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_ "NOSTROMO" is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels
which belong to the period following upon the publication of the
"Typhoon" volume of short stories.
I don't mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending
change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my
writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in
that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with
the theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the
inspiration; a phenomenon for which I can not in any way be held
responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that
after finishing the last story of the "Typhoon" volume it seemed
somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.
This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little
time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint
for "Nostromo" came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote
completely destitute of valuable details.
As a matter of fact in 1875 or '6, when very young, in the West
Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land
were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who
was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of
silver, somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the
troubles of a revolution.
On the face of it this was something of a feat. But I heard no
details, and having no particular interest in crime qua crime I
was not likely to keep that one in my mind. And I forgot it till
twenty-six or seven years afterwards I came upon the very thing
in a shabby volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop. It
was the life story of an American seaman written by himself with
the assistance of a journalist. In the course of his wanderings
that American sailor worked for some months on board a schooner,
the master and owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard
in my very young days. I have no doubt of that because there
could hardly have been two exploits of that peculiar kind in the
same part of the world and both connected with a South American
revolution.
The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver,
and this, it seems, only because he was implicitly trusted by his
employers, who must have been singularly poor judges of
character. In the sailor's story he is represented as an
unmitigated rascal, a small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of
mean appearance, and altogether unworthy of the greatness this
opportunity had thrust upon him. What was interesting was that he
would boast of it openly.
He used to say: "People think I make a lot of money in this
schooner of mine. But that is nothing. I don't care for that.
Now and then I go away quietly and lift a bar of silver. I must
get rich slowly--you understand."
There was also another curious point about the man. Once in the
course of some quarrel the sailor threatened him: "What's to
prevent me reporting ashore what you have told me about that
silver?"
The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He actually
laughed. "You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me
you will get a knife stuck in your back. Every man, woman, and
child in that port is my friend. And who's to prove the lighter
wasn't sunk? I didn't show you where the silver is hidden. Did
I? So you know nothing. And suppose I lied? Eh?"
Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness of that
impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode
takes about three pages of his autobiography. Nothing to speak
of; but as I looked them over, the curious confirmation of the
few casual words heard in my early youth evoked the memories of
that distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so
venturesome, so interesting; bits of strange coasts under the
stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, men's passions in the
dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown dim. . . . Perhaps,
perhaps, there still was in the world something to write about.
Yet I did not see anything at first in the mere story. A rascal
steals a large parcel of a valuable commodity--so people say.
It's either true or untrue; and in any case it has no value in
itself. To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not
appeal to me, because my talents not running that way I did not
think that the game was worth the candle. It was only when it
dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not
necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of
character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes
of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of
a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco,
with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute
witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men
short-sighted in good and evil.
Such are in very truth the obscure origins of "Nostromo"--the
book. From that moment, I suppose, it had to be. Yet even then I
hesitated, as if warned by the instinct of self-preservation from
venturing on a distant and toilsome journey into a land full of
intrigues and revolutions. But it had to be done.
It took the best part of the years 1903-4 to do; with many
intervals of renewed hesitation, lest I should lose myself in the
ever-enlarging vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in
my knowledge of the country. Often, also, when I had thought
myself to a standstill over the tangled-up affairs of the
Republic, I would, figuratively speaking, pack my bag, rush away
from Sulaco for a change of air and write a few pages of the
"Mirror of the Sea." But generally, as I've said before, my
sojourn on the Continent of Latin America, famed for its
hospitality, lasted for about two years. On my return I found
(speaking somewhat in the style of Captain Gulliver) my family
all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the fuss was all
over, and our small boy considerably grown during my absence.
My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of
course, my venerated friend, the late Don Jose Avellanos,
Minister to the Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc., in his
impartial and eloquent "History of Fifty Years of Misrule." That
work was never published--the reader will discover why--and I am
in fact the only person in the world possessed of its contents. I
have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest meditation, and
I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to myself,
and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point out
that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the
sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is
closely related to actuality; either throwing a light on the
nature of current events or affecting directly the fortunes of
the people of whom I speak.
As to their own histories I have tried to set them down,
Aristocracy and People, men and women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon,
bandit and politician, with as cool a hand as was possible in the
heat and clash of my own conflicting emotions. And after all this
is also the story of their conflicts. It is for the reader to say
how far they are deserving of interest in their actions and in
the secret purposes of their hearts revealed in the bitter
necessities of the time. I confess that, for me, that time is the
time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities. And in my
gratitude I must mention here Mrs. Gould, "the first lady of
Sulaco," whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr.
Monygham, and Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Material
Interests whom we must leave to his Mine--from which there is no
escape in this world.
About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially
contrasted men, both captured by the silver of the San Tome Mine,
I feel bound to say something more.
I did not hesitate to make that central figure an Italian. First
of all the thing is perfectly credible: Italians were swarming
into the Occidental Province at the time, as anybody who will
read further can see; and secondly, there was no one who could
stand so well by the side of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the
Idealist of the old, humanitarian revolutions. For myself I
needed there a Man of the People as free as possible from his
class-conventions and all settled modes of thinking. This is not
a side snarl at conventions. My reasons were not moral but
artistic. Had he been an Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get
into local politics. But Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader
in a personal game. He does not want to raise himself above the
mass. He is content to feel himself a power--within the People.
But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I received the
inspiration for him in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor.
Those who have read certain pages of mine will see at once what I
mean when I say that Dominic, the padrone of the Tremolino, might
under given circumstances have been a Nostromo. At any rate
Dominic would have understood the younger man perfectly--if
scornfully. He and I were engaged together in a rather absurd
adventure, but the absurdity does not matter. It is a real
satisfaction to think that in my very young days there must,
after all, have been something in me worthy to command that man's
half-bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. Many of
Nostromo's speeches I have heard first in Dominic's voice. His
hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes roaming the horizon from
within the monkish hood shadowing his face, he would utter the
usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: "Vous autres
gentilhommes!" in a caustic tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like
Nostromo! "You hombres finos!" Very much like Nostromo. But
Dominic the Corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from
which my Nostromo is free; for Nostromo's lineage had to be more
ancient still. He is a man with the weight of countless
generations behind him and no parentage to boast of. . . . Like
the People.
In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence
and generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly
vanity, in the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful
devotion with something despairing as well as desperate in its
impulses, he is a Man of the People, their very own unenvious
force, disdaining to lead but ruling from within. Years
afterwards, grown older as the famous Captain Fidanza, with a
stake in the country, going about his many affairs followed by
respectful glances in the modernized streets of Sulaco, calling
on the widow of the cargador, attending the Lodge, listening in
unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the
enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the
trusted, the wealthy comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his
moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a Man
of the People. In his mingled love and scorn of life and in the
bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying betrayed
he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the People,
their undoubted Great Man--with a private history of his own.
One more figure of those stirring times I would like to mention:
and that is Antonia Avellanos--the "beautiful Antonia." Whether
she is a possible variation of Latin-American girlhood I wouldn't
dare to affirm. But, for me, she is. Always a little in the
background by the side of her father (my venerated friend) I hope
she has yet relief enough to make intelligible what I am going to
say. Of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the
Occidental Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my
memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the Aristocrat and
Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the New Era,
the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and
daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she
is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the
heart of a trifler.
If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to
see all these changes) it would be Antonia. And the true reason
for that--why not be frank about it?--the true reason is that I
have modelled her on my first love. How we, a band of tallish
schoolboys, the chums of her two brothers, how we used to look up
to that girl just out of the schoolroom herself, as the
standard-bearer of a faith to which we all were born but which
she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching hope! She
had perhaps more glow and less serenity in her soul than Antonia,
but she was an uncompromising Puritan of patriotism with no taint
of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only
one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her
scathing criticism of my levities--very much like poor Decoud--or
stand the brunt of her austere, unanswerable invective. She did
not quite understand--but never mind. That afternoon when I came
in, a shrinking yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I
received a hand-squeeze that made my heart leap and saw a tear
that took my breath away. She was softened at the last as though
she had suddenly perceived (we were such children still!) that I
was really going away for good, going very far away--even as far
as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the darkness of
the Placid Gulf.
That's why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the "beautiful
Antonia" (or can it be the Other?) moving in the dimness of the
great cathedral, saying a short prayer at the tomb of the first
and last Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in
filial devotion before the monument of Don Jose Avellanos, and,
with a lingering, tender, faithful glance at the
medallion-memorial to Martin Decoud, going out serenely into the
sunshine of the Plaza with her upright carriage and her white
head; a relic of the past disregarded by men awaiting impatiently
the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of more Revolutions.
But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand perfectly
well at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the
Magnificent Capataz, the Man of the People, freed at last from
the toils of love and wealth, there was nothing more for me to do
in Sulaco.
Joseph Conrad
October, 1917. _
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