Sailors on the Inward Sea

by Lawrence Thornton

  I hurried downstairs and found him bent over, examining the torn left pant leg of his brown tweed suit. He looked up and a huge smile spread over his face. We shook hands and then stood back and looked at each other.

  “You look fit enough for a trip round the Cape,” I said.

  “No thanks to that damned Burke’s hound. It tried to rip off my leg. But I wouldn’t mind a voyage. A good little ship, a decent crew. Exactly what I need. Come, you much be parched.”

  I was splendid, Ford, hiding what brought me up as well as an actor does, whatever personal sorrows may be dogging him when he steps onstage. We went out to the garden, where Jessie had set up a table in the shade of a tree near the hedge with tea and a pile of sweet buns still steaming from the oven. No sooner did we sit down than I was assailed by second thoughts and started worrying about bringing up things that would embarrass him if not cause outright pain. It wasn’t as if I had been hurt or humiliated, not at all, and I really didn’t feel proprietary about the stories. It was beginning to feel damned uncomfortable when Borys came running across the lawn and skidded to a stop in front of his father, handing over a jar that contained two butterflies.

  “Look, Papa,” he said breathlessly, “are they rare?”

  Conrad raised the jar up to the light.

  “Rare, but not too rare.”

  As he named their genus and species, along with something of their migration habits, I remembered Stein (Viereck) taking on the role of lepidopterist, telling Marlow that Jim was like one of the rarest of those creatures who made their home in the jungle and probably shared its fate, a beautiful passage in Lord Jim that captures Jim’s ephemeral nature and has absolutely nothing to do with either Viereck or me. The moment fitted perfectly with the mixing of times and places, people and characters I had recollected on the train, the line separating the invented and the real dimming even more, or rather seeming to fray like a rope being pulled in two directions.

  Once Conrad finished his explanation Borys grabbed his net and promised to find something his father had never seen. As I watched him run along the hedge I decided to put off mentioning the books until later. He asked about my plans and I said that I had just signed on with a firm in Amsterdam and would be abroad for quite some time.

  “I miss the sea,” he said. “I know I can’t wear two hats and I’m not complaining. I was meant to write if I was meant for anything. That’s not to say I’ve forgotten the sharpness the sea gives to life, the excitement. I never will. None of that here,” he said, gesturing toward the fields, “though I do have interesting neighbors. Come along and take a look at my garden.”

  As we followed the path between the house and the oak trees he told me that he had seen you at Aldington a few days earlier. There had been a dinner party and Kipling had made a fool of himself as usual with his rant about the white man’s burden. Wells was becoming increasingly intolerable, a development which made Conrad feel even more grateful that you and James and Crane lived near by. He mentioned a piece in the literary supplement that was critical of James and launched into a spirited defense, going on about how tradition-bound Europeans were and how all James had done was to expose that.

  “Now, here we are.”

  In what had been an empty plot gone to seed on my last visit were rows of cabbages and radishes and beans. He had started the garden one day when the writing was going badly and found that it suited him more than he would have guessed to spend an hour tending his vegetables, weeding, fertilizing, adding with a laugh that he had taken the last step toward becoming a country gentleman. He asked if I knew Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” When I said I didn’t he recited a few lines:

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

  Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  “Pilfered from Thoreau’s Walden,” he said, “who raised the art of gardening to a mystical enterprise.”

  He broke off a bean, bit into it, pronounced it ripe, and asked me to fetch a basket from the shed, which I was happy to do, buoyed up by his account of literary borrowing, which I thought might come in handy.

  WE HAD A SPLENDID dinner, vintage Jessie, too much of everything, the table threatening to collapse under the weight of tureens and serving dishes, enough food for a regiment when you looked down the length of it from the seat at the end. Whenever we were together I always felt more like a member of the family than a guest, the sailor home from the sea at ease in the bosom of his kin. A platter of chicken was making the rounds as I recalled evenings from years past when I suddenly realized that at least on some of those occasions Conrad had very likely spent the time before my arrival working on some adventure of Marlow’s. I wondered how he felt being in my presence then, whether he saw me as myself, or the personage who was compounded of the two of us. For all I knew a new tale was lying on his desk upstairs. I recalled an evening when he talked about being haunted by his characters, citing Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” as an example and arguing quite heatedly that it was necessary for a writer to feel such an intimate connection, otherwise your characters couldn’t steal your fire and live on the page. I didn’t fancy myself related to poor Bovary, but I had a rather eerie sense of wearing quotation marks and rather felt that I was eating for two, as it were, which may explain why I accepted a second piece of Jessie’s strawberry tart for dessert.

  After helping her clear the table, Conrad and I retired to the parlor. The warm Kentish day had given way to a cool evening. He lit the logs in the stone fireplace and uncorked a bottle of port, which he put on the table between the wing-back chairs—the same ones I imagine us sitting in now, Ford. I was still musing about him at work in his study conjuring my voice, controlling my every utterance and gesture, and it seemed as if I’d been reborn in that house, or perhaps not so much reborn as submitted to some mysterious process that led to the creation of my double—our double. Phrases of mine that he had incorporated into the books came back along with more interesting ones he had invented, wonderful observations like Marlow’s vision of Jim exiled on the Walpole Reefs: “I had a rapid vision of Jim perched on a shadowless rock, up to his knees in guano, with the screams of sea-birds in his ears, the incandescent ball of the sun over his head; the empty sky and the empty ocean all a-quiver, simmering together in the heat as far as the eye could reach.”

  Once the fire caught and the logs snapped and settled in cherry-red cylinders, Conrad held his glass up, studying the deep ruby color before he turned toward me. Leaning on the arm of the chair, he gave me a frank look and said, “Out with it, Jack. Something’s on your mind.” He narrowed his eyes in mock seriousness. “After all these years you haven’t run into woman trouble, have you? It’s that sort of hangdog expression.”

  He raised his head in that way he had, judiciously looking down his nose at me with a twinkle in his eyes, absolutely convinced, so far as I could tell, that a woman stood behind my distraction. I was cornered. I swear, Ford, I felt my heart come up in my throat. I suspect I might have invented a woman if I weren’t already knee-deep in something so close to a lie it would have taken a philosopher to see the difference. I tossed off my drink and managed a pathetic laugh.

  “It’s not a woman.”

  “No? Too bad. You should settle down. You’re too long in the tooth to be a bachelor, Malone. Find someone like Jessie.”

  “Jessie’s a saint,” I said automatically, wishing that I could launch into an elaborate hagiography to kill time.

  Conrad put a finger to the side of his nose.

  “Very close but not quite.”

  “I’ve been reading,” I blurted out, “by accident.”

  “By accident?” he said, arching his brows. “What the devil does a man read by accident?”

  “The Marlow books.”

  He blushed, Ford, the only time I’d ever seen. As his
face turned scarlet as a beefeater’s jacket he opened his mouth as if to speak, clamped his lips shut, did it again, clamped again, like a sea bass freshly plucked from the water. I told you I hadn’t known what to expect, but this was worse than anything I could have imagined—not his surprise, which was almost comical, nor his blushing either—but his expression, the blatant suffering. I felt terrible. I stammered that I had learned of the books from a fellow of refined tastes and repeated Clive’s praises as well as those of the bookseller, hoping that would mollify him. But Conrad only winced as if a spark from the fire had landed in his lap. His face went slack and his gaze lost focus. The silence couldn’t have lasted more than a minute at the most but while it did everything I had said seemed to hover somewhere near the ceiling like genies some fool had let out of a bottle.

  “A writer has certain latitudes,” he said archly.

  “I know,” I said miserably, “I understand that.”

  “Do you?” he challenged.

  “I admire the books. They’re wonderful. I’m flattered you thought enough of me to, well, use me.”

  “And do you understand that a writer must follow his inspiration?”

  “Of course.”

  Conrad picked up his glass and took a drink.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He finished his port. When he got up to stoke the fire he moved awkwardly, as if his body hurt.

  “No,” he went on, his face like granite, those black eyes flashing, “I definitely don’t think so. If you did, you wouldn’t have come like this. We’ve been friends so long, Jack. How can you accuse me?”

  “I’m not accusing you. As far as not saying anything to you in advance, it didn’t seem right to bring it up in a letter.”

  “Ha! This is?” he said, the this hissing like a snake. “This seems more appropriate, to come here and accuse me?”

  His speech had grown deeper, overlaid with the Polish accent that always took over whenever he was agitated.

  “Put yourself in my place,” I said. “Out of the blue you learn that a friend has written you into his books. Wouldn’t you be intrigued?”

  His expression softened, not much, but enough to notice. He will be reasonable, I thought. He will back down.

  “I suppose so.”

  “I was interested,” I said. “That’s all. I wanted to know how you did it.”

  “How I did it?”

  “Yes.”

  He jabbed the poker into the fire and aligned the logs, which crackled and spat. When they were burning brightly he put the poker in the iron rack and sat down.

  “People think artist and see a man in a velvet coat, his feet in embroidered slippers. For some that is true, the ones who give the public tripe. I have no quarrel with them. They’ve made their accommodations and must live with the consequences. For the rest of us to whom the work is serious, the truth is different, very different. Every day is a struggle to say something you can stand by, something you hope will bring in enough money so that you can keep a roof over your head and food on the table. You’re intelligent, Malone. In Singapore I thought, ‘What a find!’ You always have been like a brother, but this you do not understand because you aren’t artistic. I accept that. It doesn’t bother me. We are not all the same.”

  “What do you think I’m accusing you of?”

  He passed his hand over his face. A moment later he got up and walked across the room to the window. When he opened it the cool night breeze ruffled the curtains and the fire blazed up.

  “Theft.”

  “It wasn’t theft. Borrowing, maybe. In any case, I don’t care.”

  He remained by the window deep in thought, confronting his conscience, no doubt, vulnerable to some personal reckoning. I understood how he felt, Ford, and that only made it worse. How many of us suffer the indignity of having our secrets hauled into the light of day before those we care about? I’d known only one such case before that night—Jim’s—which Conrad had captured in the most excruciating detail, infinitely more elaborate than what I had told him about the poor lad. I guessed that Conrad was remembering the words he had used to describe my experiences with Jim during the trial, when I had taken him to my rooms because I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving him alone. Jim had launched into a defense of his actions not much different from what Conrad was doing, a defense that had fallen apart because it had no substance. I couldn’t forget his eyes when he said, “I had jumped . . . it seems,” admitting to his lack of nerve when he saw the bulging bulkhead and minutes later watched his shipmates leap overboard. Because he was too caught up in the dream of what he could be to know what he was, Jim simply didn’t understand that breach of faith. To him, the leap was only a temporary aberration. But Conrad, whose mind was far more subtle and capacious, had no fantasies to cling to and that was what made his suffering so painful to watch.

  “I always knew you might find out,” he said after a while. “It was an acceptable risk since I believed that in time I would abandon Marlow and find another voice. But the fact is I still battle with you. I was battling with you before you arrived, carrying on the combat in the new book. Marlow’s not in it but his influence has to be reckoned with—his voice, his way of seeing, his intrusive presence in my mind. Every day I approach the manuscript like a drunkard who puts a bottle on the table to test himself. At the end of the day I’m relieved to read over what I have written and see that there isn’t a page with a trace of your voice. But what of the blank ones in the drawer? I ask myself. Marlow’s voice could already be inscribed on them, like writing in invisible ink. When I look up from my desk I have the feeling that you’ve just gone out the door. Sometimes you return after I’ve gone to bed. I gloat over having silenced you one more day and explain the nuances of my new voice to you, the one that’s bringing to life a tale set in a South American country, a twilight country with a high, shadowy sierra and misty campo. I call it Nostromo, after the main character, a capataz de cargadores.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Marlow,” I insisted. “In any case, his books are behind you. You’re finished with him. Why not just forget?”

  “It isn’t that easy.”

  “You haven’t even tried. If you had . . .”

  “Have you forgotten about Ayu?”

  Surprised, I looked at him, wondering if he was getting back at me or if he had a point I couldn’t see.

  “I’ve never wanted to forget her. You know that.”

  “Just so. I don’t want to forget Marlow. He’s too close to me, my greatest success, my worst failure. In a strange way, it’s salutary to fight with him. You said you wanted to know how I transformed your experiences. I can explain that but you need to know what lay behind that work, the state of creative torpor I was in to understand why I gravitated toward the stories you told us on the Nellie.”

  He was quite aware that the voice of his first books was undistinguished even though Almayer’s Folly took five years to write. It wasn’t the book he had hoped for but it had given him confidence to go on to An Outcast of the Islands and what he called some indifferent stories. He had made half a dozen starts on other projects that turned as inert as an old scow scuttled in an out-of-the-way channel. Just when he had reached the point where he had begun to fear that he had nothing left to say, he thought of the hours we spent aboard the Nellie with Harrison and the gang, recalling in the minutest detail the stories I had told. It was very exciting, he said, “as if I were panning for gold and suddenly there were nuggets shining in the sun.” But when they began shaping up in his mind as if he were thinking my thoughts, his pride revolted. He returned to an abandoned narrative—The Rescue—and worked on it for six months. When The Rescue got to a sticking place he knew there was something to say about the Congo by combining his own personal experiences in that infernal place with a tale I had told him about my adventures in the region that had occurred a short time before his own.

  As you probably know, Ford, Conrad met George Antoine Klein, the com
pany agent of the Societe Anonyme Belge who became Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, at Stanley Falls, the last stop on his ill-fated journey up the Congo. Sickness was rife among the white men, which explains why Conrad did not get to know the man well. As soon as they could leave, Klein and Conrad departed down the river whose “brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness leading us towards the sea.” Klein did not get that far, dying in Tchumbiri, where he was buried.

  I was well acquainted with Klein, having run into him while I was engaged in a bit of gun-running for those who opposed the Belgians’ looting. Yes, I got to know the man, Ford, becoming a kind of confessor willing to listen to all sorts of things. For reasons I’ll never fathom, he liked and trusted me even though I’d made clear at the outset of our relationship that I disapproved heartily of everything he and his kind were doing in the name of progress. I remember Klein quite vividly in a white pith helmet, white jacket, and knee-high boots sitting in a chair before a group of black men, each of whom was balancing a huge elephant tusk on the ground in front of him, an enormous weight, waiting for Klein to call to him so that he could lug the tusk forward and hear Klein’s ridiculously low price. And I remember a dozen hippo heads stacked in a pyramid, hippos Klein himself shot and whose decapitation he supervised on the riverbank so he could sell them off to certain wealthy men with a taste for the bizarre. Klein enjoyed talking to me about ivory and hunting and ideas. I’ve known a number of great talkers in my time and he was among the most prodigious, quite happy to go on for hours without the aid of whisky about his plans. He had discovered that he had the power to do anything he liked and was drunk on it, Ford, drunk on George Antoine Klein, besotted with visions of his impending greatness.

  Conrad had known the dying man. I knew the living one. It was no surprise that Conrad could not resist the temptation—the opportunity—to put them together. “Everything was bright and clear,” he said, as if illuminated by lightning. “I had tried out your voice in ‘Youth,’ and it came back quite wonderfully in Heart of Darkness, Malone, like a voice out of thunder,” which made him feel more like an amanuensis than a novelist. He took it all down and finished during the first week of February 1899.