To recount a memory is often to embrace the romantic possibility that things went the right way. Even if they didn’t. Yesterday, I discussed how Kyne’s story of Bill Emlow and Dad Tully was framed around Dad recounting the past as a lesson. Romance blossomed in Bill's persistent entreaties to Lady Angela and Dad used that fortuitous foundering of love to prescribe possibilities for the future.
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| Joseph Conrad considering tales of the sea he has heard |
The past was the map to move forward. In Kyne’s ever moving forward progression of time, it was important for Dad to create an American identity and thus an American past that could resonate in perpetuity.
“This could have occurred nowhere but in England where men and seas interpenetrate, so to speak” are the first words of Joseph Conrad’s “Youth.” Conrad’s tale follows a similar framing device, but the narrators are much less assured of any nationalist bombast.
Around a table sit five men. They drink. They share. Marlow (at least that is how the narrator thinks his name is spelt) details his attempted trip to “Bankok” aboard the Judea. This experience happened twenty-two years ago when Marlow was a sprightly twenty years old and “second mate for the first time.” Aboard the ship are men like the stern old Captain Beard and Mahon “who insisted that [his name] be pronounced Mann.” “Youth” is the story of Marlow.
As in numerous stories read so far, these brief asides add shading to the conventional outline Conrad works within. Where the framing device in Kyne’s story gave a didactic feel that preached a series of self-help lessons, Conrad dots his tale with repeated moments, such as the Mahon-Mann joke (an aural reflection predicated on what is written). Tropes like the thin gap between the solider and the philosopher are pointed to and played with in a world that “was nothing but an immensity of great foaming waves rushing at us, under a sky low enough to touch with the hand.”
This tale features yet another young ambitious individual squaring off with the violent forces of nature and transportation (like “The Run of The Yellow Mail”). Conrad tiptoes through this journey with poetic flourishes and the consistent reminder that this is a story told by one who in looking back has basted his past with a glaze of romance.
Repeatedly Marlow invokes the absurd dangers of his trip aboard the Judea, a ship which is lit aflame, with the exasperated joyful ending note: “O! Youth!” He asks his listener to “remember I was twenty.” It is no surprise when Marlow explains that at the time he carried with him the complete works of Lord Byron. This romantic longing appears to be a way to rewrite the frightful moments that only seem gone.
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| "Youth" was first published in Blackwoods in 1898 |
Perhaps Conrad’s greatest skill is in the vibrant pacing of the tale. Even when he recounts more than might actually be interesting to listen to, Marlow’s voice seems to run off the page. The frenzied energy of what-has-been is less obnoxious than inviting as he explains, in a manner that reads sincere in its desire for that which once was: “I seemed somehow to be in the air. I heard all round me like a pent-up breath release—as if a thousand giants simultaneously had said Phoo!… Coals, gas!—By Jove! we are being blown up—Every body’s dead—I am falling into the after hatch—I see fire in it’” Marlow’s experience is relayed in a haze-like dreamscape in which the omnipresence of death is comical and also considered with seriousness dipped in the phantasmagoric.
Eventually it becomes clear : the Judea will not last. The sturdiness needed for a ship to sail doesn’t fit into the bludgeoned edges of this puzzle of the past. Punctuating his descriptions with calls to his youth and the occasional request to “pass the bottle” Conrad-through-Marlow provides a ghastly recounting of earlier years on the sea. Even the detailed outlining of the ship’s obliteration rests on an apparitional presence: “The interstices of that mass of wreckage were full of something whitish, sluggish, stirring—of something that was like a greasy fog.”
After he has become the leader of a much smaller vessel (since the Judea is engulfed), Marlow makes it to Java. Whatever success, whatever triumph comes with the cost of life. So it goes. However, persistence through death is not some masculine marker or badge of courage. Life is exhausting in this past and though the youth seems thrilling it isn't always easy to access those memories or articulate those feelings.
In fact Marlow encounters a blockage of memory that presents itself as the opposite: a clarified vision of the past. For the second-mate suddenly turned skipper the entirety of “the East” emerges as he opens his eyes. “For me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth,” Marlow describes. He adds, “It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it… only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamor—of youth!” This is a description defined by an affective response—for a storyteller who has provided details, he is unable to respond. All Marlow can do it yoke together the space that is “the East” to some romantic personal past.
The descriptor “romance,” which has lent its name to this volume, is signaled with less sincerity here. Marlow has narrated his own romantic remembrance. The emphasis of the fantastic and the sincere twists this equation of the “East” with a single vision into a claim that necessarily fails to capture the past. In other words, Marlow’s desire to re-inhabit the past is skewered; he is unable to grasp the impossibility of the scenario he describes.
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| In 1902 the story was published in a collection |
The narrator hints at this in the final lines suggesting that all the men in the room are “looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone.” The need for stories and the significance placed on narratives to help understand the world is important. Equally important is the recognition that these descriptions of youth are a “romance of illusions.”
Such an acknowledgement is not pessimistic. Rather it is a reckoning with the ways individuals make sense of the chaotic systems they find themselves a part of. Conrad seems to suggest that one doesn’t work through their past so much as they continue to work with it. That insight distinguishes the tone relayed by Marlow from the story Kyne charts through Dad Tully. Where Kyne lived in the illusion, Conrad seems to thrash against and with it, never forgetting that it's there. Even if it is necessary to live.
You can read “Youth” at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.44688
You can listen to “Youth” at Librivox: https://librivox.org/youth-a-narrative-by-joseph-conrad/
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