Richard Curle's piece appeared in the TLS of August 30, 1923
The material facts on which great novels are founded and the places in which
their scenes are enacted are of no vital importance because the high art of
the novelist consists in transmuting the particular into the general. His
appeal, in other words, is to universal emotions through the temperamental
handling of personal experience. The works of Mr. Conrad are a case in
point. He has suffered from foolish and misleading labels at the hands of
critics more interested in externals than in life. But the real truth is
that in all his stories he is concerned deeply with only one thing – human
nature. Everything else is the mere setting, valuable mainly in so far as it
heightens the drama of passions, hopes and fears that, are the common
heritage of mankind. His books do not “age” because his creation is powerful
enough to have at its heart a universal feeling.
This is the final truth about Mr. Conrad and, in a sense, the only truth of
first importance. All his books expand far beyond their frame and appeal to
no special public – the public, for instance, that looks for exoticism,
adventure, or the sea – but to all of us who have discovered that life
itself, with its problems and its perplexities, is the one ultimate thing
that matters. In this respect his prefaces – now all made accessible to the
general public for the first time in the popular uniform complete edition in
process of publication – are of peculiar significance. They are very
characteristic and in many of them Mr. Conrad has given us the genesis of
his books and enabled us to follow the sources of his inspiration. Indeed,
anybody who has studied the works of Mr. Conrad must have perceived that
there is about them a kind of finality of presentation which suggests a
basis of real experience. It is not that, in the accepted term, he appears
to draw direct from life, but that his works, from first to last, seem to
have a foundation of solid actuality. And such is the case. His creative
imagination can only work at its best when it is attached, so to speak, to a
remembered incident. Sometimes such memories may pervade the whole
structure; more often, perhaps, the whole structure is developed from one
glimpse. But in either instance the motive power arises from the reality of
some kind of past experience – if only from that of a vivid story told at
secondhand. It is this which gives a genuine importance to the history of
these books and makes it a legitimate subject of study. The purpose of this
article, therefore, is to carry such information yet a step further where
possible and to sum up the known facts.
Almayer’s Folly was Mr. Conrad’s first book. Published in 1895, it had been
begun as long ago as 1889 and the manuscript had accompanied him on various
journeys over, the world. Although the preface tells nothing of its
inception, “A Personal Record” is full of its strange wanderings. It was
begun in London after his final return from the East, and, shaping slowly,
it went with him to the Congo, to France, to Switzerland, to Poland and to
Australia. “Line by line, rather than page by page, was the growth of
Almayer’s Folly.” It was the memory of a real Almayer that started Mr.
Conrad writing seriously. As he says in “A Personal Record”: – “I had seen
him for the first time some four years before from the bridge of a steamer
moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or less, a Bornean
river.” There is no character in Mr. Conrad’s books of whose prototype more
has been told us by the author himself. This novel is one of the works
directly traceable to Mr. Conrad’s period of service, in the eighties, as
first officer in the s.s. Vidar. The vessel belonged to Straits Arabs and,
with her home port at Singapore, traded on the wild coasts – they really
were wild in those days – of Borneo, Celebes and Sumatra.
The chief figure in An Outcast of the Islands was also suggested by a real
person. Mr. Conrad writes in his preface:–
"The man who suggested Willems to me was not particularly interesting in
himself. My interest was aroused by his dependent position, his strange,
dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked, worn-out European living on the
reluctant toleration of that settlement hidden in the heart of the
forest-land."
That “forest-land”, of course, is the same corner of Eastern Borneo in which
Almayer’s Folly is staged; but the town of Willems’s rise and fall is
Macassar, in Celebes.
The story of The Nigger of the Narcissus is founded on an actual voyage from
Bombay to England made by the author in a ship of that name. The members of
the crew are a collection of various types of old sailing-ship men with whom
he came in contact at various times. James Wait was an actual person whose
death occurred as stated. The psychology of the ship’s company is the result
of long association with seamen of all grades, first as one of them, then as
officer, through many years of fine weather and foul, not only afloat but
also ashore. The five stories in Tales of Unrest were written between 1895
and 1897. The “Lagoon” and “Karain” suggest further memories of his service
in the Archipelago. “An Outpost of Progress” is “the lightest part of the
loot I carried off from Central Africa” (preface), a reminiscence of his
voyage up the Congo in the early nineties; “The Idiots” was composed during
a visit to Brittany in 1896 – “the suggestion of it was not mental but
visual; the actual idiots” (preface). About “The Return” nothing in
particular can be said. Mr. Conrad has called it “a left-handed production”,
which means, perhaps, that it was founded upon no specific incident or
memory.
Lord Jim was imagined first as a short story, connected with the pilgrim-ship
episodes, and put aside. The copy was taken up again and developed when Mr.
William Blackwood asked for a contribution to “Maga”. Jim, himself, was a
figure seen by Mr. Conrad in the shadowy past. “One sunny morning in the
commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by –
appealing – significant – under a cloud – perfectly silent” (preface). The
Patusan, where he worked out his salvation, was assumed to lie on the south
coast of north-west Sumatra, and Stein’s villa was outside some town of
northern Java. In the chief outline of its topography, at least, Lord Jim is
another reminiscence of the Vidar period.
Of the three stories in “Youth”, the first, “Youth”, is very much a
reminiscence of Mr. Conrad’s own first voyage to the East. It was in 1881
that he set sail in the Palestine for Bangkok. The ship caught fire off the
coast of Sumatra and the crew had to take to the boats. “The End of the
Tether”, which takes us to such spots as Deli and Malacca and even as far
north as the southern islands of the Mergui Archipelago, is a more composite
production. In the words of Mr. Conrad’s preface, “One had to pick up one’s
facts here and there”. “Heart of Darkness” is “quite as authentic in
fundamentals as ‘Youth’ . . . it is experience pushed a little (and only
very little) beyond the actual facts of the case” (preface). This story of
the Congo is the heavier portion of his African “loot”. “Typhoon” consists
of four stories. The one that gives its name to the book is a tale of the
China Sea. The s.s. Nan-Shan was not the steamer of the tale, and the
typhoon was not experienced by Mr. Conrad himself. The facts were as stated.
“Falk” is made up of things seen and things heard by the author at the time
he took over his first command in Bangkok. Neither “Amy Foster” nor
“To-morrow” is actually reminiscent.
Romance is the second and last book in which Mr. Conrad collaborated with Mr.
F. M. Hueffer. In a copy of it Mr. Conrad has written: –
"In this book I have done my share of writing. Most of the characters (with
the exception of Mrs. Williams, Sebright, and the seamen) were introduced by
Hueffer and developed then in my own way with, of course, his consent and
collaboration. The last part is (like the first) the work of Hueffer, except
a few paragraphs written by me. Part second is actually joint work. Parts 3
and 4 are my writing, with here and there a sentence by Hueffer."
We come now to Nostromo, which some people consider Mr. Conrad’s most
triumphant achievement in the creation of atmosphere. We know from his
preface how the figure of Nostromo himself was partly suggested by the
Dominic of “The Mirror of the Sea”– “many of Nostromo’s speeches I have
heard first in Dominic’s voice”– and how the story of the stolen silver came
from a yarn told to the author in the middle seventies and found by him in
print nearly thirty years later. The picturesque and darkly symbolic
background of Nostromo, with its inner fidelity to the spirit of place and
character, has no doubt been helped in a certain measure by a few momentary
glimpses of the land; for Mr. Conrad had occasion in the course of his
duties to stay ashore at several points of the South American coast in the
Gulf of Mexico – perhaps not half-a-dozen days altogether. What may be
called the local scenery of Nostromo is, one cannot but think, the most
impressive instance of his power to evolve a living world, so complete in
its very details that the sense of its reality goes even beyond the words,
out of one touch of actual remembrance.
The Mirror of the Sea is a book apart. It is a confession of emotions of a man
who looks back upon the sea as the scene of his inner life. It may be
regarded as a farewell to twenty years of formative experience coupled with
a deeply felt tribute to the memory “of ships that are no more and to the
simple men who have had their day”. That book is a personal revelation based
on true events. The Secret Agent, which followed it, is avowedly the product
of a period of mental and emotional reaction. As Mr. Conrad has stated in
his preface, the novel was suggested by the attempt made in the nineties to
blow up Greenwich Observatory. As showing once more our author’s uncanny
gift of creating from a hint, one may mention the fact that Winnie and her
weak-minded brother owe their existence to a single phrase used about the
perpetrator of the outrage in a casual conversation – “Oh, that fellow was
half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards” (preface). In a copy
of the work Mr. Conrad has written this comment:– “As literary aim the book
is an attempt to treat consistently a melodramatic subject ironically.”
The stories in A Set of Six are, as Mr. Conrad tells us in his preface,
"the result of some three or four years of occasional work. The dates of their
writing are far apart; their origins are various. None of them is connected
with personal experience directly. In all of them the facts are inherently
true, by which I mean that they are not only possible but that they have
actually happened."
Gaspar Ruiz, a South American tale, was begun within a month of finishing
Nostromo. The hint for it was found by its author in a book written by a
British naval officer in the twenties of last century. “The Brute” is
“associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on
warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship”
(preface). “II Conde” also was created from a heard story. “It is an almost
verbatim transcript of the tale told me by a very charming old gentleman
whom I met in Italy” (preface). The longest story in the volume is “The
Duel”, and it was Mr. Conrad’s first attempt at historical fiction. “Its
pedigree is extremely simple. It springs from a ten-line paragraph in a
small provincial paper published in the South of France” (preface). It is
interesting to know that this story, with its French setting, though
finished in Kent, was actually begun at Montpellier.
About the genesis and history of Under Western Eyes one cannot do better than
quote what Mr. Conrad has written privately:–
"I was induced to write this novel by something told me by a man whom I met in
Geneva many years ago (Razumov’s fate). The novel was slow in gaining
recognition here, but found quick appreciation in Russia. The European
Messenger serialized it, and cheap editions were published before 1914 in
Moscow and Petersburg. Lately a very able French translation by M. Neel has
gone into a fourth edition."
“A Personal Record” (formerly known as “Some Reminiscences”) is a survey of
the past as much as is the “Mirror of the Sea”. It carries its own history
in its pages. It deals with the author’s boyhood and contains the story of
his first book and his first contact with the sea, viewed in perspective as
a formative experience. In a copy of it Mr. Conrad has written: “My feelings
towards this book are expressed exactly in the preface. He who has read to
the end knows all that’s worth knowing of me.” ’Twixt Land and Sea contains
three stories. “A Smile of Fortune” is based, so far as the story of the
potatoes is concerned, on an incident that occurred to the author at
Mauritius while in command of a ship loading there. The source of “The
Secret Sharer” is a story which was, in the words of the preface, “the
common possession of the whole fleet of sailing ships trading to India,
China, and Australia . . . . The fact itself came to light and even got into
newspapers about the middle eighties.” In Mr. Conrad’s hands it becomes a
drama of the brotherly feeling which exists between seamen, as such, under
an extreme stress. Of “Freya of the Seven Isles” less can authoritatively be
said. It was not the record of any personal experience. But it is curious to
notice that to the north of Banka there actually is a group of seven islets
– the Tuju Islands: the author may well have had this group in mind when
placing his background.
Chance was the first book by Mr. Conrad to win him a much wider recognition.
In his preface the novelist has nothing to tell us of the hints from which
the idea arose, but it is certain that the “great” de Barral was suggested
by the history of one or more notorious financiers of recent times. In the
complication of the plot, springing, as it were, from the slightest of
roots, there is another astonishing example of Mr. Conrad’s imaginative
gift. In a copy of the book he has written:– “In this book I made an attempt
to grapple with characters generally foreign to the body of my work and
tried to present them colloquially.” Within the Tides is composed of four
stories. “The Planter of Malata”, has this particular interest, that it
begins in Australia, which continent, in spite of Mr. Conrad’s numerous
voyages thither, has scarcely been used by him at all as a setting. Malata
itself would appear to be some imagined islet off New Guinea. “The Inn of
the Two Witches” is an elaboration from a yarn heard long ago. Of “Because
of the Dollars” and “The Partner”– one set in the East and the other in
London and on the English coast – Mr. Conrad says in his preface:– “The
other two stories have considerably more ‘fact’ in them, derived from my own
personal knowledge.” In a copy of the book he has written:– “A meditated
attempt at four different methods of story-telling.” Heyst’s island in
Victory is supposed to lie off the south coast of Celebes, and in actual
fact there is a volcano on one of a little group of islands there called the
Tiger Islands. The town where Schomberg-like Marlowe, one of the recurrent
figures of Mr. Conrad’s fiction had his hotel was probably Samarang, in
northern Java. Many of the chief figures of this book, Heyst, Linda, Mr.
Jones, Ricardo, even the savage Pedro, owe their being to vivid glimpses of
real people. Mr. Conrad’s preface is rich in recovered memories of them. The
original of Mr. Jones, for instance, was met in the West Indie’s in 1875.
“We found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the
loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave
an almost gruesome significance.”
The Shadow Line is quite definitely autobiographical. It recounts the story of
an extraordinary experience of Mr. Conrad’s first command, as captain of the
Otago, while bound from Bangkok to Australia. As he says in his preface, the
idea of the story had long been in his mind “under the title of ‘First
Command’”. But its real theme of the shadow line which experience traces
between early youth and maturity demanded a less definite title.
Of The Arrow of Gold Mr. Conrad has written in his preface, “The subject of
this book I have been carrying about with me for many years, not so much a
possession of my memory as an inherent part of myself.” All the Tremolino
incident in The Mirror of the Sea points to the personal origin of much of
this novel (in the latter part of “A Personal Record” there are also
reminiscences of Marseilles), but, as Mr. Conrad points out in his preface,
the whole book is true. In a copy of it he has written:– “All the personages
are authentic.” The Rescue was begun after completion of An Outcast of the
Islands and then laid aside for twenty years. “Several reasons contributed
to this abandonment and, no doubt, the first of them was the growing sense
of general difficulty in the handling of the subject” (preface). The only
real place mentioned in The Rescue is the island of Carimata, and that is an
island lying off the west coast of Borneo. We may assume, therefore, that
the action of the novel passes on the coast of western Borneo itself.
This is not a critical article, but it touches upon a critical issue. Far more
than has been explained, far more than anybody save the novelist himself
knows, is it probable that Mr. Conrad’s work is founded upon the promptings
of memory. The gathered hints for a story may cover many places and many
years, they may even be very slight apparently, but the driving force behind
his creation is reality. It is this sense of contact with life that gives to
his pages the feeling that things happened so and no otherwise. Curiosity
being a part of man’s nature, all facts about a remarkable writer’s books
intrigue us, but the facts underlying those of Mr. Conrad have an infinitely
deeper interest. It sounds almost paradoxical to say that the more we
perceive the variety of their settings, the more do we also perceive the
oneness of their aim, but so it is. Whether he places his people in Borneo
or in Soho, whether they live in a ship or in a shop, he is concerned
primarily with the unchanging problems of human destiny.
