“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were… No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of their being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.”
This is how Marlow describes to his companions on the Thames his experience on the Congo, when his steamer would come upon a native village and its inhabitants.
I had been re-reading Heart of Darkness earlier this year, shortly before the Wuthering Heights movie came out and everyone was talking about that novel. I re-read it, too, after the Conrad. I seemed to find a surprising number of connections between them. But why should it have been surprising.
It seemed popular to say of Wuthering Heights that the characters are crazy, psychotic even. I’ve never thought that. Would it be crazy to say they seem reasonable? Take Hindley Earnshaw. One day, his father returns from a trip with a little kid, whose presence caused the gift intended for Hindley to break, and who immediately becomes a petted favorite of said father. This happens when he is a child of about 12 or 13. You might say he is ill-natured for not taking this turn of events better (I might say he simply isn’t a saint), but mad it certainly does not seem to turn against Heathcliff and his own father and ultimately to strike out away from Wuthering Heights. Later, he has his opportunity for revenge, which is soured when his beloved wife dies and he turns to alcohol. Certainly, he gives in to despair and addiction. But where is the madness? No, he was not inhuman. That was the worst of it!
The basic geography and situation of Wuthering Heights are important to the novel of the same name. The Heights is a very old house, still perfectly respectable at the earliest events depicted but in a depopulated rural landscape. It’s high up on the moors; it’s alone; it’s easily cut off by snow; and there aren’t many people there, especially at what we may call the lower points of the story. It’s not fully within bounds of civilization. Young Cathy and Heathcliff visit Thrushcross Grange for the first time and literally watch from outdoors as the nice gentry family sits in their sumptuous living room. The encounter results in Cathy being confined in this civilized space for a long period, and emerging different—with a new side to herself, if not fully transformed. Then she goes home, which is at a low point with respect to civilization.
Catherine had kept up her acquaintance with the Lintons since her five weeks’ residence among them; and as she had no temptation to show her rough side in their company, and had the sense to be ashamed of being rude where she experienced such invariable courtesy, she imposed unwittingly on the old lady and gentleman, by her ingenious cordiality; gained the admiration of Isabella, and the heart and soul of her brother: acquisitions that flattered her from the first, for she was full of ambition, and led her to adopt a double character without exactly intending to deceive any one. In the place where she had heard Heathcliff termed a ‘vulgar young ruffian,’ and ‘worse than a brute,’ she took care not to act like him; but at home she had small inclination to practise politeness that would only be laughed at, and restrain an unruly nature when it would bring her neither credit nor praise.
Good manners would not only not be appreciated at the Heights, they would actually result in ill-treatment, because it is ill-mannered savages who are ascendant at the Heights; this is true of Hindley when Catherine Linton is a young girl and of Heathcliff when Catherine Heathcliff is a betrayed young bride. The Catherines are not inhuman. That was the worst of it!
Marlow’s companions on the Thames apparently joke that Marlow should have joined the natives, since he seems to speak so fondly of their “fiendish row.”
“I had no time. I had to mess about with white lead and strips of woollen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steampipes—I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man.”
This is true enough on Marlow’s way up the river. But once he reaches Kurtz? Nelly Dean, also, is too busy with her life in service to fall completely in with the savagery of Wuthering Heights, but she certainly has her role to play in the action, as Marlow too involves himself extremely on the side of Kurtz.
Mr. de Barral’s bitterness at his hemmed-in freedom is not the only thing that has been standing in the way of Flora’s marital happiness. She has been foolish. There are more secrets here for Marlow to learn and more suppositions for him to make.
He knows from the Fynes that Miss de Barral and Captain Anthony, Mrs. Fyne’s brother, met at their vacation home, that they didn’t talk much but quietly started walking together, and that Miss de Barral followed Captain Anthony to London, sending a letter to Mrs. Fyne shortly after. This letter is an important artifact. Mrs. Fyne receives it and doesn’t read it to her husband, but based on its contents she wants him to take steps. She enlists Marlow for help in convincing her husband, and also doesn’t read it to Marlow or let him read it. Marlow cuts the knot of the Fynes’ disagreement by telling the husband to go along with his wife’s idea to go to London and tell Captain Anthony not to marry Flora, because surely doing so will have no effect on a man in love anyway.
This seems like good advice, but Marlow hasn’t read the letter and can’t anticipate that what Fyne will say about it—without having seen it either, of course—and it does, against all odds*, strongly affect Captain Anthony. He doesn’t call off the marriage, but he does do something rash that changes his relationship with Flora and significantly diminishes their happiness in the first part of their marriage. This will change only through the climactic scene that also results in the death of Flora’s father.
When Marlow recounts that scene later, he says:
“I believe that just then the tension of the false situation was at its highest. Of all the forms offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realize it fully, which is the most imperative. Pairing off is the fate of mankind. And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding and voluntarily stop short of the—the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. Perhaps sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at least, which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom—or even a straight if despairing decision.”
Why did she do that, they will say of Flora, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart? And of Anthony they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully? Marlow finally finds out, right at the end of the novel, when he finds Mrs. Anthony again after many years and asks her what was in “that famous letter which so upset Mrs. Fyne.”
“‘It was simply crude,’ she said earnestly. ‘I was feeling reckless and I wrote recklessly. I knew she would disapprove and I wrote foolishly. It was the echo of her own stupid talk. I said that I did not love her brother but that I had no scruples whatever in marrying him.’
“She paused, hesitating, then with a shy half-laugh.
“‘I really believed I was selling myself, Mr. Marlow. And I was proud of it. What I suffered afterwards I couldn’t tell you; because I only discovered my love for my poor Roderick through agonies of rage and humiliation. …’
…
“Again she paused, then going back in her thoughts. ‘No! There was no harm in that letter. It was simply foolish. What did I know of life then? Nothing. But Mrs. Fyne ought to have known better.'”
Fortunately, what comes out of it is heroic, and a “fine adventure.”
*I’m trying, really trying, not to get into “chance” stuff, but it’s hard to completely avoid.
When Marlow first encounters Flora de Barral, he is walking along a quarry and she is on a precipice above. He calls out to her. It turns out she was trying to kill herself, or at least thinking about it, and eventually Marlow realizes the crisis is being caused not merely by the hardship she’s experienced in the years since her father was imprisoned, but in the fact that he is about to be released. It’s Mr. Fyne, Marlow’s holiday-friend, who finally imparts this important fact at the end of Part I.
“‘But dash it all,’ he cried in hollow accents which at the same time had the tone of bitter irony—I had never before heard a sound so quaintly ugly and almost horrible—’You forget Mr. Smith.’
“‘What Mr. Smith?’ I asked innocently.
“Fyne made an extraordinary simiesque grimace. I believe it was quite involuntary, but you know that a grave, much-lined, shaven countenance when distorted in an unusual way is extremely apelike. It was a surprising sight, and rendered me not only speechless but stopped the progress of my thought completely. I must have presented a remarkably imbecile appearance.
…
“It is one of the advantages of that magnificent invention, the prison, that you may forget people which are put there as though they were dead. One needn’t worry about them. Nothing can happen to them that you can help. They can do nothing which might possibly matter to anybody. They come out of it, though, but that seems hardly an advantage to themselves or anyone else. I had completely forgotten the financier de Barral. The girl for me was an orphan, but now I perceived suddenly the force of Fyne’s qualifying statement, ‘to a certain extent.’ It would have been infinitely more kind all round for the law to have shot, beheaded, strangled, or otherwise destroyed this absurd de Barral, who was a danger to a moral world inhabited by a credulous multitude not fit to take care of itself.
The Great de Barral is, in other words, one for the Colonel Chabert files, someone back from the dead who everyone wishes would stay buried.
This isn’t exactly true. Flora does want him to come back, even if it almost drives her to jump off a cliff. She was only 15 when his empire collapsed and has a girl’s memory of a beloved father. The Great de Barral was never worth much as a father, of course (he left her with that governess, after all), and now that he’s full of bitterness over his downfall his presence is a poison.
Of the trial, Marlow’s unimaginative pressman friend “told me with a sourly derisive snigger that, after the sentence had been pronounced the fellow clung to the dock long enough to make a sort of protest. ‘You haven’t given me time. If I had been given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of them.’ And he had permitted himself his very first and last gesture in all these days, raising a hard-clenched first above his head.”
De Barral is also angry that Flora didn’t give him time before marrying. “Couldn’t you wait at least till I came out? You could have told me; asked me; consulted me! …You couldn’t wait—eh?”
Flora has spent the past year researching her father’s trial in the newspapers and shares his view that he was an innocent victim. She believes that if only he had been given time he might have ended by being made a peer. But she also knows that she couldn’t wait until he came out to act to save them both. And that he must be a bit mad for acting like she hadn’t done what was best for him.
The Great de Barral has, finally, the courtesy to remove himself from the scene, and they all live happily ever after. Not quite, but the climax that ends in his exit ushers in, like magic, love and happiness.
Chance is Conrad’s last novel to feature Marlow and a great showcase for Marlow’s particular passion: finding out the secret fulcrum behind an otherwise unexplained psychological situation. For Marlow these things are mysteries; for many other people they are not. “I am like a puzzle-headed chief-mate we had once in the dear old Samarcand when I was a youngster. The fellow went gravely about trying to ‘account to himself’—his favorite expression—for a lot of things no one would care to bother one’s head about,” Marlow tells the young friend who (actually) narrates Chance. “He was an old idiot but he was also an accomplished practical seaman. I was quite a boy and he impressed me. I must have caught the disposition from him.”
It takes quite a long time to find out a particular unstated fact behind the actions of Marlow’s acquaintances. We learn a lot about Mr. and Mrs. Fyne, his holiday-friends; we learn a lot about Flora de Barral, a friend of Mrs. Fyne’s and the daughter of a disgraced and convicted financier. It seems to make sense that Miss de Barral would be suicidal, with the extremely difficult life she’s led for years; it seems to make sense that despite their friendship, Mrs. Fyne wouldn’t want Miss de Barral marrying her brother. But the urgency of Miss de Barral’s feelings, and the heat of Mrs. Fyne’s, make much, much more sense when Marlow learns at length that Flora’s father, the (formerly) Great de Barral, is about to be released from prison to pose an immediate, material problem to Flora and anyone closely involved with her.
This isn’t the only little secret Marlow finds out or figures out. A good one is the secret of Miss de Barral’s governess. This one is speculative—but I dare you not to believe it. What is known of the governess are the superficial information of Mrs. Fyne, who found the woman unsuitable and untrustworthy, and the report from Flora herself of her last morning with the governess (whose name Marlow can’t recall). The governess did not have Flora’s best interests at heart; she was out for personal gain. The question is, what sort? The typical idea for a grasping governess working for a wealthy widower would be to insinuate herself as the next wife, but Marlow knows that doesn’t make sense for the type of man de Barral was nor does it fit with the specific venom the governess has for Flora. The governess gets intelligence that de Barral is ruined. She spends one final night in his home in Brighton, arguing with her accomplice and preparing to flee with anything that isn’t nailed down. “Dark and, so to speak, inscrutable spaces being met with in life there must be such places in any statement dealing with life. In what I am telling you of now—an episode of one of my humdrum holidays in the green country, recalled quite naturally after all the years by our meeting a man who has been a blue-water sailor—this evening confabulation is a dark, inscrutable spot. And we may conjecture what we like,” Marlow says to his interlocutor, and proceeds to so conjecture. Rather than aiming to become the next Mrs. de Barral, the governess was instead setting up her young lover to marry the heiress. Marlow’s sordid idea seems clearly correct. “I was struck by the absolute verisimilitude of this suggestion,” our narrator tells us. Marlow expounds further, and:
I couldn’t refuse Marlow the tribute of a prolonged whistle “Phew! So you suppose that…”
He waved his hand impatiently.
“I don’t suppose. It was so. And anyhow why shouldn’t you accept the supposition.”
There’s no reason not to, except that it’s exactly that, a supposition (that is to say, made up). But it does perfectly explain things, like nothing else would.
There’s a lot in this novel about thinking, and people or types of people who think or don’t think, or do or don’t understand. I will have to read it again to get at all of the thinking. But we do learn early on that journalists don’t, or at least shouldn’t, think. Marlow has a drink with one who covered the trial of de Barral, just after he was convicted.
Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand anything? I guess not. It would lead him too far away from the actualities which are the daily bread of the public mind. …And then, for him, an accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly ‘bad business.’ His business was to write a readable account. But I who had nothing to write, I permitted myself to use my mind as we sat before our still untouched glasses. And the disclosure which so often rewards a moment of detachment from mere visual impressions gave me a thrill very much approaching a shudder. I seemed to understand that, with the shock of the agonies and perplexities of his trial, the imagination of that man, whose moods, notions and motives wore frequently an air of grotesque mystery—that his imagination had been at last roused into activity.
Much later, the Great de Barral is also asked about thinking, and imagining. One could take his response as a comment on Marlow. “Think! What do you know of thinking. I don’t think. There is something in my head that thinks. The thoughts in men, it’s like being drunk with liquor or—You can’t stop them. A man who thinks will think anything.”
Among the many terrible things I have done in my life are writing the blog that was bibliographing and also stopping writing it and finally letting it completely disappear through absurd negligence, but it wasn’t finally after all because then ((almost) finally) I realized I could find it again and resurrect it, at least in part, in some form, and now among the terrible things I have done is (finally?) also republishing at least some of it. There is absolutely no point to any of this. But the archive is accumulating and will continue to do so.
This has meant reading some of these old posts, and something struck me about the last…many of them, which is that they were not, something, they were not about good enough books? That’s not right. They were not, perhaps, appreciationist enough, or at all. I do not feel compelled to bring such posts back. But more importantly I wonder if they were the reason I had to stop writing. I’m not sure that’s the case or that that makes sense. They felt hollow and joyless, or maybe even emotionless. But I know the real reason I had to stop writing was the voice in my head that just kept saying, over and over, as it has been since I started republishing yesterday, “Schweigen.” (Perhaps notably, the actual last post, on Ema, the Captive, did not feel like this, and will be republished.)
I don’t know what this space will end up as, if anything. On verra.
There are some things I have read since I’ve been gone, including some good things. Toward the end of bibliographing, I was re-reading Your Face Tomorrow; I’ve re-read it twice more since then, along with first readings of a few other Marías novels that were characteristically excellent. Another late bibliographing post was on Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island; I recently read The Making of Incarnation, also typical of the author. I have re-read Under the Volcano several more times. I have re-read a lot of Conrad, in some cases a few times. I have read some of Septology, to be 57% modisch. A, da, I re-read Ada. I read Mating (Norman Rush), which was really something. I read Salka Valka. I read a slim little Helen DeWitt I liked, and “Tiny Alice,” a couple times. Right now I am reading The Rider, by Tim Krabbé, which is about cycling, and which I am loving. Sometimes I think I may just re-read Your Face Tomorrow and Lord Jim and Under the Volcano forever and nothing else, but then I think no, you’d have to add more Conrad than just that, and certainly Ada and probably other Nabokov, and what are you playing at leaving out all of Melville, even Benito Cereno, which, I am now recalling, I have also re-read semi-recently. But then here I am now reading this Krabbé which could not be making me happier.
This is more than enough for now; I have work to do on the archive.
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