After Conrad had completed Nostromo and Jessie had recovered from the first operation on her knee (at Conrad’s insistence, she prepared for this ordeal by giving an impromptu dinner for thirty people the night before entering the hospital), they took another disastrous holiday abroad and spent from mid-January to mid-May 1905 on the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples. Conrad disliked trains, steamboats and hotels, worried a great deal when he was abroad and felt travel did not suit his work, which required the quiet and concentration he found only at home. But he needed a change and a rest from the strain of writing and from five attacks of gout in the last eleven months, and felt the mild Mediterranean climate would revive him and help Jessie recover.
The trip got off to a bad start in Dover when one of the men carrying Jessie, immobile and extremely heavy, pinched his hand between her chair and the gangway rail of the Channel ferry, and nearly dumped her into the water between the vessel and the quay. In Rome, where they had only fifteen minutes to change trains, the porters, in their rush and excitement, removed Jessie’s chair too soon and left her hanging from the side of the railway car. Conrad was terrified and her nurse, Miss Jackson, nearly fainted. Naples, bitterly cold and windy, had rough seas, and the shipping company refused to land Jessie in Capri until the weather changed and their boat could safely approach the Marina Grande. After five expensive days in Naples, Conrad wrote, “the Captain took his steamer in as close in as he dared and a special big rowing boat came off to do the transshipping. The uproar was something awful; but I must say that for all their yelling these Italians did their work extremely well. . . . The whole affair, which had afforded the population of Capri so much innocent enjoyment, cost me 40 francs.” The delays and extra tips for carrying Jessie cost considerably more than Conrad had anticipated, and he was soon sending frantic requests to Pinker for more money.
The Conrads lived at the Villa di Maria, in the center of the village, and were visited by the Galsworthys, who came over by boat from Amalfi. Miss Jackson, whom Conrad detested, got influenza and pneumonia, and had to be nursed by her patient. Conrad caught influenza and bronchitis, and suffered from nerves and insomnia. Then his face swelled up with a raging toothache. Since there was no dentist in Capri, he crossed twice to Naples to have two teeth dragged out and felt he would lose a third one as well.
By early May Conrad was thoroughly fed up and annoyed by everything on the beautiful island. The torrid climate, the hot wind from the desert and the cold wind from the hills, the steep cliffs and the azure sea—even the sea—were all “impossible.” But he at least managed to pack Miss Jackson off to England, for she was impossible too. His amusing letter to Ford mentioned the homosexual ambience, complained of the mob of tourists who overran the place and prayed God to save him from another such holiday:
The scandals of Capri—atrocious, unspeakable, amusing, scandals international, cosmopolitan and biblical. . . . All this is a sort of blue nightmare traversed by stinks and perfumes, full of flat roofs, vineyards, vaulted passages, enormous sheer rocks, pergolas, with a mad gallop of German tourists lâchés à travers tout cela [let loose across it all] in white Capri shoes, over the slippery Capri stones, kodaks, floating veils, strangely waving whiskers, grotesque hats, streaming, tumbling, rushing, ebbing from the top of Monte Solaro (where the clouds hang) to the amazing rocky chasms of the Arco Naturale—where the lager beer bottles go pop. It is a nightmare with the fear of the future thrown in.
Conrad formed an important friendship in Capri with Norman Douglas, who played a prominent part in the scandalous milieu that Conrad found so offensive. Borys once mentioned that his father was “disgusted” by a group of scantily clad women they had seen in a music hall. Joseph Retinger (who later became Conrad’s rival in love) emphasized his conventional morality, calling him “a man of stern principles and straight lines in his private life, [who] despised weakness of character [which he had certainly exhibited in Marseilles] and the display of immorality. He disliked consequently the works of Oscar Wilde, because he had a profound contempt for his way of living.” Norman Douglas declared that Conrad “was the greatest stickler for uprightness I have ever known.”
Yet the adventurous and artistic side of Conrad had an interest in, a tolerance of and perhaps even a vicarious pleasure in the extremely irregular and immoral sexual lives of his intimate friends. Edward and Constance Garnett both took lovers; Galsworthy (who had sex with Conrad’s maid while a guest at Pent Farm) had an affair with his cousin’s wife; Sidney Colvin maintained a long-standing adulterous liaison; Ford and Wells were extremely promiscuous and lived with women who were not their wives; and Stephen Crane’s companion was a former prostitute. Many of Conrad’s friends were homosexuals—his French translator Vicomte Robert d’Humières, the young novelists Stephen Reynolds and Hugh Walpole, Roger Casement, André Gide and Norman Douglas—and the last three were recklessly indiscreet.1
The tall, handsome, leonine Douglas—a stylish and well-bred gastronome, bohemian, sexual libertine and cad—was a lover of Italy and a lover of boys. Born in Scotland in 1868, partly educated in Germany, he was a linguist and a diplomat, who had begun a promising career in St. Petersburg. A strange alloy of savage and scientist, he also wrote erudite monographs on zoology and geology. He later became a traveler and travel writer; the author of South Wind (1917), a hedonistic and amoral novel of Capri; and, with Pino Orioli in Florence, the successful publisher of his own works. Douglas’ deepest conviction was “Do what you want to do, and be damned to everybody else,” and he frankly acknowledged the pleasures of homosexual pursuit. His life was haphazardly ordered by the pragmatic necessity to “hop it” across the frontier whenever his liaisons became dangerous. “Burn your boats!” he declared. “This has ever been my system in times of stress.” D. H. Lawrence portrayed the courtly but grandiose Douglas as James Argyle in Aaron’s Rod, describing him as “decidedly shabby and a gentleman, with his wicked red face and tufted eyebrows.” And Richard Aldington called him “a witty and high-spirited man, with a sane view of life, a wide range of interests and a fund of recondite knowledge.”2
Conrad met Douglas in March 1905, was immediately impressed and described him to Pinker as a linguist and scientist, a learned, intelligent and original thinker with a fine prose style. Conrad believed in Douglas’ talent (as he believed in Ford’s), and gave him extremely valuable advice, encouragement and help. He placed Douglas’ work in Ford’s English Review and arranged for him to become assistant editor of that journal. In February 1908 Conrad told Douglas, who had also begun his writing career in his late thirties: “It is obvious to me that you have a distinguished future before you as a writer. And also some hard times before you get known. Think seriously of writing a novel. . . . I promise you that everything that I and two or three more can do shall be done to get the novel published with a proper flourish.”
Douglas later described how Conrad had helped him revise his travel book about Tunisia, Fountains in the Sand (1912): “There was a story running through it: a kind of romance. I showed the thing in this form to Joseph Conrad, who read it carefully and then said: ‘What is that woman doing in here? Take her out!’ Out she went and all that belonged to her, and the book became what it is now.” Douglas knew from personal experience “how appreciative and encouraging Conrad could be, and what infinite pains he would take with the work of other writers.” In his favorable review of Richard Curle’s study of Conrad, Douglas called his friend “one of the most complex and, to English minds, elusive of modern writers.”3
When Douglas went down to stay at the Cearne in 1907, David Garnett, who was then fifteen, felt that his father, aware of Douglas’ tastes, was apprehensive about the visit and “kept an eye out on them both.” Conrad seemed to have no such fears about Borys, and his friendship with Douglas continued in England. Between 1905 and 1916 Douglas, who frequently visited for the day from London and spent many weekends with the Conrads, was always a welcome guest. In 1910 Conrad called him “one of my two most intimate friends.”
The following August, Douglas, who had just returned to London from Italy, came down for a weekend and became seriously ill with what seemed to be heatstroke, typhoid or “brain-fever,” but was actually an attack of malaria:
He arrived in a state of high fever and hardly able to stand. We put him to bed and sent for a doctor. On Monday we sent for a nurse (after Jessie and I had been up with him for two nights and a day). To-day he does not recognize anybody, his temperature after most appalling ups and downs had reached 105°. . . .
He can’t be moved and indeed where could one move him? One can hear him moaning and muttering all over the house. . . . Should he die, I shall have to bury him I suppose. . . . I have seen and tended white men dying in the Congo but I have never felt so abominably helpless as in this case.4
Douglas’ marriage had collapsed in 1903, and the following year he divorced his wife for adultery. He took care of his two small sons, Archie and Robin (the latter, born in 1902, was four years younger than Borys), in Capri for two years, and then placed them in the care of friends in England. Robin was sent to a boarding school at the age of ten, and during the next four years spent most of his holidays with the Conrads. He called Jessie “Mum” and was a close companion of the Conrads’ son John. Robin later recalled that Conrad carried the tension of his writing desk to the dinner table and at the beginning of the meal “there was no conversation. Mrs. Conrad served whilst her husband made bread pills between his left thumb and forefinger. When a number of pills had been rolled and flung irritably into the fireplace, Conrad began to eat. Under the influence of his wife’s cooking he gradually became more human.”
Conrad was very fond of the handsome Robin, treated him like a son and worried about the future of the “manly, clever little chap.” Pleased that Robin wanted to become a sailor, he paid for his clothes and school fees at Ashford Grammar School until Robin followed Borys on to the Royal Navy training ship Worcester in the fall of 1916. In April of that year Conrad told Richard Curle: “We couldn’t sleep another wink in our lives if we chucked the kid out.”
Douglas probably introduced Conrad to the doctor and scholar Ignazio Cerio, a member of the most esteemed family on Capri. One of the main squares on the island was named in their honor. Ignazio gave Conrad access to his collection of books on the history of Capri, and Conrad’s research on Napoleon’s campaigns in the Mediterranean led eventually to his late novels, The Rover and Suspense.5
Conrad also hoped to get some writing done on Capri, but found it more distracting than restful (Lawrence called it “a stewpot of semi-literary cats”) and did as little work on the rocky island as he had done on the flat coast of Belgium. He explained to Edmund Gosse that as a foreigner he needed the stimulus of the English language and the English setting: “It’s all very well for Englishmen born to their inheritance to fling verse and prose from Italy back to their native shores. I, in my state of honourable adoption, find that I need the moral support, the sustaining influence of English atmosphere even from day to day.”
“Autocracy and War” (1905), which he wrote on Capri, was Conrad’s response to the current Russo-Japanese war. In his longest and most important political essay, he shrewdly predicted, before Japan had defeated Russia in the naval battle of Tsushima, that this war would be won (as World War One would be won) “not from the victor obtaining a crushing advantage, but through the mortal weariness of the combatants.” He even anticipated the apathetic response of the masses to reports of modern atrocities on television: “a man writhing under a cartwheel in the street, awakens more genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation than the stream of reports, appalling in their monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying bodies.” But Conrad also had some blind spots. He naïvely praised the “innate gentleness” of the Japanese character. He falsely prophesied that Russia’s power had finally been extinguished: “the ghost of Russia’s might is laid. . . . It has vanished for ever at last, and . . . there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill-omened creation.” And he endorsed Bismarck’s comment: “La Russie, c’est le néant,” though that description applied more aptly to Poland. Conrad ended the essay by condemning Germany as the principal enemy of peace in Europe.
Conrad’s essay echoed many of the themes of Apollo’s vitriolic “Poland and Muscovy” (1864) and argued, as Apollo had done, that Russia was a barbaric Asiatic despotism, implacably opposed to the humane traditions of Western civilization:
For a hundred years the ghost of Russian might, overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils of Central and Western Europe, sat upon the gravestone of autocracy, cutting off from air, from light, from all knowledge of themselves and of the world, the buried millions of Russian people. . . .
This dreaded and strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images; that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul . . . still faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance.6
“Autocracy and War,” Conrad’s major political statement, provided the ideological basis for the treatment of Russia in his next two novels: The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.
The Conrads took a tramp steamer from Naples to Marseilles on the first leg of their journey home. On that voyage Conrad, according to Jessie, lost his wallet, claimed he could not find it and behaved like a helpless infant. When he had gone to sleep, she searched his clothes, found the wallet, and invented a transparent excuse to cover his embarrassment and prevent his inevitable explosion.
In March 1905, while still on Capri, Conrad learned that William Rothenstein and Edmund Gosse had succeeded in getting him a grant of £500 from the Royal Bounty Fund. Conrad naturally expected to be given this fabulous sum in one prompt payment, and was horrified to learn, two months later, that the money would be administered by two trustees—Rothenstein and the patriotic poet Henry Newbolt—who mistrusted Conrad’s extravagance and thought it wise to dole out the money more cautiously. In May, with some justice and wounded pride, Conrad complained to Gosse that the grant in recognition of his talents and services to literature had become converted into an award that he now had to beg for: “The whole affair has assumed an appearance much graver and more distressing than any stress of my material necessities: the appearance of ‘Conrad having to be saved from himself’—the sort of thing that casts a doubt on a man’s sense of responsibility, on his right feeling, on his sense of correct conduct.” Thinking perhaps of Francis Thompson’s pathetic dependence on the Meynells and Swinburne’s on Watts-Dunton, the aristocratic master-mariner exclaimed: “I own to a, not I hope very peculiar, dislike of falling, even by the remotest appearance, into the class of those disorderly talents whose bohemianism, irregularity and general irresponsibility of conduct are neither in my tradition and training nor in my character.” Gosse had once again cast him into the humiliating and childishly dependent role he had suffered first with Tadeusz and then with Pinker. Instead of relieving his anxieties, the grant actually intensified them.
When Conrad returned from Capri to England in mid-May, he had an interview with Henry Newbolt and followed it up with a letter asking for £250 to settle his immediate debts. These debts, which he listed in detail, included £60 toward his overdraft at Watson’s Bank, £50 to his landlord toward six years’ arrears in rent, taxes, and bills to four doctors and to local tradesmen. When Newbolt proposed that Conrad compound with his creditors, the equivalent of declaring bankruptcy, Conrad mentioned his extensive business experience as a commander of ships, justly said that Newbolt’s suggestion would destroy his local credit and declared that “a confession of insolvency in exchange for the assistance received would not carry out the intention of the grant.”7 Finally, while Conrad, obsessed with the need to maintain at least the external appearance (to use a word he frequently employed in this affair) of wealth, alternated between outrage and humility, they agreed that Newbolt would give him checks made out to his creditors, which Conrad would then endorse and mail to them. The remainder of the grant was paid out in £15 installments until April 1906.
During the last half of 1905 Conrad saw one of the five London performances of One Day More, worked on an early version of Chance, did several more sketches for The Mirror of the Sea, wrote three stories that were later collected in A Set of Six and tried to cope with serious family illness. Just after he told Wells that “I stick here fighting with disease and creeping imbecility—like a cornered rat, facing fate with a big stick that is sure to descend and crack my skull before many days are over,” Jessie had her “nervous breakdown of a sort” in October, and Borys caught scarlet fever and had to enter a London nursing home in November. Two months later, as the child was about to leave the home, a nurse burned his skin by putting too much disinfectant in his bath, making him swell up like a balloon and break out with purple spots all over his body. Conrad, with “death in his soul” and a gout-boot on his foot, was becoming positively ashamed of his constant invalidism and his persistent calamities. After learning that Jessie was pregnant, he told Rothenstein: “I feel very shy and blushing at being let in for that thing at my venerable age.” In February 1906 the Conrads left England to recuperate for two months in the mild climate of Montpellier, near the south coast of France.
They stayed in the first-class Hôtel Riche et Continental on the main square of the town, the Place de la Comédie, below the Esplanade and the Citadel. And Conrad began to write The Secret Agent on the Promenade du Peyrou, which was full of fountains with black swans floating on the ornamental water and which probably suggested the name of Peyrol, the hero of The Rover. Henry James wrote of the Peyrou: “nothing could be more impressive and monumental. It consists of an ‘elevated platform’ . . . an immense terrace laid out, in the highest part of the town, as a garden, and commanding in all directions a view which in clear weather must be of the finest.” When Conrad arrived in Montpellier, riots were taking place over the separation of Church and state:
[There is] a most extraordinary uproar reigning over the whole town, an amazing mixture of carnival and political riots going on at the same time. In the same street troops, infantry and cavalry drawn up in front of churches, yells, shrieks, blows—people with broken heads carried into chemist’s shops, and through it all bands of costumed and masked revellers pushing with songs and ribald jokes. It’s extremely curious and very characteristic.8
Travel seems to have made Conrad restless. He returned to Pent Farm in mid-April 1906, and spent two weeks in mid-May in Winchelsea, collaborating with Ford on The Nature of a Crime, which concerned, Ford said, “the eternal subject of the undetected criminal.” This novella is a first-person confession, made to his married mistress in Rome, by a wealthy, respectable man who has embezzled the money of his friend’s son and who plans to kill himself to avoid shame and prison. He is reprieved at the end when the son decides not to check the accounts. He then places himself in the hands of his mistress, saying he will reform and order his affairs if she consents to marry him. This static, essentially Fordian story has no significant action. Its limited interest lies in the style and in the mode of narration, which anticipates The Good Soldier, and in the thinly disguised revelation of Ford’s attempt to disentangle himself from his wife, Elsie. The rather thin novella was published in the English Review of April–May 1909 under the absurd pseudonym, Ignatz von Aschendorf (the name of a German barony that Ford imagined he might one day inherit), and (with Conrad’s reluctant agreement) as a book in 1924.
During July and August 1906 Conrad borrowed Galsworthy’s London house at 14 Addison Road, in Kensington, which had a garden overlooking Holland Park. His second son was born there on August 2. There was no anguish about Slavic names for John Alexander, who was named after Galsworthy. Jessie noted that Conrad, who had gradually become accustomed to fatherhood, was more pleased about the birth of John than he had been about Borys. But he felt obliged to stress John’s physical unattractiveness—as he had emphasized Jessie’s and Borys’ when first describing them to friends—and wrote Ada Galsworthy, in the arch tone he reserved for these occasions: “I have lately made the acquaintance of a quiet, unassuming, extremely ugly but on the whole rather sympathetic young man.” John was better-looking, more appealing, happier and much healthier than Borys. He got on well with his father, was a bright student and was more successful, as a child and as a young man, than his older brother, who was always something of a disappointment to Conrad.
Having escaped their usual disasters on the first visit to Montpellier, the Conrads returned (when the baby was able to travel) to the Hôtel Riche in mid-December for a six-month stay that became—so far—their worst trip abroad. The journey started promisingly, and on January 8, 1907, Conrad wrote an unusually warm and ecstatic letter to Ford, who loved southern France, once again mentioning the need for an English ambience in order to write:
I am better in this sunshine. The landscape around has magic, all bustle, all of colour alone. The villages perched on conical hills stand out against the great and sweeping line of violet ranges, as if in an enchanted country. The beauty of this land is inexpressible and the delicacy of colours at sunset and sunrise beyond the power of men to imagine. . . . And every day as I go about entranced, I miss you more and more. You ought to see this. . . . I am drunk with colour and would like dearly to have you to lean upon. I am certain that with no other man could I share my rapture. Work at a standstill. Plans simply swarming in my head but my English has all departed from me.
But Conrad’s pleasure was short-lived. By the end of the month the nine-year-old Borys, extremely susceptible to illness, had trouble with his adenoids, and then caught, in terrible succession, measles, bronchitis, rheumatic fever and pleurisy, and had rheumatism in both ankles. Also suspected of having tuberculosis, which had killed both of Conrad’s parents, he was seriously ill, feverish and emaciated for five dreadful months. Jessie was at her. best, just as Conrad was at his worst, during a crisis. As he told Rothenstein, she “has been simply heroic in the awful Montpellier adventure, never giving a sign of anxiety, not only before the boy but even out of his sight; always calm, serene, equable, going from one to the other and apparently never tired though cruelly crippled by her leg.”9 Conrad rivaled Jessie and Borys with his own invalidism and eruptions of gouty eczema. He contributed to the crisis by having his pocket picked (“Please send me a £10 note instanter,” he told Pinker, “because life without pocket money is not worth living”) and by setting his mattress on fire by going to sleep with a lighted cigarette.
In mid-May, following the French doctor’s advice, the Conrads moved for three months to Champel, where he had taken the water-cure after returning half-dead from the Congo in 1891, and had revisited in 1894 and in 1895, when courting Émilie Briquel. “Champel has brought me round once,” he optimistically explained to Pinker when requesting more money, “and it may give me a fresh lease of mental life again now my health shows signs of general improvement.” But in Geneva the baby came down with whooping cough, which required a tank of oxygen to enable him to breathe between the convulsive coughs, and reduced him (as illness had reduced Borys) to mere skin and bones. And in Champel, they had to be isolated with the contagious infant in the annex of the Hôtel de la Roseraie. Though Borys eventually recovered in Champel, Conrad was finally revolted by the town, which had once been his refuge but now had unbearably painful associations: “No more trips abroad. I am sick of them. . . . I long to get away from here. The place is odious to me; and the whole thing with its anxieties and expense sits on me like the memory of a nightmare.”10 Conrad’s last, unhappy visit to Geneva influenced his negative portrayal of that city in Under Western Eyes.
The prolonged sickroom crisis and Borys’ slow recovery from his dangerous illnesses drew father and son together for the first time. Conrad would read to Borys (and later to John) his two fantastic favorites—Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—as well as Charles Kingsley’s inspiring The Heroes and the books that he himself had read as a boy: Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, and Captain Marryat’s sea tales, Peter Simple and Mr. Midshipman Easy. But Conrad (like Tolstoy) was an exacting teacher who became short-tempered when his sons, through nervousness, seemed mentally slow. When Borys had difficulty learning to read, after their return from Capri in 1905, Conrad exclaimed: “Disgusting! I could read in two languages at his age. Am I a father to a fool?”11
In January 1908, five months after returning from Champel, Borys assumed the rather poignant role that Conrad had taken when Apollo was dying. As Conrad told Galsworthy: “He has not a very lively time; he plays the part of the devoted son to me, coming in several times a day to see whether he can do something for me—for I am crippled [by gout] and once anchored before the table can not budge very well.” Conrad was disappointed, a few years later, when Borys failed both the examination that would have led to a university education and the entrance examination for a private school at Tonbridge. Though Borys did not show any interest in or aptitude for the nautical profession, and his poor eyesight precluded a naval career, Conrad got him a place on the training ship Worcester. In September 1911 he gave a moving account of leaving his son on the ship: “Poor Mons. B. looked to me a very small and lonely figure on that enormous deck, in that big crowd, where he didn’t know a single soul. It is an immense change for him. Yes. He did look a small boy. Couldn’t make up my mind to leave him and at last I made rather a bolt of it. I can’t get him out of my eyes.”
Though Conrad gave Borys a de luxe edition of his works, he never read a single one of them. Neither boy cared much about literature; they were interested only in practical things. Borys’ love for cars amounted to auto-eroticism, and the series of automobiles—from a 4½-horsepower De Dion to a Daimler that had once belonged to the Duke of Connaught—that Conrad began to hire and then to purchase at the turn of the century became a strong common interest.
In 1913 Conrad candidly told Rothenstein that Borys, who retained a slightly simian appearance, was not “beautiful, poor boy [but] a good fellow.” And he confessed to Bertrand Russell that “he found it difficult to talk to his boys or to young people, as he disliked being insincere, and at the same time he shrank from burdening them with his own experience and knowledge of life.” The reasons for Conrad’s constraints with his sons went deeper than he suggested, for he was often politely insincere, and he loved talking about his adventurous experiences and imparting his vast knowledge of life. Apart from his personal formality and reserve, even within his own family, he probably feared inculcating his sons, as Apollo had done to the young Conrad, with his profoundly pessimistic views.
John Conrad described a rare and moving example of intimacy with his father. Though Conrad had no hobbies, he liked to play chess and would work through the games in José Capablanca’s book with John. Sometimes, when blocked in his writing in the middle of the night, he would wake up young John and ask him to “come down and give me a game of chess.” After a few stimulating moves, Conrad would walk over to his desk and start writing, his pen scratching the paper while the boy dozed off in his chair. When the flow of words had revived, he would touch John’s shoulder and tell him: “It’s time to turn in. It’s your watch below.”12
When Conrad returned from Champel to Pent Farm in mid-August 1907, both doctors and friends advised him to leave the dampness of Kent, which seemed to harm the health of everyone in the family. By the end of the month he had found a “jolly old Farmhouse” on the estate of Sir Julius Wernher, a Transvaal mining magnate, two and a half miles from Luton in Bedfordshire and forty-five minutes from London on the Midland line. “The house is not big but roomy for its size with a walled garden in front,” he told Pinker. “There is also an excellent kitchen garden with fruit trees, properly fenced and with a door to it which locks—so that one may expect some good from it. The position is excellent, 500 ft above sea level on clay and gravel. The well is 200 ft deep. . . . What seduced me most was the nearness to town combined with perfect rural isolation. I want to be in closer touch with everybody.”
The Someries, as the house was called, had six bedrooms and was much bigger than Pent Farm. But it was also noisy and the locked door to the garden did not prevent the nearby farm laborers from stealing the fruit and vegetables. By January 1908 Conrad realized he had made a serious mistake (though he remained in the house for another fifteen months) and was complaining to friends: “I’ve not known a single moment of bodily ease since we got this new house. . . . You have no idea of the soul corroding bleakness of earth and sky here when the east wind blows.”13
Conrad began The Secret Agent (1907) in Montpellier in February 1906 when Jessie was in the early months of her pregnancy and completed it in Champel in June 1907 while Borys was recovering from his severe illnesses. The novel combines closely observed lower-class London interiors with the larger political theme of anarchists who threaten the stable surface of Edwardian England. Adolf Verloc, the proprietor of a squalid pornographic shop, is married to a young woman, Winnie, who has sacrificed herself to provide a home for her mother and her retarded adolescent brother, Stevie, whom she loves and treats as her child. Verloc’s shop is a front for his revolutionary activities. The plot focuses on his bungled attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and the destruction of the innocent Stevie, who unwittingly carries the fatal bomb. Winnie exacts revenge for Stevie’s death by murdering her husband.
In the murder scene, the greatest moment in Conrad’s most perfectly wrought novel, Verloc provokes Winnie beyond endurance by asserting that she is equally responsible for Stevie’s death. When he says “come here” “in a peculiar tone which . . . was intimately known to Mrs. Verloc as the note of wooing,” he recalls the earlier scene in which she was forced to have sexual relations with a husband she finds physically revolting. When Winnie had asked (echoing Othello): “Shall I put the light out?” and Verloc had snapped at her with sexual impatience, “Put it out,” he foreshadowed his own death in the stabbing scene. As Winnie’s knife meets no resistance and Verloc slouches on the sofa, the dripping blood merges with the ticking of the clock and suggests that time would have been stopped, and progress retarded, if Verloc had succeeded in blowing up the Observatory. At the end of the novel the political status quo is maintained. Stevie, Verloc and Winnie (who commits suicide) have died for no reason. And Mr. Vladimir, the First Secretary of the Russian Embassy, has failed in his attempt to provoke the English into deporting the anarchists who have been plotting against the Czarist regime.
Although the novel’s political theme is grim enough, Verloc and Winnie’s “domestic drama” expresses Conrad’s considerable hostility to his wife and jealousy of his children. At the same time, it seeks to atone for Conrad’s frustration and anger during the protracted period of family illness. Jessie, who assumed that Conrad was pleased by the birth of John, wrote of this novel: “As I did not know in the least what the book was about, I could not account to myself for the grimly ironic expression I used often to catch on his face, whenever he came to give me a look-in. Could it have reference to the expected baby?”
Four months after John was born, during the railway journey to Montpellier in December 1906, Conrad impulsively and irrationally opened the train window and, to Jessie’s horror, threw out a package containing all the baby’s clothes. Jessie bit her lip and then said calmly: “I am sure the man who finds that bundle will be looking for the baby’s corpse.”14 This symbolic murder of John was a striking parallel to Verloc’s destruction of his “step-son” Stevie in The Secret Agent. Winnie, who deceives Verloc and marries him for Stevie’s sake, represents Conrad’s fear of a woman who wants a father for her child more than a husband for herself.
Winnie’s mother is Conrad’s fictional portrayal of the placid Jessie, who was especially fat during her pregnancy, and whose crippled condition tried Conrad’s patience and drained his money. Winnie’s mother “was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large brown face” whose “swollen legs rendered her inactive.” There was a “venerable placidity conferred upon her outward person by her triple chin, the floating ampleness of her ancient form, and the impotent condition of her legs.” All the poignant themes of the novel—the poverty, cruelty, degradation and death-in-life of the Verloc household, and the sacrifice, displaced maternity and perversion of human emotions that result from it—are concentrated in the great passage when Winnie’s mother is sent to the poorhouse in a funereal carriage:
This woman, modest indeed but hardened in the fires of adversity, of an age, moreover, when blushes are not expected, had positively blushed before her daughter. In the privacy of a four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage (one of a row) which by the exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hide from her own child a blush of remorse and shame.
1. Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski: “A man of great sensibilities; of exalted and dreamy temperament; with a terrible gift of irony and of gloomy disposition.”
2. Conrad’s mother, Eva Korzeniowska: a “wide-browed, silent, protecting presence.”
3. Conrad’s uncle and guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski: “The wisest, the firmest, the most indulgent of guardians, extending over me a paternal care and affection, a moral support.”
4. Konrad Korzeniowski, Cracow, 1874: “He used to suffer from severe headaches and nervous attacks; the doctors thought that a stay at the seaside might cure him.”
5. G. F. W. Hope: A married man with a high forehead, trimmed beard and pointed mustache, fond of cigars and of yachting.
6. Adolf Krieger: A rugged, good-looking man with thick hair and a drooping mustache.
7. Konrad Korzeniowski, Marienbad, 1883: “He had vigorous, extremely mobile features which would change very quickly from gentleness to an excitability bordering on anger.”
8. Marguerite Poradowska: Jessie thought her “the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”
9. Sir Roger Casement: “He is a limpid personality. There is a touch of the Conquistador in him too.”
10. Jessie George, 1896: “She is a small, not at all striking-looking person (to tell the truth alas—rather plain!) who nevertheless is very dear to me.”
11. Edward Sanderson, 1896: The tall, handsome Sanderson was a prototype for Lord Jim.
12. John Galsworthy, 1906: “Tall, austere looking, with a Roman profile and tightly closed lips.”
13. Edward Garnett, c. 1904: “His dark eyes and dark-grey unruly hair gave him the appearance of rugged untidiness.”
14. R. B. Cunninghame Graham: “A slight, nervous, strong figure, very well dressed, with a touch of exoticism in loose necktie or soft hat.”
15. Henry James, 1913, by John Singer Sargent. He had a “lofty forehead and a superior yet propitiatory smile. His face was uniformly solemn, but his eyes were disconcertingly furtive.”
16. Stephen Crane, 1899: “A young man of medium stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes.”
17. Ford Madox Ford, c. 1909: A tall, thin, warmhearted fellow with fair hair, pink-and-white complexion, and prominent pale blue eyes.
18. Hugh Clifford, 1895: A large, rugged-looking man, forthright, energetic and impetuous.
19. J. B. Pinker and Joseph Conrad, Oswalds, 1921. Pinker “was short, compact, a rosy, round-faced clean-shaven grey-haired sphinx with a protrusive under-lip.”
20. Joseph Conrad, 1904: “Tanned, with a peaked brown beard, almost black hair, and dark brown eyes, over which the lids were deeply folded.”
21. Norman Douglas, Capri, 1912: “Decidedly shabby and a gentleman, with his wicked red face and tufted eyebrows.”
22. Perceval Gibbon, 1909: A small, lively, dark, virile and sometimes brutal man, with thick blue-black hair and a sensitive mouth.
23. Jessie, her ample form draped in a shawl, serves tea in the book-lined study while Conrad, in high boots, and John, with a charming expression, stare into the camera, 1912.
24. John Quinn, 1921: A bald, thin-lipped, sharp-nosed, severe-looking lawyer, with exquisite taste in modern art and literature.
25. Richard Curle, 1923. Conrad told Curle, a tall Scotsman: “Outside my household you are the person about whom I am most concerned both in thought and feelings.”
26. Joseph Retinger, 1912: “He was a narrow, green-faced young man and in the light his eyes were liver colored.”
27. Jane Anderson, 1910: Wearing a long dark dress and sitting with her legs crossed at an angle to the camera, she rests her elbow on her knee and chin on her lace-gloved hand, and turns her strikingly handsome face toward the lens as her tawny hair cascades onto her shoulders from under the canopy of an enormous soft black hat.
28. Conrad, Jessie and Borys, Oswalds, 1921.
29. Gérard Jean-Aubry, 1911: He had a high forehead, small, widely spaced eyes, a sharp nose and full lips beneath a broad mustache.
30. Sir Robert Jones: A portly man with a gentle countenance, broad forehead, blue eyes, trim white mustache and jaunty bow tie.
31. Joseph Conrad, 1923: “Black eyebrows, hooked nose, hunched shoulders gave him a hawk-like look.”
32. Jessie Conrad, 1926: Grotesquely obese and loaded, like a gypsy fortune-teller, with heavy beads.
Through the artistic sublimation of The Secret Agent Conrad revenged himself on his family by destroying the unwanted child and abandoning his ungainly and unattractive wife to the deathly existence of an almshouse. But he also expressed the tragic aspect of his antagonistic feelings.
The novel also portrayed, with grim irony, the seedy revolutionary underworld of Apollo Korzeniowski. Adolf Verloc, the reluctant agent provocateur, was partly based on Conrad’s old friend Adolf Krieger, who, though born in an English-speaking country, had a slightly foreign air about him. Conrad had lived with Krieger, knew the details of his domestic life and was resentful that Krieger had pressed him to repay a loan when he was unable to do so. Mr. Vladimir, who forces Verloc to attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, was based on the Russian General Selivertsov, shot in Paris in the 1890s. He represents Russian savagery masquerading as civilized gentility.
In his “Author’s Note” of 1920, Conrad alluded to the sources that inspired the novel. The friend who told him about anarchist activities in London was Ford. The story of the actual attempt by Martial Bourdin to blow up the Observatory on February 15, 1894, was recounted in David Nicholl’s pamphlet The Greenwich Mystery (1897). And the memoir of the Assistant Commissioner of Police was Robert Anderson’s Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement (1906).
But Conrad does not mention the fascinating personal, biographical and literary origins of the important scene (which occurs just before Winnie’s mother is sent to the charity home) when Stevie, revealing his tender feelings, begs the cabman not to whip his infirm horse by pleading: “Don’t” (which is the last word Verloc utters before Winnie stabs him). Jessie wrote that during her knee operation in London in November 1904, Conrad “must have acted subconsciously part of the time he waited, and when he found himself he was standing in front of an old dray-horse with his arms literally round the animal’s neck.” Conrad probably knew that Nietzsche’s permanent mental breakdown in Turin in 1890 occurred after he had seen a horse being whipped, had thrown his arms around the pathetic beast and had collapsed in the street. And when writing this scene Conrad certainly remembered Raskolnikov’s dream, in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), of seeing when he was a child an owner cruelly beating his old mare: “The poor little boy was quite beside himself. He pushed his way, shrieking, through the crowd to the mare, put his arms round the dead muzzle dabbled with blood and kissed the poor eyes and mouth.”15 It is worth noting that Conrad (who disliked the morbid details) was influenced by Dostoyevsky—whom he frequently repudiated—several years before he wrote his own version of Crime and Punishment in Under Western Eyes.
Just as Heart of Darkness had expressed ideas that opposed the prevailing late-Victorian imperialism, so The Secret Agent also disturbed readers in 1907 with its prescient and prophetic political ideas. In the novel, Conrad suggested that it is foolish to believe “science is at the source of material prosperity”; that the mind and method of criminals and police were essentially the same; that assassination “has entered into the general conception of the existence of all chiefs of state. It’s almost conventional—especially since so many presidents [like William McKinley in 1901] have been assassinated”; that the Professor, who perversely fingers a detonator in his trouser pocket and threatens to blow himself up, symbolizes the dangers of anarchic freedom and the absurdity of modern man who (like kamikaze pilots and Arab terrorists) carry their own death; and that the Professor’s desire to exterminate the weak (which echoes Kurtz’s “Exterminate all the brutes!”) could lead to genocidal mania: “They are our sinister masters—the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress.”16
Conrad’s “Author’s Note,” ironically enough, apologized for the very qualities of the novel that have made it most meaningful to contemporary readers: the threatening portrayal of London as the “cruel devourer of the world’s light” (so different from the gas-lit security of a Sherlock Holmes novel), the depiction of the sordid surroundings and moral squalor of the inert yet menacing revolutionaries, the absurd cruelty and gratuitous outrage of the explosion that blows Stevie to bits (which inspired the concept of the acte gratuit in André Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures), and Winnie’s tragic belief that “life doesn’t stand much looking into” (which inspired the lines in Eliot’s Burnt Norton: “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.”)
The Secret Agent—far from being a “Simple Tale of the XIX Century,” as Conrad wrote in his dedication to H. G. Wells—created the genre of the psychological-political detective novel that had a profound influence on modern writers like Orwell, Greene, Koestler, Silone, Sartre and le Carré. He had “a considerable understanding of conspiratorial politics,” Orwell observed. “He had an often-expressed horror of Anarchists and Nihilists, but he also had a species of sympathy with them, because he was a Pole—a reactionary in home politics, perhaps, but a rebel against Russia and Germany.”
Conrad later attempted to minimize the power of The Secret Agent by insisting: “the impression of gloom, oppression, and tragedy, is too much emphasized. . . . I don’t believe myself that my tales are gloomy, or even very tragic, that is, not with a pessimistic intention.” Yet at the time the novel was published he admitted that his ironic treatment of a melodramatic theme, his disturbing ideas and his gloomy ideology were alien and antipathetic to the English temperament, which believed (as he said in the novel) in an “idealistic conception of legality.” One reviewer described the book as “too sordid to be tragic and too repulsive to be pathetic.” In January 1908 Conrad confessed to Galsworthy that the critical response and the modest sales had not lived up to his expectations: “The Secret Agent may be pronounced by now an honourable failure. It brought me neither love nor promise of literary success. I own that I am cast down. I suppose I am a fool to have expected anything else. I suppose there is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public. . . . Foreignness, I suppose.”17
Conrad had a genius for friendship, and his lonely occupation and intellectual isolation in the country made him especially sympathetic, responsive and hospitable. In May 1906, while collaborating with Ford in Winchelsea between his two trips to Montpellier, he met Ford’s friend and neighbor Arthur Marwood. During the next few years—prior to his quarrel with Ford—Conrad also met Thomas Hardy and formed new friendships with Arthur Symons and, most importantly, Perceval Gibbon.
Born in 1868, Marwood came from an old Tory family, had attended Clifton College in Bristol and had read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, though poor health had forced him to leave in his second year without taking a degree. An invalid with tuberculosis of the bladder, he lived quietly in the country with his wife, who had been his nurse. Marwood put up £2,000 to start Ford’s English Review, which published his “Actuarial Scheme for Insuring John Doe against All the Vicissitudes of Life.” He was the model for Christopher Tietjens, the idealized hero of Ford’s tetralogy, and for Gerald Luscombe in his novel, The Simple Life Limited: “six feet tall, blond, heavy, broad-shouldered, full-chested, with a mustache, sagacious eyes, and white level teeth.”
A burly Yorkshireman with a subtle and profound mind, Marwood was both physically and intellectually impressive. John Conrad called him “a big man with a happy disposition and a pleasant voice, but rather slow and methodical in his movements.” Violet Hunt, noting his trouser-presses and tortoiseshell hairbrushes, considered him a bit of a dandy. And Ford, who had enormous respect for Marwood, described him as
the heavy Yorkshire squire with his dark hair startlingly silver in places, his keen blue eyes, his florid complexion, his immense, expressive hands and his great shapelessness. He used to say of himself beside Conrad’s vibrating small figure: “We’re the two ends of human creation: he’s like a quivering ant and I am an elephant built out of meal sacks!” . . .
[He] possessed, upon the whole, the widest and most serene intelligence of any human being I have yet met. . . . [He] was a man of extraordinarily wide reading, of a memory so tenacious that he appeared to be encyclopaedic in his knowledge, and of singular wisdom.18
Conrad also admired Marwood’s analytic mind, knowledge of literature and acute judgment, and was very intimate with him until Marwood’s early death from cancer in May 1916.
In his letter to Galsworthy about the negative response to The Secret Agent, Conrad suggested that his work had certain affinities with the novels of Thomas Hardy, which “are generally tragic enough and gloomily written too—and yet they have sold in their time and are selling to the present day.” Conrad first met Hardy through Hugh Clifford early in 1903 during lunch at the Wellington Club, and again in May 1907 at a dinner, which included Wells and Shaw, in the house of Dr. Hagberg Wright, secretary of the London Library. Yet when Hardy was asked by Jacques Rivière to contribute to the Conrad memorial issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française in October 1924, he either forgot their earlier meetings or ignored them in order to excuse himself from an unwelcome chore. Hardy told Rivière “that though he was an admirer of Mr. Conrad he did not know him personally.”19 No record of their conversation exists, possibly because there was no opportunity to talk at length in a large group or because the two literary giants, cautious and reserved with each other, confined themselves to pleasantries.
The poet Arthur Symons, eight years younger than Conrad, had provoked Conrad’s defense of Kipling by his invidious comparison of these two English novelists to D’Annunzio. A contributor to the Yellow Book, editor of the Savoy (which published Conrad’s first story, “The Idiots,” in 1896) and author of the influential The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), Symons belonged to the aesthetic and decadent traditions of the 1890s. He dedicated Figures of Several Centuries (1916) “To Joseph Conrad, with a Friend’s Admiration” and published a rather superficial pamphlet, Notes on Joseph Conrad with Some Unpublished Letters (1925), in which he called Conrad “a Dwarf of Genius” and inexplicably said he was about the same height as Toulouse-Lautrec. Conrad used a poem by Symons as the epigraph to ’Twixt Land and Sea. But fearful of his friend’s periodic fits of insanity, Conrad was always making excuses to avoid Symons.
Conrad was as attracted to the adventurous life of Perceval Gibbon as he had been to the lives of Stephen Crane and Cunninghame Graham. Like Crane, the son of a Congregational minister, Gibbon was born in Trelach, Wales, in 1879 and educated at the Moravian School in Königsfeld, Baden. He sailed in British, French and American merchant ships before becoming a distinguished journalist and war correspondent as well as a poet, story writer and novelist. Gibbon was captured and escaped during the Boer War, which he reported for the Natal Witness; he joined the Rand Daily Mail in 1902 and spent many years in South Africa. His first book of poems, African Items (1903), was followed by Souls in Bondage (1904), on race relations, and Vrouw Grobelaar’s Leading Cases (1905), about the Boers. Both were strongly influenced by Conrad. His novel Margaret Harding (1911) was dedicated to the Conrads, and four years later Conrad dedicated Victory “To Perceval and Maisie Gibbon.”
In November 1912 Gibbon left on twenty-four hours’ notice to report for the Daily News the Balkan-Turkish wars in desolate Bulgaria. In mid-1915 he spent five months on the Russian front and then reported from France for the Daily Chronicle. When on leave in England, he confirmed Conrad’s deepest hatreds by telling “the most sanguinary stories about the horrors he had seen, and spoke most critically of the Russian methods of conducting warfare and of their treatment of the civilian population.” During 1918–19 Gibbon became a major in the Royal Marines and worked for British Intelligence in Italy.
Norman Douglas, who met Gibbon in Rome during the war, disliked him intensely. Douglas, who loved to expose British hypocrisy, did not know that Gibbon was (like Ford and Curle) having marriage problems with his beautiful hazel-eyed wife, nor did Gibbon know that Douglas was homosexual. In Alone, Douglas, put off perhaps by Gibbon’s military swagger, rather unfairly portrayed him as drunken, vulgar, belligerent and lecherous:
Mr. P.G., the acme of British propriety, inhabiting a house, a mansion, on the breezy heights of north London, was on that occasion decidedly drunk . . . and soon began pouring into my ear, after the confidential manner of the drunkard, a flood of low talk. . . .
It was rich sport, unmasking this Philistine and thanking God, meanwhile, that I was not like unto him. . . . I listened to his outpouring of inanity and obscenity. . . .
He finally wanted to have a fight, because I refused to accompany him to a certain place of delights. . . . Unable to stand on his legs, what could he hope to do there?
Gibbon was a small, lively, dark, virile and sometimes brutal man, with thick blue-black hair and a sensitive mouth. Well known for his forceful personality, his sharp wit and his strong views, he maintained a filial and even reverential attitude toward Conrad. In a review of A Personal Record in 1912, he praised his friend’s “warm personality, radiant and humane intelligence,” and called the memoir “a fresh work of the first importance, a vital and individual book, a true Conrad.”20
Conrad met Gibbon while living near Luton in about 1908, and his young friend soon contributed “Afrikander Memories” to the English Review of May 1909 and became a client of Pinker. Gibbon’s two small daughters, Joan and Joyce, were about John’s age and (like Ford’s daughters) formed a link between the two families. Speaking of Conrad’s serious illness early in 1910, Jessie, who adored Gibbon, said she was strengthened by his emotional support: “if it had not been for Perceval Gibbon who came often and always, it seemed, in the nick of time, I feel sure I would not have held out.” During the move to Capel House in June of that year, she sent Conrad safely away to stay with the Gibbons, and called their friendship “perhaps the closest and, for both Joseph Conrad and for me, the most intimate” one they had.
On this visit Conrad was as exhilarated by Gibbon, who shared his experience of Russia and knowledge of the sea, as he had been by Crane, for both young men had the capacity to have fun, dispel his gloom and cheer him up. Using a striking simile, Conrad told Galsworthy: “He rushed me about on his side-car motor-bike, storming up hills and flying down dales as if the devil were after him. I don’t know whether that is particularly good for the nerves, but on return from these excursions I felt ventilated, as though I were a bag of muslin, frightfully hungry and almost too sleepy to eat.”21
The following year, when the “talented buccaneer” moved to nearby Dymchurch, on the Kentish coast near Romney Marsh, Conrad—who reciprocated Gibbon’s admiration and took a fatherly concern in his welfare—saw him frequently. A mutual acquaintance, Edgar Jepson, described how excruciatingly bored he was when listening to the two old sailors endlessly discussing the marks that distinguished the passing steamers at Dymchurch. Trying to interest Pinker in Gibbon’s literary career, Conrad described him as stubborn but modest, uneasy and somewhat panicky about the future. To help Gibbon as well as to provide stimulation and companionship for himself, Conrad planned in the spring of 1913 to collaborate on a play based on Gibbon’s African stories. Though Gibbon knew all about actors, was direct in technique and concise in style, and seemed keen to work with Conrad, they never got very far with this project. Gibbon’s marriage, which had been unhappy long before the war, apparently disintegrated. Borys, who shared Gibbon’s interest in motorcycles and cars, cryptically wrote that Gibbon’s life ended rather tragically. At the time of his early death in the Channel Islands at the age of forty-six, “he had deliberately abandoned, or had been abandoned by, all his other friends and was living in rather squalid loneliness.”22
In August 1908, around the time he met Gibbon, Conrad published his fourth collection of stories, A Set of Six, which were six but not a set. In a rather misleading letter to the publisher Algernon Methuen, Conrad exaggerated the love interest, insisted they were merely amusing and claimed they were not depressing. These supposedly light-hearted love stories include the destruction of a ship in “The Brute”; the betrayal of love and friends in a group of London anarchists in “The Informer”; a man unjustly sent to a penal settlement (which suggests the dangerous effect of politics on innocent meddlers) in “The Anarchist”; the destruction of an innocent man whose back is broken while supporting a gun carriage in “Gaspar Ruiz” (a spin-off of Nostromo); the terrorism of an invalid in “Il Conde”; and absurdly protracted violence in “The Duel.” “All the stories are stories of incident—action—not of analysis,” he told Methuen. “All are dramatic in a measure but by no means of a gloomy sort. All, but two, draw their significance from the love interest—though of course they are not love stories in the conventional meaning. They are not studies—they touch no problem. They are just stories in which I’ve tried my best to be simply entertaining.” But Conrad, however hard he tried, could not possibly be “simply entertaining.”
In the anecdotal “Il Conde,” a Polish nobleman (based on Count Zygmunt Szembek, whom Conrad had met in Capri, and who is mistakenly given a Spanish rather than an Italian title) is living in the Bay of Naples for his health. While the count is being robbed in a pleasant outdoor café by an Italian who belongs to the Camorra and threatens him with a long knife, “the clarionet [of the band] was finishing his solo, and [the count explains] I assure you I could hear every note. Then the band crashed fortissimo, and that creature rolled its eyes and gnashed its teeth hissing at me with the greatest ferocity, ‘Be silent! No noise or—.’ ”23 After the count has been forced to surrender his wallet and his watch, the rather leisurely robbery concludes with the sudden disappearance of the Italian, accompanied by the complicated finale of the band, which ends with a tremendous crash. In this story—influenced by the counterpoint of public platitudes and private seductions in the agricultural fair scene of Madame Bovary—Conrad ironically contrasts the great waves of harmony flowing from the band on that apparently peaceful evening with the life-threatening robbery, accompanied by the rolling eyes and gnashing teeth of the operatic villain who terrifies the invalid count and drives him away from the only climate that enables him to survive. In his case, the Italian proverb used as the epigraph—“Vedi Napoli, e poi mori [i.e., muori]”—is literally true.
The most interesting of these stories is “The Duel,” which takes place between 1801 and 1817, and was profoundly influenced by Pushkin’s “The Shot” (1831). D’Hubert combines the roles of Pushkin’s Count and Silvio. Like the Count, he coolly eats some fruit before the duel (he peels and sucks an orange, while Pushkin’s hero eats cherries), and begins to value his life only after he is engaged to be married. Like Silvio, he endures two shots, refuses to kill an unarmed man and proves his moral superiority by returning the forfeited life. Like Pechorin in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840), whose “soul is used to storms and battles, and, when cast out on the shore, feels bored and oppressed, no matter how the shady grove lures him,” the two French officers fight duels to maintain martial excitement between campaigns. But their combat is an anachronistic absurdity.
Conrad’s tale, based on an actual episode in dueling history, portrays with irony the naïve heroism and childlike exaltation of sentiment that reflects the romantic spirit of the Napoleonic age. Since Napoleon disapproved of dueling, officers who fought ran the risk of being broken and disgraced; but D’Hubert and Feraud neither fear the consequences nor feel remorse. After a trivial provocation—the restrained northerner D’Hubert disturbs the fiery southerner Feraud while he is talking to a lady—the former must fight to avoid ridicule. They engage in a meaningless series of duels with swords, sabers and pistols, on foot and horseback. The duels cover sixteen years; move from France through Germany to Russia and back; parallel their promotions from lieutenant to general; coincide with the rise and fall of Napoleon; and last through the restoration of the monarchy. These duels demand a homicidal austerity of mood and represent the bloody madness of the Revolution as well as a microcosm of Napoleon’s violent and destructive campaigns.
After the first four duels end with inconclusive wounds, it seems clear that the quarrel can be settled only by death. During the fifth duel, a complicated mobile combat fought with pistols in a wood, the Republican Feraud misses both shots. The Royalist D’Hubert—who had for years been exasperated by the savagery of Feraud, but had gallantly protected his enemy from political reprisals after the fall of Napoleon—refuses to kill him. But Feraud will not be reconciled, and his life loses its meaning once the combat is concluded.
D’Hubert realizes his fiancée’s profound love when he learns of her grief-stricken dash to rescue him from danger. He tells her that he owes the most ecstatic moment of his life to Feraud, and subtly links his romantic passion to his absurd enmity: “But for his stupid ferocity, it would have taken me years to find you out. It’s extraordinary how in one way or another this man has managed to fasten himself on my deeper feelings.”
In early March 1909, seven months after A Set of Six was published, and after eighteen unhappy months near Luton, the Conrads moved permanently back to Kent and to the village of Aldington, between Ashford and Hythe. Ford had unaccountably rented them four small and poky rooms above a butcher’s shop and near the church. Conditions were extremely primitive. Conrad’s study was a windowless cubicle, the fires produced more smoke than heat, water had to be carried in from an outside well and a bucket in the garden shed served as a toilet. Borys described the noisy and smelly place that Conrad endured for the next fifteen months: “It was the upper part of a rambling house, the ground floor of which was occupied by our landlord, a pork butcher, whose shop also formed part of the building. The slaughter house and the shed where the bacon was cured, were situated at the back of the house directly under the bedroom windows. The squealing of the pigs on the weekly ‘killing’ days together with the smell from the old-fashioned curing shed must have been very trying.”24 The squalor of Aldington drove home to Conrad his worldly failure and his bleak prospects.
Conrad’s close friendship with the devoted Gibbon made it easier to sever relations with Ford when the latter’s behavior became intolerable. In 1909 Ford discovered three geniuses—D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound—and published them all in the English Review, which he founded with Marwood and edited with the help of Conrad (who suggested the title). Ford expressed the editorial policy of the journal in a high-minded circular: “The only qualification for admission to the pages of the Review will be . . . either distinction of individuality or force of conviction, either literary gifts or earnestness of purpose, whatever that purpose may be—the criterion of inclusion being the clarity of diction, the force or illuminative value of the views expressed.” The first issue of December 1908—which contained works by Tolstoy, Hardy, James, Conrad, Galsworthy, Hudson and Wells—immediately established it as the leading literary magazine in England.
Conrad later recalled, with fond nostalgia, the intellectual excitement of bringing out a new journal, when Ford arrived at the Someries with his assistant Douglas Goldring and his secretary Miss Thomas:
The early E.R. is the only one I ever cared for. The mere fact that it was the occasion of you putting on me that gentle but persistent pressure which extracted, from the depths of my then despondency, the stuff of the Personal Record, would be enough to make its memory dear. . . .
Do you care to be reminded that the editing of the first number was finished in that farmhouse we occupied near Luton? You arrived one evening with your amiable myrmidons and parcels of copy. I shall never forget the cold of that night, the black grates, the guttering candles, the dimmed lamps and the desperate stillness of that house, where women and children were innocently sleeping, when you sought me out at 2 a.m. in my dismal study to make me concentrate suddenly on a two-page notice of [Anatole France’s] Île des Pingouins. A marvellously successful instance of editorial tyranny! I suppose you were justified. The Number One of the E.R. could not come out with two blank pages in it. It would have been too sensational. I have forgiven you long ago.
Jessie’s recollections were quite different. She resented the sudden invasion of the Someries, did not consider the myrmidons (whom she had to feed) particularly amiable and declared that the women were desperately awake, not “innocently sleeping”:
Lights blazed from every room downstairs—no expense was spared. To have some four or five strangers quartered on one without more notice than an hour or so was not exactly comfortable. Only the baby and the maids slept that night. Orders, directions, or suggestions were shouted from room to room. It was an uproar all night, and the next day the house was in a chaos. My monthly stock of provisions were soon devoured, and the great trouble was that we had to use lamps and candles. However, that nightmare came to an end at last—and there was that great amount of distinction according to my husband in the first number being edited under our roof.25
The instant success of the English Review, and Ford’s new power and prestige in the literary world, improved his wardrobe but had an adverse effect on his character. As David Garnett amusingly wrote: “For a year or two Ford was to become an outstanding figure of literary London: he was arrayed in a magnificent fur coat;—wore a glossy topper; drove about in hired carriages; and his fresh features, the colour of raw veal, his prominent blue eyes and rabbit teeth smiled benevolently and patronisingly upon all gatherings of literary lions.” Wells remarked that Ford, confused about his own identity, became “a great system of assumed personas and dramatised selves.” And Richard Aldington, who satirized Ford as Shobbe in Death of a Hero (1929), emphasized his vanity, pomposity, selfishness, mendacity and scandalous personal life: “He repeatedly tells me that he is ‘the only poet there has been during the last three hundred years’ and ‘the greatest intellect in England!’ . . . After the comfort of his own person he really cared for nothing but his prose style and literary reputation. He was also an amazing and very amusing liar—a sort of literary Falstaff. As for his affairs with women—my God.”26
In 1901 Ford began an affair with his wife’s sister, Mary Martindale, which Elsie discovered in July 1905. Ford nevertheless continued his involvement with Mary until he left her for Violet Hunt, who had been Wells’ mistress, in 1908. By 1909 he was having affairs with both Violet and with his moon-faced German “secretary,” Gertrud Schlablowsky, while trying in every way to force Elsie to divorce him.
Violet, seven years older than Ford, was “a thin viperish-looking beauty with a long pointed chin and deep-set, burning brown eyes.” In a witty letter of July 1910, D. H. Lawrence satirized Violet’s weird dress and odd behavior: “She was tremendous in a lace gown and a hat writhed with blue feathers as if with some python. Indeed she looked very handsome. She had on her best society manners. She is very dextrous: flips a bright question, lifts her eyebrows in deep concern, glances from the man on her right to the lady on her left, smiles, bows, and suddenly,—quick curtain—she is gone, and is utterly somebody else’s, she who was altogether ours a brief second before.”27
After more than a decade of intimate friendship, Conrad and Ford quarreled in the summer of 1909 and remained completely estranged for the next two years. One provocation (Ford felt) was Conrad’s failure to supply a chapter of A Personal Record—prompted by his desire to distance or detach himself from Ford—that was scheduled for publication in the July 1909 number of the English Review. In that issue, Ford printed a false explanation that Conrad found intensely irritating: “We regret that owing to the serious illness of Mr. Joseph Conrad we are compelled to postpone the publication of the next installment of his Reminiscences.” Another ostensible reason for the dispute was Conrad’s intense hostility to Ford’s Russian brother-in-law, Dr. David Soskice, who was the head of the syndicate that owned the English Review. An able and industrious man, who had qualified as a lawyer in Russia, Soskice had been imprisoned for anarchist activities by the Czarist regime, fled the country, joined the Garnetts’ circle of exiles in England and was helping Constance translate Conrad’s bête noire, Dostoyevsky.
But the real reasons for the bitter quarrel, and for Conrad’s refusal to give more of his work to the English Review, were much more complex. Just as Henry James had been afraid of Conrad’s mental instability, so Conrad feared Ford’s (as he feared Arthur Symons’) megalomania and nervous breakdowns. He had noticed the adverse changes in Ford’s character. And hating to be dragged into Ford’s sexual scandals, he told Galsworthy, using the very phrase Eliza Orzeszkowa had used about Conrad: “I have been fed up in this connection of late till my gorge rises at the thought of it.”
In March 1909 Elsie had called at the Conrads’ house and (backed by Ford) had accused Arthur Marwood of making sexual advances. Conrad believed that Marwood was “a gallant-homme in the fullest sense—absolutely incapable of any black treachery” and was horrified at being implicated in the “beastly affair”: “By such juggling with the realities of life, an atmosphere of plots and accusations and suspicions is created,” he told Ford. “I can’t breathe in situations that are not clear. I abhor them.” Alluding to Marwood, he felt obliged to admonish Ford: “of late you have been visiting what might have been faults of tact, or even grave failures of discretion, on men who were your admiring friends, with an Olympian severity. . . . I have the right to warn you that you will find yourself at forty with only the wrecks of friendship at your feet.”
On top of all this, after Conrad, who did not like to be disturbed by casual visitors, had declined to meet Willa Cather, Ford sent Conrad’s letter (which he had written to Elsie) directly to the American writer. Naturally furious at Ford’s tactlessness, deviousness and manipulation, Conrad frankly told Ford (who belatedly revealed that he had been counting on Cather’s connection with McClure’s to secure backing for the English Review): “I get your letter like a bolt from the blue throwing at my head a lot of things of which I had no previous inkling—what you never even hinted to me before—as a basis for reproaches! Telling me my attitude is too bad!! . . . Stop this nonsense with me Ford. It’s ugly. I won’t have it.”28
The final break came in July when, provoked by Conrad’s refusal to contribute more chapters, the disciple had the audacity to criticize the incomplete reminiscences of the master. Conrad haughtily replied: “If you think I have discredited you and the Review, why then it must be even so. And as far as the Editor of the E.R. is concerned, we will let it go at that, with the proviso that I don’t want to hear anything more about it. But as writing to a man with a fine sense of form and a complete understanding, for years, of the way in which my literary intentions work themselves out, I wish to protest against the words—Ragged condition.”
The affair ended in a rather ludicrous fashion when Ford went about saying he had “called Conrad out” for a duel. “His conduct is impossible,” Conrad complained to Pinker. “He’s a megalomaniac who imagines that he is managing the Universe and that everybody treats him with the blackest ingratitude. A fierce and exasperated vanity is hidden under his calm manner which misleads people. . . . I do not hesitate to say that there are cases, not quite as bad, under medical treatment.”
Ford’s commitment to the highest literary standards, combined with his total lack of business ability, led inevitably to financial disaster. In December 1909, after the English Review had lost £2,800, the financier Sir Alfred Mond bought the magazine at a nominal price and dismissed Ford as editor. Lawrence summarized Ford’s faults and virtues by saying: “Hueffer lives in a constant haze. He has talent, all kinds of it, but has everlastingly been a damn fool about his life. . . . A bit of a fool, yes, but he gave me the first push and he was a kind man.”29
Ford retaliated for Conrad’s rejection by satirizing him as Simon Bransdon in The Simple Life Limited (1911) and as Macmaster in Some Do Not (1924). In the former, Bransdon becomes a writer after ruining his health by walloping “nigger” railway crews in the Congo: “his laziness and apathy, his hairiness, his clammy hands, and his drooping eyelids give him ‘the appearance of oriental and semi-blind imbecility.’ ” In the latter, Macmaster—who has a pointed black beard streaked with grey and wears a monocle that gives him a slightly agonized expression and the privilege of putting his face close to anybody he wants to impress—also has a dangerous weakness for large-bosomed red-cheeked shopgirls.
Despite Ford’s satire, Conrad always retained a fondness for his former collaborator and warmly praised The Good Soldier (1915), which appeared just before Ford, though over-age and in poor health, enlisted in the army. Conrad admired Ford’s extraordinary fictional women, his perfectly realized subject and the melancholy cadences of his style. Yet Conrad never re-established his close friendship with Ford. When Elsie, who had successfully sued Violet Hunt for calling herself Mrs. Hueffer, suddenly wanted to resume social relations in 1920, Conrad suspected her motives and her sincerity. Wary of becoming entangled with the embittered wife, he coldly rejected her conciliatory offer. When Ford turned up in 1924, Conrad’s attitude had softened and he wanted to invite him to tea. But Jessie, still hostile, absolutely refused to entertain him. “What is the use of letting him get very friendly again,” she asked Pinker’s son Eric. “I dislike him profoundly.”30
