 August 1910 edition of Harper's Magazine | |
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short story |
| Publisher | Harper's Magazine |
Publication date | 1910 |
"The Secret Sharer" is a short story [1] by Polish-British author Joseph Conrad, originally written in 1909 and first published in two parts in the August and September 1910 editions of Harper's Magazine . [2] [3] It was later included in the short story collection Twixt Land and Sea (1912). [4]
The story is written from the first-person point-of-view, in which the unnamed captain is the narrator. Recently commissioned to command his first ship, he is unfamiliar with both the vessel and its crew. The youthful captain, to the surprise of his officers, takes the evening watch. That night, with the crew below deck, he discovers a naked half-submerged figure clinging to a rope ladder: it is the first mate named Leggatt from the Sephora, the only other ship anchored in the bay. He explains he is a fugitive from the ship, having been arrested by the ship’s captain for killing a crew member during a violent storm.
After hearing his story, the captain—rather than summoning an officer to seize the man—fetches clothing for him and conceals him in his quarters. The captain recognizes in Leggatt a youthful “double” of himself: The two men are similar in appearance, personal history and maritime experience and aspirations. They differ in that Leggatt has had the bad fortune to have been embroiled in a conflict with a troublesome deck hand, ending in a violent confrontation during a typhoon, in which the vessel is almost lost. Leggatt’s efforts save the ship and the crew, but the captain of the Sephora puts him in shackles allegedly for murder.
The youthful captain comprehends the gravity of Leggatt’s situation, and is determined to protect him. The steps necessary to keep the crew ignorant of the stowaway involve a number of evasive antics and near discoveries. When the Sephora’s elderly captain arrives to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of his first mate, the young captain adroitly deflects his suspicions. To his chagrin, the Sephora’s captain departs empty-handed. The local authorities are notified of Leggatt’s escape and he risks arrest if he swims directly to shore.
Favorable winds develop and the captain orders the ship to set sail. In an effort to facilitate Leggatt's escape, he takes the boat near a point on the mainland where Leggatt might swim to shore and evade detection. The maneuver is extremely risky, and the crew and officers, ignorant of the captain’s motives, are dismayed.
Certain that Leggatt has made his escape, the captain resumes course. [5]
Conrad wrote “The Secret Sharer” in a matter of weeks at the end of 1909 which was “exceptionally quick for him.” [6] Conrad found that his American publisher, Harper & Brothers, and its president Colonel George Harvey were particularly receptive to his material. Between 1903 and 1913, they would publish five of his novels and four works of his short fiction. [7] “The Secret Sharer” appeared in Harper’s Magazine in August–September 1910. [8]
“The Secret Sharer” is based on an incident that occurred aboard the Cutty Sark in 1881, reported when the vessel arrived in Singapore. The first mate of the Cutty Sark—“a despotic character with a sinister reputation”—had killed an insubordinate crew member who had defended himself against the mate’s threatening behavior with a capstan bar.” [9] Conrad’s fictional first mate Leggatt, who has fled from his ship Sephora, is presented as a victim of circumstances that compels him to commit homicide. [10] Indeed, Conrad altered the reports from the Cutty Sark incident “to make Leggatt more agreeable.” [11]
Conrad’s own early experiences as a newly commissioned captain commanding his first ship are also tapped in “The Secret Sharer”, in which the youthful narrator is described as “a stranger to the ship” and “somewhat of a stranger to myself.” [12]
According to biographer Joycelyn Baines “Honor and dishonor, in their particular aspects of fidelity and betrayal, were constantly recurring themes throughout Conrad’s work. It is clear from ‘The Secret Sharer’ that he was especially concerned with them” at the time he wrote it in 1909. [13]
“The Secret Sharer” is among the most analyzed of Conrad’s oeuvre, a work that has been “endlessly debated.” [14]
Biographer Jocelyn Baines, while acknowledging that “The Secret Sharer” is “undoubtedly one of his best short stories” adds this caveat: “Albert J. Guerard and Douglas Hewitt have claimed for it a position as a key in Conrad’s work and attributed to it a significance which I do not believe that it can hold. It is intensely dramatic but, on the psychological and moral level, rather slight.” [15]
“‘The Secret Sharer’, widely acclaimed as a psychological masterpiece, [is] the subject of more fanciful interpretations than any of Conrad’s other stories. Yet no one who has written on this problematical tale has given a wholly reliable sense of its peculiar distinction. Polemical and highly selective, the average reading of ‘The Secret Sharer’ is easily open to charges of partiality or distortion.”—Literary critic Laurence Graver in Conrad’s Short Fiction (1969) [16]
According to Baines “the point of the story”, dramatized through the intimate encounter between the captain and the fugitive first mate Leggatt “is to suggest that the fates of these two men were interchangeable, that it was quite possible for an ordinary, decent, conscientious person to…commit some action that would make him ‘a fugitive and vagabond upon the earth.” [17]
Literary critic Joan E. Steiner emphasizes the similarity in the two men’s personal history, careers, physical appearance and moral foundations inviting the young captain “to regard Leggatt as his double…” [18] [19] Baines argues that Conrad’s captain is sympathetic to his double:
Conrad had no wish to condemn Leggatt but considered him an honorable man who had done something that other honorable men might equally well have done in similar circumstances. [20]
Baines denies that there is any “moral dilemma” that informs the relationship between the captain and his “doppleganger.” Leggett departs from the ship “...a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.” [21]
Both Baines and literary critic Laurence Garland dispute Albert J. Guerard’s contention that the captain’s double must be “exorcized” as a threat to his freedom. [22] Graver rejects Guerard’s interpretation, writing:
Leggatt’s attractiveness is based less on some sinister appeal than on an obvious self-possession and strength…By the end, the captain has learned nothing about his own capacity for evil; he has learned only to assume confident command of his ship. [23]
Literary critic Edward W. Said concurs with Gueard’s analysis of “The Secret Sharer” that “Conrad’s basic theme is the conflict between the mariner [captain-narrator] and the outlaw [Leggatt]; between the man who seeks to establish control by finding his place among the hard, infallible objects of external reality and that other, darker figure who immerses himself in the destructive, chaotic jungle within and without.” [24]
According to Steiner, the doubling device, though not a Conrad invention, appears as the key image in the narrative. Indeed, the terms “my other self”, “my secret self”, “my secret sharer” appear repeatedly: the captain refers to his doppelganger, Leggatt, as “my double” a total of eighteen times. [25] The Leggatt double and his influence on the captain’s struggle for self-discovery is ambiguous. Rather than the “double” exerting an explicitly creative or degenerate influence on the captain, he serves to reveal that “irrational and the instinctive elements in human nature can be a source of strength as well as weakness, good as well as evil.” [26] Steiner tends to align herself with that of critics Baines and Graver namely, that Leggatt’s effect is “more positive than negative.” [27]
Steiner concludes that the departure of Leggatt signals “the re-submergence of the captain’s unconscious and the reintegration of his personality…the narrator has moved, with the assistance of his double, from immature and naive integration…to a more mature reintegration resulting from self-knowledge and self-mastery.” [28]
The story was adapted for a segment of the 1952 film Face to Face, and also for a one-act play in 1969 by C. R. (Chuck) Wobbe. Robert Silverberg adapted the story to a science fiction setting under the same title in 1987, winning the Locus Award for best novella. [29] A film, Secret Sharer , inspired by the story and directed by Peter Fudakowski, was released in the United Kingdom in June 2014.[ citation needed ]
The Secret Sharer public domain audiobook at LibriVox Official site for Secret Sharer, released in the UK on 27 June 2014:
Cutty Sark is a British clipper ship. Built on the River Leven, Dumbarton, Scotland in 1869 for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, she was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest, at the end of a long period of design development for this type of vessel, which ended as steamships took over their routes. She was named after the short shirt of the fictional witch in Robert Burns' poem Tam o' Shanter, first published in 1791.
Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad originally published as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900. An early and primary event in the story is the abandonment of a passenger ship in distress by its crew, including a young British seaman named Jim. He is publicly censured for this action and the novel follows his later attempts at coming to terms with himself and his past and seeking redemption and acceptance.
Typhoon is a short novel by Joseph Conrad, begun in 1899 and serialized in Pall Mall Magazine in January–March 1902. Its first book publication was in New York by Putnam in 1902; it was also published in Britain in Typhoon and Other Stories by Heinemann in 1903.
"The Lagoon" is a short story by Joseph Conrad composed in 1896 and first published in The Cornhill Magazine in January 1897. The work was collected in Conrad’s first volume of short stories Tales of Unrest (1898).
“Youth” is an autobiographical work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1898, and collected in the eponymous collection Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories in 1902.
"An Outpost of Progress" is a short story written in July 1896 by Joseph Conrad, drawing on his own experience in Belgian Congo. It was published in the magazine Cosmopolis in 1897 and was later collected in Tales of Unrest in 1898.
Tales of Unrest is a collection of five works of short fiction by Polish-British author Joseph Conrad. Four of the five works were previously published as serials in literary journals before appearing in the volume, published in 1898 by T. Fisher Unwin.
"The Idiots" is a short story by Joseph Conrad, his first to be published. It first appeared in The Savoy in 1896. The story was included in the Conrad collection Tales of Unrest, published in 1898.
"The Return" is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, first published in 1898 in the collection Tales of Unrest by T. Fisher Unwin.
Youth, a Narrative; and Two Other Stories is a collection of three works of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, originally serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine. The volume was published in 1902 by William Blackwood and Sons.
“The Black Mate” is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad which first appeared in London Magazine in 1908, and was collected in Tales of Hearsay, published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1925.
‘Twixt Land and Sea is a collection of three works of short fiction by Joseph Conrad published in 1912 by J. M. Dent publishers.
"Falk: A Reminiscence" is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad. The story was completed in May 1901 and was collected in Typhoon and Other Stories in 1903, published by William Heinemann and Company.
“The Tale” is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, first published in the Strand Magazine in October 1917. The story was collected in Tales of Hearsay in 1925 by T. Fisher Unwin.
A Set of Six is a collection of six works of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, each appearing in literary journals between 1906 and 1908. The works were collected in A Set of Six, published in 1908 by Methuen and Company.
"The Duel" is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, first published in The Pall Mall Magazine in January–May, 1908. The story was collected in A Set of Six (1908) released by Methuen Publishing. It was adapted as the 1977 film The Duellists, directed by Ridley Scott.
Typhoon and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Joseph Conrad published in 1903 by William Heinemann and Company.
"The Inn of the Two Witches" is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, first published in The Pall Mall Magazine in March 1913. The story was collected in Within the Tides (1915) published by J. M. Dent and Sons.
“Because of the Dollars” is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, first published in The Metropolitan Magazine in September 1914. The story was collected in Within the Tides (1915) published by J. M. Dent and Sons.
The Great Tea Race of 1872 was a regatta, held in 1872 between two "tea clippers" Cutty Sark and Thermopylae.
