Sailors on the Inward Sea

by Lawrence Thornton

  An annual Hindu celebration was begun at the end of the week that entailed lighting candles fixed to hundreds of small squares of wood that are floated into the bay from the beach and the end of the jetty, symbolic prayers to multitudinous gods. To my Western eyes the flames looked like an armada of burning ships. At dawn, dozens of these squares, all humped with melted candle wax, littered the bay like water lilies in a pond, eventually washing up onshore or drifting out to sea on the tides. Two nights ago the ritual ended with a street party in the Hindu enclave, a raucous affair of blaring horns, bare-chested men performing feats of strength, acrobats whose tumbling reminded me of the many-armed Shiva, Lord of the Dance, food so hot it seared the tongue, a pristine bacchanal that kept me up until sunrise and necessitated spending all of yesterday in bed.

  I woke refreshed this morning, ready to pick up the thread of the story where I had left it, with Conrad disappearing in the hatchwork of lines and masts, an image that serves a larger purpose than nostalgia, no less than a sign for all that is coming, the background an entrance as well as an exit.

  The day after he had come to see me on the Nellie I was up early, eager to go to work. Boat repair, if you care about it and aren’t just killing time or doing patchwork to keep your vessel afloat, is precise, painstaking labor. Results, things you can look at and take pride in, are slow in coming, which is to say you must learn to find your pleasure in the doing, which is what Conrad meant in Heart of Darkness when Marlow went on the river boat:

  No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

  The point is that I enjoyed myself notwithstanding the suspense Conrad had created. I was determined to make the Nellie shine as brightly as she did the day her builders launched her up in Glasgow, a task that was equal parts pride and sentimentality driven by all she meant to me. Once I settled down, I kept going from morning until dusk and occasionally later with the help of a lamp.

  Toward the end of the week I took a break at midmorning to visit the post office, where I hoped to find amid my bills and correspondence the letter Conrad promised. Fox-Bourne had been in possession of the manuscript for quite some time so far as I could tell, long enough, at any rate, to have come to a decision. Day after day I left my work and walked up to the road in that wretched heat, under a sky that seemed to have been dyed a sickly yellow, sweating profusely, returning empty-handed to the relative comfort of the water and the occasional cat’s-paw, wondering what was going on in Fox-Bourne’s head and occasionally, despite my contempt for him, feeling a twinge of sympathy as I would for anyone faced with such a dilemma.

  The silence lasted precisely a fortnight. During that time I had seen practically nobody other than Sebold, whose ship chandlery I frequented for parts and advice, taking advantage of his experience to discuss the best way to fix braces and the like. Conrad was a steady presence in my mind while I worked, rather like the lector Crane told of seeing in a Cuban cigar factory sitting on a high stool and reading to the laborers, a singular beneficence whose like I have never heard of elsewhere in the world. Parts of his story came back, or drifted down from his lofty perch, especially the descriptions of the collision between the Brigadier and the Valkerie and its immediate aftermath, Whelan’s lifeless body flung across the rail, Fox-Bourne standing at the wheel, blinking in response to each faint cry.

  As the days had worn on, I found myself thinking about our friendship, plucking events from the thirty years we had known each other that bore on his decision to give Fox-Bourne the power of life or death over his manuscript. As I have said, his gamble in that regard irritated me no end, but it was not surprising. In packing up those pages and shipping them off, he was at once acknowledging the power of the old thing over him and taking advantage of a chance to resolve an issue that went straight to the heart of his creative process and played a large part in how he saw himself as an artist.

  I should tell you now, Ford, by way of fair warning, that I had a stake in the outcome of that gamble—a very personal stake. What lay behind the old thing and had precipitated his act bound us together like links in an anchor chain, superceding all other connections, including our common love of the sea and shared views on the great unanswerable questions regarding man’s fate and purpose and what about us as a species is worth preserving. The fate of the Brigadier’s story, the Valkerie’s story, Fox-Bourne’s book—one could easily call it any of these and I won’t discriminate among them—refocused my attention. I was grateful for the lull, Ford. It allowed me to see more clearly than I had before the trajectory of this issue and track it through time to its presumed conclusion—whatever Fox-Bourne chose to do. An explanation is long overdue. I want to spin time backward to the day in 1903 that I learned that Conrad had borrowed a number of my experiences and put them in his books.

  TWENTY-ONE YEARS before I had acquired the Nellie, I had stopped for a pint at a waterfront tavern I frequented, the Sailors’ Ease. Driven indoors by a raw wind off the North Sea that had been getting up all day, I stepped inside as a gust slammed the door behind me so hard the windows rattled. Everyone looked up. I shrugged my shoulders as if to say it wasn’t my fault and was heading toward the bar when out of the corner of my eye I saw a man sitting at a corner table leap to his feet and call my name. He was halfway across the room, his bushy red beard jutting out in front of him like a bowsprit, before I recognized Clive Jones, who had served as first mate on a China schooner I had commanded years earlier. I was delighted to see him, Ford. Much as there is to commend the sailor’s life, it has its drawbacks and none is greater than the gypsy nature of the profession. We come into contact with men from all over the earth, some too different from ourselves for friendship, but there are plenty who are like us, the kind we would be happy to stick with the rest of our lives, stand up for at weddings, act as godfather to their tykes, that sort of thing. All too often they sail away never to be seen again. Clive was one of the latter and I threw my arm around his shoulders possessively. With the help of tankards of ale we filled in the years since we had last been together with a kind of sailor’s shorthand—another peculiarity of the profession that is necessary since such meetings often last only a few hours—names of ships and ports, routes sailed, shipmates, that sort of thing.

  Clive had done very well, holding a succession of posts that led to a master’s ticket and command of a vessel owned by a Hong Kong firm that had just arrived and was taking on cargo for a circuitous return voyage. Competence is generally all a captain expects from men who come to the life early, sometimes without even needing a razor—as was the case with me—often from homes where a trade of any kind is the most they can hope for. They grow up on the sea without learning to read or write, and consequently are not given to talking about things that have no direct bearing on their work. Clive was an exception. He had the advantage of an education at the hands of a country parson in Wiltshire that had made him an avid reader. When his work aboard ship was done, I invariably found him curled up on a bunk, or in fine weather plopped down on the deck, oblivious to everything but the book in his hand. Many nights the two of us discussed our reading while the stars moved in stately procession across the sky and a full moon turned the sea into a silvery plain. If we tired of books, we entertained each other with our own stories much as you and I are pretending to be doing now.

  After a lunch of steak and kidney pies Clive gave me a long, appraising look.

  “There’s something I have to ask,” he said. “Are you familiar with an author named Joseph Conrad?”

  “Yes,” I answered with a laugh, “he’s a friend of mine. We sailed together years
ago. Why do you ask?”

  “How much of his work have you read?”

  I said that I knew Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands and had recently bought The Nigger of the Narcissus.

  “But not Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim?”

  The first title meant nothing to me. I was surprised by the second, which happened to be the name given to a friend of mine by some natives he had befriended, a young man whose story I had told to Conrad and the gang on the Nellie.

  “Really,” I said, “Lord Jim?”

  Clive looked at me intently, skeptically, his expression all but saying that he doubted my credulity and I must know more than I was letting on. He eyed me over the rim of his tankard, which he then put down carefully. It was a remarkable novel, he said, one of the best he had read in years, set in territory I knew, the Malay Archipelago, and that was not the only point of interest. The story was virtually identical to one I had related to him long ago on the China Sea of a rattletrap ship called the Palestine, whose young mate disgraced himself in an act of cowardice. Heart of Darkness also relied on experiences I had discussed with him. But what he had found most striking, stunning, to say the least, was that Conrad had made me the narrator of both books.

  “He calls the chap Marlow, but it’s you, no doubt about it. He’s got your voice down pat. I hadn’t read more than a page before I said to myself, ‘By God, that’s Jack Malone.’ ”

  It was raining but I could see the boats along the waterfront and the sea beyond flecked with whitecaps, people walking along with their heads bent, collars upturned, all of it perfectly normal and thus in sharp contrast to what Clive had said, the news so utterly unexpected that I was at a loss for a reply. Suddenly I recollected a time—it must have been 1899 or thereabouts—when Conrad had stopped by to see me in London on his way to deliver a manuscript to his agent. When I asked about the book he dismissed it as a “little adventure of the sea” and I recalled that he had then changed the subject rather quickly.

  Other things came back. For days after I had told those stories on the Nellie, Conrad had plied me with questions about the principals, George Antoine Klein and Jim (I never knew his last name), questions that in retrospect seemed clearly intended to uncover my deeper feelings toward those fellows and the events that had shaped them. You remember how skilled he was at that sort of thing, Ford, able in a few words to cut through the fog and clutter to the essence of an issue. I was happy to oblige, going on at length, explaining how the time I had spent with them represented the high-water mark of my experience, philosophically speaking. There was nothing mysterious about Conrad borrowing those stories; they were irresistible, wonderful, terrible, what any writer would give his eyeteeth for, and I was more than a little curious to find out how closely he had followed my lead.

  “What drives Klein?” I asked.

  “The character’s name is Kurtz. Ambition, I suppose, overweening ambition. He seems to think of himself as godlike.”

  That was Klein, Ford, the very pith and essence of the man I’d talked about to Conrad.

  “Does Jim meet someone named Jackson?”

  “He’s called Brown, Gentleman Brown, the worst sort of reprobate. He asks Jim if there’s nothing in his life he’s ashamed of that wouldn’t change his mind about letting Brown get out of the scrape he’s in.”

  “Is there an old German named Viereck?”

  “There’s one called Stein.”

  “Does Marlow rely on him for advice?”

  “He does.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Profound, though he talks almost exclusively in metaphors.”

  I had heard enough to satisfy my curiosity. I was puzzled, naturally, and still off my stride, which I think prompted Clive to reconsider.

  “Listen, Jack,” he said, fingering his beard, “I feel I’ve talked out of school. I just thought . . . It’s the voice that got to me. I could hear you going on quite as you used to. It was like Conrad had taken you over.”

  I laughed, saying there was nothing so unusual about that, all writers engaged in conjuring people and places and things. I saw no reason to add that Conrad’s secrecy intrigued me. It seemed to be a more personal issue, and since it didn’t cast a particularly flattering light on him, I decided to keep my feelings to myself. The problem was that it was not like Conrad, not in the least. You know as well as I do that he inclined in exactly the opposite direction, toward frankness that sometimes embarrassed even his closest friends. At the same time, I was fascinated that I had been plunked down in the middle of his books rather like a ventriloquist’s dummy, spouting whatever Conrad thought appropriate.

  I watched the storm bearing down on the city through the wavy glass of the old windows, each pane dotted with tiny pockets of air that had been trapped while the glass was being poured into frames to cool. The rain had developed into a steady downpour, a cloudburst that was virtually silent since the Sailors’ Ease was on the ground floor of a three-storied, half-timbered building. Gusts swept across the road obliterating the cobblestones, striking the curbs, running off in the gutters, the kind of storm that makes you glad to be inside. We remembered some weather we had sailed through off the coast of Spain, near Galicia, that had ruined half our sails. I could have gone on reminiscing, but as I was aware of time running out, I pressed Clive to tell me about his life. I wanted particulars so that when I thought of him afterward I would have a vision of a village, a house on a road with a garden, apple trees, his wife and children, that sort of thing.

  Half an hour later he pulled out a pocket watch and said that he hated to go but he had to oversee the loading of some fragile cargo. We walked over to the door and shook hands, both saying that we hoped we’d meet again. He had his hand on the knob when he turned and said, “Look here, Jack. I hope I did the right thing. I’d feel terrible if I thought I’d damaged your friendship.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Conrad and I have known each other a long time. It would take a good deal more than this to cause trouble.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I know you’ll read the books because of Marlow but there’s more to them than him. They’re wonderful in different ways. There’s a character in Heart of Darkness called the Harlequin who tells you . . . Marlow . . . that Kurtz enlarged his mind. That’s what they did for me.”

  “Well,” I said, “I can always use improvement.”

  “I’m serious. I wish I were lucky enough to know the man. He must be something.”

  “He is cantankerous, opinionated, moody, warm, devoted, indispensable. You’d like him, and he’d like you.”

  With that we shook hands again and he went out into the rain, walking close to the buildings, his upturned collar swallowing all but the peak of his cap. I watched until he turned left at the corner and then went back inside. I intended to track down the books before going home, but since it was raining so hard I decided to wait out the storm and spent the next hour playing whist with some men who had gotten up a game at a corner table.

  I do well at games of chance, Ford, but even though I was the clear winner I couldn’t enjoy my luck with Marlow looking over my shoulder. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was deuced odd learning that I had become a character in a book, my emotions and ideas, everything about me on display like the mirrors, glasses, plates, old watches that are laid out on a flea-market table that anyone can pick up and examine. I wondered if Conrad had taken liberties with me, what they were, which aspects of my character he had kept intact, which he altered or discarded, indeed, whether I would even like Marlow.

  Writing about this, I can’t help thinking about Fox-Bourne fresh from reading Conrad’s letter. The manuscript would be close to hand, its bulk a reproach, filled with unknown hazards. The two of us were grist for Conrad’s imagination (and in Fox-Bourne’s case his ire), the one difference being that whereas I was worried about Conrad distorting my
nature for artistic purposes, Fox-Bourne would have known that he had drawn an exact portrait of him down to the cleft in his chin. Knowing that, I wondered, how long would he wait before he began to read the novel? Minutes? Hours? Days? He had to be fascinated despite Conrad’s warning in the cover letter that he had not gone easy on him. The truth is, I doubt there was any appreciable difference in the way we thought of those narratives, none in the least.

  BY THE TIME we finished the second game, the rain had let up. I thanked my companions for letting me play and went outside. The wind was still blowing but I didn’t mind. In light that was the color of lead I walked a block before the heavens opened again. The wind howled under the eaves. Water rose in the gaps between the stones and pooled at intersections, where cars sent up spray that reached all the way to windows and doors, soaking an old couple tottering along ahead of me. I was dripping wet, a condition that usually causes me great irritation on land, where I entertain the notion that sailors should be immune from the elements that are their daily bread at sea, but that afternoon I enjoyed contending with the storm, walking determinedly with my head bent for upward of a mile before I reached a square across which I saw a sign for Thomas and Sons, Booksellers, glowing like a lighthouse off Lands End.

  When I opened the door stained by spray halfway up to the knocker, a bell tinkled. As I closed it I noticed a strong smell of cooking, the peculiar reek of cabbage. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the weak light of lamps set here and there with no regard for efficiency. I could just make out the spines of books and a few gilt titles. If the place were mine, I would have made sure the customers could see, which presupposed that the owner had an interest in selling his wares. As is often the case with such establishments, he probably prized everything and would only reluctantly part with a dusty tome. I walked down the dim aisles, convinced that his vision must be terrible, a price he was willing to pay to keep his treasures obscured, imagining him groping among the shelves, touching the spines of his favorites, which were arranged under signs atop the shelves announcing History, Politics, Religion, Poetry, Fiction, the last decorated with two arrows pointing downward.