Penguins on Parade: The Shadow-Line!

Some Penguin Classics are eerily prescient, sometimes in decidedly unpleasant ways. In 2013 we’re resolutely gearing up for the 2014 centennial of the opening of the First World War, gearing up for a probable onslaught of books, documentaries, and commemorative magazines designed to remember/reassess/cash in on one of the gruesome formative events of the 20^th century. Publishers will scour their slush-piles for WWI novels, and maybe we’ll see some reprints nifty enough to counterbalance the faintly unsavory air of opportunism that hangs over the whole affair.

The centennial is hardly the first occasion for such opportunism, of course. The first such occasion was the war itself, which suddenly burst on the world in 1914 and was thereafter the main topic of conversation (and the main avenue of sales) from Birmingham to Bombay. Even relatively well-adjusted people felt the urge to jump on such a big, vivid bandwagon – and writers aren’t known for being particularly well-adjusted.

Enter Joseph Conrad, author of such classics as Lord Jim and The Heart of Darkness. He was aghast at the cataclysm enveloping Europe, and in 1915 he set about writing a novella which he serialized in the magazines in 1916 and brought out as a slim book in 1917: The Shadow-Line, produced as an elegant little Penguin Classic in 1986 edited by Conrad scholar Jacques Berthoud. The Shadow-Line is a brief sea-story patterned fairly closely on some of Conrad’s own experiences as a young man in the merchant navy forty years before, but Conrad didn’t leave it at that; he tried his best to link his novella to the ongoing war, invoking his son Borys, who was fighting on the front. Early on, in 1915, Conrad was saying it was an act of “criminal levity” to natter on about made-up stories while brave young men were being shot, blown up, and gassed on the Western front. But he was also feeling old and seeking not to be sidelined by history, and by the time his novella was being reprinted, he was saying the “shadow-line” referred to the harsh maturation being experienced by Borys and his comrades under fire. And a century of Conrad explicators – including Berthoud in his generally incisive Introduction – have worked hard to shore up that connection.

It’s utter nonsense. There is no connection. Conrad wrote a rock-solid, hugely enjoyable and challenging novella about an untried young captain whose vessel is fatally becalmed in the hot waters of the gulf of Siam and whose crew is stricken with malaria (with quinine supplies running vanishingly low). This self-doubting young captain must navigate the complex personalities of the crew he inherits, and Conrad tells the story with, I find, a greater and surer insight than I’ve ever seen in him before (one of the many happy gifts arising from these Penguin re-readings). It’s a pure joy to see him shape even the quickest scenes, as when our young captain interviews his first mate Burns about the shape of the ship:

Now a question like this might have been answered normally, either in accents of apologetic sorrow or with a visibly suppressed pride. In a ‘I don’t want to boast, but you shall see,’ sort of tone. There are sailors, too who would have been roughly outspoken: ‘Lazy brute,’ or openly delighted: ‘She’s a flyer.’ Two ways, if four manners.

The doldrums seem to hold forever, and Conrad plumbs his memories with a wonderfully controlled narrative, taking the reader inside the semi-delirium of a ship becalmed at sea, stretching out time and warping our perceptions to the point where, when unlooked-for relief suddenly arrives, we initially find it as bewildering as the captain does:

It’s extraordinary I should not have heard myself doing it [grinding his teeth]: but I hadn’t. By an effort which absorbed all my faculties I managed to keep my jaw still. It required much attention, and while thus engaged I became bothered by curious, irregular sound of faint tapping on the deck. They could be heard single, in pairs, in groups. While I wondered at this mysterious devilry, I received a slight blow under the left eye and felt an enormous tear run down my cheek. Raindrops. Enormous. Forerunners of something. Tap, tap, tap …

This is all first-rate stuff, the kind of inventive, confident writing I’ve tended to deny attributing to Conrad. But it has no more to do with World War I than it does with the price of Chesapeake oysters. One can sympathize with Conrad, of course – a boy at the front, a world at war – and one can sympathize with his future editors, since a writer alchemizing some ongoing crisis has a lot more dramatic oomph than a writer simply carrying on with his criminal levity while a world burns.

The Shadow-Line is as neat and powerful a little sea-story as anything Marryat or Forester or Monsarrat could have devised. Bandwagon or not, that should be good enough.