Conrad and Masculinity

204 Conrad and Masculinity
ending in the death of both him and Lena. Heyst’s father has not
destroyed his son’s human needs, but has repressed his ability to
acknowledge them; only the needs of others enable him to seek
company, active employment, or emotional and sexual fulfilment.
The connection between the two relationships is explicitly made by
Heyst talking to Lena, but is prefigured when he first meets her. In
each case an ambiguity is raised about the relationship with Morrison.
On first seeing Lena, Heyst looks at her ‘as no man ever looks at
another man’ (71). Yet in the next paragraph, when he gets up to
speak to her, we are told that: ‘It was the same sort of impulse which
years ago had made him ... accost Morrison, practically a stranger to
him then ... It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it’
(71–2). Shortly afterwards the narrator adds:
It is very clear that Heyst was not indifferent. I won’t say to the girl,
but to the girl’s fate. He was the same man who had plunged after
the submerged Morrison ... But this was another sort of plunge
altogether, and likely to lead to a very different kind of partnership.
(77)
The look is different, the ‘plunge’ is different, yet the impulse is the
same. This pattern, of similarity and difference, is repeated in Heyst’s
account to Lena of the Morrison affair. Lena describes her horror of
Schomberg’s sexual harassment, and says that she was ‘cornered’
(195). This is as much a literal as a metaphorical term, since we have
earlier been told that Schomberg has ‘assailed her in quiet corners’
(79). Heyst is quite clear what she is talking about, dealing tactfully
with her embarrassment as she refers to their own sexual relations
(195). He nevertheless picks up her term to describe his relations with
Morrison: ‘One day I met a cornered man. I use the word because it
expresses the man’s situation exactly, and because you just used it
yourself. You know what that means?’ (197). Lena is startled by this,
and when Heyst explains that ‘I mean in his own way’, she responds
‘I knew very well it couldn’t be anything like that’ (197). Heyst also
refers to his friendship with Morrison, based on the fact that ‘one gets
attached in a way to people one has done something for’ (199), as
constituting ‘a germ of corruption’ (200). Lena is understandably
upset, since this might equally apply to her relationship with Heyst.
Twice, then, the idea of a sexual element in Heyst’s relationship with
Morrison is evoked and then put aside. It might be argued that these
are unsurprising effects in a fiction about a social context where men