Conrad’s self-absorbed engagement of mind, will and conscience, and a creative effort that obliterated the external world and excluded “all that makes life lovable and gentle,” had enabled him to complete Nostromo in 1904. He later wrote with Swiftian irony: “my sojourn on the Continent of Latin America, famed for its hospitality, lasted for about two years. On my return I found (speaking somewhat in the style of Captain Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably grown during my absence.” But the creative agony of Under Western Eyes, begun in December 1907, was even more intense, and led to Conrad’s complete nervous breakdown just after he completed it in January 1910.
During the composition of the novel Conrad suffered recurring pain from chronic gout and the ever-present anxiety about money. He often started his novels without a clear plan and had no idea where the book would end—or when. Like Lord Jim and Nostromo, Under Western Eyes began as a short story, but quickly absorbed Conrad and carried him onward. Though the novel kept growing and there was no prospect of completing it in the immediate future, he repeatedly told Pinker that the end was near. In the summer of 1909 Pinker, dissatisfied with Conrad’s failure to deliver the long-awaited manuscript, threatened to sever their business connection. In December they reached a crisis when Pinker refused to advance any more funds and Conrad, threatening to throw the manuscript into the fire, angrily exclaimed: “In a manner which is nothing short of contemptuous you seem to be holding out a bribe—next week forsooth!—as though it were a bone to a dog to make him get up on his hind legs.”
Nearing the end of the novel as well as the end of his tether, and irritated by what he considered the inordinate fees Pinker was deducting from royalties to pay off the enormous debt, Conrad exploded in a self-pitying letter to Galsworthy that described how the novel was eating up his life:
It is outrageous. Does he think I am the sort of man who wouldn’t finish the story in a week if he could? Do you? Why? For what reason? Is it my habit to lie about drunk for days instead of working? . . . I sit twelve hours at the table, sleep six, and worry the rest of the time, feeling the age creeping on and looking at those I love. For two years I haven’t seen a picture, heard a note of music, hadn’t a moment of ease in human intercourse—not really. And he talks of regular supplies of manuscript.1
Finally, they agreed that Pinker would stimulate productivity by advancing no more than £3 for every thousand words of manuscript that Conrad sent. Even so, Conrad feared the ambitious novel would not sell and that most of the meager proceeds would be used to pay off his massive debt to Pinker.
Under Western Eyes, set in about 1904, begins with a confrontation between a Russian revolutionary movement and the Czarist secret police. In January 1908, two years before completing the novel, Conrad expounded his original conception in a letter to Galsworthy:
I am trying to capture the very soul of things Russian. . . .
Listen to the theme. The Student Razumov (a natural son of a Prince K.) gives up secretly to the police his fellow student, Haldin, who seeks refuge in his rooms after committing a political crime (supposed to be the murder of de Plehve). First movement in St. Petersburg. (Haldin is hanged, of course.)
2nd in Genève. The student Razumov meeting abroad the mother and sister of Haldin falls in love with the last, marries her and, after a time, confesses to her the part he played in the arrest of her brother.
The psychological developments leading to Razumov’s betrayal of Hal-din, to the confession of the fact to his wife and to the death of these people (brought about mainly by the resemblance of their child to the late Haldin) form the real subject of the story.
As Conrad actually wrote the novel, however, Razumov confesses to Nathalie Haldin in part IV, precluding their marriage (though she forgives him) and eliminating their child from the plot. The first part concentrates on Razumov’s motivation for betraying Haldin. Resenting Haldin’s assumption that he sympathizes with his cause and will help him escape, fearful of being implicated in the crime and of ruining his career, Razumov betrays Haldin but is forced by the secret police to spy for the Russian government on the revolutionaries in Geneva. The rest of the novel focuses on what happens to him after this event. When Razumov also confesses his betrayal to the revolutionaries he has met in Geneva, Nikita, who is later exposed as a police spy, expresses his “loyalty” by bursting Razumov’s ear drums as punishment. Permanently deafened, Razumov is hit and crippled by a tramcar, and returns as an invalid to Russia. Razumov and the circle of revolutionaries in Geneva are meant “to capture the very soul of things Russian”: the hypocrisy and mindless destruction; the compulsion to betray, to repent and to debase themselves as a way of recovering lost honor; the Dostoyevskian combination of instinctive cowardice and anguished longing for spiritual absolution.
The theme, plot and structure of Under Western Eyes are similar to those of Lord Jim. The first part of the novel focuses on the dishonorable act and the remainder of the book, set in a different place, describes the attempt to recover self-esteem after moral disgrace. Marlow’s famous phrase about Jim—“one of us”—is ironically used in Conrad’s Russian novel to refer to the revolutionary brotherhood. Conrad’s greatest works concern the revelation of hidden guilt, the confession of a disgraceful deed. Kurtz has betrayed his colonial mission by committing the “horror” he can scarcely express; Jim admits to deserting an abandoned ship and betraying his trust as an officer; Nostromo has stolen the silver of the mine; Verloc has sacrificed Stevie; Leggatt in “The Secret Sharer” has murdered a disobedient sailor. And in Under Western Eyes Razumov continues this “Russian” obsession to confess, first to Nathalie and then to the revolutionaries.
Though Conrad told Galsworthy that Haldin’s crime was based on the murder of the reactionary Russian official Vyacheslav de Plehve, who was blown up by a university student named Sasonov in 1904, there was probably another source of this plot—a historical event set in Geneva that suggested Razumov’s betrayal of Haldin—which Conrad did not mention. In 1869 the sexually attractive nihilist Sergei Nechaev returned to Moscow from Geneva, the spiritual home of Russian revolutionaries, and “murdered a student who was a member of his [small, secret] organization, perhaps because he feared treachery, or perhaps simply to demonstrate his own power over his followers, and then fled back to Geneva. . . . In 1872 he was arrested and extradited to Russia, where he died in prison ten years later.”2 Nechaev’s murder of Ivanov, which took place on November 21, 1869, inspired the plot of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (1872). Nechaev was a revolutionary colleague of Mikhail Bakunin (the model for Peter Ivanovich in Conrad’s novel), and an evil influence on and would-be seducer of Natalie Herzen, whom he met in Geneva in 1870 and whose name is strikingly similar to Nathalie Haldin.
Using the English professor of languages as the narrator of the novel, Conrad cultivated an objective point of view and portrayed the Russian soul as perceived by Western eyes. In an important letter to a Polish compatriot, he stressed his dual heritage and the double focus he employed in the novel: “Both at sea and on land my point of view is English, from which the conclusion should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning.”
Part I (the strongest section of the novel) and the final chapter of part IV take place in St. Petersburg, and the rest of the book is set in Geneva. One city is repressive, one free; but Switzerland shelters the Communist revolutionaries who in 1917 would make Russia even more repressive than it had been under Czarist rule. Conrad not only contrasts the violent lives with the placid setting, but (provoked by memories of Borys’ recent illness in Champel) satirizes the bourgeois virtues of Geneva: “there was but little of spring-like glory in the rectangular railed space of grass and trees, framed visibly by the orderly roof-slopes of that town, comely without grace, and hospitable without sympathy. . . . He saw the green slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the picturesque made of painted cardboard.” In this precise and prosaic context, the professor of languages expresses the political theme of the novel (which would influence Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four):
A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment—often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success.3
Conrad’s contemporary reputation had reached its height with the publication of Lord Jim, Youth and Typhoon in the early years of the century, but his more mature and ambitious novels—Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes—were critical failures. Though Garnett wrote a favorable review in the Nation, his criticism of Under Western Eyes in a private letter provoked Conrad’s angry defense against the charge that he hated Russians. Alluding to the revolutionaries who gathered around Constance and Edward, Conrad wrote: “You are so russianised my dear that you don’t know the truth when you see it—unless it smells of cabbage-soup when it at once secures your profoundest respect. I suppose one must make allowances for your position of Russian Ambassador to the Republic of Letters.” Their antithetical political views also led to a cooling of their friendship.
Conrad’s Russian novel and cast of Russian characters raise two closely related questions: did he know Russian, and what was his attitude toward Russian novelists: Turgenev, Tolstoy and especially Dostoyevsky? Inspired by Polish pride, Conrad always denied that he knew the Russian language, despite his five and a half years of exile in Vologda and Chernikhov during 1862–67. Though his complete ignorance of the language and even of the alphabet seems unlikely, Conrad suggested to the Russophile Garnett that Apollo had deliberately isolated him from the pernicious Russian influence and taught him Polish amidst the small community of exiles: “I know extremely little of Russians. Practically nothing. In Poland we have nothing to do with them. One knows they are there. And that’s disagreeable enough. In exile the contact is even slighter if possible, if more unavoidable. I crossed the Russian frontier [and returned to Poland] at the age of ten. Not having been to school then I never knew Russian. I could not tell a little Russian [a Ukrainian] from a Great Russian to save my life.” But Najder, citing Tadeusz’s directions concerning Conrad’s visit to Poland in 1893: “From Brzesc telegraph for horses, but in Russian, for Oratow doesn’t receive or accept messages in an ‘alien language,’ ” convincingly states that “Conrad must have known some Russian. He could read the Russian alphabet.”4
The only Russian Conrad admired was Henry James’ friend, Ivan Turgenev, a westernized writer who lived in France. Conrad accepted the dedication of Constance Garnett’s translation of Turgenev’s A Desperate Character in 1899, and took A Sportsman’s Sketches as a model for The Mirror of the Sea. The enthusiasm expressed in Conrad’s late essay, “Turgenev” (1917), provides a notable contrast to his coolness toward James and toward Crane. And his description of Turgenev’s great gifts, so different from the negative Russian traits defined in “Autocracy and War,” expresses an ideal standard that he himself reached in his greatest works: “absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfading generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy.” Conrad also used this essay to contrast Turgenev’s humane compassion with the grotesque pathology of the “convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski”: “All [Turgenev’s] creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.”
Conrad was also hostile to Tolstoy. He suspected Tolstoy’s anti-sensualism and found his brand of Christianity distasteful. He spoke of the gratuitous atrocity of the deathbed repentance in “The Death of Ivan Ilych” and the monstrous stupidity of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the jealous husband who had murdered the wife he suspected of infidelity, “an obvious degenerate not worth looking at twice, totally unfitted not only for married life but for any sort of life, is presented as a sympathetic victim of some sort of sacred truth that is supposed to live within him.” Jocelyn Baines notes that a “satiric allusion in a cancelled passage to Peter Ivanovich as author of ‘The Resurrection of Yegor’ [i.e., Tolstoy’s late novel Resurrection] and the ‘thrice famous Pfennig Cantata’ [’The Kreutzer Sonata’] suggests that Conrad at least had Tolstoy in mind.”5 At the end of Under Western Eyes Peter Ivanovich fulfills Tolstoy’s socialistic ideal by uniting himself to a peasant girl.
In contrast to his straightforward admiration of Turgenev and distaste for Tolstoy, Conrad felt both revulsion from and attraction to Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky’s revolutionary plotting, his arrest and exile to a penal settlement, his emotional extremism, religious mysticism and desire for expiation inevitably reminded Conrad of Apollo’s disastrous career and morbid temperament. In the same way, Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy revived fears of Conrad’s own childhood illness. He disliked Dostoyevsky’s artistic characteristics and would have agreed with Vladimir Nabokov that his “lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity—all this is difficult to admire.” Conrad also disliked Dostoyevsky’s dominant ideas: his intense Russian nationalism, his messianic Christian faith and his belief in Holy Russia’s redemptive mission in Western Europe. Conrad disapproved in theory of Dostoyevsky, who had also been traumatized by political revolution, but shared his response to contemporary political unrest. He identified with Dostoyevsky’s awareness of both the evil and the spirituality in man, with his passionate conservatism and with his deep-rooted fear of social disorder, anarchy and nihilism.
Like most Russian novelists, Dostoyevsky was extremely hostile to Poles. In The Idiot Aglaya marries a fraudulent Polish “count” and converts to Catholicism, whose doctrines the Orthodox Dostoyevsky detested. In The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoyevsky suggests that Polish women have loose morals, an unnamed Pole who had seduced Grushenka reappears five years later as an avaricious deceiver and cardsharper. He poses as an officer, wears greasy clothes and accepts a bribe to leave Grushenka alone, but then demands even more money to complete the bargain. Criticizing its lack of clarity and its barbaric pathology, Conrad ambivalently called that novel “terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating. Moreover, I don’t know what D stands for or reveals, but I do know that he is too Russian for me. It sounds to me like some fierce mouthings from prehistoric ages.”6 Just as Conrad rejected Melville because he himself had been labeled a writer of the sea, so he rejected Dostoyevsky—like Melville, a mystical novelist—because he had also been labeled and limited as a Slav.
Despite all this hostility, Borys mentioned that Dostoyevsky “was one of the authors his father read most assiduously.” And Crime and Punishment had a more powerful influence on Conrad than the works of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev or Henry James. In Under Western Eyes, as in Dostoyevsky’s novel, the tormented conscience of a Russian soul moves from crime through agony, isolation and remorse to confession and expiation, and, cared for by a humble woman, the hero finds in the end a kind of peace. As Ralph Matlaw observed of Conrad’s use of Dostoyevsky, he “was a devil who could only be exorcised by the imaginative transformation of the offensive matter.”7
Conrad’s disappointment, frustration and anxiety about Under Western Eyes as well as his constant worry about money, dissatisfaction with his own work and physical exhaustion, were vividly recorded in Arthur Symons’ letter of February 1911: “[Conrad] said: I have had £300 for the serial rights of my novel [Under Western Eyes]: think of those awful creatures who get thousands. I may get altogether £1,000 out of it. Mais, I am always under the water. (He was walking to and fro, smoking.) I am not content with my novel. It has no end. It sickens me when I have to sit down to my desk and write so many thousand words for a short story—for money. (He put his hand over his forehead! All is here!) But how can I go on?”8
In January 1910, after completing the novel, Conrad went up to Pinker’s office in London. Resentful about Pinker’s threats, innuendoes and refusal to advance money, he got into a blazing quarrel with him. In the course of the argument, Conrad either used a foreign word or became furiously incomprehensible, and the equally exasperated Pinker, striking at a weak point, declared that “he should speak English, if he could!” Five months later he icily wrote Pinker: “As it can’t have escaped your recollection that the last time we met you told me I ‘did not speak English to you’ I have asked Robert Garnett [Edward’s brother and a solicitor] to be my mouthpiece—at any rate till my speech improves sufficiently to be acceptable.” After this confrontation, Conrad and Pinker were estranged for two years.
Immediately after returning to his house in Aldington Conrad had a nervous breakdown. The serious illnesses of his family and himself (every long novel since Lord Jim had cost him a tooth), the wrenching quarrel with Ford, the slowness of writing and long strain of creation, the intense emotional involvement with Russian material, the chronic financial problems, the fear of a negative response to his novel and the final provocation of the fight with Pinker, all contributed to his collapse. Jessie related that during the breakdown, which was accompanied by grave physical symptoms and resembled the feverish delirium he had experienced on his honeymoon, Conrad mixed imprecations against Pinker with morbid memories of his Catholic childhood and the death of his parents:
Clearly he was very ill, and I was horrified to see his throat was swollen out level with the end of his chin, and in a moment more he rambled off in evident delirium, using his own language and muttering fiercely words of resentment against Mr. Pinker: “Speak English . . . if I can . . . what does he call all I have written.” . . .
Day and night I watched over him, fearful that if I turned my back he would escape from the room. I slept what little I could on the couch drawn across the only door. More than once I opened my eyes to find him tottering towards me in search of something he had dreamed of. . . .
He seemed to breathe once when he should have done at least a dozen times, a cold heavy sweat came over him, and he lay on his back, faintly murmuring the words of the burial service.
Though Conrad’s creative energy had lasted until he had finished the novel, he could neither revise it nor free himself from its imaginative force. As Jessie told the Blackwood’s editor David Meldrum: “Poor Conrad is very ill and Dr. Hackney says it will be a long time before he is fit for anything requiring mental exertion. . . . There is the M.S. complete but uncorrected and his fierce refusal to let even I touch it. It lays on a table at the foot of his bed and he lives mixed up in the scenes and holds converse with the characters.”9
Conrad’s letters to Hugh Clifford and to Norman Douglas, when he began to regain a semblance of health in mid-May, reveal that he had not recognized the gravity of his illness and still had to keep tight control of himself lest his nerves go to pieces once again:
I am somewhat shaky all over. It seems I have been very ill. At the time I did not believe it, but now I begin to think that I must have been. And what’s more, I begin to see that the horrible nervous tension of the last two years (of which even my wife knows nothing) had to end in something of this sort. . . .
You may imagine what it was like to have four months taken out of one’s life. I am all of a shake yet; I feel like a man returned from hell and look upon the very world of the living with dread.10
While recovering from his breakdown between February and May 1910 and as Under Western Eyes (his first book in three years) was going through the press, Conrad extended his range of friendships to include three Americans and a Frenchman: Agnes Tobin, Warrington Dawson, John Quinn and André Gide. Agnes Tobin, the daughter of a prosperous San Francisco lawyer and banker, was born into a large Catholic family in 1864. Linguist, translator of Petrarch and Racine, friend of Alice Meynell and of Arthur Symons (who introduced her to Conrad), she had a passion for meeting famous writers and artists. She knew George Meredith, Edmund Gosse, Francis Thompson, W. B. Yeats, André Gide, G. K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound and Augustus John—many of whom praised her character and her work.
Agnes inspired Alice Meynell’s poem “The Shepherdess.” Francis Meynell (Alice’s son), who praised the delicacy of her head and neck, called her “beautiful, powerful, exquisite and child-attentive.” Yeats first met Agnes in San Francisco during his American lecture tour in 1904 and recommended her translations to Symons: “I think them very delicate, very beautiful, with a curious poignant ecstasy, and would have written about them but for my ignorance of Italian.” And to Lady Gregory he hyperbolically described Agnes as the greatest American poet since Walt Whitman. Symons described the flighty, capricious, droll and dainty Agnes as “a plump little person like her name” (which suggested a Toby jug), “bright, warm-hearted, very talkative; very amusing.”11 In August 1911 Agnes gave Conrad, whom she adored, a written introduction to John Quinn, a wealthy collector who during the next decade bought a great many of his manuscripts. And in October of that year Conrad gratefully dedicated Under Western Eyes “To Agnes Tobin, who brought to our door her genius for friendship from [California] the uttermost shore of the west.”
Warrington Dawson, born in South Carolina in 1878, was the first of Conrad’s young disciples. While hunting with Teddy Roosevelt in East Africa, he had met Ted Sanderson, who was then Town Clerk in Nairobi and who provided the introduction to Conrad. A man of reactionary social ideas and literary tastes, he was strongly influenced by the attacks on modern art in Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) and opposed to what he considered the immorality of modern art. In 1913 Dawson failed to interest Conrad in the crackbrained principles of the Fresh Air Art Society; in 1924 he dedicated Adventures in the Night “To My Friend Joseph Conrad”; and in 1927 published his feeble novel, The Crimson Pall, with some letters Conrad had written to him about the art of fiction. Dawson became the model for the South Carolinian Captain J. K. Blunt, who is Monsieur George’s rival for the love of Rita de Lastaola in The Arrow of Gold.
John Quinn (whom Conrad never met) was a successful tariff lawyer, born in Ohio in 1870 and educated at Harvard. A patron of the arts and friend of Ford, Joyce and Pound, he bought all the manuscripts Conrad offered for sale between 1911 and 1919, paying the prices Conrad asked and adding considerably to Conrad’s income during those years. Conrad played the bald, thin-lipped, severe-looking Quinn like an angler with a fish, stimulating his acquisitive instinct with new prospects, and constantly discovering “lost” manuscripts in old cupboards and drawers. Their long-distance friendship was sustained not only by the acquisition of the manuscripts, but also by Quinn’s admiration for Conrad and by his friendly advice and assistance to Conrad’s American publisher, Frank Doubleday. During the war Conrad enhanced Quinn’s collection by writing a series of long and interesting letters about world politics and the trial of Roger Casement.
In July 1911 Agnes Tobin introduced Conrad to André Gide, the greatest writer, apart from Henry James, among his friends. Gide took the epigraph to part V of Lafcadio’s Adventures from Lord Jim, and adopted the concept of the acte gratuit in that novel from The Secret Agent. In 1919 Gide thought of asking Conrad to write a preface to Straight is the Gate, and he consistently praised Conrad’s works throughout the 1920s. He felt The Rescue, though “encumbered,” was one of Conrad’s most remarkable books and “touched the most sensitive parts of my heart.” Gide dedicated his Travels in the Congo (1927) “To the Memory of Joseph Conrad” and expressed in that book Conrad’s anti-imperialist themes. He admired the art of Typhoon (which he had poorly translated into French) and commended Conrad for “cutting short his story just on the threshold of the horrible [second storm] and giving the reader’s imagination full play, after having led him to a degree of dreadfulness that seemed unsurpassable.” He also confirmed—on the spot—the greatness and impact of Conrad’s African novella: “I am re-reading Heart of Darkness for the fourth time. It is only after having seen the country that I realize how good it is.” Conrad would have been gratified to read Gide’s response in his journal of February 1930 to the serious themes and complex structure of Under Western Eyes: “one does not know what deserves more admiration: the amazing subject, the fitting together, the boldness of so difficult an undertaking, the patience in the development of the story, the complete understanding and exhausting of the subject.”12
In November 1919 Conrad had a sharp disagreement with Gide, who was supervising the French translation of his works, about what he considered Gide’s negligent attitude toward The Arrow of Gold (and perhaps toward Typhoon as well). Deeply offended by and suffering a certain malaise from Gide’s reply to his letter, Conrad told his French disciple Jean-Aubry that he was trying to convince Gide to abandon the difficult and troublesome translation: “I am afraid that I have quarrelled with Gide for good. The answer he sent to my request to let you have the translation of A. of G. is not the sort of answer you send to a man whom you take seriously. I pointed it out to him and said distinctly that this sort of thing looked as if he were taking me for a fool. At the same time he bothers me with all his scruples about the style of the translations by all three [obscure French] women! . . . I need not tell you that in all this I tried to appear more hurt than angry.” A week later Conrad told Jean-Aubry that he was still bothered by the situation and was determined to wrest the translation from the women who had made him their “prey.” Conrad apparently won this argument with Gide. By the following year, their anger had subsided and they resumed their cordial praise of each other’s works. The disputed French translation of The Arrow of Gold was eventually brought out by Jean-Aubry in 1929.
In June 1910, after meeting Agnes Tobin and Warrington Dawson, and recovering from his breakdown, Conrad justified paying a higher rent of £45 a year on grounds of health and moved five miles east of Aldington to Capel House in Orlestone, near Ashford, in Kent, where he remained for the next nine years. Capel House—a seventeenth-century building, surrounded by a garden—was actually “three old cottages knocked into one—the rooms having low ceilings with oaken beams and floors that were crazily uneven.” Though there was no electricity, hot water or telephone, “comfortable, old-fashioned furniture made the [small rooms] look very cosy. On the ground floor were the dining-room, living-room, the boys’ room, what was called the den, full of tools, stones, in short: treasures. The first floor consisted of bedrooms and a guest-room—a large room with a low ceiling and wide windows facing the garden.”13 The more spacious quarters made it much easier for Conrad to entertain his numerous guests and admirers.
Conrad told Pinker that his ambition in his random recollections, A Personal Record, published in January 1912, was “to make Polish life enter English literature.” Andrzej Busza has pointed out the influence of Polish literature on Conrad’s works: the late-nineteenth-century emigrant story on “Amy Foster,” the plot of a ballad by Mickiewicz in “Karain,” echoes of Stefan Zeromski’s novel The History of a Sin in Victory.14 But in A Personal Record Conrad defines himself in opposition to the Russian Slavic tradition while describing his life in Poland, discussing his career at sea from Marseilles to Borneo and revealing the origins of his first novel. After writing about his father and his reasons for leaving Poland, he describes his trips to the Ukraine to visit Uncle Tadeusz (whose Memoirs provided the material for several sections of the autobiography) and his memorable meeting with his great-uncle Nicholas Bobrowski, who, as a starving officer in Napoleon’s army, had eaten Lithuanian dog. Though interesting, Conrad’s fictionalized maritime memories, in A Personal Record as in The Mirror of the Sea, are often unreliable, and are most untrustworthy precisely when they appear to be frank.
In October 1909, while Conrad was working on Under Western Eyes, the unexpected appearance of Captain Carlos Marris—who had married a Malay princess in Penang and spent twenty-one years in the East—turned Conrad’s mind back to Asia. Marris’ visit inspired him to write the three stories—“A Smile of Fortune” (1911), “The Secret Sharer” (1910) and “Freya of the Seven Isles” (1912)—that comprised ’Twixt Land and Sea (mistakenly dedicated to “Captain C. M. Harris”), a volume that equaled the stories in Youth and Typhoon. “I had a visit from a man out of the Malay Seas,” Conrad told Pinker. “It was like the raising of a lot of dead—dead to me, because most of them live out there and even read my books and wonder who the devil has been around taking notes. . . . The best of it is that all these men of 22 years ago feel kindly to the Chronicler of their lives and adventures. They shall have some more of the stories they like.” Conrad was especially grateful for the recognition of sailors, who could appreciate the accuracy of the setting and the evocation of atmosphere.
“A Smile of Fortune”—based on Conrad’s experiences on the Otago—is a mixture of a fairy tale (a wild, beautiful girl confined to an exotic garden), a story of frustrated love and a social satire on the bourgeois respectability of Mauritius. While courting the strangely sulky and silent illegitimate girl, whom he actually kisses, the autobiographical captain is forced by her ship-chandler father to buy seventeen tons of potatoes. Though he sells them at the next port for a great profit, he feels corrupted by the compromise between sex and commerce, and resigns his command to avoid returning to the island.
“The Secret Sharer” portrays the theme of the double or potentially evil self that Conrad had explored with Marlow and Kurtz, Jim and Gentleman Brown, Haldin and Razumov. The story was based on an actual incident that occurred on the Cutty Sark in the 1880s. But Conrad’s version takes place after the crime has been committed and suggests that as the young captain brings his ship dangerously close to the island of Koh-ring (off the coast of Cambodia, south of Phnom Penh), the murderer Leggatt, his secret sharer in guilt and self-knowledge, who has crept aboard in the night, lowers himself into the water to take his punishment. Basil Hall recounted the events that inspired Conrad’s story:
The mate of the Cutty Sark was apparently a despotic character with a sinister reputation. An order which he gave to an incompetent negro named John Francis was twice disobeyed, and when he went forward to deal with Francis the insubordinate seaman attacked him with a capstan bar; after a struggle the mate got hold of the bar and brought it down on Francis’ head so heavily that he never regained consciousness and died three days later. Nonetheless the captain of the Cutty Sark, who was by no means a hard man, is supposed to have said that it served Francis right, and he helped the mate to escape from the law. When the mate was eventually captured and tried, he was acquitted of murder and the judge, “with great pain,” sentenced him to seven years for manslaughter.
Conrad confirmed the source and added that “the swimmer himself was suggested to me by a young fellow who was 2nd mate . . . of the Cutty Sark clipper and had the misfortune to kill a man on deck. But his skipper had the decency to let him swim ashore on the Java coast as the ship was passing through Anjer Straits [between Java and Sumatra]. The story was well remembered in the Merchant Service even in my time.” Pleased, as he rarely was, by this story of sympathy, conscience and moral judgment, Conrad assured Garnett that he had achieved his artistic intention—though he modestly attributed it to luck rather than to skill: “The Secret Sharer, between you and me, is it. Eh? No damned tricks with girls there [as in the other stories in the book]. Eh? Every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck my boy. Pure luck.”15
While defending himself against the Slavic label that Garnett misused to define him and to explain his work, Conrad told his old friend that “Freya of the Seven Isles”—his best romantic love story—was, like “The Secret Sharer,” based on an actual incident: “It is the story of the Costa Rica which was not more than five years old when I was in Singapore. The man’s name was Sutton. He died in just that way—but I don’t think he died of Slav temperament. He was just about to go home to marry a girl (of whom he used to talk to everybody and anybody) and bring her out there when his ship was run on a reef by the commander of a Dutch gun-boat whom he had managed to offend in some way. He haunted the beach in Macassar for months and lies buried in the fort there.” Like the trusting Captain Whalley with the treacherous Massy, Jasper Allen has his ship and his life destroyed by the villainous Heemskirk.
In this charming but tragic tale (as in “II Conde”) Conrad uses discordant music to express sexual corruption and to provide an ironic counterpoint to the action. Freya, named for the goddess of love, beauty and fecundity, the leader of the Valkyries in Teutonic mythology, likes to play Wagnerian music “in the flicker of blinding flashes.” She is engaged to the handsome Jasper and plans to live on his beloved brig, the Bonito, as soon as they are married. In order to prevent the unwelcome advances of her loathsome Dutch suitor, Lieutenant Heemskirk, Freya rushes to the piano and fills the verandah “with an uproarious, confused resonance.” When Heemskirk orders her to stop playing, she ignores his command but “could not make the sound of the piano cover his raised voice.” He then repeats the order for her to stop, lifts her bodily from the piano stool and kisses her neck. Later in the story, when Freya discovers Heemskirk spying on her while she waves to Jasper aboard the Bonito and then trying to sneak off scot-free, she punishes him by making “the rosewood monster growl savagely in an irritated bass . . . then she pursued him with the same thing she had played the evening before—a modern, fierce, piece of love music. . . . She accentuated its rhythm with triumphant malice.”16
But art, in this story, is no antidote to life. Heemskirk (the name of the ship of the explorer Abel Tasman), jealous of Freya’s love for Jasper, vengefully grounds the Bonito on a reef near Macassar. Jasper, who feels his brig is a live being and extension of himself, is (like Lord Jim with Jewel) made powerless by his love for Freya. He pines away as his wreck is looted, and Freya dies of pneumonia and heartbreak in Hong Kong. In this story, which has no sacrificial, redemptive Wagnerian heroine, evil triumphs over good.
During 1912 and 1913 Conrad acquired two young disciples and met two prominent aristocrats, all of whom made pilgrimages to visit him and to enjoy his conversation and hospitality at Capel House. Richard Curle, born in Melrose, Scotland, in 1883 and educated at Wellington College, worked as an assistant editor and columnist for the Daily Mail. His son wrote that he “travelled compulsively, driven by an inner quest he was never able to formulate, even to himself,” and in the course of his restless wanderings had visited and written about many of the places that Conrad had known in the East. Like Perceval Gibbon, who also had an unhappy marriage, Curle was a moody and sometimes difficult man. “Subject to fits of profound melancholy, [he] was driven by irrational feelings of guilt, could take unreasonable exception to perfectly innocent remarks and break with people he had known for years.” With Conrad, however, he always behaved perfectly.
In October 1912 Curle, through Garnett, sent Conrad copies of two critical appreciations that appeared the following month in Everyman and in Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry’s little magazine, Rhythm. Though Conrad was a bit annoyed when Curle compared him to Dostoyevsky, stressed his Slavic qualities and emphasized his books about the sea, he was pleased by Curle’s intelligence and critical insight, which (he felt) made other accounts of his work seem like “mere verbiage.” Conrad wanted to meet Curle and Garnett introduced them at one of his weekly literary lunches at the Mont-Blanc restaurant on Gerrard Street in Soho. Conrad soon became quite fond of the tall, well-off Scotsman, called him a nice, sensitive fellow, and analyzed the strengths and defects of his character. Though rather immature and naïve, Curie was certainly no fool. He had an intuitive shrewdness about both life and literature, and desperately wanted to be a serious writer.
Their friendship became increasingly intimate, and by 1919 Conrad told Curle: “Outside my household you are the person about whom I am most concerned both in thought and feelings.” The following year, when Curle was about to take up a newspaper job in the East, Conrad expressed his paternal feelings and sadly confessed: “I can’t contemplate your possible departure for India with equanimity. . . . I can only feel that your decision is bound to affect [my life] intimately, with a sense of loss in its deeper values.”17 In 1919 Conrad dedicated The Arrow of Gold to Curie and the next year Curle reciprocated with the dedication of his book, Wanderings. Between 1912 and 1964 Curle published dozens of biographical, bibliographical and literary reviews, articles, introductions, editions, pamphlets and books—including Joseph Conrad: A Study (1912), The Last Twelve Years of Joseph Conrad (1928) and an edition of the letters Conrad wrote to him (1928)—which helped to sustain Conrad’s reputation in the years following his death.
Joseph Retinger, born in 1888 and five years younger than Curle, was instrumental in reviving Conrad’s interest in Poland, which had diminished since the death of Uncle Tadeusz and the attack by Eliza Orzeszkowa. The son of a prosperous lawyer, Retinger earned his law degree in Cracow and his doctorate in the humanities at the Sorbonne, and published a number of literary and political books. Though quite ugly, with sallow skin and irregular yellow teeth, Retinger had recently married a beautiful Polish wife and was also -very successful with other women. Katherine Anne Porter, a former mistress, caustically portrayed him as the Polish pianist Tadeusz May in “The Leaning Tower” (1931): “He was a narrow, green-faced young man and in the light his eyes were liver colored. He looked bilious, somehow, and he continually twisted a scorched looking lock of hair on the crown of his head as he talked, a tight clever little smile in the corners of his mouth.”
In November 1912 Arnold Bennett, who had met Retinger in France, introduced him to Conrad. Retinger, running the Polish Bureau in London, was trying to stimulate interest in Polish independence in the French and English press. Conrad thought the cause was hopeless, but invited Retinger down to Capel House for the day. When they spoke Polish, Retinger noticed that Conrad had the rather sing-song accent of the Ukraine. Shortly after their meeting, Conrad called Retinger an intelligent young literary man and said his wife, Otolia, was a charming Polish country girl. Otolia’s mother inspired what became the ill-fated trip to Poland in July 1914 by inviting the Conrads and the Retingers to visit her country estate outside Cracow. In 1943 Retinger published his lively but sketchy and unreliable book, Conrad and His Contemporaries.18
Lady Ottoline Morrell—daughter of Lieutenant-General Arthur Cavendish-Bentinck, half-sister of the sixth Duke of Portland and generous patron of the arts—was reluctantly introduced by Henry James, who thought Conrad “the strangest of creatures.” When Ottoline asked James to arrange a meeting in the summer of 1913, he at first tried to discourage her, insisting that the Polish aristocrat was a barbarian unfamiliar with polite society, and that the plebeian Jessie was not capable of entertaining the aristocracy: “Henry James held up his hands in horror, and was so perturbed that he paced up and down the grey drawing-room. . . . ‘But, dear lady . . . but, dear lady. . . . He has lived his life at sea—dear lady, he has never met “civilised” women. Yes, he is interesting, but he would not understand you. His wife, she is a good cook. She is a Catholic as he is, but . . . No, dear lady, he has lived a rough life, and is not used to talk to—.’ “
Ottoline was born in 1873 and married Philip Morrell, an old Etonian, lawyer and liberal MP, in 1902. During her marriage she had affairs with the painters Augustus John and Henry Lamb, the art critic Roger Fry and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Ottoline was described by Osbert Sitwell as an “over-size Infanta of Spain.” Extremely tall and striking, with dyed red hair and jutting jaw, nasal voice and neighing laugh, she wore extravagant costumes that resembled the plumage of an exotic bird. A baroque, flamboyant, eccentric and even grotesque personality, she had a malicious sense of humor and an exalted though indiscriminate devotion to the arts. Though not herself a good conversationalist, she was an encouraging and generous hostess. Her salons were characterized by high spirits and high-mindedness, pacificism, poetry and all that was ultra-modern in the arts.
Ottoline’s vivid description of Conrad’s looks, character, behavior and speech belied James’ horrific forebodings:
Conrad’s appearance was really that of a Polish nobleman. His manner was perfect, almost too elaborate; so nervous and sympathetic that every fibre of him seemed electric, which gave him the air of a highly-polished and well-bred man.
He talked English with a strong accent, as if he tasted his words in his mouth before pronouncing them; but he talked extremely well, though he always had the talk and manner of a foreigner. It seemed difficult to believe that this charming gentleman with high square shoulders, which he shrugged now and again so lightly, and the unmistakably foreign look, had been a captain in the English Merchant Service, and was, too, such a master of English prose. He was dressed very carefully in a blue double-breasted jacket. He talked on apparently with great freedom about his life—more ease and freedom indeed than an Englishman would have allowed himself. He spoke of the horrors of the Congo, from the moral and physical shock of which he said he had never recovered.19
Conrad had no interest in joining Ottoline’s impressive social circle—which included D. H. Lawrence and eminent members of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury group—at her house in Garsington, near Oxford. But he did allow her to introduce him to Bertrand Russell in September 1913. Grandson of a prime minister, brother of an earl, author with A. N. Whitehead of Principia Mathematica and lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he invited Conrad for a weekend), Russell was one of the leading intellects in England. An immediate sympathy sprang up between the two men, who became good friends though they rarely saw each other. Russell’s enthusiastic report to Ottoline was surprisingly emotional, for Conrad evoked a deep response in him by revealing his intimate thoughts about his Polish background, his experiences in Africa, his rootlessness and (an increasingly common subject) his exhaustion as a writer:
It was wonderful. I loved him & I think he liked me. He talked a great deal about his work & life & aims, & about other writers. At first we were both shy & awkward—he praised Wells & Rothenstein & Zangwill & I began to despair. Then I asked him what he thought of Arnold Bennett, & found he despised him. Timidly I stood up for him, & he seemed interested. . . . Then we went [for] a little walk, & somehow grew very intimate. I plucked up courage to tell him what I find in his work—the boring down into things to get to the very bottom below the apparent facts. He seemed to feel I had understood him; then he stopped & we just looked into each other’s eyes for some time, & then he said he had grown to wish he could live on the surface & write differently, that he had grown frightened. His eyes at the moment expressed the inward pain & terror that one feels him always fighting. Then he said he was weary of writing & felt he had done enough, but had to go on & say it again. Then he talked a lot about Poland & showed me an album of family photographs of the 6o’s—spoke about how dreamlike all that seems, & how he sometimes feels he ought not to have had children, because they have no roots or traditions or relations. He told me a great deal about his sea-faring time & about the Congo & Poland & all sorts of things. At first he was reserved even when he seemed frank but when we were out walking his reserve vanished & he spoke his inmost thoughts. It is impossible to say how much I loved him.
In November 1921 Russell linked Conrad to tradition and honored him (as G. F. W. Hope had done) by naming his son after the novelist. Deeply moved by Russell’s tribute, which connected him to an illustrious English family, Conrad wrote: “Of all the incredible things that come to pass—that there should be one day a Russell bearing mine for one of his names is surely the most marvellous. . . . I am profoundly touched—more than I can express—that I should have been present to your mind in that way and at such a time.”20
The great irony of Conrad’s artistic career was that he had poor sales for his greatest books and popular acclaim for his late, inferior work, which he himself called “secondhand Conradese.” During a chance meeting in Ceylon in 1909, Hugh Clifford had persuaded Gordon Bennett, the owner of the New York Herald, to serialize Conrad’s latest novel in his newspaper and to buy the book in advance. Conrad had started and abandoned Chance (then called “Dynamite”) as early as 1898, but inspired by the lucrative payment, he wrote the novel, with relative ease, between June 1911 and March 1912. In March Conrad gave Pinker his familiar, precise but less agonizing account of completing the book in the dark shadows of the night: “the last words were written at 3:10 a.m. just as my working lamp began to burn dimly and the fire in the grate to turn black. It’s my quickest piece of work. About 140 thousand words in 9 months and 23 days. I went out and walked in the drive for half an hour. It was raining and the night was still very black.” The epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne on fortune was found by Arthur Marwood and the novel was gratefully dedicated to “Sir Hugh Clifford, K.C.M.G., whose steadfast friendship is responsible for the existence of these pages.”
Because of its multiple narrators and frequent shifts in time, Chance (1913), of all Conrad’s books, was the most difficult to read and the most unlikely to become a popular success. Henry James, in his essay of 1914 on “The Younger Generation,” which caused Conrad considerable pain, spoke harshly of the narrative clutter: of its “eccentricities of recital” and “that baffled relation between the subject-matter and its emergence which we find constituted by the circumvallations of Chance.” Yet the novel sold ten thousand copies in the first few months and—in contrast to Under Western Eyes, which had sold only four thousand—reached a record, for Conrad, of 13,200 in two years.
What factors, despite very considerable narrative obscurity and the characteristic Conradian theme of emotional isolation, accounted for the astonishing success of Chance? Apart from the serialization in the New York Herald, which exposed Conrad to his widest readership, there was a very successful publicity campaign organized by the young, energetic Alfred Knopf, who was then working for Doubleday, a long and favorable review by Sidney Colvin in the Observer, a catchy title, chapter headings for the first and only time in Conrad’s fiction, the drawing of an attractive lady on the dust jacket,21 a romantic and sentimental heroine who is cruelly victimized and then rescued by love, and, rare for Conrad, an affirmative (despite two sudden deaths at the end) as opposed to a tragic conclusion.
In Chance, Flora de Barral, the daughter of a confidence man and financial swindler who has been sent to prison, is harshly treated by her embittered governess and then rescued by her neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Fyne. Flora contemplates suicide but is stopped by Mrs. Fyne’s brother, Captain Roderick Anthony, the son of a famous but unpleasant poet (based on Coventry Patmore). Flora elopes with Anthony, who takes her on his ship, the Ferndale, but scrupulously refrains from consummating the marriage. When de Barral is released, he joins them but is bitterly jealous of Anthony. Powell, the second mate of the Ferndale, sees de Barral putting poison in Anthony’s brandy and warns him of the danger. Wrongly thinking that Flora has tried to poison him, Anthony says he will let her off the ship at the next port. Flora replies that she does not want to leave, and they embrace. De Barral, his plot foiled, takes the fatal drink and dies. Later, a ship collides with the Ferndale and Anthony goes down with his vessel. Flora is saved and marries young Powell.
Like the heroine of James’ What Maisie Knew (1897), Flora is an innocent victim who is contaminated by adult corruption. There are many obstacles impeding Flora’s redemptive love for Anthony: her father’s crime and then his jealousy, her cruel treatment by the evil governess (the best chapter in the novel), her own sense of unworthiness, her morbid sensitivity, her suicidal despair and her dubious desire to marry Anthony in order to provide a refuge for her father. But she eventually manages to overcome all these impediments.
The notorious Frédéric Humbert and Whitaker Wright financial frauds were the actual basis for de Barral’s swindles. But there were also other intriguing biographical sources: Wells was the model for Mr. Fyne, Coventry Patmore for Carleon Anthony and Conrad himself—the son of a poet, who became a sea captain—for Roderick Anthony. Most importantly, as Thomas Moser notes, Conrad gave some of Ford’s objectionable traits to the “cold, vain, self-deluded charlatan” de Barral, who “looks, talks, and acts like Ford.” And (to extend Moser’s argument) Ford’s young daughters, Christina and Katherine—who were victimized by the anger and scandal when Ford left his wife, and by the ruin and disgrace when he was sent to prison in 1910 for failure to pay alimony—must have influenced Conrad’s portrayal of the innocent Flora. Moreover, Conrad had told Galsworthy: “My view of M[arwood] is that he is a gallant-homme in the fullest sense,” and in Chance he connects Captain Anthony to Arthur Marwood by using the identical phrase and writing that Anthony “is what the French call un galant homme.”22 In Chance, the jealous Ford’s figurative attempt to poison Marwood’s reputation by accusing him of trying to seduce Elsie is transformed into de Barral’s literal attempt to poison Anthony for loving his daughter. Thus, another aspect of Flora’s complex character may have been based on Elsie Hueffer, the subject of a vicious sexual struggle, so painful to Conrad, between Marwood and Ford.