I once read Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, but I
would probably never have thought of reading his Typhoon, if Christian
Bobin, in one of his last books, “L’homme-joie”, had not given an arresting
echo of it.
Bobin is a compulsive reader. Fortunately for us, he
is also a prolific writer. Because, for him, the world as we experience it –
overwhelmed, hyper-connected, stressed – is unbearable. He desires – he even needs – the invisible world, that
books, music, love, prayer… allow us to approach. “To write, says Bobin,
is like drawing a door on an impassable wall, and then opening it”.
“L’homme-joie” is enchanting. At one point, it makes
reference to Typhoon in a
chapter entitled “La gueule du lion” (The Lion’s Mouth). Bobin first lays his
cards on the table: “My idea of life is a book, and my idea of a book is a
draught of ice-cold water like the one coming out of the mouth of a lion
fountain on a mountain road in the Juras, one summer. I was in one of these joyful
penal colonies that one calls ‘summer camp’. I was left there for centuries,
integrated into a small troop of singing killers, my peers, when in the middle
of a forced march under a broiling sun there appeared the fountain belching out
its foam of light. I rushed under the lion's mouth, opened my own and swallowed
an ocean of cold water. The water rushed into my body right up to the heart
where it extinguished the fire of abandonment that ravaged it. Decades later, I
still remember the mystical comfort given by that icy water. Whenever I open a
book, I look for the lion's mouth.”
Then, almost without transition, off he goes. “Three
days and three nights aboard this old tub tortured by the storm (...) Three
days and three nights on this boat, to feel my heart sinking into my chest, to
slide into the abyss of a fear with black eyes…” And we, readers, we are
embarked as he is, feeling “Tons
of black water exploding in the hold of the brain, the end of plans and dreams…” The chapter then ends then abruptly: “ –
What’s wrong with you? – Nothing, I just finished reading Conrad’s Typhoon. It took me three days and three
nights to read it. – Is it good? – I cannot answer your question. A book is
light or it is nothing at all. It’s task is to switch on some light in the
palaces of our desert brains. Writing knows more than death, I'm sure. I paid
the price to learn this, three days, three nights”.
So, what about Typhoon? There is, of course,
the masterful writing of an author who, for nearly twenty years was at first a
sailor. The descriptions of the raging nature of the China Sea, are
breathtaking, realistic and poetic at the same time. “The wind had thrown
its weight on the ship, trying to pin her down amongst the seas. They made a
clean breach over her, as over a deep-swimming log; and the gathered weight of
crashes menaced monstrously from afar. The breakers flung out of the night with
a ghostly light on their crests – the light of sea-foam that in a ferocious,
boiling-up pale flash showed upon the slender body of the ship the toppling
rush, the downfall, and the seething mad scurry of each wave...”
But the most impressive aspect is elsewhere, in the
heart, the body and the soul of some of the characters in the story. It is
there that the storm brings out the very depths of their personality, their
humanity. There is Jukes, the chief mate, a quibbler, reluctantly obeying what
seems to him unreasonable. And Mr. Rout, the chief engineer, experienced,
unwavering in his duty. “He moved, climbing high up, disappearing low down,
with a restless, purposeful industry, and when he stood still, holding the
guard-rail in front of the starting-gear, he would keep glancing to the right
at the steam-gauge, at the water-gauge, fixed upon the white wall in the light
of a swaying lamp.” And, finally, Captain MacWhirr, in whom some critics
have seen Conrad’s self-portrait. A taciturn, placid, apparently insignificant
man: “Captain MacWhirr, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, in
the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his mind: it
presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity; it had no
pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and
unruffled…”
But this man, strong-minded and
unresponsive to the arguments of his chief mate – who suggested avoiding the
typhoon by modifying the ship's course – shows a quiet courage and remarkable
determination. When he gives Jukes the order to face up to the wind, whatever
happens, because “They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run
with the wind”, the mate, for a long time puzzled and irritated by what he
took to be unconsciousness on the part of the Captain, rediscovers, at the
height of the storm, the self-assurance that he had lost: “Yes, sir, said
Jukes, with a flutter of the heart (…) For some reason Jukes experienced an
access of confidence, a sensation that came from outside like a warm breath,
and made him feel equal to every demand. The distant muttering of the darkness
stole into his ears. He noted it unmoved, out of that sudden belief in himself,
as a man safe in a shirt of mail would watch a point”.
Besides his composure and his tenacity, which
eventually save the ship, MacWhirr shows his humanity and his sense of justice.
Coolies housed in the steerage during the crossing, fought, at the height of
the storm, to recover a few dollars that had escaped from their trunks, shaken loose and broken open by the waves' battering. The
Captain had sent the crew to seize all the money and to lock up the coolies.
When calm was restored, it was time to gather them and to return their money to
them. In a letter sent to a friend after the events, Jukes writes: “– I
wish, said I, you would let us throw the whole lot of these dollars down to
them and leave them to fight it out amongst themselves, while we get a rest. –
Now you talk wild, Jukes, says he, looking up in his slow way that makes you
ache all over, somehow. We must plan out something that would be fair to all
parties”. And MacWhirr unimpressed by the danger, moves forward bare hands
to the coolies and, with quiet authority, distributes to them what they
deserve. Jukes explains: “It seems that after he had done his thinking he
made that Bun Hin's fellow go down and explain to them the only way they could
get their money back. He told me afterwards that, all the coolies having worked
in the same place and for the same length of time, he reckoned he would be
doing the fair thing by them as near as possible if he shared all the cash we
had picked up equally among the lot…”
By his courage, his determination and his sense of
justice, this apparently “ordinary and irresponsive” Captain held on to the
light of hope throughout the storm. Christian Bobin writes: “Nothing more
than a ring of black water around the ship on which I had embarked without
knowing why (...) And inside the black mass, in its gaping maw, the yellow dot
of trust (…) So we had to embrace the fear with furious eyes, to love it like
good bread, to continue crossing, to lose ground, to lose heart and to continue
anyway, to see the iron filings sky, to see the stars fall like dirty gold
dust, and hear then, at this very moment, at the height of the disaster, we
needed to hear the sweet, peaceful and confident voice, the light yellow voice
that promised to bring the ship to port”. That “light yellow of trust”
certainly evokes captain MacWhirr, according to the description made by Conrad:
“His hair was fair and extremely fine (…) The hair of his face, on the
contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short
to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic
gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks”.
Blessed is he who discovers, in the dark moments of
his life, this “yellow dot of trust”. Isn’t it true that a good man can
change the course of history?
Fiodor
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