The N. from the "Narcissus" • Joseph Conrad

I’m not really a collector, and apart from books I don’t hoard things. And even with books, I’m not someone who needs to own everything from a series. One exception is the mare classics. These beautiful bibliophile volumes always come with outstanding production values and consistently convince with their content. They’re always classics by major authors with a strong connection to the sea. I’ve never been disappointed here, so I own every book that has appeared in the series so far. Joseph Conrad hasn’t won me over up to now, so I was all the more curious which novel mare would reissue next. Until now I’ve been able to trust them blindly. Whether that also applies to this book—you’ll find out in this review.

On content alone, the book reads like a perfect fit for me. The Narcissus lies in the harbour off Bombay in India and sets out for home, back to England, via the Cape of Good Hope. Also coming aboard is James Wait, a Black sailor. The voyage begins, and it quickly becomes clear that James Wait is ill. It doesn’t take long before he draws the ship’s crew to himself and throws the harmony on board thoroughly out of balance.

The book opens with the crew first coming aboard, and Conrad evokes the scene atmospherically, with an eye for detail: the individual seamen, how the first hours on board pass, what the atmosphere is like, and how the voyage begins. It shows very quickly that Conrad knew exactly what he was talking about and must himself have been very familiar with seafaring. The moment when the Narcissus sets sail is also wonderfully described. Just as I’ve come to expect from the mare classics, this book carries a proper gust of the sea, and as a reader I immediately felt that sensation that overcomes me with every volume in the series. It’s very similar to reading the novel Ned Myers; or, A Life Before the Mast. That too is a truly fine novel about nineteenth-century seafaring, and this new book about the voyage of the Narcissus is correspondingly dense in atmosphere, with an ever-present sea, with descriptions of nature, with scenes of light and weather that sprang vividly to life before my mind’s eye.

I often found Conrad’s style very poetic. He crafts some long, beautifully formed sentences—especially when describing the sky, the sea, and the overall mood. I really enjoyed that. Here’s an example of the kind of sentence that’s sprinkled throughout:

The ship began to dip into a south-westerly swell, and the sleek, bright sky of the low latitudes took on, day by day above our heads, a harder sheen: quivering and pallid it arched over the ship like a colossal steel dome in which the deep voice of freshening storm-winds resounded. (p. 64)

Conrad also depicts the seamen wonderfully—the different types you find aboard. The book conveys the soul of ordinary sailors who toiled day in, day out, braved every kind of weather, and did very hard work. Conrad erects a monument to them here, and I especially liked the old sailor Singleton. He characterises him beautifully, with all the virtues and weaknesses of a person who has spent his entire life at sea. And he does it with powerful language, in an abstracted way that gives these people a stage—admirable despite their simple, rough-hewn manner.

In truth they had been men who had known hard work, privation, violence, and degradation, but not fear, and had never felt in their hearts any malicious desire. Men difficult to lead but easy to inspire; men of few words, but man enough to hold in low esteem, deep in their hearts, the sentimental voices that lamented the hardness of their fate. […] They were the everlastingly young children of the mysterious sea. […] they were worn out, bowed, and patient like stone caryatids upholding through the night the lighted halls of a splendid and glorious edifice. They are no more—and it does not matter. Sea and earth are not faithful to their children. A truth, a faith, a generation of men passes—and is forgotten—and it does not matter. (pp. 35–36)

At times the novel feels like an adventure story, but it often loses a lot of pace and Conrad goes very deep into detail. He slowly unfolds, with comparisons, the thoughts and motives of the individual figures. I often found that a bit long-winded. As hinted above, he also writes wonderful sentences—poetic, with a pleasant verbal melody. At the same time, his phrasing often feels unwieldy, and I never fully slipped into an easy reading flow. What Conrad writes has great depth, but it’s not easily accessible and demands a certain level of attention to follow and fully grasp his trains of thought. The pleasure of beautiful sentences, then, comes at a price.

The overtly adventurous elements, by contrast, I found very successful—they really gripped me. I didn’t always find the characters’ motives entirely consistent, though. Perhaps what’s described in the book is possible; I consider it rather unlikely. The underlying causes for their actions are coherent and comprehensible, however. Perhaps it’s on me—or the temporal context. I never quite tuned into Conrad’s mental world; I noticed that again and again while reading. Even so, I appreciated the high quality of the writing. I also sensed that much lies hidden in the story. The book has something dark, dystopian about it that reminded me a bit of Kafka, though Conrad doesn’t conjure quite so bleak an atmosphere here.

The true protagonists of the novel are the sea and the ship, the Narcissus. And it’s precisely this secret lead role the sea plays that explains why this book belongs in the mare classics series—for it shares that trait with several other novels in the line, and it’s what I love every time anew. Even if Conrad’s message didn’t fully reach me, these maritime impressions are exactly what made the read worthwhile for me. The sailors are quartered in the forecastle, a superstructure with a slight camber so the water runs off better. It looks like a back, which is why the quarters are called the “forecastle” or “fo’c’sle.” You learn such details in the book, and the afterword with explanations is very helpful for the nautical terminology. This love of detail lends the book great authenticity.

I found the informative afterword by the translator Mirko Bonné very interesting. There we learn that Conrad himself spent more than twenty years at sea—as ship’s boy, steward, second officer, and later as captain. He travelled all the continents, was on the coasts of Africa, China, and South America; he was in the Caribbean; rounded the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn; passed through the Suez Canal; and served on a river steamer in the Congo. In short: Conrad was a dyed-in-the-wool seaman. In 1884 he actually shipped out on an English clipper called the Narcissus, and that too was the vessel’s final voyage before being broken up. Most of the characters are indeed modelled on members of the Narcissus’s crew (Singleton foremost), but Conrad made clear even then that, while the novel has ties to reality, it is conceived as purely fictional. The model for James Wait was not part of the Narcissus’s crew but belonged to another ship with which Conrad, as in the book, returned from Bombay to England. After more than twenty years on countless voyages, Conrad contracted tropical fever and had to give up his seafaring career.

Joseph Conrad’s real name was Józef Teodor Nałęcz Konrad Korzeniowski. He was born in 1857 in Poland, the son of landed gentry. The Nigger of the “Narcissus” first appeared in 1897 and counts among Conrad’s early works. A few years later came Heart of Darkness, one of his best-known novellas. Once Conrad had gained recognition, his novel about the Narcissus was widely read because it was short and marketed as an adventure story—though in my view that label only applies to a limited extent.

The first edition appeared in 1897 under the title The Children of the Sea. Only many years later was Conrad able to enforce his intended title for the U.S. edition, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. I’m not surprised that the publisher mare didn’t dare to translate the original title accordingly, and in the text, with two exceptions, the word in question is consistently rendered differently (usually as “Black man”). I asked myself whether that’s good or bad. Racism in classics doesn’t bother me because I do value receiving a text as unaltered as possible. I’m not a racist, and in my view it’s exceedingly unlikely that such reading would turn anyone into one. I also found the story itself has little to do with racism. A Black man in the fo’c’sle had no friends at that time, in the age of colonisation. James Wait does, however, and even if his behaviour gives him a special status among the crew, his skin colour is rarely the issue. Conrad argues that he wanted to reflect seamen’s argot and deliver as authentic a text as possible. After all, the novel is set in the colonial era. In the first edition he couldn’t, however, carry through the word “nigger”, since the publisher feared that the predominantly white readership wouldn’t exactly care to read about Black people. Overtly discriminatory racism was not the publisher’s problem then. Krege translated the novel in 1994 and used the word “Bimbo” instead of “nigger”, which also doesn’t really fit. Mirko Bonné argues that translation is always a trade-off, and that the word “nigger” gained intensified force through the Nazi era that doesn’t correspond to the original text. I wondered how the reaction would have been had mare stuck with the original title. I do think their chosen solution is good: every place in the text where Bonné translates the term differently is marked in the notes. I can well imagine Conrad didn’t have racist intentions here but was aiming at the rough sailors’ speech, which, according to Bonné, is at times truly hard to translate. In Germany in 2020—with its primary export of moral paternalism and its excessive political correctness—you obviously can’t get away with “nigger” in a title; even Pippi Longstocking’s “Negerkönig” has become a problem.

The edition has the series’ usual high quality, and I greatly credit mare with not tweaking production and design in favour of profit maximisation. They always come with a very sturdy cloth binding, sewn signatures, and high-quality paper. I really liked the colour of the ribbon marker; it harmonises beautifully with the binding and endpapers. The typeface is top-notch as well. Overall there are prettier volumes in the series—the cover image here looks a bit too modern for my taste—but it’s a book made for the ages, so solid and high-quality that it will likely last the next hundred years with ease. In the hand it’s a pleasure again, and you can tell at a glance from the photos that it’s simply top-tier.

Conclusion: Joseph Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the “Narcissus” is a book that captivated me with its breath of the sea, its atmospheric scenes of seafaring, and its poetic language. Conrad’s style doesn’t entirely reach me, and the novel’s significance didn’t land with the force I sensed hidden within it. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful book—for its design, high quality, fine adventure elements, depth, and the ever-present sea. I love the mare classics, and once again you can buy with confidence here.

Book information: The N. of the “Narcissus” • Joseph Conrad • mare Verlag • 256 pages • ISBN 9783866486126