The vivacious and reckless Jane Anderson, ignored or neglected by Conrad’s biographers, had a significant influence on his life.1 He fell in love with her, met her secretly and—seizing the last chance for sexual romance—wrote her passionate love letters. She became his mistress in the summer of 1916 and was the only woman, apart from Jessie, whom we know he slept with. She distracted and rejuvenated him when he was depressed by the war, and inspired him to engage in the propaganda effort by going on sorties in planes and ships, and by writing of his experiences. (Rebecca West wrote that Jane “was always going up in planes and down in submarines.”) Jane flirted with Borys, who fell for her in Paris during his leave from military service. She also became Joseph Retinger’s mistress, broke up his marriage and, by arousing Conrad’s jealousy, damaged their friendship. Jane stimulated Conrad’s interest in journalism, in films and in America. And she was the principal model for the seductive Rita de Lastaola in The Arrow of Gold, the first novel he published after the war.2
An only child, Jane was born Foster Anderson in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 6 in about 1888.3 Her mother, Ellen Luckie, a wealthy and beautiful socialite, was the daughter of Foster Luckie, who owned and developed a great deal of property in Atlanta, and for whom Luckie Street was named. Soon after Jane’s birth her apparently ill-matched parents separated, and her rough, likable father, Robert “Red” Anderson, took off for the Southwest. Kitty Crawford, Jane’s college friend, described him as “a tall, handsome, reckless-looking man with a humorous quirk to his mouth and blue-steel sharpness in his eyes.” Retinger gave a more colorful and no doubt exaggerated account of Jane’s father:
When I first met him he was seventy-eight. His breakfast consisted of a bottle of whiskey and a 2 lb. steak. Anderson had been an associate of Buffalo Bill. He was the head of the police while the Panama Canal was being constructed under General Goethals [c. 1909–14], and later was Marshal of Arizona, when Arizona was still a territory. He once showed me his revolver, which had twenty-eight notches, and told me they represented the criminals he had killed, not including Mexicans. At seventy-eight he had a mistress, a woman of not more than thirty-five, who was in love with him.
The future law officer revealed his short temper and punctilious conscience during an incident that took place on May 8, 1891, in Globe, Arizona. He appeared in court, charged himself with assault and battery, and confessed that he and another man “had some words this morning and I struck him with my fist. I don’t know how many times. I want to make this complaint [sic] and pay my fine” of eight dollars.4
In 1903, when Jane’s mother was being tried in a murder case, Jane was sent away to Demorest, Georgia, to live with her grandmother. Though Ellen “was acquitted of the accessory charge, the word went round that the jury was soft-hearted because she was an attractive woman. Her brother, Dan Luckie, assumed the blame and confessed to the murder on the eve of departing for South America.” Jane attended Piedmont College in Demorest from 1903 to 1904, “although it is not certain she completed a full year’s work, since she was expelled according to the records on May 13, 1904 . . . for unauthorized departure from the campus, about which there were very severe rules at that time.”
Ellen Luckie died soon after the scandalous trial. And Jane was sent to stay with her father, who was almost a complete stranger to her. He was living with an elderly Mexican housekeeper in the wild frontier town of Yuma, Arizona, near the borders of California and Mexico, and was town marshal from 1904 to 1908.5 Though isolated and lonely in Arizona, Jane learned to ride horses, to love the desert and to observe the ways of the Indians. She called her father “Daddy Bob”; he called her “Baby,” adored her and spoiled her outrageously. In about 1906 “Red” Anderson, deciding that Jane needed an education that was unobtainable in Yuma, enrolled her in Kidd-Key College, north of Dallas, in Sherman, Texas.
Mrs. Lucy Kidd-Key, the founder of the very proper women’s college (which closed before World War One), was an aristocratic, conservative, elderly southern lady, married to a retired Methodist bishop. While at Kidd-Key College Jane, who loved music, diligently practiced the piano. After hearing the Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski perform at a concert in Dallas, she made Chopin her favorite composer, constantly played his works and was awarded a special certificate in music.
The autobiographical stories, poems and editorials in the Kidd-Key Journal of December 1, 1908, which listed “Jane Foss Anderson” (her original name now abbreviated and placed second) as Editor-in Chief, reveal how the twenty-year-old displaced Southern college girl saw herself and was seen by her contemporaries. In her short story “With Long Distance From 7 to 9 p.m.,” a beautiful, elegantly dressed young woman meets a varied group of people who are making long-distance calls in the phone company office. And she shocks them by putting a call through to the Crown and Anchor Saloon (which sounds more like an English pub than a western bar): “She was all silk and lace from head to heel. She had hair like the sunbeams, a skin like a roseleaf, and big eyes, blue as a June sky.” In her romantic and formulaic work called “Story,” a cowboy-economics professor in the West courts a modern girl with Southern manners who will not express her feelings for any man. But when he risks serious injury and is thrown from a horse while breaking broncos, she rushes to his side and declares her love.
A doggerel poem about Jane, with a drawing of her in an enormous hat and long flowing dress, reinforces the image of a Southern belle who defied convention and was determined to make a striking impression:
If you wish to see a funny sight
Just look at Janie Foss—
(We really hate to state the fact,
But she’s our Journal Boss.)
She wears a hat so very large
Her face you cannot see,
The shape of which said head-piece
Doth vex the Facul—ty.
Jane’s first political pronouncement was an editorial called “Enterprise,” written during the jingoistic presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, which patriotically asserted: “America is a nation to be admired and respected by other countries.”
According to the information on her passport Jane was five feet seven inches (slightly taller than Conrad), with red hair, blue eyes, fair complexion, high forehead, oval face, small nose and mouth, and round chin. Kitty Crawford, who adored Jane and thought her the most beautiful girl she had ever seen, wrote that “her face, framed with curly hair, was rather broad, with widely-spaced violet-blue eyes, a pert upturned nose and the flawless complexion of her southern heritage. Tall and slender, graceful and assured, with large eyes looking directly at one, she dominated a scene the moment she entered the room . . . queenly, triumphantly beautiful, and with a veneer of international sophistication.”
In the spring of 1909 Jane suffered a disaster at Kidd-Key that must have reminded her of the expulsion from Piedmont in the spring of 1904. During her senior year, “Red” Anderson’s letters suddenly stopped. Oscillating between adoration and neglect, he disappeared without paying her tuition and deserted her for the second time in her life. Kitty observed that though friends helped Jane with money, “the foundations of her life were shaken cruelly by this experience.” She did not have enough credits to graduate from college, or enough money to continue, but distinguished herself that year in French and in English literature.
After college, Jane went to New York, where she intended to become a fiction writer, and Kitty became a reporter in San Antonio. In the course of her work Kitty met the distinguished composer and music critic Deems Taylor, who was born in 1885, and asked him to help Jane find a job. He did so, they fell in love—Taylor said “she has a face like a flower!”—and were married on September 26, 1910. In a photograph taken at the time of her wedding, Jane looks like a woman in her early twenties. Wearing a long dark dress and sitting with her legs crossed at an angle to the camera, she rests her elbow on her knee and chin on her lace-gloved hand, and turns her strikingly handsome face toward the lens as her tawny hair cascades onto her shoulders from under the canopy of an enormous soft black hat.
Kitty wrote that Buffalo Bill Cody, “one time Indian scout and proprietor of a Wild West show, was a poker-playing friend of Daddy Bob, and an affectionate admirer of Jane.” Colonel Cody gave Jane a letter of introduction to one of his New York friends, George Harvey, editor of Harper’s Weekly, where Jane published eight western stories between April 1910 and February 1913. Jane’s competently written but sentimental and melodramatic stories—which also appeared before the war in Munsey’s, Collier’s and Harper’s monthly—frequently concern an obstacle to love that is overcome through a sudden twist in plot, and conclude in romance as bad guys are redeemed by good women or prostitutes rescued by good men. Many of the stories are set in Arizona, concern Mexicans and Indians, test men’s courage, criticize injustice, and show strong sympathy for the maimed and wounded underdog.
During 1914–15 Jane also earned money by writing articles for the naturalist and popular science author William Beebe, curator of ornithology at the Bronx Zoo. At this time Jane expressed doubts to Kitty about her competence to write on unfamiliar subjects and resentment about publishing her own work under someone else’s name: “I am to do a whole book for Will, now. . . . This is to be a book about all the countries I have never seen—the Lord only knows what I would write if I had been there. . . . I’m going to try and get the book out before spring. I mean the book which is to be published at the same time as his monograph. . . . I know I’m getting a rotten deal—what with everybody believing that I’ve flunked in my work, and Beebe getting all manner of credit for the stuff.”6
On September 24, 1915, possibly financed by a Denver man who was infatuated with her, Jane sailed to Europe on the Baltic and became a war correspondent in London. She rushed to the scene when a German Zeppelin was shot down in a village near London, borrowed a nurse’s uniform to get close to the carnage, “saw a lot of Germans frying in somebody’s pasture” and wrote the story. She got a job on the Daily Mail and was commissioned by the Daily Express to write a series of articles about the effect of the war on people in villages and farms.
Jane was also permitted to inspect a damaged submarine and to interview the officers who had brought it safely home. And she was “the first woman to make a flight across London in one of His Majesty’s war machines.” On May 18, 1916, the London Times stated: “The following article by Mrs. Jane Anderson, a well-known American writer, describes a remarkable feat of courage and seamanship on the part of the officers and crew of a British submarine.” Two weeks later The Times said of her effective (though not blatant) war propaganda, “A Woman’s Flight Over London”: “The following account of a trip over London in a military aeroplane was contributed to the New York Tribune by Miss [no longer “Mrs.”] Jane Anderson, who recently described the return to port of a British submarine which had been badly damaged in a collision with a mine.”7 These articles show Jane’s considerable courage, enterprise and ability to persuade political and military officials to let her go wherever she wanted and do whatever she wished. Even more extraordinary for a woman during World War One were Jane’s fearless and frequent visits to the trenches and the battlefronts of France.
While in London Jane became friendly with Conrad’s friends Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, and with Wells’ mistress, Rebecca West. The brilliant Miss West, herself an accomplished journalist, was far more impressed by Jane’s beauty than by her mind. She suggested that Jane was an inordinately ambitious, not very talented and politically naïve woman, who slept her way into journalistic success with influential men like Sir Leo Money and Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail and The Times:
She was very beautiful with orange hair that I am sure was of nature, a slender figure, a ravishing complexion, and great charm of manner. . . . I associate her in my mind with Sir Leo Money who, I think, introduced me to her. . . .
She was a goodnatured, silly, melodramatic ass, and I don’t know whether she was a pro-German enthusiast of the Bund variety or just an adventuress with a taste for the exceptional. . . . I can’t really think that she would be a useful observer. The paucity of her journalistic equipment was universally remarked, so I don’t think she could have got by without raising some suspicions. . . .
We [Wells and West] rather liked her, and I do not think she knew one belligerent side from another. . . . She was far too simple-minded to be taken as a serious interviewer in the war.
Jane’s limitations, behavior and success were similar to those of Mary Welsh, Irwin Shaw’s mistress during World War Two, whom he portrayed as Louise M’Kimber in The Young Lions: “she seemed to know every big-wig in the British Isles. She had a deft, tricky way with men, and was always being invited to weekends at famous country houses where garrulous military men of high rank seemed to spill a great many dangerous secrets to her.”8
Lord Northcliffe, born in 1865, the son of a Dublin barrister, was one of the most powerful men in England. Conrad and Ford had portrayed him as Mr. Fox, “full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner . . . very successful in launching papers.” He also owned the Evening News, the Daily Mirror and the Observer, and was created a viscount in 1917. Northcliffe was clearly attracted to Jane and probably became her lover. As she wrote to Kitty in July 1917: “Some two or three times a week I went down for tea with him at his office. . . . A curious, antagonistic intimacy sprang up and lived between us for some time. It terminated, of course, in a quite unnecessary quarrel. . . . My chief regret was the breaking of the somewhat innocuous bond between Northcliffe and me.”
In 1915 Jane had asked both Wells and Northcliffe to secure her an invitation to visit Conrad. When Jane herself finally wrote, enclosing an introduction from Northcliffe, who had not yet met Conrad but “presumed upon his prestige to dictate the letter,” Jessie replied that he was ill with an attack of gout and could see no one. Though this was the truth, Jane took it as “a chilly bit of fiction which left me singularly cold on the reading of it.” She eventually managed to secure her own invitation and, after meeting Conrad, had the pleasure of introducing Northcliffe to him. On July 1, 1916 (Conrad told Pinker), Northcliffe visited Capel House during his first wartime holiday, arriving from Broadstairs, on the Kentish coast, at noon and staying until five. He looked very tired, spoke devotedly of his mother, and became very friendly with John Conrad and Robin Douglas, who dragged him away to look at birds’ nests. Conrad later told Cunninghame Graham that Northcliffe “himself was absolutely genuine. He had given me one or two glimpses of his inner man which impressed me.”9
Jane also told Kitty of “the loyal welcome unfailingly extended to me by Sir Leo Money and Lady Money,” who had introduced her to Rebecca West. Sir Leo Chiozza Money was born in Genoa in 1870. A noted economist and journalist, and former Fabian on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, he was the author of Riches and Poverty (1905). He had been an MP for East Northamptonshire since 1910, was knighted in 1915 and, as private secretary to Lloyd George (whom he introduced to Jane), was a member of the wartime government from 1916 to 1918.
In view of the scandals Sir Leo was later involved in, it seems clear that he had a sexual interest in Jane and may also have been her lover. In April 1928 Sir Leo and Miss Irene Savage, a twenty-two-year-old factory worker, were charged (in the euphemistic language of that time) “with being concerned together with behaving in a manner reasonably likely to offend against public decency at Hyde Park.” In other words, while sitting under a tree, they were probably kissing and fondling each other. The police claimed that when he was arrested Sir Leo desperately exclaimed, “I am not the usual riff-raff. I am a man of substance. For God’s sake let me go.” The defendants were remanded on bail with Lady Money as surety for both. But a parliamentary debate and three leading articles in The Times the following month criticized the police for their improper questioning of Miss Savage and for their insistence that she have a medical examination, and Sir Leo was awarded ten guineas costs against the police.
This incident would have been forgotten if the hot-blooded Sir Leo had not become involved five years later in a similar event with another working-class woman. In September 1933 the sixty-three-year-old Sir Leo was accused of assaulting a girl in a railway compartment by passionately kissing her on the lips. He admitted kissing her hands but denied the graver charge, claiming the girl’s motive in accusing him was that she had recently been jilted and was hostile to men. In this case, however, the judge thought Sir Leo’s admission suggested misconduct. He was convicted and fined two pounds—yielding a net profit in the two cases of £8.10.0—and decided for financial reasons not to appeal the case.10
In April 1916 chance events enabled Jane to achieve “the greatest ambition of [her] life” and to meet “the greatest writer in the world.” When Conrad was ill at home with gout, Jessie attended the London exhibition of Jo Davidson’s bust of her husband, where she met the charming American journalist Gordon Bruce of the New York Herald. He told Jessie that he would soon be flying to France and offered to take her message to Borys, then serving with the Mechanical Transport Corps. The Conrads invited Bruce to lunch on April 16 and he immediately accepted, asking if he could bring a young lady with him.
Jessie recorded that the young lady, Jane Anderson, made a “very great impression” on Conrad and, it seems, on everyone else as well. When Jane sat before the fire and a married French Red Cross officer with whom she was flirting placed two tall vases full of flowers in front of her and made a deep bow, Conrad gave a “rather vexed laugh,” held out his hand to help his guest to rise and upset both vases while doing so. John Conrad, who was nine years old at the time, vividly remembered this party. He thought Jane was extremely attractive, had a good figure and was elegantly dressed, and mentioned that Jessie later became jealous of her: “She was vivacious and not against having a mild scrap with me, rolling me on the floor while my father looked on with amusement [and, perhaps, a desire to join in the rolling]. All the other women who came were married, some rather staid and practically every one of them nervous and on their best behaviour.” But Jane won their hearts with her charming Georgia accent and her free and easy American manners.
Conrad and the French officer were not the only ones to be sexually attracted to Jane. As they were cycling down a hill, the wind caught Jane’s long skirt and blew it well above her knees. Jane properly told young John: “You should not look round when that happens!” but he candidly replied: “Oh, why not? I think your legs are very beautiful!” Jane played music for Conrad even more effectively than Émilie Briquel had done in Geneva. As Robin Douglas noted: “Having captivated us, [Mrs.] Taylor then made two more easy conquests in Mr. and Mrs. Conrad. After tea we went into the drawing-room, where the ‘American flying girl’ played and sang negro songs of the cotton fields and plantations. Conrad listened, spellbound by the plaintive melodies of the South.”11 The Georgia peach did not try out her Chopin polonaises on Conrad, who always associated music with sensuality, but moved him nevertheless with her lively and unconstrained performance.
Jane, also moved by this visit, carefully described Conrad’s speech, accent and appearance as well as his house, wife and children in long letters to Deems Taylor and to Kitty Crawford:
[Conrad was] talking very fast and making tremendous motions with his hands and his shoulders. His voice is very clear and fine in tone, but there is an accent which I never heard before. It is an accent which affects every word, and gives the most extraordinary rhythm to phrases. And his verbs are never right. If they are in the place they should be—which is seldom—they are without tense. . . .
His head is extraordinarily fine in the modelling, although the forehead is not high. There are certain planes above the eyes, however. It is the pose of his head, which is a little shrunken into his shoulders, which gives the impression of strength. His mouth, although not clearly defined under the gray moustache, is full but sensitive. But it is his eyes which are the eyes of genius. They are dark, and the lids droop except in moments of intense excitement. They are dark brown, in which the pupil does not show. And there is in them a curious hypnotic quality. . . .
“I would show you,” he said, “ze spire of ze cathedral as you would see it from ze hills—but my car is broken, and we do not go. Zis will be for anuzzer time.”
One early afternoon—it was Sunday, I drove up to Capel House. What shall I say of that Kentish farmhouse, set within the confines of an old moat, with a garden bright with flowers, and above all the intense shadow of towering pines. Oh, there are no words for the love and beauty I found there!
Jessie Conrad is one of the great women of this earth. She came walking across the little living room to meet me, leaning heavily on her cane. She has walked with this cane for eighteen [i.e., twelve] years. She was smiling. Jessie is always smiling. I loved her then. The spell of Conrad’s genius lives in that house but the soul of Jessie Conrad lies behind that genius.
And there was my Brother John. He has the magnificent age of ten [i.e., nine]. We went that day for a long walk together—down the old lane through the woods back of Capel to gather primroses. We brought them back in the late afternoon to give to Jessie.
Thus it came about that Capel House became my home. . . . Each weekend I went down, giving whatever I could, for with the older son at the front, there is always another shadow over Capel deeper than the shadow of the pines.
Jane also sent Kitty’s daughter, Jane Anderson Jenkins, a doll that had been dressed by “Lady Conrad.”
Two revealing photographs were taken (perhaps by Gordon Bruce) during Jane’s visit. In the first, a tall, thin, elegant Jane, her eyes momentarily closed during the long exposure, leans over and embraces (though her hands cannot meet) the stolid bulk of an impassive, double-chinned Jessie, who appears to be holding a dishrag. In the second, Conrad wears a dashing bowler hat, monocle, highly polished boots and leather gaiters. With his arm resting negligently on the door of the high open car and his right leg raised on the running board, he beams fondly—and uncharacteristically—at Jane. She, holding a white fur-piece and wearing smart pointed boots and a high plumed hat, returns, with an engagingly tilted head, his more than affectionate regard.12
Joan Givner observed that Jane could be “entertaining, even brilliantly amusing, but at other times she was morbid, oversensitive, and easily upset.” In the summer of 1916, when Jane collapsed from exhaustion, pneumonia and a nervous breakdown, the Conrads saw the darker side of her character. Jessie heard of her illness, visited her in a London hospital and, when she was better, had her moved (with Conrad’s encouragement) to Capel House for a five-week convalescence. “There was so much she had seen of the horrors of the war,” Jessie wrote, “and under circumstances few women, other than those engaged as nurses, could have dreamt of. She had made a passage across the Channel in a hospital ship, been present at least once very close to where a German machine had come down in flames. . . . When she came to us after a spell of these adventures she spent a month practically in bed. Her nerves were decidedly ragged, and she made an interesting invalid.”13 Jane’s mental breakdown (which may have reminded Conrad of his own in 1910) had been caused by her difficult and unstable childhood as well as by the war. It is scarcely surprising that Conrad felt solicitous and Jessie maternal, and that Jane found in their domestic life at Capel House a secure refuge from the wounded, mutilated and dead men she had seen at the front.
Conrad’s letters to his friends and to his wife suggest that he fell in love with Jane as desire mingled with pity during her convalescence. In August 1916, as Jane was recovering, he aroused Pinker’s interest by inviting him to meet an amusing and pretty young woman. And that month—complimenting Jane, expressing his feelings in a paternal guise and concluding with an uncharacteristic expression that alluded to the charming heroine of The Mikado—he told Curle: “We made the acquaintance of a new young woman. She comes from Arizona and (strange to say!) she has an European mind. She is seeking to get herself adopted as our big daughter and is succeeding fairly. To put it shortly she’s quite yum-yum.”
On September 14, when Jane had recovered and returned to London, Conrad went to her flat for tea, stayed for dinner and possibly consummated their affair. In a letter to Jessie—the ostensible subject of their conversation—Conrad described how they both put on elaborate dress for this momentous occasion, and how he supposedly remained passive while she revealed intimate details of her personal life, which had become rather precarious because of her quarrel with her lover and employer, Lord Northcliffe:
I changed into my yachting suit and then went on to Jane’s where after 3 cups of tea I recovered somewhat. She kept me to dinner, put on a charming frock for me and behaved generally in a charming manner. She talked of you and the boys a good deal. Rather a lot of herself. Very curious. Very nebulous of course. No facts but a lot about sensations, intelligence and so on. You know what I mean—I fancy she feels her position to be not without danger (of a shake up) and would be perhaps glad to know (or to feel) that you, I mean you personally as a woman (as distinct from us) would be likely to stand by her—I was very reserved on these matters generally.
Two weeks later Conrad, who had been corresponding with Jane, told Jessie about her current relations with Northcliffe, maintained the convenient fiction that Jessie and Jane were devoted to each other, and took up the equine metaphor he was fond of using to describe the two women: “Had a letter from your pair-mate about N’cliffe. N. obviously cooled down a lot. Letter curiously indefinite but I seem to see that N. has found some new American wonder. Just what I expected. But this is strictly between us. The dear Chestnut filly is obviously put out. Am trusting the dearest dark-brown mare to steady that youngster in her traces.” He also told Jessie to be circumspect about showing Jane the presents he had sent her, lest Jane become jealous. And in late September, anticipating vicarious pleasure, he instructed Jessie to embrace Jane on his behalf: “Give my love to Jane and if the signs are propitious you may even go so far as a hug, or something of the kind. I wish I was there to see it. I never cared to see you kissing other women as you know. But this one is different.”14
At the beginning of her first book on Conrad, which does not mention Jane, Jessie claimed that she generously gave him complete freedom to do as he wished in their marriage: “I determined that his bonds should rest lightly on him; that to all intents and purposes he should feel as free as if he had remained a bachelor.” But when her intention was tested by his sexual passion for Jane, the groom (to adopt Conrad’s imagery) jerked the bridle and brought the restive stallion to a halt. As Conrad noted in “Because of the Dollars”: “A stupid woman with a sense of grievance is worse than an unchained devil.”
The affair came to a crisis on September 18, 1916, when Conrad (who had taken a flight in a warplane) met Jessie in Folkestone, where she had been staying with John and Jane. In Jessie’s account, the first thing Conrad asked when his train arrived was: “Where is your stable-companion?” And he was disappointed when told she had not come. Perhaps during a quarrel with Jessie, Jane had boasted of Conrad’s love letters and made Jessie suspect his fidelity. Furious at his “little backsliding,” Jessie had greeted his pretense of innocence with a frigid hauteur. The “fair American” had also intercepted the letters that Conrad always wrote to Jessie with great regularity and, as his wife remarked of Jane’s selfishness and malice, she “had been amusing herself at my expense. The seriousness of that deliberate attempt to spoil our long understanding affection had probably never struck her and more than likely would not have troubled her if it had.”
When they returned to the hotel Conrad had a stormy interview with Jane and must have reproached her for her reckless indiscretion. According to Jessie, she later discovered while sorting his books Conrad’s love letter to Jane: “The letter would have proved all she had said. It was a very high flown epistle, without signature or superscription, but there was no mistake who had written it.” When confronted with the incriminating evidence, Conrad angrily “flung it into the fire, and turning to me suggested a way of procuring something I had expressed a wish for. A usual form of any penitence, that followed no accusation and no apology.”15 Conrad, significantly, did not deny Jessie’s accusation of betrayal and bought her off rather cheaply with a long-coveted present. Jessie knew his affair did not seriously threaten their marriage, and Conrad apparently became more devoted than ever.
Conrad tried to live up to the gallant role Jane offered him, but knew he had no future with her. He had no wish to become involved, as Ford and Elsie had, in a squalid and embarrassing public scandal. He felt a need to preserve appearances, and believed that passion, especially between an older man and a young woman, was essentially ludicrous and potentially destructive. As he wrote in “A Smile of Fortune”: “Jacobus became suddenly infatuated with one of the lady-riders [in the traveling circus]. What made it worse was that he was married. He had not even the grace to conceal his passion.”
Though Jessie did not want Jane to stay with them any longer, she remained with the Conrads, to maintain appearances, until they left Folkestone two days later, and continued to see them at least until the end of 1916. In mid-December Conrad sent her pre-war Western stories to Pinker, discussed her complex character, analyzed her personal weaknesses and enthusiastically recommended her work:
The best point about her is that though very earnest about her production she has not the slightest conceit about her. . . . The novel she has planned being essentially autobiographical may make a success by a sort of wild sincerity that will be the distinctive mark of it I guess: for that is her great characteristic. She has gifts but her personality is inwardly in such a tangle that one can’t tell what all these gifts will amount to in the end. Personally she lacks judgment and determination in the conduct of her life. But she is as frank and open as a woman can be, I believe, and all her instincts are rather generous than otherwise. With all her airs of independence and her consciousness of her own intellect you will find her a most amenable creature and by no means naturally ungrateful.16
Conrad’s affair with Jane illuminates the most obscure aspect of his character: his sexual attitudes and sexual life. Halverson and Watt observe that “it must have been a great experience for Conrad to get to know intimately someone so open, so gifted, so lovely, and so unlike anyone else he had ever known.” And, they might have added, so different from the very proper French girls who had rejected and humiliated him, and from his boring “lump of a wife.”
When Conrad met Jane in 1916 he was fifty-eight and she was about twenty-eight. His sexual relations with the crippled Jessie (about fifteen years older than Jane) must have been, for most of their marriage, very limited. Unless Conrad had discreet affairs—which his obsessive work habits, lack of money, neurasthenia and agonizing guilt made unlikely—he probably led a nearly celibate life. A photograph in John’s book, taken in the garden of Capel House, shows Jane bending over to hug the boy while looking toward the camera. Jessie—who was only five feet two inches tall, weighed two hundred pounds and looked old enough to be Jane’s mother—props herself up with a cane and glances suspiciously at her while Conrad—with sporty waistcoat, gold chain and cigarette—beams at her with jaunty delight. Jane was Conrad’s last (and perhaps first) chance to sleep with a beautiful, well-born woman. He knew this and seized the opportunity.
Curle remembered Conrad telling him, “in that final way of his, how much safer it was for a woman to be married to a roué than to an idealist”—though Conrad of course was an idealist. Cunninghame Graham called him “un homme à femmes,” and in 1915 Conrad confessed that he was still capable of losing his old but still impressionable heart. Two years later, speaking of a model for an imaginary portrait of Alice Jacobus, the heroine of “The Planter of Malata,” and thinking of Jane, Conrad wrote that the search for “Titian-red hair” would be amusing.17
Many of Conrad’s friends commented on his attraction to women, and believed that Jane had been his mistress. In Some Do Not, Ford, who knew him intimately, wrote of Macmaster (based on Conrad): “He had passages when a sort of blind unreason had attracted him almost to speechlessness towards girls of the most giggling, behind-the-counter order, big-bosomed, scarlet-cheeked.” And in Ford’s The Simple Life Limited, Bransdon, though not particularly interested in women, sometimes takes them for sordid weekends in Brighton.
Rebecca West remarked that Conrad thought Jane “was so marvellous.” Joseph Retinger thought Conrad had had extramarital ventures and described them as “de louches passes” (sordid engagements). Richard Curle, like Ford an intimate friend, said Conrad “always had an eye for a pretty face and a pretty ankle,” and believed “there may have been a tendresse with the American journalist.” And Graham Greene, who was passionately interested in Conrad and may have been privy to inside information, maintained in his review of Jessie’s second book that Conrad had been “unfaithful to her in his old age.”18
The most convincing evidence, however, came from George Seldes, a professional journalist who interviewed Conrad and knew Jane, and whose brother Gilbert was, between 1918 and 1919 (during her separation from Retinger), Jane’s lover. In 1916 the London office of the United Press asked George Seldes to interview Conrad about the fighting capacity of British submarines. Jane, whom George Seldes called a redhead of “spectacular beauty,” was living in Conrad’s house. He politely referred to her as “my ward,” but George Seldes suspected she was actually his mistress. Unlike Rebecca West, George Seldes agreed with Conrad that Jane was an extraordinary woman with a bright mind. She was known as “a good newspaperman,” which in those days was a great compliment for a woman journalist. George Seldes also saw a love letter to Jane in which Conrad wrote, with his wittiest man-of-the-world manner: “I don’t see why my last mistress should not be Borys’ first.”19
Jane’s adoration of Conrad, unconventional sexual attitudes and willingness to sleep with great men; Conrad’s powerful attraction to Jane, quasi-celibate life with Jessie and desire to grasp the final opportunity for sexual adventure; the evidence of the photographs taken during Jane’s visits; the invitation to Jane to convalesce in his household and enliven his domestic life; their meetings in London; the stilted tone he adopted when discussing Jane in his letters and describing her in The Arrow of Gold; Jane’s revelation of Conrad’s love for her; his quarrel with Jessie about his “back-sliding”; his tacit admission of guilt when she discovered his love letter; Jessie’s jealousy of Jane; and Conrad’s serious quarrel with Retinger after he had become Jane’s lover, all seem to indicate that Jane was Conrad’s mistress.
Having conquered the hearts of Conrad, the French officer, young John, Robin and, for a time, of Jessie, Jane bewitched both Borys and Retinger. Between her convalescence and the showdown in Folkestone, Jane said that she intended to look up Borys in Paris; but Conrad, thinking she might try to seduce him, sharply replied: “None of that, you let the boy alone.” In July 1917, however, after he had been forced to sever his own liaison with Jane, he stimulated Borys’ interest by writing to him that Jane (whose French was excellent) had a suite at the luxurious Hôtel Crillon. He summarized her attractions, mentioned that she was involved with Retinger, then living in Paris, and bluntly advised Borys to “take care not to make a damned fool of yourself”—as Conrad may have felt he had done. He also told Pinker, with stoic resignation: “If he must meet a ‘Jane’ it’s better he should meet her at nineteen than at twenty-four.”20
The five days Borys (who was about ten years younger than Jane) spent with “the glamorous lady from Arizona” in hotels, restaurants and nightclubs during his first leave in Paris were among the happiest of his life, for the awkward and inexperienced youth immediately fell in love with her. When he told Retinger that he was having dinner with Jane, her Polish lover said he was disappointed that Borys had “abandoned” him. While Borys was dining with the femme fatale they were summoned by Retinger’s landlady, who “said that [he] had been working far too hard and had developed some sort of nervous disorder.” This illness was undoubtedly connected with his unhappy relations with Jane, who, with Borys, “spent the remainder of the night holding him down in the bed during fits of hysteria.”
As Borys was about to return to his unit, Jane got him into trouble and then out of it. She was late in returning to the hotel to say goodbye, he missed his military train and was arrested for overstaying his leave. Jane then promised: “ ‘I’ll have you out of that in no time at all.’ She did just that—within an hour I was back in her sitting room—she certainly had friends in the right places.” And Borys had another day of leave. When, Borys said, he finally returned to the front, Conrad “expressed the hope that the enemy would keep me sufficiently pre-occupied to enable me ‘to get Jane out of my system.’ ”
Retinger’s much more serious love affair with Jane began in Paris and continued in America. He followed her there after the war, and Jane and her friend Katherine Anne Porter became rivals for his love. Porter thought Retinger was a well-informed and brilliant conversationalist and—despite his gaunt physique and simian features—“the most attractive man she had ever met.” Retinger’s description of Jane’s attractiveness, ability and sympathetic personality echoes Conrad’s letter about Jane to Pinker and explains why both Poles fell in love with her:
Brilliant and beautiful, she turned the heads of many conspicuous and famous men in Europe and in her own country. Exceptionally gifted, a good newspaperwoman and short-story writer of more than average talent, she had a marvellous capacity for listening and understanding. After she arrived in London in 1916, and until she left a year or so later, Conrad saw a lot of her. She became part-heroine in one of his last novels The Arrow of Gold. She was one of the very rare persons whom Jessie could not stand. . . . She also, after the War, caused a certain estrangement between Conrad and myself.21
The similarities between Jane and Rita de Lastaola, the mistress of the autobiographical hero of The Arrow of Gold (1919), are even closer than Retinger suggested. The novel expresses Conrad’s passion of the war years more than the passion of his youth in Marseilles. Jane, the Southern model for the heroine, matches Warrington Dawson, the Southern model for the South Carolinian character, J. K. Blunt. The “four magic letters” of Rita’s name have the same number of letters as Jane’s, and the Royalist friend who acts as George’s second in his duel with Blunt has a married sister called Jane. Both Jane and Rita have blue eyes and rust-colored hair. And even Conrad’s generalized description of Rita suggests his strong attraction to her model: “All that appertained to her haunted me with the same awful intimacy, her whole form in the familiar pose, her very substance in its colour and texture, her eyes, her lips, the gleam of her teeth, the tawny mist of her hair, the smoothness of her forehead, the faint scent that she used.” And Jane’s “familiar pose” is, in fact, repeated in Rita’s. Jessie wrote: “Miss A seated herself before the fire like an idol”; in The Arrow of Gold, Rita is seen “sitting cross-legged on the divan in the attitude of a very old idol.”
Jane’s “airs of independence,” her flirtation with Borys (a partial compensation for the loss of Conrad), her liaisons with Lord Northcliffe and Sir Leo Money, her connections “in the right places” and political influence with high-ranking officials are all clearly reflected in The Arrow of Gold, which ends as Rita abandons Monsieur George. Conrad describes the magnetic Rita as “a woman formed in mind and body, mistress of herself, free in her choice, independent in her thoughts.” Her sister Therese asks: “Did she tell you about a boy, the son of pious and rich parents, whom she tried to lead astray into the wildness of thoughts like her own.” And Captain Blunt remarks that “every bald head in this Republican Government gets pink at the top whenever her dress rustles outside the door.”
Conrad heard from Jane for the last time in April and May 1919, just after The Arrow of Gold had been published in America, when she sent him two telegrams about buying the film rights to his novels. After Jane’s first business-like telegram Conrad placed the matter in Pinker’s hands and did not respond to the warmer tone of the second one, which asked him to extend the option and sent her tender salutation: “Dearest love, Jane Anderson.”22