Sailors on the Inward Sea

by Lawrence Thornton

  But it was not just Fox-Bourne’s crime that was disappearing in the depths. Everyone sworn to silence was sinking too, leaving a trail of bubbles as they descended into the blackness, where they would be trapped by the crushing weight of the sea. Right or wrong, it was the law, and he respected the law more than most men, understood the necessity for it, but something more fundamental was at stake, his obligation as a writer. He could offend by remaining silent or by writing, and the latter was clearly the lesser evil. He began working the day he came up into the light with a sense of purpose he had not felt in a long time. With the first sentence he felt like Razumov had departing Laspara’s apartment, gravely wounded but free to walk in the cleansing rain.

  I had always admired Under Western Eyes, Ford, perhaps more than any of his novels, and could easily see why he called up Razumov’s spiritual victory to describe his own struggle with his conscience. I suppose it was inevitable that the question of writing would lead me back to how our day began with his evocation of “the old thing,” which I had been given to understand was somehow connected to the story, but I had seen no connection during the course of the day, and none now that it was drawing to a close. That was fine with me, quite a relief, actually. I asked what his agent thought of the book.

  “Pinker hasn’t seen it,” he said.

  “But it’s finished?”

  “Yes.”

  Knowing how desperate he always was for money, you’d think he would have rushed into town with the ink still wet on the last page and dropped it on Pinker’s desk. But then I realized that he might be leery of publishing because of legal problems associated with the Official Secrets Act.

  I said, “It’s 1924. The war’s been over seven years. I can’t believe there isn’t a statute of limitations.”

  “There may be,” he answered, “but that’s not the issue.”

  “What is?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Fox-Bourne. I gave him another name in the book but it’s a close portrait of him, an exact portrait, easily recognizable. The Valkerie incident is enhanced, put under a magnifying glass for dramatic purposes, but essentially the same. Anyone remotely acquainted with Fox-Bourne will recognize him. And the business with the U-boat won’t have gone unnoticed. You know how sailors are. There was plenty of time for the crew and officers to say what they knew before they learned of the injunction.”

  “I still don’t see the problem,” I said.

  “The old thing, Malone, with a slight twist. This time, it’s Fox-Bourne’s story. So I must give him the chance that I didn’t give you years ago. No one will see the book unless Fox-Bourne gives me permission to publish.”

  “You want his blessing.”

  “Approval, acquiescence, call it what you like. It eases my conscience and resolves the problem, once and for all.” He grinned and added, “That should appeal to you.”

  “Is this why you told me the story?”

  “There are worse reasons for spinning a yarn, Malone. I value your opinion of me. I wanted you to know that I could make amends.”

  “This is different. For one thing, there’s more at stake. You wouldn’t let the government stop you. Why let this bloody bastard?”

  “Outwardly it’s different. But not inwardly. My situation as a writer is identical. I appropriated Fox-Bourne’s story just as I did yours.”

  “He told you practically nothing,” I said angrily. “You wrote about what you experienced, what you thought. But even if you’d lifted the whole thing from him, it wouldn’t matter. My God, how many times have I said I don’t care, a hundred?”

  “But you see, that’s the difference. Fox-Bourne will care. The book will matter to him, immensely. I have to give him the choice.”

  “This wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for Marlow.”

  “That’s right. But Marlow exists. Marlow is the great, abiding fact. When this is over, whatever happens, I’ll be able to look the two of you in the eye, you and Marlow.”

  “You’re looking at me just fine right now. You’ve been looking at me for years.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  And I did, Ford, albeit grudgingly. Shifting in my chair, I glanced at the estuary, which had gone the color of gunmetal, the end-of-the-day color that would darken into night, a color and view I had known for over a quarter of a century. For a moment or two it seemed as if I were seeing the sweeping river as I had in the old days when the gang swapped tales on the Nellie. Just as quickly I was back in the present, irritated by Conrad’s refusal to let the issue go. When I looked at him I saw the same stubbornness he had presented years earlier at Pent Farm when we discussed the Marlow question for the first time.

  “Too much empathy,” I ventured, “gets in the way of clear thinking.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know you are,” he said dryly. “You must have considered the cost when you were worried about what to do with Jim. I seem to remember that your empathy covered quite a period of time, yes, and led to no end of worry.”

  Having turned my observation on its head, he waited for my next effort, but none was forthcoming. Though his notion seemed absurd to me—in certain ways it still does—I had run out of arguments.

  “You’ve already sent him the manuscript?”

  “A week ago Tuesday, with a letter explaining my position. Nothing about you or Marlow, of course.”

  “You know damned good and well that he’ll turn you down cold.”

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? I remember what he said while you were at sea, what he told the board. You’re the one who once said that the leopard can never change his spots.”

  “Everything was fresh then, Malone. Seven years is a long time. There’s a chance his conscience may have started to get the better of him.”

  “You’re talking like a writer,” I said. “Sacrificing his career to his conscience, assuming he has one, sounds very far-fetched.”

  “Any more than Jim going to Doramin?”

  He had me, Ford, laying before me the perfect example of the reversal I had sneered at. I don’t know how you feel about it but for me there is no scene more moving in Lord Jim than the final one where Jim goes before the chieftain, Doramin, and takes responsibility for the death of his son, Dain Waris. My God! It gives me the chills remembering Jim walking through the crowd of villagers toward Doramin, who sits with that pair of flintlock pistols on his knees while a man in the crowd says of Jim, “ ‘He hath taken it upon his own head’ . . . going away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.” I could have put up an argument based on the difference between Jim and Fox-Bourne, pointing out that Jim’s excessive romanticism made him vulnerable to such larger-than-life gestures, but it wouldn’t have negated Conrad’s comparison. Besides, he wanted to believe such a change of heart was possible for Fox-Bourne because, despite everything, the man was one of us, a member of our tribe who had shared our values until that fatal day. And, like you, Ford, he was more intimately acquainted with the human heart than I was or ever will be, capable of seeing into its depths and not afraid to look. Yes, such a change seemed fantastical to me, but I was not about to undermine him.

  “So,” I said, “how does the book end?”

  “With him leaving the building after the hearing, aware that everyone is watching, sickened by what has happened.”

  “Going where?”

  “That was hard, Malone. I decided not to say.”

  It was typical Conrad, ambiguous, the story turning back on itself, reminding you of a hall of mirrors or the Uroboros that makes a circle by swallowing its tail. The more I thought about what he had done the more subtly ironic it seemed, the tragedy embedded in all the characters’ minds playing itself out over and over in the imposed silence, none of them able to forget or rest. When I asked if that were intentional he smiled and said it was. He had wanted to yoke the men in the w
ater to the Official Secrets Act in such a way that the injunction kept them alive in the reader’s mind and in the characters’ as well. It was then that an idea came to me out of nowhere. I asked if while he was working on the novel he had decided to allow Fox-Bourne to vet it.

  “From the beginning,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because I just now thought it might be interesting if you included that, showed him receiving the manuscript sometime down the line and what he did.”

  “I see what you’re getting at, Malone, but it would break the flow, and that’s not something you want to do at the end. Besides, it would make his fate too explicit.”

  “On the other hand, it might intrigue your readers, if you have any.”

  “That doesn’t matter. It hasn’t from the day I started the book.”

  “Why the devil not?”

  “I wrote it for myself—and you. If Fox-Bourne agrees to publication, I’ll be happy. If not, I know what I’ve done.”

  “All that wasted effort.”

  “It wasn’t wasted.”

  He meant it, too. There was satisfaction in his gaze, a sense of accomplishment and resolution that sprang from the depths of that capacious mind, a great ocean of a mind that was too big for me to navigate. In the face of something so powerful and subtle you can only acquiesce to what you have been told, trust that there are sufficient reasons.

  “No,” he said again, “it wasn’t wasted at all.”

  With that he put his hands on his knees and pushed himself up, groaning a little from the effort, his face glowing like alabaster in the fading sunlight. He took a deep breath the way one does after something has been accomplished and very deliberately looked the Nellie up and down, taking her in from stem to stern.

  “I am so fond of this boat.”

  “Everyone is.”

  “ ‘We have lost the first of the ebb.’ Do you remember the rest?”

  “ ‘The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.’ ”

  It was a stirring moment, Ford, the last sentence of that amazing story—a sentence you helped Conrad get right—erasing all the years that had passed since he wrote it, the narrator’s voice taking us back to the old days when the tale first entered his imagination, ravishing him, offering a way to explore some of his deepest beliefs, all of it coming back—the inclement weather; the sluggish tide; our friends, boon companions, listening to the raw, shapeless narrative that he molded into a vision—returning in his voice though I was the one speaking the words, as if Conrad were a ventriloquist and I his puppet, yet in its primitive version it was I who held him captive. He nodded, acknowledging the layered past, the many levels revealed by that sad, elegiac sentence and its history that was gnarled as the limbs of an old oak reaching out in innumerable directions, nodded, smiled, shouldered his bag, and held out his hand, shaking mine warmly and with what felt like a kind of finality.

  “I’ll write as soon as I hear from Fox-Bourne,” he said.

  “And I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, for your sake.”

  Fitting his monocle on its black satin cord to his eye, he went down the gangway, the boards sagging a bit, adding a false spring to each step. When he reached the bottom he looked round, his eyes playing over me and the Nellie, the fading sun caught in the lens reminding me of Stephen’s wafer, the sign of our day’s beginning, while behind him the dock stretched into the distance, a thick brown avenue darkening at its farthest reach.

  Then he was walking away. I felt like running after him so we could walk the rest of the way to the cab stand together. He clearly wasn’t well. In addition to that burden and the question of what would happen to his novel, he had to deal with the discouraging news about Jessie, which had come out in dribs and drabs during the day. It was frustrating knowing there was nothing I could do, and I suppose that played into my hope that he was right about Fox-Bourne. In my mind the book at that stage of its existence had already become a mix of testimony and eulogy. I wanted him to have the pleasure of publishing it, wanted it for his sake, you understand, as well as for those poor bastards who had drowned, though I thought it very unlikely that it would see the light of day.

  When I told him I would give Fox-Bourne the benefit of the doubt I had done so out of affection and loyalty, not because I actually believed the man would act against his own best interests. I had known only two people in my lifetime who had done such a thing, and neither risked anything like the ignominy Fox-Bourne faced, the personal destruction, the loss of his livelihood, the possibility of serving time in prison. Nevertheless, I put my faith in Conrad, reminding myself that he was one of the wisest men I had ever known, a connoisseur of the human heart, privy to secrets that are denied most of us and thus in a far better position to judge than I was. And I found some encouragement in the fact that I knew Fox-Bourne only secondhand. Conrad had lived through that terrible day with him and taken his measure during the long calvary of the inquiry, seeing something during those encounters that let him believe the man was capable of enlightened self-sacrifice. It could have been as subtle as a glance or a candid exchange between the two of them when they were alone that he had withheld in his telling for reasons known only to him.

  What I did know was that Jim’s case hovered in the background, reminding him that a man who strays from the hallowed fixed standard of conduct is not necessarily lost forever. I also knew that he was thinking about Borys and what he himself might have done had he come face-to-face with men who could have been responsible for his son’s death. His ability to keep an open mind about the captain seemed positively saintly and I think it was this example of forbearance that softened my view of Fox-Bourne. I imagined him in his cabin reading Conrad’s letter under the gaze of Edward and his wife, blanching, his lips moving in some brief utterance, his thoughts surely returning to the hearing room at Lowestoft the moment Admiral Worthy dismissed the charges against him. That would all seem like a dream as he read the letter and then started on the manuscript, seeing everything again, the Brigadier and the Valkerie, the last German disappearing in the fog. Much as I despised the man, my heart went out to him when I thought of how his carefully constructed persona of a captain in the Royal Navy was being dismantled before his eyes, his medals stripped away, everything he had worked for gone. Even if Conrad had explained what lay behind Fox-Bourne’s order to change course and described the rage and loss that lay behind it, real, heart-wrenching things, even if he sympathized with the ancient desire for vengeance, even then Fox-Bourne would see a portrait of a guilty man that would make the book’s readers hope that his fate would be commensurate with what he deserved. Given all that, he would have to be possessed of remarkable reserves of strength and courage to let the book go forth into the public eye.

  Conrad had reached the far end of the dock, where the sky, crosshatched with masts, spars, and lines, looked like the background sketching in a drawing. A moment later he seemed to merge with a thick mast and then I saw him again and it went on like that with him coming in and out of view, growing smaller each time until I lost him.

  IV

  * * *

  Enter Marlow

  I’VE BEEN TRUANT for a week, Ford. Not a single word has gotten on the page, a consequence of mental fatigue. Six months of writing—more than I have done in my life—has left me short of the halfway point with the most difficult part still to come. When I started I had no idea how enervating it would be to relive the emotions that make up such a large part of the story, or that I would feel them again so deeply while I wrote and even afterward, when they lingered, coloring my perceptions of other things. Nor did I know that the events they sprang from would come back in Conrad’s voice just as if he were talking to me again, paraphrasing his book, sometimes declaiming whole sentences that opened my heart wide to that terrible day at sea. And that intensity exte
nded to material which was mine alone. For instance, as I described Conrad walking off I felt him so close, immediate, so vital, that our parting could have been happening for the first time. Yet the experience was more complex than that because, like Cassandra, I knew what was coming so that the present and future seemed to be unfolding simultaneously in my mind, each step Conrad took on the dock leading him away from the Nellie and moving me closer to revelations and heartbreaks I did not have the energy to confront for a while. I am not, as you once described yourself, “an old man mad about writing.”

  The morning after I finished the last part I left the bungalow before the heat had a chance to settle over the city, taking a betjak to an out-of-the-way section of the Old Port, where I keep my junk. She is utterly devoid of the Nellie’s virtues—no sleek white hull, no grace under sail—an altogether different kind of vessel, which happens to suit my purposes quite well. She is the color of dried tobacco leaves, high in the stem and stern, her cabin resembling a hut with a curved roof, sturdy enough to be sailing long after I’m gone. She had been shut tight for weeks, and even after I removed the padlocks and squares of wood that fit over her door and windows she reeked of odors coaxed from her old timbers by the heat, a medley of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, gutta-percha, cooking oil, dried fish, along with traces of her previous owners, their sweat as well as their ghostly presences—a fair number since she is upwards of a hundred years old and from the look of her never saw a day’s rest until I bought her. The scars on her hull, the repairs, the Chinese ideogram carved into the cabin wall that I have not succeeded in deciphering though I suspect it says something about good luck, testify to multiple irrecoverable histories. Of the boats in my life, she is second in this regard only to the Nellie.

  Every day last week I sailed the junk as far as the buoys in the outer harbor, where I fished for my lunch in the shadows of the big ships and gave into nostalgia for the old days when I ordered my crew to drop anchor off some exquisite shore and waited for word from the harbormaster to proceed into port. Except for those forays, I let the hours pass as they might, watching the commerce of the port, ships being loaded and unloaded by brown-skinned men in bright sarongs, vendors with pushcarts selling food and drink, sailors from a dozen countries looking for amusement. I read and spent time with people I have come to know down here, consciously averting my thoughts from Conrad and Fox-Bourne, and in the process began to return to an even keel.