‘Amy Foster’ is one of Joseph Conrad’s early short stories. It was written in 1901, first published in the Illustrated London News in December 1901, then collected in ‘Typhoon and Other Stories’ (1903). It is 12,334 words long.
The plot
The unnamed first-person narrator returned to England from abroad ‘a good many years ago now’. Soon after he was invited to go and stay with his friend Kennedy, who is a country doctor, living in Colebrook, on the shores of Eastbay in Kent. Kennedy began his career as a surgeon in the Navy before becoming the companion of a famous explorer. He invites the narrator down to stay with him and so the narrator finds himself accompanying the doctor on his rounds.
Amy
In the fifth paragraph they are out riding in the doctor’s gig when they see Amy Foster in her garden, hanging out her washing, ‘her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young’ (p.150) and the doctor calls out a friendly greeting to her. Somewhere playing is her little boy, Johnny.
Amy’s biography
He goes on to tell the narrator that Amy is the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk to be a shepherd. The beginning of his misfortunes dated from his runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father – ‘a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life’ (p.151). The story of her father’s failed marriage anticipates Amy’s own tribulations.
Despite the homely English setting, Conrad almost immediately falls into familiar, hyperbolical and pessimistic ways of thinking, as Kennedy remarks of Amy that you’d think she lacked all imagination:
It’s enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind – an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises of imagination. And yet which of us is safe?
This is the moral of ‘Lord Jim’, the nagging fear that none of us live up to our moral values and idealised self images, what Freud would later call the punishing superego. In the same vein, Kennedy continues:
‘There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads – over all our heads…’
Kennedy now launches into the life story of Amy which makes up the text. At the age of 15 she was put out to service, to the New Barns Farm, tenanted by Mr and Mrs Smith. Mrs Smith was ‘a genteel person with a sharp nose [who] made [Amy] put on a black dress every afternoon. She also owned a grey parrot.
Amy falls in love
Amy lived for four years at the Barns, faithfully serving the Smiths, and never going further than the two mile tramp back to her mother’s house. Then she fell in love, not casually of course, but in a Conradian way, with the maximum of hyperbole.
She fell in love silently, obstinately – perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse – a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky. (p.152)
The immigrant
Who did she fall in love with? Well, thereby hangs the majority of the tale. The man in question is the survivor of a shipwreck, washed up on the Kentish shore, who blunders round the countryside terrifying honest citizens. Because he speaks no English but a harsh East European language, then Kentish country-people think he’s a tramp or even a dangerous madman.
The gift of bread
Until he’s cornered by Mr Smith in one of the outhouses on New Barns Farm. Smith keeps him locked in his wood-lodge while he ponders what to do with him. During this interval Amy shyly offers the scared, exhausted and hungry vagrant some pieces of bread.
‘No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel of light. The girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of white bread.’ (p.163)
This gesture of compassion and acceptance goes right through the vagrant, staying with him, and is the basis for their eventual relationship and marriage.
The immigrant is taken in by Old Mrs Swaffer
Smith arranges for the vagrant to be taken in by his nearest neighbour, old Mr. Swaffer. Here he is washed and dressed and put to work. In exchange for board and keep, he is employed in the fields and proves a solid worker even if no one can understand a word he says and his progress in English is very slow. Kennedy remarks on his handsomeness:
He was very good-looking, and most graceful in his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in his aspect.
The immigrant is named Yanko Goorall
And around about this time the community gets to learn his name. It is Yanko, which means ‘little John’, Goorall (p.169).
Yanko saves Swaffer’s grand-daughter
In a crucial event, Yanko looks up from his work in a field and notices that Swaffer’s toddler grand-daughter has fallen into a local horse pond, drops everything, runs over and saves her life (p.167). As you can imagine Swaffer and the entire community upgrade their opinion of him. Swaffer now gives him a regular wage, which the vagrant uses to go to the local pub where he tries to get people interested in the exotic folk songs of his native land. Slowly he learns to speak halting English.
The immigrant’s story
In one of those stories within a story, Kennedy now tells the narrator what he pieced together of Yanko’s story. Yanko was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, brought up in an East European country by his devout peasant parents. He was recruited by an agency which offered young men and women a new life in America. And so he is transported by train (which he finds novel and bewildering) then put up overnight in a tenement house in Berlin, before travelling again by train to the north German coast, at Hamburg.
Then they were loaded aboard a ship, which Kennedy later found out was the Hamburg emigrant-ship Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, and set off through the Baltic. Kennedy picks up the story when he says he saw the ship anchor off the Kent coast. That night is dark and stormy and in the middle of it another steamer sought shelter in the bay and rammed the emigrant ship, splitting it in half so that it quickly went down with all hands, drowning hundreds of emigrant men, women and children. Yanko alone survived and swam to shore, emerging half dressed, covered in mud and weed, and traumatised. (Over the coming days hundreds of the drowned corpses would wash up ashore and be taken on stretchers to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.)
Anyway, it was in this state that he washed up, stumbled about the countryside terrifying everyone till Mr Smith of New Barns managed to lock him in his wood-lodge, where Amy fed him.
Yanko’s marriage proposal
All through the weeks and months as he works for Old Swaffham, Yanko retains the impression of compassion from when Amy gave him his first piece of bread and moonily worships her from afar. Eventually he asks Old Swaffer to intercede with her father (Foster) for her hand.
Foster thinks it’s as good an offer as he’s ever liable to get for his simple daughter and accepts. Old Swaffer makes over a cottage to the couple as reward for saving his grand-daughter.
Marriage and child
And so the couple get married and she bears him a son. But then the tone of the story markedly changes. Quite abruptly Conrad has Dr Kennedy tell the narrator that the village began to hear rumours of discord. Slowly it leaks out that Amy dislikes Yanko talking his language to the baby and reciting the Lord’s Prayer to it, as his father had to him (p.172).
Yanko gets tuberculosis
The reader wonders where this marital discord theme will go when Conrad bottles out with one of the easiest ends to a story like this – he dies. To take it a bit more slowly, Yanko comes down with tuberculosis and lies in a bed in the downstairs room, tended by Amy (p.173). But she is no longer the angel of simple-minded compassion who gave him the bread, but worn down by nerves and anxiety.
The night of terror
Indeed she feels a growing fear which, in classic Conrad style, in the course of just one night, turns into an unreasoning terror. So that when, in his fever, Yanko begs her for water, she’s too genuinely terrified to give him any, but she snatches up the baby, paralysed with fear.
She sat with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal instinct and that unaccountable fear. (p.174)
In his fever Yanko shouts at her in his guttural language then staggers up out of his bed – at which point terrified Amy seizes the baby, runs out the door and doesn’t stop running till she arrives at her parents’ house.
Yanko dies
Next morning Kennedy finds him lying face downwards outside the house with the door open. He had obviously staggered a few paces after his fleeing wife then collapsed. He’s not quite dead so Kennedy and his servant carry him inside where, exhausted by the fever, he does finally expire. Or, as Conrad puts it:
The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him. She had left him – sick – helpless – thirsty. The spear of the hunter had entered his very soul. ‘Why?’ he cried… (p.175)
And died. Dr Kennedy wrote heart failure caused by fever on his death certificate.
Puzzlement
The story ends with the very Conradian tone of puzzlement as Dr Kennedy wonders how much red-faced peasant woman Amy every thinks about the one great love of her life, the man who was her true love but then became her terror.
‘Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields?… It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past?’
And the very last phrase in the entire story luxuriates in the characteristically Conradian sense of futility and despair:
‘I have seen her hanging over the boy’s cot in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I seemed to see again the other one – the father, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.’
Yes Joseph, truly we are all birds snared in the traps of our tragic lives etc.
People smuggling
Critics are always claiming that this or that author or artist was ‘prophetic’ or ‘anticipated’ or ‘predicted’ issues which are still with us but this, in my view, is a profound misunderstanding about society and history. These people didn’t set out to prophecy anything. Instead they are describing issues which were problems in their own day (the only day they knew) and if they appear to us, looking back, to have ‘anticipated’ some of our modern social or political problems, it is, in fact, because we have failed so solve them.
Thus one aspect of the tale is Conrad’s surprising revelation about unscrupulous people smugglers operating in eastern Europe in the 1880s.
‘A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus “Emigration Agencies” among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant people’s homesteads, and they were in league with the local usurers. They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly.’
One hundred and forty years later the issue is still with us, and has become one of the defining political issues of our time. Conrad didn’t predict anything, he was just reporting a theme of his own time. It is not his fault or to his credit, that the same issue remains a hot button issue 140 years later. All that indicates is our complete failure as a society and international community, to solve it.
Other cast members
No matter how simple the basic plot of a Conrad story, and no matter how much it is focused on a central protagonist, they are always surprisingly densely populated with numerous secondary and tertiary characters. I think this is for two reasons: 1) it damps down the hyperbolic hysteria Conrad is so prone to whereby his protagonist ends up taking on the powers of the universe or representing the futility of human existence. Including a number of other people who are going about their normal business, pushing prams or shopping or chatting down the pub helps ground Conrad’s stories and make them more plausible. 2) But having adopted this approach of numerous extra characters, Conrad is often very sly in making them, their behaviour or their stories compare and contrast with the central narrative, so they are not utterly random, but often part of a carefully wrought pattern.
Miss Swaffer, who keeps house frugally for her father, ‘a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey, steady eye… She dressed severely in black, in memory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago, young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day’ (p.166). She is almost completely deaf.
So Miss Swaffham’s story –a tragic love affair leading to her being on her own, is very directly comparable with Amy’s case.
The young ladies from the Rectory who come to visit snooty Miss Swaffer. One of them is reading Goethe with the help of a dictionary and the other ‘had struggled with Dante for years’ (p.164). Their bourgeois education and ambition contrast starkly with Amy’s uneducated simplicity.
In the hours after Yanko is washed up he manages to terrify a range of locals including:
- Hammond, owner of the pig-pound where Yanko takes shelter after staggering up out of the sea.
- The Brenzett carrier who takes him for a tramp sleeping under a hedge.
- The schoolmistress who goes out to remonstrate with the vagabond when he scares her children.
- The driver of Mr Bradley’s milk-cart who lashes out at Yanko with his whip.
- Three boys who later admitted to throwing stones at him.
- Mrs Finn, the wife of Smith’s waggoner, out walking with her baby in a perambulator; outraged by the approach of this muddy phantom she hits him with her umbrella and runs away.
- Old Lewis hammering away at rocks, who Mrs Finn gets to join her watching the vagabond flee across the fields.
Then there’s the two brothers, who went down to look after their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett, a hencoop from the wrecked ship lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks inside, which they took home to their family and ate.
You can see how all these sometimes comic types help to ground the story, while creating the sense of a wider community that his central protagonists operate in.
Swaffer’s younger daughter, married to Willcox, a solicitor and the Town Clerk of Colebrook. It is her 3-year-old daughter, Bertha, who fell into the horsepond and Yanko saved (p.167).
In the tap-room of the Coach and Horses:
- Preble, the lame wheelwright
- Vincent, the fat blacksmith
- the strange carter who can’t be doing with Yanko performing some weird dance and takes his half-pint outside
- the landlord who tells Yanko he doesn’t want no ‘acrobatic tricks in the tap-room’ (p.169)
Mystery
Conrad’s fiction is based on the premise that everyone is a mystery to everyone else: Kurtz is a mystery, Jim is a mystery, Falk is a mystery to the puzzled narrators of their stories. And so is the unnamed emigrant, sole survivor of a tragedy at sea, who’s washed up on their shore. The first time Kennedy sees him is described in a phrase which could have come from the stories of Kurz or Jim:
‘It was there that I saw him first…’
Portentous words which inaugurate the long puzzle, the investigation and piecing together which we are familiar with from so many Conrad stories.
It’s in this spirit that, even as he tells her story, Kennedy admits to the narrator that Amy is a mystery to him (just as Kurz and Jim remain, to the bitter end, mysteries to Marlow).
‘How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery…’
She lives for 4 years at New Barns with the Smith family, never went further than back to her parents’ house. Then she fell in love, which, in Conrad’s hands, is a diabolical business:
‘It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse – a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky – and to be awakened at last from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment, from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a brute…’
Conradian hyperbole
Conrad can’t help himself from adopting a hyperbolic or cosmic tone, readily resorting to talk about terror, horror, fear or idiot imbecility, or invoking the mighty powers which govern the world and even the universe, at the drop of a hat.
Hyperbole
Conrad’s mind always leaps to extremes. Pondering Yanko’s complete alienation from the people who take him in, Kennedy remarks:
Conceive you the kind of an existence overshadowed, oppressed, by the everyday material appearances, as if by the visions of a nightmare. (p.166)
Dr Kennedy and the narrator are pottering along in his cart and they see some labourers walking home from a day’s work. You can imagine how, in many Edwardian authors, this might prompt nice thoughts of home, hearths, fires, wives and good meals, but not for Conrad. Everything is cranked up to an Edgar Allen Poe level of shrillness:
‘One would think the earth is under a curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were loaded with chains…’ (p.153)
Later, when Smith first sees the shipwrecked man:
Smith, alone amongst his stacks with this apparition, in the stormy twilight ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the dread of an inexplicable strangeness.
At the drop of the smallest hat everything in Conrad becomes about lunatic, inexplicable strangeness, weirdness, insanity, rage, despair, horror and agony.
Conrad’s cosmic similes
The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the hearts lost among the passions of love and fear. (p.172)
And then there is Conrad’s frequent tendency to go cosmic, to invoke the entire universe in his metaphors and comparisons, to such an extent that, to my mind at any rate, he sometimes steps into science fiction territory.
It was as if these had been the faces of people from the other world…
He was different: innocent of heart, and full of good will, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future. (p.168)
But this is not to say this is bad. On the contrary, Conrad has a brazen boldness about talking about life, the universe and everything which his stiff-upper-lipped British contemporaries mostly lacked, and which helps to give all his stories their sense of symbolic depth and resonance, so unusual in English literature.
The hyperbole as it were sets a tone, allows the stories to contain greater allegorical or symbolic force than their straitlaced English contemporaries. Thus it is that, among numerous other themes and images, the story recurs to the image of humans as birds caught in traps.
1) When Dr Kennedy is called in by Smith to examine the vagabond who he’s just locked up in his wood-lodge, Kennedy observes ‘his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a snare’.
2) Years later when Kennedy is called in to treat Yanko in his final fever, he observes that, ‘with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare’.
3) A preparation of images which make it all the more haunting and effective when, at the very end of the story, Kennedy leans over the cot of Yanko and Amy’s baby son and observes ‘The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare’. (p.175)
The narrator as jigsaw solver
The Conradian storyteller is always a detective, a man who pieces together his narrative from fragments told him by their parties or the protagonist himself, which always require pondering, assessing and carefully stitching together.
‘I have been telling you more or less in my own words what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years, during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him.’
‘Perhaps it was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced Old Swaffer. Perhaps it was only an inexplicable caprice. All I know is that at the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith’s lunatic digging in Swaffer’s kitchen garden.’
This is acknowledged at the start of the story, where the narrator tells us that:
‘His papers on the fauna and flora made him known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country practice – from choice. The penetrating power of his mind, acting like a corrosive fluid, had destroyed his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence is of a scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of that unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle of a general truth in every mystery.’
He is, then, an investigator and puzzle solver by disposition.
The language barrier
‘He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these had been the faces of people from the other world – dead people – he used to tell me years afterwards.’ (p.166)
Figures at the heart of Conrad stories often, like their author, suffer from a language barrier. Yanko is, among other things, an extreme example of the difficulties with language which so many Conrad protagonists suffer.
‘A sudden burst of rapid, senseless speech persuaded him at once that he had to do with an escaped lunatic. In fact, that impression never wore off completely. Smith has not in his heart given up his secret conviction of the man’s essential insanity to this very day.’
With the profoundly alienating effect that:
‘All these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living…’
Even when he slowly painfully acquires some grasp of English, it is always marked by his alien origins:
‘He told me this story of his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language, with great fluency, but always with that singing, soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power into the sound of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the words of an unearthly language.’
With the result that:
His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible stamp. (p.168)
Impossible not to read into this the experience of Conrad the exile, the immigrant who obtained a stunning fluency in English but always with an alien flavour.
Thoughts
‘Amy Foster’ is, at first, a convincingly gritty portrait of rural life into which the powerful figure of Yanko stumbles… and yet, by the end, in fact at the very end, it feels forced.
The initial slow sections about Amy’s character are the eclipsed by the colourful piecing together of the account of the man washed ashore, and there is a slow logic to the love between Yanko and Amy, as the doctor tells it… but right at the end the tempo completely changes and the speed with which Conrad has the couple fall out and argue, and then the sudden note of horror which grips her on the night of the storm, all this feels too rushed. Conrad devotes barely a page to describing how Amy is transformed from doting lover to feeling anxious about, then scared of, then terrified by, her husband. It feels forced and rushed.
Notes
Originally Conrad toyed with calling the story ‘The Castaway’ or ‘A Husband’. It’s interesting how he gravitated away from focusing on the handsome mysterious immigrant and came to realise that the story would have more power if told for its impact on the simple, monosyllabic peasant girl.
No specific location has been identified for the story. It’s somewhere on the Kent-Sussex border. The fictional town of Brenzett is based on Dymchurch.
Yanko is a transliteration of the Polish Janko. Goorall corresponds to Góral, the Polish word for ‘highlander’.
Credit
Conrad wrote ‘Amy Foster’ in 1901. It was first published in the Illustrated London News (December 1901) and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories (1903). Page references are to the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition of ‘Typhoon and Other Stories’, 2008 revised edition.
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