To-morrow is a short story of a little over 10,000 words that is hardly “savage” (as one comment of it that I came across describes it). Rather, it is sad. It’s a tragic tale, one concerning the hazards of confusing dream with reality. It’s about the fragility of hope.
It tells the story of an iffy seaman, Captain Hagberd, who lives in the seaport town of Colebrook. He has tenants in another house across from him, on the other side of a fence. It is Bessie and her father (the Carvils), from whom the Captain gets rent.
We learn that Captain Hagberd is not quite the sailing fellow his title and appearance suggest. He rarely went far from land, was never away for long, and had only one ambition: to get back to the mainland.
He finally managed it and eventually moved to Colebrook. His reason for going there was to find his son, who had left home something like 15 years earlier. He had a tip that his son was in Colebrook so he went there — and never left.
What then happens is the substance of the story. He appears to become delusional, though there is a suggestion that he is not so much delusional as manipulative. Perhaps he’s both.
Speaking to Bessie each day, across the fence, he tells her of how his son will be back, “to-morrow.” Eventually, he includes Bessie in his delusion about his son. And then one day the son does come back. The story now kicks into high gear.
Honestly, I was not expecting it to go where it did but it all made sense. I found it a very easy and engaging story to read. In a way, it’s a romance turned on its head, a kind of puncturing of romantic notions.
Conrad is great at creating very distinct characters; people that live and breathe. There is nothing cardboard about them. Combined with his deft hand with description of landscape and place, it makes for a very vivid portrait. And there is always a skillfully told story that moves you along from start to finish, as happens in To-morrow.
As I’ve mentioned before, the place where I usually get held up when reading Joseph Conrad is at the beginnings of his stories, though more so with his novels than his shorter works. He rarely jumps right into the tale. Rather, there is something akin to a throat-clearing exercise where he stage sets — takes care of the business of exposition — so when the story does get going the reader is not lost. It’s an essential, if problematic, aspect of every story.
But it can be tedious, particularly for us, his contemporary readers. In To-morrow, however, this is not really a problem because the stage setting is largely about the nature and history of Captain Hagberd, as well as how he is perceived by the town (and why). The character being as intriguing as he is, the expository nature of his introduction works to draw the reader in. This is not always the case with Conrad, I’ve found.
There is also a sense of relative brevity to Conrad’s descriptions — relative to his novels, that is. His short stories are also, by their very nature, less structurally complex. They are much more direct. (Compare that to his novels, such as Chance, The Rescue, or Nostromo where there are several primary characters that need to be introduced, changing points of view, and often time shifts.)
It makes me wonder if I don’t prefer the Joseph Conrad of the short stories and novellas, as opposed to the novel.
July 29, 2016
