'Twixt Land and Sea (1912)

I do like Joseph Conrad. He is a great storyteller. The stories in this volume are engaging and enjoyable as his other works.

The central theme of most of Conrad’s works is the civilized western individual confronting a foreign, less sophisticated culture alone. He produces a very modern character analysis and highlights how a civilised man, removed from his society, regresses to his raw emotions often with tragic consequences.

The common theme in the stories in this particular volume is the central character, alone in a new environment acting as a confidante and extricating himself from a delicate situation.

In the first story - A Smile of Fortune - we accompany a young sea captain on his first commission and on his first visit to this port. He is ignorant of the characters in this port and the way business is conducted here. He is immediately impressed by the first businessmen who makes an extraordinary effort to be the first to meet him, but who is hated by everyone in the town. Very quickly we sense that the sea captain will be taken advantage of. When the sea captain becomes romantically interested in the businessman’s daughter, an intriguing web of motives develops. As the story unravels we learn more of the relationships that develop among westerners living in foreign environments. As the title suggests, the story ends favourably but in quite an unexpected way.

In the second story - The Secret Sharer - again we are with a young sailor on his first commission, feeling very alone on a ship where the crew has been together for some time. Contrary to normal practice, the new captain takes a night watch to be alone with the ship to get it know it better. On this watch a lone swimmer boards the ship and confides that he is running away from a nearby ship where he has killed a man. Why does the captain choose to protect him, to develop devious behaviours to hide is existence, and eventually make decisions that place the safety of the ship at risk when there is no personal gain for him?

The third story - Freya of the Seven Isles – is told by the narrator who is a trusted friend of the central character, the half-caste daughter, on the verge of adulthood, of a Dane living alone on a small, remote island. The father is unable to recognise his daughter’s love for the adventurous English captain who visits regularly, and is overly concerned to maintain good relations with the authorities, represented by the Dutch gunboat captain. When the Dutchman takes a romantic interest in the daughter events turn tragic.

So why the title? It is as if the characters are more themselves and at peace when they are on the sea, but once confined to the land, negative emotions come to the fore. The sea seems to represent the positive qualities of man and their free expression to elevate him, while the land brings out man’s dark side. Our lives are spent finding a path between these two opposing forces, and how successful we are determines our ultimate fate. ( )

'Twixt Land and Sea (1912) is a collection of three short stories by Joseph Conrad. After a hiatus from sea stories Conrad returned to the great blue in this collection, much to the delight of his fans.

"Secret Sharer" is one of Conrad's best short stories in general, and without a doubt the best of the three. Although the action takes place aboard a ship, for the most part it is a symbolic journey of the discovery of self. A young untested Captain is faced with a number of challenges - morally, and as a skilled sailor - and is able to show to himself and the crew that he is a capable captain. In the end it is ambiguous if the Captain made the right choices - was he morally right or wrong in freeing an escaped murderer? Conrad leaves no solid ground to decided if it was the right choice or not, there are good arguments either way. Was it reckless to put the ship in peril by going to close to shore? Was it morally right to free a man who was essentially innocent, in effect choosing humanity over unbending law? The atmosphere of the story is creepy, almost super-natural, but Conrad remains firmly in the ground of realism, yet also employing symbolism in things such as the hat and scorpion. This combination of realism and symbolism is the very definition of Modernism and Conrad was at the forefront.

"Freya of the Seven Isles" is written as a melodrama, but Conrad doesn't follow the rules of the genre, he twists the ending; the evil guy gets away without repercussions, and the good guys pay a steep price for doing the right thing. It's an anti-melodrama. A very dark story and not very satisfying. The implication is that life is not a fairy-tale, stuff happens and no matter how hard we work, life can just turn out bad no matter what we do. I wonder if this sort of fatalism was common in the years leading up to World War I.

"A Smile of Fortune" is essentially the same idea as "Freya" but in reverse, sometimes bad things happen that turn out to be "fortunate". In this story a young man is blackmailed into taking a shipload of potatoes (a seemingly worthless haul), but when he arrives at his destination port, he discovers there is a potato shortage and ends up profiting greatly. The tricked becomes the trickster. In both of these stories the themes of fate and fortune have a long tradition in Medieval literature, making them essentially Romantic works, but with a Modern twist. Like the title suggests, between land and sea, the stories are somewhat of a mixture of styles, hybrid mutts, sort of like Conrad, a Polish expat writing in English.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )