The Real-Life Event Is Nothing Less Than an Eloquent and Anguished Attestation of ConradS True Feelings Regarding His Role in Stephen CraneS Death
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Stephen Crane as a Source for Conrads Jim by Nina Galen June 1983 - Volume 38 - Number 1 ©1983 by The Regents of the University of California. 1 IN THE AUTHORS NOTE to Lord Jim, written some sixteen years after the novels first appearance, Joseph Conrad said of his hero: One sunny morning in the common- place surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by appealing signifi- cant under a cloud perfectly silent. 1 Biographers and critics have tended to give little credence to Conrads self-admit- ted sources. Thus Ian Watt, commenting on Conrads surprising assertions about the source for his character Almayer: The offhandedly preposterous exaggeration is charac- teristic of Conrad . [who] often attributed the initial impetus for a novel to a passing glimpse of someone or to a casual encounter.2 Watt proposes four less preposterous sources for Jim, beginning with one Augustine Podmore Williams. In 1923, a year be- fore Conrads death, a letter appeared in a London newspaper suggesting that Lord Jim might have been based on an incident which had occurred in 1880 involving the pilgrim ship Jeddah. While it was not unheard of for those old, heavily laden vessels to be abandoned by their crews in times of distress, the Jeddah affair attained great notoriety partly because the abandoned ship and its nearly one thousand passengers did not sink after all, and partly because her crew was British and, it was generally felt, should have behaved more honorably. Williams was the first mate on the Jeddah, as Jim was on the Patna, and there is certainly enough similarity between their stories to justify calling him a source, although Conrad never directly confirmed it. Conrad may even have set eyes on Williams in Singapore in 1885 or 1887. In the quotation above he mentions seeing Jims form pass by in an Eastern roadstead. A roadstead is an area offshore where ships lie at anchor outside the harbor. It is in such an area that ship chandlers water clerks visit the ships. Williams was such a ship-runner, as was Jim. In Tuan Jim: A Sketch, Conrad wrote, the captains of the ships in the roadsteads called him Jim (Norton LJ, 283). Later that sentence was modified and the term omitted. Norman Sherry, attempting to prove that Conrad actually met Williams in Singapore and then modeled Jim closely on the Jeddahs mate, asked descendants of A. P. Williams to match up their memories with Conrads descriptions of Jim and Jims early life. Not surprisingly, he received letters from daughters and nieces affirming that Williams, like Jim, had been the son of a parson, one of five boys, had blue eyes, often wore white,3 and had approximately the same height, build, and temperament. Despite his efforts, Sherry leaves us with the problem of why Conrad, who changed nearly every detail and circumstance of the Jeddah incident to fit his own purposes (in fact, it was a wildly chaotic event), and who completely altered the actions and fate of A. P. Williams in creating Jim (Williams actually was thrown overboard by pilgrims furious at being abandoned in a stormy sea, then shot and wounded), would have gone to the trouble of 2 matching Jims early life in every detail with that of the Jeddahs mate. Even had he met Williams, it is unlikely that Conrad, a young seaman at the time, would have dared ques- tion his notorious elder about the details of his family life, especially as Conrad in the mid-1880s was not yet an author and apparently had no plans to become one. He did not begin writing until 1889 and only turned to Lord Jim nearly two decades after the Jeddah episode. Watts second source for Jim is Jim Lingard, the son of William Lingard, who is considered the model for Captain Tom Lingard of Almayers Folly. Jim Lingard, who could have been known as Tuan Jim, was married to a Sea Dyak woman. Watt feels she may have been the model for Jewel, Jims woman in the Patusan part of the novel. The third source for Jim and his exploits on Patusan can be found, Watt suggests, in the books of travel and historical accounts of adventures read by Conrad. The fourth source was Conrad himself who, like Jim on the Patna, once had the misfortune to be incapaci- tated by a falling spar and was obliged to ride out a terrible storm in his cabin, glad enough not to have to go up on deck but suffering pangs of conscience all the same at his own disinclination to help out. 4 Watt feels that there are really two Jims the Jim of the Patna, based upon Will- iams and Conrad himself, and the Jim of Patusan, based on Jim Lingard and fictional heroes. An author may make use of many sources in writing such a complex novel, and there can be no denying that Watts are reasonable choices. Nevertheless, none of these sources accounts for that special element in the story, the affection that Marlow and Conrad felt for young Jim. This sentiment runs through the entire novel, binding the two parts into a whole. One might also ask why, after conceiving his story as a simple sketch about an abandoned pilgrim ship, Conrad let it evolve into a lengthy and complex two-part novel. It is clear that whatever the authors original intentions concerning the Jeddah incident, and his musings about her officers actions, they were soon outgrown, left behind. What had occurred to cause this change? My purpose is to show that there was another and more immediate source for Jim, one whose existence may provide us with answers to these questions and many more. II The argument that follows is based entirely upon circumstantial evidence, just as are in the absence of confirmation by the author suggestions that A. P. Williams, Jim Lingard, and others were Conrads sources for Jim. I do not wish to refute other specula- tions, only to complement them as cogently as possible. There is one biographical fact essential to an understanding of the following thesis: that Joseph Conrads mother died of pulmonary tuberculosis when he was seven. Not all writers, but some, write out of an inner compulsion they do not necessarily 3 understand. Certainly Conrad did so during the sea-tale phases of his literary career. One might call it, aptly enough in his case, the Ancient Mariner syndrome, a need to tell and retell a ghastly tale of woeful agony embodying some terrible personal guilt in order to be at least temporarily free of it. Judging from his sea stories, Conrads ghastly tale was the story of his mothers death and his infant fears and guilts surrounding her death. It is common knowledge today that children often feel personal responsibility for the death or divorce of their parents, and that these guilts may affect their entire lives. Numerous examples of Conrads anxieties over his mothers death appear in his sea stories, one of the most outstanding of these being the death, by a slow-burning, con- suming fire in her hold, of the old ship Judea in the story Youth. Another curious sign of this personal trauma may be seen in Conrads repeated use of the number thirty-two, his mothers age at the time of her death. Thus in The Nigger of the Narcissus the thirty-second day out of Bombay began inauspiciously. In the morning a sea smashed one of the galley doors.5 It was the first blow of the gale, the onset of the labor, that would lay the Narcissus on her side, preparatory to the birth of James Wait through a hole in his cabin bulkhead. (Significantly, perhaps, it was the galley, the source of nour- ishment on board a ship, that was threatened first.) In Lord Jim, Captain Brierly, thirty- two years old, sets the course for his ship before committing suicide: Thirty-two miles more as she goes, says he, and then we shall be clear. Thirty-two miles more on this course and then you are safe. (LJ, 37). It may also be significant in this respect that Conrad, without any apparent motiva- tion, quite suddenly began his writing career in the autumn of 1889 just when he was turning thirty-two years of age. The reason for stressing the connection between this authors inner psychological anxieties and his writing will become clear later in this essay. It will be seen how this same psychological phenomenon virtually took posses- sion of Conrads entire life and being during one of the more crucial phases of his liter- ary career, while he was writing Lord Jim. III In November 1895 a novel was published in England which was to have a tremen- dous impact upon one of its readers. The readers name was Joseph Conrad and the novel was The Red Badge of Courage. My purpose being to show that Stephen Crane himself was an important source for Lord Jim, a moment may profitably be spent con- templating just why and how his book had such an impact on Conrad. The first why must, of course, be that Conrad identified deeply with something in the novel. An author himself, he was able to identify not only with the hero of the book, Henry Fleming, but with the young author who had created the youthful soldier who considered himself an unknown quantity, who told himself that he was not 4 formed for a soldier . and mused seriously upon the radical differences between him- self and [his comrades].