Conrad Aiken: Blue Voyage

Well, Cynthia — I draw to the end of this simple narrative. I find myself losing heart or losing impetus. What if, after all, the impulse to tell of it should seem to you rather silly?… Yet, at the last minute, it had its thrill of terror, which perhaps more than anything else served to make it memorable. For when the sails had all been spread, and the towrope had been cast off, and the Wamsutta drew away to starboard and stopped, her nose pointing toward Cuttyhunk, it was then that the greatest moment came. One of the whaleboats was manned and lowered into the sea; into this we clambered, Mr. Pierce and Cousin Stanley and I; and the men pulled away toward the waiting tug. The Sylvia Lee hung enormous above us, her sails flapping, as we drew out from her shadow; but I now paid little attention to the beautiful tall ship, for I had discovered that the whaleboat was leaking, leaking fast! In a moment I had to draw up my feet. Before we had gone half the distance to the Wamsutta we had taken in about four inches of water. Were we sinking? Would we get there before we sank? What astonished me was the indifference of the men at the oars — they sat with their feet in the swashing water and hauled stolidly away as if nothing whatever were occurring. I felt, therefore, that it would be a breach of etiquette to comment, or show anxiety, and I scarcely knew what attitude to take toward Mr. Pierce’s humorous observation that it looked “as if they were trying to drown us.” It hardly seemed a subject for joking. I was measuring the water, measuring the gap between us and the Wamsutta; and seldom have I experienced such an acute sensation of relief as when we drew alongside and climbed aboard in a smell of oil and hot-breathing engines. More remarkable still, however, was the fact that the men in the whaleboat did not pause to bail out the water — which was now halfway up their legs — but at once turned the heavy boat about and started back again. How slowly, how laboriously, she seemed to creep! By the time they had come up once more with the Sylvia Lee her gunwales were only a foot out of water. They were safe, however — we saw them climb briskly aboard. And then we saw the boat being hauled up, while one man bailed with a pail, flinging great scoops of hollow silver over the side; and at once, majestically, with filling sails, the Sylvia Lee bore away. The men waved to us and shouted — the Wamsutta blew three vibrating blasts of her whistle — and while the ship moved statelily southward, we turned and chug-chugged back toward New Bedford. Good-by, Sylvia Lee!.. Good-by indeed. For the Sylvia Lee was destined to be one of the tragedies of the sea. None of the men who sailed away with her ever returned. No one ever knew how she was wrecked. All that was found of her, two years later, west of the Horn, was the fragment of sternplate that bore her name.

( Not sent .)

TWO

MY DEAR MISS BATTILORO:

You will be surprised to learn that this is the second letter which I have written to you today — and that to the writing of the first (which I have decided not to send to you, and which I am not sure I ever intended to send) I devoted several hours. This behavior must seem to you very peculiar. Indeed, it seems peculiar to me, though I am (if anybody is!) in a position to understand it. Why should I be writing you letters at all? Why on earth? It is easy for me to put myself in your place (bad dramatist though I am) and I can therefore without the least difficulty imagine the mixture of bewilderment, curiosity, contempt, and annoyance, or even shame, shame for me, with which you will receive this last of my underbred antics. Why in God’s name should this upstart young man (not so young either), this mere ship’s acquaintance, this New Englander with intermittent manners, presume to write to you ? you who so habitually and unquestioningly regard yourself as one of the world’s chosen few? And how entirely characteristic of him that instead of coming to see you he should write —send you, merely from one end of a ship to another, a morbidly and mawkishly self-conscious letter!.. All of which is perfectly just, as far at it goes; and I doubt whether I can find any very adequate defense. You have, of course, an entire right to drop me without advancing reasons. Who among us has not exercised that privilege of selection? If the manner in which you have administered the “cut” seems to me extraordinarily ill-bred and uncharitable, who am I that I should rebuke you for a want of courtesy? I have been rude myself. I have even, occasionally, to rid myself of a bore, been inexcusably cruel. One must, at times, defend oneself at all costs, and I recognize perfectly that this has seemed to you an occasion for the exercise of that right. Ah! (you will say) but if you admit all this, why talk about it? Why not take your medicine in silence, like a gentleman?… Well, I could reply that as I seem to have lost in your eyes the privileges of a gentleman, I have therefore lost also the gentleman’s obligations; and as you have put me in the position of an outcast, I might as well make a virtue of necessity, and, as a final gesture of pride, haul up the Jolly Roger.

But no — that’s not exactly what I mean. Why is it that I seem always, in trying to say the simplest things, to embroil myself in complications and side issues, in references and tangents, in qualifications and relativities? It is my weakness as an author (so the critics have always said) that I appear incapable of presenting a theme energetically and simply. I must always wrap it up in tissue upon tissue of proviso and aspect; see it from a hundred angles; turn laboriously each side to the light; producing in the end not so much a unitary work of art as a melancholy cauchemar of ghosts and voices, a phantasmagoric world of disordered colors and sounds; a world without design or purpose; and perceptible only in terms of the prolix and the fragmentary. The criticism is deserved, of course: but I have often wished that the critics would do me the justice to perceive that I have deliberately aimed at this effect, in the belief that the old unities and simplicities will no longer serve. No longer serve, I mean, if one is trying to translate, in any form of literary art, the consciousness of modern man. And this is what I have tried to do. I am no longer foolish enough to think that I have succeeded — I am in process of adjustment to the certainty that I am going to be a failure. I take what refuge I can in a strictly psychological scrutiny of my failure, and endeavor to make out how much this is due to (1) a simple lack of literary power, or genius, or the neurosis that we give that name, and how much to (2) a mistaken assumption as to the necessity for this new literary method. What if — for example — in choosing this literary method, this deliberate indulgence in the prolix and fragmentary, I merely show myself at the mercy of a personal weakness which is not universal, or ever likely to be, but highly idiosyncratic? That is perfectly possible; and it brings me back to my starting point. I am like that — I do think and feel in this confused and fluctuating way — I frequently suspect that I am nothing on earth but a case of dementia praecox, manqué, or arrested. Isn’t all this passion for aspects and qualifications and relativities a clear enough symptom of schizophrenia? It is as a result of my uncertain and divided attitude toward you that you now finally wash your hands of me; the conflict in me between the declared and the undeclared produced that callow and caddish ambiguity of behavior which offended you. And now, in this letter, I continue the offense! I mumble and murmur and beat round the bush — and succeed in saying nothing. Why is it that I don’t simply say that the whole trouble has been that, from the moment when I first saw you coming up the gangway to the Silurian, last year, I adored you and was terrified by you? Yes, you terrified me. But what use is there in analyzing this? None. The important thing is merely to say that I have loved you, that I love you, and that I must, now that you have dropped me, take any available way of telling you this, no matter how much the method may offend you.