JOSEPH CONRAD: The Secret Sharer

Full context of this review HERE.

My eccentric method of pre-setting a reading voyage through these two anthologies is alone made worthwhile by the synchronous segue as secret sharing between MIMIC by Alan Sillitoe and this Conrad classic (and possibly MASON’S LIFE by Kingsley Amis, too!)…such a mutual synergy making the Conrad seem even more powerful, if that were possible!

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“…it’s to no commander’s advantage to be suspected of ludicrous eccentricities.”

The irony of that is not lost to me. And this substantive work tells not only of a new Captain (the narrator) but also of him as a Captain new to an old ship whose crew are already inured to it, a ship subject to anchor-watch in the Gulf of Siam. You will already know of the late-coming of an effective stowaway, accused of murder, swimming from another ship and luckily finding a side-ladder where our Captain himself is holding anchor-watch, a second self, a secret sharer, a double, a man whose later gift of a shared sun-hat leads our Captain from danger… a telling mythos of man and his ‘nemo’ (see that quote from John Fowles earlier in this review). A man who meets his Koh-ring, for me, a second self to Bowen’s KÔR as well as Conrad’s Gate of Erebus. And the ‘endless gale’ with ‘a sea gone mad’. And the sticking out of a tongue from the Captain Archbold of the second self’s ship Sephora: “He had had terrible weather on the passage out – terrible – terrible – wife aboard, too.” And the playing by the two Proustian selves of hide and seek, as it were, with our Captain’s steward. And the ‘terrifying whiskers’ of our Captain’s First Mate and the ‘whispering’ elsewhere by contrast (“And in the same whisper, as if we two whenever we talked had to say things to each other which were not fit for the world to hear, he added, ‘It’s very wonderful.’”), a whispering by our Captain with his second self, as if whispered sexily to each other, as well as the earlier scorpion in an inkwell left unsolved (Leggatt in the L shaped cabin?)…
And much else.

Below are my choice quotations as meaningful landmarks in the body of this work to steer by, including any elbow-triggers! …

“But what I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself. […] but I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man acts up for himself secretly.”

“…my mind picturing to myself the coming passage through the Malay Archipelago, down the Indian Ocean, and up the Atlantic.”

“…got a sleeping-suit out of my room and, coming back on deck, saw the naked man from the sea sitting on the main-hatch, glimmering white in the darkness, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.”

“It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror.”

“And I knew well enough also that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more. I saw it all going on as though I were myself inside that other sleeping-suit.”

“…the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own grey ghost.”

“….his elbow in the ratlines of the mizzen-rigging…”

“He had turned about meantime; and we, the two strangers on the ship, faced each other in identical attitudes.”

“And then you speaking to me so quietly – as if you had expected me – made me hold on a little longer.”

“There was a sort of curiosity in his eye that I did not like. I don’t know whether the steward had told them that I was ‘queer’ only, or downright drunk, but I know the man meant to have a good look at me.”

“…and all the time the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality, sleeping in that bed, behind that door which faced me as I sat at the head of the table. It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it.”

“I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret sharer of my cabin….”

“That mental feeling of being in two places at once affected me physically as if the mood of secrecy had penetrated my very soul.”

“Sometimes he reclined on the floor, his legs bent, his head sustained on one elbow.”

“Can it be, I asked myself, that he is not visible to other eyes than mine? It was like being haunted.”

“‘Are you going on, sir?’ inquired an unsteady voice at my elbow.”

“‘My God! Where are we?’ It was the mate moaning at my elbow.”