Sailors on the Inward Sea

Autorentext

Lawrence Thornton's novels include the critically acclaimed Imagining Argentina. The recipient of many prestigious awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, Thornton lives in Claremont, California.

Klappentext

History and fiction combine to create a startling premise: that Joseph Conradborrowed the ideas for his greatest novels.

Zusammenfassung
In a triumphant fusion of fiction and history, award-winning author Lawrence Thornton re-creates a terrible tragedy at sea and takes the reader on an unforgettable voyage through the human heart. Thornton brilliantly reveals how the repercussions of small and large actions can haunt even the deepest of friendships for generations.

Sailors on the Inward Sea recounts the desperate time when the stately British minesweeper Brigadier, blinded by thick fog in the North Sea, crashes into a German submarine in a horrifying accident. When an altercation between the enemies ensues and the Brigadier's prodigy, a talented young ensign, is fatally shot, the captain, Fox-Bourne, orders a retreat, deliberately leaving dozens of German sailors to die in the frigid waters.

Although Captain Fox-Bourne's murderous judgment is called into question in a military court, when he is found innocent, a passionate witness to the incident decides to take matters into his own hands. This witness -- none other than the great novelist Joseph Conrad, a former sailor himself and a guest-observer on the Brigadier -- writes an account of the conflict in order to give the captain a chance to confess, redeem himself, and purge his conscience. But Conrad has other, secret motivations, as his trusted confidant, Captain Jack Malone, knows only too well.

And it is ultimately Malone, our sage but enigmatic narrator, whose journey we follow as he confronts the timeless challenges of being a friend, confidant, lover, sailor, and muse. As he sweeps across the oceans from England to Africa and finally to the sensuous world of Indonesia, Malone seeks to uncover the true boundaries between friendship and betrayal, loyalty and love, legacy and life.

Malone, Conrad, and Thornton form a brilliant trinity of wisdom, imagination, and adventure. Together they carry a torch that threatens to singe, just as it promises to reveal, the path to which the inward sea ultimately leads.

Leseprobe
Chapter I: Pent Farm

Dear Ford,

I have imagined your surprise when you received this package and saw the name Jack Malone and my Dutch East Indies return address. Finding the manuscript inside must have made you wonder why you had been sent it, so I want to tell you straightaway that I am not asking you to vet it as you have done for so many writers over the years. It is yours to do with as you wish. I should add that it concerns Conrad -- his life and work -- as I have seen them through the lens of our friendship that lasted more than a quarter of a century and persists in memory to this day. To avoid any confusion at the outset, I think it best for me to begin with a brief explanation of how I came to write these pages and my reason for sending them to you.

Six years ago, in the fall of 1924, I boarded a freighter in London bound for Java. Still grieving for Conrad, who had died only a month earlier, I had become quite aware even then that my only chance to understand what had happened between us would be to put the story down on paper, the whole thing, from beginning to end. If I had had a reasonable grasp of what I wanted to say, the solitude and endless vistas of a long sea voyage would have been an ideal occasion to begin the enterprise, but at that point the story was a great jumble of people and places and objects. As I stood at the aft rail watching the dock recede, the well-wishers who had come to say good-bye growing smaller, the city flattening out, I saw in the spreading V of the freighter's wake shimmering images of Conrad emerging from the fog at Tilbury Dock, a sign over the door of an old bookshop, the tormented eyes of a captain in the Royal Navy, a German U-boat's conning tower decorated with kill signs. By the time I reached Batavia, Indonesia, several weeks later, those and other images, along with their attendant emotions, had overrun my mind, leaving me in a state of exhausted frustration.

Five years were to pass before I finally sat down to see what I could do in the way of memoir writing. After three false starts I was close to giving up. I remember crushing what I thought might well be the last page of my efforts and rolling it across the table, where the bloodless thing disappeared over the edge. And then, half an hour later, you appeared, Ford, descending like a ministering angel from the silky blackness of an Indonesian night to show me the way.

I had abandoned the table in the living room of my bungalow and was standing on the veranda, looking down at the Old Port of Batavia, whose bay was dotted with lanterns hanging from the prows of invisible fishing boats. Farther off lay a net of lights, the sparkling city, lovely and seductive. I was listening to the incessant nightly hum, a medley of human and inhuman sounds, hisses and groans and bangings, cars' motors, the clip-clop of bullocks' hooves, the creaking wheels of old carts, faint voices of people out for a stroll or coming home late from work.

Suddenly, I recalled an afternoon you and I spent with Conrad in Kent at his country house. We three had walked from Pent Farm to Stanford for lunch at his favorite pub, the one with the weathered picnic benches that stood outside on the grass, and afterward returned to the parlor. Nothing earth-shattering, simply a rescued moment that somehow led my thoughts to the opening pages of your Good Soldier, where John Dowell frets over how to tell his story and finally decides to imagine himself talking to a sympathetic soul in a country cottage. I had a vision of him and this nameless chap sitting by a crackling fire -- Dowell, heartbroken and confused, going on about his trials with his poor wife, Florence, quite as a man would to someone who understood the torments of love and sex.

Well, my heart started pounding. In that instant I realized that I, too, needed a confidant, someone interested enough in Conrad to listen to what I had to say. There were plenty of candidates among Conrad's writer friends -- Henry James, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling -- but none was as well suited for the job as Ford Madox Ford, his friend and steadfast ally ever since you two had met in 1898. The fact that you had lived at Pent Farm and vacated it just before Conrad moved in made your role as my Muse even more natural. And it was also there at Pent that you and he began your collaboration on Romance, the first of the novels you wrote together. I also knew that you had a hand in revising Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and parts of The Mirror of the Sea -- work that let you understand far better than I what drove the man and what made him the artist we admired.

It was a heady moment, Ford, deeply exciting. To think that you, Conrad, and I could connect again on that inner, familiar landscape. As I gazed out over the bay at the lights of Batavia under the stars wheeling across the heavens, I thought that I might as well appropriate your imaginary cottage, too, and politely usher Dowell and his guest outside so you and I could take over the blazing fire, the pantry stocked with food and drink, the still-warm chairs. But charmed as I was by the idea of speaking to you over the echoes of your own book, I had the good sense to see that doing so in your fictional cottage would be too clever by half. Pent Farm, with its uneven brick floor in the kitchen, the stone fireplace guarded by bird-shaped andirons, the parlor with its comfortable furniture, where the three of us had spent so many pleasant…