Joseph Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
Late writing, early sailing...
The Arrow of Gold, a romance by the Mediterranean set during the Carlist wars of the 1870s, is one of Conrad’s later novels. I knew nothing about this book before reading it, and when I got to the end I had to wonder: Why is this mid-tier fiction the opening volume of the Doubleday collected edition of Joseph Conrad’s works?
Because, while Arrow of Gold may not be Conrad’s earliest book, it draws from the very first voyages of his sailing career. He went to Marseilles to sail ships running contraband when he was still in his teens, and at some point went in with three others to buy a vessel called the Tremolino, which they used for smuggling till they felt the need to deliberately wreck it. In this novel, the narrator, codename Monsieur George, purchases a Spanish balancelle with his comrade Dominic, to run guns from the port of Marseilles to the Carlist armies detached in the south of Spain.
M. George is an aloof and rudderless young guy. He doesn’t identify with the interests of the clerical absolute monarchists backing Carlos’s play for the Spanish throne; he’s a simple opportunist for adventure. At one point Dominic asks him, “I suppose Alphonso and Carlos, Carlos and Alphonso, they are nothing to you, together or separately?” “Dominic, if they were both to vanish from the earth together or separately it would make no difference to my feelings,” he replies.
What truly anchors him to this shady work is the inclusion of Doña Rita. A sexually exuberant, cosmopolitan beauty of Basque peasant origin, she was the favorite model of a bigshot painter (the only woman who ever got to sit for him; he usually dressed a dummy), and is actually set to inherit his extravagant house. Of course there is a suitor hovering in the wings coveting this property, as well as Therese, Rita’s ultra-sanctimonious sister, who is also renting out rooms in the painter’s house. Therese is extremely judgemental of Rita, and also may have a humiliation kink—at least that’s how George colors it.
Our adventurer may be apolitical, but even he must grumble about the putrid atmosphere surrounding these aristocrats and big merchants, people who built their fortunes off the bloody American slave plantations while brandishing a rotten Catholicism. Here they are in Marseilles, refugees from the American civil war as well as the Paris Commune, looking to combat “the excesses of communistic Republicanism” (the militias raised for their late 19th century wargames would be turned over to Generalissimo Franco in the civil war of the 20th). Lucky thing the “woman of all time” Doña Rita is in town to counterbalance these sneering ghouls!
Arrow of Gold is narrated as a long letter written by George, bookended by two “notes” from another first-person speaker. The narrative chains together some familiar romanticist plot beats: a woman descending a staircase, sneaking around the house, nighttime ambushes, a gentlemen’s duel, etc. Some of these set pieces are so melodramatic it’s almost risible, even to the characters. The most interesting aspect is the detachment George seems to project about his own life’s story. The two notes have some funny editorializing comments, mentioning the things they cut out of George’s manuscript for being too boring, but ultimately it reinforces the impression of this book having been mailed-in.
Rita gets abstracted
The first note for this letter makes the predictable “complaint” that Rita is so aestheticized in George’s infatuated eyes that the reader doesn’t get to grasp her literal form. It’s the way she “haunts” these men that is most pronounced. (Indeed, she doesn’t really become a human being till after the story’s over.)
After many pages of buildup, Doña Rita (who does her own clandestine Carlist activities under the name Mme. de Lastaola) makes her femme fatale entrance:
The woman of whom I had heard so much, in a sort of way in which I had never heard a woman spoken of before, was coming down the stairs, and my first sensation was that of profound astonishment at this evidence that she did really exist. And even then the visual impression was more of colour in a picture than of the forms of actual life. She was wearing a wrapper, a sort of dressing-gown of pale blue silk embroidered with black and gold designs round the neck and down the front, lapped round her and held together by a broad belt of the same material. Her slippers were of the same colour, with black bows at the instep. The white stairs, the deep crimson of the carpet, and the light blue of the dress made an effective combination of colour to set off the delicate carnation of that face, which, after the first glance given to the whole person, drew irresistibly your gaze to itself by an indefinable quality of charm beyond all analysis and made you think of remote races, of strange generations, of the faces of women sculptured on immemorial monuments and of those lying unsung in their tombs.
Her suitor, the Carlist skipper Blunt, first encountered her by way of the pictures she modeled for, “Girl in the Hat” and “Byzantine Empress,” making her a “woman of all time” in the painter’s phrase (from a femme fatale to das Ewig-Weibliche, you could say). George piles on the abstractions in his smitten descriptions, never talking about Rita so much as doing ekphrasis, making her out in every scene as an object d’art, though she seems to have a cool mischievous personality. The “blue shimmer of her embroidered robe,” the “tawny halo of her unruly hair,” the “mysterious quality of her voice,” the “harmonized sweetness and daring of her face,” the “quiver of her lips,”—these unmoored partitive expressions could amount to the idealized epitome of late-century French portraiture, or just as easily to one of Picasso’s ladies.
The sea, the…sea?
Woman and the sea revealed themselves to me together, as it were, says George:
two mistresses of life’s values. The illimitable greatness of the one, the unfathomable seduction of the other working their immemorial spells from generation to generation fell upon my heart at last: a common fortune, an unforgettable memory of the sea’s formless might and of the sovereign charm in that woman’s form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse of divinity rather than blood.
The only absolute positive thing that comes out of George's experience is his discovery that he loves to sail boats. The sea is where he finds “occupation, protection, consolation, the mental relief of grappling with concrete problems, the sanity one acquires from close contact with simple mankind, a little self-confidence born from the dealings with the elemental powers of nature.” The sea is “full of freshness and soft whispers.” Ah, the “faithful austerity of the sea.”
Except there’s barely any sea in this book!!! The actual sailing adventures are sidelined by the narration, which at one point converts to journal entries to further condense the timeline. Two good scenes come back to back very late in the novel, involving an ambush by a squad of Carabineers, then from an armed trading ship. Before the shooting begins, Dominic delivers the best line: “There is a smell of treachery about this.” The excitement is over quickly, with George’s and Dominic’s escape being too close for comfort.
Soon afterwards, while sailing quietly at night, we found ourselves suddenly near a small coasting vessel, also without lights, which all at once treated us to a volley of rifle fire. Dominic’s mighty and inspired yell: ‘A plat ventre!’ and also an unexpected roll to windward saved all our lives. Nobody got a scratch. We were past in a moment and in a breeze then blowing we had the heels of anything likely to give us chase.
Then a shipwreck, which comes very abruptly and is done within a couple of lines:
The little vessel, broken and gone like the only toy of a lonely child, the sea itself, which had swallowed it, throwing me on shore after a shipwreck that instead of a fair fight left in me the memory of a suicide. It took away all that there was in me of independent life, but just failed to take me out of the world, which looked then indeed like Another World fit for no one else but unrepentant sinners.
But as with Rita’s descriptions, the suppression of the sailing is not really a complaint but the point of the story. George may be a young buck fresh from the West Indies at the beginning of the book, and more interested in “fortunes and adventures,” but that’s before the influential gravity of Rita’s presence. Neither Rita nor seafaring are rendered with wholeness, which speaks to the obscurity that George plunges us into from the first chapter.
Modernist trash romance, ho!
As we first get to know George and his haunts in Marseilles, we get impressions of, well, a rather impressionistically rendered world in George’s mentality. People and things only register themselves faintly in the flickering gaslight. Mr. Blunt’s smile is a “play of white gleams.” These are the eyes of someone used to picking out their way home after many drinks.
When George follows Blunt and a mutual friend named Mills back to Blunt’s place for more wine, his own reflections get caught up in how these men might “see” him. What could George represent? Only “a perfect freshness of sensations and a refreshing ignorance. …I knew very well that I was utterly insignificant in these men’s eyes.” But he is captivated by their conversation about Rita; their roundabout words inflame his imagination. “For these two men had seen her, while to me she was only being ‘presented,’ elusively, in vanishing words, in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar voice.”
These thoughts about the intangibility of words and concepts, the dark and inscrutable objective world, the mysteries of life’s content—such material speaks to the historical position of Conrad’s work as a stepping stone toward full-fledged literary modernism. The inner world has more credence than reality. The narrator’s agnostic indifference applies to his emotional life just as much as European politics. And the attitude only grows as the story continues. As the work gets more dangerous, George insists his insomnia is not from worrying about being away from Rita: “Far or near was all one to me.” He believes that his memories, of Rita’s laughter, or her shoes, are truer, “more penetrating than the reality itself.” At another moment, he thinks about Mr. Blunt with “such intensity” that when the real Blunt enters the room “it didn’t really make much difference.”
Conrad’s “heroes” get to wander the world, their adventures bringing them to the “marginal” places of a burgeoning world economy, but that very marginality of location seems to also doom these characters to obscurity, of both themselves and their social vision. This theme of failing to “see,” combined with the kitschy elements that seemed to interest Conrad at this point means Arrow of Gold kind just passes through your reading experience. It’s very much like how people make “passages” through George’s life: “not to be forgotten, a little fantastic, infinitely enlightening for my contempt, darkening for my memory which struggles still with the clear lights and the ugly shadows of those unforgotten days.”
Some background on the 1873 revolts in Spain, courtesy of Friedrich Engels, who argues that the republican struggle was not a socialist one, but was precisely the most effective path toward socialism.
“The Bakuninists at Work” (1873):
When the Republic was proclaimed in February 1873, the Spanish members of the Alliance found themselves in a quandary. Spain is such a backward country industrially that there can be no question there of immediate complete emancipation of the working class. Spain will first have to pass through various preliminary stages of development and remove quite a number of obstacles from its path. The Republic offered a chance of going through these stages in the shortest possible time and quickly surmounting the obstacles. But this chance could be taken only if the Spanish working class played an active political role. The labour masses felt this; they strove everywhere to participate in events, to take advantage of the opportunity for action, instead of leaving the propertied classes, as hitherto, a clear field for action and intrigues. The government announced that elections were to be held to the Constituent Cortes. [May 10, 1873] What was the attitude of the International to be? The leaders of the Bakuninists were in a predicament. Continued political inaction became more ridiculous and impossible with every passing day; the workers wanted "to see things done". [J. W. Goethe, Zueignung. -- Ed.] The members of the Alliance on the other hand had been preaching for years that no part should be taken in a revolution that did not have as its aim the immediate and complete emancipation of the working class, that political action of any kind implied recognition of the State, which was the root of all evil, and that therefore participation in any form of elections was a crime worthy of death.
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There is some speculation that the anonymous narrator of the two “Notes” is Conrad’s most famous storyteller Charles Marlow. Arrow of Gold has been included in anthologies that bind all the Marlow books together. I don’t see it at all; Marlow is more worldly-wise, always keen to pronounce on sexual relations and other matters with no sugarcoating. It’s more likely to me that it’s simply George again, but older, mediating this vague story once again, with a perspective that has only changed in the intensity of its jadedness.