On March 13, 1897, the Conrads moved from Victoria Street to Ivy Walls, a fifteenth-century farmhouse, with an annual rent of £28, just outside Stanford-le-Hope. This larger, more comfortable home had an adjoining orchard and was protected by a row of lime and elm trees. The Thames could be seen from the second-floor window. Isolated in the country with Jessie and near Hope, with whom he took Sunday sailing trips, and blocked on The Rescuer, which he could neither complete nor abandon, Conrad felt cut off from intellectual and literary life.
He rarely met other writers except through introductions or through their initiative. But during 1897–98 he quickly developed a rich network of friendships—a literary cross-section of the Edwardian era—as authors read and admired his work, and sent him enthusiastic letters that led to meetings. He moved from Hope and Krieger, from Galsworthy and Sanderson, and from Edward Garnett to intimacy with four of the best writers of his time: Henry James, whom he met in February of 1897, Stephen Crane in October, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham in November—and (as we shall see in the next chapter) Ford Madox Ford in 1898.
Conrad’s friends included literary admirers who gave him practical help: Garnett and Ford; coevals: James, Wells and Kipling; experienced men of action: Casement, Crane, Graham, Hugh Clifford and Perceval Gibbon; young disciples and substitute sons: Richard Curle, Jean-Aubry and Hugh Walpole. Galsworthy, Garnett, Ford, Wells and Clifford, as well as Arthur Symons and Sidney Colvin (whom he met later on), wrote many favorable reviews of Conrad’s work. Curle and Walpole published flattering books about him during his lifetime, André Gide translated his work and Jean-Aubry became his first biographer. Extremely devoted and loyal, Conrad maintained most of his friendships throughout his life, and his quarrels with Krieger and (later) with Ford distressed him deeply. When in December 1897 Krieger became angry with him when he could not repay a considerable loan, Conrad lamented to Garnett: “My soul is like a stone within me. I am going through the awful experience of losing a friend. . . . When life robs one of a man to whom one has pinned one’s faith for twenty years, the wrong seems too monstrous to be lived down.”
Conrad admired the ideas, technique and style of several older contemporary writers: Cunninghame Graham, W. H. Hudson and Thomas Hardy. But he felt that Henry James was pre-eminent. James had known Conrad’s three artistic idols—Turgenev, Flaubert and Maupassant—and emulated their devotion to art and striving for perfection. Ford, who followed in this tradition and published a book on James in 1914, recalled: “James was about the only living figure writing in English that Conrad regarded as at all his equal or whose work presented to him technical problems that he could not solve. . . . He would close a book by Henry James, sigh deeply and say: ‘I don’t know how the Old Man does it. There’s nothing he does not know; there’s nothing he can’t do. That’s what it is when you have been privileged to go about with Turgenev.’ ” Like Flaubert, James “compelled admiration,—about the greatest service one artist can render to another.”1
Though eager to meet James, Conrad was diffident about approaching him. After hesitating for seven months, Conrad, who almost never made the first overture, sent James a copy of An Outcast of the Islands in October 1896 with an excessively humble and flattering inscription. Referring to James’ fictional creations, he scattered capital letters as liberally as the praise that filled the flyleaf: “Exquisite Shades with live hearts, and clothed in the wonderful garment of Your prose, they have stood, consoling, by my side under many skies. They have lived with me, faithful and serene—with the bright serenity of Immortals. And to You thanks are due for such glorious companionship. I want to thank You for the charm of Your words, the delight of Your sentences, the beauty of Your pages!” These compliments may have been too much for the exquisitely mannered James. He waited until February 1897 to reciprocate with an inscribed copy of The Spoils of Poynton and with a more subtly expressed invitation to lunch at his London flat on February 25. “He is quite playful about it,” Conrad joyfully told Garnett. “Says we shall be alone—no one to separate us if we quarrel. It’s the most delicate flattery I’ve ever been victim to.” During this visit Conrad spotted the diary of Samuel Pepys, who had a notable career in the Admiralty in the seventeenth century. While browsing through the volume, he found a passage that described boarding the Naseby to bring King Charles II back from exile in 1660: “My Lord in his discourse discovered a great deal of love to this ship”—and used it as the epigraph of The Nigger of the “Narcissus.”
Henry James’ nephew Billy provided an amusing account of Conrad and Ford’s later visits to James at Lamb House in Rye: “James would take Conrad’s arm and start off with him along the road, leaving Hueffer [Ford] and Billy to bring up the rear. ‘Hueffer babbled,’ the frustrated nephew said, ‘and I didn’t listen. I wanted to hear what the great men were saying up ahead, but there I was stuck with Hueffer. Occasionally a word or two would drift back and what I always heard was—French!’ ” Ford’s version of these visits gently satirized the strained formality of the two mandarins. They habitually spoke to each other in French, and Conrad piled on the flattery in person as he had done when writing the inscription: “The politeness of Conrad to James and of James to Conrad was of the most impressive kind. Even if they had been addressing each other from the tribune of the Académie Française their phrases could not have been more elaborate or delivered more ore rotundo. James always addressed Conrad as ‘Mon cher confrère,’ Conrad almost bleated with the peculiar tones that the Marseillaises get into their compliments ‘Mon cher maître.’ . . . Every thirty seconds!” Paul Valéry noted that Conrad had a pleasant Provençal accent and Edouard Roditi observed: “he spoke French rather slowly, though not hesitantly. He had a slight foreign accent and chose his words with great care.”2
James was much more guarded and reserved than Conrad. Troubled by Conrad’s nervousness, his peculiar temperament and his profound morbidity, James felt, when with him, a mixture of amiability and anxiety. In The Inheritors, Conrad and Ford portrayed James as Callan and gave an exaggerated impression of his rather theatrical mannerisms:
He—spoke—very—slowly—and—very—authoritatively, like a great actor whose aim is to hold the stage as long as possible. The raising of his heavy eyelids at the opening door conveyed the impression of a dark, mental weariness; and seemed somehow to give additional length to his white nose. His short, brown beard was getting very grey, I thought. With his lofty forehead and with his superior, yet propitiatory smile, I was of course familiar. . . . His face was uniformly solemn, but his eyes were disconcertingly furtive.
Four years later Conrad published in the North American Review an extremely vague appreciative essay on James’ sophisticated novels that managed, in 2,500 words, to say almost nothing substantial or significant. The creator of the tormented Lord Jim praised James as “the historian of fine consciences” and tautologically mentioned “his own victorious achievement in that field where he is a master.” When the American collector John Quinn later asked Conrad if he had underestimated James in this essay, he weakly replied: “I said he was great and incomparable—and what more could one say?” In a more sincere and revealing letter to Galsworthy of March 1899, Conrad defended the sensitively restrained James against the charge of cold-heartedness: “He is cosmopolitan, civilised, very much ‘homme du monde.’ . . . To me even [‘The Real Thing’] seems to flow from the heart because and only because the work approaches so near perfection yet does not strike [me as] cold. . . . I argue that in H.J. there is a glow and not a dim one either. . . . His heart shows itself in the delicacy of his handling.”3
In June 1902, when Conrad was seeking a grant from the Royal Literary Fund, James’ generous support helped him to secure the vitally needed £300. James praised Conrad to Edmund Gosse, who had taken the matter up with the prime minister, and, thinking of his own failure to secure a wide audience, stated that the very merits of his work precluded popular success:
The Nigger of the “Narcissus” is in my opinion the very finest and strongest picture of the sea and sea-life that our language possesses—the masterpiece in a whole great class; and Lord Jim runs it very close. When I think moreover that such completeness, such intensity of expression has been arrived at by a man not born to our speech, but who took it up, with similar courage, from necessity and sympathy, and has laboured at it heroically and devotedly, I am equally impressed with the fine persistence and the intrinsic success. Born a Pole and cast upon the waters, he has worked out an English style that is more than correct, that has quality and ingenuity. The case seems to me unique and peculiarly worthy of recognition. Unhappily, to be very serious and subtle isn’t one of the paths to fortune. Therefore I greatly hope the Royal Literary Fund may be able to do something for him.
Though James had immense respect for Conrad’s character and achievement, and could find no technical fault in his work, he did not really like his later novels and told Ford that they conveyed a disagreeable impression. James’ personal uneasiness and artistic reservations about Conrad were intensified by an encounter that took place in February 1904, when Conrad abandoned his habitual gloom as well as his customary deference toward James. Edward Garnett’s sister, Olivia, was present at a gathering which included W. H. Hudson, Galsworthy, Conrad, whose books were at last beginning to sell, and Henry James. Conrad, for once gleeful, exclaimed: “I am at the top of the tree.” James replied with an exaggerated self-abasement that expressed his disapproval of Conrad’s impermissible boast: “I am a crushed worm; I don’t even revolve now, I have ceased to turn.” This incident may have affected James’ criticism of Chance, in which Conrad employed and perhaps parodied James’ convoluted narrative techniques and achieved with them a popularity greater than the Master’s. James’ essay on “The Younger Generation,” published in the Times Literary Supplement of April 2, 1914, portrayed his friend as an errant disciple (Conrad by then was fifty-six), and called Conrad “absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that should make it undergo most doing.” Two years later the wounded Conrad, who maintained his profound respect for the Master, told John Quinn that James had rather airily condemned his elaborate narrative methods and confessed: “I may say, with scrupulous truth, that this was the only time a criticism affected me painfully.”4
In his last years, James’ estimation of Conrad’s work continued to fall. In a letter of February 1914 to his colleague and compatriot Edith Wharton, he was more enthusiastic about Chance than he would be two months later in “The Younger Generation.” And he suggested (without specifying titles) that Nostromo and The Secret Agent were Conrad’s last successful works and had been followed by a series of failures (A Set of Six, Under Western Eyes and ’Twixt Land and Sea): “The last book [Chance] happens to be infinitely more practicable, more curious and readable, (in fact really rather yieldingly difficult and charming), than any one of the last three or four impossibilities, wastes of desolation, that succeeded the two or three final good things of his earlier time.” James’ final word on Conrad (in a letter of July 1915 to Edith Wharton) strangely emphasized his literary paralysis: “I haven’t for instance much hope of Conrad, who produces by the sweat of his brow and tosses off, in considerable anguish, at the rate of about a word a month.”
Though Conrad may not have realized, or may even have deceived himself about James’ personal uneasiness and serious criticism of his work, James continued to “compel respect.” As he told John Quinn in May 1916, just after James’ death: “In our private relations he has always been warmly appreciative and full of invariable kindness. I had a profound affection for him. He knew of it and accepted it as if it were something worth having.”5
Henry James was fourteen years older than Conrad; Stephen Crane, James’ American antithesis, fourteen years younger. James, cautious and cultivated, felt at home in the drawing room. Crane, reckless and rough, belonged to the battlefield. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871, the fourteenth and youngest child of a Methodist minister, Crane rebelled against his family’s genteel values. He became a reporter in New York and a correspondent in the Southwest and Mexico, in Cuba and Greece; and published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 1893 and The Red Badge of Courage two years later. In the course of his wanderings he formed a common-law marriage with Cora Taylor, the former proprietor of the aply-named brothel, the Hotel de Dream in Jacksonville, Florida. Cora may have influenced Conrad’s portrayal in Victory of Lena, a prostitute stranded in Java.
The Cranes pitched up in England after he had reported the brief Greco-Turkish War of 1897. They lived first in Ravensbrook, in Surrey, and then in Brede Manor, in Kent, which Ford said was very damp, hopelessly remote and full of evil influences. When the publisher Sidney Pawling asked Crane if there was anyone he would especially like to meet in England, he mentioned Conrad, whose Nigger of the “Narcissus” was then being serialized in William Ernest Henley’s influential New Review. Crane—“a young man of medium stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes”—bore a striking resemblance to Robert Louis Stevenson. Both had an oval face, drooping mustache, long thin nose and frail tubercular body. During the luncheon in London with Conrad and Pawling, Crane provocatively declared that he was bored by Stevenson, the darling of the English literary world, who had recently died in Samoa. Conrad also thought Stevenson’s reputation—based more on his charming personality and exotic life than on his romantic novels—was inflated and sympathized with Crane’s criticism. By the time Pawling left at four o’clock, Conrad and Crane had established an unusual rapport. Fascinated by each other’s conversation, they were reluctant to part and spent the rest of the evening walking around London and talking about everything from Greece at war to Balzac’s Comédie humaine.
Like Conrad, Crane had been a man of action, risked danger and come close to death. He had been shipwrecked off the Florida coast in 1896 and had survived for several days in a lifeboat. This disaster, which matched Conrad’s experiences on the Palestine, became the basis of one of Crane’s best short stories, “The Open Boat” (1897). “The boat thing is immensely interesting,” Conrad told Crane. “I don’t use the word in its common sense. It is fundamentally interesting to me.” Though Conrad complained about his relatively minor ailments while Crane was stoical about his fatal tuberculosis, they both recognized profound similarities in their temperaments. Even when Conrad felt seedy, he could, with his beloved Stevie (he never called James “Hank”), forget his worries and, for once, have a “real good time.” There was in Crane, Conrad believed, “a strain of chivalry which made him safe to trust with one’s life.”6 In the summer of 1899 Conrad and Crane bought a twenty-two-foot sailboat, La Reine, from G. F. W. Hope, moored it at Rye and used it for excursions in the Channel.
Unlike James, Crane fully reciprocated Conrad’s admiration and friendship, and consistently praised him in letters, in print and in conversation. When he read Conrad’s fine description of the death of the consumptive James Wait (“Something resembling a scarlet thread hung down his chin out the corner of his lips—and he had ceased to breathe”), which had for him an intensely personal meaning, he punned on the hero’s name and wrote Conrad: “I felt ill over that red thread lining from the corner of the man’s mouth to his chin. It was frightful with the weight of a real and present death.” In an essay of March 1898, Crane agreed with James’ high estimate of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and praised it (with some American hyperbole) as “a marvel of fine descriptive writing. It is unquestionably the best story of the sea written by a man now alive, and as a matter of fact, one would have to make an extensive search among the tombs before he who has done better could be found.” James Gibbons Huneker, another American admirer, remarked that Crane spoke as reverently of Conrad, as if he were the Blessed Virgin Mary.7
Crane’s enthusiasm for Conrad’s work prompted his suggestion that they collaborate on a play based on the theme (according to Garnett) of a ship wrecked on an island or (according to Conrad) of “a man personating his ‘predecessor’ (who had died) in the hope of winning a girl’s heart. The scenes were to include a ranch at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, I remember, and the action, I fear, would have been frankly melodramatic.” Conrad swore to Crane that he had no dramatic gift, that Crane himself possessed the requisite terseness, clear eye and easy imagination. At the same time, Conrad confessed to Graham that his “dark and secret ambition” was to write a play. But the distance between their houses, Crane’s chaotic way of life and his sudden departure (with the help of an advance procured by Conrad from Heinemann) to cover the Spanish-American War, prevented the play from being written. Conrad would no doubt have profited from collaboration with Crane when he attempted to realize his dramatic ambitions toward the end of his career.
Crane, though still in his twenties, had begun to publish several years before Conrad. Impressed by Crane’s fluency, which provided an astonishing contrast to his own agonized paralysis, Conrad noted: “I have seen him sit down before a blank sheet of paper, dip his pen, write the first line at once and go on without haste and without pause for a number of hours.” But his reluctance to collaborate may also have been based on reservations about the all-too-easy imagination, lack of artistic perfection and absence of resonant depths in the work of his young friend. “I could not explain why he disappoints me,” he told their mutual friend Edward Garnett, “why my enthusiasm withers as soon as I close the book. While one reads, of course, he is not to be questioned. He is the master of his reader to the very last line—then—apparently for no reason at all—he seems to let go his hold.”8
Considering his genuine fondness for Crane and the sweetness of Crane’s character, Conrad’s first essay about him (1919) was curiously negative. Conrad wrote that Crane, who was ignorant about Balzac but honest enough to ask Conrad about him, “knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other.” Though Crane had packed an extraordinary amount of travel and experience into his short life, Conrad emphasized “his ignorance of the world at large—he had seen very little of it.” Declaring that Crane was only “half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement,” he maintained that his early death was “a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature.” Conrad stressed Crane’s good nature as well as the strain of weakness in his character that allowed him to be surrounded “by people who understood not the quality of his genius and were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature.” In an unpublished letter to an American correspondent, Conrad elaborated his condemnation of Crane’s parasitic and even treacherous retinue. They did not appreciate his work, and flattered, patronized and slandered both him and his wife. Conrad strongly disapproved of this crowd, but could not persuade the good-hearted Crane that his “friends” were not as decent as he was himself.9 In the end, Conrad was disappointed by Crane’s works as well as by his character.
In his second and much longer essay, an introduction to Thomas Beer’s biography of 1923, Conrad again stressed Crane’s misfortune and morbidity: “Crane had not the face of a lucky man. . . . [He had] the smile of a man who knows that his time will not be long on this earth.” On his final visit to Crane in Dover on May 23, 1900, Conrad, who had seen Apollo slowly die of tuberculosis, knew that Crane was doomed: “He had been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes. The last words he breathed out to me were: ‘I am tired. Give my love to your wife and child.’ ”
Crane’s last letter, written immediately after seeing Conrad on his last day in England, was a chivalric plea to Sanford Bennett to assist his friend. (If Conrad had known about this letter, he surely would have been more positive about and more generous to Crane in his two essays.) Crane wrote: “My condition is probably known to you. . . . I have Conrad on my mind very much just now. Garnett does not think it likely that his writing will ever be popular outside the ring of men who write. He is poor and a gentleman and proud. His wife is not strong and they have a kid. If Garnett should ask you to help pull wires for a place on the Civil List for Conrad please do me the last favor. . . . I am sure you will.”10 Two weeks later Crane died at the age of twenty-nine in Badenweiler, in the Black Forest, where in 1904 Anton Chekhov would also die of the same disease.
Crane’s death was one of a grim series that deeply disturbed Conrad at the turn of the century. In December 1899 Hope’s seventeen-year-old son was sexually assaulted and murdered. His stripped and beaten body was found in a ditch in the Essex marshes less than a mile from Ivy Walls farm. Jack Hope’s murder was followed, in alarming succession, by the deaths of Jessie’s maid’s husband from a blood clot in February 1901, of Constance Garnett’s brother in a climbing accident on the Matterhorn in July 1901 and of Ford’s father-in-law by suicide in February 1902.
After reading Conrad’s bitter satire on colonialism, “An Outpost of Progress,” in Cosmopolis during June and July 1897, Cunninghame Graham wrote an admiring letter that led to a meeting in London in November and to a lifelong friendship. Ford described Graham as “the magnificent prose writer, rightful King of Scotland, head of the Clan Graham, Socialist Member of Parliament [and] gaolbird”—for his political protests. He was also a traveler, horseman, rancher, cattle-dealer, frontiersman, fencing-master, journalist, prospector, historian and Scottish nationalist.
Though the House of Lords had denied the claim of Graham’s father to the Earldom of Monteith, which had expired in 1694, Graham continued to maintain his unrealistic claim to the crown of Scotland by descent from the medieval King Robert II. Graham’s maternal grandfather, an admiral who had commanded ships in the West Indies and was a friend of the South American liberators, Bolivar and Páez, later represented Stirlingshire in the Reform Parliament of 1832. Graham’s maternal grandmother was Spanish, and gave birth to his mother on the admiral’s flagship off the coast of Venezuela. In 1845 Graham’s father, a wealthy major in the Scots Greys, was thrown from a horse and fractured his skull. This injury caused brain damage and led to fits of violent temper; and in 1878 the family was forced to confine him in a shooting lodge.
Graham (five years older than Conrad) was born in London in 1852, and learned Spanish at the age of eight when visiting relatives in Cádiz. He went to Harrow, which he disliked, and then studied German, French and fencing at a school in Brussels. When he was seventeen his parents gave him the money to go into partnership with two Scots who had a ranch in Argentina. He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1870 and lived in the Americas for the next thirteen years. During this adventurous period he acquired physical courage and became an expert horseman. He valued energy and vitality, disliked conventional behavior, and developed a taste for violence and revolutionary politics.
In 1883 Graham’s father died and he was summoned home to Scotland. In 1886 he successfully stood as an advanced Liberal and Home Ruler for Northwest Lanarkshire, which included the slums of Glasgow, and was a prominent member of parliament for six years. Frank Harris vividly described the cowboy dandy as “above middle height, of slight, nervous, strong figure, very well dressed, the waist line evenly defined, with a touch of exoticism in loose necktie or soft hat; in colouring the reddish brown of a chestnut; the rufous hair very thick and up-standing; the brown beard trimmed to a point and floating moustache; the oval of the face a little long; the nose Greek; the large blue eyes.” T. E. Lawrence punctured this romantic persona by declaring: “Not much brain, you know, but a great heart and hat: and what a head of hair!”11 Despite his class, wealth, pride and foppishness, Graham was a democratic aristocrat, a radical with Tory sympathies, an idealist and a humanitarian. He had the temperament of a soldier of fortune, and his socialism was based on a romantic conception of freedom and a profound sympathy for the underdog.
Despite their political differences, Conrad shared many of Graham’s values and beliefs. Both came from a noble, feudal background and believed in the chivalric concepts of fidelity and honor. Both were men of action who had traveled widely and had extensive experience in practical affairs. Both were interested in exotic cultures, had a fondness for French and admired Mediterranean culture. Both hated tyranny and exploitation, were fiercely anti-imperialistic and believed in home rule for Scotland and for Poland. Graham had temperamental affinities with Apollo Korzeniowski as well as with Conrad, and like Apollo was a connoisseur of hopeless causes.
Conrad used Graham as a model for Don Carlos Gould in Nostromo and initiated the adulatory writing about him. He always insisted that Graham was a grand seigneur born out of his time and contrasted Graham’s idealism with his own pessimism: “You with your ideals of sincerity, courage and truth are strangely out of place in this epoch of material preoccupations. . . . You seem to me tragic with your courage, with your beliefs and your hopes. . . . You are a most hopeless idealist—your aspirations are irrealisable. You want from men faith, honour, fidelity to truth in themselves and others. . . . What makes you dangerous is your unwarrantable belief that your desire may be realized. That is the only point of difference between us.” Conrad also valued faith, honor and fidelity, but he had seen enough of the consequences of revolution to be convinced that Graham’s idealistic radicalism was an illusion.
William Rothenstein perceived that there was also a negative, bitter and contradictory side to Graham’s character: “Conrad knew that Cunninghame Graham was more cynic than idealist, that he was by nature an aristocrat, whose socialism was his symbol of his contempt for a feeble aristocracy, and a blatant plutocracy.” Even staunch admirers like Edward Garnett spoke of Graham’s icy disdain and sardonic contempt for the human race. After he was defeated for re-election as a Labour candidate, he angrily denounced parliament and cynically admitted: “I have been foolish enough to soil myself with the pitch of politics, and to have endured the concentrated idiocy of the Asylum for Incapables at Westminster for six years.”12
Graham’s idealism provoked some of Conrad’s most serious and interesting letters. He treated Graham’s socialist-republican ideas with philosophical contempt, and stated (even exaggerated for Graham’s benefit) the pessimistic ideas that derived from his Polish heritage, his father’s legacy, his experience at sea, the current scientific belief that the universe was tending toward inertia and his reading of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.
Conrad’s letters to Graham, who brought out the gloomiest side of his nature, expressed the beliefs that informed his greatest works: that life is a dream and faith an illusion, that this world consists of meaningless suffering, that there are no moral absolutes and that man’s tragic fate is to end in hopeless nothingness:
Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow. . . .
In this world—as I have known it—we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt. . . .
There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that . . . is always but a vain and floating appearance. . . .
A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains—but a clot of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.
The only possible antidote, Conrad believed, was profound scepticism, which he called “the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth—the way of art and salvation.”13
Graham brought out his first books, Notes on the District of Monteith, For Tourists and Others (1895) and Father Archangel of Scotland and Other Essays (1896), at the same time as Conrad began to publish. During the last forty years of his life Graham tossed off two hundred short stories and sketches, more than half of them for Frank Harris’ Saturday Review, and eleven historical works about South America. D. H. Lawrence later exposed and condemned Graham’s haste, carelessness and insincerity (a vivid contrast to Conrad’s anxious perfectionism) that were the radical defects of his work: “Don Cunninghame, alas, struts feebly in the conquistadorial footsteps. . . . He writes without imagination, without imaginative insight or sympathy, without colour, and without real feeling. . . . He lifts a swash-buckling fountain pen, and off he goes. The result is a shoddy, scrappy, and not very sincere piece of work.”
Conrad perceived but ignored these faults in characteristically loyal and flattering letters about the work of a man he greatly admired. He dedicated Typhoon to Graham in 1903 and Graham returned the compliment by dedicating Progress to Conrad in 1905. “I’ve always felt that there are certain things which I can say to you,” he told Graham, “because the range of your feelings is wider and your mind more independent than that of any man I know.” Graham was sufficiently intimate with Conrad to correct his pronunciation of English. Richard Curle observed that Graham, like Crane, brought out the best in his friend: “In each other’s company they appeared to grow younger; they treated one another with that kind of playfulness which can only arise from a complete, unquestioning, and ancient friendship. I doubt whether the presence of any man made Conrad happier than the presence of Don Roberto.”14 Though Conrad met James, Crane and Graham infrequently, for meals and conversation, and kept in touch by correspondence, their friendship and appreciation of his work were vitally important to him.
In July 1897, between lunching with James and meeting Crane, Conrad—who had told Jessie he did not intend to have children—unhappily informed Ted Sanderson that she was pregnant and prepared himself for the worst: “There is no other news—unless the information that there is a prospect of some kind of descendant may be looked upon in the light of something new. I am not unduly elated. Johnson [the doctor] says it may mend Jess’ health permanently—if it does not end her.” Jessie felt Conrad was not pleased by the prospect of an heir; he took no responsibility for her condition and behaved as if she had “played him false.” The arrival of his children, who were both dreadfully sick throughout their early childhood, always took him by surprise.
When Jessie’s time came and he was sent to fetch the doctor, Conrad assumed there was no hurry and accepted the doctor’s offer of a leisurely second breakfast. According to Jessie, two frantic messengers had to be sent before husband and doctor returned to Ivy Walls for the delivery. On January 15, 1898, expressing irritation, distancing himself from the event and disguising his deepest feelings, Conrad told Graham: “This letter missed this morning’s post because an infant of the male persuasion arrived and made such a row that I could not hear the Postman’s whistle.” Describing the rather objectionable infant to his cousin in Poland, Conrad emphasized his physical unattractiveness (as he had done when describing Jessie): dark hair, enormous eyes and the appearance of a monkey. To Jessie, he exclaimed with considerable amazement: “Why, it’s just like a human being.”
Fearful of losing Jessie’s love and attention, the forty-year-old Conrad was reluctant to accept the arrival of his son. In March 1898 he could scarcely bear the short train journey with his family to visit Stephen Crane in Surrey. Jessie, who liked to portray Conrad as a kind of superior fool, vividly recalled:
He had taken our tickets, first class, and intended travelling in the same carriage, but—here he became most emphatic—on no account were we to give any indication that he belonged to our little party. . . . [He] seated himself in a far corner, ostentatiously concealing himself behind his newspaper and completely ignoring his family. . . . The baby whimpered and refused to be comforted. I caught a glance of warning directed at me from over the top of the paper. All my efforts to soothe the infant proved unavailing, and the whole carriage re-echoed with his lusty howls. The paper was flung aside and from all sides came murmurs of consternation and sympathy for him—the only man; the stranger in the carriage. . . . Then the whole carriage was convulsed with suppressed merriment when my young sister [Dolly] turned to Joseph Conrad and, forgetting his injunction, demanded that he should reach down the case that contained the baby’s bottle.
The brooding genius was thus forced into the humiliating role of helpful father. A year later, in a letter to Helen Sanderson (who had married Ted in April 1898), Conrad suggested that he still felt distant from his son, whom he invested with adult vices: “I do not mind owning I wished for a daughter. I can’t help feeling she would have resembled me more and would have been perhaps easier to understand. . . . At the age of thirteen months he is an accomplished and fascinating barbarian, full of charming wiles and of pitiless selfishness.”15 The troubled and sometimes tragic relations of father and daughter (though not father and son) were a constant theme in Conrad’s works.
Wishing to pay homage to his Polish heritage, Conrad told Aniela Zagorska that the child would be baptized in the Chapel of the Cloister of the Carmelites in Southwark (though this Chapel was in North Kensington and he was not baptized there). He also explained: “I wanted to have a purely Slavonic name, but one which could not be distorted either in speech or in writing—and at the same time one which was not too difficult for foreigners (non-Slavonic). I had, therefore, to reject names such as Wladyslaw, Boguslaw, Wienczyslaw etc., I do not like Bohdan: so I decided on Borys, remembering that my friend Stanislaw Zaleski gave this name to his eldest son, so that apparently a Pole may use it.”
It is surprising that Conrad’s own names (Joseph and Theodore) as well as those of his father and uncles (Apollo, Robert, Hilary, Tadeusz and Stefan), which could easily have been pronounced in English, were notably absent from this list of possibilities. Conrad’s biographers have assumed that the name Borys, adapted to English and strangely spelled with a “y” instead of an “i,” was typically Russian, uncommon in Poland and given “under an illusion that it is a name used in the Ukraine and by Poles living there as well.” Yet it seems impossible that Conrad, who hated Russians, would ignorantly confer a Russian name on his first-born son and would spell it with a “y” for no apparent reason. In fact, Conrad chose the name carefully and was well aware that the Ukrainian-Polish Borys (as opposed to the Russian-Bulgarian Boris), the first Kievan-Slavic martyr and saint of the Ukrainian church, was and still is a prominent name in the part of the Polish Ukraine where Conrad was born.16
Conrad had developed his methods of composition, prose style and theory of art by 1897, when he wrote his first masterpiece, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” which was enthusiastically praised by his new literary friends. Though he denied (in his Author’s Note to A Set of Six) that he made notes before writing his fiction, he did, in fact, take extensive notes from source books to refresh his memory when composing his Malayan novels, his Napoleonic novels and Nostromo. His “Congo Diary” as well as notebooks on the Franco-Prussian War (possibly prepared for collaboration with Stephen Crane) have survived. Conrad needed a factual basis to inspire his fiction and believed: “Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.” His imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories were based on reading as well as on his actual experience.
Conrad usually wrote with a common steel pen, which he sometimes saved, after it had worn out, for sentimental reasons. The manuscript of “Youth” (1898), however, was composed (atypically and in the manner of D. H. Lawrence) with pencil and in a little notebook, while lying on his stomach under a chestnut tree at Ivy Walls farm. Though Conrad always came down to breakfast at exactly nine o’clock, he was a slow and reluctant starter. In his middle and late years, he usually spent the mornings reading the newspapers and answering letters. But he often worked from half past eight in the evening until two or three in the morning and finished many novels, after a long spurt of work, in the middle of the night.
He could not face the anguished prospect of writing a long novel over a period of years. So he conceived works like Lord Jim as stories and claimed he was nearly finished when he still had a long way to go. When composing, he tried to visualize the movement of successive scenes. He would absorb himself in prolonged meditation about his novels until his characters and plot could be grasped, and were ready to flow through his pen and onto the paper. His ambition, as he explained in his Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” was to re-create and intensify reality and “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.”17
A slow and painstaking writer, Conrad felt utterly exhausted after completing three hundred words—a page and a half of his script—which was his average daily achievement. While writing An Outcast of the Islands he agonized with pen in hand and produced only six lines in six days. Sometimes he wrote even less than this. When blocked on The Rescuer, for example, he produced three sentences in eight hours, but erased them before leaving his desk in despair. As Ford later told Robert Lowell: “Conrad spent a day finding the mot juste; then killed it.”
Conrad found imaginative writing a form of exquisite torture. He converted nervous force into phrases, felt as if each page were wrenched from his very soul, and needed crisis and frenzy to complete his work. Like D. H. Lawrence, he used the metaphor of coal-mining to symbolize the exploration of the unconscious, and told Garnett: “I had to work like a coal-miner in his pit, quarrying all my English sentences out of a black night.” When encouraging his friends and criticizing the manuscripts of Galsworthy, Garnett, Ford, Hugh Clifford, Norman Douglas and Warrington Dawson, he urged them to search the depths of their being and to strive for the highest standards. As he told Edward Noble—who was also born in 1857, served in the merchant marine and would publish fifteen novels of the sea between 1905 and 1929—“you must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image—mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse; you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain.”18
Conrad had never been gratified by his creative gift, which brought many hours of unhappiness, doubt and heart-searching. Following the Romantic tradition of Nietzsche and of Rimbaud, he told Dawson, a young American disciple, that torment and agony were essential to creation: “Suffering is an attribute, almost a condition of greatness, of devotion, of an altogether self-forgetful sacrifice to that remorseless fidelity to the truth of his own sensations, at whatever cost of pain and contumely, which for me is the whole Credo of the artist.” Just before completing The Nigger of the “Narcissus” he said that he could not eat, suffered from nightmares and terrified his wife. While struggling with The Rescuer he felt suicidal and thought he had suffered a mental breakdown: “The fear of this horror coming back to me makes me shiver. As it is it has destroyed already the little belief in myself I used to have.” And while working on Nostromo, amidst painful attacks of gout, he exclaimed: “If I had written each page with my blood I could not feel more exhausted,” and resembled the Poe-like artist of Robert Lowell’s “The Severed Head,” who “dripped/a red ink dribble on us, as he pressed/the little strip of plastic tubing clipped/to feed it from his heart.”19 Conditions improved slightly after 1904, when Conrad engaged Miss Lillian Hallowes as his secretary. The tall and willowy sister of a naval architect, she had (according to Borys) a vacant expression and a supercilious manner, but was able to lighten Conrad’s burden.
A major cause of Conrad’s artistic agony was his eternal struggle with the English language. He complained that critics who had penetrated his pseudonym considered him “a sort of freak, an amazing bloody foreigner writing in English.” But even after he had published Lord Jim and Nostromo, he still felt English was a foreign tongue that demanded a fearful effort. When an acquaintance wondered “how so un-English a man in temperament, looks, and utterance as Conrad should be able to write such perfect English,” Conrad replied: “Ah, if only I could write zee English, good, well! But you will see, you will see.”20
Another difficulty was that Conrad retained many characteristics of Polish as well as of French prose style, which provided an exotic foundation and made his English seem unusual even when it was grammatically correct. Polish has longer sentences, “it is rich in adjectives, more sedate in pace, less ambiguous, and tends to the rhetorical.” Conrad’s overfondness for triple parallelism, especially in his early works (“all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men”), as well as for rhetorical abstraction (“It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention”21), is more typical of Polish than English and reveals his Slavic literary legacy.
Conrad’s books usually received favorable reviews. But contemporary critics, as well as James and Crane, realized that the very qualities that enhanced his reputation—his exotic style, complex narration, profound themes, pessimistic ideas—discouraged his readers and diminished the sales of his books. Reviewing The Nigger of the “Narcissus” in the Spectator of December 1897, one critic perceived: “Mr. Conrad is a writer of genius; but his choice of themes, and the uncompromising nature of his methods, debar him from attaining a wide popularity.” Yet as Conrad’s ideas were justified by the events of the twentieth century, he came to be admired by modern critics for beliefs that seemed more in accord with our time than with his own.
The poor sales of his books led to money troubles that persisted from 1895 until 1913, for he always spent much more than he earned. Neither a fluent nor a successful writer, with a growing family and a tendency to live above his means, Conrad found it impossible to maintain a middle-class façade or to survive on his income as a writer. Forced to borrow money from friends and editors—Adolf Krieger, Spiridion Kliszczewski (the Pole in Cardiff), Galsworthy, Garnett and Ford as well as William Blackwood, David Meldrum (Blackwood’s London editor) and the American publisher S. S. McClure—he was unable to repay his debts and felt guilty about his dishonorable behavior. Alluding to his slowness as a writer, Conrad angrily told Unwin, when negotiating terms for The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: “I can’t afford to work for less than ten pence per hour and must work in a way that will give me this magnificent income.” After he had sold the American rights of the unfinished Rescuer to S. S. McClure for £250, he regretfully told Ted Sanderson that McClure “sends on regular cheques which is—according to his lights—right, but I pocket them serenely which—according to my lights—looks uncommonly like a swindle.”22 Despite these scruples, Conrad kept the money.
When writing became intolerably oppressive, Conrad dreamed of resuming his life in the merchant marine. Two weeks after Borys was born, he again felt the call of the sea and imagined he could take his family with him. And in August 1898, still tormented by the implacable Rescuer, he begged Graham to get him a Scottish ship: “To get to sea would be salvation. I am really in a deplorable state, mentally.” The following month he spent three days in Glasgow, making the rounds of the shipping offices and (for the last time) searching for a command. But there were no vacant posts for masters in the vanishing Clyde clippers and Conrad was forced back to his “torture chamber.”
Though Conrad tried to return to sea, he hated the reputation he had acquired as a novelist of the sea, which seemed to limit rather than to define his achievement and to discourage his readers from accepting his works on other subjects. He told friends, with considerable exasperation, that “behind the concert of flattery, I can hear something like a whisper: ‘Keep to the open sea! Don’t land!’ They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean.” He ardently wished “to get freed from that infernal tail of ships, and that obsession of my sea life.”23
Conrad’s unwelcome reputation as a sea novelist helps to explain his irrational dislike of the work of Herman Melville. Conrad called Fenimore Cooper—a lesser writer, whom he had read as a child—a constant companion, a rare artist and one of his masters. But he hated Melville’s romanticism, insincerity and mysticism, and did not want to be coupled with Melville as an exotic (though less brutal) writer of the sea. “Excepting in Melville, perhaps,” wrote the Daily Chronicle when reviewing An Outcast of the Islands, “we know nothing to match his scenic descriptions of tropical islands, and to say they recall Typee and its fellow romance [Omoo] is to give the highest and justest meed of praise.” When Oxford University Press asked him to write an introduction to Moby-Dick, Conrad refused the offer and called the novel “a rather strained rhapsody with whaling for a subject and not a single sincere line of the 3 vols of it.” And when the sculptor Jacob Epstein unwisely mentioned the book, Conrad burst into a furious denunciation: “He knows nothing of the sea. Fantastic, ridiculous. . . . Mystical my eye! My old boots are mystical.”24
In an early appreciation of Melville in his pioneering Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), D. H. Lawrence rubbed salt in the wound by favorably contrasting Melville to Conrad: “His vision is . . . far sounder than Joseph Conrad’s, because Melville doesn’t sentimentalize the ocean and the sea’s unfortunates. Snivel in a wet hanky like Lord Jim.” Lawrence disliked the pessimism and defeatism “that pervades all Conrad and such folks—the Writers among the Ruins. I can’t forgive Conrad for being so sad and giving in.” In the opening lines of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Lawrence would (by contrast) bravely declare: “The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes.” Conrad returned the compliment (before Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published) by condemning The Rainbow, which had been suppressed for obscenity in 1915: “D. H. Lawrence had started well, but had gone wrong. Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”25
The Nigger of the “Narcissus” was serialized in Henley’s New Review from August to December 1897 and published by Heinemann, in an edition of 1,500 copies, in December of that year. In this novella Conrad simplified and sharpened his style, shifted his setting from land to sea and began to establish his reputation as a nautical novelist. The mutinous crew, the violent storm and the ship on its beam-ends were based on the 136-day voyage on the Narcissus (June–October 1884), which left from Bombay, sailed east of Madagascar and Mauritius, round the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Azores to Dunkirk (the fictional Narcissus sails to London). In the story, the cook Podmore, a religious fanatic, was given the middle name of Augustine Podmore Williams, the actual model for Lord Jim. Singleton, the noble patriarch who steers through the tempest for thirty-six hours, was given the family name of Edward Garnett’s mother, as a subtle tribute to her son.
The eponymous hero, James Wait, was based on Joseph Barron, a thirty-five-year-old illiterate American Negro who died at sea three weeks before the ship reached Dunkirk. His name (which sounds like “white” when pronounced by Wait, a West Indian) allows Wait to make a dramatic pun, when he first steps aboard, by simultaneously calling out his name and apparently ordering the chief mate to stop. His name suggests that the crew will wait on him while he waits for death, as a dead weight on the ship. Wait’s excessive self-love and egoistic concern for his own comfort connect him to the myth of Narcissus.
Conrad’s conception of the story may have been influenced by Melville’s Benito Cereno (1856), a tale about a rebellion of Negro slaves on a Spanish ship. His use of Wait’s blackness is extremely effective. It emphasizes Wait’s isolation and difference; it makes him more dramatic and mysterious; it reverses his traditional social status. For he is arrogant and impudent, gives himself airs, speaks elegant English, boasts of stealing a white man’s girl and persuades the crew to serve him. Wait is related to evil, the devil and black magic; and, apparently dying of tuberculosis, is associated with death, coffins and graves. A chronic malingerer, he deceives the crew into thinking he is much sicker than he actually is (so he does not have to work) and, both genuine and fraudulent, persuades himself that he is not seriously ill. Wait tests the crew’s response to death, exemplifies their guilt, forces the men to identify their survival with his own and (with the help of his evil familiar, Donkin) incites rebellion and destroys the solidarity of the ship.
The two greatest moments in the novella, apart from the description of the storm that rivals “Typhoon,” are the two burial scenes. In the first, Wait is buried in his narrow room by the violent tempest and the crew have to break down the walls and extract him, as in a difficult childbirth, by his “blooming short wool.” In the second and final burial Wait, who had been “reborn” in the storm, dies in the calm that is superstitiously associated with his illness and that impedes the passage home. As they lift his corpse on the plank to slide it into the sea, Wait, still apparently animate, refuses to move. Finally, as his friend shrieks: “Jimmy, be a man!,” they realize his shroud has been caught on a nail, and push him off the tilted board and into the sea. Through their confrontation with Wait, the complicitous crew move from innocence to experience and are forced to come to terms with the evil in themselves.
In 1897 Conrad, rarely pleased with his own work, told Crane he was dissatisfied with the conclusion of the novella: “I think however artistically the end of the book is somewhat lame. I mean after the death [which Crane had found haunting]. All that rigamarole about the burial and the ship’s coming home seems to run away into a rat’s tail—thin at the end.” But the conclusion is actually very well done. The wind, released from Wait’s malign spell once he is safely under water, suddenly rises and carries the ship to port. The paying off of the men at the end balances the mustering at the beginning. And the ironic perspective of the crew on land emphasizes the unique values of the sea. The wise old Singleton now seems “a disgusting old brute” while Donkin, who had come aboard in rags and was given a bad discharge for inciting the mutiny that was suppressed by Captain Allistoun, has found his proper element. By 1914, when Conrad had completed a number of major works and acquired considerably more self-confidence, he revised his harsh judgment in the preface to a new American edition and justly maintained: “It is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to stand or fall.”26