When I was half-way through reading this long-awaited compilation1 I found myself springing, with my right hand extended, towards my bookshelves. It was an action purely reflex for when I stood before the backs of those volumes I had no idea why I was there. You feel like that when you find yourself out of bed in a black, unfamiliar room. So, my left hand, as it were unknowing, I let the other do what it wanted. It fell on the back of a book called The Shadow Line and when the book opened and my eye read the first two or three chance words I found myself saying: ‘Thank God!’
I really found myself saying: ‘Thank God!’ with a feeling of deep, of grateful, relief. Truly, I do not mean to be ungenerous to Monsieur Jean-Aubry, it is only that he is of a different school – so absolutely of the other house. He has done his allotted task with industry, application, conscience, erudition; it betrays every attribute that the official biography of a man of letters lately deceased, can possibly display. If the fact that Monsieur Jean-Aubry is an industrious Frenchman set wandering in the thorny, if not tropical, undergrowth of British literary life – if that fact causes the appearance in his pages of certain minor inaccuracies or unfamiliarities with British conditions they are so minor as to amount to little more than a row of pins.
Because there is true truth – and truth.
Which was Conrad? The bothered, battered person who wrote innumerable, woeful, tactful, timid letters that are here connected by a string of properly noncommittal prose, or the amazing being that I remember? With a spoken word or two he could create a whole world and give to himself the aspect of a returned Sir Francis Drake emerging from the territory of the Anthropophagi and the darkness of the Land of Fire. Or with two sentences of The Shadow Line he could make you say: ‘Thank God!’
For it is hardly rhetoric to say that one ought to thank one’s creator for letting one read ‘Youth’ or Heart of Darkness or The Nigger of the Narcissus. Or even The Shadow Line. Pure sensation, pure emotion – pure poetry – are so rare in life; and so necessary to the sweetening – the disinfection! – of the soul, that probably the world would be better lacking the telephone which is anyhow a maddening instrument than without…. This sentence is, however, so controversial that I had better not finish it, my controversy here being on another line.
The public then, apparently demands the Official Biography, and the greater part of my life, as the greater part of Conrad’s whilst vigour remained to him, has been given to combatting the Official Biography – at any rate for men of letters. Or perhaps for anyone. I used to know a diplomat and proconsul who had a rather pompous name, but who was one of the most entertaining of after-dinner speakers and raconteurs that it was possible to imagine. He had besides done the state a great deal of service. He died, in due course, his official Life and Letters appeared: well, because he was a pretty poor letter writer and because, for reasons of politics the material facts of his world-transactions had to be omitted, his Life and Letters presented him to the world as being infinitely more pompous and ridiculous than his name. The public nevertheless devoured the book.
And in the end the public decides – so no doubt I am playing a losing game in thus fighting, not this alone, but all official biographies and the frame of mind that produces them. Well, I who am about to die salute you.
Conrad, then, was not only an incomparable fingerer of the lute of words, he was an unrivalled autobiographer – not only in his records and reminiscences but in all his writings for publication. Consider Marlow! Consider Heart of Darkness. Or consider his remembrances of childhood in Poland.
Well, sentence by sentence, line by line, with scissors, paste and dactylography Monsieur Jean-Aubry – his text, as is proper; in large type and Conrad’s in small, connects up passages in these works, comments that So and So’s name was really This and That or that the city of Coronograd was really the District of Palinzona. The result, at any rate for me, is the exasperation that made me spring for my bookshelf and read just one or two words of Conrad’s own writing in a type that did not try the eyes, and in the context where it was meant to lie. (And I am bound to say that, once started, I read the whole of that book through, far into the night before returning to the Life and Letters – I simply could not put it down.)
Again I am not attacking Monsieur Jean-Aubry. This book was ordered of him; his conscience, he being of the other house, permits him to compile it, and according to the canons of the followers of Boswell he has performed his work. (Alas, Boswell killed Johnson. Who reads Rasselas or even the Life of Drake?) And he has done it quite decently and becomingly. Living much in contact with the more official type of British litterateur, he has avoided knocking on the head more writers of other persuasions than he was absolutely forced to. For what a bloody battlefield the book might have been – or have occasioned! But Official Lives and Letters suffer and must always suffer from lack of proportion. The persons most intimate with a man are seldom the recipients of the majority of his letters simply because they are constantly in his society. Or letters are not preserved, or go astray. Or the Official Biographer is ordered to ignore this or that person!
Thus in the world of letters Henry James was almost the only figure in England who constantly perturbed, intrigued and exasperated Conrad. I don’t mean to imply that other writers’ names did not occur in his conversation or that he did not speak frequently and with generosity of the work of, say, Mr Galsworthy. But James was about the only living figure writing in English and Conrad regarded as at all his equal or whose work presented to him technical problems that he could not solve. Yet as far as I have been able to discover (there is, alas, no index in the copy of the book with which I have been provided), Henry James is hardly mentioned in the work, which contains only two of the several score letters that Conrad wrote to James. And as his letters were frequently in acknowledgment of James’s work, they had a peculiar interest as showing what type of praise Conrad thought would please the Old Man.
Or, again, as regards that peculiar type of relationship that is indicated by the English phrase, ‘cook, slut and bottle-washer’ – as regards two men who were peculiarly intimate with and useful to Conrad – Krieger and the late Arthur Marwood – these again are hardly mentioned in the volumes; to Krieger there is no letter at all, to Marwood only one. Yet I have heard Conrad speak over and over again in terms of the deepest emotion of the services Krieger rendered him in the days when he was attempting to be a financier in the city; Marwood, in the days after those of The English Review, was of unfailing solace and support to this author. And Marwood was a man of encyclopaedic knowledge and of clear English Tory common sense such as I at least have never known the like of. So that, until the time of his death he really was, as it were, the measuring stick by which Conrad got his sense of proportion. But how was poor Monsieur Jean-Aubry to obtain letters of Conrad to Marwood? The two men met so constantly that there were none.
If then the official Biography of necessity omits the greatest literary influence and two of the greatest personal influences of its subject’s life it must needs be an almost Hamletless Hamlet! It would be going too far to say as much of Monsieur Jean-Aubry’s so conscientious pages. They contain an infinite number of details, and little quips of phrase in letters and of such things as the public obviously delights in.
But in the end I remain in the other house. I still prefer the Shelley of Trelawney to the Shelley of the infinite number of Shelleyographers down to my Uncle William and beyond him. I prefer indeed the Shelley of Ariel.2 Monsieur Jean-Aubry falls politely foul of myself for representing Conrad as in his young days ‘lieutenant de torpilleurs de la marine militaire Francaise’ (sic) Monsieur adds. And he backs himself up and floors me with a great number of dates, extracts from marine records of Marseilles and the like. I, however, remain impenitent.
I have again and again heard Conrad say that he served on a French naval vessel called the Ville d’Ompiteda – I present Monsieur Jean-Aubry with the name so that he may search the naval records – and that he passed the examination for lieutenant – sometimes he would say ensign – in the French torpedo service. During a valedictory interview in 1916 he said quite specifically: ‘I, too, have been under fire on service!’
Now Monsieur Jean-Aubry may be quite right and Conrad may have seen all his French sea service in merchant bottoms. But my Conrad is more truly true… Do you mean to tell me that that dark magnetic, devil of a young fellow did not get cashiered from the French navy for going to Marseilles races on an unvarnished four-in-hand covered like a flower garden with all the corps de ballet of Marseilles? If you do, you lie!
For the only alternative would be to say that Conrad lied and that I will never do. Whether he ever sat in his flesh and bones, even, on that unpainted coach with a ballerina in each physical arm I don’t know. And I don’t care… But that he could have been the dear Conrad that he afterwards was – the Conrad of the flashing eyes, the caressing voice and the infinite Oriental tact that, also, was like a caress; – that he could have been the man he was and done the things with words that he did, that he could have achieved so much and so much suffered without that reminiscence at the back of the inward soul, is impossible. The Poet – and particularly the poor devil so harried as was Conrad – must have escape from the world, anodynes, and drugs of which the lay public has neither need or knowledge. One of these is to Poetiser un peu – to romance a little when he talks of himself. Then that romance becomes part of himself and is the true truth. But, once he must have been a glorious fellow – for respice finem!3 Look at the miserable end – not of this book but of the true ambition that was in the bottom of his heart! I confess that there are letters of Conrad’s that I cannot read without the tears in my eyes – and they are not the ones that you think.
That man’s material purpose in life was one, beautiful and single. By the greatness of his labours to that one end he had made of his house a true house of prayer. What have they made of it? What would he say today? The harpies!
That has nothing to do with Monsieur Jean-Aubry: he has done his best. The translation, both in text and letters, is very well and unassumingly done.
New York Herald Tribune Books, 2 October 1927, 2.