Conrad, James, and Vertical Lintels
- Conrad, James, and Vertical Lintels
In his Penguin edition of The Shadow-Line (1986), Jacques Berthoud preferred the 1920 American Sun-Dial edition reading, "He [the steward] leaned against the side of the door" to that of his copytext and the l921 Heinemann Collected Edition, "He leaned against the lintel of the door" because the latter reading "presupposes powers of levitation" (60, 31). Berthoud's joke caused scholarly excitement. Having verified that "lintel" was in the manuscript, Jeremy Hawthorn at first thought the steward was reaching above his head. Subsequently, however, Hawthorn found a phrase in An Outcast of the Islands that left no doubt of lexical error: "his [Willems's] hands grasping the lintels on each side of the door" ("Conrad" 178-79; Outcast 256). After collecting further examples in other works, Hawthorn concluded that Conrad misused the word "lintel" for twenty years and seemingly never corrected it ("More" 206). (He obviously did not in The Shadow-Line: it occurs not only in the Heinemann edition, but also in a 1934 reprint of the 1917 Dent first edition (39).
The origin of Conrad's tenacious misconception may well reflect the way we learn a language. Some words we look up in a dictionary: most we learn by hearing or seeing them used. Conrad, inscribing An Outcast of the Islands to Henry James in 1896, recalled that many of James's creations, "clothed in the wonderful garment of Your prose" had "stood, consoling, by my side under many skies" (CL 1: 307); among them may have been one of James's best-known tales, "The Aspern Papers" (1888), in which the Master evokes the Piazza San Marco:
The wonderful church, with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looked ghostly in the tempered [End Page 169] gloom, and the sea-breeze passed between the twin columns of the Piazzetta, the lintels of a door no longer guarded, as gently as if a rich curtain were swaying there.
(311-12)1
The passage is so beautiful we may overlook the fact that the vertical columns are likened to the "lintels of a door," whereas a door has only one lintel, which is horizontal ("Aspern" 312). Whether James, too, was vague about lintels, or whether he placed sound before sense is impossible to say; but he provides a possible key to Conrad's confusion. It may be time for the OED to include in its definition of "lintel": "Poet: a door-post."
Paul Kirschner has retired from the University of London and lives in Geneva. He is the author of Conrad: The Psychologist as Artist (Edinburgh, 1968) and Comparing Conrad: Essays on Joseph Conrad and his implied Dialogues with other Writers (Geneva, 2009). He edited Typhoon and other Stories (1990) and Under Western Eyes (1996) for Penguin Twentieth-century Classics.
Notes
1. This version printed by Leon Edel appeared in Atlantic Monthly, 61 (March-May): 1888, and in book form (New York and London: MacMillan) in September 1888 and October 1990. "Lintels" survived in the "New York" Edition (12. 51-52). Conrad told James in 1908 that The American was "the first of your long novels I ever read—in '91," suggesting he may have read shorter works by the Master before then (CL 4.161).
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