Year

1975

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Publication

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Chronology Entries (1)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1927.1	Lowry, Malcolm. China [ID D30878]. China China's like a muddle to me, it's just like a dream, mostly a queer dream. For though I've been there it takes on a quality sometimes that my imagination bestowed on it before I went. But even if I lived there it would still seem to me to be unreal; for the most part I don't think of it and when I do it makes me laugh. I live down at the docks now in Hoboken, New Jersey, and now and again I wander down there to see a ship that's crossed the Western Ocean. That doesn't make me homesick or stir up in me the old love of the sea or of memories I've got of China. Nor does it make me unhappy when I think I've been there and really have so few memories after all. I don't believe in China. You can say I'm like that man you may have read about who spent his life as a sailor on some vessel plying from Liverpool to Lisbon and on retiring was only able to say of Lisbon: The trams go faster there than in Liverpool. Like Bill Adams I came fresh to sea life from an English pub¬lic school where I had worn a tophat and carried a silver- topped cane, but there the resemblance ceases. I was a fireman. There was a terrible war on in China at this time and in this I did not believe either. Just across the river from where we were moored, China thundered her guns Doom! doom! doom! but the whole thing crashed over our heads without touching us. Not that I would have believed in it any more had we been blown all to hell: we do not associate such dooms with ourselves. But it was as if you were dreaming, as I often have, that you are standing unscathed beneath the tumult of an immense waterfall, Niagara for instance. We were moored nose on to the English battle-cruiser, H.M.S. Proteus. Astern lay a high, brightly-painted Ningpo junk. Apart from this, there was little in our surroundings, before the stevedores arrived, to suggest that we were not at home: even the war, palpable as it seemed to be through the river fog eclipsing the opposite bank, did not dissipate this illusion: much might have happened for good or evil in our absence from England. And this perhaps brings me to my only real point. We are always "here." You've never felt this? Well, with me this was very cogent. In an English paper I could read about the famous city near at hand, divided against herself, tortured not only by the possibility of invasion but with threats of its own ochlocracy, but when the chief engineer forbade us to cross the river to it, I turned over and went to sleep. I didn't believe I was there at all. And when it was proposed by the chief steward that a cricket match take place between the Arcturion, which was the name of our ship, and the H.M.S. Proteus I was certain I was not. I had seen this coming, however. They started it in the Indian Ocean. I was coming off watch at eight bells and when I got to the galley I knew they were starting it. The seamen were standing round outside their forecastle winding up strands of heaving line. They were like old maids, holding each other's knitting, I thought. Then I saw that they were making cricket balls. The Arcturion carried a spare propellor which was shackled to the break of the poop and the captain was chalking on this. A wicket! While I was having my chow I knew they were starting it and when I finally came out, they had begun. From the broom-locker to the spare propellor along the seaman's side of the welldock was about the length of a cricket pitch and at the far end Hersey was bowling. He took a long run right down the companion ladder and then bowled. At the wicket chalked on the spare propellor trembled Lofty. He milled about in the air with a bat the carpenter had made him. The ball was returned to Hersey. Fieldmen stood round on the hatches, on the steam-piping, among the washing. Now Hersey was bowling again. Lofty had missed. Hersey had the ball once more. One or two were still winding heaving-lines. When the seamen saw me they started to mince for my benefit. Oh, I say, pass the bally ball, —And so on. I made up my mind I hated these men and then I wished I could crush them: they would never be anything but underdogs. Unctuousness and servility flowed in their very veins and even now it seems necessary to me to say these things with mere malice. Imitating a workingman's accent, they were even more unpleasant than my own class. Old bourgeois maidservants with mob cap and broom, that's what English steamboat sailors are. A few blackened firemen stood around, watching and grinning like niggers. They wouldn't join in. They had solidarity, they had one enemy, the chief steward. The sailors and the others were petty Judases who had to keep in with both sides. They let each other down and they would steal the milk out of your tea. But the firemen were solid. We were prime. And we stood together against the chief steward because of the food. They had begun by jeering at me: Where is Heton, Hoxford or Cambridge? But in the end they took the attitude, Eton, Oxford, Cambridge and the fireman's forecastle. At any rate he didn't become a seaman and that's something. That was their attitude. I was a coal passer and worked on the 12 to 4 or duke's watch, and after a while they accepted me silently as one of them. I worked hard and didn't growl. I respected them but to them that was neither here nor there. But now standing together looking at the sailors with contempt, they gave me a sidelong glance as if suspicious that I had gone over to the enemy. Then the chief steward came out of the galley smoking a cigar, paused imperiously at the top of the companion ladder and descended slowly, puffing. —Hello boys, give me a knock. And Lofty handed over the bat to the chief. Soon he was slogging the balls all over the place; he hit two into the Indian Ocean and it was very clear he fancied himself. Oh it was very clear he thought he had some class. —Silly sailors, said the firemen in a long drawl. That night as I was pacing up and down the poop in carpet slippers smoking, the chief steward came up to me. —Tell me, he began. Surely you play cricket. Now I'm not just a chief steward you might say. I've got education. But let me see, you're not the— Suddenly I felt I had to tell him that I was. I told him how I fared in the Eton and Harrow match, how I'd played against the Australians, there was nothing I didn't know about cricket. I also told him to hold his tongue, but I ought to have known better than to trust a sailor. It was only after he'd gone that I thought of all the things I ought to have said to him. He kept his promise as long as it suited him, only as long as it suited him. Meantime we were getting nearer and nearer to China. And the nearer we got the less I believed in it. What I want to convey to you is that to me it was not China at all but right here, on this wharf. But that's not quite what I wanted to say. What I mean is what it was not was China: somewhere far away. What it was was here, something solid, tactile, impenetrable. But perhaps neither one thing nor the other. You see, I had worn myself out behind a barrier of sea life, behind a barrier of time, so that when I did get ashore, I only knew it was here. Even if I perked up after a few drinks, I always forgot I was in China. I was "here." Do you see that? The first thing I knew when I got there was the extent of this mistake. I don't mean I was disillusioned, I want to make that clear. I didn't feel with Conrad "that what expected had already gone, had passed unseen in a sigh, in a flash together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions." That sigh, that flash, never happened. There was no moment that crystallized the East for me. This moment did not occur. What happened was different. I had been looking forward to something anxiously and I called this China, yet when I reached China I was still looking forward to it from exactly the same position. Perhaps China wasn't there, didn't exist for me just as I could not exist for China. And I even began to believe my work was unreal, although there was always one voice that said: you get hold of a firebar and you'll soon enough know how real it is. Then we were alongside and not long after the captain called for me. —We've arranged a cricket match with the H.M.S. Proteus and we want to show them, he said. —Sure, said the chief steward. We've arranged a cricket match and we' ll show them foxy swaddies what we think of them. —And you're going to play, said the captain. —Sure, said the chief. And now you've got to titivate yourself up a bit, make yourself look a bit smart you know. You can't play with an old towel round your neck. What would they think of us? —That's right, said the captain. The last time you went ashore with a towel round your neck, you were a proper disgrace to the ship. —You were the only man who went ashore without a tie, said the chief. —I went to have a swim, I began. But what was the use of talking to these old washerwomen anyway? And I was highly amused to be looking right down once more into the corrupt heart of the life I'd left behind; I thought it extremely funny that my existence had not changed at all and that wherever I was I would be evaluated, smelt out, by my own kind. A little later the chief steward came down to the forecastle with all sorts of fancy white ducks he'd rooted out and pretty soon I found one hanging on the curtain rail of my bunk. As I changed the firemen grinned. —Now you'll feel at home, Jimmy. No other fireman had been selected to play and inwardly I raged. Outside the chief was saying: —We'll show these swaddies we can make a proper respectable turnout. Then we strolled along the wharf towards the cricket field which was situated between a slagheap and a coaldump. A river mist was rolling thickly over towards the city, but the atmosphere was clear where we were going save for a thin rain of coal which drizzled in our faces from the tips, speckling our white trousers with dust. Now you could make a fine character study out of this. There was old Lofty and Hersey and Sparks and Tubby and the three mates and the doctor and you could make a fine description out of each one. But unfortunately I can't discriminate, maybe it's my loss, but they all looked the same to me, those sailors: they were all sons of bitches and now after so long I can only see them at all through the kind of mist there was then. So I won't bother you with that. They just looked damned funny as they straggled down the wharf. And I must have looked the funniest of all straggling along with them, all of us in the fancy white ducks the steward had given us. Some trousers far too short and some far too long, which made us look more like a bunch of Chinese coolies than a proper respectable turnout. Then the swaddies came out of the H.M.S. Proteus and they hadn't bothered about any whites. Some wore khaki shorts, some dungarees, others singlets and khaki trousers. And now after so long I only see them through a kind of mist. I can't even say, Well, there was one fellow like this. Hell, they were just swaddies, misled, exploited, simple, handsome and ugly like the rest of us. Their captain and the chief steward spun a coin. The chief steward won. The captain of the Arcturion, who was not playing but who was reported to be "keen" on cricket, stood behind a godown and watched the proceedings with a heavily critical air. —It was my call, I laughed. You should have run. —I thought you said you could play cricket, the chief grumbled. —I called. It was up to you to run, I laughed. —Don't laugh, said the chief. But I went right on laughing. Then the captain appeared and it seemed that he was damned angry too. —What are you laughing at? I thought you said you could play cricket, he said. And you've run our best man out and been bowled yourself. Why, I thought you said— —Firemen don't play cricket, I said shortly and walked away from the wharf. Once I looked back. Lofty was playing hard with a cross bat, defending the honour of the welldock. Then rain sluiced down and stopped play. It was the monsoon season. I ran for the Arcturion and changed quickly. At the entrance I watched the others shuffling back mourn' fully into the seaman's forecastle, their white trousers clinging to them like wet rags. Doom! Doom! Doom! Other firemen joined me at the entrance and we watched the stevedores unloading our cargo, of scouting planes, a bomber, a fighting plane, machine guns, anti-aircraft guns, 25 pound bombs, ammunition. I did not believe in all this. I was not there. And here's what I want to ask you again. Haven't you felt this too, that you know yourself so well that the ground you tread on is your ground: it is never China or Siberia or England or anywhere else... It is always you. It is always the earth of you, the wood, the iron of you, the asphalt you step on is the asphalt of you whether it's on Broadway or the Chien Mon. And you carry your horizon in your pocket wherever you are. Sekundärliteratur Gutted arcades of the past : China – short story. http://guttedarcades.blogspot.ch/2012/05/china.html. The story was left by Lowry at the home of his friend James Stern in the summer of 1934. The story is set in China in 1927 during the Chinese civil war. Lowry visited Shanghai in 1927. He had a romantic view of China developed through a reading of the novels of Conrad and the plays of O'Neill, sea literature and other readings.	Person: Lowry, Malcolm

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1		Zentralbibliothek Zürich	Organisation / ZB