Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“THE MIRROR OF THE SEA” by Joseph Conrad (first published 1906; author’s note added 1919 for a collected edition of his works)

On this blog, I have discussed a number of times England’s Polish literary genius Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). You can look up posts on Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Victory. With the possible exception of Victory, all these are among his best-known works.  But in this posting I am examining one of his least-read texts, The Mirror of the Sea, which is not a work of fiction. The Mirror of the Sea was written and published in 1906, during Conrad’s most fruitful period as a novelist. It came between what are regarded as two of his masterpieces, Nostromo and The Secret Agent.

For those who have never read his works, Conrad is reputed to be simply a writer of the sea – and of course he was sometimes that, in novels like Lord Jim, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and The Shadow Line; and in novellas like Typhoon and Youth. But the sea was not the setting for most of his novels and the sea is not the main subject of any of the five novels I have so far discussed on this blog, although the sea is a small part of the narrative of some of them. Conrad was a professional seaman for twenty years, between the ages of 16 and 36, working his way up first in the French, then in the English, merchant marine from sailor to Master. He left the sea at 36 and settled down to a literary career, with his first novel appearing when he was 39. It wasn’t until he was nearly fifty that he wrote The Mirror of the Sea, a reflection on his days under sail.

The Mirror of the Sea is and is not an autobiography. It is drawn from Conrad’s memories, certainly, but it is not a chronological account of his life, says nothing about his childhood, family or background, and does not even give the names of fellow-seamen who were his colleagues. (They are disguised discreetly as ‘Captain C-‘, ‘Boatswain B’ – etc.) In the author’s note, which he added for the book’s 1919 reprint, Conrad remarks that some critics were taken aback by this and expected him to reveal more of himself. But Conrad says that what he attempts here is “to lay bare, with the unreserve of a last hour’s confession, the terms of my relation with the sea”. Only in the last quarter of his book does it become more autobiographical in the conventional sense, and at this point it is worth noting that the last three of the book’s 48 shortish chapters are a big diappointment. They end The Mirror of the Sea with the clunk of bathos, for Chapters 46, 47 and 48 are patriotic British bombast about the glories of the Royal Navy and Lord Nelson. Conrad is cosmopolitan enough to tell us that the French and Spanish captains at Trafalgar were jolly decent chaps too. But for the sake of his literary reputation, I hope that Conrad wrote tongue-in-cheek, and as a sop to his British readership, this dreadful conclusion to an otherwise thoughtful book. I will say no more about it.

The Mirror of the Sea is a book about the sea, about how young Conrad reacted to the moods of the sea, and how he fared in different ships. As for the title, the phrase “mirror of the sea” recurs a number of times in the text. “Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea”, says Conrad in Chapter 7. He speaks of one swift sailing ship, saying “her image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the old sea” in Chapter 12. And in Chapter 26 there is the “blue sky whose immense and unfathomable tenderness, reflected in the mirror of the sea, embraces, possesses, lulls to sleep the ships with white sails.” There are other places in the text where the phrase is used. They all picture the sea as the literal mirror that it is. But there is a subtext here – for a seaman, the sea is the mirror of himself, reflecting his character in the way he reacts to the sea in calm or (more particularly) in storm. For as a professional seaman, Conrad knows that the sea tests every sailor. Each finds out who he really is. This becomes one of the book’s dominant themes.

In his opening ten or so chapters, Conrad moves methodically through maritime matters in what are, in effect, a series of essays – the importance of departures and landfalls; the varying qualities of captains he has known; and the proper use of nautical terms. Sometimes he chastises landlubbers, as when he remarks “Your journalist almost invariably ‘casts’ his anchor. Now an anchor is never cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime” (Chapter 4). An anchor is properly “let go”, not “cast”. He tells us of “the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable to a seaman” (Chapter 5) i.e. a sailor should not be cocksure, as the sea is so variable in its moods; hence a sailor should always be prepared for the worst. With proper contempt as a professional mariner, Conrad looks down on yachting, saying: “Yacht racing is an organised pastime, a function of social idleness ministering to the vanity of certain wealthy inhabitants of [England] nearly as much as to their inborn love of the sea” (Chapter 7) But he relents and admits that yachting requires sailing skill and the art of managing a crew. “To deal with men is as fine an art as to deal with ships - both men and ships live in an unstable element, are subject to subtle and powerful influences, and want to have their merits understood rather than their faults found out.” (Chapter 7). More than once he refers to the sea as “the unstable element”, and as readers of Lord Jim will know, Conrad frequently used this term as a metaphor for the instability of human affairs.

He moves on to some of the perils of seamanship, considering the horror of newspapers’ “Shipping Intelligence”, which tell anxious wives and relatives of seamen about ships first “Overdue” and then “Missing”, which most often means “sunk” (Chapter 16). We learn that in polar seas, even a small ice-floe can be enough to sink a ship (Chapter 17); and we learn what a misery it is for a ship to be stranded on a submerged sandbank (Chapters 20 and 21).

As Conrad always expresses it, ships are feminine and to be loved as such. In Chapter 15 he tells us: “Yes, your ship wants to be humoured with knowledge. You must treat with an understanding consideration the mysteries of her feminine nature, and then she will stand by you faithfully in the unceasing struggle with forces wherein defeat is no shame.” Ships are in their glory when they are on the high seas. When a ship is tied up at docks “you would think a free ship would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage” (Chapter 32). Stevedores and others are “trampling unconcerned, brutal and hodnailed upon her helpless body” (Chapter 33). Ships “can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make of our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance.” (Chapter 35). The obvious inplication here is that ships are like women who have to be protected by men, cherished by men and loved by men – and whose whims have to be considered. I can’t help wondering, too, if there is not another impulse for this anthropomorphising of ships. As the safe body in which men live as they sail across the unstable sea, isn’t a ship a little like an enfolding womb? Truly feminine.

By contrast, neither the winds nor the sea itself are feminised. From Chapter 23 to Chapter 29, Conrad dwells on the influence of prevailing winds. In these chapters he is at his most rhetorical . He personifies the West Wind as the King of the oceans, treating human beings as his petty subjects and playthings; while the East Wind is a conniving villain, who rushes upon ships when they are unprepared. As for the sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown.” (Chapter 36) In this same chapter, Conrad says he really became an adult when, as a very junior officer, he understood for the first time the complete indifference of the sea to human life. He was a part of a crew who rowed from a merchantman to rescue nine Danish seamen. The Danes were clinging to a waterlogged ship, almost completely submerged and on the point of dragging them down as it sank. It was, of course, the pitiless sea that had brought them to this state, and that threatened the rescuers with being dragged down too.

Writing in 1906, Conrad is aware that the era of sailing-ships – the era he knew as a sailor in the 1870s and 1880s – is almost over. He is writing of a time now past. “Stevedoring,” he tells us,“which had been a skilled labour, is fast becoming a labour without the skill. The modern steamship with her many holds is not loaded within the sailorlike meaning of the word. She is filled up. Her cargo is not stowed in any sense; it is simply dumped into her through six hatchways, more or less, by twelve winches or so…” (Chapter 13). He is clearly still unfamiliar with modern hoisting machinery to load cargo. And the future looms in modern London docks with “here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil storage tanks, low and round with slightly domed roofs, peep over the edge of the foreshore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron.” (Chapter 31) He has a low opinion of those who look after wharves, docks and loading – he refers to them as “renegades” (Chapter 33) in that he sees them as failed sailors.

Along with this goes his near contempt for steamships that are killing the true seamanship of sailing ships. He dwells on the majesty of sail, pushed along simply by the forces of nature (Chapter 10). “Of all ships disabled at sea,” he declares, “a steamship who has lost her propeller is the most helpless. And as she drifts into an unpopulated part of the ocean she may soon become overdue.” (Chapter 18). One of his most pitiful stories is of a steamship which lost its propeller on the run between New Zealand and Cape Horn and which, until being rescued by a whaler, drifted helplessly in places where a sailing ship could have taken advantage of the winds. He says “The machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.” (Chapter 22) The existence of steam power lessens that existential struggle between man, wind and sea that Conrad relishes. And, on a less important note, he regrets the loss of the old figureheads that used to adorn sailing ships (Chapter 35).

As for the future of navigation, Conrad strikes a prophetic note imagining the type of steel warship, capable of immense destructiveness, that will be developed. (Remember, this was written eight years before the First World War). When inventors have made this come to pass, he says “the bodies of the inventors should [be] blown to pieces by means of their own perfected explosives and improved weapons with extreme publicity as the commonest prudence dictated.” (Chapter 37) This nostrum for ending war has been suggested by many others in the years since then.

As a practitioner of irony, Conrad sometimes displays the art of understatement. Describing a ferocious storm at sea, he writes “I confess that the idea of being suddenly spilt into an infuriated ocean in the midst of uproar affected me always with a sensation of shrinking distaste” (Chapter 9). Personally, I would be absolutely terrified – and I suspect Conrad or any other sane human being would too. He also describes with deep irony the sinking of a leaking ship thus: “The surmise of my maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui at every seam.” (Chapter 39) Along with the irony, there are some euphemisms which I assume cover the effing and blinding of sailors in distress, typical of literature in Conrad’s times. As a violent sea-storm is going on, a captain and his first mate are arguing, and there is “a little private ship’s storm going on in which you could detect strong language, pronounced in a tone of passion, and exculpatory protestations uttered with every possible inflection of injured innocence” (Chapter 10).

In contrast with the irony and euphemisms, there are the grand apostrophes for which Conrad is sometimes criticised, but which can be very grand indeed. Consider this evocation of the primal nature of the sea: “It seems to me that no man born and truthful to himself could declare that he ever saw the sea looking young as the world looks in spring. But some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it old, as if the immemorial ages have been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old… If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm. The greyness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam , tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before light itself.” (Chapter 22)

Although, as I have argued, this is not a conventional autobiography, there are in The Mirror of the Sea vivid personal anecdotes, in Conrad’s reminiscences of the wool-ships that went to and fro between England and Australia (Chapter 33) and one vivid and unexpected chapter on the night young Conrad had to spend being a ship’s night-watchman when the ship was anchored at Sydney’s Circular Quay. He saw from the deck the sights and sounds of young rough Sydneysiders having organised fistfights and other traditional Aussie pastimes.

When he passes to his considerations of the Mediterranean Sea, he at first spends three chapters on the Mediterranean as the cradle of navigation, and the ancient and more modern sea battles that took place there (Chapter 37-39). But the subject of the Mediterranean launches him into the most straightforwardly autobiographical parts of the book – six chapters (Chapters 40 to 45), almost amounting to a novella, on his membership of a syndicate of four young men (the other three were an American, a Corsican and an Englishman) gunrunning for the ultra-conservative pretenders to the Spanish throne, the Carlists. Their venture was on the leaky, unreliable little ship Tremolino and it came to a sticky end. Conrad tells the story with the relaxed irony of an older man looking back at the follies of his youth; and yet at the same time regretting the passing of those days of naïve and idealistic youthfulness. As the whole venture comes to a pathetic end, Conrad reflects bitterly on the older people who fired up these young men to undertake the venture in the first place:  “The whole Royalist gang was in Monte Carlo now, I reckoned. And they appeared to me clear-cut and very small, with affected voices and stiff gestures like a procession of rigid marionettes upon a toy stage.” (Chapter 44) Scholars of Conrad will know that much later, when his literary career was fading, he worked this episode into a novel, The Arrow of Gold, which, as repute tells me (I have never read it), is one of his weakest efforts. And, just to confuse matters, other scholars (such as John Stape in his biography The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, which sits on my selves) argue that the whole story of gunrunning is a fiction.

And then – clunk! – we come to those awful jingoisitc last three chapters of The Mirror of the Sea, which would almost have sunk this ship if what precedes them had not been such an interesting, ruminative set of reflections.