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 Good Reader 