On a return to blogging, and Joseph Conrad

It's been a bad summer for blogging. I'd blame Jenkins, our new dog--named, naturally, after Nicholas Jenkins from A Dance to the Music of Time, an aspirational name that reflects our hopes that Jenkins the dog will carry at least some of Jenkins the character's generosity of spirit--but that's a cop-out. Yes, time with Jenkins has taken away from other activities. But many's the day I've sat on the porch with him and a book, and could as easily have had the laptop and been typing away to you all.

Rather, it's more that the ongoing decline in the frequency of my blogging has fed on itself so that in a crucial way I've lost the blogging sense: I find I'm no longer reading quite like the blogger I was--the connections I would have made (and that I see myself making when I come across old posts) aren't readily coming to me; the mental note-taking I habitually engaged in for nearly a decade has atrophied.

And I miss it. I miss thinking and reading that way. So this post marks an attempt at a new start. I'm going to start modestly: my goal for the rest of the year is to post once a week, even if some (or many) posts are brief. I won't promise to hold to it--I believe promises should be kept, and I know the vagaries of life could easily disrupt this plan--but I'll do my best to make it happen. Come the new year, we'll see where things are at. And with all this, certainly implicit but deserving to be made explicit, is an apology from me: if you've bothered to check in here with any regularity, only to be dismayed by the Havisham-esque cobwebs burying memories of glory, well, I'm sorry to have been so remiss.

As for the substance of today's post, I'll keep it simple. I've recently returned to Joseph Conrad after some years away, reading Chance, Youth, and The End of the Tether. It's been wonderful, reminding me of the clarity of expression and thought that drew me to Conrad in the first place. But what's perhaps struck me most was Conrad's own assessment of his work, offered in a preface to his memoir A Personal Record in 1912, and included in the mid-1990s Penguin Classic edition:

Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention, I have not been revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Aesthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free . . .

Fidelity. That really is what it's all about with Conrad. It's most obvious in Victory, which I remember nearly twenty-five years after reading it as all but a monument to the importance--and costs--of holding to one's ideals. But it's there in so many of the books, situation after situation where someone is ruined either by the impossibility of reconciling their ideals with the reality of a situation or someone is utterly, and ultimately, undone by a momentary, even reflexive, self-preserving deviation from those ideals. Writing at the end of an era and an empire that frequently honored those values more in the breach than in reality--and on the cusp of a war that would in many ways show them up to be breathtakingly destructive, where not hollow--Conrad kept his subject narrow but powerful, and firmly held before him.

Details, details

Every once in a while as a reader you encounter a detail in a novel that is so perfect, so unusual, and so strictly unnecessary, that you can't help but assume it comes direct from the author's experience--adapted as needed for the fictional situation, but still seeming to carry with it a whiff of reality that extends beyond the page.

My two favorite examples come from Joseph Conrad and Lawrence Block. In The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Conrad tells of a terrible storm:

On the lee side another man could be seen stretched out as if stunned; only the washboard prevented him from going over the side. It was the steward. We had to sling him up like a bale, for he was paralysed with fright. He had rushed up out of the pantry when he had felt the ship go over, and he had rolled down helplessly, clutching a china mug. It was not broken. With difficulty we tore it away from him, and when he saw it in our hands he was amazed. "Where did you get that thing?" he kept on asking us in a trembling voice.

Conrad of course drew on his experience at sea throughout his books, but that one moment--the extraneous detail of the miraculously (and inconsequentially) unbroken china cup feels as straight from life as anything else in his fiction.

Lawrence Block's moment comes in the best Matthew Scudder novel, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. Published in 1986 but set in the '70s, back when Scudder was still a heavy drinker, it portrays the run-down, nigh-lawless New York of that period--the city, like Scudder, still mostly functional but clearly heading downhill fast. At one of the many drinking sessions in the book, a guy is prompted to tell a story of one of the strangest things he's ever seen in New York: leaving his girlfriend's house on West End Avenue in the 80s early one morning, he sees three black men standing in the street, "wearing fatigue jackets, like, and one's got a cap. They look like soldiers." He continues:

"Well, it's hard to believe I really saw this," he said. He took off his glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose. "They took a look around, and if they saw me they decided I was nothing to worry about--"

"Shrewd judges of character," Skip put in.

"--and they set up this mortar, like they've done this drill a thousand times before, and one of them drops a shell in, and they lob a round into the Hudson, nice easy shot, they're on the corner and they can see clear to the river, and we all like check it out, and they still don't pay any attention to me, and they nod to each other and strip the mortar down and pack it up and walk off together."

"Jesus," I said.

"It happened so fast," he said, "and with so little fanfare, I wondered if I imagined it. But it happened."

"Did the round make a lot of noise?"

"No, not a whole lot. There was the sort of whump! sound a mortar makes on firing, and if there was an explosion when the round hit the water, I didn't hear it." "Probably a blank," Skip said. "They were probably, you know, testing the firing mechanism, checking out the trajectory."

"Yeah, but for what?"

"Well, shit," he said. "You never know when you're gonna need a mortar in this town."

If Lawrence Block didn't at some point see some dudes firing a mortar into the Hudson--or, at minimum, hear about it from someone else he knew, I'll buy him a steak dinner. Or maybe some beef tongue. (You'll see why in a minute.) The Scudder stories portrat a New York that's always believable, even in--or especially in--its seediest aspects. But that moment? Whump! Just too real.

All of which leads, with my usual obliqueness, to the book that brought these instances to mind: Kate Atkinson's Life after Life. I've got a lot more tolerance for historical fiction than Jessa Crispin, who recently gave up on the book because she "got about three pages in . . . and suddenly Hitler is there," but as I near the halfway point I'm not yet wholly sure of the book either--despite finding it engaging. That said, leaving Hitler aside Atkinson does wear her research well--the fundamental requirement for a historical novel that's not dreck. Her descriptions of daily life and its accoutrements feel like typical novelistic description rather than gawping at the past or detail delivered for its own sake.

There was, however, one moment that did feel like the fruit of research, a discovery so entertaining that Atkinson surely couldn't help but include it. In that regard, it's like the mirror image of the moments in Block and Conrad, shining more brightly than its surroundings not because it's crafted from lived experience but because it's the sort of thing that only the haphazardly diligent magpie's research of a novelist would likely turn up. See what you think:

Mrs. Glover was more than fully occupied with pressing a calf's tongue, removing the gristle and bone and rolling it up before squeezing it into the tongue press.

If I may take a moment to play the squeamish vegetarian: There is such a thing as a tongue press! Good god, I hope it has gone the way of sock garters and collar stays, beef tea and pink shape.

Finally, I won't blame you if you begin to suspect that I wrote this whole post for the sole purpose of sharing the following line--which a friend credits to me but I have to believe I stole from someone more clever:

Tongue--the meat that tastes you back.

Good night, folks.

If only I had the monkey's paw!

{Photo by rocketlass.]

Any fan of ghost stories knows that some of the best come from writers who are known primarily for mainstream fiction, the sort where the only scares are the usual 3 A.M. existential insomnias. Henry James is the most well-known of those writers, having written enough to fill a fat volume, but he shares company, with, among others, Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, and Rudyard Kipling, who’ve all also written a book’s worth of ghostly tales. And then there are the here-and-there one-offs from Penelope Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Joyce Carol Oates, Donald E. Westlake--the list goes on and on.

But like a classic hungry ghost, I can't help but want more. Herewith, my wish list:

1 Herman Melville. Oh, "The Lightning-Rod Man" comes close--but only in that its lush, overripe language calls to mind Ray Bradbury, and its air of menace feels as if it's building to some supernatural revelation. The fact that it doesn't in no way prevents it from being a great story, mind you. But the autumnal extravagance of this story does make me wonder what Melville might have created had he turned his hand to the world beyond the grave. (Over in the Gotham Ghost Gazette Andrea Janes, meanwhile, has speculated, in a different way, on what might have been: a ghost story not by Melville but of Melville.)

2 Joseph Conrad. In response to a question about Conrad and ghosts I put out on Twitter, Mark Kohut pointed out that not only did Conrad not write any ghost stories that he knew of, but that his story "The Black Mate" was an "anti-ghost story, ghost as con job." But imagine what Conrad's ghosts would be like? They'd be called into existence as much by our own needs as hauntees as by the dead's need to haunt, manifestations of our failures of nerve and honor, our unforgettable regrets, the gnawing acid of our mistakes. They'd certainly not be for the faint of heart two whiskeys in.

3 Barbara Pym. She would be on the other end of the spectrum from Conrad: I imagine Pym's ghost stories being gentle, even cozy. The vicarage would be haunted, manifested by spoilt milk and wobbling mint jellies; the ghost would be the source of quiet worry, its relatively benign activities nonetheless way too far beyond the pale to be acknowledged in polite company, especially as it would be at its most active when unrequited crushes begin to rear their unmentionable heads. Decorum would be at risk of disruption, desire, as always, however, ultimately thwarted by reticence. The ghost, like love, would move on.

4 Rex Stout. Wouldn't it be fun to have Nero Wolfe confronted with an actual, honest-to-goodness ghost, one he couldn't banish with a "Bosh!"? Inconceivable, I realize--Stout's world has no truck with nonsense, and Wolfe would, I suspect, continue to deny the supernatural even in the face of the strongest evidence. But what fun it would be to see the battle of wits and clash of stubbornness that could ensue between two such powerful forces!

5 Iris Murdoch. Murdoch's ghosts would, I trust, be like her characters generally: flighty, impressionable, headlong, emotional. They would haunt because of love, be banished by clarity, wreak havoc in between.

These are my five. Yours? (But let's be clear: I get the first crack at wishing for these when that damned monkey's paw turns up! Then you can go. It's not like anything could go wrong, right?)

Conrad and Powell

Anthony Powell fans who turn to Joseph Conrad's novella The Duel (one of the five novellas of that title that Melville House, in a clever gimmick, published together last week) will enjoy an amusing echo of Uncle Giles in the whinging of one of the two contestants. Conrad's tale concerns Feraud and D'Hubert, a pair of officers in Napoleon's army who, through the insane readiness of Feraud to take offense, spend more than decade of the Napoleonic Wars in an on-and-off duel. Or, rather, a perpetually on duel, one whose interstices are forced by circumstance: recovery from wounds, lack of proximity, or, in the case that calls Uncle GIles to mind, difference in rank. D'Hubert is promoted to colonel, which leaves Lieutenant Feraud unable to challenge him without rendering both men liable to court martial. Feraud, formerly a casual, even feckless soldier, felt "an urgent desire to get on" spring up in his breast. He

resolved in his mind to seize showy occasions and to court the favourable opinion of his chiefs like a mere worldling.

That in itself is not much like Uncle Giles, who didn't tend to court work or opinion of any sort. But this certainly is:

He began to make bitter allusions to "clever fellows who stick at nothing to get on." The army was full of them, he would say; you had only to look around. . . . Once he confided to an appreciative friend: "You see, I don't know how to fawn on the right sort of people. It isn't in my character."

The minute he gets his promotion, Feraud begins making the arrangements to meet D'Hubert at arms, for,

"I know my bird," he observed grimly. "If I don't look sharp he will take care to get himself promoted over the heads of a dozen men better than himself. He's got the knack for that sort of thing."

Powell was a staunch fan of Conrad, calling him "one of our greatest novelists" in a 1974 article, so it's not unreasonable to think that Feraud's cynical disdain played a part in the creation of Giles.

In a different article on Conrad, published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1947, occasioned by a two new volumes of biography, Powell draws out a couple of succinct distillations of Conrad's stance and concerns as a writer. One is constructed almost entirely from some lines from Razumov, the student from Under Western Eyes who, as Powell puts it, is "forced to play a shabby part through no particular fault of his own . . a favourite theme of Conrad's":

"As if anything could be changed!" thinsk Razumov. "In this world of men nothing can be changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary trifles." This was the lesson Conrad himself had learnt.

Then there's this, which fruitfully compares Conrad to Kipling (an author to whose fundamental literary and imaginative qualities Powell, with his conservative leanings, is probably a better guide than many, able to judge with relative dispassion Kipling's achievements and failures; those of us on the left can then decide where to set the balance regarding other aspects):

Indeed, his informed distrust of pretentious claims to idealism and of pursuit of power masquerading as liberalism sets him apart form the mood of his literary contemporaries. . . . In this divergence he resembles Kipling--an author personally unsympathetic to him--who shares Conrad's respect for a sense of duty, his recognition of the practical difficulties of exercising command, and also, to some degree, his satirical attitude towards officials. Conrad is more sensitive than Kipling in handling the niceties of human character, but he does not possess Kipling's dexterity nor, perhaps, his imaginative powers. On the other hand Kipling--although his dislike for Peter Ivanovitch and his [anti-Tsarist terrorist] circle would in no way have fallen short of Conrad's--could never have achieved the objectivity of Under Western Eyes.

For the best distillation of Conrad's moral sensibility, however, you'll be best off turning to Conrad himself--and if you don't have time to read the whole of Victory, where it's given its most explicit treatment, then this brief passage of scene-setting from The Duel will suffice:

No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It hurries us into situations from which we must come out damaged; whereas pride is our safeguard, by the reserve which it imposes on the choice of our endeavour as much as by the virtue of its sustaining power.

I suppose as a key to Conrad, that passage could be faulted for lacking an explicit reference to honor and duty, but it's at least a good start.

Joseph Conrad

Now this is how you open a story:

Napoleon I, whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect for tradition.

Nevertheless, a story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage. They were officers of cavalry, and their connection with the high-spirited but fanciful animal which carries men into battle seems particularly appropriate. It would be difficult to imagine for heroes of this legend two offices of infantry of the line, for example, whose fantasy is tamed by much walking exercise, and whose valour necessarily must be of a more plodding kind. As to gunners or engineers, whose heads are kept cool on a diet of mathematics, it is simply unthinkable.

That's how Joseph Conrad begins his novella The Duel. I know there are those who dislike Conrad's prose--Ha Jin, for example, has written that it "tends to be purple at the expense of immediacy and penetrativeness"--but I find it almost always suited to his aims at a particular moment. What better way to begin a somewhat ridiculous, satirical account of a decade-long running duel than with the gentle irony of these sentences? The opening sentence alone, with its almost immediate interpolation of opinion, instantly reveals a narrative voice at some remove, both temporally and intellectually, from his subject, the perfect location for a Conradian narrative voice. (It's the position in which we find Marlowe at times, Heart of Darkness aside--though his emotional connection to the stories he tells prevents him from ever being as wry as this opening.)

One of the pleasures of Conrad is that he feels almost inexhaustible: there are nearly twenty novels, a handful of memoirs, and countless short stories. A reader can pick up one or two each year, when the hot late summer breeze brings thoughts of distant islands, and not run out for a long time. Such a summer night is this one; I'm glad The Duel is here.

Ballard, Wolfe, and a Sci-Fi question

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Finding my thoughts a bit scattered today, I turn to numbers in hopes of giving them a pretense of order. But since I'm writing about science fiction, let's make it a countdown!

3 For the past year and a half, I've been ever-so-slowly making my way through the 1,200 or so pages of J. G. Ballard's Complete Stories. I'm only about 350 pages in--up to 1962--and the thought that keeps returning to my mind (and that I can't be the first to dsicover) is that Ballard is clearly writing in the tradition of Joseph Conrad: Ballard's scientists, marooned on far-flung outposts throughout the galaxy, are merely Conrad's company agents and traders thrown into the future.

Like Conrad's characters, Ballard's have been nominally put in charge of places that are only barely understood back home--and whose history, culture, traditions, and dangers are almost entirely a secret. Their knowledge is limited where it isn't totally useless; their true dominion extends no farther than the walls of their base camp; and the culture they represent is utterly unwanted, even insignificant when set against against the inescapable age of the universe around them.

Look at the opening of "The Waiting Grounds," for example:

Whether Henry Tallis, my predecessor at Murak Radio Observatory, knew about the Waiting Grounds I can't say. On the whole it seems obvious he must have done, and that the three weeks he spent handing the station over to me--a job which could easily have been done in three days--were merely to give him sufficient time to decide whether or not to tell me about them. Certainly he never did, and the implied judgment against me is one I haven't yet faced up to.

Sounds self-consciously Conradian, no? That passage also signals the other key similarity between the writers: their characters, symbols of power without its substance, ultimately have only their honor to fall back on, and even, eventually, to hold them together.

If you're a Conrad fan who hasn't tried Ballard, you've got a treat in store (and vice-versa).



2 I've also been reading The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Short Fiction, which offers different charms. If Ballard's stories are of a space colonialism, about Western civilization's endless attempts to extend its domain into areas where it's not necessarily wanted or needed, Wolfe's are often about our attempts to exert that sort of control over our own selves and beings here at home. His stories are full of mad doctors operating on humans, psychological experiments that kill, houses of human horrors. Wolfe's world is one of knowledge perverted: it's not surprising that he has a story called "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories." (Though it is surprising that he also has stories called "The Doctor of Death Island" and "Death of the Island Doctor"--both written to answer a dare from Isaac Asimov.)

They make a good pair for reading in alternation, Ballard and Wolfe, the antiseptic, plainspoken loneliness of space set against the gothic nightmares we can produce here at home.



1 Which leads me to a question for you all: what good sci-fi writers am I missing? Ballard and Wolfe I enjoy, Bradbury--for all his occasional sentimentalism--is a long-standing favorite, Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem are as well. I tried Iain M. Banks last year, and he decidedly was not for me; I felt the same about Samuel R. Delaney's Nova, though in his case I'm not sure that I ought to give up on his whole ouevre.

Any suggestions?

"It is a fool's business to write fiction for a living," or, Joseph Conrad's letters

I've been enjoying dipping into The Portable Conrad this week, particularly the small selection of letters that close the volume, which alone would make the whole book worth picking up for any Conrad fan. I drew from one of those letters, to John Galsworthy, on Wednesday, but there's more worth sharing--including the closing line of that letter:

The finishing of "H. of D." took a lot out of me. I haven't been able to do much since.

Which does seem excusable.

The letters, at least the selection included here, offer us a somewhat unexpected Conrad, less weighty and serious than in his novels, and at times almost light--though what's fascinating is how frequently Conrad veers from moments of humor or self-deprecation into darker passages of near despair. Take the opening of this letter, from October 12, 1899, to his friend E. L. Sanderson:

Were you to come with a horsewhip you would be still welcome. It's the only kind of visit I can imagine myself as deserving from you. Only the other day Jessie asked me whether I had written to you and overwhelmed me with reproaches. Why wait another day? But I am incorrigible. I will always look to another day to bring something good, something one would like to share with a friend,--something,--if only a fortunate thought.

That lament will, I fear, be familiar to the couple of friends to whom my letter writing debt has settled into serious arrears. But, knowing me as a naturally a light-hearted person, they would I think be shocked if I followed up that lament with the bleakness that Conrad envisions:

But the days bring nothing at all,--and thus they go by empty-handed,--till the last day of all.

That same letter also offers some entertaining reflections on publishing and the craft of writing, starting with the raising--and instant dashing--of hopes of financial reward:

A book of mine (Joseph Conrad's last) is to come out in March. Three stories in one volume. If only five thousand copies of that could be sold! If only! But why dream of the wealth of the Indies? I am not the man for whom Pactolus flows and the mines of Golconda distill priceless jewels. (What an absurd style. Don't you think I am deteriorating?) Style or no style,--I am not the man. And oh! dear Ted, it is a fool's business to write fiction for a living. It is indeed.

The very next paragraph, however, turns what had begun as a joking account into a striking, unforgettable description of the haunted existence of the dedicated writer:

It is strange. The unreality of it seems to enter one's real life, penetrate into the bones, make the very heartbeats pulsate illusions through the arteries. One's will becomes the slave of hallucinations, responds only to shadowy impulses, waits on imagination alone. A strange state, a trying experience, a kind of fiery trial of untruthfulness. And one goes through it with an exaltation as false as all the rest of it. one goes through it,--and there's nothing to show at the end. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!

With some adjustments, that passage could slip into any number of Conrad's works; I even hear echoes of the final lines of Heart of Darkness

While we're on the subject of publishing, I'll close with this letter from late in Conrad's life to Richard Curle, about a magazine article Curle was writing about him. (I think that's the case--one of the faults of The Portable Conrad is that it entirely lacks contextual or explanatory notes.). Dated July 14, 1923, it opens with Conrad expressing gratitude for the form of the survey Curle had made of his work, then continues:

I was in hopes that on a general survey it could also be made an opportunity for me to get freed from that infernal tail of ships and that obsession of my sea life, which has about as much bearing on my literary existence, on my quality as a writer, as the eunmerating of drawing rooms which Thackeray frequented could have had on his gift as a great novelist. After all, I may have been a seaman, but I am a writer of prose. Indeed the nature of my writing runs the risk of being obscured by the nature of my material. . . . Even Doubleday was considerably disturbed by that characteristic as evidenced in press notices in America, where such headings as "Spinner of sea yarns--master mariner--seaman writer," and so forth, predominated.

Conrad is overstating his case there a bit: his ships, for what their natural isolation does to a man's spirit, are far more important to his writing than he suggests--just as Thackeray's drawing rooms, and their distorting effects on character, are in some important way the heart of his work. I have some sympathy for him nonetheless; the sense of being forever defined by the accidental path of one's youth must, as age closes in, be incredibly frustrating.

The inimitable Joseph Conrad

{Photo by rocketlass.}

From Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer (1909):

She floated at the starting point of a long journey, very still in an immense stillness, the shadows of her spars flung far to the eastward by the setting sun. At that moment I was alone on her decks. There was not a sound in her--and around us nothing moved, nothing lived, not a canoe on the water, not a bird in the air, not a cloud in the sky. In this breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and judges.

Those who know Conrad understand that the young captain, in setting this scene, has left out a far more terrible judge--next to whom the relatively forgiving judgments of sky and sea will seem as nothing: the implicit judgment posed by a man's idea self, honorable and brave--at least until it faces its first real challenges.

I deeply admire Conrad; Victory and Lord Jim are among the most important books in my development as a reader, my memories of first reading them still powerful fifteen years later. Yet he occupies an odd place among writers I love: I can go for a year or more without reading him . . . and then the urge will come over me, and absolutely no one else--not even his most obvious descendant, Graham Greene--will do.

That urge is what led me to The Secret Sharer last week. Of a piece with Conrad's other novel of young, inexperienced command, The Shadow-Line, it presents a narrator who is similarly young and uncertain in his command, and like that novel it verges on the uncanny--the captain's account of the discovery of a would-be stowaway reads like nothing so much as the set-up for a classic, Jamesian (Henry or M. R.) ghost story:

In the end, of course, I put my head over the rail.

The side of the ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flicked in the sleeping water with the elusive, silent play of summer lightning in a night sky. With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad, livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow. One hand, awash, clutched the bottom rung of the ladder. He was complete but for the head. A headless corpse! The cigar dropped out of my gaping mouth with a tiny plop and a short hiss quite audible in the absolute stillness of all things under heaven. At that I suppose he raised up his face, a dimly pale oval in the shadow of the ship's side. But even then I could only barely make out down there the shape of his black-haired head. However, it was enough for the horrid, frost-bound sensation which had gripped me about the chest to pass off. The movement of vain exclamations was past, too.I climbed on the spare spar and leaned over the rail as far as I could, to bring my eyes nearer to that mystery floating alongside.

I love the detail of the cigar plopping into the water, and the way the horror simply presents itself, unmoving, for the captain's mind to amplify and expand. The tale remains just this side of the supernatural, but it does make me dream of a parallel body of work by some alternate-universe Joseph Conrad, writer of ghost stories.

Having mentioned Henry James above, it seems right to share some of Conrad's take on James, which I came across in a letter included in the wonderfully small and chunky copy of The Portable Conrad that I found at my local library during this most recent eruption of Conrad fever. In a letter to John Galsworthy of February 11, 1899, Conrad offers this rousing defense:

Dearest Jack,

Yes, it is a good criticism. Only I think that to say Henry James does not write from the heart is maybe hasty. He is cosmopolitan, civilized, very much homme du monde and the acquired (educated if you like) side of his temperament,--that is,--restraints, the instinctive, the nurtured, fostered, cherished side is always presented to the reader first. To me even the R. T. [The Real Thing] seems to flow from the heart because and only because the work approaching so near perfection, yet does not strike cold. Technical perfection, unless there is some real glow to illumine and warm it from within, must necessarily be cold. I argue that in H. J. there is such a glow and not a dim one either, but to us used, absolutely accustomed, to unartistic expression of fine, headlong, honest (or dishonest) sentiments the art of H. J. does appear heartless. The outlines are so clear, the figures so finished, chiselled, carved and brought out that we exclaim,--we, used to the shades of the contemporary fiction, to the more or less malformed shades,--we exclaim,--stone! Not at all. I say flesh and blood,--very perfectly presented,--perhaps with too much perfection of method.

This seems a clear case of the best qualities of one writer appealing directly to the best qualities of another, superficially quite different writer: minute variations in self-understanding and self-assessment are crucial to both men, despite the very different settings and characters they deploy to explore them.

All of which, now that I've temporarily sated my appetite for Conrad, may just set me off on a long-overdue James binge. Perhaps OGIC will be willing to point me in the right direction?

Joseph Conrad and Lew Archer

Last weekend, as I was reading Joseph Conrad's spooky, gripping short novel The Shadow-Line (1917), I found my thoughts unexpectedly drifting to Ross Macdonald. I've praised Macdonald recently, impressed anew by his talent after reading three of his Lew Archer novels in the space of a week, and while I'll admit that it's at least a tiny bit of a stretch, I do find similarities between the two writers. Conrad's protagonists tend to be isolated men who are racked--or even undone--by questions of honor, which is often all they have to cling to in a society that fails to understand its necessity, let alone its value. Their isolation can be geographical, but these are men who would discover--or generate--that isolation even in a crowd: finding their fellow men wanting, they would choose, rather than judging them, to look for signs of that same failing in themselves, and to use any hint of it as an unholy combination of hair shirt and armor. They are loners by trade, hopeful fatalists by nature, and they prefer a noble failure to a tarnished success.

All of that could describe Lew Archer, too--that is, if you could find a way to make room for his sense of external duty, his deep-rooted belief that someone must be the champion of the afflicted, and that a flawed champion who is honest is at least marginally better than none at all. But last weekend I realized, in reading a blog post from trusted reader Jon Faith, that Archer's qualities are cumulative, not necessarily apparent on first acquaintance. The first Archer novel I read, several years ago, didn't impress me all that much. I enjoyed it--a well-told crime story is always a pleasure--but I didn't understand why people praised Macdonald so highly. It was only when I read a second, and even a third, that I realized that somewhere along the line, without quite realizing it, I'd gotten to know Lew Archer.

Macdonald's technique is cumulative, even pointillist. Whereas someone like P. D. James will alternate chapters of plot with chapters focusing on the lives of her recurring characters, Macdonald is content to sneak in a sentence here and there in the midst of his narrative. We learn about Archer through quick asides, judgments of character, expressions of regret, moments of self-recrimination. These accumulate, novel by novel, so that by the time we've read half a dozen or so, we ache in advance every time Archer decides--ignoring the wisdom gained from his long experience--to trust. Yet we also understand why this romantic cynic insists on trusting, understand that for him the short-term cost of external betrayal is always less than the long-term cost he'd have to bear to avoid it entirely.

So if you read one Macdonald novel and aren't convinced, I'd urge you to consider trying at least one more. It's what Lew Archer would do, after all.

"The grim shadow of self-knowledge"

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Apropos of the PJ Harvey song I wrote about a few days ago, here's Joseph Conrad's good friend Marlow on self-deception, from Lord Jim (1900)

I didn't know how much of it he believed himself. I didn't know what he was playing up to--if he was playing up to anything at all--and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief that no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

As I've been reading Lord Jim this week, I've also been reading MacDonald Harris's Mortal Leap (1964), a book that, coincidentally, opens with a young man being swept away to a life sea by his reading of Conrad, and which shares some thematic elements with Lord Jim; this passage from the book's opening chapter can serve as a sort of fervid companion to Marlow's cool appraisal:

[U]nder the scars, behind the wrinkle in the forehead, there were other ghosts, deeper and more elusive. Here was the mark where I murdered and fornicated, betrayed my friends and was betrayed by them; here I slept in strange rooms, the whore's cubicle, the prison cell, the psychiatric ward. Is there anybody who would like to have written on his forehead a record of the places where he has slept? We are all innocent, in the end, and all guilty. We move blindly toward our sins, and the things we do and the things we suffer for don't have much to do with each other. In the end there's no justice: the universe is not an auditing firm. Would we like it better if it were? If we had to pay for everything, down to the last cruelty, the last fornication, the last harmless lie? Let's leave the dark places where they are.

I begin by telling you straight out that you are a worthless scoundrel!

The other day, I mentioned that at the Brooklyn Book Festival I picked up some novellas published by Melville House. One of them was Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband (1870), which the flap copy describes thus:

This remarkably edgy and suspenseful tale shows that, despite being better known for his voluminous and sprawling novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky was a master of the more tightly focused form of the novella.

The Eternal Husband may, in fact, constitute his most classically shaped composition, with his most devilish plot: a man answers a late-night knock on the door to find himself in a tense and puzzling confrontation with the husband of a former lover--but it isn't clear if the husband knows about the affair. What follows is one of the most beautiful and piercing considerations ever written about the qualities of love: a dazzling psychological duel between the two men over knowledge they may or may not share, bringing them to a shattering conclusion.

They write good copy, those Melville House marketing people.

The copy got me to buy the book, and in addition, before I'd had a chance to start reading, it got me thinking about how other favorite authors would have handled this plot. Graham Greene came immediately to mind. A Greene protagonist, confronted with the husband of a woman he's been sleeping with, would surely sit, his inherent guilt confirmed, and wait stolidly for the man to take a well-deserved swing at him. But if there turned out to be no blow--if the husband turned out to be ignorant after all--the Greene character would not take this close call as a sign that he should desist; rather, he would pursue the affair with ever more flagrant abandon, begging to be exposed and appropriately punished.

I imagine that a Joseph Conrad hero's reaction would be fairly similar, but still distinct. Conrad's character would wait for the revelation that will confirm the knowledge he already carries of his failure. He knows he is guilty, but the guilt is not a religious guilt; rather, it is a personal one. He has failed to live up to his own deeply felt code. His only solace now is silence: he will endure any punishment (and consider it in some sense just) rather than confirm the husband's statements--and thereby betray the only confidence he has left, that of the wife. (Think "Long Black Veil.")

About Anthony Powell, on the other hand, we don't have to speculate: in The Kindly Ones, he presents us with a very similar situation, as Nick Jenkins finds himself having drinks with Bob Duport, ex-husband of Jean Templer, with whom Jenkins had brief, passionate affair at a time when she and Duport were vaguely separated. Duport is an impressively unpleasant man (Hilary Spurling, in her guide to A Dance to the Music of Time, Invitation to the Dance, calls him "aggressive and contradictuous."), but Jenkins rightly understands that

[W]hat I had done had made him, in some small degree, part of my own life. I was bound to him throughout eternity. Moreover, I was, for the same reason, in no position to be censorious. I had undermined my own critical standing.

What follows is one of the few moments in the novel sequence where Jenkins's own feelings come to the fore. So much of Dance consists of Jenkins telling the reader about the activities of others, which he has watched from the wings while remaining relatively aloof; the Jean Templer episode affects Jenkins powerfully when it happens, and its repercussions, echoing ever so slightly throughout Jenkins's life, reawaken that power each time they surface.

In this case, Powell uses Duport to, in a sense, teach Nick a lesson, remind him that even those aspects of life that we think we know best--those people whose very hearts we think we've mapped--are full of mystery and surprise, often of an unpleasant nature. In the course of rather dispassionately relating his troubles with Jean over the years, Duport off-handedly reveals an affair that had been totally unknown to Jenkins, one that throws his own time with her into a new, stingingly cold light. It's a marvelously complicated scene, with all the power and surprise of real-life emotional reverses, and Nick Jenkins emerges from it as a more nuanced and interesting character--not just for the reader, but for himself as well.

All this is by way of thinking about how Dostoevsky would handle such a situation--and as I thought about it, I realized that I had no idea. Oh, I had some general guesses: Dostoevsky's characters tend to react to everything in some sort of overwrought fashion--getting angry, drunk, guilty, passionately loving, violent. But part of what fascinates me about Dostoevsky is that I never have any real idea, in specific, how his characters are going to act. They're so utterly foreign to me, so singular, that they seem denizens of a world that is solely Dostoevsky's, bearing little relation to my own--like pinballs behaving according to laws of a physics that is totally different from ours, though no less immutable. In my own life I know Graham Greene characters, Joseph Conrad characters, and Anthony Powell characters--but no one knows Dostoevsky characters, right? (If you do, you're living a more dramatic life than I do, certainly.) No one can actually live with that intensity; that singularity is part of what makes them teem with life. They're utterly unpredictable, yet their actions, however overblown, manage somehow to seem right, even inevitable.

In that regard, The Eternal Husband does not disappoint. The protagonist, Velchaninov, doesn't feel the slightest bit guilty about his position in relation to the husband, Pavel Pavlovitch--whom he characterizes as one of a type, "the eternal husband," a man who is destined to be a cuckold and who seeks out, unwittingly, a marriage in which he will be cuckolded (the very reason, again perhaps unwittingly, that the wife selects him)--yet he can't simply dismiss him, either. Instead, his Dostoveskian overwroughtness takes the form of obsession, a desire to know whether Pavel knows about the affair--and whether Pavel's young daughter, whom Pavel mostly disregards, might actually be Velchaninov's. That obsession also shades into paranoia, as Velchaninov has no idea what to make of Pavel Pavlovitch, who--in pure Dostoevsky fashion--is by turns lachrymose, manically exuberant, and vaguely accusing. His every statement of intent feels disingenuous--yet there is no way for Velchaninov to be sure, no way to know what Pavel wants from this renewed acquaintance. Unable to break with Pavel without knowing, Velchaninov finds himself in the role of advisor and friend--necessarily a false friend--accompanying him on an ill-fated courting expedition, all the while clueless about Pavel's knowledge and intentions. The tension is unremitting, and the resolution--surprisingly drawn-out and complicated--is frightening, oddly moving, and largely unexpected.

It's a reminder of why I return to Dostoevsky every year or two: even a second or third reading brings surprises and new insights. His vision of human life is almost wholly alien to me, but its intensity and honesty are undeniable and compelling. If Tolstoy makes us larger, more empathetic, more human, Dostoevsky, for all his vexed faith, reminds us of our smallness and failures--and yet at the same time of our unbowed determination. As Pavel says,

One drinks the cup of one's sorrow till one is drunk with it.

Tolstoy would remind us to consider, as we empty our cups, the cups that others must drink; thus, together, he and Dostoevsky become twin stars, inseparable and indispensable.

Three dreams

1) I dreamed that one of the editors at my workplace had arranged for some prominent authors to give lectures on their craft to the entire office. First up were Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. They took turns speaking, and they actually had fairly interesting things to say about each other’s work. Hemingway was surprisingly self-effacing, and Conrad was exactly as I expected: formal, precise, and thoroughly serious.

It was only after I’d returned to my office following the lecture that I remembered that both Hemingway and Conrad were long dead. “Of course!” I thought. “Those must have been professional impersonators!”

I ran for the front desk, hoping to catch them before they left. Conrad was gone by the time I got there, but Hemingway was just stepping into the elevator. “Wait!” I shouted. “Who do you do when you’re not doing Hemingway?”

Hemingway turned. Then, smiling, he ripped off his mask, held it aloft, and jauntily shouted, “Yourcenar!”

2) I dreamed that I was reading—and greatly enjoying—Anthony Powell’s biography of Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). It was only after I woke up that I remembered that Powell never wrote a biography of Burton; that was Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, who serves as Powell’s stand-in.

Realizing that I would never get to read the book I’d been enjoying so much in my dream was substantially disappointing and not a good way to start the day.

3) This one is Stacey’s dream. Friday morning, before we left to visit my parents for the weekend, she told me, “Last night, I dreamed that you were bringing fifty books on this trip.”

From Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

Against fearful and troublesome dreams, nightmare and such inconveniences, wherewith melancholy men are molested, the best remedy is to eat a light supper, and of such meats as are easy of digestion; no Hare, Venison, Beef, &c. not to lie on his back, not to meditate or think in the day time of any terrible objects, or especially talk of them before he goes to bed. For, as he said in Lucian after such conference, I seem to dream of Hecate, I can think of nothing buy Hobgoblins; and, as Tully notes, for the most part our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep, which Ennius writes of Homer: as a dog dreams of an hare, so do men dream on such subjects they thought on last.