corollary

Listening to:

The whir of a Macbook Pro’s optical drive.

Listening to:

Nothing, and with a small baby in the house, that’s got to be a good thing!

Listening to:

Handel, Messiah. By the Gabrieli Consort and Players, led by McCreesh.

Listening to:

Mozart, piano trio in E, K.452

Just read:

Joseph Conrad, The mirror of the sea.

The volume I read was a Folio Society combination of The Mirror of the Sea and another book called A Personal Record. The former is a mix of relatively matter-of-fact pieces about aspects of maritime life and some personal reminiscences. A Personal Record is more explicitly autobiographical. And of course, matter-of-fact for Conrad means prose like:

The cradle of overseas traffic and of the art of naval combats, the Mediterranean, apart from all the associations of adventure and glory, the common heritage of all mankind, makes a tender appeal to a seaman. It has sheltered the infancy of his craft. He looks upon it as a man may look at a vast nursery in an old, old mansion where innumerable generations of his own people have learned to walk. I say his own people because, in a sense, all sailors belong to one family: all are descended from that adventurous and shaggy ancestor who, bestriding a shapeless log and paddling with a crooked branch, accomplished the first coasting trip in a sheltered bay ringed with the admiring howls of his tribe. It is a matter of regret that all those brothers in craft and feeling, whose generations have learnt to walk a ship’s deck in that nursery, have been also more than once fiercely engaged in cutting each other’s throats there. But life, apparently, has such exigencies.

The second book covers more than just maritime matters, including material on Conrad’s childhood in Poland, and how he came to be a sailor at all: first out of Marseilles, and then as part of the British Merchant Marine. And why did he want to become British? According to his own account, it was because he met an exemplary Brit on top of an Alp while walking there. But then, all of Conrad’s autobiography needs to be read with a modicum of scepticism. He turned bits of his personal history into novels, and equally appears to have thought that there wasn’t anything wrong with fictionalising his personal history for others’ consumption.

Both volumes are more collections of little essays rather than components of some larger argument. This makes for easy reading, and some of the little vignettes are quite interesting.

Listening to:

Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler.

Just read:

Joseph Conrad, The Arrow of Gold.

According to Zdzisław Najder, a biographer, Arrow of Gold is “Conrad’s weakest novel”. It starts well enough, with exciting things happening to a young hero in Marseilles, and even seems to hold onto its nerve when a mysterious woman appears. There’s smuggling and intrigue and all looks well, even if it’s never entirely clear where Conrad wants our attention to lie.

At last came the day when everything slipped from my grasp. 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 was in me of independent life, but just failed to take me out of the world.... The lurid swiftness of it all was like a stunning thunderclap—and, one evening, I found myself weary, heartsore, my brain still dazed and with awe in my heart, entering Marseilles by way of the railway station, after many adventures, one more disagreeable than another, involving privations, great exertions, a lot of difficulties with all sorts of people who looked upon me evidently more as a discreditable vagabond deserving the attentions of gendarmes than a respectable (if crazy) young gentleman attended by a guardian angel of his own.

The title of the book refers to a piece of jewelry worn by the mysterious woman, so perhaps it is fair enough that the emphasis of the novel shifts to focus on the relationship between Doña Rita and the book’s cast of male characters. Certainly, she remains a mysterious object more than she is ever a human being. In some sense she is most like a MacGuffin that pushes the plot onwards, and quite unreal.

This seems to me to be consistent with the off-hand way in the novel concludes (in a strange final section called “Second Note”). Here the novel is perhaps revealed to be all about the hero’s development and coming of age, and not really the arrow of gold at all.