All at sea: two crises in Conrad

I

Two major works by Joseph Conrad, both written within three years at the turn of the 20th century, show characters in the grip of a crisis at sea.  The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) describes an unexpected storm around the Cape of Good Hope as the captain suppresses a mutiny, headwinds becalm the ship and a Black sailor lies ill.  His death releases the winds for the homeward voyage.  In Lord Jim (1900) the main character performs a cowardly act, and redeems himself by facing a humiliating trial and then by acting heroically in war.

Conrad’s novella Narcissus , a great advance from his two early Malayan novels, was his first masterpiece.  He vividly makes us hear, feel and see the sailors, their response to the storm, the temptation of evil, the confusion of appearance and reality, and the difficulty of knowing and revealing the truth.  The fictional vessel is based on the Merchant Marine sailing ship, with the same name, on which Conrad served from June to October 1884.  The ship left from Bombay, went east of Madagascar and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, around the southern edge of Africa, west of the Portuguese Azores in the Atlantic Ocean and through the English Channel to the Port of London. 

The book begins with the mustering of the 26-man crew and ends with their paying off at home.  In the course of the novella the narrator describes more than he could actually know about some conversations and events.  As the voyage progresses, he changes from calling the crew “they” to the more comradely and intimate “we” and “I”. Beginning with the first sentence and throughout the work, Conrad frequently emphasises the contrast between light and dark, day and night, white and black, clarity and mystery, good and evil.

Notable among the crew are Singleton and Donkin, who have completely different moral characters.  Singleton, whose name suggests “singular” and “single-minded”, special and dedicated, struggles to read a difficult three-volume novel by Bulwer-Lytton, but cannot write and signs his name with an X.  The noble patriarch, sixty 

years old — ancient for a mariner — has godlike qualities: a long white beard, a portentous silence and accurate prophecies.  He’s faithful to his strenuous duties, and during the storm “he steered with care” for 36 hours.  In the galley, the cook, Podmore, echoes Singleton’s devotion by referring to the ship and twice repeating, “As long as she swims I will cook!”  When the sailors complain of the cold, the cook, a religious fanatic, threatens the sinners with Hell and shouts, “they will be warm enough before long”.  

Donkin (a “donkey”) is a misfit, malcontent and thief, an agitator and mutineer.  He’s filthy and repulsive, parasitic and extortionate; he can’t steer the ship, shirks work, nurses a series of grievances and repeatedly but unreasonably demands his supposed rights.  To incite mutiny, the grudge-holding Donkin throws a heavy lead weight at Captain Allistoun and just misses him.  The captain then confronts Donkin, forces him to pick it up and put it back where he found it.  Conrad cannot resist satirising a mute Russian (a nation the Anglo-Polish patriot hated), who had an “unconscious gaze, contemplating, perhaps, one of those weird visions that haunt the men of his race”.

The eponymous character makes a late dramatic appearance by calling out his name, Wait, in response to a roll-call, which sounds as if he’s ordering the chief mate to stop.  Though he is Black, Wait, who comes from the island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean, pronounces his name to sound like “white”.  In a series of subtle implied puns, he’s a dead weight, the crew waits on him, and both he and the crew wait for him to die.  James Wait, the only sailor with a first name, is affectionately called “Jimmy” and by his antonym “Snowball”. His excessive  self-love and egoistic concern for his own comfort connect him to the ship, named after the Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool of water and pined away for himself in agony.  Wait embodies passive resistance to order and authority.

The colour black is traditionally associated with death, mourning, coffins and graves, with black magic, Satan and evil.  Wait, different and isolated from the crew, reverses the then usual prejudice against and inferior status of Blacks, and makes the servile crew serve him.  He’s arrogant and impudent, superior and self-important.  He gives himself airs, calls himself a “coloured gentleman” and brags about stealing a white man’s girl.  When Donkin becomes too intimate, Wait (using a Polish expression that sounds comical in English) declares: “Don’t be familiar.  We haven’t kept pigs together.”

The tubercular Wait has a “metallic, hollow and tremendously loud cough; it resounded like two explosions in a vault . . . a roaring, rattling cough that shook him, tossed him like a hurricane.”  It is a dreadful welling up of the juices of organic dissolution.  He claims to be moribund, demands sympathy and pity, and doesn’t want to die alone.  Wait’s apparently fatal illness and infantile dependence persuade the crew to grant him special treatment.  The sailors don’t know if his sickness is real or fake, if he’s genuine or fraudulent, actually dying or merely pretending to die.  He doesn’t have to work, has his own dry and comfortable cabin, and influences the destiny of the men and the ship.

Conrad shows how the sailors believe in legends and superstitions, and find ways to explain weather they can’t control, and events they don’t understand.  Wait’s hidden and mysterious power seems to influence the weather as well as the crew.  Singleton makes two fanciful but accurate predictions: “He said that Jimmy was the cause of headwinds” that prevent the ship from sailing home, and maintains that “mortally sick men linger till the first sight of land, and then die”. According to Singleton, Wait stays the winds and delays the landfall in order to keep himself alive.  Identifying their own survival with Wait’s, the crew also try in vain to keep him alive.  But he incites rebellion, destroys the solidarity of the ship and undermines the fight against the storm.

A writer of violent and chaotic motion, Conrad brilliantly describes the physical and emotional effects of the storm: “At that moment the topsail sheet parted, the end of the heavy chain racketed aloft, and sparks of red fire streamed down through the flying sprays.  The sail flapped once with a jerk that seemed to tear our hearts out through our teeth, and instantly changed into a bunch of fluttering narrow ribbons that tied themselves into knots and became quiet along the yard.”  The ship has gone on her beam ends and almost capsized, but miraculously manages to survive.

In a great scene, the crew rescue Wait from drowning during the storm by breaking the walls of his cabin with a crowbar and pulling him by his hair out of the narrow hole: “Suddenly Jimmy’s head and shoulders appeared.  He stuck halfway, and with rolling eyes foamed at our feet.  We flew at him with brutal impatience, we tore the shirt off his back, we tugged at his ears, we panted over him; and all at once he came away in our hands as though somebody had let go of his legs.”  In this violent struggle, like a difficult childbirth, Wait is reborn and spreads his malign influence throughout the ship.

Wait is the last man to board the ship and, as a corpse, the first man to leave.  After the Narcissus passes the Azores and he enters the darkness of death, his last words—echoing Goethe’s deathbed plea for “More light”—are “Light . . . the lamp . . . and . . . go.”  Donkin, seizing his chance, immediately steals Wait’s clothes and money.  Then, in a passage particularly admired by Stephen Crane, “Wait’s eyes blaze up and go out at once, like two lamps overturned together by a sweeping blow.  Something resembling a scarlet thread hung down his chin out of the corner of his lips—and he had ceased to breathe.”  As Conrad wrote of the sailors in Lord Jim , “death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement.”  The sailors don’t discover that Wait has been truthful about his illness until he actually dies.

Conrad does not take the opportunity to quote the Church of England’s rather grim “Prayer for the Burial of the Dead at Sea”: “We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.”  But he adds another fascinating twist to Wait’s posthumous power.  Shrouded in sailcloth, his body refuses to slide down the tilted wood and into the calm sea, and he “seemed to cling to the ship with the grip of an undying fear”.  The crew beg him to let go, he finally whizzes off the lifted plank and “the ship rolled as if relieved of an unfair burden”. The carpenter explains that Wait’s apparent reluctance to depart was caused by a nail carelessly sticking up and catching him on the greasy slide.  Reborn in a storm, he dies in a calm, and the wind is released from his malign spell once he is safely under water.

Through their seduction by Wait, who’s both duplicitous and honest, the crew move from innocence to experience and are forced to face the presence of evil on the ship.  Conrad’s skillful novella describes men and events that embody his own self-discovery at sea.  Well pleased for once with his achievement, Conrad justly concluded: “It is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to stand or fall.”

II

Lord Jim echoes several aspects of Narcissus that were indelibly etched in Conrad’s memory.  Both main characters are named Jim; and both wise men, Singleton and Stein (an anagram in Singleton’s name), are 60 years old.  Captain Allistoun refuses to cut the masts during the storm to make the ship float higher and take on less water; Jim imagines himself cutting away masts in a hurricane.  Singleton steers with care; the Malay lascars also risk death as they stick to the helm of the Patna .  During the storm in Lord Jim, a man is pulled out by his hair like Wait; and like the crew’s cries to the dead Wait, the men scream, “For God’s sake, let go!  Let go!” to release the lifeboat on deck.  In both works Conrad stresses the need for solidarity.  In his preface to Narcissus , Conrad famously announces that he wants to make his readers hear, feel and see.  Lord Jim is similarly filled with “the instantaneous effect of visual impressions”: see and hear, sights and voices, sounds and eyes, sounds and sights.  By contrast, when the Patna is about to sink in the darkness, “there was nothing to see and nothing to hear”.

Jim has grown up in rural Essex, the son of a clergyman.  Unlike Marlow, who listens carefully to Jim, his father would never be able understand or forgive his son’s morally reprehensible act.  The 23-year-old Jim is handsome, almost six feet tall and powerfully built.  Certain that he is well prepared for any crisis, he feels “sure he alone would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas”.  He nourishes romantic dreams and lives in “the fanciful realm of recklessly heroic aspirations”.  Everyone admires him and, most unusually, takes him at his own high valuation.  Jim is completely crushed when he loses his chance to be a hero and betrays his ideal conception of himself.

Conrad repeats ten times, from the Author’s Note to the last page, that Jim is “one of us”. He is likable, congenial, the right sort, and belongs with the elite nautical officers.  This phrase also has a more significant biblical meaning.  In Genesis 3:22, God tells the angels that Adam has eaten the forbidden fruit and acquired experience and knowledge: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.”  When Jim jumps ship and becomes like his opposite, “one of them”, Marlow helps redeem the outcast and remake him as “one of us”.  Jim’s inward pain and recognition of his own potential evil eventually leads to his new Adamic self-awareness.  

Jim’s ship the Patna is an anagram in the name of Patusan, a place in northwest Borneo where his adventures occur in the much weaker second half of the novel.  The ship carries 800 Muslim pilgrims en route to Mecca, squeezed into the hold and on deck, on the long voyage from Singapore to Jeddah on the Red Sea.  On a dark night the Patna suddenly collides with a derelict, water-logged, floating wreck.  Jim descends below the waterline, inspects the rotten, rusted, bulging bulkhead, and sees that it will give way in a minute and instantly sink the ship.

Jim is certain that he can’t rescue the numerous pilgrims but knows that he can save himself.  The vile, drunken German captain is too fat to squeeze under the jammed lifeboat and help dislodge it.  The other three officers, who have managed to lower the boat, urge Jim to abandon the ship.  One of them has a fatal heart attack that makes room for Jim, who jumps down and lands on the corpse.  As if he were speaking of someone else and acting with no volition, as if in a dream, Jim tells Marlow, “ ‘I had jumped . . . ’ He checked himself, averted his gaze . . . . ‘It seems,’ he added. . . . ‘I wished I could die,’ he cried.  ‘There was no going back.  It was as if I had jumped in a well — into an everlasting deep hole,’ ” an eternal hell from which he could never escape.  The crew, picked up by the Avondale and taken to Aden, is horrified to see that the Patna has survived and been towed into that port by a French gunboat.

The official Court of Inquiry convenes in Singapore to determine the facts of the case.  The drunken captain has cleared out, but Jim refuses to run away or accept wages due from the Patna .  To punish himself, he faces the public exposure of his own cowardice and the ruin of his reputation.  He’s not convicted of a crime, but the Court cancels his officer’s certificate.  Disgraced, lonely and with nowhere to go, Jim has hit bottom.  Marlow asks him, “what advantage can you expect from this licking of the dregs?”  In Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence explains that acknowledging his guilt was a relief: “There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety.  Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal level beneath which he could not fall.  It was a satisfaction on which to rest.”

Montague Brierly, one of the assessors of the Court, is captain of a crack ship on the prestigious Blue Star Line.  Unlike Jim, “He had never in his life made a mistake, never had an accident, never a mishap, never a check in his steady rise, and he seemed to be one of those lucky fellows who know nothing of indecision, much less of self-mistrust.”  

Soon after the Inquiry, Brierly suddenly and unexpectedly, decisively and disastrously, commits suicide.  The motives of the prickly Brierly are unclear.  Both men jump off a ship; Jim to save himself, Brierly to kill himself.  Jim faces reality, Brierly avoids it.  He condemns Jim but also identifies with him.  He wonders how he would have acted in the same crisis, and thinks he would reveal his own fear and cowardice.  He sees Jim’s evil in himself and irrationally shares Jim’s guilt.  Brierly could ask, like Chaucer in the Prologue to the “Pardoner’s Tale,” “If gold rust, what will iron do?”

In his novel Rasselas (1759), Samuel Johnson warns men (like Jim and Brierly) “who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope”, about the “dangerous prevalence of imagination”.  By anticipating, magnifying and intensifying fear, imagination weakens men and undermines their courage.  Conrad writes, it “starts into life some thought with which a man unused to such a companionship [with ideas] finds it impossible to live”.  Jim clearly imagines what would happen when the Patna seems about to sink: “His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped—all the appalling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of.”  As Hemingway observed in his Introduction to Men at War (1942): “Cowardice is always simply a lack of ability to  suspend the functioning of the imagination.  Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier [or sailor] can acquire.”

Still puzzled, after his long conversations with Jim about the contradiction between his character and his behaviour, Marlow seeks perception and understanding from his German friend and father-figure Stein (a strong contrast to the odious German sea captain).  The old man has been a soldier and adventurer as well as a scientist and intellectual.  Stein calls Jim a romantic and says, “the question is not how to get cured, but how to live” after the disaster.  Vaguely, he tells Marlow that Jim must maintain his idealism, “follow the dream” and remain steadfast to the very end.  In a cryptic passage endlessly explicated by critics, Stein declares in his Teutonic English: “A man that is born falls into a dream [life] like a man who falls into the sea.  If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns. . . . The way [to survive] is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.”  

Stein seems to mean that the sea is the real world and men must learn to endure it, not struggle against it like Jim and Brierly, in order to live.  Ian Watt explains that Jim has triumphantly “survived his ritual immersion in life’s destructive traumas and has now emerged into the maturity of tragic acceptance”.

In his Author’s Note to Lord Jim , Conrad announces a major theme: Jim’s acute, morbid “consciousness of lost honour”.  Jim has lost his moral identity but still hopes, through self-sacrifice, for absolution and redemption.  Jim has tested his inner worth during the crisis at sea and failed to maintain the fixed standard of conduct.  But the metamorphosis of Stein’s precious butterflies suggests that Jim will be transformed into a nobler character and will recover his self-esteem.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published a biography of Joseph Conrad (1991), and Introductions to The Mirror of the Sea , The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes .

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