Lord Jim can be told in a single sentence: Jim jumps from a sinking ship and then faces a life without honour. The tale was, Conrad wrote to his editor at Blackwood’s, ‘the development of one situation, only one really from beginning to end’. It is not a complicated plot and nor is Jim an enigmatic figure, but in Conrad’s hands the story becomes manifold and Jim’s consciousness a maze. ‘Imagine a fat, furry spider with a green head and shining points for eyes, busily at work, some dewy morning, on a marvellous web,’ wrote the reviewer for The Critic, ‘and you have the plot of Lord Jim. It spins itself away, out of nothing, with sidetracks leading, apparently, nowhere, and cross tracks that start back and begin anew and end once more.’ Conrad’s preferred method of narration is a story within a story: most of the book is contained in quotation marks, sometimes three in a row — ‘ ‘’ ” — and it is Captain Marlow’s role to hold the different frames together. Lord Jim opens with Conrad’s narrator introducing Jim to the reader: ‘He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you.’ In the fifth chapter, this first narrator disappears and Marlow takes over the story. ‘After a good spread, two hundred feet above sea level, with a box of decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight,’ Marlow tells a gathering of sea dogs how he attended the Patna inquiry and afterwards invited Jim to dinner in the Malabar Hotel.
At the end of chapter twenty-one, Marlow tells us that his ‘last words about Jim shall be few’, but his last words continue for another twenty-four chapters. Lord Jim is all talk: talk framed within talk; talk spinning itself away out of nothing. It is remarkable how much talk Jim’s jump manages to generate. A column called ‘Books to Cut’ in the November 1900 issue of the British journal Public Opinion concluded: ‘Words cannot describe the weary effect of all this… we long to get on and skip all this chatter, to discover into what sort of man Jim really develops.’
This is not the only occasion that Marlow talks about Jim. Throughout his life, Conrad tells us, ‘many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly. Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar-ends.’ When he remembers Jim, Marlow becomes ‘very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past’.
It is not only Marlow who talks about Jim. In Conrad’s novel, wrote the reviewer for the Daily News, ‘no one talks unless it is to discuss Jim’. The scandal had, Marlow says, ‘an extraordinary power of defying the shortness of memories and the length of time: it seemed to live, with a sort of uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their tongues. I’ve had the questionable pleasure of meeting it often, years afterwards, thousands of miles away, emerging from the remotest possible talk.’ Everyone has something to say about Jim, and much of it is extraordinary. One man, a German butterfly collector called Stein, compares Jim’s psychological state to that of Hamlet, who also delays action and is then racked with existential doubt. Ja! Ja! In general, adapting the words of your great poet: That is the question… how to be! Ach! How to be.’
On this particular night, two hundred feet above sea level, so much talk is generated by the facts of Jim’s case that Conrad’s reviewers mocked the novel’s claims to realism. ‘This after-dinner story, told without a break,’ wrote Arnold Bennett in an unsigned review for Academy, in November 1900, ‘consists of about 99,000 words. Now it is unreasonable to suppose that the narrator, who chose his words with care, spoke at a greater rate than 150 words a minute, which means that he was telling the after-dinner story to his companions for eleven solid hours.’ Time is nothing to a sailor — this is the difference between shore people and sea people — and Conrad responded that ‘men have been known, both in the tropics and in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night “swapping yarns”… whereas all that part of the book which is Marlow’s narrative can be read through aloud, I should say, in less than three’. Other reviewers were baffled by the book. ‘More readable novels, better novels in every way, have already been published by the score,’ said The Sketch, but ‘none more strange, none more genuinely extraordinary. Lord Jim is an impossible book — impossible in scheme, impossible in style. It is a short character sketch, written and rewritten to infinity, dissected into shreds, masticated into tastelessness. The story — the little story it contains — is told by an outsider, a tiresome, garrulous, philosophising bore. And yet it is undeniably the work of a man of genius.’
All this writing and rewriting, this torrent of words, came out of years of solitude and silence. ’Lord Jim is a great book, a wonderful book, a magnificent book,’ wrote William Alden (also, coincidentally, the name of Senator Smith) in the New York Times Book Review on 1 December 1900. ‘Here, then, is a work of genius — of unique and superb genius… It is a phenomenon almost as strange as the author himself — the man who spent a lifetime at sea, dealing with the roughest places of life, and living wholly without books, then suddenly showing himself to be one of the most striking writers known to English Literature.’ Perhaps the best description of the book’s appeal came later from Albert Guerard, who wrote: ’Lord Jim is a novel of intellectual and moral suspense, and the mystery to be solved, or conclusion to be reached, lives not in Jim but in ourselves. Can we, faced by the ambiguities and deceptions oflife itself… apprehend the whole experience humanely? Can we come to recognise the full complexity of any simple case, and respond both sympathetically and morally to see Jim and his version of “how to be”?’5
Conrad, for whom English — which he learned aged twenty-one — was his third language, is never as relaxed as Marlow. This is one of the differences between the two captains. Captain Marlow is Conrad’s English orator; his cadences are commanding and clear while Conrad’s thick Polish accent weighed down a voice already heavy with gloom. Conrad was not a natural public speaker, but he was a conversationalist who knew the power of exchange. Talk for Conrad was romantic or it was nothing.
Edward Garnett, his first reader at Unwin’s, describes the writer’s conversation as ‘a romance; free and swift, it implied, in ironical flashes, that though we hailed from different planets the same tastes animated us… there was a blend of caressing, almost feminine intimacy with masculine incisiveness’. When Marlow and Jim talk it becomes a sentimental education for them both: Jim’s story is less interesting than Marlow’s interest in Jim’s story; that Marlow is fascinated by Jim makes Marlow himself fascinating, and Jim’s words are rich because Marlow makes so much of them. More than any other writer, Conrad understands the difficulties of language: the subject on which he has most to say is the horror of being able to say nothing at all, of words drying up and failing the speaker. Speech might be no more a serried circle flying around an immovable fact, but so long as it keeps on coming, there is hope of some kind of meaning. For Conrad the modernist, meaning is always carved out of language but words are also ‘the great foes of reality’, as he puts it in Under Western Eyes. ‘There comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.’
When we first meet Marlow in Youth (1898), he is forty-two and drinking claret at a mahogany table with four other men who ‘share the bond of the sea’. The narrator, one of the group, tells us that this story ‘could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak’. Marlow — ‘(at least I think that is how he spelt his name)’ — then relates the tale of his first voyage as a young sailor twenty-two years earlier. ‘You fellows know,’ Marlow begins, ‘there are those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence.’ His ship, the Judea, is an ancient masted rig transporting 600 tons of coal to Bangkok. The coal spontaneously combusts and a fire breaks out in the bunker; after burning for days the shi
p is finally destroyed but the crew are saved. The fate of the Judea represents the end of the age of sail: all ships will soon be powered by coal. But the story is elegiac in other ways too: Marlow’s subject is the exuberance of youth and its ‘romance of illusions’. What to an older man is a harrowing experience at sea is, to a younger man, an awakening, an adventure. The days of his youth were when Marlow was happiest, and the group around the table drink to ‘youth and the sea. Glamour and the sea! The good, strong sea, the salt, bitter sea, that could whisper to you, and roar at you and knock your breath out of you.’
We meet him for the second time in Heart of Darkness (1902), when Marlow is on board the Nellie telling his companions the story of Kurtz, an ivory trader who lives as a demi-god in the Congo. ‘Do you see him?’ Marlow asks; ‘Do you see the story? Do you see anything?’ The opacity of Conrad’s prose sometimes makes it hard for his reader to see very much; E. M. Forster said that ‘the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel’. But Conrad’s aim as a writer is ‘to make you hear, to make you feel… to make you see’, to give the reader ‘encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. From the introduction to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, this is the most perfect explanation in the language of why we read and also the most beautiful, the most extraordinary, of all Conrad’s beautiful, extraordinary sentences. We read because we are looking for something we have forgotten, and this is why we need Marlow. He is a detective searching for clues.
Marlow wants us to see Kurtz and to see the Judea and to see Jim and to see the story; he wants us to see everything, even the invisible. But Conrad only wants us to see Marlow. Jim may be a coward or an idealist, a romantic or a criminal, but he is fixated on a single idea — the loss of his heroism. We see him as clearly, or as unclearly, as we see ourselves: the best of us would do what he did: Jim is Everyman, Marlow insists. But there are very few men like Marlow, men who live on land ‘as a bird rests on the branch of a tree, so tense with the power of brusque flight into its true element that it is incomprehensible why it should sit still minute after minute’. Marlow is a detective but he is also a High Romantic; he belongs to the tradition of Romantic wanderers, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner — which poem Conrad loved and whose lunar imagery suffuses Lord Jim — who have outlasted illusions but still thirst for something more. To Marlow, the quenching of this thirst can only be done at sea. Shore-dwellers are aliens whose solid world is closed, cluttered, imaginatively impoverished. Only in the presence of the endless monotony of the ocean can one immerse oneself in reflection.
It is typical of Marlow that he does not wander into Lord Jim until we have settled down into chapter four, at which point he kidnaps the story. ‘That preposterous master mariner’, as Henry James called him, is Conrad’s other self, his double; Marlow is the English gentleman Conrad can never be. ‘The man Marlow and I came together,’ Conrad explained, ‘in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships. This one has ripened. For all his assertiveness in matters of opinion [Marlow] is not an intrusive person. He haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time. Yet I don’t think that either of us would care much to survive the other… Of all my people he’s the one that has never been a vexation to my spirit. A most discreet, understanding man.’6 Marlow ‘lives as he dreams — alone’ and therefore comes without a biography. A ‘lanky, loose’ figure with a ‘narrow, veiled glance’, Marlow is ‘quietly composed in varied shades of brown robbed of every vestige of gloss’. He has no history, home, family or friends, no connections to the world in which he takes such an interest and of which he has such luminous understanding. He does not even possess a consistent personality; in Marlow the very idea of personality is obliterated. He is simply a mind in which ‘some notion’ is chased ‘round and round… just for the fun of the thing’.
Like all mariners, Marlow is a threshold figure; wherever we find him, he is neither quite on land nor quite at sea. Whether on a deck or a verandah, in a port, a harbour hotel or moored at the mouth of a river, he is standing apart, looking on. Without having known the love of a mother, sister, wife or mistress, he is unencumbered by women. ‘You say I don’t know women,’ Marlow explains in Chance, the novel in which he tries to get to know one. ‘Maybe. It’s just as well not to come too close to the shrine. But I have a clear notion of woman. In all of them, termagant, flirt, crank, washerwoman, blue-stocking, outcast and even in the ordinary fool… there is something left, if only a spark.’ Sea creatures are less strange to Marlow than females. ‘As to honour — you know — it’s a fine medieval inheritance which women never got hold of… In addition they are devoid of decency. I mean masculine decency.’ Over twelve years and in four separate books, Conrad needs Marlow to expound on women, youth, imperialism, cowardice, honour and fidelity. Only in Chance, where Marlow makes his final appearance, do we find him out of his element. This story of the blue-eyed, red-lipped Flora de Barral, suffocated by the combination of her husband’s magnanimity and her father’s incestuous love, was Conrad’s least satisfying and most commercially successful book. He called it his ‘girl-novel’.
Conrad’s writing is filled with irreversible acts, with men — and occasionally women — who gamble and lose and are forced to live on. When Marlow first talks to Flora de Barral, it is because he chances, on a country walk, to prevent her from throwing herself from a precipice. Always drawn to those who jump, Marlow then becomes involved in Flora’s decision to marry a sea captain whom she does not love. ‘The fact of having shouted her away from the edge of a precipice, seemed somehow to have engaged my responsibility as to this other leap.’ The story is strung together by chance encounters, and Marlow hears about the next stage of Flora’s life when he happens upon the second mate of the ship of which her husband was captain. A jump, for Conrad, is just another sort of chance.
Ismay was thirty-seven when Lord Jim was published in 1900, but it is unlikely that he knew the novel; it is a difficult read and he was not a bookish man. He had probably never heard of Conrad, but Conrad knew about Ismay. Everything about the Titanic, which Conrad thought a ‘monstrous’ upholstered ferry — the excessive futility of its conception, the excessive lack of professionalism amongst the management, the excessive number of words it was generating in the press — offended his essential frugality. For centuries, travellers had been blown about the sea on the movements of the wind like dispersed dandelion parachutes and now they were shunted along by the screwing motion of a propeller. The North Atlantic trade by which Ismay made his living was, Conrad said in a letter to John Quinn after the Titanic went down, ‘not good enough for a man who cared for his profession; very monotonous, very risky, no better than running a tramway under disagreeable conditions of weather’.7 Ships like those run by the White Star Line, Conrad believed, destroyed the ancient traditions of seamanship. ‘A marvellous achievement’, he said of steam propulsion in his essay ‘Ocean Travel’, ‘is not necessarily interesting. It may render life more tame than perhaps it should be.’ Sailing ships brought you closer to ‘the silence of the universe’, suspending you from the stresses and anxieties of land life. Under sail the traveller communed with the sea, but it was only by looking out of the curtained windows of the White Star liners that you remembered you were afloat at all. Conrad’s ocean was not a house party but a place of monastic simplicity. As he puts it in Chance, ‘the service of the sea and the service of the temple are both detached from the vanities and errors of a world which follows no severe rule’.
On 16 April, the day after the news of the Titanic reached England, Conrad offered a piece on the subject to Nash’s Magazine. The editor turned his suggestion down and Conrad published a statement (now lost) in The London Budget on 20 April. Another article
on the Titanic (also lost) appeared in The Literary Digest on 4 May. Needing to ‘talk a little’ about the wreck, ‘for my own comfort partly’, Conrad wrote to his agent on 22 April: ‘In order to throw it off my chest I ask you to get Harrison on the telephone and ask him if he cares to get an article from me on the subject. A personal sort of pronouncement, thoughts, reminiscences and reflections inspired by the event with a suggestion or two.’ Austin Harrison, the Harrovian editor of the English Review, was considering serialising Chance, which had, since January, been appearing in instalments in the New York Herald. Harrison turned down Chance, and accepted instead not one, but two personal pronouncements by Conrad.
The first of Conrad’s articles, ‘Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic, appeared in May 1912.8 He noted the ‘good press’ the wreck had enjoyed, and condemned the ‘provincial display of authority’ exercised by the ‘august’ Senators Smith and Newlands, the ‘grimly comic touch’ they brought to the affair by ‘rushing to New York and beginning to bully and badger the luckless “Yamsi” — on the very quay-side so to speak… What are they after? We know what happened. The ship scraped her side against a piece of ice, and sank after floating for two hours and a half, taking a lot of people down with her. What more can they find out from the unfair badgering of the unhappy “Yamsi”, or the ruffian abuse of the same?’ The codename ‘Yamsi’, Conrad explains, is ‘symbolic’, used here to represent not Ismay but commerce itself. While Conrad has no high regard for shipping magnates, he must protest against the ‘Bumble-like proceedings’ of the Senate inquiry. What motivated such a tasteless rush to abuse Ismay, ‘a man no more guilty than others in this matter’? What motivated the Senate to set up a court ‘before the poor wretches escaped from the jaws of death had time to draw breath’, and before the accusers themselves had time to learn the most basic sea terms? The Senators did not even understand the language they were required to speak. ‘Such a simple expression as that one of the lookout men was stationed in the “eyes of the ship” was too much for them.’ Conrad could not see why there was an inquiry in New York at all, the Titanic being a British-built ship which sank in high seas, or why Ismay should answer the questions of ‘any king, emperor, autocrat, or senator of any foreign power’.
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