Conrad’s Captains

Joseph Conrad died thirty years ago, on 3 August 1924, in his country house at Bishopsbourne near Canterbury. He was sixty-six and had spent twenty years as a seaman and thirty years writing. He was already a success in his own lifetime, but his real fame in terms of European criticism began only after his death. In December 1924 a whole issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française was devoted to him, with articles by Gide and Valéry: the remains of the old captain, a veteran of long sea voyages, were lowered into the sea with a guard of honour comprising France’s most sophisticated and intellectual literati. By contrast, in Italy, the first translations were only available in the red canvas bindings of Sonzogno’s Adventure Library, though Emilio Cecchi had already singled him out to readers of more refined tastes.

Those few, bare facts are sufficient to indicate the different kinds of appeal that the figure of Conrad has inspired. He had lived a life of practical experience, travel and action, and he possessed the prolific creativity of the popular novelist, but also the fastidious attention to style of the disciple of Flaubert, as well as having links with the chief exponents of international Decadentism. Now that his critical fortune has been established in Italy, at least judging by the number of translations available (Bompiani is publishing the collected works, both Einaudi and Mondadori are bringing out translations of individual books, either in hardback or in paperback, while Feltrinelli’s Universale Economica has recently published two of his works), we are in a position to define what this writer has meant and still means for us.

I believe there were many of us who turned to Conrad driven by a recidivist taste for adventure-stories – but not just for adventure stories, also for those authors for whom adventures are only a pretext for saying something original about man, while the exotic events and countries serve to underline more clearly man’s relationship with the world. On one bookshelf of my ideal library Conrad’s place is next to the aery Stevenson, who is nevertheless almost his opposite in terms of his life and his literary style. And yet on more than one occasion I have been tempted to move him onto another shelf, one less accessible for me, the one containing analytical, psychological novelists, the Jameses and Prousts, those who tirelessly recover every crumb of sensation we have experienced. Or maybe even alongside those who are more or less aesthetes maudits, like Poe, full of displaced passions; always presuming that Conrad’s dark anxieties about an absurd universe do not consign him to the shelf (not yet properly ordered or finally selected) containing the ‘writers of the crisis of modernism’.

Instead I have always kept him close to hand, alongside Stendhal, who is so unlike him, and Nievo, who has nothing in common with him at all. For the fact is that though I never believed in a lot of what he wrote, I have always believed that he was a good captain, and that he brought into his stories that element which is so difficult to write about: the sense of integration with the world that comes from a practical existence, the sense of how man fulfils himself in the things he does, in the moral implicit in his work, that ideal of always being able to cope, whether on the deck of a sailing ship or on the page of a book.

This is the moral substance of Conrad’s fiction. And I am happy to discover that it is also there, in its pure form, in a work of non-fiction, The Mirror of the Sea, a collection of pieces on maritime topics: the techniques of mooring and setting sail, anchors, sails, cargo weights and so on. (The Mirror of the Sea has been translated into Italian – for the first time, I believe, and in beautiful Italian prose – by Piero Jahier, who must have had enormous fun, as well as agonising difficulty, translating all those nautical terms: it appears in volumes 10–11 of the complete works being published by Bompiani, which also contains the magnificent tales of ’Twixt Land and Sea, which has already appeared in the same translation in Einaudi’s Universale series.)

Who else but Conrad in these pieces has ever been able to write about the tools of his trade with such technical precision, such passionate enthusiasm, and in such an unrhetorical, unpretentious way? Rhetoric only comes out at the end with his exaltation of British naval supremacy, and his reevocation of Nelson and Trafalgar, but this also highlights a practical and polemical basis to these essays, which is always present when Conrad discusses the sea and ships, just when one thinks he is absorbed in contemplation of metaphysical profundities: he constantly stressed his regret for the passing of the ethos of the age of sailing ships, always rehearsed the myth of the British Navy whose age was now on the wane.

This was a typically English polemic, because Conrad was English, chose to be English and succeeded: if he is not situated in an English social context, if one considers him merely an ‘illustrious visitor’ in that literature, as Virginia Woolf defined him, one cannot give an exact historical definition of the man. That he was born in Poland, called Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzieniowski, and possessed a ‘Slav soul’ and a complex about abandoning his native land, and resembled Dostoevsky despite hating him for nationalistic reasons, are facts on which much has been written but which are not really of much interest to us. Conrad decided to enter the British Merchant Marine at the age of twenty, and English literature at the age of twenty-seven. He did not assimilate the family traditions of English society, nor its culture or religion (he was always averse to the latter); but he integrated with English society through the Merchant Navy, and made it his own past, the place where he felt mentally at home, and had nothing but contempt for whatever seemed to him contrary to that ethos. It was that quintessentially English personage, the gentleman captain, that he wanted to represent in his own life and in his creative works, though in widely differing incarnations, ranging from the heroic, romantic, quixotic and exaggerated to the over-ambitious, flawed and tragic. From MacWhirr, the impassive captain in Typhoon, to the protagonist of Lord Jim who tries to escape being obsessed by a single act of cowardice.

Lord Jim goes from being a captain to being a merchant: and here we find an even wider range of Europeans trafficking in the Tropics and ending up as outcasts there. These too were types Conrad had known during his naval experience in the Malaysian archipelago. The aristocratic etiquette of the maritime officer and the degradation of the failed adventurers are the two poles between which his human sympathies oscillate.

This fascination for pariahs, vagabonds and madmen is also evident in a writer far removed from Conrad, but more or less a contemporary, Maksim Gorki. And it is curious to note that an interest in this kind of humanity, so steeped in irrational, decadent complacency (an interest that was shared by a whole epoch of world literature, down to Knut Hamsun and Sherwood Anderson) was the terrain in which the British conservative as much as the revolutionary Russian found the roots of their robust and rigorous conception of man.

This has brought us round to the question of Conrad’s political ideas, of his fiercely reactionary spirit. Of course at the root of such an exaggerated, obsessive horror for revolution and revolutionaries (which led him to write whole novels against anarchists, without ever having known one, not even by sight) lay his upbringing as an aristocratic, land-owning Pole, and the milieu in which he lived as a young man in Marseilles, amidst Spanish monarchist exiles and American ex-slavers, shipping contraband arms for Don Carlos. But it is only by situating him in the English context that we can recognise in his stance a key historical configuration similar to Marx’s Balzac and Lenin’s Tolstoy.

Conrad lived through a period of transition for British capitalism and colonialism: the transition from sail to steam. His world of heroes was based on the culture of the small shipowners’ sailing ships, a world of rational clarity, of discipline at work, of courage and duty as opposed to the sordid spirit of profit. The new fleet of steamships owned by huge companies seemed to him squalid and worthless, like the captain and the officers of the ‘Patna’ who push Lord Jim into betraying himself. So, whoever still dreams of the old virtues either becomes a kind of Don Quixote, or surrenders, dragged down to the other pole of humanity in Conrad: the human relics, the unscrupulous commercial agents, the bureaucratic, colonial outcasts, all of Europe’s human dregs which were starting to fester in the colonies, and whom Conrad contrasts with the old romantic merchant-adventurers like his own Tom Lingard.

In the novel Victory, which takes place on a desert island, there is a fierce game of chase, which involves the unarmed, Quixote character Heyst, the squalid desperadoes, and the battling woman Lena, who accepts the struggle against evil, is eventually killed, but achieves a moral triumph over the chaos of the world.

For the fact is that in the midst of that aura of dissolution which often hovers over Conrad’s pages, his faith in man’s strengths never falters. Though far removed from any philosophical rigour, Conrad sensed that crucial moment in bourgeois thought when optimistic rationalism shed its final illusions and a welter of irrationalism and mysticism was unleashed on the world. Conrad saw the universe as something dark and hostile, but against it he marshalled the forces of man, his moral order, his courage. Faced with a black, chaotic avalanche raining down on him, and a conception of the world which was laden with mystery and despair, Conrad’s atheistic humanism holds the line and digs in, like MacWhirr in the middle of the typhoon. He was an incorrigible reactionary, but today his lesson can only be fully understood by those who have faith in the forces of man, and faith in those men who recognise their own nobility in the work they do, and who know that that ‘principle of fidelity’ which he held dear cannot be applied solely to the past.

[1954]