University of Virginia Library

The Voyages of Conrad

IN 1873, A POLISH LAD of fifteen, walking in the Alps with his tutor, dismayed that gentleman by a declaration of independence. He proposed to give up his country and career, in order to take his chances on the sea. A few years later he was sailing on the Mediterranean, that "nursery of the craft." Then he realized his dream by becoming associated with the English flag — incidentally learning the English language. He went on far voyages, seeing little of Europe for a quarter of a century. Finally, he accomplished his second transformation: the Polish lad became a great writer of English. The boy was named Jozef Korzeniowski the writer is known to fame as Joseph Conrad.

The adventurous spirit thus manifest is characteristic of Conrad's mind and work. Romance is his great word, genuinely romantic are his favorite heroes. He arrays them against the manifold visage and challenge of the seven seas. He is primarily the psychologist of mariners, he is Henry James on a South Sea Island.

Let us follow some of his rovings. The real voyages of Jozef Korzeniowski concern us only as a basis for the fictional adventures that his double, Conrad, has narrated. We know that a dozen actual ships and scenes served as a springboard for his imagination. The publishers of his tales have recently charted for us the voyages undertaken by his dream-ships in seas that often Conrad alone has adequately celebrated. We will cruise with these ships, not in chronological order, but widening out from the author's favorite center. Usually his ports of call are found in Malaysian waters and his ordinary beat is that of his hero, Heyst "a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn round a point in North Borneo." This point is approximately the scene of Almayer's Folly, with which book we begin to cruise.

The original of Almayer, inadequate and shiftless dreamer, had been studied along the muddy banks of the Pantai, where the story unrolls. The breath of this poisonous backwater eats into the characters and the sunset gold of the Pantai symbolizes the vain greed of Almayer. Swathed in mist, the river hides a pair of lovers and their canoe; it is a sleeping world, wherein all the ardent life of the tropics is transferred to the beating hearts of Dain and Nina. Finally — and this is the actual voyage — Almayer watches his daughter and her lover depart in a violent brazen light; he watches the vanishing canoe that holds their embracing figures, and he dies in his curses, unforgiving and abandoned.

The ardor and chivalry of the Malays, their passionate pride, again fascinates Conrad in Karain. Our circle now widens out to include the Archipelago around Borneo. Karain's mad avenging journey, as he tells it, proceeds from the monster-shaped Celebes, past "a great mountain burning in the midst of water," past myriad islands that are scattered like shards from the gun of a demiurge, to Java, with its stone campongs and its slavish population. Then on to unhealthy Delli, where a blossoming thicket hid Karain and his brother-in-arms, the two avengers; and there the deluded Malay kills his friend instead of the too ravishing woman who should have been the victim.

This is an intensely tragic voyage. The more epic and comic Typhoon is a tale of endurance and conquest. Reaching beyond the Philippines, its scene is laid near the northernmost point of the Malaysian circle. In the narrow dangerous China seas, near Formosa, the Nan-Shan encountered one of the worst storms ever recorded. She was saved by the dullness and obstinacy of her Captain MacWhirr, a man — witness his name — of no imagination. Just as his stupid dutiful letters home are barely read by a yawning family, so does his imperviousness disgust Jukes, the livelier chief mate. MacWhirr has never yet been in a great storm, but you feel that, as a crustacean, he is prepared for one. He greets the danger-signals with the obvious remark: that there must be "some dirty weather knocking about." It becomes a Typhoon and knocks everybody about: the officers scurrying on their duties from pillar to post; the cargo, namely two hundred coolies, who presently begin sliding to and fro in a mass of boxes, pigtails, and dollars. They are roped in like an unruly herd. Jukes plunges down to the engine-room and from that gleaming Inferno the boat seems submerged by the greatest blow yet; tons of water descend, sufficient to wipe out everything; those in the engine-room stare at one another aghast; and through the speaking-tube the captain's voice goes on unperturbed, attending strictly to business.

When the Nan-Shan was virtually a wreck and the wind fell, they were caught in the circular whirl of the hurricane; but the captain and the boat kept their heads up and came to anchorage, to the astonishment of Jukes, the reader, and all the seamen, in the harbor. Mrs. MacWhirr, in a far-off, forty-pound

house, stifled a yawn at the captain's dull account of his voyage.

On the other side of the Archipelago are the peregrinations told of in The End of the Tether. The blind Captain Whalley touches bottom as mate of the coasting craft Sofala, which beats up and down its sixteen-hundred-mile circular route through the Malacca Straits. Needing the money for his daughter, Captain Whalley has descended to this from much greater voyages. To hold his position, he has concealed his oncoming blindness, depending on the eyes of his faithful Malay serang. But he is suspected by his worthless officers, one of whom, near Pangu Bay, piles the steamer up on the reef — and the captain will not survive his charge.

Such is the third Journey in Conrad's chief volume of nouvelles. The others of the trilogy are Youth and Heart of Darkness, both of which are reminiscences. Who has not read Youth, that record of gallantry, endurance, romance, and humor? It tells of Marlow's very first voyage, beginning far out of our circle, but aiming for the "white" of it, for that Bangkok which is the scene of Falk and from which Conrad's own first command set sail. Marlow's boat was the Judea — "all rust, dust, grime — soot aloft, dirt on deck." But on her stern she bore the imperative and romantic motto "Do or Die." And Bangkok for Marlow promised all the thrill and wonder of the unknown East.

Bound first for an English port to load on with coal, the Judea spent a week in getting to the Yarmouth Roads. There was a gale; she shifted ballast; the crew were set to the "grave-diggers' work" of righting her. After long delay in loading, she had a collision with a steamer, and waited three weeks more. Another gale, 300 miles W. of the Lizards, tore up the old ship and the crew turned to endless pumping. But still the battered craft threw out "like an appeal, like a defiance, like a cry to the clouds without mercy, the words written on her stern: 'Judea, London. Do or Die.'" And for Marlow, aetat. 20, the faith, the endeavor, the imagination of Youth were in that cry.

Their deck-house was blown away and they put back to Falmouth. Three times they put back to Falmouth. The crew refused, and no wonder, to trust that leaky and bewitched hooker, now six months on the road to Bangkok and not yet clear of England. You ask if they ever reached Bangkok? Almost. They finally got to the Indian Ocean, they neared Java Head — when the coal caught fire. Still sailing for Bangkok, "Do or Die," they fought that fire for days and just as they seemed to conquer it, the cargo blew up. The ship herself blew up, after a steamer had taken the wreck in tow. But the crew had saved all they could, and Marlow, in charge of his own boat, presently sighted Java — his first vision of the East, "the East of the ancient narrators, mysterious, resplendent, and somber." The Judea did and died; her second mate had begun to live.

From the year of grace 1900 dates the personal history of Lord Jim and the record of the pilgrim-ship, the Patna. She was a rusty lean cosmopolite, who at some Eastern port took on her cargo of eight hundred faithful ignorant cattle-like pilgrims. Her officers, barring the untried Jim, were all scamps and bullies. Unlike the men of the Judea and the Nan-Shan, these fellows are not true seamen; and that, with Conrad, always spells disaster. His picture of the early part of the voyage is one of his greatest pieces of descriptive writing. After clearing the Strait, the Patna headed through the "one-degree" passage for the Red Sea, borne down by an oppressive sun, sailing on a stagnant ocean. Under a slender shaving of a moon, not far from where the Arabian Sea joins the Red, something happened. A collision with a derelict shook the ship and the souls upon her. The scared officers, believing her about to sink, took to the boats, abandoned the Patna and her pilgrims.

In the record, shifted and twisted from a dozen angles, we feel all of human dread and cowardice, all of human pity for the doomed eight hundred, who yet were not doomed but successfully towed by a French gunboat into Aden. The Patna was saved. Only her officers were damned. The rest of the story, dealing with the "case" of Jim; his wanderings like those of the accursed Jew, his atonement in savage Patusan, will concern us later.

In a previous voyage, described in The Nigger of the Narcissus we meet with foul weather off the Cape and with that admirable cook, who at the height of the storm accomplishes the miracle of making coffee. His declaration "as long as she swims I will cook" becomes the motto of the desperate and dauntless boat. For here we are in the presence of "the dumb courage of men obscure, forgetful, and enduring." Throughout the windings of their limited and superstitious souls there has passed the taut shiver of responsibility, of "Do or Die." The Narcissus is no Patna. It is with admiration and fellowship that Conrad bids these seamen farewell. It has been said that this story best "conjures up the actual spirit of a voyage," the smell of the ocean, the ship moving through the tropical heat.

We have already twice swung around the Cape n Conrad's wake; his farther reaches take us into he penetralia of the West African Coast. As a

boy he had dreamed of the dark and dreadful Congo. In the incomparable Heart of Darkness, under the witching spell of the narrator Marlow, we are taken far up this river, which, resembling an "immense snake uncoiled," buries its tail in the tenebrous wilderness. Kurtz, that leader of men, has lost both his moral sense and his life. An expedition has been sent to pluck him out. The steamboat crawled along the gloomy silent Congo; it was "like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when the big trees were kings." An uncertain channel, a sluggish atmosphere, wonderfully conveyed in the telling, saurians on sandbanks, and especially the "stillness of an implacable force, vengefully watching." It had watched poor Kurtz to some purpose, for when, after experiences with cannibals, ivory, attacks from the jungle — when you, I, and Marlow reach the heart of darkness, we find that its powers have driven Kurtz to headhunting, megalomania, and the point of death.

Far-flung tangents from the circle are traced by other voyages which may be briefly summarized. There is the transatlantic venture by which the hero of Romance comes to peril and thirst and the most adorable of stately senoritas on the Spanish Main. There is the savage brute of a boat (Sydney to London) which slays a passenger every trip and whose cruel anchor catches up and crushes the mate's sweetheart before his eyes. There is the Ferndale (London to Port Elizabeth), on which occurs the singular incident narrated in that obscure book, Chance. If Victory has most of Stevenson in its scheme, Chance has most of Henry James in its method. Gradually Conrad has become more interested in souls than in ships; also he stays longer and more persuasively in the society of women.

That brings us to his inland voyages, which are of two kinds, geographical and psychological. As regards the first kind, for over twenty years Conrad scarcely saw the continent of Europe, and the journeyings which traverse that continent — such tales as Under Western Eyes — are to my thinking almost negligible. But the voyages of discovery into the varieties of human hearts and situations demand fuller treatment. They demand first of all some reckoning with the author's philosophy.

Traveling always from one place to another, shifting imaginatively from standpoint to standpoint, Conrad has naturally come to view life as a great panorama, and art as an adventurous cruise. Life is a succession of scenes and the "master of the show" is the goddess Maia. Illusion is the word most frequently on Conrad's lips — illusions of youth, of hope, in fact the "darkness of a world of illusions" in which his best-beloved romantic characters appear as beautiful vanishing figureheads. Sombre and splendid, they come, they flash, they go. "Ports are no good, ships rot, men go to the devil." Conrad's pessimism becomes more sardonic and matter-of-fact in his later books. But throughout he is saved by his absolute love of the sea and seamen, and by his belief in a certain steadiness and sturdiness which is essentially nautical. We have seen how he displays courage and character in his best sailors. Again, the artistic compass by which he steers swings resolutely to the pole of Truth. Sincerity and a kind of austere control guide this romantic realist who can on the one hand define literary criticism as a high adventure of personality — exactly like Anatole France — and on the other achieve restraint in the deepest emotion of Lord Jim or Lena.

Conrad is professedly not "literary " in the special sense. He lived only for the sea and did not write a line until his thirty-sixth year. It is natural then that the sea's rhythm should be found in his sentences, something of her swift fickleness in his restless eye. He has often compared artistic creation to voyaging. Each effort is like the "everlasting somber stress of the winter passage around Cape Horn." Each story gets under way as leisurely as the Judea. There are voyages into the consciousness of a hundred heroes, into the thwarted spirit of Kurtz, into the self-deception of the Nigger, a voyage of discovery to learn simply that Captain Whalley is blind, another outward tragedy that ends in inner Victory. From this mental and moral Odyssey I will detail only a few episodes, which will likewise serve as specimens of Conrad's constructive technique. There are two main sorts: the voyage that flits from one interest, group, or situation to another, using each cursorily as a port of call; the voyage which proceeds from one psychological standpoint to another, plumbing the depths of each soul, through its own narrative and confession.

Of the first kind, the epic story of Nostromo — regarded by some as Conrad's greatest — is typical. We know the immense labor that went into this presentation (based on almost no experience) of a South American republic. The result, I believe, is a tangle, a too intricate web. The adventurous interest is to find the pattern, which is not zero as in musical comedy, but nearer infinity, as in Balzac. In fact, Balzac's method rules. From an initial situation, in medias res, we travel back to one set of people and then to another, with fresh digressions and dossiers, eddies and whirlpools. We sink into the maelstrom of an individual experience

to emerge into the muddy froth of revolutionary parties. We are led astray by an undated log-book, which produces much confusion of time and place. We are frustrated by unclear sequences and contrary winds and we chart our course in a dozen directions.

To this excessive ramble one is justified in preferring the stiller depths of Lord Jim. Here Conrad nearly attains his desired unity of effect, the atmospheric steeping which is the essence of his romanticism. Here, at least, there is a single subject, a mountain of a subject, which we cruise around and see through the eyes of several observers. The author uses his pet device of first-person narration. The reminiscent and gloomy Marlow first appears here and tells us, too lengthily, nearly the whole story of Jim's failure and rehabilitation. But that is only one point of view. There is also the inner circle of Jim's own consciousness, gradually becoming distinct. There are the successive sidelights thrown episodically by the self-sufficient Brierly, by the French captain, with his touchstone of honor, by the merchant who retrieves and establishes Jim in Patusan. There are the crowning lights thrown by Jim's dusky sweetheart and his chivalrous brother-in-arms — spotlights for the catastrophe.

Here again space and time are introverted or confused, but the main end is gained and we have a progressively ascending study of one temperament mirrored through several others. . . In Chance, these others are quite evidently of the sort usually chosen by Henry James: the first-person narrator, curious but limited in knowledge, the dull conventional couple who guard the unfortunate heroine, the viewpoint of the romantic captain who weds and saves her.

But it is in Victory that we find the happiest amalgamation of the true Conrad with his cosmopolitan masters — for certainly his technique is much more exotic than English. With Victory we are in the heart of Malaysia again and we are furthermore in the hearts of the various actors in this passionate drama. The magnanimous self-tormented Heyst is set off against the cupidity and villainies of old Schomberg, Ricardo, and "plain Mr. Jones." With most of these we stay for several chapters, while each expounds his attitude and outlook. They are loosely enclosed within two outer rings of observation, that of the semi-detached narrator and of the peripatetic Captain Davidson, who brings news of Heyst and the girl on the island. The triumph of the book is the girl herself, her gradual rise from a dull sulkiness — Conrad is strangely fond of sulky women — to participation in Heyst's scheme for her rescue, and finally to an overwhelming gratitude reaching the point of self-immolation. Her growth in consciousness and effectiveness is a marvel of psychological portrayal, set amid stirring deeds. The Spanish heroine of the Arrow of Gold (Doubleday, Page; 1919) is, on the other hand, already fully grown; almost as grown as her creator, in her strange mingling of deep romance and disillusionment.

Mr. Richard Curie, Conrad's biographer and critic, has found over ninety strongly realized characters in his work. What a power of vision is needed to conceive sharply all these diverse types! The creative mind has roamed from the duellist Feraud, of Napoleon's time, to the chivalrous dark-skinned Dain, from caged and restless English girls (Bessie Carvil, Flora de Barral) to the romantic Ninas and Seraphinas of exotic strain. Literally from China to Peru Conrad has voyaged and observed. He has depicted vast rivers and "those seas of God" in all their myriad changes — sunny smiles hurrying into darkness, sluggish peace alternating with riot and cruelty. Much has he traveled in the realms of gold — so much that the deferent reviewer can see only two more major adventures for him to undertake. The first would be to visit this country, as he once proposed to do. May he long delay the great Departure, the uncertain landfall of the second voyage!