The Shadow-Line, A Confession is a novella, published in 1917, but first serialized the year before in Metropolitan Magazine (New York) and The English Review (London). A young sailor in an Eastern port gives up his berth on a mysterious whim. He stays at the Officers’ Sailors’ Home, getting angry with the steward and the other guests, until an opportunity to captain a ship in Bangkok arrives. He takes the commission with great anticipation. On deck, the chief mate, Mr. Burns, tells him how the previous captain went insane and tried to lead the crew to their deaths. There’s not much time to worry about that though, as the narrator will soon have to see the ship across the Gulf of Siam to Singapore, a span which a fellow sailor calls “a funny piece of water”. Things start well, but then the ship is becalmed, and there’s an outbreak of tropical fever. There should have been enough quinine to see the crew through sickness, but there’s been some interference, and most of it is missing from its cabinet. Meanwhile Mr. Burns thinks that the last captain, though buried in a “roomy grave” at the entrance to the gulf, is haunting the ship.
In The Shadow-Line the heaviness one expects from Conrad is leavened somewhat by some colloquial touches in the narration. The unnamed narrator begins by writing of youth, every man’s time in the “enchanted garden”: “It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation—a bit of one’s own.” That “bit of one’s own” is a lighter moment; there is another in the reassurance that “this is not a marriage story,” as it “wasn’t so bad as that with me.” Conrad gives about a hundred and fifty words before the foreboding sets in. The narrator turns then to the “shadow-line” itself, warning that the his early youth will soon be over when he crosses this mark. This foresight prompts him to give up his berth on a steamship, which in his mind is almost a disgraceful desertion, although of a ship “not worthy of any man’s love”, because of her “internal propulsion”. There’s a portentous a somewhat imprecise metaphor and then another aside, tonally like the “bit of one’s own”: “The green sickness of late youth descended on me and carried me off. Carried me off that ship, I mean.”
The narrator is capable of reader-friendly plain speech, but his temper has a way of stiffening his prose. The atmosphere at the Officers’ Sailors’ Home is stifling, the attitude of the steward worse, and these bring out the narrator’s pompous anger, as in “This is the most infernal cheek…” and “His impudence still rankled”. In a theatrical moment, he rejects the improvident questions of a fellow sailor with a flourish: “I flung away the paper I was still holding. I sat up, I slapped the table with my open palm.” Maybe this hamminess is less artificial than it seems, and sailors actually act this way, but the universal premise and promise of the “shadow-line” itself is pushed away by the narrator’s tantrums, which read more as a personal problem. Perhaps Conrad should have been more insistent on the climate as an irritant. On the way to his lodgings, the narrator does note how “The heat of the tropical East descended through the leafy boughs, enveloping my thinly-clad body, clinging to my rebellious discontent, as if to rob it of its freedom.” In describing the relationship between the sweltering haze and his consciousness, Conrad has moved too quickly from concrete to abstract, such that the sensation of heat is lost by the end of the sentence.
Conrad likes to give us brief images from the mind’s eye. When he floods their minds with the seas, we share in their exhilaration. For instance, that pesky sailor, Captain Giles, at the home, whose brain “must have been a perfect warehouse of reefs, positions, bearings, images of headlands, shapes of obscure coasts, aspects of innumerable islands, desert and otherwise.” Or the narrator, briefly, when Giles comments on the distance from Bangkok to the Indian Ocean, and “this murmur, like a dim flash from a dark lantern, showed me for a moment the broad belt of islands and reefs between that unknown ship, which was mine, and the freedom of the great waters of the globe.” When he gets his appointment to command on foolscap, he calls it “a gift of extraordinary potency, for, as I put it in my pocket, my head swam a little.”
It may be simply that staying tethered to specific images and sounds, whether on the enormous scale as above, or a much smaller one, helps Conrad write better. (The narrator acknowledges the need to find concretes to fill out brainy abstracts; when he sees first sees the ship he is to command, a “harmonious creature in the lines of her fine body,” then steps aboard, he looks her over to note the “form concreting the abstract sentiment of my command.”) There is this effective synesthetic moment in the middle of the potentially deadly calm: “A great over-heated stillness enveloped the ship and seemed to hold her motionless in a flaming ambience composed in two shades of blue.” And similar in tone, after the death of a breeze, “The ship’s head swung where it listed; the stilled sea took on the polish of a steel plate in the calm.” This diction brings to mind an exquisite bit of similar trickery in Lord Jim, when “the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tessellated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny silvery scream."
In the appointment scene with the Marine Superintendent, Conrad is almost playful in his associations; the narrator sees this authority as a “deputy-Neptune”, and though he assures us that there’s no trident, he notes that “his hand was holding a pen—the official pen, far mightier than the sword in making or marring the fortune of simple toiling men.” It doesn’t bode well that when they stand and make their goodbyes (the narrator’s head swims again), this man-as-god drops his weapon. For lovers of loud and entirely sincere figurative language, though, Conrad has left some in The Shadow-Line bold and entirely bare, daring the rest of us to find it silly. The image here is finely rendered and then turned abruptly into the big idea, one which surely doesn’t add much that wasn’t already understood. The moment jars and jangles even worse because the simile is simply tacked on with a semi-colon to modify a noun:
Won’t she answer the helm at all?” I said irritably to the man whose strong brown hands grasping the spokes of the wheel stood out lighted on the darkness; like a symbol of mankind’s claim to the direction of its own fate.
The metaphor of the ship’s wheel is surely already understood when we read maritime tales such as Conrad’s. It’s almost as if he had stopped at something like “I said irritably to the man at the wheel”, finished The Shadow-Line, and then decided he needed the signature Conradian stuff about the extent of man’s control over his fate to be more explicit, and attached it here. Perhaps he was giving his readers what they wanted; one would have been disappointed to have made it through any Conrad without at least one moment of camp over-signification.