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CONRAD wrote for his own time, and his own world. The values and opinions expressed by his characters, the language they employ, the attitudes they bring to life, may not be those of the 21st century. If you choose to take offense – because he lived in his time, not ours – you will miss out on the chance to experience what great literature does.
It evokes. It takes you places. It makes you feel like you are there. You will use all five senses reading Conrad, to the point where you too are smelling rotten hippo meat (Heart of Darkness), fingering a torn-off velvet collar (The Secret Agent), or feeling the first great spattering raindrops that precede a typhoon (The Shadow-Line).
To paraphrase another great writer, William Faulkner, dead writers aren’t over. They aren’t even dead – as long as readers keep their work alive. THIS STUFF IS F U N.
Martin Travers died at sea three weeks out of Bangkok. As his widow Edith watched the pine box disappear over the side, she thought, well, it wouldn’t do to have me run back to the shallow seas, would it. In particular with no idea where the brig Lightning might be. At the same time there came to her a near-tangible sense of the Lightning’s captain, Tom Lingard, standing resolute and firm-lipped by her side as he so often had throughout the tumult and tragedy surrounding her husband’s kidnapping. She retreated to the stern to watch the wake,. This was always her favorite place on the yacht – much to Martin’s disgust, for there was no attitude, no taste, no inclination on her part toward anything, at which he did not carp and criticize. Why must you stare at where we have been? Why won’t you focus your attention on where we are going, Edith? His need to control every aspect of her being had been so overwhelming, and had lasted for so long – over ten years! – that even as the barque moved farther and farther away from his discarded corpse, she had to tell herself again, no, he is gone, the fever took him and I am left alone,
Standing at the stern had other comforts. Back there, no one could see her smile.
Continue reading “The Rescued” here.
This story previously appeared in Joseph Conrad Today, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring 2021
IN THE ORIGINAL: In a botched bombing, double agent Verloc accidentally blows up his wife’s younger brother. She reacts by stabbing him in the gut. The Metro Police are on the case, but Inspector Heat and the Assistant Commissioner take different paths toward justice.
“How is your bombing case coming along?” asked Dr. Frung, igniting one of his Turkish cigarettes. “You were quite
exercised about it a few months ago.”
The Assistant Commissioner (Special Crimes) of the Metropolitan Police arched his back against hard wooden slats.
His supple, serpentine frame fitted with difficulty into angular English chairs. The great curved mirror over the
mantelpiece reflected light from a waterfall of glass above his head, while the sticklike lamp next to him on the card
table flickered in an inadequate way, its white shade reddened by fireplace glow. All the other whist players had gone,
leaving only Carr and Frung beneath the watchful eyes of smoky portraits on the wall.
When he spoke, it was in a low drawl. Unspoken hyphens seemed to punctuate his words. “L’affaire Verloc. I suppose
I can tell you we’ve turned up that Ossipon fellow.”
“Aha! The wife’s lover?”
“I doubt it. They hadn’t time to get that far.”
A fire log snapped, odd and loud among the hushed surroundings. Carr considered his boot, black and solid against the writhing colors of the rug. “As a matter of fact I was with him not more than three hours ago. In a vile place called the Club Silenus.”
Continue reading “After Verloc” here.
This story previously appeared in Joseph Conrad Today, Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring 2023
IN THE ORIGINAL: Razumov, an apolitical student, becomes compromised for life as the result of a misunderstanding. A feminist demagogue lives off a screechy older woman.A polyglot Englishman agonizes on the side. Dreams and delusions collide, with tragic consequences.
In the sequel:
Eleanor Evgenia Maximovna Schablikine, noted in Russian expatriate circles as a tireless crusader against autocratic tyranny, died last night in her London townhome of unspecified causes. Mme. Schablikine, long resident in Geneva, was the widow of Kuzma Kuzmich Schablikine, Adjutant General to his late majesty Czar Alexander II. While in Geneva, Mme. Schablikine supported the cause of Peter Ivanovitch Ziemanetsky, the famous feminist and former political prisoner who chronicled his difficult escape in his award-winning memoir, “Woman Amid the Firs: A Russian Man Acknowledges the Stronger Sex.”
“She advised me in all things,” Mr. Ziemanetsky told a reporter. “A woman from a mythological time, a counselor worthy of a Roman emperor. She was my Egeria.”
Mme. Schablikine will be interred in the Russian section of Highgate cemetery.
He was not optimistic about Russia. Assistant Commissioner Adrian Carr considered who had come out in the rain for Madame’s funeral. This loose group of emigres, huddling under umbrellas, had like undernourished monks yoked themselves to a faith they were not strong enough to defend.
Continue reading “After Egeria” here.
IN THE ORIGINAL: Meyer Hirsch, a dealer in ox hides, is rejected by the blancos who rule commerce in Costaguana, a troubled South American country. When a treasure in silver goes missing, he is tortured by the sadistic colonel of a rebel army who is convinced Hirsch knows the silver’s whereabouts. At the last moment, Hirsch surprises his captor.
So easy you think it was for me to be a hero? I was a coward my whole life, this all of you must know. “But Meyer, in your last moments – !” Sure, in my last moments before I was shot I spat in the man’s face. He called me terrible names!
For me nothing came easy, not in those almost fifty years while I breathed air. You think it was easy to haul myself and my stinking hides around those papaya-and-mango republics, all over that lousy place they call the Queen of Continents? Hah! Better you should call it Whore of Continents. I was from Leipzig, a beautiful city, Johann Sebastian Bach played there in the Thomaskirche. From there I end up in a place called Sulaco, hanging in some trap of ropes and hooks, face-to-face with a crazed unshaven colonel with the breath which comes only from eating goat’s cheese from the goats they raise there, in Costaguana. I was a cheese connoisseur, when I the time had, also the money, and that smell, I can tell you, is worse than goat shit, you should excuse me. For hours I had in my face this! What was I going to tell him? The truth?
Continue reading “Hirsch Speaks!” here.
“After Donkin” – Three Sequels in One!
In Conrad’s novel about the ship Narcissus: Donkin, a disagreeable sailor with radical views, shirks work, brags about his
convict status, and attempts to mount a mutiny. In “The Secret Agent”: Mr. Vladimir, a Russian diplomat, commands hapless Verloc to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. In the aftermath of that botched attempt, the Assistant Commissioner confronts Vladimir, and the diplomat is recalled.
In “Lord Jim,” Brierly, the perfect man, a successful steamer captain who’s never made a mistake,
unexpectedly commits suicide.
I’ve a right to blow up me own business. I paid the insurance. It’s my money, innit? Just takin it back from the bastards what took it from me.
That fat slobbering milkface, he’s too much in my way. Thinks he’s entitled to half the cut just cos he comes up with the blamed sticks. But I’m the one meetin the public, I tells him. I’m the one has to do the bloody deals with the mumblin coves. Can’t you shave a shilling off that, Mr. Donkin. I’ll bring you the rest this coming Friday, s’help me I will. Get out of my shop, says I. I’m the one crackin the whip, I’m the one siphonin pennies from the poor, I’m the one turnin what’s been stole from all the others into a neat little profit for yours truly. Revolution my Aunt Sally. Years now, milkface, I says to him, you’ve been sittin in Kent on your fat arse, writin lies into books and livin off that rich old lady. Thousands of pounds you’ve lifted, bits of jewels swiped here and there. Don’t think yer foolin me. No one fools Reg Donkin.
Continue reading “After Donkin” here.