PEARL K. BELL
295
deterioration as her fragile resistance to Strickland caves in. After weeks
of water-borne solitude, Browne begins to hallucinate and falls ill. After
dropping anchor at a ghostly island near Tristan da Cunha, he knows
that his hope of victory is doomed. In a desperate last gasp, he falsifies his
position in his radio bulletins. But the prospect of living out his lie
pushes him, literally, over the edge, and he lets. the sea close over him.
"He could no more take a prize by subterfuge than he could sail to the
white port city of his dreams."
It is a terrifying story, studded with literary allusions to Shakespeare,
Melville, Hart Crane, even Henley's "Invictus,"
all
of which Stone knits
with seamless dexterity into his text. The metaphoric intensity of Stone's
descriptions of the sea is at times almost unbearable, though at other
moments the symbol-devising hand of the author lies too heavily and
obtrusively on the page: the Outerbridge Reach of the title, for instance,
a derelict salvage yard off Staten Island, filled with rotting tugboats and
marine debris, which Browne comes upon early in the story. When the
rats start scurrying all too predictably at the edge of this "phantom
disaster," it's hard not to feel at such moments that Stone is parodying
himself
If in the end
Outerbridge Reach,
for all its unnerving dramatic power,
does not try
to
confront the profound philosophic questions about hu–
man destiny, about character as fate, that Conrad drew from the sea,
Stone has nonetheless defined the limits of his expectations. As he con–
fided in a recent interview, "I see this enormous empty space from which
God has absented himself I see this enormous mystery that I can't pene–
trate, a mystery before which I'm silent and uncomprehending. This ...
is
where I find myself in my sixth decade."
