The helmsman’s eyeballs seemed to project out of a hungry face as if the compass-card behind the binnacle glass had been meat.… The rudder might have gone for all he knew, the fires out, the engines broken down, the ship ready to roll over like a corpse. He was anxious not to get muddled and lose control of her head, because the compass-card swung far both ways, wriggling on the pivot, and sometimes seemed to whirl right round. He suffered from mental stress. He was horribly afraid also of the wheelhouse going. Mountains of water kept on tumbling against it. When the ship took one of her desperate dives the corners of his lips twitched.
Let us consider the writing of Mr Conrad. Other pens more weighty, more authoritative, or for a hundred reasons more acceptable, shall no doubt attend to his moralities, his geography, his knowledge of the sea and even to his ‘style’, since the appearance of this admirable collected edition will make the works of Mr Conrad more extendedly accessible than ever they were before.1 Let us, then, for a moment limit ourselves to the consideration of his writing.
If you call it ‘style’ you will be at once in a frame of mind more monumental and much less intimate. Style implies a man in parade uniform; writing, the same man in working dress. The paragraph set at the head of these columns has always seemed to the writer the high-water mark of Mr Conrad’s, and in consequence of English prose. It resembles, and perhaps with cause, the extraordinary passage ending ‘et comme il était très fort, hardi, courageux et avisé il obtint bientôt le commandement d’un bataillon’, in ‘Saint Julien l’Hospitalier’. In Flaubert’s passage of a few short lines the whole career of a soldier of fortune is summed up, pictured, professionalized and done for ever. It is the soldier of fortune. Mr Conrad’s passage about the helmsman is the helmsman; his whole life qua helmsman is there, his whole career and all his preoccupation, and that, looking at the work of Mr Conrad more aloofly, is the secret of his magic. His books are an unending procession of exact presentations, in the first place of men and then of their vicissitudes and the fascination of his books is the fascination of that most fascinating of all things, gossip. It is as if you stood at a window giving on to a not too crowded but lively street with, beside you, an instructed companion who said continually, ‘You see that man. He …’ or ‘There is Mrs Witcherly. She has just …’ Only instead of your own unobservant organs you look upon the passers-by with the eyes of Mr Conrad that miss nothing. Nothing.
It then becomes a matter of selection, and in selecting what he shall render in order to give the exact balance and the exact truth of a life Mr Conrad is as unerring as he is in his observation. His leavings-out are as matchless as are his inclusions, and that is all a question of the ‘writing’. In the passage quoted from Typhoon you have the flashed picture of a helmsman’s eyes; you have his preoccupation with the strains on the rudder, the fires, the engine and the hull; you have his preoccupation with the strain upon himself; you have his fear; you have the actual circumstances of the moment, and then once more in ‘when the ship took one of her desperate dives the corners of his lips twitched’ you have the man himself considered from the outside, and that last sentence is ‘writing’ as distinguished from style. For style, we may presume, would concern itself with cadence, with the atmosphere, with, as it were, the dressing-up of the paragraph. When you write – or still more when such a writer as Mr Conrad writes – you have to concern yourself with the getting in of ‘things’. That must come first, and that is the essential. The stylist, on the other hand, concerns himself firstly with dressings-up, the tonalities of words, the cadences of paragraphs. So that it is best to consider Mr Conrad as a writer of prose, rather than as a stylist in the horrible sense in which the late Mr Pater or the late Mr Wilde were stylists. For Mr Conrad the mot juste is the word that exactly expresses a material object; for the stylist the mot juste expresses the mood, the manner and more particularly the prose of the concocter. It is thus the writing much more than the style that is the man, the style being only too often his trappings.
Considered exteriorly the ‘style’ of Mr Conrad will be observed in this collected edition to vary very considerably from the relatively thin, Daudetish, phonectic syzygies of Almayer’s Folly to the richer Elizabethan organ-rollings of Heart of Darkness; from them to the drier precisions ofHeart of Darkness Typhoon; from those to the looser textures of Nostromo, and so to the relative fluencies of Chance, of Victory or ‘The Inn of the Three Witches’. There is in all these succeeding works obvious progression, or at least a gradual alteration in attack. For the present writer the high-water mark of Mr Conrad’s style is reached in the passage quoted from Typhoon, and this because at this point his ‘writing’ and his ‘style’ more intimately approach the one to the other, so that Typhoon is at one and the same time a tremendous poem of pure humanity and a tremendous tour de force of pure writing. But appreciation of style is very much a matter of individual tastes. The reader may very well prefer the concluding paragraph of ‘A Smile of Fortune’ or he might prefer:
It enveloped me, it enfolded me so lightly as not to be felt, so suddenly as not to be believed in, so completely that that whole meeting was an embrace, so softly that at last it lapsed into a sense of rest that was like the fall of a beneficent and welcome death.
There is, in short, room in the stylistic world for the brave inclusive decorations of the Renaissance as for the dry selectiveness of Cranach, and if the reader prefer the grand staircase of the opera-house in Paris on a gala night to the cold mud of the trenches, he need not, therefore, be contemned. And the same latitude must be allowed to the writer of prose, who changes his cadences so that they may be in tone with the changing stresses of his narrative. Mr Conrad came to England, an Elizabethan, with a prose that almost continuously burst into polyphonic organ effects. But these sounds have gradually nearly died out of his pages. You have to look with some care through the pages of The Rescue, the latest of Mr Conrad’s novels to be included in Messrs Dent’s edition, before you come upon such passages as:
The sun had sunk already, leaving that evening no trace of its glory on a sky clear as crystal and on the waters without a ripple. All colour seemed to have gone out of the world. The oncoming shadow rose as subtle as a perfume from the black coast lying athwart the eastern semicircle; and such was the silence within the horizon that one might have fancied oneself come to the end of time.
Whereas the present writer once occupied himself for an hour or two turning Heart of Darkness into blank verse and found that a very creditable production of Christopher Marlowe’s could be made by adding a very few syllables here and there. This is not to say that Mr Conrad writes blank verse: the addition of the syllable here and there making all the difference, but it does say that the effect of that most wonderful of nouvelles is attained by mighty lines and cadences enormously cared for. In The Rescue these are largely absent, yet probably the atmosphere of the Shallows is as all-pervading in the later book as is that of the Congo in the much earlier. It is probable, in short, that the later and more assured Mr Conrad was satisfied that with the rarer ‘atmospheric’ passages of The Rescue he had established in the reader’s mind as lasting an effect of place as in Heart of Darkness he had done with a far greater number of polyphonics. For the province of the ‘atmospheric’ passage is merely to give a sense of place to the reader; to strike a note that shall hold throughout the reading. Once this is achieved every word of atmospheric writing becomes a longueur, or at very best an excrescence.
And Mr Conrad is the greatest English poet of today because, more than any other writer, he has perceived – he has gradually evolved the knowledge – that poetry consists in the exact rendering of the concrete and material happenings in the lives of men. It is obvious that, like every other writer, he has the secret longing now and then to produce abstract writing – writing which shall be as devoid of material significance as a fugue of Bach is of ‘programme’ and that yet shall have the beauty of pure sound. But few writers have so well resisted this craving – few at least of those who have so supremely the gift. And, indeed, to find Mr Conrad in the purely symphonic mood for any length of time you have to go to such personal writings as was The Mirror of the Sea. Here for page on page you got pure word painting, but in the end, and for the most part all the way through, Mr Conrad is the humanist. The swing of his sentences is achieved less by falling in to time with studied or derived cadential measures than by the fact that they time themselves to the measure of Mr Conrad’s thoughts when he is thinking of his fellow-men. So they have, his cadences, a unity that is the unity of an incomparable observer of his kind.
Literary Supplement to Spectator, 123 (17 November 1923), 744, 746.
1 Uniform Edition of the Complete Works of Joseph Conrad, in 19 Vols (London: Dent).