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But the main fact is that we worked together – like two navvies digging at a job of work. And what we worked at was not so much specific books as at the formulation of a literary theory, Conrad seeking most of all a new form for the novel and I a limpidity of expression that should make prose seem like the sound of some one talking in rather a low voice into the ear of a person that he liked. Of what took place during those endless conversations I am the sole living witness and my word must be taken for what I say. And they may be taken as going this way, those colloquies: I would ask, ‘How would you render such and such a concrete object in words?’ Or he would ask, ‘Don’t you think we have made that rather obvious?’ Or even, ‘Don’t you think we ought to tone that passage down a little?’ by the introduction of an obvious word or so, in order that the passage might not read like ‘fine writing’.
Our literary friendship, I beg leave to say, was for its lack of jealousy a very beautiful thing. It is a thousand pities that a number of gentlemen who could not, in the nature of things, know anything about that friendship should have attempted to make it look mean and ugly, for wholehearted friendships that have no other aim than the perfection of a literary method are rare things in this world.
Having said that, I will set down what occurred to me in looking over the manuscript of ‘The Sisters’ which I was permitted to do by the executors of the late Mr John Quinn.
The manuscript, then, opens up again the question that has always tormented me – and I dare say plenty of other people! – where did Conrad get his English? I am accustomed to be told – I was told only yesterday – that he certainly got it from me. He certainly did not. When I am disposed to consider the nature of my interference with his work I think sometimes that I acted for him merely as a sort of thesaurus, a handy dictionary of synonyms. I don’t mean to say that his vocabulary was not as large as mine; I dare say it was even larger on the lines of more orthodox English, for he had a marvellous gift for assimilating the printed word and, before I knew him, could have written an article for, say, The Edinburgh Review, far, far more easily than I, either then or today. And my function as assistant at his labours was more than anything that of directing him towards an easy use of the vernacular.
It is necessary to labour this point a little. With, then, his marvellous gift of assimilating the printed word, Conrad was just a little obtuse to the spoken one as soon as conversation got outside the stage of argot. I suppose that, eager talker as he was, he was not a very minute listener. He could catch, that is to say, a man’s characteristic turns of phrase and idiosyncrasies of speaking. That accounts for the wonderful way in which he managed conversation in his novels. But when talk between himself and others grew into conversation and went, as it were, over the country, his attention would wander.
There are three English languages – that of The Edinburgh Review which has no relation to life, that of the streets which is full of slang and daily neologisms and that third one which is fairly fluid and fairly expressive – the dialect of the drawing-room or the study, the really living language. It was at this last that Conrad aimed, and which he found difficult to render on paper. That aspiration made his writing life a matter of much torture. Whereas he could have written in the language of The Edinburgh Review – I mean no disrespect to that respectable, that even august, organ of a light that never was, since 1820, on land or sea!1 – whereas, then, Conrad could have written that sort of thing with ease and success at any moment, the more fluid language in which words assimilate themselves to each other with delicacy and tenuity tended constantly to escape him. He knew, nevertheless, what he wanted and if any one were at hand to suggest that ‘wire’ was a more colloquial word than ‘telegram’ he would accept that word if it would fit into the cadence of his paragraph. Or he would even change the cadence of his paragraph. I daresay that living constantly with a person like myself whose normal conversation is compounded of polite slang words may have influenced his style a little. Indeed I am sure that it did, but he continued his development in that direction long after I had any finger at all in his work, so that it has always seemed to me that The Rover, for the limpidity of its style, was almost unapproached.
That would no doubt have happened had Conrad been in daily contact with any other moderately cultivated Englishman who expressed himself in the politer shades of argot. I dare say indeed that the slightly stilted nature of Conrad’s earliest prose was due to the fact that he consciously guarded himself against the rougher ship’s lingo that he had been accustomed to hear. He used to say that he had acquired English by reading in the forecastle the works of Miss Braddon, the Family Herald and Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham. Indeed the passage in The Nigger in which Conrad writes about the frame of mind of the aged seaman, hermetically sealed up as it were between the pages of the book, whilst Donkin and the rest showered expletives all about him – that exposition of a reader’s mind may well have gained something from Conrad’s own experience. And indeed his own reading of Pelham in the forecastle may well account for Conrad’s barbarously inaccurate rendering of the cockney’s dialect. He must have recognized that the words that exploded around him whilst he read of the tribulations of Miss Braddon’s Lady Audley differed enormously from the words that were under his eye on the printed page, dim in the smoky light of the oil lamp. And so he acquired the more stilted style that is most easily recapturable nowadays in his letters of that date. He was not a very good letter-writer, even as novelists go. The prose of his novels was a very carefully calculated affair, its one aim being to be interesting and to be interesting because of the quality of surprise. He avoided the obvious turn of phrase with ferocity – with true ferocity! But when he wrote letters he nearly always just sailed ahead and the result was a certain monotony, even a certain turgidness. I well remember the feeling almost of dismay that I had when during the war I read in a South Wales city a great body of correspondence addressed by Conrad to a compatriot in that port and I well remember the silent petition I put up that those letters might never see the light. But returning to the question of from whom Conrad had his own English I may say that for long I used to think that Mr Edward Garnett must have been largely responsible. But, judging from Mr Garnett’s profuse annotations of the actual handwritten copy of ‘The Sisters’ that can hardly have been the case. Mr Garnett criticizes the work with a minuteness that must have cost him infinite pains, but I cannot discern, in any of the notes that he made, any suggestion of verbal alterations or the corrections of syntax and the like.
The most interesting suggested emendation by Mr Garnett on the margin of this manuscript attaches to the words, ‘He made up his mind to try Paris – and started at once’. Mr Garnett comments that this is too abrupt. And indeed to a reader in 1897 it may well have seemed too abrupt, coming as it does at the end of a long passage of psychologizing and completely without preparation.
But the whole, the whole, the whole secret of Conrad’s attractiveness as a writer lies in that particular device, that particular form of jolting the reader’s attention and if you read Conrad sentence by sentence with minute care you will see that each sentence is a mosaic of little crepitations of surprise and that practically every paragraph contains its little jolt. I must in the old days have accompanied his mind through at least a million written words, and no doubt through as many more that never even got onto paper, and no sound is even today more familiar to me than the voice of Conrad saying, ‘No, that’s too obvious!’ Every two or three minutes the words would come, in a sort of rhythm. And today when I write – at this minute whilst I am writing – my subconscious mind is saying to me, ‘Isn’t it time to put in a little jolt?’ It has become indeed a second nature.
What Conrad got from me as writer I don’t know for I never thought about it, but I am perfectly certain that I – and the Anglo-Saxon world – got that particular form of scrupulosity from Conrad. For it is a form – the highest form – of scrupulosity in a writer unceasingly to study how he may interest his reader. And do not let yourself be misled by the orthodox Anglo-Saxon critic into believing that the evolution of such a method is trickery, or a mere device, or merely mechanical. It is the training, as it were, of special muscles for your task. I have seen two quite weedy little furniture removers trot up some narrow stairs carrying a piano that fifteen beefy privates of my command had only succeeded in wedging hopelessly into that orifice. In the same way a really trained writer such as was Conrad can interest you in a washing list or a catalogue of ships whilst the amateur puts you to sleep with an account of the battle of Marathon.
The erasures and alterations in the manuscript of ‘The Sisters’ are full of interest from this point of view but a disquisition on them would be too technical to be here appropriate. I will however just glance at one or two to show you how Conrad’s mind worked:
Thus he changes ‘natural aptitude for that sort of thing’, which is vague and enforces on the reader the trouble of an effort of the imagination, into ‘revelling in a charming occupation’, which hints at the charm of the personality and throws on it a certain psychological illumination. Or he changes ‘to assert herself’ into ‘to assert her personality against José’ as more precisely establishing the range of the character’s self-assertion – as much as to say, ‘This character is not of necessity and always self-assertive but one individual calls for a certain measure of self-assertion’. Or, in the interests of precision he changes ‘ancient’ into ‘medieval’, the word ‘ancient’ to some extent connoting classical antiquity: as the phrase ‘the world known to the ancients’ implies the tract of land round the Mediterranean known to the Greeks and Romans. For the connotations of words must always be considered, a word with double, or vague, meanings causing the reader to pause for a moment, to choose one or the other, and thus taking his mind off the story and slowing down the interest of the passage. Or he transposes, in the interests of his cadence the two phrases, ‘of the old people, of the dead’, because the short ‘e’ sound of the monosyllable has the effect of a full stop, whilst the two-syllabled word carries on the continuing cadence. That in effect was how Conrad wrote, at any rate in his early days.
***
Bookman (New York), 67 (June 1928), 405–8.
1 [Alludes to Wordsworth’s ‘Elegaic Stanzas’ on Peele Castle.]