights on the ship, plunging them into the blackness of hell etc. In this dark the narrator sees a Shape loom up from the floor, huge and shaggy, and screams with pure unadulterated horror.
Moments later it is revealed to be the emaciated mate, Burns, who’s wrapped himself in a thick coat. He repeats for the hundredth time his conviction that the old captain has doomed the ship and then bursts into hysterical laughter, an ‘insane screeching’. This daunts the drew who think the captain’s gone mad so the narrator has to quickly move to tell them it’s the mate, and ask for help to get him back below decks.
And then a wind comes, the first wind for 18 days, the masts fill and the ship starts moving. The narrator bounds up to the helm, helping Frenchy replace the exhausted Grumbal, while Ransome takes Burns below. He reports that Burns has finally fallen into a deep sleep. The reader guesses all this has happened because they’ve finally passed beyond the spot where the old captain was buried at sea and so broken the curse. And he goes on to state it explicitly:
By the exorcising virtue of Mr. Burns’ awful laugh, the malicious spectre had been laid, the evil spell broken, the curse removed. We were now in the hands of a kind and energetic Providence. It was rushing us on…
And so the ship sails swiftly through the foamy sea and, 40 hours later, arrives back at the same harbour it left 21 days earlier. Conrad describes the immense effort of the weak and feeble hands to reef in the sails and drop anchor. They are flying a signal for medical assistance flying on the mizzen so doctors boats come out to see them. The sick men are taken off. The narrator watches them feeling guilty and responsible. A doctor examines him and recommends a strong sedative for that evening.
Once on shore he bumps into old Captain Giles, which allows Conrad to bring the story round full circle. It also allows him to end it with something like normality, two seamen sharing a meal in the dining room of the Officers’ Home, trying to eclipse the way he has just put us through a steadily intensifying horror show.
When the narrator surprises Captain Giles by saying he’s aiming to recruit a new crew from a recently shipwrecked ship and cast off tomorrow to head for the Indian Ocean, Giles nods approvingly, ‘That’s the way. You’ll do.’
The very final passage of the narrative is the narrator signing Ransome’s termination of contract. Ransome was the only other crewman not afflicted by sickness, was as solid and dependable as a rock, from his clockwork cooking to his encouragement of morale, to his mucking into help with sails and steering. By the end he has become an allegorical figure of devotion to duty. But even he is mortal and is terrified that his faulty heart will give out at any moment. He shakes hands and leaves the ship to the narrator preparing for his next voyage.
And with this highly symbolic apothegm – that none of us know when our common enemy will strike – this harrowing and haunting story ends.
Resemblance to ‘The Secret Sharer’
Obviously the story has lots in common with The Secret Sharer, which also features a captain taking his first command, who becomes possessed by a strange obsession, and keeps going down to the cabin to update a sick man confined there, Leggatt in ‘Sharer’ and the wasted first mate Burns in this story.
Even the location in the Bay of Siam and the ominous and then supernatural power of the mountain island Koh-ring appear in both.
The Great War connection
Conrad wrote the novella after the outbreak of the First World War. His son, Borys, served in (and survived) the war, and ‘The Shadow Line’ is dedicated to him. So plenty of critics have interpreted ‘The Shadow Line’ as Conrad’s response to the Great War. This seems to me most obvious in the descriptions of the haggard band of sick and haunted men, worn down by their ordeal and yet doggedly loyal and dutiful, and the portrait of their pitying and reluctant officer.
Those who were able to walk remained all the time on duty, lying about in the shadows of the main deck, till my voice raised for an order would bring them to their enfeebled feet, a tottering little group, moving patiently about the ship, with hardly a murmur, a whisper amongst them all. And every time I had to raise my voice it was with a pang of remorse and pity.
It’s easy to take the disease which afflicts the ship as a metaphor of war:
The disease disclosed its low type in a startling way. It was not so with many of the men. The wastage of ill-health seemed to idealise the general character of the features, bringing out the unsuspected nobility of some, the strength of others, and in one case revealing an essentially comic aspect.
And this passage seems to be an unambiguous tribute to the suffering of the soldiers:
If I remember all their faces, wasting tragically before my eyes, most of their names have vanished from my memory. The words that passed between us were few and puerile in regard of the situation. I had to force myself to look them in the face. I expected to meet reproachful glances. There were none. The expression of suffering in their eyes was indeed hard enough to bear. But that they couldn’t help. For the rest, I ask myself whether it was the temper of their souls or the sympathy of their imagination that made them so wonderful, so worthy of my undying regard. (p.100)
The thematic structure
His critics follow Conrad’s claims in his boring prefaces that his stories are about ‘morality’ but they aren’t really, are they? They are far more accurately described as harrowing visions of horror and futility. The figure of Ransome is meant to be some kind of rock to which the narrator can cling, a symbol of what is, in the end, Conrad’s extremely simple Victorian belief that (as the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition, Jeremy Hawthorn puts it) ‘work has a moral force and action a therapeutic value’.
A kind of intellectual duality is built into the text, which obviously aims to contrast moral strength with moral dissolution, Ransome’s dutifulness with the narrator’s sense that he has failed, visions of sin and hell with Ransome conceived as an angel and old Captain Giles’s wisdom. These antitheses are all very cleverly worked out and inhabit what you could call the world of liberal sensibility. But the actual experience of reading the text has nothing to do with moral discriminations; it is extraordinarily intense and melodramatic. It is like being hurled into Samuel Beckett land, only even bleaker than Beckett land.
Ransome stepped back two paces and vanished from my sight. At once an uneasiness possessed me, as if some support had been withdrawn. I moved forward, too, outside the circle of light, into the darkness that stood in front of me like a wall. In one stride I penetrated it. Such must have been the darkness before creation. It had closed behind me. I knew I was invisible to the man at the helm. Neither could I see anything. He was alone, I was alone, every man was alone where he stood. And every form was gone too, spar, sail, fittings, rails; everything was blotted out in the dreadful smoothness of that absolute night. (p.113)
The text again and again immerses the reader in such feelings of existential dread, aloneness, crisis and collapse. It makes for an extraordinary experience.
Three elements
As ever, the reader is struck by three really obvious elements of a Conrad story:
- it is very wordy, and the style is that of a non-native English speaker, with odd vocabulary (‘unexpugnable’) and unidiomatic word order which frequently reminds you of French rather than English
- the wordiness sometimes obscures the events, which themselves sometimes feel odd, not in a profound writerly way, but frequently in a cack-handed, surprisingly amateurish way
- although 130 pages long (in the Oxford Classics edition), like so many other Conrad novellas and short stories ‘The Shadow Line’ has a surprisingly large number of characters, named and unnamed
Cast
The unnamed first-person narrator, admits that he has the touchiness of youth. He describes himself as sullen and sarcastic, petulant and grumpy.
On his first ship
Its Arab owner, a Syed, the head of a great House of Straits Arabs, an old, dark little man blind in one eye, in a snowy robe and yellow slippers’.
The Captain, Kent, a man with a thick iron-gray moustache.
The second engineer, John Nieven, ‘a sturdy young Scot, with a smooth face and light eyes’, ‘a fierce misogynist.’
The chief engineer, ‘young, too, but very thin, and with a mist of fluffy brown beard all round his haggard face’, ‘a confirmed dyspeptic’.
Ashore
Unnamed official in the Harbour Office who is sad the narrator is signing off from his ship.
Chief Steward of the Officers’ Home, ‘an unhappy, wizened little man, who if put into a jockey’s rig would have looked the part to perfection’.
The dozing stranger who Giles says is an officer from some Rajah’s yacht.
Hamilton, well-groomed aloof permanent resident of the Officers’ Home who a) regards everyone else as ‘an outsider’ and b) to the despair of the Steward, has never paid his bill.
Captain Giles, seasoned old expert navigator round the Malayan seas.
Mr R, the Head Shipping Master, secretary to…
The Harbourmaster, Captain Ellis, who sends for him and asks if he wants to captain the skipperless ship in Bangkok.
En route to Bangkok
The unnamed captain of the unnamed ship which transports the narrator to Bangkok, ‘a thin, long-armed, long-legged man, with a closely clipped gray beard.’
His command
The steward.
Burns, the first mate, ‘His long, red moustache determined the character of his physiognomy, which struck me as pugnacious in (strange to say) a ghastly sort of way.’
The previous captain, now dead: ‘He was a peculiar man – of sixty-five about – iron gray, hard-faced, obstinate, and uncommunicative. He used to keep the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons. Would come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off her, God only knows why or wherefore, then go below, shut himself up in his cabin, and play on the violin for hours – till daybreak perhaps. In fact, he spent most of his time day or night playing the violin. That was when the fit took him. Very loud, too.’ (p.58)
The former captain’s white woman in Haiphong, seen only in a photograph.
The doctor of the Legation and Consulate.
Ransome the cook, a fit handsome man who, however, cried off being a dull seaman because he has a heart condition’. Ransome becomes the stoutest, bravest, most loyal and dutiful of the crew throughout the nightmare voyage.
The second officer, ‘a callow youth with an unpromising face.’
Frenchy, a short, gingery, active man with a nose and chin of the Punch type’, ‘To see him coming aft to the wheel comforted one. The blue dungaree trousers turned up the calf, one leg a little higher than the other, the clean check shirt, the white canvas cap, evidently made by himself, made up a whole of peculiar smartness, and the persistent jauntiness of his gait, even, poor fellow, when he couldn’t help tottering, told of his invincible spirit.’
Gambril, ‘the only grizzled person in the ship’.
Vivid phrases
Like diamonds in mud Conrad continually comes up with vivid images.
Captain Giles… began to haul at his gorgeous gold chain till at last the watch came up from the deep pocket like solid truth from a well. (p.27)
The doctor’s glasses were directed at me like two lamps searching the genuineness of my resolution. (p.71)
Cosmic visions
As usual I spotted a couple of Conrad’s cosmic comparisons, the astronomic similes which seem to lift you clean off the surface of the earth and into another dimension or genre.
The darkness had risen around the ship like a mysterious emanation from the dumb and lonely waters. I leaned on the rail and turned my ear to the shadows of the night. Not a sound. My command might have been a planet flying vertiginously on its appointed path in a space of infinite silence. (p.74)
As I’ve repeatedly said, his bleakness often becomes so intense as to carry him out of the realm of realistic literature altogether and into the realm of science fiction.
There was still no man at the helm. The immobility of all things was perfect. If the air had turned black, the sea, for all I knew, might have turned solid. It was no good looking in any direction, watching for any sign, speculating upon the nearness of the moment. When the time came the blackness would overwhelm silently the bit of starlight falling upon the ship, and the end of all things would come without a sigh, stir, or murmur of any kind, and all our hearts would cease to beat like run-down clocks. (p.108)
Conrad’s style
In the first half of the story Conrad’s aim is to make the narrator appear naive and innocent; part of this strategy is to make him feel superior and quick to judge all the other characters. He has the arrogance, the cocksureness of youth. When he is offered the captaincy it makes him feel like he is walking on air, floating with happiness, feels as if he’s in a fairy tale etc. In the second half, well, I’ve described and quoted how the story collapses into horror and terror.
Clunkers
As usual, a lot of the text is only borderline English and Conrad fairly often writes sentences that cross the border, into being non-English and sometimes almost incomprehensible.
‘Well, no,’ I conceded, restraining a desire to laugh at that something mysteriously earnest in delivering the conclusions of his wisdom as though it were the product of prohibited operations. (p.41)
The doctor’s round, full face framed in a light-coloured whisker was the perfection of a dignified amenity. (p.66)
These occasional weirdnesses have a charm of their own. Alternatively, sometimes his sentences aren’t incomprehensible, they’re just poorly written and phrased.
Seizing eagerly upon the elation of the first command thrown into my lap, by the agency of Captain Giles, I had yet an uneasy feeling that such luck as this has got perhaps to be paid for in some way. (p.83)
I said to myself disdainfully that it should take much more than that to affect in the smallest degree my fortitude. (p.86)
French word order
In English we tend to put adjectives and adverbs before the noun or verb. In French they do it the other way round. Very often Conrad writes sentences with the adjective or adjectival phrase following the noun in a pronounced and foreign-feeling way.
He turned to me his face grotesque beyond the fantasies of mad dreams… (p.90)
Ransome’s unperturbed voice uttered pleasantly the words…
Poor quality wisdom writing
Conrad has a related habit which is writing something which starts out looking like it’s going to be a quotable bit of wisdom writing, but then turns out to be disappointingly banal or flat. To be harsh, he sounds like a man who, in the first fifteen years of his career, had written everything interesting and shocking and insightful he was ever going to write, and is now just going through the motions.
People have a great opinion of the advantages of experience. But in this connection experience means always something disagreeable as opposed to the charm and innocence of illusions. (p.65)
It starts off with the flow and feel of something which is going to be profound but ends up, in fact, being both obvious and clunkily phrased.
Credit
The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad was first published as a serial in the English Review from September 1916 to March 1917 and published in book form by J.M. Dent in 1917. Page references are to the 1985 Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition.
Books & Boots 