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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
It has become fashionable in some circles to say that Conrad's prefaces and autobiographical utterances are to some extent oversimplifications and therefore misleading. And, of course, brief essayistic statements of overtly moral intent cannot adequately suggest the interplay of emotional struggles, ideals, and human depravity so richly and variously presented in the conflicts of Conrad's fictional world. Indeed, there may lurk beneath the conscious artifice of fiction subconscious psychic depths, hinted at in such symbols as may reasonably be exploited in terms of Jungian archetypes. I do not for a moment doubt the validity and plausibility of such approaches to Conrad.
1 In Nov. 1909. See G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (New York, 1927), ii, 5. There is some doubt about just when Conrad completed The Shadow Line. In one letter he says, “I was writing that thing in Dec., 1914, and Jan. to March, 1915” (ibid., p. 182). In another letter he says he finished it in Jan. 1915 (p. 193). But he dates the last page of the MS. (which the committee in charge of rare books in Yale Univ. Library has kindly permitted me to see in microfilm) “Dec. 15, 1915.” Conrad's writing of the month and the year is quite legible, though the “15” is obscure. This may be the date on which he completed final revisions, in plenty of time for first publication in The English Review, Sept. 1916 to March 1917.
2 It seems to me that what I shall say of the attitude and of the central problems constitutes an elaborate footnote supporting the Conrad criticism of Robert Penn Warren and Morton D. Zabel. Warren says, Introd. to the 1951 Modern Library edition of Nostromo, “The characteristic story for Conrad becomes the relation of man to the human communion” (p. xvii), and suggests, “The central process that engaged Conrad is the process of the earned redemption” (p. xix). He says of The Shadow Line specifically, “It is through the realization of this community that man cures himself of ‘that feeling of life emptiness’ which has afflicted the young hero of The Shadow Line before he came to his great test” (p. xvii). Zabel, Introd. to the New Directions Under Western Eyes, quotes Conrad on “unavoidable solidarity … the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible earth,” and then says of Conrad, “The solidarity he so insistently invoked, exemplified as much by his personal courage as by the art he practised against appalling obstacles of doubt and insecurity, offered little but this grim consolation to his skepticism; but this much it did offer, and on that principle of trust and sincerity he staked his faith” (pp. xxxiv-xxxv).
3 Page references throughout are to the 1926 Canterbury edition of the Complete Works. “The Secret Sharer” is in 'Twixt Land and Sea (pp. 91-143).
4 At the end of the story the captain rejoices: “And I was alone with her. Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” (my italics). To anticipate, I do not feel that the captain of The Shadow Line could have said “alone” in such a context at the end of his voyage, though he might have at the beginning. And I shall argue that “material conditions” throw such shadows that for the Conrad of The Shadow Line the concept of “perfect communion” would seem immature and illusionary.
5 Albert Guerard, Jr., Joseph Conrad (New York, 1947), pp. 37 ff., and Introd. to the Signet edition of Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, pp. 8-9. In the latter Guerard says, “The two men [Marlow and the narrator of ”The Secret Sharer“] … must recognize their own potential criminality and test their own resources, must travel through Kurtz and Leggatt, before they will be capable of manhood . .. manhood and ‘moral survival.’ The two novels alike exploit the ancient myth or archetypal experience of the ‘night journey,’ of a provisional descent into the primitive and unconscious sources of being” (p. 9). I dislike to find myself in disagreement with so able and penetrating a critic of Conrad as Guerard, and I feel that he has made an acceptable and rewarding reading of Heart of Darkness, but the reading does not seem to me applicable to “The Secret Sharer.” As Guerard indicates, “The Secret Sharer” is a troublesome story, and “various interpretations are possible” (Joseph Conrad, p. 40 n.).
6 See the letter to Galsworthy, Life and Letters, ii, 143-144: “I can't tell you what pleasure you have given me by what you say of the ‘Secret Sharer,‘—and especially the swimmer. I haven't seen many notices—three or four in all; but in one of them he is called a murderous ruffian,—or something of the sort. Who are those fellows who write in the Press? Where do they come from?” I have not been able to find the Galsworthy letter to which this is a reply.
7 Of the Steward of the Officers' Home in Singapore, e.g., he says, “He doesn't seem very fit to live” (p. 39). There is an interesting parallel in “The Secret Sharer,” where Leggatt speaks of the man he killed as one of the “miserable devils that have no business to live at all” (p. 101). The parallel phrasing actually lights up the difference between the two stories, for in The Shadow Line Captain Giles, who is the model of compassionate maturity against whom the captain measures himself, replies, “As to that, it may be said of a good many,” and by the end of the story the young captain possesses a similar tolerance.
8 “Well Done” in Notes on Life and Letters, p. 183.
9 A letter to Sir Sidney Colvin calls especial attention to the importance of Ransome: “My last scene with Ransome is only indicated. There are things, moments, that are not to be tossed to the public's incomprehension, for journalists to gloat over” (Life and Letters, ii, 182).
10 Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad and His Circle (New York, 1935), p. 77.
11 Life and Letters, ii, 182-183. See also pp. 181, 184-185, 195, and the “Author's Note” to The Shadow Line.