Why Read the Classics? (25 page)

So, then,
The Pavilion on the Links
is a story that emerges from a landscape. From the desolate dunes of the Scottish coasts the only story that can emerge is one of people who hide and seek. But in order to bring out a landscape’s contours there is no better method than that of introducing an extraneous, incongruous element. That is why Stevenson brings on to the Scottish moors and quicksands to threaten his characters none other than that murky, Italian secret society, the Carbonari, with their black conical hats.

Through this series of definitions and deductions I have tried to isolate not so much the secret nucleus of this story — which, as is often the case, contains more than one — as the mechanism which guarantees its hold over the reader, that fascination which never wanes despite the rather chaotic mixing of the different story plans that Stevenson takes up and then abandons. Of these, the most powerful is certainly the first one, the psychological tale about the relationship between the two friends/enemies, perhaps a first draft for the enemy brothers in
The Master of Ballantrae
, and which here hints vaguely at an ideological divide between Northmour, a Byronic free-thinker, and Cassilis, the champion of Victorian virtues. The second is the love story, and it is the weakest of all, saddled as it is with the two very conventional characters who are involved: the girl who is the model of every virtue, and the father who is a fraudulent bankrupt, driven by squalid avarice.

It is the third plot which triumphs, the one that is typically novelistic, which takes for its theme the elusive conspiracy which spreads its tentacles everywhere, a theme which has never been out of fashion from the nineteenth century to our own day. It triumphs for various reasons: firstly because Stevenson’s hand which with just a few strokes suggests the menacing presence of the Carbonari — from the finger squeaking down the rain-soaked window to the black hat skimming over the quicksands — is the same hand that, more or less at the same time, was recounting the approach of the pirates to the ‘Admiral Benbow’ inn in
Treasure Island
. In addition, the fact that the Carbonari, however hostile and frightening they may be, enjoy the author’s sympathy, in line with British romantic traditions, and are clearly in the right against the universally loathed banker, introduces into the complex game that is already being played this internal contrast,
which is more convincing and effective than the others: the two friendly rivals, bound together by honour to defend Huddlestone, nevertheless in their conscience are on the side of the enemy, the Carbonari. And finally it triumphs because it immerses us more than ever in the spirit of childhood games, with sieges, sallies, and attacks by rival gangs.

The great resource that children have is that they know how to derive from the space that they have available for their games all the magic and emotion they need. Stevenson has retained this gift: he starts with the mystique of that elegant pavilion rising up in the middle of a natural wilderness (a pavilion ‘Italian in design’: perhaps this qualification already hints at the imminent intrusion of an exotic, unfamiliar element?); then there is the secret entry into the empty house, the discovery of the table already set, the fire ready for lighting, the beds prepared, though there is not a soul to be seen … a fairy-tale motif transplanted into an adventure story.

Stevenson published
The Pavilion on the Links
in the
Comhill Magazine
, in the issues for September and October 1880; two years later, in 1882, he included it in his
New Arabian Nights
. There is one glaring difference between the two editions: in the first, the story appears as a letter and testament which an old father, as death closes in, leaves for his sons in order to reveal a family secret to them: namely, how he met their mother, who is already dead. In the rest of the text the narrator addresses the readers with the vocative, ‘my dear sons’, calls the heroine ‘your mother’, ‘your dear mother’, ‘the mother of my sons’ and calls that sinister character, her father, ‘your grandfather’. The second version,
in
book form, goes straight into narration from the first sentence: ‘I was a great solitary when I was young’; the heroine is called ‘my wife’ or by her name, Clara, and the old man is called ‘her father’ or Huddlestone. This shift usually means a completely different style, indeed a completely different kind of story; instead the corrections are minimal: the excision of the preamble, of the addresses to the sons, and of the more grief-stricken references to the mother. Everything else remains exactly the same. (Other corrections and cuts concern old Huddlestone, whose infamous reputation in the first version, instead of being attenuated later through familial piety, as one might have expected, was actually accentuated — perhaps because the conventions of the theatre and the novel made it quite natural that an angelic heroine should have a horribly avaricious father, whereas the real problem was making acceptable the terrible end of a blood relative, without the comfort
of Christian burial, which could be justified only if this relative was thoroughly evil.)

According to M. R. Ridley, the editor of the recent, ‘Everyman’s Library’ edition,
The Pavilion on the Links
really must be considered a flawed work: the characters fail to arouse any interest in the reader, and only the first version, which has the narrative start from the heart of a family secret, manages to communicate any sympathy and suspense. That is why, contrary to the rule that demands that the last edition of a work corrected by the author be definitive, Ridley reissues the text of the
Comhill
version. I have not followed Ridley’s practice. In the first place I disagree with his value judgment: I consider this tale, particularly in the
New Arabian Nights
edition, one of Stevenson’s finest. Secondly, I would not be so sure about the order in which these versions were written: I am more inclined to think of different layers of writing reflecting the uncertainties of the young Stevenson. The opening the author chooses as definitive is so direct and full of pace that it is easier to imagine Stevenson starting writing with its dry, objective thrust, perfectly suited to an adventure story. As he progresses in the tale, he realises on the one hand that the relations between Cassilis and Northmour are so complex as to require a psychological analysis much deeper than the one he intended to embark on, and on the other that the love story with Clara was turning out rather cold and conventional. Consequently he goes back and starts the story all over again, enveloping it in a smoke-screen of family affections: this is the version he publishes in the magazine; then dissatisfied with these mawkish overlays, he decides to cut them, but discovers that to keep the female character at a distance the best solution is to have her known from the start and to wrap her in reverential respect. That is why he adopts the formula ‘my wife’ instead of ‘your mother’ (except for one point where he forgets to alter it and garbles the text somewhat). This is all conjecture on my part, which only manuscript research could confirm or disprove: from a comparison of the two printed versions the only certain fact to emerge is the hesitancy of the author. His hesitancy is somehow consonant with the game of hide and seek with himself which he plays in this story about a childhood which he would like to prolong, even though he knows full well that it is over.

[1973]

Joseph Conrad died thirty years ago, on 3 August 1924, in his country house at Bishopsbourne near Canterbury. He was sixty-six and had spent twenty years as a seaman and thirty years writing. He was already a success in his own lifetime, but his real fame in terms of European criticism began only after his death. In December 1924 a whole issue of
La Nouvelle Revue Française
was devoted to him, with articles by Gide and Valéry: the remains of the old captain, a veteran of long sea voyages, were lowered into the sea with a guard of honour comprising France’s most sophisticated and intellectual literati. By contrast, in Italy, the first translations were only available in the red canvas bindings of Sonzogno’s Adventure Library, though Emilio Cecchi had already singled him out to readers of more refined tastes.

Those few, bare facts are sufficient to indicate the different kinds of appeal that the figure of Conrad has inspired. He had lived a life of practical experience, travel and action, and he possessed the prolific creativity of the popular novelist, but also the fastidious attention to style of the disciple of Flaubert, as well as having links with the chief exponents of international Decadentism. Now that his critical fortune has been established in Italy, at least judging by the number of translations available (Bompiani is publishing the collected works, both Einaudi and Mondadori are bringing out translations of individual books, either in hardback or in paperback, while Feltrinelli’s Universale Economica has recently published two of his works), we are in a position to define what this writer has meant and still means for us.

I believe there were many of us who turned to Conrad driven by a
recidivist taste for adventure-stories—but not just for adventure stories, also for those authors for whom adventures are only a pretext for saying something original about man, while the exotic events and countries serve to underline more clearly man’s relationship with the world. On one bookshelf of my ideal library Conrad’s place is next to the aery Stevenson, who is nevertheless almost his opposite in terms of his life and his literary style. And yet on more than one occasion I have been tempted to move him onto another shelf, one less accessible for me, the one containing analytical, psychological novelists, the Jameses and Prousts, those who tirelessly recover every crumb of sensation we have experienced. Or maybe even alongside those who are more or less aesthetes
maudits
, like Poe, full of displaced passions; always presuming that Conrad’s dark anxieties about an absurd universe do not consign him to the shelf (not yet properly ordered or finally selected) containing the ‘writers of the crisis of modernism’.

Instead I have always kept him close to hand, alongside Stendhal, who is so unlike him, and Nievo, who has nothing in common with him at all. For the fact is that though I never believed in a lot of what he wrote, I have always believed that he was a good captain, and that he brought into his stories that element which is so difficult to write about: the sense of integration with the world that comes from a practical existence, the sense of how man fulfils himself in the things he does, in the moral implicit in his work, that ideal of always being able to cope, whether on the deck of a sailing ship or on the page of a book.

This is the moral substance of Conrad’s fiction. And I am happy to discover that it is also there, in its pure form, in a work of non-fiction,
The Mirror of the Sea
, a collection of pieces on maritime topics: the techniques of mooring and setting sail, anchors, sails, cargo weights and so on.
(The Mirror of the Sea
has been translated into Italian—for the first time, I believe, and in beautiful Italian prose—by Piero Jahier, who must have had enormous fun, as well as agonising difficulty, translating all those nautical terms: it appears in volumes 10-11 of the complete works being published by Bompiani, which also contains the magnificent tales of
’Twixt Land and Sea
, which has already appeared in the same translation in Einaudi’s Universale series.)

Who else but Conrad in these pieces has ever been able to write about the tools of his trade with such technical precision, such passionate enthusiasm, and in such an unrhetorical, unpretentious way? Rhetoric only
comes out at the end with his exaltation of British naval supremacy, and his reevocation of Nelson and Trafalgar, but this also highlights a practical and polemical basis to these essays, which is always present when Conrad discusses the sea and ships, just when one thinks he is absorbed in contemplation of metaphysical profundities: he constantly stressed his regret for the passing of the ethos of the age of sailing ships, always rehearsed the myth of the British Navy whose age was now on the wane.

This was a typically English polemic, because Conrad was English, chose to be English and succeeded: if he is not situated in an English social context, if one considers him merely an ‘illustrious visitor’ in that literature, as Virginia Woolf defined him, one cannot give an exact historical definition of the man. That he was born in Poland, called Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzieniowski, and possessed a ‘Slav soul’ and a complex about abandoning his native land, and resembled Dostoevsky despite hating him for nationalistic reasons, are facts on which much has been written but which are not really of much interest to us. Conrad decided to enter the British Merchant Marine at the age of twenty, and English literature at the age of twenty-seven. He did not assimilate the family traditions of English society, nor its culture or religion (he was always averse to the latter); but he integrated with English society through the Merchant Navy, and made it his own past, the place where he felt mentally at home, and had nothing but contempt for whatever seemed to him contrary to that ethos. It was that quintessentially English personage, the gentleman captain, that he wanted to represent in his own life and in his creative works, though in widely differing incarnations, ranging from the heroic, romantic, quixotic and exaggerated to the over-ambitious, flawed and tragic. From Mac Whirr, the impassive captain in
Typhoon
, to the protagonist of
Lord Jim
who tries to escape being obsessed by a single act of cowardice.

Lord Jim goes from being a captain to being a merchant: and here we find an even wider range of Europeans trafficking in the Tropics and ending up as outcasts there. These too were types Conrad had known during his naval experience in the Malaysian archipelago. The aristocratic etiquette of the maritime officer and the degradation of the failed adventurers are the two poles between which his human sympathies oscillate.

This fascination for pariahs, vagabonds and madmen is also evident in a writer far removed from Conrad, but more or less a contemporary, Maksim Gorki. And it is curious to note that an interest in this kind of humanity,
so steeped in irrational, decadent complacency (an interest that was shared by a whole epoch of world literature, down to Knut Hamsun and Sherwood Anderson) was the terrain in which the British conservative as much as the revolutionary Russian found the roots of their robust and rigorous conception of man.