Captain Lingard, known on the coast as ‘King of the Sea’, runs supply ships for ‘The Master’, trader Hudig, whose warehouses are filled with ‘gin cases and bales of Manchester goods’, a demand for which has been created among the local Malays. Lingard is legendary for having ‘discovered’ (colonialists were always ‘discovering’ features known to indigenous peoples from ancient times) a river; a profitable trading highway whose location he keeps to himself. He takes a fancy to the young English-speaking Dutchman, Kaspar Almayer, who is a clerk in Hudig’s warehouse. Almayer begins his association with Lingard clerking for him on sailings up and down the Archipelago. Lingard has an adopted daughter, a Malay girl taken from a boat in one of his forays against pirates; he demands that Almayer should marry her. ‘And don’t you kick because you’re white. None of that with me! Nobody will see the colour of your wife’s skin. The dollars are too thick for that … And mind you, they will be thicker yet before I die. There will be millions, Kaspar! And all for her – and for you, if you do as you’re told.’
The beckoning dollars are too thick for qualms. Almayer marries the girl, is provided with a modest house and set up to run Lingard’s trading post at Sambir.
It is a loveless match with a woman with whom colour and cultural differences are never overcome. Her relationship with Almayer is that of harridan, avaricious and aloof, knowing herself despised. But she gives him a daughter, Nina. Almayer’s desire for wealth (he has built a pretentious house, symbol of wealth not yet attained, known on the Archipelago as ‘Almayer’s Folly’, in which he doesn’t live) becomes one with the passion of his love for this girl-child. On the first page of the novel, ageing Almayer’s thoughts are
… busy with gold; gold he had failed to secure yet … He absorbed himself in his dream of wealth and power away from this coast … forgetting the bitterness of toil and strife in the vision of a great and splendid reward. They would live in Europe, he and his daughter. They would be rich and respected. Nobody would think of her mixed blood in the presence of her great beauty and his immense wealth.
Nina was sent away to Singapore to be educated as an English lady and has returned as a young woman, having been rejected by the woman in whose care she was because her beauty distracted the attention of suitors intended for the daughters of the house. In Sambir she lives strangely impassively, alienated from her mother despite her share of Malay blood, isolated in her father’s adoration. The realisation of his dream of her future depends on his conviction that there is a mountain of gold deposits, Gunong Mas, to which he has planned a secret exploratory expedition with Dain, a raja’s son from Bali. Lakamba, the local raja in Sambir, is also involved, for a share of the gold, while Lingard, who discovered it, left for Europe to raise capital for the venture and has not been heard of in years. Unknown to Almayer, Dain and Nina are attracted to each other.
All these intense personal preoccupations are going on within historico-political changes in the Archipelago. Almayer’s trade has been taken over by the Arabs, his warehouse is empty, bankrupt. The Dutch, the British, the Arabs and the raja, the up-river Dyak tribes – all are embroiled in territorial and trade rivalries, which inevitably have extended to include smuggled gunpowder. Dain, on behalf of his father, the independent raja of Bali, in conflict with the Dutch, has first come to Sambir to buy it; Almayer has been persuaded to obtain the gunpowder, with the collusion of Lakamba, on Almayer’s condition that Dain would help him in his enterprise at Gunong Mas. Almayer’s friend, sea-captain Ford, would buy the gunpowder in Singapore and smuggle it from his ship to a brig by which Dain would bring it to his father. But a Dutch ship spies the brig, and when Dain runs it ashore inside the reefs, the Dutch follow in their boats, killing Dain’s crew and losing two of their own men in the ensuing struggle. It is believed in Sambir that Dain is among the dead.
Nina’s reaction to the news is mysterious to the reader; Conrad is master of the tension of withholding reasons for reactions. Stunned or impassive, it seems, she calmly brings her desolated father a glass of gin. ‘Now it is all over, Nina.’ The gold of Gunong Mas will never be his to take her away to ‘a civilisation … a new life … your high fortune … your happiness’.
But Dain is alive; Nina in her great love, and her mother in her avarice (she has received a bride-price in dollars from him and sees her particular ambitions for her daughter to be realised as the wife of a future raja) revive him when he drags himself to the Almayer compound at night. They help him haul a body of one of the drowned men on to the river bank and the mother defaces it unrecognisably and forces Dain’s ring and anklet upon a finger and leg. Dain is hidden in a nearby settlement. There a hawker of cakes, Taminah, who is in love with him although he has barely ever acknowledged her existence who discovers he is not the dead man and his life is in danger. She knows the white men – the Dutch – will be seeking him; she could tell them all. ‘Did they wish to kill him? … no, she would say nothing … she would go to him and sell him his life for a smile, a gesture even … be his slave in far-off countries’ away from her jealous hatred of Nina.
A party of Dutch officers arrives at Almayer’s compound. They believe he knows where Dain is.
‘And he killed white men!’ [Nina says.]
‘Yes, two white men lost their lives through that scoundrel’s freak.’
‘… Then when you get this scoundrel will you go? … Then I would get him for you if I had to seek him in a burning fire … I hate the sight of your white faces … I hoped to live here without seeing any other white face but this.’
She touches her father’s cheek. The Dutch are led by drunk, embittered Almayer to the corpse that has been brought into the courtyard. ‘This is Dain.’
With the connivance of Babalatchi, go-between of Lakamba, Nina and her mother, plans are made for Dain’s escape. And here this first novel, like a rising gale bringing a tempest, elevates Conrad’s powers as a writer to forecast – in my opinion to outreach – what he will achieve in works that were to come. For there is an almost prudish discretion, an averting of the eyes from any description of sexual love in Conrad’s otherwise flouting of conventions in nineteenth-century literature. The love of father for daughter, mother for son, sister for brother, is generally his most explicit depiction of human emotion. But this work is the exception. At the reunion of Nina and Dain in his hideout, the wild answers of the body to the tensions and danger – the unreasonableness, in terms of the other kind of love, Almayer’s vision of his daughter’s fulfilment – are truly erotic. Their power clashes with the gigantic despair of Almayer become Lear; all pleading and violent reproach having failed to get her to stay with him, Almayer casts his desperate sorrow like a curse: ‘I shall never forgive you, Nina; and tomorrow I shall forget you.’
Her love of Dain is a betrayal of her father’s love; betrayal is increasingly to be a theme of Conrad’s deeply delved situations between political imperatives and personal lives, as well as in the relationships between men and women. (It is fascinating to foresee, here, its apogee to come in Under Western Eyes.)
Where lesser writers are content to have reached in relative fulfilment, one finality, Conrad, even in this first novel, is not, although the vision of old Almayer on his knees obliterating the footprints of his daughter in the sand where she has walked away with her chosen love to a boat is one that leaves its imprint on the mind long after the book is closed. Almayer burns the past; burns down the fine house known as Almayer’s Folly and dies, an opium smoker in the sole company of an old Chinaman. Shortly before his death he has said, to himself rather than to the rare visit of Captain Ford: ‘I cannot forget.’
The curse was pronounced upon himself, as well as on his daughter. It is compounded, symbolic in his abandoned loneliness, by the situation itself as the alienation of the coloniser. So, for Conrad, there is no finality in the way human lives might have gone, and he will spend the rest of his writing life in restlessly brilliant quest of their possibilities, the realised becomin
g the unrealised, to be followed in another and another working of the imagination on elusive reality. The constructions he evolved to do this began with his first novel, where he was then and thereafter to break the linear narrative. Almayer’s story is not told sequentially, it moves as our human consciousness does, where what happened in the past seamlessly interrupts the present, and what is to come occurs presciently between these. He makes demands on the reader to follow him in the cut-and-paste interplay of that consciousness: an invigorating pleasure only great writers can offer. A nineteenth-century writer who died early in the twentieth, Conrad’s work hurdled over modernism and practised post-modern freedom that was to enter literary theory long after his death.
Conrad’s writing is lifelong questioning: even the title of this book poses one. What was ‘Almayer’s Folly’? The pretentious house never lived in, his obsession with gold, his obsessive love for his daughter, whose cogenitors, the Malay woman’s race, he despised? All three? As if to answer some of these questions, Conrad did something else highly original, if doubtful in its success as an example of his work. A year after the publication of Almayer’s Folly in 1895, he produced – what shall I call it – a prologue-novel to it, An Outcast Of The Islands, in which Almayer and his then small daughter are also central characters. But I don’t advise reading Conrad in the way he obviously did not choose to be read; don’t start with An Outcast Of The Islands; open the first pages of Conrad’s magnificent literary creation by taking up Almayer’s Folly.
2002
A Coincidence of Wills?
There comes a time in a reading life when you realise – there, on your bookshelves, are books you may never re-read. Books that once changed your sense of being. That opened your eyes, your understanding of human emotions, the context of your consciousness in the world.
Proposing the literature of the imagination as truth out of the reach of histories, I’ve often said ‘If you want to know about Napoleon’s famous retreat from Moscow, you have to read War and Peace, not a history book.’
Now facing me is the scuffed, monumental one-volume War and Peace. When did I last read it, and when shall I read it again – ever?
So now I have. And I understand that just as you discover new meaning in situations that recur in your life as changing social and political mores contain you, so every time you re-read a great work you discover something you missed because you and an earlier period were not ready for it: a hidden message for the particular present.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 and the novel was published in 1864. The time-span it covers is that of the Napoleonic wars in Russia from 1805 to 1812. It therefore chronicles events that happened before he was born. He was not writing about his own time, and I’m not reading about my own time. What the author and I have in common is that we are illuminating, each his own time, with intimations for the present that were there in the past. For him about 52 years distant; for me in 2003, 191 years.
The grandeur of the story moves from society salons around Tsar Alexander I, with the intrigues of love, its concomitant bargaining power in money and noble names, to the battlefields where none of these counts in snow, pain, hunger and death. The themes run concurrently, with fictional characters mixed with historical ones, invented gossip with actual military despatches. Tolstoy was a post-modernist nearly two centuries ago; his fiction brilliantly appropriated anything it demanded: life itself is incongruity.
Among the characters who emerge from the salons, Pierre Bezukhov is the most extraordinarily alive for me. He is rich, a count if only by a nobleman’s liaison with a mistress; educated abroad, he is of no particular career. He himself makes a misalliance, falling in love and marrying the femme fatale, Helen. The choice of the name a touch of Tolstoy’s wry humour. She is unfaithful, and there begins what was latent in Pierre’s character, the examined life as a search for existential meaning. He tries Freemasonry (in the 1960s he would have been barefoot chanting Hare Krishna in the street), he tries good works among slave-peasants, his disillusion with materialism foresees the discontents of the well-endowed swallowing Ecstasy in our millennium of great riches and greater poverty. For Pierre the war against Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was his saviour. First Napoleon’s prisoner of war, then ragged and hungry in the ruins of Moscow, he finds among his fellow wretches that the will to live is itself the joy in life.
But it is not the bold and subtle understanding of personal conflicts that makes this 139-year-old novel contemporary. It is its amazing prescience of the nature of endless violence, the confusion and hopelessness of its persistent use to solve human problems between peoples and nations, multiplying them down the centuries.
Tolstoy calls into question the cause of catastrophic events being attributed to a single symbolic individual. A Napoleon, Hitler – now, for us, a Bin Laden, a Saddam Hussein. ‘To the question as to what is the real causation of historical events … the course of this world depends on the coincidence of the wills of all those who are concerned in the issues …’ The world, in 1812, was what its peoples made it, not Napoleon or Alexander I, as ours is what we have made and are making of it. The hollowness of victories achieved by violence is there when Napoleon retreats from Moscow, and the Russian peasants come in from the country to loot from their own people; it is there when we see the same desperate moral breakdown in the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Kosovo, Burundi, every month somewhere new. On the day 80,000 men, Russians, Frenchmen, were killed at Borodino, ‘Napoleon neither fired a shot nor killed a man’. This is not the old fact that the leaders sit safe while they send Everyman out to kill or be killed. Tolstoy implies, beyond time and changing circumstances, the days of empires become our day of globalisation, that as individuals we bear responsibility for our world, which creates symbolic messianic politicians and leaders, taking us into chaos and foretelling our own corruption.
Re-reading Tolstoy’s book is to realise that we live, not as a brave new millennium so much as an epilogue to what is revealed in that book of the senseless, persistent suffering and demoralisation of violence as the inhuman condition.
2003
Witness – Past or Present?
Like all witnesses to human acts that come second-hand, the reactions of visitors to museums dedicated to horrors perpetrated in the past, differ.
The United States Holocaust Museum in Washington opened in 1993. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, 2001. The Jewish Museum in Berlin, 2001. While no one questions the need for such institutions to confront us with a past still within living memory of many, there are criticisms that come between awed acceptance and total dismissal of the achievement.
I think we have first to consider the way in which the definition ‘holocaust’ has come to be dispersed in meaning quite far from the dictionary one: the intent of genocide. We now report any massacre between factions, nations, as a holocaust, though the violent intention is to gain power over others, not wipe them off the face of the earth. This brings into question whether the old narrow definition was correct, and a case is demonstrable in the differences between the three museums. The Washington museum illustrates a holocaust, the intention to kill all Jews in Germany and the countries it occupied. The Berlin museum and the Johannesburg museum share with it a related but different, double purpose: the Jewish museum chronicles the political and cultural history of Jews in Germany before the Nazi extermination came into practice, as well as the experience of that period; the apartheid museum creates the African pre-colonial background, the period of early white settlement, the effect of exploitation, industrialisation, loss of land tenure on Africans, as well as their political subjection, and focuses on the black population’s struggle to attain ultimate freedom. Perhaps the present-day meaning of ‘holocaust’ extends to any attempt by any means to kill the right of a people to live without discrimination and oppression?
The three museums are all subject to criticism in both their shared and specific aspects. We visitors are onlookers at a dista
nce of time and space. The process called perspective.
A recurrent criticism of the Holocaust Museum is that a museum of the Nazi holocaust should be one encompassing and dedicated to the experience of all who suffered it, six million Jews, five million anti-Nazi activists, homosexuals, Gypsies and others. The counter-argument is that the Nazis’ avowed holocaust was the culmination of a unique 2,000-year-old history of persecution of Jews. The lingering smell of the shoes of gas-oven victims, relics in the museum, perhaps brings ominous understanding, unspecified, of what genocide means.
For eighteen months after the opening, the Jewish Museum in Berlin was empty. I visited when the exhibits were in place, but there was something new to me – the impact of architecture as a blow-in-the-chest statement. Daniel Libeskind’s building is an affront in itself: the affront of harassment, enclosure, the persecution of walls, material and ideological. Some opinions are that it should have been left empty, in that statement. The exhibits attempt to recreate the life, culture and beliefs of German Jews since medieval times, even earlier. Critical debate has been rough: the museum creates ‘a Disney world aesthetic’,1 it is ‘a gigantic misunderstanding … a failure … simplifying the facts’. Yet it is demonstrably honest about the uncomfortable facts of the assimilation attempts of German Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as their remarkable contributions to German cultural life – which drained away under Nazi persecution, mainly to the benefit of the United States. There is displayed the German-Jewish Christmas tree, and the silver basin and ewer provided by a prominent family who desperately tried to hedge prescience of a coming fate by having some of their sons baptised Christian while the others remained Jewish. The holocaust documents and photographs are somehow more personal than the evidence in the Washington museum. There is criticism that this testimony of the dead needs to be completed by accounts of the lives of German Jews in the diaspora; apparently the extension is planned.
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