Masters of the Short Story #4: Stevenson, Maupassant, and Conrad

Stevenson - The Sire de Maletroit's Door 

Reading Stevenson is such fun, and unlike most of the authors I've been covering I have something of a previous acquaintance with him.  As one introduction once observed, he's an author who has survived effortlessly into the movie era because his actions remains in the action.  That is to say, his outlook has a kind of consonance with how William James described the Greeks:

"The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not yet made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility.  Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwell on in their classic literature.  They would would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within proper bounds of lachrymosity."

While they certainly think and reflect, Stevenson has no patience for introspection for its own sake in his characters.  It is pondering with a purpose and must be translated into action to be meaningful.  If they are to debate whether one should choose love or death, it is because that option is before them, not because they are sitting around a coffee table and think it great philosophical sport.  This means that something is always happening in his stories, and I think that this often causes him to be underappreciated as anything other than a deft adventure writer.  He is that, but underneath it lies his ideals, what the editors of my own collection describe as his, "code of behavior which moves men to act nobly and unselfishly and with dignity."  It is what he felt deeply, and as a result felt deeply constricted by the advent of industrial urban society.  His characters have to exist in other places and other times because his time and place, and our time and place, are quite deadening to the manly heroic spirit.  To that end, while Stevenson isn't explicitly a moralist his stories are full of events which give the opportunity for his characters to make the right choice as a man (while women do feature in his stories, they are always auxiliary).  Which brings me to the story itself.

First, to reiterate the beginning, it really is just a fun story.  It's got a good pace, quick characterization, and an interesting resolution.  But to keep with my focus above, it also fits into Stevenson's outlook.  We're introduced to Denis de Beaulieu.  He's 22 in 1429; "lads were early formed in that warfaring epoch; and when one has been in a pitched battle and a dozen raids, has killed one's man in an honourable fashion, and knows a thing or two of strategy and mankind, a certain swagger in the gait is surely to be pardoned."  A young male, full of many of the right virtues, appropriate for his time, but prone to some (minor) errors.  It is perhaps why he was a little foolish in going out at night in an unfamiliar town, the story noting that he should have perhaps not done so, or having done so returned before the light went down.  Yet the fact remains, as in so many Stevenson tales, that this critical adventure in his life would not have happened if he had simply played it safe.  

Now, having taken this step, his subsequent journey through the darkened town is one of real danger.  Stevenson doesn't tell us Denis imagines that the town is unfamiliar at night or that he might encounter trouble, it's that Denis truly doesn't know the way and his status as a foreign soldier makes him a target.  But he does have a head on his shoulders, and rather than shudder at his own fear he takes the necessary precautions, scoping out squares and intersections before crossing them and, knowing that his lodgings lie at the top of a ridge, keep himself going up rather than down.  When he does misstep and is detected by the night patrol he is given a choice: he could give himself up to them or take his life into his own hands and flee.  He chooses the latter.  Stevenson cannot conscience meekly submitting to the patrol's authority for no other reason than it is an authority, especially when doing so has such a dubious outcome.  Better to retain one's autonomy to act properly than submit out of fear of the consequences.

Which emphasizes that when Denis does become trapped by the elderly Maletroit he still refuses to bow.  Perhaps he can't hack his way out of the door, but he won't let the old man dictate the terms of their engagement, a position he maintains even when the physical entrapment becomes a mental one: Denis will be killed if he does not do as he is told.  This is a greater danger even than being lost at night, for it threatens to rob him of his agency via his own fear.  But he overcomes that as well, showing with full flair how a generous, heroic spirit should act.

"It is a small love that shies at a little pride."

But the last reversal in his decision is also a Stevenson comment: be forceful, be daring, but don't be bullheaded or stubborn or reckless.  There's a difference, and it's a recurrent theme in his stories that a proper man needs to know it.  As for the resolution, I think it would be too much to read any irony into it; it's a very clever, snappy demonstration of the elderly manipulation, but also that Denis got his just reward.  If he had not resisted the old man then he would have not won her heart, but had he been too insistent he would have been hanged.  Maletroit Sr. got the good nephew he wanted with his little ploy and Denis got a good wife.  As such, it rather nicely toes the line between bland moralizing and a certain sense of realistic karma, and I'll give it a pass if for nothing else than the sense of satisfaction I had on reading it.

Anyway, that was mostly about Stevenson rather than the story, but it is nice to actually read something by somebody I know a lot more about since it gives the work so much more dimension than it would otherwise.

Maupassant - Father and Son

In contrast to Stevenson, I had never heard of this author before.  The editors describe him as a Flaubert disciple, but with a kind of godless misanthropy all his own.  This one sample wasn't enough to get a proper taste of his full view, but I admit what I had a very hard time overcoming was his blatant misogyny.

A brief summary of the plot: Hautot Sr and Hautot Jr live together happily, though perhaps the son is overly subservient to his powerful, domineering father.  Hautot Sr wounds himself in a hunting accident and on his deathbed confesses to Hautot Jr that he's been retaining a mistress for these last six years, having made a promise to his deceased wife that he wouldn't remarry, but admitting with full carnal implication, "Well, you understand.  Man is not made to live alone..."  He exacts from Hautot Jr a promise to notify his mistress Donet of his passing and to provide for her.  The son, though finding his moral sense outraged, goes dutifully locates her and gives her the news.  She is devastated but still hospitably has him stay after she recovers herself, and he learns that she has a child by his father.  At the end of the stay she invites him back; he is reluctant but overcome.  By the end of the second visit he is feeling quite at home and when she invites him back a third time he is happy to accept.  The story ends there, but the future is obvious: she's found a new lover.  Which this would be fine if it were just a general critique of humanity; the big, burly father idiotically got himself killed, the son's spineless morals come to nothing in his likely future, and the sins of the former will be inherited by the latter in a continuing cycle.  But nonetheless, it feels like there's a particular blame laid on the women.  If the first wife hadn't exacted such a jealous promise, the next woman would have been a wife rather than a mistress:

"All the morality we possess, which lies buried at the bottom of our emotions through centuries of hereditary instruction, all that he [Hautot Jr] had been taught since he had learned his catechism about creatures of evil life, the instinctive contempt which every man entertains toward them, even though he may marry one of them... rose up within him"

Um... I'm sorry, I don't entertain an instinctive contempt for women?  Or later, after Donet composes herself hearing the news, she "listened to his story now, perceiving with a woman's keen sensibility, all the sudden changes of fortune which his narrative implied."  Yes, she was genuinely saddened by losing Hautot Sr.... but soon she is more worried about her situation, and "the practical instinct of the housewife, accustomed to think of everything, revived in the young woman's breast."  It is a phrase that is offered before she serves Hautot Jr food, and it is quite bitter - for while it plainly indicates that she is thinking of his hunger, she is thinking more deeply about beginning to ensnare him too.  That he is stupid and docile is his own curse, but it is woman who takes advantage of the weakness of men.

I would be willing to grant all this under the umbrella of general misanthropy if again it weren't for a few of these phrases that seem to just make the entire story pivot around the manipulation by women.  It's not even that I think what he observes isn't true in some sense, that one of the principle modes of interaction between the sexes is trading resources for sex, and so naturally when one supplier goes out of business you look for another vendor.  But there's just this edge to it, this feeling like Maupassant considers the male failing to be a kind of passive weakness but the female one to be active avarice, that I just had a hard time stomaching.

Anyway, I was going to write on some of its positive attributes but honestly I'd just be giving it generic praise.  It's in a handpicked compendium so of course it's not bereft of artistic merit and it's not like I particularly resent it.  I just instinctively reject his perspective, whether about humanity in general or women in particular, and that is primarily what remains in my memory rather than the craftsmanship.

Conrad - An Outpost of Progress

[Note: I'm not happy with this.  My first attempt to grasp it was simply wrong about Conrad, my second too vicious in a way that doesn't match my outlook.  I'm trying to find the right tone, but when the subject is "human nature" it is so very hard to capture it properly: that part of civilization is overcoming baseness, and part of baseness is fear, and that it is only a facsimile of civilization to operate only out of fear.]

Whew, this was Conrad guns blazing.  I recall once reading a fascinating foreword to a Stevenson book that these two writers were in a similar "vein", one that started with Defoe in Robinson Crusoe: whereas many great authors look at their society from the inside, these men endeavor to look at it from without.  That's the proper perspective in their view, and to do that we must once again go on an "adventure".

"For days the two pioneers of trade and progress would look on their empty courtyard in the vibrating brilliance of vertical sunshine."

And boy does Conrad spare no sentiment for civilization.  But before I go there, I do want to pause on this line.  "Vertical sunshine."  What a strange phrase I can yet perfectly visualize; it's like how I've never forgotten the beach scene in The Stranger.  There's a kind of airless that belies something else missing.  I try to imagine such a story happening at the poles, for instance, and while the darkness and claustrophobia could produce dementia, there is a quality all its own to the tropical variety.  This enlightening little episode could have happened nowhere else, which if Stevenson would have used it to reveal how we should act, Conrad rather wants to say how he thinks we (in the form of the two white managers of the trading station) would act:

They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. 

The fact that I quote this here is evidence that it stuck with me, if at least for its absolutely uncompromising position.  Here is the progenitor of all the later bloodless assertions that society is just a ruse, a belief usually asserted while still attending cocktail parties.  And in its clarity there is a challenge that makes me want to take it up: is this, is, "Kayerts in desperation made a blind rush, head low, like a cornered pig would do..." an accurate summary of it all?

[And unfortunately, I need to go get ready for the day and collect ants.  I also need to think longer on this, for while sometimes as I write I find myself coming to the conclusions in the process, I was pondering this story into the night and I find I'm still not done digesting my rebuttal.]

 

Hrm, I've had another ~24 hours and still struggling with how to begin.  Perhaps with a Clark quote, since I love them so:

"The contrast between [the Apollo and the African mask] means something.  It means that at certain epochs man has felt conscious of something about himself - body and spirit - which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection." - Civilisation

Conrad comes in the latter half of the 19th century, and it is a peculiar time, especially in England.  There's just... so much hypocrisy, but peculiarly for the right reasons, if such a thing can be.  What I mean by that is that the expectations of behavior have outrun the pace of reality, when we expect more out of people but the slow wheel of civilization has not caught up.  There has come into public consciousness the idea that the slave, the poor, the native, the infidel should not be mistreated, but not yet the actuality.  War and imperialism continue as before, yet there is increasingly a need to justify them, to explain why the ruling of other peoples is for their own good (rationalizations were never required in previous empires).  And in the realm of public morals, you have a kind of strange idiocy as Christianity decays but secularism is not fully enacted either.  It reminds me of Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, a mockery of Giorgione's Pastoral Concert: 

 

You have this Academic art that is continuing to copy the Greek/Roman as inherited through the Renaissance, one that does not blush at nudity, situated in a life (especially in England) where the utmost prudery reigns.  For Manet to place these nymphs in a Paris park, as though women stripped in polite company, brings out the absurdity of an art that has long long since stopped reflecting the society that produces it.  It is part of the greater disconnect between the ideals people are constantly referencing and the realities they actually live.

But I think what gets genuine artists even more is the resulting attitude toward it, that most loathsome aspect of the bourgeois values: the moral reasoning that miraculously finds one's state is the highest wisdom and is content with its own mediocrity: 

 So when people have the gall to talk about this being the pinnacle of civilization, and to refer to themselves as civilized as a result, there is something that just revolts in those who have any awareness.

This is where I see Conrad come in, asking the inevitable questions: "What is civilization?  How great is it?  And are we really civilized?"  Kayerts and Carlier are fools, creatures that can only exist in a society that is so detached from reality as to put up with them.  "Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men," and so does Conrad.  But Conrad does not belong to those who believe in the noble savage.  The natives are violent and superstitious, and above all ruled by fear as much as the white men:

The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath. In his fear, the mild old Gobila offered extra human sacrifices to all the Evil Spirits that had taken possession of his white friends.

Which is where we return to the beginning of today's discussion: does the Apollo truly represent a higher state than the African mask?  Or is it just a pretense and the truth is that civilization and savagery are simply two sides of the same coin, both serving fear but one simply pretends to be better? 

I... do not have an easy answer, but I do wish to argue with Conrad as I understand him from this story.  It seems to me that the key, devastating line is when Carlier notes that he and Kayerts are slave traders.  That's when he drops the pretense, drops the hypocrisy, and states things as they are; that they not only permitted Mukola to trade men for ivory, but that they were inherently helpless to stop it.  That's how the world actually works, and their civilization, their little speck, was this:

They lived like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in contact with them (and of that only imperfectly), but unable to see the general aspect of things. The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing with life, were like a great emptiness. Even the brilliant sunshine disclosed nothing intelligible. Things appeared and disappeared before their eyes in an unconnected and aimless kind of way. The river seemed to come from nowhere and flow nowhither. It flowed through a void.

And having been plugged into the Matrix for so long, they just couldn't stand to be separated from it.  Which is what makes this story more interesting, that this isn't simply about piercing civilization's hypocrisy to see the truth:

Night came, and Kayerts sat unmoving on his chair. He sat quiet as if he had taken a dose of opium. The violence of the emotions he had passed through produced a feeling of exhausted serenity. He had plumbed in one short afternoon the depths of horror and despair, and now found repose in the conviction that life had no more secrets for him: neither had death! He sat by the corpse thinking; thinking very actively, thinking very new thoughts. He seemed to have broken loose from himself altogether. His old thoughts, convictions, likes and dislikes, things he respected and things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last! Appeared contemptible and childish, false and ridiculous. He revelled in his new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed. He argued with himself about all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed lucidity which may be observed in some lunatics.

Kayerts isn't enlightened after he kills Carlier, he is deranged.  The jungle has worked its effect on him, but hardly for the better; in the end he can't escape the whisper of the higher ideals he was imperfectly acquainted with and hangs himself, out of fear or shame or guilt, left only to stick his tongue out at the representative of "progress" come to fetch him.

So much of life is fear.  Perhaps it is because I am overly-acquainted with that emotion that I attribute to it so much importance, but when Conrad said, "fear always remains" I knew what he meant.

And I think he is wrong.

Recently @Wishes finished GSG, and while watching it he noted: "I must say, I understand why you have [Claes] as your PFP.  I enjoy her detached, intellectual look."  I had to say it was a bit more complicated than that, and at this juncture I can take a moment to explain (part of) why.

"Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate.  She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract by her conduct her favourite maxims." - S&S

Claes is proud.  When called upon to act as a decoy she submits merely saying it is her duty and that she is doing nothing more remarkable. To be ruled by her fear is beneath her, she thinks, and though she goes forth into danger she puts up the pretense that it is nothing remarkable.  But what she finds when things go wrong is that she is not so confident; the hours tick by and her pretenses are stripped away (rather like the months at the station in Conrad), leaving her to face the inescapability of her own death: 

 

Perhaps in her mind she had told herself that she was resigned to it.  That she was above that fear or had come to terms with it.  But she was not, and when rescue finally did arrive she lost herself.  She took off her glasses, dropped Raballo's gentle Claes, and went on the prowl to the tune of Rabbia ("Rabid") if there was even the slightest chance that she could survive.  In short, she lost control of herself, and without that she had nothing.  Or, she thought she had nothing, and it is on this point that my difference with Conrad turns.

What I believe is being observed in An Outpost of Progress is that civilization is fragile, not that it is illusory, and that reason alone does not carry us to our highest limits.  It is absolutely true that when pressed we fall back on instinct; it is there, always there, waiting and ready.  But I think it is a mistake to believe that is our "true" self just because of that.  The indignity of Kayerts and Carlier lies in their hypocrisy, in their mediocrity, and in their inability to reconcile with reality.  That's what is plaguing 19th century England, and what is frankly plaguing us today.  But it seems quite the mistake to take as wholly representative two such specimens of humanity.  They serve to accuse the self-satisfied mid-level manager, but not a greater spirit, and I do believe Claes is a greater spirit:

She had sought to overcome the world and herself, using the best in herself, and found that she could not.  It is only in the end, distraught and humbled, that she submits to the truth: she is only human.  It is not an easy admission, but it comes with a smile that no longer avoiding the truth brings, and there is a paradoxical affirmation of her greatness in that moment when she finally accepts that she can be no greater.

As for what I think lies beyond that realization, I leave for another time.

Which having gone over hill and dale in my discussion, I return to the story.  I always find that my greatest writing is elicited in response to things I think are great; it's a kind of resonance that I find a more reliable tell than a conscious estimation.  The lovely thing about writing, as Flaubert notes, is that you discover what you believe.  I have purposefully been rough with my discussion here, not wishing to be hung up for too long, but I think this qualifies as a case worth noting, that Conrad represents a strong enough position, eloquently expressed, that it calls forth an equally dignified response.  And as always, for the existence of such things, for civilization you might say, I am grateful.

---------

Still thinking over An Outpost of Progress, and after all my writing I wonder if I slightly missed the mark on Conrad.  Re-reading the selections, I see that he is not so much after civilization as "civilized man", no so much the ideas and principles as their embodiment (or lack thereof) in the average citizen.  I wandered closer to the mark with my comment, "The indignity of Kayerts and Carlier lies in their hypocrisy, in their mediocrity, and in their inability to reconcile with reality." 

Because what I didn't quite explain well above was how well this captures it:

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.

I have this sense when I listen to people talking about a better world that what they mean is a safer world.  They don't want bad things to happen to them, they want to be able to go through life without risk or uncertainty, promised by their society that it will all turn out.  It's as Aristotle observes in one of my favorite little quotes:

"Our pity is excited by misfortunes undeservedly suffered, and our terror by some resemblance between the sufferer and ourselves."

But pity is an emotion of those in a superior position, and so we don't mind indulging in it.  It makes us feel good about ourselves to be outraged about bad things happening to people we've decided are the victims.  We sit here behind our screens typing loudly about events halfway around the world that, ultimately, we little understand and which do not affect us.  They're safe that way; it's sports on a grand stage.

Which is why when misfortune visits closer to home the reaction is fear.  Our institutions are all we have to swaddle us from unsafety, and so every negative event, even random accidents, must be ascribed to an institution failing, and institutional failings Must Be Fixed.  I don't mean in a reasonable way, in the acknowledgement that there are flaws and that we must assess whether we can perhaps improve them.  I mean in the immediate, knee-jerk reaction at the thought of it being you that it failed.

Therein lies the root feeling, the fear, the terror that it might have been you and the urgent need to prevent that from ever happening.  For all their "civilization" Kayerts and Carlier could have just as easily been sold into slavery, in thrall to these men from the coast, a realization they can only come to when removed from it.  It reminds me the quip that proficient workers believe in compensation based on merit while mediocre ones talk of equal pay.  We talk mightily of the importance of social fairness, but what we fear is being out-competed and preyed on by people who are more capable than we.  Delacroix was likened to a tiger while he was alive, and this is how Clark talks of Rodin's Balzac:

"Hostile critics said it was like a snowman, an owl, a heathen god.  All quite true, but we no longer regard them as terms of abuse.  Balzac's body has the timelessness of a prehistoric stone, and his head is like a bird of prey.  And the real reason that he made people so angry is the feeling that he can gobble them all up and doesn't care a damn for their opinions."

Please, institutions, protect us from anything like this.  Protect us from violence because we cannot defend ourselves.  Protect us from accidents because we cannot watch ourselves.  Protect us from quandaries because we cannot think ourselves.  And above all, protect us from other people who can, because we cannot do these things ourselves.

And call it a kindness.