Conrad felt he had lost a year of his life in the Congo and was desperately eager to recover his health and resume his career. But it took fourteen months to find a new berth. During that time, suffering humiliation and rejection, Conrad grew increasingly despondent. His pessimism, gloom and depression were caused not only by the human frailty, baseness and greed he had witnessed in the Congo, but also by his melancholy disposition, the effects of his illness and his inability to find work. In The Mirror of the Sea he ironically described searching for a berth as “an occupation as engrossing as gambling, and as little favourable to the free exchange of ideas, besides being destructive of the kindly temper needed for casual intercourse with one’s fellow-creatures.”
Tadeusz, upset by Conrad’s melancholic letters and by his chasing after chimerical projects, tactlessly mentioned that his nephew’s maritime career had not been a great success. He warned Conrad about the futility of pessimism and—in a typical homily—related his defects to the pernicious Korzeniowski strain: “you have always lacked endurance and perseverance in decisions, which is the result of your instability in your aims and desires. . . . You let your imagination run away with you—you become an optimist; but when you encounter disappointments you fall easily into pessimism—and as you have a lot of pride, you suffer more as the result of disappointments than somebody would who had a more moderate imagination but was endowed with greater endurance.” As if to substantiate Tadeusz’s accusation, the thin-skinned Conrad told Marguerite Poradowska: “A transaction full of promise fell through at the last moment. I ate the bread of bitterness for an entire week.”1
He tried, through Marguerite’s influence, to fulfill an ambition he had conceived in the Congo to get a job with the Prince shipping company, which operated a fleet of vessels between Antwerp and Africa. When this, and many other prospects, failed to materialize, he continued his snail’s progress on Almayer’s Folly, did some ill-paid commercial translations for a firm in London and managed the dusty waterside warehouse of Barr, Moering and Company at 95 Upper Thames Street. He compared this boring job to penal servitude—without the pleasure of having committed a crime.
Finally, on November 19, 1891, an old acquaintance, Captain W. H. Cope, offered Conrad the position of chief mate on the Torrens. Still in poor health, Conrad confessed his doubts about his physical fitness for the post. But when Cope said moping ashore would be futile, and was very encouraging about work on the Torrens, Conrad gladly accepted the job. His culture and refinement would be a distinct advantage on a ship that carried passengers. The Torrens, a full-rigged clipper of 1,334 tons, built in 1875, was one of the fastest and most famous ships of her time. Basil Lubbock writes in The Colonial Clippers: “In easting weather she would drive along as dry as a bone, making 300 miles a day without wetting her decks. . . . Her biggest run in the 24 hours was 336 miles; and her fastest speed through the water by the log was 14 knots.” Conrad confirms that the Torrens was attractive, “known to handle easily and to be a good sea boat in heavy weather.”
Between November 1891 and July 1893 Conrad made two round-trip voyages to Adelaide on the Torrens. On the first outbound voyage he became friendly with one of the sixty passengers, the attractive, reserved and sympathetic twenty-two-year-old W. H. Jacques, who had just come down from Cambridge and was traveling to recover his health. His terminal illness was reflected in his sallow, sunken face and in his thoughtful, introspective look. While sailing off the Cape of Good Hope, Conrad asked Jacques—the first educated Englishman he had ever met—to look at the incomplete manuscript of Almayer’s Folly. Jacques “had the patience to read with the very shadows of Eternity gathering already in the hollows of his kind, steadfast eyes.”
If the laconic, moribund Englishman had been negative and discouraging, he might well have terminated Conrad’s literary career at its inception. But his positive response to the author’s queries gave Conrad the courage to complete his first book:
“Well, what do you say?” I asked at last. “Is it worth finishing?” This question expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.
“Distinctly,” he answered in his sedate veiled voice, and then coughed a little.
“Were you interested?” I inquired further, almost in a whisper.
“Very much!” . . .
“Now let me ask you one more thing: Is the story quite clear to you as it stands?”
He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face and seemed surprised.
“Yes! Perfectly.”2
In A Personal Record Conrad states that Jacques “died rather suddenly in the end, either in Australia or it may be on the passage while going home through the Suez Canal.” In fact, Jacques returned to England and died there of tuberculosis in 1893. On the first return voyage the Torrens stopped for four days on the island of Saint Helena; but it is not clear whether Conrad had time to investigate the Napoleonic history which so absorbed him toward the end of his life.
On the second return voyage from Adelaide (which Conrad had visited on the Otago in 1889) he formed important friendships with two young Englishmen who had been companions at Harrow and Oxford. They had gone to the South Seas in search of Robert Louis Stevenson but, unable to get a boat to Samoa, had never found him. The tall, handsome, bearded Ted Sanderson—a prototype of Lord Jim—was the son of the Headmaster of the Elstree Preparatory School in Hertfordshire. The oldest of thirteen surviving children in a lively, intellectual and socially unpretentious family, which constantly invited friends for a meal or a weekend, he would later fight against the Boers, spend ten years in East Africa and succeed his father as headmaster.
John Galsworthy, born (like Sanderson) in 1867 and ten years younger than Conrad, was the son of a prosperous solicitor. Educated at New College, Oxford, he was called to the Bar, but had no desire to practice law. He was completing his education by traveling around the world, was supposed to be studying navigation for the Admiralty Bar and faithfully worked out the daily position of the ship with the captain. “Tall, austere looking, with a Roman profile and tightly closed lips, always correctly dressed,” writes William Rothenstein, “Galsworthy would not have looked out of place in Downing Street.” And his manners were as severely correct as his dress. In contrast to the easy-going Sanderson, Galsworthy was rather formal and stiff.
On March 18, 1893, Sanderson and Galsworthy boarded the Torrens with fifteen other passengers in Adelaide, met Conrad and sailed with him for fifty-six days, until Galsworthy disembarked to visit the mines at Capetown. Confinement and intimacy aboard ship enabled their friendship, which might not have been possible in England, to ripen quickly. In a letter to his family, Galsworthy noted Conrad’s strangeness and commented on the marvellous stories that always fascinated his friends: “The first mate is a Pole called Conrad and is a capital chap, though queer to look at; he is a man of travel and experience in many parts of the world, and has a fund of yarns on which I draw freely. He has been right up the Congo and all around Malacca and Borneo and other out of the way parts, to say nothing of a little smuggling in the days of his youth.”3
In “The Doldrums” (1897), a story that appeared in his first book and that offended Conrad’s wife, Jessie, Galsworthy portrayed him as the first mate Armand, emphasized the mournful Slavic qualities that made him queer to look at and attempted to convey Conrad’s peculiar pronunciation of the English language:
“Dosé fallows, you know” (he pronounced it “gnau”), said the mate in his slightly nasal, foreign accent, evidently resuming, “it’s very curious you know, day [Chinamen] rraally haven’t any feelings.” . . .
The mate looked up sharply, and with his brown, almond-shaped Slav eyes scrutinised keenly the dim figure of the speaker; and his mouth, between the close-trimmed, pointed beard and drooping moustaches, took a more than usually cynical and mournful curve. . . .
His mournful eyes [were] the eyes of a man who has been to the edge of the world many times, and looking over—come back again. . . .
The melancholy fatalism of his face, that outcome of his Slav blood, was veiled by a look of sorrowful concern.
Galsworthy’s reminiscences of Conrad, written after his friend’s death, give a vivid sense of his heavy-lidded, long-armed appearance, his nervous energy, his poor health and his duties at sea:
Very dark he looked in the burning sunlight—tanned, with a peaked brown beard, almost black hair, and dark brown eyes, over which the lids were deeply folded. He was thin, not tall, his arms very long, his shoulders broad, his head set rather forward. . . .
I never saw Conrad quite in repose. His hands, his feet, his knees, his lips—sensitive, expressive, and ironical—something was always in motion. . . .
His subordinate position [as first mate] on the Torrens was only due to the fact that he was then still convalescent from the Congo experience which had nearly killed him. . . .
All the first night he was fighting a fire in the hold. . . . He was a good seaman, watchful of the weather, quick in handling the ship; considerate with the apprentices.4
After their return to England, Conrad and Galsworthy frequently met at the Sandersons’ home and, despite differences in art and in temperament, became lifelong friends. Conrad gave Galsworthy good advice about his early work and sent characteristically flattering appraisals of his thin but popular novels; Galsworthy gave the hard-pressed Conrad many generous loans and gifts, and dedicated Jocelyn (1898) and In Chancery (1920) to Conrad, who, in turn, dedicated Nostromo (1904) to him.
Conrad was successful, content and fortunate in the friends he met on the Torrens, the classiest of all his ships. But the ship was laid up for a while after the second voyage; Captain Cope left and Conrad was once more without a berth. He therefore decided to make his second visit to the Ukraine to see his ailing uncle Tadeusz. Though Tadeusz did not want Conrad to damage his career by leaving the Torrens if he had a chance of succeeding Cope and getting command of the ship, he also did not want to forgo the pleasure of a last meeting: “as always, I wish for and await your visit, my dear lad—for at my age any postponement might mean final defeat!!” Yielding to family piety, to his uncle’s wishes and to his own inclinations, Conrad traveled to the Ukraine via Holland and Berlin (where he nearly lost the manuscript of Almayer’s Folly in the Friedrichstrasse railway station), and spent about a month there during September–October 1893. “This is a good place to be ill (if one must be ill),” he told Marguerite. “My uncle has cared for me as if I were a little child.”5
Conrad was unable to regain his position on the Torrens and took thirteen months to secure a lowly berth as second mate—a position he had held on the Palestine as long ago as 1881!—on a steamship that never sailed. The Adowa (named after the town where the Ethiopians were to defeat the Italians in 1896) was a 2,097-ton English-owned steamer that had been chartered by the Franco-Canadian Transport Company and was supposed to carry French emigrants on fortnightly sailings to Montreal and Quebec. Conrad got the job through Captain Froud of the Shipmasters’ Society in Fenchurch Street, who needed an officer with fluent French.
He joined the ship in London on November 26, 1893. Four hundred and sixty bunks had been put together between decks by industrious carpenters in the Victoria Dock and “some gentlemen from Paris . . . turned up indeed and went from end to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the deck-beams. . . . Their faces as they went ashore wore a cheerfully inconclusive expression.” Conrad crossed to Rouen on December 4 and remained on board the moored ship, first in the center and then in the outskirts of town, for six weeks. In the old part of the city, as night-watchman of the ship, he would lean his elbows on the rail, gaze at the shop windows and at the brilliant cafés, watch the audience enter and leave the opera house, and think of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which was set in Rouen. In the suburbs of the city, he was gripped by inclement weather along the quay—as he had been on the Highland Forest in Amsterdam in 1887. Staring through the brass-rimmed porthole, he saw “a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tail-end of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen nightcap leaned against the wheel.”6
In early December he expected to sail for La Rochelle and Halifax, Nova Scotia, but not a single emigrant turned up in Rouen. The Franco-Canadian Company broke its agreement with the shipowner, the sailing was postponed and then cancelled. The venture was a complete disaster and they never left for Canada. The Adowa eventually returned to London, Conrad signed off on January 18, 1894, and—though he did not know it at the time—ingloriously concluded his maritime career, which had progressed until he left for the Congo and had then gone into a steep decline.
Conrad clung to the romance of clippers and always preferred sail to steam. But in the 1890s there were eight hundred new certified masters each year for a decreasing number of berths. At the end of 1897 there were forty-two fewer British ships than there had been in 1892. Steamers, which were replacing sailing ships, carried larger cargoes and smaller crews. Frank Bullen writes that all captains believed “that the position of master of even a fifth-rate steamship marks a step upward from the same position on board of the finest sailing ship afloat. . . . The mate of a steamer is so much better paid as a rule, that he naturally regards his status as much higher than the mate of a ‘wind-jammer.’ ” And Edward Blackmore observes that though foreigners intensified the competition for jobs, they were not at a disadvantage. Shipowners frequently felt the alien “ ‘is a better shipmaster’ and understands his business; is more attentive, more docile, and altogether better educated and better mannered” than English officers.
Despite this supposed advantage, Conrad was never able to secure another berth. Though he tried strenuously to get a command in Glasgow as late as September 1898, he finally realized that he had spent twenty years of his life mastering an art that was no longer needed. By that date, as Captain David Bone observed: “He had been away from the sea for a long time and much had changed: not many sailing ships remained under British registry at that date and those that lingered were ill-found and ‘parish-rigged’ [with worn or bad gear] alow and aloft.”7
Though the termination of Conrad’s maritime career was essentially involuntary, the longer he stayed ashore and tried to be a writer, the more difficult it was to return to the sea. The beginning of his writing career coincided with the onset of the extraordinarily painful gout that often crippled his hands and feet. He frequently became despondent about his literary work, but felt poor health made it dishonorable for him to accept a command. When John Sutherland asked Conrad what induced him to become a writer, “he was silent for some minutes, and then said, as if he had considered my question: ‘Well, Commander, I was a long time on shore.’ ” Conrad replaced the impecunious life of a sailor with the equally precarious life of an invalid writer.
Ford Madox Ford, who knew Conrad extremely well, pointed out a crucial but often neglected fact: that Conrad hated the isolation, tedium, drudgery and hardship of the sea:
His whole existence [was] passed in a series of ninety-day passages, in labouring ships, beneath appalling weathers, amongst duties and work too heavy, in continual discomfort and acute physical pain—with, in between each voyage, a few days spent as Jack-ashore. And that, in effect, was the life of Conrad. . . .
He detested the sea as a man detests a cast-off mistress, and with the hatred of a small man who has had, on freezing nights of gales, to wrestle with immense yards and dripping cordage; his passion became to live out of sight of the sea and all its memories.
Unlike many old sailors, Conrad never owned a boat; he preferred to travel on land and by car. Sea life for Conrad, who spent half his time ashore, had often been a boring failure. He liked the sea much better when he remembered it than when he was actually experiencing it. As he wrote of Captain Marryat: “He loved his country first, the Service next, the sea perhaps not at all.”8 Conrad’s years at sea prepared him for a literary career by giving him technical expertise, exposing him to exotic experience, trusting him with immense responsibilities, forming his character and providing him with an honorable code of conduct.
Attempting to connect his two apparently disparate lives, Conrad was fond of drawing parallels between deck and desk. He claimed that he went to sea and began to write for the same inexplicable reasons: “The necessity which impelled me was a hidden, obscure necessity, a completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon.” His nautical and literary careers both led to an immense, oppressive and often intolerable solitude. To Conrad, both isolated occupations made intense physical demands, and he compared the anguished creation of a work of art to a dangerously turbulent voyage: “the strain of a creative effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle—[is] something for which a material parallel can only be found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn.”
In his essay on the much-admired Henry James, Conrad likened the imaginative re-creation of experience to salvage work at sea, for both saved what otherwise might have been lost: “Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phrases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into . . . light.” As the sociable and sedentary Henry James told Conrad, with acute perception, after reading The Mirror of the Sea in 1906: “No one has known—for intellectual use—the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached.”9
Another crucial phase of Conrad’s life also came to an end in 1894. On January 28 (ten days after Conrad left the Adowa) Tadeusz went to bed in apparently good health, woke up the next morning feeling short of breath, called his manservant to rub him with alcohol and then, at seven o’clock in the morning, pronounced the word: “Attack!” and suddenly expired at the age of sixty-four. “It seems as if everything has died in me,” the grief-stricken Conrad told Marguerite. “He seems to have carried my soul away with him.” Though Conrad did not attend his uncle’s funeral, he dedicated Almayer’s Folly “To the memory of T. B.” and paid tribute to Tadeusz’s kindness and generosity in A Personal Record: he “had been for a quarter of a century the wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians, extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support which I seemed to feel always near me in the most distant parts of the earth.”10 Tadeusz’s death severed Conrad’s ties with Poland for the next twenty years; his legacy of 15,000 rubles [£4,000 or $20,000], which Conrad received a year after his death, gave him the financial security to begin his career as a writer.
After Tadeusz’s death Conrad became even closer to Marguerite, the last intimate member of his family, despite previous warnings from his uncle about the dangers of getting emotionally involved with her. In many respects Marguerite was the ideal woman for Conrad. She was attractive, intelligent and cultured; had money, social position and a literary reputation. His frequent letters to her in French contain intimate revelations about his health, maritime career and literary work as well as cries of despair, affectionate teasing and declarations (albeit in the vous rather than in the tu form) of his esteem. On July 8, 1891, for example, he wrote: “I admire you and love you more and more. I kiss your hands.” Ten days later Tadeusz, who said Marguerite was “as romantic as a girl of sixteen,” referred to the fact that she was past childbearing age, suggested she would make a more suitable alliance with her longtime suitor, the Burgomeister of Brussels, and told Conrad that he would not be able to support her: “I advise you to give up this game, which will end in nothing sensible. A worn-out female, and if she is to join up with somebody, it will be with Buls who would give her a position and love—of which he has given proof. It would be a stone round your neck for you—and for her as well. If you are wise you will leave this amusement alone and part simply as friends: if not, however, you have been warned!” When Conrad was visiting the Ukraine in September 1893, Marguerite heard a rumor that he was going to marry a local girl. She became deeply distressed and forced Conrad to make an emotional denial: “It is perfectly true that Marysienka is getting married; but in the name of all the follies, what have I to do with this matrimonial affair! However, I can hardly believe that you could speak seriously of the matter in your letter, for it must have seemed strange to you to see someone suddenly rush from the depths of Australia, without warning anyone, to the depths of the Ukraine in order to throw himself into the arms of—the whole idea is ludicrous.”11
The first six years of Conrad’s relations with Marguerite were marked by his constant attempts to establish intimacy, beginning by calling her aunt and ending with proposals for literary collaboration. He visited her frequently, begged for her sympathy and her help, expressed his pessimistic philosophy and grossly flattered her competent but commonplace novels. Though Marguerite refused Charles Buls, Conrad, as Tadeusz’s letters reveal, seriously considered marrying her. But he was inhibited by the difference in age, social position and wealth. He may not have had the courage to propose to her or may have done so and been rejected. (If he had married her, he might have moved to Paris and become a French instead of an English writer.) In any case, their correspondence broke off for five years in June 1895, while he was courting Jessie, his future wife, because either she or Marguerite became jealous.
Almayer’s Folly had grown line by line, rather than page by page. His shortest novel took five years to write—in London, the Congo, Australia, the Ukraine, Switzerland and France—and earned only £20 (which Conrad had made in two and a half months as chief mate of the Torrens). But in the early months of 1894, to compensate for unemployment, he pressed on to the conclusion of the novel. Conrad’s main literary model, if not direct influence, was Gustave Flaubert. He admired Flaubert’s unworldly, almost ascetic devotion to his art, his literary technique and good craftmanship, his ability to render concrete reality and visual impressions. “One never questions for a moment either his characters or his incidents,” Conrad told Marguerite; “one would rather doubt one’s own existence.” Flaubert, with his friends Ivan Turgenev and Henry James, were the three writers Conrad most admired.
Marguerite also received confidential revelations about his method of composition and—as he would lament to friends throughout his life—his agonies of creation. As Conrad stared at the blank sheet of paper, the characters that existed in his imagination gradually took solid form and could be described in words: “I begrudge each minute I spend away from the page. I do not say from the pen, for I have written very little, but inspiration comes to me while gazing at the paper. Then there are vistas that extend out of sight; my mind goes wandering through great spaces filled with vague forms. Everything is still chaos, but slowly, ghosts are transformed into living flesh, floating vapours turn solid, and—who knows?—perhaps something will be born from the collision of indistinct ideas.” Proust’s technique was similar to Conrad’s—recovery of the past through memory. The French novelist compared the creation of characters, who “take on colour and distinctive shape, become . . . permanent and recognisable . . . [and] taking their proper shapes and growing solid, spring into being,” to the little crumbs of paper that assume form when the Japanese steep them in porcelain bowls of water.12
When things were not going well and the characters did not spring into being, Conrad became tormented by neurasthenia, which crippled his attempts to write: “My nervous disorder tortures me, makes me wretched, and paralyses action, thought, everything! I ask myself why I exist. It is a frightful condition. Even in the intervals, when I am supposed to be well, I live in fear of the return of this tormenting malady. . . . I no longer have the courage to do anything. I hardly have enough to write to you. It is an effort, a sudden rush to finish before the pen falls from my hand in the depression of complete discouragement.”
In April 1894 Conrad spent a weekend with the Sandersons at Elstree. Galsworthy’s sister remembered “that both Ted and his mother . . . took a hand, and considerable trouble, in editing the already amazingly excellent English of their Polish friend’s Almayer manuscript, and in generally screwing up Conrad’s courage to the sticking-point of publication.” Conrad expressed his gratitude by dedicating his next book, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), to Ted Sanderson and The Mirror of the Sea to Ted’s mother, Katherine. On April 24 Conrad, whose fictional characters had become real people, was—as his creations faded and resumed their ghostly shapes—finally able to announce to Marguerite the completion of the novel: “I regret to inform you of the death of Mr. Kaspar Almayer, which occurred this morning at 3 o’clock. It’s finished! A scratching of the pen writing the final word, and suddenly this entire company of people who have spoken into my ear, gesticulated before my eyes, lived with me for so many years, becomes a band of phantoms who retreat, fade and dissolve.”13
Once the novel was completed, he had to get it published. Conrad had no great confidence in its merits and tried to improve his prospects during July and August 1894 with two peculiar proposals to Marguerite. He first suggested that she translate Almayer’s Folly into French and that they publish it as a collaboration in the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes, where her novels had been serialized. “Haven’t I any amount of cheek to speak to you like this, dear Teacher!” he wrote with ingratiating irony. The following month, having adopted kemudi (the Malay word for “rudder”) as his pseudonym, he proposed that Marguerite’s name appear as author on the title page with an explanatory note to say that kemudi (the real author) had merely collaborated on the book.
Conrad submitted the novel to Fisher Unwin on July 4 and, as he often did after completing a major work, took a holiday on the Continent. He returned to the hydropathic establishment and spent August in Champel, outside Geneva. Perhaps because of her unwillingness to collaborate on his novel, Conrad did not stop to see Marguerite on his way to and from Switzerland.
When he returned to London in early September and found no response from the publisher, Conrad wrote a fatuous letter to Fisher Unwin, in his most stilted and awkward English, which was bound to make a bad impression on the man he hoped would bring out his work. After an elaborate but pointless description of how the parcel had been wrapped and tied, he said (with mock modesty) that though the worthless book did not deserve to be read, he had neglected to make a duplicate of the precious work and was (like all authors) absurdly attached to his only copy: “I venture now upon the liberty of asking You whether there is the slightest likelihood of the MS. (Malay life, about 64,000 words) being read at some future time? If not, it would be—probably—not worse fate than it deserves, yet, in that case, I am sure you will not take it amiss if I remind you that, however worthless for the purpose of publication, it is very dear to me. A ridiculous feeling—no doubt—but not unprecedented I believe. In this instance it is intensified by the accident that I do not possess another copy, either written or typed.”
When Fisher Unwin finally accepted the novel in early October, he said Conrad could either subsidize the publication with his own money and share in the profits or retain French rights and sell the copyright for £20. When Conrad chose the latter, the notoriously tight-fisted publisher explained: “We are paying you very little . . . but, remember, dear Sir, that you are unknown and your book will appeal to a very limited public. . . . Write something shorter—same type of thing—for our Pseudonym Library, and if it suits us, we shall be very happy to be able to give you a much better cheque.”14
Fisher Unwin’s first reader, W. H. Cheeson, alerted Edward Garnett to the merits of Almayer’s Folly. Garnett, a sympathetic and worldly bohemian, “most beautifully free of the world’s conventions” (according to D. H. Lawrence), understood Conrad’s feelings as well as his novels. After recommending the book for publication, he became a close friend and adviser, a literary mentor and a replacement for Uncle Tadeusz.
The tall and mildly eccentric Edward, born in 1868, was the son of the Keeper of Printed Books in the British Museum. Conrad’s son John said Edward’s “face lacked colour, and his dark eyes and dark-grey unruly hair gave him the appearance of rugged untidiness.” Garnett’s son, David, observed that “Edward was intuitive, illogical and in many ways ill-educated. . . . He arrived at his opinions, especially his aesthetic ones, by instinct and by sympathy.”15 Edward had critical rather than imaginative ability. He was a notoriously unsuccessful poet, playwright and novelist, but a brilliantly perceptive publisher’s reader, who discovered Galsworthy and Lawrence, and also helped W. H. Hudson and H. E. Bates.
Edward’s wife, Constance, six years his senior, was a prolific and influential translator of Russian novels into English. She had won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she took a first-class degree in Greek, and had learned Russian from exiles and during a short visit to Russia, where she met Tolstoy. She maintained an adulterous liaison with the anarchist and assassin Sergei Stepniak, as Edward did with Nellie Heath, who painted the first portrait of Conrad in 1898. The Garnetts lived with their small son at the Cearne, a country house in Surrey that Conrad frequently visited.
Garnett, struck by the unusual setting and style of Almayer’s Folly, was particularly captivated by “Babalatchi, the aged one-eyed statesman and [by] the night scene at the river’s edge between Mrs. Almayer and her daughter [Nina]. The strangeness of the tropical atmosphere, the poetic ’realism’ of this romantic narrative excited my curiosity about the author, who I fancied might have Eastern blood in his veins.” When they first met at the National Liberal Club in November 1894, Garnett noted the complex and contradictory aspects of Conrad’s character. He was “a dark-haired man, short but extremely graceful in his nervous gestures, with brilliant eyes, now narrow and penetrating, now soft and warm, with a manner alert yet caressing, whose speech was ingratiating, guarded, or brusk turn by turn. I have never seen before a man so masculinely keen yet so femininely sensitive.” Late in life, Conrad recalled that Garnett had encouraged him—when he was still torn between the life of art or of action—by praising Almayer’s Folly and insisting that he had the style and temperament to become a professional novelist: “If he had said to me, ’Why not go on writing?’ I should have been paralysed. I could not have done it. But he said to me, ’You have written one book. It is very good. Why not write another?’ Do you see what a difference that made? Another? Yes, I would do that. I could do that. Many others I could not. Another I could. That is how Edward made me go on writing. That is what made me an author.”
The two friends also met at Conrad’s snug bachelor quarters at 17 Gillingham Street, which contained a tall screen, an easy chair, a cozy fire, a row of French novels and, on the mantelpiece, family photographs and engravings. Conrad fascinated Garnett (as he had fascinated Galsworthy) with stories of his adventures and told him about the time he “had to keep an enraged negro armed with a razor from coming aboard, along a ten-inch plank, and drive him back to the wharf with only a short stick in [my] hands.” When Conrad read aloud to Garnett from the early chapters of his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, he mispronounced so many words—which he had learned from books but never heard spoken—that Edward could scarcely understand him. When Garnett, anticipating a crucial problem in Conrad’s career, urged him to follow his own artistic ideals and to disregard the public’s taste, the thirty-seven-year-old novelist became alarmed and upset, and declared: “I won’t live in an attic. . . . I’m past that, you understand? I won’t live in an attic.”16 Conrad’s works (as Garnett predicted) did not appeal to a wide public; though never forced into an attic, he was extremely hard-pressed for money during his first twenty years as a writer.
Garnett and Cunninghame Graham, whom Conrad met in 1897, were the only correspondents with whom he was completely honest and sincere. Garnett read all of Conrad’s early works in manuscript: not only his first two Malayan novels but also Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (dedicated to Edward), the first part of The Rescue and the unfinished draft of “The Sisters.” Conrad was grateful for Garnett’s frankness, criticism, appreciation, encouragement and friendship. He valued the younger man’s good opinion, used him (as he had used Tadeusz) as a moral touchstone and apologized when Garnett’s expectations were disappointed: “I feel to you like a son who has gone wrong and what with shame and recklessness remains silent—and yet nourishes the hope of rehabilitation and keeps his eye fixed steadily on some distant day of pardon and embraces.” Conrad paid his finest tribute to Garnett when he portrayed him as Lea in The Inheritors, praised his generosity and insight, and expressed uneasiness about his inability to repay his friend:
Lea had helped me a good deal in the old days—he had helped everybody, for that matter. You would probably find traces of Lea’s influence in the beginnings of every writer of about my decade; of everybody who ever did anything decent, and of some who never got beyond the stage of burgeoning decently. He had given me the material help that a publisher’s reader could give, until his professional reputation was endangered, and he had given me the more valuable help that so few can give. I had grown ashamed of this one-sided friendship.17
Though Garnett, an extremely sophisticated reader, found Almayer’s Folly so authentic that he believed Conrad had Eastern blood in his veins, other authorities questioned the authenticity of the work. In the Singapore Free Press of September 6, 1898, Hugh Clifford, an author with long experience in the Malayan Colonial Service, praised the atmospheric power of the river and jungle, but claimed the novel was flawed by ignorance: “a real Nina would not go back to native ways, a real Babalatchi would never dare to yawn and scratch himself in the royal presence.” Clifford, who later became Conrad’s friend, repeated these charges in a lecture he gave in Colombo: “the author had none but a superficial acquaintance with the Malayan customs, language and character. Hardly a proper name, or a Malayan word, from one end of the book to the other, was not misspelt.”18
Having spent only twelve days or so on land in Borneo, Conrad could not, with all his perception, have learned very much about the native population during that time. (He had, however, observed Malays in Malacca and in Singapore, and worked with them aboard the Vidar: a trusty serang steers the ship for the blind Captain Whalley in “The End of the Tether.”) But he compensated for his lack of extensive knowledge by using “dull, wise” source books for the Malay names (including the improbable-sounding Babalatchi), language, characters and customs.19 Since Conrad took considerable trouble to make his novels accurate, he was surprisingly (and too readily) deferential—in letters and in print—when editors and critics challenged his authority. Responding to Clifford’s review—“Extremely laudatory but in fact telling me I don’t know anything about it”—he told William Blackwood, who published “Karain” and other Malayan stories: “Well I never did set up as an authority on Malaysia,” and he repeated this in his Author’s Note to A Personal Record. Deferring to Clifford’s authority when writing to him, Conrad suspected that “my assumption of Malay colouring for my fiction must be exasperating to those who know.”20 Yet Conrad was not writing for a select audience of old Malaya hands. Since the English reader could not differentiate Clifford’s accuracy from Conrad’s, the essential point was how realistically and effectively the Malays were portrayed in fiction. Clifford’s characters were perhaps expertly drawn, and had all the pedantically proper diacritical marks attached to their names. But they were also terribly dull. Conrad’s Malays, though sententious, were convincing and alive.
Almayer’s Folly portrays not only the indigenous Malays, Dyaks, Arabs (and their slaves), but also suggests the political hierarchy in the local rajah, the remote sultan on the far side of the island and the Dutch rulers in distant Batavia, whose gunboats show the flag on occasional visits. Starting with the character of the real Charles Olmeijer, Conrad significantly changed the details of his life: he gave him a tragic fate and a single disloyal daughter instead of a brood of eleven children. The title of the novel refers to Almayer’s megalomanic dreams about Tom Lingard’s patronage, his own prosperous marriage to a Eurasian woman, a great future for Nina, fabulous wealth, escape from Borneo and a prominent social position in Amsterdam (which he has never seen) as well as to his grandiose but decrepit house.
The plot of the novel—filled with suspicion, deception and intrigue—revolves around Almayer’s futile hope of discovering gold treasure, his illegal trading in gunpowder and his attempt to redeem himself through his beautiful half-caste daughter. Despite her Dutch father and her convent education in Singapore, Nina reverts to the race of her primitive mother, chooses to be a Malay and, in an operatic scene, remains loyal to her princely lover, Dain Maroola, rather than to her father. It is significant that Dain Maroola is the romantic hero of the novel; that Almayer and all the other Dutchmen are portrayed as foolish and mercenary. When writing the novel Conrad imagined what might have happened to him if he had given in to his irresponsible impulses, remained on the Vidar and become enthralled by a native woman. His theme is the destruction of a man by the East and by his own corrupt ambition.
Two scenes in this first novel are especially memorable and strikingly Conradian, the first for its pathos, the second for its sardonic humor. After Almayer has been abandoned by Nina and has accepted the tragic insight that “No two human beings understand each other,” Conrad reverses the famous scene in which Robinson Crusoe first discovers Friday and shows Almayer creating a pathetic and morbid memorial to his loss. To the dismay of his servant, Almayer “fell on his hands and knees, and, creeping along the sand, erased carefully with his hand all traces of Nina’s footsteps. He piled up small heaps of sand, leaving behind him a line of miniature graves right down to the water.”
In the second scene Conrad wittily juxtaposes the evil plots of Lakamba, the Malay rajah, with the lament of Manrico, the hero of Verdi’s Il Trovatore. After Lakamba tells his pock-marked factotum and adviser, Babalatchi, that he must poison Almayer to prevent him from revealing to the Dutch the secret of his gold, Lakamba demands music. And Babalatchi must reluctantly and incongruously provide it. Nearly falling asleep while he turns the hand-organ, Babalatchi fills the unresponsive jungle with alien yet soothing sounds. As Lakamba dozes comfortably in his armchair, and the music plays, Manrico, captured in battle and about to be beheaded, sings (in the first scene of the final act of Trovatore) his farewell to life and to Leonora:
Through the open shutter the notes of Verdi’s music floated out on the great silence over the river and forest. Lakamba listened with closed eyes and a delighted smile; Babalatchi turned, at times dozing off and swaying over, then catching himself up in a great fright with a few quick turns of the handle. Nature slept in an exhausted repose after the fierce turmoil, while under the unsteady hand of the statesman of Sambir the Trovatore fitfully wept, wailed, and bade good-bye to his Leonore again and again in a mournful round of tearful and endless iteration.21
The crucial events of 1894 proved as important in Conrad’s life as his departure from Poland in 1874. In mid-January he had signed off the Adowa and ended his career at sea. In late January the death of Tadeusz had broken his ties with Poland. In April he had finished Almayer’s Folly. In October his first novel had been accepted for publication and he became a professional writer. And in November he had met Edward Garnett, his lifelong friend, and Jessie George, his future wife.