Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

The pronouncement gave me food for an hour’s anxious thought. Finally I arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for the subject itself being rather foreign to women’s normal sensibilities, the lady could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether she was European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He’s not a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning n the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by—appealing—significant—under a cloud—perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was “one of us.”

J. C.

June, 1917.

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Introduction

If one were to choose from Conrad’s work a single book which would be representative of all that he stands for in English literature, one could hardly do better than to choose “Lord Jim.” It is characteristic in its technique, and it embodies the substance of his attitude toward life. He is one of those writers of whom it is difficult to say with assurance, This is his best book; and although the choice of some lovers of Conrad would undoubtedly be “Lord Jim,” others would as certainly make their stand for “Nostromo,” or “Youth,” or “The Nigger of the Narcissus.”

“Lord Jim” is not a perfect piece of work, and it would be easy to name several of Conrad’s stories which surpass it technically. Conrad himself held it in high regard, although at the moment of its completion he considered it to be a failure. Later the book grew in his estimation, but he remained sensitive to its shortcomings. In the Author’s Note which he wrote a few years before his death, he recalled that when “Lord Jim” first appeared in book form some reviewers pointed out, as evidence that the tale was an overgrown short story, the length of Marlow’s verbal narrative, which forms the greater part of the book. No man, they argued, could have talked that long, nor would his listeners have heard him out. Conrad would not admit the inconsistency, and maintained with amusing stubbornness that all of Marlow’s narrative could be read aloud in less than three hours. Perhaps it could, in a rapid speaking contest, but at an ordinary pace, as any interested reader may determine for himself, at least eight hours would be required for its oral delivery. Granting even that “Men have been known, both in the tropics and the temperate zone, to sit up half the night swapping yarns,” and accepting, as we must, Conrad’s postulate that “the story was interesting,” one must decline to believe in that after-dinner group, assembled in its cane chairs about the figure of Marlow, setting forth to tell a story that would last until dawn.

But that imperfection is, after all, minor and unimportant. Marlow’s narrative, if we admit his own endurance, might have left his auditors slumbering in their chairs long before its conclusion, but it holds the reader of Conrad’s book. A more serious fault lies in the method used to bring the tale to a close. Marlow’s Story ends on that fine page where he recounts his last glimpse of Lord Jim, standing on the beach and listening to the two half-naked fishermen “pouring the plaint of their trifling, miserable, oppressed lives into the ears of the white lord.” Marlow concludes, “And, suddenly, I lost him…” So too, in a degree, does the reader lose him. Somehow, the spell is broken. Conrad then gives us Marlow’s account in writing of the culminating act in Lord Jim’s tragedy, as Marlow earned it from the lips of the man who brought Jim to his death. An essential unity is lost, and never quite recovered.

I had not meant to say so much in disparagement of a book which remains, when all is said and done, a noble piece of literature. I do not know where else one may find a better portrait of an incurable romantic, a more sensitive reflection of the sense of lost honor. Lord Jim died in a desperate reaching after an ideal of conduct which had eluded him in life. It was his tragedy to see the heroic pattern of his adolescent daydreams crumble before the sudden assault of actuality. Life, in the crisis that wrecked his self-esteem, bore down upon him with a brutal rush. A responsible officer, he abandoned a disabled ship and its passengers against principles of conduct which he held sacred. So cunningly did Conrad contrive that situation, with its inextricable mingling of concrete right and abstract wrong, that no man can say what he would have done, had he been in Lord Jim’s place. Yet one cannot accuse Conrad of stacking the cards, for life is like that. There is nothing more complex, at times, than the simple choice between right and wrong.