The astonishing success and unprecedented royalties of Chance combined with the enthusiastic invitation of the Retingers propelled the Conrads into a dangerous and disastrous journey to Austrian Poland that surpassed all the horrors of their previous expeditions to Belgium, Capri and Montpellier. On May 29, 1914, Conrad finished Victory, which had begun as the short story “Dollars” in April 1912. He was now eager for travel and for a change of routine.
He had predicted Austria and Germany’s conflict with Russia in “Autocracy and War” when he wrote: “War is with us now; and, whether this one ends soon or late, war will be with us again.” But in July 1914, when the lights were going out all over Europe, Conrad failed to notice the Götterdämmerung, refused to pay attention to what he called “alarmist rumours,” and took his wife and children to Poland after an absence of twenty-one years. When the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, Conrad thought he would simply be replaced by one of the numerous shadowy archdukes who populated central Europe, and casually told Richard Curie: “That’s of no importance. . . . He wasn’t anybody in particular. It won’t lead to anything.”
Why did Conrad, who was congenitally pessimistic, and Retinger, who was professionally concerned with international affairs, blindly walk into the midst of the conflagration only two days after Austria-Hungary delivered its ultimatum to Serbia? Conrad later explained his lack of awareness by stating that he had been entirely absorbed in his work and his plans, had not looked at a newspaper for a month, had failed to notice the ominous signs or to interpret them correctly and simply had not thought about the danger. When caught behind enemy lines in a Polish mountain resort, he excused himself by telling Pinker: “I have not found myself in this position through any fault of mine. No one believed in the war till the last moment when the mobilization order caught us in Cracow.”1
Deceived perhaps by the fact that there had not been a major European war since Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, Conrad allowed himself to be carried away by the enthusiasm of his family. The man who had seemed so strange and rootless in England desperately wanted to return to his past, to show his sons his origins and traditions, and to revisit his homeland as a successful author with an international reputation—though in Poland he was still better known as the son of Apollo Korzeniowski than as an English novelist. Retinger, eager to awaken Conrad’s patriotic memories and to enlist him in the nationalist cause, took him to Cracow. But they never reached the house of Otolia’s parents, which was only sixteen miles from the town, just across the frontier in Russian territory.
At Jessie’s request, the Conrads and Retingers left Harwich for Hamburg on July 25 and took the long route to Europe across the North Sea. Conrad tried as usual to impress his traveling companions by establishing nautical intimacy with the captain of the ship. But, Retinger reported, the captain took Conrad for an author and a tourist, and looked down upon him “as only a sailor can look down on a landlubber. And the more Conrad fussed, the more the captain looked askance at him and finally he gave him clearly to understand that he thought him to be a liar. . . . Really the scene was painful, and there was some pathos in it.”
After touring the port and the zoo in Hamburg, they continued their journey by train to Berlin and, having lost two trunks along the way, arrived at the Grand Hotel in Cracow late in the evening of July 28—when Austria declared war on Serbia. On his first night in Cracow (where he had lived during the last three months of Apollo’s life), still restless despite the long journey, Conrad took a nostalgic moonlit walk with Borys into the immense and solitary Market Square in the center of the old town. He saw there the landmarks of his boyhood: the Cloth Hall, the Town Hall Tower and St. Florian’s Gate (through which his father’s funeral had passed in 1869), and heard the traditional bugle call sound the hour from the spire of the Gothic Church of the Holy Virgin. In “Poland Revisited” (1915) Conrad recorded the chiaroscuro of this solemn moment in exalted prose: “To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary’s Church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the distance [three streets to the north] the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of the old city wall.”
Jessie—more down to earth, struck by the strangeness of it all, immobilized by her crippled knee and confused by her inability to speak any foreign language—recalled, on first entering Cracow, that “the road paving seemed extremely primitive, and the odour of stables and bad draining was somewhat sickening.” Noticing her disgusted expression, Conrad sharply remarked: “This is not England, my dear; don’t expect too much.” When they finally left the Cracow railway station, which sheltered many wounded soldiers, on their way out of the country in October, Jessie caught sight of a huge pail of human limbs—which might have appealed to Conrad’s cannibalistic character, Falk. Though the two months among foreigners were a severe trial for Jessie’s nerves, she said she understood her husband better after visiting his country: “So many characteristics that had been strange and unfathomable to me before, took, as it were, their right proportions.” A friend who met the Conrads in Corsica in 1921 observed, more bluntly, that “Jessie hated the Poles, found them [as she often found Conrad] hysterical and unbalanced, slovenly and helpless, and, as for morals—they simply hadn’t any!”2
On their first day in Cracow—where Conrad had attended an Austrian school from 1868 to 1874 and from where he had taken his leap into another life at the age of sixteen—he took Borys to visit the university and the Jagiellonian Library. The librarian, coincidentally called Jozef Korzeniowski, showed them Apollo’s manuscripts and letters, which Conrad thought had been lost. Conrad was deeply moved by the letters, which expressed a touching concern for Apollo’s young son. As they left the main quadrangle, they heard the news of the German ultimatum to Russia. Father and son also visited Apollo’s grave in Radowice Cemetery, which bore the inscription “Victim of Muscovite Tyranny.” Here, for the first and only time in his adult life, Conrad kneeled down in prayer.
The next day Conrad took his family to the Wawel, the historic hill with fine views of the old town and the Vistula River, on which stood the ancient castle of the Polish kings and the sacred cathedral where they had been crowned and buried. That evening in the Grand Hotel he suddenly recognized and embraced a white-haired man, Konstantyn Buszczynski, the son of his first guardian and his old schoolmate, who invited the Conrads to visit, the following day, his prosperous sugar beet estate ten miles outside the city. As they drove back through the flat farmland to the hotel on July 31, they saw all the horses, requisitioned by the Austrian soldiers, taken out of their plows and carts.
As soon as Britain declared war on Austria, Conrad, a naturalized British citizen, would risk internment for the duration of hostilities. On August 2, fearful of being imprisoned or caught in a battle, he took his family to stay in the Villa Konstantnowska, owned by Aniela Zagorska (the niece of Conrad’s distant cousin Alexander Poradowski), in Zakopane, a resort in the Tatra Mountains, about sixty-five miles south of Cracow. As he explained to Galsworthy in a letter of August 1, he decided to retreat to this remote but pleasant place where he had friends rather than try to escape during the confusion and chaos of the first days of the war. They boarded the last civilian train that was allowed to leave Cracow for the next three weeks:
This mobilization has caught us here. The trains will run for the civil population for three days more: but with Jessie as crippled as she is and Jack not at all well (temperature) I simply dare not venture on the horrors of a war-exodus. So urged and advised, and after long meditation (24 hours), I have decided to take myself and all the unlucky tribe to Zakopane (in the mountains, about 4 hours [by] rail from here) out of the way of all possible military operations. I had rather be stranded here, where I have friends, than try to get away and be caught perhaps in some small German town in the midst of the armies.
In the hotel on his fifth and last night in Cracow, Conrad met with a group of Polish intellectuals to discuss the fate of their country. Conrad was sympathetic to Austria, before it entered the war against Britain, and moved by his compatriots’ faith in Jozef Pilsudski’s Polish Legion, which was fighting for Austria against Russia. He listened to their expressions of hope that a major conflict between the powers that had divided Poland might eventually lead to some sort of independence, guaranteed by the Western powers, if the Russian territory were recaptured and placed under loose Austrian sovereignty. But he was, as usual, extremely pessimistic. In a letter of February 1918 to John Quinn, he recalled his words to the Poles on that sad evening and indirectly explained why he had originally left Poland: “ ‘If anybody has got to be sacrificed in this war it will be you. If there is any salvation to be found it is only in your own breasts, it is only by the force of your inner life that you will be able to resist the rottenness of Russia and the soullessness of Germany. And this will be your fate for ever and ever. For nothing in the world can alter the force of facts.’ ”
And in his essay “First News” (August 1918), he explained how ugly and dangerous the situation looked to the friendless and hopeless country that was no longer able to take refuge in the stoic acceptance of its tragic fate: “I saw in those faces the awful desolation of men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged in the contest with no will of its own and not even the power to assert itself at the cost of life. All the past was gone, and there was no future, whatever happened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral annihilation.”
During his two stimulating but nerve-racking months in Zakopane, a mountain village surrounded by pastures, clear streams and waterfalls, Conrad sat for a crayon portrait by Kazimierz Gorski and read a great deal of modern Polish literature. He endlessly analyzed news of the volatile political situation that, filtered through Austrian propaganda, gradually reached them. He endured the strain of living amidst compatriots who dismally watched the ruin of all their hopes. And through Walter Hines Page, a founder of Doubleday and now American ambassador to England, he got in touch with Frederick Courtland Penfield, who during 1913–17 was the American ambassador to Austria-Hungary. A Catholic, born in New Haven in 1855 and educated at Princeton, Penfield began his career as a journalist on the Hartford Courant. He had served in diplomatic posts in London and Cairo, and was married to one of the wealthiest women in the world.3
On October 8, after a two-month wait, the Conrads finally, with the help of Polish friends in Zakopane, obtained permission to travel by train from Cracow to Vienna. Setting out after midnight during a heavy snowstorm, they traveled to the nearest railway station in an open carriage drawn by a pair of wild and shaggy horses, which must have reminded Conrad of the open sleigh ride to Uncle Tadeusz’s estate in the early 1890s.
They spent five days in Vienna, where Jessie, with stubborn persistence and the help of an interpreter, tracked down and recovered in the main railroad station the two trunks that had been lost en route to Berlin in late July. With the help of Ambassador Penfield, whom Conrad met in Vienna, they were permitted to leave the enemy capital on October 18 and reached Milan, in still-neutral Italy, on the 20th. A week later, Conrad reported, orders were issued to have them detained until the conclusion of hostilities. He described their narrow escape, during a lull in the war, in an exciting letter to Galsworthy:
The great rush of German and Austrian re-inforcing troops was over for a time and the Russians were falling back after their first advance. So we started suddenly, at one in the morning, on 7th [i.e., 8th] Oct. in a snowstorm in an open conveyance of sorts to drive 30 miles to a small railway station where there was a chance of finding something better than a horse-truck to travel in with ma petite famille. From there to Cracow, some fifty miles, we sat 18 hours in a train smelling of disinfectants and resounding with groans. . . . Our journey to Vienna was at comparatively lightning speed; 26 hours for a distance which in normal conditions is done in five hours and a half. But in Vienna I had to go to bed for five days. Directly I could put foot on the ground again we made a fresh start, making for Italy.
The Conrads made their way from Milan to Genoa and visited the old port, which he was to describe in the opening chapters of his last novel, Suspense, before boarding the Vondel, a Dutch mail boat en route from Java, on October 25. They reached England on November 3 and Conrad once again took to his bed with a severe attack of gout. In 1920 he dedicated The Rescue to Frederick Penfield: “in memory of the rescue of certain distressed travellers effected by him in the world’s great storm of the year 1914.”
In 1914 Richard Curle introduced Conrad to new friends, Ralph Wedgwood, a railway magnate from the illustrious family of pottery manufacturers, and his wife, Iris. Born in 1874 and educated at Clifton and Trinity College, Cambridge, Ralph became a brigadier-general and director of docks in France from 1916 to 1919. Conrad dedicated Within the Tides (1915) to the Wedgwoods “in gratitude for their charming hospitality in the last month of peace,” and Ralph became an executor of Conrad’s will. Conrad’s letters to the Wedgwoods, written in the months following his return to England, show that he was profoundly disturbed by the war and unable to concentrate on his own work: “However reasonably optimistic one can be, the thoughts of this war sit on one’s chest like a nightmare. I am painfully aware of being crippled, of being idle, of being useless with a sort of absurd anxiety. . . . It seems almost criminal levity to talk at this time of books, stories, publication. This war attends my uneasy pillow like a nightmare. I feel oppressed even in my sleep and the moment of waking brings no relief.”
Dame Veronica Wedgwood, the distinguished historian, who was four years old when Conrad first met her parents, explained the basis of his friendship with Ralph and provided a rare glimpse of Conrad from a child’s point of view:
My father admired Conrad’s writing and unusual personality and history, and Conrad probably admired my father’s intelligence and cultural and intellectual interests. (He had been an “Apostle” at Cambridge.) Richard Curle was a mutual friend.
As a young child I was impressed by what seemed an exotic personality with beautiful if overelaborate manners and a funny accent. I “approved” of him because he took great notice of me as a child. I have a recollection of a good looking, not very tall man coming occasionally to see me in the nursery.4
In Victory (published in 1915), the last major novel he completed before the Great War and (apart from The Shadow-Line in 1917) his last great work, Conrad returned to the setting of his earliest novels, the Malay Archipelago. Most of the action takes place on the remote island of Samburan, near Sourabaya, on the north coast of Java in the Dutch East Indies. There Axel Heyst, following his father’s pessimistic philosophy, has attempted to isolate himself from human entanglements.
While briefly staying in Sourabaya at a hotel run by the malicious Schomberg, Heyst, prompted by a kindly instinct, rescues Lena, an itinerant prostitute in a musical whorehouse run by the cruel Zangiacomos, and brings her back to the island.5 Like Heyst with Lena, Conrad rescued the young Jessie from a commonplace existence, took her to an island (the Ile-Grande in Brittany) for their honeymoon and found he had nothing to say to her.
Enraged that Heyst has “stolen” Lena from him, Schomberg sends an evil trio—Mr. Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro, who have been gambling in his hotel and intimidating his guests—to steal Heyst’s treasure (which does not actually exist) and to destroy his enemy. Victory portrays, in that violent confrontation, Heyst’s conflicting desires for solitude and emotional commitment, and Lena’s self-sacrificial wish to protect him, which merely intensifies his lack of feeling and inability to respond to her.
The main characters in Victory—also the title of a story by Cunninghame Graham in Thirteen Stories (1900)—are closely connected to those of Conrad’s earlier works. Lena and Captain Whalley in “The End of the Tether” share the same misguided optimism, Heyst and Decoud in Nostromo the same cynical pessimism. The powerful and influential fathers of both Heyst and Charles Gould in Nostromo forcefully indicated the paths for their sons to follow and both sons, to their fathers’ great sorrow, define their lives in opposition to their parents’ predestined plans.
Victory has many similarities in plot and character to the second half of Lord Jim. Stein, a good German, is balanced by Schomberg, an evil German who appears in both novels. Captain Davidson, a narrator of the novel, is like Captain Marlow; Heyst’s servant Wang resembles Jim’s servant Tamb Itam. Jim is morally crippled by his cowardly behavior on the Patna; Heyst, who believes: “I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul,” is emotionally crippled by his father’s negative philosophy. Both are unable to live up to their own ideals and take refuge in a remote tropical island. Jim rescues Jewel, Heyst rescues Lena; both men rather archly say: “command me.” Both women adore their men and try in vain to protect them. Though Gentleman Brown is supposed to be the son of a baronet and Heyst is a Swedish baron, the closest link is between Gentleman Brown and Gentleman Jones. Both arrive on the island by boat, unexpectedly and in decrepit condition. Both villains menacingly suggest that the heroes have had the same experiences, motives and guilt as they themselves, and fiercely condemn what they consider to be a guise of moral superiority. In Victory, as in Lord Jim, there was “an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts.”6 Both heroes are unarmed and unable to defend themselves because of their involvement with a woman. Jim lacks the will to kill Gentleman Brown, Heyst lacks the spirit to kill Gentleman Jones, and both willingly die for idealistic reasons.
Victory is Conrad’s most misunderstood, underrated and controversial novel. Critics invariably quote the ostensible theme—“woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!”—as a life-affirming exhortation that exemplifies the weaknesses of the book: its obvious idea, wooden characters and melodramatic plot. But the theme is actually more complex than this. Since Heyst had not learned the lessons of the heart while young, he can never learn them later in life and is doomed to emotional sterility. The novel does not reveal Conrad’s failure to depict a mature love relationship; it portrays, with great subtlety and daring, the failure of love in an idyllic setting.
Heyst’s emotional and sexual failure negates Lena’s responsiveness, capacity to love and trust in life. And the idea that a woman’s sacrificial devotion can redeem a man who is incapable of love is undermined by a concurrent and even more powerful theme: that men who withdraw from normal human relations and deny life are doomed and damned beyond redemption. Conrad’s discreet sexual allusions reveal the subtle tension between the overt and covert themes, and the complex motivation of the characters. They also suggest that the extravagant emotions and violent actions are inspired by the perverse sexual passions that surge beneath the surface of the novel.
Conrad’s portrayal of the misogynist Jones, an evil homosexual who nevertheless has the most forceful and impressive speeches in the novel, reveals that he was fascinated and frightened by what was then considered sexual perversion. But the literary and social conventions of the time (which made characters like Ricardo call his enemies “ill-conditioned skunks” and “animated cucumbers”) precluded any direct discussion of this theme. When Macdonald Hastings, who was dramatizing the novel, asked Conrad to explain the character of Jones, he evasively replied: “There is a strain of peculiar craziness about the gentleman. The novel only faintly suggests it.”7 Victory is a deliberate compromise between Conrad’s desire to write openly about homosexuality and his need to suppress the theme and to surround the sexual core of the novel with reticence and evasion. This conventional restriction exaggerated Conrad’s characteristic tendency toward ambiguity, allusiveness and abstraction.
Conrad’s extremely complex narration, in which the action shifts back and forth in time and is usually related indirectly, makes it impossible to know exactly what is going on between Morrison (a sea captain whom Heyst rescues) and Heyst, Heyst and Lena, Lena and Ricardo, or Ricardo and Jones: the sexual relationships of all the characters remain ambiguous. Their story is related partly by a representative white man in Java and partly by Captain Davidson, who could not possibly be aware of the dialogue of Heyst and Lena when they are alone on Samburan. Davidson is a kindly, normal figure who is incapable of understanding the strange sexuality of Jones and Ricardo and dismisses them as grotesque rascals. His lack of insight ironically underlines the contrast between the conventional and the subterranean themes.
Conrad also accentuates the ambiguity of the characters by emphasizing their extreme isolation and the unreality of the exotic setting. And all the characters deceive each other, for base or noble motives. Heyst, Lena and Mrs. Schomberg deceive Schomberg, Schomberg deceives Jones and Ricardo, Ricardo twice deceives Jones, Lena deceives Ricardo, Wang deceives Heyst, and both Heyst and Lena fear they have been deceived by each other. At the violent climax of the novel Heyst, Lena, Jones and Ricardo meet their death in a chaos of misapprehension. Finally, even the minor characters are not what they seem to be. Zan-giacomo is really a German with a dyed beard; the oppressed and terrified Mrs. Schomberg hides behind a mask and is quite capable of resolute action; the manly, military, bearded and broad-chested Schomberg is actually a coward; and “plain Mr. Jones” is neither plain, nor a gentleman, nor Jones.8
Victory’s structure is based on a recurrent pattern of human relationships. Heyst’s rescue of Lena is like his rescue of Morrison, Ricardo’s assault on Lena is like Schomberg’s, Lena’s dependence on Heyst is like Ricardo’s dependence on Jones, and Ricardo’s tenuous control of the violent Pedro is like Jones’ control of Ricardo. Even Wang’s relations with his wife, whom he persuades to run away with him and then keeps safely hidden in the jungle, parodies Heyst’s inability to protect Lena. The effect of this intricate pattern is to bind all the characters in a common tragic destiny and to emphasize the irony of Heyst’s desire to remain detached and isolated—invulnerable because elusive.
Heyst’s relationship with Morrison is introduced as a subject of speculation and gossip: “Heyst became associated with Morrison on terms about which people were in doubt.” No one knew the real reason why they became partners because each wanted to keep it hidden: Morrison out of embarrassment, Heyst out of delicacy. A rumor soon sprang up that Heyst, “having obtained some mysterious hold on Morrison, had fastened himself on him and was sucking him dry,” and Schomberg warned people not to get caught in Heyst’s web. But the narrator makes it clear that when Heyst rescued Morrison from the Portuguese authorities on Timor, he soothed him and shared his distress. Unlike the traders who had a wife in every port, Morrison was “rather ascetic than otherwise.” He begged Heyst, like a lover, not to “spurn and ruin him,” and urged Heyst to become a partner and retrieve his money, though Morrison’s foolish generosity had ruined his trading ventures. So Heyst, the temperamental opposite of Morrison, became the victim of Morrison’s emotional demands.
Morrison’s pathetic belief that Heyst was his divine savior, and Heyst’s feeling that he had rescued Morrison from one fate only to deliver him to a worse one, made Heyst “deem himself guilty of Morrison’s death.” Thus Schomberg’s venomous slanders that their homosexual friendship suddenly ended when Heyst discarded Morrison and sent him to die in England, which Lena repeats to Heyst, exacerbate his sensitivity and guilt, and make him more vulnerable to the evil designs of Jones.
When Heyst first tells Lena about Morrison he is unaware that she has already heard Schomberg’s version of the story. He mentions “some hidden weakness” in his character and emphasizes the similarity of his relationship to Morrison and to Lena: “I use the word [cornered] because it expresses the man’s situation exactly, and because you just used it yourself.” Lena’s response to this casual allusion is extremely emotional:
“What do you say?” she whispered, astounded. “A man!”
Heyst laughed at her wondering eyes.
“No! No! I mean in his own way.”
“I knew very well that it couldn’t be anything like that,” she observed under her breath.9
Heyst’s forced laughter disguises his uneasiness about Lena’s violent reaction. His reassurance that Morrison was cornered by financial trouble is met by her sotto voce relief that Morrison was not, as she had feared, a cornered homosexual.
When Heyst actually mentions the name of Morrison, Lena repeats it in an appalled tone, suddenly realizes that her rescuer was involved with Morrison and is profoundly upset. She then astounds him by repeating Schomberg’s accusation that “there never were such loving friends to look at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him and got thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home and die.” And this, of course, is what the insecure Lena fears will happen if Heyst also grows weary of her clinging emotional demands and awkward attempts to express her gratitude. Despite Heyst’s strenuous denials, there is something about his character and behavior that makes Lena retain her suspicions about his dubious relations with Morrison. Her doubts about his rectitude have the moral effect of a stab in the back and help to undermine his resistance to Jones and Ricardo.
Lena is the focus of passion in the novel and inspires powerful emotions in Schomberg, Heyst and Ricardo, though none of them is sexually successful with her. Both Schomberg and Heyst offer to liberate Lena from Zangiacomo’s bondage and to provide her with protection and security. The difference between them, of course, is that the ludicrous Schomberg, the victim of a belated passion, revolts Lena with his crude sexual demands while the more passive and gentlemanly Heyst (who shrinks from the idea of competition with Schomberg) merely says, “Pray command me.” Lena runs away with Heyst not because she is attracted to his bald head and long mustaches, but because she is desperate to escape from both Zangiacomo and Schomberg. And Mrs. Schomberg, who knows that her husband wants to get rid of her, helps Lena not out of sympathy and charity, but out of a desire to protect her own marriage and security.
Though Schomberg disliked Heyst before the arrival of Lena (because of his involvement with Morrison, his aloofness and even his temperate drinking habits), the thwarted passion, the wounded vanity and especially the humiliation of being deceived and defeated by someone he considered far less virile than himself are responsible for his violent hatred. Schomberg also feels that, like Heyst, Jones and Ricardo use his hotel as a base for their secret plots against him. And when he concocts the story of Heyst’s treasure and sends the avenging furies to Samburan, he hopes to free himself from their dangerous presence at the same time that he destroys Heyst and Lena. Ricardo represents Schomberg’s lust for Lena just as Jones manifests his hatred of Heyst.
Heyst’s ambivalent rescue of Lena, which is prompted by a generous feeling that his father would have defined as a form of contempt called pity, is both a repetition of his sympathetic response to Morrison and an unusually impulsive act. Heyst is known as a “queer chap,” completely detached from “feminine associations” and even earthly passions. And when Davidson hears that his friend has run off with Lena he can hardly believe it and exclaims: “He’s not the man for it . . . being a gentleman only makes it worse.” Davidson’s statement is ambiguous, but like Schomberg, Ricardo and Jones, he seems to question Heyst’s manliness. By calling Heyst a gentleman he not only stresses the social differences between Heyst and Lena, but also uses the term that is constantly applied to Jones and that Jones derisively applies to Heyst in order to link the Swede with himself. When Heyst first looks at Lena (whose face is not described) he has “the sensation of a new experience.” They immediately reverse their male and female roles as Lena challenges him to do something to save her and Heyst, hiding his ineffectuality behind a cavalier statement, says “What would you wish me to do?”
Heyst and Lena have nothing to say to each other, either in Sourabaya or Samburan, and their basic lack of communication is symbolized by the profound silence of the island. Heyst’s emotions are severely repressed and Lena cannot eliminate the fear and distrust of women that he inherited from his father. Heyst defensively insists that he is sceptical and has no illusions, and even when his heart becomes “infected” he never forgets how easily women betray men.
Like Lena, Heyst never knew his mother and was devoted to his father, who also had failed to learn while young to put his trust in life. His father’s portrait and library dominate Heyst’s small house on Samburan and emphasize his permanent influence, and Lena’s tenderness, love and self-sacrifice cannot overcome Heyst’s spiritual and emotional starvation. The passive Nordic gloom of the Heysts is characterized by a melancholy atmosphere, mutual unhappiness, lack of understanding, failure to communicate and silent despair.
Lena tells Heyst that she will stand by him as she once stood by her father; and after she has helped Ricardo to escape from her room, Heyst (who has failed to protect her against Ricardo) assumes his fatherly role and puts the exhausted Amazon to bed as if she were a child. Though Heyst feels more comfortable in the role of a father than a lover, Lena refuses to be filial, transposes her repressed feelings from Ricardo to Heyst and experiences a kind of vicarious orgasm: “She felt the woman’s need to give way, the sweetness of surrender. . . . She was surprised by a wave of languid weakness that came over her, embracing and enveloping her like warm water, with a noise in her ears as of a breaking sea.”10
Lena quite naturally complained of her solitude in Schomberg’s hotel, and seemed white and spectral when Heyst first embraced her. But on the island, when she falls in love with Heyst, Lena is still intensely lonely and feels that her very existence depends on a man who is unable to respond to her love and to satisfy her desperate need for emotional reassurance. Lena’s fears are intensified by Wang, who seems to vanish out of existence rather than out of sight; and she tells Heyst: “if you were to stop thinking of me I shouldn’t be in the world at all. . . . I can only be what you think I am.”
Lena’s ontological fears and sense of unreality are presumably caused by her lack of sexual relations with Heyst, who once tried to sleep with her but was unable to do so. They are in the archetypal romantic situation of lovers alone (for three months) on a desert island, and though Heyst’s vanity is flattered by the (nominal) possession of a woman and Lena’s by a belief that she can provide the absolute sacrifice that will satisfy Heyst’s obscure needs, they are both deluded and unhappy. Heyst attempts to defend his emotional sterility and sexual impotence by alluding to his “hidden weakness,” suggesting that love prevents sex and stating that “when one’s heart has been broken into the way you have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to enter.” Heyst’s complaint makes Lena feel guilty about his sexual inadequacies as well as her sexual desires. She rather fearfully asks, “What more do you want from me?”; he seems to want companionship without emotional responsibility and answers, “The impossible, I suppose.” And her pathetic apology: “I only wish I could give you something more, or better, or whatever it is you want,”11 suggests she is both frightened and desperate.
Their mutual misunderstanding is so complete that when Heyst hides Lena from Jones and Ricardo for her safety, she thinks he is ashamed of her. Lena’s almost suicidal desire for self-sacrifice is at once an attempt to punish herself for living “unlawfully” with Heyst, to compensate for Heyst’s impotence by elevating their relationship to a higher plane, and to make herself worthy of his love. The abject Lena realizes that she can never hope to understand or to satisfy Heyst, and feels ashamed of her emotions, “as if her passion were of a hopelessly lower quality, unable to appease some exalted and delicate desire of his superior soul.” This is Lena’s rationalization of the superiority of Heyst’s coldness to her all-too-human passion.
Heyst’s sexual doubts and fears are intensified by Lena’s guilty confession: “I am not what they call a good girl.” This allusion to her extensive sexual experience—the inevitable result of an abandoned childhood and the hopeless grip of poverty—confirms Schomberg’s accusation (euphemistically expressed in the novel) that Lena is a whore: “He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start. That’s what the girl was.” Lena’s admission also lends substance to Ricardo’s claim (which parallels Jones’ claim about Heyst) that he and Lena have a great deal in common. Most important, it worries and intimidates Heyst (though not, as Lena thinks, for moral reasons) by forcing him to compare his own lack of “feminine associations” with Lena’s extensive experience.
Heyst reveals that he has neither conscious nor subconscious desires for women and tells her directly: “I’ve never killed a man or loved a woman—not even in my thoughts, not even in my dreams. . . . To slay, to love—the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I have no experience of either.”12 Just after this assertion Heyst and Lena have an apparently unsatisfactory sexual encounter. “With her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone—a command which Heyst did not obey.” The next chapter begins, according to novelistic convention, as they get up from the ground and Lena arranges her hair while Heyst retrieves her sun helmet. It is significant that Heyst makes his unusual overture at the very moment he “detests” Lena for believing Schomberg’s slanders and is “disgusted” with himself for being contaminated by the evil in the world. His sexual approach to her is inspired not by love or passion, but by a resolute desire to overcome his feelings of inadequacy and to experience one of the two “greatest enterprises of life.”
It is clear from their subsequent dialogue that Heyst’s sexual advance has failed to satisfy Lena and merely heightened her belief that he does not love her. They also intensify Heyst’s feeling of incompleteness and of “the physical and moral sense of the imperfections of their relations.” When they return home he goes straight to his books and tries to sanction (or rationalize) his dissatisfaction with one of his father’s philosophical epigrams: “Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love—the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.” Lena seems to challenge this high-minded cynicism with the frank accusation: “You should try to love me!” Heyst replies in confusion, “Try . . . but it seems to me—,” and then falls silent. Though his sexual attempt has been unsuccessful, he comforts himself with his favorite belief that “he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.”13
The difference between Lena’s and Heyst’s view of reality is reflected in her desire for a victorious self-sacrifice and his belief that she has corrupted their Eden. As Lena recklessly plans to disarm Ricardo and save Heyst, even at the cost of her own life, Heyst (especially at the moment he watches Ricardo kissing Lena’s feet) sees Lena as the disobedient Eve who awakens the original Adam in him and introduces evil into their paradise. He quite unjustly blames her for the intrusion of Jones and Ricardo and for the treachery and desertion of Wang.
Heyst realizes that his inability to love is related to his inability to kill, but he is unable to assert himself when Jones and Ricardo invade the island and when Wang steals his revolver. While Ricardo strokes his knife and Jones fondles his gun, Heyst is profoundly aware that he is disarmed, without a weapon, “not sufficiently equipped,” that is, unmanned and impotent in the physical as well as the sexual sense. Whereas Schomberg felt that he lost his courage when he lost Lena and would be a much stronger man if she were at his side, Heyst feels that Lena weakens him, makes him vulnerable, and forces him to lie, to cringe and to humiliate himself for her sake: “All his defences were broken now. Life had him fairly by the throat.” By contrast, Lena is inspired by Heyst’s affection and seems to grow in physical as well as moral stature. In Schomberg’s hotel she seemed small, weak and frightened, but when Ricardo first spies her “she loomed up strangely big and shadowy at the other end of the long, narrow room.”
Though Heyst never desires Lena, she attracts Ricardo as she had attracted Schomberg. Ricardo’s instinctive violence is barely suppressed and only held in subjection by the rational influence of Jones; his passion contrasts with Jones’ passivity and apathy just as Lena’s contrasts with Heyst’s. Ricardo recognizes their similarities, for both have their origins in the dregs of mankind and both are precariously dependent upon gentlemen with strange sexual habits.
The sexual relationship of Lena and Ricardo reveals aspects of their characters that are repressed in their liaisons with Heyst and Jones. When Ricardo emphasizes their common background, attacks their gentlemen and undermines Lena’s fragile security, he is trying to convince her that he can give her what Heyst has failed to provide. He wants to display, not hide Lena, and naïvely asks her to call him “husband.” Though Ricardo increases Lena’s doubts about Heyst, he also intensifies her guilt and her craving for sacrifice and redemption.
Since the passionate Lena is a “bad girl” with considerable sexual experience and Heyst is clearly unable to satisfy her emotional or physical needs, she subconsciously responds to Ricardo’s sexual assault. Yet it is obvious that if Lena is to remain the redemptive heroine and achieve the ironic victory, she cannot actually be raped by Ricardo. Just as we realize that Davidson could not possibly know what he is narrating and that Ricardo would not really speak as he does in the novel, so we are also aware that the rape scene would not actually take place as Conrad describes it. Though he overtly portrays a conventional scene in which the heroine defeats the villain, he also covertly yet unmistakably suggests an alternative—and more convincing—reality.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that Ricardo’s attempted rape has upon Lena the psychological and emotional effect of an actual rape, and that he thinks she derives a certain satisfaction from his violent attack. Despite Conrad’s explanations, it is impossible to believe that Lena could successfully resist the surprise attack of the armed Ricardo; her “fingers like steel” and “muscles like a giant” are a startling contrast to the frail and frightened Lena of Sourabaya, with her “slender white bust” and prettily crossed feet. Ricardo’s assault and her complicity in his escape lead to an unusual bond of intimacy between them. He believes “A woman that does not make a noise after an attempt of that kind has tacitly condoned the offence,” and he talks to her tenderly, as if they had slept together. He has, in fact, torn open her sarong and seen her naked body, and his “sudden relaxation of the terrific hug” leaves him “crestfallen.”
Finally, Ricardo’s knife is an obvious symbol of his penis. He boasts “I carry a pretty deadly thing about me” and Lena remarks that he could rape her only “with that thing stuck in my side.” When Lena disobeys Heyst and secretly meets Ricardo in the evening, the phallic connotations of the bone-handled weapon become glaring: “a tremor of impatience to clutch the frightful thing, glimpsed once and unforgettable, agitated her hands.” Lena symbolically consummates her sexual combat with Ricardo when she seductively steals his knife: “she let it slip into the fold of her dress, and laid her forearms with clasped fingers over her knees, which she pressed desperately together. The dreaded thing was out of sight at last. She felt a dampness break out all over her.”14
Though Ricardo is sick of crawling on his belly for Jones and wants to free himself from his master’s sexual domination, he gets perverse pleasure from debasing himself before Lena and makes the paradoxical but revealing statement about his own fantasies: “What you want is a man, a master that will let you put the heel of your shoe on his neck.” Ricardo’s mastery consists of persuading Lena to satisfy his masochistic urges. He substitutes foot-fetishism for sexual intercourse and tells Lena that he is “as tired as if I had been pouring my life-blood here on these planks for you to dabble your white feet in.” When Ricardo surrenders his knife he demands her foot, and as she slowly brings it out from under her dress he throws himself on it greedily and “clasping her ankle, pressed his lips time after time to the instep, muttering gasping words that were like sobs, making little noises that resembled the sounds of grief and distress.”15
Ricardo’s assault on Lena illuminates her unhappy relationship with Heyst as well as Ricardo’s connection with Jones. Though Ricardo’s violent lust for Lena is an ironic reflection of Heyst’s sexual failure, he achieves orgasm with Lena in a fashion that is as bizarre as his relations with Jones. All three men (as well as Schomberg and Wang) share a common misogyny, which is manifested in Heyst’s impotence, Jones’ homosexuality and Ricardo’s exhibitionism, voyeurism and fetishism.
Ricardo’s relationship with Jones, as everyone notices, is scarcely secretarial. Ricardo admits that Jones “seemed to touch me inside somewhere,” and at the first opportunity he attaches himself to his Governor and becomes, as Jones salaciously boasts to Heyst, “absolutely identified with all my ideas, wishes, and even whims.” Ricardo is Jones’ paid lover and has the “morals of a cat,” and the marks on his face suggest the great as well as the small pox. Ricardo enjoys deceiving Jones, having furtive little flings (which never amount to anything and are therefore tolerated by Jones), and attempting to excite himself and confirm his masculinity by making sexual overtures to women, like Lena, whom he threatens with violence but is actually afraid to sleep with.
Conrad is most explicit about the sexual anomalies of the handsome and shrill-voiced Jones, an invalid who dies in his gorgeous blue silk dressing-gown. Jones has a violent and passionate hatred of women, and his obviously feminine eyelashes and waspish penciled eyebrows make him appear “unnatural,” “vicious,” “depraved” and “disgusting.” In Mexico, Jones had picked up ragged and bare-legged street urchins for his pleasure, and the brazen girls asked Ricardo “if the English caballero in the posada was a monk in disguise, or if he has taken a vow to the sanctissima [sic] madre not to speak to a woman, or whether—You can imagine what fairly free-spoken girls will ask.”16
During Heyst’s confrontations with Jones—which parallel the previous encounters of Heyst with Lena, and of Lena with Ricardo, and which lead directly to the tragic climax of the novel—Jones confirms Schomberg’s accusations and Lena’s suspicions by recognizing the homosexual element in Heyst that has led to his fear of women, his guilt and his impotence. Though Jones never directly accuses Heyst of homosexuality, he enjoys implicating his victim in his own corruption and stresses the similarities between himself and his secret sharer.
Jones complains bitterly to Heyst that he was hounded out of society by a lot of highly moral souls and states that his presence on the island is not more morally reprehensible than Heyst’s: “Something has driven you out [too]—the originality of your ideas, perhaps. Or your tastes.” And in their final meeting Jones insists that he has remained closer to his origins, breeding and traditions than Heyst: “Not everyone can divest himself of the prejudices of a gentleman as easily as you have done.” Though Jones knows nothing of Heyst except the malicious gossip he has heard indirectly from Schomberg via Ricardo, he is able to wound Heyst with insinuations that awaken his guilt about Morrison. Jones considers himself more open and honest than Heyst because he admits his homosexuality instead of trying to repress and deny it, and preys on the world instead of evading it. Jones carries the philosophy of Heyst’s father (who also wore “an ample blue dressing-gown”) to the logical extreme of negation. For just as Heyst (like his father) believes that men are evil and the earth is “the appointed hatching planet of calumny enough to furnish the whole universe,” so Jones believes he is justified in exacting retribution through ferocity and violence.
While Ricardo is pursuing his masochistic gratifications, Heyst awakens Jones’ doubts about his faithful secretary just as Ricardo had stirred Lena’s suspicions of Heyst, and Jones discovers that the well-groomed Ricardo (who has recently become concerned with his appearance) has been deceiving him with Lena. In a rage of jealousy and disgust Jones rushes out to murder Ricardo and finds him kissing Lena’s feet. At that fatal moment, when Jones aims at his lover and shoots Lena, Heyst becomes painfully aware of his sexual failures and is convinced that Lena has deceived him.
When the dying Lena insists “I would never, never have let him . . . get it back,” even if she had to stab Ricardo, she reiterates the thematic connection between loving and killing. Heyst repeats that though women have their own weapon (guile), he has been a “disarmed” (impotent) man all his life. Then, in a moment of sudden fury, Heyst seems to recognize Lena’s corporality for the first time and to re-enact Ricardo’s assault: he “started tearing open the front of the girl’s dress” and stared at the “little black hole,” made by the bullet, beneath her swelling breast. Lena’s sexual excitement during her morbid consummation with Heyst accounts for her swelling breast as the blood flows from her wound, and she clasps Ricardo’s knife “like a child reaching eagerly for a toy.” Despite his final “thematic” pronouncement, Heyst never abandons the idea that “he who forms a tie is lost”; and his inability to grant Lena’s dying wish to take her in his arms—even as a formal gesture of consolation—confirms the emptiness of her thoroughly ironic victory.17 As the villains kill each other, Heyst is agonized by his impotence and his guilt about Lena’s meaningless sacrifice. He “couldn’t stand his thoughts before her dead body” and attempts to punish and purify himself by a fiery death.
Homosexuality, though rarely made explicit, has an important function in Victory. The clever, witty, depraved Jones is a classic villain who is guilty of murder and theft as well as sexual corruption. But Heyst’s repressed homosexuality and impotence symbolize in sexual terms the conflict between his desire for isolation and his need for love. His relationship with Lena (who is also called Alma) represents a spiritual as well as a sexual struggle, for she is trying to save him not from death, but from a kind of death-in-life that is the tragic legacy of his father’s philosophy. Conrad uses the homosexual theme to portray Heyst’s emotional sterility and denial of life. Heyst’s failure to respond to Lena’s love after his first generous impulse leads to the victory of pessimism and negation over devotion and sacrifice.
Victory, published in America in March 1915 and in England in September, was even more successful than Chance. It also had a much more provocative dust wrapper on which Lena, with long hair streaming on to the breast of her sarong, straight-arms the pajama-clad Ricardo, who cowers on a chest after attempting to assault her. Conrad soon earned his enormous advances—£1,000 for serial rights and £850 for book rights—for the first and second printings were exhausted on the date of publication, and his most exciting and poignant novel sold an unprecedented 11,000 copies in the first three days. Until the success of Chance, all Conrad’s English editions were printed in runs of between 1,500 and 3,500 copies. After Chance, Victory had a first English printing of 10,000, The Arrow of Gold (1919) of 20,000 and The Rescue (1920) of 25,000. But Conrad was unable to capitalize on his long-awaited success as an author during the war years. And he could not shake off his depression until 1916, when he met and fell in love with the beautiful and bohemian American journalist Jane Anderson.