Laurence Davies et al, editors
THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF JOSEPH CONRAD, VOLS 6–9
Joseph Conrad; edited by J. H. Stape
NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS
John Stape
THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD
Carola M. Kaplan et al
CONRAD IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
For full book details see the end of the article
You don’t hear very much about gout any more. None of the meat-eating drinkers
I know seems to suffer from it, you don’t read about it in the papers, and,
unlike consumption or the pox, it doesn’t now appear under another name. You
might almost think it vanished along with the rubicund gentleman in
knee-breeches whom we imagine as its principal victims, and it therefore
comes as a shock, in reading The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, to
learn of the degree to which it afflicted that lean and grizzled figure. His
attacks were frequent and severe, and though he didn’t have a diagnosis
until 1898, when “gout or some other devil” so inflated his wrist that he
was unable to write, his legs first began to swell soon after his return
from the Congo in 1890. It punctuated book after book, it broke his rhythm
and kept him in bed, incapable – or so it seemed to him – of writing
anything but one letter of complaint after another. There were other
illnesses too. He never fully shook off the malaria he caught in Africa; its
recurrent fevers would leave him shouting in Polish. There was dysentery,
influenza, angina eventually, and some form of depression almost always,
with a full breakdown in 1910 after the completion of Under Western Eyes
(published in 1911).
Both his children were desperately sick during the writing of The Secret Agent
(1907), when Conrad – a critical but not yet a commercial success – was
without enough ready cash to pay the doctor’s bills. His wife, Jessie, lived
in constant pain that both necessitated and was exacerbated by a twenty-year
series of operations on her knees. Their oldest son, Borys, would know the
effects of gas and shell shock. The difficulties Conrad faced were real;
however detailed his account of his symptoms, the novelist was no
hypochondriac. In some way, though, he almost always managed to conquer
them. In 1899, he wrote of lacking “the belief . . . to make me put pen to
paper”, as though a year that included both “Heart of Darkness” and Lord Jim
(1900) were somehow unproductive. In 1917 he described himself, in a letter
to Edward Garnett, as feeling “broken up – or broken in two – disconnected.
Impossible to start myself going impossible to concentrate to any good
purpose. Is it the war – perhaps? Or the end of Conrad simply?”. He had
written almost nothing in the previous year, and yet was soon productive
once more; it hardly matters that his next novel, The Arrow of Gold (1919),
would be his worst.
Last year was the 150th anniversary of Conrad’s birth, an occasion marked by
John Stape’s new biography, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, a Penguin
repackaging of Conrad’s major works, and the completion of the Cambridge
University Press edition of all his surviving letters. Still, anyone reading
the later volumes of his correspondence will have on their minds not his
birth, but his death, in 1924. The seven years covered by Volumes Six to
Eight are like a long slow fading of the light. From his last decade, only
The Shadow-Line (1917) can stand with his best books, and by Volume Eight
Conrad has reached a point at which he can merely hope to work; he mutters
about the distractions of journalism, but remains too worn out for anything
more sustained. In another sense, however, these are years of triumph, the
years when Conrad found his largest audience and became in some measure a
public figure. His 1913 novel, Chance, had become an unlikely bestseller.
Marketed as “a sea story that appeals to women”, its narration was as
maddeningly indirect as anything in his oeuvre. But it did at least tell a
familiar story of romantic rescue, in which an upright sailor saves a
troubled young woman from the tangles of her past. Ten thousand copies of
the American edition went in the first week alone, and, once those readers
had arrived, they stayed.
Later books did even better. In Britain, his last novel, The Rover (1924),
sold 30,000 copies in not much more than a month, and the boom was
accompanied by a growing demand for his earlier work. There were movie deals
and theatrical adaptations; there was a collected edition for which Conrad
wrote a set of gruff avuncular prefaces. His only visit to America was in
1923 for a publicity tour, a trip made just fifteen months before his death.
He gave just one reading, at a private house in New York, but there were
reporters on the dock when he arrived; he enjoyed being lionized, but took
to his bed as soon as he was back home in Kent. Ramsay MacDonald offered a
knighthood; Oxford and Cambridge honorary degrees; all were refused. Yet
Conrad in his last years worked hard at tending his posterity, paying close
attention to translations and doing his best to massage what his critics
might say; he even revised an
overview of his career written for the TLS in 1923 by his disciple
Richard Curle. By then Conrad rejected, sometimes angrily, any
identification as a “spinner of sea-yarns”, arguing that “the nature of my
writing runs the risk of being obscured by the nature of my material”. The
sea was a “biographical matter, not literary”. It would be some time before
his readers took the point.
The CUP edition of Conrad’s letters now stands at the centre of any account of
his working life as a writer. Its first volume appeared twenty-five years
ago, and collects the correspondence of his first forty years, including his
early life in Poland and his whole career at sea. Inevitably there are gaps.
Later volumes, in contrast, cover just three or four years, and allow for a
minute, almost day-by-day reconstruction of his activities. When the volumes
under review here begin, Conrad was living in a modest farmhouse just north
of Romney Marsh; he had moved his family there in 1910, before his years of
success, and remained until 1919, then settling outside Canterbury.
His most frequent correspondent was, as always, his agent, J. B. Pinker.
Pinker was a help to many writers – his clients included both H. G. Wells
and Henry James – but to Conrad he was something more. He managed the
family’s accounts, supplied Jessie Conrad with a regular cheque for
housekeeping, and did his best to keep the novelist on an allowance. Conrad
in turn would write to him for small sums and sometimes even for office
supplies, fountain pens and particular marks of writing paper. For most of
his career he regularly outspent his earnings. By the time of Under Western
Eyes he owed Pinker £2,700 and had accused the agent of treating him “as a
journeyman joiner”; their resulting quarrel undoubtedly contributed to
Conrad’s breakdown. But Conrad knew what he owed him, in every sense, and
repaying his confidence was one of the pleasures of success.
Conrad wrote to Pinker almost every week, and often sent him two notes in a
day. But the most interesting correspondence here is that with the American
collector John Quinn. A New York lawyer, Quinn began to buy Conrad’s papers
in 1911 and eventually acquired the manuscripts of almost all his important
work; some of it in fragments only, for in the early years Conrad did not
always keep close track of his things. The two never met, but the novelist
did write a series of confidential letters to Quinn, many of them on public
affairs. A letter from 1918, for example, not only looks sceptically at Ezra
Pound, but also describes the Russian Revolution in terms of the opportunity
and danger it presents for Conrad’s native Poland, a nation in which “the
Western world took no interest. Fine words have been given to it before. And
the finer the words the greater was always the deception”. Possibly Conrad
was aware of giving good value, of keeping a customer interested – he had,
after all, received $10,000 from the New Yorker. In another sense, however,
the worldly Quinn was an ideal audience for the writer of Nostromo (1904).
Still, Conrad couldn’t resist the temptation to sell a few manuscripts
elsewhere, and when Quinn learned of it their relationship cooled. He was
not Quinn’s only interest. The lawyer also bought pictures, as well as
manuscripts from Joyce and Eliot among others, and he put his Conrad
materials up for auction in 1923. The sale price topped $100,000, and Conrad
received a few notes of commiseration – if only he had held a few things
back! Yet he took it all with a certain mordant pleasure. It was one more
sign of his new popularity, and the figure was enough to ensure that “People
who never heard of me before will now know my name”.
That late success has, however, always presented Conrad scholarship with some
difficulties, and his critics must all come to terms with Thomas Moser’s
1957 analysis of the novelist’s “achievement and decline”. Nothing from
Chance onwards can match his earlier work, and yet those were the books that
sold. Why? What happened? Moser suggests that Conrad could not handle a
“sexual subject”, could not reconcile a romantic theme to his sense of moral
isolation. In his analysis, the very thing that made Conrad’s late work
popular is also what made it go off, and probably he’s right that the
novelist would always have had difficulty with such material. It may be
impossible to forget characters like Emilia Gould in Nostromo or Natalia
Haldin in Under Western Eyes, but such idealized figures are not what we
read him for. Still, one can accept Moser’s estimation of Conrad’s later
work and yet disagree with his sense of the reason why. I would instead join
with Conrad’s best biographer, Zdislaw Najder, in seeing his turn to that
material “rather as a symptom of his weariness than as the cause of his
decline”. He was fifty-two when he finished Under Western Eyes, and he never
again attempted a “political” novel. Instead he began to pluck old
manuscripts from his drawer, to go back to the fragments he had once put
aside. Even The Shadow-Line dates, at least in conception, from the earliest
years of his career. From Chance on, his backlist had a new value, and so
Conrad made sure that there was more of it, knowing that “all I can leave to
my people will be my copyrights”.
One minor part of that backlist was the volume of essays called Notes on Life
and Letters (1921). Conrad did not produce a substantial body of occasional
writing. His success in a language he learned only as an adult may, in this
postcolonial age, seem slightly less remarkable than it did to his English
contemporaries, but he never developed the easy prolix fluency on which the
magazines of his period relied. His non-fiction has the defects of his
virtues as a novelist: he cannot stick to the point and backs his way into
the most elliptically defined of subjects. His “Author’s Note” to the
collection starts with a kind of apology, presenting it as “a process of
tidying up which from the nature of things can not be regarded as
premature”, and in his own editorial introduction to a new edition of the
book, J. H. Stape quotes Ian Watt’s observation that “Conrad was a good
literary critic who was bad at writing literary criticism”. That statement
has the truth of paradox. The collection’s dozen-odd “notes” on writers from
Turgenev to Stephen Crane seem merely dutiful in comparison to what Conrad
says about books in his letters. Certainly nothing here matches his
extraordinarily observant 1922 correspondence with the translator C. K.
Scott Moncrieff on Proust’s creative method and temperament. Of more
interest are the book’s political pieces: the flashes of memory in “Poland
Revisited”, the two essays on the loss of the Titanic, or the Russophobic
meditation on the course of European history in “Autocracy and War”.
The editing in this volume, as in the Cambridge edition as a whole, is both
meticulous and exhaustive. Variants have been tracked and the house styles
of Conrad’s various publishers allowed for, while Stape’s introduction
provides not only a history of the book’s genesis and reception, but a
detailed account of the role that such fugitive pieces played in Conrad’s
career. The notes follow Conrad’s every allusion, and the back alleys of his
period too; as do the notes to Conrad’s letters themselves, in two volumes
of which Stape has also had a hand. Stape’s editorial work includes as well
a fine volume in the Cambridge Companion series, and it has made him an
inescapable presence in Conrad scholarship: authoritative as to fact, and
generous in sharing his knowledge with other students. He would seem the
perfect choice to write the Conrad biography for this generation, as
Najder’s 1981 volume was for the last one.
The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is nevertheless a curious and in some ways
unsatisfying production. The title speaks to Conrad’s own division of his
life into three parts, “as Pole, as seaman, and as writer”, a division that
has provided an important interpretative model (for example, in Frederick R.
Karl’s 1979 biography). To Stape, a reliance on that division serves,
however, “to neglect unduly other, more intimate sides of him, other
‘lives’, as husband, father, and friend, roles that undoubtedly enriched and
variously influenced his fiction”. He offers an account of those other lives
“to the extent that documents . . . allow”, but his version of Conrad is
also “deliberately constrained”. This is not a critical biography, and Stape
says little either about the works themselves or about the way they draw on
Conrad’s own experiences; those wanting an account of his reading, or of
just how much he did and didn’t know about the anarchist world of The Secret
Agent, will have to look elsewhere. Stape does, however, give a fine
portrait of the shabby London milieu in which Conrad lived between his
periods of employment at sea, in streets such as Pimlico’s Bessborough
Gardens that were then split between boarding houses and brothels. He also
provides the fullest account yet of Conrad as a parent, describing him
playing with his children, concerned about their schooling, and proud of
Borys’s military service. (Though Borys would give him trouble, marrying a
woman whom both parents thought unsuitable, living beyond his means, and in
later life imprisoned for fraud.) Stape is especially good on Conrad’s
different illnesses, and in showing just how little peace the writer’s new
prosperity gave him.
Biography calls for different skills than editing. The fact-driven positivism
that makes Stape’s work on Conrad’s essays so successful here gives his
narrative a headlong quality. He rarely lingers over an incident or a
relationship, but instead moves quickly on to whatever is next, and then
next again. We get dates and names, but not texture. Najder shares Stape’s
commitment to chronology, and to fact; both writers avoid the Freudian
accounts to which Conrad has been too frequently subjected, by the post-war
generation of American critics in particular. But Najder’s biography –
especially valuable in its understanding of Conrad’s Polish world – remains
the one to read. Still, Stape’s emphasis makes me question the possibility
of anyone writing a genuinely great biography of Conrad. Both his childhood
and his marriage remain under-documented, inviting a psychoanalytic reading
of the kind that tries to make speculation seem definitive. It would take a
Dostoevsky – whom he hated – to render the emotional disturbances, the
privation, of Conrad’s boyhood. His part of Poland lay under Tsarist rule,
and when his father was condemned for his rather minor role in a failed
patriotic uprising, both the child and his mother went with him into an
exile far to the north-east of Moscow. Conrad’s mother died of tuberculosis
when he was five, his father when he was twelve; and the intervening years
were spent in a house of mourning.
Testimony of any kind is scarce here, and Conrad’s marriage presents a
different set of lacunae. Nobody supposes his 1896 union with the cheerful
but stolid Jessie George to have been very satisfying, though she always
maintained that an intellectual equal would not have suited his nerves as
she did. Yet the most assiduous research has not been able to make him into
anything other than a faithful husband, and the novelist left no written
record of the marriage itself. There are no diaries, and on this issue his
correspondence with such friends as Pinker or Garnett is as reticent as if
the couple were one person in fact as well as law. The Conrads were rarely
apart, and exchanged few letters until near the very end of his life, when
their different troubles left him bedridden at home while she was in
hospital for another knee operation. Those letters are moving in their
statement of his love and need.
The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad adds some nuance to our picture of Conrad’s
life, but does not change the broad outlines of our understanding. What does
continue to change our sense of him is the development in Conrad criticism
for which Chinua Achebe’s 1975 lecture “An Image of Africa: Racism in
Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” provides a convenient shorthand. That attack
on Conrad’s depiction of Africa and Africans, its view of Conrad as a
“bloody racist”, has been attacked in turn, its overstatements discounted,
its argument sifted for error. Achebe’s target, however, wasn’t so much
Conrad as a European habit of rhetoric to which, and despite his explicit
criticism of imperialism, the novelist himself was not immune. The essay
remains a founding document in postcolonial criticism, and in Conrad studies
marked a shift in the interpretative paradigm: a move away from the old mix
of Freud and the New Criticism and into a series of more fully historicized
and political readings. Of course, in recent decades almost all critical
practice has moved in that direction; but, given his material, such a change
has had with Conrad an extra degree of relevance and success. It has served
to link what had once seemed the two halves of his career, making “Heart of
Darkness” into a kind of hinge that connects the eastern, seagoing books to
the political novels that followed them. It has brought to light the degree
to which, for all its variations of subject and setting, Conrad’s work
remains all manifold and one; an oeuvre in which he consistently presents,
as Nostromo puts it, “the working of the usual public institutions . . . as
a series of calamities overtaking private individuals”.
Conrad in the Twenty-First Century demonstrates some of the attractions of
that contextualized approach. The title plays on that of Ian Watt’s summa
and synthesis of postwar scholarship, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century
(1979), and the seventeen contributors provide an essential snapshot of
Conrad criticism today. Benita Parry offers a provocative look at the way
“Heart of Darkness” comes to us “already glossed”; Mark Wollaeger reads the
tale in a way that allows him to explore the interrelations of Modernism and
propaganda. Padmini Mongan defines Conrad’s presence in anglophone South
Asian fiction today, Peter Mallios provides a shrewd analysis of The Secret
Agent in the period immediately after the destruction of the World Trade
Center, and Carola Kaplan gives us an account of Conrad’s construction of
masculinity in Under Western Eyes among other works. In general, the volume
is strong in its treatment of gender, a growth area in recent years and one
that among older critics only Moser anticipated.
The jewel is Mallios’s interview with Edward Said, conducted shortly before
his death in 2003, an account of all that Conrad has meant to him. Said
describes reading “Youth” as a schoolboy in Egypt, and of getting nothing
from it – “the context was completely missing”. He speaks with special
fondness of Victory (1915), seeing it as an example of what he calls “late
style”, a book about “withdrawal . . . a novel full of reminiscences . . .
of self-quotation”. The island is full of noises, and for Said the book is
made memorable by its “infernal trio” of villains, a cast that turns it into
“one of the most unsettling and disturbing novels I’ve ever read”. This is a
strong collection, and most of its contributors are deft enough not to lose
their author in the discourses that surround him. It is strong enough, in
fact, to admit a note of dissent. In a brief foreword, J. Hillis Miller
notes that the essays agree that “placing Conrad’s fiction within some
external cultural, historical, biographical, or intellectual context” is the
best way to explain it, and that they are in consequence “unanimous in not
taking seriously any ‘metaphysical’ dimension of Conrad’s work”. Perhaps as
a corollary, “there is little detailed attention to narrative technique”. I
share the interests of this book’s contributors, those to the section on
“Global Conrad” in particular. But Miller is right about its limits, and any
new directions in Conrad studies must involve some fusion of “extrinsic
criticism . . . [and] what used to be called . . . ‘close reading’”. Only
then can we do justice Conrad’s imaginative grandeur: to the “metaphysical”
or to those aspects of his work that Said continued to find unsettling; to a
sense of the world in which, as Nostromo’s Dr Monygham says, “there is no
peace and no rest”. Only then can we say why, 150 years after his birth, so
many of us find it necessary, not to read Conrad, but to reread him.
Michael Gorra is the editor of The Portable Conrad, published
last year. He teaches English at Smith College.
Books under review
Laurence Davies et al, editors
THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF JOSEPH CONRAD
VOLUME SIX
1917–1919
570pp. £91 (US $160).
978 0 521 56195 7
VOLUME SEVEN
1920–22
722pp. £96 (US $170).
978 0 521 56196 9
VOLUME EIGHT
1923–1924
426pp. £90 (US $180).
978 0 521 56197 6
VOLUME NINE
Uncollected letters and indexes
383pp. £90 (US $180).
978 0 521 88189 0
Cambridge University Press
Joseph Conrad
NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS
Edited by J. H. Stape
504pp. Cambridge University Press. £75 (US $128).
978 0 521 56163 1
John Stape
THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD
378pp. Heinemann. £20.
978 0 434 01327 2
Carola M. Kaplan et
CONRAD IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Contemporary approaches and perspectives
326pp. Routledge. Paperback, £16.99.
978 0 415 97165 2
