Conrad’s first eleven books were brought out by six different publishers, and it was not until his twelfth work, in 1907, that he settled down for a time with Methuen—though he continued to alternate between this firm, Unwin and Dent until the end of his life. His first eight American editions were published by seven different firms, and he did not finally move to Doubleday until 1912.1 Conrad was not good at dealing with publishers, felt wounded when they rejected his terms and was crushed when told that his books had lost money. To protect himself, he cultivated an aristocratic disdain for publishers and profits, claimed their tradesmen’s behavior was discreditable and called them “strange cattle.” To Garnett, who gave good advice and acted as a buffer between the mercurial artist and the sober businessmen, he both boasted and confessed that he had become expert at exploiting agents and editors. But it was a tedious and exhausting process.
When the literary agent James Brand Pinker first approached him in August 1899, Conrad frankly admitted his personal and professional faults, and warned him that he would be a risky client: “My method of writing is so unbusiness-like that I don’t think you could have any use for such an unsatisfactory person. I generally sell a work before it is begun, get paid when it is half done and don’t do the other half till the spirit moves me. I must add that I have no control whatever over the spirit—neither has the man who has paid the money. The above may appear fanciful to you but it is the sober truth.” Ignoring these warnings, Pinker waited a year and then persuaded Conrad to let him sort out the confusion with his publishers. At this time, Pinker succeeded Uncle Tadeusz, “Aunt” Marguerite and Edward Garnett in the role of guardian, and supported Conrad’s literary career as Tadeusz had supported his career at sea. Pinker recognized Conrad’s extraordinary talent, believed in his future, wanted to help him and thought he would eventually succeed.
James Pinker—a self-made man with a dash of the arriviste—was born in Scotland in 1863, the son of poor parents, and had very little formal education. After a brief time as a clerk at Tilbury Docks, he worked as a journalist in Constantinople, married a wealthy woman and returned to England in 1891. He became assistant editor of an illustrated weekly, Black and White, read for a publishing house and briefly edited the popular Pearson’s Magazine. In 1896 he became a literary agent, with offices in Granville House, Arundel Street. He could recognize talent, and his early clients included Wilde, Wells, Crane, James and Arnold Bennett.
Pinker was a sturdy but lively man with pink cheeks and a pronounced burr—dapper, bow-tied and rather pleased with himself. Ford said that behind the benevolent spectacles was a grim gleam in his hard eyes. And Frank Swinnerton also emphasized the toughness beneath the kindly countenance: “He was short, compact, a rosy, round-faced clean-shaven grey-haired sphinx with a protrusive under-lip, who drove four-in-hand, spoke distinctly in a hoarse voice that was almost a whisper, shook hands shoulder-high, laughed without moving, knew the monetary secrets of authors and the weaknesses of publishers, terrified some of these last and was refused admittance by others, dominated editors, and of course enjoyed much power.” Pinker had an expert knowledge of the trade, enjoyed close relations with publishers in Europe and America, drove a hard bargain and energetically defended the rights of his clients.
Unlike D. H. Lawrence (who later became Pinker’s client), Conrad was unwilling to reduce his standard of living to match his income and cut back expenses to maintain his independence. He was, after all, an aristocrat; he had to live like a gentleman and have (even when in debt and pressed for money) maids, gardeners, secretaries, nurses, tutors, private schools, a London club, cars, holidays abroad and expensive hotels. He believed “that an artist should obtain the uttermost farthing that can be got for his work—not on the ground of material satisfaction but simply for the sake of leisure which, it seems to me, is a necessary condition of good work.”2 Conrad’s anguished creation seemed to justify spending more than he earned. Almost every letter to Pinker—who must have dreaded their arrival—worried him with a demand for a favor or for cash.
In January 1901, true to his original warning, Conrad apologized to Pinker for his entanglements with several publishers, explained that he hoped to finish The Rescuer but had to work on other projects that would bring in money, and placed their business relations on a shaky foundation by asking payment for work that had not yet been sold:
Would you, therefore, advance me as much as the prospect of placing the story [“Typhoon”] would justify—leaving you on the safe side. I feel I am not fair to you with all my reservations of book-rights to certain publishers and so on. However, later on, when I’ve cleared up my position vis-à-vis Heinemann—principally—we may be able to put our connection on a sounder basis, as far as you are concerned.
The “knot” in the situation is the finishing of the Rescue. That would clear the air—but on the other side I must for the present write stuff that’ll bring immediate bread and butter.
Despite the prize from the Academy, grants of £300 and £200 from the Royal Literary Fund in 1903 and 1908, £500 from the Royal Bounty fund in 1905, and a Civil List Pension of £100 a year in 1910, Conrad shuddered to think how much he owed Pinker, who frequently advanced him considerable sums of money. Conrad estimated that he lived on £650 a year, and by 1908 he owed Pinker as much as £1,600. The following year his total debt amounted to £2,250, for which he paid £100 annual interest. Pinker managed Conrad’s finances; paid for milk, cigars, hotel rooms and a new coat for Jessie; he even replaced the money when Conrad’s pocket was picked. When Conrad’s bankers, Watson & Co., failed in 1904, Pinker helped cover the overdraft of £200. In 1907 Conrad hoped to settle down on a secure financial basis within three years, but in 1908 his thirteen books brought in less than £5 in royalties. In 1912 he complained to the wealthy Edith Wharton that after sixteen years of scribbling he was still living from day to day. Pinker was paying Jessie’s medical bills as late as 1919.
Conrad frequently declared that he was hopeless with money matters and, addressing his benefactor as if he were Uncle Tadeusz, begged Pinker not to scold him. But this volatile situation inevitably produced explosions of temper on both sides. In January 1902, after a harsh, admonitory letter from Pinker, Conrad took offense and complained in a haughty tone that he was not being treated with proper respect: “I am not just now in the right frame of mind for the proper appreciation of a lecture. . . . Pray do not write to me as [if] I were a fool blundering in the dark. . . . Don’t address me as if I were a man lost in sloth, ignorance or folly.” Pinker backed down and paid up, and the quarrel blew over within a week.
With a mixture of apology and complaint, Conrad confessed: “I feel every time I write as if I were begging. I don’t like it. It grows impossible,” but he continued nevertheless to beg. When Jessie claimed she was entitled to an outing and insisted on coming up to London with her husband, Conrad, like a schoolboy demanding a treat, asked Pinker to meet this expense. He claimed it could not be very heavy, though it was certainly heavier for Pinker than for Conrad. The agent must have been exasperated not only by his client’s poor logic, but also by the demand that he pay for Jessie’s whims. It may have been on this occasion that Conrad had one of the infantile tantrums that Jessie loved to record in her memoirs:
[He] walked rapidly into another hotel and curtly requested the waiter to “tell my wife I am here.” The waiter’s very natural question, “What name, sir?” had exasperated him, and he answered sharply, “Mrs. Conrad, of course.” When the man returned after a short absence with the information that there was no one of that name in the hotel, Conrad called for the manager, and now, greatly irate, turned on him tensely with the command, “Produce my wife!” It was with difficulty he was persuaded that he was in the wrong hotel.3
In July 1904, when Conrad was forced to borrow a pound from William Heinemann for his train fare home, his literary friends got the impression that Pinker was keeping him on a very short leash. Defending himself against this charge, Pinker told Wells that some people may have “the impression that Conrad was in penury and that I was treating him with less than humanity. As a matter of fact Conrad always borrows a sovereign when he comes in. . . . In truth I have never refused Conrad any sum that he has asked for.” Conrad, to disguise his humiliating situation, boasted to Galsworthy (another benefactor): “The slave obeys my behests in profound silence as a rule.” But he was as grateful for Pinker’s faith as for his cash, recognized that their relationship was based on friendship, not business, and said: “He has stepped gallantly into the breach left open by the collapse of my bank; and not only gallantly, but successfully as well. He has treated not only my moods but even my fancies with the greatest consideration.”4 Conrad later told his young Polish friend Joseph Retinger that if it had not been for Pinker he would have starved.
In the early years of the century Conrad continued to widen his circle of acquaintances. He not only met (through Wells) Major Ernest Dawson, who had served as a magistrate in the East and as an officer in the Rangoon Volunteer Rifles and had contributed stories about Burma to Blackwood’s, but also some of his most successful contemporaries: Arnold Bennett, Bernard Shaw and Rudyard Kipling. Conrad first met Bennett in 1899 at the home of H. G. Wells. The popular Staffordshire novelist sent him Leonora in 1903, and for the next decade Bennett, who had impeccable taste in Conrad, consistently praised The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Chance.
Wells recalled that when he introduced Conrad to George Bernard Shaw in the spring of 1902, the witty but flippant Irishman “talked with his customary freedoms. ‘You know, my dear fellow, your books won’t do’—for some Shavian reason I have forgotten—and so forth. I went out of the room and suddenly found Conrad on my heels, swift and white-faced. ‘Does that fellow want to insult me?’ he demanded. The provocation to say ‘Yes’ and assist at the subsequent duel was very great, but I overcame it. ‘It’s humour,’ I said, and took Conrad into the garden to cool. One could always baffle Conrad by saying ‘humour.’ It was one of our damned English tricks he had never learnt to tackle.” The always serious Conrad, who never forgot Shaw’s criticism, later told Garnett, with considerable truth: “The fellow pretends to be deep but he never gets to the bottom of things but rides off on some tricky evasion.”5 Yet he respected Shaw’s good opinion and told Galsworthy that Shaw was (inexplicably) enthusiastic about Conrad’s play One Day More and had praised him as a “real dramatist.”
Conrad’s relations with Kipling, his most notable rival, were much more complex. They were the only great authors who portrayed imperialism during the zenith of its power and influence. Conrad’s unfamiliar subject matter and exotic settings, his themes of self-discipline and devotion to duty, led his first critics to label him a spinner of sea yarns and the “Kipling of the Malay Archipelago.” Both writers employed technical expertise in their fiction, but Kipling’s was acquired from books while Conrad’s was learned from experience. Conrad justly thought his works were more ambitious and profound, and resented the comparison to Kipling. Comparing his own works to those of his contemporary, Conrad told a French friend: “A national writer like Kipling for example translates easily. His interest is in the subject, the interest of my work is in the effect that it produces. He speaks of his compatriots. I write for them.”
In January 1898 Arthur Symons, reviewing a translation of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il trionfo della morte in the Saturday Review, contrasted The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Captains Courageous to continental novels and said these two books had no idea behind them. The following month Conrad wrote a 1,500 word defense of Kipling (and of himself) and sent it to Outlook, where in 1898 he published essays on Alphonse Daudet and on Marryat and Cooper. It was never published and has never been found.6
Charles Carrington’s statement that “each was an admirer of the other’s work” needs some qualification. Though Conrad recommended Kipling’s work to his Polish cousin, he expressed profound, if somewhat cryptic reservations about him in two letters to Cunninghame Graham, who was not sympathetic to Kipling’s conservative views:
Mr. Kipling has the wisdom of the passing generations—and holds it in perfect sincerity. Some of his work is of impeccable form and because of that little thing he shall sojourn in Hell only a very short while. He squints with the rest of his excellent sort. . . .
In the chaos of printed matter Kipling’s ébauches [rough drafts] appear by contrast finished and impeccable. I judge the man in his time—and space. It is a small space—and as to his time I leave it to your tender mercy. I wouldn’t in his defence spoil the small amount of steel that goes to the making of a needle.
While granting Kipling’s artistic polish and superiority to his rather undistinguished contemporaries, Conrad criticized his irritating cleverness and the shallowness of his moral vision. By the time Under Western Eyes appeared in 1911, the difference between the two writers was much clearer and a critic could justly declare: “Mr. Conrad represents the genius of negation as surely as Mr. Kipling represents the genius of affirmation.”7
Kipling’s political views and justification of colonialism deeply offended the author of Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. As Conrad, whose sympathies were always with the underdog, wrote of the Boer War: “There is an appalling fatuity in this business. If I am to believe Kipling this is a war undertaken for the cause of democracy. C’est à crever de rire! [It’s enough to make you split your sides laughing].” And the usually patriotic Conrad used to shock Ford “by declaring that the French [who had less racial prejudice than the English] were the only European nation who knew how to colonize; they had none of the spirit of Mr. Kipling’s ‘You bloody-Niggerisms’ about them.” As Retinger noted, Conrad also “had the prejudice of many of his contemporaries against what they called Kipling’s reporter’s style and his ‘journalese.’ ”
Retinger was quite mistaken, however, when he claimed that “Conrad never understood the great Imperialist, and, indeed, disliked him intensely,”8 for the difference in their political views—like Conrad’s political differences with Garnett and Graham—did not interfere with their friendship. On August 30, 1904, Mrs. Kipling, impressed by Conrad, increased his stature and wrote in her diary: “Mr. Conrad, author of Lord Jim, comes to call. A large Pole seaman full of amusing stories.” Two years later Conrad inscribed a copy of The Mirror of the Sea “To the memorable, for me, kindness of your reception, just over two years ago, pray add the kindly act of accepting this copy of a very small book—very small but particularly my own. Believe me, with the greatest regard, yours faithfully, J. Conrad, 4 October 1906, Pent Farm.” Five days later Kipling responded with an enthusiastic note, praising “Typhoon” as well as the new book.
Conrad also visited Kipling at Burwash during the 1920s. Conrad’s son John recalled that he had an enjoyable time and was in a very cheerful mood on the way home. Kipling reciprocated Conrad’s admiration. A Polish diplomat and author, who met him in Madrid in 1928, recorded: “I was struck by the magnanimity with which he praised and discussed Conrad’s outstanding talent that was overshadowing his own writings of recent years. . . . ‘His spoken English was sometimes difficult to understand but with a pen in his hand he was first amongst us.’ . . . [But] there was nothing English, according to Kipling, in Conrad’s mentality. ‘When I am reading him,’ he continued, ‘I always have the impression that I am reading an excellent translation of a foreign author.’ ”9
During 1903–4 Conrad also formed friendships with two men who belonged to the world of art and letters, had distinguished careers and were later knighted. William Rothenstein—a short, bald man with thick glasses, fifteen years younger than Conrad—was well-connected and prominent in the artistic and literary worlds of Paris and London. His friend Max Beerbohm wrote that “he wore spectacles that flashed more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of ideas. . . . He knew every one.” Rothenstein was also a friend of Cunninghame Graham and had traveled with him in Morocco. In July 1903 Rothenstein came down to Pent Farm and did two portraits of Conrad, one in chalk and one in pastel (the former is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London), and their friendship developed quickly. Rothenstein lent Conrad money and helped him obtain a grant in 1905. Conrad praised his “amazing intelligence,” and in 1906, while living in London, offered Rothenstein the use of Pent Farm. In Men and Memories Rothenstein described Conrad’s appearance with an artist’s eye and ascribed to his Polish background his nervous sensitivity and elaborate manners:
With his piercing eyes and keen, deeply-lined bearded face, in some ways he looked like the sea captain, but his nervous manner, his rapid, excited speech, his restlessness, his high shoulders, didn’t suggest the sailor. I accepted him at once as an artist; never, I thought, had I met anyone with a quicker apprehension, with such warmth of intellectual sympathy. . . .
There was always an element of strain in Conrad—an excitability, which may have been individual, or may have been Polish. . . . While Conrad was extremely courteous and understanding by nature, his nerves sometimes made him aggressive, almost violent; and like most sensitive men, he was strongly affected, either favourably or disagreeably, by others. . . . When he liked people he would admit no faults; indeed, he was inclined to flatter—perhaps this was a Polish trait—both in speaking and writing.
Conrad met Sidney Colvin—a thin, bald man with a white pointed beard, a gentle scholarly face and delicate features—in February 1904. The son of a country gentleman and East India merchant in London, Colvin was born in 1845 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. An art critic, biographer of Keats and Landor, editor and intimate of Stevenson, friend of Ruskin, Rossetti and Henry James, he had been Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum before becoming Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum (where he had a flat) in 1884. An earnest, conservative and rather humorless man, “in the conduct of life he was [like Conrad] all for the traditions, perfect courtesy, an unflinching code of honour, decent manners and a certain avoidance of the crudities [of] modern life.”10
Frances Sitwell, an older woman who had been venerated by Stevenson and eventually became Colvin’s wife, had long been separated from her clergyman husband. But she was unable to marry Colvin, whom she had known for thirty years, until Reverend Sitwell’s death in 1903. Though Colvin and Mrs. Sitwell had lived separately in London, she had been the recognized hostess in his house and their liaison (curiously like Galsworthy and Ada’s) had been approved by all their many friends. Despite Conrad’s disdain for Stevenson, whom Colvin worshiped, they soon became close friends. Colvin suggested and then produced One Day More at the Court Theatre in London in June 1905, and wrote favorable reviews of Chance, Victory, The Shadow-Line and The Arrow of Gold in the Observer, the Daily Telegraph and the Living Age.
In mid-January 1904 the Conrads rented rooms for two months in 17 Gordon Place, Kensington, close to Ford and his family, shared their household expenses and took meals with them. During this period Conrad continued to work on Nostromo; wrote One Day More; and discovered, he told the fluent Wells, that he could dictate his sea sketches to Ford at the astonishing rate of 3,000 words in four hours. In Return to Yesterday Ford described his dual role as prompter and recorder:
The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record were mostly written by my hand from Conrad’s dictation. Whilst he was dictating them, I would recall incidents to him—I mean incidents of his past life which he had told me but which did not come freely back to his mind because at the time he was mentally ill [i.e., depressed], in desperate need of money, and, above all, skeptical as to the merits of the reminiscential form which I had suggested to him. The fact is I could make Conrad write at periods when his despair and fatigue were such that in no other way would it have been possible to him. He would be lying on the sofa or pacing the room, railing at life and literature as practised in England, and I would get a writing pad and pencil and, whilst he was still raving, would interject: “Now, then, what was it you were saying about coming up the Channel and nearly running over a fishing boat that suddenly appeared under your bows?” and gradually there would come “Landfalls and Departures.”
By April 15 Conrad told George Harvey, president of Harper’s publishers: “I have a book which is nearly ready, a volume of Sea-sketches, something in the spirit of Turgeniev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, but concerned with ships and sea with a distinct autobiographical and anecdotal note running through what is mainly meant for a record of remembered feelings. . . . For title I thought of: A Seaman’s Sketches or if a more general effect is desired Mirror of the Sea.”11 Serialized during 1904–5 and published as a book in October 1906, The Mirror of the Sea is a somewhat wordy, sententious and rambling memoir (not surprising, considering its mode of composition). It describes, in random, achronological order, several illuminating episodes on Conrad’s ships: the Tilkhurst, Loch Etive, Highland Forest, Duke of Sutherland, Otago and Mont-Blanc. The central metaphor is that ships are alive and have their own personal qualities. The main interest of the book lies in the final chapters on Conrad’s Marseilles hero, Dominic Cervoni, and the destruction of their ship, the Tremolino.
A few days after he arrived in London an accident occurred that affected Conrad for the rest of his life. Coming out of John Barker’s department store on High Street, Kensington, Jessie “slipped the cartilage” of both knees, fell onto the pavement and badly injured the knee that had been previously dislocated and damaged by a skating accident in 1889. Partially crippled by this fall, during the next thirty years Jessie endured a dozen expensive but unsuccessful operations. Her consequent immobility led to obesity, which, in turn, further weakened her crippled knee.
In November 1904 a surgeon examined Jessie under chloroform and, according to Borys, botched the first operation. Conrad told Ford that “the mischief was not located—it was not even found. As a matter of fact Bruce Clarke (as good a man as there is, I suppose) took his patient for a pampered, silly sort of little woman who was making no end of fuss for a simple stiff joint. You may imagine to what horrible pain he put her acting on that assumption.”
A year later, in October 1905, the previously imperturbable Jessie succumbed to the pressure of straitened circumstances and to the anxieties of living with a neurasthenic artist, and collapsed under the strain of Conrad’s illness as well as her own. “She had a violent fit of palpitation in the morning,” Conrad told Ada Galsworthy, “which alarmed me to some extent. I sent off for the doctor. His verdict is nervous breakdown of a sort; nothing dangerous in itself but with a defective heart most undesirable. . . . Fact is our life or else life in general is beginning to tell on her. The sameness of existence varied by nothing but anxiety during my fits of [asthma] and gout is I suppose proving a bit too much.” By 1908 Conrad, taking the darkest view, confided to Marguerite Poradowska that Jessie’s knee was much worse, that she could scarcely drag herself about and that it might all end with amputation.
Jessie compensated for her immobility and pain with quantities of rich cakes, numerous boxes of chocolates and bottles of liquor, and her heavy drinking sometimes led to embarrassing scenes. As she became increasingly heavy, her features, like raisins in a pudding, seemed to sink into her pudgy face. Conrad was probably thinking of his wife when he wrote in Nostromo of “that dull, surfeited look which can be seen in the eyes of gluttonous persons after a heavy meal.”12 Jessie occupied herself, when servants took over her household duties, by writing letters, knitting, and reading trashy novels. She played bezique and dominoes, and liked to be driven through the countryside and taken to see her mother, who scarcely seemed to appreciate these expeditions. John Conrad complained that old Mrs. George was never interested in any of the places they visited by car and, whenever they stopped in a village, expected someone to buy her a gift. Whenever Jessie’s whims were not satisfied, she lapsed into tears and “stubborn dumbness.”
In April 1903 Conrad published Typhoon, his second collection of stories, which included, in addition to the title piece, the autobiographical “Amy Foster,” the negligible “Tomorrow,” and “Falk.” The last story is set in Bangkok (with vivid descriptions of temples, town and river) and based on Conrad’s experience on the Otago. The narrator of the story is appointed to take command after the captain has died and, because of the shortage of stores and supplies, finds it difficult to get her ready for sea. The niece who remains absolutely silent during her courtship, the disturbing mixture of ruthlessness and moral delicacy, and the theme of cannibalism made serialization impossible. Even the equable Jessie became “physically sick when [she] typed those pages. Sick with disgust at the idea of human beings having been cooked.”
In the story Falk, who owns the only tugboat on the dangerous river, is led to believe that the narrator has become his rival in love for the niece of the German Captain Hermann. Falk refuses to tow the narrator’s ship, which cannot leave on its own, until he pleads Falk’s suit with Hermann. But Falk—like Lord Jim and Razumov in Under Western Eyes—feels compelled to clear his conscience and risk his love by confessing a reprehensible act. After his former ship had lost its propeller and drifted into Antarctic ice floes, Falk decided “the best man shall survive,” killed the ship’s carpenter, who tried to shoot him, and ate the unfortunate man. The merit of this overlong but interesting story lies in the humorous treatment of Falk’s infatuation with the silent woman, and in the ironic contrast between his crude behavior and his fine conscience.
Conrad actually served under a Captain McWhirr on the Highland Forest and used his tempestuous name (with a variant spelling) for the hero of “Typhoon,” a story that complements the themes of Lord Jim. Both works deal with human cargo: pilgrims and coolies; Jim has excessive and MacWhirr deficient imagination; Jim runs when he should have stayed, MacWhirr stays when he should have run. Faced with the unmistakable signs of a typhoon in the South China Sea, MacWhirr—whose Scots pragmatism and stubborn character cannot conceive the reality of anything he had not personally experienced—refuses to alter the course of the Nan-Shan [Southern Mountain]. He justifies his bizarre behavior by declaring that he cannot waste coal and must protect his sober reputation with the owners. Like the Russian in motley in Heart of Darkness, MacWhirr has no imagination, is unaware of the danger and, though limited, is able to survive. The description of the violent storm is a brilliant and justly famous tour de force during which MacWhirr exhibits his impressive faith, stoicism and courage—as well as his astonishing, dangerous and costly stupidity.
The coolies in the hold—who are returning from work in Southeast Asia and fight like beasts to recover their long accumulated wages when their sea chests are bashed open by the storm—are a human parallel to the storm. And the even distribution of the money at the end of the voyage restores the solidarity that has been threatened by the tempest. MacWhirr’s belief—“a gale is a gale . . . and a full-powered steam-ship has got to face it. There’s just so much dirty weather knocking about the world, and the proper thing is to go through it”—ironically, blindly and humorously reaffirms the traditional values of the merchant marine that Conrad expressed in “Well Done”: “A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing. . . . For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort. In other and in greater words, what is needed is a sense of immediate duty, and a feeling of impalpable constraint.”13
Conrad worked on Nostromo—his longest, most complex and most ambitious novel—from December 1902 until August 1904. His previous works had been based on personal experience. But this novel (which, like many others, began as a short story) was based on imagination. While sailing to South America on the Saint-Antoine in 1876–77, Conrad had only the briefest experience on that continent. He had a glimpse of Cartagena, Colombia, and spent twelve hours at Puerto Cabello and three days at La Guayra on the coast of Venezuela. His creative imagination always needed the stimulus of solid facts, and he searched with a hawk-eye through personal and historical memoirs for precise details that would give authenticity to his work.14
In a letter to the critic Edmund Gosse, Conrad explained the composite setting of the novel: “The geographical basis is, as you have seen, mainly Venezuela; but there are bits of Mexico in it, and the aspect presented by the mountains appertains in character more to the Chilean seaboard than to any other. The curtain of clouds hangs always over Iquique [in Chile]. The rest of the meteorology belongs to the Gulf of Panama and, generally, to the Western Coast of Mexico as far as Mazatlan.”
In A Personal Record Conrad described how he created the whole world of Costaguana: the mountains, town and campo: the history, geography, politics and finance; the wealth of the mine-owner Charles Gould, the idealism of his wife, Emilia, the cynicism of the journalist Decoud, the bitterness of the tortured Dr. Monygham and the pride of Nostromo, the chief of the stevedores, whose name “dominated even after death the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.” When writing the novel, Conrad experienced the same loneliness, concentration, tension, responsibility and control he had felt when navigating a perilous passage on a ship:
Neglecting the common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on this earth, I had, like [Jacob] the prophet of old, “wrestled with the Lord” for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterise otherwise the intimacy and 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—something for which a material parallel can only be found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn.15
While he was living in London near Ford during February and March 1904, and the novel was being serialized in T. P.’s Weekly, Conrad could not keep up with the installments. He therefore sought the assistance of Ford, who ingeniously and effortlessly wrote sixteen manuscript pages of part II, chapter 5, imitating Conrad’s style and keeping the novel going without making anything significant happen. Ford later explained to the American collector George Keating, who had bought the manuscript in Ford’s hand:
Whilst I was living in London with Conrad almost next door and coming in practically every day for meals, he was taken with so violent an attack of gout and nervous depression that he was quite unable to continue his installments of Nostromo. . . . I therefore simply wrote enough from time to time to keep the presses going—a job that presented no great difficulties to me. . . . I was practically under oath to Conrad not to reveal these facts owing to the misconception that might arise and nothing in the world would have induced me to reveal it now but for the extremely unfortunate sale of these pages.
The protracted composition of this vast novel of corrupt politics and futile revolution in a South American republic was more agonizing than usual. Conrad had a terror of dentists and the last thirty-six hours of solid work was interrupted by a painful extraction and concluded by an almost surrealistic incident:
Finished on the 30th in Hope’s house [where the whole family had gone for a visit] in Stanford in Essex, where I had to take off my brain that seemed to turn to water. For a solid Fortnight I’ve been sitting up. And all the time horrible toothache. On the 27th had to wire for dentist (couldn’t leave the work) who came at 2 and dragged at the infernal thing which seemed rooted in my very soul. The horror came away at last, leaving however one root in the gum. Then he grubbed for that till I leapt out of the chair. Thereupon old Walton [the dentist] said: I don’t think your nerves will stand any more of this. . . .
At 11.30 I broke down just after raising my eyes to the clock. Then I don’t know: two blank hours during which I must have got out and sat down—(not fallen) on the concrete outside the door. That’s how I found myself; and crawling in again noted the time: considerably after one.16
Nostromo continued the attack on colonialism that Conrad began in Heart of Darkness and developed the themes of personal power, individual responsibility and social justice. In both works the country and the hero are cut off from civilization, dominated by greed, exploitation and material interests. Both portray the violent threat of nature, the sense of unreality, the moral darkness, the disintegration of humane values, the choice of nightmares, the redemptive woman and the calm yet richly suggestive conclusion in the final sentence.
Nostromo asks several important questions: What is the meaning of civilization and progress? What happens when materialism replaces humane values? How does colonialism affect traditional societies?
Conrad establishes the violent spirit of Costaguana, so different from the placidity of its somber gulf, by relating the anarchy and chaos of its history. The opening chapter, with its startling description of the enlightened Ribiera and his followers fleeing from the savage Monterist revolution, gives potent warning about the fate of progressive governments. The brutal torment of the kindly statesman Don José Avellanos and the ghastly torture of Dr. Monygham are testaments to the imbecility of political fanaticism with which another dictator, Guzman Bento, tyrannized the country. The history of Costaguana, cruelty linked with poverty and oppression, is reminiscent of the history of Poland.
The pattern formed by the characters—enslavement, corruption and betrayal—originated with Charles Gould’s father and was followed by his son, by Decoud and by Nostromo, who are most directly affected by the silver. The elder Gould, who correctly predicted that he would be killed by the San Tomé mine, begged his son never to return to Costaguana. Despite these warnings, the fact that his uncle Henry had been executed during a bloody revolution and that a similar venture (the Atacama nitrate fields) had ended disastrously, Gould has fallen under the spell of the mine. He egocentrically believes that the mine, which had been the cause of moral disaster, must be made a material and moral success in order to preserve the name and honor of his family.
Gould’s capitalistic ambitions, summarized in his ironic declaration early in the novel (and answered by Dr. Monygham much later, when it is apparent that Gould has failed to achieve his aims), are twofold and in opposition to each other:
What is wanted here is law, good faith, order, security. Any one can declaim about these things, but I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It’s justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope.
Unfortunately, the ideals that Gould wants and the country needs are incompatible with the material interests to which he pins his faith, and “law, good faith, order, security” are subordinated to the welfare and success of the mine. Ultimately, money-making is not justified by security (it is the security, not the wealth, that is to be shared with the people), and the masses continue to be oppressed in different ways. A “better justice” never comes, and nothing is ever bound to come, because the security of the mine is dependent upon the political stability of the country, and history has repeatedly proved that permanent stability is impossible to achieve.
Gould’s greatest limitation is that he never fully realizes the social consequences of his actions. Though exploding the mine (which he threatens to do) might suit his own interests, it would certainly harm the lives of the workers under his protection as well as the economic future of the entire country. The tremendous power of “El Rey de Sulaco” is too personal, dynastic and irresponsible. Gould never considers what the silver is used for once it leaves Sulaco; he never fully realizes the potential evil of the mine and lacks the imaginative estimate of the silver that his wife possesses. For him, the worth of the mine is beyond doubt. He has complete faith in the financial empire of Holroyd, who has mechanized the lives of his American employees just as Gould has in Costaguana. Holroyd uses his vast profits for further imperialistic ventures and exploitation, and wants to subject the entire world to the inexorable processes that have been destroying Costaguana. When Gould agrees with Holroyd that the mining interests will dominate Costaguana along with the rest of the world, Emilia is horrified and calls it the most awful materialism, devoid of all moral principle.
Dangerously obsessed by his conception of the mine and seduced by the idea that it can redeem the country, Gould surrenders his wife’s happiness. Emilia realizes that the wealth pouring out of the mine dries up her husband’s feelings, and that she is being robbed of both affection and children. She believes that her mission is to save him from the effects of his obsession and from the evils of material progress. Her failure is one of the tragedies of the novel, for she can never make Charles share her vision of the mine: “It was as if the inspiration of their early years had left her heart to turn into a wall of silver-bricks, erected by the silent work of evil spirits, between her and her husband. He seemed to dwell alone within a circumvallation of precious metal, leaving her outside.”17
Emilia sees the reflection of her own personal tragedy in the pattern of Nostromo’s corruption, and in the debasement and ruination of his love for Giselle Viola. In a poignant moment she tells the mournful Giselle that she too had once been loved. When Emilia lets the silver come down the mountain to be sent north for credit, she too becomes corrupted. She redeems herself only when she tells the dying Nostromo to renounce the treasure and “Let it be lost forever.”
Decoud shows that European values cannot survive in the wilds of Costaguana. He recognizes the conflict between the two worlds but cannot reconcile them: “There is a curse of futility upon our character: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, chivalry and materialism, high-sounding sentiments and a supine morality, violent efforts for an idea and a sullen acquiescence in every form of corruption.” The positive qualities are the illusions that Europe brings to Costaguana: the beliefs of Gould, the code of Nostromo, the ambitions of Decoud. The negative ones are the ghastly realities of the country that crush these ideals. The dualism is expressed in the social structure of Costaguana, in the indolence of the upper classes and the mental darkness of the lower. It is also expressed in the ambiguity of Decoud’s death, for the general belief was that he died accidentally, but the truth was that he died from solitude and want of faith in himself.
Decoud’s idealistic counterpart is Don José Avellanos, an ironic and pathetic figure, who suffers untold horrors under Guzman Bento, only to die fleeing from the Monterist invasion. Avellanos’ naïve and passionate involvement in affairs of state is pitifully misplaced and defies the experience he recorded in his History of Fifty Years of Misrule. His death represents the triumph of rapacity over nobility.
In contrast to Don José, Decoud employs material interests to serve his personal ambitions. He used the wealth of the mine to bring back a well-armed General Barrios, to effect a Ribierist counter-revolution and to form an independent Occidental Republic. Though he achieves these ambitions, he betrays his love for Antonia Avellanos (a younger version of Emilia Gould) and loses his life.
The testing of Decoud’s inner strength and European values, of his love for Antonia and commitment to the revolution, takes place in the greatest scene of the novel, when he finds himself threatened by the dark silence of the Golfo Placido:
It was a new experience for Decoud, this mysteriousness of the great waters spread out strangely smooth, as if their restlessness had been crushed by the weight of that dense night. . . . The solitude could almost be felt. And when the breeze ceased, the blackness seemed to weigh upon Decoud like a stone. . . . Intellectually self-confident, he suffered from being deprived of the only weapon he could use with effect. No intelligence could penetrate the darkness of the Placid Gulf.18
After ten days of isolation Decoud, no longer protected by his habitual irony and scepticism, is overcome by solitude. He begins to doubt his own individuality, loses faith in the reality of his past and future actions, and sees the world as a succession of incomprehensible images. His mental agony is subtly likened to the tortured trader Hirsch, hanging from a rope that pulls his wrists above his wrenched shoulder blades, until he is shot by his interrogator, Sotillo. Decoud’s “solitude appeared like a great void and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands. . . . He imagined [the cord] snapping with a report as of a pistol.” In the same way, “the sensation of the snatching pull, dragging the lighter away to destruction,” which Decoud feels when the boats collide in the gulf, is similar to Linda Viola’s jealousy of her sister Giselle: “A strange, dragging pain as if somebody were pulling her about brutally.”19 These parallel descriptions bind all the European victims in a moral and physical destruction that can be delayed, but not prevented, by idealism or material interests. Hirsch’s torture recalls Monygham’s, whose breakdown contrasts with Avellanos’ resistance. The execution of Gould’s uncle is nearly repeated when Gould is lined up to be shot, just as Monygham is almost hanged by Sotillo—as Hirsch was.
Overcome by the crushing sense of human futility as he struggles against the forces of nature, Decoud shoots himself and uses the silver to sink his body in the gulf. His death and the missing ingots seal Nostromo to the treasure and make him its slave. Conrad’s letter to Gosse illuminated his conception and presentation of the main character:
Nostromo is a man suffering intensely all the time from an exaggerated amour propre. I present him at first as complaining that, after he has brought the old Englishman [Sir John Holroyd] (rich enough to pay for a whole railway) from the mountains, he had not enough money in his pocket to buy himself a cigar, because his wages were not due till next week. He is a man with instincts for magnificence. His prestige with the great populace is the very breath of his nostrils. The episode when he cuts (or rather lets the girl cut) the silver buttons off his coat in the view of the assembled people gives the note of his psychology. Afterwards he may be supposed to reflect as men of the people often do: Yes, I am a great man but what do I get for it.
Nostromo admires (and is measured against) the idealism of the old Garibaldino, Giorgio Viola, in the same way that Charles admires Emilia’s; and Teresa Viola’s warning of betrayal and destruction echoes that of Gould’s father. Though Viola’s idealism is admirable, it is ineffective and even pitiful. Simon Bolívar’s statement that those who worked for independence have ploughed the sea is an ironic judgment of Viola’s career in South America. The noble warrior of republican principles, who cannot live under a king, subjects his family to exile and far worse tyranny in Costaguana. Yet Viola does follow the principle of brotherhood while Nostromo thrives solely on adulation.
Nostromo’s exploits are legion. He saves Ribiera from the mob, rescues the Viola family, carries Father Corbelan’s message to the wild Hernandez, brings Holroyd over the mountains, finds a doctor for the dying Teresa and sails into the gulf with the silver of the mine. But all these exploits divorce action from thought. He was called upon, his reputation demanded that he accept the challenge and he acted—instinctively and without reflection.
The extraordinary change in Nostromo begins with his possession of the silver, and is symbolized by his Adamic awakening and rebirth into a new life at the ruined fort. His physical and mental awakening occur simultaneously, initiate his thoughtful phase and confirm his belief that he has been betrayed by the “hombres finos.” Deprived of reputation, Nostromo seeks compensation in wealth. He has always lived amidst splendid publicity, but awakening in solitude suddenly makes him feel destitute: “on a revulsion of subjectiveness, exasperated almost to insanity, [he] beheld all his world without faith and courage. He had been betrayed!”20
Like Gould, Nostromo pins his faith on materialism in order to compensate for his loss of prestige. This ruins him, and his life becomes bound up with the stolen treasure. His stealthy rapacity forces him to abandon Giorgio’s wife, Teresa, on her deathbed, denying her final wish, and to abandon Decoud to solitude and suicide. He betrays his love for Giselle (as Gould betrays Emilia) and agrees to marry her sister Linda so that he can continue to “mine” the buried silver on the Great Isabel.
On this island Viola protects his family with an old rifle, just as he did when Ribiera fled from Montero; but this time Nostromo returns, not to save Giorgio, but to be slain by him. The accidental murder is the final sardonic comment on Viola’s violent career in South America. If idealism has killed corruption, it has also killed part of itself.
Dr. Monygham’s devastating pronouncement to Mrs. Gould, prompted by his loyalty and devotion to her, carries the ideological substance of the novel. His speech evolves from the history of Costaguana and the San Tomé mine, from the terrible effects of “progress” on the traditional life of the people and from the corruption of the Europeans by the silver. His declaration is an answer not only to Gould’s “material interests” speech, but also to those who, like the obtuse Captain Mitchell, continue to put their faith in the silver:
There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle. Mrs. Gould, the time approaches when all that the Gould concession stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty and misrule of a few years back. . . . It’ll weigh as heavily and provoke resentment, bloodshed, and vengeance, because the men have grown different. Do you think that now the mine would march upon the town to save their Señor Administrador?
The people of Costaguana are faced with a choice of evils, the inevitable result of unprincipled exploitation and destruction of their traditional culture.
The central tragedy of Nostromo is the incompatibility of material interests and moral principles. In Costaguana, as Emilia Gould realizes, “there was something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.”21 Gould’s idealization of the silver forces him to compromise his principles, and the civilizing mission of the Europeans corrupts the mine and betrays the country.
Conrad was profoundly disappointed by the response of both critics and the reading public to his “most anxiously meditated” novel. The serialization provoked many irritated protests from readers who complained that so much space was taken up by “utterly unreadable stuff.” The novel was too complex, too morally ambiguous and too critical of capitalism to be successful. Jessie remarked that Nostromo’s “reception was perhaps the greatest disappointment—literary disappointment—Conrad ever had. He used to say it was ‘a dead frost.’ “ The one notable exception was Edward Garnett’s perceptive review in the Speaker, which praised the European vision, the complex structure, the vivid characters and the ambitious themes: “This great gift of Mr. Conrad’s, his special sense for the psychology of scene, that he shares with many of the great poets and the great artists who have developed it each on his own chosen lines, it is that which marks him out for pre-eminence among the novelists.”22