My Conrad

I

I HAVE two feet of Conrad in my library. It is not, I know, customary to measure him in this yardstick fashion, but as I glance at the shelf of well-thumbed volumes, I am impressed by the sheer bulk of his work — by the number of inches, growing to feet, that Conrad wrote his way along during the course of a literary life that began so late and ended so comparatively early. Twenty-four inches is not, of course, the measure, even linearly, of his achievement. My present collection lacks the two collaborations, Romance and The Inheritors, as well as Almayer’s Folly, The Secret Agent, and The Arrow of Gold, which friends have borrowed and failed to return. They show preferences which I do not share. Place the above mentioned volumes with those before me, and one may say that Conrad wrote his way across and down some nine thousand pages (this is a rough estimate), which, printed and bound, occupy close to three feet of library shelf.

I begrudge none of the space which these books occupy in my own library, but if I were compelled to reduce it, I would reluctantly part with all but the following, named in the order in which I prize them: Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, the Youth volume, Victory, Typhoon, Nostromo, Chance, and The Nigger of the Narcissus. You observe that I have not mentioned The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record. These are in a special category, and it would be foolish to attempt an estimate of their value in comparison with the tales. The ten books comprise some fifteen inches of Conrad’s work, and I could as easily part with one of my own linear feet as with any inch-and-a-half volume of the lot.

I have read that interest in Conrad is waning; that the present generation care little for him. If I were one of his publishers I should not be greatly concerned. Whatever may be the preferences of maturing readers, Conrad will never lack devoted admirers among the matured. It is inevitable that he should have his seasons of neglect. His path, like that of Halley’s comet, is elliptical: he will follow it, full circle, time after time. Not as endlessly as Halley’s comet, but oftener. He may be outward bound now, as some think. If so, a generation to come will know something of the breath-taking astonishment and delight felt by those who witnessed his first appearance.

When we remember the unhappy circumstances under which much of his best work was done: the frequent ill health, the perpetual struggle to earn enough for his family’s support; when we recall with what, one may well say, anguish he labored under these circumstances, how are we to measure the extent of our debt to him? I am speaking, of course, of lovers of Conrad, for I am aware that the full enjoyment of his work is, in part, a matter of temperament. Some men do not and cannot read him at all. Those who prefer him to all other novelists of our times, down to this year of 1942, are justified in estimating him by weight or measure, for not a troy ounce, not the fraction of an inch, will ever be added to Conradian literature. Estimators of the future, surveying the important literary figures of the early twentieth century, will say: ‘And now we come to Joseph Conrad,’ as biologists might speak of an extinct genus comprising a single species. They will recognize that he is of unique Conradian stature, and cherish him, as we do, for this. H. L. Mencken once said of him: ‘My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of living fiction that I know, is that Conrad’s figure stands out from the field like the Alps from the Piedmont Plain.’ He might, to the better liking of Conrad’s novelist contemporaries, have reversed the figure. It is not height that matters, but unlikeness — unapproachable oneness.

II

What purer delight can a reader have, upon surrendering his imagination to another’s guidance, than in the sudden coming upon the signs and portents that reveal a creative mind functioning serenely, with an all but unconscious rightness of instinct? The serenity may be disturbed, at times, as the surface of a full-banked river is flawed by gusts of wind blowing across it; but it is unmistakably there, as though it were, in itself, part of a stream of energy flowing from an inexhaustible source. Or, to change the figure slightly, the energy of Conrad’s mind seems, rather, the tide sweeping up the estuary of a river, flooding into coves and bays and creeks as it proceeds on its way. The main channel is neither wide enough nor deep enough to contain it.

Consider the tales within tales that Conrad gives us. They are not the mere surplus of a richly stored mind, thrown in à propos de bottes. When Conrad tempts you away for a moment, or a quarter of an hour, from the main course of his narrative, he has the best of reasons for doing so. Consider, as one of many examples, the tale of Captain Brierly, in Lord Jim — ‘Big Brierly, the captain of the crack ship of the Blue Star Line,’ and his first mate, old Jones. What a superb digression it is, although it may be called a digression only for the sake of convenience. It is one of the signs and portents. In Conrad, one may not immediately recognize them. One may pass them by before the realization comes of what has been passed. Some reflect light from a source hidden afar; others reveal themselves with the sudden splendor of a meteor. Conrad is a great provider of this unexpected delight. In him alone, of the novelists of our time, can we be certain of finding it.

I will speak of one instance among many. It is to be found on page 127 of my old 1909 Doubleday, Page edition of Lord Jim. In the midst of a paragraph you find Marlow saying, with one of his abrupt and seeming digressions: —

‘“Fort intrigués par ce cadavre,” as I was informed a long time after by an elderly French lieutenant, whom I came across one afternoon in Sydney, by the merest chance, in a sort of café, and who remembered the affair perfectly.’

The sentence might, perhaps, be arranged somewhat to its advantage in smoothness, but this is a detail I should be ashamed to call attention to, except that someone may ask what I mean by a creative mind functioning serenely when the citation begins thus. Conrad was too deeply preoccupied with his story to be concerned about such a trifle. This incident, the conversation between Marlow and the French lieutenant, has always seemed to me an excellent example of what might be called white-heat serenity. The reader anything but expects this digression. Throughout fiftyseven pages immediately preceding he has been with Marlow, in the Malabar House at Soerabaja, listening to Jim’s story. Then, in a flash of time, he finds himself in Sydney, listening to a Greek chorus commenting on the action in French, through the lips of an elderly naval lieutenant. It is not a reasonable transition, but what has reason to do with these matters?

I wonder how many readers of Conrad have noticed the number of what can only be called ‘dusty pictures’ scattered through his work. He is tagged as a writer of romances, and so he was, but none of our modern realist novelists has been able to approach, to say nothing of equal, his mid-afternoon, ‘ life-with-thebloom-off ‘ sketches. The scene between Marlow and the French lieutenant is one, and there are dozens of others. I once started to make a list of them, but was led away from my purpose by the recollection of the many writers, not only novelists, who give evidence of that mid-afternoon disenchantment with life. In Amiel’s ‘Journal,’ under the date of March 31st, 1873, appears this entry: ‘Of all the hours of the day, in fine weather, the afternoon, about three o’clock, is the time which to me is most difficult to bear. I never feel more strongly than I do then, le vide effrayant de la vie, the stress of mental anxiety, or the painful thirst for happiness.’ This is what Tennyson said, in the last stanza of ‘ Mariana ‘: —

Even Henry Thoreau, that healthy spirit, was not immune. In one of his Journals, where he is speaking of his Walden experience, he says: ‘Why did I change? Why did I leave the woods? I do not think I can tell. . . . Perhaps I wanted change. There was a little stagnation, it may be, about two o’clock in the afternoon. The world’s axle creaked as if it wanted greasing, as if the oxen labored with the wain and could hardly get their load over the ridge of the day.’ This is the only passage I have ever discovered in Thoreau in which he admitted that he knew and feared t he spectre that makes its presence felt between the hours of two and three P.M. Conrad, it would appear, was not an occasional, but a frequent, host of this dreaded visitant.

III

I am puzzled at the indifference of Conrad readers of my acquaintance to Under Western Eyes — at least, the comparative indifference; it is never one of the favorites, and often they place it far down the list of preferences, sometimes at the very end. I have yet to meet the man whose eyes kindle at the mere mention of the title. One man whose judgment I respect resents the appearance of yet another spokesman for Conrad: the professor of modern languages who is at such pains to disclaim ‘ the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression’ which he reveals so eminently before he has done. Another thinks the tale would have been greatly improved had Conrad conquered, for once, his painfully meticulous concern about method, for plausibility’s sake. Yet another finds the beginning of the story tedious, and tells me that he has never got beyond the first half-dozen pages.

I am such a wholehearted admirer of Conrad that I can no more wish for than I can conceive of a structural plan other than the one adopted for each of his tales. They seem to me perfect, for Conrad; and when we read a man’s work, it is not to compare his method of composition with those of other novelists. We read it because it is his and no other’s. All one needs to be convinced of is that the guide knows what he is about. Plausibility is, rightly, an important concern for a novelist; Conrad could not be otherwise than meticulous in this matter, but he is never painfully so, to my thinking, and least of all in Under Western Eyes.

I can think of no tale that engages the interest more swiftly, or that holds it more relentlessly. The professor of modern languages makes his knowledge of Razumov’s history entirely plausible on pages one and two. On the following page, Razumov takes his three-dimensional shape, and more than that: among other things, you learn the salient fact concerning him, upon which all the story hangs — his curious, unconscious ability to inspire confidence. On page four you find yourself plunged into the midst of the tale, and he who can read to the bottom of that page without wishing to proceed . . . I pause here. People do break off at about this point. I have known them to do it, without in the least wishing to proceed. The observation to be made in this connection has been made before: How strange and various a creature is man! I would doubt the paternity of a son, of twenty or thereabout, who found Under Western Eyes unreadable.

Some years ago, I was interested in searching out references to it in Mr. Jean-Aubry’s Life and Letters of Conrad. The first is a brief note by the biographer: —

At the beginning of 1908 he started upon a novel, Razumov, afterward called Under Western Eyes, the idea of which sprang out of a casual conversation he had with a stranger at Geneva as long ago as 1895; for revisiting that city had brought that talk back to his mind. Physically and spiritually, Conrad was in a very bad way all this year, but he succeeded in pulling himself together.

There are four other references, three of them in Conrad’s letters, but nothing to indicate that he took pleasure in this story, written, as I believe, when he was at the height of his powers. Occasional outpourings of unhappiness in letters to friends do not tell us all, of course. Conrad’s were, undoubtedly, sincere, but the state of mind in which those letters were written could not have been common when he was engaged upon this task. As he reread the pages of the growing pile of manuscript, he could not have believed, in his heart — as he wrote to Norman Douglas — that ‘there is neither hope nor inspiration in them.’ To be sure, we do not know what pages were discarded before the right ones were written; but in any case the story, lacking only the final 12,000 words at the time when he wrote to Douglas, contained evidence overwhelmingly against any finding for despair. Ill health must have accounted for his pessimism on that occasion.

One way — not the best, of course — of estimating Conrad’s stature, is to take incidents from his stories and compare them with somewhat similar ones in the work of other novelists. The best of his are nuggets of gold. For all the casual way in which they are offered, they lie beautifully embedded in the structure of his tales. You may lift them out for the pleasure of closer examination, but you must put them back. Nothing else can be substituted for any one of them.

I take an example, at random, from Under Western Eyes — it is to be found on page twenty-seven of my two-shilling Methuen edition. Razumov, having left his lodgings to search for Ziemianitch, the coachman who was to help Victor Haldin escape, goes instead to Prince K——, and through him betrays Haldin to the police. He then returns to his lodgings, where Haldin is awaiting him. ‘Well, and what have you arranged?’ Haldin asks. ‘It’s done,’ Razumov replies. The whole of this passage, from the time of Razumov’s departure from his lodgings until his return, is an illustration of the mind of a great artist working with what appears to be effortless power; but the incident I refer to is the passage describing Haldin’s departure. Aroused by Razumov’s strange manner and by his words as they sit there, waiting for midnight, — when the coachman, supposedly, was to be in the street below, — Haldin is suddenly appalled by the thought that his action — the killing of the Russian official, which has made him a fugitive — is abhorrent to his friend. He rises abruptly and leaves the house.

There was a faint rustling in the outer room, the feeble click of a bolt drawn back lightly. He was gone — almost as noiseless as a vision.

Razumov ran forward unsteadily, with parted, voiceless lips. Staggering out to the landing, he leaned far over the banister. Gazing down into the deep black shaft with a tiny glittering flame at the bottom, he traced by ear the rapid spiral descent of somebody running downstairs on tiptoe. It was a light, swift, pattering sound which sank away from him into the depths: a fleeting shadow passed over the glimmer — a wink of the tiny flame. Then stillness.

Let those familiar with the tale recall what has gone before and what follows: what awaits Haldin in the silent, snowy, dimly lighted street. That swift, pattering, tiptoe descent is as memorable an exit as a character in fiction has ever made to his doom. Indeed, I can think of no other to be compared with it.

IV

Last week I was reading H. G. Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography, and, remembering that Wells had been a near neighbor of Conrad, in Kent, I was interested to learn what he thought of him, both as a man and as a fellow novelist. He didn’t care much for him in either respect, that is clear, although he is as fair to him, perhaps, as a man so different in character, interests, and outlook upon life could be. He tells an amusing story of Conrad’s first meeting with the old egocentric playboy, Bernard Shaw: —

When Conrad first met Shaw at my house, Shaw talked with his customary freedoms. ‘You know, my dear fellow, your books won’t do’ — for some Shavian reason I have forgotten — and so forth. I went out of the room and suddenly found Conrad on my heels, swift and white-faced. ‘Does that man mean to insult me?’ he demanded. The provocation to say ‘Yes’ and assist at the subsequent duel was very great, but I overcame it. ‘ It’s humour,’ I said, and took Conrad out into the garden to cool. One could always baffle Conrad by saying ‘Humour.’ It was one of our damned English tricks he had never learned to tackle.

In speaking of Conrad and other novelists of his generation, Wells goes on to say: —

These vivid writers I was now beginning to encounter were, on the contrary, hard to educate — as I use the word educate. They were at an opposite pole to me as regards strength of reception. Their abundant, luminous impressions were vastly more difficult to subdue to a disciplined and coordinating relationship than mine. They remained, therefore, abundant but uneducated brains. Instead of being based on a central philosophy, they started off at a dozen points; they were impulsive, uncoördinated, wilful. Conrad, you see, I count uneducated, [withl Stephen Crane, Henry James and the larger part of the world of literary artistry. Shaw’s education I have already impugned. The science and art of education was not adequate for the taming and full utilization of these more powerfully receptive types and they lapsed into arbitrary, inconsistent and dramatized ways of thinking and living. With a more expert and scientific educational process, all that might have been different.

This paragraph, it seems to me, tells us indirectly more about Wells than it does about the men whose shortcomings he deprecated. One would say that he himself had never mastered the ‘Humour’ trick. When his ‘Planned World’ comes into existence, I hope that a few of the unredeemed, of the James and Conrad kind, may somehow escape the expert and scientific educational process. Even Mr. Wells, one would think, would appreciate their value for the sake of contrast. The educated hosts could look down from the shining towers of the Temple of Central Philosophy upon the few wretched beings in the huts outside the gates. And they would say, or think: ‘There, but for the grace of Wells, go I!’