Read Sailors on the Inward Sea Online
Authors: Lawrence Thornton
Sailors on the Inward Sea
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For Toni
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
â
JOSEPH CONRAD,
HEART OF DARKNESS
Pent Farm
Dear Ford,
I have imagined your surprise when you received this package and saw the name Jack Malone and my Dutch East Indies return address. Finding the manuscript inside must have made you wonder why you had been sent it, so I want to tell you straightaway that I am not asking you to vet it as you have done for so many writers over the years. It is yours to do with as you wish. I should add that it concerns Conradâhis life and workâas I have seen them through the lens of our friendship that lasted more than a quarter of a century and persists in memory to this day. To avoid any confusion at the outset, I think it best for me to begin with a brief explanation of how I came to write these pages and my reason for sending them to you.
Six years ago, in the fall of 1924, I boarded a freighter in London bound for Java. Still grieving for Conrad, who had died only a month earlier, I had become quite aware even then that my only chance to understand what had happened between us would be to put the story down on paper, the whole thing, from beginning to end. If I had had a reasonable grasp of what I wanted to say, the solitude and endless vistas of a long sea voyage would have been an ideal occasion to begin the enterprise, but at that point the story was a great jumble of people and places and objects. As I stood at the aft rail watching the dock recede, the well-wishers who had come to say good-bye growing smaller, the city flattening out, I saw in the spreading V of the freighter's wake shimmering images of Conrad emerging from the fog at Tilbury Dock, a sign over the door of an
old bookshop, the tormented eyes of a captain in the Royal Navy, a German U-boat's conning tower decorated with kill signs. By the time I reached Batavia, Indonesia, several weeks later, those and other images, along with their attendant emotions, had overrun my mind, leaving me in a state of exhausted frustration.
Five years were to pass before I finally sat down to see what I could do in the way of memoir writing. After three false starts I was close to giving up. I remember crushing what I thought might well be the last page of my efforts and rolling it across the table, where the bloodless thing disappeared over the edge. And then, half an hour later, you appeared, Ford, descending like a ministering angel from the silky blackness of an Indonesian night to show me the way.
I had abandoned the table in the living room of my bungalow and was standing on the veranda, looking down at the Old Port of Batavia, whose bay was dotted with lanterns hanging from the prows of invisible fishing boats. Farther off lay a net of lights, the sparkling city, lovely and seductive. I was listening to the incessant nightly hum, a medley of human and inhuman sounds, hisses and groans and bangings, cars' motors, the clip-clop of bullocks' hooves, the creaking wheels of old carts, faint voices of people out for a stroll or coming home late from work.
Suddenly, I recalled an afternoon you and I spent with Conrad in Kent at his country house. We three had walked from Pent Farm to Stanford for lunch at his favorite pub, the one with the weathered picnic benches that stood outside on the grass, and afterward returned to the parlor. Nothing earth-shattering, simply a rescued moment that somehow led my thoughts to the opening pages of your
Good Soldier,
where John Dowell frets over how to tell his story and finally decides to imagine himself talking to a sympathetic soul in a country cottage. I had a vision of him and this nameless chap sitting by a crackling fireâDowell, heartbroken and confused, going
on about his trials with his poor wife, Florence, quite as a man would to someone who understood the torments of love and sex.
Well, my heart started pounding. In that instant I realized that I, too, needed a confidant, someone interested enough in Conrad to listen to what I had to say. There were plenty of candidates among Conrad's writer friendsâHenry James, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kiplingâbut none was as well suited for the job as Ford Madox Ford, his friend and steadfast ally ever since you two had met in 1898. The fact that you had lived at Pent Farm and vacated it just before Conrad moved in made your role as my Muse even more natural. And it was also there at Pent that you and he began your collaboration on
Romance,
the first of the novels you wrote together. I also knew that you had a hand in revising
Heart of Darkness, Nostromo,
and parts of
The Mirror of the Sea
âwork that let you understand far better than I what drove the man and what made him the artist we admired.
It was a heady moment, Ford, deeply exciting. To think that you, Conrad, and I could connect again on that inner, familiar landscape. As I gazed out over the bay at the lights of Batavia under the stars wheeling across the heavens, I thought that I might as well appropriate your imaginary cottage, too, and politely usher Dowell and his guest outside so you and I could take over the blazing fire, the pantry stocked with food and drink, the still-warm chairs. But charmed as I was by the idea of speaking to you over the echoes of your own book, I had the good sense to see that doing so in your fictional cottage would be too clever by half. Pent Farm, with its uneven brick floor in the kitchen, the stone fireplace guarded by bird-shaped andirons, the parlor with its comfortable furniture, where the three of us had spent so many pleasant evenings together, should be our place, yours and mine. In that quiet, simple room with a beam across the middle of the low ceiling, the windowsills fretted with the
blooms of small roses, we'd sit together for as long as the story lasted.
These pages record what I have imagined telling you in that parlor for the last year and a half. I could not have written one of them without your intervention and guidance, and since I had all but abandoned any hope of being able to set down this memoir, I feel that I should tell you a little about my struggle before launching into the story proper.
As my Muse you played a role remarkably close to the one I fulfilled for Conrad years ago. It seems to me that that similarity binds the three of us together in the realm of a “magic suggestiveness,” about which Conrad spoke so movingly in his preface to
The Nigger of the Narcissus,
the suggestiveness that frees voices in a country cottage or on the deck of a yawl moored in London, where much of what I will unfold takes place. Though I am telling you this tale, Ford, you are more than a mere listener, more than a friend to me and Conrad. By showing me how to reveal all that happened you have become part of the story, my silent listener and compassionate judge, the very sympathetic soul you invented for your own character.
And so,
avanti. . . .
A
WEEK AFTER
arriving in Batavia in the fall of 1924, I found the bungalow where I have stayed ever since. My pension allows me to live here like a
pukka sahib
in a section of the city far from the wretched
kampongs,
where the disenfranchised struggle to put rice on their tables by breaking their backs for the Dutch. Nothing unusual in that, of course, you see it everywhere, the large white colonial hand balled into a fist throwing a dark shadow across the land. But an uneasiness is stirring in the archipelago. One day there will be a revolution, though probably not in my lifetime. Such things are sluggish and demand wild-eyed leaders I have not seen, yet I know that out in the
kampongs
babies are trying their lungs, wailing precociously not for milk but for freedom. For all the unrest, Java's traditions remain untouched. I delight in all of them, especially the
Wayang kulit,
the shadow theater performed at night during the season of the dry monsoon when the heat from the Australian Outback blows like a torch across the archipelago. After dinner I go down to the road and hail a
betjak,
a half-bicycle, half-carriage contraption I sit in beneath a black canvas hood while a man thin as a rail peddles me through town as if I were a viceroy. In a field, sometimes a dusty square, I spend the long hot nights listening to the bells and gongs of the
gamelan
while beak-nosed puppets move in response to the storyteller's chants.