We take for granted by the general law of fiction a primary author, take him so much for granted that we forget him in proportion as he works upon us, and that he works upon us most in fact by making us forget him.
—HENRY JAMES, 1914.
When Henry James wrote those words, he was reviewing the latest novel from Joseph Conrad. Chance came out in 1913, when all of Conrad’s major work was behind him. James and Conrad were mutual admirers of each other, but James’s remarks almost read as the ultimate backhand compliment.
It’s “an extraordinary exhibition of method,” he says. Conrad is a disciple of the way “to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing.”
James is referring to the proliferation and mixing together of narrators. Chance may be subtitled as a “Tale,” but there’s nothing plain about this narrative’s delivery. In addition to an unnamed first-person narrator, Charles Marlow is back with another long yarn. And a substantial part of this yarn is supplied by another sailor named Powell. At first Powell and Marlow tag team the same story, concerning Captain Anthony and his fiancée aboard the Ferndale.
But soon enough Marlow is delivering both his perspective on events and also relaying things Powell had told him to the unnamed narrator. Punctuation cues, like single quote marks to denote speech reported by someone else speaking dialog, won’t help the reader’s orientation here.
For Henry James, the only thing more shocking than Conrad fusing together these yarns within yarns, is that it succeeded with the reading public. Chance is the only Conrad book to sell copies in any meaningful way.
The reviewers were less kind however, and unfortunately we have to agree with them. Chance lacks the energy of Conrad’s earlier prose, and is ultimately pretty unmemorable despite being very, very long. The general consensus seems to be that Chance marks the beginning of Conrad’s Not As Good period.
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In practice, Marlow is the predominant narrator. He tells the story of a young woman named Flora de Barral. Her father is a conman, whose ponzi scheme gets exposed by one of the several financial crashes in the late 19th century. (There’s no precise dating in this text so at the risk of sounding pedantic, it may well have been the long depression of 1873, the first capitalist crisis of world significance; “All the world…” Marlow trails off about “the crash” at one point.)
Humiliated and imprisoned, Mr. de Barral leaves the daughter in the care of a mean governess, then in the charge of Mr. Fyne, a civil clerk (and who briefly becomes another narrator reporting this story).
Marlow’s connection with the Fynes is that he likes to visit their summer estate while on shore leave. This must be an older, relatively sedentary Marlow, yarning about vacations and young love. It’s as if the horrors and pains of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim were just bad opium dreams.
In any event, in his discourse reads a touch overbaked, in a way that Conrad’s earlier writing doesn’t give off. Listen to the prolix way in which he speculates on the reliability of Powell’s yarning: “Under such conditions, signs can be seen only by a sharp and practised eye. I am alluding now to troubles which are subtle often to the extent of not being understood by the very hearts they devastate or uplift.”
Couldn’t this suspicion about understanding our personal experience apply to Marlow? No sir. He gives “the naked truth,” stripped of “the rags of business verbiage and financial jargon.”
And he proceeds to deliver multiple tangents on “the pathos of being a woman,” beginning with Flora’s disappearance from the Fynes’ summer home, prompting Marlow and Mr. Fyne to search the cliffs and seashore at night, in case it was a suicide, leaving the sailor very put out. Mrs. Fyne comes to Flora’s defense: “Why should a girl be more considerate than anyone else?”
From hearing that utterance, Marlow tells us, “I learned the true nature of Mrs. Fyne’s feminist doctrine. It was not political, it was not social. It was a knock-me-down doctrine—a practical individualist doctrine.”
The contradiction at the heart of female pathos is that women have the clearest view on reality, which necessitates passivity, no matter how much energy, wisdom, or courage they possess, usually in a surplus compared to the men who must “struggle to get a place for himself or perish.” At another point he starts waxing sentimental: Men can’t live by bread alone, “but hang me if I don’t believe that some women could live by love alone.” And just when the reader begins to suspect Conrad is putting some editorial lines in Marlow’s mouth, he puts a lampshade on the business when Marlow suddenly addresses the nameless narrator: “What the devil are you laughing at…”
It’s all a bit quaint, and this quality is captured in the image of de Barral taking little Flora by the hand at her mother’s grave: “Pictures from Dickens,” Marlow says, “pregnant with pathos.”
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The sliver of Flora’s life story that Marlow witnesses directly is her running away from her adopted home with the Fynes to elope with Captain Anthony. Of course he offers more than a few maundering passages on Flora’s unfortunate upbringing, at the mercy of an abusive narcissistic governess: “her life had been a mere life of sensations—the response to which can neither be foolish nor wise.”
He speaks of an emotional transference afoot, a “pouring” of resentments into the “vessel” of the child (I’m beginning to suspect why whole books have been written about Conrad and pre-Freudian psychoanalysis):
Even when she was asked violently whether she imagined that there was anything in her, apart from her money, to induce any intelligent person to take any sort of interest in her existence, she only caught her breath in one dry sob and said nothing, made no other sound, made no movement. When she was viciously assured that she was in heart, mind, manner and appearance, an utterly common and insipid creature, she remained still, without indignation, without anger. She stood, a frail and passive vessel into which the other went on pouring all the accumulated dislike for all her pupils, her scorn of all her employers (the ducal one included), the accumulated resentment, the infinite hatred of all these unrelieved years of—I won’t say hypocrisy. The practice of perfect hypocrisy is a relief in itself, a secret triumph of the vilest sort, no doubt, but still a way of getting even with the common morality from which some of us appear to suffer so much. No! I will say the years, the passionate, bitter years, of restraint, the iron, admirably mannered restraint at every moment, in a never-failing perfect correctness of speech, glances, movements, smiles, gestures, establishing for her a high reputation, an impressive record of success in her sphere. It had been like living half strangled for years.
The victimized child is in a dire situation, besieged by her caretaker, the cause of these attacks “naturally escaping the girl’s imagination,” ultimately rending her “as it were insensible.”
After losing her father (whom she stubbornly idolizes) and enduring such cruelty at a tender age, Flora as a young adult is either “leaden-foot,” paralyzed with anxiety and dissociated, or she’s running headlong through the halls (in one scene with Mr. Fyne sprinting alongside) in a state of despair or sheer spooking.
“It is as though Flora had been fated to be always surrounded by treachery and lies stifling every better impulse, every instinctive aspiration of her soul to trust and to love,” Marlow says. “It would have been enough to drive a fine nature into the madness of universal suspicion—into any sort of madness.”
The only safe person in Flora’s mind is her father. But we swiftly learn when he’s released from prison halfway through the story that he’s a complete douchebag. Every word out of him reeks with entitlement and self-pity. He sees himself as a victim of slander rather than an scam artist, and he’s positively wounded that Flora has married a sailor—even though she’s partially doing it to furnish an escape via the Ferndale for him!
“You can’t care for him,” he digs at her.
“And I have called you an unfortunate girl. You are that as much as if you had gone on the streets. Yes. Don’t interrupt me, Flora. I was everlastingly being interrupted at the trial and I can’t stand it any more. I won’t be interrupted by my own child. And when I think that it is on the very day before they let me out that you . . . ”
And Flora, finding comfort in the familiar, no matter how corrosive, ultimately identifies with this nonsense, “because somehow, obscurely, what this man said appealed to her as if it were her own thought clothed in an enigmatic emotion,” according to Marlow.
Being stuck in a sailboat with this guy for a long voyage is more cursed than having seventy Jonahs aboard. But the sea also undeniably gives Flora some peace and security, the sheer space away from society to finally develop. On land as a girl she was mostly crying or hating herself or being an object of struggle, which isn’t too appealing. But there’s a few small moments where Flora seems to know her way around nautical business on the ship with second mate Powell.
Flora’s storyline seems to explore the more serious “psychological realist” implications of a stereotypically Dickensian scenario. But one wishes Conrad had pulled off the writing of her character. She probably has a rich inner world, but that is structurally inaccessible to this baroque arrangement of salty seamen speakers. As James pointed out in his review, they are “almost more numerous and quite emphatically more material than the creatures and the production itself in whom and which we by the general law of fiction expect such agents to lose themselves.”
The men may be in command of the narrative, but the glaring point at the end is that Flora won’t become herself till the current men in her life are cast off like so much deadweight tonnage. How that works out is naturally left to chance.
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If the quaintness and sometimes hokey moments of the story could be considered the “bad” Dickensian elements, there are “good” Dickensian elements as well, namely Powell’s own short story of how he got his first berth as a certified able seaman. It takes place at the very beginning of Chance, for better and worse.
His story unfolds like a mini adventure, full of odd details, that feel like an atavism from a Victorian novel, but it’s also where the book has the most verve and personality. Powell learns from a fellow sailor that in the Shipping Office is a man who can hook him up with with a ship—and his name is also Powell. “Upon my word, I had grown so desperate that I’d have gone boldly up to the devil himself on the mere hint that he had a second mate’s job to give away.”
(Marlow breaks in to help Powell describe this other Powell, leading to a digression on whether or not he looks like Socrates.)
Powell’s mission takes him into the basements and bowels of St. Katherine’s Dock House. “Powell wandered up and down there like an early Christian refugee in the catacombs,” says the narrator, paraphrasing Powell’s narration. He tries a door, and it opens on a cramped office, a “hot and musty” dungeon, with a single heavyset clerk with a “perfectly bald head.”
“One couldn’t imagine why the Marine Board should keep that bald, fat creature slaving down there,” Powell says.
The obstacles continue as young Powell reaches the private office where the mythical Powell resides:
The first thing I saw right in front of me were three middle-aged men having a sort of romp together round about another fellow with a thin, long neck and sloping shoulders who stood up at a desk writing on a large sheet of paper and taking no notice except that he grinned quietly to himself. They turned very sour at once when they saw me.
Mr. Powell is found hanging out on a high stool, and when young Powell asks for a berth, he is reminded that such practices are illegal. “He didn’t mind helping a young man to a ship now and then, … but if we kept on coming constantly it would soon get about that he was doing it for money,” Powell says.
It’s here that—just by chance—Captain Anthony comes through looking for a second mate, since his just got hit by a carriage. This was such a promising start for the novel. Its vividness may be explained by how closely it resembles Conrad’s own experience getting assigned a British ship (his application letter was the first text he wrote in English). At least that’s how he portrayed it in his travel essay from 1915, a couple years after Chance was published. Once again we get strikingly decrepit details. And count how many times Dickensian appears:
The place I was bound to was not easy to find. It was one of those courts hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost among the thick growth of houses like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway as if by secret path; a Dickensian nook of London, that wonder city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy the Great Master knew so well how to bring out by the magic of his understanding love. And the office I entered was Dickensian too. The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.
It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By the light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. He had a grey beard, a big nose, thick lips, and heavy shoulders. His curly white hair and the general character of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in the barocco style of Italian art. Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop, which had been just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round the corner.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the sequence with the most pzazz and memorable moments is also the most personal to Conrad.
What follows are the lines from Henry James in context, which is interesting if also almost as hard to read as Gertrude Stein. From “The New Novel”:
It is odd and delightful perhaps that at the very moment of our urging this truth we should happen to be regaled with a really supreme specimen of the part playable in a novel by the source of interest, the principle of provision attended to, for which we claim importance. Mr. Joseph Conrad’s “Chance” is none the less a signal instance of provision the most earnest and the most copious for its leaving ever so much to be said about the particular provision effected. It is none the less an extraordinary exhibition of method by the fact that the method is, we venture to say, without a precedent in any like work. It places Mr. Conrad absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing. The way to do it that shall make it undergo least is the line on which we are mostly now used to see prizes carried off; so that the author of “Chance” gathers up on this showing all sorts of comparative distinction. He gathers up at least two sorts—that of bravery in absolutely reversing the process most accredited, and that, quite separate, we make out, of performing the manœuvre under salvos of recognition. It is not in these days often given to a refinement of design to be recognised, but Mr. Conrad has made his achieve that miracle—save in so far indeed as the miracle has been one thing and the success another. The miracle is of the rarest, confounding all calculation and suggesting more reflections than we can begin to make place for here; but the sources of surprise surrounding it might be, were this possible, even greater and yet leave the fact itself in all independence, the fact that the whole undertaking was committed by its very first step either to be “art” exclusively or to be nothing. This is the prodigious rarity, since surely we have known for many a day no other such case of the whole clutch of eggs, and these withal of the freshest, in that one basket; to which it may be added that if we say for many a day this is not through our readiness positively to associate the sight with any very definite moment of the past. What concerns us is that the general effect of “Chance” is arrived at by a pursuance of means to the end in view contrasted with which every other current form of the chase can only affect us as cheap and futile; the carriage of the burden or amount of service required on these lines exceeding surely all other such displayed degrees of energy put together. Nothing could well interest us more than to see the exemplary value of attention, attention given by the author and asked of the reader, attested in a case in which it has had almost unspeakable difficulties to struggle with—since so we are moved to qualify the particular difficulty Mr. Conrad has “elected” to face: the claim for method in itself, method in this very sense of attention applied, would be somehow less lighted if the difficulties struck us as less consciously, or call it even less wantonly, invoked. What they consist of we should have to diverge here a little to say, and should even then probably but lose ourselves in the dim question of why so special, eccentric and desperate a course, so deliberate a plunge into threatened frustration, should alone have seemed open. It has been the course, so far as three words may here serve, of his so multiplying his creators or, as we are now fond of saying, producers, as to make them almost more numerous and quite emphatically more material than the creatures and the production itself in whom and which we by the general law of fiction expect such agents to lose themselves. We take for granted by the general law of fiction a primary author, take him so much for granted that we forget him in proportion as he works upon us, and that he works upon us most in fact by making us forget him.
Mr. Conrad’s first care on the other hand is expressly to posit or set up a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first person singular, possessed of infinite sources of reference, who immediately proceeds to set up another, to the end that this other may conform again to the practice, and that even at that point the bridge over to the creature, or in other words to the situation or the subject, the thing “produced,” shall, if the fancy takes it, once more and yet once more glory in a gap. It is easy to see how heroic the undertaking of an effective fusion becomes on these terms, fusion between what we are to know and that prodigy of our knowing which is ever half the very beauty of the atmosphere of authenticity; from the moment the reporters are thus multiplied from pitch to pitch the tone of each, especially as “rendered” by his precursor in the series, becomes for the prime poet of all an immense question—these circumferential tones having not only to be such individually separate notes, but to keep so clear of the others, the central, the numerous and various voices of the agents proper, those expressive of the action itself and in whom the objectivity resides. We usually escape the worst of this difficulty of a tone about the tone of our characters, our projected performers, by keeping it single, keeping it “down” and thereby comparatively impersonal or, as we may say, inscrutable; which is what a creative force, in its blest fatuity, likes to be. But the omniscience, remaining indeed nameless, though constantly active, which sets Marlow’s omniscience in motion from the very first page, insisting on a reciprocity with it throughout, this original omniscience invites consideration of itself only in a degree less than that in which Marlow’s own invites it; and Marlow’s own is a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed. We make out this ground but through the shadow cast by the flight, clarify it though the real author visibly reminds himself again and again that he must—all the more that, as if by some tremendous forecast of future applied science, the upper aeroplane causes another, as we have said, to depend from it and that one still another; these dropping shadow after shadow, to the no small menace of intrinsic colour and form and whatever, upon the passive expanse. What shall we most call Mr. Conrad’s method accordingly but his attempt to clarify quand même—ridden as he has been, we perceive at the end of fifty pages of “Chance,” by such a danger of steeping his matter in perfect eventual obscuration as we recall no other artist’s consenting to with an equal grace. This grace, which presently comes over us as the sign of the whole business, is Mr. Conrad’s gallantry itself, and the shortest account of the rest of the connection for our present purpose is that his gallantry is thus his success. It literally strikes us that his volume sets in motion more than anything else a drama in which his own system and his combined eccentricities of recital represent the protagonist in face of powers leagued against it, and of which the dénouement gives us the system fighting in triumph, though with its back desperately to the wall, and laying the powers piled up at its feet. This frankly has been our spectacle, our suspense and our thrill; with the one flaw on the roundness of it all the fact that the predicament was not imposed rather than invoked, was not the effect of a challenge from without, but that of a mystic impulse from within.
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This letter is so overlong (and overdue) that I didn’t even talk about the nautical affairs in particular. Although we don’t get into the Ferndale’s voyage till halfway in (the plot in general is bogged down with flashbacks), there are some cool sailing accidents depicted: first a near miss, then a collision with a steamship (real subtle, Joe).