Conrad wrote 'The Secret Sharer' some time during the end of November and early December [1909]—exceptionally quick for him. It is undoubtedly one of his best short stories, but certain critics, notably Albert Guerard [in Conrad the Novelist, 1958] and Douglas Hewitt [in Conrad: A Reassessment, 1952], have claimed for it a position as a key story 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.

The story is based on an incident which happened on board the Cutty Sark in 1880. The Cutty Sark had put in to Singapore on 18 September, three days after the chief officer of the Jeddah (the Patna in Lord Jim) had arrived there. In Conrad's adaptation of the Cutty Sark incident, Leggatt, the mate of the Sephora, kills a disobedient member of the crew during a storm and is put under arrest by his captain. But he escapes and swims to another ship of which the narrator of the story is captain. The captain is a young, comparatively inexperienced man who has just been given his first command—here Conrad seems to draw on his own experiences on the Otago—'a stranger to the ship' and 'somewhat of a stranger to myself'. He had taken the anchor watch himself and thus spots Leggatt in the water, clinging to a rope ladder; without calling anyone, for 'a mysterious communication was established already between us two', he lets Leggatt come on board and fetches some clothes for him.

In a moment he had concealed his damp body in a sleeping-suit of the same grey-stripe pattern as the one I was wearing and followed me like my double on the poop.

When the captain has heard Leggatt's story he decides that he must hide him in his cabin. He does this at great risk and strain to himself and at the cost of becoming somewhat estranged from the rest of the crew because of the precautionary antics he has to go through to prevent Leggatt being discovered.

After some eventful days which include a visit from the captain of the Sephora he is able to come in close to shore and allow Leggatt to escape.

Constantly throughout the story it is emphasised that the young captain regards Leggatt as his double, and in a letter to Pinker Conrad suggested for titles of the story 'The Second Self', 'The Secret Self', 'The Other Self (these three phrases, without the definite article of course, occur in the text); he also suggested 'The Secret Sharer', but wondered whether it might not be too enigmatic. The point of this, apart from heightening the dramatic effect, and the point of the story, is to suggest that the fates of these two men were interchangeable, that it was quite possible for an ordinary, decent, conscientious person to kill someone or to commit some action which would make him 'a fugitive and vagabond on the earth'. Thus Leggatt takes his place alongside Jim and Razumov. There is no suggestion of a transcendental relationship between Leggatt and the captain or of the 'double' being a psychological manifestation of an aspect of the original as there is in Poe's vulgar, trashy 'Richard Wilson' or Dostoevsky's obscure nightmare, 'The Double'.

But that is the way in which Guerard interprets the story. For him the 'hero' is the young captain: 'The real moral dilemma is his, not Leggatt's'. He, and Marlow in Heart of Darkness, 'must recognise their own potential criminality and test their own resources, must travel through Kurtz and Leggatt, before they will be capable of manhood… and moral survival'. The story will bear this interpretation, as long as it is realised that such was no part of the author's conscious intention. However, Guerard goes on to assert that Leggatt is not merely an 'other self', he is a 'lower self', 'the embodiment of a more instinctive, more primitive, less rational self'. I believe that this misses the whole point. Leggatt is not a symbol of the unconscious but a man on precisely the same level as the young captain; their selves are interchangeable (the epithet 'secret' might imply the opposite but its context and the whole tone of the story show that the word was intended in its literal sense: Leggatt was 'secret' because he had to be kept secret or hidden). Guerard's interpretation makes nonsense of the last sentence of the story, in which Leggatt departs, 'a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny'. This is no way for a symbol of the unconscious to behave; Guerard's answer is that Leggatt is both a symbol and a 'man of flesh and blood'. He continues: 'By seeing his own dilemmas and difficulties in Leggatt, the captain has turned this man into symbol and spirit.… But at the end, emerging from his self-examination, the captain can see Leggatt as a separate and real human being.' But there is no indication in the story, explicit or implicit, that the captain sees any of his dilemma or difficulties in Leggatt or that he performs any self-examination. Nor is there any 'moral dilemma'.

Guerard's interpretation is based partly on what I believe is a mistaken assessment of the narrator's, or Conrad's, attitude to Leggatt's action. He claims that, for Conrad, 'a crime on shipboard … was simply and irrevocably a crime'. But there is no suggestion that Conrad or the captain-narrator condemns Leggatt's action; quite the contrary. At the start the captain says that he knew Leggatt was 'no homicidal ruffian'; and when the foolish mate comments on the event as 'A very horrible affair.… Beats all these tales about murders in Yankee ships', the captain snaps back: 'I don't think it beats them. I don't think it resembles them in the least.' His own opinion is summed up: 'It was all very simple. The same strung-up force which had given twenty-four men a chance, at least, for their lives, had, in a sort of recoil, crushed an unworthy mutinous existence.'

In this connexion it is interesting to see that Conrad softened the crime, if it can be called a crime, which took place on the Cutty Sark and also softened the character of the mate. The mate of the Cutty Sark was apparently a despotic character with a sinister reputation. An order which he gave to an incompetent negro named John Francis was twice disobeyed, and when he went forward to deal with Francis the insubordinate seaman attacked him with a capstan bar; after a struggle the mate got hold of the bar and brought it down on Francis's head so heavily that he never regained consciousness and died three days later. Nonetheless the captain of the Cutty Sark, who was by no means a hard man, is supposed to have said that it served Francis right, and he helped the mate to escape from the law. When the mate was eventually captured and tried, he was acquitted of murder and the judge, 'with great pain', sentenced him to seven years for manslaughter.

Leggatt was, however, clearly an exemplary sailor, and his provocation was greater; it was in the middle of a storm when the fate of the ship was at stake and the captain had lost his nerve. Leggatt was in the process of performing an action, which probably saved the ship, when one of the sailors was insubordinate; Leggatt 'felled him like an ox. He up and at me. We closed just as an awful sea made for the ship. All hands saw it coming and took to the rigging, but I had him by the throat, and went on shaking him like a rat, the men above us yelling, "Look out! look out!" Then a crash as if the sky had fallen on my head.' Although Leggatt says, 'It's clear that I meant business, because I was holding him by the throat still when they picked us up,' his action was far less deliberate than that of the mate of the Cutty Sark.

The object of this digression is to show that Conrad had no wish to condemn Leggatt but considered him an honourable man who had done something that other honourable men might equally well have done under similar circumstances. He was in fact 'simply knocked over' when a reviewer described Leggatt as 'a murderous ruffian', and certainly had no intention that he should be a symbol of the dark impulses of human nature.

Although his interpretation is not so extreme, Hewitt also regards Leggatt as a symbol, 'an embodiment of his [the captain's] original feeling of being a "stranger" to himself, of that fear that there are parts of himself which he has not yet brought into the light of day', and this 'strangeness' is finally exorcised with the departure of Leggatt. But this is again reading a meaning into the story which the text neither explicitly nor implicitly warrants; and despite the young captain's initial feeling of 'strangeness', the passage at the end where he says 'Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command' can be countered by a similar passage, before Leggatt turns up, where the captain is alone in 'quiet communion' with the ship, his 'hand resting lightly on my ship's rail as if on the shoulder of a trusted friend'.

Although I do not believe that Conrad intended 'The Secret Sharer' to be interpreted symbolically, it is easy to discover an unconscious symbolism which has no direct literary relevance but is important psychologically and autobiographically. Conrad had just left off writing his reminiscences for the English Review, in which he had been particularly concerned to justify his action in leaving Poland and to answer charges of desertion. It is tempting to identify Conrad with Leggatt and to see the implicit justification of Leggatt's action as a justification of Conrad's own, which metaphorically had made him too 'a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, with no brand of the curse on his sane forehead to stay a slaying hand—too proud to explain'. It seems that in the twelve months which saw the completion of the reminiscences, the writing of 'The Secret Sharer' and the finishing of Under Western Eyes, Conrad finally succeeded in coming to terms with his sense of guilt with regard to Poland. It is thus that the last sentence of 'The Secret Sharer' acquires an added significance as an expression of Conrad's desire to be:

a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.