Tag: Joseph Conrad

The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad

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Most photographs of Conrad show an older man, grave and distinguished. He didn’t become established as a writer until his forties, and it almost comes as a shock to realise that during his twenty-year career as a seaman, on which he drew for inspiration, he was actually quite young.

The Mirror of the Sea, published in 1906, is his non-fiction account of his years afloat. It is subtitled Memories and Impressions and that is a pretty good description of what is contained here. It is a collection of impressions of deep-water sailing ships and the men who sailed them, as well as a meditation on wind, weather and the nature of the sea itself.

The writing is beautiful, as you would expect from Conrad, in places like prose poetry. The book gives a vivid impression of what it was like to serve on a merchant ship during the age of sail. If there is a theme running through these varied, essay-like pieces it is regret for the passing of that era and its replacement by the steam age. “Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea.”

Conrad gives us the benefit of his knowledge gained through many years of experience. He explains how there could be indefinable differences in handling characteristics between one sailing ship and another. The loading of cargo on to a sailing vessel was a fine art, affecting the performance of the ship at sea. An officer who was hard of hearing had great difficulty, because hearing is important in determining the speed and direction of the wind.    

This is the dangerous maritime world before radar or wireless, where a ship posted “overdue” and then “missing” had probably sunk with all hands, its loss never to be explained, as if it had simply vanished.

Much of this is romantic in tone with the west wind personified as a great king and sailing ships regarded as living creatures, but Conrad never loses sight of the complete indifference of nature to human concerns. “The most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty”.

There is a whole chapter devoted to the Thames estuary and the London docks as they were around the end of the nineteenth century. This is fascinating and was a big influence on Rachel Lichtenstein when she wrote her own book about the estuary in 2016.

There is much here for any admirer of Conrad’s fiction to enjoy. Inevitably in a book like this some parts are more interesting than others. The chapter called The Tremolino is an account of an early Mediterranean voyage made by Conrad. It reads like one of his short stories, making the reader wonder if it is quite as factual as the rest of the book. In the last chapter, Conrad gives us an account of the career of Lord Nelson.

The book is a lament for a lost art, for the days when sailors had to understand and respect the moods of the sea. Who knows, with the way the world is going, sailing ships may yet make a return.                

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

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One of the few pleasures of this strangest of years has been re-discovering the works of Joseph Conrad. Here are my thoughts about his 1903 novella, Typhoon.

Captain MacWhirr is a man of absolutely no imagination. He is also a man of few words. When his chief mate, Mr Jukes, uses a figure of speech, he takes it literally, much to Jukes’ amusement. MacWhirr’s distrust of language applies to the written word, too. When the barometer drops alarmingly, promising extremely bad weather ahead, he consults a book in his cabin. The advice is to change course and avoid the storm altogether. MacWhirr cannot see the point of this, just as he did not when  he heard something similar spoken by a fellow captain. Lengthening the voyage will cost time and therefore money, so how can he justify to his owners a diversion to avoid a storm he has not actually seen? He decides to head straight on into the typhoon and power through it.

One always thinks of Conrad as a writer of the age of sail, but the ship here is actually a steamer. In every other way, though, we are in the pre-technology era. There is no radar and no wireless communication to warn of tricky conditions ahead.

When the storm hits, it is of a fury and violence that no-one on board has experienced before. They are dependent on themselves and the judgement of the captain. “Captain MacWhirr could expect no relief of that sort from anyone on earth. Such is the loneliness of command.” Fixtures and fittings are swept from the deck by the fury of the gale. So much water falls on to the deck that Jukes believes himself to have been swept overboard at one point. If the wheelhouse or the funnel are lost, the ship will be helpless.

Pretty soon we are in that familiar Conrad territory of men battling the savage elements, while fearing that the ship may be plunged into oblivion at any moment. How do they hold their nerve when every moment could be their last?

This is described with that almost hallucinatory vividness that is so characteristic of Conrad’s writing. The reader feels as if they on that ship.        

In his author’s note, Conrad is careful to point out that this story did not derive from direct personal experience. Nonetheless, it is steeped in Conrad’s deep professional knowledge of the sea, ships and the kind of men who sail them.

It shows his mastery of the shorter forms and he skilfully expands our insight into the characters’ thoughts by including some of their letters to family and friends.

In many ways, it is the opposite to Lord Jim. In that novel of 1900, Jim has a romantic conception of himself, deriving from his reading of boys’ adventure fiction, as a man who will rise to the occasion when the moment of danger comes. When he submits to panic like the others, it shatters his idea of himself, and he takes drastic steps to atone for his failure.

Here, through sheer stubbornness and determination, MacWhirr faces the danger head on. He restores Jukes’ flagging resolve with these words: “Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That’s enough for any man. Keep a cool head.”

He even tries, in his way, to do the right thing by the Chinese coolies in the hold below, unlike Jim’s fellow sailors who abandon the pilgrims aboard the Patna to their fate.

As always with Conrad, there is a lot going on here and you certainly do not need to have read Lord Jim to appreciate Typhoon. It stands up by itself.

To his wife and grown-up daughters MacWhirr has become a distant figure, a mere financial provider. In a brief coda, Mrs Macwhirr is shown yawning over the letter her husband sends her describing his experiences in the typhoon. There is a certain irony in Conrad, that supreme man of words, giving us characters who place so little importance on language, whether spoken or written.                

The Duel by Joseph Conrad

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It really has turned into the summer of Conrad for me, as anyone who has read some of my earlier posts will know. I have greatly enjoyed re-discovering his writing. This one is another old friend, that I first read many years ago.

The Duel is one of Conrad’s novella-length works. It was first published in 1908 and is based on a real-life story of two officers in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of duels with each other over a period of many years.

In Conrad’s story, this mutual antagonism begins over a trivial incident when D’Hubert and Feraud are young lieutenants, and goes on for years, with the origin of the quarrel long since forgotten. Outsiders believe there must be some terrible enmity between them, that perhaps they fell out over a woman. It only ends when both men are retired generals.

This covers a longer period of time and is also told in a more conventional manner than many Conrad works. It is a linear narrative with none of the time shifts for which he is famous. It is mostly seen from the point of view of one character, D’Hubert.

It’s plain from the opening sentence that Conrad intended this to be rather more than just the story of the two main characters. “Napoleon the First, whose career had the quality of a dual against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army.”

The tale of the long association of these two men becomes nothing less than the story of the rise and fall of Napoleon’s France, a picture of the era, its politics and its military attitudes. The two men “pursued their private contest through the years of universal carnage”.

These two soldiers fight campaigns all over Europe, and experience the harshness and brutality of the retreat from Moscow, described here in detail. Yet there is a sense in which their relationship as opponents somehow benefits them. The code of honour says that a duel can only be fought between those of the same rank, so as one of them climbs the ladder of promotion the other is inspired to follow him.

The defeat of Napoleon brings great changes. The plight of the cashiered ex-soldiers, the “living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest” who now languish on inadequate pensions is quite poignant. Feraud does not know what to do: “No longer in the army! He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist.”

But D’Hubert seems to regret this changed state of affairs, too. “He felt an irrational tenderness toward his old adversary, and appreciated emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had introduced into his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish.”

By the end the reader may think that this strange relationship was the most important of their lives to both men. Is than an echo here of that other Conrad “double” story, The Secret Sharer?

This story was originally called The Duel, but was later also published as The Point of Honour. The 1977 film adaptation used the title The Duellists. It is a very fine film, Ridley Scott’s first as director, with marvellous photography of the French countryside.

 

Victory by Joseph Conrad

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Victory was one of Joseph Conrad’s later works, published in 1915. I can’t pretend to fully understand this complex novel. It’s not the easiest read, and yet it fascinates me for several reasons and I’ve read it more than once.

There is the resemblance to Shakespeare’s Tempest for one, although by the end the stage is littered with bodies more like Hamlet. Indeed, we might see the main character as a rather Hamlet-like figure.

The story is really fairly straightforward, but the telling of it is not, with the time shifts and changes of point of view characteristic of Conrad.

As so often with this writer, the title is ambiguous and possibly ironic; readers must decide for themselves who the winner is.

We are in Conrad’s familiar territory of the Malay Archipeligo. Axel Heyst has withdrawn from the world to live alone on the island of Samburan. His outlook on life has been influenced by his philosopher father. Heyst has drifted through life, believing that the only way to avoid doing harm is to avoid taking any action at all: “The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I think here we can safely defy the fates.”

The world bites back in the form of three of the nastiest villains in literature, who come to Heyst’s island intending to relieve him of the fortune that they believe he has hidden there.

This has been brought about by two actions of Heyst’s that were well-intentioned. He rescued Morrison from financial ruin and became his business partner. Morrison, however, died on a visit back to England. Then, when visiting the hotel on a neighbouring island owned by Schomberg, Heyst rescued a young woman, Alma, from a life of near-slavery as a member of a travelling orchestra, and took her to live with him on the island.

Schomberg coveted Alma for himself, so he now dislikes Heyst intensely. He is in any case, a gossip and teller of tales, who has been spreading the story that Heyst murdered Morrison and stole his money. The nefarious trio of Mr Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro turn up at his hotel and thoroughly frighten him, so he persuades them that Heyst is sitting on a fortune to get rid of them.

The world bites back in the form of three of the nastiest villains in literature, who come to Heyst’s island intending to relieve him of the fortune that they believe he has hidden there.

This has been brought about by two actions of Heyst’s that were well-intentioned. He rescued Morrison from financial ruin and became his business partner. Morrison, however, died on a visit back to England. Then, when visiting the hotel on a neighbouring island owned by Schomberg, Heyst rescued a young woman, Alma, from a life of near-slavery as a member of a travelling orchestra, and took her to live with him on the island.

Schomberg coveted Alma for himself, so he now dislikes Heyst intensely. He is in any case, a gossip and teller of tales, who has been spreading the story that Heyst murdered Morrison and stole his money. The nefarious trio of Mr Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro turn up at his hotel and thoroughly frighten him, so he persuades them that Heyst is sitting on a fortune to get rid of them.

When they arrive on the island, Heyst’s position is complicated by the fact that his Chinese housekeeper, Wang vanishes to the far side of the island, taking Heyst’s gun with him.

The stage is now set for the drama of the later part of the novel, which takes place in an intense, dreamlike atmosphere, under the shadow of the nearby live volcano sputtering on the horizon.

It is the trio of villains who make this novel so compelling. The “gentleman” Mr Jones, is tall and emaciated, with a face like a skull and a hollow voice. He is subject to strange depressive fits and bears more than a passing resemblance to Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. His henchman is Martin Ricardo, repeatedly described as catlike, an unrestrained killer, with a knife concealed under the leg of his trousers. The third is Pedro, a hardly human, Caliban-like figure, treated like an animal by the other two. Heyst says: “Here they are before you, evil intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm. The brute force is at the back.”

For me, Ricardo is the most interesting and vital character in the book. His twisted mind and the strange relationship that he has with Mr Jones feels quite modern. Jones hates women and it is Ricardo’s longing for Alma that causes them to fall out. This aspect of the novel anticipates the later psychological crime fiction of writers such as Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.

Indeed, Greene used Heyst’s words from Victory as the epigraph to his 1978 cold war spy story, The Human Factor. “I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered his soul.”

Read now, Victory feels like the inspiration for a lot of later writing and one of Conrad’s most influential works.

The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad

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Conrad outlined his artistic intention in an early essay. “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” He certainly succeeds in that aim in his short 1916 novel The Shadow Line.

I wrote in an earlier post how I had been re-visiting Conrad’s works, and that he seemed to be the perfect writer for current circumstances and my present mood. Strangely enough, I had forgotten the illness theme in The Shadow Line.

The unnamed narrator leaves a secure berth, almost on a whim. He is then approached to take command of a ship whose captain has died suddenly. The prize of command has fallen to him as if by accident. It appears, though, that there was something strange about the late captain.

The crew start to fall ill, and our narrator assumes that the sickness will stop once the ship puts out to sea, yet more and more of the crew succumb to the fever. Different crew members are affected in different ways.

The weather does not follow any previously known pattern and the wind refuses to blow. The only sailor apart from the captain not to fall ill has a heart problem, restricting his capacity for physical exertion. These two must save the situation.

They are becalmed; time seems to slow down and then stop altogether: “. . .my command seemed to stand as motionless as a model ship set on the gleams and shadows of polished marble.” Has the previous captain exerted some kind of supernatural influence, so that they will all die, leaving a ghost ship? There are echoes of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner here. This first voyage as captain has turned into a nightmare.

There are descriptive passages of such vividness that I had to read them again: “Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, king’s palace, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable…”

There is an astonishing scene when the night turns to an inky blackness just before the rain comes, and the sailors have to feel their way around the ship: “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 is also a good deal here about the hidden motives of human behaviour. The odd reasons that some of the characters have for behaving as they do are gradually revealed. The shadow line itself is the line between youth and experience, we are told, but is it something more as well?

I feel that I cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of Conrad’s writing in a short piece like this. That’s not to say it’s a difficult read, though. I found it unputdownable and read it in a single sitting, despite having read it at least once before.

I think it’s a pity that so many people encounter Conrad’s writing first through Heart of Darkness, perhaps on an academic course. It’s not his easiest or most accessible work.

Knowing something of Conrad’s biography and the fact that English was actually his third language, you might think that the plainer style of the later works was a consequence of his becoming more familiar with the language.

Yet the short story An Outpost of Progress, the other fiction that came out of Conrad’s time in the Belgian Congo, was published in 1898, before Heart of Darkness and is written in a much more direct style. It’s certainly a good place to start with this extraordinary writer.

What should I read during the lockdown?

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I’ve seen a lot of articles lately, both in print and online, as to what we might read during the lockdown.  A lot of self-improving advice of the “now is the time to tackle Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time” sort. But then I have also seen quite a lot of people saying that, when it all started, they found their concentration affected, particularly when it came to fiction. I had that problem myself. It was as if the events going on in the real world made it impossible to live in an imaginary one.

What could possibly be the right sort of thing to read in these strange times that seem to create such an odd state of mind, I kept asking myself. Should I go for humour and escapism or no-holds-barred realism? In the end I decided I was over-thinking the whole question and stopped agonising about it. I would carry on with my unread pile, as usual. When that was done, I would pick an old favourite off the shelf and just see how I got on.

The unread pile was down to two. First was John Gardner’s James Bond continuation novel, Death is Forever, hugely enjoyable, expertly crafted escapism. Next up was Henry Williamson, and It Was The Nightingale, escapism of a different sort, into the rural North Devon of the 1920s.

Now it was time to look at the shelf. After several false starts, I settled on the Gorse Trilogy by Patrick Hamilton. I have written about these novels in more detail elsewhere. The combination of mordant humour and insights into the darker aspects of human nature seemed to hit exactly the right spot.

Around this time I heard a very interesting podcast on the subject of reading, with American academic Alan Jacobs. His basic idea is “reading by Whim” (note the upper case “W”), which comes from the American poet Randall Jarrell.

Reading should not be about laboriously working one’s way through a list of “great books”. It is not a box-ticking exercise. If one talks about “getting through” a book, one is in fact talking about wanting to have read the book, possibly to impress other people.

An alternative method of finding good books is to read the books that the authors you like had read themselves. This will eventually lead you back to the “great books”, but in a way that means more to you.

He also addressed the vexed question of whether or not you should finish a book if you are not getting much from it. It’s ok not to finish. It probably means that you are simply not the right reader for that book. (That made me feel much better about my inability to finish The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, despite having tried three times!) I think you could summarise this approach to reading as “one thing leads to another”.

I realised that in my own reading, one thing had been leading to another without my noticing it. The 1920s setting of Henry Williamson had perhaps reminded me of Patrick Hamilton’s rather different view of that same era.

I found myself drawn to a volume of Joseph Conrad’s short stories. Perhaps he popped back into my mind because his death is mentioned by Henry Williamson. Whatever it was that brought me to them, I have to say there is something about the mood and feel of these stories by Conrad that perfectly suits my current state of mind.

The life and death struggle with the ship that is first leaking, then burning in Youth; the decline into madness and death of the two lazy and incompetent traders in An Outpost of Progress; the plight of the central European emigrant, washed up on the beach in Kent to become an alien in a strange land in Amy Foster.

I have read Conrad all my life, but it’s as if I never truly understood what he was trying to tell us until now.

I think I have answered my own question. Conrad’s tales of the extremes of human experience in an indifferent world seem just right for where we find ourselves at the moment.