In any case, you can imagine my surprise when I received a letter from William Scorsby, the naval oficer who testified against Fox-Bourne with Conrad. It contained an exhaustive if inconclusive account of the circumstances surrounding Fox-Bourne’s death that were so ironically convoluted they still make my head swim. Scorsby began by explaining that he was writing at Fox-Bourne’s request, the captain having told him that as an old friend of Conrad’s I would be interested in how things had turned out. He had given Scorsby my card—the same one I’d handed him at Conrad’s funeral!—and suggested that if I were no longer in London, Scorsby could track me down through the Maritime Association, which was what he’d done. Scorsby had no idea why Fox-Bourne urged him to contact me, saying he had decided to do so only because he remembered that Conrad had been extremely kind to a young colleague of his named Whelan who had been killed in the war. The rest of the letter was devoted to a detailed account of part of one night and the following morning aboard the Brigadier, a period of roughly ten hours. I couldn’t make head nor tail of anything until I was halfway through. The central event was connected through Lord Jim to the tragedy of the Valkerie and, in my view, Scorsby having no way of knowing it, to Conrad’s lost story of Fox-Bourne and the doomed German sailors.
The minesweeper had undergone an extensive overhaul in 1927 that necessitated temporary reassignments for the crew and a desk job in the admiralty for Fox-Bourne. When the work was complete, they returned and promptly took her out on a shakedown cruise. While they prepared her, and during the one day they were at sea, Fox-Bourne seemed to be in good spirits, a change Scorsby addressed later that, in retrospect, suggests that Fox-Bourne had thought out what he was going to do well in advance of the Brigadier’s departure.
Around six o’clock that evening Scorsby ran into Fox-Bourne in the officers’ mess and exchanged a few words about the sweeping gear that was to be tested first thing in the morning. That was their only contact, everything else he wrote being reconstructed from conversations with various officers and ratings. Even though he presented the events in a summary fashion, his account was an impressive piece of detective work.
A steward saw Fox-Bourne enter his quarters just after seven o’clock. Scorsby assumed that he remained there until ten, when he appeared on the bridge seeming rather subdued, according to the watch officer. That did not interfere with his attention while he went over the chart with the man, double-checking the course. Fox-Bourne stayed on the bridge awhile chatting with the men, asking after their families, then bid them goodnight around eleven o’clock, saying that he was going for a stroll before turning in.
When Scorsby woke the next morning there was an envelope on the floor just inside the door. It contained my card and a brief letter from Fox-Bourne that began with his request that Scorsby write to me. The rest of it praised Scorsby’s work and ended with Fox-Bourne’s assurance that he bore him no ill-will for testifying at the inquiry. He was well aware that it had taken a good deal of courage and was proud of him for doing the right thing. Such praise was the last thing Scorsby expected. In the years since the inquiry, Fox-Bourne hadn’t spoken a kind word to him or Chambers or Higgins, addressing them brusquely on matters concerning their duties and looking through them as if they were made of air. He clearly resented them and was likely biding his time until he could take his revenge, an assumption given weight by the fact that all their requests for transfer had been denied.
Scorsby was concerned enough to go down to the captain’s cabin. There was no response to his knock. He checked in the officers’ mess. None of the stewards had seen him. He went up to the bridge. Neither the new watch officer nor the helmsman, both of whom had gone on duty at six o’clock, knew where Fox-Bourne was. At that point he notified Chambers. They scoured the compartments, including the engine room, where Fox-Bourne liked to get his hands dirty, looked in the wardroom. Having exhausted all the possibilities in the bowels of the ship, they returned to the deck by way of stairs that came out at the stern. As they stepped through the doorway, Scorsby noticed something glinting in the sun—Fox-Bourne’s pocket watch, dangling by its chain, which had been fastened to the rail. When he examined it, he saw that the stem had been pulled out, stopping it precisely at eleven-thirty. They were stunned, but there was no mystery about what had happened: Fox-Bourne had jumped. Approximately nine hours had elapsed, which meant that the spot was a good forty miles behind them, putting it very close to the spot where they had struck a German U-boat during the war, a terrible accident that cost dozens of lives. Without coming out and saying so directly, Scorsby managed to suggest that Fox-Bourne was responsible. He and Chambers debated whether the location was coincidental or deliberately chosen.
From there they went to the captain’s quarters. A book lay squarely in the middle of the bunk, Lord Jim, open to chapter six, where Marlow launches into the curious story of Montague Brierley, captain of the Ossa. Fox-Bourne obviously intended it as a message. He must have anticipated that whomever came upon it wouldn’t be acquainted with the story and had bracketed one passage as well as underlining several sentences. They each read the whole section, talking to each other as they did, appalled but fascinated by the picture that was emerging. There was no mistaking the parallels with Brierley’s last hours.
The question now was what to do. They agreed that Fox-Bourne’s death was momentous enough to justify canceling the exercise and returning to port. At a meeting of the officers in the wardroom Chambers announced that Fox-Bourne had gone overboard. As ranking officer he was assuming command. He then called a general assembly of the crew. The flag was lowered to half-staff. On the way back to port, men gathered in knots at the aft rail. Sailors who had been with the Brigadier since the Valkerie incident were overheard suggesting that she was a cursed ship.
When they reached Lowestoft late in the afternoon Scorsby and Chambers were whisked away to the headquarters building, where they spent hours sequestered with the senior staff. Fox-Bourne’s copy of Lord Jim was passed round the table and each man read the relevant section. One admiral wondered aloud what it meant and why Fox-Bourne would have chosen those pages to announce his last earthly thoughts. An official inquiry followed, Scorsby and Chambers testifying along with the watch officer and the helmsman. A few weeks later the command issued a report stating that Captain Fox-Bourne had died of “misadventure.”
That was where the story ended. Scorsby was not at all sure it would reach me. While he would be interested in hearing from me if it did, he didn’t expect a response and concluded with the hope that I could make more sense of the business than he did.
If someone had asked me what I thought the likely outcome would be to Fox-Bourne’s life, suicide would have been the last thing on my mind. The notion that Conrad’s words would stick in his head and plague him, perhaps force him to the edge, had always seemed much more a hope than a likelihood, something to make me feel better about that travesty at the inquiry. I have also wished for decidedly unpleasant ideas to pop into Worthy’s mind and those of his colleagues for the same reason. The fact is, Ford, I was completely unprepared for the news. All the time I was reading Scorsby’s letter I was conscious of the mix of fiction and fact, the ironies he missed, being ignorant of the manuscript, which constituted an even more compelling narrative running alongside the one he knew about. It was pure Conrad, you know, as layered as anything he ever wrote. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Fox-Bourne had done a turn as an author by forcing us to see his end through Conrad’s novel. There must have been some satisfaction of the darker kind in the way he finessed his suicide, setting it up as carefully as he would a course on a chart with dividers and ruler.
While I was mulling that over I went to the bookshelf and took down my copy of the novel. You should know that Conrad invented Brierley out of whole cloth, there having been no one at Jim’s trial who remotely resembled him. Given the man’s fate, making him a member of the board that rescinded Jim’s certificate and threw him to the w
olves has always struck me as a fine bit if irony. It took on an even sharper edge in the passage I knew Fox-Bourne had marked off, Marlow’s reflections on Brierley in the courtroom. Here it is, to save you the trouble of looking it up:
As I looked at him flanking on one side the unassuming pale-faced magistrate who presided at the inquiry, his self-satisfaction presented to me and to the world a surface as hard as granite. He committed suicide very soon after. . . . No wonder Jim’s case bored him, and while I thought with something akin to fear of the immensity of his contempt for the young man under examination, he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been of unmitigated guilt, and he took the secret of the evidence with him in that leap into the sea. If I understand anything of men, the matter was no doubt of the gravest import, one of those trifles that awaken ideas—start into life some thought with which a man unused to such a companionship finds it impossible to live. I am in a position to know that it wasn’t money, and it wasn’t drink, and it wasn’t woman. He jumped overboard at sea barely a week after the end of the inquiry, and less than three days after leaving port on his outward passage; as though on that exact spot in the midst of waters he had suddenly perceived the gates of the other world flung open wide for his reception.
You may remember that immediately after this appraisal Marlow tells of encountering Brierley’s former first mate, a man named Jones from whom he learns how Brierley spent his last night on this earth, a virtual blueprint for Fox-Bourne. After calling Jones into the chart room, Brierley goes over the position with him, calculating it with a pair of dividers and writing the date and time. When Brierley finishes, he says that he is going aft and asks Jones to lock up his faithful dog in the chart room. The next morning Jones finds Brierley’s “gold chronometer watch carefully hung under the rail by its chain.” Brierley left two letters, one for the company, the other for Jones, which was intended to get him command of the Ossa as a reward for faithful service.
Marlow then describes his own last meeting with Brierley, which takes place outside the courtroom after the inquiry is adjourned on the first day. Brierley is deeply unhappy that he was called to sit on the board, complaining that there is no reason to make Jim eat “all that dirt,” a comment that suggests to Marlow that the man is “thinking of himself.” Brierley’s discomfort becomes more obvious when he offers to put up two hundred rupees if Marlow will add another hundred to pay Jim to run off, explaining that it is abominable to think of him being burned to ashes with shame. Marlow declines the invitation, understanding that Jim knows he must take his punishment. On that note Brierley disappears from the story, leaving us to conjecture over what he had done that made presiding at the trial so loathsome and set him on his course of self-destruction.
The questions piled up, Ford, a great heap of them, solid and impenetrable as a mountain. Why did Fox-Bourne ape Brierley in the manner of his suicide? His conscience obviously got the best of him, but what triggered it? We know that Brierley identified with Jim, saw himself on trial alongside that poor romantic soul, couldn’t stand looking any longer at whatever boiled up out of his past. Does that mean Fox-Bourne saw his own reflection in Brierley and Jim, or was it something else? Were they models or guides? And there is an even more fundamental question. Why in the devil did he read the book in the first place? I mean you’d think that after the taste he had of Conrad’s prose in the manuscript, a taste that had to be as bitter as gall, he wouldn’t have gone within ten miles of another of his books.
The only conclusion I could draw at the time and still believe is that someone directly or indirectly induced him to read Lord Jim at a time when the book would get under his skin and awaken ideas, a time when he was already vulnerable and could be affected by it. He might have overheard some fellow officers discussing it and that was all it took to pique his interest. The parallels among his life and Jim’s and Brierley’s could easily have stoked the weird desire most of us have felt at one time or another to get close to the fire that has burned us.
I’d like to know what happened when he came to the Brierley chapter, whether the character’s fate scared him enough so that he put the book aside for a while or if a sense of relief flooded over him the moment he understood that Brierley’s affliction was essentially the same as his own.
I’d like to know whether his conscience got hold of him before or after he read the novel, whether it revealed him to himself or confirmed what he already knew.
I’d like to know how long, and under what circumstances, he battled with his demons, who were surely sharp-toothed creatures. For some reason, I see them as fanciful bowsprits looking on accusingly through unblinking wooden eyes, possessed of a refined taste for the human heart, capable of imitating the cries of those Germans that rose from the fog like ghosts and, in between, reciting the more biting sentences of Conrad’s manuscript.
I’d like to know if he jumped feetfirst, dived, cried out, looked on like Heyst’s father and made no sound.
Most of all, I’d like to know if Conrad mentioned Brierley in his manuscript. If so, did he intend it as warning or a prophecy, a last effort to help Fox-Bourne, or a scenario of what awaited him, like Doom frescoes in old churches?
These are only a few of the questions raised by Scorsby’s letter. I could add more, pages’ worth, new questions, offshoots, whole subsets that would lead to yet more questions. No doubt there are caches tucked away like the silver coins Greek soldiers buried before going into battle, waiting for me to dig up, all fascinating and dark, for they carry their own murky weather with them. I have thought of these questions often, Ford, reread Scorsby’s letter more times than I can count in the hope of seeing something I had missed in all previous readings that would lead me to a few answers.
Well, there are none. Do you see any? One? For me, there is only the assumption of unappeasable guilt, a day of reckoning, the echo of Brierley’s suicide in Fox-Bourne’s. Beyond that, nothing but the infinite regress of questions arching toward the vanishing point. And yet there is a sense of an ending in the way Scorsby’s letter comes into the picture so unexpectedly, years after the major events had played out, sealing the story with a final irony in the image of that disabled watch whose hands are arrested at the moment Fox-Bourne jumped into the sea where those German submariners drowned. For the last few days I have kept my mind’s eyes on the watch and its fictional counterpart. The longer I looked the more it seemed that the memoir might end with that image. It was not perfect. I preferred something that focused on Conrad, but in its absence Fox-Bourne’s watch would do. About this time yesterday I had all but decided to use it. Then I attended a performance of the Wayang last night that changed everything.
A DALANG, FORD, IS an entertainer, the medium for stories familiar to his audience since childhood. He combines the skills of a puppeteer, ventriloquist, singer, comedian, rabble-rouser. He is a priest who mediates between the present and the past, this world and the world of the gods, keeper of mysteries and revelations, a man held in the highest regard by Indonesians, revered alike by peasants and politicians, betjak drivers and shipping magnates. He is, above all, an artist. Some are more gifted than others, more dexterous with their hands, blessed with more musical and dramatic voices, with the mysterious power of presence the audience can feel though he is shielded by the Wayang screen. Hamoto, the dalang I saw last night, is one of the latter, supremely so, a man who has an almost mythic status and commands the largest crowds, much like a great violinist does in European concert halls.
When I learned that he would be in Batavia a few weeks ago I marked the date on my calendar. Nothing short of a typhoon that made landfall would keep me from seeing him. After a long nap yesterday I went down to the street at twilight and hailed a betjak. At that time of day Batavia’s streets are awash with these vehicles contending for space with buses, cars, throngs of pedestrians, each of which claims the right of way. It was slow going, heading west along Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan toward Pa
sar Semen, where the traffic thinned out. In the kampong some distance out of the city the driver stopped at a station where other betjaks were discharging passengers. The cars of the affluent were parked in a line that disappeared in the darkness. In this city of stratas where place is rigidly observed, the Wayang is the great leveler, drawing the powerful down to the disenfranchised, raising the disenfranchised to the height of the powerful, reminding everyone of their common blood and heritage.
A white face draws stares, then smiles of approval, greetings in Bahasa. I walked with a group along a path paralleling a canal where women were drawing water in pails and bottles and strange, amphora-shaped vessels destined for their floorless huts whose windows glowed weakly with the light of coconut-oil lamps. Men hunkered down on their shanks watched us pass, their clove-scented cigarettes glowing in the narrow walkways, no doubt welcoming the distraction of visitors from the outside world, grateful that Hamoto had chosen their kampong over other locations in the city. A constant stream of chatter from the group added to the carnival atmosphere.
I was excited, Ford, quite thrilled at the prospect of seeing Hamoto, but also feeling let down over the approaching end of this writing, which has occupied me for nearly two years to the exclusion of everything else. The sensation was akin to the tristesse that follows lovemaking when we face the loss of passion and heat, knowing we must return to the prison of the self we have briefly escaped. I think it was made worse by my sense that something was missing though I had no idea what it might be. The fact of the matter was that I had had my say, for better or worse. The memoir would now pass out of my hands into yours and you would judge how well or poorly I had done. I was close enough to the clearing to see the white screen of the Wayang and the dark outline of the platform where people had gathered. For some reason I remembered telling you quite early in these pages about the resemblance I had noted between writers and puppet masters. I suppose it was only natural for the idea to come back since I was thinking of you and Conrad. In any case, I wondered how the comparison would sit with you, whether it would seem as obvious as it did to me, and decided that you would be pleased. Looking back on that moment this morning, I can’t help seeing it as prophetic, as if I had somehow intuited what I was going to see later and was moving toward it through that memory.
Sailors on the Inward Sea Page 23