 | Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad |  |
AUTHOR'S NOTE
"NOSTROMO" is the most anxiously meditated of the
longer novels which belong to the period following upon
the publication of the "Typhoon" volume of short
stories.
I don't mean to say that I became then conscious of
any impending change in my mentality and in my attitude
towards the tasks of my writing life. And perhaps
there was never any change, except in that mysterious,
extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the
theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the
inspiration; a phenomenon for which I can not in any
way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me
some concern was that after finishing the last story of
the "Typhoon" volume it seemed somehow that there
was nothing more in the world to write about.
This so strangely negative but disturbing mood
lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my
longer stories, the first hint for "Nostromo" came to
me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute
of valuable details.
As a matter of fact in 1875 or '6, when very young, in
the West Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my
contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting, I heard
the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen
single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere
revolution.
On the face of it this was something of a feat. But I
heard no details, and having no particular interest in
crime qua crime I was not likely to keep that one in my
mind. And I forgot it till twenty-six or seven years
afterwards I came upon the very thing in a shabby
volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop. It
was the life story of an American seaman written by
himself with the assistance of a journalist. In the
course of his wanderings that American sailor worked
for some months on board a schooner, the master and
owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard in
my very young days. I have no doubt of that because
there could hardly have been two exploits of that peculiar
kind in the same part of the world and both connected
with a South American revolution.
The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter
with silver, and this, it seems, only because he was implicitly
trusted by his employers, who must have been
singularly poor judges of character. In the sailor's
story he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a small
cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of mean appearance,
and altogether unworthy of the greatness this opportunity
had thrust upon him. What was interesting
was that he would boast of it openly.
He used to say: "People think I make a lot of
money in this schooner of mine. But that is nothing.
I don't care for that. Now and then I go away quietly
and lift a bar of silver. I must get rich slowly — you
understand."
There was also another curious point about the man.
Once in the course of some quarrel the sailor threatened
him: "What's to prevent me reporting ashore what
you have told me about that silver?"
The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He
actually laughed. "You fool, if you dare talk like that
on shore about me you will get a knife stuck in your
back. Every man, woman, and child in that port is
my friend. And who's to prove the lighter wasn't
sunk? I didn't show you where the silver is hidden.
Did I? So you know nothing. And suppose I lied? Eh?"
Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness
of that impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner.
The whole episode takes about three pages of his
autobiography. Nothing to speak of; but as I looked
them over, the curious confirmation of the few casual
words heard in my early youth evoked the memories
of that distant time when everything was so fresh, so
surprising, so venturesome, so interesting; bits of strange
coasts under the stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine,
men's passions in the dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces
grown dim. . . . Perhaps, perhaps, there still was
in the world something to write about. Yet I did not
see anything at first in the mere story. A rascal steals
a large parcel of a valuable commodity — so people say.
It's either true or untrue; and in any case it has no
value in itself. To invent a circumstantial account of
the robbery did not appeal to me, because my talents
not running that way I did not think that the game was
worth the candle. It was only when it dawned upon
me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily
be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man
of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the
changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that
I had the first vision of a twilight country which was
to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy
Sierra and its misty Campo for mute witnesses of events
flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good
and evil.
Such are in very truth the obscure origins of "Nostromo"
— the book. From that moment, I suppose,
it had to be. Yet even then I hesitated, as if warned
by the instinct of self-preservation from venturing on a
distant and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues
and revolutions. But it had to be done.
It took the best part of the years 1903-4 to do; with
many intervals of renewed hesitation, lest I should lose
myself in the ever-enlarging vistas opening before me
as I progressed deeper in my knowledge of the country.
Often, also, when I had thought myself to a standstill
over the tangled-up affairs of the Republic, I would,
figuratively speaking, pack my bag, rush away from
Sulaco for a change of air and write a few pages of the
"Mirror of the Sea." But generally, as I've said before,
my sojourn on the Continent of Latin America,
famed for its hospitality, lasted for about two years.
On my return I found (speaking somewhat in the style
of Captain Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily
glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small
boy considerably grown during my absence.
My principal authority for the history of Costaguana
is, of course, my venerated friend, the late Don Jose
Avellanos, Minister to the Courts of England and Spain,
etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent "History of Fifty
Years of Misrule." That work was never published —
the reader will discover why — and I am in fact the only
person in the world possessed of its contents. I have
mastered them in not a few hours of earnest meditation,
and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice
to myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers,
I beg to point out that the few historical allusions are
never dragged in for the sake of parading my unique
erudition, but that each of them is closely related to
actuality; either throwing a light on the nature of current
people of whom I speak.
As to their own histories I have tried to set them
down, Aristocracy and People, men and women, Latin
and Anglo-Saxon, bandit and politician, with as cool a
hand as was possible in the heat and clash of my own
conflicting emotions. And after all this is also the
story of their conflicts. It is for the reader to say how
far they are deserving of interest in their actions and
in the secret purposes of their hearts revealed in the
bitter necessities of the time. I confess that, for me,
that time is the time of firm friendships and unforgotten
hospitalities. And in my gratitude I must mention
here Mrs. Gould, "the first lady of Sulaco," whom we
may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr. Monygham,
and Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Material
Interests whom we must leave to his Mine —
from which there is no escape in this world.
About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and
socially contrasted men, both captured by the silver of
the San Tomé Mine, I feel bound to say something
more.
I did not hesitate to make that central figure an Italian.
First of all the thing is perfectly credible: Italians
were swarming into the Occidental Province at the
time, as anybody who will read further can see; and
secondly, there was no one who could stand so well by
the side of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the Idealist
of the old, humanitarian revolutions. For myself I
needed there a Man of the People as free as possible
from his class-conventions and all settled modes of
thinking. This is not a side snarl at conventions. My
reasons were not moral but artistic. Had he been an
Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get into local politics.
But Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader in a
above the mass. He is content to feel himself a power
— within the People.
But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I received
the inspiration for him in my early days from a
Mediterranean sailor. Those who have read certain
pages of mine will see at once what I mean when I say
that Dominic, the padrone of the Tremolino, might under
given circumstances have been a Nostromo. At any
rate Dominic would have understood the younger man
perfectly — if scornfully. He and I were engaged together
in a rather absurd adventure, but the absurdity
does not matter. It is a real satisfaction to think that
in my very young days there must, after all, have been
something in me worthy to command that man's half-
bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. Many of Nostromo's
speeches I have heard first in Dominic's voice.
His hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes roaming the
horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his
face, he would utter the usual exordium of his remorseless
wisdom: "Vous autres gentilhommes!" in a caustic
tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like Nostromo!
"You hombres finos!" Very much like Nostromo.
But Dominic the Corsican nursed a certain pride of
ancestry from which my Nostromo is free; for Nostromo's
lineage had to be more ancient still. He is a
man with the weight of countless generations behind
him and no parentage to boast of. . . . Like the
People.
In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence
and generosity, in his lavishness with his
gifts, in his manly vanity, in the obscure sense of his
greatness and in his faithful devotion with something
despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a
Man of the People, their very own unenvious force,
grown older as the famous Captain Fidanza,
with a stake in the country, going about his many affairs
followed by respectful glances in the modernized streets
of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, attending
the Lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist
speeches at the meeting, the enigmatical patron of the
new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy
comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his moral ruin
locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a Man
of the People. In his mingled love and scorn of life and
in the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed,
of dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom,
he is still of the People, their undoubted Great Man —
with a private history of his own.
One more figure of those stirring times I would like to
mention: and that is Antonia Avellanos — the "beautiful
Antonia." Whether she is a possible variation of Latin-
American girlhood I wouldn't dare to affirm. But, for
me, she is. Always a little in the background by the
side of her father (my venerated friend) I hope she has
yet relief enough to make intelligible what I am going
to say. Of all the people who had seen with me the
birth of the Occidental Republic, she is the only one
who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued
life. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of
the People are the artisans of the New Era, the true
creators of the New State; he by his legendary and daring
feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what
she is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere
passion in the heart of a trifler.
If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I
should hate to see all these changes) it would be Antonia.
And the true reason for that — why not be frank
about it? — the true reason is that I have modelled her
the chums of her two brothers, how we used to look
up to that girl just out of the schoolroom herself, as the
standard-bearer of a faith to which we all were born but
which she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching
hope! She had perhaps more glow and less
serenity in her soul than Antonia, but she was an uncompromising
Puritan of patriotism with no taint of the
slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the
only one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear
oftenest her scathing criticism of my levities — very
much like poor Decoud — or stand the brunt of her austere,
unanswerable invective. She did not quite understand
— but never mind. That afternoon when I
came in, a shrinking yet defiant sinner, to say the final
good-bye I received a hand-squeeze that made my heart
leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. She was
softened at the last as though she had suddenly perceived
(we were such children still!) that I was really
going away for good, going very far away — even as far
as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the
darkness of the Placid Gulf.
That's why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the
"beautiful Antonia" (or can it be the Other?) moving in
the dimness of the great cathedral, saying a short prayer
at the tomb of the first and last Cardinal-Archbishop of
Sulaco, standing absorbed in filial devotion before the
monument of Don Jose Avellanos, and, with a lingering,
tender, faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to
Martin Decoud, going out serenely into the sunshine of
the Plaza with her upright carriage and her white head;
a relic of the past disregarded by men awaiting impatiently
the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of
more Revolutions.
But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand
left the body of the Magnificent Capataz, the Man of
the People, freed at last from the toils of love and
wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco.
| Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad | |