THE
CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF
THE WORKS OF
JOSEPH CONRAD

’TWIXT LAND AND SEA

THE WORKS OF JOSEPH CONRAD

CHIEF EXECUTIVE EDITOR
S. W. Reid

ASSISTANT EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Robert W. Trogdon

EDITORIAL BOARD
Laurence Davies   Owen Knowles
Dale V. Kramer   C. T. Watts

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Nancy Birk (document control), Raymond T. Brebach (Philadelphia
libraries), Andrew Busza (Polish and Russian background),
Don L. Cook (editorial), Robert D. Foulke (nautical),
Robert Hampson (London libraries), Neill R. Joy (Colgate
libraries), Gerald Morgan (nautical), Mary Morzinski (Polish language),
Donald W. Rude (bibliography), Peter L. Shillingsburg
(editorial)

Founding Editors
^†Bruce Harkness   Marion C. Michael   Norman Sherry

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Catherine L. Tisch

JOSEPH CONRAD

’TWIXT LAND AND SEA
TALES

A SMILE OF FORTUNE
THE SECRET SHARER
FREYA OF THE SEVEN ISLES

EDITED BY
J. A. Berthoud
Laura L. Davis
S. W. Reid

ASSISTANT EDITOR
Raymond T. Brebach

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in the United States of America by
Cambridge University Press, New York

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This, the Cambridge Edition of the text of ’Twixt Land and Sea now correctly established
from the original sources and first published in 2008 © the Estate of Joseph Conrad
2008. Introduction, textual essay, apparatus, appendices and notes © Cambridge
University Press 2008. Permission to reproduce these texts entire or in part, or to quote
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notes entire or in part should be requested from Cambridge University Press.

First published 2008

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In Memoriam
BRUCE HARKNESS
1923–2004

Published in association with

CENTER FOR CONRAD STUDIES
INSTITUTE FOR BIBLIOGRAPHY AND EDITING
KENT STATE UNIVERSITY

Preparation of this volume has been supported by

RESEARCH AND GRADUATE STUDIES, KENT STATE UNIVERSITY

THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION

PROGRAM FOR EDITIONS

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

AN INDEPENDENT FEDERAL AGENCY

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

Maps

PREFACE

JOSEPH CONRAD’S place in twentieth-century literature is now firmly established. His novels, stories, and other writings have become integral to modern thought and culture. Yet the need for an accurate and authoritative edition of these works remains. Owing to successive rounds of authorial revision, transmissional errors, and deliberate editorial intervention, Conrad’s texts exist in various unsatisfactory and sometimes confused forms. In his last years he attempted to have his works published in a uniform edition that would fix and preserve them for posterity. But though trusted by scholars, students, and general readers alike, the received texts in the British and American editions published since 1921 have proved to be at least as defective as their predecessors. The Cambridge Edition, grounded in thorough research on the original documents, is designed to reverse this trend by presenting Conrad’s novels, stories, and other prose in texts that are as trustworthy as modern scholarship can make them.

   The present volume contains critical texts of ‘The Secret Sharer’, based on Conrad’s manuscript, and of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ and ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, based on his revised typescripts, which restore passages excised in the early magazines and incorporate revisions drawn from these and other authoritative documents, as well as editorial emendations. The Cambridge text of the ‘Author’s Note’ is based on the revised typescript. The survival of these manuscripts and typescripts has made possible the recovery of numerous and often significant words, phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs lost to his many readers since Conrad’s day and finally published in this volume for the first time.

   The ‘Introduction’ included in this volume provides a literary history of the work focused on its genesis, development, and reception in the twentieth century and describing its place in Conrad’s life and art. The essay on ‘The Texts’ traces its textual history, examining the sources of the texts and explaining the policies followed in editing them. The apparatus records basic textual evidence, documenting the discussion of genealogy and authority in ‘The Texts’ as well as other editorial decisions. The various appendices include a version of the first tale rejected for this edition and further information on matters discussed in the ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Texts’. The ‘Notes’ comment on specific readings that require glosses or involve particular textual problems. Two sets of illustrations either supplement the descriptions of documents given in the editorial matter (pp. 190–202) or help clarify the references to places made there or found in the texts themselves (pp. 530–39). Although they may interest the great variety of readers, the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Notes’ are written primarily for an audience of non-specialists, whereas the textual essay, apparatus, and appendices are intended for the scholar and specialist.

   This volume follows certain policies and conventions observed throughout the Cambridge Edition. The pages of the text contain line numbers in their margins to facilitate reference to the ‘Notes’ and other editorial matter. References to Conrad’s other works cite volumes of the Cambridge Edition already published, or else the Doubleday collected edition in its Sun-Dial printing (1921) and in the Dent printings (1923 and subsequently). Superior letters (e.g., ‘M^r’) in the original documents have been lowered (i.e., to ‘Mr’). The beginnings of paragraphs are represented by standard modern indentation regardless of the various conventions of the documents, and Conrad’s ‘_ _“’ is reduced to simple inverted commas. Dashes of variable lengths are normally printed as one-em dashes. Other typographical elements in the texts and titles of the original documents (e.g., display capitals, chapter heads, running titles) have been standardized.

   The texts and apparatus in this volume were prepared by computer. Those interested in data and documentation not published here should contact the Chief Executive Editor.

   In addition to those named in the Acknowledgements, the editors wish to thank the Trustees and beneficiaries of the Estate of Joseph Conrad and Doubleday and Company and J. M. Dent and Company for permission to publish these new but old texts of Conrad’s works. The support of the institutions and individuals listed on p. ix has been essential to the success of the series and is gratefully acknowledged.

CHIEF EXECUTIVE EDITOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIKE MOST critical editions, this volume has benefited from the support and numerous kindnesses of individuals and institutions during its preparation. Thanks are due to the following libraries and professional staff for facilitating access to manuscripts and other unpublished materials: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and Vincent Giroud, Timothy Young, and Anne Marie Menta; the Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, and Isaac Gewirtz and the late Lola S. Szladits; the Free Library of Philadelphia, and William F. Lang and Joël Sartorius, as well as William M. Brown; the Imaging and Photographic department of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Jane Daley Witten; and, finally, Elizabeth E. Fuller and Najia Khan of the Rosenbach Museum and Library for helpful answers to queries.

   For their support of the Edition we also wish to express gratitude to present and former administrators of Kent State University, including (in alphabetical order) Rudolph O. Buttlar, Carol A. Cartwright, Ronald J. Corthell, Joseph H. Danks, Susanna G. Fein, Suzanne B. Fitzgerald, Paul L. Gaston, Charlee Heimlich, Myron S. Henry, E. Thomas Jones, Dean H. Keller, Gordon W. Keller, Michael Schwartz, F. S. Schwarzbach, Carol M. Toncar, Darrell R. Turnidge, Eugene P. Wenninger, and John L. West. Gratitude for special support goes to the staffs of Kent State University’s Libraries and Media Services, and Nancy Birk, Cara L. Gilgenbach, Don L. Tolliver, Jeanne M. Somers, and Mark W. Weber, and particularly to the Systems staff, including Thomas L. Hedington, Thomas E. Klingler, Todd M. Ryan, and Richard A. Wiggins.

   As always it is a pleasure to acknowledge the aid of colleagues associated with the Cambridge Edition as well as other scholars who have given advice or answered queries: Stephen Donovan on the London Magazine, Jeremy Hawthorn on circuses, J. H. Stape for various counsel on the explanatory notes, Susan Jones and Ernest W. Sullivan, Ⅱ, for checking manuscripts and typescripts at libraries, and Andrea White on ‘A Smile of Fortune’. We wish especially to thank Laurence Davies, Owen Knowles, and J. H. Stape, the editors of Cambridge University Press’s Letters for 1916–21, for their cooperation and permission to consult texts of the letters prior to publication.

   The explanatory notes to ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ have benefited immensely from information given by the late Hans van Marle in a 1994 letter to the late Bruce Harkness. We wish to acknowledge the generosity of both in sharing this information as well as the extraordinary research of the former. The latter began this volume early in his tenure as one of the General Editors of the series. His work on one of its stories during much of his professional career is evidenced at various points; less evident are his contributions to the foundations of the volume, including examination of the early documents and numerous other details. In a unique exception to the policies of the series, the editors express on a separate page their debt to a scholar, a gentleman, and our quiet collaborator.

CHRONOLOGY

JOSEPH CONRAD’S life may be seen as having several distinct stages: in Poland and in Russian exile before his father’s death (1857–69); in Poland and the south of France under the care of his maternal uncle (1870–78); in the British merchant marine, mainly as junior officer sailing in the Far East (1878–90); after a transitional period (early 1890s), as writer of critical esteem (1895–1914); as acclaimed writer, though perhaps with his greatest work achieved (1914–24). After 1895 the history of his life is essentially the history of his works. Publication dates given below are those of the London editions, unless otherwise specified.

ABBREVIATIONS

[London is the place of publication unless otherwise indicated]

Locations of Unpublished Documents

INTRODUCTION

THE THREE NOVELLAS that Conrad composed between December 1909 and February 1911, and that were published in October 1912 under the title ’Twixt Land and Sea: Tales, followed (with a slight overlap) the creation of three of his greatest novels, Nostromo (1903–4), The Secret Agent (1906–7), and Under Western Eyes (1907–10). What the three tales may have owed to these mighty predecessors has not yet been determined, perhaps because the debt is indirect; but what is beyond doubt is that had Conrad, desperate as he was to bring Under Western Eyes to a conclusion, not received an unexpected visit, ’Twixt Land and Sea would not have been written. Captain C. M. Marris, a merchant sea-captain from Penang, Indonesia, who had come to England for medical treatment, called on Conrad in Aldington, Kent, on Monday, 13 September 1909, the day before his return to the East, and informed him that his earlier sea narratives evoking the old trading life in the Malay Archipelago had become the favourite reading of the surviving merchant mariners out there, that they had identified the figure behind the pseudonym ‘Conrad’ as the Captain Korzeniowski they knew, and that they were eager for more such stories from him.¹

   The conditions of Conrad’s current life in England, where the novels which are now read in every part of the world were respected only by fellow specialists, and where he and his family had been reduced to living in four tiny rooms above a butcher’s shop, had begun to demoralize him. His friendship with Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford, who had supported his work since 1898, had collapsed at the end of June. His ‘gout’ – a condition in him teeming with stress symptoms – had become chronic.² He was struggling to complete the disastrously overdue ‘Razumov’ (the working title of Under Western Eyes) – a task which was forcing him to confront his deepest insecurities as an orphaned and émigré Pole. Finally, he owed his agent, James B. Pinker, a staggering £2,566 (or roughly seven times the annual earnings in the professions),¹ which only the product of his pen could repay. Under such conditions Marris’s visit came upon him like an act of grace. As he heard what Marris had to tell him, his sense of paralysis apparently began to lift, and it eventually yielded to a run of creative energy which, by the end of January 1910, had enabled him not only to generate the 46,000 words required to complete a great novel, but also to produce, in a faultless two weeks, the 16,400 words of ‘The Secret Sharer’ – a story which converted into a comic key the novel’s tragic narrative, and which also opened the door to two further tales inspired by memories of his final year’s maritime service in eastern waters.

SOURCES

CAPTAIN MARRIS’S visit, then, proved to be massively productive. But does that make it a ‘source’ of Conrad’s three tales? The answer to that question, which is by no means straightforward, requires us to recognize a distinction between the general and the particular uses of this term. When, for example, John Locke invokes the ‘Source of Ideas’ that ‘every Man has wholly in himself ’,² he invites us to seek the origins of a text in the creative energy that brings it into existence, and for which the quality of that text is the sole evidence. To enquire, however, into the sources of a piece of writing would seem to ask us to relate it less to the author than to the world available to him. But this distinction is misleading, for the production of source – that is to say, the absorption of a piece of the world into a text – presupposes creative power. An event in the world is not a source until it has ceased to be merely itself, until it has been adapted to the requirements of its new environment. The criterion for the identification of a source, therefore, remains its creative function, whether that source originates as an episode in another text, or as a person in life, or as an event in time. In this perspective, the Marris who called on Conrad in September 1909, indispensable as his visit may have been in restoring Conrad’s faith in himself, cannot be regarded as a source unless he himself acquires some textual presence, as he arguably does in ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’. Until then (like Edward Garnett and Ford Madox Ford, who for years fostered Conrad’s writing without featuring in it), he should be understood in relation to Conrad’s talent – that ‘Source of Ideas that every Man has wholly in himself ’ – rather than to those ‘sources’ by means of which the outside world enters narrative fiction.

The Secret Sharer

ONE OF the most commanding of Conrad’s shorter works, ‘The Secret Sharer’ owes much of its power to the interaction of two sources. The first is autobiographical, and draws on his experience of his first command, which he assumed in Bangkok on 24 January 1888. The second is historical, and is centred on the killing of a seaman by the first mate of the legendary clipper, Cutty Sark, in early August 1880. The novella is also significantly indebted to Conrad’s extraordinary visual memory, the major effects of which are indicated in the ‘Notes’ to this edition.

   The circumstances connected with Conrad’s first and only appointment to a command deserve to be recalled, for they form the autobiographical context of ‘The Secret Sharer’. On 19 January 1888,¹ the Singapore Harbour Office offered him charge of the Otago, a barque immobilized in Bangkok (today also called Krung Thep) by the death at sea of her captain. Conrad left at once by steamer, assuming his post four days later. He found the Otago to be a small but elegant commercial sailing ship of 367 tons gross, measuring 147 × 26 × 14 feet, and equipped with the standard barque rigging (sails set square on the fore and main masts, and fore-and-aft on the mizzen mast). Apart from the captain, her complement consisted of two officers (the first mate, a German called Charles Born, and the second mate, probably an Englishman, named Jackson), together with six ordinary sailors comprising two Englishmen, one Scot, one German, and two Norwegians, with one of these doubling as steward. After Conrad joined her, the Otago was detained in Bangkok for a further sixteen days. The reasons for this delay remain unclear, but it offered an opportunity for acquaintance with a city that provided settings for two other tales of first command, ‘Falk’ (1903) and, more incidentally, The Shadow Line (1917). On 9 February, however, having loaded a cargo of teak, the Otago was taken down the winding twenty-five or so miles of the River Meinam (today, the Chao Phraya), over the sand-bar at the river’s entrance, and into the head of the Gulf of Siam, known to the British merchant marine as the Bight of Bangkok. Although Captain Korzeniowski (to give him his contemporary title) was eager to prove his mettle, prevailing calms, ruffled only by occasional faint breezes, turned the southern route to Singapore past the south-east corner of the Bight of Bangkok into a three-week ordeal.¹ When the Otago finally reached Singapore on the evening of 1 March, three ordinary sailors stricken with fever (malaria) were hospitalized, while a fourth resigned his berth. These had to be replaced before the barque was able to resume her voyage to Sydney via the Sunda Straits and Western Australia.²

   How much of this found its way into the tale? The magnificent opening description of land and sea as perceived some distance from the shore is generally an accurate impression;³ so is, at the climax of the narrative, the evocation of the craggy island landscape of the south-east coast of the Bight of Bangkok. The depiction of the barque, her officers and men, and her sailing qualities as it unfolds through the narrative confirms what is known of the Otago’s design, performance, and complement – except perhaps for the disposition of the officers’ cabins around the cuddy under the poop deck, which has to reflect the requirements of the plot rather than the facts of memory. Conrad’s treatment of the handling of the barque, from her initial immobilization outside the mouth of the river to the dangerous manœuvre required to drop Leggatt as near the shore as safety permits, exhibits the authority and precision (if not the wisdom) of professional experience. Furthermore, his representation of the effects of the failure of the wind on the psychology of the Captain and the crew retains the concreteness of remembered events. However, the illness which had disabled two-thirds of the Otago’s men disappears from the tale – though it will return no later than in ‘A Smile of Fortune’. Nor does the tale’s treatment of the Captain’s relations with his crew show any sign that he had, like Conrad, already spent nearly a fortnight in harbour with them, especially when many of them had required treatment for fever (malaria). And finally, least of all does the story’s central incident – the protection and release of a fugitive from justice – derive from any incident known or suspected in its author’s life.

   The difficulty of relying on biographical evidence in interpreting a text is shown by the Captain’s connivance in Leggatt’s escape from prosecution. This episode originates in an incident recorded in the essay ‘Emblems of Hope’ published in the earliest collection of his reminiscences The Mirror of the Sea (1905). Referring to his vigilant and irascible first mate ‘Mr B.’ (‘Mr Born’ in life, ‘Mr Burns’ in fiction), he writes: ‘then, on our first leaving port (I don’t see why I should make a secret of the fact that it was Bangkok), a bit of manœuvring of mine amongst the islands of the Gulf of Siam had given him an unforgettable scare’.¹ This is a source for ‘The Secret Sharer’ that is as firm as anything one receives from the horse’s mouth; but it does not, of course, have any bearing on the meaning it acquires by its transplantation. For that, we must go to one of Conrad’s very last essays, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’ of November 1923,² which evokes briefly Conrad’s second deep-sea voyage as master of the Otago, from Sydney to Mauritius to collect a cargo of sugar. Conrad decided against the safer but allegedly slower route via southern Australia, and instead took his ship through the rock- and wreck-strewn Torres Straits dividing northern Australia from New Guinea. Zdzisław Najder, the only biographer to link this decision with the dangerous self-testing manœuvre that concludes ‘The Secret Sharer’, attributes Conrad’s recklessness to his need to exorcise his less-than-distinguished Trinity House examination record, which included two failures in navigation that had to be made good before the master’s certificate could be awarded. Be that as it may, there is little to suggest that Conrad’s opting for the riskier route betrays an inferiority complex. With hindsight – that is, with some awareness of the cultural impact achieved by ‘The Secret Sharer’ – one is tempted to say that, like the gamble required to release Leggatt near enough to the coast to ensure his safe escape, the magnificent twelve-hour passage through the ‘windswept, sunlit empty waters’¹ of the Torres Straits, within sight of wrecks old and new, reveals Conrad’s mistrust of those who, like the captain of the Sephora, fetishize the rule book – that is to say, believe that the act of following a rule requires the relinquishment of moral independence.

   However, it is from the tale’s use of historical sources – public events which bear directly on its plot or action – that the power of its action derives. By far the most significant of these are associated with the Cutty Sark’s disastrous outward-bound voyage of 1880 to the Far East. This voyage has been fully documented by Basil Lubbock in Chapter 5 of The Log of the ‘Cutty Sark’ (1924) and in that book’s Appendix VII, which reports on the trial of the ship’s first mate at London’s Central Criminal Court in 1882.² Lubbock’s appendix takes into account contemporary reports which appeared in The Times of 5 July and 4 August, but he seems also to have had access to information that the reporters disregarded or did not have.

   Under the celebrated Captain J. S. Wallace, who had been appointed master of the already legendary clipper at the exceptionally young age of twenty-seven, the Cutty Sark sailed from Cardiff ’s port of Penarth on 4 June 1880 with a full complement of twenty-eight (officers, men, and apprentices), carrying a cargo of coal for the American fleet anchored in Yokohama, Japan. The first mate, a ‘hard-fibred, despotic character’ named John Anderson, alias Sidney Smith, but also known as ‘Bucko’ Smith, early acquired an aggressive dislike for John Francis, one of the three black sailors on board – a physically powerful man and well-liked by his fellows, but ‘incapable and clumsy’ in his handling of ropes and tackle. In an attempt to ease the tension between the two, Wallace got them to fight out their aggression, but the contest proved inconclusive. Meanwhile, the ship, which had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and descended to latitude 42° 30′ South to catch the winds of the ‘roaring forties’, drove eastward before gales which gradually intensified into a hurricane that eventually reduced her storm canvas to shreds. The wave troughs that threatened to becalm her as she sank into them exposed her to the fearful phenomenon of ‘pooping’ (being overtaken by a following sea). The men struggled for two hours to ‘bend’ (attach to a yard) a fresh top-sail, while the decks remained continuously awash. However, the sail was finally set, and the ship went on to make over 1,000 miles in three days, until it reached about longitude 90° East, when it became necessary to alter her course north-north-east towards the Sunda Straits and Anjer.¹ At that point John Francis, who was on the look-out forward, twice ignored Anderson’s order to release a line to the foresail to allow the men aloft to make the required adjustment to the foremast yard. Losing his temper, the mate attacked him; Francis retaliated with a heavy capstan bar, and a struggle ensued during which Anderson got hold of it and brained his opponent. Three days later, Francis died and was buried at sea. Anderson, now seriously vulnerable, was retired to his cabin and not seen again on deck for the rest of the voyage, which lasted another seven days. On 14 August the ship dropped anchor off Anjer, among half-a-dozen international vessels, to await orders by telegraph from John Willis, the owner of the Cutty Sark, whom Conrad affectionately recalled eleven years later in his ‘Author’s Note’ to ’Twixt Land and Sea. Meantime, Wallace was persuaded by Anderson to let him escape to an American ship moored near the Cutty Sark, which, knowing herself beyond the reach of British law, was only too eager to get hold of a man-handler of his reputation.

   Willis’s orders, when they at last arrived, were to proceed directly to Yokohama. On 5 September, therefore, Wallace took the Cutty Sark and her increasingly resentful crew northwards into a becalmed Archipelago. There ensued four days of continuous struggle to make headway, at the end of which, seeing nothing but disgrace before him, Wallace walked off his ship into the shark-infested waters. After a hopeless search, the Cutty Sark returned to Anjer, which she reached on the 14th. On the 20th she was instructed to proceed under pilot to Singapore, a voyage which with better winds she was able to accomplish in a week – only to discover that the population was agog with the news of the Jeddah scandal. (That ship’s officers had abandoned her 900 pilgrims off Aden under the mistaken assumption that she was about to sink – an event which Conrad would eventually turn into Lord Jim, drawing for good measure Wallace’s suicide into the novel.) The Cutty Sark’s cargo was ignominiously transferred to a steamer, and she was subjected to an official inquiry, which appointed a new master called Bruce. He was a ‘fat little man with an uneasy look’ who proved boastful ashore, timid on the water, prone to bouts of drinking, and sanctimonious with his crew, whom he forced into prayer meetings conducted by himself. He was also pedantic, literal-minded, ultra-cautious, and legalistic – traits which, aided by his terror of landfalls, turned him into an excellent navigator, but also bred endless hesitations that made him a very bad handler of men. His first port of call out of Singapore was not Bangkok on the Meinam but, next door as it were, Bombay on the Houghley River. His career ended a year later when, after an atrocious voyage to New York, his first officer made a formal complaint against him which was upheld by the consular inquiry that ensued.¹

   That Conrad would have been familiar with every detail of these events is beyond dispute. In his ‘Author’s Note’ of 1920, he alludes to the ‘basic fact of the tale’ (the mate’s killing of a seaman) as ‘the common possession of the whole fleet of merchant ships trading to India, China and Australia’ (p. 6), and claiming, too, that ‘I had heard of it before, as it were privately’ (p. 6). There he also evokes ‘the great wool fleet in which my first years in deep water were served’ (p. 6). The vessel in which he made his first voyage as an officer to the East was the Loch Etive, an iron clipper of 1,287 tons with a crew of twenty-eight, which brought it into the same class as the Cutty Sark. It left London for Sydney on 21 August 1880, about a fortnight after the Francis homicide, and almost three weeks before Wallace’s suicide. By the time Conrad reached Sydney, on 24 November, the whole of the maritime East was awash with these scandals² – which additionally now included the desertion of the Jeddah’s pilgrims. Thus Conrad’s voyage to Sydney – memorable enough to be recalled in another essay in The Mirror of the Sea, ‘Cobwebs and Gossamer’, the title of which describes what happens to heavy canvas sails when they encounter the winds of the southern latitudes – provides a double foundation for his rendering of the Sephora’s tribulations in ‘The Secret Sharer’: direct experience of a passage to the East in a similar vessel, and the scandalous news of the Cutty Sark’s doom-laden voyage.

   In composing ‘The Secret Sharer’, Conrad’s relationship with his sources ranges from the near literal to the near independent. The second mate’s account of the arrival of the big vessel beyond the bar guarding the entrance to the River Meinam – ‘She draws over twenty feet. She’s the Liverpool ship Sephora with a cargo of coal. Hundred and twenty-three days from Cardiff ’ (p. 83) – could be applied almost without alteration to the Cutty Sark. As for their respective voyages, they differ only in incidentals. With the Sephora the hurricane and the killing are not separate incidents, as they were for the Cutty Sark, but parts of a single event which occurs in the Southern Ocean deducibly south of Cape Augulhas (the southernmost part of Africa). However, in both cases the mate is confined to his cabin until he escapes, though – since Conrad has removed Wallace from ‘The Secret Sharer’, replacing him with a socially improved version of the Cutty Sark’s sanctimonious Bruce – Leggatt’s detention does not last ten days, but for the duration of the Sephora’s voyage from a point south of Africa – ‘thirty nine south’, he tells the Captain-narrator (p. 88) – to the northernmost reach of the Gulf of Siam. The exact time taken by that long final leg would have depended on wind and weather, but of the 123 days taken by the Sephora to reach the mouth of the Meinam from Cardiff, sixty-three days, or nine weeks, were required from the point where Leggatt killed the sailor. Leggatt tells the Captain that he spent ‘six weeks’ in detention before the Sephora reached Java Head, i.e., Anjer (p. 91); he then states that faltering winds prolonged the voyage between Java Head and the Meinam anchorage by another three weeks (p. 93), a total of nine weeks from the killing of the sailor (p. 95).¹ The ‘completely muddled’ Archbold estimates the time as ‘just over two months’ (p. 100), which more or less confirms Leggatt’s computation. This very minor wobble is not fatal to the integrity of a text that seeks to reflect the subjectivities of experience. Conversational memory is less reliable than a ship’s log; but it is only the detained Leggatt, and certainly not the self-gratifying Archbold, who would have counted the days.

   Conrad’s narrative, however, begins to draw away from its source when it deals with Leggatt’s ‘crime’ and Archbold’s response to it. There are radical differences between the Sephora’s Leggatt, whose strangling of the uncooperative sailor as the ship is ‘pooped’ is presented as an unavoidable reflex attending the effort to set the saving sail in monstrous seas, and the Cutty Sark’s testosterone-charged ‘Bucko’ Smith Anderson, whose racism had already vented itself on the uncooperative and truculent black sailor, Francis, before he finally killed him in an explosion of rage. Although Anderson was highly rated by his employers for his authority over a crew – these admirers included Wallace, who helped him escape, and indeed John Willis, who spoke for Anderson at his trial and re-employed him after he had served his sentence¹ – he has absolutely nothing in common with the Conway-trained, self-possessed, and up-market Leggatt, except for the circumstances of his crime.

   As for Archbold, Conrad has derived him from Wallace’s successor, the evangelical hypocrite Bruce, though he took his ship not up the Gulf of Siam, as Conrad’s Archbold does the Sephora, but up the Gulf of Bengal parallel to it. In Conrad’s tale, Archbold (like Leggatt in relation to Anderson) is an eminently respectable Bruce, without Bruce’s emotionalism and vulgarity and instability, and with a much more self-confident sanctimoniousness, secured in a literalist conception of the law that disdains the very idea of the mitigating circumstance and in a conception of religion that recognizes no intermediate space between salvation and damnation. As the gale turns into a hurricane, the Sephora’s captain takes cover in his cabin, leaving Leggatt to deal with the crisis. The mate is able to rally the hands to hoist a storm-sail, even as a following sea overtakes the ship, sending the men scrambling up the shrouds. When the ship rises again, Leggatt is found grasping a dead man’s throat. Far from feeling any gratitude, Archbold strips the apparently compromised Leggatt, to whom he and the crew owe their lives, of all credit, attributing the saving of the ship to the Almighty (as if God and man were in competition), and withdrawing into an inflexible legalism. Conrad’s Captain, of course, variously undoes this scenario, by identifying with Leggatt, by repudiating legal and religious orthodoxy, by accepting risk as a condition of life, and by demonstrating that leadership requires a good deal more than managerial competence.

   Hence Conrad’s villain in ‘The Secret Sharer’ is not the mate – i.e., Anderson, alias ‘Bucko’ Smith, whom he writes out of his scenario – but Archbold, whose interview with the Captain forms the central episode of the undivided tale. However, if Anderson disappears, out of what source is Leggatt created? No individual precedent has been found, nor is one likely to be, for he has, as it were, been summoned into being out of Conrad’s struggle with Under Western Eyes, the political novel he allowed ‘The Secret Sharer’ to interrupt, despite all his legal, financial, moral, and indeed human obligations to his agent not to do so. Yet at a subtler level, ‘The Secret Sharer’ does not turn away from Under Western Eyes. In that novel, the protagonist, a St Petersburg student named Razumov, finds Victor Haldin, a political idealist who has just assassinated the State Minister of Public Order, hiding in his rooms. This discovery turns the life of Razumov, who betrays Haldin to the authorities, into an agony of divided loyalties – a condition not unknown to his creator, who had himself, in fact if not in spirit, left his hapless country to make a career for himself in the West. Everything conspires to suggest that ‘The Secret Sharer’ – where Leggatt, in flight from authority for a crime of which he is and is not guilty, is protected and set free by the Captain – represents a re-negotiation of the tragic contradictions of Under Western Eyes. This feat is achieved by means of a highly original revaluation of the ethics of leadership which implicitly calls into question Archbold’s inflexible segregation of right from wrong through the young Captain’s demonstration that there is more to leadership than the laws that define it – that is to say, that there is more to following a rule than activating a conditioned reflex, just as the existence of sources, whether or not they can be traced, indicates that there is more to art than the rules of art.

   A survey of the major sources of ‘The Secret Sharer’ shows that the autobiographical material sustaining Conrad’s Captain is massively enriched by the historical material invested in Leggatt, and that together they permit an exhilarating inquiry into the complex interdependence of private affection and public duty. Moreover, this inquiry (if the term is not too cold-blooded) is enriched by a number of minor sources, two of which deserve mention. The first, which centres on Leggatt, is Biblical and is evoked as early as the opening sentence and as late as the concluding one (pp. 81, 119). In Genesis, chapter iv, verses 5 to 19, God’s ‘mark’ is set upon Cain, murderer of his brother Abel, as a sign of his expulsion from the community of mankind. But it is also the signature of divine protection accorded to ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’ upon earth ‘lest any finding him, should kill him’. Cain’s crime of fratricide is, of course, decidedly more transgressive than Leggatt’s, whose offence an impartial court might have classified, if not as self-defence, then as ‘manslaughter’ – that is, ‘the unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought’. What this source provides, however, is a context which broadens the ethical perspectives on the central action. For example, it calls into question a sanctimonious moralism which the narrative by no means confines to Archbold, but extends to our Captain’s officers and steward. It also raises questions about the limits of private morality, such as what being one’s ‘brother’s keeper’ (the phrase is of course Cain’s) might mean – questions that become markedly unorthodox when one recalls Poland’s, and Conrad’s, notion of brotherhood as ‘solidarity’.

   The second such source is cultural rather than religious. It is explicitly signalled by the title of the tale which, according to Conrad’s letter of 18 December 1909 to his agent, could have been ‘The Secret Self ’ or ‘the Other Self ’.¹ The notion of the self as double, which varies and qualifies the Christian notion of the self as fallen, pervades the literature of the nineteenth century, from Jean Paul Richter’s Doppelgänger to W. B. Yeats’s anti-self. Conrad’s major writing, in which doubleness of identity is always latent and frequently explicit, is rooted in this tradition. For him, however, the double is never a ghostly other, summoned by a hyperactive subjectivity, or else an angst fished out of the subconscious. Instead, it is produced by the tension between the self and the condition of plurality into which it is born, and which indeed requires it to act. Thus in his work the double is always summoned at moments of crisis, or more precisely by the protagonist’s need to decide what to do, whether politically as with the Razumov of Under Western Eyes, or professionally as with the new Captain of ‘The Secret Sharer’, whose story demonstrates that the successful performance of a public role requires that the claims of the private self should not be disregarded or repressed by it, as the Stoic ideal demands, but disentangled from it.

A Smile of Fortune

ACCORDING TO Jessie Conrad, ‘A Smile of Fortune’, unlike ‘The Secret Sharer’ which was mostly ‘pure fiction’, was inspired by two episodes from her husband’s 1888 visit to Mauritius: ‘Joseph Conrad’s one and only bargain’ (the potato deal that gives the story its penultimate ironic twist), and his entanglement with Alice Jacobus, of whom, Jessie adds, ‘He used to accuse me of being jealous’.² We know, of course, that ‘A Smile of Fortune’ is closer to the facts of biography than ‘The Secret Sharer’ which predates it, for Conrad’s seven-week visit to Mauritius generated a surprising number of testimonies, whereas only two elements of the earlier tale – the Otago itself, and the coasts and weather of the Bight of Bangkok (the upper part of the Gulf of Siam which replicates the main part in little) – can be recognized from the records. Nevertheless, despite the accuracy of Conrad’s observation of Mauritius, and despite the sometimes irascible candour of his writing, ‘A Smile of Fortune’ has something to hide.

   What that has turned out to be is an unsuccessful offer of marriage he made two days before his departure from Mauritius. Moreover, contrary to what Jessie Conrad was encouraged to believe, the object of this offer was not the nubile Alice with whom the novella’s Captain is drawn into decidedly ambiguous relations, and whose historical reality is by no means secure, but the second daughter of a well-to-do Port Louis family, who turned out to be already engaged, and whom the master-mariner turned master-novelist continued to feel compelled, twenty-one years later, to write out of his script. Thus the central event of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ – the Captain’s three-week dalliance with the sensuous Alice Jacobus – turns out to be perhaps nearly as imaginary as the Leggatt episode in ‘The Secret Sharer’, though psychologically much more evasive and complicated.

   There are, therefore, two kinds of source material in ‘A Smile of Fortune’. The first bears witness to a vividness of observation in its author that seems, yet again, to have been unaffected by the passage of time and that generated flawlessly focussed writing. The second, which acquires its energy at least in part from the need to recode rather than record the past, is sustained by what it represses and conceals, often with help from other writers. That Conrad is able to combine these two sources to create an integrated new text shows that repression may be no less potent than inspiration in the achievement of classic fiction.

   The island of Mauritius imprinted itself so vividly on Conrad’s memory that it seems to have lost nothing of its freshness over the near quarter-century it had to wait before its transformation into fiction. Conrad’s treatment of the approaches to the island, of its port and shipping, of the small capital city with its public buildings, gardens, and suburbs against a backdrop of volcanic mountains, of its socially and racially mixed population, of its history, politics, and commerce, of its tropical climate and vegetation, and above all of its isolation in the midst of a vast ocean – all this, and much more, demonstrates not only the distinctness of his original perceptions, but the degree to which they continued to live within him during the intervening years.¹ Conrad sailed for Port Louis from Sydney on 7 August 1888, some seven months after assuming command of the Otago. He carried a cargo of fertilizer,¹ a commodity required by the sugar-cane on which the island’s prosperity depended. Taking a route through the Torres Strait,² he reached Mauritius on 30 September and delivered his cargo to his ‘consignees’ – the term for receivers of goods sent by public carrier. The unloading seems to have been done quickly; however, he encountered problems with the return loading, which took seven weeks to resolve. During this delay he was able to get to know Port Louis and some of its inhabitants. Indeed, as a master-mariner with a romantic background, fastidious manners, an excellent command of French, and an extensive culture, he proved sufficiently striking to be remembered nearly half a century later. Most of these recollections were gathered at the beginning of the 1930s by one Auguste Esnouf, citizen of Curepipe, Mauritius’ second town. Esnouf was enough of a litterateur to value his island’s association with a world-famous author. His inquiries proved remarkably successful, and he published his findings in an article, ‘Joseph Conrad et Nous’, under the nom-de-plume of ‘Savinien Mérédac’, in the 15 February 1931 number of L’Essor (‘Uplift’), the periodical of the Port Louis Literary Circle. Further findings appeared in a later and shorter article, ‘Joseph Conrad chez Nous’ in the Port Louis daily Le Radical of 7 August 1931.³

   Esnouf discovered that Conrad’s consignees were a firm called Blyth Brothers, and that through one Krumpholtz, the only freight agent in the Mauritius of those days, he was able to find a business house, Langlois and Co., willing to charter the Otago to transport a cargo of sugar to Melbourne. This information came from Paul Langlois, at the time a young director of the firm of that name, who recorded his recollections in a letter published by Esnouf in his first article. Langlois vividly remembered Captain Korzeniowski’s appearance and manners, his punctilious dress sense, his multilingual culture, his aloofness among his rough fellow captains, and his intense, volatile personality. To be sure, all these traits could be deduced from a careful reading of ‘A Smile of Fortune’; but Langlois’ account is distinctive enough (e.g., Conrad’s fellow captains called him ‘the Russian count’, he had ‘a nervous tick in the shoulder and the eyes’) and is sufficiently fallible (he thought, for example, that Conrad ‘never made any contact with fashionable society’) to confirm his independence. Further research by Esnouf into Conrad’s business affairs established that the reason why the 550 tons of sugar he had secured could not be loaded was the contamination of the Otago’s hold by the fertilizer she had brought to Mauritius, and that the jute matting (not the ‘bags’ that delay the tale’s protagonist) required to insulate the boards was currently unobtainable because a fire in the factory of Valaydon & Co., a firm which held the monopoly for the manufacture of the matting, had destroyed their stock.¹ Moreover, although Conrad was forced by increasing competition from steam-ships to accept freight at the lowest rates, he remained (unlike his counterpart in the novel) sufficiently self-possessed to persuade his charterers, Langlois & Co., to pay for the costs of pilotage up the River Melbourne, and apparently to purchase a small cargo of potatoes on his own account.² He left Mauritius for Melbourne on 22 November.

   The tale’s version of these events, which it focusses on and around the Jacobus brothers (about whom we have no independent information), is much sourer. Having laboriously secured his sugar cargo, the Captain quickly falls foul of his business contact, one Ernest Jacobus, a truculent and rapacious merchant who is also a member of the Council (the ruling body of Mauritius under the Governor), and whose wealth rests on his influence over the island’s law-enforcement system. He controls the sugar bag supply, and thus the price of Mauritius’ principal export; and he refuses to help the Captain on the spurious grounds that supplies of this commodity have run out. It is only through a decidedly louche deal with Ernest’s brother, the ship-chandler Alfred – a man who is generally despised because he hawks for himself – that the Captain is able to prise the bags out of Ernest and make his ignominious departure.

   It is in the nature of literary fiction to transform its origins in life (or indeed in fantasy) in order to serve a determinate idea. What is unusual about ‘A Smile of Fortune’ is that one of its major autobiographical sources has been suppressed by the narrative, and thus driven into covert activity. This source is Conrad’s relations with a leading Mauritian family, the Schmidt-Renoufs, which lasted from just after his arrival till just before his departure. According to Auguste Esnouf ’s on-the-spot investigations, the story’s claim that he gained access to that household (or rather, as it turns out, to an extremely abbreviated and contemptuous version of it) through a chance encounter derives from fact. Esnouf reports that the day after his arrival in Port Louis Conrad, who was calling on his consignees, Blyth Bros., ran into a Mauritian captain in the French merchant marine, Gabriel Renouf by name, whom he had met in India four years earlier and to whom he had been of financial service. The circumstantial support for this story is compelling. Relations between India and Mauritius were very close (Mauritius imported from India the indentured labour on which its production of sugar depended); Conrad had spent a month in Bombay in May 1884 (indeed ‘four years’ before his arrival in Mauritius), waiting for the departure of the Narcissus on which he had enrolled as second mate; finally, this Gabriel’s elder brother, Henri Renouf, was an employee of Blyth’s. Through such a contact Conrad would have been invited into one of the more exclusive households of Port Louis, located on the corner of the still fashionable Rue de la Bourdonnais and the Rue Saint-Georges.

   Its head was Louis Edouard Schmidt, who was not only a member of the Council but also Receiver-General, or Collector of Taxes and Revenues, for Mauritius, and who had married the senior Renouf girl.¹ With them lived her two sisters and two brothers. During his stay in Mauritius, Conrad visited the house regularly, participating in drawing-room games (such as answering indiscreet questionnaires, one of which has survived in Conrad’s hand to tell us that the virtue he thought he most lacked was ‘self-confidence’, and the vice he most despised, ‘false pretences’), and reciprocating with invitations for tea on board the Otago, and a carriage ride to the then magnificent ‘Jardin des Pamplemousses’ (Garden of Grapefruits) about seven miles north of Port Louis.² During these visits he fell for the second Renouf sister, Eugénie. Two days before he was due to return to Australia, he proposed marriage through her brother Gabriel, only to be told that she was already engaged to her cousin – a pharmacist fifteen years her senior called Loumeau, whom she married on 14 January 1889,³ less than two months after Conrad’s departure. Conrad’s last act before leaving was to write to Gabriel asking him to convey his respect to the family and to assure him he would never return to Mauritius.¹ Nor did the after-shocks of Conrad’s amatory blunder end there. After some desultory sailing between Melbourne, Minlacowie (Melaton), and Adelaide, he received a letter dated 19 January 1889 from the Otago’s owners proposing a voyage to Cape Town and Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth), and adding: ‘you will, no doubt, return to Mauritius from So: Africa’. The next surviving letter from these employers was a testimonial referring to their earlier acceptance of his resignation from the command of the Otago.²

   This major episode has not been entirely excised from the tale (otherwise the notion of an ‘absent source’ could scarcely get a foothold), but it converts its representation of the Schmidt-Renoufs to satire, reducing them to a clan marked by domestic narrowness, bilingual vacuity, and provincial smugness (see p. 39). Even worse, they lionize the rich and squalid merchant Ernest Jacobus (who in the fiction seems to have displaced the distinguished Louis Edouard Schmidt), while turning their noses up at his ship-chandler brother Alfred for daring to bring up his illegitimate daughter in a reputable Port Louis district, and for looking after her godless mother – a travelling circus-performer for whom he had conceived an abject amour fou and for whom, to the town’s immense scandal, he had hired a bungalow after she turned up (damaged by the kick of a horse), where she died, impenitent and raving to the last. Thus in the tale the Schmidt-Renouf episode is explicitly reduced to a mere illustration of reactionary colonial snobbery. However, Conrad’s elimination of a romantic idyll (if such a term could ever be associated with Józef Korzeniowski) ending in a humiliation which – as his life-long silence about it indicates – he never forgot should be regarded not simply as an absent source, but as a repressed one. As such, it drains the story inspired by his visit to Mauritius of much of its original responsive zest, spreading over portions of the narrative a tone of sardonic disenchantment.

   This repressed source, however, is more creative than the epithet suggests. It generates a substitute narrative which becomes the central movement of the tale: the narrator’s ambiguous dalliance with Alice Jacobus in her hortus conclusus (the enclosed garden of courtly love). Such an argument assumes, of course, that this episode is not a reflection or transformation of a biographical event. That assumption, however, must overcome a serious difficulty. In 1942 P. G. Barnwell reported the discovery that in 1888 there lived near Port Louis’ commercial centre a stevedore of English descent named James Horatio Shaw, who possessed a rose-garden unique in Port Louis, who was married, and who had a daughter named Alice aged nearly seventeen when Conrad was in Mauritius. Although Barnwell’s supporting evidence takes the form of a bibliography only, the detail he gives about these people’s subsequent lives commands respect. It is likely that Conrad, living for two months on board his ship, would have got to know an English dock-hand and been taken to admire his garden, and even his daughter. The question, however, is whether, since at that time he was regularly visiting the socially desirable Renoufs, he did more than notice her attractions. The fact that when he was writing the story he teased his wife about the attractions of Alice while remaining as silent as the grave about the debacle of Eugénie, does not augur well for Barnwell’s thesis that Conrad enjoyed a ‘highly charged idyll’ among the stevedore’s flowers.¹

   Another reason to suspect the autobiographical importance of this episode is the fact that Conrad had to resort to a major literary source in order to flesh it out. This is Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Les Sœurs Rondoli’² a story of 11,000 words written in 1884 for the delectation of the male readers of the racy newspaper L’Echo Parisien. In this exuberant and cynical narrative, a young Parisian, Pierre Jouvenel, persuades a philandering friend to join him for a fortnight’s dalliance in Genoa. After an uncomfortable night in the train the young men awaken to the radiant beauty of early summer in Provence. At Marseille station a magnificent young woman, who eventually identifies herself as Francesca Rondoli, enters their compartment. Although she is in due course persuaded to devour the provisions the young men offer her, she remains truculently unresponsive to Jouvenel’s attempts at flirtatious conversation. Reaching Genoa too late for her to get home, she agrees without fuss to share one of the young men’s hotel rooms, spending an uninhibited night with Jouvenel to the envy and mortification of his friend. Francesca proves, however, to be no one-night stand and shares with pleasure the young men’s sightseeing in her native city. A fortnight later, just before their return to Paris, she calls at last on her mother, who lives in a working-class district, but fails to rejoin the young men. After a vain search, they return to France. The next spring Jouvenel, unable to forget her, goes back to Genoa alone where he tracks down the mother’s address, is welcomed by her with open arms, and learns that Francesca, who had pined for him for some weeks, had met a French painter and was now happily established with him in Paris. Jouvenel’s disappointment, however, does not last long. Another and even more splendid Rondoli daughter appears, and after her another two, still growing up but highly promising. Jouvenel discovers, finally, that Francesca’s original truculence, when she had boarded the train at Marseille the previous year, was owing to her frustration at parting from an original lover, who had decided to resume his profession as painter in Paris (where else?), and whom she had accompanied on the first leg of his journey from Genoa.

   Conrad’s twenty-four significant verbal borrowings from Maupassant’s text bear almost wholly on his presentation of Alice Jacobus and the Captain’s response to her. Her jet-black hair, the sensuality of her body under her light garments, her indifference to the young man’s attentions, her lack of self-consciousness, her pagan innocence, and even her petulant ‘shan’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘don’t care’, and so on all derive from ‘Les Sœurs Rondoli’. More generally, Conrad owes to Maupassant rather than Mauritius the juxtaposition of an innocent exhibitionist and a not-so-innocent voyeur. This whole scenario suggests that Conrad’s memory, usually the engine of his creative work, needed supplementation. Thus the tale’s ‘absent’ or ‘repressed’ source returns to the text by the back door, transforming Maupassant’s amoral erotic farce, whose message is ‘You don’t have to go to Tahiti, or even Mauritius, in order to find sex free of charge’, into a narrative riven with emotional and moral discomfort. In Maupassant’s Mediterranean paradise, mothers bring up daughters to do what comes naturally. In Conrad’s equivocal garden, whose very blooms have been transplanted from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal,¹ who can tell whether a father is seeking to save his daughter from a life of solitary and sterile excommunication in hypocritical Mauritius, or is treating her as bait to promote a profitable deal in potatoes?

   Returning in imagination to Mauritius some twenty-two years after an experience of humiliation, magnified of course by his patrician pride and emotional insecurity, Conrad was able to wrest a final meaning out of his visit. To judge from his depiction of Mauritian society, and especially of the ‘Renouf ’ family, the fiasco of his proposal seems to have opened his eyes to the ferocity of colonial snobbery and its effects on the island’s underclasses. The tale offers several examples of bullying and exploitation, from Ernest Jacobus’ treatment of his illegitimate mulatto son to the condition of the negro dockers of Port Louis’s harbour, but it is the ostracism of Alfred Jacobus and his daughter Alice that fully exposes the cynicism of the island’s social establishment. The family that Conrad has virtually written out of the script remains in it as an example of the decay of the patrician values of the pre-revolutionary French colonists. They cannot see anything reprehensible in Ernest Jacobus, the visibly squalid, politically corrupt, and racist tycoon of Mauritius; on the other hand, they warn the Captain against associating with his brother, the déclassé Alfred, who sells his wares himself, refuses to go to church, and above all takes in the disreputable, indeed godless, mother of his child when she seeks his protection after an irremediable circus accident. To be sure, Conrad’s narrative shows no special awareness of the general exploitative scandal of Mauritius: that the source of its wealth, the production of the sugar justifying a trading ship’s trip to Port Louis, is rendered profitable only by the importation of a sub-population of indentured labourers who, at the time of Conrad’s visit, were still slaves in all but name. Be that as it may, his Captain defies the family’s threat of ostracism. Thus the absent source – Conrad’s 22-year suppression of his failed marriage proposal – finally reappears, in a politicized guise, in the Captain’s choice of the socially untouchable Alfred over the courted, even toadied, Ernest. This represents a commitment of sorts to the island’s despised social classes. But Conrad is too keen a psychologist to try to raise the red flag over his text. In choosing Alfred, the Captain does not choose revolution; he chooses ambiguity, for he continues (as we do) to find him unreadable. Is marriage to the sensuous Alice, whom her father seems to throw at him, the price he will have to pay the merchant for procuring the unobtainable sugar bags? And when the bags finally materialize and his response to her collapses, is the purchase of the potato crop the fine he has to pay the father for having compromised the daughter? Confronted by these conundrums, all that remains for him is to return to the sea.

   The sea narrative that frames the Captain’s misadventures in Mauritius also grows out of an autobiographical source. The voyage to and from Mauritius is rendered in terms of the Captain’s sea-relationship with his ‘chief-officer’, Mr Burns. This figure is based on the Otago’s first mate, the German Charles Born, who was in life three (not five) years older than Conrad. He is described in The Mirror of the Sea as a man with ‘a red moustache, a lean face, also red, and an uneasy eye’, who fulfils to the letter two essential qualities in a naval officer: ‘the sense of insecurity . . . so invaluable in a seaman’, and ‘an absolute confidence in himself ’. Conrad’s lapses in navigational caution persuade Born that his Captain is utterly reckless, but the grip of his hand at parting at ‘the end of two years and three months’ (in fact one year and two months) tells a friendlier tale.¹ When the newly promoted Captain Korzeniowski joined the ship which Born had hoped to command, he found, as the ‘Physician of Her Majesty’s Legation of Siam’ testified, that the crew of the Otago had ‘suffered severely . . . from tropical diseases, including Fever, dysentery and Cholera’;² but there is no evidence at all that Born was himself seriously affected, let alone hospitalized, as Burns is in ‘A Smile of Fortune’. On the contrary, in ‘The Secret Sharer’ – the story that concludes with the most memorable example of the recklessness that earned Born’s disapproval in The Mirror of the Sea – the first mate is in excellent health.

   ‘A Smile of Fortune’, therefore, seems to juggle history. Mr Burns is rescued by the new Captain in the teeth of the protests of the British Consulate Doctor in Bangkok, is brought back to the ship on the point of death, and is restored to health by the Captain’s ‘six weeks of anxious nursing’ (p. 14). Two years later, they are both, each in his own way, in excellent spirits as they approach the ‘Pearl of the Indian Ocean’. Burns is the first to spot the island on the remotest horizon, and he rouses his Captain. The ship reaches the island at nightfall, too late to enter the port – but not too late for its master to perform a ‘reckless’ act, which recalls the release of Leggatt at the end of ‘The Secret Sharer’, by shooting the ship ‘in so close to the cliffs as almost to frighten’ himself, then checking it over the anchorage only at the last moment.¹ No such exuberance marks their departure, with a cargo of sugar, to be sure, but also with a supply of rotting potatoes exuding the contamination of shore life. It is now Burns’s turn to look after his Captain, who is prostrate in his cabin. This he does in his own way, by nursing the Captain’s investment back to health with a devotion equal to the Captain’s refusal two years before to leave him to die in Bangkok. It would appear, then, that in the frame narrative, the solidarity of life at sea displaces the ambiguities of life on shore, and an unsavoury deal is converted into a magnificent profit.

   The evidence is that this smile of fortune was as true of Conrad’s life as it is of his story. To be sure, the Australian press does not confirm that the Otago carried more than sugar. Najder, however, rightly points out that the potatoes were transported on the captain’s account and, as a private transaction, would have had no public record. We also possess, as already noted, Jessie Conrad’s testimony that they represented Conrad’s ‘one and only bargain’.² There is the strongest circumstantial support from the weather, a ten-month drought in 1888, ending in torrents of rain, which destroyed all root vegetables in south-east Australia. Finally, the other circumstantial details are consistently plausible: on a forty-four day voyage, with the first half spent in the tropics, potatoes would certainly have required the ventilation they receive in the tale. We should take it that, like his Captain, Conrad was manipulated into buying a lottery ticket, and then won. For both, however, the solidarity of sea-life offers no protection from the island. The very devotion of Burns, and presumably of Born, too, is mired in the logic of gain. The Captain resigns at once, and Conrad some weeks later, when a return to Mauritius seems inevitable. Even the sources get into the act: in the tale, the Captain recommends Burns as his successor; in life, Born was once again overlooked.³

   It seems, then, that the virtues of service at sea cannot salvage the vices of self-interest on land, for the latter have been shown to disrupt and destabilize the former, as the Captain apprehends while contemplating the island at the end of his sea passage (pp. 15–16). It looks as if Conrad can no longer sustain the hard optimism of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, a narrative which opens out a space, as it were, between the ship and her cargo by allowing her temporarily to transcend the ‘sordid inspiration of her pilgrimage’ (p. 30). Conrad’s sexual humiliation in Mauritius may have been repressed; but it has not been wasted. Relocated as it is from Eugénie Renouf ’s Rue de la Bourdonnais to Alice Jacobus’ prison garden, it generates what is perhaps Conrad’s most radical study of the irreconcilability of sex and money – radical enough indeed to close the ideal gap between the word ‘merchant’ and the word ‘marine’.

Freya of the Seven Isles

OF THE three tales prompted by the visit of their dedicatee, Captain Marris, it is only the third, ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, that is indebted to him for its content. The first two are autobiographical fictions built on episodes from the days of Conrad’s command of the Otago. ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, however, marginalizes the autobiographical Conrad into a passive spectator–narrator who with his small steamer trades in the regions frequented by Conrad when he was first mate of the Vidar, plying regularly between Singapore and north-east Borneo, with occasional deviations to the Seven Isles some thirty-five miles due north of Bangka in order to call on old Nelson (or Nielsen) and his daughter Freya. But this narrator, who sees and understands much, has no effect at all on the action. Well before the narrative crisis, he withdraws to a dreary London where, in the end, he is sought out by the bereaved old Nelson, who tells him the story of Freya’s humiliation of Lieutenant Heemskirk, captain of a Dutch police-boat, of its consequences in the destruction of the sensitive Jasper Allen to whom Freya is secretly betrothed, and of her own ensuing death.

   The action of ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, then, is largely confined to those parts of the Malay Archipelago that Conrad had known at first hand: Bangka, to which he had been taken in March 1883, when the Palestine on which he was serving had foundered in its vicinity; Singapore, where Conrad spent in all more than five months over several visits between 1883 and 1888; and the entrance of the River Berau off north-east Borneo, to which Conrad made four trading voyages between 22 August 1887 and 2 January 1888.¹ Although Conrad never set foot on the Seven Isles, he would have passed near them whenever he travelled between the Sunda Straits and Singapore. As for Macassar, where the novella’s tragic climax is located but in which Conrad never set foot, his astonishingly exact and vivid description of it as it was some forty years before the date of the novella’s action is owed entirely to A. R. Wallace’s account of it in his masterpiece The Malay Archipelago. Moreover, the 1890 edition, which Conrad owned, contains a map in which the Seven Isles (to-day the ‘Pulau Tujuh’ or ‘Islands Seven’) are identified as the ‘Toojoo Islands’.²

   Yet, even if the main action of the tale mostly derives from Conrad’s first-hand knowledge of the Archipelago, his narrative evokes the whole of that immense area, which covers over 3,400,000 square miles. The reasons for this will be touched on later. Its origins, however, are to be found in Captain Marris’s self-introductory letter of 18 July 1909, which – to judge from Conrad’s subsequent correspondence with Pinker (11 October 1909) and with Edward Garnett (4 August 1911) – effectively set the agenda for their meeting on Monday 13 September, the day before Marris embarked in Southampton on his return to Penang.³ Of Marris’s three letters to Conrad, his first should be regarded as a comprehensive source for a tale that highlights geographical space, as early as its opening page, with an image that embraces the entire expanse of the East Indies. Nelson’s tracks, we are told, ‘if plotted out would have covered the map of the Archipelago like a cobweb – all of it, with the sole exception of the Philippines’ (p. 123): an exception that serves to keep them on the map. Conrad’s narrative goes on to do just that. Its geographical allusions cover the whole of Indonesia, from Manila in the north-east to New Guinea (which divides the Archipelago from the Pacific), then westwards to Ternate (the Moluccas) and Celebes (Macassar) and along the southern border from Flores and Sumbawa to Sumatra, then northwards to Chantabun (Chantaburi, on the eastern edge of the Gulf of Siam), and finally to Hong Kong (where Freya goes to die). And this list is limited to the localities on the periphery.

   This spatial restlessness correlates with perhaps the most remarkable moment in Marris’s long letter of self-introduction. In what is in effect a single sentence of over 200 words, he evokes his escape from Macassar following the arrest of the Costa Rica (see below), first to Deli, on the island of Timor, then (having acquired an Australian ketch) on a headlong course of contraband and ‘trade’ stretching from the north-eastern tip of Celebes to Ternate, then back to Macassar, then northwards to the southern Philippines, then westwards through the treacherous north Borneo passage to the great Meinam River and Bangkok, then down the eastern side of the Malay Peninsula, round Singapore, and up the western side, with excursions in the dangerous Atjeh of northern Sumatra, then pushing further north to the fabled Nicobar Islands – only to be ‘smashed up on the Lys shoal between Mergui & Tavoy, losing everything & so ended sailing days’. This résumé scarcely does justice to the headlong excitement of Marris’s trajectory, which names twenty-one identifiable places; nor does it convey what the letter certainly does: a nostalgia for an age not yet subdued into the predictabilities of law and order, when the Archipelago was not yet fully dominated by the high imperialism in place at the beginning of the 1880s.

   When Marris refers to ending his ‘sailing days’, he does not mean giving up seafaring but taking up ‘steam’. He lists the nine coast boats he commanded after writing off his ‘Ketch’ (a two-masted sailing boat), among which is Conrad’s Vidar. Thus Marris’s letter becomes a lament for the passing of the age of sail: ‘There is not now I suppose a square topsail to be met with between the Yangtze & Batavia, & the days of shipping & harbor crowded with sail, in Bangkok, Singapore and Sourabaya are done’. Now, he adds, ‘there is nothing to be met with but steam . . . where of old we saw nothing but the 6 weekly Packetvaart boat from Java . . . & the Dirty little Dutch Kapal prang [= man-of-war] that used to cruise about in Caramata & Macassar Straits’.¹ The area patrolled by this gunboat exactly covers Conrad’s itinerary with the Vidar. How strongly Marris’s headlong sentences would have revived Conrad’s memories of 1888–9, the period of his life revisited in the three tales that comprise ’Twixt Land and Sea, can be seen in the last, which not only turns Jasper’s brig into a symbol of the beauty of sail at the moment of its passing, but makes ‘progress’, in the guise of a ‘Dirty little Dutch’ steamer, the agent of its destruction.

   Marris’s first letter expresses an aversion for England: ‘I . . . am disgusted with the climate, customs, & language’, he writes. His second letter, dated ‘September 6² / 09’, confirms this, though more positively: ‘the East is calling too strongly, & I must return’.¹ Conrad’s tale responds powerfully to these feelings. When the narrator suddenly removes himself from the action in Indonesia, just as it begins to accelerate to the catastrophe, and returns to England, the East seems to drop out of his life. London’s ‘winter days composed of the four devilish elements: cold, wet, mud and grime, combined with a particular stickiness of atmosphere that clings like an unclean garment’ (pp. 185–6) obliterate the past. But old Nelson’s visit, like Marris’s to Conrad, reawakens in him a visionary nostalgia for the tropical beauty of virgin forests with their rivers ‘opening their sombre forest-lined estuaries amongst a welter of pale green reefs and dazzling sand-banks’, and far-away glimpses of Jasper’s brig, ‘a tiny dazzling white speck flying across the brooding purple masses of thunder-clouds piled up on the horizon’ (p. 140).

   When Marris, the day before returning to Penang, travelled down to the Conrads’ cramped and uncomfortable quarters in Aldington to make what Jessie Conrad describes as a ‘never to be forgotten visit’, Conrad was able to see for himself Marris’s ‘partial paralysis’, worse than that of old age, ‘that obscured his recollection’ and to understand his eagerness to return to his ‘Malay princess’ and his little daughter.² When ’Twixt Land and Sea came out in October 1912, all three stories were dedicated to ‘Captain C. M. Marris late master and owner of the Araby Maid’ though it was only the third for which Marris was the direct source. The thought that the man who had urged him to ‘give us some more tales of the East, & weave some further romances about Rajah Laut & the old times of the 70’s and 80’s’, or to ‘write the story of the Costa Rica’,³ was now gone as irretrievably as Conrad’s own past helps account for the sometimes piercing sadness that haunts this tale, and it legitimates the sense of dissolution that concludes it, despite the reservations expressed by Garnett, who felt that the tragedy was ‘too “willed” & led up to’.¹

   Marris’s intervention was crucial not only in reawakening Conrad’s creative interest in the maritime East from Bangkok and Port Louis to Sydney and Melbourne, but also, and specifically, in Indonesia proper, the tropical setting of his first novels, to be sure, but more originally the arena for intensely confrontational politics, both native and colonial, which play so important a part in this tale’s catastrophe. The rivalry between the Netherlands and Great Britain had become endemic since the gifted and audacious but less-than-scrupulous James Brooke, in contemptuous disregard of the spirit if not the letter of the convention limiting British interests in Indonesia to north of the Malacca Straits, had been confirmed Rajah of Sarawak by the Sultan of Brunei and thus ‘completed the encirclement of the South China Sea by British dependencies’.² As a result, imperialist tensions between the British and the Dutch remained high until the Second World War. In his tale Conrad plants this conflict deep in the psychology of old Nelson/Nielsen, who with his divided self – a symptom not only of fear (Danish or Nordic nationality being much less provocative than a British passport in the Seven Isles), but also of a kind of paralyzing neurosis – comes through as being more politically receptive than Marris, secure with his Malaysian wife in the British–Malay Federation. Yet, once he has settled in his Dutch-held island, his anxieties become disastrous as they discourage his daughter from confiding in him about her English lover, Jasper Allen, or indeed from revealing to Jasper himself the danger represented by the rebuffed Dutch naval lieutenant, Heemskirk.

   Still, Marris’s letter of self-introduction to Conrad has a final card to play. It is represented by the sentence ‘I finished up with Sail with Carpenter in Macassar, in the old “Costa Rica Packet” when he got into the big smuggling trouble with the Dutch there’. This could have been passed over as a simple association of Marris with an international cause célèbre. In 1881 John Bolton Carpenter, skipper of the Costa Rica, was stopped by the Dutch authorities over disputed casks of gin that Carpenter had allegedly retrieved from a derelict prau. The Dutch took him, but not his ship, to Macassar where, the following year, he was charged with theft and the smuggling of arms. Carpenter maintained that the original offences had occurred in waters outside Dutch jurisdiction. A diplomatic row ensued between Great Britain and the Netherlands; the matter was submitted to international arbitration, and in 1895 the Russian arbiter found in favour of Great Britain. Evidently this episode offered Conrad, at the end of 1910, a political context supercharged with Dutch–British rivalry which forms the political–psychological foundation of the novella.

   Conrad, however, seems to have found more than that in this ‘source’. Writing on 4 August 1911 to Garnett in defence of a tale about which his former mentor had reservations, he explained:

It is the story of the Costa Rica which was not more than five years old when I was in Singapore. The man’s name was Sutton. He died in just that way – but I don’t think he died of Slav temperament. He was just about to go home to marry a girl (of whom he used to talk to everybody and anybody) and bring her out there when his ship was run of[f] a reef by the commander of a Dutch gunboat whom he had managed to offend in some way. He haunted the beach in Macassar for months and lies buried in the fort there.

      Only 18 months ago Charles Marris master and owner of the Araby Maid island-trader, came to see me in Aldington . . . He said: “You ought to write the story of the Costa Rica. There’s a good many of us left yet who remember Sutton.” And I said I would, before long.¹

There is no mention of Sutton in Marris’s initial letter to Conrad, but Conrad is clearly referring to their conversation during Marris’s visit to Aldington – which of course is irrecoverable. The problem with this explanation is not Sutton’s story, about which there is no reason to doubt that Marris and Conrad talked to each other, but its connection with the Costa Rica affair, since surviving accounts of that do not mention him.² What the episode nevertheless offered Conrad was a sensational case of ‘firearms’ smuggling – though one which went in favour of the accused, whereas in Conrad’s novella the man formally charged with that infraction (Jasper) cannot defend himself in court because the man who has committed it (Schultz, the first mate who steals to pay for his alcoholic bouts) cannot be believed.

   However, another precedent for Jasper’s tragic end does exist – indeed was already in existence in 1898. This is not the real-life Sutton that Marris and Conrad remembered – though that does not prove that such a figure never existed. This precedent is to be found in the first-draft version of Conrad’s The Rescue, Part II, Chapter 5, which Garnett had seen twelve years earlier, for he returned Part II to Conrad, who confirmed its receipt on 29 March of that year (Letters, II, 49). The following extract from the manuscript now in the British Library differs only incidentally from the revised form Conrad gave it after 1916, when he returned to a project that had been mothballed for nearly twenty years. One Jörgenson, an old drop-out loner, who years before had been obliged to burn his prized barque The Wild Rose to prevent her confiscation by the Dutch, tells the shocked Lingard, in explanation, that he did not wish to follow the example of ‘Dawson’ (whose name, if similar, is still not quite ‘Sutton’): ‘I wasn’t going to let her rot to pieces in some Dutch port.’ Lingard then asks: ‘He died – didn’t he?’, to which Jörgenson replies:

“Cut his throat on the beach below fort Rotterdam” said Jörgenson. He seemed to waver in the unsteady moonshine as though his gaunt figure had been made of mist. “Yes. He broke some trade regulation or other and talked big about law-courts and of legal trials to the lieutenant of the “Komet.” “Certainly” says the hound. “Jurisdiction of Macassar; I will take your schooner there.” Then coming into the roads he tows her full tilt on a ledge of rocks on the north side. Smash! When she was half full of water he takes his hat off to Dawson. “There’s the shore” – says he – go and get your legal trial you damned Englishman. . . .” He lifted a long arm and shook his fist at the moon which dodged suddenly behind a cloud. “All was lost. Poor Dawson walked the streets for months barefooted and in rags. Then one day he begged a knife from some charitable soul, went down to take a last look at the wreck, and”. . . .

Dawson obviously anticipates Jasper Allen, though it is Schultz who cuts his throat; Allen loses his wits and gradually fades away. The hounding lieutenant with his Komet plainly prefigures Heemskirk and his Neptun. This does not, of course, resolve the question of a real-life precedent for the fate of Jasper’s Bonito: the first cause, as such causes do, continues to elude capture. But it does provide a literary source which casts some light on the psychology of the tale. In his debate with Lingard, Jörgenson’s point is that it is better to destroy your vessel yourself than to have it destroyed for you by others, for sailing ships – like human beings – are not machines, and awaken in their owners a commitment usually reserved for living things.

   The source material determining the catastrophe of Conrad’s third land-and-sea narrative also determines the location of that climax – a town that Conrad never visited. He was not at liberty to choose a site in a part of the Archipelago he knew, such as Mintok, for the politics of his story; and indeed its sources required that the catastrophe occur in the Dutch naval headquarters of the Eastern Archipelago. When he reached the final section of his tale, he was obliged to seek help. This he found, as already noted, in Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago. On his first visit to Macassar in September 1856, his contact in Macassar was a Mr Mesman, a hospitable merchant and botanist established in the district, whom Conrad had already used as a source for Stein in Lord Jim and whom he brought back into ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ under his own name (p. 178). The town itself Wallace found to be ‘prettier and cleaner than any I had yet seen in the East’ (p. 162). It consists, he added, ‘of one long narrow street, along the sea-side . . . principally occupied by the Dutch and Chinese merchants’ and lined by ‘native shops or bazaars’. Two short streets parallel to the sea edge formed the old Dutch town with its fort and church. The long beach-front extended beyond the fort, lined with ‘native huts and many country houses of the tradesmen and merchants’ (p. 163). Conrad follows this description closely, and he owes many further significant details to Wallace. For example, on his arrival Wallace notices in ‘the roadstead of Macassar’ not only a ‘42-gun frigate’ but, more significantly, ‘a small war steamer’ (p. 162). He then puts up at ‘a kind of club-house, in default of any hotel’ (p. 162). Old Nelson books into the ‘Oranje House’ (named after the royal house of the Netherlands), which evokes all the atmosphere and amenities of a colonial club.

   Conrad’s need to provide a geographical as well as a historical foundation for his fiction, whether in the form of documentary or of first-hand evidence, is a legacy of the later nineteenth-century tradition of French realism where he went to school as a novelist. And yet, like other works in that tradition, ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ remains art, not reportage, and retains all the disciplined plenitude of Conrad’s characteristic style. The current of events that determines the catastrophe of the novella owes very little to fantasy or improvisation. Like the grand inclusive sweep of islands and seas it evokes, it represents Conrad’s farewell to the East he had known at the moment of its transformation under the onslaught of European progress. The glamour (his word) of the East had made itself felt as early as his first deep-water voyage to Australia in 1878–9.¹ During the four months his ship remained moored at Sydney’s Circular Quay, he became (in the words of his guardian–uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski) ‘acquainted with some captain famous for his knowledge of the trade with that Archipelago’ and devoted to ‘the Sunda Isles, the beauty and the wealth of which he describes with the greatest enthusiasm’.² This delight remained intermittently with him until he resigned his command of the Otago in 1889. To be sure, after ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ Conrad’s fiction revisited the East at least five times. But of these works, it is this tale that expresses most deeply the exploitative menace of modernity which hangs over the Archipelago, and without which its elegy of love and youth would dwindle into merely private grief.

   This collaboration between the personal and the political Conrad owes to a genuinely unexpected source: the music of Richard Wagner, with which he associates his heroine. Conrad’s Freya bears the name of the Nordic goddess of love and youth who reaches her nineteenth-century apotheosis in Wagner’s Das Rheingold (1852–4). There Wotan, ruler of the gods, exchanges his daughter Freia for possession of the world’s gold – a choice which will eventually bring about the destruction of the gods. Conrad draws Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen into his novella not only through his heroine’s Nordic physique and bearing, but also, more literally, in the power of her performance of Wagner’s music on the pianoforte. Wagner, whose fame had spread to the East by the early 1880s, not only contributes a realistic touch to Conrad’s narrative; his music is also a constitutive part of the power of Freya’s glamour. Offenbach and Franz Lehár were at least as popular in Singapore, but neither would have provided the piano scores required to turn Heemskirk from clown to monster. At the end of the nineteenth century the acquisition of pianos in the remoter parts of the world was a statement of prestige – though even here realism has not been banished: Conrad’s account of the efforts required to unload Freya’s ‘Steyn and Ebhart’ upright grand (125.37n) has been graphically corroborated by Jane Campion’s 1998 film The Piano, set in the New Zealand of the same period.

   Broader formal resemblances between Conrad’s novella and Wagner’s Ring could be and have been proposed. It is just possible, for instance, to establish links between old Nelson’s failure to see, let alone to face, the menace of Heemskirk’s infatuation with his daughter and Wotan’s incapacity in Die Walküre (1854–6) to check the murderous jealousy which his son-in-law Hunding (physically a Nordic Heemskirk, if such a thing can be imagined) vents on her blond lover Siegmund. But there would be no end to such comparisons. Instead, it is more profitable to pause, in conclusion, over Conrad’s justification of his art in a crucial letter written on 31 May 1902 to William Blackwood, editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and publisher of Lord Jim, ‘Youth’, and other narratives of that period (Letters, II, 418). In this letter, Conrad defended himself against the charge of commercial unsuccess ‘in a time when Sherlock Holmes looms so big’ with the claim that ‘I am modern, and I would rather recall Wagner the musician and Rodin the Sculptor who . . . had to suffer for being “new” . . . My work shall not be an utter failure because it has the solid basis of a definite intention – first: and next because . . . in its essence it is action’.

Composition

THE COMPOSITION OF a literary work is distinguishable from its sources as a verb is distinguished from a noun. Captain C. M. Marris’s visit to Conrad at Aldington on 13 September 1909 not only reminded him of his past in the eastern seas: it also energized him. Returning to ‘Razumov’ (the working title of Under Western Eyes), he produced, between mid-September 1909 and the first few days of December, 302 pages, or 32,000 words, of a novel that had been labouring, even seizing up, since December 1907. He then interrupted this run, but only to double his rate of production by generating the some 16,400 words of ‘The Secret Sharer’ in about ten days. This extraordinary spurt of inspiration was partly driven by his guilt at stealing time from Pinker, who was dependent on the novel to recoup his enormous investment in its author. Once delivered of his tale, Conrad returned headlong to ‘Razumov’, finishing the novel with a final burst of over 14,000 words. ³

   Conrad’s productiveness, part-cause of his breakdown in late January 1910, became the instrument of his recovery. After six weeks of prostration, which had begun to ease only with the revision of ‘Razumov’, he set about doggedly writing himself back into the world of the living. Over the next three-and-a-half months (from mid-May to the end of August), at first falteringly and inadequately, then with rising confidence, he coaxed out of himself the nearly 28,000 words of ‘A Smile of Fortune’. On its completion he almost at once turned to ‘Prince Roman’, a minor 8,000-word masterpiece of patriotic hagiography which consumed the month of September.¹ Thereupon, in complete contrast, over a period of ten weeks punctuated by the shortening of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ for serial publication, he produced ‘The Partner’, a tale in which the profit motive of capitalist England turns the louche deals of colonial Mauritius into the murderous brutality of the Edwardian underworld. Thus, it was only in late December, and probably in response to the news of Marris’s death, that he fulfilled his promise to him to return to the Archipelago they both had known by writing ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, a task which required nine weeks and nearly 29,000 words to complete.

   This episode in a literary career at a major turning-point is a striking example of the degree to which the act of writing can generate self-recovery. Progress on ‘Razumov’ was held up by the anxiety of an ever-increasing debt to Pinker, by the demands of a novel which was forcing him to envisage the possibility that his life in England rested on a betrayal of his origins, and by his estrangement from Ford Madox Ford, who had been a source of support and stimulus to him since 1898. Thus Conrad’s breach with Pinker represented the climax of a long-incubating crisis, advanced by such local trespasses as the writing of A Personal Record and of ‘The Secret Sharer’, and finally brought to a head by the ‘completion’ of Under Western Eyes. Yet the long process of recovery only reversed the paradox that writing had destroyed Conrad’s capacity to write: for it was by writing that he was able to overcome his paralysis. What he struggled to produce, as he fought for the recovery of his creative talent, was the second of three tales he would eventually dedicate to Captain Marris, and that itself would demand nearly four months of effort.

The Secret Sharer

THE MEMORIES awakened by Captain Marris’s visit found their initial expression in what many regard as Conrad’s finest novella, ‘The Secret Sharer’. But as already noted, its writing, like its subject, was an act of transgression. Since 3 December 1907, Conrad had been struggling with ‘Razumov’, which Pinker, over and above other occasional advances, was sponsoring at the rate of £6 per week. By June 1909, Conrad owed the man whose business was wagered heroically on the success of the novel no less than £2,250.¹ Driven by the prospect of his own ruin, and perhaps Pinker’s too, Conrad spent part of an August recess with a younger friend, the novelist Perceval Gibbon, trying to work out some kind of strategy for completing ‘Razumov’. Although this exercise was not very successful,² from the time he saw Marris he was able to settle down to completing the last third of the novel; and during the following three months he worked steadily at it, even while revising proofs of a French translation of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ in November.³ However, around 5 December, having posted the latest manuscript batch to Pinker, he abruptly broke off once again – this time to launch himself into a new tale, which would find enduring celebrity under the name of ‘The Secret Sharer’. With an unprecedented concentration and fluency driven at once by elation and anxiety he completed the manuscript on the 14th.

   The external evidence for these dates comes from Pinker’s archives and Conrad’s correspondence. The extant typescript of Under Western Eyes has now been thoroughly analysed.¹ This document consists of the typewritten copies of the manuscript batches received by Pinker’s office from December 1907 to January 1910, when the novel was at last ‘completed’. The usefulness of this record consists in the dating of almost every batch of manuscript or typescript from March 1909, when, after moving to Aldington from Luton, Conrad resumed ‘Razumov’ under increasing concern about his relationship with Pinker. The record shows that Conrad’s determination to complete the novel flagged only once in late 1909, between the 5th and the 31st of December, when Pinker received no further manuscript. Moreover, a letter by Conrad dated 19 December to the particularly supportive Gibbon indicates that on the previous day Pinker had warned Conrad that if the novel was not completed within a fortnight (i.e., by 2 January) he would suspend the weekly subsidy (Letters, IV, 301–2). The letter also reveals that Conrad’s own page-count of ‘Raz’ on 19 December showed only four pages beyond the batches of twenty and twelve pages sent the first week of December.

   Conrad’s correspondence for December is unusually informative about the progress of his work, though a bit imprecise about when he began the tale.² Yet he was well into the central episode of the narrative, the interview with the captain of the Sephora, before he showed his hand.³ On Friday the 10th, he sent Pinker the incomplete manuscript of ‘a short story of say 8 thou, which could be reduced to 6 if necessary’, together with the request: ‘Pray have these 64 pages typed and sent back to me say on Sat – as I have Sunday post. The last 15 pp will be sent by to-night’s mail if I can get them ready by six o’clock. If not then you won’t get them till Monday.’ The bustling tone does not wholly conceal the underlying unease: plainly, there is no prospect of catching the evening mail-train. Conrad concludes: ‘With them I’ll send you a title and a letter explaining why the thing came to be written’ (Letters, IV, 294). But the explanation is already there: the story is the product – as Wordsworth once put it – of ‘a paramount impulse not to be withstood’.

   On the same day, Conrad addressed Galsworthy in a very different key: ‘I have been working rather well of late. I took off last week to write a short story. Raz is really nearing the end. The French Nigger has been made to look like an original work – almost.’ (Letters, IV, 294). Now the balance sheet looks and feels good: Conrad is on the point of completing a full-scale novel and a long story (both of which posterity would rate as masterpieces). And in addition, he has recently corrected and enhanced the proofs of Robert d’Humières’ French translation of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ for the Mercure de France.¹ He was riding the crest of a creative wave; but, as waves do, it was moving towards the shore.

   On the following day, Saturday the 11th, having been forced by a delay in the publication of the ‘French Nigger’ to accept the offer of a loan from Galsworthy to tide him over, he concluded his letter of thanks with: ‘I’ve been working all day and feel horribly stiff and discouraged’ (Letters, IV, 295). Evidently, ‘The Secret Sharer’ needed much more attention than he had led Pinker to understand the day before. But at last, on Tuesday the 14th – one day later than he had promised a now ominously silent Pinker – he announced to Galsworthy: ‘I’ve just finished the short story – 12000 words in 10 days. Not so bad. I had to lay aside Razumov for a bit tho’ I didn’t think it would take 10 days’ (Letters, IV, 296). In fact, the ‘last 15 pages’ or ‘say 1200’ words which on 10 December he had told Pinker he might be able to post ‘by to-night’s mail’ had taken four days and had grown to 7,800 words, and by 6,000 words – or perhaps even more than that, since it was only on Wednesday the 15th that Conrad was finally able to separate himself from his manuscript.

   With the end of the story at last on its way to London, Conrad concocted a letter of explanation to Pinker that managed to blend deliberate nonchalance with devious self-justification. He justified breaking his promise to remain with ‘Razumov’ until its completion by having had to hospitalize the suddenly stricken ‘faithful maid’ Nellie Lyons between 10 November and about 9 December at a guinea a week, and he minimized his neglect of ‘Razumov’ with the explanation that the story, which he had just posted to Pinker, had initially been conceived as a sketch for the Daily Mail in response to an invitation by its literary editor, Lindsay Bashford, but had spontaneously grown into something which he ‘hadn’t the heart to throw . . . away’. He added, somewhat disingenuously, that ‘we may call it 10,000 words’, and that it had been ‘written in 8 days’. He then offered it to Pinker as collateral for a loan to cover the cost of Nellie’s illness (six guineas) and, for good measure, the cost of his son Borys’s change of schools (5 pounds), though making ‘no demand whatever’ with respect to the latter.¹ To reassure Pinker that ‘Razumov’ was now back on course, he described a return of energies he had not known since writing Lord Jim ten years earlier. The literary quality of ‘The Secret Sharer’, and indeed of what finally became Under Western Eyes, suggests that this claim was more than manipulative. However, it was also that, for before signing off Conrad had to come clean about yet another contractual breach: that he had borrowed yet more of Pinker’s time to revise the French translation of ‘the Nigger’ – to the point of transforming it into ‘a French work’. His uneasiness, moreover, persisted after he had signed off, for he added a postscript designed to draw his agent into a collaborative stance: ‘What do you think for title of the story The Second Self. An episode from the sea.’

   By this time presumably, Conrad was already at work revising the early typescript pages of the new tale.² Two days later, still having heard nothing from Pinker himself, he must have received from his office by the morning mail the rest of the typescript and set about revising it almost instantly, for he returned the whole the next day or the following one, with a covering note to which he anxiously appended a prompt, ‘For titles I suggest The Secret Self or The Other Self ’, and then added: ‘It could be also The Secret Sharer but that may be too enigmatic.’¹ On the morning of the 18th, he had at last received Pinker’s reply (Letters, IV, 304). Although all of Conrad’s allusions to the new story were, at the very least, uneasy, he had utterly underestimated the effect this latest breach of his contract would have on his agent and patron, whose already massive debt on Conrad’s behalf, secured by no fewer than four mortgages, would according to his accountants shortly reach the catastrophic sum of £2,702.19.9.²

   The effect on Pinker, and thus on Conrad, of the discovery that Conrad had yet again marginalized the novel on which his firm’s viability now depended can be recovered from Conrad’s correspondence between 19 and 27 December. Echoes of Conrad’s first reaction to Pinker’s letter can be picked up in a letter to Gibbon of the following day, Sunday the 19th. He began by summarizing his productivity over the past twenty-four months – or, more exactly, sixteen months, since eight months had to be written off on grounds of illness. It came to a total of 187,000 words in all, comprising the still incomplete novel ‘Razumov’, which required only another 20,000 words, two long stories (‘The Black Mate’ and ‘The Secret Sharer’, as yet untitled), and the 35,000-word autobiographical manifesto which Ford’s English Review had serialized as ‘Some Reminiscences’ the past year and which Eveleigh Nash and Harpers would publish in 1912 (in America as A Personal Record). And what was Pinker’s response to that performance? – That Conrad had given him nothing to sell for two years, and that he would cut off his weekly retainer ‘if he don’t get the end of R. in a fortnight’. If that happened, however, Conrad would burn the autograph of ‘Razumov’ – an empty threat, at best.³

   On the following day (Monday the 20th) Conrad fired off his response to Pinker. He vigorously defended his assiduity over ‘the last 23½ months’, despite ‘severe attacks of gout’, and despite Pinker’s contemptuous dismissal of the ‘Reminiscences’ (to-day regarded as one of Conrad’s monuments); and he peremptorily told him, in a pointed reference to his reminder that Conrad had given him nothing to sell for two years, ‘You have the story’, written ‘for the very purpose to ease the strain’: ‘Sell it’ (Letters, IV, 303–4). This was, of course, not strictly true: ‘The Secret Sharer’ had demanded to be born. Two days later (Wednesday the 22nd), driven frantic by Pinker’s continuing silence, Conrad sent a letter to Galsworthy with an explanation of why he had written the tale (to pay for the maid’s hospital expenses) and a summary of what he had told Pinker in defence of his lapse; he then abandoned himself to an outburst of fear, rage, despair, resentment, and humiliation, pathetically concluding with: ‘One must secure a certain detachment which is beyond me. I can hardly sit still’ (Letters, IV, 305–6).

   Soon after posting this letter Conrad’s suspense, which during the seven days had risen to a kind of frenzy, was over. Although the letter he received from Pinker has not surfaced, it is clear from his response to it later that day that Pinker (who had surely had time to realize that nothing could be gained by ending Conrad’s contract) had broached the question of where to place the new story. This abrupt fall in the emotional temperature is confirmed, though more pathetically, in a surviving letter by Conrad to his medical doctor. It discloses that he proposes to tackle at once ‘the last chapters of that interminable novel’, but that, since the ‘only thing which lags a bit yet is the brain. It isn’t steady’, he would be ‘grateful’ for something to help him ‘to more continuous working’.¹ Thus Conrad prepared himself for the last stage of the ascent of a literary summit he would not attempt again.

   The compositional history of a substantial literary text must distinguish between ‘immediate’ and ‘deep’ causes. The story was propelled into existence by the coincidence of the Daily Mail’s request for literary sketches and the sudden illness of ‘the faithful maid Nellie’.² These two events certainly qualify as its immediate causes even though they have absolutely no bearing on the tale’s meaning and merit. But there is also, as there must be, a more general if equally efficient cause without which ‘The Secret Sharer’ would not have come about: the visit of Captain Marris, some two-and-a-half months earlier, with its news of the success of Conrad’s sea-fiction in the Malay Archipelago. Such a cause, of course, is not yet a source, for ‘The Secret Sharer’ does not use any of the material evoked by the voluble Marris; but it qualifies as a deep cause in that it resurrected Conrad’s artistic self-confidence, which the technical and psychological demands of ‘Razumov’ had undermined, by associating it with his successful initiation in a profession that offers no second chance.

   If, however, we attend to the actual writing of ‘The Secret Sharer’ we are immediately struck by an unerring fluency and control quite at variance with Conrad’s usual struggle for forceful articulation. The writing of the ‘Razumov’ manuscript, agonizingly dragged out over a total of two years and two months and repeatedly interrupted by bouts of illness and French leave, averaged about 167 words a day; the tale of 16,400 words that interrupted the novel’s final run was produced in a mere ten days of elated inspiration at roughly ten times that rate.¹ The sense of moral release perceptible in every sentence of the tale becomes a kind of felix culpa, for it is owed to Conrad’s defection from a double burden of accountability represented by ‘Razumov’ – a text driven by his confrontation with the meaning of his apparent defection from a cause for which his parents had given their lives, yet also weighed down by the enormous sum his agent and patron had invested in its author. When, therefore, on about 5 December 1909 Conrad dropped ‘Razumov’ in order to write ‘The Secret Sharer’, he performed an act of defiant self-expression evident not only in its insolent plot, but also in the elated confidence of its style.²

   It would be naive to claim, however, that this declaration of Conradian independence merely entailed a set of substitutions – of intruders (Leggatt for Haldin), or of values (service at sea for individualism on land), or of outcomes (self-affirmation for self-submission). The young Captain’s achievement of command, which overrides nautical legalism, is a response to and therefore dependent on Razumov’s discovery that there are no gratuitous acts. Although ‘The Secret Sharer’ is in every formal respect an independent achievement able to yield a reading on its own terms, it remains indebted to the novel it defies, very much as its creator, however remote his sea-voyages may have been, could not cease to be a child of the land-locked nation that gave him his being. This is not to say, of course, that ‘The Secret Sharer’ is ultimately a mere pendant of Under Western Eyes. Nearly three years later, still able to relive the elation of its composition, he himself told his first and best mentor, Edward Garnett: ‘The Secret Sharer, between you and me, is it. Eh? . . . Every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note.’¹

A Smile of Fortune

IF THE two-week trespass of ‘The Secret Sharer’ and Pinker’s reaction to it significantly contributed to Conrad’s breakdown at the end of January, he owed his return to independent health to the support of his wife and his friends, to be sure, but also to his four-month struggle to write ‘A Smile of Fortune’. The pre-history of that novella thus becomes part of its compositional record.

   Having recovered from an attack of influenza during the first week of 1910, Conrad resumed his supply of ‘Razumov’ copy to Pinker. On 10 January he sent him 20 pages; on the 12th he proposed, for the first time, to call the novel Under Western Eyes. On the 13th, still pleading the effects of an attack of ‘flu’ for the delay, he promised to come up to London on the 17th ‘with the last pages’. On Wednesday the 19th he cited an unexpected visitor (the scholar Sidney Colvin) as the reason for having failed to appear two days earlier, and enclosed ‘the pages up to 1300’.² On the 26th, having written an astonishing fifty pages in sixteen days, he telegraphed Pinker to announce his arrival with the completed novel for Thursday the 27th. On that day, author and agent, tied together by a fearful debt and divided by the existence of ‘The Secret Sharer’, had a furious row about which we know only that Pinker, going for the jugular, complained that Conrad ‘did not speak English to him’.¹ Conrad spent the night in London with Galsworthy, returning to Aldington the following morning in a very overwrought condition, and he collapsed on Sunday, 30 January. His doctor diagnosed ‘a complete nervous breakdown’ which ‘has been coming on for months’.² The attack kept Conrad delirious and paranoiac for over a fortnight, and incapacitated until deep into April; and when it finally lapsed, he remained enfeebled for several months.

   The disintegration of Conrad’s relations with Pinker – his agent, paymaster, and friend – left him hugely exposed. A necessary condition for his return to health and creativity was the establishment of an alternative support system. His wife Jessie, who had always run the household, nursed him night and day and became his typist; his wealthy and generous fellow-novelist John Galsworthy opened and re-opened his purse; and Robert Garnett, the lawyer–brother of Conrad’s first mentor, Edward, took over Conrad’s legal and financial affairs and negotiated a new contract with Pinker.³ A major effect of this solidarity was that on 21 June the Conrads were able to move from their cramped Aldington quarters to Capel House, a seventeenth-century farmstead near Ashford. Moreover, on 9 August, following a two-year campaign by Galsworthy, Conrad was awarded an annual Civil List pension of £100. Yet even this concerted help, indispensable as it was, would have remained insufficient without Conrad’s own determination, sustained for over six months, to work himself back into creativity. The result of this effort of self-repair was not only the major revision of Under Western Eyes, but also the production of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ – a tale which might lack the explosive mastery of ‘The Secret Sharer’, but which by its very existence embodies a deeper understanding of the interdependence of living and writing.

   At 27,700 words, ‘A Smile of Fortune’ is 11,300 words longer than ‘The Secret Sharer’, but its composition took almost four months, not ten or twelve days. The reason, of course, is that it was a work of convalescence – or, more precisely, of forced recovery, since, notwithstanding the Civil List award, Conrad’s pen continued to stand between his family and penury. His initial prostration, as we have noted, lasted six weeks. When he was finally able to write his first letter – to John Galsworthy – it was movingly to express his gratitude to him and to Robert Garnett: ‘I don’t know what to say to you my dearest Jack. Without you I would have perished morally and materially. I daren’t ask what has been done by Robert’.¹ When, at the very end of March, he felt at last capable of undertaking a preliminary task, the ‘correction’ of the Under Western Eyes typescript, he was unable to sustain attention for more than a few minutes at a time;² and it was only three and a half weeks later, on 24 April, that he found himself able to give the task the concentration it required; and only on 11 May, nearly six weeks after his first attempt, that he was able to bring it to a conclusion.³

   Several days before this minor triumph, he had intimated to Henry-Durand Davray, the French translator of The Secret Agent, that he would ‘recuperate by the sea’ for a while, adding that he planned ‘Nothing technical. Dramatised experience’.⁴ He meant that the merit of the story would consist in the conversion of a remembered episode of his life into narrative fiction. Writing to Galsworthy a fortnight later he was even more down-to-earth: ‘I am going to begin to-morrow a short story – if the devil’s in it. It’s to be comical in a nautical setting and its subject is (or are) potatoes. Title: A Smile of Fortune’.⁵

   Conrad, however, found the prospect of writing even more daunting than the task of revising, and in part re-shaping, the typescript of Under Western Eyes. His correspondence with Galsworthy in particular, virtually a diary of his progress, continued to betray the seriousness of his recent breakdown. Struggling to begin, he complains of periods of ‘a sort of queerness’⁶ and that he ‘can’t concentrate for more than ½ hour at a time’ (20 May); he refers to a ‘relapse or check in the slow improvement’ though ‘the new story moves on halting a little’ (27 May); then, three days later, suddenly wiping the slate clean, he exclaims: ‘All that went before is a mere trial run’ (31 May). After another fortnight, he is forced to confess: ‘I haven’t yet finished my story. It’s no use worrying. What can’t be can’t be and there’s an end of it’ (18 June). But a week later, now settling into the secluded and relatively spacious Capel House, he allows himself a note of cautious optimism: ‘The hot spring boils somewhere deep within. There’s no doubt of that; but if uncovered nothing would come out but a little vapour – a thin mist of words’ (26 June). On the same day, he confirms this glimpse of hope: ‘I am still not myself . . . Not so much empty-headed as just unable to keep up any sort of mental pace . . . But I am not depressed’.¹

   At last, on 13 July, nearly two months after his first frail attempts, he was able to report a measurable achievement: ‘I have 70 pp of the short story written and typed’ he told Galsworthy; ‘Mentally I am not empty – the trouble is that after an hour or so I grow confused. But that’s improving since I can by an effort of will get over that queer sensation and continue at work in six cases, say out of ten’ (Letters, IV, 347). Twenty-three days later, on 5 August, having thoroughly revised and partly rewritten those seventy pages, he informed the same correspondent, almost in the style of his former self: ‘I’ve 14 000 words of a long short-story ready. Another 6 will finish it’.² And although the story would, in the event, demand as many words again before Conrad deemed it complete, his sense of returning self-possession is confirmed by his covering note to Pinker, written almost certainly by the 15th – and the first to deal with new work since the fracas: ‘Herewith pp 1 to 39 roughly 9000, first half of a story, ready for clean copy. Great part of other half is already written but . . . I must request you to forward me against the enclosed MS £20 = half the agreed advance on short stories’.³ The agreement referred to was, of course, the new one secured by Robert Garnett. Finally, on the 27th, he was able to tell Galsworthy that he could see the winning post: ‘Another couple of thousand which I must do by next Monday [29 August] will end it. This will mean over 20 thou. words in two months because I did not really start till July. June’s work was mere fooling . . . But I certainly can write in this place’ (Letters, IV, 362). And Conrad was able to be as good as his word, for he dated the finished typescript ‘30 Aug⁴ 1910’, and his letter to Pinker of 3 September states: ‘Dear Sir, I beg to acknowledge the receipt of £40 against MS Smile of Fortune’.¹ Pinker must have received those final pages – in fact two-thirds of the total – during the intervening days.

   After an initial sterile struggle with the new tale that lasted forty-two days, during which Conrad could do nothing except try again and again to ignite his imagination, he suddenly started writing consecutively. On the informed inference that this breakthrough occurred about the beginning of July, the 27,700 words of the novella got themselves on paper in sixty days, at a daily average of just over 460 words. Indeed, this matches the speed he had achieved over the four months preceding his breakdown, when he produced the 46,000 words required to complete Under Western Eyes and the 16,400 words of ‘The Secret Sharer’ at a rate of about 420 words a day.

   Conrad was back in business – except for a final hitch. In November, about two and a half months after he had sent the tale to his long-suffering agent, Pinker was able to place it with the London Magazine on condition that it be curtailed. Whether what its editor required was specifically that the prologue, which described the rescue of Mr Burns from an eastern hospital and the brig’s voyage to Mauritius, should be eliminated or drastically reduced is not certain. Conrad’s reply began by opposing any alteration for ‘any person whatever’ on artistic, if not ethical, grounds; but it soon modulated into conceding that the prologue might be severely shortened for serialization, despite the fact that it ‘“establishes” our principal character – gives his “note” as: – impressionable, impulsive, humane’ in his treatment of the ailing Burns, and ‘susceptible to mystery, imaginative’ in his ‘vision of the Island’.² Moreover, that letter indicates that during his convalescence Conrad had not only recovered his powers as a self-conscious artist, but also regained his diplomatic skills in placating his agent and his editor by offering them the much shorter first-draft of the prologue. Thus on the 22nd Conrad telegraphed Pinker to say that he did not ‘care much for London Magazine’ but that ‘if terms allow you make it up to 55 for me’ he would ‘deliver altered MS by Friday’.¹ And indeed two or perhaps three days later he returned the amputated manuscript with the comment: ‘I am disgusted at the silly job but what has been agreed to is performed’.² What he did not anticipate, however, was that nearly a century would have to pass before his final versions of the prologue and the related ending would be published.

   The compositional dynamics of the second tale destined for ’Twixt Land and Sea are not primarily reactive – as they were for ‘The Secret Sharer’, a story that derived its momentum, and indeed its nonconformity, from its interruption of ‘Razumov’ – but generative. As a study of its sources indicates (see above), ‘A Smile of Fortune’ is more autobiographical than its famous predecessor. It responds, of course, to Marris’s invitation to return to eastern themes, though less to satisfy an eastern fan club than to resurrect an imperfect former self in order to repair a damaged present self. This attempt receives support from the tale’s realism. We have noted that ‘A Smile of Fortune’ stands out among Conrad’s eastern tales for the vividness and comprehensiveness of its depiction of Mauritius. Thus the resurrection of Conrad’s 22-year-old recollections of the island and the struggle to recover his writing powers should be regarded as complementary aspects of a single-minded attempt to return to creative life.

   Conrad’s struggle against illness affected not only the tale’s composition but also its substance. Its expanded but suppressed prologue would appear to owe little to autobiography. When Conrad joined the Otago in Bangkok, his first mate, a German called Born, was probably the fittest member of the ship’s company. His fictional equivalent, Burns, is seriously ill, terrified to be left to die in a local hospital, and pitifully grateful to be taken on board to recover at leisure. It is difficult to believe that Conrad’s wholesale alteration of the history of 1888 owes nothing to the history of 1910. His own terror and despair as he sank into delirium at the end of January 1910, and the depth of his gratitude to his wife and friends which surfaced in his first letter after his collapse (to Galsworthy in mid-March) and was still audible a month and a half later in a letter (to Davray on 3 May), where he said of Jessie ‘Elle m’a soigné toute seule jour et nuit’³ – these are both transposed into the relations of the Captain and the Mate, where Conrad’s identification with the latter is nearly as close as with the former.

   Conrad’s breakdown invaded the writing of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ by other routes. The letters marking the very first stage of his recovery powerfully express the humiliation of his collapse. It is therefore unsurprising that Conrad should have covertly recalled, in planning his new story, the unforgotten mortification of his proposal of marriage in Mauritius, some twenty-one years earlier, to Eugénie Renouf, who was already engaged and indeed on the point of marrying her fiancé.¹ The shame of this self-exposure, which most of us would have learned to live with sooner rather than later but which marked him for life, reveals how deeply it had engaged his pride and his diffidence. He suppressed it from a narrative composed twenty-two years later as thoroughly as he had concealed it from everybody else – not excluding his wife, to judge by her references to the tale in her first memoir of her life with her husband, where she reports that he used to tease her for being jealous of ‘Alice’, the fictional and far less respectable cover for the fiasco with Eugénie.² But repressed feelings do not consent to lie low for ever: they returned disguised to Conrad’s text twenty-two years later, in the intense moral and sexual ambiguities of the narrator’s dalliance with Alice.

   However, art, like memory, has its own logic. The narrative of Conrad the mature writer achieves a much more complex and self-critical response to hurt pride than Conrad the master-mariner would have been capable of. What it does is to complicate the experience of humiliation by raising the question of the lover’s responsibility. At the climax of the story, the protagonist becomes aware of his role in bringing the humiliation not only on himself but also on the defenceless Alice. At thirty-two years of age Conrad was capable of shame; at fifty-two he acknowledged guilt. Guilt, of course, was far from a new experience to him – as Under Western Eyes, as profound an exploration of the meaning of an act of moral and political betrayal as any we possess – had recently revealed. But what was new was Conrad’s confessional intimacy, which he owed to an illness that revealed to him how dependent he was on his wife and his friends for his return to life.

   Finally, Conrad’s illness entered the composition of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ through the open-handed generosity of these friends – which stands in sharpest contrast to the commercialism implicit in the tale’s title. The mercantile reality which underpins the Captain’s voyage to Mauritius and which spoils every aspect of Mauritian life for him – from its louche business and social establishments to the unreadable private agenda of the ship’s chandler – turns the island into a moral maze from which in the end all he can do is to extricate himself. Just as the voyage to Mauritius had been marked by the Captain’s kindness to the physically ailing Burns, so the return journey to Melbourne is defined by the grateful Burns’s preservation of the rotting potato investment which Jacobus had foisted on his demoralized guest. But neither Burns’s gratitude nor indeed the caprice of the Australian weather which, as the ship reaches harbour, turns the potatoes into a phenomenal bargain, is able to dissuade the Captain from resigning his commission and returning to Europe. As the full maritime context of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ recovered in this edition shows, Conrad’s misgivings about the profit motive that drove the merchant fleets of the world could no longer be overridden or ignored. The man who in 1897 had celebrated the voyage of the Narcissus as transcending the ‘sordid inspiration of her pilgrimage’ (p. 30) was unable fourteen years later to recover that confidence. This was, of course, partly because he was now an older and sadder man; but it was also because he was recalling his life as master of a commercial vessel who, as such, was responsible not only for her navigation but for her profitability – and thus vulnerable to such temptations as trading for himself. Now that the tale’s narrative framework has been fully restored, the tension between sea and land values stands disclosed, and the complexity of its moral psychology can no longer be underplayed.

Freya of the Seven Isles

CONRAD FINISHED ‘A Smile of Fortune’ on 30 August 1910 and started ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ on or about 26 December. During the three-and-a-half intervening months he completed, as already noted (p. lxiii), two narratives – ‘Prince Roman’ with its noblesse oblige commitment to the idea of Poland, and ‘The Partner’, with its exposure of the criminal underside of Edwardian capitalism – which together anticipated the collision in ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ of nostalgic romance and colonial realism.

   Conrad was, of course, fully aware that with ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ he was at last embarking on the substantial story of colonial life in the Malay Archipelago which he had promised Marris some fifteen months earlier. After his return to Penang, Marris had written to him on 11 January 1910 to report that his ‘owners’ (the owners of the ships he was employed to sail) had not thought him sufficiently recovered from his stroke to let him have a command.¹ By the time this letter reached him, Conrad would have been working day and night on the very last sections of ‘Razumov’; and stricken by his breakdown at the end of January, he would not have been able to reply to it. Whether or not he heard again from Marris before the latter’s death, which occurred some time in 1910,² is not known, but it is unlikely, for he preserved Marris’s letters, and none dated after January has been found. However, if the evidence of ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, which he apparently began to write the day after Christmas that year, can be relied on, he would by then have been in possession of the fact, for that novella’s relentless inevitability is full of it. We can assume, therefore, that Conrad’s promise to Marris that he and his eastern friends would receive ‘more of the stories they liked’³ was carried out, but only after Marris was no longer able to know anything about it.

   Unlike several of his endlessly productive contemporaries such as John Galsworthy or H. G. Wells, Conrad did not usually start a piece of fiction with a clear idea of what the finished product would look like. His method of composition, with its large-scale alterations and endlessly retreating horizons, meant that most of his longer pieces started life as short stories. For him writing was a form of thinking rather than a technique of articulation – which is one of the reasons why he could not keep to deadlines. So it was with ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’. On ‘Monday evening’ (26 December 1910) Conrad told Galsworthy: ‘I’ve begun another story and moiling over the foolish stuff I forgot the time’ (Letters, IV, 400). Seventeen days later, on 12 January 1911, he wrote to Edward Garnett to explain why he could not read his Joan of Arc at once: ‘The straight truth of it is that I am now writing a silly story (being near the end of it) and as soon as I am done with the truck and have got over the disgust my writing leaves behind I shall drop you a postcard asking for that play’ (Letters, IV, 407). After another eleven days, he responded to a letter from Joseph de Smet, a Belgian priest and writer, who had asked him how he had learnt English. ‘In writing I wrestle painfully with that language which I feel I do not possess but which possesses me’, Conrad replied, adding: ‘Pardon delay in answering but I am trying to finish a longish story’ (Letters, IV, 409). However, sixteen days later, on 8 February, he felt able to announce to Pinker that he would be ‘sending a longish story in a day or two’ (Letters, IV, 412).

   Yet with another week gone, on the 15th Conrad was still not done, as two letters written that day demonstrate. The first was a response to a note from the young American journalist Warrington Dawson alerting him to the prospect of a new Parisian magazine: Conrad assured him that he was ‘putting the finishing touches to a story, (which I think I’ll call Freya of the Seven Isles), length about 20 000 words (3 or four instalments) of which I could send her the typescript in say fortnight’ (Letters, IV, 413). The second, in complete contrast, was addressed to Galsworthy: ‘I expect to finish a longish story in a day or two – but the devil only knows. I have been fooled too often by such expectations to put my trust in them’ (Letters, IV, 414). A couple of days later, he told Davray, translator into French of some of the best contemporary English fiction: ‘I am in the process of finishing a novella (24000 words)’.¹ But it was only on the final day of February, after sixty-six days at his desk, that Conrad was able to tell Pinker: ‘Herewith Freya: say 27000. Eastern seas tale – quite a novel in character and quite suitable for serialising’ (Letters, IV, 417). In sober truth, the story had consumed something over two months. However, still smarting from Pinker’s treatment of ‘A Smile of Fortune’, which had had its initial framing episode virtually cancelled and its final one therefore altered, Conrad was exerting pressure to ensure that his new text would remain intact: ‘Whatever happens, I beg to say at once that no suggestion of alteration or curtailment will be entertained. Not a single word.’

   This combative note reflects Conrad’s changed relationship with Pinker which, since their quarrel, he had kept on the chilliest register. But his letters to his other correspondents, being far less guarded, expressed the full range of his authorial anxieties. They continue to reveal his inability to meet his own deadlines as he struggles to control a constantly expanding text. They also sound the usual litany of complaints about the inadequacy of his writing, and for the first time express fears of a loss of creative power. To Garnett he refers to feeling ‘as if I had smashed myself ’ (12 January); to de Smet he complains about being ‘so tired at the end of the day’ (23 January); to Symons he suspects that ‘my days of fine things are done’ (7 February); to Galsworthy he even invokes martyrdom: ‘I had . . . no consecutive ideas, no six consecutive words to be found anywhere in the world. I would prefer a hot gridiron to that cold blankness’ (15 February).¹

   Conrad had of course always felt acutely the stress of composition, partly because of his native volatility, partly because of his struggles with the English language, but mostly because of his uncompromising commitment to the demands of high art. And it is this last which comes to the surface in his two revelatory letters to Arthur Symons, mediator to the English 1890s of French symbolisme, who (like Conrad during the first months of the previous year) was struggling to recover from a nervous collapse which, in his case, had required a period in a mental hospital.² What Conrad’s letters to a fellow-sufferer reveal is that his writer’s anguish, far from being symptomatic of a ‘Slav temperament’, or merely an expression of the traumas of an infancy spent in political detention, or of the loss of a mother at the age of six and of a father at the age of eleven, was largely a product of the effort demanded by the creation of masterpieces. Even if he is right to claim that his ‘days of fine things are done’, he tells Symons on 7 February: still ‘we must go on.’ It is not success but defeat that measures resolve: ‘Don’t look back’, he tells him on the 14th, ‘for indeed the only way to overcome injustice whether of man or fate is to disregard it’ (Letters, IV, 411, 415). On such principles ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, which in so many respects seems to look back, does so in order to go forward.

   The composition of ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ was nourished by Conrad’s relationship with its material. The integrity of the collection of tales gathered under the title ’Twixt Land and Sea derives from the fact that they were all, in one way or another, inspired by Conrad’s meeting with Marris. ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, however, being the only tale of the three written after Marris’s death, possesses a distinctive sub-text. This sub-text is variously present in the story, but it becomes most visible in a composite narrative structure: whereas the narrators of ‘The Secret Sharer’ and ‘A Smile of Fortune’ control the stories they tell from start to finish, the narrator of ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ does not. In an action that properly belongs to old Nelson, Freya, Jasper, and Heemskirk, his sole contributions are to land a piano on Nelson’s isle for Freya’s use, and to assent to Jasper Allen’s decision to sign on the disastrous Schultz. To be sure, both these are links in the causal chain that will destroy Jasper and Freya; but otherwise the narrator (like Conrad in his relation to Marris) remains a mere spectator or recipient of the events of the first two acts. Thereafter, he abruptly removes himself from the scene of the action to return ‘home’, where in the fullness of time he will become merely the auditor of the tragic finale of a story long over and done with. Should we conclude, therefore, that ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ has diverted or even checked the autobiographical current which ‘A Smile of Fortune’, and indeed ‘The Secret Sharer’, sustain to the end?

   Attention to the compositional dynamics of ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ supports the view that it is the most autobiographical of the three tales in that it offers the most literal rendering of its author’s relationship to his material. Its narrator, like Conrad, having spent some time trading between Singapore and north-east Borneo – though of course, unlike him, calling at the Seven Isles, which Conrad only by-passed – returns to England, where he loses touch with his former life in the tropics until it suddenly returns to him in the form of a letter from an old trader–mariner. This man reminds the narrator, as Marris had Conrad, of the freedom and beauty of the East. But in both instances he also reveals that he has himself been damaged: Marris exhibits the symptoms of a stroke which will kill him in under a year, old Nelson of a catastrophic bereavement that deprives him of his future.

   Thus for the author, as for the narrator of this tale, the prison door of the past, having momentarily half-opened to offer a glimpse of a young and beautiful world, slams shut again. And that it will remain shut is guaranteed by the fact that the man who opened it is himself now no more. It is to the brutality of this effect, present in the story in the remorseless destruction of the young couple, that Conrad’s earliest and best reader, Edward Garnett, responded when he complained of ‘a certain weakness in the manipulation of the tragedy at the close’, and advised Pinker to get Conrad to ‘have another look at the MS’. But Conrad indignantly rejected this advice,¹ for in his new story the young lovers’ fate is an expression of his most searching fears and griefs. Marris’s death, to be sure, once again puts the East out of Conrad’s reach. But it does so not only by depriving Conrad of the youthful memories Marris had reawakened: it does so because Marris revealed to him how far the East had changed behind his back, so to speak, in the course of his twenty-two years of absence.

   The novella’s composition was a product of the tension between Conrad’s memories of the relatively unexploited and unspoilt Indonesia of the 1880s and Marris’s reports (despite his loathing of England and his longing for Penang) of its modernization. It is this discontinuity that transforms the love of Freya and Jasper into a dysfunctional idyll, poisoned by a father’s political neurosis and a rival’s nationalistic paranoia. More generally, it opens out the story’s narrative fault-line which, as noted, disjoins the first-person narrator from the third-person narrative. After the narrator’s return to England, for example, Conrad does not hesitate, when describing events which his narrator could not have witnessed himself or even deduced from old Nelson’s testimony, to resort to the third-person narrative, or indeed to revert to the first-person narrative when, for instance, old Nelson brings him the intolerable news of Freya’s death and Jasper’s ruin.

   First-person narrative, of course, exhibits the voice of the self; third-person assumes impersonality and tends to project objectivity. Thus, when the gap between the two is highlighted – for example through physical distance, as when the narrator learns of the fate of the young couple 10,000 miles away – the pathos of that tragedy is deepened by a separation which increases helplessness without diminishing grief. This effect Conrad must have felt himself when he received the news of Marris’s disappearance on the other side of the globe. But such effects become even more poignant when they extend over time rather than space to reveal that ‘there is no greater pain than to recall past happiness in present misery’.¹ Marris’s visit to Conrad reawakened, in the midst of his sedentary toil, the exhilaration of his first command. And the news of his death, which followed Conrad’s own long, slow recovery from breakdown, prompted the requiem for lost youth which brings ’Twixt Land and Sea to a close.

   But it did more. The juxtaposition of a remembered past with a reported present permitted Conrad to perceive these deaths as products of the commercial-imperialist rivalries now firmly installed in and around the Archipelago, and which were even then beginning to ravage and pollute a virginal world. Conrad’s awareness of the threatened beauty of Indonesia is everywhere apparent in his narrator’s evocation of its seas, islands, forests, and distances, especially when recalled from within the dank and stifling thickness of a London pea-souper. In this we now know that ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ has proved prophetic. However, even in 1911, such warnings were not premature. In the final page of the last revised edition of Conrad’s favourite bedside book, Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago (1890), Conrad would have read – and to judge by his work read again and again – the following warning: ‘And if we continue to devote our chief energies to the utilizing of our knowledge of the laws of nature with the view of still further extending our commerce and our wealth, the evils which necessarily accompany these when too eagerly pursued may increase to such gigantic dimensions as to be beyond our power to alleviate.’

Reception

THE MANUSCRIPT OF ‘The Secret Sharer’ was completed by the middle of December 1909, that of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ by the end of August 1910, and that of ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ by the end of February 1911. Pinker was able to place ‘The Secret Sharer’, with the subtitle ‘An Episode from the Sea’, in the August and September 1910 issues of New York’s prestigious Harper’s Monthly Magazine, which published on both sides of the Atlantic. After he and Conrad agreed to cuts in its prologue, the London Magazine brought out ‘A Smile of Fortune’ in February 1911. But it was only a full year later, just before its appearance in book form, that ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ achieved magazine publication, first in New York’s rather down-market Metropolitan Magazine of April 1912, and three months later in the London Magazine of July 1912, where it carried a dedication to ‘Captain C. M. Marris’.

   More than eight months after he had completed the composition of the final tale of ’Twixt Land and Sea, Conrad told Pinker, on 10 November 1911, that he ‘would very much like to have Sharer – Smile & Freya published in one vol’, adding: ‘These three stories are a set of which I am not ashamed. They have a common character – something slightly different from any short stories I ever wrote’ (Letters, IV, 503–4). Methuen would have been the natural choice for such a book: that firm had handled virtually all his work since 1906, and in 1911 they were still owed two novels. But Conrad’s feeling that the projected volume represented a new departure together with his growing dissatisfaction with Methuen prompted him to seek a different publisher. Pinker therefore eventually sold the stories in London to J. M. Dent and Sons and in New York to George H. Doran, and the collection was issued on 14 October and on 3 December 1912, respectively. The volume turned out to be Conrad’s first unqualified commercial success.¹ As a result, he at once sought to sever his links with Methuen, who, Conrad maintained, had failed to make him any money over the previous seven years; but, perhaps sensing a turn for the better, that firm understandably held to their legal contract, and Conrad was obliged to publish Chance (1914) and Victory (1915) with them. In the event, both those novels generated a small fortune.

   In planning the volume, Conrad had briefly entertained the possibility of including ‘The Partner’ on the grounds that it might otherwise look a bit thin. But on 6 July 1912 he told Pinker: ‘if there’s enough copy I would dearly like to have the Partner thrown out. It doesn’t match . . . Please ask Dent’ (Letters, V, 83). Although ‘The Partner’ qualified as a land–sea story, it dealt with a ruffianly attempt to wreck a ship off the Somerset coast for the insurance money: as such it had nothing to do with Conrad’s autobiographical East, and even less with Captain Marris, to whose visit the collection was partly indebted. The ’Twixt Land and Sea we now possess relates its central tale of achievement of command to two surrounding narratives of resignation from command – in the ‘Mauritius’ tale from a sense of self-disgust, in the ‘Seven Isles’ tale from feelings of personal and historical irrelevance. Moreover, by dedicating the collection to the ‘late’ Captain Marris ‘in memory of those old days of adventure’, Conrad unobtrusively emphasized its underlying effect of ‘family resemblance’. And, finally, by choosing as an epigraph ‘a few lines’ which Arthur Symons, at the time recovering from a serious breakdown, had written after reading ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ (‘Life is a tragic folly / Let us mock at life and be jolly . . .’), Conrad suggested to readers opening the collection for the first time that the ‘affirmation’ its stories propose is no more (and no less) than self-generated defiance of mortality.²

Early Reception

CONRAD’S CONFIDENCE in the artistic integrity of his new volume was vindicated by its reception in England from mid-October and in America from the end of December. As a happy augury, on the day of the book’s publication in England there appeared an exceptionally perceptive review in the Daily News by its literary critic Robert Lynd, who was obviously taking advantage of his pre-publication review copy. Invoking ‘Typhoon’, Lynd identified the Conradian narrative style as ‘visionary realism’. Though quieter than ‘Typhoon’ in its power to project the reality of the seas we know, ‘The Secret Sharer’ shared the intensity of such works as Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’. Conrad’s art revealed a ‘sense of life . . . far richer’ than Kipling’s. It showed the impersonal power of nature to be greater than the moral power at the disposal of those who have to face it, despite the ‘miracles of endurance’ they perform. This is the reason why Conrad’s characters tend to have the quality of victims – as with ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, a ‘wonderful pitiless story of revenge in the Dutch East Indies’, in which a man (Jasper) is struck down not by his vices but by his virtues (his generosity to Schultz). The ‘intense imaginative excitement’ that Conrad generates is free from melodrama or rhetoric, even at the story’s climax, when ‘Jasper Allen’s beautiful white ship’ is manœuvred by an enemy ‘to its doom upon the reef where it would lie long afterwards, a grey ghost, haunting the insane eyes of its owner as he watched it from the shore’. ‘A Smile of Fortune’, set in tropical seas, is also ‘a study of a spell cast on the captain of a ship by a mysterious outcast, shy, untamed, animal of a woman’ – though it is not quite as good as ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, or indeed as ‘The Secret Sharer’. ‘The great elation of [the latter] story’, Lynd concludes, ‘does not arise from its study of the psychology of fascination’, or of self-identity, but in what it generates: the concluding episode, when ‘the captain compels his crew, almost still with horror, to bring the ship right up under the shadow of the land ... That scene gives us one of the great thrills of modern literature’. And he concludes: ‘The elation that we get from this story is the elation which all great literature, even tragic literature, ought to give.’¹ Thus, on the very day of its publication, ’Twixt Land and Sea received its near definitive response from a Belfast-born journalist–critic who, employed between 1908 and 1947 by the Daily News (originally a Liberal London paper founded by Charles Dickens in 1845), managed to turn out ‘every week an impeccable essay . . . about anything or everything or nothing’ – to cite Leonard Woolf ’s rather snide formulation.¹

   A sample of other English reviews confirms the critical success of Conrad’s new book. John Masefield, writing for the Manchester Guardian of 16 October, regarded Conrad, with his ‘old colours of mystery, romance, and the strangeness of life’ as a master of the long story in ‘A Smile of Fortune’ (which he thinks re-writes ‘Heart of Darkness’ with Alfred Jacobus in the role of Kurtz) and in ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, which begins with ‘its movement rather clogged . . . until the tragedy is at its height’.² The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement of 17 October found that the three stories are ‘each a masterpiece’. On 19 October the Athenaeum found Conrad’s stories ‘tragic, vivid and penetrating’, but warned readers that sometimes ‘he explains too much’. The following day, the Observer opined that the three stories were ‘as good as anything Conrad has ever written, tales as good as any man might hope to write’. The Standard of 25 October offered an unsigned piece which identified Conrad’s originality in his blending of ‘the sense of life proclaimed by the great Victorians with the sense of form discovered here in England somewhere about 1890’, and declared that this ‘welding’ of ‘vision and matter-of-fact’ in the stories leaves us with a ‘haunting . . . conviction that in the heart of the darkest . . . things there is a great light shining’. The Spectator congratulated Conrad on 16 November for throwing off the evil influence of Henry James which (it claimed) had rendered The Secret Agent indigestible, and for producing a collection which, mingling the ‘comic and psychological’, included the purely ‘tragic’ ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, which it dubbed ‘Conrad’s greatest success’. And – to conclude this sample – the London Bookman for December 1912 announced that ‘’Twixt Land and Sea is as good as the best of Conrad’s early works in its combination of adventure and psychology: the narrator does not have to go on “a Pateresque search” for new impressions which come to him unbidden’.³ In Britain other reviews appeared in the Scotsman (17 October), the Outlook (2 November), the Sketch (6 November), the English Review (for November), the Nation (26 October), the Evening Standard (18 October), and the Glasgow Evening News (14 November). Reviews also surfaced in Germany in the Zeitschrift für Französichen und Englischen Unterricht (1914), and in France in the Mercure de France on 1 January 1913 (by Henry-Durand Davray, one of Conrad’s literary associates).¹

   This chorus of approbation, which contained more than a hint of relief at the return of the ‘traditional Conrad’, was repeated at a much more leisurely pace in New York, following the issue of the American edition on 3 December. Conrad’s young American admirer, Warrington Dawson, journalist and aspiring novelist, provided a review-essay on Conrad, Hardy, and Meredith for the New York Times Review of Books of 2 February 1913, in which he claimed that the three tales of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea ‘rank with the most mature and romantic of his work’, and argued that his ‘principle is to unfold a tale just as we ourselves might observe it if we were thrown into intimate touch with the characters’, for ‘he knows that the straight line does not exist in nature’.² Frederick Taber Cooper, in the March issue of the Bookman, noted that Conrad, having written about ‘nihilism and dynamite’ (in The Secret Agent) returned to ‘exotic lands and waters’ with ‘A Smile of Fortune’ in the lead, a story that remains untouched by ‘the new flamboyance’ – whatever that may be. An anonymous article in the Outlook of 15 March 1913 identified Conrad’s three ‘tales of Eastern lands and waters’ as the ‘very best’ of Conrad – better especially than his ‘book-romances’, spoilt by his ‘tendency to involution’ – the reason being that they allowed ‘passion, fate, and character’ to ‘play their part in human life mercilessly but with exactness of truth’. In America (New York) of 22 March 1913, the anonymous reviewer praised the power of the stories, but in a sudden recoil of pudeur found Alice in ‘A Smile of Fortune’ ‘as impossible as she is unpleasant’. In the Nation of 10 April 1913, another reviewer discovered that the ‘odd fascination’ of these stories comes from ‘Mr Conrad’s faculty in creating . . . the atmosphere of a strange enchantment, or a deadly fear, or an imminent catastrophe’. Finally, in June 1913 the Review of Reviews, still from New York, ushered Conrad into immortality by announcing that the three tales have a ‘delicacy and truth’ that ‘rivals Dickens and Thackeray’.¹

   If the American reviews exhibited a rather dispiriting sameness of approval, it is perhaps because they perforce appeared by up to six months after the English chorus of marginally livelier and more eccentric praise.² But on both sides of the Atlantic, responses to ’Twixt Land and Sea added up to a statement that the unremunerative succès d’estime that had been Conrad’s fate throughout his middle career was now over. On 11 February Conrad told Pinker that ‘Dent without lying advtist’ had ‘managed to sell nearly 5000 copies of a vol of Short Stories in something under six months’ (Letters, V, 348); and there is no reason to believe that the volume fared less well under its American imprint. Moreover, although the majority verdict was that the stories owed their success to Conrad’s reversion to his earlier mode of sea adventure, two of them, ‘A Smile of Fortune’ and ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, contained enough cultural and political ballast to require contemporary readers to confront their views of their own world. For that matter, so would Conrad’s next full-scale novel, Chance, which by mixing land and sea in the story of the conflict between an Edwardian capitalist swindler, the ‘Great de Barral’, and an other-worldly merchant-navy captain, Anthony, over the possession of the emotionally and socially orphaned Flora de Barral, decisively turned Conrad into an international celebrity.

Critical Reception

THE INITIAL and popular reception of ’Twixt Land and Sea was followed by about three decades of critical neglect.³ During that period, to judge by the number of prestige and popular editions of his work that appeared, Conrad continued to be read variously and widely, though without yet having acquired the cachet of election to the ‘great tradition’. In the wake of the astounding commercial success of Chance, which dwarfed even that of ’Twixt Land and Sea, critical discussion tended to focus on Conrad’s novels and either to ignore or, at best, make only brief mention or use of his shorter fiction. To be sure, Richard Curle’s appreciative survey (1914), which soon followed his 1912 review of the volume, gave its tales frequent and sometimes sustained attention; identified an ‘underworld’, an ‘undertone’, an ‘undercurrent’ throughout the collection; often cited the stories (especially the first and last) in its attempt to portray the general nature of Conrad’s achievement; and found ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ Conrad’s ‘most painful’ work, ‘The Secret Sharer’ absolutely compelling, and ‘A Smile of Fortune’ the best example of ‘the close-knit fabric of his later style’, a point that he illustrated by quoting several pages from the Captain’s first encounter with Alfred Jacobus. But the tales’ almost total absence from Wilson Follett’s otherwise penetrating and judicious study (1916) presaged the silence that would increasingly greet them for the next twenty-five years, despite the public stature Conrad had attained by the middle of the next decade.¹

   In the 1940s, however, three major scholarly studies, one historical, the other two primarily critical, appeared. The first was John Dozier Gordan’s majestic investigation of the sources of Conrad’s early fiction (1940), which established Conrad’s reliance on lived and historical experience. The next year brought Muriel Bradbrook’s ambitious survey of Conrad’s work, which argued his particular relevance in a world again at war, posited a career of three periods (‘The Wonders of the Deep’, ‘The Hollow Men’, and ‘Recollections in Tranquility’), and traced common themes and different styles through these periods. While focussing chiefly on Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Chance, and Victory as representing Conrad’s second and more ironic phase, Bradbrook found that the first and last stories of ’Twixt Land and Sea exhibited the same sceptical and pessimistic vision as the novels and, like his other stories, brought the reader closer to Conrad the man than they did. ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ is not only ‘painful’, but depicts ‘helpless, fixed, unmitigated suffering’; the ‘resentful, savage and pathetic Alice’ in ‘A Smile of Fortune’ does not ‘belong to the . . . world’ of ‘the captain and her papa’. On the other hand, ‘The Secret Sharer’ is more like the stories of Conrad’s ‘early days’, to which his ‘best stories’ belong; it succeeds ‘consummately’ and is ‘the perfected version’ of the enlarged tale that became Lord Jim, though ‘cooler, terser, yet with far more of pity and terror’.¹

   The third groundbreaking book of this decade was F. R. Leavis’s classic The Great Tradition (1948), which confirmed Conrad as one of the masters of the English novel. Leavis’s subsequent essay on ‘The Secret Sharer’, given as a lecture at the University of York as late as 1966 and published in 1967, belongs, intellectually, to that earlier phase and may be regarded as representative of it. In Leavis’ view, what ‘the great security of the sea’ delivers is the shock of ‘a headless body’ resolving itself into a fugitive representing an ‘unsupported individual defiance of code and law and precedent and all decision by the book’. The young untested Captain who hides this figure in his cabin has no guilt feelings: both men are possessed by a rational conviction strong enough to forgo codes and to defy legalism. What the tale rejects is ‘sheltering convention and routine discipline’. This represents a critique of the romantic view of sea life indulged by the Captain before Leggatt’s advent. It is the Captain who passes on to us the ‘terrible immediacy’ of the tempest during which Leggatt’s so-called crime takes place. Archbold is narrowly correct but odious in locking up Leggatt. By virtue of their wrongness, failure, and paralysis during the emergency, Archbold and his crew hate Leggatt for the very ‘rightness’, ‘decision’, and ‘adequacy’ to which they owe their lives. The young Captain’s own officers and crew identify with Archbold – hence the agonizing drama of the concealment. For Leavis ‘creative action, collaborative though it must be, depends upon creative individuals and creative will’. Thus in spite of his Conway training, or because of his ‘trained readiness’, the young Captain reacts independently of its explicit ethos in protecting the fugitive and even endangering his ship to release his double.¹

   This reading, despite its moments of insistence and oversimplification, is more in tune with the elementary thrust of Conrad’s inspiration than the abstract intellectualism of a good deal of the commentary that has followed it. But it may also be partly responsible for the tone of intransigent moralism that marks a surprising number of the critical essays that ensued. And in its exclusive emphasis on ‘The Secret Sharer’ it also anticipated one of the more regrettable features of the subsequent reception of ’Twixt Land and Sea: the relative critical neglect of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ and ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ – tales which may not possess the glamorous intensity of ‘The Secret Sharer’ but which remain characteristically Conradian in their representation of lived experience within a fully realized social, economic, and political environment. As a result of the enormous prestige ‘The Secret Sharer’ attained, which has extended beyond academic circles to its adaptation as a Hollywood film starring James Mason (1952),² the three tales have not been discussed as parts of a rationally conceived collection, even in the two critical books on Conrad’s shorter fiction that have so far appeared: Lawrence Graver’s Conrad’s Short Fiction (1969) and Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan’s The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (1999). Any attempt, therefore, to provide a summary account of the later reception of ’Twixt Land and Sea is obliged to take the tales separately.

A Smile of Fortune

ALTHOUGH Conrad agreed to reduce his frame narrative in order to meet the demands of the London Magazine, he was, as he told Pinker, ‘disgusted at the silly job’ (Letters, IV, 391). Yet he remained confident about the tale’s quality. To Galsworthy, he described it as ‘a good short serial’ for which there would be ‘a market’ (Letters, IV, 362). Moreover, after its publication in ’Twixt Land and Sea, he was distressed by reviews that referred to Alice as ‘a wild girl of the tropics’ who inspired ‘crude animal passion’ (the Telegraph) or who appeared to be an ‘untamed animal of a woman’ (the Daily News), pleading that he ‘had tried to make her pathetic’.¹ Even if one reviewer (the maverick John Masefield) compared the tale to ‘Heart of Darkness’ and another described the three stories as ‘each a masterpiece’,² these references to Alice anticipated the mixed reception it would have from academic critics. Like ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, ‘A Smile of Fortune’ has been so overshadowed by the glamour of ‘The Secret Sharer’ that it has had difficulty attracting the critical attention and thorough analysis it merits.

   Many of the early studies, mesmerized by the Captain’s dealings with Alice, disconnected this core episode not only from the rest of his experience of Mauritius – including his participation in the child’s funeral, his encounter with the rich and nasty Ernest Jacobus, his introduction to some of the old colonial families, and his evocation of the island and its peoples – but also from his sea-voyages to and from the island, textually incomplete as these have been. Thomas Moser’s 1957 book was the earliest, and remains the best-known, treatment of the thesis that after Conrad’s breakdown, provoked by his two-year struggle with Under Western Eyes and brought on by the debacle of ‘The Secret Sharer’, he disastrously committed himself to the theme of sexual love. Yet Moser’s verdict on the first such alleged failure – a tale which he reduced to the scenes between the Captain and Alice – was that ‘Whatever Conrad’s intention, he wrote in “A Smile of Fortune” a first-rate story of female sexuality and male impotence’, though Moser’s reasons for rating it so highly were not entirely clear. For Albert J. Guerard (1958), who also remained fixed on the scenes of moody dalliance in Jacobus’ garden, the tale was much more ambivalent – to the point, indeed, of requiring him to invoke Conrad’s failed proposal of marriage to Eugénie Renouf in order to support his hypothesis that the tale may ‘represent a subtle form of revenge on life’, since in the narrative it is the Captain who eventually repudiates Alice, and not the other way round. The story betrays Conrad’s – and not the Captain’s – ‘clumsiness and evasion’ in approaching the subject of sexual attraction. Its narrative picks up energy as soon as ‘the slovenly and crouching Alice appears’ and seizes the Captain’s attention. However, for Guerard this attention ‘could hardly be more voyeuristic’. When the Captain finally brings himself to make a sexual advance, he is prompted by her relief at being told that his visits to her have nothing to do with her father. Recalling the events that immediately follow, Guerard concludes: ‘What the scene rather brilliantly dramatizes is a voyeuristic impotence and the . . . collapse of desire’.¹

   Osborn Andreas’ discussion the next year (1959) dismissed the tale as offering little more than the story of ‘a young captain’s tendency to look with favor upon a boycotted family’, which ‘misleads him into biassed support of a man whose unsuitable daughter he nearly marries’.² The inadequacy of this view can stand as representing what is still a common response to it. Yet at about the same time the ever-alert Jocelyn Baines (1960) had a rather more positive response to ‘A Smile of Fortune’, a ‘haunting’ if not altogether successful story in which Alice might be part of a commercial transaction. Her father ‘hopes to palm off Alice on the Captain, but he also wants to sell him a cargo of potatoes, and it is sometimes not quite clear whether he is using Alice as bait for the potatoes or the reverse’. The Captain’s eventual acceptance of the unsavoury cargo is a sign of his own corruption: his uncandid behaviour towards Alice has deprived him of the will to resist her father’s pressure. However, despite recognizing Conrad’s psychological acuity, Baines concluded that it is doubtful whether Conrad realized ‘how reprehensible he had made the conduct of the Captain appear’.³

   Several years later Paul Kirschner (1966) regarded the tale as initiating Conrad’s final phase, which (except for The Shadow-Line) he confined to ‘the relationship between men and women’. Largely ignoring the maritime and Mauritian contexts, Kirschner too focussed on the Captain’s relations with Alice. Her isolation and helplessness awaken in him not compassion but curiosity and covert desire. Her father behaves like a procurer, though it remains unclear whether he regards the potatoes as bait for the girl or the girl as bait for the potatoes. What is plain, however, is that the Captain shows little interest in her as a human being – which accounts for criticism’s equivocal responses to the story. Kirschner was the first to have noted the extent of Conrad’s dependence on Maupassant’s ‘Les Sœurs Rondoli’ in the Alice episodes, and his analysis of this material is of exceptional value. He perceives a ‘current of desolation’ behind Maupassant’s ‘amoral cheerfulness’, and he seeks to persuade us that Conrad did so, too. However, this view leads him to regard Conrad’s story as an ‘uneasy hybrid of personal experience and derivative experience’,¹ though in making a case for Conrad’s adaptation of material from Maupassant, he has also implicitly made one for an encounter of minds between the two writers.

   By this time wider perspectives on the tale had begun to appear. As early as 1964 Jerome Zuckerman had sensed that the story deserved to be regarded as an organized whole. He recognized that it sought to juxtapose ‘two themes in contrapuntal structure: a central love theme involving the protagonist–captain and Alice Jacobus, and a subordinate rule theme involving the protagonist-captain and his crew. The difficulty is’, he argued, ‘that the treatment of the rule theme seems sketchy and inadequately developed’. Pursuing an impressive insight based on the drastically abbreviated prologue available to him, he found that ‘the rule situation implies in the last pages a counterpointed background emphasizing the protagonist’s dual failure.’² This qualified perceptiveness he owed to his assumption that a full reading required the inclusion of all the tale’s elements, not just its flawed idyll in a tropical garden. Yet, a few years on, Lawrence Graver (1969) was assuming that because the tale was written during Conrad’s convalescence, it ‘did not engage his full attention’ – nor (he adds) did its two immediate successors, ‘Prince Roman’ (now regarded by many as a memorable and moving evocation of family piety) and ‘The Partner’ (an experimental study of the underside of Edwardian capitalism). Unsurprisingly, therefore, Graver thought that Conrad’s alleged determination not to test the Captain’s courage at sea (Conrad’s métier) but to describe his sexual prowess and business skills on land made the tale ‘fatally’ self-divided and market-directed. The disreputable chandler uses his nubile daughter to trap the Captain into purchasing a cargo of rotting potatoes which realizes a poisoned profit on his return to Melbourne. Despite the Captain’s alleged ‘obtuseness’ of observation, Graver found the comedy of the pre-Alice scenes successful. As for Alice, her ‘mysteries’ are ‘exaggerated beyond credibility’, and the Captain’s indulgence of his ‘secret vice’ for her (a replication, apparently, of her father’s debased passion for her circus-performer mother) remains unexplored. Conrad allows himself to be distracted from his satirical treatment of the Mauritians by his determination to create a marketable story. Since ‘impotence, voyeurism, and the enervating power of sexual desire’ were hardly fit for the London Magazine, he shied away from the dark undercurrents of the tale in order to remain with ‘the more convivial aspects of realism and romance’ – respectively, the potato deal and the ‘stormy interlude with Alice’.¹

   Six years later, on the other hand, William Lafferty (1975) offered a well-sustained and suggestive interpretation built on the conflicting duties of a merchant-marine captain divided, as he has to be, between sailing his ship and selling his cargo. The voyage to Mauritius brings this tension to a head because the whole of Mauritian society is directly or indirectly driven by the profit motive. Using (some might think over-using) the story of the Biblical Jacob in his interpretation of the Jacobus brothers, Lafferty claimed that the Captain eventually resigns his commission from self-disgust at his obligatory collusion with commerce. But of course the story is more ambiguous than this implies. The relentlessly commercial ship-chandler Jacobus is also a romantic, who once pursued a grande passion to South Africa and beyond, who acknowledged the entirely uncommercial infant daughter it had brought him, and who did not flinch before the inflexible social outrage that her very existence in the island provoked.² Thus the Captain’s infatuation with Alice is as much a product of her father’s reckless romanticism as of his commercial cunning.

   The early 1980s saw quite different views of the tale presented in books by well-known Conradian scholars. Daniel R. Schwarz (1982) presented the tale as a ‘dramatic monologue in which the speaker’s tormented conscience reveals a version of events different from the one he is telling’. He rightly worried about the Captain’s malcontentment, not to say his cynicism, about the whole of his island experience, nourished as it is by an unholy alliance between romance and commerce – announced by the beauty of the approach to the island and revealed by the nastiness of life on it. However, while Schwarz was reaching the not entirely anticipated conclusion that the tale forces us to listen to ‘the confessions of a disturbed young man who has become obsessed with an even more disturbed young woman’,¹ Cedric Watts (1984) was abruptly hoisting the critical debate to a new level. He regarded the tale as the intercalation of an overt narrative and a covert plot. The first consists of ‘a sea-captain’s sexual infatuation . . . which leads to an unsavoury business transaction’. Within this, however, simmers a second plot in which the Captain ‘is gradually decoyed into an ambush from which he extricates himself awkwardly and feels sullied’. The tempter Jacobus, father of the girl who is used as bait, is therefore a ‘procurer’ twice over – of sexual gratifications and of commercial supplies. Additionally the tale offers two enigmas: on the one hand, the contrast between a sea-captain obliged to bury his newly born daughter and an old master-mariner grieving for the loss of his ship’s figurehead; and, on the other hand, a succession of social, moral, and economic contrasts between the brothers Alfred and Ernest Jacobus. Moreover, throughout its prevailingly naturalistic narrative, the tale evokes ‘glints and half-echoes of ancient myths’ (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Pandarus, Calypso, Circe) distorted parodically. These create a blurred counterpoint of legends not quite transformed into the sordid reality of island life – and which could be said to represent another kind of covert plot. Be that as it may, the following year, relinquishing ‘Sleeping Beauty’ et al., Watts returned to several of the more puzzling incidents, including the funeral, which he then treated as interlinking one captain’s grief at the loss of his new-born child with another’s prostration at the loss of his ship’s figurehead, as complicating the distinction between right and wrong feeling, and as a preparing for the much more elaborate ambiguities of Alfred Jacobus’ treatment of his daughter.² Although Watts ignored the mutilated maritime frame-plot, and thus lost a significant further ambiguity (sea-service as commercial service), the inclusiveness and originality of his analysis, driven home by the clarity of his style, represented a significant contribution to the recovery of the tale’s artistic status.

   Two substantial studies have revisited ‘A Smile of Fortune’ in the last decade of the twentieth century. Yves Hervouet’s re-examination of the tale’s dependence on Maupassant, in his phenomenal conspectus of Conrad’s indebtedness to French nineteenth-century literature, posthumously published (1990), has offered a further account of Conrad’s debt to Maupassant’s ‘Les Soeurs Rondoli’, to be sure, but also to Baudelaire and the French ‘symbolistes’. The intensity and scale of Hervouet’s research, however, may have slightly inhibited his account of the use Conrad made of these sources. In his view the Maupassant material shows up Conrad’s puritanical voyeurism, which is a poor substitute for the sexual state-of-nature that, Maupassant roguishly implies, reigns over the happy populations of Southern France and Northern Italy.¹

   Finally, Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan’s classy and ambitious chapter ‘The Romantic Paradox’ in her book on the shorter fiction (1999) shows that the tale has not remained immune to theoretically sophisticated readings. She takes Conrad’s phrase ‘the romantic feeling for reality’ not to signify what it seems to mean (that ‘romantic feeling’ can enhance the perception of reality), but to signal an ‘ideological tension . . . which lies at the core of Romanticism’. Thus Conrad’s tale should not be regarded as a dramatization of experience, whether remembered or imagined, but as possessing a ‘thematic core’, which is ‘the relation . . . of truth to fiction’, and which assumes the form of an ‘oscillation’ between the affirmation that ‘the word’ has the power ‘to create a world’ and the recognition that this world is ‘fictitious’. Out of this not altogether unfamiliar if paradoxical scenario, the magic plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest emerges as the sub-text of the tale, but inverted: the creepy Alfred Jacobus occupies the role of Prospero, the island’s squalid business world fills the space of Prospero’s magic isle, the ‘Pearl of the Ocean’ declines into a cash nexus unknown to or at least unrecognized in Shakespeare’s sanitary play, and – to switch sources, or precedents – the fairy-tale Cinderella’s slipper, far from winning the maiden a prince, triggers a rejection by a pusillanimous voyeur. Deeper analysis discloses that ‘the idiom of romance and fairy tale’ has been ‘predicated on the self-proclaimed fictionality of the genre’. Thus all we are left with is the realization that reality may be ‘a mere story that we cast ourselves into’ and that ‘the only liberty given to us is that of choosing between alternative texts’.² Whether or not this is Conrad’s scenario, it is a bleak prospect indeed.

The Secret Sharer

THE critical attention lavished on ‘The Secret Sharer’ has been such that any attempt to deal chronologically with it would quickly become intolerable even to the most hardened reader of academic writing. It also means that coverage cannot hope to be complete. Indeed, wide-ranging as it is, the survey that follows does not cover the entire field in English and excludes articles, several very distinguished, written in French, German, Polish, and Italian. Even so, what remains is so extensive that in the interests of coherence and readability it must be loosely divided into what may be called categories of convenience.

New critical readings.

The essays in this general category assume that the meaning of a text is determined less by cultural and biographical antecedents than by the formal organization of its material, whether moral, symbolic, thematic, or psychological. Robert W. Stallman’s 1949 article is a classic of the kind. Quoting Conrad’s warning to Arnold Bennett against mere documentation, Stallman raises two crucial questions. Why does the Captain risk his ship for that stranger? And why must he take his vessel so close to the land in order to release him? The answers are that Leggatt’s self-possession and courage offer an inspiring challenge, and that the Captain needs to catch the land breezes in order to escape from the prevailing calm. For Stallman the two coincide: Leggatt presents the Captain with his utmost test as a man, which is also his initiation into professional command. Hence Stallman concludes, in a characteristically New-Critical move, that the ‘situation’ between the Captain and his secret sharer corresponds to that between the artist and his work – which of course effaces any possible contradiction between Conrad the master-mariner and Conrad the master-novelist.¹ Stallman’s essay received support from Walter F. Wright (1949), who argued that the new Captain’s feeling of distance and even alienation from his men makes him specially responsive to Leggatt’s predicament; and that it is this very response, ultimately expressed in the gift of his hat to Leggatt as he prepares to disappear into Cambodia, that restores him to his ship. Thus the motif of the good deed saving the doer, which is as old as the New Testament, retains its potency even when it appears in a wholly secular context.¹

   In a brief common-sense account of the tale a few years later Douglas Hewitt (1952) claimed that the presence of Leggatt on board is ‘nightmarish’, not because it makes the Captain aware of his own wrongness but because ‘the relation between them is . . . an objective correlative of such knowledge’. It is only when ‘strangeness’ – the awareness of doubling – has been expelled that ‘normality is restored’. Neat as it is, the simplicity of this diagnosis did not rise to the demands of Conrad’s narrative, though it might in part explain the success Hewitt’s popular book had. Like Hewitt, Carl Benson (1954) excised Archbold from the narrative, concluding that the tale fails to realize the ‘commonalities’ that are the point of The Shadow-Line, though it teaches us that in the end the Captain has been brought ‘a little nearer to a realization of his communal duties than he was at the outset’.²