Under western eyes
David Crane
IN SEARCH OF CONRAD by Gavin Young Hutchinson, £17.99, pp. 304
on't speak to me of Monmouth', Tennyson is reported saying on a visit to Lyme: 'Show me the steps from which Louisa Musgrove fell!' Gavin Young can go one better. He will show you the spot Where Lord Jim is buried.
'The writer, Lord Jim?'
'Well,' I said, `he was a character in Joseph Conrad's novel of that name. . . The man who was the original Lord Jim — the real Lord Jim — is buried here. At least I hope so.
Mr de Souza had not read Lord Jim, but he remembered now that he had seen the feature film of the novel:
'Who was the actor now?'
'Peter O'Toole, I answered.
'Peter O'Toole! Now, we know what we're looking for — the grave of Peter O'Toole! We'll try all the harder to find the tomb, Mr Young!' With renewed vigour we set about clearing grass and shrubs. And suddenly it was all over. There it was, calf-deep in grass and needing to be swept: the grave of Lord Jim. Augustine Podmorc Williams Born 22nd May 1852 Died 17th April 1916 `Thy Will he Done'
There must be a thousand such graves in the great London cemeteries, survivors of Lucknow or the retreat from Kabul, Company Men and maverick colonial bishops, planters, adventurers and rubber traders, the rootless romance of their lives Shrunk away to the obscurity of some half- fashionable West End address and a forgotten plot in Kensal Green. Conrad himself lies in a Canterbury graveyard but for Augustine Podmore Williams there could be no England or obscurity. Pilloried by the courts and immortalised as Lord
the man who abandoned a thousand Pilgrims to their fate on the Jeddah was buried where he lived, among the whispers and ghosts that brought Gavin Young to Sing ap- ore's snake-infested Bidadari
cemetery. Williams's grave is just one stop on a search that takes Young from Singapore to Bangkok, from northern Java to the east coast of Borneo and down again through the hidden reefs of the Makassar Strait.
`1)
You can cross half of Holland and never lose sight of this part of the world, walk down any number of Timorstraats and Celebeslaans proclaiming its Dutch past, but for Gavin Young it only ever belonged to one man. These are Conrad's islands and Conrad's seas. The entrance to the Baka Strait marks the final resting place of the Palestine. Pulau Laut is Axel Heist's Samburan, the islands at the head of the Gulf of Siam where a naked figure emerged from the blackness of the water in The Secret Sharer to announce that he had killed a man.
'Would you put your reasons for wanting to see the entry for Mr Williams in writ- ing?', an official asks. 'State exactly what you want it for and how you propose to use it.' It can't have been an easy demand to cope with, one might just as well ask Patrick Leigh Fermor what he thinks he's up to swimming around Cape Matapan looking for the entrance to Hades. But if there is an answer — an exact answer — then I suppose it is this book. Part journal and part historical and literary detection, it is above all a homage to the imaginative power of a great novelist, to a writer's ability to create and sustain his own world. 'One never questions his characters or his incidents', Conrad himself remarked of Flaubert; 'one would rather doubt one's own existence.' The same faith lies behind Gavin Young's search. He is far too good a traveller to ignore what is in front of him, but it is a landscape that takes its imagina- tive colour and romance from the past. Show him an oil rig burning in the darkness and he will see a wooden barque going down in a last blaze of fire. A crack of thunder and he hears the shot that finally ended Lord Jim's life. The effect is sometimes comic — surely not even a war correspondent can think of Conrad's Freya with an Australian cargo boat bearing down out of the darkness on him? — but there is a wonderfully self-indulgent and contagious zest about the whole business that is in the end the only answer anyone needs to that official's 'Why?'
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