Sailors on the Inward Sea (21 page)

When I reached the end of the chapter I put the book down and gazed out the window. Evening had come and the streetlights were on, glowing in a long recession down the road, a merry double row of globes that went from white to yellow in the distance. My friendship with Conrad had undergone a sea change and would never be the same again. With the invention of Marlow, the intervention of Marlow, we were now a threesome—a kind of secular trinity—our spirits inseparable and interdependent, though still with discrete lives. There were pedestrians on the sidewalk and while I watched them walking toward the next stage in their lives I suddenly imagined the three of us—Conrad, myself, and Marlow—going down the road side by side, passing into yellow pools of light and then into darkness and then into light again, and in my vision we looked like
sailors at the end of a shore leave returning to our ship. Not so many miles away men were doing that, going up gangways with hearts full or sad, excited by or reconciled to the voyage that lay ahead. But that was not for us, Ford. Not at all. I realized that we were bound for a stranger destination, the inward sea of Conrad's imagination, a secret journey for which I, by virtue of my pledge of silence, had become the guardian.

T
HE VISIT TO
Conrad occurred in mid-April 1903. I sailed a month later, in command of the
Korimatsu,
feeling guilty for leaving Conrad alone to make his way through the rocks and shoals of his conscience and hoping that he would come round to see the business with Marlow for the trifle it was and let the poor bloke be. I didn't want to go, not under those conditions, but I had a living to make—obligations—all the things that make our own little worlds go round. Still, they didn't keep me from fretting over the belated insights that had come to me on the train on the way up from Stanford, stunning,
moving
insights that had been strong enough to change the way I felt about Conrad and raise him even higher in my esteem. The courage, the integrity it took to insert those subtle confessions! My God, that was remarkable in its own right, wasn't it? And to have done so without mangling the stories was extraordinary, too, a testament to his genius that the world, by and large, refused to acknowledge. Do you think these tiny self-portraits were what he meant when he said that all fiction is autobiography? It seems to me that's not quite it, that fiction is discreet, self-contained, and his references to his influences separate things. How do these discoveries of Conrad's confessions strike you as a fellow artist, Ford, what kind of light do they shed for you? No doubt it is different from what I saw—and see.

BETWEEN MY DEPARTURE
and the day we spent on the
Nellie
in 1924, Conrad and I saw each other perhaps a dozen times. Visits
spaced years apart make for ragged friendships but we kept ours from fraying with letters. Mine from ports of call, though sometimes I wrote at sea, filled with observations about the business of sea life, rumors, gossip. His from one house or another, litanies of troubles with publishers, his health, news of Jessie and Borys, dour observations on politics and the state of the world. It was the rare letter that failed to mention his continuing struggle with Marlow, which he pointed out was physical as well as mental. I frequently imagined them wrestling on the floor of his study while downstairs Jessie screamed bloody murder.

Over the years packages arrived in obscure ports of call with copies of his latest success—
Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent,
the wonderful tales from that period, as well as
Chance.
On the flyleaf he had written a brief comment that began with the first line of the epigraph to
Romance: “C'est toi qui dors dans l'hombre.
When you stepped out into the light, offering me a voice for Flora's trials, I couldn't resist. So here you are, one last time, dear feller, with my apologies.”

I sat down and read
Chance
in two days. The book moved me, Ford. Here was Conrad finally writing about love between men and women, but the book, at least to my mind, seemed to mark a falling-off of his powers. Even more surprisingly, Marlow lacked the brio of his earlier avatars—or perhaps, like Conrad and me, he was just getting old.

In any case, Marlow vanished from the scene and I thought I had very likely seen the last of him when sometime around 1918 or 1919 Conrad sent me a collection of stories prefaced with the author's note I mentioned a short while back. In an accompanying letter he explained that Marlow had become something of a cause célèbre over the years and that his publisher, sensing an opportunity to sell more books by exploiting this interest, more or less demanded that
he write a little something about the character's genesis. I remember bridling at the use of the character, Ford, which did, in fact, offend me. “I apologize in advance, Malone,” Conrad wrote. “The truth is there, indirectly. I couldn't go closer, you understand.” I suspect that you know the essay, Ford, but I want to copy out the relevant part for the record:

Youth . . . marks the first appearance in the world of the man Marlow, with whom my relations have grown very intimate in the course of years. The origins of that gentleman (nobody as far as I know had ever hinted that he was anything but that)—his origins have been the subject of some literary speculation of, I am glad to say, a friendly nature.

One would think that I am the proper person to throw a light on the matter; but in truth I find that it isn't so easy. It is pleasant to remember that nobody had charged him with fraudulent purposes or looked down on him as a charlatan; but apart from that he was supposed to be all sorts of things: a clever screen, a mere device, a “personator,” a familiar spirit, a whispering “daemon.” I myself have been suspected of a meditated plan for his capture.

That is not so. I made no plans. The man Marlow and I came together 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 he 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. In his case, at any rate, his occupation would be gone and he would suffer from that extinction, because I suspect him of some vanity. I don't mean vanity in the Solomonian sense. Of all
my people he's the one that has never been a vexation to my spirit. A most discreet, understanding man. . . .

You must agree that it's a masterful performance, Conrad at his ironic best, dexterously manipulating the tongue-in-cheek tone that, on the surface, seems so perfectly suited for this charming portrait of a friendship, the author at ease with himself, winking at the reader in every line as if to say the whole business was an amusing trifle. I especially admire the way he characterized his “familiar” as a real person, a reliable friend who has been of service. That is likely the standard interpretation of common readers as well as critics, fellows of goodwill and considerable learning who lack the crucial information that would allow them to see that it is just a show, its real subject nothing less than a wrenching confession filled with references to the deleterious effects Marlow has had on him—his fear of readers getting wind of those evenings on the
Nellie
and charging him with writing with fraudulent purposes, revealing him as a charlatan hidden beneath the surface as in a palimpsest. That double writing is the most perfect example of irony I know, Ford, and it cost him dearly. I swear, as I was copying those paragraphs I could feel his anguish. And painful as that was, the account of being haunted is worse because it is the truest statement in the whole essay, conveying a sense of a warm relationship that has pulled the wool over readers' eyes and made them smile, unaware that Marlow and I were truly whispering daemons who never left him alone. But the most poignant thing lies a level lower—beneath the confession—I mean the lingering sense of uncertainty about his talent, the need to prove himself over and over against those claims in all their multifarious incarnations.

I have leapt ahead to this material because it's important for you to see how the “old thing” hung on in his mind until Fox-Bourne
unexpectedly gave him the opportunity to redeem himself in his own eyes. And I might as well admit that the issue of discretion was also on my mind. Not three months after we parted at the train station in Stanford I broke my pledge during a stopover in Bali while visiting my old friend Hans Viereck. That meeting preceded by twenty years the one I mentioned at the beginning of these pages that occurred after everything had played out and Conrad was gone. I was too pressed for time then to tell you much about Viereck then, but I want to now.

WHEN I WAS
young Viereck had taken me under his wing as a sort of junior partner to help run his coastal schooner. By that time he was already an established trader in the region, dabbling in a little of everything, including gun-running, and therefore the perfect man to teach the secrets of a business that combines the measured judgment of an accountant with the risktaking of a gambler, talents he possessed in abundance. During our first year together, we sailed through most of the islands and up obscure rivers known only to him, visiting villages where he introduced me to the headmen and taught me how to bargain. At that point I thought his talents were mainly practical, limited to the subtleties of business in exotic locales where he spoke most of the languages and seemed to know everyone.

Early in our second year he began to reveal other qualities, including a talent for abstract ideas, which he parceled out in tiny doses since I was abysmally ignorant and ill read. Viereck knew all the great philosophers of his homeland, Kant, Spengler, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, whose mind he admired but whose views repelled him. He was also conversant with the thinkers of other nations and the sacred texts of the East, large chunks of which he had committed to memory. His concern was with values, what was
good and how we could know it, what most people call moral philosophy shaped by his own peculiar combination of the pragmatic and the romantic, a quality Conrad found irresistibly attractive for
Lord Jim.
Sitting on the schooner's deck or on the veranda at his home, Viereck instructed me in the art of thinking. Even now I remember exactly how he leaned forward, his beard almost touching the table, his great shock of hair outlined by the mottled light coming down through the jungle trees, searching my eyes to see if I could follow his train of thought, his quiet voice so compelling that the chatter of monkeys and the raucous call of birds faded away until there was only the sound of Viereck talking.

Well, Ford, since I hadn't seen him for several years you will understand how delighted I was that one of the ports of call on the
Korimatsu
's outward voyage was very near Denpasar, Bali's capital, which was only a few miles from his estate. Readying the ship for that long voyage kept me busy from dawn till dusk, and it was not till the week before we left that I found time to close my cabin door and write to Viereck, giving the date of my arrival, unable to resist adding that he would be interested to know that he had become a character in a novel written by a friend of mine. And that was when my pledge stopped me cold. Conrad's problem would fascinate him and, as a disinterested third party, it seemed likely that he could see it more clearly than I did. But how could I tell him in good conscience? I got up, paced back and forth, went outside, continued on deck for a good hour. Did my promise apply to a man who lived half a world away and was himself a model of discretion? Could telling Viereck compromise me if what I said was guaranteed to go no further than him, especially since I would speak only out of a desire to help Conrad? The questions were self-serving, of course, and couldn't stand up in the face of the counterargument that my word wasn't limited by geography. I leaned on the aft rail looking at the
lights of the city that made a glowing haze in the sky, a kind of dome in the darkness that seemed to replicate the ambiguity of the situation without adding anything in the way of clarity. In a while, I went back inside and rewrote the letter without mentioning Conrad, having decided to let my thoughts on the question play out on the voyage and then see how I felt once I was with Viereck.