An 1898 Millennial’s Job Skills, Work Ethic, and Heroism

“There is a deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort…. lasting it out, there are moments of exultation….”

The 42-year-old story-teller named Marlow has turned meditative toward the end of his detailed, celebratory, and occasionally wistful, recounting of the memorable voyage of his youth. His audience is comprised of pub chums. In their earlier years – in the later decades of the 19th century – each of the chums had, in one kind of vessel or another, shipped in England’s merchant marine service. One of the chums is the narrator (the re-teller of Marlow’s tale) in Joseph Conrad’s story Youth, which was first published in September of 1898.

Marlow’s tale of an ill-fated ship and voyage traces the misfortunes of a 400-ton three-masted vessel, the Judea, whose foremast and mainmast were square-rigged.

His chronicle tells of leaks, squalls, gales, more leaks, and the spontaneous combustion of the coal cargo booked for delivery London to Bangkok. Each misfortune takes a turn for calamity, then catastrophe. Through prose that at times seems florid, we are nevertheless glad to be at that pub table where a bottle is passed to fuel the story-telling.

A reader’s place at the story-teller’s table

Conrad’s un-named relator of Marlow’s chronicle tells us, “We were sitting round a mahogany table that reflected the bottle, the claret-glasses, and our faces as we leaned on our elbows.”

We learn that the Judea’s skipper was on the far side of sixty and had “a nut-cracker face, with chin and nose trying to come together over a sunken mouth.” His face was “framed in iron-gray fluffy hair that looked like a chin-strap of cotton-wool sprinkled with coal dust.” Fate was cruel to him and his vessel, but served up learning experiences, tests of character – amounting to a rite of passage – for the story-teller Marlow, who was just twenty years old at the time.

Mishap upon mishap upon mishap

In her home port, the Judea was already in decline: “all rust, dust, grime – soot aloft, dirt on deck.”

Well before they were in open sea, she was battered by a major gale, and was forced to retreat for the first in a series of considerable repairs. A two-month delay.

Before she is out of port, she is rammed by an inattentive steamer. Her departure for the Far East is delayed another three weeks.

Adversity is a constant. The Judea is challenged by yet another gale which Marlow recalled as “an immensity of great foaming waves rushing at us, under a sky low enough to touch with the hand and dirty like a smoked ceiling. In the stormy space surrounding us, there was as much flying spray as air.” The 400-ton vessel was tossed and pitched. “She stood on her head, she sat on her tail, she rolled, she groaned….”

Eight men worked the pumps, while the four other crew members rested in berths, sleepless, with boots still on.

The pumping was non-stop – “all day, all night, all week.” Marlow recalled that the vessel was leaking continuously – “not enough to drown us at once, but enough to kill us with the work at the pumps.” As the sea battered and poured over her, there was every indication that the vessel “was working herself loose…. was going from us piecemeal…. being gutted bit by bit.”

The atmospherics were disorienting and forbidding: “There was for us no sky, there were for us no stars, no sun… nothing but angry clouds above an infuriated sea.” Marlow recalled that the crew forgot how it felt to be dry.

Adversity endured – Admiration

The vessel had to be towed back for a major overhauling. She was abandoned by her third crew – and by rats, who “had consumed more stores than the crew.”

“The fiendish gale” had been weathered as best as the Judea could. The mounting indignities had delayed her open-sea voyage six months. The suffered indignities instilled a respect – and a kind of fondness – for “that carcass of a ship.” Marlow told his chums, “To me she was not an old rattle-trap…. to me she was the endeavor, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret – as you would think of someone dead who you have loved. I shall never forget her…. Pass the bottle.”

Marlow expanded on his affection for the vessel: “I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.”

Still more mishaps

On the open sea, at last, “heavy with her age and the burden of her cargo,” the patched and tired vessel lumbered and crawled – only to be done in from within: “The smell from down below was as unexpected as it was frightful. One would have thought hundreds of paraffin-lamps had been flaring and smoking in that hold for days.”

At various ports, with unloading and reloading to facilitate caulking and other repairs, the coal cargo she was carrying had been so mishandled that the agitated and aerated cinders erupted in spontaneous combustion. The cargo was on fire; the ship was burning.

The crew worked feverishly to choke and stifle the fire. No luck. They tried to douse the fire, but the vessel’s “prehistoric hose” burst and was “past repair.” The crew’s brigade managed to pour buckets of Indian Ocean into the main hatch. No luck.

Pumping was the crew’s voyage fate. Leaks upon leaks had required the crew to pump water out. To quell the fire, the crew had to try to pump water into her. Marlow recalled, “After keeping water out to save ourselves from being drowned, we frantically poured water into her to save ourselves from being burnt.” They half wished she would spring a tidy, opportune leak. No such luck.

A great naval “battle”

Before they were able to flood the bottom of the cargo hold to drown the fire, there was an explosion; then several explosions. Marlow recalled that “the deck was a wilderness of smashed timber, lying crosswise like trees in a wood after a hurricane.” The sails were blown to shreds. The crew-members’ clothing was in shreds. “Several boards protruded overboard, like a gangway leading to nothing…. as if inviting us to walk the plank at once to done with our ridiculous troubles.”

A passing steamer came to their rescue, but the speed of the towing “fanned the smoldering destruction.” To free the floating inferno that was being stoked with air, the tow line was axed. The crew manned row boats, which bobbed about the doomed vessel as the men waited “to see the last of her.”

“Two red-hot anchors plunged to the bottom, tearing out after them two-hundred fathom of red-hot chain. The ship trembled…. burned furiously, mournful and imposing like a funeral pyre kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars…. At daylight, she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within…. As we pulled across her stern a slim dart of fire shot out viciously at us, and suddenly she went down, head first, in a great hiss of steam.”

Youth – a 20-year-old’s command, of a small boat and himself

In the smallest of the escape boats (a 14-footer), Marlow took on two crew members; using a spare oar for a mast, he improvised a sail from a boat-awning. He relished taking chances to beat the other rowboats to some harbor.

His “first command” was a tester: Thick rain-squalls deluged the open boat and had them “bailing for dear life.” They pulled at oars that seemed not to make headway, and yet they pulled and pulled, arms aching, bodies completely fatigued.

At the close of his recollections, a reader will find Marlow’s (somewhat self-congratulatory) chronicle to be a tale of valiant weathering. Marlow looked back on his first voyage to the East as a test and a triumph – a chance to feel his strength and affirm his resolve.

Conrad’s reporter closes his account of the evening by sounding a rather maudlin note. At the polished pub table “that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined and wrinkled, marked by toil,” he speaks of “our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that, while it is expected, is already gone.”

More than an action-adventure yarn

In his “Author’s Note” to Youth, Conrad explained that his own setback-filled 1883 maritime journey to Bangkok was the basis for the story. He called the creation of Youth “a feat of memory… a record of experience.”

In his essay “The Duality of Youth…” Dr. Hugh Epstein (the Secretary of the Joseph Conrad Society U.K.) persuasively makes the case that Conrad’s “fictionalised autobiography” can be read as something more than just an adventure yarn. There is, he contends, an “artistically informing idea which lifts Youth above the generality of nostalgic or wish-fulfilling adventure tales.”

While Epstein characterizes Marlow’s voice as “jauntily egotistical,” he does credit Marlow’s chronicle as expounding on what, for some, “constitutes human fulfillment.” Epstein’s analysis provides a reader with the lens to see that ego-fulfilling demonstrations of “striving will-power” can express “something everlasting.”

Regarding the youth in Youth

Conrad’s depictions of the “ages of man” are the focus of Professor Douglas Kerr’s essay in which the first phase of manhood is exemplified by Marlow, in his youth.

Kerr considers the story to be “an allegory of youth… a rite of passage, an initiatory voyage to manhood” which has the 20-year-old fixated on the romance and glamour of his first long-haul voyage as a junior officer.

That young Marlow was imagining himself to be what we now call an action-adventure hero, who through perseverance and heroism is credentialing himself to “belonging to the legendary order of men who hazard challenging voyages to the little-explored East of ancient navigators.”

Nothing unsettles that 20-year-old’s “romantic and largely aesthetic conception of adventure.” Kerr explains that the youth’s “voyage of ordeal and discovery belongs to the repertory of romantically-motivated journeys of exploration that were the inaugurating myths of empire.”

If I read Kerr correctly, the 20-year-old Marlow’s moments of strength, resolve, resourcefulness, and daring may have been in Conrad’s experience, to some extent. In his observation, anyway. Conrad had the talent and wit to aggrandize those observations and experiences for the 42-year-old story-teller.

The poignancy would seem to echo Dr. Epstein’s perspective. The regret expressed by the 42-year-old Marlow does not arise from a falsehood or an illusion of what transpired, but because self-assurance, excitement and bravado have been lost. And that regret, that mourning, is as everlasting as the commemoration of what has been lost. Thus, there is something immortal in that idea of loss.

Big-screen cinema incarnations and sensibilities

Many of Joseph Conrad’s stories were destined to be made into motion pictures.

In 2016, Youth was incarnated in a French-Portuguese production titled The Young One.

Much more famously, there are five film versions of Victory. There are two Lord Jim movies (Peter O’Toole, James Mason, Curt Jurgens, and Eli Wallach were in the 1965 version).

There was a 1993 television adaptation of Heart of Darkness (with Tim Roth and John Malkovich). And, most notably, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic Apocalypse Now (with Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, and Robert Duvall). That derivation (with its Vietnam War setting) won Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Sound; won Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture Direction and Best Motion Picture Score; and garnered numerous other nominations in numerous other categories.

There is at least one animated derivation of Heart of Darkness; this one set in Brazil.

I have long thought about trying to fashion a screenplay drawing heavily on Conrad’s The End of the Tether. A 1956 teleplay was written by no less than Abby Mann, who was well-known for Judgment at Nuremberg and Kojak.

Should an aspiring screenwriter dare to imagine another derivation?

In the current climate of sensitivity to even a whiff of racial profiling, might it be imprudent to champion a Joseph Conrad story?

In Youth, Marlow speaks of “the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength.”

Was Joseph Conrad a bigot? a racist?

Professor David Mulry, who has published noteworthy assessments of Conrad’s The Secret Agent – its politics, anarchism and 19th century terrorism – has also published appraisals of The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness.

As to Conrad’s narrative figures, Professor Mulry counsels caution: “Conrad employs ironic distancing techniques that we recognize, but occasionally forget are in play. So when he is at his most outspoken (about race or gender) employing garrulous figures such as Marlow, it is sometimes easy to mistake Marlow’s voice for Conrad’s voice. We should note how Conrad keeps authorial distance from his narrators. Within a story, he has other characters react (often gruffly) to those whose harsh judgments and outspoken prejudices may have readers bristle.”

Professor Mulry acknowledges that “characters such as Marlow are so authoritative that it is easy to make assumptions about them as authorial representations. We have to remind ourselves that these characters are narrative figures, limited, occasionally bumptious and quite prejudiced. We have to remind ourselves that they are cultural and dramatic constructs who are speaking about their times and their biases.”

So we wonder, do characters such as Marlow speak for Conrad? Does Joseph Conrad speak his mind and heart through such characters? Or, is Conrad writing as a reporter, authentically capturing the thinking and phrasing that existed in his time?

For Professor Mulry, “Conrad’s humanity comes through even where he resorts to racial epithets that we nowadays rightly decry. What can be read as nods to European cultural supremacy, arising from appropriation of Charles Darwin’s theories, we now recognize as glib ignorance.

“In many ways, Conrad is very much a product of his time, but for me his stories still convey an appeal to humanity and even generosity of spirit. Those themes should be read as counters to assertions of racial differences. Conrad’s stories tell of kinships that go beyond the color of skin.”

Bias and Bigotry laced through notable literature

Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist is most certainly a classic. Among the several film incarnations, there’s the award-winning 1968 musical Oliver! – with splendid scenery, costumes, casting, and performances; with no fewer than ten songs that are memorable in their lyrics and renditions. Six Academy Awards (including Best Picture), along with six other Oscar nominations; the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical. And with all that tribute and all the artistry, I still have trouble with Fagin, the crew chief of the band of urchin pickpockets and pre-teen thieves.

If I had ever been honored to teach a course focused on Shakespeare’s plays, I would never include Merchant of Venice. No matter who was cast to play Shylock, the money-lender – on stage, at an outdoor Shakespeare festival, on a screen – no matter, I would pass on all those performances. Shakespeare’s characterization may have been a reflection of stereotyping attitudes of his time. Even so, I would give that play a miss.

By my reading – by my memory of my readings – there are quite a number of notable novels that are tainted with portrayals of prejudice, which made me uncomfortable, even resentful. A few that come to mind: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Somerset Maugham’s The Alien Corn, George du Maurier’s Trilby, Henry James’ The American Scene….

So where do I come out as to Joseph Conrad? Do I share the prejudices and disdain of some of his bigoted characters? No, I surely don’t. And it’s not clear to me that Conrad shared most of those, either. Still, he was drawing on what he had seen and heard.

Conrad’s characterizations

For starters, I am partial to blue-water sea stories. Forty-five years ago, fifty years ago, I sailed dinghies – all well in sight of shorelines. So I was given to imaging what it might be like to sail beyond sight of land. I voyaged through Conrad’s stories, traveled via his evocative descriptions.

Those page-turning navigations stayed with me. In the coming months, I expect to revisit Heart of Darkness, a Congo River journey – Joseph Conrad’s most controversial story, which was first published in 1899. The 120-year anniversary of its publication will coincide with the 40th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Any thoughtful appraisal of Heart of Darkness would surely be better informed following an open-minded reading of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff, who is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard.

Professor Jasanoff informs us of Joseph Conrad’s descriptions of humanity in those populations once designated as uncivilized and savage. She also informs us of Conrad’s descriptions of inhumanity and commercial savagery among those who considered themselves civilized.

That kind of sorting out would seem to have applicability to a number of modern-day contexts and political savagery.

Conrad as an ahead-of-his-time globalist

The most recent (October 2017) and perhaps most thorough (and engaging) assessment of Conrad’s prejudices are found in Professor Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch. The author is candid about her displeasures and disinclinations:

“As a woman, I balked at spending so much time with an author whose fiction was so short on plausible female characters it seemed like he barely realized that women were people too. As a half-Asian, I winced at Conrad’s exoticized and often denigrating portrayals of Asians; as a half-Jew, I bridled at his occasional but undeniable anti-Semitism.”

The balking, the wincing, and the bridling are certainly understandable. The disclosures make Professor Jasanoff’s “takes” all the more interesting:

In personally – and bravely – retracing and experiencing a number of the far-flung and uncomfortable journeys that gave rise to many of Conrad’s best-known stories, Jasanoff steeped herself into the places and the peoples of those stories. Her experiences informed her re-readings of Conrad. Her accounts inform our readings.

Rather than condemn Conrad, she tells us that she came to further appreciate his contexts, understand his views, and even find him companionable. If I read her correctly, Conrad can be viewed not as a hater but as a reporter.

Jasanoff explains that, “in places,” Conrad can be judged as “unexpectedly tolerant by the standards of his time. Whether I agreed with him or not, I always found his company worthwhile.”

To her knowledge, Conrad “brought to the page a more international and multiethnic assortment of voices than any other writer of his day…. his books offered thoughtful engagements with the responsibilities and challenges that came with Britain’s being the leading world power of that age.”

She finds that Conrad “was unafraid to reject truisms and call out exploitation, tyranny, and cant where he saw them.”

He may not have recognized, let alone called out, intolerance and denigration as often as we would like. Jasanoff does not hesitate to note that his characters are fixed on their determinative views of “racial differences.”

By my reading, Jasanoff is telling us that, for his time, Conrad was quite observant, and, for his time, may have been uniquely human and humane.

In her Prologue, she concludes, “For better and for worse, Joseph Conrad was one of us: a citizen of the global world.”