The Devil in Us (2007)

IN MAY 1838, the Tsar Nicholas I, in transit from St Petersburg to Lubeck, caught fire just outside the Baltic port of Travemunde. We must send a courier to the Emperor! an hysterical Russian general cried as the ship began to list. The carriages of the rich were lashed to the deck: his burning as briskly as any. In the melee, a nineteen-year-old student on his way to university in Berlin - a giant of a boy with a disappointingly squeaky voice - offered of the Danish sailors 10,000 roubles to be saved at the expense of others.It not so much his life the young Turgenev trying to save as his freedom. Just at the very moment he unshackled himself from an oppressive mother and a moribund Russian society, fate (or chance) laid him by the heels. When the uproar first began, he playing cards for money in the saloon. As the tables shot across the floor, it dawned on him that for all the poetry he read and all the literary ambitions that buzzed in his head, he could not swim.However badly Turgenev actually behaved - and who does well in such circumstances? - the incident magnified back in St Petersburg as a tale of detestable cowardice, an accusation that dogged him all his life. (Dostoevsky used a version of the incident in The Possessed) It vexing, but it did not disturb by a single ripple Turgenev's famously assured sense of self. Forty-five years after the event took place, he wrote his own account of the fire at sea. Wracked by cancer of the spine and with only a few weeks to live, he characteristically represented this ancient disgrace as farce, though lit by flames fierce enough to redden the sea.His account dictated, for he no longer the power to hold and guide a pen. There is something especially moving in this detail, for the tale being spun by the man he become since being saved, that is, by the supreme story-teller and a literary hero to his times. The incident depicted as farce because at heart all human experience is so.A Fire at Sea almost the last thing Turgenev ever wrote. He died two months later, in September 1883, in a little town outside Paris located on a bend of the Seine where it sweeps north for a while. He carried into posterity as much accumulated love and respect as any writer of the century.As we know, Conrad yet to begin. Conradians will not need to be told where he and what he doing in 1883, but it seems likely the germ of Lord Jim already planted in him. In the introduction to the 1917 edition of the novel he describes how this came about. Speaking of Jim he says: One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by - appealing - significant - under a cloud - perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It for me, with all the sympathy of which I capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was - Conrad concludes, with a sharp and knowing flick of a fist wrapped in silk - one of us.It is this aspect of Lord Jim that has always intrigued me. Somewhere far distant, in the farthest corners of the world, there are implacable fates awaiting a white man. Early on, Conrad identifies two kinds of fellow to be found in the Eastern roadsteads. There are the tough and taciturn, stalking the harbour streets and hotels as if directed by some inner force, those who had preserved an undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. And then there is the majority, those have been afflicted by some inner decay and have lost their way. Figuratively, these are the men who can never go home:They were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short passages, good deck chairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement...We have seen their like in Willem and Metzger, but in Lord Jim we meet the English variant. …