Positive Liberty

On the theory that a classic is a book you read twice, I’ve been lately re-reading (or re-listening to) some of my favorites, including Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. I think Lord Jim is Conrad’s supreme masterpiece, greater even than Heart of Darkness, or Nostromo.

I’m the only person I know who absolutely adores Conrad. Listening to an audio version of Lord Jim, I think I can see why. It’s not just that his stories are so often morally ambiguous or even that they are often told in an extremely confusing way—out of sequence, with characters narrating large portions of the stories, and sometimes even characters telling what other characters said about what they experienced, creating a strange story-within-story effect. It’s that Conrad is such a reader’s writer. I mean that listening to Conrad just cannot capture the experience. And certainly not watching movie versions of Conrad’s stories: there’s a fairly decent version of Victory, and even of Lord Jim, but the horrendous Heart of Darkness shows just how impossible it is to really make a movie out of Conrad. His stories are so introspective, so full of literary tricks, that only really reading them can give you the whole experience.

And what an experience! Probably because he was not a native speaker of English, Conrad was a true genius of the English language. I’ve heard it said that the most boring thing possible is to have to read about the weather; Mark Twain even began one book with a proud announcement that there was no weather in it. But I love to read Conrad describing the weather. He’s often at his very best when describing the sun, the sky, the land, and the sea. Here’s a passage from Lord Jim, as he describes a ship at sea:

She held on straight for the Red Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle—viscous, stagnant, dead. The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that plain luminous and smooth, unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.

Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her advancing bows. The five whites on board lived amidships, isolated from the human cargo. The awnings covered the deck with a white roof from stern to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.

The night descended on her like a benediction.

How on earth does a writer make something that perfect? He finds sounds in the English language to carry a power like no writer has ever done since. He gives everyday words an exotic color, like “scattered” and “enigma” and “inscrutable.” Everything is “inscrutable” in Conrad, everything silent and intense. It’s said that Cicero used to tag on extra phrases at the ends of sentences to give them just the right rhythm; Conrad does this too, with a characteristic (adjective-and-adjective-noun) construction that sometimes stuns you with its perfection:

…the simple charm and the delicate vigour of a wild-flower, her pathetic pleading, her helplessness, appealed to me with almost the strength of her own unreasonable and natural fear.

…He, too, was the heir of a shadowy and mighty tradition!

…The houses crowding along the wide shining sweep without ripple or glitter, stepping into the water in a line of jostling, vague, grey, silvery forms mingled with black masses of shadow, were like a spectral herd of shapeless creatures pressing forward to drink in a spectral and lifeless stream.

The meaning of his sentences is often obscure, because Conrad conveys an impression rather than a particular fact. As he himself says in Lord Jim, “the power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the logic of their construction.” For this reason, he has often been called an “impressionistic” writer, and I do think there is an indefinable kinship between his writing and the best impressionistic, or near-impressionistic painting, such as my favorite painter, John Singer Sargent. (I was delighted that in the otherwise terrible TNT movie of Heart of Darkness, a version of Sargent’s Madame X figures prominently in some scenes.)

But Conrad isn’t impossible to understand, not by a long shot. Heart of Darkness is a brilliant indictment of colonialism in Africa (something that could only be overlooked by someone as ignorant as a respected intellectual). Lord Jim, much more complicated than Heart of Darkness, is about a search for moral redemption by a character who has done a terribly cowardly thing. Perhaps my love for this novel is due to the fact that I read it shortly after I had done a terribly cowardly thing, and almost despaired of rescuing my self-respect. (How did it come out? I’ll tell you when I finish.) In any case, I’ve read some critics who think that Jim is an anti-hero, that Conrad is attacking the folly of romanticism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Conrad—who I believe appears in a cameo in the novel as the butterfly collector, Stein—loves and admires Jim’s possibly futile quest, because there’s really nothing else in the world but the goal he’s seeking. Conrad is a romantic; read any of his passages about women, and you’ll see that. But he is also very realistic about the difference between good and evil. Marlow tells us that Jim, describing his moment of cowardice, said,

“It was something like that wretched story they made up. It was not a lie—but it wasn’t truth all the same. It was something…. One knows a downright lie. There was not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of this affair.”

“How much more did you want?” I asked; but I think I spoke so low that he did not catch what I said. He had advanced his argument as though life had been a network of paths separated by chasms. His voice sounded reasonable.

Of course, life is not paths separated by chasms.

Well, my enthusiasm for Conrad has never been contagious. But I do encourage anyone who hasn’t experienced him to pour a nice drink, dim the lights a little, and give his work a try. For beginners, I recommend starting with Heart of Darkness, then some short stories (including his horror story “An Outpost of Progress”) and Nigger of The Narcissus. Nostromo and Lord Jim are generally considered his greatest novels; Conrad himself was proudest of Nostromo. I’m not very fond of Under Western Eyes, Youth, or “The Secret Sharer” myself. The Rescue, “Freya of the Seven Isles, ” and Chance are also some of my favorites.

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