“I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon, too soon — before life itself.”
I seem, when it comes to nautical language, to have a highly specific learning disability. Fore-riggings and mizzenmasts act in me like foreign coins in a vending machine: my mental gears jam; no imagery is dispensed. A few pages into any Patrick O’Brian novel (“… by clinging to the futtock-shrouds, which run from the catharpings near the top of the mast to the futtock-plates…”), I realize that I might as well be reading “The Jabberwocky.”
Joseph Conrad’s “Youth,” however — a story jingling with such lines as, “The carpenter’s bench stood abaft the mainmast,”— is not just accepted by my inner machinery; it’s cherished. “Youth” tells the story of a disaster-magnetizing ship called The Judea, and I read it in a single, riveted sitting, as if staring at a worrisome column of smoke on the horizon.
Conrad makes the jargon of seafaring manageable — alluring, even — by putting it into vivid action. “The cat-heads had burned away, and two red-hot anchors had gone to the bottom, tearing out after them two hundred fathoms of red-hot chain.” I don’t know what a cat-head is, but I can feel those plummeting fathoms of red-hot chain in the depths of my stomach. So dire and unrelenting are The Judea’s troubles (it’s being eaten by rats, now it’s flooding, now it’s exploding) that we don’t have time to wonder how fast, exactly, is a knot; we just grab a pump and get to work.
But Conrad’s deeper secret is his intensity. There’s an unapologetic grandeur to his prose, a pounding-his-shoulder-against-the-door quality, that is — at a moment when try-hard has become a pejorative — refreshingly out of time. While the minimalists mutter, and the hysterical realists agrammatically blather, Conrad stands atop a table and declaims.
The wind blows “with spite, without interval, without mercy, without rest.” The sea is “white like a sheet of foam, like a cauldron of boiling milk…” Emerson once said, “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.” Conrad spends his arrows (“O youth!”) and then flings himself at the target like Wile E. Coyote running headlong into a wall.
And this flinging — which might, on land, seem a bit much — is, out on the water with The Judea, just the ticket. Conrad uses the bare surface of the sea to show us the true state of things: we are smoldering, we are sinking, we are doomed. Shunryu Suzuki (the Joseph Conrad of Zen masters) says, “Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.” Such a predicament, Conrad believes, calls for an exclamation point or two.
And so when, with only a few pages left, Conrad climbs for one last time onto the tabletop and clinks his glass, we look up not with irritation but with gratitude. By this point The Judea has sunk (“suddenly she went down, head first, in a hiss of steam,”), and our poor narrator, Marlow, has clambered aboard a rescue boat, in which he and his two fellow survivors are paddling desperately toward Bangkok (“To Bankok! Magic name, blessed name.”)
But Marlow, despite having had his eyebrows and eyelashes burnt off, despite having gone sixteen hours without rest or water, is feeling a bit giddy.
“I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon, too soon — before life itself.”
Every time I read this sentence I feel giddy too. The musical repetitions (the feeling.. the feeling… ); the network of em-dashes and semicolons like a system of locks through which the sentence’s meaning flows; the vigor marshaled on behalf of describing vigor’s end. Overwrought is one of those words in which the modifier, over-, has parasitized the host, rendering it useless. Conrad’s prose demands a corrective; this sentence is wrought.
And this shipwreck of a life, Conrad says, happens also to be a marvel. The very fire that destroys you (that burns off your eyelashes!) is also the warmth that sustains you. One response to a hopeless predicament, and an understandable one, is nihilism. But another response — the one that Conrad’s story both urges and embodies — is effort, unceasing effort. Man the foc’s’le. Raise the mizzenmast. We aren’t sunk yet.
Another excellent piece, Ben. You practice what Emerson preached. I loved the Jabberwocky comparison with O'Brian, though I love O'Brian too. I've read the Aubrey/Maturin series maybe four times... but even now I don't have the foggiest what a coaked double sister block might be. I long ago taught my eyes to glaze briefly at the nautical hardware descriptions before sailing onward through his marvelous prose.