Rereadings

by Anne Fadiman

  I read Lord Jim where I read everything, lying in my bed, in a dark corner of my room, in my family’s house in suburban Houston. My room was at the top of the stairs by the front door, far from where the rest of the family slept, presided over by a huge poster of The Pirates of Penzance. A bit of ingenuity with the pillows and the gooseneck lamp made it impossible for my mother downstairs to see if the light was on after bedtime, and the rumble of the window-mounted air conditioner gave the room exactly the same sense of coziness, in the dreadful Texas summer heat, that I would later experience by a fireplace in cold, damp places. When my parents called up to me from downstairs, always for something less interesting than my book, I could pretend not to hear them, safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t climb the stairs unless it was important. I’ve never found a place that was better for reading.

  Lord Jim started off in the best possible way for me, with Jim’s experiences at a maritime academy in England. His age isn’t stated, but the narrator makes it clear he’s a teenager, probably just two or three years older than I was. The boy Jim was “generally liked.” He had “an excellent physique.” In the evenings, he would live in his mind “the sea-life of light literature.” He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half-naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.

  Those were my daydreams: I was Jim! Needless to say, that wasn’t me at all but rather the me I dreamed of being, in my imminent future life as Peter O’Toole’s best friend. My physique was not excellent at all, rather painfully skinny, and although I had friends, I was too bookish to be generally liked. One of the most excruciating moments in my life had come in the school year just completed, when a boy with an excellent physique, who was generally liked, actually spoke to me—and referred to my private passion, as if he could read my mind. He asked me, in front of his friends, “Why are you a pirate’s dream?” I was dazzled by the very thought of it: How could I ever be a pirate’s dream? Then he painfully thumped my sternum and said, “Sunken chest!”—and walked away laughing. I burned with anguish and tragic shame as only a humiliated thirteen-year-old can do.

  The story became much more complicated after Marlow took over and reconstructed Jim’s act of cowardice at sea, when he abandoned his ship to save his own skin—the moment the hero flinched. I was puzzled and intermittently bored by a story in which the hero failed to do what he had dreamed of doing when he was a boy. Nonetheless, I kept reading, having already developed an aversion to setting aside a book halfway through, as Marlow pieced Jim’s story together in that rambling, roundabout way of his. When I reread Lord Jim this year, I had an almost continuous feeling of surprise that my thirteen-year-old self had been able to wade through so much ambiguity and irony and fine moral distinction making. I must have known something about irony, because half the words that came out of my father’s mouth were ironic, but I could not have understood the joke about living in the mind “the sea-life of light literature,” since that was still one of the main motives of my own reading.

  The second half of the book, when Jim arrives in Borneo and finally does the right thing, was much more to my taste: he had a girlfriend, which was tedious, but the mushy stuff was kept to a minimum, and the story was crammed with action. Jim and his best friend, Dain Waris, the son of the good chief, subdue their enemies and bring peace and order to the village—until the arrival of a group of white desperadoes (whom I recognized on my rereading as pirates, though Conrad doesn’t call them that). I was moved by Marlow’s description of Jim standing on the shore of his new home, waving farewell to his friend as he sailed away, and took to heart Jim’s parting words, which seemed to me even then the defiant national anthem of adolescence: “I saw him aft detached upon the light of the westering sun, raising his cap high above his head. I heard an indistinct shout, ‘You—shall—hear—of—me.’”

  One of the most popular oracles in late antiquity and the Middle Ages was the sortes Vergilianae, in which the petitioner opened a copy of the Aeneid and chose a verse at random, without peeking, to predict the future. The practice was based upon the belief that Virgil’s poems, like those of Homer, contained all human learning and wisdom; if the consultation gave an unreliable forecast, at least it might offer some good advice. Nowadays, if somebody says a book is magical, chances are he’s trying to sell it to you. Yet every now and then a book comes along that appears to exert an uncanny influence on your life. I don’t mean that in the sense that its ideas change your way of thinking, but rather “uncanny” in the old Scots sense of the word, meaning that it possesses occult powers—like the predictive ability the Romans attributed to the Aeneid.

  As I reread my sortes Conradensis, the thought that kept recurring to me was how closely it had predicted my own life. On the second page, before flashing back to Jim’s school days, the book describes his later career as a “water-clerk,” or salesman for a ship chandler: “Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia.” I reread those words sitting on the porch of my house in Jakarta—as Batavia has been known since 1949. Since my travels in Asia began sixteen years ago, I too have spent some time—been known, you might say—in those places, all except Calcutta; it’s still on my “not yet” list. I have been a party to a few after-dinner storytelling sessions at hotels in Singapore, though the verandas now are usually glazed and air-conditioned. I have slept in the jungle of Borneo, in a village much like Jim’s. Dain Waris is Buginese, born on the island of Celebes, now called Sulawesi, and so is my own best friend, my partner Rendy. Conrad writes of the Bugis: “The men of that race are intelligent, enterprising, revengeful, but with a more frank courage than the other Malays, and restless under oppression.” The words could have been written to describe Rendy, except that as far as I know he has never exacted revenge of any sort. I’m certain that he would be restless under oppression, but since I have known him, he has refused to submit to anything like that. Conrad might have added “stubborn” to the list.

  Our house in Jakarta isn’t as tranquil a literary refuge as my boyhood room, though it’s quite as comfortable, perpetually breezy thanks to the L-shaped garden that encloses it. It can’t really be described as a quiet house; we’re just around the corner from the neighborhood mosque, which broadcasts a loudly amplified call to prayer five times a day. After the predawn call on the first night we spent here, I announced at breakfast that we would have to leave the house, that I couldn’t possibly live with such a racket. Ten days later, I was sleeping right through it. It’s a long story why I came to live in Indonesia, revolving around certain inequities in U.S. immigration law that make it all but impossible for Rendy even to visit my country. It is in every way a tiresome subject. Suffice it to say that I grew bored with feeling bitter about my own country and decided to take up residence in his.

  As I knew it would, my recent reading of Lord Jim turned up much that had eluded me the first time. My understanding of the concept of honor, which governs Jim’s life, has changed a great deal since I first read the book. At thirteen, under the moral influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the Boy Scouts, I found it unambiguously clear that Jim lost his honor when he abandoned his ship, and regained it with his act of bravery in Borneo, resulting in his death in the last chapter. It was a quest, pure and simple, which ended as all quest stories must, in the successful attainment of the goal. My concept of honor would soon be transformed in school, when we read Henry IV, Part 1 in English class, and I heard what Falstaff had to say on the subject. I still see honor as an essential part of a good life, and I also see it as an empty slogan used to justify all kinds of wicked
ness—a word, air, a mere scutcheon. And there, with Jim and Falstaff, began my catechism.

  My rereading also gave me insight into the accusation, made by many critics since I first read the book, that Conrad is a racist. One of the principal moral ambiguities of the novel arises from the fact that Jim is killed not by an enemy but by a friend. The book’s plot, slow to come to a boil, overflows in the last few chapters: Dain Waris’s father, Doramin, the sympathetic Bugis chief who lets Jim pretty much run his village, shoots him on the last page of the book because he wrongly believes that Jim is in league with the white desperadoes responsible for Dain Waris’s death. Jim knows Doramin will assume this, yet walks right up to him and his wife as they mourn over the body of their son. “Whispers followed him; murmurs: ‘He has worked all the evil.’ ‘He hath a charm.’ … He heard them—perhaps!” The old man picks up a gun and shoots Jim. “They say that the white man sent right and left at all those faces a proud and unflinching glance. Then with his hands over his lips he fell forward, dead.”

  In order for the ending to make sense, the reader must accept the assumption, vaguely hinted at and never justified, that Doramin, despite his years of friendship with Jim, is incapable of dissociating him from the evil white men who killed his son. Doramin isn’t evil himself; he’s simply not endowed with the powers of ratiocination that would enable him to make such a distinction, and he has an impulsive, brutish nature that disposes him to kill without hesitation. (Hence the foreshadowing that the Bugis are vengeful people.) I generally detest criticizing literature through the lens of contemporary morality, yet at the same time I find that most people who gripe about “political correctness” have a hidden agenda to whisk us back to a mythical golden age, when life was simpler and no one complained (and, as it happened, people who looked just like them ran the world). My principal objection to the denouement of Lord Jim, which comes early in Conrad’s career as a writer, is that it’s lazy, relying on the imperialist cliché of the violent, irrational savage—one that was familiar to the readers of Blackwood’s Magazine, where the tale was first published. I don’t doubt that someone like Doramin might have concluded that Jim was in league with the desperadoes, and might have made such a calculation based on the fact that he was white; but when the author expects me to take that assumption for granted, based upon my experience as a reader of “light literature”—what we now call genre fiction—rather than on his narrative of events and his presentation of the characters, then his book itself becomes light literature.

  Indonesia is an endlessly fascinating country, as big and diverse and rich in its way as the United States. I’ve learned a lot by living here, about the country and its way of life, its arts and religions. The experience has also taught me that you can live anywhere. When I first moved to Indonesia, my friends in New York, where I had spent more than twenty years, joked that I wouldn’t last long without Western theater and opera and art museums. Yet the life of the mind respects no national boundaries. Just as the boy Jim performed picturesque acts of heroism in his imagination, so I find few limits here on where I can go and what I can do. (I concede that it’s been even easier since I got broadband Internet access.) I have made many friends: some are Indonesians, but most are other expatriates, mainly because my command of Indonesian (not to mention Javanese and Bugis) is shaky. Expatriates are generally good company: people who choose to live in faraway places, where they do everything differently from how they do it at home, are necessarily imaginative and broad-minded.

  When I read Lord Jim the second time around, more important than the heightened sophistication of my literary analysis was my discovery that one of Conrad’s central themes is the strange life of the expatriate. He was one himself, of course: when he was seventeen, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski left his native Poland to follow the sea, and he never lived there again. Critics (rightly, in my view) have elevated him to the upper ether of the literary pantheon for his exploration of the themes of alienation and futility and man’s propensity for evil. But he wasn’t dealing with these themes in a general way, even if the moral dilemmas of his most complex characters have a universal application. No, in his finest novels he wrote about the particular forms of spiritual unease experienced by expatriates: the alienation of idealistic cosmopolites such as the Goulds and Dr. Monygham in Nostromo, and the futility of that book’s eponymous hero, an Italian in South America. In The Secret Agent, Mr. Verloc, a Russian living in London, presides over a veritable nest of expatriates in the upstairs room of his shop. Kurtz is as far from home as a man can be. Unlike the seafarer Marlow—Conrad’s storytelling mouthpiece, his genial chorus, who dreams of retiring to England—the central characters in the novels aren’t wanderers; they are foreigners who, like me, have found a place to stay. Like their creator, they are not simply alienated; they are aliens.

  When Marlow visits Jim in Borneo, he meets Doramin and his “little, motherly witch of a wife.” Doramin tells him that Jim, like all white men, will leave them someday. Marlow seeks to reassure him, insisting that Jim is different. Then the old woman speaks from behind her peephole of purdah: “Without removing her eyes from the vast prospect of forests stretching as far as the hills, she asked me in a pitying voice why was it that he so young had wandered from his home, coming so far, through so many dangers? Had he no household there, no kinsmen in his own country? Had he no old mother, who would always remember his face?” As I read the book on my porch, in a deepening dusk that vibrated with the plangent call to prayer from the mosque, Jim came fully alive for me for the first time when I saw him through the sentimental eyes of Dain Waris’s mother. I thought of my mother, and my father, my kinsmen in my own country, who will always remember my face. Then I really was Jim.

  VIVIAN GORNICK

  Love with a Capital L

  The Vagabond and The Shackle, by Colette

  When I was in my twenties, my friends and I read Colette as others read the Bible. She was our Book of Wisdom. We read her for solace, and for moral instruction. We read her to learn better who we were, and how, given the constraint of our condition, we were to live. The condition, of course, was that we were women, and that Love (as we had all long known) was the territory upon which our battle with Life was to be pitched. Not another living writer, it seemed to us, understood the situation as well as Colette. No one, in fact, came close. She alone had stared long and hard into the heart of the matter. In her work we could see ourselves not only as we were but as we were likely to become. It was the potential for self-recognition that made Colette’s novels so compelling.

  It was a tricky business, loving Colette as we did, one that spoke to acute inner dividedness. We were intellectually inclined girls, English majors whose relation to literature was high-minded, romantic, amateurish. On the one hand, we read Henry James and George Eliot only to imagine ourselves as Isabel Archer or Dorothea Brooke, passionately intelligent young women destined for pedestrian tragedy at the hands of famously unworthy men. On the other, we were daily absorbed by a hungry fantasy of ourselves as new women, literary and independent; in this spirit we read Mary McCarthy. The Company She Keeps gave us back a female protagonist in whom we could see ourselves reflected as we actually were, right then and there (Oh god! we moaned over “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” that is just the way it is). McCarthy’s central character was a budding “free” woman whose sexual humiliations were redeemed for us through the delicious brilliance of a prose edged in glittering irony and leveled at those who held the power. What fools her men were, mean and pathetic. Just to see them so portrayed, lowered into a bath of scorn, was to feel ourselves raised up. That, of course, was the thing with McCarthy, the scorn: scorn applied as balm against the surface of the wound.

  Yet McCarthy’s scorn had, ultimately, the power neither to penetrate nor to clarify. What she knew wasn’t sufficient; didn’t go far enough, deep enough, something enough. It only brought us back to Colette—this modern bohemian of two generations ago—whose
writing achieved so much nuance, so much quick-paced change, such fluidity of thought and feeling that, in her hands, being swamped by sexual attraction had the power of metaphor. Colette’s work sounded depths of understanding that were like nothing we had ever encountered. She seemed to know everything that actually went on inside a woman “in the grip.” Her wisdom riveted your eyes to the page, gathered up your scattered, racing inattention. It made A Woman in Love as serious a concern for the novelist as God or War. As you read on in Colette, the noise within died down; at the center, stillness and silence began to gather; a point of entry into the human condition was about to be reached.

  Two novels became imprinted on me: The Vagabond and The Shackle. In these books Colette dramatized the “condition” in a voice more nakedly autobiographical than any she would ever again assume. Here we found a glamorous loneliness, the kind we fantasized as emblematic of the contemporary woman who need no longer absorb in Victorian silence the slings and arrows of outrageous married fortune. She was free now to pick up and go … . And then what? Colette would tell us.

  For years I had by heart the following passage from The Vagabond:

  Behold me then, just as I am! This evening I shall not be able to escape the meeting in the long mirror, the soliloquy which I have a hundred times avoided, accepted, fled from, taken up again and broken off. I feel in advance, alas, the uselessness of trying to change the subject. This evening I shall not feel sleepy, and the spell of a book—even a brand-new book with that smell of printers’ ink and paper fresh from the press that makes you think of coal and trains and departures!—even that spell will not be able to distract me from myself.