illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence.’ His ship, the Judea, is an ancient masted rig transporting 600 tons of coal to Bangkok. The coal spontaneously combusts and a fire breaks out in the bunker; after burning for days the ship is finally destroyed but the crew are saved. The fate of the Judea represents the end of the age of sail: all ships will soon be powered by coal. But the story is elegiac in other ways too: Marlow’s subject is the exuberance of youth and its ‘romance of illusions’. What to an older man is a harrowing experience at sea is, to a younger man, an awakening, an adventure. The days of his youth were when Marlow was happiest, and the group around the table drink to ‘youth and the sea. Glamour and the sea! The good, strong sea, the salt, bitter sea, that could whisper to you, and roar at you and knock your breath out of you.’
We meet him for the second time in Heart of Darkness (1902), when Marlow is on board the Nellie telling his companions the story of Kurtz, an ivory trader who lives as a demi-god in the Congo. ‘Do you see him?’ Marlow asks; ‘Do you see the story? Do you see anything?’ The opacity of Conrad’s prose sometimes makes it hard for his reader to see very much; E. M. Forster said that ‘the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel’. But Conrad’s aim as a writer is ‘to make you hear, to make you feel… to make you see’, to give the reader ‘encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. From the introduction to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, this is the most perfect explanation in the language of why we read and also the most beautiful, the most extraordinary, of all Conrad’s beautiful, extraordinary sentences. We read because we are looking for something we have forgotten, and this is why we need Marlow. He is a detective searching for clues.
Marlow wants us to see Kurtz and to see the Judea and to see Jim and to see the story; he wants us to see everything, even the invisible. But Conrad only wants us to see Marlow. Jim may be a coward or an idealist, a romantic or a criminal, but he is fixated on a single idea — the loss of his heroism. We see him as clearly, or as unclearly, as we see ourselves: the best of us would do what he did: Jim is Everyman, Marlow insists. But there are very few men like Marlow, men who live on land ‘as a bird rests on the branch of a tree, so tense with the power of brusque flight into its true element that it is incomprehensible why it should sit still minute after minute’. Marlow is a detective but he is also a High Romantic; he belongs to the tradition of Romantic wanderers, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner — which poem Conrad loved and whose lunar imagery suffuses Lord Jim — who have outlasted illusions but still thirst for something more. To Marlow, the quenching of this thirst can only be done at sea. Shore-dwellers are aliens whose solid world is closed, cluttered, imaginatively impoverished. Only in the presence of the endless monotony of the ocean can one immerse oneself in reflection.
It is typical of Marlow that he does not wander into Lord Jim until we have settled down into chapter four, at which point he kidnaps the story. ‘That preposterous master mariner’, as Henry James called him, is Conrad’s other self, his double; Marlow is the English gentleman Conrad can never be. ‘The man Marlow and I came together,’ Conrad explained, ‘in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships. This one has ripened. For all his assertiveness in matters of opinion [Marlow] is not an intrusive person. He haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time. Yet I don’t think that either of us would care much to survive the other… Of all my people he’s the one that has never been a vexation to my spirit. A most discreet, understanding man.’6 Marlow ‘lives as he dreams — alone’ and therefore comes without a biography. A ‘lanky, loose’ figure with a ‘narrow, veiled glance’, Marlow is ‘quietly composed in varied shades of brown robbed of every vestige of gloss’. He has no history, home, family or friends, no connections to the world in which he takes such an interest and of which he has such luminous understanding. He does not even possess a consistent personality; in Marlow the very idea of personality is obliterated. He is simply a mind in which ‘some notion’ is chased ‘round and round… just for the fun of the thing’.
Like all mariners, Marlow is a threshold figure; wherever we find him, he is neither quite on land nor quite at sea. Whether on a deck or a verandah, in a port, a harbour hotel or moored at the mouth of a river, he is standing apart, looking on. Without having known the love of a mother, sister, wife or mistress, he is unencumbered by women. ‘You say I don’t know women,’ Marlow explains in Chance, the novel in which he tries to get to know one. ‘Maybe. It’s just as well not to come too close to the shrine. But I have a clear notion of woman. In all of them, termagant, flirt, crank, washerwoman, blue-stocking, outcast and even in the ordinary fool… there is something left, if only a spark.’ Sea creatures are less strange to Marlow than females. ‘As to honour — you know — it’s a fine medieval inheritance which women never got hold of… In addition they are devoid of decency. I mean masculine decency.’ Over twelve years and in four separate books, Conrad needs Marlow to expound on women, youth, imperialism, cowardice, honour and fidelity. Only in Chance, where Marlow makes his final appearance, do we find him out of his element. This story of the blue-eyed, red-lipped Flora de Barral, suffocated by the combination of her husband’s magnanimity and her father’s incestuous love, was Conrad’s least satisfying and most commercially successful book. He called it his ‘girl-novel’.
Conrad’s writing is filled with irreversible acts, with men — and occasionally women — who gamble and lose and are forced to live on. When Marlow first talks to Flora de Barral, it is because he chances, on a country walk, to prevent her from throwing herself from a precipice. Always drawn to those who jump, Marlow then becomes involved in Flora’s decision to marry a sea captain whom she does not love. ‘The fact of having shouted her away from the edge of a precipice, seemed somehow to have engaged my responsibility as to this other leap.’ The story is strung together by chance encounters, and Marlow hears about the next stage of Flora’s life when he happens upon the second mate of the ship of which her husband was captain. A jump, for Conrad, is just another sort of chance.
Ismay was thirty-seven when Lord Jim was published in 1900, but it is unlikely that he knew the novel; it is a difficult read and he was not a bookish man. He had probably never heard of Conrad, but Conrad knew about Ismay. Everything about the Titanic, which Conrad thought a ‘monstrous’ upholstered ferry — the excessive futility of its conception, the excessive lack of professionalism amongst the management, the excessive number of words it was generating in the press — offended his essential frugality. For centuries, travellers had been blown about the sea on the movements of the wind like dispersed dandelion parachutes and now they were shunted along by the screwing motion of a propeller. The North Atlantic trade by which Ismay made his living was, Conrad said in a letter to John Quinn after the Titanic went down, ‘not good enough for a man who cared for his profession; very monotonous, very risky, no better than running a tramway under disagreeable conditions of weather’.7 Ships like those run by the White Star Line, Conrad believed, destroyed the ancient traditions of seamanship. ‘A marvellous achievement’, he said of steam propulsion in his essay ‘Ocean Travel’, ‘is not necessarily interesting. It may render life more tame than perhaps it should be.’ Sailing ships brought you closer to ‘the silence of the universe’, suspending you from the stresses and anxieties of land life. Under sail the traveller communed with the sea, but it was only by looking out of the curtained windows of the White Star liners that you remembered you were afloat at all. Conrad’s ocean was not a house party but a place of monastic simplicity. As he puts it in Chance, ‘the service of the sea and the service of the temple are both detached from the vanities and errors of a world which follows no severe rule’.
On 16 April, the day after the news of the Titanic reached England, Conrad offered a piece on the subject to Nash’s Magazine. The editor turned his suggestion down and Conrad published a statement (now lost) in The London Budget on 20 April. Another article on the Titanic (also lost) appeared in The Literary Digest on 4 May. Needing to ‘talk a little’ about the wreck, ‘for my own comfort partly’, Conrad wrote to his agent on 22 April: ‘In order to throw it off my chest I ask you to get Harrison on the telephone and ask him if he cares to get an article from me on the subject. A personal sort of pronouncement, thoughts, reminiscences and reflections inspired by the event with a suggestion or two.’ Austin Harrison, the Harrovian editor of the English Review, was considering serialising Chance, which had, since January, been appearing in instalments in the New York Herald. Harrison turned down Chance, and accepted instead not one, but two personal pronouncements by
