ESSAYS ON CONRAD

Ian Watt has long been acknowledged as one of the nest of post-
war literary critics. TheRiseof theNovel (:q) is still the landmark
account of the way in which realist ction developed in the eight-
eenth century and Watts work on Conrad has been enormously
inuential. Conrad in theNineteenth Century (:qq) was to have been
followed by a volume addressing Conrads later work, but the
material for this long-awaited second volume remains in essayform.
It is these essays, as Frank Kermode points out in his foreword,
which form the nucleus of Essays on Conrad, Watts ownphilosophy,
as well as his insight into Conrads work, was shaped by his experi-
ences as a prisoner of war on the River Kwai. His personal and
moving account of these experiences forms part of his famous
essay The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth whichcompletes
this essential collection.
IAN WATT is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He is
author of TheRiseof theNovel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding
(:q), Conrad in theNineteenth Century (:qq) and Myths of Modern
Individualism(:qq6). Born in :q:, he was educated at Dover County
School for Boys and St Johns College, Cambridge. In the Second
World War he was a lieutenant in the Fifth Battalion of theSuffolk
Regiment. Captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, he
was a prisoner of war on the River Kwai for three and a half years.
His subsequent teaching career took him from Cambridge to the
University of California at Berkeley (:q.6.), the University of
East Anglia (:q6.) and Stanford University, where he has been
Professor of English since :q6.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
ESSAYS ON CONRAD
I AN WATT
Stanford University



PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING)
FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

http://www.cambridge.org

Ian Watt 2000
This edition Ian Watt 2003

First published in printed format 2000


A catalogue record for the original printed book is available
from the British Library and from the Library of Congress
Original ISBN 0 521 78007 1 hardback
Original ISBN 0 521 78387 9 paperback


ISBN 0 511 01374 4 virtual (netLibrary Edition)
Contents
Foreword Frank Kermode pagevii
Acknowledgements xii
: Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment :
. Almayers Folly: introduction .o
Conrad criticism and TheNigger of theNarcissus 6
Conrads Heart of Darkness and the critics 8
Comedy and humour in Typhoon q
6 The political and social background of TheSecret Agent ::.
The Secret Sharer: introduction :.
8 Conrad, James and Chance :
q Story and idea in Conrads TheShadow-Line :.
:o The decline of the decline: notes on Conrads reputation :o
:: Around Conrads grave in the Canterbury cemetery
a retrospect :86
:. The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth :q.
Index .o8
v
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Foreword
Frank Kermode
Readers of the nal chapter of this book may nd it surprising that the
man who spent years labouring on the River Kwai should have returned
after the war to an inconceivably different way of life and immediately
embarked on a distinguished academic career. Little more than a decade
later he published TheRiseof theNovel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and
Fielding(:q). After the war years many of Watts contemporaries, even
if they had not spent them in painful captivity, found it difcult to
adjust their lives to more sedate civilian routines. What readers of this
collection as a whole will observe is that the strength of mind the
character displayed in the nal chapter also informs Watts critical
writing. The persistence of this quality goes some way to explaining
Watts devotion, over many years, to Conrad an honourable stoicism
that shuns illusion without being an enemy of pleasure, especially the
pleasure of ne technical and aesthetic discriminations.
In TheRiseof theNovel Watt maintained that realism, as he dened it,
was the quality that distinguished the work of the early eighteenth-
century novelists from all previous ction. Before that period there were
of course thousands of ctions, but the novel, as we know it, became
possible only when the general acceptance of certain social, economic and
philosophical assumptions, and the coming into existence of a literate,
middle-class and predominantly Protestant audience, made possible such
extraordinary works as Samuel Richardsons Clarissa (:8). Watt dis-
criminates between the kind of realism exemplied by Defoe, with his
unmatched power to persuade readers by minute presentation of detail
that what they are reading is true, and a richer realism that concerns
itself also with personality and civilized values generally. This variety of
realism is essential to the kind of writing that we agree to call the novel.
It is not merely a matter of making the narrative seem authentic as to
local and period detail; it is also a matter of establishing the authenticity,
the complex art and humanity, of the work as a whole.
vii
Watts view of the rise of the novel has often been contested, most
recently and most emphatically by Margaret Anne Doody in her vast
book TheTrueStory of theNovel (:qq6). Her title itself indicates dissent
from Watt, whose version of that story is, she claims, untrue. Her
argument is that the novel has a continuous history of .,ooo years;
that form of ction for which Watt reserves the appellation novel
cannot, by his own criteria of realism, or indeed by any other criteria,
be distinguished from the romance, a category into which most of that
earlier writing is conventionally placed. That the English invented the
novel in the eighteenth century is a literary lie. Ms Doody is a strong
feminist, and might want to add that the claim is also a masculine lie.
The interest of her remarkable book, in the present context, is that she
needs to tell the whole history of ction in the West, and assert that
its genius is entirely female, in order to undermine the forty-year-old
contentions of Watt. I do not believe she succeeds.
It is not a simple coincidence that Doodys book belongs to the
modern era of magic realism. It seems unlikely that works in that
mode, much admired of late, would meet Watts criteria, and although
I am only guessing I will say I believe he would not admire them.
Doubtless it should be admitted that more permissive notions of realism
now prevail both in practice and in literary theory, and it would not be
beyond the wit of man (or woman) to devise reasons to show that this
alteration of focus has been brought about by the social and economic
changes in our world since :q. Nevertheless TheRiseof theNovel is a
landmark, one of the very few works of modern literary criticism that
may be said to have achieved classic status. As early as :q: Watt
published an important and provocative essay stressing the economic
signicance of Robinson Crusoe, so it can be said that for the better part
of half a century practically any serious discussion of this book, and the
eighteenth-century novel, has had to establish a relationship, even if
questioning or dissenting, with Watts work.
After resuming his interrupted career, he taught at UCLA and Harvard,
at Cambridge and at the new University of East Anglia, before settling
at Stanford, where he eventually became the rst Director of the Stanford
Humanities Center. A good deal of his published work has been on the
period considered in his rst book, but a vital supplement to Watts
bibliography is his work on Joseph Conrad, which culminated in Conrad
in theNineteenth Century (:qq). This exemplary work was to have been
followed by another treating Conrads writings in the twentiethcentury,
viii Foreword
but it now appears, most regrettably, that we shall not see this second
volume. However, the present collection contains a number of essaysand
lectures on Conrad, most of them on the later part of the novelistscareer.
Watt has long been acknowledged to be among the nest and most
learned of Conrads expositors. The long and carefully researched
chapter on Conrads rst novel, Almayers Folly, is a ne example of his
powers as biographer and critic. His observations on Conrads early
inuences, and on his command of English (a topic that still requires
attention) has not, I think, been bettered. Always attentive to what
other critics have to say, he can here be seen adjudicating between
angry commentators, himself perfectly composed and conspicuously
true to his own Conradian idea of virtue.
When Conrad writes of Singleton, in TheNigger of theNarcissus, that
he steered with care, Watt comments: It is the climactic recognition
of our utter and yet often forgotten dependence, night and day. . . on
the labors of others and he adds that there is perhaps a moral for the
critic here: for, in making us look up, briey, to Singleton at the wheel,
Conrad gives us a moment of vision in which, from the height of our
modish attachment to ever-developing discriminations, we arecompelled
to afrm our endless, intricate, and not inglorious kinship with those
who cannot write. Another such exemplar is MacWhirr in Typhoon, a
character both funny and admirable, and an instance of the paradox-
ical fact that superiors who are in many respects inept can nevertheless
be very good at the job; indeed, their very lack of interest or skill in
conversation and books, the main values of verbal culture, may even
have left them freer to do in a more single-minded way the one thing
that they have trained themselves to do. One might say without much
fear of contradiction that Watt learned this Conradian moral when in
uniform or in the prison camp.
His delity to the spirit of the author, whom he tells us he rst
admired at the age of twelve, enables him, in the chapter on Heart of
Darkness, to speak temperately on complex issues of colonialism, and, in
the chapter Conrad, James and Chance, to settle the question of how
the two great men stood on the vexed problem of Jamess disapproval
of Chance. What is most striking is Watts ability to think with Conrad,
and he has that ability not only by reason of his literary intelligence but
also from his conviction, strengthened at Kwai, that human society,
horribly imperfect though it is, depends, if it is not to be even worse, on
the devotion and courage of people honestly doing their jobs, whether
commanding or commanded, whether writers or not.
Foreword ix
And here one must glance with admiration at the chapter on theRiver
Kwai. Watt is interested in the truth of that matter, but also in themyth
that has been developed from it. What the world now thinks about the
building of that bridge depends on a lm that depends on, and departs
from, a novel which is itself far from describing things as they reallywere.
It seems that the Japanese had more prisoners than they could handle,
and so the prisoners themselves took over the business of disciplined
production. It is recorded that their lives were painful and close to
desperation, but the point is made without reference to the writersown
discomforts, save in that he was one of them. They had to settle for the
kind of life available. There was no chance of escape. They organized
their own police force, conscious of a need for order of some kind. One
ofcer, especially efcient, found ways to make their lot easier, and,
inevitably, also expedited the building of the enemy railway bridge.
By chance a French writer came to hear about this episode, and
based a novel on it. He seems to have represented it as primarily a
comment on the way modern technology destroys human meanings
and purposes. And he began the transformation of the actual efcient
ofcer into the character played by Alec Guinness in David Leans
movie. The lm was wholly false to the situation of the prisoners; it was
colonialist, it misrepresented the kind of bridge involved, and, contrary
to the facts, blew it up. Watt was there; and he has since that bad time
gone back to the bridge, and can say what happened subsequently to
the railway. He prefers reality to myth, unlike the movie-makers and
unlike their audiences.
Why did the myth take over? The answer is Conradian: the deep
blindness of our culture both to the stubbornness of reality and to the
continuities of history. That blindness encouraged the public to accept
the movie-fantasy of Nicholsons unconquerable British individualism,
his triumph over his powerful but racially inferior captors. Watt believes
our whole society is prone to distort the truth by such mythical thinking.
It fails to observe that the world will not do its bidding, that the best
and only decent form of conduct for the prisoners, as now for us, was
work and restraint two of Conrads imperatives. These imperatives
have always operated powerfully in Watts world, and are the enemies
of self-indulgent myth. It is to be noted that he nowhere dwells on his
own work and suffering; his concern is entirely with facts and false
interpretations.
His interest in myth, and its part in the creation of undesirable social
and individual fantasy, led to the writing of his most recent book, Myths
x Foreword
of Modern Individualism(:qq6), a study of Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan
and Robinson Crusoe as myths that have acquired a special resonance
in modern culture. Of course they did not have that function originally,
but were recreated to suit a more modern and individualist sensibility
than they at rst possessed. One could read this new collection of essays
as a sober and unillusioned defence of the principle of unmythicized
reality as it can be studied in the novels of Conrad. He too has his
fantasizing individualists his Haldins, his nihilist professors, his cor-
rupt anarchists but he has also his MacWhirrs and Singletons, the
men without conversation, who dont write and rarely read, but who
command and are commanded, and do the work of the world. Like
Conrad, Watt admires such men. Rarely has a critic shared so fully the
virtues of his author.
Foreword xi
Acknowledgements
Copyright in all essays rests with Ian Watt. His essays are reproduced
from the following sources: Joseph Conrad: alienation and commit-
ment (Cambridge University Press); the introduction to Almayers Folly
(ed. Ian Watt, Cambridge University Press); Conrad criticism and The
Nigger of theNarcissus (Nineteenth-Century Fiction); Conrads Heart of
Darkness and the critics (North Dakota Quarterly); Comedy and Humour
in Typhoon (Murisa International); The political and social background
of TheSecret Agent (The Macmillan Press); the introduction to The
Secret Sharer (The Limited Editions Club); Conrad, James and Chance
(Methuen & Co.); Story and idea in Conrads TheShadow-Line (Critical
Quarterly); The decline of the decline: notes on Conrads reputation
(Stanford Slavic Studies); Around Conrads grave in the Canterbury
cemetery a retrospect (Radopi, Amsterdam); The Bridge over the
River Kwai as myth (BerkshireReview).
xii
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment :
:
cn\r+rn :
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment
The doubts of the critics about the whole history-of-ideas approach are
understandable enough: one way of not experiencing King Lear is to
underline a few passages containing recognizable ideas, and to make
the gratifying reexion that the Great Chain of Being is really there.
The search for such portable intellectual contents as can be prised loose
from a work of imagination is likely to deect attention from what it can
most characteristically yield, in exchange for a few abstract ideas whose
natures and inter-relationships are much more exactly stated in formal
philosophy. And if we cannot base our literary judgements on philo-
sophical criteria, we must be equally on our guard against the criteria of
the historian of ideas, which naturally place most value on literary works
which are ideologically representative; whereas the greatest authors
actually seem not so much to reect the intellectual system of their age
as to express more or less directly its inherent contradictions, or the very
partial nature of its capacity for dealing with the facts of experience.
This seems to be true of Chaucer and Shakespeare; and it tends to
become truer as we come down to the modern world, in which no single
intellectual system has commanded anything like general acceptance.
All these are familiar objections; and as regards criticism of modern
literature they have been reinforced by a new form of philosophys old
objections to the cognitive validity of art by the symbolist aesthetics
rejection of all forms of abstraction and conceptualization. The ancient
notion was that ideas were the natural and proper inhabitants of mans
mind; T. S. Eliots resounding paradox that Henry James had a mind
so ne that no idea could violate it transformed them into dangerous
rufans threatening the artist with a fate worse than death.
The alarm, we can now agree, was exaggerated; indeed, the recent
tendency for much literary criticism to add moral to formal analysis might
well proceed further, and make inquiry into intellectual backgrounds
an essential, though not a dominating or exclusive, part of its critical
. Essays on Conrad
procedure. For instance, an understanding of Conrads intellectual
attitudes, and of their relation to the various ideological battlegrounds
both of his own and of our time, seems to me to illuminate several literary
problems which have not yet been satisfactorily answered, despite the
increasing critical attention which his works have lately received. At the
same time, the consideration of these problems seems to indicate that it
is not in ideology as such, but in the relationship of systems of ideas to
other things, things as various as personal experience or the expectations
of the audience, that we are likely to nd answers to literary questions.
The position of Joseph Conrad (:8:q.) among his great contem-
poraries is unique in at least three respects. First, he has a much more
varied audience: one nds his admirers not only in academic and
literary circles, but among people in all stations of life. Secondly,
Conrads reputation, after a relative decline following his death in :q.,
seems to have grown steadily ever since the Second World War; and
it continues now, just as one detects a certain mounting impatience,
just or unjust, against most of Conrads literary peers mainly against
Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, but also, to some extent, against Yeats. The
reasons for these two features of Conrads literary appeal seem to be
connected with a third and equally wellknown matter his obscurity.
For although the charge of obscurity against modern writers is not
novel, it takes a very special form in the case of Conrad. E. M. Forster
expressed it most memorably when he asked whether the secret casket
of [Conrads] genius does not contain a vapour rather than a jewel,
and went on to suggest that the vapour might come from the central
chasm of his tremendous genius, a chasm which divided Conrad the
seaman from Conrad the writer:
Together with these loyalties and prejudices and personal scruples, [Conrad]
holds another ideal, a universal, the love of Truth. . . . So there are constant
discrepancies between his nearer and his further vision, and here would seem
to be the cause of his central obscurity. If he lived only in his experiences,
never lifting his eyes to what lies beyond them: or if, having seen what lies
beyond, he would subordinate his experiences to it then in either case he
would be easier to read.
:
The continual contradiction which Forster describes between the
seer and seaman, between philosophy and experience, seems to offer a
key to the three literary problems I have posed. For whereas Conrads
further vision was very similar to that of his great contemporaries, his
nearer vision, his actual range of experience, was not; and in his works
the two perspectives combine in a way which seems directly related to
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment
the varied nature of his audience, to the renewed topicality of his view
of the world, and to the unresolved conict of attitudes which underlies
his obscurity.
Conrads further vision was dominated by the characteristic despair
of the late Victorian world-view, which originated in all those develop-
ments in nineteenth-century geology, astronomy, physics and chemistry
which combined with industrialism to suggest that, so far from being
the eternal setting created by God for his favourite, man, the natural
world was merely the temporary and accidental result of purposeless
physical processes. In one letter, written in :8q, Conrad used an
appropriately industrial metaphor to express this notion of the universe
as a determinist mechanism denying all mans aspirations towards
progress and reform:
There is a let us say a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientic) out
of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! it knits. I am horried at the horrible
work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider but it goes on knitting.
You come and say: This is all right; its only a question of the right kind of oil.
Let us use this for instance celestial oil and the machine will embroider a
most beautiful design in purple and gold. Will it? Alas, no! You cannot by any
special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most
withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself: made itself
without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without
heart. It is a tragic accident and it has happened. . . .
It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death,
corruption, despair and all the illusions and nothing matters. . . .
.
In such a meaningless and transitory universe, there is no apparent
reason why we should have any concern whatever with the lives of
others, or even very much concern with our own:
The attitude of cold unconcern is the only reasonable one. Of course reason is
hateful but why? Because it demonstrates (to those who have the courage)
that we, living, are out of life utterly out of it. . . . In a dispassionate view the
ardour for reform, improvement, for virtue, for knowledge and even for beauty
is only a vain sticking up for appearances, as though one were anxious about
the cut of ones clothes in a community of blind men.

What has been considered mans most precious gift, consciousness, is

really, therefore, a curse:
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that
they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions
of this earth is very well but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain,
the anger, the strife the tragedy begins.

Essays on Conrad
In Lord Jim (:qoo), Stein contemplates a buttery, and discourses like
a discouraged version of the great evolutionist Alfred Wallace, on whom
he was in part based:

. . . so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is Nature the balance of

colossal forces. Every star is so and every blade of grass stands so and the
mighty Kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces this. This wonder; this
masterpiece of Nature the great artist!
. . . And what of man? [Marlow asks]:
Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece, he said. . . . Perhaps the
artist was a little mad. Eh? . . . Sometimes it seems to me that man is come
where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him.
6
Man, in fact, is Natures permanent alien; he must create his own
order if he can. This, of course, was how the Victorians had come to
think of human destiny; the religion of progress, in Tennysons words,
called on man to
Move upward, working out the beast
And let the ape and tiger die.
But that was not so easy, as Freud was to show; and also, at much the
same time, Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness (:8qq).
Kurtz begins as a representative of all the highest aspirations of
nineteenth-century individualism; he is an artist, an eloquent political
speaker on the liberal side, an economic and social careerist; and his
story enacts the most characteristic impulse of Victorian civilization,
combining the economic exploitation of Africa with the great moral
crusade of bringing light to the backward peoples of the world. But the
jungle whispers to [Kurtz] things about himself which he did not know,
things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this
great solitude (p. ::). His forgotten and brutal instincts ( p. :) soon
lead Kurtz to outdo the other colonial exploiters in sordid rapacity; he
enslaves and massacres the surrounding tribes; and he ends up being
worshipped as a God to whom human sacrices are offered.
At the back of the great nineteenth-century dream was the assumption
that man could be his own God. But to Disraelis question Is man an
ape or an angel?, Kurtzs fate seems to answer that we are never less likely
to let the ape and tiger die than when we imagine we are angels. Kurtz
thought that we whites . . . must necessarily appear to [the savages] in
the nature of supernatural beings we approach them with the might
as of a deity. But he ends his report to the International Society for the
Suppression of Savage Customs: Exterminate all the brutes! (p. ::8).
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment
For Conrad, then, mans hope for progress ignores the fact that the
ape and tiger are not merely part of our evolutionary heritage, but are
ontologically present in every individual. This goes beyond the usual
assumptions of the most sceptical of Victorians, and it makes impossible
the faith in the development of mans intellectual potentialities through
education which characterized the main spokesmen of the Victorian
and Edwardian periods. Thus, when his reformer friend Cunninghame
Graham wrote that his democratic ideal was the heroic sailor, Singleton,
in The Nigger of the Narcissus (:8q8), but a Singleton who has been educ-
ated, Conrad retorted:
I think Singleton with an education is impossible. . . . Then he would become
conscious and much smaller and very unhappy. Now he is simple and
great like an elemental force. Nothing can touch him but the curse of decay
the eternal decree that will extinguish the sun, the stars, one by one, and in
another instant shall spread a frozen darkness over the whole universe. Noth-
ing else can touch him he does not think.
Would you seriously wish to tell such a man Know thyself! Understand that
you are nothing, less than a shadow, more insignicant than a drop of water in
the ocean, more eeting than the illusion of a dream? Would you?

Knowledge merely makes the individual more conscious of the terr-

ible disparity between actuality and aspiration: nor does mans love of
his fellows afford any more secure a foundation for political and social
reform. Such reform represents no more than as Conrad put it in
Victory (:q:) the conict between gorge and disgorge (p. 8); and
mans own nature dooms his longing for fraternity; as Conrad asked:
Frankly, what would you think of an effort to promote fraternity amongst
people living in the same street, I dont even mention two neighbouring
streets? Two ends of the same street. . . . What does fraternity mean? . . .
Nothing unless the CainAbel business.
8
Conrad, then, shared with the Victorians their rejection of the reli-
gious, social and intellectual order of the past, but he also rejected, as
completely as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence or Thomas Mann,
the religion of progress with which they and the Edwardians had re-
placed it. This alienation from the prevailing intellectual perspectives
both of the past and of his own time naturally did much to colour
Conrads picture both of his own selfhood and of his role as an author.
I use the word alienation because it seems to me the most comprehen-
sive term to describe the two aspects of the process we are concerned
with the external or public, and the internal or private. We have
already considered the public, the external ideological vision; but it
6 Essays on Conrad
would, from a literary point of view, remain merely notional, as
Newman put it, unless it were internalized: that it was in Conrad, we
shall see.
The word alienation has been used in a wide variety of ways,
q
but
its derivation and early usage make its main meaning reasonably clear.
From alius, another, Latin developed the forms alienus, belonging to
another country, and alienatus, estranged. Our word alienation thus
bears the constant notion of being or feeling a stranger, an outsider.
Alienation, as a translation of the German Entfremdung, was given philo-
sophical currency early in the nineteenth century by Hegel, who used
it to denote what he thought to be characteristic of the individual in
the modern world, his sense of inward estrangements, of more or less
conscious awareness that the inner being, the real I, was alienated
from the me, the person as an object in society. Later, Marx transferred
the idea to the economic plane; for Marx, man only loses his isolation
and realizes himself as a person through his activities, through his
work; but under capitalism, since the commodity and its cash value
are primary, the individual, no longer in personal control of his labour,
feels alienated from his work, and therefore from society and from
himself.
:o
Conrad, I need hardly say, was neither a Hegelian nor a Marxist;
but all his writings, and especially his letters, make it clear not only that
his mind completely rejected the social and intellectual order of the
day, but that his whole inner being seemed to have been deprived of
meaning. There can surely be few expressions of such total estrange-
ment from the natural world, from other people, from the writing
process, and from the self, to equal this Conrad letter to Garnett:
I am like a man who has lost his gods. My efforts seem unrelated to anything in
heaven and everything under heaven is impalpable to the touch like shapes of
mist. Do you see how easy writing must be under such conditions? Do you see?
Even writing to a friend to a person one has heard, touched, drank with,
quarrelled with does not give me a sense of reality. All is illusion the words
written, the mind at which they are aimed, the truth they are intended to
express, the hands that will hold the paper, the eyes that will glance at the
lines. Every image oats vaguely in a sea of doubt and the doubt itself is lost
in an unexplored universe of incertitudes.
::
But alienation, of course, is not the whole story: Conrad also gives us a
sense of a much wider commitment to the main ethical, social and
literary attitudes, both of the world at large and of the general reader,
than do any others of his great contemporaries.
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment
Commitment I take to be the secular equivalent of what prize-
giving speakers call dedication a binding engagement of oneself to
a course of action which transcends any purely personal advantage.
And the question inevitably arises as to how a man with the general
intellectual perspective sketched above can possibly commit himself to
anything larger than his own personal interests.
The beginnings of an answer are probably to be found in Conrads
life, which made alienation not an endless discovery demanding expres-
sion, but merely the initial premise. The initial premise because Conrad
was, to begin with, an orphan; his mother died when he was seven, and
his father when he was eleven. Then there was his nationality: as a Pole
he belonged to a country which no longer existed, and whose people,
Conrad wrote, had for a hundred years been used to go to battle
without illusions.
:.
Adolescence brought further estrangements: in
France from :8 to :88, Conrad tried to realize his dream of a career
at sea, but he achieved only failure, debts, an unhappy love affair, and,
it now seems virtually certain, an attempt at suicide. But when, at the
age of twenty, Conrad joined the crew of the English freighter Mavis,
the premise of total alienation began to be undermined. Conrads
successful struggle, under conditions, for the most part, of unbearable
physical and psychological hardship, to rise from able-bodied seaman
to captain, must have given him a sense of the unexpected possibilities
and rewards of individual participation in the ordinary life of humanity.
Conrads years at sea were everything for his career as a writer. Not
because they gave him a subject Conrad would surely be a major
novelist quite apart from the sea stories; but because to the earlier
perspective of every kind of alienation there was added a foreground of
immediate experience which featured a series of the most direct per-
sonal and social commitments to his career, to his fellow-seamen, to
his adopted country. These commitments had the most far-reaching
effects on Conrads attitude to his audience, on his role as a writer, and
on his understanding of human life; and their importance was not
diminished by the fact that they arose from attitudes which were in
perpetual opposition to the larger view of the world which Conrad the
seer had absorbed from his nineteenth-century heritage.
There is no very specic statement about the conict in Conrads
letters or essays, but its results appear very clearly in his views of his
audience, and of his art, as well as in the novels. In the earliest extant
letters alienation is the pervading theme, and there is very little about
commitment; where the conict of the two does occur, it is very much
8 Essays on Conrad
from the point of view of alienation, as in an early letter to Madame
Poradowska. We are condemned, Conrad wrote in :8q, to go through
life accompanied by
the inseparable being forever at your side master and slaves, victim and
executioner who suffers and causes suffering. Thats how it is! One must
drag the ball and chain of ones self hood to the end. It is the price one pays for
the devilish and divine privilege of thought; so that in this life it is only the elect
who are convicts a glorious band which comprehends and groans but which
treads the earth amidst a multitude of phantoms with maniacal gestures, with
idiotic grimaces. Which would you be: idiot or convict?
:
The war within is an internal projection of the external conict
between the uncomprehending multitudes, the idiots, and the con-
victs whose intelligence and self-consciousness have condemned them
to loneliness and alienation. The possibility of siding with the idiots,
of course, is presented by Conrad only as a rhetorical question. In
this, Conrad is echoing, not so much Hegels picture of alienation, as
the familiar romantic dichotomy between the sensitive artist and the
crass world outside and, more particularly, its later development, the
division of the reading public into highbrow and lowbrow. These
divisions must have been much more familiar to Conrad than to many
of his English contemporaries, since he read such French writers as
Flaubert and Baudelaire very early in his career, and for them the
alienation of the writer from the bourgeois public was both more con-
scious and more absolute than for any English writer of the Victorian
period.
Unlike Flaubert and Baudelaire, however, Conrad had no private
means, and so as soon as he began his career as an author the problem
of nding a public became immediate. When his rst literary adviser,
Edward Garnett, urged Conrad to follow his own path as a writer and
disregard the multitude, Conrad retorted: But I wont live in an attic!
Im past that, you understand? I wont live in an attic! On the other
hand, keeping out of attics unfortunately seemed feasible only for such
popular writers as Rider Haggard, and when Garnett mentioned his
work, Conrad commented: too horrible for words.
:
Conrads nancial dependence on public favour must often have
reinforced his sense of separateness. On the one hand, he was forced
by economic necessity to degrade himself as he once put it, all my
art has become artfulness in exploiting agents and publishers;
:
on the
other hand, his inner self remained aloof and proudly refused to accept
the role of authorship as society dened it. We nd Conrad on one
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment q
occasion declining to send his photograph to his publisher, though he
added with sardonic magnanimity, if I were a pretty actress or a rst-
rate athlete, I wouldnt deprive an aching democracy of a legitimate
satisfaction.
:6
When, for advertising purposes, Algernon Methuen re-
quested a description of The Secret Agent, which his rm was publishing,
Conrad replied disdainfully, Ive a very denite idea of what I tried to
do and a fairly correct one (I hope) of what I have done. But it isnt a
matter for a booksellers ear. I dont think he would understand: I dont
think many readers will. But thats not my affair.
:
What his readers thought was not his affair. That, at least, is one
of the postures of authorship which Conrad adopted. But there was
another.
How a writer comes to form an idea of his audience is no doubt a
complicated and highly idiosyncratic matter; but the starting point
must always be the people the writer has actually talked to and heard
talk. In Conrads case, when he became an author virtually everyone
he had heard talk English was a seaman; and although collectively they
were part of the mass public he scorned, yet many of them were people
he respected as individuals. This may be part of the reason why when
Conrad speaks of the reading public, as in this letter to John Galsworthy,
his sardonic mockery is qualied by the sense that, however fatuous,
the reading public is, after all, composed of human beings:
A public is not to be found in a class, caste, clique or type. The public is (or
are?) individuals. . . . And no artist can give it what it wants because humanity
doesnt know what it wants. But it will swallow everything. It will swallow Hall
Caine and John Galsworthy, Victor Hugo and Martin Tupper. It is an ostrich,
a clown, a giant, a bottomless sack. It is sublime. It has apparently no eyes and
no entrails, like a slug, and yet it can weep and suffer.
:8
There is no sense here, such as one nds in many other modern
authors, that the writer must make a conscious choice of a public, and
set his sights either at the literary lite or at the masses who have to be
written down to. Conrad the seer viewed both with the same jaded
scepticism, and he chose neither. Still, the humbler side of his double
vision reminded him that the target of his scorn could also weep and
suffer; and so he retained sufcient faith in a direct appeal to mankind
to write for a public comprising readers as different as his later literary
friends and his former shipmates. After nearly twenty years of discour-
aging struggle, Conrads residual commitment to mankind considered
as an audience bore fruit when Chance (:q:) became a best-seller: this
response, Conrad wrote in his Authors Note,
:o Essays on Conrad
gave me a considerable amount of pleasure, because what I had always feared
most was drifting unconsciously into the position of a writer for a limited
coterie; a position which would have been odious to me as throwing a doubt
on the soundness of my belief in the solidarity of all mankind in simple ideas
and sincere emotions. . . . I had managed to please a number of minds busy
attending to their own very real affairs. ( pp. viiiix)
The checks which the committed seaman imposed on the alienated
writer in his attitude to his audience also affected Conrads general
literary outlook; and this despite his awareness, as he put it in the
Familiar Preface to A Personal Record (:q:.), that as in political so in
literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of
his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness of his outlook. Most
obviously, Conrads training at sea ran counter to any intransigent
expression of his inner alienation. . . . to be a great magician, he wrote
in the same preface, one must surrender to occult and irresponsible
powers, either outside or within ones breast. But this direction, he
continued, was not for him, because his sea training had strengthened
his resolve to keep good hold on the one thing really mine . . . that full
possession of myself which is the rst condition of good service; and
Conrad concluded that the conscience must sometimes say nay to the
temptations of the author: the danger lies in the writer becoming the
victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and
in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
blunt for his purpose as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
emotion.
As for literary doctrine, Conrads disenchantment with the accepted
literary modes was with him from the beginning of his career as a
writer. He expressed it most fully and most eloquently in the famous
preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. None of the temporary formulas
of [the artists] craft is reliable, Conrad begins: they all: Realism,
Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofcial sentimentalism (which,
like the poor, is exceedingly difcult to get rid of ), all these gods must,
after a short period of fellowship, abandon him ( pp. xxi).
All the conceptual formulae, whether of literature or of science or of
philosophy, are much too unreliable a basis for the writer: he must
depend on those primary facts of the experience which he shares with
mankind at large. So the positives of the nearer vision, of ultimate
commitment, somehow enabled Conrad to bypass the ndings of the
alienated intellect, and to convert the most esoteric of literary doctrines
Art for Arts sake into the most universal:
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment ::
The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts,
demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is
not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition
and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for
delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense
of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all
creation and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits
together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in
joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to
each other, which binds together all humanity the dead to the living and the
living to the unborn. ( p. viii)
At this point I can begin to answer the rst question: the breadth of
Conrads appeal was made possible by the fact that, almost alone
among his great contemporaries, he thought a broad appeal worth
making; he was glad, he wrote in the Authors Note to Chance, that
apparently I have never sinned against the basic feelings and elemen-
tary convictions which make life possible to the mass of mankind ( p. x).
This alone surely does much to account both for Conrads decline in
critical esteem during the twenties, and for the way he acquired a wider
and more miscellaneous audience than his literary peers. If alienation
had been the sum of his subjects and literary attitudes, Conrad might
have captured the highbrow vote more quickly; but the wide variety of
people whom he respected and admired, and their very various ways of
looking at life, were always there as a constant check to the extremes
of the vision of the isolated writer. Conrads writings do not proclaim
their authors radical separateness from the rest of mankind; their style
does not aunt his alienation like a banner announcing a certied Dark
Knight of the Soul. It was characteristic of Conrad that he should
praise the work of his friend Ford Madox Ford on the grounds that he
does not stand on his head for the purpose of getting a new and striking
view of his subject. Such a method of procedure may be in favour
nowadays but I prefer the old way, with the feet on the ground.
:q
On the other hand, of course, the alienation is still there; there is
nothing promiscuous about Conrads commitment; he is very far from
what D. H. Lawrence called the vast evil of acquiescence; and even in
his most afrmative works the heroic, romantic or popular elements
are always qualied by the general atmosphere an atmosphere, to use
Conrads own phrase, of cold moral dusk.
.o
The tone of desperate
alienation which one nds in Conrads early letters is not directly
expressed in the novels; but one can often recognize its mufed presence,
whether in the defeated cadences of his rhetoric, or in the tendency of
:. Essays on Conrad
the narrative progress to seem under the constant threat of envelop-
ing torpor. Nevertheless, it seems broadly true that, in Conrads most
characteristic work, the negative voices of alienation are confronted
and largely overcome by the possibilities of commitment, or, in Conrads
term, of solidarity.
What Conrad meant by solidarity is sufciently evident from the
preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. In the terms of our argument
we can see it as an intangible and undemonstrable but existent and
widespread acceptance of common human obligations which somehow
transcend the innite individual differences of belief and purpose and
taste. It is not a conscious motive, and it rarely becomes the dominating
factor in human affairs; its existence seems to depend very largely upon
the mere fact that, in the course of their different lives, most individuals
nd themselves faced with very similar circumstances; nevertheless, it is
solidarity which gives both the individual and the collective life what
little pattern of meaning can be discovered in it. Conrads own experi-
ence, of course, tended to conrm this view of solidarity; and his most
typical writing is concerned to present its achievements, to enact its
discovery, or to assay its powers.
The theme of solidarity is most obvious in what are surely Conrads
most perfect, if not his most important works, in The Nigger of the Narcissus,
Typhoon, The Shadow-Line. But in some form it also controls most of the
other novels, which characteristically present the movement of the
protagonist towards another person or persons; the movement is often
incomplete, or too late to succeed; but, from Marlows involvement in
the fate of Kurtz and Lord Jim, to the sexual relationships of Chance and
Victory, the readers attention is usually engaged in following the fortunes
of an isolated and alienated character towards others; and this quest
eventually assumes both for the character and for the reader a much
larger moral importance than that of the personal relationship as such.
In Lord Jim, for example, Marlow is presented with an apparent
breakdown of his unquestioned belief in the values of solidarity when
an unknown rst mate, a young man, one of us, deserts his post and
leaves the 8oo passengers on the Patna to their fate; for no apparent
cause Marlow discovers that his deepest being demands that he know:
Why I longed to go grubbing into the deplorable details of an occurrence
which, after all, concerned me no more than as a member of an obscure body
of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by delity to a
certain standard of conduct, I cant explain. You may call it an unhealthy
curiosity if you like; but I have a distinct notion I wished to nd something.
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment :
Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would nd that something, some profound
and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of
an excuse. I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible for the
laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of mans creation, of the uneasy
doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling
than the certitude of death the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a
xed standard of conduct. ( p. o)
The doubt can never be set at rest; but the concern remains, not
only in Lord Jim, but in most of Conrads novels. Of course, it takes
different forms. In Conrads later works, for example, the protagonist is
often closer to our sense of the younger, the more sceptical, Conrad, as
with Decoud, for example, or Heyst. There the concern for solidarity
tends to an opposite pattern: the protagonists moral crisis is not that
the xed standard of conduct is challenged, but that, to his surprise, the
alienated protagonist encounters its overwhelming imperatives.
This movement from alienation towards commitment is rather rare
in the other great modern writers. They tend, indeed, to equate the
achievement of individuality with the process of alienation; the poetry
of Eliot and Pound, for example, typically leads us away in revulsion
from contemporary actuality; while the novels of Joyce and Lawrence
tend to focus on the breaking of ties with family, class and country:
both poets and the novelists leave us, not with a realization of mans
crucial though problematic dependence on others, but with a sharpened
awareness of individual separateness.
It is here, of course, that we may nd one reason for the renewed
interest in Conrad. For since the Second World War, the experience of
a whole generation has brought it close to Conrads personal position;
partly because world history has played over so many of his themes in
deafening tones; and partly because our habituation to alienation, rein-
forced by the vision of the other great modern writers, has inevitably
brought us back to the dominating question in Conrad: alienation, yes,
but how do we get out of it?
One can observe the recent convergence on this typical Conradian
preoccupation in many different intellectual areas. Most directly, it can
be seen in recent Conrad criticism, which, since Morton Dauwen
Zabels article Chance and Recognition in :q,
.:
has concentrated
on Conrad as the master of the process of moral self-discovery leading
to human commitment; most widely, we can turn to the extremely close
parallel between this aspect of Conrad and the main philosophical and
literary movement of the last two decades, Existentialism.
: Essays on Conrad
Existentialism, like Conrad, rejects all traditional philosophy as too
theoretical, too concerned with cognitive problems treated in isolation
from the actual personal existence. It attempts instead a full understand-
ing of the individual confronting life; and this, as in Conrad, involves
much attention to such themes as death, suicide, isolation, despair, cour-
age and choosing to be. In each case the starting point is the alienated
man who, believing, in Sartres words, that there can no longer be
any a priori good,
..
or in Conrads that there is no sovereign power
enthroned in a xed standard of conduct, concludes that the whole
external world and mans attempt to establish a valid relationship to it
are equally absurd. The way out of the dilemma, apparently, is that, at
a certain point, the existential hero, realizing that he is free for nothing,
.
comes out on the other side of despair to discover a more realistic kind
of provisional commitment.
There are, of course, vital differences. Conrad does not see commitment
as a single willed reversal occurring with dramatic clarity and violence
in the individual consciousness; for him it is, rather, an endless process
throughout history in which individuals are driven by circumstances into
the traditional forms of human solidarity: are driven to accept the position
that delity must govern the individuals relation to the outside world,
while his inner self must be controlled by restraint and honour. This con-
servative and social ethic is certainly very different from the existentialist
position, and embodies the main emphases of the most widely shared secular
codes of behaviour over the ages. It is also rather closer to the philosoph-
ical materialism of Marx than to the basically subjective metaphysic of
Existentialism, since Conrad sees solidarity as an eventual consequence
of corporate activity. Thus Conrad begins his essay on Tradition by
quoting Leonardo da Vincis Work is the law, and comments:
From the hard work of men are born the sympathetic consciousness of a
common destiny, the delity to right practice which makes great craftsmen,
the sense of right conduct which we may call honour, the devotion to our
calling and the idealism which is not a misty, winged angel without eyes, but a
divine gure of terrestrial aspect with a clear glance and with its feet resting
rmly on the earth on which it was born.
.
The origins of solidarity, then, are derived from the economic neces-
sities to which men nd themselves involuntarily but inexorably exposed:
as Conrad writes elsewhere:
Who can tell how a tradition comes into the world? We are children of the
earth. It may be that the noblest tradition is but the offspring of material
conditions, of the hard necessities besetting mens precarious lives. But once it
has been born it becomes a spirit.
.
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment :
It is surely remarkable that Conrads way of looking at the condi-
tions of positive individual commitment would have such strong afni-
ties with three such contradictory ideologies the conservative, the
existentialist and the Marxist. It helps, of course, to explain the present
width of his appeal, but we are bound to return to Forsters view of the
discrepancies between Conrads nearer and his further vision, and to
wonder if there is not some radical confusion in a position which leads
in three such different directions; whether, in fact, Conrads obscurity
may not be an unavoidable result of his failure to establish any real
connexion between the alienation he felt and the commitment he sought.
Conrad would probably have answered that his outlook was based
on common elements of experience which were more enduring than
any particular social or economic or intellectual system. He thought of
his own age, he wrote in Victory, as one in which we are camped like
bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel ( p. ); and the best we
could do at any time was to assume that in any given circumstance the
direction of individual commitment would be sufciently clear to any-
one who, like Axel Heyst in Victory, nds that he cannot scorn any
decent feeling ( p. :8). This, indeed, was close to the teaching of his
uncle and guardian, Thaddeus Bobrowski, who once wrote to him: I
have taken as my motto usque ad nem, as my guide, the love of duty
which circumstances dene.
.6
The way people actually react to the circumstances of their lives
such seems to be Conrads only justication for his view of solidarity.
We would no doubt like more; but it is only fair to observe that the
logical difculties of demonstrating the validity of any ethical system
are just as great either in traditional philosophy or in Existentialism; so
that we must be careful not to condemn Conrad because his working
assumptions echo the greatest of English empiricists, who in Twelfth
Night gave Sir Andrew Aguecheek the immortal words: I have no
exquisite reason for t, but I have reason good enough.
The reason good enough, we might now be tempted to add, is that
the way things are with our poor old planet, the time has come for
bifocals. Such, it appears, was Conrads view, and he once justied the
patent irrationality of this dual perspective on the simple grounds that
it reected the facts of common human experience:
Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the sun;
one small blob of mud among several others, spinning ridiculously with a
waggling motion like a top about to fall. This is the Copernican system, and
the man believes in the system without often knowing as much about it as its
name. But while watching a sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the sun as a
:6 Essays on Conrad
small and useful object, the servant of his needs . . . sinking slowly behind a
range of mountains, and then he holds the system of Ptolemy.
.
In the perspective of the history of ideas, the wheel has indeed come
full circle: Conrad seems to accept an impasse to which his great
contemporaries, more ambitious, and perhaps less deeply alienated
from the possibilities of belief, tried to nd solutions. Most of twentieth-
century literature, for example, may, broadly speaking, be said to have
an implicit programme; it urges a direction which, to put it simply, is
based on an adherence to the ideology either of the future, or of the
past, or of the supernatural world. But Conrad, as we have seen, had
no belief in liberal reform, in the politics of the future to which Shaw,
Wells and Galsworthy devoted so many of their writings; and he had
equally little interest in the backward look, in the utopianism of the past
which, in various forms, can be found in the thought of Yeats, Joyce,
Pound and Eliot: Conrad speaks, for example, of the mustiness of
the Middle Ages, that epoch when mankind tried to stand still in a
monstrous illusion of nal certitude attained in morals, intellect and
conscience.
.8
Nor, nally, did Conrad nd any appeal in supernatural
transcendence: his objection to Christianity combined a Voltairean
rejection of myth, superstition and hypocrisy, with a primary emphasis
on the impracticality of Christian ideals; as he once wrote to Garnett:
I am not blind to [Christianitys] services, but the absurd oriental fable from
which it starts irritates me. Great, improving, softening, compassionate it may
be, but it has lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion and is the
only religion which, with its impossible standards, has brought an innity of
anguish to innumerable souls on this earth.
.q
Conrad the seaman, then, could not allow the seer to make that leap
out of the chaos of immediate reality which must precede the construc-
tion of any system. More willingly than most of his contemporaries, he
followed Heyst in Victory and entered the broad, human path of incon-
sistencies ( p. :6). We, surely, can join Thomas Mann in admiring the
refusal of a very much engaged intelligence to hang miserably in the
air between contraries,
o
and to concentrate not on the illogicality, but
on the achievements, of men who live their lives according to Ptolemys
erroneous notion that man is the centre of the universe. To do this,
Conrad seems to argue, we must not be too demanding about the
intellectual foundations of human needs; Marlow, for instance, probably
speaks for Conrad when he says of Jims need for a truth, or an illusion
of it, to live by: I dont care how you call it, there is so little difference,
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment :
and the difference means so little ( p. ...). In Heart of Darkness Marlows
nal act is even more explicit: when he preserves the great and saving
illusion about the dead Kurtz which is enshrined in the Intendeds
mature capacity for delity ( pp. :q, :), he enacts the notion that,
once we have experienced the heart of darkness, we may be driven to
the position that, in cases where delity is in conict with truth, it is
truth which should be sacriced.
Commitment to human solidarity, of course, also implies that whatever
disgust and doubt we experience at the spectacle of history, we must
nevertheless feel that in some sense the past and the future of mankind
are a part of ourselves; not as nostalgia, and not as programme, but as
experienced reality, the kind of reality expressed by Emilia Gould in
Nostromo, who thought that for life to be large and full, it must contain
the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the
present ( pp. .o:). Conrads pessimism about the direction of con-
temporary history, shown in Heart of Darkness, for example, or in Nostromo,
was logically incompatible with any optimism about the future of man;
and yet even here the gloom was pierced by a moment of Ptolemaic
afrmation.
In :qo Conrads greatest literary descendant, William Faulkner,
seems to have had a passage of Conrad obscurely in mind when he
declared in his Nobel Prize Address:
It is easy enough to say man is immortal simply because he will endure; that
when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worth-
less rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then
there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still
talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he
will prevail.
The Conrad passage this seems to recall comes from a :qo essay on
Henry James; in it Conrads further vision cannot but foresee disaster,
and though the nearer vision appeals against the verdict, it does so in
terms so qualied by the ironic distance of the seer that they underline
how Faulkner, yielding to his own insistent emotion, nally protests too
much:
When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces [wrote Conrad], the last
airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying
earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall
set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun. The
artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain, may nd its voice in
some individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression and
:8 Essays on Conrad
courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms
of his temperament, in terms of art . . . whether in austere exhortation or in a
phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess?
For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I
am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may
appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is delightful
in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the
battleeld among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a
barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten.
:
xo+rs
: Joseph Conrad: a Note, Abinger Harvest ( London, :q6), pp. :6.
. G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters ( London, :q.), vol. :, p. .:6.
Ibid. :, ....
Ibid. :, ..6.
Cf. Florence Clemens, Conrads Favourite Bedside Book, South Atlantic
Quarterly, 8 (:qq), o:.
6 Dent Collected Edition ( London, :q8), p. .o8. Future references from
Conrad are to this collection, unless otherwise stated.
Life and Letters, :, .::.
8 Ibid. :, .6q.
q Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Revolu-
tion (New York, :q:), pp. q, .6; Lewis Feuer, What is Alienation?
the Career of a Concept, New Politics, : (:q6.), pp. ::q; Melvin Seeman,
On the Meaning of Alienation, American Sociological Review, . (:qq), 8
q:; and, more generally, Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community ( New
York, :q).
:o Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp. ..q.
:: Letters from Conrad, , ed. Edward Garnett (London, :q.8), pp. :..
:. Ibid. p. .:6.
: Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska, , trans. and ed.
J. A. Gee and P. J. Sturm (New Haven, :qo), p. ..
: Letters from Conrad, , p. xiii.
: Ibid. p. :8.
:6 Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, ed. William
Blackburn ( Durham, N.C., :q8), p. ::.
: Life and Letters, ii, 8.
:8 Ibid. ii, :.:.
:q Letters to Blackwood, p. ::.
.o A Glance at Two Books, Last Essays, p. :.
.: Sewanee Review, (:q), :..
.. Lexistentialisme est un humanisme (Paris, :q6), p. .
. Le sursis ( Paris, :q), p. .86: Je suis libre pour rien.
. Notes on Life and Letters, p. :q.
Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment :q
. Well Done, Notes on Life and Letters, p. :8.
.6 Life and Letters, i, :8.
. The Ascending Effort, Notes on Life and Letters, pp. .
.8 The Censor of Plays: an Appreciation, Notes on Life and Letters, pp. 6.
.q Letters from Conrad, , p. .6.
o Joseph Conrads The Secret Agent , in Past Masters and Other Papers, trans.
Lowe-Porter ( New York, :q), p. ..
: Henry James: an Appreciation, Notes on Life and Letters, pp. ::.
.o Essays on Conrad
.o
cn\r+rn .
Almayers Folly: introduction
+nr nroi xxi xos: nonxro, :88 \xn roxnox, :88q
It was in London and in :88q that a thirty-one-year-old ships ofcer
whom the world was to know as Joseph Conrad began to write his rst
novel. One ne autumnal morning he did not, as usual, dawdle after
his breakfast but instead summoned the landladys daughter to clear
the table. Conrad told the story some twenty years later, in A Personal
Record; that books immediate aim, he explains, was to present the
feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my rst book and
with my rst contact with the sea.
:
As regards writing his rst book
Conrad insists on the obscurity of his sudden impulse: I was not at all
certain that I wanted to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had
anything to write about ( p. o); nevertheless, Conrad concludes, What
I am certain of is, that I was very far from thinking of writing a story,
though it is possible and even likely that I was thinking of the man
Almayer ( p. ).
Conrad had met Almayer some two years earlier. A back injury
had forced Conrad into a hospital at Singapore in the summer of :88;
and when he was better he shipped as rst mate on the Vidar, an 8oo-
ton steamship which traded in local products in various islands of the
Malay Archipelago. On one of its routine stops at an isolated settle-
ment of Eastern Borneo Conrad had dealings with a Dutch trader
called Charles William (or William Charles) Olmeijer.
.
A Personal Record
gives a memorable account of their rst meeting: alongside the little
wharf on the edge of the jungle Almayer emerges through the mist clad
in apping pyjamas of cretonne pattern (enormous owers with yellow
petals on a disagreeable blue ground) and a thin cotton singlet with
short sleeves ( p. ). He is to take delivery, oddly enough, of a riding
pony; but as soon as it touches ground the pony knocks Almayer down
and takes off into the jungle. After relating some memories of their
Almayers Folly: introduction .:
subsequent encounters extending at most to four visits of a day or two
each ( Najder, pp. qq8) Conrad makes the singular assertion that if
I had not got to know Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there
would never have been a line of mine in print ( p. 8).
The casually preposterous hyperbole is characteristic of how, whereas
he presented his career as a British mariner as much more purposeful
and successful than was in fact the case, Conrad liked to maintain that
he had become an author by pure accident. Actually, it seems probable
that some years before, in :886, Conrad had already written a short story,
The Black Mate; he thought later that it was for a prize competition,
started, I think, by Tit-Bits.

This story, which now exists only in the

presumably much-rewritten form of its publication in :qo8, is amusing
but trivial; it only faintly qualies Conrads assertion that Almayers
Folly may keep its place as my rst serious work.
We need not, however, wholly believe Conrads statement that the
ambition of being an author had never turned up amongst these graci-
ous imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in the
stillness and immobility of a day-dream (A Personal Record, p. 68). Conrad
may well have found the coming into existence of his rst book quite
an inexplicable event ( p. qo); but it was a good deal less inexplicable
than it would have been for most sailors. Few of them elect to spend their
shore leaves in rooms where there are books lying about and where
pen and paper are also at hand; even fewer of them are, like Conrad,
the son of a distinguished writer, as his father, Apollo Korzeniowski,
had been.
Still, why it should have been a few chance encounters with Almayer
that precipitated Conrad into authorship is not easy to explain. To
begin with, what little we know about the actual Olmeijer makes it
clear that Almayers Folly is in no sense the story of his life. Unlike
Almayer, the original Olmeijer was not of pure Dutch parentage, but
an Eurasian of mixed Dutch and Malay ancestry; and so was his wife.
It is true that he was a trader on the Berau River (then, as in the novel,
usually called the Pantai); but unlike Almayer, Olmeijer was apparently
a fairly successful and respected one, at least in :8q, when he was
reported to be the head of the area, whose counsel was sought by
various local sultans; and he apparently died back home at Surabaya
in :qoo

that is, ve years after publication of Almayers Folly.

There is no rst-hand testimony about Olmeijers character; and
virtually all we have to go on to explain his appeal to Conrad is
Conrads account in A Personal Record. There he is an extraordinary
.. Essays on Conrad
combination of ambitious dreamer and habitual defeatist. Thus Conrad
comments that What he wanted with a pony goodness only knows,
since I am perfectly certain he could not ride it; but here you have the
man, ambitious, aiming at the grandiose ( p. 6). At the same time,
when Almayer asked, I suppose you havent got such a thing as a pony
on board?, he was hardly audible: and spoke in the accents of a man
accustomed to the buffets of evil fortune. Behind this lack of conviction,
however, Conrad became aware of Almayers abiding sense of his own
importance: the worst of this country, Almayer later mumbles, is that
one is not able to realise . . . very important interests . . . he nished
faintly . . . up the river ( p. 86).
Conrad tells us that his pathetic mistrust in the favourable issue of
any sort of affair touched me deeply ( p. ), but he adds that he found
nothing amusing whatever in Almayer ( p. 8). What he did nd was
probably the vast disparity between the extravagant hopes of Almayers
inner life and the petty actualities of his achievement, a disparity which
Conrad was familiar with, no doubt, in himself. This kind of identica-
tion would at least be consistent with a passage in A Personal Record
where Conrad imagines himself placating Almayers aggrieved shade
for the very small larceny of his name, and for having given him a
ctional incarnation which was not worthy of your merits ( pp. 888).
At rst, Conrads defense is jocular and ironical, but he goes on to
disclaim any intention of mocking Almayers aspirations: What made
you so real to me was that you held this lofty theory with some force of
conviction and with an admirable consistency.
For the novel Conrad invented an action which remorselessly broke
down the admirable consistency of Olmeijers megalomania; but part
of that action was based on two kinds of historical reality.
One of them begins in the fact that, in so abandoned a spot as
Tanjung Redeb, three other whites were present, and one of them was
called Jim Lingard. He was apparently the nephew of William Lingard,
a very famous trader and adventurer. This William Lingard had special
interests on the Eastern coast, the least developed part of Borneo; in
particular he had long ago discovered a channel for navigating the
labyrinthine estuary of the Berau River; and, at Tanjung Redeb (the
novels Sambir) had set up its rst permanent trading post.

Lingard
had apparently helped the Sultan of Gunung Tabor, just across the
river, either in a sea battle with a neighboring sultan or by forgiving
him his debts or supplying rice (at a fairly high price) during a famine.
As a reward the Sultan ceremonially named him Pangeram (Prince)
Almayers Folly: introduction .
and Rajah Laut (King of the Sea); and he also, probably at Lingards
request, ceded him a piece of land on which he built a store and living
quarters. The Dutch authorities were annoyed that one of their sultans
should receive a foreigner without their permission, and in February
:86 sent a gunboat up the Berau River to investigate. Its commander
made a report which showed that the Sultan apparently had more or
less cleared himself; but thereafter Lingard learned that it was wiser to
keep on good terms with the Dutch.
Olmeijer had been William Lingards representative in Tanjung
Redeb for some seventeen years; and the two men had apparently both
prospected for gold further upriver and dealt in contraband arms and
gunpowder with the Dyaks, the more primitive inhabitants who had
preceded the Moslem Malays and Arabs in the occupation of Borneo.
But Lingards fortunes had declined; his monopoly of trade in Berau
had been broken and his last ship, the Rajah Laut, was put up for sale in
:88.
6
There are few records of him between his return to England in
:88 and his death in :888.

In the novel Conrad invents a picturesque plot from these materials.

Charles Olmeijer becomes Kaspar Almayer, the son of a minor Dutch
ofcial in Java; he leaves home to work as a clerk at the port of
Macassar in the Celebes, and there he meets a famous English trader
called Tom, not William, Lingard. Tom Lingard proposes that Almayer
marry his ward, a native girl who is to inherit his fortune. Though he
has no feeling for the girl, and is ashamed to be marrying a Malay,
Almayer agrees because he believes that he will then be able to realize
the earthly paradise of his dreams make a huge fortune and live in a
big mansion in Amsterdam.
8
The main action of Almayers Folly occurs
some twenty years after the marriage. Lingard has disappeared, appar-
ently trying to raise further capital somewhere in Europe; the trading
post is derelict because Lingards secret channel for navigating the
Pantai River has been betrayed to rival Arab traders; and the splendid
new house on which Almayer has wasted his last resources in the
vain and momentary hope that his trade would ourish again, and
that the British Borneo Company, not the Dutch, would take over
Sambir,
q
has now been mockingly dubbed Almayers Folly by his
trading rivals.
:o
It now stands unnished, untenanted, and already
much decayed; while its universally despised master is suffered to live
on by the Malay and Arab leaders merely because they believe that
only Almayer can tell them the secret of Lingards rumored mountain
of gold inland.
. Essays on Conrad
There may, then, be some faint historical basis for the character and
actions of Tom Lingard in the novel; but a second and much more
general historical process pervades the moral world of Almayers Folly,
and it supplies another possible reason why Conrad found nothing
amusing whatever in Olmeijer.
What has really foreclosed the dreams of Almayer is that he has
pinned all his hopes on Lingards monopoly of trade at Berau; but that
monopoly has in fact been condemned by the coming of steam, which
has made river navigation much easier and fostered the development
of regular coastal trade routes.
::
The Malay Archipelago had seen two
generations of heroic individual achievement: that of Sir Stamford
Rafes (:8::8.6), founder of Singapore, and then that of Sir James
Brooke (:8o68), who became the rajah of Sarawak, in north-eastern
Borneo. Later, some of their merchant-adventurer successors in the
:8os and 6os, such as William Lingard, had at least become gures of
legend. One man who met Lingard in :88, W. G. St Clair, describes
him as a personage of almost mythical renown, a sort of ubiquitous
sea-hero, perhaps at times a sort of terror to evildoers, all over the
Eastern waters from Singapore to Torres Straits, and from Timor to
Mindanao (CEW, pp. ::6). But this type of the adventurer-skipper
was now quite extinct. As the Western powers set up coaling stations
for the new steamships, and their men-of-war put down piracy, oppor-
tunities for individual enterprise declined; and so on the whole the
merchants and sailors of the seventies and eighties were a much more
humdrum lot.
:.
Even Borneo, one of the last areas to be taken over by
the Western colonial powers, had been largely settled by the :88os.
That Olmeijer was, in the simplest sense, the victim of history, no
doubt gave him his appeal to Conrad, who was another. The effective
partition of Borneo and the coming of steam had sealed Olmeijers fate
exactly as the partition of Poland and the coming of steam had Conrads.
Conrad went up the Berau in :88 on a steamship which was owned by
the very Arab traders who had supplanted Olmeijer and Lingard the
Singapore rm of Syed Mohsin Bin Salleh Al Jooffree; while the whole
period of the writing of the manuscript of Almayers Folly (from :88q to
:8q) was when Conrad was discovering that, in the world of the
steamship, he himself no longer had a dependable future as a sailor.
During his rst voyage to the East in :8q, Conrad had written from
Australia to his uncle and guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski, with the
greatest enthusiasm about the beauty and wealth of the area, and had
even talked of taking up a position there, which he said he had been
Almayers Folly: introduction .
offered by a famous captain and shipowner whom he had met at
Sydney.
:
Nothing came of the project, and when, in :88, :88, and
especially in :88, Conrad actually went to Southeast Asia (which he
had not done when he wrote to Bobrowski), he must have seen that he
had come East too late; too late to share the dreams of William Lingard
or even those of his foolish protg Olmeijer; and yet the disappoint-
ment continued to rankle.
+nr vni +i xo: :88qq
Almayers Folly, then, reects both large historical processes and Conrads
personal experience of them; but although we have more physical
evidence to document its writing than we have for most rst novels,
these records reveal very little about Conrads unique experiences.
Nonetheless, the records have their own intrinsic, and very consider-
able, interest and importance.
The Manuscript:
The rst of the documents is the manuscript, complete except for
Chapter q. It is extant only through a series of lucky chances, many of
which Conrad describes in A Personal Record. For instance, the manuscript
survived the misfortunes and perils of Conrads canoe journey on the
Congo; and between its beginning in the autumn of :88q and its
completion four and a half years later, also in London, it shared Conrads
various other travels to Australia (twice), to the Ukraine (twice), and to
Belgium, Switzerland, and France ( pp. .6, 686q). Later, the survival
of the manuscript depended on a further and rather commoner vicissi-
tude. Like many writers, Conrad sometimes destroyed his rst drafts
after a new revised or typed version was completed, but the manuscript
of Almayers Folly was apparently kept hidden away by Conrads wife,
Jessie. As a result it survived to be sold, some eighteen years later, along
with many of his other manuscripts, to John Quinn, a wealthy New
York lawyer who was an enlightened patron of the arts with modern
tastes. Quinns collection, which contained the manuscripts of many
writers who were later to become celebrated, including those of Ezra
Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce,
:
was sold at auction by the
Anderson Galleries in :q.. Conrads fame was then at its peak, and
the manuscript of Almayers Folly fetched $,oo, compared to only
$:,q for Ulysses. The buyer was a colorful magnate of bookdealing,
.6 Essays on Conrad
Dr A. S. W. Rosenbach; and he ensured that the manuscript of Almayers
Folly, together with many others, can now be seen in one of his houses,
which has become the Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Museum and
Library in Philadelphia.
Two incidental features of the manuscript bring us fairly close to
Conrads life during the time of the writing. First, the back of the fourth
leaf of Chapter records the familiar nervous distractions of the writer
unable to write: there are a number of Ks and Konrads; sketches of
four ships, of a hansom cab, and in a premonitory adumbration of
what was to be a continuing obsession of Conrads poverty-threatened
career as a writer pictures of English coins from a penny to a half-
crown. Second, some of the other occasional notes ll in a few details of
the chronology of the novels composition. Conrad wrote that Almayers
Folly was written line by line, rather than page by page (A Personal Record,
p. :q); but despite this, Conrads early progress was rather rapid. There
is a letter written in Polish on the back of the rst leaf of Chapter
which suggests that Conrad had progressed that far early during the
winter of :88qqo, when he was largely unemployed. There presumably
followed a pause during his voyage to the Congo in the last half of :8qo,
but work was resumed on his return. Conrad went to convalesce in
Switzerland, at Champel, near Geneva, between .: May and : June
:8q:; and on the back of the fourth leaf of Chapter 6 (originally folio 6
of Chapter ) there is a computation of 6 francs for ve weeks board,
and a word which John Gordan interpreted as Genve (though it may
be Guineas), followed by the words Receive from London fr.
:
Conrad probably nished Chapter while at Champel and 8 after
his return to London, but then progress again slowed down for the next
two years. This period was mainly occupied by Conrads two voyages
as rst mate of the sailing ship Torrens, beginning mid-November :8q:.
He recounts how, on his second voyage, which began on . October
:8q., he showed the manuscript to its rst reader, a passenger named
W. H. Jacques. Would it bore you very much reading a MS. in a
handwriting like mine? Conrad asked him, and was told, Not at all (A
Personal Record, pp. ::6). Next day Jacques returned the MS, silently.
Finally Conrad asked him: Well, what do you say? . . . Is it worth
nishing? Distinctly. Were you interested? Very much! But a west-
erly blow was coming on, and Conrad had time only for one more
question: Now let me ask you one more thing: Is the story quite clear
to you as it stands? Jacques, Conrad tells, raised his dark, gentle eyes
to my face and seemed surprised, but he answered: Yes! Perfectly.
Almayers Folly: introduction .
They never mentioned the tale again, and Jacques soon died, either
in Australia, or on the homeward journey; but, from the way Conrad
refers to this episode as these quiet rites of Almayers and Ninas
resurrection, we can probably take it that there had earlier been some
hesitation in Conrads mind as to whether he should go on with the
novel. Even during that voyage, not one line was added to the careless
scrawl of the many pages which poor Jacques had had the patience to
read; but although, as Conrad writes, the purpose instilled into me by
his simple and nal Distinctly remained dormant, it was alive to
await its opportunity.
The opportunity was nearly lost forever. Conrad recounts that, after
leaving the Torrens late in July of :8q to pay his last visit to Tadeusz
Bobrowski that autumn, on an early, sleepy morning, changing trains
in a hurry, he left his Gladstone bag in the refreshment room of the
Friedrichstrasse railway station in Berlin (A Personal Record, p. :q). Luck-
ily it was retrieved by a porter; and at that time the manuscript had
only advanced . . . to the rst words of the ninth chapter. However, in
the period of enforced leisure which followed Conrads return from the
Ukraine, the last four chapters were nished in a relatively sustained
burst of energy. Chapter q was written in the autumn of :8q; and the
next chapter was begun in the inactivity of Conrads berth on the
steamship Adowa. He had accepted the position of second mate, and
sailed with the Adowa from London to Rouen, arriving on 6 December
:8q. Conrad wrote that the shade of old Flaubert . . . might have
hovered with amused interest over the decks as he penned the opening
lines of the new chapter (A Personal Record, p. ). Conrad also remem-
bered that, as he wrote the tenth chapters rst sentence on the grey
paper of a pad which rested on the blanket of my bed-place, he was
interrupted by the cheerful and casual young third mate, who asked,
What are you always scribbling there, if its fair to ask? Conrad did
not answer him, and simply turned the pad over with a movement of
instinctive secrecy; the story was then put away under the pillow for
that day.
:6
The Adowa never made its voyage, and Conrad returned to
London, not knowing that he had experienced his last association with
a ship (A Personal Record, p. ).
Before leaving Rouen, however, Conrad had mentioned Almayers
Folly in his correspondence with the main condante of his early years.
Marguerite Poradowska was then the beautiful 6-year-old widow of
the refugee rst cousin of Conrads maternal grandmother. She came
from a distinguished Belgian family, and had already published three
.8 Essays on Conrad
novels. Their friendship had begun early in :8qo, and she was the rst
author that Conrad knew personally. Conrads extant letters contain
frequent praise of her works, but the rst mention of his own novel is
not until January :8q. On that day he ends a letter (written as usual
in French): If you are a well-behaved little girl, I shall let you read my
story of Almayer when I have nished it.
:
Conrads reference is
so brief, and without any other explanation, that we can assume that
Marguerite Poradowska had already learned of the project at one of
their meetings, although she had not yet seen the manuscript.
The tenth chapter seems to have taken Conrad about three months to
complete. One cause for the delay was his depression at the death of his
guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski, on :o February; another was that he
was still looking for a job at sea. Conrad seems to have nished Chapter
:o only by late March :8q. He wrote to Marguerite Poradowska,
either on .q March or April:
Forgive me for not having written sooner, but I am in the midst of struggling
with Chapter xi; a struggle to the death, you know! If I let go, I am lost! I am
writing to you just as I go out. I must indeed go out sometimes, alas! I
begrudge each minute I spend away from the page. I do not say from the pen,
for I have written very little, but inspiration comes to me while gazing at the
paper. Then there are vistas that extend out of sight; my mind goes wandering
through great spaces lled with vague forms. Everything is still chaos, but,
slowly, ghosts are transformed into living esh, oating vapours turn solid, and
who knows? perhaps something will be born from the collision of indistinct
ideas. ( Letters, :, ::)
The letter is characteristic of many later ones in its preoccupation with
the extreme difculties he found in composition; it also shows Conrad
was obviously putting great pressure on himself to nish. On :6 April
he wrote to Marguerite Poradowska that Chapter xi is completed
(qooo words) longer but much worse than the others. I am beginning
Chapter xii in a quarter of an hour (Letters, :, :.). Conrad wrote this
last chapter at a furious pace, in nine days. This appears from a letter
to Marguerite Poradowska where Conrad describes writing the end of
the novel and his feelings about it:
. April :8q
:: a.m.
My dear Aunt,
I regret to inform you of the death of Mr Kaspar Almayer, which occurred
this morning at oclock.
Its nished! A scratch of the pen writing the nal word, and suddenly this
entire company of people who have spoken into my ear, gesticulated before
Almayers Folly: introduction .q
my eyes, lived with me for so many years, becomes a band of phantoms who
retreat, fade, and dissolve are made pallid and indistinct by the sunlight of
this brilliant and sombre day.
Since I woke this morning, it seems to me I have buried a part of myself in
the pages which lie here before my eyes. And yet I am just a little happy.
(Letters, :, :)
The Typescript, Acceptance, and Publication:
The manuscript of Almayers Folly is a remarkably nished production
for a beginners draft; still, it is only a working copy, and the extant
typescript, which is obviously later, stands as vital evidence of Conrads
creative intentions in the crucial period between the completion of the
manuscript and the novels publication.
Little is known about the early history of the typescript. The rst
mention of typing comes in Conrads letter to Marguerite Poradowska
of . April :8q, announcing that he had nished the manuscript.
Conrad added: I shall send you the two chapters as soon as typed
(Letters, :, :). These were :: and :.; and in the next few weeks Conrad
repeated the promise regarding Chapter :. in three other letters (Letters,
:, :6, :8, :q). But as late as his October letter to his publisher,
T. Fisher Unwin, Conrad says that although last June Marguerite
Poradowska had seen the manuscript and proposed to me to translate
it into French for the Revue des Deux Mondes, he also says that she had
not even seen the last . chapters which were not written at the time
(Letters, :, :6). Conrad, then, had not sent her the chapters even by the
time Almayers Folly was about to be submitted to Unwin for publica-
tion.
:8
A letter probably written on : or . May, which gave as his
excuse for the delay that the manuscript was in the hands of a rather
distinguished critic, Edmund Gosse (Letters, :, :8), may supply some
indirect evidence. The excuse itself is unconvincing, as Conrad would
surely not have left himself without any copy, especially since he was
probably still completing his revisions;
:q
on the other hand, it suggests
that at least one typed copy of each of the chapters existed by late May
or shortly before.
One confusing element in the testimony concerning the history of
the typescript may be due to the fact that, as here, when Conrad said
manuscript, he may have meant what we should now call a typescript;
the latter term did not come into common use until a decade later.
.o
We can surmise that Conrad may have had the rst ten chapters typed
by the time he visited Marguerite Poradowska in March of :8q (Letters,
o Essays on Conrad
:, :o) and showed her the novel. That so much was in typed form is
further implied when Conrad, in a letter of .q March or April, says
that he is sending her the rst page (which I have copied) of Chapter
:: to give you an idea of the appearance of my manuscript, and that
this is only fair since I have seen yours. This only makes sense if one
assumes that what she had seen previously was typewritten.
The whole had almost certainly been typed in some form by the time
Conrad wrote that the novel was in the hands of Gosse, and thus
probably by late May. Only the typing of the twelfth and last chapter,
according to a later letter to Marguerite Poradowska, seems to have
been delayed (Letters, :, :q), but this probably involved the second
typing of that chapter. The wrapper on the manuscript says that the
T.S. was nished on the .. May :8q, though Conrad may have got
the date wrong.
The transition from the manuscript to the typescript continues the
verbal and stylistic improvements found in the revisions in the manu-
script. Some of these were probably suggested by friends, and particularly
by Edward Lancelot Sanderson another friend from the Torrens
with whom Conrad spent about ten days in the middle of April :8q.
The Sandersons presumably played a signicant role in one important
aspect of the process of revision. John Galsworthys sister recalled: I
remember that both Ted [Sanderson] and his mother . . . took a hand,
and considerable trouble, in editing the already amazingly excellent
English of their Polish friends Almayer manuscript, and in generally
screwing up Conrads courage to the sticking-point of publication.
.:
One effect of their discussions may have been the reduction of gallic-
isms as when rapprochement became reconciliation ( p. ) and
entremise was replaced with agency ( p. :).
The history of the extant revised typescript after May :8q is rela-
tively simple. It was sent to Fisher Unwin on July :8q (Letters, :, :.).
Next, it served as printers copy for setting up the novel. It was later
returned to Conrad, who in :q:. sold it to John Quinn for .
..
Compared to most writers Conrad was very lucky in getting his rst
work published so quickly; but if we can judge by his letters during
those ten months everything between sending in the manuscript and the
books eventual publication involved agonizing delays and self-doubts.
In the latter part of May, it will be recalled, Conrad had sent the whole
manuscript to Edmund Gosse (Letters, :, :8). Conrad had presumably
approached Gosse because he was then the editor of Heinemanns
International Library. Conrad may have thought that a novel by a
Pole about Borneo would have tted that bill, but unfortunately the
Almayers Folly: introduction :
series consisted of foreign novels in English translation. Nothing more
is known about this relationship.
.
Conrads friend and rst biographer,
Jean-Aubry, suggested later that Conrad had two possible publishers in
view. He wrote that It was actually from the ofces of the Shipmasters
Society, where he used to go in the hopes of nding some employment,
that, one day in the beginning of June, he decided to send his MS. to a
publisher just on the chance. He had hesitated for a moment between
two of them, but that morning he made up his mind, and he called a
messenger boy to take his MS. to T. Fisher Unwin (LL, :, :8q). Jean-
Aubrys mention of June is contradicted by Conrads letter to Fisher
Unwin which gives July as the date (Letters, :, :.), but his account is
otherwise plausible.
Conrad probably chose Unwin partly because they ran a collection
of short novels known as the Pseudonym Library (see Letters, :, :6:);
one of them was John Sherman and Dhoya by William Butler Yeats, using
the pseudonym Ganconagh (Karl, p. :). Many years later, in :q:8,
Conrad wrote this account of his choice to W. H. Chesson: At that
period of his existence T. F. Unwin had published some paperbound
books by various authors and I bought one or two of them, Mademoiselle
Ive and The Popes Daughter, I believe. My ignorance was so great and my
judgment so poor that I imagined Almayers Folly would be just suitable
for that series. As a matter of fact it was much too long, but that was my
motive in the choice of a publisher (LL, :, :q).
Once he had sent the typescript, there was nothing more to do,
and Conrad began to profess an attitude of indifference. In a letter to
Marguerite Poradowska Conrad wrote on :. July :8q: To be com-
pletely frank, I dont feel any interest in the fate of Almayers Folly. It is
nished. Besides, it could in any case be only an inconsequential episode
in my life (Letters, :, :6:). Conrads casual disclaimer of any intention
of turning author for good probably cannot be taken very seriously, except
perhaps as an attempt to conceal his anxieties. In a letter of . July he
expressed to her the depression of complete discouragement more
than he had ever confessed to anyone; and shortly after, on o July, he
reports having had ten days in bed with a fever, and comments: I have
had no response from Fisher Unwin. That could go on for months, and
then I do not think they will accept it (Letters, :, :6).
A few days later, as had happened before in :8q:, Conrad went to
take the cure at Champel. He wrote from there to Marguerite
Poradowska: Since you have been kind enough to take an interest in
the matter, let us speak of that imbecile Almayer. I have requested the
return of the manuscript (Letters, :, :o). Conrad presumably expected
. Essays on Conrad
a rejection, and went on to suggest a desperate and humiliating expedient
that Marguerite Poradowska translate Almayers Folly into French and
publish it either as a collaboration (Letters, :, :6), or even entirely under
her own name: The name Kamoudi [sic] somewhere in small print
will be adequate. Let your name appear on the title-page with merely
an explanatory note to say that K. collaborated in the book.
Conrad was somewhat preoccupied at this time with a new tale
called Two Vagabonds, which he described as very short let us say
twenty to twenty-ve pages (Letters, :, ::). This was to become his
second and considerably longer novel, An Outcast of the Islands.
Conrad returned to London at the end of August, and on 8 September
he wrote to Unwin:
I venture now upon the liberty of asking You whether there is the slightest
likelihood of the MS. (Malay life, about 6.ooo words) being read at some
future time? If not, it would be probably not worse fate than it deserves,
yet, in that case, I am sure You will not take it amiss if I remind you that,
however worthless for the purpose of publication, it is very dear to me. A
ridiculous feeling no doubt but not unprecedented I believe. In this
instance it is intensied by the accident that I do not possess another copy,
either written or typed. (Letters, :, :)
One need not accept the improbable assertion that Conrad had honored
Unwin by depriving himself of the unique copy of his work; nor need
we take Conrads elaborately apologetic strategy too seriously. Letters
to publishers are often characterized by a special rhetoric of ostenta-
tious, but false, unconcern; it is part of the conventional dispensation
of authors from disclosing the humiliating truth of their anxiety. The
apologies and indirections, like the underlying despairs, are also, no
doubt, greater in the case of a rst work. No Unwin reply is recorded;
but Conrads novel was in fact getting the best attention he could
possibly have hoped for.
One of the house readers for Unwin was Wilfrid Hugh Chesson; he
was favorably impressed, and called it to the attention of another. This
was Edward Garnett, who wrote much later:
My wife recollects that I showed her the manuscript, told her it was the work
of a foreigner and asked her opinion of his style. What particularly captivated
me in the novel was the gure of Babalatchi, the aged one-eyed statesman,
and the night scene at the rivers edge between Mrs. Almayer and her daugh-
ter. The strangeness of the tropical atmosphere, and the poetic realism of this
romantic narrative excited my curiosity about the author, who I fancied might
have eastern blood in his veins. I was told however that he was a Pole, and this
Almayers Folly: introduction
increased my interest since my Nihilist friends, Stepniak and Volkhovsky, had
always subtly decried the Poles when one sympathized with their position as
under dog.
.
Both his readers, then, were enthusiastic, and on October Conrad
reported to Marguerite Poradowska that on the previous day Unwin
had accepted Almayers Folly for publication in what he later wrote was
the rst typewritten letter I ever received in my life (LL, :, :q). If
Conrad felt either joy or pride his letter to Marguerite Poradowska
makes no mention of it; instead, he is severely business-like: I wrote
accepting the terms. . . . I have taken what they offered me because,
really, the mere fact of publication is of great importance. . . . Now, I
need only a ship in order to be almost happy (Letters, :, :8).
Still, publishing business had to be attended to, and on :o October
Conrad wrote to Marguerite Poradowska about his meeting with the
two readers and Unwin:
At rst the rms two readers received me, complimenting me effusively
(were they, by chance, mocking me?). Then they led me into the presence of
the great man in order to talk business. He told me frankly that if I wished to
share in the risk of publication, I could participate in the prots. Otherwise,
I receive .o and the French rights. I chose this latter alternative. We are
paying you very little, he told me, but, remember, dear Sir, that you are
unknown and your book will appeal to a very limited public. Then there is the
question of taste. Will the public like it? We are risking something also. We are
publishing you in a handsome volume at six shillings, and . . . planning not to
publish you until next year, in April, during the season. We shall print imme-
diately, so that you can make corrections, and shall send the proof-sheets to
Mme Marguerite Poradowska before Christmas. Write something shorter
same type of thing for our Pseudonym Library, and if it suits us, we shall be
very happy to be able to give you a much better cheque. (Letters, :, :8o)
Conrads account of this interview raises two minor issues. First, the
question of French rights. The idea that Marguerite Poradowska should
translate Almayers Folly belongs to the period before Unwin had accepted
it; but Conrad kept the idea open in the early negotiations with Unwin
because of the advantages of his novel appearing in the well-known
Revue des Deux Mondes. But in late October or early November of :8q,
Conrad wrote to tell Marguerite Poradowska that she was doing herself
an injustice in considering doing the translation, and recommended
that she concentrate on her own novels (Letters, :, :8). Later, on :.
March :8q, he wrote to Unwin saying that his aunt was too unwell to
undertake the work now but that he had another person in mind who
might write a critical notice of Almayers Folly for the Revue des Deux
Essays on Conrad
Mondes (Letters, :, .o). This attempt was unsuccessful, and it was
only in :q:q that Almayers Folly was nally translated into French, by
Genevive Seligmann-Lui.
Second, Edward Garnetts recollection of the meeting shows that
from the beginning Conrad was far from subservient in his dealings
with his publisher. Garnett described how, in this or perhaps a later
meeting, in answer to Unwins casual but signicant reference to your
recent book, Conrad threw himself back on the broad leather lounge
and in a tone that put a clear cold space between himself and his
hearers, said I dont expect to write again. It is likely that I shall soon
be going to sea. A silence fell (Garnett, pp. viiviii). In fact, as we have
seen, Conrad had, since August, been engaged on a long novel which
was to become An Outcast of the Islands.
Conrads letters make it clear that his corrections on the proofs were
on a much larger scale than he himself had anticipated. He had written
Marguerite Poradowska on : or .: November:
Ive had a long interview with Mr T. Fisher Unwin. They will denitely not set
the work in type before next year, in February. Its all absolutely the same to
me. I have nothing to revise in the way of style or composition, and, as for
misprints, the rms readers will see to them. But I hope with all my heart and
soul that I shall no longer be in London at that time. (Letters, :, :888)
But Conrad was in London when the rst sixteen pages of proofs
arrived on Christmas Eve. They plunged him into the deepest gloom:
as he wrote to Marguerite Poradowska, I was horried: absolutely
horried by the thing in print, looking so stupid worse senseless
(Letters, :, :q). Conrad, then, had the common, but not the less painful,
experience of nding that, faced with the fateful prospect of this being
the nal chance of improving what the public would at last see, there
was much more to change in the way of style or composition in his
revised typescript than he had previously imagined.
Conrad eagerly anticipated the novels appearance; but when, even
in early March, there was no news of its publication, he wrote to
Unwin with an anxiety masked by an elaborately facetious irony:
I return to town next week for the th. Isnt the :8
th
the date for the
appearance of a certain Immortal work?!
I warn you that if I am disappointed I shall surely have some kind of a t;
and if I die on your ofce-carpet the Conservative papers will have big headlines.
Horrible cruelty of a well-known Publisher . . . [Unwin was a Liberal].
The above frivolity of expression disguises very deep feeling. In common
mercy to a suffering fellow creature let it be the :8
th
without fail. (Letters, :, .o)
Almayers Folly: introduction
The proposed March publication was nevertheless pushed forward to
early April, and, writing in much the same playful spirit to disguise
very deep feeling, Conrad, who was staying with the Sandersons at
Elstree, tried again at the end of March:
I do not want to make myself a nuisance at least not very much, but since I
have been staying with my friends here I became aware that the expectation of
Almayers Folly is unsettling this glorious and free country. All the people that
have been told to look out for the book in March are writing letters full of
anxiety and tears to know when Oh! When! they will be able to get the
immortal work. Letters by every post. They come from North and west and
south and east they are as numerous as the raindrops as persistent and
loud as the wild west wind. . . . You will ruin my career at its very outset by a
too prolonged delay. Can You? Will you? give me a date so that I can appease
the universal thirst for information and be called blessed by [an] anxious and
enthusiastic crowd of respectable and intelligent people. (Letters, :, .o6)
By :. April Conrad had received his advance copies but no publication
date had been set. He wrote to Marguerite Poradowska, giving the reason
for the delay: I have not yet been published but shall be this month,
for certain. They cannot give me a denite date yet. The Macmillan
Company of New York is undertaking the American publication, and,
because of the copyright law, we must wait until they are ready over
there.
.
Conrad was referring to the Chace Act of :8q:, which stipulated that
a foreign work could be copyrighted in the United States and thus be
protected from appearing in pirated editions only if it were set and
printed there, and if its publication was simultaneous with that in Britain.
After a further delay Almayers Folly was nally published on .q April in
London, and on May in New York. The English edition Conrad
estimated as of :,:oo copies; the American edition was probably of 6o
copies.
.6
Conrad had submitted Almayers Folly under the pen name of Kamudi;
it was doubly symbolic, since it was a Malay word, and it meant rudder.
But when his novel did not appear in Unwins Pseudonym Library,
this was dropped, and Almayers Folly eventually appeared under what
was really another pseudonym. Conrads real surname, of course, was
Korzeniowski, and to his death he regarded it as such; for ofcial matters,
such as passports, he was still using Konrad Korzeniowski (Najder, p. :8).
But years of exasperation at the way his name was mispronounced and
misspelled had gradually led him to use his two easiest given names,
Jzef Konrad, for most purposes; and on : January :8q he had, for
6 Essays on Conrad
the rst time, signed an ofcial document his discharge papers from
the Adowa J. Conrad ( Najder, p. :6:). When he became an English
author, therefore, it was natural that he should use these two names, in
their anglicized forms, and eventually became known, even in his native
Poland, as Joseph Conrad.
Almayers Folly was dedicated To the memory of T. B. We do not
doubt Conrads deep feeling for his beloved uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski;
but we must also observe that, like his chosen pen name, the initials
avoided raising the issue of Polish nationality.
Meanwhile, Conrad was so exhausted by the process of getting pub-
lished that, the day after the London appearance of Almayers Folly, he
wrote to Marguerite Poradowska: I am not at all well. To set myself up
again, I am quitting my bed and going to Champel for hydrotherapy
(Letters, :, .:o::).
The Authors Note:
Although Conrad had written a preface for Almayers Folly soon after
receiving the rst proofs of the rst English edition, it did not appear in
print until :q.:, when the collected editions were published in America
and Britain. Because its publication was delayed until then, the Authors
Note has been lumped in popular memory with the other retrospective
notes written in his last decade when Conrad was looking back and
dening himself to his newly-acquired reading public.
.
Actually, how-
ever, this Authors Note had been written by January :8q, for on
that date Conrad mentioned in a letter to Garnett that he would send
on the preface tomorrow (Letters, :, :q). Before q January :8q, Chesson
had read the preface and suggested at least one change, for on that
date Conrad responded to a now lost letter: As to that preface (which
I have shown you) I trust it may be dispensed with, but if it must appear
you are quite right aversion from not aversion for as I wrote and
stuck to like a lunatic. You will correct? (Letters, :, :qq).
.8
Why did Conrad write the preface? Traditionally, novelists have
written prefaces to state an artistic creed, to dene, explain or justify a
subject, to engage in a literary quarrel, or, from the vantage of several
years, to reminisce about the creation of their work. Henry James, for
example, would probably not have written The Art of Fiction had it
not been for the provocation of Walter Besants earlier essay; and the
Authors Note to Almayers Folly partly belongs to this category, since in
it Conrad quarrels directly with one of his noted contemporaries.
Almayers Folly: introduction
The opening paragraph of the Authors Note ( p. ) clearly identies
both the target and the grounds of the quarrel:
I am informed that in criticising that literature which preys on strange people
and prowls in far off countries, under the shade of palms, in the unsheltered
glare of sun beaten beaches, amongst honest cannibals and the more sophist-
icated pioneers of our glorious virtues, a lady distinguished in the world of
letters summed up her aversion from it by saying that the tales it produced
were de-civilized. And in that sentence not only the tales but, I apprehend,
the strange people and the far-off countries also, are nally condemned in a
verdict of contemptuous dislike.
Who was this lady distinguished in the world of letters of
intuitive, clear, felicitous, and infallible judgment? Conrad identied
her, in the brief paragraph added to the Authors Note in the :q.:
Heinemann edition: I wrote the above in :8q by way of preface for
my rst novel. An essay by Mrs. Meynell furnished the impulse for this
artless outpouring. I let it now be printed for the rst time, unaltered
and uncorrected, as my rst attempt at writing a preface and an early
record of exaggerated but genuine feeling.
.q
Today Alice Meynell
(:8:q..) is almost forgotten, but in :8q she was a prominent literary
gure. Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and George Eliot had praised
her rst collection of poems, Preludes I, published in :8, and in the
:8qos she was frequently mentioned as a possible successor to the poet-
laureateship. She continued to write poetry, essays, and reviews, and
also assisted her husband in editing various magazines The Pen, The
Weekly Register, and Merry England.
Decivilised, the essay which provoked Conrads preface, appeared
in the . January :8q: issue of the National Observer and was reprinted
as the second essay in Meynells The Rhythm of Life in :8q.
o
In it
she uses the term decivilised, which seems to have enjoyed some
popularity in reviews and journals at the time, possibly because of
its use by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Sociology;
:
but it is difcult
to tell whether she is attacking colonial literature or reacting to the
primitivism which was then surfacing in European painting, sculpture,
music, and literature. Basically, she objects to colonial literature be-
cause it ignores the value of continuity, and argues that, though we
cannot select our posterity, we may give our thoughts noble forefa-
thers and follow their ways to the best well-heads of the arts. Decivilized
art, on the other hand, presents the mentally inexpensive, and is
designed to . . . reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a
young society.
8 Essays on Conrad
Conrads attitude toward this view is succinctly indicated in his
suggestions concerning literary notices for his novel. I am quite con-
tent, he wrote Chesson, to be in your hands but it struck me that
perhaps a suggestion from me would meet with your approval. Could
you not say something about it being a civilized story in savage sur-
roundings? Something in that sense if not in those words (Letters, :,
:qq). His Authors Note focuses almost exclusively on the idea that
the savage surroundings serve only to throw the basic similarities of
man in sharp relief, and, in line with this idea, argues that the Borneo
of Almayers Folly essentially mirrors mans metaphysical, not his phys-
ical, condition. Conrad juxtaposes Borneo and London in the third
paragraph of the Authors Note and asserts that man is everywhere
the same:
The picture of life there as here is drawn with the same elaboration of detail,
coloured with the same tints. But in the cruel serenity of the sky, under the
merciless brilliance of the sun the dazzled eye misses the delicate detail, sees
only the strong outlines, while the colours, in the steady light, seem crude and
without shadow. Nevertheless it is the same picture. ( p. )
The fourth passage restates this assumption, and Conrad returns to it
again in the nal paragraph. In :q.o, he dismissed his preface as an
artless outpouring; but the recurrence of its ideas in A Personal Record
( p. q) suggests that he stood by it.
Why this rst critical essay written by Conrad was not published
until :q.: remains something of a mystery. Conrads q January :8q
letter to Chesson hints that he wished to see it published, and in :q: he
spoke of it as being suppressed; but Conrad does not indicate who
suppressed it or why.
.
The most probable hypothesis is that prefatory
writings were rarely included in novels, at least until the author was
famous, and even then as in the case of Henry James, as well as
Conrad were retrospective assessments which helped the publisher to
justify and sell a new collected edition. In the present case, we can say
that the loss of Conrads brief preface was not particularly signicant at
the time; and it makes no contribution to general literary theory. Yet
the Authors Note at least establishes some of the critical assumptions
with which Conrad began writing, and it surely reveals a novelist who,
from the very beginning of his career, was deeply concerned with the
relationship between subject-matter, authorial vision, and the general
role of the artist. In that sense it strikingly anticipates Conrads later
and more famous critical pronouncements.
Almayers Folly: introduction q
+nr nrcrr+i ox or ALMAYER

S FOLLY
When Unwin was explaining his terms to Conrad he gave as one
advantage that you know that whatever we bring out always receives
serious critical attention in the literary journals. You are certain of a
long notice in the Saturday Review and the Athenum, not to mention the
press in general. That is why we are planning not to publish you until
next year, in April, during the season (Letters, :, :8o). Unwin was
something of an innovator

as regards pushing his books, and we must

remember that in any case, the novel, before the days of movies, radio,
or television, played a relatively larger part in the entertainment of the
public. The chances of a rst novel by an unknown author being widely
reviewed were therefore rather better then than they are now, even
though, as Conrad wrote, every week some dozens of novels appear
(Letters, :, :8); and in the event Almayers Folly was very widely, remark-
ably promptly, and on the whole quite favorably, reviewed.
There were, rst of all, a number of short notices before the date
of publication in the Sunday Times (.: April), the Westminster Gazette
(. April), and the Daily News (. April). The rst review was a fairly
detailed notice in a Scottish daily, the Scotsman. Its unsigned review
began by calling it a remarkable book, which will probably attract all
the more attention because its authors name is new to readers of
novels; and concluded that every one who reads it will look with
hopeful anticipations for the future productions of its authors pen.

Conrad apparently followed the reviews assiduously, and occasion-

ally commented on them. He wrote to Marguerite Poradowska from
Champel on . May about how the Scotsman, the major Edinburgh
paper, is almost enthusiastic, and added that the Glasgow Herald
speaks with a more restrained benevolence (Letters, :, .:). Conrad
concluded: Now we are waiting for the London dailies and, especially,
the non-political weeklies. The rst of the London dailies, the Daily
Chronicle, said all that Conrad could have hoped: it wrote that we have
been struck with the book, and know nothing quite like it of recent
years, and ended with the encouraging words that Mr. Conrad may
go on, and with condence; he will nd his public, and he deserves
his place (CH, pp. qo). Conrad must have been very satised at
the number of people who welcomed Almayers Folly as, to quote a
retrospective comment in the London Mercury of :q.o, an immense
and exhilarating surprise to those who cared for good letters (CH,
p. .).
o Essays on Conrad
The American reception, though favorable, was in general briefer
and less enthusiastic than the English. The Atlantic Monthly (September
:8q) began: In spite of plainly evident marks of inexperience on the
writers part, there is undeniable power in this tale, as well as a some-
what unusual measure of freshness and originality. Its nal comment
stressed Conrads descriptive power: The scene, a new one in ction,
of this wretched tragedy is depicted with a vividness which must make
it visible even to an unimaginative reader. In The Dial (:6 August :8q)
William Morton Payne stressed the racial conict, writing of Nina that
the strain of Malay savagery struggles with the European, and nally
asserts its mastery; and he concluded that the novel enforces once
more the lesson that East is East, and West is West, and never the
twain shall meet.
The themes (and the clichs) which the critics selected were very
varied on both sides of the Atlantic. The most obvious was place. The
English Daily News congratulated Conrad for annexing the island of
Borneo in itself almost a continent (CH, p. ); while the Daily
Chronicle reviewer allowed himself a pun in the middle of his praise
Conrad was a man who can write of Borneo and never bore, if so
frivolous a phrase, used in honest and deserved compliment, do not
offend him (CH, p. q). Arthur Waugh, in the Critic, the rst non-
political weekly to consider Almayers Folly, commented that Borneo
was a tract hitherto untouched by the novelist, but now annexed by
Mr. Joseph Conrad, a new writer (CH, p. o), while the Spectator ended
a perceptive review by announcing that Conrad might become the
Kipling of the Malay Archipelago (CH, p. 6:). Not that this area of the
world won universal approval; the reviewer in the American weekly
journal the Nation, who reported his general impression of the novel as
a mob of raging heathen engaged in battles for rum and wives, wrote
that Borneo is a ne eld for the study of monkeys, not men, and
ended with a jocular insult: The only interesting native of Borneo, he
commented, in allusion to a popular song, got away and was long ago
introduced to an astonished civilisation as The old man from Borneo
/ Whos just come to town (CH, p. 6o).
In general, however, the reviewers admired Conrads mastery of his
chosen scene, and that included its way of life. As the reviewer of the
Daily Chronicle perceptively wrote, the novel showed the emasculating
and despair-breeding effect of the tired but scheming East upon a weak
neurotic Western organisation, and Conrad tells as only one who has
seen it can, of the creeping decay of house and boat, stage, balcony,
Almayers Folly: introduction :
and building; he makes one know the warm moisture that slowly rots,
as readily as he makes one feel the inertia that fails ever to repair or
reconstruct (CH, pp. qo). Another reviewer, James McArthur, in
the Literary News, focused on the clash of races: Nina is a ne illustra-
tion of what may happen to the Malay in the transition which Mr.
Swettenham

sees is imminent. The phase of character is a revelation

to us, and in this whole story of an Eastern river we are impressed with
the fact that a new vein has been struck in ction (CH, p. q).
Among the many other general issues raised by the reviews, three
gure in much of Conrads later critical career: rst, that what Conrad
offered was real literature; second, that his work continued important
elements of romance; and third, that both the nature of his subject and
his treatment of it raised doubt as to whether he would nd many
readers.
The exceptional and original literary quality of Almayers Folly was
recognized by many reviewers. Breaks fresh ground in ction, and
stands far apart from the common run of novels wrote another (CH,
pp. 6:, 8). H. G. Wells said of the three local colour stories in his
unsigned review for the Saturday Review that only one of them is to be
regarded seriously as a work of art; he meant Almayers Folly, and wrote
that it was exceedingly well imagined and well written, and it will
certainly secure Mr. Conrad a high place among contemporary story-
tellers (CH, p. ). Another of the weeklies, the Speaker, said that the
novel was written with manifest knowledge of the life which it portrays
the life of a solitary European in one of the remoter possessions of the
Dutch in the East. . . . His marriage with a native woman may have
degraded him, but it has never turned him into a brute. The reviewer
concluded that If Mr. Conrad can give another story as striking and
life-like as this, his place in our literature ought to be an assured one
(CH, pp. 6). The longest and most impressive review was that in
the Weekly Sun, where a very well-known journalist and member of
Parliament, T. P. OConnor, made it his Book of the Week, and
hailed this startling, unique, splendid book. His enthusiasm is evident
from the beginning of a review which takes the rst two sides of a full-
sized newspaper page: This is a book a few people have already read
with rapture; by-and-bye everybody will have read it, and then the
world will know that a great new writer and a new and splendid region
of romance have entered into our literature.
6
Conrad mentions OConnors review in several letters. In particular,
he wrote on :: June :8q that he has gone back to writing, strongly
. Essays on Conrad
encouraged by seven and a half columns in the Weekly Sun, where
T. P. OConnor has buried me under an avalanche of compliments,
admiration, analysis, and quotations, all of it with an enthusiasm which
certainly makes him say some quite ridiculously stupid things (Letters, :,
..q). One of the stupid things OConnor wrote may have been that,
Almayer is the Lear of the Malay Archipelago; another, more plaus-
ibly, may be his conclusion: It is only a writer of genius who could write
that and many another passage in this startling, unique, splendid book.
In general the reviewers were not much concerned with literary
inuences, but some of them touched on the popular writers of the
period, notably Louis Becke, with his pictures of the Pacic Islands,
and there were also more celebrated authors, most notably the French
naturalist, Emile Zola. In the Athenum Zola was seen as Conrads
inspiration (CH, p. .), where the reviewer wrote: Mr. Conrad has, we
imagine, studied Zola to some purpose, and quoted as an example the
following overloaded, but powerful description of a Bornean forest.

In America the New York Times, whose general judgment was exception-
ally favorable, ended with the comment: The reader may have been
carried away by the cleverness of a Pierre Loti or a Lafcadio Hearn
through their high literary art in the description of far distant countries,
but Mr. Joseph Conrad is quite their equal, and for dramatic effective-
ness, their superior (:. May :8q).
The heading of the Times review was An Oriental Romance, and this
term was used by a good many reviewers, including that of the Guardian,
who wrote that It is a romance in all senses of the word; the scene laid
in the strange, weird world lying within the Malay Archipelago, and
the actors, Dutch, Arab, Malay, and half-caste, essentially romantic
personalities (CH, p. ). The Academy saw it as a romance and then
congratulated Conrad for possessing the art of laying on just sufcient
local colour, but not going so far as to make his work unintelligible to
the general (CH, p. ). The Daily Chronicle liked the way that the
story made one feel that the old notion of hero and heroine may still
have some excuse, that there are still novelists who can breathe life
into the old ideals of love and bravery. It also congratulated Conrad
on his powers in the art of creating an atmosphere, poetic, romantic
(CH, pp. qo).
Conrad, who was himself aware that some elements in his novels
made it unlikely that he would nd much popular appeal, must have
paid particular attention to the reviewers who pointed in that direction.
He commented, for instance, that the poor old World kicks at me (in
Almayers Folly: introduction
: lines) like a vicious donkey (Letters, :, .:q). What the World said may
be indicated by quoting its rst sentence and its last two: Almayers
Folly . . . is a dreary record of the still more dreary existence of a solitary
Dutchman doomed to vegetate in a small village in Borneo . . . The life
is monotonous and sordid, and the recital thereof is almost as wearisome,
unrelieved by one touch of pathos or gleam of humour. Altogether the
book is as dull as it well could be (CH, p. :). There were several
reviewers who objected to the conduct of the action. The Sketch, for
example, found that Conrad committed the terrible offence of forcing
his readers too often to turn back and re-read something of import-
ance to the narrative; while the National Observer complained of Conrads
laboured and muddle-headed involution which made the sequence of
events . . . very hard to follow.
8
Few reviewers were so completely
negative; but even some sympathetic critics noted weaknesses in Conrad
which might well have discouraged readers. H. G. Wells wrote that It
is a gloomy tale, and the Bookman, though in general laudatory, found
several faults: human nature has not in Mr. Conrad so powerful a
painter as have the wood, the river, the Eastern sky by night and day;
the reviewer also wrote that as a whole it is a little wearisome, and
hard to follow, that the action drags, and that the style has beauty,
but it lacks swiftness (CH, p. 8).
There were, then, lots of lessons which Conrad could, if he chose,
learn from the reviewers; but, at the same time, he must have felt that
Fisher Unwin had been as good as his word, and that he had been
better launched on his literary career than he, or anybody else, could
reasonably have expected.
To this account of the reception of Almayers Folly, we can add three
notes. First, that its sales proved somewhat disappointing. Conrad wrote
triumphantly on . May :8q to Marguerite Poradowska that the rst
edition of ::oo copies has been sold (Letters, :, .:). So quick a sale
would have been a remarkable success for a rst publication; but Conrad
had been deceived by the unintended effects of Garnetts enthusiasm.
Garnett wrote later:
The fact that the critics handsome praise of Almayers Folly failed to sell the
novel is attested by my old friend, Mr. David Rice, then Mr. Fisher Unwins
town traveller, who at my instigation had prevailed on the booksellers to
subscribe practically the whole edition. Mr. Rice tells me that the majority of
the copies rested for years on the booksellers shelves, and that the title Almayers
Folly long remained a jest in the trade at his own expense. Conrads rst book
took seven years to get into the third impression. (Garnett, p. xx)
q
Essays on Conrad
Second, even though the general public did not nd Conrads work
to their taste, he had not only won golden opinions from most of the
critics, but from old friends and new admirers. One of the latter was
Justin McCarthy, a celebrated writer and politician (Letters, :, ..);
another was Harriet Capes, who was to remain a friend, and whose
appreciation Conrad found to be very rare (Letters, :, .).
The third point, which Conrad did not know for over a year after
the appearance of Almayers Folly, was that it had received the attention
of reviewers in far-away Singapore with unexpected speed.
o
The rst
(anonymous) review came out in the Straits Times on :6 January :8q6.
Under the title of A Romance of the Indian Archipelago it contains a
fairly long account of the novel, and ends by conceding that although
our author is weak in his Malay . . . in error in representing Bali as one
kingdom, and in describing a prince of Bali as a Brahmin, these
blemishes did not detract from the general truthfulness of the book.
The reviewer commented on how the natives are forced to judge white
civilization by the ethics of the trader and the manners of the beach-
comber, and concluded with an emphatic judgment on the racial
conict: The power of the European has substituted a sullen peace for
the open war of the past. It has done so in the interest of trade, not
of civilisation, however much we may disguise the fact. Civilisation
makes no proselytes; it indeed rejects them with its barrier of racial
prejudice. . . . The result is deplorable but it has nonetheless to be
faced.
This racial interpretation of Almayers Folly produced another and fairly
lengthy comment which was published in the Straits Times on the next
day. It is signed only by G, and is largely concerned, as one who knew
well the late Captain Lingard, the Rajah Laut of Bornean waters, to
refute a few of the pernicious libels on his memory. The writer has no
difculty in showing that Lingard held the respect and esteem of all
who knew him, and was never, as the reviewer wrote, a penniless
adventurer who disappeared in the labyrinth of London life. More
surprising, G believes that the author and his reviewer must know
very little of Dutch Indian Society when they dwell so deeply on the
social disabilities of the results of mixed marriages. He believes that it
is ludicrous to suppose that Almayers society, which is that of a
mercantile clerk in Macassar, would be similar to that of Kiplings
British India. There is no time here to give the full argument, but we
can note that the letter writer was probably correct in believing that
Conrad exaggerated the racial disability which Almayer felt in his
Almayers Folly: introduction
marriage. We must also observe that G found Almayers Folly to be
undoubtedly, a powerful and interesting work.
+nr xo\rr
Language
The narrative begins with Almayer, having been called to dinner, still
irresolutely lingering on the verandah of his private domain, the Folly.
:
He is
looking xedly at the great river that owed indifferent and hurried before
his eyes. He liked to look at it about the time of sunset; perhaps because at that
time the sinking sun would spread a glowing gold tinge on the waters of the
Pantai, and Almayers thoughts were often busy with gold . . . There was no
tinge of gold on it this evening for it had been swollen by the rains and rolled
an angry and muddy ood under his inattentive eyes, carrying small drift-
wood and big dead logs, and whole uprooted trees with branches and foliage,
amongst which the water swirled and roared angrily.
One of those drifting trees grounded on the shelving shore, just by the house,
and Almayer, neglecting his dream, watched it with languid interest. The tree
swung slowly round, amid the hiss and foam of the water, and soon getting
free of the obstruction began to move down stream again, rolling slowly over,
raising upwards a long, denuded branch, like a hand lifted in mute appeal to
heaven against the rivers brutal and unnecessary violence. Almayers interest
in the fate of that tree increased rapidly. He leaned over to see if it would clear
the low point below. It did; then he drew back, thinking that now its course
was free down to the sea, and he envied the lot of that inanimate thing now
growing small and indistinct in the deepening darkness. ( pp. 6)
As narrative writing this is more than competent. The traditional
opening description of the place and time of day has been skillfully
combined with an initial preguring of character, situation, and theme;
and these are given considerable visual and psychological effectiveness
by being presented through combining concrete images of the external
world with the internal reverie of the protagonist. The visual imagery is
not particularly arresting in itself Conrad still tells rather more than
he shows: nevertheless, by making us identify with the developing
sequence of Almayers observations, the passage makes us both par-
ticipate in his consciousness and yet anticipate the fate to which he is
still blind, but which is presaged in the imagery.
Almayers fate began in the past, with his dreams of gold; but now
the sun is setting on a stormy present, with the angry ood suggesting
6 Essays on Conrad
the capsizing of Dains boat, and hence the nal wreck of Almayers
hopes; while the future is pregured when our attention is captured by
the mute appeal of the denuded branch. It is a strong dramatic irony
that Almayer should have envied the lot of the uprooted tree because
its course was free down to the sea; only two days later he will go
down the river to the sea with Nina and Dain, but from there he is
bound not for a voyage to Europe and his dream, but for a return to
Sambir and his death.
That we look for general implications in the passage is largely because
it is so full of verbal emphasis. The most obvious manifestation of this
emphasis is repetition for instance, in the three uses of the word gold
in the rst paragraph, and in the duplication of angry and angrily at
its end. Tautology and anaphora are the easiest of rhetorical devices for
demanding attention; and Conrad uses them a good deal throughout
Almayers Folly.
In the present passage the repetition is too heavily done. Some of this
may be the inadvertent residue of difculties with the English language.
For instance, Conrad could easily have avoided one of the verbal
repetitions, that of tree, by writing Almayers interest in its fate, which
would also have been less cumbrous than interest in the fate of that
tree. Even the tree would have sufced, but Conrad often had trouble
with articles, probably because there are none in Polish; and here the
difculty may have been compounded by the fact that Conrad had
learned French long before he knew English French often uses the
demonstrative (cet arbre) where the indenite article would be normal
in English. Another and more general result of not being a native user
of the language may also underlie Conrads tendency to repetition: it is
the anxious overexplicitness of any foreigner; he says it twice to make sure.
Ford Madox Ford much later diagnosed the slightly stilted nature of
Conrads earliest prose as being the result of his knowing only two of
the three English languages. Conrad had mastered the ofcial literary
tongue that of the Edinburgh Review which has no relation to life, as
Ford put it;
.

and he was also fairly familiar with the slang of the streets
and the forecastle; but of the third language, which Ford called the
dialect of the drawing room or the study, Conrad had had relatively
little experience; and it is, of course, precisely that middle style which
lays the basis for rapidity and ease in written prose.
The stiltedness to which Ford refers is partly a matter of vocabulary.
Very few of Conrads lapses are of the kind which would have been
avoided by consulting a dictionary; they mainly seem the result of
Almayers Folly: introduction
Conrads late exposure to educated colloquial English, together with
the contamination of his previous exposure to Polish and French. Thus
when Conrad wrote they had dwelt together in cordial neighbourhood
( p. 6), his dictionary would probably not have explained that, whereas
voisinage in French is very currently used for neighbourly intercourse,
this particular sense of neighbourhood is so rare in English as to sound
anomalous and awkward.
Many of Conrads difculties with grammar and syntax are of a
similar nature. He once unidiomatically joked: I know nothing of
grammar myself as he who runs may see (Letters, ii, .:6); and most
writers, one imagines, have been much less inuenced by their formal
knowledge than by their intuitive linguistic sense, absorbed through a
lifetimes experience; so it is not surprising that Conrad had particular
difculty in the more indeterminate areas of English grammatical
practice. One obvious example, that of tense sequences, is found in a
passage about a womans look of surrender: Men that had felt in their
breasts the awful exultation such a look awakens become mere things
of to-day ( p. :.q). Sequence demands that it be either have for had
at the beginning or became for become at the end, while the sentence
as a whole requires the present men who feel . . .. Behind Conrads
difculties here one could no doubt trace the equally complicated but
much more denite rules for tense agreements in French, and the quite
different but equally categorical rules in Polish.

Another major difculty about Conrads English concerns the order

of the words. The inected nature both of French, and even more of
Polish, syntax makes the reference of modiers, whether adjectives,
adverbs, phrases, or clauses, much less dependent on word order than
is the case in English. For instance, Conrad was probably inuenced by
the French and Polish practice of more regularly putting adverbs and
adverbial phrases after the verb; in English position is often a matter of
judgment, and Conrad often gets it wrong, sometimes to the point of
extreme gaucheness; as when, for instance, he writes: Mahmat had to
produce the bangle and saw with rage and mortication the lieutenant
put it in his pocket ( p. :oq).
Conrads difculties with prepositions, his awkwardness in the plac-
ing of modiers, and his uncertainty with levels of diction combine to
provide the ludicrous climax to an already tangled sentence describing
Ninas rst glimpse of Dain: she espies him with half her face shyly
hidden behind a curtain, thus leaving only half a rounded cheek, a
stray tress and one eye exposed, wherewith to contemplate the gorgeous
8 Essays on Conrad
and bold being so unlike in appearance to the rare specimens of traders
she had seen before ( p. ). It sounds awful, but awful in exactly the
way that any literal translation from an inected language can sound in
English.
The passage also illustrates the heavy use of qualiers in Conrads
early style, where almost every noun has its adjective, and often two or
three. In the opening passage about the Pantai, for instance, Conrads
phrase about the rivers brutal and unnecessary violence has an articial
and strained quality which is quite absent in the French translation:
la violence brutale et inutile de la rivire.

The device of paired or

tripled qualiers is most obtrusive when they are placed after the noun
or verb, as in the earlier the great river that owed indifferent and
hurried before his eyes. There Conrads measured cadence perhaps
suits the content and thus justies the departure from common English
usage; but more often the use of paired and post-positioned qualiers,
usually adjectives, suggests a at-footed striving for elegance which is a
rather wearisome hallmark of Conrads early writing.
Repetition and over-qualication in their various forms are the
commonest defects in the prose style of Almayers Folly; and they tend to
become most prominent when Conrad is least sure of himself or is
trying to force a climax. The two sometimes coincide, as in the sentence
describing Dains emotions on rst seeing Nina: Dain . . . forgot . . . the
object of his visit and all things else, in his overpowering desire to
prolong the contemplation of so much loveliness met so suddenly, in
such an unlikely place as he thought ( p. ). The elaborate balance
of three phrases of similar form and cadence so much loveliness,
met so suddenly, and in such an unlikely place seem inappropriate
to the subject; and the very attempt at stylistic elegance draws attention
to such lapses from it as the rather vague archaism of all things else,
and the awkwardly otiose explanatory parenthesis of as he thought.
These various weaknesses, however, are not the dominant features of
the prose of Almayers Folly. They have been given considerable attention
here for three reasons: partly because critics have often raised the matter
in over-general terms, or passed over it too easily; partly because an
examination of the style of his rst novel enables one to see more
clearly how, although Conrad never wholly lost some of the awkward-
ness of idiom and syntax illustrated here, his writing became much
more uent, colloquial, and effective with each succeeding work; and
partly because we can infer that the pervading unconscious presence in
Conrads mind of other languages and rhetorical traditions probably
Almayers Folly: introduction q
provided counter-models which helped him to achieve the very eloquent
and original prose style of his mature work.
Literary inuences
In a sense, Conrad is the least derivative of major writers; he wrote very
little that could possibly be mistaken for the work of anyone else. Still,
he did read very widely; and as is usual in an authors rst signicant
work, the main residues of his reading are perhaps more clearly present
in Almayers Folly than elsewhere.
In :8q the days of the great Victorian novelists had long been over;
and among their successors, Robert Louis Stevenson had died the
previous year, while Thomas Hardy was about to close his career as a
novelist with Jude the Obscure in :8q6. As the reviews of Almayers Folly
make clear, Conrad was in part following current market formulae.
Almayers Folly could, after all, be regarded as a romance in the most
popular sense, since it contained a love story with a happy ending; and
it also tted in with contemporary interest in exotic adventure. Follow-
ing the fashion set earlier by Chateaubriand and Byron, the exotic had
become a major mode of nineteenth-century literature. In the :88os the
novel about foreign lands had become an established and popular genre
in France with the immensely successful Pierre Loti, and in England
with Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling; at a lower literary level the exotic
had attracted many best-selling novelists, notably Rider Haggard and
such prolic but now almost forgotten writers as the Australians Louis
Becke (:8:q:) and Carlton Dawes (:86:q). Conrad was early
compared with most of these, and he certainly knew their work: he
found Rider Haggard too horrible for words (Garnett, p. xiii), but
seems to have had some admiration for Becke, Stevenson, and Kipling.

There is, however, little reason to suppose that Conrad was particularly
indebted to any of these, beyond their part in creating an audience for
narratives about foreign lands.
In any case, the exotic novel could hardly have provided a perman-
ent direction for Conrad, if only because he had been ashore much too
briey to have anything but the most supercial understanding of
Malay life. But in Almayers Folly the genre at least afforded Conrad an
opportunity of developing one of his characteristic strengths as a writer,
his power to describe the outside world. The power is of a special kind:
Conrad looks at the visible universe with the eye of one who believes
that only by deciphering its features can the individual hope to nd
o Essays on Conrad
clues to lifes meaning or lack of it. For instance, in the scene where the
lovers, Dain and Nina, are parting after a secret tryst, the passage
begins like an Oriental travelogue, but soon modulates into something
quite different:
the two little nutshells with their occupants oated quietly side by side, re-
ected by the black water in the dim light struggling through a high canopy of
dense foliage; while above, away up in the broad day, amed immense red
blossoms sending down on their heads a shower of great dew-sparkling petals
that descended rotating slowly in a continuous and perfumed stream; and over
them, under them in the sleeping water; all around them in a ring of luxuriant
vegetation bathed in the warm air charged with strong and harsh perfumes,
the intense work of tropical nature went on; plants shooting upward, entwined,
interlaced in inextricable confusion, climbing madly and brutally over each other
in the terrible silence of a desperate struggle towards the life-giving sunshine
above as if struck with sudden horror at the seething mass of corruption
below; at the death and decay from which they sprang. ( p. )
The passage is typical of Conrad in presenting a picture, not of a static
landscape but of nature in motion: within a single sentence the lush
tropical aubade, with the jungle showering the happy lovers with nuptial
petals, is soon disclosed as an ephemeral moment in a larger and grimmer
process; natures cycle begins in death and decay, and though some
spectacular owers may manage to thrust themselves up into the sunshine,
they soon fade, die, and sink back into the corruption where they began.
This kind of writing exhibiting what Cedric Watts calls the anti-
pathetic fallacy
6
is rather common in Almayers Folly. It emphasizes,
contrary to the pathetic fallacy (which suggests a conscious harmony
between man and nature), that for Conrad the opposite is the case: the
Darwinian struggle for survival affords man no consolation, and all
human aspirations can plainly be deciphered among its fated victims.
The reviewer for the Athenum had cited the passage as an example of
Zolas inuence; and, more generally, we must see that the determinist
perspectives which dominated the Naturalist novel are in direct contra-
diction to the basic assumptions of the popular romance: its heroes and
heroines require a world offering that unconditional freedom which is
the essence of individual wish-fullment. In themselves Nina and Dain
are perfect romantic lovers they have ideal beauty, grace, courage,
mutual devotion; and their destiny (the wandering son of a great rajah
arrives from beyond the sea and bears away the granddaughter of
another) is equally romantic. Yet, as we have seen, the environment
denies the primary absolute of romantic love that it is eternal; while
Almayers Folly: introduction :
as regards plot, Conrad though seeming to follow, actually undermines
the prescriptions of popular romance.
Almayers Folly, like much of Conrads later ction, embodies many
standard adventure-story motifs: Lingards secret channel up the river;
his notebook with its vague clues to the treasure; pirates and gunrun-
ning and mysterious political intrigues; and, above all, the hunted hero,
Dain. At different times Dains life is threatened by the Dutch, the
Arabs, the Malay chief Lakamba, even Almayer, and he is saved by
two of the most implausible but time-hallowed devices of ction: rst,
that of mistaken identity the false clue of Dains ring on the drowned
corpse; and second, that of the heroines dauntless self-sacrice Nina
interposing herself between her lover and her irate fathers drawn
revolver. Despite these standard melodramatic elements, however, the
novel never reads like a romance or an adventure story for very long:
by the accepted convention such intrigues and dangers are clever,
exciting, larger than life; but in Almayers Folly they come to seem foolish
and irrelevant because they are overpowered by the dominant pres-
ences of the novel the changeless torpor of Sambir and its symbolic
representative, Almayer.
Almayer is an example of what we have come to call an anti-hero;
and he belongs to a variant of that tradition which is typical of the later
nineteenth century. Conrad was characteristically unhelpful about what
literary models may have inuenced Almayers Folly, and wrote only that
it was very likely that on the evening before I began to write myself
he had read one of Anthony Trollopes novels (A Personal Record, p. :).
But it was surely not Trollope, any more than Scott, Marryat, Dickens,
or Thackeray, who had provided Conrad with the antecedents for the
character of Almayer, or shaped his idea of the novel. For Conrad at
this time the exemplary novelists were French, and, in particular,
Flaubert and Maupassant.
It was probably Guy de Maupassant who inuenced Conrad most
directly and powerfully at the outset of his career. He would feel
personal afnities with another aristocrat, skeptic, orphan, depressive,
even would-be suicide; and as a writer no one had a clearer conception
of his craft than Maupassant, or worked at it more assiduously. When
Conrad took up writing, he studied both Maupassants theory and
practice intensively. I fear I may be too much under the inuence of
Maupassant, he wrote to Marguerite Poradowska in :8q; I have
studied Pierre et Jean thought, method, and all with the profoundest
despair. It seems nothing, but it has a technical complexity which
. Essays on Conrad
makes me tear my hair (Letters, :, :88). There is no doubt that
Conrads works show a considerable indebtedness to Maupassant: there
is imitation and even much detailed borrowing, of which a good many
convincing, and even disturbing, examples have been pointed out;

the
grave charge of plagiarism, however, must be somewhat qualied when
we consider that Arthur Symons wrote that Conrad always had a
volume of Maupassant open on his worktable,
8
and that Ford recalled
that Conrad could recite a great deal of Maupassant by heart.
q
Most of
the borrowings look like unconscious residues of Conrads remarkable
but erratic memory: he probably forgot that he was remembering. In
any case, although Conrad was perhaps too proud to own up to what
he owed, he was also too proud to owe very much to anyone; and as
regards inuence in the wider sense, Conrad is never very much like
Maupassant. The economy of Maupassants style, the rapidity of the
narrative development, and the cool distant clarity of his moral analysis
were not Conrads way; and in a :qo essay on Maupassant he made it
clear that he found the determinism of the Naturalist perspective too
narrow as a view of life. It was primarily the conscientious art of
Maupassant
o
which won and retained his enthusiasm.
In the last half of the nineteenth century the supreme gure of the
novelist as artist was unquestionably Maupassants master, Gustave
Flaubert. Hugh Walpole wrote in :q: of the unmistakable inuence
of the style of the author of Madame Bovary on Conrads.
:
Conrad at
once wrote Walpole a letter strongly denying that he had been under
the formative inuence of Madame Bovary, and claiming that he had
read it only after nishing Almayers Folly (LL, ii, .o6). The chronologi-
cal argument is certainly wrong, for a letter of :8q. survives in which
Conrad writes that he has just reread Madame Bovary with respectful
admiration (Letters, i, iii). Admittedly Conrad mentions him less often
than Maupassant; but there is no question of his early and detailed
familiarity with Flaubert,
.
and it is likely that Madame Bovary had some
inuence on Almayers Folly.
Almayer is a Borneo Bovary. Like Emma, he devotes his entire life to
one obsessive fantasy though not of great love, but of great wealth.
Both Almayer and Emma begin by making a loveless marriage merely
as a step towards realizing their fantasies; and then, refusing to abandon
their early dreams and come to terms with the ordinariness of their own
selves and of the lives offered by Sambir or Yonville, they are steadily
driven into a deepening tangle of circumstances from which death is
the only way out.
Almayers Folly: introduction
Albert Bguin said of Madame Bovary that it is the book of the
impossible escape, the heavy-hearted poem of eternal ennui.

Almayers
Folly represents a different and later variant of Emma Bovarys attempt
to escape the boredom of ordinary life. Since the brave days of the
Romantics, the idea of existence as essentially an attempt by the individual
to realize his private dream had been widely diffused and progressively
debased both in literature and in life. In the decades after Madame
Bovary the diffusion and internationalization of Romantic individual-
ism had proceeded in highbrow as well as in popular literature; and
Almayers ennui can be seen as a distant demotic variant of that aunted
by the decadent heroes of J. K. Huysmanss novel A Rebours (:88) and
Villiers de lIsle Adams play Axl (:8qo). The world-weary isolation of
Des Esseintes and Axl is obtained and solaced through great wealth;
and these two might perhaps have recognized, as Emma certainly
would not, a remote kinship to their contemporary Almayer, whose
sense of selfhood is expressed by his unique pony and ock of geese, his
owered pajamas, his pet monkey, and even his nal recourse to opium
in the architectural extravagance of his folly.
If Almayer in some measure belongs both to the petty bourgeois and
the Decadent stages in the history of Bovarysme, the narrative methods
by which he is presented are much more direct developments from
Flaubert. Conrads obtrusive detachment as narrator, for instance, fol-
lows from Flauberts conception of the novelist as God, felt everywhere
but never seen.

In Almayers Folly we are at least continually aware, as

in Conrads work generally, that every compositional unit, from the
basic structure to the cadence of each phrase, has been carefully and
consciously fashioned; while the main action is highly unied, and, as
in Madame Bovary, everything works remorselessly to foreclose the hopes
of the protagonist and bring on the ordained catastrophe.
Conrad also decisively departed from the Victorian tradition of the
intrusive author in favor of Flauberts attitude of narrative imperson-
ality and emotional impassibilit towards his creation; and he seems to
have adopted Flauberts idea of artistic completeness in the rendering
of a single unied theme. The most specic aspect of his likeness to
Flaubert can be seen in the way that, both in Almayers Folly and his later
ction, Conrad proceeds through an exhaustive and primarily visual
presentation of each aspect of the central subject. Conrads letter to
Walpole had singled out Flauberts skill only from the point of view
of the rendering of concrete things and visual impressions. I thought
him marvellous in that respect (LL, ii, .o6). This admiration is implicit
Essays on Conrad
from the rst pages of Almayers Folly, where we are introduced to Almayer
through the impressions evoked in him by the river; and the method
dominates the whole narrative, where every important aspect of the
action has patently been conceived so that it can be rendered in concrete
and predominantly visual terms. Such is the passage which T. P. OConnor
singled out for praise when Ninas prau nally drops from his sight,
and the mortal wound to Almayers hopes is enacted visually:
Now she was gone his business was to forget, and he had a strange notion that
it should be done systematically and in order. To Alis great dismay he fell on
his hands and knees and creeping along the sand erased carefully with his
hand all traces of Ninas footsteps. He piled up small heaps of sand leaving
behind him a line of miniature graves right down to the water. ( p. :)
Here Conrad no doubt obtrudes himself considerably more than
Flaubert would have done when he supplies the explanatory metonymy
of graves for Almayers piles of sand; and the symbolic action itself is
rather more inherently unlikely than anything in Madame Bovary; but it
is difcult not to see the scene as a recollection, though not necessarily
conscious, of several in Flauberts novels.
Point of view, theme, and meaning
Conrad undoubtedly worried rather consciously about his method of
narration, and he knew that Almayers Folly contained a good deal of
retrospective writing (A Personal Record, p. :). Thus Chapters . to are
a continuous ashback; and a great deal of anterior information is
also conveyed not only in the rst chapter, where it is given through
Almayers reverie about his past, but in the last seven chapters of the
novel Conrads account of Taminahs love for Dain in Chapter 8, for
instance, or of Ninas relation to her father in Chapter ::. So if we take
full account of these, the novel probably contains almost as much
narrative of past events as of present ones. This is a formal reection of
the fact that the three days into which the present-tense action of the
novel is compressed are really only the nal stage in the working out of
an already predetermined fate.
In general Conrad handles the retrospective method with consider-
able skill. For the most part the time setting of past events is clearly
conveyed; and the story of Almayer, who made a choice in the past to
live only for the future, is kept going by making frequent shifts in
chronological sequence and point of view. For instance, we rst see the
mutilated corpse through Almayers eyes, and like him assume it to be
Dains; Conrad then keeps up the mystery either by not recounting the
Almayers Folly: introduction
scenes where other characters Nina, Mrs Almayer, Babalatchi, and
the slave-girl, Taminah learn the truth, or by postponing these scenes
and recounting them later, out of their temporal order. For instance,
just to maintain suspense about the identity of the corpse, Conrad
makes two changes of narrative point of view, both of them involving
switches in time. Thus we get the full disclosure that the corpse is not
really Dains only in the eighth chapter, when we are given Taminahs
doings on the previous night in the form of a retrospective ashback
told from her point of view. Then in the next chapter we go forward in
time to see the Dutch ofcers hold their enquiry, and Almayer produce
the dead body. The reader already knows that it is not Dains, and so
he can appreciate the irony that Almayer still thinks it is; while Almayers
ignorance makes possible the climactic scene later that night when
Taminah awakens him from his drunken stupor to announce that Dain
is alive, and has taken Nina away from him.
The manipulation of chronology and point of view to achieve sus-
pense helps the romantic and adventurous side of the novel; but it also
has the effect of keeping us from any continuous closeness to the minds
of the characters. With most of them this involves no particular dif-
culty. Lakamba, Babalatchi, and the rest are undoubted successes as
characters, but only because they are at and the plot does not require
them to have a real or developing inner life. Romance, adventure, and
melodrama are alike in requiring only that the individual performers
be easily recognizable; the most successful characterization in these
genres usually comes with people like Babalatchi, or the eccentrics in
Dickens or Stevenson, who are picturesquely different, not only from
all the rest of the cast, but from any actual human being; and this, of
course, means that their moral and psychological life does not carry
over to that of the reader, and that they are essentially separate from
the other characters in the novel.
Conrads protagonist, Almayer, on the other hand, must have a
wider truth to life if he is to represent the novels central subject, which
is individual and subjective; and this purpose also requires that the
relationship between him and Nina be much more inward than those
we expect between fathers and daughters in romance. At the same time
suspense demands that the reader be kept guessing as to Ninas real
feelings towards Almayer, and so Conrad is forced to avoid going
inside Ninas mind. This is most obvious when, after Nina has avowed
her love, Conrad shifts into the role of intrusive and yet secretive
commentator to say that: a faint smile seemed to be playing about her
rm lips. Who can tell in the tful light of a camp re? It might have
6 Essays on Conrad
been a smile of triumph, or of conscious power, or of tender pity or
perhaps of love ( p. :.q). The teasing evasion does not particularly
matter here; but our ignorance of Ninas actual feelings towards her
father has the ultimate effect of feeding our curiosity about the plot at
the cost of starving our understanding of its protagonists. In Almayers
Folly the reader can hardly help asking the question: does Conrad keep
us guessing to maintain our interest, or because he does not know the
answer?
As regards Almayer, there are moments when Conrad takes us into
his mind with convincing power, but even there a note of cold detach-
ment inhibits our response. In general Conrad seems least effective
when he is dealing with Almayer in his more conscious and social roles,
as in his last scene with Nina. The main exception is signicant: Almayer
is most convincing when he echoes Conrads own sardonic accents. For
instance, when Almayer nally uncovers the drowned corpse to the
Dutch ofcers, he comments: Cold, perfectly cold . . . Sorry can do
no better. And you cant hang him either. As you observe gentlemen
he added gravely there is no head and hardly any neck ( p. :o8).
Nothing we have heard Almayer say before has prepared us for this
composed and laconic graveyard humor; but it is recognizably a variant
of Conrads own mordant voice.
Both here and later, Conrad either deliberately preferred, or uncon-
sciously required, a way of distancing himself from the inner lives of his
main characters; and he was at his best when he found modes of
writing which gave free play to the movements of the remembering
mind. This freedom could most easily be achieved by the use of inter-
mediate narrators. Thus Almayers sufferings seem most real when
they are reported at secondhand, as in one passage from the brief coda
of the novel which is allotted to Almayers nal efforts to forget Nina
and all his former dreams. It occurs after Almayer has told his solicitous
visitor, Captain Ford, I am a rm man; Conrad then adds: Ford
looked at his face and ed. The skipper was a tolerably rm man
himself as those who had sailed with him could testify but Almayers
rmness was altogether too much for his fortitude ( p. :).
This tightly ironic indirection is only one of Conrads many ways of
avoiding the more inward narrative methods which would have been
needed to enable the personality of Almayer to bear the psychological
and moral weight which his central role in the novel requires. One
reason for this indirection probably had its origins in the contradictions
of Conrads own attitude toward Almayer, contradictions which can be
discerned both in his title and in his epigraph.
Almayers Folly: introduction
The primary reference of folly is, of course, to the lavish house
Almayer builds when he briey imagines that his fortunes will rise
again. But this literal reference is largely peripheral to the action of the
novel itself, since the possible British takeover of Sambir is raised at the
end of one retrospective paragraph only to be dashed early in the next.
The decaying house remains, of course, as an appropriate material
symbol for Almayers folly in the other main sense it is a monument
to his foolishness. But folly in the sense of mere foolishness seems to
have too little moral weight to bear the main burden of the novels theme.
Here a matter of linguistic connotation may be involved. In French,
quite apart from its special meaning for an absurdly costly building or
enterprise, the primary sense of folie is not foolishness but madness.
This much stronger usage was lost when the word was naturalized in
English; but Conrads prior knowledge of French may have led him to
assume that his title would cover a wider range of meanings than it
does, including that of actual insanity.

After Ninas departure, Almayers
mental state can justly be described as madness; but that nal collapse
is merely the culmination of Almayers lifelong schizophrenic division
between his inner picture of himself and what he actually is and does;
his whole existence has been a continuously accelerating process of
protecting his ego ideal by insulating it from reality.
In any case Conrad does not go very deeply or consistently into
Almayers consciousness, perhaps because it would have meant a full
exploration of the hidden identication between himself and his rst
hero. One aspect of this unresolved identication is suggested in the
novels epigraph, drawn from Henri Frdric Amiel: Qui de nous na
eu sa terre promise, son jour dextase et sa n en exil? ( Who of us has
not had his promised land, his day of ecstasy, and his end in exile?).
6
The opening verbal gesture of the novel, then, invites us to an act of
universal spiritual recognition; who has not dreamed of the Promised
Land and failed to attain it? But in the novel this imputed universality
of theme hardly stands up to examination. We can accept the inevit-
ability of disillusionment and still feel disinclined to pay much heed to
the particular case of Almayer; after all, he dies, not in heroic exhaus-
tion and on the brink of his peoples victory like Moses, but in petulant
disappointment at the failure of the future to behave as he thinks it
ought, and make him very rich.
His heros leaden sense of posthumous survival was no doubt deeply
familiar to Conrad, but the unexamined residues of his own past were
still too problematic to enable him to view Almayer either with consist-
ent sympathy or resolute detachment. When he had nished Almayers
8 Essays on Conrad
Folly, Conrad felt he had buried a part of myself in the pages (Letters,
i, :), but although the memory of Olmeijer was vivid, and appar-
ently urgent, his personal meaning for Conrad seems to have remained
obscure. The models of detachment offered by Maupassant and Flaubert
not only worked against the close identication required for popular
ction, but also against the deeper probing of the buried motives which
might explain why the man who had impelled him into authorship
should then have become the object of his disdain. Conrad used much
of his already formidable technical skill not to confront, but to avoid
confronting this basic irresolution; and the reader may well feel inclined
to shrink from committing too much of his sympathy to a hero who
comes out of the past only to tell us that the present is merely epilogue.
Why should Joseph Conrad, at the age of less than forty, have felt
this way about the present? In A Personal Record he writes that once he
had begun Almayers Folly, he would hold animated receptions of Malays,
Arabs and half-castes in his imagination ( pp. q:o). They came, he
continues, with silent and irresistible appeal, which in retrospect seems
now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of
these beings . . . demand to express itself in the shape of a novel, except
on the ground of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a com-
munity of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth? Conrad goes
on to afrm that this sense of mysterious fellowship lay behind all his
output. After all these years . . . I can honestly say that it is a sentiment
akin to piety which prompted me to render in words assembled with
conscientious care the memory of things far distant and of men who
had lived.
No other novelist talks like that about his work; it seems closer to
more archaic notions of art as a ceremonial invocation of the tribal
gods and heroes; and the attitude of sacred homage to the people of his
past life is dominant in much else that Conrad said about his approach
to ction. For instance, he once wrote that a man who puts forth the
secret of his imagination to the world accomplishes, as it were, a reli-
gious rite (LL, ii, 8q). This seems puzzling if we consider how often
Conrads attitude to his characters is ironic and irreverent, as it is with
Almayer; but there is no question that Conrads recorded statements
about writing novels persistently afrm the spirit of retrospective piety.
Why that abiding reverence for people in his past merely because they
had left traces in his memory?
David Hume had long before located the source of personal identity
in the individual memory; it alone acquaints us with the continuance
Almayers Folly: introduction q
of the images of our past perceptions,

and Conrads attitude seems

particularly close to that of his contemporary, the Spanish writer,
Unamuno. Unamuno writes: We live in memory and by memory, and
our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist;
and he concludes that memory is really the effort of our past to trans-
form itself into our future.
8
For Conrad it was through memory that
the past of the sailor was to become the future of the writer; the names
enshrined in Conrads memory were the most objective bridge between
his past and his present; they were the symbolic tokens of the unknown
but continuing identity of the man who had carried them in his mind.
Proper names, Jean Starobinski has written, are the common de-
nominators between the inner (tre profond ) and the social being.
q
This
may help to explain why it was in Conrads rst novel that there should
have occurred the most extreme correspondence between the name of
a ctional and a real character. If it was indeed the memory of Olmeijer
which set off the unconscious process by which Conrad interlocked
both the outer and the inner world of his past self with his present
existence, and projected them into future life through his novel, it
becomes somewhat easier to understand why Conrad, while failing
to come to terms with his central character, should nevertheless have
asserted that if he had not got to know Almayer . . . there would never
have been a line of mine in print.
The present account of Almayers Folly obviously does not follow the
extravagant praise which the novel has received from some critics
most notably from H. L. Mencken: I challenge the nobility and gentry
of Christendom to point to another Opus : as magnicently planned
and turned out. . . . If it is not a work of absolute genius then no work
of absolute genius exists on this earth.
6o
Nor does this critical analysis
take up by any means all of the points which other critics have focused
on most heavily or recently. For instance, it has not given very full
consideration to the views of Albert Guerard, who nds that the best
elements in the novel are the presentation of Bornean life, together
with the novels technical side which made it an important rst experi-
ment in the impressionist method.
6:
Nor has it considered Thomas
Mosers argument that the romance between Nina and Dain lacks moral
and psychological interest, and thus anticipates certain fundamental
weaknesses in Conrads imagination whenever he dealt with the
uncongenial subject of love.
6.
Nor have we considered the various
defenses that have been made against this reasonable charge. John
Hicks, for instance, argues that, even though Conrads erotic dialogue
6o Essays on Conrad
may often be turgid, love functions in Almayers Folly as a general test of
the great Conradian conict between delity and illusion.
6
A similar
defense has been made by Royal Roussel, who nds that Dain and
Nina discover a more authentic world by returning to the primitive
source of life, the dark side, which Almayer and the white side of
Ninas dual nature habitually despise and betray.
6
This question is
also taken up by Juliet McLauchlan in her general defense of Conrads
rst two novels, Almayer and Willems How not to be; she studies,
for example, the parallelism between Almayers longing for the lost
glories of Amsterdam, and Ninas dreams of savage glories.
6
There is another issue, which we have approached only from one
point of view: what, nally, were the psychological motives which led
Conrad to nd himself in that foredoomed loser Almayer? In his :qo
study of The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad, Gustav Morf argues that
Conrad, the exile, had recognized himself ( p. 86), or at least recognized
what he might become, in Almayer and his fate. In the later study, The
Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad (:q6), Morf complements Conrads
personal identication of Almayer with a national one; he writes that
the formula of Almayers Folly obviously stems from Conrads Polish back-
ground and heritage ( p. ::). Almayers dreams of glory, we may say,
were like Polands glorious past; they were real, of course, but they could
never be made real in the present; and it was idle to imagine otherwise.
On this, and on many other topics, then, the case of Almayers Folly is
by no means closed.
xo+rs
: P. xxi. References to Conrads works are usually given in the text, pre-
ceded when necessary by a shortened title. Citations are taken fromvolumes
of the Cambridge Edition already published, or else from the Doubleday
collected edition in its Sun-Dial printing (:q.:) or in the Dent printings
(:q. and subsequently). Where there are several quotations from the same
or immediately contiguous pages, only the rst is given a reference.
. On Conrads life, see Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography
(:q6o), Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (:qq), Zozislaw
Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (:q8), and Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad
(:qq:); these and other authorities disagree about the order of Olmeijers
Christian names.
Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (:q.) ii, .6 (hereafter LL).
For a discussion of the facts and myths of this episode, see Keith Carabine,
The Black Mate: JuneJuly :886; January :qo8, Conradian, : (:q88),
:.88.
Almayers Folly: introduction 6:
See John Gordan, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (:qo), p. 8;
Norman Sherry, Conrads Eastern World (:q66) (hereafter CEW), p. ::.
A. B. Lapian, The Sealords of Berau and Mindanao: Two Responses to
the Colonial Challenge, Masyarakat Indonesia, : (:q), :.
6 See CEW, pp. :o, ::o, which gives by far the fullest account of William
Lingard ( pp. 8q:).
Hans van Marle, Jumble of Facts and Fiction: The First Singapore Reaction
to Almayers Folly, Conradiana, :o (:q8), :6, nn. :o, :..
8 See Joseph Conrad, Almayers Folly (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, :qq), p. :o; subsequent references to the text of this edition appear
in round brackets.
q In :8, ofcers of both the Dutch and British navies had almost simul-
taneously negotiated agreements with the Sultan of Berau; but both govern-
ments soon lost interest (Graham Irwin, Nineteenth-Century Borneo: A Study in
Diplomatic Rivalry [:q], pp. :). However, there is no evidence that by
the time of Lingard Britain was ever seriously interested in annexing parts
of Eastern Borneo as far south as Tanjung Redeb; its main differences
were with the Spanish claim to the Sulu Archipelago, which had been
accepted by Britain and Germany in :8q on the condition of free trade
there, and the acceptance of the British Protectorate over Sarawak, Brunei,
and North Borneo. The Dutch had accepted this settlement mainly because
they were forced to acknowledge that they were unable to colonize all of
Borneo themselves. See L. R. Wright, The Origins of British Borneo (:qo),
pp. :, :, :o:, :q6o, .o:.
:o There is a photograph of Olmeijers house, taken in :qo, in Najder.
:: For the revolution in far-eastern trade created by steamships, especially
after the opening of the Suez Canal in :86q, see Francis Hyde, Far Eastern
Trade, (:q), pp. :6.6.
:. For further information see, Hans van Marle, De rol van de buitenlandse
avonturier ( The Role of the Foreign Adventurer [in nineteenth-century
Indonesia] ), Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 86
(:q:), .q; G. J. Resink, The Eastern Archipelago under Joseph Conrads
Western Eyes, in his Indonesias History between the Myths (:q68), pp. o..
: Conrads Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends, ed. Zdzislaw Najder
(:q6), p. :8o.
: B. L. Reid, The Man From New York (:q68), pp. , :., :6q, 6o..
: See Gordan, p. :q. Chapter numbers given here are the nal ones of the
manuscript (and of all subsequent documents), not the ones Conrad origin-
ally used for the rst seven chapters. It is unclear whether Conrad was
thinking of the original or nal sequence in his comments in A Personal
Record, p. :. Gordan cites the original numbering.
:6 A Personal Record, pp. . The absence of this grey paper from the manu-
script leaves now extant shows that Conrad was revising his text even at
this stage.
: The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad ed. Frederick R. Karl (:q8 ), i, :
(hereafter Letters).
6. Essays on Conrad
:8 Conrads 8 September letter ( Letters, :, :) provides further conrmation,
at least for Chapter :..
:q For further information on this and other aspects of the script, see Almayers
Folly (:qq), The Texts, p. ::.
.o OED, under type; the rst English citation is dated :qo6.
.: Quoted in Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, p. :.
.. At the :q. sale of Quinns collection the typescript, Lot :,8:, was pur-
chased for the then remarkably large sum of $6o. Finally, in the early
:qos the typescript, together with that of Chance, was offered for sale by the
House of El Dieff, New York City, on behalf of W. B. Leeds, and bought
for approximately $.,ooo by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center of the University of Texas at Austin. See Complete Catalogue of the
Library of John Quinn (:q.), p. :66; Gordon Lindstrand, An Unknown
Conrad Manuscript and a Record Price Set for Conrad Typescripts,
Conradiana, . (:q6qo), :..
. Gosse is silent on this matter; perhaps he preferred to forget his rejection of
the rst novel of an eventually eminent author, though identied only as
Kamudi at this point.
. Letters from Joseph Conrad, ed. Edward Garnett (:q.8), p. vi.
. Letters, :, .oq. The advance copies had arrived no later than the .nd (Letters,
:, .o8).
.6 Letters, :, .:. A Conrad Memorial Library: The Collection of George T. Keating
(:q.q), p. :.
. Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrads Literary Theory, Criticism, . (:q6o), .
.8 This change is made in the extant manuscript, perhaps in a hand different
from Conrads.
.q Conrad sent this paragraph to Heinemann on September :q.o (see LL,
ii, .8).
o Pp. ..; pp. ::.
: De-civilized, rd edn, : (:8q), p. :6:.
. Ugo Mursia, The True Discoverer of Joseph Conrads Literary Talent
and Other Notes on Conrad Biography, Conradiana (:q.), pp. q:o.
Frank Arthur Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling (:qq), pp. .qoq:.
.q April :8q, quoted from Norman Sherry, Conrad: The Critical Heritage
(:q) (hereafter CH), p. 8.
Frank Swettenham (:8o:q6) wrote a number of books about the Malays.
6 The Weekly Sun, q June :8q, pp. :..
In a moment . . . from which they sprang ( p. ). On Louis Becke, see
p. q below.
8 Gordan, pp. ..
q The complex printing history of the rst English edition suggests Garnetts
last statement is virtually, if not literally, faithful to the facts.
o See, for example, van Marle, Jumble of Facts and Fiction, pp. :6:66.
: This critical treatment draws considerably on earlier writings of Ian Watt,
notably Almayers Folly: Memories and Models, Mosaic, 8 (:q), :68.,
and Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (:qq), pp. 6.
Almayers Folly: introduction 6
. Introduction, The Sisters (:q68), pp. ....
On the general inuence of the Polish language and literary style on
Conrad, see I. P. Pulc, The Imprint of Polish on Conrads Prose, in Joseph
Conrad: Theory and World Fiction, ed. Wolodymyr T. Zyla and Wendell M.
Aycock (:q), pp. ::q, and Najder, pp. ::6:.
La Folie-Almayer, trans. Genevive Seligmann-Lui (:q), p. 8.
A. Grove Day, Louis Becke (:q66), p. :6; LL, ii, ..; Cedric Watts, A Preface
to Joseph Conrad (:q8.), pp. :; Lawrence Graver, Conrads Short Fiction
(:q6q), pp. :o:; Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (:q8), p. n.
6 Conrads Heart of Darkness: A Critical and Contextual Discussion (:q), pp. :8
.:.
Especially by Paul Kirschner, Conrad: The Psychologist as Artist (:q68),
pp. :q:..q.
8 Keating, p. :8o.
q At least by :8q8: Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance
(:q.), p. 6.
o Notes on Life and Letters, p. .6.
: Joseph Conrad (:q:), p. .
. Richard Curle, Joseph Conrad: A Study (:q:), p. :88.
In En relisant Madame Bovary (:qo), quoted from Madame Bovary, ed. Paul
de Man (:q6), p. .q.
Lartiste doit tre dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la cration, invisible
et toutpuissant; quon le sente partout, mais quon ne le voie pas
(Correspondance [:q.6], i\, :6).
Conrad discussed the issue briey but inconclusively in two letters about
the Polish version, commenting that Almayers Folly cant exactly be translated
into any other language (Najder, Letters, pp. .6., .:).
6 The original is from Amiels little known collection of poems and prose
meditations Grains de Mil [Grains of Millet] (:8), p. :q6, or his Fragments dun
journal intime (:88.). Conrads somewhat less idiomatic version of Amiels
original French suggests he was quoting from memory (see ::n in
the Notes). The context in Amiel obviously establishes the epigraph as
decidedly more appropriate to Conrads youthful romantic reveries than
to Almayers more material aspirations.
A Treatise of Human Nature (Book I, Part i\, section 6), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge
(:q8), p. .6:.
8 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch
(:q.:), p. q.
q Stendhal Pseudonyme, LOeil vivant (:q6:), p. :q8.
6o Quoted from The Monthly Feuilleton, Smart Set, 6q (:q..), :.
6: Conrad the Novelist, pp. ., 8:.
6. Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (:q), pp. o.
6 Conrads Almayers Folly: Structure, Theme, and Critics, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, :q (:q6), .q.
6 The Metaphysics of Darkness (:q:), pp. .
6 Conradiana, :: (:qq), ::.
6 Essays on Conrad
6
cn\r+rn
Conrad criticism and
The Nigger of the Narcissus
So our virtues
Lie in the interpretation of the time
Coriolanus, IV, vii, qo
The increasing critical attention of [the :qos] brought forth in the
centenary year of Conrads birth a tolerably heated literary controversy:
Marvin Mudricks attack on the views of among others Robert W.
Stallman, in his Conrad and the Terms of Modern Criticism (Hudson
Review, Autumn, :q), was answered in the Spring, :q, issue of the
Kenyon Review (Fiction and Its Critics . . .), an answer which provoked a
pretty note of injured innocence from Mudrick in the subsequent issue.
Their mutual acerbities may, I think, be welcomed, if only as a re-
minder that Billingsgate has an ancient title to not the least attractive
among the foothills of Helicon; my present concern, however, is with
the ultimate grounds of their disagreement and this because it involves
several problems of some importance both for Conrad and for our
literary criticism in general. It also happens that Mudrick amplied
his case against Conrad in the March, :q, issue of Nineteenth-Century
Fiction with an essay on The Nigger of the Narcissus, a book which was at
the same time the subject of a full-scale essay in the Kenyon Review by
another of the writers attacked by Mudrick, Albert J. Guerard; and
since The Nigger of the Narcissus has also received considerable attention
in the last few years from a representative variety of modern critics, it
would seem that our discussion can conveniently be centered on the
criticism of Conrads rst masterpiece.
i
In The Artists Conscience and The Nigger of the Narcissus Mudrick
grants Conrads mastery of sustained passages of description unsurpassed
in English ction; the storm, for example, and the early presentation of
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus 6
Wait, are wholly successful, for there Conrad gives us an extraordinarily
close and convincing observation of the outside of things. But alas!
our verbal photographer does not always keep his introspection to a
respectful minimum; he has the gall to tell us what to think about life,
death, and the rest; and there results gross violation of the point of
view and unctuous thrilling rhetoric . . . about mans work and the
indifferent universe and of course the ubiquitous sea.
The sardonic irony of that last phrase may give one pause; on an
ocean voyage the sea is rather ubiquitous if you cant bear it The
Nigger of the Narcissus and, indeed, a good deal of Conrad, is best left
alone. True, Stallman can show how impatient Conrad was with being
considered a writer of sea stories, but this methodological strategy
seems suspect minimizing the importance of overt subject matter so
as to ensure for the critic that amplitude of sea-room to which his
proud craft has of late become accustomed. One may, indeed, nd
Mudricks contrary assertion in his earlier essay that the sea is Conrads
only element less than nal and yet salutary in emphasis; in any case
his present jaded impatience seems ominously revelatory.
Mudricks main charges, however, are not easily dismissed. A number
of previous critics have drawn attention to the inconsistencies in the
point of view of the narration in The Nigger of the Narcissus, and to the
marked strain of somewhat portentous magniloquence in Conrads
work generally. Mudrick has only given old objections new force, partly
by his enviable gift for the memorably damaging phrase, and partly by
allotting them a much more decisive signicance in his nal critical
assessment. In some form, I take it, the charges are incontrovertible;
but a brief analysis of Conrads practice and of its historical perspective
(the book appeared in :8q) may lead both to a more lenient judgment
on the technique of The Nigger of the Narcissus and to a clearer realiza-
tion of some of the problematic implications of our current critical
outlook.
Among the gross violations of point of view specied is that whereby
the reader directly witnesses the nal confrontation of Wait and Donkin,
although no one else, of course, was present. Mudrick argues:
though the violation in itself compels no distressing conclusions, it is a more
important fact . . . than it would be in other, more loosely organized ction.
From the outset, and through more than half of the novel, Conrad has made
us almost nervously sensitive to the point of view as product and evidence of
the stereoscopic accuracy of the account: I, a member of the crew, restricted
in my opportunities but thoughtful and observant, tell you all that I see.
66 Essays on Conrad
A brief historical reection forces us to recognize that it is not really
Conrad who has made us almost nervously sensitive to the point of
view, or, at least, not directly; it is a generation of critics who have
developed, partly from Conrads technique, partly from the theory
and practice of Henry James, and even more from its formulation in
Percy Lubbocks The Craft of Fiction (:q.:), a theory of point of view in
narrative which has been tremendously inuential in providing both
the critic and novelist with an until-then largely unsuspected key to the
technique of ction. But there is a vast difference between welcoming a
valuable renement of formal awareness and accepting as a matter of
prescription the rule that all works of ction should be told from a single
and clearly dened point of view. Yet in the last few years something
like this seems to have happened, and one of Mudricks phrases seems
even to bestow on the dogma a quasi-ethical sanction: when he speaks
of illicit glimpses of the inside, doesnt that illicit attempt to convict
Conrad of some kind of moral turpitude? To be fair we must at least
admit that the charge only became criminal a generation after the fact.
And, waiving the chronological defense, hasnt the time come to ask
whether Dr. Johnsons point about an earlier formal prescription the
unities of time and place isnt relevant here? Delusion, if delusion be
admitted, has no certain limitation: the reader knows that The Nigger of
the Narcissus is just a story; and Conrad is surely at liberty to turn his
pretended narrator into a veritable Pooh-Bah of perscrutation if it will
serve his turn.
If it will serve his turn. Interestingly enough, Albert J. Guerard in
his ne essay on The Nigger of the Narcissus can show very convincingly
that the changes in point of view serve a number of turns, and yet
there are signs of a lingering embarrassment. He writes, unexception-
ably, that, in general, the best narrative technique is the one which,
however imperfect logically, enlists the authors creative energies and
fully explores his subject; in the present case he nds the changes in
point-of-view done unobtrusively and with pleasing insouciance, and
shows how they mirror the storys general movement from isolation to
solidarity to poignant separation. However, when Guerard comes to
another kind of change in Conrads method of reporting the shift
from objective reporting to lofty generalization he comments that
it is one of the incorrigible necessities of the early Conrad, and in
that incorrigible concedes that such variations in narrative strategy
are indisputably literary offenses, although he is prepared to be good-
tempered about it.
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus 6
But Guerards earlier position is surely equally applicable here; for
both kinds of change in Conrads point of view, not only those concern-
ing the identity of the presumed narrator but also those concerning
his varying tone and attitude toward what he is narrating, are closely
related responses to the rather complicated imperatives of Conrads
subject as it develops. If Conrad had wholly restricted himself to the
mind of one individual narrator, he would have had to expend a great
deal of mechanical artice the kind of dexterous literary engineering
later exhibited in Chance in arranging for them to be plausibly visible:
but this particularization of the point of view could only have been
achieved at the expense of what is probably Conrads supreme objective
in The Nigger of the Narcissus; the continual and immediate presence of an
individualized narrator, sleeping in a certain bunk, member of a certain
watch, caught up in a particular set of past and present circumstances,
could not but deect our attention from the books real protagonist
the ship and its crew. So protean a protagonist could be fully observed
only from a shifting point of view: sometimes hovering above the deck,
seeing the ship as a whole; sometimes innitely distant, setting one brief
human effort against the widest vistas of time and space, of sea and
history; occasionally engaging us in a supreme act of immediate parti-
cipation, as when the narrator becomes identied with one of the ve
wes who rescue Wait; and nally involving us in the pathos of separa-
tion, when the narrator becomes an I to pronounce the books closing
valediction to the crew as they disperse.
The terms of this valediction, indeed, seem to emphasize how well
advised Conrad was not to make his narrator too immediate a person
to the reader. In general, as soon as we feel that the authors reections
are issuing from an individual character we naturally expect them to be
expressed in an appropriate personal vernacular; and this either sets
severe limits on the range of reection, or creates an almost insoluble
stylistic problem. Both difculties, and especially the second, obtrude in
the last paragraph of The Nigger of the Narcissus; for example when Conrad
writes: Havent we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a
meaning from our sinful lives? The particularized individual cannot
in prose, at least, and since the rise of realism be both microcosm and
macrocosm without some kind of apparent ination; such was the
problem which the Irish dramatists, trying to escape from the joyless
and pallid words of Ibsen and Zola, had to face; and in this moment-
ary anticipation of the very note of Synge, Conrad surely reveals how
inappropriate such quasi-colloquial elevation was for his purposes.
68 Essays on Conrad
The intrusiveness of the I narrator, who only becomes evident in
the last two paragraphs of The Nigger of the Narcissus, thus under-
lines the books need for a variable narrative angle easily adjustable to
different kinds of vision and comment. Until then, I think, we can nd
many logical contradictions in Conrads manipulations of point of view,
but not, unless our critical preconceptions are allowed to dominate our
literary perceptions, any consequent failure in narrative command; and
we should perhaps conclude that E. M. Forster was in the main right,
when he insisted, in Aspects of the Novel, that the whole intricate question
. . . resolves itself . . . into the power of the writer to bounce the reader
into accepting what he says.
The shifting point of view in The Nigger of the Narcissus, then, enacts
the varying aspects of its subject; in a wider sense, it may be said to
enact the reasons for Conrads greatness: the fact that he was a seaman
but not only a seaman, that he was able to convey, not only the
immediacies of his subject, but their perspective in the whole tradition
of civilization. The actual prose in which some of the loftier elements of
this perspective are conveyed, however, is a good deal more grandiloqu-
ent than we can today happily stomach. As an example, we may take a
well-known passage which Mudrick quotes as his clinching specimen of
Conrads unctuous thrilling rhetoric, the opening of the fourth chapter:
On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its
justice the full privilege of desired unrest. Through the perfect wisdom of its grace
they are not permitted to meditate at ease upon the complicated and acrid
savour of existence [, lest they should remember and, perchance, regret the
reward of a cup of inspiring bitterness, tasted so often, and so often withdrawn
from before their stiffening but reluctant lips]. They must without pause justify
their life to the eternal pity that commands toil to be hard and unceasing, from
sunrise to sunset, from sunset to sunrise: till the weary succession of nights and
days tainted by the obstinate clamor of sages, demanding bliss and an empty
heaven, is redeemed at last by the vast silence of pain and labour, by the dumb
fear and the dumb courage of men obscure, forgetful, and enduring.
Conrad himself, apparently, was uneasy about some of this, and
deleted the passage in brackets when revising for the collected edition
some twenty years after. He had no doubt become more aware, and
more critical, of the inuence of the stylistic aims of French romanti-
cism, the only specic literary inuence on his work which he admitted.
The passage is, in part, an attempt to write la belle page to achieve
the grandiose richness of verbal and rhythmic suggestion found, for
example, in Victor Hugos Les Travailleurs de la Mer; and it can, therefore,
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus 6q
if we wish, be explained away in terms of a literary indebtedness which
Conrad later outgrew.
But there are other, perhaps more interesting, certainly more con-
temporary, issues raised by the historical perspective of the passage.
We have today an unprecedented distrust of the purple passage; the
color has been banned from the literary spectrum, and poetic prose has
become a term of abuse in the general critical vocabulary, including
Mudricks. Since T. E. Hulme, at least, we have demanded in poetry
and, a fortiori, in prose tautness of rhythm, hardness of outline, exact-
ness of diction; we have insisted that every word, every rhythmical
inection, every rhetorical device, shall contribute to the organic unity
of the whole work, shall not exist for its local effect. Mudrick takes
comment on the passage to be superuous, but the grounds of his
objection are, I take it, somewhat along these lines. So, indeed are
mine, I suppose. At least I can hardly read the passage, or others in
Conrad like it, without momentary qualms (Should I let myself go and
enjoy it? No, in real life relaxings ne, but in literature? . . . Think of
Leavis. . . .); and yet, if we consider the Hulmean principle seriously,
isnt the cost more than we are prepared to pay?
To begin with, a rather large series of literary rejections may be
involved; not only Hugo and Pater and much of Flaubert but also a
good deal of Proust and Joyce not only the Portrait but much of Ulysses
Molly Blooms reverie, for example. There are countless passages in
the greatest literature which, though no doubt related by subject and
theme to the rest of the narrative, are essentially set-pieces, developed
largely as autonomous rhetorical units; and in a good many of them
every device of sound and sense is, as in Conrad, being used mainly to
induce feelings of rather vague exaltation. Nor is it only a matter of the
illustriousness of the precedents; they may have valid literary justication.
For, although we are no doubt right to reject de Mussets romantic
certitude that our most beautiful feelings are our saddest, is there any
more justication for the antiromantic prescription that our deepest or
most complicated feelings so often vague and penumbral can and
should be expressed through clear images? And why in images at all?
How can we reconcile the symbolist rejection of logic and conceptual-
ization with the fact that our minds often work by partial and groping
movements toward conceptualization and logical ordering? More
specically, isnt it carrying the demand for imagistic particularity too
far to assert that in literature every part of the picture must be in clear
focus? Can we not, on the contrary, assert that Conrad, a preeminently
o Essays on Conrad
pictorial writer, requires, on occasion, a chiaroscuro effect between one
series of concretely detailed presentations and another? Such certainly
is the way this passage and many others of a similar kind are
disposed in The Nigger of the Narcissus: we get a relief from the immediate
image, from the particularities of time and space, and this, by contrast,
both brings out these particularities more clearly and at the same time
reminds us that there are other less denite and yet equally real dimen-
sions of existence.
It is probably because these less denite dimensions cannot be made
real visually that Conrads style changes abruptly and at once evokes
analogies that are musical rather than pictorial. In the Preface to The
Nigger of the Narcissus he wrote that one of his aims was to approach the
magic suggestiveness of music; and though nowadays we are very
suspicious of word music, there may in this case at least be something
in Coleridges apparently outrageous assertion that a sentence which
sounds pleasing always has a meaning which is deep and good. Conrads
particular sentences here certainly suggested a meaning not lacking in
depth or goodness to one of the greatest practitioners of the prose poem;
for this is one of the passages by which Virginia Woolf, in Mr. Conrad:
A Conversation (The Captains Death Bed ), exemplies her assertion that
in Conrads prose the beauty of surface has always a bre of morality
within. She goes on, I seem to see each of the sentences . . . advancing
with resolute bearing and a calm which they have won in strenuous
conict, against the forces of falsehood, sentimentality, and slovenliness;
and so brings us, at long last, away from this rather inconclusive review
of some of the theoretical issues raised by the passage by forcing us to
ask whether the relation of form and content in the passage is as she
suggests.
To make full sense of its content we must, of course, grant Conrad
the benet of the kind of exible and cooperative interpretation we are
accustomed to give poetry, allow him his steady reliance on ironic,
elliptical, and paradoxical, personication. We must accept, for example,
the dependence of the paradox of desired unrest upon an implicit
assertion by the narrator that life, which is what men literally desire,
is in fact always unrest; we must also accept the personications of the
seas mercy and grace as necessary to prepare for the nal modula-
tion of the eternal pity, where the seas order is equated with Gods;
and we must excuse the somewhat obscure quality of the irony at Gods
supposedly merciful attributes and at the empty heaven because it is
evident that Conrad wants to achieve his juxtaposition of religious
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus :
illusions against the only redemptive power which he acknowledges,
the vast silence of pain and labour, without undermining the traditional
sort of literary theism on which the passages elevation of tone in part
depends.
The gnomic compression, the largeness of reference, the latent irony,
all suggest a familiar literary analogue, the Greek chorus: and the
formal qualities of the passage offer striking conrmation. The Greek
choruss lofty and impersonal assertion of the general dramatic theme
depends for its distinctive effect on the impact, at a point of rest in the
action, of a plurality of voices and an intensied musicality: a plurality
of voices, not an individualized narrator, because the function of a
chorus in general, as of Conrads in particular, is to achieve what Yeats
called emotion of multitude, which is difcult to achieve through a
wholly naturalist technique for the presentation of reality; an intensied
musicality because it emphasizes the requisite impersonal urgency, as
in the present case Conrads tired and yet hieratic emphasis on repeti-
tion and balance of sound and rhythm is itself the formal expression of
his controlled exaltation at the prospect of the laborious but triumphant
monotony offered by the endless tradition of human effort. The placing
and the assertion of the passage are equally choric in nature, for Conrad
seizes a moment of rest between two contrasted phases of the crews
exertion to remind us that, contrary to their longings and to what any
sentimental view of existence would lead us to hope, mans greatness,
such as it is, has no reward in this life or the next, and is a product only
of the unending confrontation of their environment by the successive
human generations, a confrontation that is unsought and yet obligatory,
although the forces of falsehood, sentimentality, and slovenliness seek
perpetually to confuse, defer, or evade its claims.
i i
Mudricks denigration of The Nigger of the Narcissus on the grounds of
Conrads rhetorical attitudinizing and of his use of point of view follows
two of the major emphases of our modern criticism of ction; and as we
shall see his operative premises are typical in much else. But we must
not overlook the fact that Mudrick, who has cast himself as the spectral
Mr Jones interrupting the feast celebrating Conrads victory over the
critics, is also possessed of a marked cannibalistic trait: he cannot abide
the enthusiasm of his confreres for the modish clues of myth, metaphor,
symbol, etc. In his earlier essay on Conrad, Stallmans reading of The
. Essays on Conrad
Secret Sharer was his main target; but he now nds The Nigger of the
Narcissus subject to the same general charge: a heavy overemphasis on
catch-all and claptrap symbolism which only a naive predisposition
for that sort of thing could possibly render acceptable.
That many critics have found a clue to The Nigger of the Narcissus in a
unifying symbolic structure is certainly true. James E. Miller, for example,
in his The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Reexamination (PLMA, December,
:q:), sees James Wait and the sea as symbols of death and life; Singleton
and Donkin as symbols of opposed attitudes toward death and life; the
other members of the crew hesitate whether to follow the true know-
ledge of Singleton or the deceptions offered by Donkin; and the conict
is only concluded when they unanimously reject Donkins offer of a
drink after being paid-off the crew has passed from a diversity based
on ignorance through a false unity based on a lie perpetrated by Donkin,
to, nally, the true knot of solidarity based on genuine insight into the
meaning of life and death.
Millers analysis is, of course, presented as a confessedly simplied
paradigm and I have had to simplify it further; his scheme certainly has
the merit of drawing our attention to a certain number of important
interrelationships which we might not have noticed: but the whole
conception of a neat allegorical drama surely does violence to the
patent diversity of Conrads narrative; this may be the gure in one of
the carpets but what of the many other richly furnished oors? Surely
no one would have seized upon this particular pattern if he had not,
in the rst place, felt sure that there must be some such neat symbolic
plot waiting to be discovered, and in the second, felt justied in giving
decisive interpretative priority to a few selected details of character and
incident which could be made to support it?
Essentially the same method reductio ad symbolum appears in Robert
F. Haughs Death and Consequences: Joseph Conrads Attitude Toward
Fate (University of Kansas City Review, Spring, :q.). Briey, from the
muster, in which they each challenge the order of the ship, both Donkin
and Wait are seen as emissaries of darkness and disorder, Conrads
synonyms for evil. Donkins level is the overt, the social, while Waits is
the religious; the book as a whole dramatizes all of the elements in the
human solidarity of Conrads world, arrayed against those forces which
would destroy them, with Wait the deeper menace since he somehow
comes to stand for the crews own darker natures. This analysis seems
a good deal closer to our sense of the books chief concerns, and in the
main Haugh applies it convincingly; but as soon as the stress shifts from
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus
interpretative analytic summary to the attribution of specically symbolic
meanings to characters and incidents doubts begin to arise. Wait may
be a moral catalyst . . . who brings death aboard ship in many ways,
but is he himself evil? And isnt it forcing the facts to say that when,
after rescuing Wait, the crew return to the deck and nd that never
before had the gale seemed to us more furious, this is somehow related
to Waits inuence which has undone . . . their courage, rather than
to the material fact that, being on deck again, they are more exposed to
the weather?
Vernon Youngs Trial by Water: Joseph Conrads The Nigger of the
Narcissus (Accent, Spring, :q.) reveals a very Galahad of the symbol.
If the ship plunges on to her port side, a parenthetic gloss at once
nautical and symbolic reminds us that this is the left, or sinister, side;
and if Conrad compares the Narcissus and her tug to a white pyramid
and an aquatic beetle, the antithesis . . . is unquestionably a sidelong
glance at the Egyptian gure of the pyramid, prime-symbol of direction
and sun-worship, and of the scarab, symbol of creative energy. It will
serve us nothing to protest, for example, that this last image is patently
visual, for we are in the presence of a Faith. In Young as in many other
of the more symbolically inclined critics that faith is of the Jungian
persuasion; and if I mention that I believe Jung to be a latter-day
example of the same arrogant credulity which has given us astrology,
the British Israelites, and the Baconian fringe, it is only because it seems
to me that the kind of thinking exhibited there is exactly analogous to
that in some kinds of literary symbol hunting: everything proves x
because proves and x are dened with such accommodating tolerance
the terms of argument do not of their nature admit either of proof or
of disproof.
Most of Youngs essay, I must in fairness add, is concerned with
elucidating a symbolic structure of a much less sectarian tendency. In
its general view it is fairly similar to that of Haugh, though somewhat
more schematically presented: Wait, for example, is dened as serv[ing]
a purpose comparable to that of El Negro in Melvilles Benito Cereno: he
is the spirit of blackness, archetype of unknown forces from the depths,
and the mysterious adjuration of his presence all but deprives the crew
of their will to live. Allistoun and Singleton, on the other hand, stand
for the superego, and they, together with Podmore, discover, behind
the mask of a dying shirker, the infrahuman visage of the Satanic.
Waits portentous rst appearance, and the way he later becomes the
chief protagonist round whom the actions and the attitudes of the crew
Essays on Conrad
revolve, these certainly justify our impulse to look for some hidden
signicance in him. Some early readers no doubt thought the same, for
in the :q: note To My Readers in America Conrad wrote the very
explicit denial: But in the book [Wait] is nothing; he is merely the
centre of the ships collective psychology and the pivot of the action. If
we set aside this disclaimer, as Young specically (and scornfully) does,
it should surely be only for the most imperative reasons; and those
offered seem to be based upon the loosest kind of metaphorical extension.
Both Vernon Young and Albert Guerard make Waits blackness their
starting point, and this leads them to parallels in Benito Cereno and Heart
of Darkness. Yet it is hardly necessary to adduce Conrads antipathy to
Melville to cast doubts on the former analogy: Conrad does not, in
Melvilles sense, believe in any absolute or transcendental evil, and his
Negro has not done any. As for the Heart of Darkness parallel, it is surely
suspicious that Young should apply the color metaphor literally, and
thus nd his analogy in the barbarous and superb woman, while
Guerard, more metaphorical, plumps for Kurtz: in any case the native
woman, quite unlike Wait, is conspicuous for her heroic resolution, while
there seems to be little in common between Wait and Kurtz except
that they are tall, proud, have African associations, are rescued with
difculty, and die painfully. Nor is the general metaphorical implication
Guerards statement that Wait comes in some sense to represent our
human blackness particularly convincing. Wait, we know, was
based on an actual Negro, and his color offered Conrad a whole series
of valuable dramatic oppositions. These are made full use of in Waits
rst appearance, where his color at once establishes his difference, his
mystery, his threat: yet later in the book the color issue becomes relat-
ively unimportant; the crew assimilates him to their group with the
jocular nickname of Snowball; only Donkin makes a serious issue of
Waits color, calling him a black-faced swine; and if the narrators
own rst description ends with the phrase the tragic, the mysterious,
the repulsive mask of a niggers soul we must remember that he is here
only the spokesman of the rst general and primarily visual reaction,
that the color is after all a mask, and that there is no suggestion later
that the soul behind it is black.
Deferring the question of what James Waits secret is if any we
must surely ask why, in the absence of any convincing internal evidence
or of any problem so intractable as to make recourse to extravagant
hypothesis obligatory, critics capable of the perceptive felicities of Young
and Guerard, to name only two, should try so hard (though not, as my
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus
present concern may inadvertently have led me to suggest, all or even
most of the time) to discover some sort of occult purport in what is, on
the face of it, a rich and complex but by no means equivocal narrative?
More generally, why have the critics of the last decade or so put such
emphasis on nding esoteric symbols? In the phrase which the hero of
Kingsley Amiss That Uncertain Feeling uses in another connection, I can
see why the critics like them, but why should they like them so much?
The superstition and obscurantism of our time, reected, for example,
in Youngs indignation at Conrads fear of wholesale commitment to
the irrational, will no doubt explain something, as I have already sug-
gested; but what is perhaps more decisive is the prestige with which
literary criticism is now invested. It is no longer the poet, but the critic
who typically functions as the romantic seer; and a seer, of course, is
someone who sees what isnt there, or at least has never been seen
before. This role seems to enforce a no-doubt unconscious operative
strategy along the following lines: a little like the bibliophile who is too
proud to deal with anything but rst editions, the critic feels his status
as seer jeopardized unless he can demonstrate that he saw the book
rst, or at least that his reading of it is the rst real one; his version must
therefore be noticeably different from any likely previous one; and since
certain kinds of symbolic interpretation, unlike the emperors clothes,
are incapable of empirical proof or disproof, they are laid under con-
tribution as offering the easiest and safest means toward achieving
the desired novelty of insight.
This is no doubt an unfair way of putting it; and in any case such
pressures would probably have insufcient force were they not comple-
mented by the obvious fact that the novels length makes it impossible
for the critics analysis to approach the relative completeness which that
of some short poems can attain. Given the impossibility of a full account,
and the somewhat pedestrian tendency of the traditional summarizing
of plot and character, the discovery of some inclusive symbolic congura-
tion appears as the readiest way to combine the imposed brevity and
the solicited originality.
In the case of Conrad, it is true, such interpretations seem to nd
some warrant from Conrads own statement that All the great creations
of literature have been symbolic. The question, obviously, is Symbolic
in what sense? and since the word symbol can be properly used in
too many ways, it may clarify the discussion to suggest a set of rather
ugly neologisms for the different kinds of literary symbolism that are
involved in the present discussion.
6 Essays on Conrad
The basic problem is to determine the kind of relationship between
the literary symbol and its referent, between the narrative vehicle and
its imputed larger tenor; most important, perhaps, are the distances
between them and the basis on which the mutual rapport is ascribed. In
the kind of symbolic interpretation I have been discussing, the distance
between the literary object and the symbolic meaning ascribed to it is
rather great: and so I would describe making Wait a symbol of evil,
darkness or Satan, an example of heterophoric interpretation; that is, it
carries us to another meaning, it takes us beyond any demonstrable con-
nection between the literary object and the symbolic meaning given it.
Many examples of symbolic interpretation differ from this, however,
in that not only is the distance between literary object and imputed
meaning relatively great, but the rapport is established, not through
taking a particular quality in the literary object very far, but through
referring the literary object to some other system of knowledge which it
would not normally be thought to invoke. Youngs interpretation of the
pyramid and the scarab would be of this kind, and since it depends
upon an allusion to a specic body of mythical, religious or literary
knowledge, it could be called a mythophor: mythophor would be a variety
of heterophor, since it makes the literary object stand for something very
distant from it, but the correlation would depend upon a reference to
a certain story or, in the Greek sense, myth; another example of this
would be Guerards drawing the parallel between Wait and the legend
of Jonah.
One particular case of mythophor seems to require some special term
because it is common and raises peculiar problems that case in which
the body of knowledge invoked is one of the depth-psychologies: this
subdivision of mythophor could be called cryptophor, since it depends upon
analogies which Freud and Jung agree to be hidden and unconscious;
one example would be when Guerard equates the rescuing of Wait from
his connement during the storm with a compulsive psychic descent,
or when he toys briey with the scenes psychic geography, proposing
that the Finn Wamibo gures as the savage superego to Waits id.
Heterophor in general tends toward allegory. Guerard, for example,
although he jests at the fashion for analysis of cabalistic intent and
cautions us against reading Conrad as an allegorical writer, insisting
that the overt subject is also the real subject, nevertheless argues for a
series of superimposed heterophoric signicances which are essentially of
the same allegorical kind as may justly be imputed to the Negro in
Melvilles Benito Cereno. I do not think that Conrads work is symbolic in
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus
this way; even less is it mythophoric or cryptophoric. To make it so, indeed,
is surely to emphasize novelty at the expense of truth; and the literary
effect of such interpretation is to reduce what Conrad actually created
to a mere illustration something both secondary and as Mudrick
would argue second-rate. For all kinds of heterophoric interpretation
inevitably disregard the great bulk of the concrete details of character
and incident in a literary work: just as T. S. Eliots allegorical concern
in The Family Reunion, for example, prevents us from inspecting the
psychology and the dynamics of Harrys wifes death did she fall or
was she pushed? so a heterophoric interpreter of Wait will be disinclined
to scrutinize the manifest developing pattern of his character and actions.
The details of these latter, indeed, will seem otiose compared to the few
elements which, on a priori grounds, have been selected as of primary
importance; and so Young can write, Fearful of overstressing the
subaqueous world of the underconsciousness, the symbol-producing
level of the psyche which, in fact, was the most dependable source
of his inspiration, Conrad overloaded his mundane treatment of the
crew.
To demur from Guerards statement that, on top of the various
more obvious levels of narrative statement, Conrad imposed an auda-
cious symbolic pattern, is not to deny that The Nigger of the Narcissus is
in many ways symbolic. Its symbolism, however, seems to me to be of
another kind. It works, characteristically, by natural extension of the
implications of the narrative content, and retains a consistent closeness
to it; for this the term homeophor seems appropriate, suggesting as it does,
carrying something similar rather than, as with heterophor, carrying something
else. When Guerard makes the parallel of the journey of the Narcissus
and the age-old theme of the pilgrimage, his interpretation, if allowed,
and at some level of generality it surely must be, would be homeophoric
because ships and pilgrimages, to those who know anything of them,
must suggest small human communities united for the purpose of a
single journey.
The terms proposed are no doubt grotesque; the distinctions on
which they are based would no doubt often prove difcult to apply; and
considered against the complexity of the problem and the richness of its
literature, the brevity of their exposition may appear unpardonable;
but if they have made more manageable the problem of what kind of
symbolic writer Conrad is, and, perhaps, suggested the need for further
discriminations in this general area, they will have served their turn. It
only remains now to show, very briey, how Conrads method in The
8 Essays on Conrad
Nigger of the Narcissus is symbolic in a homeophoric way, working through
a very accessible extension of the implications of character and event.
This task, however, is complicated by the need to meet the charges
against Conrads use of symbolism made by Mudrick; for, believing
that, for the novelist as well as for the critic, emphasis on symbolism
tends to be at the expense of character and action which, surely rightly,
he takes to be the essential components of ction, Mudrick proceeds
to argue that, in The Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad did not aim at
elaborating or examining character and incident beyond the static,
repetitive point of illustration and symbol. We must therefore attempt
to show, not only that Conrads symbolism is of a very exoteric kind,
but that it does not have these damaging consequences for his pres-
entation of character and incident.
i i i
Mudrick gives Conrads early presentation of Wait two eloquent and
appreciative paragraphs, but he nds the later treatment of him dis-
appointing. It is true that the rst commanding air of mystery slowly
evaporates as we see Wait more closely: his curious pride, it appears, is
merely the defense of an alien who is aboard only because, as he tells
Baker, I must live till I die mustnt I?; and his climactic confronta-
tions with Donkin, Podmore, and Allistoun give increasingly clear illu-
mination to the ordinariness of his secret, his unacknowledged terror
of approaching death. These later developments undoubtedly have a
deating effect, and if we see Wait as an emissary from some spiritual
chamber of horrors, they must seem mistaken; but the cumulative
anticlimax can also be seen as an essential part of the books meaning;
it reveals that the inuence Wait exercises on the crew is an irrational
projection of their own dangerous fears and weaknesses; to put it in our
terms, it asserts, eventually, that contrary to possible earlier expectation,
Wait is not a heterophor; order and disorder on the Narcissus are temporary,
contingent, man-made; behind the mysterious and menacing authority
of a St Kitts Negro there is only a common human predicament;
Wait is a symbol, not of death but of the fear of death, and therefore,
more widely, of the universal human reluctance to face those most
universal agents of anticlimax, the facts; and the facts, as always, nd
him out.
Mudrick, perhaps, mistook Wait for a heterophor and then found, as in
that case I think one must, that Conrad didnt come through; but his
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus q
disappointment has other grounds, notably that there is no development
and nothing mobile or unexpected in the novel. This charge seems,
specically, to overlook or to reject the actions which focus round Wait
in the fourth chapter; for when Mudrick writes that Only Donkin the
gutter creature sees through Wait he is implicitly denying the
picture of the case that is presented there. Donkin is no doubt the only
person who most consistently sees Wait as an infuriatingly successful
evader of responsibility; but everyone else has some such suspicions,
and the matter is obviously not so simple. No malingerer is ever wholly
well, even if at times he thinks so; Waits own agonizing divisions and
contradictions about his condition seem a psychologically convincing
reaction to all the elements in his situation; and his puzzling gratication
at Donkins insults is surely an expression of the desperation of his wish
to believe that Donkin really has seen through him.
Actually, of course, only one man Allistoun can be said to see
through Wait, as we realize in the scene when, after Podmore has told
Wait that he is as good as dead already, and Wait, supported by the
crew, has urged that he be allowed to return to duty, Allistoun mysties
and outrages everyone by his brusque refusal Theres nothing the
matter with you, but you chose to lie-up to please yourself and now
you shall lie-up to please me. As Allistoun explains later to the mates,
it was a momentary impulse of sympathetic insight into Wait . . . three
parts dead and so scared which urged him to enact a form of Ibsens
benecent lie by shielding him from the deception of his own wishful
illusions, and letting him go out in his own way.
That it is the most total act of sympathy for Wait which precipitates
the mutiny is surely a development both mobile and unexpected,
and it dramatizes one of the general themes in The Nigger of the Narcissus
which is far from commonplace: pity, emotional identication with
others, as an active danger to society. Nor is the treatment of the theme
by any means banal; for Conrad shows that pity, though dangerous, is
also a condition of human decency, by juxtaposing the Allistoun scene
between two others where Wait is subjected to the cruelty of two kinds
of extreme and therefore pitiless egoism: to complete the picture, we
must bear in mind the qualications implied both in the subsequent
scene where Donkin brutally satises his malice and cupidity by tor-
menting Wait to his death with endish cruelty, and in the earlier
interview where the pious Podmore, a conceited saint unable to forget
his glorious reward . . . prayerfully divests himself of his humanity and
terries Wait with visions of imminent hell-re.
8o Essays on Conrad
Symbolically, Conrad seems to be saying that although pitilessness
is characteristic of the selsh, yet the increasing sensitiveness to the
sufferings of others which civilization brings necessarily poses grave
problems of control for the individual and for society; and by making
Singleton not so much unsympathetic as unaware of Waits suffering he
may be thought to have reminded us that the older and less humanitar-
ian order was not so easily deected from its collective purpose. Such
a reading can be advanced with considerable condence, since, as is
necessarily the case with homeophoric extension, it is arrived at merely by
extracting a more generally applicable statement from the manifest
implications of particular characters and actions; and the reading could
easily be supported, both by showing how the juxtaposition of certain
episodes implies such a meaning, and by pointing out various explicit
comments on the softening, rening and corrupting effects of pity,
comments which authorize the assumption that any events which raise
such issues were designed to have representative signicance.
This is not to say that Allistoun, Wait, and the rest are to be re-
garded primarily as symbols of these attitudes and values, and I do not
think that Mudrick would regard them as elementary emblems of
what they are intended to demonstrate unless his own criteria, both of
literary character in general, and of what is desirable to demonstrate,
were so contrary to Conrads.
It is undeniable that Conrad does not give us here, nor, typically,
anywhere, the kind of psychological exploration focused on the indi-
vidual sensibility in the manner of James or Proust: but there is surely
some middle ground between this and mere elementary emblems. If
one assumes that Conrads main objective is the ship its voyage and
its society it is evident that, in what is little more than a long short
story, not all its complement twenty-six individuals can possibly be
particularized; nor, on the other hand, can any two or three of them be
fully treated without disturbing the emphasis, which must be on the
social group rather than the individual. It is inevitable that some char-
acters of marginal importance should be portrayed with something
approaching caricature Belfast with his hypertonic Irish sensibility,
Wamibo with his inarticulate frenzies of participation; and it would
obviously be very unsettling to introduce characters who were agrantly
untypical of their setting. Mudrick takes exception to the stereotyped
banality of the gentlemanly Creightons daydreams a girl in a clear
dress, smiling under a sunshade . . . stepping out of the tender sky; and
one hastens to concede that Creighton would be a more interesting
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus 8:
character if he spent all his time at sea counting the days until he could
have another stab at Kierkegaard; but what would that do to the book?
Nowadays we can swallow everything except the obvious; and one of
the reasons that Mudrick singles out this particular passage for repro-
bation is probably that he shares our terror of whatever may seem
clich. He nds clich, for example, when Wait talks to Donkin about
his Canton Street girl . . . cooks oysters just as I like, commenting that
Wait provided with the white mans conventional notion of the black
mans secret desires is less convincing personally and symbolically
than Wait with no background at all, as at the beginning. But the girl
is mentioned in a context which gives Wait just the right kind of tawdry
and hopeless pathos: off the Azores, with the crew talking of the joys of
London, Wait naturally thinks of the London girl he will never see; the
sick mans notorious dream of food (and rations are short) explains the
oysters; while the fact that the remark is addressed to Donkin makes it
Waits last and of course unavailing effort to achieve some sort of
triumph over the one man on the ship he has been unable to soften or
impress.
Mudrick, both here and elsewhere, seems to me to have imported
the clich, and for two reasons: there is the already noted demand for
a degree of individualization which is impossible and undesirable in
many cases, including the present; and there is exactly the same fastid-
ious rejection of the commonplace which, under the direction of other
predispositions, causes the critics he attacks to coax esoteric symbols
into the text. Both Mudricks tendencies, of course, are closely related
to his earlier demand for the sharpest possible denition in prose and in
point of view: all his literary criteria, in fact, have total individualiza-
tion as their basic premise.
His discussion of the moral and social dimensions of The Nigger of the
Narcissus is informed with the equivalent premise, expressed as ethical
and political nonconformity, and it operates with the same rude vigor.
Conrads metaphysical and moral scheme is based on the exaltation
of the grim-jawed, nerveless, reticent men in charge; they inhabit a
hand-me-down aristocratic universe in which everybody in charge
deserves to be and everybody else had better jump; and if we examine
them, all we nd beneath the gritty authoritative British exterior is a
collection of soft-headed Anglophilic clichs. We have seen that Allistoun
in one crucial episode, at least, is far from nerveless, and that there are
some elements in the book which are neither soft-headed nor common-
place; yet to exemplify and analyze further, or to attempt to assess how
8. Essays on Conrad
severe a disablement is involved in being an Anglophile, would prob-
ably be little to the purpose. For we are in the presence of a total
incompatibility: Conrads social and political attitudes, and Mudricks
diametrically opposed convictions.
Conrad, of course, was conservative in many ways: yet surely one
can be, like Donkin, Mudrick or myself , a votary of change and
still nd that Conrads picture of society commands respect. Even his
presentation of the class issue, for example, has considerable objectivity:
the hardships and the miserable economic rewards of the crew are not
minimized, and we are given their cynical discussion of the characteristics
of a gentleman; among the ofcers, Allistoun, with his old red mufer
and his nightshirt uttering like a ag is not a hero but a prisoner of
the class to which his command has brought him, as we see when his
smart wife arrives to collect him at the dockside; and our last picture of
the ship shows the rst mate, Baker, reecting that, unlike Creighton
with his swell friends, he will never get a command. In any case, we
can hardly make Conrad responsible for the fact that no ship was ever
successfully sailed democratically; and we must also admit that, with all
its rigidities and injustices, the Narcissus is a community with a genuine
and in some ways egalitarian set of reciprocities: for the most part
everyone on it knows and sees and wants the same things; while the class
antipathy is qualied by the crews recognition, in Allistoun or Baker,
that individuals who in themselves are no way special or even particularly
likeable can be wholly admirable and necessary in the performance
of their roles. This dichotomy, of course, is an essential condition of
Conrads presentation of his characters: with the signicant exceptions
of Donkin and Wait, their function in one sense usurps their individuality
but in another it endows them with heroic stature.
All these connections and contradictions, operating within a very
restricted setting, gave Conrad his opportunity for a compressed drama
which could, in part, be representative of society at large. The general
values which emerge are on the whole traditional, if not authoritarian;
but at least they are real values, and they are really there. If George
Orwell could detect in Conrad a sort of grown-upness and political
understanding which would have been almost impossible to a native
English writer at that time, it is surely because, as a foreigner, Conrad
could be more objective about a social order which, for all its many
faults, was in some ways admirable and rewarding; while as an exile
from Poland he had cause to be presciently responsive to the existence
of any viable social order at all.
Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus 8
Mudricks case against Conrad, then, is largely the result of the
conjunction of two value systems, neither of which happens to favor
The Nigger of the Narcissus. On the one hand he takes to their logical con-
clusion a rather complete set of modern critical assumptions the pieties
of point of view, of prosy-prose, of authorial reticence about character
and meaning, of extreme fastidiousness about permitted attitudes
and endorsements; on the other he lets loose a teeming menagerie of
personal btes noires, ranging from symbolism, the sea, and the stiff
upper-lip to hierarchical authorities, parvenus, and Anglophiles. Mudrick
had a very nice irony in Conrad and the Terms of Modern Criticism
about how, in our too perceptive times, nose to nose, critic confronts
writer and, astonished, discovers himself ; one could nd striking con-
rmation both of this thesis and of the cryptophoric signicance of proper
names by considering how vivid an image of Mudrick was reected
when he came nose to nose with Narcissus.
As for Conrad, we must conclude, I think, that Mudricks impatient
intransigence forces one to realize, both by its palpable hits and by
what I have tried to chalk up as its misses, how The Nigger of the Narcissus
is, in a number of ways, not at all the answer to our modern critical
prayer. No amount of symbol-juggling will or should divert us fromseeing
that there is an important Romantic and Victorian element in his
work; and, although Conrad was, of course, in many ways a precursor
of the modern movement in ction, his deepest originality and perhaps
the chief unacknowledged cause of his popularity today, derives from
an attitude to his society, both as subject and as audience, which has
been shared by no other great writer of our century. Many things in
himself, his life and his times, gave him as deep a sense of the modern
alienation as any other of our great exiled and isolated writers; and yet
Conrads most vigorous energies were turned away from the ever-
increasing separateness of the individual and towards discovering val-
ues and attitudes and ways of living and writing which he could respect
and yet which were, or could be, widely shared. Mudrick has more
than reminded us of the occasional cost in emphasis, repetition, and
clich, but no criticism has yet adequately assessed what Conrad gave
in exchange. His aim to make you see has often been quoted: but
there has been less emphasis on how Conrad specied that the objects
in the presented vision should be such as to awaken in the hearts of
the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in
mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds
men to each other and all mankind to the visible world. In the centrality
8 Essays on Conrad
of his ultimate purpose Conrad is akin to Wordsworth; and if he
expresses it grandiloquently, he at least does not, in the Arnoldian
phrase, give us the grand word without the grand thing.
The third chapter of The Nigger of the Narcissus, for example, is not
merely a magnicent evocation of a storm at sea; it is a sequence of
unequaled enactments of the theme of solidarity. It begins as we experi-
ence gratitude for the efforts of the crew to save Wait, or of Podmore,
incredibly, to produce coffee; and it achieves its nal resonance in the
famous ending when, after long forgetting him, our eyes are turned to
Singleton at the wheel, and we are told, simply, that, after thirty hours,
he steered with care. It is the climactic recognition of our utter and yet
often forgotten dependence, night and day, by sea and by land, on the
labors of others; and by the kind of cross reference of attitudes which is
Conrads most characteristic way of achieving a symbolic dimension,
this supreme image is linked with three other scenes: that where we
later see how Singletons endurance at the wheel brings him face to
face with death; that where he has previously told Wait: Well, get on
with your dying, dont raise a blamed fuss with us over that job; and
that soon after where Donkin taunts Wait with slackness on the rope
You dont kill yourself, old man! and Wait retorts Would vot?
Singleton does, and the heroic quality of his labors reminds us, not
only that what has been most enduring about human society has been
the mere continuity of its struggle against nature, which is, as we have
seen, the tenor of the ensuing paragraph about the sea which opens the
next chapter, but also that Conrads greatest art, in Typhoon and The
Shadow Line as in The Nigger of the Narcissus, is often reserved for making us,
in Audens words, Give / Our gratitude to the Invisible College of the
Humble, / Who through the ages have accomplished everything essential.
There is perhaps a moral for the critic here: for, in making us look up,
briey, to Singleton at the wheel, Conrad gives us a moment of vision
in which, from the height of our modish attachment to ever-developing
discriminations, we are compelled to afrm our endless, intricate, and
not inglorious kinship with those who cannot write and who read only
Bulwer-Lytton.
Heart of Darkness and the critics 8
8
cn\r+rn
Conrads Heart of Darkness and the critics
You may be surprised to learn that this is a very big topic, and that Im
not going to attempt more than a sketch of one of its aspects: the
question of Conrads attitude to racism, to colonialism, and to Africa.
From its rst appearance in :8qq, for the thousandth number of
Blackwoods Magazine, Heart of Darkness has been considered a major
attack on the horrors perpetrated in the Belgian Congo by Leopold,
King of the Belgians, and his agents. When he broached the project to
Blackwood, Conrad was aware of this element in the story, and said
that the criminality of inefciency and pure selshness when tackling
the civilizing work in Africa is a justiable idea.
:
In answer to a letter of
praise from Cunninghame Graham for the rst installment Grahams
term for Empire was The Stock Exchange Militant Conrad was
again on the defensive, warning his radical friend that the latter two
installments of the story might disappoint him, after the rst one where
the note struck chimes in with your convictions.
.
So Conrad who
had been to the Congo in :8qo knew that the rst installment could
be read as anti-imperialist, although not the story as a whole. In any
case the general assumption that the story was, among other things, an
attack on the atrocities on the Congo, was generally accepted.
At least, that is, until :q, when the well-known Nigerian novelist
Chinua Achebe made a vigorous attack. His subject was An Image of
Africa, and his general theme was that Conrad used Africa as a
historyless and barbaric opposite to European civilization, and that
his treatment of the Congolese people was offensively stereotyped and
unsympathetic. His general approach was political, but he also claimed
that Heart of Darkness should no longer be regarded as a masterpiece,
and even that Conrad was a bloody racist.

Achebe, you will note, belongs to the older generation of African

writers, which was well trained in current colloquial Briticisms. In one
respect he makes a case that must be answered: that is, that Conrad
86 Essays on Conrad
was inuenced by the general attitudes to Africa in late nineteenth-
century Europe, an attitude which had replaced the Enlightenments
sympathy for noble savages brought down into slavery, with a post-
Darwinian view that the African indigenes were primitive savages, but
not noble.

The term racism was not known to Conrad; the word was
not mentioned in the Oxford English Dictionary until the :q8 Supplement.
But we know that it means the doctrine, whether avowed or not, that
nds racial differences in character, intelligence, etc. and that asserts
the superiority of one race over another or others, or in practice
discriminates, segregates, persecutes and dominates

on the basis of
this theory of racial superiority. What evidence can we nd in Heart of
Darkness for racism in this rather general sense?
There is in fact more evidence than we have time to deal with. For
instance, Marlow gets his job because his predecessor in command of
the river steamer, a Dane called Fresleven, had been killed in a scufe
with the natives.
6
The scufe began when Fresleven decided he had
been overreached in his dealings for two black hens, and decided to
take the law into his own hands, and whacked the old nigger the
village chief mercilessly; whereupon his son made a tentative jab
with a spear and it went through quite easy (). Later we observe
that Marlows aunt shared the current humbug, as Marlow calls it,
about weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways (q).
Weaning, of course, implies that the Congo natives are children, and
their ways are assumed to be necessarily horrid. But when we come to
Marlows own experience, and his expressed views, the racial perspect-
ive changes. On his way out, the boats from the shore, he says, were
paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their
eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with
perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks these chaps; but
they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement,
that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted
no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at (6:).
We may perhaps nd some racist assumption in their faces being
described as like grotesque masks, but there is no doubt that Marlow
nds them a comfort compared to the white people aboard his ship.
Once ashore, Marlow nds a similar contrast in favor of the blacks,
though not one that is any comfort. First Marlow sees a chain gang of
six blacks who were called criminals, but who only know that they are
being punished by an insoluble mystery from the sea; the whites, of
course, regard their fate as high and just proceedings (6). Conrad
Heart of Darkness and the critics 8
makes Marlow regard the whites as pitiful representatives of a abby,
pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly; and he
essentially sides with the blacks against them. When Marlow comes to
the blacks in the grove of death, in all the attitudes of pain, abandon-
ment and despair, we notice that his pity leads him to give the dying
young black all that he can nd, a biscuit (66).
Later, Marlow nds that his crew on the steamer are cannibals; and
his homage to them is considerable: Fine fellows cannibals in their
place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them.
And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face (q). One
may nd the comic irony of the last sentence in bad taste, as well as
wrong in its assumption that the crew would eat each other; but Marlows
admiration and gratitude are surely genuine. The blacks living on the
river banks are a different matter; Marlow sees and understands them
very little, and that little gives him an uncomfortable notion this
suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one.
They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what
thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity like yours the
thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar
(q6). Before we condemn Marlow for his surprise, we must take account
of two incontrovertible facts: rst, that there really was a great deal of
cannibalism in this part of the Congo;

and second, and even more

important, civilized whites had not adopted that refusal to make moral
judgments which is typical of many modern anthropologists and their
followers; in those days, just as such terms as nigger were not regarded
as offensive, so no one then would, like Stanley Diamond recently, think
of glossing cannibalism as a mode of directly confronting the concrete
humanity of the subject.
8
Neither Marlow nor Conrad had much personal contact with their
crew: they dont speak the language. The main exceptions in Marlows
case are the reman and the helmsman. His view of the reman is
sympathetic only if we can accept the idea that he had been improved,
meaning educated, only to the point that he accepted the need to keep
the boiler full of water lest the evil spirit inside the boiler would get
angry (q8). The reman is not up to scientically endorsed techno-
logy; but there is surely sympathy as well as mockery in Marlows
verdict that He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping
his feet on the bank instead of trying to acquire useful knowledge.
This passage is attacked by Chinua Achebe, especially Marlows report
that to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of
88 Essays on Conrad
breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs. Marlows involve-
ment with the helmsman is rather close. He lacks restraint and has
opened the pilot-house shutter; so a spear from one of the followers of
Kurtz kills him. But although Marlows judgment is not wholly favor-
able, he nevertheless understands the intimate profundity of that look
he gave me when he received his hurt, and it remains to this day in
my memory like a claim of distant kinship afrmed in a supreme
moment (::q). Achebe notes of this passage that Conrad does not go so
far as Albert Schweitzer, who remarks ironically that the African is
indeed my brother but my junior brother.
q
Marlow only talks about a
claim of kinship; and it is this passage which leads to Achebes remark
about Conrads being a bloody racist; but he does not quite play fair,
since the claim does not in fact frighten Conrad, and there is no
mention of how Marlow repeats that he missed my late helmsman
awfully, and indeed he was not prepared to afrm the fellow was
exactly worth the life we lost in getting to Kurtz (::q).
The other black who makes a memorable impression on Marlow is
the savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnicent woman who is
contrasted with the deluded and bloodless Intended whom he later
visits back in Brussels (:6). Again, it is a very favorable portrait. So
what are we to make of Achebes charge of racism? There is certainly
good reason to believe that Marlow, and Heart of Darkness as a whole,
imply that the blacks are savages who are incapable of using or under-
standing Western knowledge and technology. There is also relatively
little effort to show the Africans as people. Still both Marlow and Conrad
show a real readiness to see that their way of life has real meaning
and value; and if we judge comparatively, we must surely make them
superior as human beings to their white masters. This is, indeed, the
major aim of the story as a whole Marlows sickened disgust with the
colonizers in Africa and then with Kurtz. That is what Marlow, and
the reader, retain from the story. This point is made by many African
writers: However unattering . . . this portrait of the African, that of
his civilisers is much less attering and all too realistic.
:o
The African
novelist Leonard Kibera indeed says that he studies Heart of Darkness as
an examination of the West itself and not as a comment on Africa.
::
Marlow and Conrad, then, are not fairly to be considered as racists,
although they are not in theory wholly opposed to the doctrine.
There is a similar difculty in deciding what specic ideological
interpretation can be drawn from Heart of Darkness on the closely related
charge that it is a work in favor of colonialism. This term can be fairly
Heart of Darkness and the critics 8q
confusing. I remember my amazement when I began reading Walter
Scotts Ivanhoe; there were those emphasized distinctions between the
Saxon words for food animals when they are grown, ox, calf , and
swine, as opposed to the Norman-French words for the meat when it
is brought to the table, beef from boeuf, veal from veau, and pork.
:.
The shock was that I had failed to realize that William the Conqueror
and his successors werent my people exactly; they were conquerors
who kept the English natives in a subservient position; they were treated
as colonials. There was a similar but double experience of colonial
status for Conrad. He was born in the Ukraine, and therefore the
master, in that the Poles there were a dominant class most of the
peasants didnt even speak Polish, but Ukrainian; on the other hand,
Conrad was in the subordinate position because Russia, Prussia, and
Austria had control over the whole of Poland. Colonialism, then, isnt
necessarily a matter of color or race differences; the white settlers who
went to Australia, or for that matter to the thirteen states of America,
were colonials in that they lived in a country which was politically
dependent on the motherland, England. Nor does colonialism imply
conscious political power, as the term Imperialism does. In the Roman
empire, as in the British dominions, you were a colonial whether you
were of, and identied with, the master-country, or were a native; and
the term also retained a sense of its Latin original, from colere, to grow
or farm; the issue of being dependent came later.
Marlow specically raises the colonial issue very early when he says
of the river Thames that this also . . . has been one of the dark places
of the earth (8). The Roman settlers, though, were, Marlow thinks,
no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing
more, I suspect. They were conquerors. Marlow goes on to speak of
how, in his view, The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the
taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
atter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it
too much (o:). Conrad and Marlow, then, are aware of the injustice
and other faults of colonialism. But they make three important con-
cessions. First, that modern Western man has a degree of efciency
which the Roman, allegedly, lacked. Second, that the only thing which
can redeem colonialism is the idea only, which is something you can
set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrice to ( :). Third, there
is the privileged position accorded to the British Empire; the map at the
Trading Companys ofce shows a vast amount of red good to see at
any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there ().
qo Essays on Conrad
Marlow, then, is not anticolonialist as far as his own country is con-
cerned, although nothing is said illustrating the British worship of the
idea. But Marlow is going into the blank space, colored yellow on the
map; it is the personal empire of Leopold, king of Belgium. There, at
least, there is no question of efciency; and as for the idea, the only
idea we see is Marlows traveling companion who, when asked why he
was there, answers, To make money, of course, what do you think? (:).
In actual fact the Belgian Congo was the scene of the most spectacular
misrule and devastation that the world had yet seen, with the black
population there estimated to have lost three million in fteen years.
:
Conrad himself had no doubt of these horrors. In his essay Geography
and Some Explorers he says that he picked up on the Congo the
distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disgured
the history of human conscience and geographical exploration.
:
From the moment we see the French warship ring into a continent
because the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts (6:),
we have no doubt that Heart of Darkness is resolutely opposed to the
practices of French and Belgian colonists. But even so, that opposition
doesnt seem to be mainly inspired by a political motive; and this is
partly because it is a reminiscence of what the Congo trip had meant
for Marlow personally, and largely because in that context the role
allotted to Kurtz is crucial. Kurtz, of course, is himself an example of a
heart of darkness. Many Westerners in the post-Darwinian period
believed that primitive people were morally inferior to civilized ones;
and they were perhaps likely to assume that Kurtzs descent into bar-
barism was the result of his contact with the people he met in the Upper
Congo. This was argued by an Indian critic, Frances Singh, in an
article on The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness.
:
She argues that
what she calls Kurtzs tribalization must be seen as a rejection of the
materialism of the West in favor of a simpler and more honest way of
life (q). We may have strong doubts about this unduly favorable gloss
on the horrors that Kurtz actually performs, his killing, violence, and
accepting human sacrices offered to him; but it is in any case not clear
that such a view of native inuence upon Kurtz was part of Conrads
intention. The text speaks, rather, of the heavy, mute spell of the
wilderness that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the
awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratied
and monstrous passions (:). Kurtzs fall arose from weaknesses within
himself memories which could come to surface and ourish only in
the wilderness far from the protection of the butchers and policemen of
Heart of Darkness and the critics q:
civilization (::). This is part of the atavistic element in man which
Marlow invokes to show the follies of talk of progress; Kurtz had no
innate strength, no capacity for faithfulness (::6); his great solitude
echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core (::). It is
true that Marlow thinks that Kurtz will be lost, utterly lost if he stays;
but that is only because staying would mean staying with everything he
has done, and continuing his appalling career.
Kurtz, then, complicates the anti-colonial theme because he had
come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, and Marlow is
naturally curious to see how he would set about his work when there
(88). But Kurtz only shows that the enemy within is not such that
anyone should be condent of being able to resist successfully; and so
one cant make a very strong case for the storys being pro-colonial on
that basis. In any case it would be wrong to assume, as Frances Singh
does, that it was some failure of understanding which prevented Conrad
from succeeding in writing a story that was meant to be a clear-cut
attack on a vicious system into a partial apology for it ( ). For Conrad
had no such intention. We can see this in the character of Kurtz. We
are told that All Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz; his
career is intended to show how the best can fall and that the most
advanced ideas of political reform can be capable of innite degrada-
tion when removed from the controlling power of the policeman and
the butcher, or public opinion (::). In a sense Kurtz remains the
number one exhibit in Conrads exhibition of colonial horrors: and
his story is too dreadful for Marlow to tell the truth about his life to
the Intended.
There are only two blacks whom Conrad shows as in any way
unsympathetic. First there is the one of the reclaimed who is in charge
of the chain gang; the servant of the whites who gives Marlow a large,
white rascally grin of collusive fellowship in the colonial enterprise (6
). The other is the managers boy on the boat who put his insolent
black head in the doorway, and said in a voice of scathing contempt
Mistah Kurtz he dead (:o). Both of these are clearly examples of
the corruption created in the blacks by the white colonists.
In Conrads letters and critical writings he makes clear that he had
no particular ideological theory that he wished to expound, and that he
did not think that this would be a desirable literary aim. His reluctance
to adopt an overt political stance lasted his whole life and can be
illustrated by his dealing with Roger Casement. Conrad had met him,
and liked him, when he was out on the Congo. Later Casement tried to
q. Essays on Conrad
get his support for the Congo Reform movement, Conrad was a charm-
ing host to him, and wrote a very nice letter recommending Casement
to Cunninghame Graham; but Conrad refused to join the movement,
although he made it clear that he was still rm in his total rejection
of Belgian actions in the Congo. He wrote to Casement, for example,
that It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which
seventy years ago has put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds
tolerates the Congo State today. It is as if the moral clock had been put
back many hours.
:6
Conrad also gave his view on the essence of the
problem of the indigenes. The black man, Conrad wrote, shares with
us the consciousness of the universe in which we live no small burden.
Barbarism per se is no crime . . . and the Belgians are worse than the
seven plagues of Egypt insomuch that in that case it was a punishment
sent for a denite transgression; but in this the . . . man is not aware of
any transgression, and therefore can see no end to the iniction. It
must appear to him very awful and mysterious; and I confess it appears
so to me too.
Conrad here surely shows a ne power of imaginative projection;
both the blacks and Conrad share their awareness of the universe in
which they live; but the violation of their usual habits and expectations
of life under the cover of the colonists pretense of progress must be
very awful and mysterious. Conrads writing and his mind in general
aim to advance, not political programs, but moral understanding; and
this is true of Heart of Darkness. Anyone who puts practical political or
national issues rst could not be expected to like Heart of Darkness. Its
tendency to universalize the problems raised by the Congo and Kurtz,
and yet express them in a sophisticated and subjective dramatic form
through Marlows consciousness, show a temper of mind very different,
and in some respects opposed to, Frantz Fanons classic statement of
the colonial problem. The only condition on which Fanon sees the
possibility of the Europeans being able to help the Third World is that
they should join in a common effort to rehabilitate mankind, and make
man victorious everywhere, once and for all.
:
Conrad would never
have entertained such sanguine hopes. He had written to Cunninghame
Graham: what would you think of an attempt to promote fraternity
amongst people living in the same street. . . . Fraternity means nothing
except the CainAbel business.
:8
Conrad would have regarded the idea
of mans being victorious once and for all as muddled political rheto-
ric. We can see this very clearly if we contrast the tone of his mind with
that of William Faulkner. Faulkner was referring to Conrads essay on
Heart of Darkness and the critics q
Henry James, in his Nobel Prize address, but gave it a very different
direction. Faulkner spoke of his optimistic hopes for the future:
It is easy enough to say man is immortal simply because he will endure; that
when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worth-
less rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even there will
still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse
to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
:q
Doesnt Faulkner insist too much? we may wonder. Conrad would
certainly have thought so; for him it was enough to say that voicing a
hope to us utterly inconceivable was the task of the artist:
When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces [wrote Conrad], the last
airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying
earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall
set this undiminished light of eyes against the feeble glow of the sun. The
artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain, may nd its voice in
some individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression and
courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms
of his temperament, in terms of art . . . whether in austere exhortation or in a
phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess?
For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am
inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may
appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is delightful
in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the
battleeld among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a
barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten.
.o
Conrad worries a good deal in formulating a balanced statement in
exactly the terms he can accept as true. He is neither a Utopian writer
nor an apocalyptic one. That, incidentally, was surely the trouble with
Coppolas Apocalypse Now. Coppolas Viet Nam and Brandos Kurtz
were the end; Conrads story ends horribly enough, but only with the
lie to the Intended; and one shouldnt assume that Kurtz or Marlow
has the nal word.
That sceptical balance, of course, does not clear Conrad completely
from the charge of being a colonialist; but it comes close to doing so. As
real evidence against Conrad we are left with a number of current
clichs about the blacks, their rolling eyes, incomprehensible frenzies,
rudimentary souls, and so on, which certainly show that Conrad had
not attempted to show the natives without prejudice in his language.
On the general charge of Conrads supporting colonialism, however,
we must acquit him in the main. This is largely on the basis of his
q Essays on Conrad
treatment of the whites: There is nothing said of them which doesnt
show them to be cruel, inefcient, mindless, and self-seeking. Conrad
no doubt felt, or at least felt he had to say, that he was in favor of
British colonization; but what we see on the Congo is a tremendous
series of descriptions, episodes, and moral developments which surely
amount to a denial of Achebes view that Conrad chose the role of
purveyor of comforting myths.
.:
Achebe, of course, may be exaggerating in the interest of a larger
cause: an attack on the ideological view of Europeans in general that
sees Africa as a metaphysical battleeld devoid of all recognisable
humanity. Here he claims, against Heart of Darkness, that there is a
preposterous and perverse kind of arrogance in this reducing Africa to
the role of props for the break up of one petty European.
..
From that
viewpoint it is fairly easy to argue that a novel which celebrates this
dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race
cannot be called a great work of art. Conrad does not, I think, lay
himself open to these charges; within the limits of the story as a whole
he does justice even to the land. When Marlow looks at the jungle
outside the Central Station one moonlit night, he feels that the silence
of the land went home to ones very heart its mystery, its greatness,
the amazing reality of its concealed life (8o).
Perhaps we have time for a little up-dating footnote. First, that
Achebe returned to his argument in a Viewpoint article in the Times
Literary Supplement. There he says that what we need between North
and South, between Europe and Africa, is dialogue, not monologue,
however brilliant; and much of the current monologue is foolishly
sensational and pretentious, including that of the alleged masterpiece,
Heart of Darkness. Its high rating, he says, is due to the way that it forties
fears and prejudices and is clever enough to protect itself, should the
need arise, with the excuse that it is not really about Africa at all.
.
He
gives another example of the lack of real dialogue in V.S. Naipaul, the
Trinidadian novelist now living in England.
Naipaul has known Conrad since he was a boy of ten when his father
read him The Lagoon, and he often speaks of Heart of Darkness. In an
essay on Conrads Darkness he mentions a page which spoke directly
to me, and not only of Africa, the presentation of whose background,
incidentally, he thought the most effective part of the book. The page
is about the discovery in the Russian harlequins hut of An Inquiry into
Some Points of Seamanship. It is a tattered and lovingly mended volume,
dreary with its massive tables and diagrams; but its honest concern for
Heart of Darkness and the critics q
the right way of going to work seems luminous with another than a
professional light. The reason for its effect, which Naipaul carried very
long in his mind, was that it seemed to speak for the whole insecurity
of the post-colonial writer. The new politics, he wrote, the curious
reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the
simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption
of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made:
these were things that began to preoccupy me . . . And I found that
Conrad sixty years before, in the time of a great peace had been
everywhere before me. Not as a man with a cause, but a man offering,
as in Nostromo, a vision of the worlds half-made societies as places which
continually made and unmade themselves. The vision, he commented,
was dismal, but deeply felt. Naipaul concludes the essay: Conrad died
fty years ago. In those fty years his work has penetrated to many
corners of the world which he saw as dark. It is a subject for Conradian
meditation; it tells us something about our new world. Perhaps it doesnt
matter what we say about Conrad; it is enough that he is discussed.
.
xo+rs
: Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, ed. William
Blackburn ( Durham, :q8), p. .
. Joseph Conrads Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. C. T. Watts
(Cambridge, :q6q), p. ::6.
Massachusetts Review, :8 (:qq), 88.
See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, Victorians and Africans: The
Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent, Critical Inquiry, :. (:q8),
:66.o.
Websters New World Dictionary, .nd edn (:q8), s.v.
6 Heart of Darkness, in Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether ( London,
:q8), p. . All later references to Heart of Darkness are from this, the Dent
Collected Edition.
See Hunt Hawkins, The Issue of Racism in Heart of Darkness, Conradiana,
: (:q8.), :66. Among the many defenses of Conrad, see the Zambian
defense of C. P. Sarvan, Racism and Heart of Darkness, International Fiction
Review, (:q8o), 6:o, and Reinhardt Kuesgen, Conrad and Achebe:
Aspects of the Novel, World Literature Written in English, . (:q8), ..
8 The Search for the Primitive, The Concept of the Primitive, ed. Ashley Montagu
(New York, :q8o), p. :.
q An Image of Africa, p. 8.
:o Ellen Mae Kitonga, Conrads Image of African and Coloniser in Heart of
Darkness, Busara, (:qo), .
:: Hunt Hawkins, :6.
q6 Essays on Conrad
:. Ivanhoe: A Romance ( Boston, :q), p. q.
: Neal Ascherson, The King Incorporated: Leopold II in the Age of Trusts ( London,
:q6), p. .:.
: Last Essays ( London, :q), p. :.
: Conradiana, :o (:q8), :.
:6 Letter of .: December :qo; Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle
(New Brunswick, :q8), p. .q.
: The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington ( New York, :q66),
p. 8.
:8 Conrads Letters to . . . Graham, p. ::.
:q Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography ( New York, :q), p. :66.
.o Henry James: An Appreciation, Notes on Life and Letters, pp. ::.
.: An Image of Africa, p. 8.
.. An Image of Africa, p. 88.
. Times Literary Supplement, : February :q8o, p. ::.
. The Return of Eva Peron ( New York, :q8o), pp. .o, .:6, ...
Comedy and humour in Typhoon q
q
cn\r+rn
Comedy and humour in Typhoon
FOR some readers Typhoon is one of Conrads great books. It was, for
instance, the work which Ugo Mursia chose to translate into Italian,
and thus initiate his publishing career as a Conradian in :qq;
:
it was
also, for F. R. Leavis, one of Conrads masterpieces.
.
Leavis doubted,
however, that there was much general recognition of just where the
strength of Typhoon lies; in Leaviss view, that strength lies not so much
in the demented fury of the typhoon itself, as in the presentment of
Captain MacWhirr, the chief mate Jukes and the chief engineer Solo-
mon Rout. Conrads particular effect of heroic sublimity, Leavis went
on, depends on the ordinariness of the characters, and it is this which
gives a supremely effective irony to the treatment of the storm, which
remains, in his view, the main theme of the tale. I do not believe that
typhoon is the main theme, or that heroic sublimity is the particular
effect, of Typhoon; while the ordinariness of the characters, and of most
of the narrative, seems to me to have a very different function: its primary
aim is to achieve not the sublime but the comic and the humorous.
Here, I should perhaps explain that without going into the issue
fully I do not intend any very specic distinction between comedy
and humour. Comedy is an established literary genre, and I believe
that Typhoon is structured in a way which is in some respects typical of
stage comedy. Humour is one of the effects which comedy uses, but
which is also found in real life, perhaps because the main subject of
both humour and comedy is the idiosyncrasies of individuals and of
their interplay, especially those that make us laugh or smile.
The passage which Leavis takes as his rst example comes from the
second paragraph of the tale, and continues the description of MacWhirr
with which the novel opens:
He was rather below the medium height, a bit round-shouldered, and so sturdy
of limb that his clothes always looked a shade too tight for his arms and legs.
As if unable to grasp what is due to the difference of latitudes, he wore a
q8 Essays on Conrad
brown bowler hat, a complete suit of brownish hue, and clumsy black boots.
These harbour togs gave to his thick gure an air of stiff and uncouth smart-
ness. A thin silver watch-chain looped his waist-coat, and he never left his ship
for the shore without clutching in his powerful, hairy st an elegant umbrella
of the very best quality, but generally unrolled. Young Jukes, the chief mate,
attending his commander to the gangway, would sometimes venture to say,
with the greatest gentleness, Allow me, sir and possessing himself of the
umbrella deferentially, would elevate the ferule, shake the fold, twirl a neat
furl in a jiffy, and hand it back; going through the performance with a face of
such portentous gravity, that Mr. Solomon Rout, the chief engineer, smoking
his morning cigar over the skylight, would turn away his head in order to hide
a smile, Oh! aye! The blessed gamp . . . Thankee, Jukes, thankee, would
mutter Captain MacWhirr, heartily, without looking up.

The intentional humorous effects are surely obvious: the clothes looking
a shade too tight; the bowler hat, the suit, and the black boots, which
illustrate MacWhirrs inability to grasp what is due to the difference of
latitudes; and that old comic standby, the umbrella. The climax of the
paragraph also sets up the main comic structure of the story. It is based
on the interplay of the three ofcers: young Jukes with his excessive
concern with the social forms, who is ashamed of his captains turnout
for going into town; old Rout, vastly amused at the inappropriateness
of young Jukess portentous gravity; and MacWhirr, simply but absent-
mindedly grateful for Jukess courtesy, and as totally unaware of Jukess
implied criticism of him as he is of its appeal to Routs comic sense.
i
Throughout the rst chapter everything that MacWhirr does and says
makes him a gure of fun. Toms an ass, says his father, who treated
him to chafng as if upon a half-witted person (); and it is at least true
that MacWhirr has a Lockean aversion against the use of images in
speech (.) and confesses to Jukes that I cant understand what you
can nd to talk about (::8). So it is very natural that we should agree
with the narrator in expecting that he will die ignorant of life to the
last (:q) and disdained by destiny or by the sea, which, we are told,
had never put itself out to startle the silent man, who seldom looked
up, and wandered innocently over the waters (:8).
This constantly mocking attitude to the protagonist is a little like the
early chapters of Conrads previous novel, Lord Jim; in both the language
of the narrator expresses irony and contempt. But whereas Jim is young,
complicated, and will develop, MacWhirr is middle-aged, apparently
Comedy and humour in Typhoon qq
successful, and wholly set in his ways. Still, we soon learn that he is not
disdained by destiny. His rst act in the chapters narrative present is
to observe that a barometer he had no reason to distrust recorded so
low a reading that it was ominously prophetic (6). MacWhirr, however,
draws from this only the conclusion that There must be some uncom-
monly dirty weather knocking about. That record low reading initiates
the theme denoted by the title; but in the whole rst chapter there are
only two references to the coming typhoon.
In the second chapter we have a description of the appalling heat
and the terrible rolling of the ship, which gets so bad that Jukes decides
that the ship really ought to be put head on to that swell (o). He goes
to suggest this to MacWhirr, but without success. Jukes speaks of the
swell getting worse, to which, with his usual total literalness, MacWhirr
returns, Noticed that in here . . . Anything wrong? Then Jukes men-
tions our passengers, to which MacWhirr wonders gravely, what
passengers? to him it seems a shockingly inappropriate term for the
cargo of .oo coolies below deck. When Jukes hints more openly that
the ship be headed east to face the heavy seas directly, MacWhirr is
even more indignant: Ive heard more than enough of mad things
done in the world but this . . . If I didnt know you, Jukes I would
think you were in liquor. Then MacWhirr goes on to say that he has
been reading up the chapter on the storms (.), but has decided not
to follow the practice recommended there of trying to get out of the
typhoons way. He gives two very characteristic reasons for this: that
nobody can know that a typhoon is actually there until he is actually
in it; and that, if it is there, very well. Theres your log-book to talk
straight about the weather ( ).
In the whole of this conversation, the narrator says, MacWhirr has
been making his confession of faith, had he only known it (). Two of
its articles are that you dont nd everything in books, and that A gale
is a gale, Mr. Jukes . . . and a full-powered steam-ship has got to face it.
Theres just so much dirty weather knocking about the world, and the
proper thing is to go through it with none of what old Captain Wilson
of the Melita calls storm strategy.
That remains MacWhirrs xed strategy throughout Typhoon, and in
all matters. The reader, however, should not admire his decision to
maintain his course directly into the typhoon. The ofcial instructions,
which MacWhirr should have learned for his Merchant Navy exam-
inations, were very widely known. For instance, in The Sailors Hornbook
for the Law of Storm, which reached its seventh edition in :88q, Henry
:oo Essays on Conrad
Piddington supplied many examples of ships which had either encoun-
tered or avoided typhoons in the China Sea. He also stated that in
those waters nearly all typhoons, or cyclones, come from the east, and
that the center of the typhoon is eight points (that is qo degrees) off the
wind (as MacWhirr comments () ).
In any case MacWhirrs argument against changing the ships course
is very weak. If the ship sails directly into the typhoon the expenses to
the owners in repairs will be vastly greater than the pretty coal bill
which would be run up in dodging the bad weather (); and though
the log would no doubt clear the captain of any wrong-doing, that seems
rather a specious and unworthy argument from Captain MacWhirr,
especially if one considers the human lives that his short-sightedness
will and does endanger.
For Piddington then, MacWhirr would certainly have been a ne
example of the kind of ofcer he attacks, the men of the old school
who do not like new-fangled notions, because they are too proud,
too ignorant, or too indolent to take the trouble to learn.

A vessel
powered by steam is not as vulnerable to storms as a sailing ship, but it
is clear that MacWhirr is wrong not to alter the Nan-Shans course. On
the other hand, this is by no means the only issue which affects our nal
judgement on MacWhirr.
Towards the end of the second chapter MacWhirr is having a nap in
the chart-room when he is awakened by the sounds and movements
which betoken the actual onset of the typhoon. There follow a variety
of humorous episodes in which MacWhirr prepares for action he
catches one of his sea-boots skidding along the oor, kicks at the shoes
hes discarded, jerks himself into his oilskins, and ties on his sou-wester
with all the deliberation of a woman putting on her bonnet before a
glass (6). Once out on deck he nds that Jukes has made all the
possible preparations; Keep her at it as long as we can, MacWhirr
shouts, but before had squeezed the salt water out of his eyes all the
stars had disappeared (8).
The main continuity of the third chapter comes from the actions and
thoughts of Jukes. This is no joke, he thinks, when the full fury of the
storm hits the Nan-Shan, and feels uncritically glad to have his captain
at hand (q). But when Jukes comments to MacWhirr that the sea has
swept away two lifeboats, he is disappointed that MacWhirr merely
remarks that losing things in such a storm stands to reason (). Jukes
is privately convinced that Shes done for; in one relative lull he tries
to outscream the storm, and asks MacWhirr, who is holding on to him
Comedy and humour in Typhoon :o:
tight, Will she live through this? He expects no reply, but after a while
he heard with amazement the frail and resisting voice of MacWhirr:
She may! (8). The narrative emphasis is on the word resisting; and
Jukes even hears snatches of further consoling reections from his cap-
tain; they include, builders . . . good men . . . Rout . . . good man. When
MacWhirr removes his arm from him, however, Jukes, immediately
lets himself sink slowly into the depths of bodily misery. Then he feels
something touching him at the back of his knees, and later exploring his
person upwards with prudent, apologetic touches, as became an inferior.
It is the boatswain, who has come up on deck to report to his captain.
In Chapter Four, Jukes is sure that he will never see another sun-
rise, and is completely dominated by an overpowering dislike towards
any other form of activity than keeping his heart completely steeled
against the worst (:). But another more important activity is soon
demanded of him. MacWhirr, who had earlier been anxious to know
where the men have taken refuge, has now learned some very bad news
from the boatswain. In the course of acceding to the crews demand that
they at least have some light to see each other by (), the boatswain
had gone to the tween deck for a lamp, and discovered that, their boxes
all having worked loose and got broken, the coolies were ghting each
other for the seven years pay they were taking home, and which was
scattered with everything else on the deck. MacWhirr tells Jukes to go
and see what the situation is: this is because his sense that he cant
have . . . ghting . . . board ship overpowers the contrary motive that
he would much rather keep you here . . . case . . . I should . . . washed
overboard myself (6o). MacWhirrs busy concern sickens Jukes like
an exhibition of blind and pernicious folly (); but very unwillingly he
goes down to investigate. He is helped by the boatswain, who keeps
cheerily yelling: What would my old woman say if she saw me now? to
which he imagines her answer: Serve you right, you old fool, for going
to sea (6:).
Once Jukes gets as far as the bunker next to the coolies, he thinks of
getting out again, but the remembrance of Captain MacWhirrs voice
made this impossible (6.). So he opens the door, and glimpses the
terrible scene of the coolies madly battling for their dollars. As ordered,
Jukes immediately closes the door again, and makes his way to the
engine room. There he tells the captain through the speaking-tube,
that nothing could stop the coolies now except main force. Then he
awaits the captains order, hoping to be dismissed from the face of that
odious trouble intruding on the great need of the ship (.).
:o. Essays on Conrad
In Chapter Five the ship is swept from end to end. When that is
over, Jukes, still in the engine room, hears MacWhirr tell him to Pick
up all the money. Bear a hand now. Ill want you up here (). Jukes,
hoping for sympathy, tells Rout: Got to pick up the dollars. To this,
Rout answers, I dont care, and adds, Go away now . . . You fellows
are going wrong for want of something to do. His ironic jocularity
exemplies the old animosity between the deck and the engine room,
but it infuriates Jukes. His anger and the unacknowledged leadership of
the boatswain combine to work a minor miracle. The two men collect
the crew in the alleyway; they then lead them into the bunker, drive the
coolies forwards to the end of the tween deck, collect all their belong-
ings, including the money, and nally rig lifelines to give the coolies
something to hang on to. This done, Jukes bolts the door again and
makes his way back to the deck. There he sees the captain holding on
to a twisted bridge-rail and reports: We have done it, sir. Captain
MacWhirr merely returns: Thought you would, and then adds the
dismissive comment Wind fell all at once (8:).
Jukes, of course, feels that more attention should have been paid to
the great risks he has just taken for the coolies, but MacWhirr merely
repeats his reason: Had to do whats fair by them. He is already
brooding about his next problem as captain, and says to Jukes that:
According to the books the worst is not over yet. Leaving Jukes in
charge, MacWhirr goes into the chart-room. It is very dark, but he can
feel the disorder of that place where he used to live tidily (8). He
strikes one match to read the barometer, and then a second: There
was no mistake. It was the lowest reading he had ever seen in his life.
The aneroid glass conveys the same gloomy message, and then, we are
told, MacWhirrs feeling of dismay reached the very seat of his com-
posure. He is careful to put the matches back in their appointed place,
but before he removed his hand it occurred to him that perhaps he
would never have occasion to use that box any more. For an innitesi-
mal fraction of a second, we read, his ngers closed again on the small
objects as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits that
chain us to the weary round of life. MacWhirr lets himself fall on the
settee; there he unsealed his lips and, as if addressing another being
awakened within his breast, says half aloud: I shouldnt like to lose
her (86). The combination of laughter and tears is the traditional
hallmark of humour, and we certainly have it here.
At this point we might perhaps briey consider the nature of Conrads
humour in the narrative tale as a whole. Thomas Mann sees Conrads
Comedy and humour in Typhoon :o
The Secret Agent as rich in a humour which is refreshingly comic and at
the same time ultramodern, post-middle-class.

Modern art, he says,

sees life as tragic-comedy, with the result that the grotesque is its most
genuine style. But in Typhoon there is surely something that is closer to
the traditional English humour of character. There is grotesque in the
description of the coolies; but most of the narrative is written in a
straightforward and non-grotesque style.
MacWhirr towels himself down, and hears a voice say: She may
come out of it yet. He goes out on deck and tells Jukes the two things
that are on his mind. First, MacWhirr says, We must trust her to go
through it and come out on the other side; and second, if it should
happen that Jukes is left alone and in charge, the Captain mumbling
rather fast, says: Keep her facing it . . . You are a young sailor. Face it.
Thats enough for any man. Keep a cool head (8q).
MacWhirr mumbles rather fast in embarrassment at speaking about
his possible death, but Jukes, we are told, for some reason . . . experienced
an access of condence. Then the blackness of the renewed onset of
the typhoon strikes the Nan-Shan, and for the second time MacWhirr is
moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: I wouldnt like to
lose her. The fth chapter immediately ends with a very short para-
graph: He was spared that annoyance.
Before going on to the sixth and last chapter, two points should be
made on that closing sentence. First, by omitting the climatic second
part of the typhoon, a tactic typical of Conrads love of ringing changes
in his narrative method, he dramatically reverses the concentration
of attention on the storm in the previous chapters. It thus prepares for
the comic note of the concluding chapter; and so does the second
point, the ironic downplaying of the threat to the Nan-Shan into a mere
annoyance.
i i
The last chapter is largely devoted to strengthening the case for MacWhirr
as a captain,
6
but in a highly comic way. Having nished with the
typhoon, Conrad ends his tale in a series of narrative modulations
which both amuse the reader and artfully delay the books general
thematic resolution.
On a bright sunshiny day the sixth chapter begins, carrying the
cheerful assurance that the typhoon is over. First, there is a short scene
showing the Nan-Shan arriving at Fu-chau, and how those at the quayside
:o Essays on Conrad
exercise their wits upon her catastrophic dilapidation. Next, the rst
arrival at the dockside, the second-mate, discloses that MacWhirr has
paid him off but told him to get his breakfast ashore. The point of view
shifts momentarily to MacWhirr, who is dutifully writing his monthly
letter home, and then settles upon his wife, who is reading the letter.
Feeling as she does that she couldnt be really expected to understand
all these ship affairs, she skips most of what MacWhirr has written
about the typhoon; consequently she is never to know that, as the
steward had earlier read, and even passed on to the unbelieving cook,
between and 6 a.m. on December .th, Captain MacWhirr did
actually think that his ship could not possibly live another hour in such
a sea, and that he would never see his wife and children again (q).
Mrs MacWhirr, provincial and self-centred, is much more interested in
a sale at the local drapers, and soon goes out shopping. On the way
she meets an acquaintance; at rst Mrs MacWhirr voices her hypocrit-
ical regret, that Its very sad to have him away; but she then explains
that it is MacWhirrs choice The climate there agrees with him. It is,
the narrator remarks, as if poor MacWhirr had been away touring in
China for the sake of his health.
The narrative next gives us Routs letter to his wife, which she, in
turn, discusses with Routs mother. Captain MacWhirr, she reports,
though a rather simple man . . . has done something rather clever
(q6). But Rout doesnt exactly say what it was, partly because he soon
turns to how the ordeal has brought home to him how much he misses
his wife, and partly because, if Rout had tried, he would never have
made her understand how much there was in it.
What that something rather clever was is still unknown to the reader,
and telling it is left to the third and last of the letter-writers, Jukes.
Jukes, we know, had assumed there would be real trouble with the
coolies unless they were kept battened down under the hatches until
the Nan-Shan gets to port; on the other hand, MacWhirr had already
hinted that he feels he must plan out something that would be fair to
all parties (qq). Jukes, however, is totally unprepared for MacWhirrs
solution. He decides that if he left the coolies to claim what they had
lost, they would all lie about how much it had been; on the other hand,
if he left it to the Chinese authorities on shore, none of the money
would ever wind up in the hands of the coolies. So MacWhirr decides
that he is going to share all the cash we had picked up equally among
the lot (:o:). To do this, with his sea-boots still drawn up to the hips
and in shirt-sleeves, MacWhirr summons up the coolies to hear his
Comedy and humour in Typhoon :o
plan. Jukes hears from the steward that the coolies are on deck, and
jumps to the conclusion that the worst has happened. He arms ve
of the crew and they go up on deck and charge the chart-room. But
all is well there, and they nd MacWhirr, who is very annoyed at the
fuss: What the devil are these monkey tricks, Mr. Jukes? Then he
orders Jukes to disarm his band, and explains his plan of action. By
nightfall the distribution of the money is peacefully completed. Rout
says that this was plainly the only thing that could be done, but Jukes
still does not understand. The book ends with Jukes own comment:
I think that he got out of it very well for such a stupid man (:o.).
This light-hearted paradox places the emphasis where it belongs: on
the irony of Jukess resolute inability to understand or appreciate his
captain.
One of the most standard devices of comedy is repetition of speech
and action. In Typhoon, we notice, both the rst and the last chapters
end in the same way: the pattern is repeated, with each chapter con-
taining a sequence of letters from MacWhirr, Rout and Jukes, letters
which are interspersed by the reactions and commentary of their
addressees. As to the repetition of speech, we notice that Typhoon is
perhaps fuller of what must be calculated repetitions of characteristic
mottoes than any other of Conrads main works. Even Jukess last
remark echoes his summary of MacWhirr in the rst chapter: Hes too
dense to trouble about, and thats the truth (:8).
The repetitions are also found in mere details; thus the crisis of the
typhoon occurred on the early morning of Christmas day (q), but in
the rst chapter MacWhirrs early letters home contain the sentence,
On Christmas day at p.m. we fell in with some icebergs (). More
importantly, some of the repetitions are used to organize the themes
of the tale. Thus the most extended single incident in the rst chapter
concerns the transfer of the Nan-Shan to Siamese registration. Jukes
takes the new ag, a ridiculous Noahs Ark elephant, as a personal
affront; he speaks indignantly of it rst to Rout and then to MacWhirr,
without getting any satisfaction from either. Rout merely cleared his
throat with the air of a man who knows the value of a good billet (:o);
while MacWhirr, when Jukes says Queer ag for a man to sail under,
at rst just answers Seems all right to me. Then, in a wholly character-
istic and irrelevant exhibition of captainly caution, he goes to the
chart room and consults the International Signal Code-book. Having
done so, he reports to Jukes, Theres nothing amiss with that ag . . .
Length twice the breadth and the elephant exactly in the middle. I
:o6 Essays on Conrad
thought the people ashore would know how to make the local ag.
Stands to reason. MacWhirrs comical failure to understand Jukess
symbolic objection is itself symbolic: as is made clear when MacWhirr
ingeniously adds that the crew should be very careful not to hoist the
elephant upside down, because this would be understood as a signal
of distress. Completely defeated by his captains misguided literal-
ness, Jukes goes to tell Rout the old mans latest; but, remembering
that Jukes had earlier threatened to throw up the billet rather than sail
under such a ag, Rout, greatly amused but impassive, merely asks
Jukes, And did you throw up the billet? To which Jukes answers
again repetitively No . . . Whats the good? I might just as well ing
my resignation at this bulkhead. I dont believe you can make a man
like that understand anything (:.).
There are a number of other references to the Siamese ag later,
and they continue to develop the JukesMacWhirr contrast. Two of
them occur in the last chapter. First, the second-mate says that he
would have made trouble for MacWhirr if it wasnt for that damned
Siamese ag (q.). This is a bluff to cover up his own disgrace at having
lost his nerve in the typhoon, but the reader is surely led to wonder
whether Jukess conviction that the coolies should not be let loose is not
undermined by illusory fear similar to the second-mates that the
crew is more vulnerable because the ship has been lately transferred to
the Siamese ag (q8). Jukes concedes that: the skipper cant see that it
makes any difference as long as we are on board; but by now the
reader sees that Jukes, like the second-mate, is quite wrong on the issue;
the ag is only a symbol, and MacWhirr is unthinkingly in command
of his ship, whatever ag he happens to sail under.
The repetition of phrases in the nal chapter is equally effective.
For instance, Mrs MacWhirr quotes some of her husbands phrases
which we already know, such as, Not in books and Hope to have
done the fair thing; Jukes twice tells us that MacWhirr was concerned
to do something that would be fair to all parties, and, in the novels
second to last sentence, reports his skippers remark that There are
things you nd nothing about in books (:o.). These formulae are
already very familiar to the reader; and here they give the conclusion
a combination of the humour which comes from the repetition of
key stock phrases, with an increasing sympathy for MacWhirr, which
comes from our understanding of the truth of the phrases as they apply
to the later events of the story, and especially to his treatment of the
coolies.
Comedy and humour in Typhoon :o
i i i
Did Conrad intend Typhoon as a whole to be a comedy? What little he
wrote about the book both at the time of writing and later offers rather
little help. His main discussion occurs in the Authors Note, which was
written in :q:q, nearly twenty years after he had nished writing Typhoon.
Conrad tells how, casting about for some subject that could be shorter
than the stories in the Youth volume, the instance of a steamship full
of returning coolies from Singapore to some port in northern China
occurred to my recollection. When he had been in the China sea long
before, he remembered that people talked about the incident, the
interest of which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but the
extraordinary complication brought into the ships life at a moment of
exceptional stress by the human element below her deck.
Conrads initial idea for Typhoon, then, came with the Chinese coolies;
but he soon realized that it was a mere anecdote, and that to bring
out its deeper signicance . . . something more was required; a leading
motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of
view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place (vi).
That something more, he says, was, of course, Captain MacWhirr.
MacWhirr, Conrad afrms, was not based on any individual he had
ever met, but is the product of twenty years of life. My own life. If
MacWhirr was the leading motive that would harmonise all these
violent noises, the point of view which would put all that elemental
fury into its proper place is not as easily identied; but the meiosis of
in its proper place suggests that it might be the humorous approach of
the narrative, especially in its treament of MacWhirr.
Conrad does not say this, however, but goes on to mention two
points which the critics had made at the time that the story was a
deliberately intended stormpiece, and that MacWhirr had a denite
symbolic intention. This last possibility, incidentally, is strengthened
by what we know of the composition of Typhoon, where the passages
dealing both with the storm, and with Jukes, were cut down and more
attention was transferred to MacWhirr.

But Conrad does not pursue

either point, merely commenting that neither the idea of a stormpiece,
nor a symbolic intention for MacWhirr, was exclusively my intention,
although he adds that, like the other tales in the volume, Typhoon has
more than one intention (vii). Easily said, we may reect.
Conrad does not mention the words comedy or humour in the
Authors Note for Typhoon. The closest he came to stating that this was
:o8 Essays on Conrad
his aim occurred at the time of writing. In a letter to his agent, Pinker,
he wrote that Typhoon, the rst work handled by Pinker, was his rst
attempt at treating a subject jocularly so to speak.
8
The intention of
jocular treatment nds some support in two of the early titles which
Conrad considered for the tale Equitable Decision and A Skittish
Cargo both of them obviously referring to the coolie side of the
story.
q
Both suggest a much more light-hearted story than does the
present, and more solemn, title of Typhoon.
We lack any other support from Conrad about his comic intention.
Why? One possible reason is that he had become convinced that his
friends did not admire this side of his writing. He may, for instance,
have known even at the time of writing Typhoon that his fairly close
friend, H. G. Wells, thought poorly of his comic talents. Wells was later
to call the humour in The Nigger of the Narcissus dismal
:o
; and in a
personal episode of roughly the period of Typhoon, when Bernard Shaw
had offended him, H. G. Wells pacied Conrad by saying Its humour,
and adds, One would always bafe Conrad by saying humour. It
was one of our damned English tricks he had never learned to tackle.
Wells is not a wholly reliable witness, but it is certainly the prevalent
critical wiew that Conrad, although admitted to be a master of irony, is
not at his best when attempting anything more than incidental humour,
and that he rarely attempted it in his later career.
There is, however, a small school of contrary opinion, especially for
Typhoon. One of its reviewers, the distinguished writer Arthur Quiller
Couch, wrote that it was a small masterpiece . . . built around a de-
lightfully humorous character.
::
Later, H. L. Mencken called it one
of the curiosities of critical stupidity to assume that Conrad was not a
master of comedy.
:.
Jocelyn Baines nds Typhoon somewhat exceptional;
it is perhaps Conrads most cheerful tale, and in it, although humour,
except for Galgenhumor, is rather rare in his work Conrad can sometimes
be delightfully funny as in the altercation over the Siamese ag between
Captain MacWhirr and Jukes.
:
If we wish to pursue the idea that in Typhoon Conrad attempted
comedy, we must ask with what deep conviction Conrad approached
the subject of the story, and whether it is consistent with a comic
idea.
One simple way of putting it would be to say that Typhoon is about
the corrections which experience administers to ideas. This, in one
form or another, is a classic theme of intellectual comedy; and it would
be consistent with Conrads ction in general, which normally exhibits
Comedy and humour in Typhoon :oq
a fairly critical attitude to theory as opposed to practice. No creed, in
fact, as E. M. Forster put it, but only opinions, and the right to throw
them overboard when facts make them look absurd.
:
Typhoon stands
out in the Conrad canon partly because its values are so completely
dedicated to the triumph of fact. The China seas, we are told, are full
of every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift
and changeable currents tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a
seaman in clear and denite language (:). So MacWhirr, who has
just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day,
and no more (), is taciturn except for his duties. As the narrator puts
it, the past being to his mind done with, and the future not there yet,
the more general actualities of the day required no comment because
facts can speak for themselves with overwhelming precision (q).
Conrad obviously uses MacWhirrs literal mindedness, and his
monocular devotion to duty, as an extreme case, and in Jukes Conrad
creates his opposite. Jukes, of course, has too much imagination, and
this is allied with the inexperience of youth, and its disregard of ordinary
realities. The conict, as a result, is very different from that in The Nigger
of the Narcissus, to which Typhoon is often compared. Both captains, in
the process of driving their ships hard, are responsible for the cata-
strophes which overtake them. Allistoun, however, is the ideal captain;
he is almost superhuman in his understanding, and he also faces other
appalling difculties, especially the mutinous developments among the
crew, for which he is not really responsible. MacWhirr is quite different;
he seems to be below average in ordinary human understanding; and
yet at the end he triumphs over his circumstances, and even teaches
Jukes a great deal about command. Contrary to what some critics have
said, MacWhirr also learns something from the typhoon, if only that he
is mortal and may go down with the ship. But he is surely not a heroic
gure in the same way that Allistoun is; much of what we are told about
him, as opposed to Allistoun, emphasizes how he suffers the common
tribulations of mortals, from an unfortunate marriage to the annoy-
ances of having his tidy chart-room routines upset by the typhoon.
MacWhirr, then, really is, as Conrad said, the product of twenty years
of life. My own life. As a young seaman, Conrad, as imaginative as
Jukes, must have learned, with equal consternation and amazement,
one of the hardest lessons of command, or rather of being commanded:
the paradoxical fact that superiors who are in many respects inept can
nevertheless be very good at the job; indeed, their very lack of interest
or skill in conversation and books, the main values of verbal culture,
::o Essays on Conrad
may even have left them freer to do in a more single-minded way the
one thing that they have trained themselves to do.
Conrad could not have done justice to his theme in merely showing
this paradox in a straightforward way. The captain had to be exagger-
atedly innocent of ideas, hostile to books, and devoid of emotional
understanding, and yet he had to show that real, indeed essential,
virtues can coexist without these traditional supports of civilized man.
The comedy arose out of this conict; and in it MacWhirrs impercep-
tiveness must be opposed by the contrasting character of his rst mate.
Jukes needs his captain badly in the typhoon; but he is too young to
understand him. Thus be cannot imagine how MacWhirr can regard
the boatswain as a rst-rate petty ofcer (q); that this is intended to
reect Jukess youthful lack of judgment is emphasized by two earlier
narrative parallels. First, there is the senior partner who thinks that
MacWhirr is the very man to command the Nan-Shan, while his young
nephew asks, with faint contempt What is it that you see in him? (8)
Second, there is the scene when the useless second mate eggs Jukes on
to get MacWhirr to change course: the idea is good, but it is badly
tarnished by this particular support.
Solomon Rout is very different from MacWhirr and Jukes. He is the
shrewd observer whose humorous relish is suggested by his remark
that the engineers that go down to the sea in ships behold the wonders
of sailor nature (:6). He ghts the typhoon in a pair of carpet slippers
(6q), but with dauntless tenacity; and we can surely trust what Rout
says about MacWhirr: Give me the dullest ass for a skipper before a
rogue (:6). Neither Jukes nor Rout is actually a close friend of MacWhirr;
but they are forced to agree on MacWhirrs handling of the coolies:
Rout says MacWhirr has done something rather clever; and Jukes
that he got out of it very well for such a stupid man. These two
judgements are alike in one respect: they place MacWhirr as a man in
an illustrious comic tradition; he is the Innocent, the Natural, the Wise
Fool, the man who is mocked by his fellows but who nally surprises
them with a quite unexpected exhibition of real wisdom.
xo+rs
: Mario Curreli, Ugo Mursia: Una Vita per Conrad, in Ugo Mursia, Scritti
Conradiani, ed. M. Curreli ( Milan, :q8), pp. :o::.
. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition ( London, :q8), pp. :8.
Typhoon and Other Stories, Dents Collected Edition (London, :qo), pp. .
Later quotations from Typhoon are given from this edition by page number
Comedy and humour in Typhoon :::
in the text. Where there are successive quotations from the same page,
or immediately adjoining ones, only the rst passage quoted is given a
reference.
Henry Piddington, The Sailors Hornbook for the Law of Storms, th edn (London,
:88q), pp. q, :o, .
Thomas Mann, Conrads Secret Agent, Past Masters and Other Papers (Lon-
don, :q), pp. .:.
6 This is contrary to the view of some recent critics. Thus Paul Bruss argues
that MacWhirrs fundamental unsuitability for life in Conrads seas becomes
the real focus of the narrators concern (Conrads Early Sea Fiction: The
Novelist as Navigator (Lewisburg, :qq), p. :.). William W. Bonney, in Thorns
and Arabesques: Contexts for Conrads Fiction (Baltimore, :q8o), p. , sees
MacWhirr as a product of the irresponsible commercial interests that ll
the sea with steamships supervised by ill-trained ofcers.
See H. T. Webster, Conrads Changes in Narrative Conception in the
Manuscripts of Typhoon and Other Stories and Victory, PMLA, 6 (:qq), q
. I. P. Pulc argues that while the rendering of the storm in The Nigger is a
magnicent triumph, the depiction of the hurricane in Typhoon is almost
a total failure (Two Portrayals of a Storm: Some Notes on Conrads
Descriptive Style in The Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon, Style, (:qo),
q).
8 Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (London, :q6o), p. .8.
q Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. A Biography (New York,
:qq), pp. q, q.
:o H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York, :q), pp. .6, o. John
Galsworthy commented of Conrad that His sense of humour, indeed, was
far greater than one might think from his work. He had an almost ferocious
enjoyment of the absurd. Writing seemed to dry or sardonise his humour.
But in conversation his sense of fun was much more vivid (Castles in Spain
(New York, :q.), p. ::).
:: Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London, :q), p. :6.
:. H. L. Mencken, Conrad Revisited, Smart Set, 6q (December :q..), :..
: Baines, Conrad, pp. .8q.
: E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad: A Note, Abinger Harvest (London, :q6),
p. :.
::. Essays on Conrad
::.
cn\r+rn 6
The political and social background of
The Secret Agent
The modern reader may nd it useful to have some further information
about the main historical source of The Secret Agent, the Greenwich Park
explosion of : February :8q, and about Conrads other sources for
the novel.
This is not to imply that The Secret Agent is to be considered a novel
about an actual historical event, in the sense that Josephine Teys
The Franchise Affair, say, is a ctional reconstruction of the mysterious
Elizabeth Canning case in which Henry Fielding participated. For
although Joseph Conrads ction nearly always started from some germ
of reality an anecdote, an historical event, an incident seen or a
conversation overheard by the time the work was nished it usually
disclaimed any relation to actual persons, places or events. The germ of
Lord Jim, for example, the desertion of the pilgrim ship, was a widely
reported and notorious event; but in the completed novel Conrad tried
to remove any details that tied it down to an identiable place and
time.
In The Secret Agent Conrad was hardly free to avoid specifying London
and Greenwich as his locale; and he retained a good many of the actual
details of the event. On the other hand, as the Authors Note says, after
the initial challenge of his friends offhand remarks about the explosion,
Conrad proceeded to develop the germinal cluster of ideas with the
utmost imaginative freedom.
Conrad also steadfastly denied any detailed knowledge either of the
explosion itself or of anarchism in general. As regards anarchism,
Conrads letter of October :qo to R. B. Cunninghame Graham is
particularly explicit:
. . . I am glad you like the S. Agent. Vous comprenez bien that the story was written
completely without malice. It had some importance for me as a new departure
in genre and as a sustained effort in ironical treatment of a melodramatic
subject, which was my technical intention. . . .
Political and social background of The Secret Agent ::
Every word you say I treasure. Its no use, I cannot conceal my pride in
your praise. It is an immense thing for me, however great the part I ascribe to
the generosity of your mind and the warmth of your heart.
But I dont think that Ive been satirizing the revolutionary world. All these
people are not revolutionaries, they are shams. And as regards the Professor,
I did not intend to make him despicable. He is incorruptible at any rate. In
making him say: Madness and despair, give me that for a lever and I will
move the world, I wanted to give him a note of perfect sincerity. At the worst
he is a megalomaniac of an extreme type. And every extremist is respectable.
I am extremely attered to have secured your commendation for my Secret-
ary of State and for the Revolutionary Toodles. It was very easy there (for me)
to go utterly wrong.
By Jove! If I had the necessary talent I would like to go for the true
anarchist, which is the millionaire. Then you would see the venom ow. But
its too big a job. . . .
:
Conrads emphasis here that anarchism in The Secret Agent is treated
without malice no doubt arises from his anxiety not to offend Cunning-
hame Grahams radical views. Yet there is much other evidence to
show that Conrad did not think of The Secret Agent either as a serious
study of anarchism, or even as a responsible reconstruction of the
explosion itself. It is true that Conrad stated to Methuen that the story
was based on the inside knowledge of a certain event in the history of
active anarchism: but he also went on to insist that otherwise it is purely
a work of imagination. Nearly twenty years later Conrad repeated this
qualication in a letter to Ambrose J. Barker, who had sent him a
pamphlet about the Greenwich Outrage, presumably that by David
Nicoll mentioned above. On : September :q. Conrad replied:
Thank you very much for your letter and the pamphlet in which I was very
much interested.
As a matter of fact I never knew anything of what was called, if I remember
rightly, the Greenwich Bomb Outrage. I was out of England when it happened,
and thus I never read what was printed in the newspapers at the time. All I
was aware of was the mere fact my novel being, in intention, the history of
Winnie Verloc. I hope you have seen that the purpose of the book was not to
attack any doctrine, or even the men holding that doctrine. My object, apart
from the aim of telling a story, was to hold up the worthlessness of certain
individuals and the baseness of some others. It was a matter of great interest to
me to see how near actuality I managed to come in a work of imagination.
I hope you will do me the pleasure to accept the book [The Rover] I am
sending you which is also a work of pure imagination though very different
in subject and treatment from the Secret Agent.
P.S. I suppose you meant me to keep the pamphlet, which I would like to
paste into my own copy of the novel.
.
:: Essays on Conrad
But if we must agree that The Secret Agent is not a novel about a
particular event, and that its merits, therefore, do not depend upon the
accuracy or insight with which the event is reconstructed, the opposite
extreme also seems to me equally untenable. If The Secret Agent dealt
with events, characters and ideas that had no basis whatever in the real
world or human history, we should presumably have to read it as
fantasy; but the novel surely enlists a quite different kind of credence,
and makes more serious claims on our attention. More information
about the background of The Secret Agent may help, then, not to test the
authenticity of its interpretation of historical events, but to suggest what
distance exists between Conrads ctional world, and the actual time
and milieu with which his novel deals.
It is impossible to establish with any precision how far Conrads version
departs from the facts about the Greenwich Observatory explosion,
because these facts are still not fully known. This is really quite in the
normal course of things for a not particularly important event in which
the protagonist died, and in which secret police, double agents, and
possibly foreign powers, were involved. Nevertheless, enough is known
to make it possible to show that on some issues Conrad was close to the
facts, and that on others he departed from them. There is, of course, a
third category of matters on which there is insufcient evidence to
make a judgement.
Norman Sherry has shown that Conrads version was faithful in its
general outlines to what the newspapers reported about the explosion
in Greenwich Park, and how the anarchists reacted to it.
There is also some evidence to show that the Criminal Investigation
Department was directly involved in the affair through a secret agent
pretending to be an anarchist, who possibly inspired the Greenwich
Outrage, and who almost certainly provided the explosives. Here the
evidence comes from three main sources: from David Nicoll, whose
two pamphlets on the matter are quoted above; from Ford Madox
Ford; and from Sir Robert Andersons memoirs.
Nicoll himself believed that Bourdins brother-in-law, the former
editor of an anarchist journal, Commonweal, H. B. Samuels, was a police
spy who had sent Bourdin to his fate; and Samuelss loyalty to the
movement was certainly questioned at the time by other anarchists.
That the police had some informant about Bourdins plans is obliquely
conrmed by Sir Robert Anderson in a later memoir than the one
Conrad quoted in his Authors Note. Anderson writes:
Political and social background of The Secret Agent ::
I never spent hours of greater anxiety than during one afternoon in February,
:8q, when information reached me that a French tailor named Bourdin had
left his shop in Soho with a bomb in his pocket. To track him was impracticable.
All that could be done was to send out ofcers in every direction to watch
persons and places that he might be likely to attack. His actual objective was
the very last place the Police would have thought of watching, namely Green-
wich Observatory. Travelling to Greenwich by tramcar, he entered the Park,
and as he ascended the path leading to the Observatory he evidently took the
bomb out of his pocket, and was preparing to use it, when it exploded in his
hand, inicting injuries from which he died after a few hours suffering.

Anderson gives no further details he is using Bourdin only as an

illustration of how difcult it is to catch a criminal who works alone
and especially these ends . . . the alien anarchist dynamiters. If Samuels
was in fact the informer, it sounds as though Samuels left Bourdin
without knowing where he was going, so that he could not warn the
police in time.
Nicoll mentions another police informer, Auguste Coulon, who started
an anarchist journal on behalf of the police, and who was also watching
Bourdin; but Anderson does not help establish what went wrong with
the surveillance, and this aspect of the case remains a mystery. On
other matters, however, Anderson is more helpful. In particular he
conrms Conrads picture of the conict between a newly appointed
Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard and such old departmental
hands as Conrads Chief Inspector Heat. When Anderson moved from
the political Secret Service to the Criminal Investigation Department
he was, he tells us
not a little surprised . . . to nd occasion to suspect that one of my principal
subordinates was trying to impose on me as though I were an ignoramus. For
when any important crime of a certain kind occurred, and I set myself to
investigate la Sherlock Holmes, he used to listen to me in the way that so
many people listen to sermons in church; and when I was done he would
stolidly announce that the crime was the work of A, B, C, or D, naming some
of his stock heroes. Though a keen and shrewd police ofcer, the man was
unimaginative, and I thus accounted for the fact that his list was always brief,
and that the same names came up repeatedly. It was Old Carr, or Wirth, or
Sausage, or Shrimps, or Quiet Joe, or Red Bob, &c. &c. one name or
another being put forward according to the kind of crime I was investigating.

It was actually only by an accident arising out of such conicts

within the police authority that the use of double agents by the Secret
Service had come to public attention in the years previous to :8q. The
matter is very fully set forth in the book of Andersons which Conrad
::6 Essays on Conrad
quotes in his Authors Note, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement. Anderson
had been in secret correspondence for over twenty years with one
Major Henri Le Caron, the pseudonym of Thomas M. Beach, an
Englishman who had risen high in the American Fenian movement,
the Clan-na-Gael. Caron had given Anderson a great deal of import-
ant advance information about the bombing and other plans of the
Fenians. Inevitably, in Andersons view, Caron had acted as an agent
provocateur in some of these cases.

The nature of Carons activities

became public during the Parnell case. In an interview with Parnell,
Caron had learned of Parnells general awareness of the plans for
violence of the Irish Land League. This and other information about
the relationships between the parliamentary and the revolutionary wings
of the ght for Irish independence was eventually used, and falsied,
in the :88 Times articles on Parnellism and Crime. In the Special
Commission of investigation that followed, Caron appeared as a witness;
and his testimony revealed both the extent to which the Government
used double agents and agents provocateurs, and the way that they and
their immediate superiors could inuence public policy. As a result the
secret use of Carons evidence to support Conservative policy on Ireland
was attacked by the Liberal leader Sir William Harcourt, who rightly
believed that the alleged Times letter from Parnell to the dynamitard
Patrick Egan was a forgery. Harcourt was also concerned at the way
Anderson had employed Caron without even informing the then Home
Secretary, Henry Matthews; and Anderson then defended the need to
keep Carons activities entirely to himself in a letter to The Times.
6
In view of his letter to Barker it is perhaps wiser to assume that Conrad
had not read Nicolls pamphlets, and that his main informant for the
background of The Secret Agent was Ford Madox Ford, the friend
mentioned in Conrads Authors Note. In his memoir of Conrad writ-
ten immediately after Conrads death, Ford contradicts part of Conrads
version of their colloquy:
What the writer really did say to Conrad was: Oh that fellow was half an
idiot: His sister murdered her husband afterwards and was allowed to escape
by the police. I remember the funeral. . . . The suicide was invented by Conrad.
And the writer knew and Conrad knew that the writer knew a great many
anarchists of the Goodge Street group, as well as a great many of the police
who watched them. The writer had provided Conrad with Anarchist literature,
with memoirs, with introductions to at least one Anarchist young lady who
gures in The Secret Agent.

Political and social background of The Secret Agent ::

There is no other evidence that Bourdin was half an idiot or that his
sister murdered her husband; and in any case Fords testimony is
suspect, if only because my own fairly prolonged frequentation of The
Secret Agent has failed to discover even one Anarchist young lady in it to
whom Conrad might have been introduced.
Ford was probably thinking of his cousins, Helen and Olivia Rossetti.
They did write a ctional memoir of their experiences as editors of an
anarchist paper, The Torch, under the title A Girl Among the Anarchists, by
Isabel Meredith ( London, :qo). It gave, among other things, a thinly
disguised account of the Greenwich explosion. The account is very
close to Nicolls as regards the role of Samuels (called Jacob Myers),
and the supplying of sulphuric acid to Bourdin (called Augustin Myers)
by Samuels from an anarchist called Dr Armitage, a Harley Street
doctor ( Macdonald in Nicoll). In Isabel Merediths account, however,
Myers, the Verloc gure, accompanied by his wife, actually escapes to
France to avoid giving evidence in the trial of two anarchists who are
falsely accused of complicity in the outrage, and sentenced to ve years
penal servitude.
8
In A Girl Among the Anarchists, according to William Michael Rossetti,
his daughters gave with fancy names and some modication of details,
a genuine account of their experiences.
q
Their account certainly tends
to cast doubt on most of Fords version where it differs from Nicolls,
except in two matters: Bourdin is shown as a rather simple enthusiast
wholly under his brothers inuence; and the brothers motives are
suspect, though mainly for advocating irresponsible violence.
There is, then, no secure evidence for seeing Conrads Verloc as being
modelled on the historical Bourdins brother or brother-in-law. Nor is
it easy to nd much beyond circumstantial evidence that the British
Government of the period employed a secret informer who was both an
anarchist leader and an agent provocateur for a foreign power. The general
history of spying, however, shows that nding as many paymasters as
possible is common, both among its important practitioners and even
more among such marginal operatives as Verloc. Apart from Coulon
there was another fairly close analogue to Verloc operating in London
in :8q, Eugne Cottin, a French police spy pretending to be an anarchist.
Cottin does not seem to have worked with the London police, however,
and so his case only supports the general probability that since the
communist and anarchist movements were international, and since
England provided their main haven, foreign governments presumably
met the threat in their usual ways. Thus the great outburst of terrorism
::8 Essays on Conrad
in France from :8q. to :8q probably explains the presence of both
French anarchists and secret police agents in London which is often
referred to by the press during the period.
The years between the Greenwich explosion and the writing of The
Secret Agent were certainly the golden age of political agents provocateurs.
The most picturesque example is that of the Russian Azev. On behalf
of the Russian secret police he inltrated the Socialist Revolutionary
Party, became the head of its terrorist section, and there provided
himself with impeccable subversive credentials by being involved in the
assassination both of the Russian Minister of the Interior in :qo, and
of the Grand Duke Sergei in :qo.
:o
Ford made Azev the instigator of Bourdin in two memoirs written long
after Conrads death. His most explicit account is in Return to Yesterday, and
the passage is worth quoting at length for its no doubt over-coloured
picture of the atmosphere surrounding the Russian anarchists and police
in London at the time:
the fact that England was the international refuge for all exiles was not agree-
able to the Russian police who lled the country with an incredible number of
spies. There must have been at least one for every political exile and the
annoyance that they caused in the country was extreme. I remember between
:8q and :8q going home for longish periods almost every night from London
University to a western suburb with Stepniak, Volkhovsky or Prince Kropotkin
who were then the most prominent members of the Russian extreme Left and
who were lecturing at the university on political economy, Russian literature
and, I think, biology respectively. And behind us always lurked or dodged the
Russian spies allotted to each of those distinguished lecturers. Stepniak or
Volkhovsky dismissed them at Hammersmith station, as often as not with the
price of a pint, for the poor devils were miserably paid, and also because,
the spies and their purpose being perfectly well known in the district where the
Russians lived, they were apt to receive very rough handling from the residents
who resented their presences as an insult to the country. One or two quite
considerable riots were thus caused in the neighbourhoods of Hammersmith
proper and Ealing.
Those matters caused at one time a very considerable friction between the
British and the Russian courts. The redoubtable Azev, who was the Russian
chief spy-master and agent provocateur, conceived the fantastic idea that an
outrage in England might induce the British Government and British public
opinion to decree the expulsion of all political exiles from their shores, the
exiles themselves being remarkably law-abiding. He accordingly persuaded a
half-witted youth to throw a bomb into Greenwich Observatory. The boy,
however, stumbling over a tree-stump in the Observatory Park was blown
to pieces and the whole matter came to light. For diplomatic reasons, the
newspapers made very little of it. But the Home Secretary, Sir William Vernon
Political and social background of The Secret Agent ::q
Harcourt, made such caustic remarks over it to the Russian First Secretary of
Embassy that Russian activities on the Afghan border became very marked for
a considerable period.
I happen accidentally to know a good deal of these episodes. My own house
was once and my mothers twice burgled by emissaries of the Russian
Embassy in search of documents. In my case, I being the owner of The English
Review, the above-mentioned scoundrel Azev sent me by one of his emissaries
a volume of the diary of the late Tzar; he imagining that I might like to publish
it which I didnt. I didnt want to have it in my house for more than a minute
and took it round to my bank for internment whilst I informed the police. In
the interval between then and my return, a little after midnight my house had
been carefully gone through and all my papers, which were very many, had
been thrown all over the oor. In my mothers case, the same thing happened
twice, during the time that Father Gapon, the heroic leader of the peasants to
the Tzars palace on Bloody Sunday, was being housed by her, my mother
being very charitable but by no means interested in politics. Eventually Gapon
was sandbagged outside the house and the burglar a Russian given a long
term of imprisonment. The Embassy naturally denied all knowledge of or
responsibility for him. I came in that way a good deal in contact with the
Scotland Yard Inspector who had charge of that sort of case and he told me a
great deal about not only the activities of the Russian spies but gave me an
I daresay highly coloured account of what the Home Secretary had said to
the Secretary of the Embassy.
::
In Portraits from Life Ford is briefer, but his account is important for
its explicitness about how he supplied Conrad with the material on
revolutionaries for The Secret Agent :
The Secret Agent represents the anarchist-communists of London as being a pretty
measly set of imbeciles, but it represents the agent provocateur whom I knew well
as even more loathsome than the hideous Azev really was and the employer
of that sad scoundrel as even more imbecile, if more sophisticated, than the
shadows of Kropotkin, Stepniak, Volkhovsky, Bakunin, and the rest. And he
had really made efforts to get behind the revolutionary mind. I supplied him
with most of the material of that sort of book, and it was instructive in the
extreme to see him react to those accounts of revolutionary activities.
:.
Both passages date from the :qos, long after the events described;
and they are demonstrably unreliable in some important matters.
Asquith, not Harcourt, was Home Secretary at the time of the Green-
wich explosion; and Fords relationship with Azev, even by his own
account, belongs to the period when he was owner of the English Review,
that is, not before :qo8, two years after Conrad wrote The Secret Agent,
fourteen after the Greenwich explosion, and in the same year that Azev
was nally exposed in a Russian revolutionary review, and forced to
:.o Essays on Conrad
go into exile. Ford elsewhere allows for the difference of dates when,
after an account of his connection with the anarchist paper The Torch,
he writes in Return to Yesterday that the association
had one other curious literary offshoot. That was The Secret Agent by Joseph
Conrad. In one of my visits to The Torch ofce I heard the inner story of the
Greenwich Observatory outrage. It was subsequently conrmed and supple-
mented to me by Inspector French of Scotland Yard after rst my mothers
and then my own house had been burgled by a professional cracksman em-
ployed by the Russian Embassy. I happened to tell the story to Conrad shortly
after my burglary and, since he detested all Russians, and the Russian Secret
Police in particular, he made his novel out of it. In his attribution to me of the
plot which will be found in the Preface to the book he says he is sure that the
highly superior person who told him the tale could never have come into
contact with Anarchists. I have recounted above how I did.
:
Ford fairly obviously conated three different periods: that of the
Greenwich explosion; that immediately before the composition of The
Secret Agent (Bloody Sunday, in which Father Gapon was involved,
occurred on .. January :qo); and that of Azevs exposure some years
later. There are no doubt relics of the conation of the rst two periods
in The Secret Agent; and so we must accept Fords accounts as important
sources for The Secret Agent, even if they are not accurate either as historical
fact or as to what Ford actually told Conrad at any given time.
:
As regards historical fact, for instance, the most convincing new
detail in the last passage is highly dubious. The ofcial reticence of
Scotland Yard has so far yielded to the importunities of scholarship as
to inform me that I am directed by the Commissioner to say that, on
the particulars supplied, it has not been possible to identify Inspector
French as having served at Scotland Yard.
:
For the purpose of estimating what Ford told Conrad before The
Secret Agent was written, the version of the Greenwich affair given in
Fords earliest mention, the :q:: Ancient Lights, is probably the best
guide. In it neither Azev nor the Russian Government is identied;
but the Greenwich explosion is already seen as a foreign effort to force
the British Government to stop harbouring revolutionaries:
I dont know where the crowds came from that supported us as anarchists, but
I have seldom seen a crowd so great as that which attended the funeral of the
poor idiot who blew himself to pieces in the attempt on Greenwich Obser-
vatory. This was, of course, an attempt fomented by the police agents of a
foreign state with a view to forcing the hand of the British Government . . . so
that they would arrest wholesale every anarchist in Great Britain. Of course
the British Government did nothing of the sort.
:6
Political and social background of The Secret Agent :.:
Again Ford erred. The new Tory Government did something of the
sort by introducing a new Aliens Bill, and raiding the main anarchist
meeting-places, the Autonomie Club and the ofce of The Torch. On
the other hand the newspapers, and Nicolls pamphlets, show that
many anarchists agreed with Ford in thinking that the explosion was
the work of an agent provocateur whose masters wanted to end the privi-
leged asylum of foreign revolutionaries in England.
Conrad certainly had other sources besides Ford for the idea of secret
but violent foreign interference in another country. He wrote in his letter
to Cunninghame Graham of October :qo: Mr Vladimir was suggested
to me by that scoundrel, General Seliwertsow, whom Padlewski shot (in
Paris) in the qos. There were peculiar circumstances in that case.
General Seliverskov was a former Russian Minister of Police who
was suspected of spying on Russian nihilists in Paris. Some of these
were arrested by the French police when making explosives in a village
near Paris in the May of :8qo; and six months later Seliverskov was
murdered in his hotel by a Pole, Padlewski, who was helped to escape
by some revolutionary French socialists.
:
The parallel to Vladimir is not, of course, very close; but Seliverskov at
least is one example of a high Russian police ofcial spying on anarchists
in a foreign country. That this also went on in England can plausibly
be inferred from the fact that the Russian Ambassador in London for
many years, Count Shuvalov, had formerly been head of the Russian
political police.
:8
On the other hand, since the foreign anarchists in
general did not want to jeopardize their safety in England, and since
there were consequently very few examples of anarchist terrorism in
England, the instigation of such activities as the Greenwich explosion
by Russian or other foreign governments must be regarded as on the
whole unlikely, or at least highly exceptional.
Whether Bourdin in fact intended a demonstration against the Green-
wich Observatory, either independently, or under the instigation of
genuine anarchists, irresponsible agents provocateurs such as Samuels, or
even a foreign power, cannot now be determined. The choice of such a
target would not in itself have been exceptional. Anarchist extremism
preached public gestures against public institutions, and self-immolation
added resonance to the gesture. There is no anarchist parallel in England
to the Greenwich case, but the Fenians provide several. Thus the Chicago
Convention of :886 determined to mount a pyrotechnic display in hon-
our of the Queens Jubilee of :88 a projected dynamite explosion in
Westminster Abbey; and in :88 Mackay Lomasney was blown to
pieces by his own dynamite in a demonstration against London Bridge.
:q
:.. Essays on Conrad
The Secret Agent, then, cannot be viewed as a reconstruction of the
Greenwich explosion; and as regards Conrads claim to Methuen,
echoing Fords to him, that it was based on the inside knowledge of a
certain event in the history of active anarchism, we can accept it only
with the proviso that, as we all know from reading the newspapers, the
inside story is often false. There are, however, reasonably close historical
analogues for the novels general presentation of the activities of the
anarchists, the police, and the British and foreign governments: so
much so that, in his recent book The Anarchists, Joll calls The Secret Agent
the classic description of the relations between anarchists and police.
.o
Where Conrad increases the distance between fact and ction is in
two main areas. First, he creates a tighter domestic drama. Ford seems
to be responsible for making Bourdin and therefore Stevie a half-wit,
and for having the Samuels or Verloc in the case murdered. Conrad
may have added the suicide of Winnie, though he was later under
the impression that he got it from Ford. These changes also support the
effect of the second and more political kind of departure from the
original circumstances. Adding Vladimir, and omitting any attractive,
impressive, or even merely English, revolutionaries, tended to under-
line the irony of the picture, and to deepen what Conrad called the
criminal futility of the story. In short, although The Secret Agent is
neither a historical nor a Naturalistic novel, its distance from reality,
though varying, is never very great. It takes an initiated, slightly fanci-
ful, and above all very selective, view of the milieu and the events out of
which the story arose.
It is the nature of this selective perspective which is the basis of
Irving Howes objection that The Secret Agent does not give a fair picture
of the anarchist movement as a whole. And, of course, Conrad did not
intend to. Nor need we see Conrads perspective as merely an expression
of his own conservative prejudices, since it was much more difcult for
anyone then to see the positive signicance of anarchism than it is now,
either for Howe or for us.
Conrad had certainly been an arch-reactionary in his early days. In
:88, for instance, he wrote to a Polish friend, Spiridion Kliszczewski:
Wheres the man to stop the rush of social-democratic ideas? The
opportunity and the day have come and are gone! Believe me: gone for
ever. For the sun is set and the last barrier removed. England was the
only barrier to the pressure of infernal doctrines born in continental
back-slums. . . .
.:
As the years passed, however, Conrads political views
became less frenetic and more objective. As a Pole born under Russian
Political and social background of The Secret Agent :.
occupation he remained anti-Russian, and of course in his day anarchism
was largely a Russian movement; but by :qo, as his important political
essay Autocracy and War shows, Conrad had come to see Russian
despotism and Prussian militarism as the main dangers to the European
order. At this time, at least, the threat of revolution seemed much less
so and with good reason.
After the split between Marx and Bakunin, and the dissolution of the
First International in :86, the revolutionary movement split into many
factions. As regards anarchism, the great traditions of Godwin and
Proudhon, continued by Bakunin and Kropotkin, were largely sub-
merged by the terrorist tactics of Nechaev. This dominance of propagande
par le fait was conrmed in :88: when a conference of revolutionaries in
London, including Malatesta and Kropotkin, agreed that revolution
could only be brought about by illegal means. In the following decades
anarchism was taken to mean terrorism; and all Europe was in fact
terried. There were innumerable attempts on the lives of prominent
statesmen and royalty throughout Europe, and some were successful.
Thus the assassinations of the Presidents of France and the United
States, of the Prime Minister of Spain, of the Empress of Austria, of the
King of Italy, were all attributed to anarchists.
What was most striking in all this to Conrad, we can assume, was the
extraordinarily wide spectrum of persons and motives which composed
the anarchist movement and its sympathizers. In every country they
ranged from high-minded sympathizers who were mainly concerned
with the degrading injustices of the current social order, to the most
marginal criminals and psychotics who sought economic or emotional
satisfaction in casual destruction. Even within the ofcial anarchist
movement itself there was a similar spectrum, from intellectual noble-
men like Kropotkin to ruthless fanatics like Johann Most.
Conrad was in France at the height of the terrorist campaign early in
:8q. There Vaillant, who had thrown a bomb into the Chamber of
Deputies, was condemned to the guillotine despite the fact that no one
had been killed. President Sadi Carnot refused clemency, and as he
died Vaillant exclaimed: Long live Anarchy! My death will be avenged.
It was indeed, for on . June :8q an Italian anarchist, Caserio, stabbed
Carnot to death. In the ensuing prosecutions the wide following of the
anarchists received great publicity. The writer Flix Fnon, a civil
servant in the Ministry of War, was prosecuted for forming a criminal
association; and the subscription list of the main anarchist paper, Le
Rvolt, was found to contain the names of some of the most famous
:. Essays on Conrad
writers and artists of the day France, Daudet, Leconte de Lisle, Signac,
Seurat, Pissarro. When Mallarm, who testied on Fnons behalf,
was asked for his views on terrorism, he answered that he could not
discuss the acts of these saints.
..
Anarchism had a similarly broad spectrum of adherents and sym-
pathizers in England, from eminent intellectuals to the most feckless
hangers-on. William Morris and Bernard Shaw were active supporters
in the early :8qos; but it was difcult then to see what would come out
of all the quarrelsome meetings and violent speeches. In some countries,
as in Spain, anarchism was to become a viable tradition; in others, as in
England, France and Russia, it was but one of many forces of protest
which led to the creation and eventual victory of powerful socialist or
communist parties. Many of the English anarchist sympathizers were
concerned, in :8q, with the foundation of the Independent Labour
Party; thirty years later one of its founding members, Ramsay Mac-
Donald, would form the rst Labour Government, and offer Conrad a
knighthood.
Conrad, in The Secret Agent at least, seems blind to this historical
perspective. One reason is probably that the political views and con-
nections of his own immediate circle seemed to illustrate something that
was both typical of the anarchist movement and very near to his own
central concerns as a writer. The most aristocratic of his friends, Robert
Cunninghame Graham, descended from the royal house of Scotland,
and an MP, had spent six weeks in jail for assault of the police when
the authorities broke up a Trafalgar Square meeting of the Social
Democratic Federation in :88, which Kropotkin had also attended.
Edward Garnett, a socialist, had a similarly varied set of connections:
his father was an establishment gure, Principal Librarian of the British
Museum; while his wife, Constance, was friendly not only with Kropotkin
but with Stepniak, on whose behalf she went on secret business to
Russia not knowing that Stepniak had earlier been a terrorist there and
stabbed General Mezentzev.
.
In his youth Ford himself had been an
anarchist; his sister married a Russian, David Soskice, who had recov-
ered from his Siberian exile in the Garnetts country home;
.
and most
striking of all, Fords mothers half-sister, though the wife of William
Michael Rossetti, Secretary to the Board of Inland Revenue, neverthe-
less allowed her daughters to edit an anarchist journal, The Torch, in her
own house.
.
When Conrad, then, began to think about the tale which was to be-
come The Secret Agent, he had already had close personal experience of the
Political and social background of The Secret Agent :.
interpenetration of order and anarchy in the political and social order.
That general conict, together with individual isolation, were already
his chosen themes; and they combined to provide an ironic perspective
very different from the one in which secret agents were usually viewed.
For Conrad we are all, one way or another, like Verloc: a little less con-
scious, no doubt, and a little less venal, but still secret agents torn between
protecting and destroying the established order. Society seems unaware
of the problem; but then society is really one vast conspiracy of blindness.
The fact that his locale was English, however, raised personal prob-
lems of a peculiar complexity for Conrad. Like the anarchists, he was
himself a refugee from political oppression and, deeply grateful to England
as he was, we may surmise that his elaborate notion of decorum made
him averse to any direct political criticism of his adopted country. That
there are no English anarchists in The Secret Agent, and that the anarchist
theme is hardly allowed to have any serious domestic implications, may
perhaps be regarded as in part an ironic tribute to his new country and
his friends there. Unlike Conrad, neither his ctional English characters,
nor his actual friends, seem able to imagine that there could conceivably
be any serious threat to the continuance of their national life: in their
insular security they treat politics as a game where, in the words of Sir
Robert Anderson, the rules of the prize ring are held to apply to the
struggle between the law and those who break it.
.6
In his heart, Conrad
probably believed that trusting in such rules was just another example
of Winnie Verlocs distaste for looking into things too deeply; but with
courteous reticence he only said it in the most indirect and jesting way.
xo+rs
: Jean-Aubry, Life and Letters, ii, 6o. Conrad made several other similar
denials. I know almost nothing of the philosophy, and nothing at all of the
men, Conrad wrote in :q:. (Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska,
, ed. John A. Gee and Paul J. Sturm ( New Haven, :qo), p. ::6);
see also Elbridge L. Adams, Joseph Conrad: The Man (New York, :q.), p. .
. Jean-Aubry, Life and Letters, ii, ...
Sir Robert Anderson, The Lighter Side of My Ofcial Life ( London and New
York, :q:o), pp. :6.
Sir Robert Anderson, Criminals and Crime: Some Facts and Suggestions ( London,
:qo), pp. 88.
Sir Robert Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement ( London, :qo),
pp. :o:.
6 See also David Nicoll, The Greenwich Mystery (Shefeld, :8q); Major Henri
Le Carons memoir, Twenty-ve Years in the Secret Service: Recollections of a Spy
:.6 Essays on Conrad
(London, :8q.); and A. G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt
(London, :q.) vol. ii, pp. .o.
Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance ( London, :q.q), p. .:.
8 Op. cit., pp. q. The two anarchists are called Banter and OFlynn
(Cantwell and Quinn in Nicoll). Conrads short story The Informer deals
with the same milieu; see James Walton, Mr Xs Little Joke: The Design
of Conrads The Informer, Studies in Short Fiction, (:q6), ...
q W. M. Rossetti, Some Reminiscences (London, :qo6), p. o.
:o See Boris Nikolajewsky, Aseff the Spy (New York, :q).
:: Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday ( London, :q:), pp. :.
:. Ford Madox Ford, Portraits from Life (Boston and New York, :q), p. 66
(published in London in :q8 as Mightier than the Sword).
: Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. ::.
: The Azev case, for instance, was certainly a source of Under Western Eyes
(:q::); and Ford probably confused the details of his help on the two
novels. The parallels are treated in Morton Dauwen Zabels Introduction
to Under Western Eyes ( New York, :q6).
: Letter from The Secretary, New Scotland Yard, of :o October :q6o.
:6 Ford Madox Ford, under the title Memories and Impressions ( London and
New York, :q::), pp. :.
: The Times, .o and . Nov :8qo.
:8 See Anderson, The Lighter Side of My Ofcial Life, pp. .68.
:q Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, pp. .8, :o.
.o James Joll, The Anarchists (London, :q6), p. :.8.
.: Jean-Aubry, Life and Letters, :, 8.
.. Joll, The Anarchists, pp. q6:.
. David Garnett, The Golden Echo (London, :q), pp. :o:.
. Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. ::.
. Ibid., p. ::..
.6 Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, p. :..
:.
cn\r+rn
The Secret Sharer: introduction
Joseph Conrad wrote The Secret Sharer with exceptional speed and
pleasure. At the end of :qoq he had been struggling desperately to
nish Under Western Eyes, harassed by sickness and debts. His depression
was particularly severe in early November; but then, as he wrote to
his old friend John Galsworthy, I took off last week to write a short
story . . . and no gout so far. Conrad said that this story The Secret
Sharer took him only ten days, but it probably took a bit longer. The
stimulus to writing it was a happy one in two ways: Conrad received a
letter, and later a visit, from Captain Carlos M. Marris, an adventurous
trader in the Malayan archipelago. Marris renewed his memories of old
times; and he also told Conrad that many seamen out there read my
books, and feel kindly to the chronicler of their lives and adventures.
Conrad was happy to hear it, and at once decided that they should
have some more of the stories they like.
And so, after the years working on Western subjects the South
America of Nostromo (:qo), the London of The Secret Agent (:qo) and
the Russia of Under Western Eyes (:q::) Conrad went to the ctional
subjects of his earlier life, and his earlier writing career. The Secret
Sharer was the rst written of these tales of the Eastern seas, and it was
originally supposed to be placed rst, although it eventually came
second, in a volume of three tales called Twixt Land and Sea. The book
was dedicated to Marris, and appeared on : October :q:., in Conrads
largest rst edition yet ,6oo copies in England. It was very well
received. One reviewer, Robert Lynd, singled out The Secret Sharer
as surely a masterpiece which any doubter of Conrads genius . . . will
do well to read; while the praise of his old friend Edward Garnett,
moved Conrad to a burst of uncharacteristic self-congratulation: The
Secret Sharer, between you and me, is it. Eh? No damned tricks with
girls there. Eh? Every word ts and theres not a single uncertain note.
Luck my boy. Pure luck.
:.8 Essays on Conrad
The tales size more substantial than a short story, but much
shorter than a novel is that of the nouvelle, which, as the poet John
Maseeld wrote in his review of The Secret Sharer, Conrad had
always used . . . with ne effect, and which, Maseeld thought, would
perhaps become the usual literary form in the decades after this. The
Secret Sharer is on the surface a simple but utterly convincing tale;
but the last forty years or so of criticism, which have in general con-
verted Conrad into a more modern and innovative writer than he was
once thought, have also turned The Secret Sharer into a work whose
larger psychological and moral meaning has lent itself to considerable
controversy.
Conrad himself had difculties with the nouvelles title. He considered
The Second Self , The Secret Self , The Other Self , as well as The
Secret Sharer. This last title, Conrad thought, was maybe too enigmatic;
and it was his agent, J. B. Pinker, who nally decided for The Secret
Sharer. At the literal level, of course, the title is not unduly enigmatic;
the sharer must be Leggatt, the fugitive from the law whom the
unnamed captain and narrator picks up by accident and hides in his
own cabin; and Leggatt is a secret sharer because he must remain
unseen by anyone else on the ship.
What else does the title imply? Some help may come from the tales
two main sources.
Most obviously, there is the actual occurrence on a famous teaclipper,
the Cutty Sark (Scots for a short chemise). In :88o its chief mate, a
Scot who went under the name of Sidney Smith, killed an incompetent
black seaman called John Francis in a quarrel precipitated by Franciss
insolent answer to a command during a change of course off the coast
of South Africa. A week or so later, in Java, the mate, who had been
conned to his cabin, was secretly allowed to escape by his captain.
This exacerbated the anger of the crew, a near-mutiny occurred, and,
as a result, the captain, a ne sailor, committed suicide by drowning.
Two years later Smith was recognized, tried in London, found guilty of
manslaughter, and given seven years penal servitude.
Conrad mentions the episode, which was rather well-known, in his
Authors Note to Twixt Land and Sea. He says he had heard of it from
the ofcers of the great wool eet in which my rst years in deep water
were served; and he later read about it in the newspapers. As many
critics have pointed out, however, Conrad made many changes. In his
version, when the death occurs there is a terrible storm and the mate is
determined that for the ship to have any chance of surviving the crew
The Secret Sharer: introduction :.q
must face the terrifying task of setting a reefed foresail. One sailor, half-
crazed with funk, gives him some of his cursed insolence whereupon
the mate, under terrible strain, fells the man like an ox. The sea then
almost submerges the ship for over ten minutes, and when the waters
recede Leggatt is found to be still holding the dead man by the throat.
He is locked in his cabin but before they arrive at Java he begs his
captain to be allowed to escape; but although Leggatt had saved his
ship, the captain refuses.
Conrad, then, gives his rst mate a much more sympathetic role than
Smiths; the death was accidental, and in a crisis for the whole ship; he
did not cause the suicide of a ne captain, but on the contrary was
victimized by the ridiculous and law-obsessed Archbold, captain of the
Sephora; Leggatt then saves himself without any help, and by a great feat
of swimming; and he is the son of a Norfolk parson, who was trained for
the merchant navy on the Conway. The captain-narrator had also been a
Conway boy a couple of years before; their immediate intimacy comes from
this, and their both being gentlemen, and speaking the same language.
The second main source of the tale is Conrads own experience. His
rst command had also come to him suddenly and unexpectedly, like
that of his ctional captain, and in Bangkok, and on a ship that was
new to him. Presumably Conrad himself, like the captain in the nouvelle,
could have said, What I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship;
and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself.
Conrad may also, like the captain, have wondered if he would turn out
faithful to that ideal conception of ones own personality every man sets
up for himself secretly. The captains tense psychological state, which
would have prevented him from sleeping anyway, is a plausible reason
for his letting the exhausted crew turn in, and deciding that he alone
will keep watch on deck that night. This violation of traditional nauti-
cal routine is essential to the narrative: the captain must be alone when
he discovers Leggatt resting at the ships ladder; if anyone else had dis-
covered or seen Leggatt, he would have been arrested and handed over
to the police. Leggatt is for different reasons at least as lonely as the
captain. He is at the ship only because its riding-light was something to
swim for; then he feels a very unpleasant faintness, and sees the
ladder. But he is still not thinking of going on board; he is there merely
because he had a confounded lonely time, liked . . . being looked at,
and wanted to talk with somebody, before I went on.
Conrad later wrote a whole novel, The Shadow-Line (:q:), that was
based on his actual initiation as captain of the Otago. All that he uses of
:o Essays on Conrad
his own experience in The Secret Sharer is his own psychology when
he got his rst command, and his rst-hand knowledge of the setting of
what is now called the gulf of Thailand. The island of Koh-ring, for
instance, is mentioned in both works, and is the setting for the climax of
The Secret Sharer. There the captain performs a very dangerous
maneuver to bring the vessel closer to the island, and thus make a
conspicuous atonement for his sense of guilt at being forced to abandon
Leggatt to his fate. This idea of the captains conspicuous risk-taking,
incidentally, may be a reection of Conrads own experience; having
asked permission of his owners, he had been allowed to take the Otago
through the very dangerous Torres Strait passage, between Australia
and New Guinea, to go from Australia to Mauritius. For both captains,
their risky maneuver on their rst tour of duty would be an inward
demonstration that, despite their own fears and the doubts of others,
they had exceptional capacities as seamen.
The relationship of the captain and Leggatt in the narrative is shown
as deeply intimate but limited by circumstances. We are told that,
while Leggatt was still in the water, a mysterious communication was
established already between us two; and also that the Captain found it
strangely troubling to suspect that perhaps Leggatt did not wish to
come on board. Once aboard, Leggatt puts on one of the captains
grey-striped sleeping suits, which was just right for his size; he wears it
all the time, and consequently he and the captain become virtual
lookalikes. The captain soon calls him my double, and from then on
there are some thirty or more references to the double, the secret self ,
the other self , the secret sharer, to say nothing of the unsuspected
sharer of my cabin and their secret partnership. This emphasis must
be deliberate: the dual working of my mind becomes an obsessive
feature of the captains life; it makes him, for instance, in scenes of
macabre comedy, shout at the steward, whisper to the mate, and even
pretend to be hard of hearing so that Leggatt can hear the skipper of
the Sephoras version of what had happened.
Narrative interest and psychological realism may well supply a suf-
cient reason for all these emphases on the captains identication with
his other self . At the same time the tale makes it clear that the secret
they share is their knowledge of, and feeling for, Leggatts problem; there
is no evidence that the captain shares his secrets, such as his worries on
facing his rst command, with Leggatt. This is easily explained; their
conversations are necessarily very limited, since for one word of them
to be overheard once would be fatal to them both. Nevertheless it is not
The Secret Sharer: introduction ::
surprising that many critics have wished to see the close relationship of
the two as having a larger and non-literal explanation or function.
Muriel Bradbook, I believe, was the rst to suggest, in :q:, that
Leggatt, in accord with Freudian and Jungian thought, comes out of
and returns from the sea, and is dressed in a sleeping suit, the garb of
the unconscious life. This symbolic aspect of Leggatt was later devel-
oped to turn him into the representative of the captains unconscious
self. One of the earliest, and probably still the best, interpretations of
the nouvelle which includes this idea, is Albert Gurards Conrad: The
Novelist. For him, The Secret Sharer, along with Heart of Darkness and
The Shadow-Line, belong to the rst and best . . . symbolist masterpieces
in English ction; all three works belong to the archetypal category of
the night journey, and in The Secret Sharer, this idea is unusually
conscious. It is certainly true that the storys wonderful opening and
closing scenes happen at night. Gurard also argues that the relationship
of the Captain and Leggatt is the whole story; and more generally, he
suggests that Conrads essential subject is the problematic and temporar-
ily crippling nature of the identication between the two men, a topic
which Conrad had already treated in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim.
There is no room here to give a full account of Gurards argument,
or of the many later interpretations developing this approach. Nor is
there time to consider a variety of contrary views, of which Marvin
Mudricks was an extreme example. As early as :q he wrote that
Conrad is not only anticipating psychoanalysis but showing how to
vulgarize it; and, Mudrick argues, Conrad thus effectively spoiled what
he was really good at: a man who merely tells a tale.
Conrad certainly tells his tale magnicently; the prose is on the whole
economic, and yet eloquent; Gurard calls its prose, together with that
of The Shadow-Line, his great triumph of a style plain and pure. The
reader can enjoy the narrative at its literal level, and must decide for
himself how much more Conrad intends; and this must include why,
if he intends Leggatt to represent the captains unconscious, he makes
him so conspicuously self-possessed.
Anyone who has ever harbored a stowaway on a ship, or merely
hitchhiked for some time with a single driver, will have some idea of
how intense a chance and relatively brief human identication can be;
the literal experience of feeling dual is not itself particularly uncommon.
What is certainly uncommon is that the union of these two ofcers
undergoes a peculiar strengthening through their joint opposition to
the law. This is not so much because the captain has thought that in the
:. Essays on Conrad
circumstances he, too, could have killed the ill-conditioned snarling
cur, but because his initial and unthinking rst favorable reaction to
Leggatt at once puts him in a posture which is diametrically contrary to
his duty. A ships captain, of course, is the representative of the law on
his ship; instead Conrad shows the two men establishing collusive
kinship of understanding about the conict between the spirit and the
letter of the law; and this conict is, as Lord Jim shows, one in which
Conrad himself was deeply interested and morally divided.
For his part, Leggatt is aware of his great luck in having accidentally
found, not only the captain of the ship, but one very different from
Archbold. Towards the end he confesses: Its a great satisfaction to
have somebody to understand. You seem to have been there on purpose
. . . Its very wonderful.
The wonders continue. The captain has risked his ship, and his
naval future, because he feels that it is a matter of conscience to shave
the land as close as possible; but the whole crew is terried. Eventually,
however, the ship is saved by an unexpected twist of events. The
captain, in another gesture of secret sharing, has given Leggatt his hat,
to shield him from the sun after he is on his own. But, once overboard,
the hat falls off Leggatts head into the sea, and there acts as the
captains saving mark. In the black proximity of Koh-ring, the hat
alone can tell the captain that the ship has gathered sternway, and the
captain can give the order to shift the helm; and the whole crew, which
has been watching the dangerous maneuver in terror, can breathe again.
Now the captain no longer shares Leggatt; he can become a real
captain and feel that no one in the world should stand now between
us, throwing a shadow in the way of silent knowledge and mute affec-
tion, the perfect communion of a seaman with his rst command. As
for Leggatt, he has gone into the water again to take his punishment;
but under his own terms, and having found a friend to strengthen his
conviction that he had been right; he is now a free man, a proud
swimmer striking out for a new destiny.
The nouvelles ending, then, gives us one reason Conrad thought he
had been lucky; The Secret Sharer has a happy ending, and yet one
that both he and his readers rightly feel, though hard-earned, was just.
:
cn\r+rn 8
Conrad, James and Chance
Think what English literature would be like without Conrad and James
. . . There would be nothing!
:
Thus Ford Madox Ford; and we must at
least agree that there would be markedly less. The roles of Conrad and
James in the English tradition of ction are parallel in many respects;
aliens themselves, they brought, and mainly from France, a view of the
novel form at once broader as regards subject-matter and more self-
conscious as regards form, than had been current in Victorian England;
and in so doing they became the recognized, perhaps the supreme, masters
of what we are still calling the modern novel. When one further considers
that James and Conrad knew each other fairly well for nearly twenty
years, one anticipates a relationship of quite exceptional human and
literary interest. Actually, though certainly not lacking an appropriately
ironic complexity, the relationship is above all elusive and obscure.
This is mainly for simple lack of evidence. Conrad habitually destroyed
his letters; James burned most of his papers before his death: and less
than a dozen letters survive from what must have been a fairly large
correspondence.
.
Even so, there was probably a good deal of ambiguity
in the relationship itself.
i
Conrad read and admired James rather early, while he was still at sea.
Once he had decided to become a professional writer, and his second
novel, An Outcast of the Islands, came out, he thought of sending it to
James; but it was very difcult to pluck up courage. In one letter (:6
October :8q6) Conrad writes to his rst literary mentor, Edward Garnett:
I do hesitate about H. James. Still I think I will send the book. After all
it would not be a crime or even an impudence. Then, after two further
letters from Garnett, Conrad nally announces (. October :8q6): I have
sent Outcast to H. James with a pretty dedication; it lls the yleaf.

: Essays on Conrad
Conrads self-mockery about the pretty dedication only partly pre-
pares us for the lacerating embarrassment of the letter to James which
accompanied the book. It begins
I address you across a vast space invoking the name of that one of your
children you love the most. I have been intimate with many of them, but it
would be an impertinence for me to disclose here the secret of my affection. I
am not sure that there is one I love more than the others. Exquisite Shades
with live hearts, and clothed in the wonderful garment of your prose, they
have stood, consoling, by my side under many skies. They have lived with me,
faithful and serene with the bright serenity of Immortals. And to you thanks
are due for such glorious companionship.

The thanks continue, and the letter closes with Conrad asking James to
accept his book and thus augment the previous burden of my gratitude.
Psychologically one senses the paralysing apprehension of an insecure
worshipper approaching a distant and redoubtable deity; or of a lover
whose abject fear of rebuff almost invites humiliation. The laborious
indirection of the prose has echoes of Jamess own reluctance to specify
the referents of his pronouns; but the primary inuence is French, not
only in making children stand for books, but in that special tradi-
tion of abstract and hyperbolic magniloquence which gushes from the
Immortals of the Acadmie Franaise on ceremonial occasions.
Some months after receiving this effusion, James reciprocated by
sending Conrad his just-published The Spoils of Poynton, with the inscrip-
tion: To Joseph Conrad in dreadfully delayed but very grateful ac-
knowledgment of an offering singularly generous and beautiful.

Then,
a week later, on :q February :8q, Conrad announced jubilantly to
Garnett: I had a note from James. Wants me to lunch with him on
Thursday next so there is something to live for at last.
The meeting probably took place in Jamess London apartment at
De Vere Gardens, Kensington it is there that Conrad later re-
membered that he had chanced upon the Pepys epigraph for his next
book, The Nigger of the Narcissus. But Conrad was then living in Essex,
and occasion for the two to meet very often was lacking. Eighteen
months later, however, James and Conrad were brought closer together.
In the summer of :8q8 James became the lessee, and later the owner, of
Lamb House, in Rye; and in October, the Conrads moved to the Pent,
a Kentish farmhouse some fteen miles to the east, and fairly close to
Sandgate, where H. G. Wells was living. The Fords soon moved nearby,
and there followed a period of quite close literary frequentation, of
which many picturesque episodes have been recorded: Wells tells of
Conrad, James and Chance :
Conrad driving a little black pony carriage as though it was a droshky
and encouraging a puzzled little Kentish pony with loud cries and
endearments in Polish;
6
Mrs Conrad recalls Henry James taking the
Conrads small son on his knee, and forgetting his existence, now and
then giving him an absent-minded squeeze, while baby Borys, with an
instinctive sense of Henry Jamess personality . . . sat perfectly resigned
and still for more than half an hour;

and one also hears of James,

nearly sixty, accompanied by Edmund Gosse, bicycling some ten miles
across the marshes to have tea with H. G. Wells.
8
Few of the friendships then formed were destined to survive; and there
is no Rye school of novelists to rival the Lake School of poets. Conrads
feelings toward H. G. Wells cooled soon after he had dedicated The Secret
Agent (:qo) to him, though the rupture was not as violent as that of Wells
and James, nor even as the earlier quarrels of Wells and Ford. James,
never very fond of Ford, broke with him completely at the time of his
conspicuously messy divorce (:q:o); Conrads relationship with Ford
became a good deal less intimate after the years of collaboration; and
although there was no breach, Conrad saw very little of James after :qo6.
The collaboration between Conrad and Ford on The Inheritors (:qo:)
and Romance (:qo), and Fords help on Conrads ction between The
End of the Tether (:qo.) and Nostromo (:qo), is probably the most import-
ant, as it is certainly the best known, of the literary consequences of
these contacts. But it is worth considering what literary importance the
ConradJames relationship may have had. James was fty-four when
they met, and had been publishing for nearly thirty years, so the debt
would obviously be entirely on Conrads side; and there is no question
of Conrads profound reverence for Jamess achievement. Conrad
habitually addressed James, and James alone, as cher matre;
q
one imag-
ines that for Conrad the veteran who had been the friend of Flaubert
and Turgenev was a captain under whom he would willingly serve to
learn the nal secrets of the novelists craft. James, for his part, seems to
have been willing. He showed Conrad the prospectus of The Wings of the
Dove; this, for so secretive a writer as James, indicates a special kind of
condence Conrad was, as James later told Wells, the only writer
who had ever been permitted to read those wondrous and copious
preliminary statements (of my ctions that are to be).
:o
There was, then, an early period of considerable literary intimacy;
but although F. W. Dupee is not alone in viewing Conrad as Jamess
greatest disciple,
::
as far as I know no one has investigated whether, or
how, Conrad may have learned from James.
:6 Essays on Conrad
There is, it is true, a very percipient comparison of James and
Conrad by E. K. Brown.
:.
For Brown both novelists are alike, not only
in their greatness, but in the fact that they focus our interest not on
what will happen, but rather with what the happening will mean to the
principal character or characters; they differ mainly because Jamess
subjective interest in the world within tends, especially in the later
novels, to place the characters in a void where the world without
hardly exists, whereas Conrad, is immensely strong just where James
is weak, in the representation of the visible world; although Conrads
attempt to convey the internal, subjective world as well seems often to
involve him in great technical difculties.
Brown does not touch on the matter of inuence; my own guess is
that it was probably Jamess example which, more than anything else,
helped Conrad to evolve his mature technique at a crucial stage in his
development. Ford suggests in the most generous spirit that it was
he who worked out with Conrad the new techniques of the Impression-
ist Novel,
:
which is itself an attempt to convey states of mind E. K.
Browns world within through sense impressions of the visible world.
But in :8q8 Ford had written only one very youthful novel, whereas
Conrad had read and admired James for many years before the col-
laboration began; and Conrad also met James some eighteen months
before he met Ford.
:
It is signicant that it was at this time, in the early
years at Rye, that James, genial as never before, was producing the
great works which precede The Ambassadors The Spoils of Poynton (:8q6),
What Maisie Knew (:8q), and The Awkward Age (:8q8): novels in which
the Jamesian method of narration through the registering conscious-
ness of one or more narrators is already perfected. It may also be
signicant that these were the works which Conrad apparently most
admired. Of The Spoils of Poynton, Conrad wrote to Garnett that the
delicacy and tenuity of the thing are amazing (: February :8q); and
although he then thought it only as good as anything of his almost,
Ford, who himself thought it the technical high-water mark of all
Jamess work, reports the rapturous and shouting enthusiasm of Conrad
over that story when we rst read it together so that that must have
been the high-water mark of Conrads enthusiasm for the work of any
other writer.
:
Fords testimony is a little misleading Conrad had read The Spoils
of Poynton long before he met Ford; but it at least conrms Conrads
enthusiasm for a work which J. W. Beach calls the rst absolutely pure
example of the James method.
:6
The dates of this enthusiasm are
Conrad, James and Chance :
signicant: in February :8q Conrad, after nishing The Nigger of the
Narcissus, was turning away from the French inuence, notably that of
Flaubert. James had moved away long before, his example and his
teaching may well have helped Conrad to move in the same direction.
At all events, in August :8q Conrad completed The Return, a story
with a somewhat Jamesian subject the fabulous untruth of a society
husbands idea of life; and in a letter to Garnett Conrad analyses the
failure of the story in somewhat Jamesian terms if I did see it [the
reason for his failure] I would also see the other way, the mature way
the way of art.
:
Then, after Conrad had failed to make any progress
with his continuation of An Outcast of the Islands, The Rescue, partly
because I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted,
mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style
:8
(.q March :8q8), but still
well before the meeting with Ford, Marlow made his appearance:
Youth was written in the summer; Lord Jim was begun; a story called
Dynamite, the probable germ of Chance, was projected in May; and
Heart of Darkness, the fourth of the Marlow stories, was written that
winter, in the earliest days of Conrads association with Ford.
:q
The signicance of Marlow has been much analysed, and it certainly
cannot be evaluated briey. Very roughly, it seems to me that it was
through Marlow that Conrad achieved his version of Jamess register-
ing consciousness. Conrads version is, of course, very different from
that of James. In a sense it is technically more extreme, since where
Marlow occurs, Conrad largely gives up the use of direct authorial
narrative, which James usually retained; on the other hand Conrads
method is more expandable there can be several narrators and
more suited to concrete visualization Marlow tells us what he saw
and heard, and we can see him doing it. With Marlow, in fact, the
narrative point of view is wholly scenic, dramatized; and yet its as
completely adapted to the relation of inner states of consciousness as
to descriptions of the external world.
Whether this change in Conrads narrative direction was inuenced
by Henry James can hardly be proved; but if so Conrad must have
been particularly pleased by a letter from James praising Lord Jim. The
letter has not survived, but Conrads delight at its tenor is evident in his
report to Garnett (:. November :qoo):
.o
I send you the H. J. letter. A Draught from the Fountain of Eternal Youth.
Wouldnt you think a boy had written it? Such enthusiasm! Wonderful old
man, with his record of wonderful work! . . . And to you alone I show it . . .
P. S. Pray send the James autograph back registered.
:8 Essays on Conrad
The friendship of James and Conrad, however, does not seem to
have become any closer after :qoo. The two men were never on
christian-name terms; there are very few references to James in Conrads
correspondence after :qoo; and even fewer references to Conrad in
Jamess. One reason may be that James, long established in England,
knew many more people, and inhabited a much grander and more
fashionable world. One gets the sense of social distance very strongly
from two letters of :qo.
.:
which James wrote to that complacent pillar
of the Establishment, Edmund Gosse, about a plan to relieve Conrads
acute and endemic nancial difculties by an award from the Royal
Literary Fund. In his covering private letter to Gosse James writes:
I lose not an hour in responding to your request about Conrad whom I had
not in the least known to be in the state you mention. It horries me more
than I can say.
James can hardly bring himself to say poverty; and it is perhaps
because of Jamess special attitude to money that he was apparently
one of the few friends Conrad did not tell about his recurrent nancial
crises; the acid test which distinguishes intimate friendship from cordial
acquaintance often seems, sadly enough, to be the question: Would I
turn to him, or he to me, for a loan if need arose?
In his ofcial letter of support James is certainly warm yet discrete,
as he explains to Gosse, in his praise of Conrads charming, conscien-
tious, uncommon work which has truly a kind of disinterested inde-
pendent nobleness. It is real literature, of a distinguished sort, and
Conrad has been, for James, one of the most interesting and striking of
the novelists of the new generation. On the other hand the warmth of
Jamess praise is curiously qualied by the distance of his tone.
..
How-
ever, it is always difcult to estimate the intention behind Jamess later
style, if only because the use of abstract terms in personal relationships
makes one suspect irony, or a defensive formality; so all one can be sure
about from these two letters is that James admired and wished to help
Conrad, but was not intimately involved in his affairs.
For his part Conrad not only gave James warm and perceptive
praise in his letters to Garnett (: February :8q) and Galsworthy (::
February :8qq); he also wrote Henry James; An Appreciation (:qo)
for the North American Review. The ceremonious grandiloquence of the
essays style hardly enables Conrad to come within sighting distance,
of, as the saying is, the words on the page; but it is a moving personal
tribute, and at the same time suggests a profound inward understanding
Conrad, James and Chance :q
of Jamess moral world. As Conrad later wrote to John Quinn,
.
he
intended only An Appreciation; nothing more nothing less; and
more specically, an appreciation of Jamess art in a large relation, as
a fellow writer . . . the sheer great art of it, where not so much the mind
as the soul nds its expression.
Conrad begins by announcing that Jamess books stand on my
shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent
communion; and he continues with jocose urbanity:
I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen; indeed,
I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that his mind is steeped
in the waters owing from the fountain of intellectual youth. The thing a
privilege a miracle what you will is not quite hidden from the meanest of
us who run as we read. To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is
manifest. After some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry
Jamess work, it grows into absolute conviction which, all personal feeling
apart, brings a sense of happiness into ones artistic existence.
Conrads essay makes two main points about the nature of Jamess
outlook: it is relativist and it is tragic. Relativist because
the creative art of a writer of ction may be compared to rescue work car-
ried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great
multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phrases of turbulence,
disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the
struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form
of permanence in this world of relative values the permanence of memory.
Conrad denes the tragic quality of Jamess work in the characteristic
formula: Nobody has rendered better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper,
or known how to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the droop-
ing form of a victor in a barren strife. The sphere of heroic action in
modern times, Conrad concedes, has much diminished, for the earth
itself has grown smaller in the course of ages; but James is a heroic
writer nevertheless:
the struggles Mr. Henry James chronicles with such subtle and direct insight
are, though only personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less
heroic (in the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of
arms and sound of trumpets. Jamess vision denies the desire for nality, for
which our hearts yearn.
Jamess vision denies the desire for nality, for which our hearts
yearn; it asserts instead and here Conrad places a familiar theme of
later James criticism in a perspective that is at once highly general and
deeply personal the imperative of renunciation:
:o Essays on Conrad
That a sacrice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth
engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edication
by the masters of ction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All
adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of
renunciation.
i i
After :qo James and Conrad seemed to have seen much less of each
other, although they continued to exchange their works, usually adorned
with magniloquent inscriptions, and usually acknowledged in equally
lapidary style. But the resonance of full human reciprocity is absent;
instead there sadly comes to mind E. M. Forsters phrase, a friendli-
ness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air. For instance, when
Conrad sent The Mirror of the Sea to James in September or October of
:qo6, he wrote (in French) that he was very sure of the friendship with
which you honour me; nevertheless he also, as if not wholly sure of the
books welcome, repeated a deprecatory phrase he had used earlier in
sending The Nigger of the Narcissus: the book has at least the merit of
being short. James responded promptly (: November :qo6) with:
No one has known for intellectual use the things you know, and you have,
as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached. I
nd you in it all, writing wonderfully, whatever you may say of your difcult
medium and your plume rebelle. You knock about in the wide waters of expres-
sion like the raciest and boldest of privateers.
Conrad, one surmises, may have winced at the faintly condescending
colloquialism of knock about, and at the nautical metaphor, which
had the effect of relegating him to a separate novelistic domain from
Jamess. Yet we would be wrong to make too much of the implicit
reservations: for James, a saucily colloquial trope was the fatal Cleopatra
for which the world of explicit human communication was well lost;
James certainly admired, and may have envied, Conrads breadth of
experience; and his praise is for him remarkably direct and unqualied,
as he concludes with a uniquely impressive and eloquent tribute:
You stir me, in ne, to amazement and you touch me to tears, and I thank the
powers who so mysteriously let you loose with such sensibilities, into such an
undiscovered country for sensibility. That is all for to-night. I want to see you
again.
Early the next year, in :qo, the Conrads went abroad, and when
they returned it was to move away from Kent into Bedfordshire. It is
Conrad, James and Chance ::
from there that Conrads last published letter to James is written
(:. December :qo), to thank him for the rst six volumes of the New
York Edition. Conrad gloats over the promise of the prefaces and,
after reading that of The American, tells how he sat for a long while with
the closed volume in my hands . . . thinking thats how it began,
thats how it was done.
In :qoq the Conrads moved back to Kent, to a house a dozen or so
miles away from Rye, but there was no personal contact with James for
some four years. The silence was apparently mainly on Jamess side; he
was much preoccupied, saddened by the death of his brothers, gloomy
about the publics neglect of his writings; and his visit to America,
combined with a long and serious illness, meant that he remained out
of touch even with close friends for several years. Conrad was not
among the two hundred and seventy or so friends who presented James
with a golden bowl on his seventieth birthday, : April :q:;
.
which
may only mean that the sponsors did not think of him as a close friend,
or that Conrad had failed to answer a letter.
Later that year, however, Conrad apparently made some friendly
overture; and James responded, from London, in a supreme example
of the later epistolary indirection (:q June :q:):
I always knew you were a shining angel, and now, under this fresh exhibi-
tion of your dazzling moral radiance (to say nothing of other sorts), my natural
impulse, you see, is to take advantage of these sublime qualities in you up to
the very hilt. Thus it is that I throw myself upon the use of this violent
machinery [the letter was dictated and typed] for at last, and in all humility,
approaching you; because I feel that you will feel how I must have some pretty
abject personal reason for it. That reason, to deal with it in a word, is simply
that, having so miserably, so helplessly failed to do what I was, during all the
dreadful time, unspeakably yearning to which was neither more nor less
than to get again into nearer relation with you by some employment, however
awkward, of hand or foot I now leave each of these members as just
damnably discredited and disgraced, and seek the aid of nimbler and younger
and more vivid agents than my own compromised personality has proved
itself able to set in motion. In other (and fewer) words, I just sit here mufed in
shame for the absolute doom of silence in all sorts of directions too than the
beautiful Kentish, and the insidiously Polish, and the triumphantly otherwise
magistrale that, beginning, horrible to think, something like four years ago at
least, was so long to disgure the fair face of my general and constitutional
good intention. For the moment I merely lift the edge of the crimson veil of
contrition to say to you, peeping, as it were, from under it, that I dont despair
of helping you to lift it almost altogether off me when once we shall really be
within mutual reach.
:. Essays on Conrad
Not having yet exhausted the resources of syntax and metaphor to
prolong the agonies of separation, James addresses himself to the poss-
ible modalities of reunion:
I hear with fond awe of your possession of a . . . miraculous car, the most
dazzling element for me in the whole of your rosy legend. Perhaps you will
indeed again, some July afternoon, turn its head to Lamb House, and to yours,
my dear Conrad, and your Wifes all far more faithfully than you can lately
have believed even by whatever stretch of ingenuity, Henry James.
Conrad paid a call; but he seems to have been told that the Master
was not at home. There was nothing exceptional in the fact itself;
Conrad himself apparently once had the great Lord Northcliffe turned
away from his door when he had called uninvited;
.
as for James,
though he delighted to receive his friends he was often away; and if he
was busy, sick, or expecting guests, his servants were no doubt accus-
tomed to shield him from the importunities of callers by the hallowed
mendacities of social decorum.
.6
After considerable delay James yet
again proposed a meeting, in terms even more elaborately disingenuous
(: October :q:):
Will you conceive of me as approaching you as the most abject of worms,
most contrite of penitents, most misrepresented by hideous appearances
of all the bafed well-meaning and all the frustrated fond? If I could but see
you for an hour all would become plain, and I should wring your heart with
my true and inward history.
The cause of this particular reaching out in what James terms the
suppliants at-on-my-belly, the crawling with-my-nose-in-the-dust,
posture is to make amends for Conrads
generous signal to me by your afternoon call of some weeks, horribly many
weeks, ago. You will be able to say nothing, however, that will reduce me to
softer pulp than I already desire to present to you every symptom of.
The combination of afternoon call with the earlier phrase most mis-
represented by hideous appearance, seems to exclude the simplest
explanation that James had actually been out; but no further expla-
nation is given. Instead the baroque banter continues as James wonders
if Conrad
mercifully and magnanimously can: come over to luncheon with me, by an
heroic effort and believe that I shall thereby bless you to the ( perhaps not
very distant) end of my days. If you tell me that this is impossible through the
extremity of inconvenience, I will then arrange that is, heaven forgive me!
propose and aspire to something less onerous to you.
Conrad, James and Chance :
There follows a review of possible methods of transportation: Conrads
fabled motorcar; that failing, James might recklessly procure one for
the occasion myself ; and there are trains rather happily available.
Any specic proposal, however, is delayed until the postscript, which
invites Conrad any day after this week that you may kindly name for
luncheon and if you can stay your stomach to ::.
All things considered we might have expected James to consider
waiving the customary lateness of his midday collation; but he was old
and set in his ways. To anyone assured of Jamess regard, the letter as
a whole would have been taken merely as one of Jamess increasingly
elaborate jokes; and Conrad no doubt so took it. Writing after Jamess
death he told John Quinn in our private relations he has been always
warmly appreciative and full of invariable kindness. I had a profound
affection for him. He knew of it and he accepted it as if it were
something worth having. At any rate, that is the impression I have.
And he wasnt a man who would pretend. What need had he? . . . even
if he had been capable of it.
One detects, alas, a note of guarded doubt: Conrad speaks of James
accepting Conrads profound affection, not of his reciprocating it.
This, taken with Conrads apologetic deference in sending The Nigger of
the Narcissus and The Mirror of the Sea, and with the way that the delays
in replying seem all to be on Jamess side, makes it likely that it was
Conrad who sought to maintain the friendship, rather than James. It
also seems probable that the elaborate formality of their intercourse,
at least after the early days, had been a more-or-less conscious protec-
tion, by two proud but highly-civilized men, both against any overt
acknowledgement of the inequality of their reciprocal sentiments, and
against the intrusion of matters where they might disagree. Conrad
for instance apparently felt that from The Ambassadors on, James had
become the prisoner of his own technique;
.
while James must have had
many reservations about Conrads work, apart from The Nigger of the
Narcissus, Lord Jim and The Mirror of the Sea.
In any case the mere passage of time was bound to change their
relationship. At rst James had been able to see Conrad mainly as a
curiosity Wells reports that to James, Conrad was the strangest of
creatures;
.8
James referred to Marlow as that preposterous Master
Mariner;
.q
and although one cannot doubt the exceptional sincerity of
Jamess praise in the passages cited, they are all concerned with Conrad
as a seawriter or as an exotic (as in the letters about Lord Jim and The
Mirror of the Sea). But, beginning with Nostromo, Conrad had increasingly
: Essays on Conrad
encroached on the more normal and terrestrial domains of ction; and
by then Conrads sales and reputation were steadily increasing, while
Jamess continued to diminish. This contrast in their respective situa-
tions is vividly evoked in an interchange as early as : February :qo,
related by Olivia Garnett: Conrad, for once gleeful, exclaimed: I am
at the top of the tree. H. J. replied: I am a crushed worm; I dont
even revolve now, I have ceased to turn.
o
By :q: it had become apparent to many critics that Conrad was
Jamess chief rival for the title of the greatest contemporary novelist;
and then in Chance Conrad made his closest approach to a Jamesian
novel.
:
John Cowper Powys, for example, comments that No work of
Conrads has so close an afnity with the art of Henry James . . . the
disturbing vibration, the intense malice of provoked curiosity. And as
we shall see Chance has many other Jamesian elements; including the
irony that Conrads most Jamesian novel should have achieved a popu-
lar and nancial success such as had for thirty years now eluded James,
and at the same time provoked James to strike the last sad note in his
dealings with Conrad.
i i i
We do not know whether Conrad nally had lunch with James, though
the two men probably did meet again. But later that year James pro-
posed to the Times Literary Supplement
.
an article which was to contain
his only published critique of Conrad. It appeared under the title The
New Generation (:q March and . April :q:), and was reprinted in
Notes on Novelists under the equally misleading title of The New Novel.
The article which is not James at his best, and which also provoked
Jamess breach with Wells divides the novelists into the very young,
and the not-so-young. Among these latter James lists Maurice Hewlett,
John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Conrad. All but
the last of them are presented as following what James calls the fatal
error of Tolstoy, the great illustrative master-hand . . . of disconnexion
of method from matter they all think only of their matter not of their
art. Conrad, on the other hand, is presented as the prime and unique
example of the other extreme:
It is doubtless fortunate that at the very moment of our urging this truth we
should happen to be regaled with a really supreme specimen of the part
playable, for our intenser interest, by a case of the exhibition of method at any
price. Mr. Conrads Chance places the author absolutely alone as the votary
Conrad, James and Chance :
of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing. The way to do
it that shall make it undergo least is the line on which we are mostly now used
to see prizes carried off; so that the author of Chance gathers up on this
showing all kinds of comparative distinction.
Jamess main objection to the narrative method of Chance is that it
compromises the readers sense of the reality of the events by drawing
attention to the narrators rather than to the narrative: Conrad
sets in motion more than anything else a drama in which his own system and
his combined eccentricities of recital represent the protagonist in face of powers
leagued against it, and of which the dnouement gives us the system ghting in
triumph, though with its back desperately to the wall . . . This frankly has been
our spectacle, our suspense and our thrill; with the one aw on the roundness of
it all the fact that the predicament was not imposed rather than invoked, was not
the effect of a challenge from without, but that of a mystic impulse from within.
This view of Chance seems to me not to take account of Conrads
aims, and since James singles out the novels ending for special attention,
I would like to suggest that the method of narration here is in fact a
response to the challenge from without, to the imperatives of the story
itself.
Very briey, Chance is told through three major informants. The
primary narrator, whose words constitute the novel, is an unnamed I
who reports his conversations with Marlow. Though technically a sec-
ondary narrator, it is Marlow who is chiey responsible for assembling
the stories of the ctional protagonists: the Fynes, Flora, her father,
De Barral, and her lover, Captain Anthony; Marlows interminable
colloquies also interpret the psychological and moral dimensions of the
story, in what James felicitously terms a prolonged hovering ight of
the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed. Then
there is the third narrator, Powell, who meets the rst two narrators at
the beginning by chance, and who was second mate of Anthonys ship
when the events of the last half of the novel occurred.
In the denouement it is Powell who happens to observe De Barral
putting poison in Anthonys nightcap of brandy and water. Powell
warns Anthony in time; Anthony, totally misinterpreting the situation,
and thinking Flora put the poison in, says he will let her off at the next
port; Flora announces I dont want to be let off ; they embrace; out of
jealousy De Barral drinks the poison himself; and Anthony, resolving
that I am not going to stumble now over that corpse, at long last
consummates his marriage with Flora while her father lies dead in the
next cabin.
:6 Essays on Conrad
James, presumably, would have focused the whole narration on the
sensibility of Flora, as he did with Fleda Vetch, Maisie Farange and
Nanda Brookenham, who are in some ways similar gures innocent
and only supercially contaminated victims of adult corruption. But
Conrad often used reciters, partly to avoid the posture of psychological
omniscience, and partly to dramatize the difculty of understanding
human values and motives. In the present instance both these reasons
seem particularly apposite; and in addition it is surely evident that the
rather gamey melodrama of the nal scene would be much too obtru-
sive if it were related through Floras consciousness. Instead it comes to
us indirectly, and very selectively, through the recital of Powell; having
no knowledge of the events that led up to the harrowing emotional
deadlock between the lovers, or of its nal resolution, he merely reports
a few surface manifestations whose real signicance is reconstituted
through Marlows imagination and the readers; nowhere, I imagine,
can subject matter have called more strongly for externality and indi-
rection of presentation.
But this scene, though the end of Powells narrative, is not quite the
end of the novel. For in the last few pages of Chance, we are surprised to
discover the reason why Powell, four years after the death of Captain
Anthony, is haunting the particular Thames-side inn where narrators
one and two are doing a little holiday sailing. Since Troilus and Criseyde
the remarriage of widows has called for supreme authorial tact; and in
Chance Conrad has recourse to his eccentricities of recital to bring
about neatly postponed recognition and resolution combined. Marlow
nally discovers that Flora lives nearby, which accounts for Powells
presence in the rst place; and the two are going to marry. The system
thus ghts back in triumph by relegating what might have been the
anticlimax of Floras remarriage into an artfully mundane, and struc-
turally secondary, framework for the more vivid romantic colours of
the central part of the story, the love of Flora and Anthony.
Much may be said against Chance and its narrative method: some
obtrusive articiality, a tendency to sentimentalize, and moments of
fatiguing garrulousness; but the charge that its mode of recital is gratui-
tously imposed seems itself to be gratuitous.
James and Conrad must have looked at the treatment of Chance in
the New Generation essay from very different points of view. James
would certainly have felt that he was innocent of envy or malice, and
he could point to passages where Conrad was implicitly accorded a
higher literary status than any other author treated: Conrad alone
Conrad, James and Chance :
is called a genius; and Chance is described as the work of a beautiful
and generous mind with a noble sociability of vision. But, as Conrad
must have seen, what James gives with one hand he takes away with
the other, and in much more detail. Imperceptive about the reasons
for the method of Chance, James, no doubt impelled by the rhetorical
requirements of his polar opposition between Conrads concentration
on method, and the infatuation with mere matter of the other con-
temporary novelists, does not mention earlier works in which Conrad
might have gured as offering happier examples of harmony between
form and content. And it was surely stretching the prerogatives of age
when, from the height of his : years, James placed Conrad, at , in
the younger generation (as he already had earlier in his :qo. letter
to Gosse); especially when Conrad was actually nine years older than
the next oldest novelist treated, H. G. Wells. It must also have been
especially bitter to Conrad when James brought out his friend Edith
Wharton, the only American novelist discussed, as his eminent instance
. . . most opposed to that bafed relation between the subject matter
and its emergence which we nd constituted by the circumvallations of
Chance. And when, nally, we notice that James cites his own The Awkward
Age as a further salutary demonstration of how the novel may be
fundamentally organised, only one conclusion seems possible: in what
Edith Wharton noted as his increasing preoccupation with the structure
of the novel,

James is leaving as his literary legacy: My life-work for

the art of ction has failed; nor can I acknowledge Conrad as a successor
even poor Edith Wharton has learned my lesson better.
In a letter to John Quinn, Conrad wrote that Jamess treatment of
Chance was the only time a criticism affected me painfully.

But it did
not alter their personal friendship which continued to the end: when, in
the summer of :q:, James solicited a contribution for a war charity
anthology, Conrad replied with all the old warmth to his cher matre
(. July :q:). But one understands how it must have hurt, not only that
James didnt like Chance better, but that he went out of his way to say
so in print, especially after his own public praise of James in the North
American Review. For Conrad, rightly or wrongly, the obligations of
friendship outweighed those of literary criticism: Curle tells of hearing
Conrad say of some living author, I like him and I dont want to talk
about his books; in public, at least, if Conrad could not praise he
preferred to remain silent.

But, as Conrad knew, James was quite different; he had never been
known to spare the critical rod even for his closest friends. With an
:8 Essays on Conrad
intimate, such as Edith Wharton, James had been savage enough in
private criticism:
6
for some reason perhaps Conrads devotion to him,
or his disarming politeness James had not, probably, been as frank
with Conrad, and his reservations clamoured for expression somehow.
In the end it comes down to an invincible difference of temperament. The
impulse to love and be loved was not as close to the surface in James as
in Conrad; it was there, but always at the mercy of many other conict-
ing impulses; above all, the truth about what mattered most the art of
the novel; and it was difcult to disentangle this felt truth completely
from other more personal impulses the urge to dominate, to get other
people in your power, to achieve in fact the absolute satisfactions of the
Godhead, or of its latter-day embodiment, the critic. And this, in the
end, is surely the functional strategy of the later Jamesian style and point
of view: that formidable digestive instrument really does produce a
bafed relation between the subject-matter and its emergence, because
the subject-matter people can only emerge in subordination to Jamess
detached analysis of them in abstract terms of his own choosing.
It was a subordination which came to dominate his life as well as his
ction. Our poor friend is the implied stance which James adopts for
Conrad, as well as for Strether and for his later ctional protagonists;
and it is difcult not to see it, ultimately, as a strategy of patronage: in
his last letters, Conrad as a person, and even Jamess feelings about
him, seem to have become merely pretexts for prose, artifacts to be
manipulated by an Omniscience with a capital O.
It is not, I think, a question either of emotional insincerity or of
intentional patronage on Jamess part. To anyone at all self-conscious
about literary expression and personal relationships, the difculty of
writing a letter increases in exact proportion to the writers awareness
of the recipients awareness of these things. James would have felt he
was insulting Conrad, as well as betraying his real self, if he remained
at the level of the usual epistolatory banalities, from the opening Sorry
I havent written before, through the central lets get together, to the
nal regards to your wife. Instead James felt bound to encompass in a
unied rhetorical structure everything from the immediate business at
hand the hackneyed items of apology, invitation and salutation to
the remoter and yet intimate presences of past relationship and present
feeling. So ambitious and all-enveloping a compositional imperative
inevitably pushes towards abstraction and indirection; and in the process
the sense of mutuality and naturalness is fatally compromised. As James
came to live more and more for his art, other people, in the letters, as
Conrad, James and Chance :q
in the novels, became the victims, not of any conscious patronage, but,
purely incidentally, of Jamess condence in a nally-achieved stylistic
mastery over his material.
Conrads powerful critical mind may have proffered some such re-
deeming explanation; but the disappointment at what he called being
rather airily condemned

must have rankled. As Conrad had worked

his painful way through the literary jungle it had been from Jamess
voice that he most hoped for recognition; but when the voice nally
spoke out it did not accept him as a peer.
The nal muted footnote on the relationship follows closely enough
along the lines of how Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, kept his own
counsel after Kurtzs death. As an obituary tribute the North American
Review reprinted
8
Conrads Henry James: An Appreciation, though
without his knowledge.
q
It is as if, in a nal gesture of delity towards
James, chance itself were enacting Conrads afrmation in Under West-
ern Eyes: A mans real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of
other men by reason of respect or natural love.
o
xo+rs
: Letter to Herbert Read, :q March :q.o (Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed.
Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton, :q6), p. :.).
. Of the six letters from Conrad to James known to me, two are published in
Lettres franaises, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, :q.q), and two in G. Jean-Aubry,
Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (London, :q.). I am indebted to Professor
Frederick R. Karl, who is editing Conrads letters, for copies of the ori-
ginals; as also for his generous assistance and advice in other respects. I
gratefully acknowledge the permission of the Trustees of the Joseph Conrad
Estate to publish portions of these letters, and the gracious help of the
Librarians of the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beinecke Library at
Yale, and the Academic Center Library at the University of Texas.
Of Jamess letters to Conrad, three were published in Twenty Letters to
Joseph Conrad, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (London: The First Editions Club, :q.6);
one of them is reprinted in Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel
(London, :q6). I gratefully acknowledge Professor Leon Edels help, and
his permission, as editor of the James correspondence, to reprint portions
of these letters here.
Letters from Conrad, , ed. Edward Garnett (London, :q.), pp. o,
. It seems likely that James was the only author whom Conrad singled
out in this way.
The letter is dated :6 October :8q6, the day of Conrads rst letter on the
subject to Garnett; Conrad presumably kept it at least until . October,
the date of his second letter to Garnett.
:o Essays on Conrad
Jean-Aubry, Life and Letters, i, .o:, n. ..
6 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York, :q), p. ..
Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him (London, :q.6), p. 8.
8 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. o8.
q Lettres franaises, pp. , .
:o : November :qo. (Henry James and H. G. Wells, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon
Ray (London, :qq), p. 8).
:: Henry James (London, :q:), p. .8:.
:. James and Conrad, Yale Review, (:q), .68.
: F. M. Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London, :q.), pp. :.:.
: In September :8q8 ( Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Lon-
don, :q6o), p. .:).
: Ford Madox Ford, Portraits From Life (Chicago, :q6o), p. ::.
:6 Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (New Haven, :q:6), p. ..
: Letters from Conrad, pp. q, q8.
:8 Letters from Conrad, p. :..
:q Baines, Joseph Conrad, p. .:o; and Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood
and David S. Meldrum, ed. William Blackburn (Durham, North Carolina,
:q8), pp. .:, 6.
.o Letters from Conrad, pp. :.
.: .6 June :qo. (British Museum, Ashley MS q..) I am very grateful to
David Thorburn for providing me with the transcripts.
.. There is a rather similar ambiguity towards Conrad in a letter James wrote
to Gelett Burgess. Jamess price for a short tale which Burgess has asked
for, as an editor of Ridgways Militant Weekly, had proved too stiff; but
Burgess had acquired The Secret Agent for serialization; and in a postscript
James commented: I rejoice for you in your having something from the
interesting and remarkable Conrad! (. September :qo6. I am grateful to
Professor Joseph Backus for informing me of this letter, and for providing
a transcript.)
. . May :q:6. I am indebted to the Manuscript Division of the New York
Public Library, and the Trustees of the Joseph Conrad Estate, for permiss-
ion to quote this letter, from the John Quinn Papers, vol. i.
. I am indebted to the Colby College Library for photocopies of the corre-
spondence and list of subscribers. Gosses management of the affair caused
the most awful fuss, according to Hugh Walpole ( Rupert Hart-Davis,
Hugh Walpole: A Biography (London, :q.), p. qq).
. According to Joseph H. Retinger (Conrad and His Contemporaries ( London,
:q:), p. 68).
.6 Jacques-mile Blanche, indeed, speaking of how James protected himself
from casual visitors, reports that much earlier Conrad had called without
previous notice at the Reform Club, and been told that James was out
(Mes Modles (Paris, :q.8), p. :6).
. Richard Curle, The Last Twelve Years of Joseph Conrad (London, :q.8), p. ::q.
.8 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. ..
Conrad, James and Chance ::
.q Ford, Joseph Conrad, p. :6:.
o Cited by Simon Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master (London, :q),
p. :, I am very grateful to Mr Nowell-Smith and to Professor Moser for
giving me the date of this diary entry.
: John Cowper Powys, Chance, A Conrad Memorial Library (New York, :q.q),
pp. .:q.o.
. Letter of James to Bruce Richmond, :q December :q: (The Letters of Henry
James, ed. Percy Lubbock (London, :q.o) ), vol. ::, pp. o..
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York, :q), p. ..
. May :q:6.
Richard Curle, Last Twelve Years of Joseph Conrad, p. :6.
6 His tender regard for his friends feelings was equalled only by the faithful-
ness with which, on literary questions, he gave them his view of their case
when they asked for it and sometimes when they did not (Wharton, A
Backward Glance, p. :8:).
Letter to Quinn, . May :q:6.
8 April :q:6.
q In his letter to Quinn thanking him for sending the article, Conrad wrote
that he had forgotten it completely (. May :q:6).
o Dent Collected Edition (London, :q), p. :.
:. Essays on Conrad
:.
cn\r+rn q
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line
Reviewing Conrads rst masterpiece, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Arthur
Symons, though an admirer, complained that it had no idea behind
it;
:
and since then this objection has been not uncommon. It was most
memorably expressed by E. M. Forster, who reviewed Conrads col-
lected essays, and found that they, at least, suggested that the secret
casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel; and that we
need not try to write him down philosophically, because there is, in this
particular direction, nothing to write. No creed, in fact. Only opinions.
.
Opinions certainly; and they are often disconcertingly typical of the
main social rles to which fate successively introduced Conrad the
Polish landowner, the French clerical ultra, the English quarter-deck
martinet. No creed, equally certainly; the word implies theological
sanctions which had no interest for Conrad; although his rather fre-
quent use of a tone of sacerdotal commitment may explain why Forster
misses in Conrad what he would surely deplore in anyone else: the only
creed to which Conrad, a child of nineteenth-century scepticism, would
freely have said Amen was Forsters own I do not believe in belief.
As for writing him down philosophically, Conrad certainly did his
best to discourage any such enterprise: I dont know what my philo-
sophy [of life] is, he once wrote sardonically to Edward Garnett,
I wasnt even aware I had it.

We obviously dont nd in Conrad the

persistent, overtly conceptualized, and often polemic, concern with philo-
sophical issues which characterizes George Eliot or Meredith; nor are
we aware of any continual pressure towards making us see the universe
in a special way, as we are in reading Thomas Hardy, for example, or
D. H. Lawrence. And yet we surely also sense in Conrads narratives
an intense and sustained thoughtfulness, whose larger tenor may indeed,
as Forster says, sometimes seem obscure, but whose seriousness never-
theless persuades us that we are in the presence of something beyond
mere opinions.
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :
Conrads own statements on the kind of general meanings he at-
tempted in his ction do not compose a clear and systematic critical
theory; what is most systematic about them, indeed, is their refusal to
submit to the conceptual mode of discourse. Nevertheless their essen-
tial purport remained very consistent, from the time of their rst enun-
ciation in the Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. The novelists aim is
dened there as by the power of the written word to make you hear, to
make you feel it is, before all, to make you see; and the primarily
descriptive nature of Conrads purpose is then emphasized by his insist-
ence that the aim of art is quite different from the clear logic of a
triumphant conclusion sought by the scientist or the philosopher. What
follows, however, is less often quoted, and it shows that the impressionist
rendering of the world of appearances was only a beginning; Conrads
nal aim was to present the rescued fragment of sense-impressions
with such clearness of sincerity that its movement, its form, and its
colour, [would] reveal the substance of its truth. The substance of its
truth has an ominously Platonic suggestion; but the nature of the
ultimate truth which inheres in sense experience is claried when
Conrad continues that at last the presented vision should awaken in
the hearts of the beholders that feeling . . . of the solidarity in myster-
ious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men
to each other and all mankind to the visible world.
This explanation, in turn, helps to guide our interpretation of a
literary aim which Conrad asserted almost as frequently as he denied
having a philosophy: all my concern has been with the ideal value
of things, events and people.

We shall return to the problem of just

what he meant by ideal values: for the moment we can at least relate
it to the notion that the reader should apparently expect to discover in
the way he is made to see the particular events and characters of the
narrative, something much more general, something which stands for
universal elements in mans relations to his fellows, and to the natural
world.
Conrads last masterpiece, The Shadow-Line, is one of his most typical
works. The story about how the young narrator suddenly throws up
a satisfactory job as rst-mate of a steamer trading in Eastern seas, only
to nd himself unexpectedly thrust into his rst command, which turns
out to be one of unique difculty is characteristic. Characteristic
because its subject is a sea voyage; a voyage, moreover, that is, as
Conrad wrote, exact autobiography,

an example, like Heart of Dark-

ness and The Nigger of the Narcissus, though even more literally so, of my
: Essays on Conrad
personal experience . . . seen in perspective with the eye of the mind;
6
while the nature of the personal experience, moral initiation, is one of
Conrads dominant literary themes.
In general, The Shadow-Line is a by no means recondite piece of
writing, and its main ideas are stated with such unusual explicitness
that it hardly seems to call for analysis. But actually it was the lack of
understanding with which The Shadow-Line was received that roused
Conrad to complain that after .. years of work, I may say that I have
not been very well understood. His friend Sir Sidney Colvin, for ex-
ample, hesitated to review it on the odd grounds that he had no local
knowledge of its setting the Gulf of Siam;

while various other critics

thought that it was a ghost story,
8
or merely an illustration of the taste
for the morbid of the English Review, in which it was serialized.
q
It was
also about The Shadow-Line that Conrad made one of his most emphatic
statements of intention: whatever dramatic and narrative gifts I may
have are always, instinctively, used with that object to get at, to bring
forth les valeurs idales:
:o
and this, together with the storys own inherent
interest and power, and the incidental fact that some of its recent com-
mentators are also in considerable critical disagreement about it, may
justify the present attempt at a further elucidation of the ideal values
in what Conrad admitted to be in its brevity a fairly complex piece of
work;
::
an attempt which may also serve to clarify the larger problem
of the connection between story and idea in Conrads work generally.
i
The rst chapter of The Shadow-Line is mainly concerned with a petty
intrigue at the Ofcers Home between two of its derelicts the Chief
Steward and a permanently unemployed ships ofcer named Hamil-
ton an intrigue aimed at preventing the narrator, a rst mate, from
receiving an urgent message from the Harbour Ofce about the com-
mand which awaits him. The slowness of this opening has often been
criticized most recently by Albert J. Guerard in his Conrad the Novelist:
The Shadow-Line, while written in part in the pure unpretentious prose of The
Secret Sharer, is distinctly less perfect. It gets underway very slowly and
uncertainly . . . Conrad apparently conceived of The Shadow-Line as dealing
with the passage from ignorant and untested condence through a major trial
to the very different condence of mature self-command. So conceived, the
story ought logically to have reected, in its rst pages, a nave and buoyant
condence.
:.
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :
Actually, Conrads deliberateness is necessary for several reasons. By
the time we have observed how, on his way from the docks to the
Ofcers Home the narrator is indifferent alike to the glare of the sun
and the pleasure of the shade, we have begun to participate in his state
of mind on leaving the ship; a state of mind which has been dened
retrospectively in the storys opening words:
Only the young have such moments. I dont mean the very young. No. The
very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early
youth to live in advance of its days in all the continuity of hope which knows
no pauses and no introspection.
One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness and enters an
enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path
has its seduction. And it isnt because it is an undiscovered country. One
knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way . . .
One goes on. And the time, too, goes on till one perceives ahead a shadow-
line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.
This is the period of life in which such moments of which I have spoken are
likely to come. What moments? Why, the moments of boredom, of weariness,
of dissatisfaction. Rash moments. I mean moments when the still young are
inclined to commit rash actions . . . such as throwing up a job for no reason.
One way of refusing to see the shadow-line ahead is to rebel against
all involvements: and so, as the narrator comments, he had never
. . . felt more detached from all earthly goings on. This fretful self-
preoccupation and the unconscious strategy it serves had to be very
rmly established before the reader could relish the irony of the scene
where the narrator nally tells Giles that he has discovered that Hamilton
and the Steward have kept him from receiving the message from the
Harbour Ofce. But he is still blind to the implications of the message,
and adds that it means nothing to him:
Nothing! repeated Captain Giles, giving some sign of quiet, deliberate indign-
ation. Kent warned me you were a peculiar young fellow. You will tell me
next that a command is nothing to you and after all the trouble Ive taken, too!
The trouble! I murmured, uncomprehending. What trouble? All I could
remember was being mystied and bored by his conversation for a solid hour
after tifn. And he called that taking a lot of trouble.
He was looking at me with a self-complacency which would have been
odious in any other man. All at once, as if a page of a book had been turned
over disclosing a word that made plain all that had gone before, I perceived
that this matter had also another than an ethical aspect . . .
. . . as soon as I had convinced myself that this stale, unprotable world of my
discontent contained such a thing as a command to be seized, I recovered my
powers of locomotion.
:6 Essays on Conrad
When Guerard, then, complains that the narrators irritability at
last becomes irritating to the reader,
:
it is surely because he doesnt see
it as part of the novels form and meaning that the reader should
experience for himself the irritating obtuseness of the narrators resist-
ance to Captain Giless well-meaning interference, a resistance whose
narrative climax is the comically laborious double-take over his rst
command, but whose ultimate function is to exhibit for the reader the
whole complex of conicting emotions which characterize the onset of
that penumbral transition from late youth to committed adulthood
which is Conrads professed subject.
As his title indicates. Conrad disliked titles that were too literal too
explicit;
:
but a shadow-line has just the right degree of suggestive
mutability and indeterminacy of application to stand as a nautical
metaphor for a transit through one of what Johnson called the
climactericks of the mind. A shadow-line is not a denite boundary that
one crosses consciously, whether in space, like a line of longitude, or in
time: Conrad isnt dealing with the rather obvious temporal indicators
of adulthood political or legal, like the .:st birthday, religious, like the
rst communion, or biological, like sexual maturity. The shadow-line
is inward and social; approaching it one is only aware of some vague
atmospheric change, and one may not know its cause; yet although it is
mysterious and elusive, projected almost at random through the chance
collisions of the individual with his endlessly varying environment, it
has a compelling universality. The narrator, eeing, as he puts it, from
the menace of emptiness, is really eeing from the shades of the prison
house that lie ahead; and he tries to alter his course because pursuing
the present one his career as rst mate obviously involves renounc-
ing many other aspirations; it means acknowledging an end to the
youthful dream that one will, one day, be able to achieve everything; it
means, alas, beginning to be like everybody else.
To have contemplated a successful struggle against the common fate
may in retrospect seem a ridiculous form of self-condence in the
narrator. But the nave and buoyant condence of youth is rarely as
simple as Guerard seems to assume: jejune optimism alternates with
equally intense indecision and self-doubt: the human mind will indulge
in endless artful dodges, as Marlow put it in Lord Jim, to escape from
the grim shadow of self-knowledge;
:
and one reason for refusing to be
like everybody else is the fear that one may not even prove to be as good.
Conrads slowness in the rst chapter enables him to present all these
perplexities concretely. And there are others, for the social perspective
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :
of the heros situation is as important as the psychological; The
Shadow-Line, as Carl Benson has written, is the communal counterpart
of The Secret Sharer;
:6
and to present this in rst-person narration,
through the medium of my own emotions as Conrad put it,
:
means
that the larger representativeness and thematic coherence of the
heros personal relationships must be suggested through a fairly fully
described sequence of encounters in which our understanding of the
pattern of motives outstrips that of the narrator. We can then see that
the narrators three former colleagues on board the ship all attempted
to understand and assist him in the light of their own characters: the
misogynist second engineer, who gloomily suspected that sex was the
great shadow-line which the narrator was approaching; the dyspeptic
rst engineer, for whom the greensickness of youth could be cured
by two bottles of a patent liver-medicine, which he generously offered
out of his own pocket; the more experienced captain, who showed
greater insight in their parting interview, and added in a peculiar,
wistful tone, that he hoped I would nd what I was so anxious to go
and look for.
On ship, then, the narrator had encountered from society but
hardly noticed a measure of helpfulness and sympathy; he is now
equally blind to the series of warning examples which face him in the
Ofcers Home: the steward, who had been connected with the sea.
Perhaps in the comprehensive capacity of a failure; the comically
supine ofcer from the Rajahs yacht, who was a nice boy before he
turned to indolence and debauch; and Hamiltons corrupt ineptitude,
which in a dangerous parallel to the narrators own case is masked
by a defensive assumption of being above the common throng. But, as
on the ship, there are also well-meaning friends; and Giles serves as a
climactic reminder that the solemn rites of passage which youth must
endure are comically protracted by the various attempts at help and
understanding by which they are customarily attended, attempts whose
purpose only the peculiar psychology of the protagonist at this stage of
life prevents him from seeing as what they are.
i i
The torpid vacillations of the rst chapter, then, constitute a series of
concrete enactments of the narrators initial reactions to the ironic
social and spiritual divisions which are Conrads theme. The narrator
next hurries to the harbour ofce, and is told to proceed that evening
:8 Essays on Conrad
by steamer to Bangkok, and take over a sailing ship stranded there
by the death of its captain. He meets all kinds of difculties in getting
the ship ready to sail, and even when he is clear of the harbour an
unseasonable lack of wind makes it impossible for him to move out into
the open sea. In these four central chapters the narrator gradually comes
to realize that his new rle as captain, which he had at rst envisaged as
the nal, total, and, indeed, magical solution of all his life-problems,
actually involves an intricate network of moral imperatives, psycholog-
ical discoveries, and social responsibilities, which had until then been
too abstract, too much in the future, to be real, but which now crowd
thickly upon him: the shadow line has unsuspected depth; it cant be
crossed easily, or quickly.
At rst, we observe, the narrator pays as little attention to Giless
gloomy prognostications as to the later warnings of the friendly doctor
at Bangkok; unreasonably but understandably he clings to the belief
that once out of harbour all will be well because the sea is pure, safe
and friendly. Such security, however, is more than anyone should count
on; the crews health actually gets worse as the lack of wind makes it
impossible to pass the island of Koh-Ring; and the nadir is reached at
the end of the fourth chapter when the narrator discovers that the
remaining ve quinine bottles actually contain a worthless white powder.
He informs the crew of the catastrophe, fully expecting to be over-
whelmed by their anger and reproach: actually, the temper of their
souls or the sympathy of their imagination surprises him; and it is their
stoic resignation, their refusal to see things personally, which does most
to turn him away from his egocentric sense that all is merely a plot
aimed against him personally a plot by which he has been decoyed
into this awful, this death-haunted command.
Before then there had already been some signs of human inter-
dependence, and of the narrators growing awareness of it. In contrast
to the moral intransigence he had showed towards the steward at the
Ofcers Home, he had listened to his sick rst mate Burnss plea You
and I are sailors, and allowed him, sick as he was, to come back from
hospital on to the ship, even though Burns, like Hamilton, had been his
rival for the command, and was now so broken in body and mind that
his mere presence on board ship was a serious hindrance. But when the
crisis comes, Mr Burns isnt wholly a dead loss: he steadies the narrator
by telling him that its very foolish, sir to feel guilty about the quinine;
and he unwittingly seconds Giless earlier advice about keeping to the
east side of the Gulf of Siam.
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :q
It is, however, to the clear-sighted persistence of Ransome that the
protagonist is most indebted. In the fth chapter, after two weeks of
being virtually becalmed, Ransome points out a broad shadow on the
horizon extinguishing the lower stars completely, and the narrator
realizes that there are not enough t men to prepare the boat for the
coming squall. Overwhelmed by the depth of his contempt for that
obscure weakness of my soul [under the] stress of adversity, he goes
below in a state of paralysed remorse and confesses in his diary: What
appals me most of all is that I shrink from going on deck to face it . . . I
always suspected I might be no good. Gradually, however, he becomes
aware that Ransome is lingering in the cabin as he had something to
do there, but hesitated about doing it. Hesitates long enough to make
the narrator ask You think I ought to be on deck, to which Ransome
replies without any particular emphasis or accent: I do, sir.
It is the nal nudge into the realization that command means self-
command. They go on deck, and the narrator nds in the impenetrable
blackness a sense of the closing in of a menace from all sides.
It is in this crisis that we are closest to the Jungian analogy suggested
by Guerard. The darkness of the night and the narrators despair
certainly receive sufcient emphasis to suggest a symbolic intent; and
even to lend some support to the interpretation of The Shadow-Line as
essentially concerned, like The Secret Sharer, with an archetypal . . .
night journey
:8
which eventually causes the protagonist to subdue
those aspects of his personality which interfere with seamanship.
The dark night of the soul seems to be getting even more of a
nuisance than the Dark Lady of the Sonnets used to be. The objection
is not that it doesnt exist metaphors exist once they are made;
but rather that the seductive concreteness of the phrase deludes its
hierophants into thinking that they have gained more than they have
when the analogy has enabled them to reduce the literary work to less
than it is: in the present case, to nd The Shadow-Line inferior to The
Secret Sharer primarily because, being much longer, it resists reduction
to a single symbolic paradigm even more vigorously.
Actually, Conrads emphasis in The Shadow-Line is not specically on
the forces which interfere with seamanship, but on something much
more general on an ordeal . . . which had been maturing and tem-
pering my character. It is true that the narrator often feels that he is a
failure as captain: but this, and his consequent sense of guilt, is, as far as
we can judge, a subjective and typical reaction to the difculties of
a rst command; from the time that the doctor in Bangkok compliments
:6o Essays on Conrad
him on his very judicious arrangements, we have no reason to doubt
that the narrator is right in saying that the seamans instinct alone
survived whole in my moral dissolution.
The darkness and immobility of the night do not, of course, in
themselves require symbolic explanation. The increment of suspense
and pictorial vividness would be justied for its own sake; it is in keep-
ing with Conrads frequent use of darkness for his narrative climax;
and it may well have been dark when the actual events occurred which
served as basis for the story. But if one looks for larger meanings, for
symbolic representations of universal elements in mans relations to his
fellows and to the natural world, there are several which are clearly
relevant to the main implications of the narrative. The calm before the
storm, and the intensied darkness that precedes dawn, are well enough
established commonplaces of human experience: and here they derive
a particular signicance from the fact that the calm is the climax of the
long period of calm since leaving port, and that the darkness is the
climax of the longer inner darkness which began when the leading edge
of the shadow-line began to trouble the narrators youthful horizon.
:q
The calm, of course, has its psychological parallel in the narrators
prolonged inward lethargy, a parallel to which Conrad draws attention
in the epigraph; in Baudelaires sonnet La Musique the poets quest
for ma ple toile is most deeply menaced, not by tempests but by the
calme plat which is the great mirror of his despair. More widely, the
alternating rhythm of calm and storm is the equivalent in the natural
order of a human perspective to which Conrad was uniquely attentive
the duality of rest and work; of the solicitations of inertia and the
impulsions to action. In the beginning the narrators deepest yearnings,
in his inarticulate revulsion from the mortal coil,
.o
were for repose;
later, on his way to the harbour ofce, he found something touching
about a ship . . . folding her white wings for a rest, and then heard that
Captain Ellis had attributed his delay in coming to funking . . . too
much work.
Once at sea, the solicitations of the most extreme form of inertia,
death, increasingly pervade the consciousness of the narrator. In the
brilliant passage where he goes down to tell Burns about the quinine,
for instance, he at rst mistakes his glimpse of Burns trimming his beard
with a pair of scissors as an attempt at suicide; and shortly afterwards
Burnss ageworn look causes him to reect: Enviable man! So near
extinction. Later, when Ransome comes to report on the darkening
sky, the narrator thinks that the message must be that Someones
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :6:
dead; and when he nally goes up to prepare for the squall he welcomes
the utter calm and darkness of the night as an image of death:
When the time came the blackness would overwhelm silently the bit of
starlight falling upon the ship, and the end of all things would come without
a sigh, stir, or murmur of any kind, and all our hearts would cease to beat like
run-down clocks . . . The quietness that came over me was like a foretaste
of annihilation. It gave me a sort of comfort, as though my soul had become
suddenly reconciled to an eternity of blind stillness.
It was this particular implication of the shadow-line which led
Conrads wife to object to his title on the grounds that it suggested the
Psalmists valley of the shadow of death.
.:
But death is only one of the
terrors which occupy the narrators mind as he waits in the blackness
which had swallowed up our world for the heavens to declare them-
selves; most obviously he experiences an unforgettable reminder of
mans precarious exposure to the unpredictable power of the natural
order as a whole; and the importance of this to the idea of the shadow-
line was suggested in a letter which Conrad wrote to his relative and
intimate friend Marguerite Poradowska: One always thinks oneself
important at twenty. The fact is, however, that one becomes useful
only on realising the utter insignicance of the individual in the scheme
of the universe.
..
On the other hand, confronting his own utter insignicance in the
natural order heightens the narrators awareness of his need for the
support of his fellows. This is brought home, for instance, in the scene
when, after the mainsail has been hauled up close and the mainyard
squared, Ransome comes to report, and then, suddenly stepped back
two paces and vanished from my sight out of the light of the binnacle
lamps. Shaken, the narrator
moved forward too, outside the circle of light, into the darkness that stood in
front of me like a wall. In one stride I penetrated it. Such must have been the
darkness before creation. It had closed behind me. I knew I was invisible to the
man at the helm. Neither could I see anything. He was alone, I was alone,
every man was alone where he stood.
Here the vivid realization of complete human isolation is the dark-
ness before creation, evokes the historical dimension of the theme of
human solidarity; the narrator, having been deprived, rst through the
loneliness of command, and then through darkness, of the support of
his fellows, is brought face to face with the long tradition of civilization
since the creation, and his own utter dependence on it.
:6. Essays on Conrad
i i i
The historical perspective of the shadow-line has, of course, made its
appearance much earlier in the narrative. For instance, as soon as the
protagonist had boarded his ship, he had sat down alone in the Captains
chair, and it had occurred to him that: A succession of men had sat
in that chair; then, reected in the cabin mirror, he had observed his
own face rather with curiosity than with any other feeling, except of
some sympathy for this latest representative of what for all intents and
purposes was a dynasty; continuous, not in blood indeed, but in its
experience, in its training, in its conception of duty, and in the blessed
simplicity of its traditional point of view on life.
F. R. Leavis, in a Conrad centenary address largely devoted to The
Shadow-Line, comments that this passage very soon takes on in retrospect
a profoundly ironic signicance. It is true that the preceding symbol of
the nautical hierarchy soon proves to have completely betrayed it,
acting with a complete disregard of his ship, its crew and its owners,
and even selling the vital quinine so that he could cut adrift from
everything and pursue his own individual inclinations sexual, in his
squalid amour with the horrible female in Haiphong, and artistic, with
his verse-writing and his nal allegiance only to his violin. Ironical,
therefore, it certainly is, that the narrator should look to this particular
symbolic precursor for support. But Leavis is surely wrong in making
the former captain an example of how the seamans career had not in
itself given him fullment;
.
he had failed it, not it him. In any case we
should be careful before taking the irony too far, since although it is a
sign of youthful illusion to expect more from its elders than they can
give, it is also a sign of maturity not to reject the inheritance of the past
merely because we have discovered the imperfections of its human
representatives. Dynastic, like apostolic successions, must always make
a distinction between the man and the rle; and the traditional deni-
tion of the rle represents a value about which Conrad was the last
man to be ironical, however acute and indeed obsessive his awareness
of the fullness with which its actual human representatives partake of
the frailty of their kind.
The late captains lurid defections enforce the point that the tradition
of the past is not handed over purged of mans selshness and weak-
ness; and the idea is later reinforced by the eerie presence on deck
of Burnss gibbering deaths head when the squall nally comes and
suddenly, the darkness turned into water. Nevertheless the mind of
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :6
the narrator is sustained, and the story as a whole enacts how the
narrator nds his place in a line of men whom he did not know, of
whom he had never heard; but who were fashioned by the same
inuences, whose souls in relation to their humble lifes work had no
secrets for him.
One of F. R. Leaviss main aims in the essay is to emphasize that
Conrad does not merely wish to preach the master mariners glamorless
routine doggedly taken. Of course; but although Conrad would not
have argued the equivalence of moral maturity and the acceptance of
the seamans code, he would surely have poured his wrath on anyone
who proposed them as alternatives. Leavis tends to do so, in his wish
to underline how Conrad stands for something more than any mere
vocational ethos;
.
while, much more misleadingly, Guerard succumbs
to the same dichotomy in an opposite direction by seeing the conclusion
as simply that . . . we cannot be good seamen, alone with our ships,
until we have faced out, recognised, and subdued those selves which
interfere with seamanship.
.
But Conrads presentation surely denies
the relevance of such oppositions: the problems of the narrators rst
command are not peculiar, essentially, to seamen; an awareness of
the unsuspected multiplicity of reciprocal obligations is surely one in
which all mankind partakes in its measure once it leaves youth behind,
although most of all when it assumes responsibility for the lives of
others; as Conrad suggested in his dedication: To Borys and all others
who like himself have crossed in early youth the shadow-line of their
generation.
The terms of this dedication emphasize one aspect of the generality
of the storys main theme. Conrad had long planned to relate his own
rst voyage as captain from Bangkok to Singapore in :888; but when
he came to write the story, nearly thirty years later, what had been
personal, autobiographical, and particular took on so much larger a
signicance that it encompassed his own eighteen-year old sons taking
up the dynastic inheritance as an ofcer at the front in the rst World
War: and what was originally to have been called First Command
became The Shadow-Line.
Conrad, then, is dealing with a particular version of a more general
shadow-line which, under a host of different social and individual and
historical circumstances, is traversed whenever youths idealized image
of the world, of itself and of its own destiny is penetrated and modied
by its sense of solidarity with those who, in the past and in the present,
continue mans struggle against all the powers of darkness and anarchy
:6 Essays on Conrad
which pervade the natural, the historical, the social, and the personal
order. And Conrad is being realistic rather than ironic if the distinction
be allowed in presenting all the forces opposed to human solidarity so
powerfully.
Burns, for example, stands for much more than the force of rivalry in
advancement; his superstitious terror of the dead captain, lying in wait
for the ship in latitude 8 .o ( his place of burial), is no doubt the main
reason why some critics thought that Conrad was invoking the super-
natural; but in fact Burns makes a much more complex and realistic
contribution to Conrads theme: Burnss madness is a corruption of
the legitimate power of the past over the present; his supernatural fears
are a common enough caricature of a proper sense of what, in his
Authors Note, Conrad called the intimate delicacies of our relation
to the dead; and, just as this superstitious awe is an indication of
Burnss own incapacity, so it awakens uneasy echoes in the narrators
mind when he is obsessed with his own sense of powerlessness. Burnss
conviction that no progress will be possible until they have passed the
particular latitude where the captain was buried is itself a superstitious
version of the shadow-line: one that Burns is afraid and incompetent
to cross; while Burnss nal diabolic laugh in the teeth of the squall
is essentially only a melodramatic form of the hysteria in the face of
impotence and terror which the narrator himself has just undergone.
The narrator, of course, needs these warning lessons: he must learn
that neither the dynastic past the dead captain nor the present his
sick and demented rst mate live up to his ideal. But this discovery
has by now been complemented by another neither does he. Blame
and regret, however, are equally futile, and in any case the reciprocities
of inadequacy are not unqualied: in these depths of the narrators self-
accusation about the quinine it is the combination of Burnss pressure,
the crews understanding, and Ransomes direct intervention, which
makes him shake off the sense of drifting impotence and betrayal; he
determines: Remorse must wait. I must steer; and steering, as Conrad
had earlier reminded us, is a symbol of mankinds claim to the direction
of its own fate.
So, with only himself and Ransome able to handle the anchors, the
ship eventually arrives at Singapore. Conrads thought has altered a
good deal from Lord Jim: conceit and error and guilt are universal, but
their consequences, it seems, are not irredeemable; we are all in the
same boat with them, and with sickness and death, but if we seize our
eeting and partial opportunities, we can steer.
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :6
Here, of course, it is Ransomes contained serenity in the face of the
most extreme physical disablement a weak heart which represents
most fully the true dynastic inheritance. Ransome has learned to live
with awareness of death, schooled himself into a systematic control of
feelings and movements; and later, for all his devotion to duty, he
asserts, in a blue funk about [his] heart, that he has a right to leave
the ship. Thus the narrator glimpsed at the human level what the black-
ness of night had suggested at the natural level the bitterest of all
the lessons of the shadow-line the reality of death; and death, in Sir
Walter Raleighs words, is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the
world, without speaking a word.
.6
Sickness and death, then, accompany the ships nal rush into port;
and in the course of this severely qualied victory both the narrator
and the reader experience intense and grateful recognition of the varied
efforts that have enabled the ship, after all, to survive; a sense which
overwhelms the narrator when his crew is carried off to hospital, but
which he has already expressed to Ransome: I and the ship, and
everyone on board of her, are very much indebted to you.
The debt, however, is soon a matter of past history, and the narrator
takes on another crew to continue his voyage. There is no heroic
nality; and in the narrators last interview with Giles we can nd no
warrant for believing that the shadow-line is crossed once and forever:
we are never, as witness the late captain, in the clear; nor are the forces
of inertia ever wholly vanquished. The narrator feels old; he has
learned Giless lesson that theres precious little rest in life for any-
body; he can even confess that God only knows whether he feels
faint-hearted or not. Further and most troubling of all he still
cannot be absolutely sure that he has become a full member of the
dynasty: as we see in the ironic resurgence of the earlier friction
when, after hes told Giles that hell be off at daylight tomorrow, and
Giles has replied in his bluff, avuncular way, You will . . . Thats the
way . . . Youll do, the narrator feels irritated by his tone, and retorts
What did you expect?
i \
Whether the ideas I have attributed to The Shadow-Line are true or
interesting, and whether (and how) Conrad made them seem so, are
not directly within my present purview. That they t into Conrads
:66 Essays on Conrad
general thought could certainly be supported by reference to his other
works, and to his correspondence; and one would also nd evidence
there for the view that Conrad is a symbolic writer only in the sense
that his narratives have a larger meaning, though one which is not
a matter of obscure and esoteric secrets, but only of extending and
generalizing the implications of his things, events and people. That is,
Conrad deals in the kind of symbolism for which I have elsewhere
.
suggested the term homeophoric carrying something similar, as opposed
to heterophoric, carrying something else as the larger import of the
tales literal meaning. To interpret the story in terms of Jung, or of
the supernatural, would be heterophoric; it would take us away to another
meaning and would slight the literal one; whereas the homeophoric
interpretation would be wholly consistent with the kind of expansion of
particular narrative implications suggested by Conrad in his Authors
Note: when we begin to meditate on the meaning of our past it seems
to ll all the world in its profundity and its magnitude.
Obviously many of the details in The Shadow-Line are there only
because they were part of Conrads memories of the past. But three
decades of experience so guided the process of discovery, selection and
emphasis that out of what Conrad himself called the mere material of
the story there arose a work which is perhaps the nest example of what
Conrad meant by bringing out les valeurs idales the French makes
much clearer than does ideal values in English that it is not, at least
directly, a question of ethical ideals, but merely of trying to perceive
and make visible the signicance of a particular individual experience:
trying to get the idea and make us get it.
In that sense Conrad must be considered a philosophic writer; and,
although his frequent jests at those who tried to turn him into a philoso-
pher once took the form There is even one abandoned creature who
says I am a neo-platonist.
.8
What on earth is that? the analogy to
Plato may serve to clarify Conrads position. For in the end there is
something Platonic about Conrads concern with ideal values; with
his insistence, for example, in the case of The Shadow-Line, that the
twilight region between youth and maturity has certain features
which are as universal as Platos Forms. He does not, of course, make
the metaphysical assertion that these universal features are part of
a unied, harmonious, and timeless system; nor is he much concerned
with the ethical preachment that we ought to devote our lives to trying
to attain them. Indeed, since the narrator does not, after leaving the
enchanted garden, achieve that special intensity of existence which is
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :6
the quintessence of youthful aspirations, we are at liberty to see the
shadow-line as only the process which age calls settling down but youth
calls selling out. We misread Conrad if we see his recall of vanished
youthful turmoil as sharing the vatic complacency of the initiate who
has completed his analysis; the protagonist doesnt come out on the
other side of the shadow-line into another enchanted garden; experi-
ence, as he says means always something disagreeable, as opposed to
the charm and innocence of illusions; the loss of Eden brings painful
exactions, not opportunities for realizing dreams. So, if Conrad gives
the impression, as Virginia Woolf put it, that his characters are tested
by their attitude to august abstractions
.q
it is not because he has a
creed but because that is his observation of what life does: everyone in
The Shadow-Line is judged by the events. Conrad is not concerned to tell
us that the various general features which he discerns in the experience
of the narrator are inherently good or bad, but that they are there; and
if we retort So what?, shrugs agreement.
Conrads ideal values, then, are not intended to be ethical or nor-
mative; and the fact that he does not bridge the gap from is to ought
is one reason why Conrad disappoints those who expect him to have a
philosophy; another reason is that his work falls far short of conceptual
synthesis. This is not in itself inconsistent with the Platonic analogy:
Plato thought you could not hope to describe the Ideas, but only to
guide your hearers in such a way that they might eventually see them
for themselves. But, of course, Conrad himself doesnt pretend to more
than partial glimpses of any universals, and what Marlow says of Steins
wisdom in Lord Jim denes only one of the directions in Conrads
narrative: we had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like
Beauty itself, oats elusive, obscure, half-submerged, in the silent still
waters of mystery.
o
Conrads other major narrative direction, of course,
lies in the vivid presentation of empirical reality; and that is perhaps
why there are, as Forster puts it, constant discrepancies between his
nearer and his further vision. If , Forster remarks, Conrad lived only
in his experiences, never lifting his eyes to what lies beyond them: or if,
having seen what lies beyond, he would subordinate his experiences to
it then in either case he would be easier to read.
:
Conrad lets us look
beyond, but never in such a way as to subordinate actuality; and the
actualities of life, especially as he learned to see them through English
eyes, were to be respected, even if they fell short of more romantic and
ideal expectations. He was, after all, a Platonist who fell among empiri-
cists; a Pole cast among Anglo-Saxons.
:68 Essays on Conrad
Conrad, then, is like many great writers, a philosopher only in the
sense that his own retrospective awareness of the continuities and
discontinuities of human experience can enlighten ours: and The Shadow-
Line is perhaps the most successful realization of Conrads achievement
in this direction. Many people, it may be hazarded, have stumbled, rst
with chagrin, and later, if they are fortunate, with re-assurance, on the
discovery that most of their thoughts and deeds are not unique, but are
linked in many ways with those of the dead and of those who are
merely nearer death; that the reciprocity is real, even though we never
receive, as we never bestow, the full measure of recognition; and that
some elements of that reciprocity, however qualied, are still, to adapt
Conrads phrase on the title page, worthy of our mortal yet undying
regard. In The Shadow-Line Conrad overwhelms us with these realiza-
tions; but he also accompanies them with various melancholy ironies:
for one thing, the dynasties of experience are fragile, corruptible and
intermittent; for another, despite the Existentialist version of the shadow-
line, we do not choose our solidarities with the past and the present, but
come to them as we come into the world involuntarily and uncon-
sciously: are usually, indeed, dragged into them, screaming.
xo+rs
: Saturday Review, 8 (:8q8), :6.
. Joseph Conrad: a Note, Abinger Harvest ( London, :q6), p. :.
Letters from Conrad, , ed. Edward Garnett (London, :q.8), p. :qq.
G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (London, :q.), vol. ii, p. :8.
Life and Letters, ii, :8:, :8..
6 Authors Note, in Collected Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad ( J. M. Dent:
London, :qo), p. vii.
Life and Letters, ii, :8; ii, :8..
8 See Authors Note, v; Life and Letters, ii, :q.
q Ibid., ii, :8:.
:o Ibid., ii, :8.
:: Authors Note, v.
:. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, :q8, p. o.
: Conrad the Novelist, p. ..
: Letters from Conrad, p. .q8.
: Collected Edition, p. 8o.
:6 Conrads Two Stories of Initiation, PMLA, 6q (:q), 6.
: Life and Letters, ii, :8.
:8 Conrad the Novelist, pp. o:.
:q David Bone assumes a literal shadow-line the darkling in the sea, the
reex of a wind in motion which at last takes the ship out of the doldrums
Story and idea in Conrads The Shadow-Line :6q
the lull between trade winds. (A Conrad Memorial Library, ed. George
T. Keating (Garden City, New York, :q.q), pp. .6o.) But it is unlikely
that anything so literal is intended: the narrator, for instance, speaks of
how, ever since he set sail, all my life before that momentous day is
innitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on
the other side of a shadow ( p. :o6).
.o P. . This is, appropriately, but one of the many phrases from Hamlet in
The Shadow-Line; e.g. undiscovered country, p. ; stale, unprotable world,
p. .8; out of joint, p. 8.
.: Joseph Conrad and his Circle ( London, :q), pp. :q. The reference is to
Psalm xxiii, .
.. Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska, , trans. and ed.
J. A. Gee and P. J. Sturm (New Haven, :qo), p. .
. Joseph Conrad, The Sewanee Review, 66 (:q8), :q6, :q.
. Ibid., pp. :q8, :q.
. Ibid., p. :.
.6 The History of the World, Book \, chapter 6, section :..
. Conrad Criticism and The Nigger of the Narcissus, see pp. 68 above.
.8 Letters from Conrad, p. ..6.
.q Mr. Conrad: A Conversation, The Captains Death Bed and Other Essays
(London, :qo), p. 6.
o Collected Edition, p. .:6.
: Abinger Harvest, p. :.
:o Essays on Conrad
:o
cn\r+rn :o
The decline of the decline: notes on Conrads reputation
There is a schism among the lovers of Conrad. It is, roughly, between
those who nd two opposed periods in his work, the good early and the
bad late, and those who see his work from beginning to end as varying
in quality, but as constituting nonetheless a good unied whole. This
division of opinion is a common feature in criticism, with Wordsworth
as a celebrated example. In the present case we will begin by looking
briey at Conrads own opinion of the matter; then well go on to a
brief review of the thoughts both of his contemporaries, and then of
some later literary and critical historians of Conrads works; and nally
we will venture some not very resounding conclusions.
First, two obvious facts: there was no decline in the amount Conrad
produced, or in its nancial rewards. Seven novels were published
between Almayers Folly in :8q and The Secret Agent, in :qo, and seven
novels between Under Western Eyes in :q:: and The Rover in :q.: in each
twelve year period Conrad completed an average of just under one
major ction in two years; there was only one major gap, of four years,
between The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.
:
As for Conrads nancial
fortunes, after the successive disasters of the very poor showings of
Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, Conrads sales went up
very fast, and until his death. The publication of Chance in :q: is widely
regarded as a crucial turning point, although Najder points out that the
collection of short stories Twixt Land And Sea in October :q:. had a rst
printing of ,6oo, which was more than that of Under Western Eyes, or
indeed of any of his earlier works.
.
Conrad said some words of praise for Chance, Of its kind, it isnt a
thing that one does twice in a lifetime! But he also spoke of it with
disgust: I have lost all belief in it, he wrote; to Gide he said, I have
written myself out; most depressingly, perhaps, he wrote to Cunning-
hame Graham that, as regards the success of Chance, Now I cant even
pretend I am elated. If I had Nostromo, the Nigger, or Lord Jim in my
Notes on Conrads reputation ::
desk or only in my head I would feel differently no doubt.

By an ironic
compensation, then, Conrads newfound economic success provoked
Conrad into deeper disgust with his writing. Of the story The Planter
of Malata, in Within the Tides, for instance, Conrad wrote to Galsworthy
that it had earned eight times as much as Youth, six times as much
as Heart of Darkness. It makes one sick.

Of course one shouldnt assume that Conrad only became a crybaby

from senility; for, as we all know, his agonies in writing, and his dis-
appointment with the results, were his trademarks from the beginning.
Thus he wrote of Lord Jim, in a letter to Garnett of :. November :qoo:
Ive been satanically ambitious, but theres nothing of a devil in me,
worse luck. The Outcast is a heap of sand, the Nigger a splash of water,
Jim a lump of clay.

Still, Conrad himself certainly felt, or thought he

felt, a decline of his powers. It is of his later work that Conrad tells Ford
that he no longer has the consciousness of doing good work, or instructs
Henri Ghon to tell Gide about Chance: Conrad has written a long
(and stupid) novel since his visit. Its disgusting to even say it try and
imagine what it was like writing it! I have become disgusted with
myself, with paper, with ink with everything.
6
Edward Garnett, John Galsworthy, even Richard Curle, were among
Conrads old friends who expressed some momentary adumbration of
his decline, but the theory was rst expressed in more or less systematic
form much later, by Douglas Hewitt, in his Conrad: A Reassessment, in
:q.; after them came Albert Guerard, in his Conrad the Novelist, of :q8,
and especially the classic and forthright study of Thomas Moser, Joseph
Conrad: Achievement and Decline in :q. The decline theory is also, to
some extent, supported by the main modern biographers of Conrad,
for instance by Bernard Meyer, Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography
in :q6, by Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives, in :qq, and
by Zdzislaw Najder in Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, in :q8. Anyone wanting
to dissent from the decline theory, therefore, has many people and much
evidence to contest. The main critics who have opposed the decline
theory are John Palmer in his Joseph Conrads Fiction: A Study in Literary
Growth, in :q68, and, more recently, Daniel Schwarz in his Conrad The
Later Fiction in :q8..
The status of Chance is a key question. Henry Jamess extended
consideration of that novel comes in his article on The New Genera-
tion in the Times Literary Supplement on :q March and . April :q:,
which was published in Notes on the Novelists under the equally misleading
title of The New Novel. The essence of Jamess objection was that he
:. Essays on Conrad
saw Conrad as a really supreme specimen of the part playable in the
novel by method, blest method. Mr Conrads Chance, James con-
tinues, places the author absolutely alone as the votary of the way to
do a thing that shall make it undergo the most doing. The objection
James nds is the fact that the predicament . . . was not the effect of a
challenge from without, but that of a mystic impulse from within.

I
have argued elsewhere that in fact the method of Chance can well be
regarded as a response to the challenge from without;
8
in literature
the remarriage of widows has always called for supreme authorial tact.
There had to be one witness, Powell, who begins the book, then tells
the story of De Barrals suicide, and Floras long delayed physical union
with Captain Anthony, before being himself nally joined to Flora, at
the end, after Anthonys death; but Conrad also needed Marlow for
commentary. One can see why Conrad felt that he had been rather
airily condemned;
q
and it was in any case odd to be treated as part of
the new generation since he was, after all, years old. Still, we must
not forget the more favourable aspects of Jamess essay; only Conrad is
called a genius; and James makes Conrad his major example of the
remedy for the current disconnection of method from matter which
was the error of no less than Leo Tolstoy.
:o
Most of the contemporary reviews or comments on Chance were
extremely laudatory. In the Daily Telegraph W. L. Courtney called
Conrad, one of the marvels of our literature, and estimated that
Chance was one of the best works which Mr. Conrad has written
comparable with Lord Jim and Nostromo; D. S. Meldrum thought one
may well declare the latest to be the best of his books; while Arnold
Bennett sighed: This is a discouraging book for a writer, because he
damn well knows he cant write as well as this.
::
Chance has certainly
remained on most critics list of the canon of Conrads major works.
F. R. Leavis, for example, rates it one of the ve great Conrad novels:
Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance and Victory it is an
impressive enough tale of books.
:.
Douglas Hewitt complained that Chance was full of clichs . . . defensive
irony . . . imprecise rhetoric.
:
We must concede there are a good many
cases of these faults; but whether there are more than in Heart of
Darkness or Lord Jim is questionable. There are also some passages
which Hewitt dislikes, but which seem quite acceptable to me. Here is
one example from Marlow, near the climax of Chance:
if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in
understanding and voluntarily stop short of the the embrace, in the noblest
Notes on Conrads reputation :
meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of
which is simple. Perhaps sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of
complexity, a torment, forcibly tortuous involution of feeling.
:
The prose is not distinguished: after an overlong sentence, Perhaps
sacred is a redeeming brevity; but the last phrase is awkward and rather
lame rhythmically; in any case, there should surely be an a before
forcibly. But that is not Hewitts objection. He writes:
There is no attempt to show any inherent inadequacy in Anthony; there is no
suggestion of any deep inhibition of feeling in him. The involution is entirely
a temporary matter a matter of this particular situation. As soon as Anthony
and Flora realize they are in a false position, all can be well.
:
No doubt it can be made well, and indeed it is; but since they are both
orphans to a certain extent in John Fynes splendid phrase,
:6
their
inhibitions have been a part of their characters for a very long time;
and they have surely been unprepared for the particular situation on
the Ferndale, or for anything remotely like it. Hewitts criticism seems to
me to be too easy.
Victory was very well received when it came out in September of :q:.
Robert Lynd expressed the general opinion when he wrote that Victory
is, compared to Chance, an unambitious story, but it is the true gold of
genius.
:
The book was, the Atlantic Monthly thought, the nest thing
that the season offers.
:8
On the other hand, Gerald Gould, despite
much praise, concluded that Conrad does not quite bring it off .
:q
The outstanding opposition view was expressed very professorially by
William Lyon Phelps: Despite many ne passages of description, it
is poor stuff, and its author should be ashamed of Mr. Jones, who
belongs to cheap melodrama. He added that the work should be seen
simply as one of the lapses of which nearly all great writers have shown
themselves capable.
.o
The later critics have been deeply divided; it has been seen favourably
by several later critics, from F. R. Leavis to Harold Bloom. Harold
Blooms list of major novels is exactly the same as Leaviss; except
that Lord Jim replaces Chance. Leavis, it should be explained, is not
an enthusiast for Lord Jim, as an over-romantic sea tale.
.:
Both these
independent-minded critics agree in the fairly rare denigration of Heart
of Darkness.
..
The main critical difference about Victory seems to arise from a basic
disagreement about narrative modes. The standard new critical, and
more generally modernist, assumptions seem to be twofold: rst, that
: Essays on Conrad
the author should not speak in his own voice, but present the larger
meanings of the novel indirectly and objectively, through the complex
associations of his imagery and metaphors: the text itself, and all its
referents should be delusively simple and referential. With this goes an
assumption that the ideological values of the literary work should be in
some sense new; it should be new, that is, in forcing us to review our
own too-conventional assumptions, attitudes and habits; the truths we
are made to see should be unpleasant; they should make us wince.
That, of course, is a parody; but there is surely a general truth behind
it; modern criticism expects a radically new way of confronting our
daily life as the signicant element in literary experience; and, as we all
know, todays kids at grammar school are all too complacently aware
that they were born equipped with hearts of darkness.
Victory, rather different from Conrads usual mode of writing, is
claimed by John Palmer, in his Joseph Conrads Fiction: A Study in Literary
Growth (:q68), as the chief work in what he describes as Conrads third
creative phase. The rst phase dealt with individual problems, from
Almayers Folly to Lord Jim: the second with the individual in society, from
Nostromo to Under Western Eyes; and the third phase takes up the problem
of the metaphysical bases of moral commitment. Conrad, therefore, is
less concerned with apparently realist narrative; he uses allegory as a
technique, and metonymy, rather than metaphor, as the basis of his
description.
.
As in The Tempest, the isolated extremity of a desert island
is a t setting for a relatively abstract treatment of the largest kind of
human concern. On Samburan Conrad challenges the three good
gures with their evil opposites: the isolated intellectual Heyst is opposed
to Jones; the sexual expert Lena versus Ricardo; and the savage Wang
against the simian Pedro. Of course this allegorical confrontation may
seem over-simple to modern taste, although we may note that metonymy
has recently found favour in Paris, and Palmer, it should be noted,
subtitles his chapter on Victory, The Existential Afrmation. Conrad
himself thought highly of Victory; at least he chose the last scenes of the
novel for his only American reading, in :q., at the gathering of not-
ables in the Park Lane residence of Mrs Curtis James.
Conrads next published work was The Shadow-Line, published in
March :q:. The Nation wrote that Mr. Conrad is an artist of creative
imagination, one of the great ones, not of the present but of the world.
.
Not all reviews were wholly enthusiastic, but I cannot spend much time
on the book since, at least since F. R. Leavis, it has come to be
universally seen as a masterpiece which miraculously escaped from the
Notes on Conrads reputation :
indignity of Conrads alleged decline. In this it shares the honour with
Conrads relatively late short story, The Secret Sharer, which was
written in :qoq although only published in October :q:. in Twixt Land
and Sea. Conrad wrote to Garnett that the story between you and me,
is it. Eh? No damned tricks with girls there. Eh? Every word ts and
theres not a single uncertain note.
.
The Secret Sharer has also long
been regarded as a masterpiece, as I can testify, having recently done
an introduction to it for the Limited Editions club; in that edition
Conrads title was further honoured by being printed in gold on an
inlay described as genuine Nigerian Oasis goat.
Conrads next novel was The Arrow of Gold, which certainly might be
called a trick with girls. Conrad wrote to Sidney Colvin that the rst
notices . . . are very poor, puzzle-headed, hesitating pronouncements;
yet not inimical.
.6
The New Statesman wrote, in a review that delighted
Conrad: If it is ever true of any book, then it should be true that a new
novel by Mr. Conrad is an event even if, as in the present case, the
new book is something of a disappointment. There are praises: the
review says that it should be admired, if only for the gentle and valued
persistence with which Mr. Conrad continues to teach English writers,
who ought to be able to nd out for themselves, how to manage their
adverbs. On the vitality of even the minor characters, the critic writes
that It is hard to think of any other living writer capable of this endless
prodigality of creation.
.
Other reviews were denitely unfavourable,
though usually respectful. W. L. Courtney complained that in this
long-dragged-out romance there is a great deal that is tedious, while
some of the conversations do not advance the narrative in the fashion
of true and helpful dialogue.
.8
I must confess that The Arrow of Gold seems relatively hard to defend
very strongly; although both the scene of the events, and most of the
characters, are very well presented. We should, however, mention
some very favourable views. Graham Greene for example has written
in his autobiography, A Sort of Life, about his early novel, Rumour at
Nightfall:
Conrad was the inuence now, and in particular the most dangerous of all his
books, The Arrow of Gold, written when he had himself fallen under the tutelage
of Henry James.
.q
We need not accept Greenes view of Conrads tutelage here to Henry
James; and we notice that in general Graham Greene is by no means
an uncritical admirer of Conrad. But the inuence was there; indeed
:6 Essays on Conrad
Greene recalls in A Sort of Life, that in :q. Never again, I swore, would
I read a novel of Conrads.
o
He had abandoned Conrad because his
inuence on me was too great and too disastrous. The heavy hypnotic
style falls around me again, and I am aware of the poverty of my
own.
:
Nevertheless Graham Greene also wrote in his essay on Conrad,
that Victory is one of the two great English novels of the last fty
years.
.
Conrads chief view of the next novel, The Rescue, which came out on
.o June :q.o, was to rejoice that he had managed to at last nish the
novel he had attempted, but failed, to write from :8q6 to :8q8: I am
settling my affairs in this world, he wrote to Garnett, and I should not
have liked to leave behind me this evidence of having bitten off more
than I could chew. A very vulgar vanity. Could anything be more
legitimate?

The reviews were rather more favourable than those of

The Arrow of Gold; for example, Punch thought The Rescue, probably the
greatest novel of the year, one by which its author has again enriched
our literature with work of profound and moving quality.

Virginia Woolf has been seen, by Norman Sherry and others, as an

early supporter of the view that Conrads work declined,

notably in
the review of The Rescue. Her earlier views on Conrad were admiring.
She began a review of the reissue of Lord Jim by complaining about the
sad green colour of the binding, and continues: it is not a question of
luxury, but of necessity: we have to buy Mr. Conrad; all our friends
have to buy Mr. Conrad.
6
Elsewhere Virginia Woolf writes that There
is no novel by Mr. Conrad which has not passages of such beauty that
one hangs over them like a humming-bird moth at the mouth of a
ower.

To return to The Rescue, Virginia Woolf begins by asking in what

directions can we expect Mr. Conrad to develop? There were signs
that the inevitable changes were taking place, but there was nothing
to regret; and it could easily be held that in Chance and Victory Mr.
Conrad was advancing, not in the sense of improving, but in the sense
of attacking a problem that was different from those magnicently
solved before. The rst part of The Rescue is praised; the man and his
brig is founded on truth. And it is only Mr. Conrad who is able to tell
us. When we get to the resolution, however, we cannot deny that we
are left with a feeling of disappointment.
8
The difculty is with Mrs
Travers, and her relationship to Lingard. She was, The Rescue says, to
have found the naked truth of life and passion buried under the growth
of centuries.
q
But when the moment comes, . . . they cannot take
Notes on Conrads reputation :
advantage of it. It seems as if they had lived too long to believe implic-
itly in romance, and can only act their parts with dignity and do their
best to conceal the disillusionment which is in their hearts. This ad-
verse judgment is treated fairly gently. Virginia Woolf also writes: It
need scarcely be said that Mr. Conrad provides out of his great riches
all sorts of compensation for what we have called the central deciency.
If he were not Mr. Conrad we should sink all cavil in wonder at the
bounty of his gift. Here are scenes of the sea and of the land, portraits
of savage chiefs and of English sailors, such as no one else can paint.
Still, Virginia Woolf concludes that Mr. Conrad has attempted a
romantic theme and in the middle his belief in romance has failed
him.
o
My own view is that, although there is a lack both of narrative and
emotional movement in many of the scenes between Lingard and Mrs
Travers, their relation in general and the nal farewell scene on the
sandbank seem convincing. We would, of course, prefer them to make
a fuller commitment to their love; and we are perhaps entitled to
expect it from the early parts of the novel; but both protagonists are
middle-aged; one is married, and the other feels embittered by an
awareness that, for his love of Mrs Travers, he has failed in the darling
project of his life, to restore Hassim and Immada to their kingdom.
Conrads sense of human reality surely allowed him very little choice;
and disillusionment is a real subject.
The last novel that Conrad completed was The Rover which came out
on December :q.. It received mixed reviews. Raymond Mortimer
in the New Statesman found it downright bad; but the Manchester Guardian
wrote with real appreciation: The tale races to its close in as ne a
piece of direct narrative as Mr. Conrad has ever written. The Glasgow
Evening News commented that Than Mr. Conrad there is no writer in
English who can make human beings live more vividly in print; and
the Times Literary Supplement comments that we are inside Peyrol
because the whole manner and physique of him, and the very ground
he treads on, are felt with a tangible vividness.
:
Conrad himself was pleased with the story. He welcomed a letter of
praise from Edward Garnett: As I have not claimed to be more than
only half-dead for the last month, I feel, after reading your letter, like a
man with wings. He goes on to explain that This was perhaps my only
work in which brevity was a conscious aim. I dont mean compression.
I mean brevity ab initio, in the very conception, in the very manner of
thinking about the people and the events. At the end of a longish letter,
:8 Essays on Conrad
mainly defending Scevola (a pathological case), he repeats his secret
desire to achieve a feat of artistic brevity, once at least, before I died.
.
Both Peyrol and Conrad are united in the quest for a youthful former
self. This was an appealing theme for the aged Conrad; as he writes to
Galsworthy on .. February :q.: I am glad you think well of The Rover.
I have wanted for a long time to do a seamans return ( before my
own departure). He goes on to talk about Suspense, and mentions that
in his view The Rover is a mere interlude.

Several reviewers commented on the lack of interest in Conrad by

the younger generation. Leonard Woolf said that the younger or young-
est generation see only this eternal sameness in him so that they tend to
see nothing in him; and Courtney opined that Conrad is no longer
popular with the younger school of writers.

This was probably true in England; Ford Madox Ford and Graham
Greene are his main disciples; neither Joyce nor Lawrence nor Forster
were great admirers, although T. S. Eliot was. On the other hand the
American younger writers certainly were. It is nice to remember the
story that Scott Fitzgerald and Ring Lardner, deprived of the opportun-
ity of meeting a writer they much admired, planned to do an informal
dance to honour Conrad on the lawn of his American host, Nelson
Doubleday; sad to relate, the only person who noticed them was the
caretaker, who naturally turned them off the property.

Much has
been written about the Conrad inuence on William Faulkner; and
although Hemingway was somewhat less enthusiastic, he at least paid
Conrad, and The Rover, a memorable tribute.
It was in an obituary notice in the Conrad Supplement of Fords transat-
lantic review. He begins by challenging the low repute of Conrad among
his friends. It is agreed by most of the people I know that Conrad is
a bad writer, just as it is agreed that T. S. Eliot is a good writer.
Hemingway then goes on to pronounce with obvious irony: If I knew
that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a ne dry powder and sprinkling that
powder over Mr. Conrads grave Mr. Conrad would shortly appear, look-
ing very annoyed at the forced return, and commence writing I would
leave for London [he was then in Paris] early tomorrow morning with
a sausage-grinder. This nal comment was, no doubt, rude (and very
personal); but it was surely what newspaper men used to call a grabber.
And the basis of the grabber, was Hemingways recalling how he read
The Rover all through the night in his hotel room. Then, when morning
came I had used up all my Conrad like a drunkard . . . and felt like a
young man who has blown away his patrimony. But, I thought, he will
Notes on Conrads reputation :q
write lots more stories. He has lots of time. But now Conrad had gone,
and Hemingway afrmed, again with heavy irony: I wish to God they
would have taken some great, acknowledged technician of a literary
gure and left him to write his bad stories.
Hemingway wrote his tribute in a hurry, with Ford waiting for it to
be done; and later he somewhat repented. I cannot reread them [the
novels]. That may be what my friends mean by saying he is a bad
writer. But from nothing else that I have ever read have I gotten what
every book of Conrad has given me.
6
Hemingway, then, was a Conrad addict. And if we glance at another
Conrad obituary, in the Times Literary Supplement, we shall nd little talk
of declining powers either. It is by Virginia Woolf. She had not been
popular for her review of The Rescue, as she makes clear in her diary: I
was struggling . . . to say honestly that I dont think Conrads last book
a good one. I have said it. It is painful (a little) to nd fault there, where
almost solely, one respects.

But now, perhaps because of the obituary

occasion, the tribute to Conrads memory is touching in its grace
and sincerity. The beginning is particularly lovely: Suddenly, without
giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our
guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is
in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his
lodging in our country. How ne is the appropriately mocking form-
ality of the opening, and how delicate the wording, notably the word
lodging with its connotation of impermanence.
Virginia Woolf next addresses Conrads literary stature: His reputa-
tion of later years was, with one obvious exception [presumably Hardy],
undoubtedly the highest in England; yet he was not popular. Why?
After all, he had readers who were people of the most opposite ages
and sympathies, from fourteen year old schoolboys to the most fastidi-
ous. One reason for his lack of popularity, she surmises, lay in his
beauty. One opens his page and feels as Helen must have felt when she
looked in her glass and realized that, do what she would, she could
never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. For Conrad it
seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or insignicant stroke of the
pen. Virginia Woolf then goes on to discuss the changes in the nature
of Conrads inspiration; going from the sea stories to the land, and thus
closer to the narrative direction of Henry James. These later works,
Nostromo, Chance, The Arrow of Gold , are those which some will continue
to nd the richest of all, she concedes. But Conrad, she asserts, never
believed in his later and more highly sophisticated characters as he had
:8o Essays on Conrad
believed in his earlier seamen. The old beliefs are inculcated in the
newer works, beautiful always, Virginia Woolf writes, but now a little
wearily reiterated, as if times have changed. Virginia Woolf, therefore
concludes that though we shall make expeditions into the later books
and bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by
most of us untrodden. It is the earlier books Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon,
The Nigger of the Narcissus that we shall read in their entirety.
8
Virginia Woolf, then, sticks to her preference; but whether that
remains a position that supports the general belief that Conrads work
declined, is rather a different question; we note her great respect for
Chance and The Arrow of Gold which are placed alongside Nostromo. The
decline theorists, then, are not agreed when it began.
Douglas Hewitt begins Conrads decline in Under Western Eyes, but
Chance, he thinks, bears, more clearly than Under Western Eyes, the marks
of the decline in his art. Victory is somewhat better, but not very much
so when we look at its rhetoric, and the lack of real development of the
plot. The Shadow-Line is much better; it is a simpler tale which does not
raise the questions which cause Conrad uneasiness and evasion; still,
he nds an inability to sustain the tension set up by that awareness of
corruption and loneliness which give such force to his best work that
is, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent.
q
Thomas Moser, in the classic work Joseph Conrad: Achievement and
Decline, seems to have established the notion of a pre-ordained deter-
minism of failure in Conrad criticism through the very phrase of the
title. He ventures a relatively simple causal explanation of the decline.
The rst chapter has the title The Early Conrads Anatomy of Moral
Failure, and awards the highest standing to The Nigger of the Narcissus,
Lord Jim, Typhoon and Nostromo. The later works are almost entirely
summed up in the title of chapter two: The Uncongenial Subject:
Loves Tangled Garden. This includes the two apprentice Malayan
novels, and the early short stories in Tales of Unrest. Their trite and
unconvincing handling of the theme of love can also be traced in the
defects of the later novels, and yet Moser does not argue for a neat
chronological decline; some of the short stories are affected throughout
Conrads career, and parts of many novels.
Moser also suggests that the thematic and structural weakness of the
novels is allied with the poverty of the expression; Conrads later prose
becomes less satisfactory.
o
Here one must agree that many of the
passages cited support Mosers case; the best defence is that contrary
to Virginia Woolf s view Conrad was quite capable of occasional
Notes on Conrads reputation :8:
sloppiness or over-complication in his prose, but it was throughout his
career; Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo and The Secret Agent are no
more immune than Chance or The Rescue.
There is a somewhat similar defence to be made against the charge
that Conrads work declined because he turned to an emphasis on
women characters, and the love theme generally, because he thought
this would make his novels popular. This is no doubt true; but there is
one chronological difculty: Conrad had always wanted to make more
money. For example, he wrote hopefully of The Secret Agent that there is
an element of popularity in it . . . my mind runs much on popularity
now.
:
Nevertheless Conrad wrote the novel in a style and with an
evaluative attitude which was the reverse of those in popular ction;
the novels did not, nally, prove popular. Indeed from Almayers Folly to
The Rover one sees Conrad dealing with possibly popular topics on the
one hand, and then treating them in a very characteristically ironic
way which trod hard on romantic and optimistic attitudes.
We still have to accept the fact that many of Conrads critics see
Under Western Eyes, Chance and Victory as major works; while some major
writers, such as Graham Greene and Hemingway, have been entranced
by The Arrow of Gold and The Rover.
I will now advance my own very tentative hypothesis. It is that some
positive qualities are also found fairly uniformly throughout Conrads
writing career.
First the style. To read any page of Conrad, whenever written, is
surely to become aware of a recognizable and highly personal mode of
expression. This is no doubt why Hemingway, although he found it
difcult to read or reread Conrad, and paid little attention, apparently
to the plot, nevertheless said that From nothing else that I have ever
read have I gotten what every book of Conrad has given me.
.
Conrads
unique cultural background somehow found expression in a unique
style. It is why Graham Greene, despite his various objections, could
write of Conrads heavy hypnotic style, and go on to confess that it
reminds him of the poverty of my own.

Virginia Woolf has suggested

in her own way that with Conrad the style is, to an exceptional degree,
the man. We must surely agree that whether he is at the top, or even at
the bottom, of his form, Conrad has created his own individual voice.
Second, this individual voice has a moral component; it is itself an
expression of human values. As Virginia Woolf put it in the same essay,
Mr. Conrad: A Conversation, The beauty of surface has always a
bre of morality within. I seem to see each of the sentences you have
:8. Essays on Conrad
read advancing with resolute bearing and a calm which they have won
in strenuous conict, against the forces of falsehood, sentimentality and
slovenliness. He could not write badly, one feels, to save his life.

Third. The sense of scene. In the review of Lord Jim, after quoting
Marlows remark that he saw the French lieutenant as though I had
never seen him before, Woolf comments that Conrad expounds his
vision, and we see it too.

Conrad, we may conclude, writes uniformly

in accord with his aim in the Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus: My
task . . . is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make
you feel it is, before all, to make you see. Emphasis is not only on see
but on the thrice repeated make. Part of Conrads spell as a writer
is the literal way in which he makes us see; the person, the time of day,
the place. It is what the T.L.S. called his tangible vividness. And this
pressure to visualize the characters and the scene is found throughout
his work, from Almayer in his rotting Folly to the people and the
terrain of Escampobar in The Rover.
Lastly, Virginia Woolf also points out that Conrads gift is not just that
of conveying sensory perceptions; it is always, or very often, a matter
of going beyond them. She remarks in a letter, of The Shadow-Line: It
is very beautiful and very calm. I wish I knew how he gets his effects
of space.
6
Dont we all. We cannot know exactly how, but we can
tell Conrad is trying by the way that he writes; that way evokes much
larger dimensions of experience; and it, also, is Conrads permanent
possession.
An individual voice, its moral component, a sense of scene and its
suggestion of larger meanings these are surely enduring qualities of
all Conrads writing. We can see all these, to take a crucial example, in
his unnished novel Suspense. A good deal has been written about
Conrads dependence on the Memoirs of the Comptesse de Boigne for
much of the plot and the characters,

and the slowness of development

of the story. On the other hand I do not think that the 8o,ooo words of
the text show any signs whatever of failing powers. The presentation of
the setting, the basic action, the convincing characters, the smoothness
of the ashback transitions from one scene to another, surely convey a
powerful sense that we are in the hands of a master who knows just
what he is doing: Genoa, with its harbour tower, Canteluccis hotel,
and the Palazzo Brignoli, have a wonderful solidity, and so do the
characters, Cosmo Latham, Adle Armand, Count Helion, Martel and
Attilio; while the settings and its denizens collaborate to create a myste-
rious atmosphere of puzzling suspense, which surely make the reader
Notes on Conrads reputation :8
regret that we do not have the whole novel. Suspense is, as Richard
Curle wrote, a fragment that will take its place among the recognized
masterpieces
8
of Conrad.
I believe, then, that Conrad is a writer to whom the decline theory
does not really apply; and to accept it as true may deter us from the
deep pleasures afforded by reading the later works. Granted, we all
hate change; Lord Jim may remain our preferred favourite; we may
even regret that Conrad did not write more Lord Jims; but if he had,
would we have liked them as much? Surely, even if his basic ideas, and
the essence of his technique did not change, his subjects did, and they
had to. There are less than perfect works all along the way of Conrads
career; but there are remarkable triumphs too, and they, also, are to be
found all along the way. One can, perhaps, object that the continuity is
all a question of Conrads manner; but manners maketh man.
xo+rs
I gladly thank various people who have helped me on this project: C. W. E.
Bigsby and the hearers who heard the rst version of this essay at the Lausanne
meeting of the International Association of University Professors of English on
.: August :q8q; also Steve Danzig, Gloria Escobar, George Light, Meg Minto
and Zdzislaw Najder.
: Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle ( New Brunswick, N.J., :q8),
pp. 6, quotes an earlier count by Conrad.
. Ibid. pp. 8o, qo.
Ibid. pp. 8, q:.
Ibid. p. o.
Letters from Conrad, to , ed. Edward Garnett ( London, :q.8),
pp. :..
6 Najder, Conrad, p. .
Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English
Literature (New York, :q8), pp. :, :o.
8 In Conrad, James and Chance, see p. : above.
q Letter to Quinn, . May :q:6, cited Conrad, James and Chance, p. :q.
:o James, The New Novel, pp. ::, :.
:: Norman Sherry, ed., Conrad: The Critical Heritage (London, :q), pp. .8.,
.8:, .6.
:. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
(London, :q8), p. ...
: Douglas Hewitt, Conrad: A Reassessment (Cambridge, :q.), p. 8q.
: Chance, Dent Collected Edition ( London, :qq), pp. .6.
: Hewitt, pp. q.
:6 Chance, p. 6o.
:8 Essays on Conrad
: Sherry, Critical Heritage, p. .8.
:8 Ibid. p. .q8.
:q Ibid. p. .qq.
.o Ibid. p. o.
.: F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, pp. :8qqo.
.. Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Joseph Conrad ( New York, :q86),
pp. , . Leavis, Great Tradition, pp. :8..
. John A. Palmer, Joseph Conrads Fiction: A Study in Literary Growth (Ithaca,
:q68), pp. xii, , :o, :q.
. Sherry, Critical Heritage, pp. o.
. Garnett, Letters from Conrad, p. .6.
.6 Sherry, Critical Heritage, p. :.
. Ibid. pp. .:, .., ..
.8 Ibid. p. ..
.q Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (New York, :q:), p. :.
o Ibid. p. .:..
: Graham Greene, In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (London, :q6:),
p. 8.
. Graham Greene, Remembering Mr. Jones, Collected Essays (New York,
:q6q), p. :8.
Garnett, Letters from Conrad, pp. .88.
Sherry, Critical Heritage, pp. , 6.
Ibid. p. . The wave of reaction to Conrad began with some delicately
expressed criticism in TLS.
6 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays (London, :q8), vol. ii, p. :o.
Ibid. iii, p. :.
8 Ibid. iii, pp. ..q, .o, .o.
q Joseph Conrad, The Rescue, Dent Collected Edition (London, :qq), p. :.
o Virginia Woolf, Essays, iii, pp. .:, .:., ...
: Sherry, Critical Heritage, pp. 8, o, 6, .
. Garnett, Letters from Conrad, pp. o, :, .
G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (London, :q.), vol. ii, p. q.
Sherry, Critical Heritage, p. 6.
Andr Le Vot, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, trans. William Byron (New
York, :q8), p. :..
6 Ernest Hemingway, By-Line, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades
(New York, :q6), pp. :..
Virginia Woolf, Diary (New York, :q8), pp. q, :.
8 Virginia Woolf, Essays, i, pp. o., o., o., o., o6, o, o.
q Hewitt, Conrad, pp. 8q, ::, ::.
o Thomas Moser, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, Mass.,
:q), pp. , :. There is much of interest, including a rejection of the view
that Conrad was a misogynist, in Conrad Criticism Today: An Evaluation
of Recent Conrad Scholarship, by Jan Verleun and Jetty de Vries, in
English Literature in Transition, , .q (:q86), .:.
Notes on Conrads reputation :8
: Jean-Aubry, Life and Letters, ii, p. q.
. Hemingway, By-Line, p. :.
Greene, A Sort of Life, p. .o6.
Virginia Woolf, Essays, i, p. :..
Ibid. ii, p. :..
6 Ibid. ii, p. :q.
Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (London, :q6o), pp. 68
and notes.
8 Joseph Conrad, Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel, Dent Collected Edition (Lon-
don, :q), p. vi.
:86 Essays on Conrad
:86
cn\r+rn ::
Around Conrads grave in the Canterbury
cemetery a retrospect
I begin with a letter written to me long ago. The text has three interest-
ing stylistic features and makes two points concerning what, somewhat
portentously, we may call my research methods.
.th Oct/ No :o not 8 Sudbury Avenue
Westgate Court Estate
Canterbury
Dear Sir referring to my knolage of the late Joseph Conrad he was buried
on the th Aug :q. his wife Buried on qth Dec :q6 I having been
employed at the cemetery for o years was helping with both funerals
previous to Joseph Conrad dying he used to walk round and have a few
words with us men at our work after his Death Mrs Conrad for the
Anaversery sent an very large wreath to be put on his grave at that time she
was living at the Top of Mill lane Canterbury but she Died in Hospital in
London but with regard to knowing much about them I am afraid I cannot
tell you very much about them so with this small bit of Information
I close hoping this meets with
your Approvall
I am yours Etc
Mr Albert R Smith
:o Sudbury Avenue
Westgate Court Estate
Canterbury
(After you saw Mr Beeching at the Cemetery you must have gone to the
Wrong house)
Stylistically this is not badly composed for a gravedigger, which its author
was. Still, it is the only letter I have ever received without any single
mark of punctuation from beginning to end; its spelling is remarkable
an extraordinary effort to reproduce each difcult words sound
apparently de novo; and lastly, the author is not unaware of how his text
should try to honor in its style the majesty of death: he gives a capital
Around Conrads grave in Canterbury :8
letter D both to Death and to Died, though not to dying. As to my
own scholarly idiosyncrasies, I note that Albert R. Smith, despite his
no doubt sincerely intended show of proper humility to an educated
gentleman, feels he must correct my sloppily attributing to him the
house number 8 instead of :o. Nor does he let pass without notice
that, with a familiar lapse, I had had difculties in following directions,
and had gone to the wrong house. By no means, I must confess, for
the rst or the last time.
Hm. An informant possibly offended, and a research opportunity
missed. Yet I must confess that I do not remember anything about
either the informant or the wrong house. Still, I will totter down memory
lane to see what comes up.
As a boy I lived outside Dover at River, and so Canterbury was only
some dozen miles away. I do remember having bicycled to Bishops-
bourne with my sister and brother when I was about twelve; and we
had even stopped to look at Oswalds, where Conrad had lived from
October :q:q until his death. My father had a copy of Lord Jim in the
house, so I had set myself early on the Conradian path. But I dont
think we went to the cemetery that trip; it would have been several
miles more to cycle; and I cant remember ever having gone there
before the war at all. Yet I must have done so, because I have a vivid
memory of a day, as a Japanese prisoner of war on the Kwai, when I
had suddenly thought: There was no mention of Jessie on Conrads
grave; but she had died in :q6. Why? There must have been a bad
quarrel or misunderstanding of some kind between Joseph and her. Id
often wondered, even then, how Conrad could have married so dull
and unintellectual a person.
That memory, I now realize, explains why, within the rst ten days
or so of my return from captivity, when I was back at Dover, I had
gone on a splendid walk to Canterbury. It was a clear October day in
:q; the green Kentish landscape was still beautiful; and Id even
picked some mushrooms. Then I had gone to have a look at Conrads
gravestone, and discovered that yes, I had been right: there was no
mention of Jessie on it even now.
Unfortunately, I was very rarely at Dover; I lived at Cambridge and
then at Berkeley. My next visit to Dover must have been in :q, the
date of Smiths letter. My mother was ill, and I had gone for a quick
visit from Berkeley. Research on Conrad had hardly begun I was still
revising The Rise of the Novel. But I had managed to visit Conrads
:88 Essays on Conrad
second son, John, at the lovely brick house he had built, Broome Quarry
House, only six or so miles away. There was a Polish national carving
over the front door, and from the garden a ne view of the valley down
the Nail Bourne, stretching to Bishopsbourne some two miles away; the
Bourne even owed through Oswalds.
:
We had a very good talk, and
I nally dared to ask him if Jessie was buried in Conrads grave. Yes,
he said, she was, and thus gave a resounding No! to my speculations.
True, there was no inscription. But that was for a signicant reason.
In her will Jessie had left instructions that a very lavish memorial tribute
to her should be placed on the gravestone; the effect would have been
that Josephs simple inscription his name, his dates, and two lines
from Spenser would be lost; he would, in effect, gure merely as the
husband of the above. Joseph Conrads executors, Richard Curle and
Ralph Wedgwood, had very properly objected; and the deadlock had
stopped any action being taken on Jessies proposed inscription for
nearly twenty years. Their difference on this, I gathered, had for a time
divided John from his brother Borys. Fortunately, John said, the differ-
ences had now been patched up, and a simpler inscription for Jessie
would soon be carved on the grave. As it has been.
I come back now to Mr. Beecher, or, as my rather rough note
spells it, Beauchamp. I no longer remember the meeting, but I have
the note. I apparently spoke to him in early September :q. He was
then in charge of the records of the Canterbury Cemetery on Westgate
Court Avenue. It is a large city affair for all comers, not a parish
churchyard. On August fth, two days after Conrads death, Mrs
Jessie Conrad had bought four plots, two large, and two small. She had
bought two more plots on .8 December :q.. Conrad was buried on
August, four days after his death. There was a Roman Catholic mass
for Conrad at Saint Thomass church in Canterbury; the ofciating
cleric was Father E. H., or possibly F. H., Sheppard. Beecher also told
me that even if Conrad had been a Catholic or an atheist, he could have
been buried in the parish churchyard of Bishopsbourne, if he wished. It
therefore looks as though Conrad himself had deliberately chosen to be
buried in Canterbury. There he could have a mass, and then be buried
in the part of the Canterbury cemetery specially reserved for Roman
Catholics, and with their usual burial service. His grave is still sur-
rounded by Italian names such as Salvatore and Megliococca. Conrad
used to walk round the cemetery according to Albert Smith; this
seems faintly possible, I suppose, and if so, would benet our memory
with a picturesque image.
Around Conrads grave in Canterbury :8q
Jessie Conrad had died in Guys Hospital, London; she was buried
next to Conrad on q December :q6, by a cleric called Middleton,
who, Beecher thought, was probably the rector of Bishopsbourne.
There, no doubt, we should leave them undisturbed. But, of course, in
research, after dealing with its usual questions, Who did?, and Did
what?, there is always the third question, What of it? One possible
answer is that my initial mistake is common enough. As Henry James
put it in the Preface to The Princess Casamassima, it seems probable that
if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about
us. The whole investigation had started in my silly and prejudiced
error, but behind the error was a genuine fact; and this fact had
illustrated the undeniable truth that authors have posthumous lives:
so one sad theme of Conrads posthumous life seems to have been
illuminated by my mistake.
In one of my interviews with David Garnett, at the Reform Club on
September :q, he had contrasted Henry James, who thought about
nothing but money, with Conrad, who, in his way thought about
nothing but honour. Conrad assumed that the people round him
thought likewise about honour and lived accordingly. But it was not so:
his honour was betrayed on every side. In the two books on her hus-
band, Joseph Conrad As I Knew Him (:q.6), and Joseph Conrad and his Circle
(:q), Jessie had shown a rather inordinate sense of her own import-
ance. She presented her life as one long martyrdom to an impossible
husband. It was her stupid vanity that had later created her ridiculous
demands for the gravestone, and which then led to there being no
inscription on it for more than twenty years.
When I asked Richard Curle in London, Queensborough Terrace,
on :6 September :q, about the rumours that Jessie had been broke in
her later years at Canterbury, he answered that she had been left very
well-off; Conrads will gave her three-fths of the residuary income
from his considerable estate. But, Curle said, she had gambled. I
asked, Was it the Stock Exchange? Curle laughed: She didnt have
the intelligence to know about that. It was horses. In his Times Remem-
bered, John Conrad, incidentally, blames his mother for having sold the
collection of books and manuscripts that Conrad had intended for him,
to the American collector, George Keating; she needed the money.
John writes: It never occurred to me that my fathers wishes would be
ignored . . . My mother was, relatively, well provided for but she never
discussed with me the sale of any object; in fact it was all done without
:qo Essays on Conrad
my knowledge so I was presented with a fait accompli about which nothing
could be done (:68). Conrad, then, had been right to protect Jessie and
his family by acting on his suspicions and tying up his capital in a trust.
As for Borys, he had presumably supported his mothers wishes for
her grave. There had been something of a quarrel with Jessie after his
marriage, but it was made up, according to Borys.
.
Borys was later
brought to court for having, as David Garnett put it, swindled his best
friend, on the false pretence of having access to Conrad manuscripts.
The facts as reported in the Times are that Alfred Borys Conrad, .q, a
motor engineer, of Hythe road, Ashford, Kent, arrested on a warrant,
was remanded on 6oo bail by the Marylebone Magistrate yesterday
[i.e. q June :q.] charged with fraudulently converting to his own use
and benet :,:oo entrusted to him on March :o, :q.6. The bor-
rowed money, Borys claimed, was to be added to .,qoo which he
possessed, and this ,ooo would be sufcient to enable him to buy
Josephs manuscripts, which could at once be sold for ,ooo. Of
course Borys never had the .,qoo, nor any knowledge of either the
alleged owner, or the purchaser, of the Conrad manuscripts. Garnett
may have exaggerated in calling the lender of the money, a Mrs Dorothy
Bevan, Boryss best friend; but there was no doubt of Boryss guilt,
and he was eventually sentenced to one years imprisonment. Earlier,
in his fathers lifetime, Borys had already exploited his fathers fame by
assuring his creditors that his father had invested :,ooo on his behalf
in the United States.

I was, and remain, much inuenced by the view of David Garnett

and Richard Curle, neither of them, admittedly, very well disposed to
Jessie. But there were other events which dogged the posthumous story
of the Conrads betrayal. John seems to have been the only loyal
member of the family; but he was subject to an outrage by the Kent
County Council. In a sublime example of to put it mildly tactless-
ness, it was decided to build what used to be called a lunatic asylum,
but is now, no doubt, to be more properly termed a residential institu-
tion for the mentally challenged, on the down side of the road from
John Conrads house, so as to block his view of Bishopsbourne and
Oswalds. He moved out. There was another building outrage at
Oswalds itself. The owner of Bourne Park, to whom it belonged, tore
down the drawing room and ploughed up the Dutch Garden, which
was turned into just a eld. The reason? Being no longer rich, and
unable to live in the main house, the owner wanted Oswalds reduced
in size and status, so that his own smaller house would still be grander.

Around Conrads grave in Canterbury :q:

A ne example of petty spoliation. And in another sense, Oswalds is
no more; it has been renamed The Rectory.
Complete diplomatic secrecy on these matters was kept both in Borys
Conrads My Father: Joseph Conrad (:qo), and Conrads Joseph Conrad:
Times Remembered (:q8:); there is no indication whatever in their mem-
oirs of the divisions Ive been talking about. So we can nd a bright
side: in its own way time heals wounds. The bold grey granite mono-
lith of Conrads grave still stands out deantly from the surrounding
crosses. But there are other names on it now: Jessie Emmeline
Conrad Korzeniowski (her Polish enthusiasm had not gone so far as to
spell her husbands second forename, Teodor, correctly her version
on the tombstone is Teador; the tombstone also anglicizes the ori-
ginal Jzef to Joseph, and Konrad to Conrad); Johns two sons, Peter
Stewart Thaddeus Conrad Korzeniowski and John Richard Teodor
Conrad Korzeniowski, are in the grave; and now, Alfred Borys Conrad
Korzeniowski and John Alexander Conrad Korzeniowski have also
died, alas! and been buried there too. It is a wry, though belated,
triumph for family solidarity over its opposite.
xo+rs
: John Conrad, Joseph Conrad: Time Remembered (Cambridge, :q8:), p. :.
. Borys Conrad, My Father: Joseph Conrad (:qo), p. :8.
Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography (:qq:), p. .
John Conrad interview (BBC, :6 November :q); Borys Conrad, Joseph
Conrads Homes in Kent (:q), p. :..
:q. Essays on Conrad
:q.
cn\r+rn :.
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth
The Kwai is a real river in Thailand, and nearly thirty years ago
prisoners of the Japanese including myself really did build a bridge
across it: actually, two. Anyone who was there knows that Boulles
novel, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and the movie based on it, are both
completely ctitious. What is odd is how they combined to create a
world-wide myth, and how that myth is largely the result of those very
psychological and political delusions which the builders of the real
bridges had been forced to put aside.
+nr nr\r nni nors
The origin of the myth can be traced back to two historical realities.
Early in :q., Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines
surrendered: and Japan was suddenly left with the task of looking after
over two hundred thousand prisoners of war. The normal procedure is
to separate the ofcers from the enlisted men and put them into differ-
ent camps; but the Japanese hadnt got the staff to spare and left the job
of organizing the prison-camps to the prisoners themselves; which in
effect meant the usual chain of command. This was one essential basis
for Boulles story: prisoners of war, like other prisoners, dont normally
command anyone; and so they dont have anything to negotiate with.
The other main reality behind the myth is the building of that
particular bridge. Once their armies started driving towards India, the
Japanese realized they needed a railway from Bangkok to Rangoon. In
the summer of :q. many trainloads of prisoners from Singapore were
sent up to Thailand and started to hack a two-hundred-mile trace
through the jungle along a river called the Khwae Noi. In Thai, Khwae
just means stream; Noi means small. The small stream rises near the
Burma border, at the Three Pagodas Pass; and it joins the main tribut-
ary of the Me Nam, called the Khwae Yai, or Big Stream, at the old
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth :q
city of Kamburi, some eighty miles west of Bangkok. It was there that
the Japanese faced the big task of getting the railway across the river.
So, early in the autumn of :q., a large construction camp was set up
at a place called Tha Makham, about three miles west of Kamburi.
Like the hundred of other Japanese prison camps, Tha Makham had
a very small and incompetent staff. To the Japanese the idea of being
taken prisoner of war is or was then deeply shameful; even looking
after prisoners shared some of this humiliation. Consequently, most
of the Japanese staff were men who for one reason or another were
thought unt for combat duty; too old, perhaps, in disgrace, or just
drunks. What was special about Tha Makham and the other camps on
the Kwai was that they were also partly controlled by Japanese milit-
ary engineers who were building the railway. These engineers usually
despised the Japanese troops in charge of running the camps almost as
much as they despised the prisoners.
The continual friction between the Japanese prison staff and the
engineers directly affected our ordinary lives as prisoners. Daily routine
in the camps in November :q., when work on the Kwai bridge began,
normally went like this: up at dawn; tea and rice for breakfast; and then
on parade for the days work. We might wait anything from ten min-
utes to half an hour for the Korean guard to count the whole parade and
split it up into work groups. Then we marched to a small bamboo shed
where the picks, shovels and so on were kept. Under any circumstances
it would take a long time for one guard to issue tools for thousands of
men out of one small shed; the delay was made worse by the fact that
the tools usually belonged to the engineers, so two organizations were
involved merely in issuing and checking picks and shovels. That might
take another half hour, and then we would be reassembled and counted
all over again before nally marching off to work.
When we had nally got out on the line, and found the right work site,
the Japanese engineer in charge might be there to explain the days task;
but more probably not. He had a very long section of embankment or
bridge to look after and perhaps thirty working parties in widely separate
places to supervise. He had usually given some previous instructions to
the particular guard at each site; but these orders might not be clear,
or, even worse, they might be clear to us, but not to the guard.
There were many organizational problems. For instance, in the early
days of the railway the total amount of work each man was supposed to
do moving a cubic meter of earth or driving in so many piles was
quite reasonable under normal circumstances. But the task often fell
:q Essays on Conrad
very unequally: some groups might have to carry their earth much
further than others, or drive their teak piles into much rockier ground.
So, as the day wore on, someone in a group with a very difcult, or
impossible, assignment would get beaten up: all the guard thought
about was that hed probably be beaten up himself if the work on the
section wasnt nished: so he lashed out.
Meanwhile, many other prisoners would already have nished their
task, and would be sitting around waiting, or even worse pretending
to work. The rule was that the whole days task had to be nished, and
often inspected by the Japanese engineer, before any single work party
could leave the construction site. So some more prisoners would be
beaten up for lying down in the shade when they were supposed to look
as though there were still work to do in the sun.
At the end of the days work an individual prisoner might well have
been on his feet under the tropical sun from in the morning until or
8 even q at night, even though hed only done three or four hours work.
He would come back late for the evening meal; there would be no lights
in the huts; and as most of the guards went off duty at 6, he probably
wouldnt be allowed to go down to the river to bathe, or wash his clothes.
So our lives were poisoned, not by calculated Japanese brutality, but
merely by a special form of the boredom, waste of time, and demoraliza-
tion which are typical of modern industrial society. Our most pressing
daily problems were really the familiar trade-union issues of long portal-
to-portal hours of work, and the various tensions arising from failures
of communication between the technical specialists, the personnel man-
agers, and the on-site foremen in our case the Japanese engineers, the
higher prisoner administration, and the guards.
The people best able to see the situation as a whole were probably
the ofcer-prisoners in charge of individual working parties. ( This was
before ofcers had been forced to do manual work.) These ofcers,
however, normally dealt only with the particular guards on their section
of the line; and back at camp headquarters neither the Japanese prison
staff nor the senior British ofcers had much direct knowledge of con-
ditions out on the trace. But since mainly because of a shortage of
interpreters most of the Japanese orders were handed down through
Allied ofcers, who were in fact virtually impotent, everything tended
to increase the confusion and mistrust in our own ranks.
At rst the difculties in the Bridge Camp of Tha Makham were
much like those in all the others. But soon they began to change, mainly
because of the personality of its senior British ofcer.
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth :q
Colonel Philip Toosey was tall, rather young, and with one of those
special English faces like a genial but sceptical bulldog. Unlike Boulles
Colonel Nicholson, he was not a career ofcer but a territorial.
Tooseys previous career had been managerial. Now a cotton merchant
and banker, he had earlier run a factory, where he had experienced the
decline of the Lancashire cotton industry, strikes, unemployment, the
Depression; hed even gone bankrupt himself. This past training helped
him to see that the problem confronting him wasnt a standard military
problem at all: it had an engineering side, a labor-organization side,
and above all, a very complicated morale side affecting both the prisoners
and their captors.
Escaping or refusing to work on a strategic bridge were both out of
the question. Trying either could only mean some men killed, and the
rest punished. We had already learned that in a showdown the Japanese
would always win; they had the power, and no scruples about using it.
But Toosey had the imagination to see that there was a shade more
room for manoeuvre than anybody else had suspected as long as the
manoeuvres were of exactly the right kind. He was a brave man, but
he never forced the issue so as to make the Japanese lose face; instead
he rst awed them with an impressive display of military swagger;
and then proceeded to charm them with his apparently immovable
assumption that no serious difculty could arise between honorable
soldiers whose only thought was to do the right thing.
The right thing from our point of view, obviously, was to do every-
thing possible to increase food and medical supplies, improve working
conditions, and allocate the work more reasonably. Gradually, Toosey
persuaded the Japanese that things like issuing tools or allocating the
days tasks to each working party more evenly would be better handled
if we did it ourselves. He also persuaded the Japanese that output
would be much improved if the duties of the guards were limited
entirely to preventing the prisoners from escaping. We would be re-
sponsible for our own organization and discipline. The ofcers in charge
of working parties would supervise the construction work; while back
at camp headquarters, if the Japanese engineers would assign the next
days work to Colonel Toosey, he and his staff would see how best to
carry it out.
The new organization completely transformed our conditions of life.
There was much less waste of time; daily tasks were often nished early
in the afternoon; weeks passed without any prisoner being beaten; and
the camp became almost happy.
:q6 Essays on Conrad
Looked at from outside, Tooseys remarkable success obviously in-
volved an increase in the degree of our collaboration with the enemy.
But anybody on the spot knew that the real issue was not between
building or not building the bridge; it was merely how many prisoners
would die, be beaten up, or break down, in the process. There was only
one way to persuade the Japanese to improve rations, provide medical
supplies, allow regular holidays, or reduce the brutality of the guards:
to convince them that the work got done better our way.
Tooseys drive and panache soon won him the condence of the
Japanese at the camp: they got about the same amount of work out of
us, and their working day was much shorter too. At the same time
Toosey was never accused by his fellow prisoners as Boulles Colonel
Nicholson certainly would have been of being Jap-happy. Some
regarded him as a bit too regimental for their taste; but, unanswerably,
he delivered the goods. Eventually, in all the dozens of camps up and
down the River Kwai, Toosey became a legend: he was the man who
could handle the Nips. His general strategy of taking over as much
responsibility as possible (often much more than the Japanese knew),
was gradually put into practice by the most successful British, American,
Australian and Dutch commanders in the other camps. Even more
convincingly, in :q, when the Japanese saw defeat ahead, and nally
concentrated all their ofcer-prisoners in one camp, the vast majority
of the three thousand or so allied ofcers collected there agitated until
various senior commanding ofcers were successively removed and
Colonel Toosey was put in charge. He remained in command until the
end of the war in August :q, when, to general consternation, all kinds
of ancient military characters precipitately emerged from the wood-
work to reclaim the privileges of seniority.
+nr xv+n nroi xs
But Toosey, like all the other heroes and non-heroes of our prisoner-
of-war days, would normally have been forgotten when peace nally
broke out. That he left any mark on the larger world is only because
a Free-French ofcer, Pierre Boulle, who had never known him, had
never been near the railway, and was never a prisoner of the Japanese,
wrote a novel called Le Pont de la Rivire Kwai.
The book was not in any sense intended as history. Though he took
the rivers real name, Boulle placed his bridge near the Burmese frontier,
two hundred miles from the only actual bridge across the Kwai, the one
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth :q
at Tha Makham. And, as Boulle recounted in his fascinating but on
this topic not very explicit autobiographical memoir, The Sources of the
River Kwai (:q66), Colonel Nicholson was based, not on any prisoner of
war but on two French colonels he had known in Indo-China. Having
been Boulles comrades in arms until the collapse of France in :q:,
they then sided with Vichy, and eventually punished Boulles activities
on behalf of the Allies as treason, quite blind to the notion that it was
they, and not Boulle, who had changed sides.
In his novel Boulle made Nicholsons collaboration much more
extreme: he built a better bridge than the one the Japanese had started,
and in a better place. Boulle may have got the idea from the fact that
the Japanese actually built two bridges over the Kwai at Tha Makham:
a temporary wooden structure, which no longer survives; and another
begun at the same time and nished in May, :q, which was a perman-
ent iron-trestle bridge on concrete piers, and still stands. Both bridges
showed up clearly on Allied aerial photographs; and Boulle may have
seen these photographs when he was a Free-French Intelligence ofcer
in Calcutta during the last year of the war.
Boulles main aim in the novel was presumably to dramatize the ironic
contradictions which he had personally experienced in Indo-China.
First, Nicholson embodied the paradox of how the military like any
other institutional mind will tend to generate its own objectives,
objectives which are often quite different from, and may even be con-
trary to the original purposes of the institution. Secondly, there was
the political paradox the total reversals of attitude which continually
occur, almost unnoticed, in our strange world of changing ideological
alliances. To drive this point home Boulle also invented the Allied
commandos who were sent to blow up the bridge with exactly the same
patient technological expertness as had been used by their former
comrades in arms who had built it.
The books interest for the reader comes mainly from the similar but
opposite efforts of the commandos and the prisoners. Like Nicholson
we forget about aims because the means are absorbing; we watch how
well the two jobs are being done, and its only at the end that we wake
up and realize that all this marvellous technological expertness harnessed
to admirable collective effort has been leading to nothing except death;
Nicholson sabotages the saboteurs, and then dies under the re of
Wardens mortar. So, nally, we see that the novel is not really about
the Kwai, but about how the vast scale and complication of the opera-
tions which are rendered possible, and are even in a sense required, by
:q8 Essays on Conrad
modern technology tend nally to destroy human meanings and pur-
poses. The West is the master of its means, but not of its ends.
This basic idea was lost, of course, in the movie; but there were
many other elements in Boulles narrative which gave it a more universal
appeal.
First, there was the character of Nicholson, which was very little
changed in the movie: an amiable fellow in his way, but egocentric;
admirable, but ridiculous; intelligent, but basically infantile. Here we
come back to a very ancient French myth about the English character,
a stereotype which was already fully established in a book written about
an English colonel by a French liaison ofcer after the rst world war
in Andr Mauroiss The Silences of Colonel Bramble. The infantile and
egocentric side of Nicholsons character is essential to the plot; the book
is after all about a monomaniac who falls in love with a boys hobby: to
build a bridge, but not with an Erector set, and not for toy trains.
The audience, of course, gets caught up in the hobby too; perhaps
because it fullls the greatest human need in the modern world: being
able to love ones work. Along the Kwai there had been a daily conict
between the instinct of workmanship and disgust with what one was
being forced to do: people would spend hours trying to get a perfect
alignment of piles, and then try to hide termites or rotten wood in an
important joint. These sabotage games werent really very signicant;
but they expressed a collective need to pretend we were still ghting
the enemy, and to resist any tendency to see things the Japanese way.
We were always on the lookout for people becoming what we called
Jap-happy; and if anyone had started talking about my bridge, like
Nicholson, hed have been replaced at once.
Neither the novel nor the lm even hint at these conicting impulses;
and so the question arises, How can Boulles shrewd and experienced
mind ever have imagined that Nicholson could plausibly get away with
his love affair for a Japanese bridge?
There are at least three possible reasons. First, Boulle himself was
born in Avignon, site of the worlds most famous ruined bridge. Secondly,
he was trained as an engineer and presumably shared the mystique of
his profession. These were two positive motives for loving bridges; and
there was also the general intellectual and political context of the post-
war world. Boulles rst collection of short stories, Tales of the Absurd,
expressed not only a sense that history had arrived at a meaningless
dead-end, but the whole Existential perspective on the human condition
in general; all political causes and individual purposes were equally
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth :qq
ctitious and ridiculous. Boulle certainly intended The Bridge on the River
Kwai to have the same implication; as we can see from his epigraph, taken
from Conrads Victory: No, it was not funny; it was, rather, pathetic; he
was so representative of all the past victims of the Great Joke. But it is
by folly alone that the world moves, and so it is a respectable thing on
the whole. And besides, he was what one would call a good man.
+nr xo\i r
Boulles book was published in :q. and sold about 6,ooo copies annually
in France until :q8. That year sales leaped to :..,ooo the movie had
come out. Later, the lms success caused the book to be translated into
more than twenty languages, and to sell millions of copies; it also, of
course, created the myth.
Hollywood has been a great creator of myths, but they have usually
been personal myths of individual actors, such as Charlie Chaplin or
Humphrey Bogart, or of character-types, such as the cowboy or the
private eye. The Hungarian producer, Sam Spiegel, and the English
director, David Lean, turned a little river in Thailand that is not
marked in most atlases into a household word.
So great a success obviously presupposes a very complete adapta-
tion to the tastes of the international cinema public: and this adaptive
process can be seen in the differences between the book and the movie,
which is even further from what really happened on the railway. Of
course, one cant fairly blame the movie for not showing the real life of
the prisoner-of-war camps along the Kwai, if only because that life was
boring even to those who lived it. On the other hand, using the name of
an actual river suggested an element of authenticity; and the movies
version of events at the bridge certainly seemed to the survivors a gross
insult on their intelligence and on that of their commanders. When
news of the lms being made came out, various ex-prisoner-of-war
associations, led, among other people, by Colonel Toosey, protested
against the movies distortion of what had actually happened; since the
name of the river was fairly well known, people were bound to think
there was an element of truth in the lm. But history had given Sam
Spiegel a lot of free publicity, and he refused even to change the lms
title. This was vital, not only for the aura of historical truth at the box-
ofce, but for the growth of the myth; since, in the curious limbo of
mythic reality, collective fantasies need to be anchored on some real
name of a place or a person.
.oo Essays on Conrad
The movies air of pseudo-reality was also inevitably enforced by its
medium. No one reading Boulle could have failed to notice from his
style alone that the book aimed at ironic fantasy, rather than detailed
historical realism; but the camera cant help giving an air of total visual
authenticity; and the effect of this technical authenticity tends to spread
beyond the visual image to the substance of what is portrayed. Every
moviegoer knows in some way that whenever he can check against
his own experience life isnt really like that; but he forgets it most of
the time, especially when the substance of what he sees conforms to his
own psychological or political point of view.
Politically, the movie gave no inkling of the unpleasant facts about
the terrible poverty and disease along the real river Kwai. Instead, the
audience must have taken away some vague impression that the poor
jungle villagers of South-East Asia all have perfect complexions, and y
elaborately lovely kites. They dont. Equally unrealistically, the movie
suggested that beautiful Thai girls dont have any boyfriends until some
handsome white man comes along. Much more dangerously, the movie
incidentally promoted the political delusion less common now than in
:q8 that the people of these poor villages are merely marking time
until they are given an opportunity to sacrice their lives on behalf of
the ideology of the Western powers. All these are examples of the
colonialist attitudes which were also present in the central idea of the
novel: although the Japanese had beaten the Allies in a campaign that,
among other things, showed a remarkable command of very difcult
engineering and transport problems, Boulle presented them as comic-
ally inferior to their captives as bridge builders. Both the novel and the
movie, in fact, contained as a primary assumption the myth of white
superiority whose results we have seen most recently in that same
Vietnam that Boulle had known.
In the movie the bridge itself, of course, also had to be transformed
into a symbol of Western engineering mastery. The form and color of
those two giant cantilevers had a poised serenity which almost justied
Nicholsons infatuation; but it was totally beyond the technical means
and the military needs of the actual bridges over the Kwai; and its great
beauty soon made one forget the sordid realities of the war and the
prison camp. What actually happened was that the movie-makers went
to Thailand, took one look at the Kwai, and saw it wouldnt do. The
area wasnt particularly interesting too at, and not at all wild; there
was already a bridge over the river the real one; and in any case there
wasnt any accommodation in the little provincial town of Karnburi to
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth .o:
match the splendors of the Mount Lavinia Hotel in Ceylon, where
most of the movie was eventually shot.
All this is a normal, perhaps inevitable, part of making movies; and
ones only legitimate objection is that ultimately the pseudo-realism of
Hollywood has the accidental effect of making millions of people think
they are seeing what something is really like when actually they are not.
The biggest departure of the movie both from history and from the
novel was the blowing up of the bridge, which distorted reality in a
rather similar direction. The movie credits read Screenplay by Pierre
Boulle, Based on His Novel. Actually, though Boulle got an Oscar for
the screenplay, he took only a modest part in the preliminary discussions
of the screenplay with Spiegel and Lean: and the real writer who
couldnt then be named was Carl Foreman, who had been black-
listed by Hollywood during the McCarthy era. Pierre Boulle eventually
approved their nal version; but only after hed objected to many of
their changes, and especially to the one which contradicted his whole
purpose: that in the movie the bridge was blown up. He was told that
the audience would have watched the screen for more than two
hours . . . in the hope and expectation of just that big bang; if it didnt
happen they would feel frustrated; and anyway it was quite impossible
to pass up such a sensational bit of action. So, on :. March :q, a
beautiful bridge that had cost a quarter of a million dollars to build was
blown up with a real train crossing it.
Building a bridge just to blow it up again so that the movie public
wont feel frustrated was an unbelievably apt illustration of Boulles
point about how contemporary society employs its awesome techno-
logical means in the pursuit of largely derisory ends.
Boulles readers had been made to think about that; not so the
moviegoers. Their consciences were kept quiet by a well-intentioned
anti-war message the killing of the terried young Japanese soldier,
for example while they were having a rip-roaring time. But, as we all
know, you cant have it both ways. You cant turn an exotic adventure-
comedy into a true lm about war just by dunking it in blood. The lm
only seemed to take up real problems; at the end a big explosion
showed that there was no point in thinking things over when things
will work out nicely anyway, why bother?
In the movie of the Bridge on the River Kwai, then, historical and political
and psychological reality became innitely plastic to the desires of the
audience. All over the world audiences gratefully responded; and in the
end they even caused the myth to be reincarnated where it had begun.
.o. Essays on Conrad
nri xc\nx\+i ox ox +nr kv\i
The decisive phase of a myth is when the story wins a special status for
itself; when people begin to think of it, not exactly as history, but as
something which, in some vague way, really happened; and then, later,
the ction eventually imposes itself on the world as literally true. The
earliest signs of this are normally the erection of shrines, and the
beginning of pilgrimages; but the process of reincarnation is only com-
plete when whatever is left of the truth which conicts with the myths
symbolic meaning is forgotten or transformed. All this has begun to
happen to the myth of the Kwai.
After the war ended, in August :q, and the last train had evacu-
ated the sad remnants of the Japanese army in Burma, silence at last
descended on the railway. Robbers furtively stole the telegraph wire;
termites ate away the wooden sleepers of the line and the timbers of the
bridges; the monsoon rains washed away parts of the embankment;
and sensing that all was normal again, the wild elephants (which few
prisoners had ever seen) once again emerged from the jungle, and,
nding the railway trace a convenient path, leaned against whatever
telegraph poles inconvenienced their passage. By the time that, in :q6,
the Thai government bought the Kwai railway from the Japanese for
about $,ooo,ooo, its track was on the way to being derelict.
Eventually it was decided to keep the railway going only as far up as
a place called Nam Tok, some hundred miles above the bridge over the
Kwai. Nam Tok was probably chosen as terminus because there are
beautiful waterfalls nearby, waterfalls that are very famous in Thai
history and legend. In :q6: the whole area was scheduled as a National
Park; and now three trains a day carry villagers and tourists up to see
the sights.
When I visited Nam Tok in :q66 I found that, just at the end of the
embankment, the local villagers had set up a little shrine. On the altar
table, in front of the little gilded image of the local tutelary deity, or
Chao Tee, there were the usual propitiatory offerings, owers, incense-
sticks, fruit, sweets, candles, paper garlands; but in the place of honor
were two rusty old iron spikes the kind we had used to fasten the rails
to the wooden ties.
There are also other and much vaster shrines near the Tha Makham
bridge: an Allied cemetery for 6,q8. Australian, British and Dutch
prisoners of war; a Roman Catholic chapel just opposite; a Chinese
burial ground for a few of the Asiatic forced-laborers of whom over a
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth .o
hundred thousand died along the Kwai; and a Japanese Memorial to
all the casualties of the railway, including their own. All these shrines are
much visited, as the fresh owers and incense sticks testify: the Japanese
Ambassador regularly lays a wreath at the Japanese Memorial; and
there is an annual commemoration service in the Allied cemetery.
There are also other kinds of pilgrim. In Bangkok, Sincere Travel
Service, for instance, advertises
Tour No. :: Daily: :o a.m. Whole day soft drinks and lunch provided.
The Bridge over River Kwai and the notorious Death Railway of World War
fame is at Karnburi. The tourists will denitely have the joy of their life when
cruising along the real River Kwai on the way to pay a visit to the Chungkai War
Memorial Cemetery, then follows a delicious lunch by the Bridge Over River
Kwai and see the real train rolling across it. All inclusive rate: US $.o. per
person minimum . persons.
The world-wide diffusion of Boulles novel through the cinema, then,
has left its mark on the Kwai. Outside the Karnburi cemetery there
stands today a road sign which reads: Bridge over the River Kwai
..qo kilometres. It points to a real bridge; but it is only worth pointing
to because of the bridge the whole world saw in the movie.
In a recent pictorial guide to Thailand there is an even more strik-
ing example of how the power of the myth is beginning to transform
reality. The book gives a ne photograph of what is actually the Wang
Pho viaduct along a gorge some fty miles further up the line; but the
caption reads Bridge on the River Kwai. Some obscure need, dis-
appointed by the failure of the real bridge over the river Kwai to live up
to the beauty of the one in the movie, has relocated the home of the
myth, and selected the most spectacular view along the railway as a
more appropriate setting.
+nr xv+n \xn +nr nr\ri +v
The myth, then, is established. What does it mean?
When The Bridge on the River Kwai was rst televised it drew the largest
TV audience ever recorded. Millions of people must have responded to
it because among other things it expressed the same delusions as
are responsible for much unreal political thinking. There was, as Ive
already said, the colonial myth the odd notion that the ordinary
people of South-East Asia instinctively love the white strangers who
have come to their lands, and want to sacrice themselves on their
behalf. There was also the implication of the blowing-up of the bridge
.o Essays on Conrad
however muddled we may be about our political aims, advanced
high-explosive technology will always come out on top in the end. The
Big Bang theory of war, of course, tted in very nicely with the consol-
ing illusion of a world of Friendly (and militarily backward) Natives.
The theory, and the illusion, have one fatal weakness: they clash
with what Sartre calls la force des choses.
:
What happened to the real
bridge illustrates this very neatly.
In the summer of :q the new American long-range bombers, the B
.qs, started ying over the Kwai, and bombing the bridges. To anyone
who knows any military history, what happened was absolutely predict-
able. Quite a lot of people, mainly prisoners, were killed; but eventu-
ally the bombers got some direct hits, and two spans of the steel bridge
fell into the river. While it was being repaired, the low wooden bridge
was put back into use; and when that, too, was damaged, it was easily
restored by the labor of the prisoners in the nearby camps. Japanese
military supplies werent delayed for a single day. If you can build a
bridge, you can repair it; in the long run, bombing military targets is
only signicant if the target can later be captured and held.
The Allied command in Ceylon know this very well. They bombed
the Kwai railway then because their armies were advancing in Burma
and preparing to attack Thailand: but this vital context is absent from
the novel and the lm. Actually there were also Allied commandos in
the bridge area at the time: not to blow up the bridge, though, but to
link up with the Thai resistance, and help liberate prison camps once
the invasion started. Boulle probably knew this, since he called his
commandos Force :6, whereas the real ones were Force :6. Still,
Boulles novel certainly undercuts the Big Bang theory, and one imag-
ines that he found in its blind destructive credulity a folly that wasnt
exclusively military. Since :866, and Nobels invention of dynamite, all
kinds of individuals and social groups have attributed magical powers
to dynamite; theyve refused to see that the best you can expect from
explosives is an explosion.
The Big Bang theory of war is rather like the colonial myth, and
even the schoolboy dream of defying the adult world; all three are
essentially expressions of what Freud called the childish delusion of the
omnipotence of thought. The myth of the Kwai deeply reects this
delusion, and shapes it according to the particular values of contemp-
orary culture.
Hollywood, the advertising industry, Existentialism, even the current
counter-culture are alike in their acceptance or their exploitation of the
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth .o
delusion of the omnipotence of thought. From this come many of their
other similarities: that they are ego-centered, romantic, anti-historical;
that they all show a belief in rapid and absolute solutions of human
problems. They are all, in the last analysis, institutional patterns based
on the posture of anti-institutionalism.
These basic assumptions of the myth are perhaps most obvious in
the kernel of the story, which the movie made much more recognizable
as a universal fantasy, the schoolboys perennial dream of defying the
adult world. Young Nicholson cheeks the mean old headmaster, called
Saito: he gets a terrible beating, but the other students kick up such a
row about it that Saito just has to give in. Confrontation tactics win
out; and Nicholson is carried back in triumph across the playground.
In the end, of course, he becomes the best student-body president Kwai
High ever had.
I dont know if anything like this total rebellion combined with
total acceptance has ever occurred in any educational institution; but
I am forced to report that nothing like it ever happened in the prison-
camps along the Kwai. There, all our circumstances were hostile to
individual fantasies; surviving meant accepting the intractable real-
ities which surrounded us, and making sure that our fellow prisoners
accepted them too.
No one would even guess from the novel or the lm that there were
any wholly intractable realities on the Kwai. Boulle proposes a simple
syllogism: war is madness; war is fought by soldiers; therefore, soldiers
are mad. Its a attering notion, no doubt, to non-soldiers, but it hap-
pens not to be true; and its really much too easy a way out to delude
ourselves with the belief that wars and injustices are caused only by
lunatics, by people who dont see things as we see them.
Neither the novel nor the lm admits that certain rational distinctions
remain important even under the most difcult or confusing circum-
stances. They seem instead to derive a peculiar satisfaction from asserting
that in a world of madness the weakness of our collective life can nd its
salvation only in the strength of madmen. There is no need to insist on
the authoritarian nature of this idea, but it does seem necessary to enquire
why these last decades have created a myth which totally subverts the
stubbornness of facts and of the human will to resist unreason.
The basic reason is presumably the widespread belief that institutions
are at the same time immoral, ridiculous, and unreal, whereas indi-
viduals exist in a world whose circumstances are essentially tractable.
A prisoner-of-war camp has at least one thing in common with our
.o6 Essays on Conrad
modern world in general: both offer a very limited range of practical
choices. No wonder the public acclaimed a lm where, under the most
limiting circumstances imaginable, one solitary individual managed to
do just what he planned to do. Of course his triumph depended on
making everything else subservient to his fantasy; and if our circum-
stances on the Kwai had been equally pliable, there would have been
no reason whatever for Toosey or anybody else to act as they did.
Its probably true that at the beginning of our captivity many of us
thought that at last the moment had arrived for revolt, if not against the
Japanese, at least against our own military discipline and anything else
that interfered with our individual liberty. But then circumstances forced
us to see that this would be suicidal. We were terribly short of food,
clothes, and medicine; theft soon became a real threat to everyone; and
so we had to organize our own police. At rst it seemed too ridiculous,
but not for long. When cholera broke out, for instance, whole camps
of Asiatic laborers were wiped out, whereas in our own camps nearby,
with an effective organization to make sure everyone used the latrines
and ate or drank only what had been boiled, we often had no deaths,
even though we had no vaccine.
In the myth, then, the actual circumstances of our experience on the
Kwai were overwhelmed by the deep blindness of our culture both to
the stubbornness of reality and to the continuities of history. It was
surely this blindness which encouraged the public, in accepting the
plausibility of Nicholsons triumph, to assert its belief in the combined
wickedness, folly, and unreality of institutions notably of those which
were in conict on the Kwai: the Japanese and their prisoners.
It isnt only on the walls of the Sorbonne that we can see the slogan
It is forbidden to forbid. It is written on all individuals at birth, in the
form It is forbidden to forbid me; and this text has been adopted to
their great prot by the movie and advertising industries: by Holly-
wood, in the version You dont get rich by saying no to dreams, and
by Madison Avenue in the version Tell em theyre suckers if they
dont have everything they want.
The movie, incidentally, added one apt illustration of this slogan
which had no basis whatever in Boulle or reality. No one wants to be a
prisoner; you dont have to be; and so William Holden escapes, easily.
On the Kwai, hundreds tried; most of them were killed; no one succeeded.
Among todays pilgrims to the present cemeteries on the Kwai, an
increasing number come from the American forces in Thailand and
Vietnam. When I leafed through the Visitors Book, one entry caught
The Bridge over the River Kwai as myth .o
my eye. A private from Apple Creek, Wisconsin, stationed at Da Nang,
had been moved to write a protest that made all the other banal pieties
look pale: rrorrr are STUPID.
Stupid, among other things, because they are mainly led by what
they want to believe, not by what they know. Its easier to go along with
the implication of the movie, and believe that a big bang anywhere
will somehow end the worlds confusion and our own fatigue. It would
undoubtedly end it, but only in larger cemeteries for the victims of the
last Great Joke.
Vietnam has been a painful lesson in the kinds of mythical thinking
which The Bridge on the River Kwai both reected and reinforced; we
seem now to be slowly recovering from some of the political forms of
the omnipotence-of-thought fantasy. Recently, I observed that the main
audience reaction to the movie was ironical laughter.
If we can accept the notion that in all kinds of spheres some individual
has to be responsible for the organization and continuity of human
affairs, we should perhaps look again at the man without whom the
myth would not have come into being. Along the Kwai, Colonel Toosey
was almost universally recognized for what he was a hero of the only
kind we could afford then, and there. For he was led, not by what he
wanted to believe, but by what he knew: he knew that the world would
not do his bidding; that he could not beat the Japanese: that on the
Kwai even more obviously than at home we were for the most part
helpless prisoners of coercive circumstance. But he also knew that if
things were as intractable as they looked, the outlook for the years
ahead was hopeless: much death, and total demoralization, for the
community he found himself in. The only thing worth working for was
the possibility that tenacity and imagination could nd a way by which
the chances of decent survival could be increased. It was, no doubt, a
very modest objective for so much work and restraint two of Conrads
moral imperatives that Boulle didnt quote, incidentally; but in our
circumstances then on the Kwai, the objective was quite enough to be
getting on with; as it is here, now.
xo+r
: The force of things as they are.
.o8 Index
Index
.o8
Academy .
Achebe, C. 86, 88, q
Adams, V. de lIsle
adults, defying .o
adventure-story motifs :
Africa see Heart of Darkness
agents, literary 8q
see also Pinker
agents provocateurs ::8, ::q, :.:
alienation 8
and commitment ::q
dened 6
allegory 6
Almayers Folly ix, .o6, :o
Authors Note 68
beginnings .o
critics, reception by q, q6o
and reputation :, :8:, :8.
language and style q
literary inuences ., q
manuscript .q
narrative and action .., ., 6o
point of view, theme and meaning 6o
typescript, acceptance and publication
.q6, 6.
writing .8
Amiel, H. F.
anaphora 6
anarchism see Secret Agent
Anderson, Sir R. :::, ::6, :.
anti-hero :
anti-pathetic fallacy o
Armitage (doctor) ::
Arrow of Gold :, :q, :8o, :8:
artist, novelist as see Flaubert
Asquith, Lord A. ::q
Athenum q, ., o
Atlantic Monthly o, :
audience/readers .
alienation from 8, q::
for Almayers Folly :,
Authors Notes and prefaces
Almayers Folly 68
Chance q:o, ::
Nigger of the Narcissus :o::, :., o, :, :8.
Personal Record :o
Secret Agent ::., ::, ::6, :.o
Shadow-Line :6
Twixt Land and Sea :.8
Typhoon :o
Autocracy and War :.
Azev ( Russian secret police) :::8, :.o
Baines, J. :o8
Bakunin, M. A. ::q, :.
Barker, A. J. ::
Baudelaire, C. 8, :6o
Beach, J. W. :6
Beach, T. M. (Major H. Le Caron) :::6
Becke, L. ., q
Bguin, A.
Belgian Congo see Heart of Darkness
Bennett, A. :, :.
Benson, C. :
Besant, W. 6
Big Bangs and war .o:, .o
biographers, major .:, :, 6, ::
family members :8q, :q:
Black Mate .:
Blackwood, J. 8
Blackwoods Magazine 8
Bloom, H. :
Bobrowski, T. :, ., ., .8, 6
Boigne, Comptesse de :8.
Bookman
Borneo see Almayers Folly
Boulle, P.: Bridge over the River Kwai x,
:q., :q.o passim
Bourdin (anarchist) ::, ::, ::6, ::, ::8, :.:,
:..
Bradbrook, M. ::
Brando, M. q
Index .oq
Bridge over the River Kwai as myth :8,
:q..o
lm :qq.o:, .o passim
novel see Boulle
and reality :q.6, .o
reincarnation of .o.
Brooke, Sir J. .
Brown, E. K. :6
Bulwer-Lytton, H. 8
Byron, Lord G. q
cannibalism 8
Canning, E. ::.
Canterbury cemetery, Conrads grave in
:86q:
Capes, H.
caricature 8o
Carnot, S. :.
Caron, Major H. le (T. M. Beach) ::6
Casement, R. q:.
Caserio (anarchist) :.
Chance :, :q, :o
Authors Note q:o, ::
and critics opinions on reputation ::,
:6, :q8:
solidarity in :.
characterization :.., :8.
Almayers Folly .., , 66o
Bridge over River Kwai :q, :q8
Chance :.
comic see comedy under Typhoon
Nigger of the Narcissus 6, :, , 88:
Rescue :
Rover :8
Secret Sharer :o.
Shadow-Line :6: passim, :6, :6
Chateaubriand, F. R., Vicomte de q
Chaucer, G. :
Chesson, W. H. :, ., 8
Christianity :6
chronological shifts see obscurity
Clair, W. G. St .
class 8.
clich 8:, q, :.
stereotyping see race
Coleridge, S. T. o
colonialism , 8, 88q:, q
and Bridge over the River Kwai .oo,
.o, .o
see also Heart of Darkness
Colvin, Sir S. :, :
comedy and humour 6
see also under Typhoon
commitment
and alienation ::q
Commonweal ::
Congo see Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph
major works in chronological order :o8
rst group (:8q:qo) see Almayers Folly;
Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim; Mirror of
the Sea; Nigger of the Narcissus; Nostromo;
Outcast of the Islands; Secret Agent; Secret
Sharer; Typhoon
second group (:q::.) see Chance;
Personal Record; Rescue; Rover; Shadow-Line;
Under Western Eyes; Victory
wife and family .:, ., :6:, :86q:
see also sailor, Conrad as
Conrad Korzeniowski, A. B. and J. (Conrads
sons) :88, :8qqo, :q:
Conrad Korzeniowski, J. R. T. and P. S. T.
(Conrads grandsons) :q:
consciousness
as curse
and knowledge
registering :6, :
Coppola, F. q
Cottin, E. ::
Couch, Sir A. Quiller :o8
Coulon, A. ::
Courtney, W. L. :., :, :8
Critic o
critics
Almayers Folly q, q6o
Heart of Darkness ix, 8q6
major see Forster; Garnett, E.; Gurard;
Leavis; Woolf, L. and V.
Secret Sharer :.8
Shadow-Line :., :, :6., :6
Typhoon q8, :o., :o8
see also under Nigger of the Narcissus
cryptophor 6, 8
Cunninghame Graham, R. B. , 8, q., ::.,
::, :.:, :., :o
Curle, R. :, ::, :8, :88, :8q, :qo
Daily Chronicle o, .
Daily News q, o
Daily Telegraph :.
darkness theme ::, :q6:
see also Heart of Darkness
Dawes, C. q
decivilized art 8
dedication see commitment
Defoe, D. viii
despair and depression , :., :6o:
see also alienation
determinism
Dial o
.:o Index
Diamond, S. 8
Dickens, C.
Disraeli, B.
Doody, M. A. viii
Doubleday, N. :8
duality ::6, ::
Dupee, F. W. :
Dynamite :
economic necessity and solidarity ::
Edinburgh Review 6
Egan, P. ::6
Eliot, G. , :.
Eliot, T. S. :, ., , :, :6, .,
Empire see colonialism
End of Tether :
England see Secret Agent
English language see language
English Review ::q, :
evolutionism , , o
Existentialism ::, :, :, :q8, .o
Fanon, F. q.
Faulkner, W. ::8, q., :8
Fnton, F. :.
Fenians ::6, :.:
Fielding, H. ::.
lm see under Bridge over the River Kwai
nance and sales 8, , , :8, :o, :8:
rst book see Almayers Folly
Fitzgerald, F. S. :8
Flaubert, G. 8, :
and Almayers Folly :, ., , 8, 6q
Ford, F. M. ::
and Almayers Folly 6, .
and Conrads reputation ::, :8, :q
and Jamess inuence :, :, :, :6,
:
and Secret Agent ::, ::6:, ::8.:, :..
Foreman, C. .o:
Forster, E. M. ., 68, :oq, :o, :8
and Shadow-Line :., :6
Francis, J. :.8
Freud, S. / Freudian , 6, ::, .o
further vision .
future ::8, q
Fyne, J. :
Galsworthy, J. q, :6, :., :8, :, ::, :8
Gapon, Father G. A. ::q, :.o
Garnett, C. :.
Garnett, E. 8, :., :., :qo
and Almayers Folly ., , 6,
and Jamess inuence :, :, :6, :,
:8
and opinions on reputation ::, :, :6, :
Shadow-Line :.
Garnett, O. :
Ghon, H. ::
Gide, A. ::
Glasgow Evening News :
Glasgow Herald q
Godwin :.
Gordan, J. .6
Gosse, E. o, :, :8, :
Gould, G. :
Graham see Cunninghame Graham
grammar see language
Greek chorus analogy :
Greene, G. :6, :8, :8:
Greenwich explosion ::., :::, ::, ::8,
:.o, :.:
Guardian ., :
guardian see Bobrowski
Gurard, A. ::, ::
and Almayers Folly q, 6, 66, , 6,
Shadow-Line :6, :q, :6
Guinness, A. x
Haggard, Sir H. Rider 8, q
Harcourt, Sir W. ::6, ::8
Hardy, T. q, :q
Haugh, R. F. .
Heart of Darkness , , :
critics ix, 8q6
on reputation ::, :, :8o, :8:
and James :, ::
solidarity in :6:
symbolism in ::
Hegel, G. 6, 8
Hemingway, E. :8q, :8:
Henry James: An Appreciation :8q, :q
heterophor 6, 8, :66
Hewitt, D. ::, :., :8o
Hewlett, M. :
Hicks, J. 6o
historical events, books based on ::., :.8o
Secret Agent see Greenwich explosion
historical perspective :6.
homeophor 8, 8o, :66
Howe, I. :..
Hugo, V. 68, 6q
Hulme, T. E. 6q
humble people ix, 8
Hume, D. q
humour see comedy and humour
Huysman, J. K.
Ibsen, H. 6
ideal values :, :66
Index .::
ideas
experience correcting :o8q
importance of :.
see also Shadow-Line
identication ..
illusion 6
imperialism see colonialism
impressionism :6, :
individualism
Ireland :::6, :.:
irony 6
Jacques, W. H. .6
James, Mrs C. :
James, H., inuence of ix, :, :, q, ::,
:8q
and Almayers Folly 6, 8, 66, 8o
and Chance :, :q
early relationship :o
later years :o
and opinions on reputation ::., :
Japanese prison camps see Bridge over the
River Kwai
Jean-Aubry, G. :
Johnson, S. 66, :6
Joll, J. :..
Joyce, J. ., , :6, ., 6q, :8
Jung, C. / Jungian , 6, ::
Karl, F. R. :, ::
Keeting, G. :8q
Kermode, F. viixi
Kibera, A. 88
Kipling, R. , q
Kliszczewski, S. :..
knowledge and consciousness
Korzeniowski, A. (Conrads father) .:
Korzeniowski, J. (Conrads wife) ., :6:,
:86q: passim
Korzeniowski, Jozef see Conrad
Kropotkin, Prince P. ::8, ::q, :., :.
Kwai see Bridge over the River Kwai
labour of others ix, 8
Lagoon q
language 8, :
Lardner, R. :8
Lawrence, D. H. , ::, :., :8
Lean, D. x, :qq, .o:
Leavis, F. R.
and opinions on reputation :., :,
:
and Shadow-Line :6., :6
and Typhoon q8
Leopold, King of Belgians 8, qo
Letters
and alienation 6, 8
and Almayers Folly . passim, , .,
8
and critics opinions on reputation :o:
and Heart of Darkness q:.
and James, inuence of :, :8q,
::, :8, :q
and Secret Agent ::.:, :..
liberalism :6
Lingard, J. ..
Lingard, W. .., ., ., , :
literary inuences in Almayers Folly ., q
literary modes :o
Conrads divergence from see obscurity
Literary News :
Lomasney, M. :.:
London Mercury q
Lord Jim , q8, ::, :., :o, ::, :8
and critics opinions on reputation :,
:, :6, :8o, :8
and James :, :
origin of ::.
and Shadow-Line compared :6, :6, :6
solidarity in :.:
Loti, P. q
love, romantic o:, :, :8o:
as uncongenial subject 6o
see also Chance
Lubbock, P. 66
Lynd, R. :., :
McArthur, J. :
McCarthy, Joseph .o:
McCarthy, Justin
MacDonald, R. :.
McLauchlan, J. 6o
Macmillan Company
magic realism viii
Malaya see Almayers Folly
Mallarm, S. :.
Manchester Guardian ., :
Mann, T. , :6, :o.
Marris, Captain C. M. :.
Marx, K. 6, :.
Marxism and materialism :, :
Maseeld, J. :.8
materialism see Marxism
Matthews, H. ::6
Maupassant, G. de :., 8
Maurois, A. :q8
mechanistic view see technology
Meldrum, D. S. :.
Melville, H. , , 6
memory q
.:. Index
Mencken, H. L. q, :o8
Meredith, G. :.
Meredith, I. ::
Methuen (publisher) q, ::, :.:
Meyer, B. ::
Meynell, A.
Mezentzev, General :.
Middleton, Rector :8q
Mikhailovich, S. (Stepniak) ::8, ::q, :.
Miller, J. E. .
Mirror of the Sea :o, :
money see nance
morality and value systems q:, :, :8:.
Nigger of the Narcissus 66, o, 8:, 8.
see also philosophy of life
Morf, G. 6o
Morris, W. :.
Mortimer, R. :
Moser, T. q6o, ::, :8o:
Most, J. :.
movie see under Bridge over the River Kwai
Mudrick, M. 66, 68, 6q, :, , 8q,
8o, ::
Mursia, U. q
Musset, A. de 6q
mythophor 6
myths xxi
see also Bridge over the River Kwai
Naipaul, V. S. q
Najder, Z. .:, 6, ::
names of characters q
narrator see point of view
Nation o, :
National Observer
nationality of Conrad , 8q
Nature
Man as alien in , 6
see also night theme; storms
nearer vision .
Nechaev, S. G. :.
New Statesman :, :
New York Times .
Newman, J. 6
Nicholson, J. x
Nicoll, D. ::, ::, ::, ::6, ::, :.:
Nigger of the Narcissus , :o, ::
critics ix, 68
narrative point of view 6:
opinions on reputation :8o, :8.
symbolism :8
humour in :o8
and James :, :, :o, :
preface to :o::, :., o, :, :8.
and Shadow-Line ::, :
solidarity in :.
Typhoon comparison :oq
night theme ::, :q6:
Nobel, A. .o
North American Review :, :q
Northcliffe, Lord A. :.
Nostromo :, q, :., :, :, :o
and critics opinions on reputation :.,
:, :, :q, :8o, :8:
obituaries of Conrad :88o
objectivity 8.
obscurity ., :o
see also point of view
oceans see sailing
OConnor, T. P. :, .,
Olmeijer, C. W. .o, .:., ., ., ., 8,
q
Orwell, G. 8.
other people, alienation from 6
other self :o:
Outcast of the Islands ., , :, :, ::
Palmer, J. ::, :
Parnell, C. S. ::6
Pater, W. 6q
pathetic fallacy o
Payne, W. M. o
Personal Record
and Almayers Folly .o, .:., ., 8, :,
, 8, 6:
preface to :o
pessimism :
Phelps, W. L. :
philosophy of life :66
lack of :.
see also ideal values; morality
Piddington, H. :oo
Pinker, J. B. :o8, :.8
pity q8o
Plato :66, :6
point of view / narrator :
Almayers Folly , 6o
Chance :
Nigger of the Narcissus 6:
Shadow-Line :6:, :6
Victory :
political themes see Secret Agent; Under Western
Eyes
Poradowska, M. 8, .6 passim, q, , :,
:6:
post-colonialism q
Pound, E. ., , :, :6, .
Powys, J. Cowper :
prefaces see Authors Notes
Index .:
prisoners of war see Bridge over the River
Kwai
progress ,
Proudhon, P. J. :.
Proust, M. 6q, 8o
pseudo-reality see lm under Bridge over the
River Kwai
public see audience
publishers 8q, ::, :.:
see also Unwin
Punch :6
purple style 68:
qualiers, excess of 8
Quiller Couch, Sir A. :o8
Quinn, J. ., :q, :, :
race and racism
Almayers Folly :,
Heart of Darkness 8q
savages, concept of , 8qo
see also Nigger of the Narcissus
Rafes, Sir S. .
readers see audience
realism/reality viiviii
and Bridge over the River Kwai as
myth :q.6, .o
relativism :q
repetition 6, 8, :o6
reputation and decline debate ., :o8
critics attitudes :o8:
Watts attitude :8:
Rescue :, :6, :q, :8:
retrospective method
Return :
Rvolt :.
Revue des Deux Mondes .q,
rhetoric 68:
Rice, D.
Richardson, S. vii
romanticism
and dichotomy between author and
reader 8
style of Nigger of the Narcissus 68:,
8
see also love
Rosenbach, A. S. W. .6
Rossetti, D. G.
Rossetti, H. and O. ::
Rossetti, W. M. ::, :.
Roussel, R. 6o
Rover ::, :o, :q, :8:, :8.
Ruskin, J.
Russia, attitude to ::8.o, :.., :.
see also Under Western Eyes
sailing and ships :., 8, :.qo
as setting see Almayers Folly; Nigger of the
Narcissus; Secret Sharer; Shadow-Line;
Typhoon
sailor, Conrad as , :.qo
and Almayers Folly .o:, ., .6
end of career .
and Shadow-Line :, :6
sales see nance and sales
Samuels, H. B. ::, ::, :.:, :..
Sanderson, E. L. o,
Sartre, J.-P. :
Saturday Review q, :
scene see setting
Schwarz, D. ::
Schweitzer, A. 88
science see technology
Scotsman q
Scott, Sir W. 8q
sea see sailing
Secret Agent q, :o, ::..6, :., :o
Authors Note ::., ::, ::6, :.o
critics opinions on reputation :o, :.,
:, :8o, :8:
and Wells :
Secret Sharer :., :..
critics :.8, :
and Shadow-Line compared :, :q
Seligmann-Lui, G.
Seliwertsow, General :.:
setting o:, :8.
see also Africa; sailing and ships; South
America; South-east Asia
Shadow-Line :., 8, :.qo, ::, :.6q
Authors Note :6
and critics opinions on reputation :,
:8o, :8.
rst chapter, slowness of :
historical perspective :6.
and Lord Jim compared :6, :6, :6
narrative :6:
symbolism and ideal values :68
Shakespeare, W. :
Shaw, G. B. :6, :o8, :.
Sheppard, Father E. H. :88
Sherry, N. ::., ::, ::6, :6
ships see sailing and ships; sailor
shrines and pilgrimages .o.
Shuvalov, Count P. A. :.:
Singh, F. qo, q:
Sketch
Smith, A. R. :86, :8, :88
Smith, S. :.8, :.q
social background to Secret Agent ::..6
socialism :.
.: Index
solidarity :.:q, 8
Soskice, D. :.
sources of books see historical events
South America see Nostromo
South-east Asia see Almayers Folly; Bridge
over the River Kwai; Secret Sharer
Speaker :
Spectator o
Spencer, H.
Spiegel, S. :qq, .o:
Stallman, R. W. 6, 6, :.
Starobinski, J. q
Stepniak (S. Mikhailovich) ::8, ::q, :.
stereotyping see race
Stevenson, R. L. q,
stilted style 6
storms see Secret Sharer; Typhoon
Straits Times
style :6, :8o, :8:
economic ::
grandiose rhetoric 68:, :.
and language q
Sunday Times q
survival, posthumous 8
Suspense :8.
symbolism ::
Nigger of the Narcissus :8
see also night theme; storms
symbolism and ideal values
Shadow-Line :68
Symons, A. ., :.
Synge, J. M. 6
syntax see language
Tales of Unrest :8o
tautology 6
technology
derisory ends of :q8, .o:
Tennyson, Lord A.
Tey, J. ::.
theme
single unied
see also darkness theme; setting
time shifts see obscurity
Times ., ::6, :qo
Times Literary Supplement q, :, ::, :,
:8o, :8.
Tolstoy, L. :, :.
Toosey, Colonel P. :q6, :qq, .o6, .o
Torch ::, ::q.o
tourism and Bridge over the River Kwai .o
Tradition :
Trollope, A. :
Twixt Land and Sea :., :.8, :o, :
Two Vagabonds .
Typhoon 8
Authors Note :o
comedy and humour in ix, q:::
Conrads intention :o:q
rst chapters q8:o
last chapter :o6
critics q8, :o., :o8, :8o
solidarity in :.
Unamuno, M. de q
unconscious 6, ::
Under Western Eyes :., :q, :o
and critics opinions on reputation :.,
:, :, :8o, :8:
Unwin, T. F. o, :, ., , q,
Vaillant (anarchist) :.
value systems see morality
values, ideal :, :66
Victorians , , 8
see also colonialism
Victory , :qq
and critics opinions on reputation :.,
:, :6, :8o, :8:, :8.
solidarity in :., :, :6
Vinci, L. de :
visual imagery
vocabulary problems 6
Voltaire, F. :6
Walpole, H. .,
war, prisoners of see Bridge over the River
Kwai
Watts, C. o
Waugh, A. o
Wedgwood, R. :88
Weekly Sun :.
Wells, H. G. :6, :, , :o8, :, :, :
Westminster Gazette q
Wharton, E. :, :8
William the Conqueror 8q
Within the Tides ::
Woolf, L. :8
Woolf, V. o, :6, :6, :q8o, :8:.
Wordsworth, W. 8, :o
World .
writing difculties .8q, ::
Yeats, W. B. ., , :6, :
Young, V. , , 6,
Youth :o, :, ::, :8o
youth, passage from see Shadow-Line
Zabel, M. D. :
Zola, E. ., o, 6