American nights entertainment
shapes, pathetic shapes, heroic shapes, twisted and tortured shapes,
but shapes that are unfailingly intelligible. It is not quite the same
thing as saying: ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Joseph Conrad.’
It is equivalent, perhaps, to saying: ‘Here, by the grace of God, is
the affinity with Joseph Conrad.’ The meaning of the universe is, as
the Spaniards say, with God; but what we feel about it is of perpetual
fascination and very real importance. J. C. has found that out, in the
course of a fairly long and extremely surprising lifetime. The world
is a ship that will never make port, it is fair to assume, in our
lifetimes; its exact position, then, as witnessed to by the sun and the
stars, is of little moment. But those who are aboard--let us have a
clear understanding about them, if we can.
“To do that, one must feel the deck beneath his feet, like that old
fellow Peyrol, in Conrad’s newest novel which you will so soon be
reading. Coming after _The Rescue_--how long it has been! Three years
after!--_The Rover_ has surprised me with an unexpected simplicity of
strain, like a clear little thread of blue in a riot of scarlet, the
bright background of Revolutionary France and Napoleon’s day. Peyrol,
I ought to tell you, was a French waif whose sea exile led him to the
coast of India and to membership in the strange fraternity of pirates
who called themselves Brothers of the Coast. But this was all before;
we open upon the return of Peyrol to France and an inconspicuous
repose in a little farmhouse where dwell an old woman, a bloodthirsty
scarecrow, and a young girl whose eyes, having looked upon the spurting
blood of the Terror, can remain fixed on nothing for consecutive
instants since. And there’s a young French officer sent to the farm
on duty connected with the blockade. Far down below the rim of the
horizon, you understand, sails the fleet commanded by Lord Nelson. The
complete affair is one of those episodes in which a handful of people
are wholly at the mercy of destiny if a single one of them fails to
sustain his illusion, whether of love, of wrath, of mercy, of hope,
or, perhaps, of a sublime despair. Despair? Why, certainly; from what
other sentiment could old Peyrol have acted as he did, in the grand
emergency, cutting the knot that bound up together those few lives,
whose only importance was the supreme importance of the insignificant
and humble? Peyrol, the ex-pirate, flashing out over the water to his
final earthly adventure is the latest and most beautiful incarnation
of that old sailor whom Conrad knew in the flesh and has translated so
often--the ‘Ulysses’ we meet in _The Mirror of the Sea_, who is also
Nostromo, who appears under his actual name and in his true rôle in
_The Arrow of Gold_. In the closing pages of The Rover we get a brief
glimpse of the great Nelson, but he does not dwarf Peyrol.
“A Mediterranean story, a tale of that sea which is ‘the charmer and
deceiver of audacious men,’ like Life itself, which also keeps ‘the
secret of its fascination.’”
v
Marlow ceased to speak. It was beautifully dark. The river, in our
stretch of it, was composed to the beauty of that darkness and won
to the felicity of a nearly perfect silence. I can’t speak for the
others, of course. Personally I was absorbed in trying to remember the
man Conrad’s exact words--in the so long suppressed preface to _The
Nigger_. You must have read them:
“The artist appeals to that part of our being that is not dependent on
wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not a mere acquisition--and,
therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for
delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives;
to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain: to the latent feeling
of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible
conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of
innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in
aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each
other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and
the living to the unborn.”
Books by Joseph Conrad
NOVELS:
1895 _Almayer’s Folly_
1896 _An Outcast of the Islands_
1898 _The Nigger of the Narcissus_
[first published in America as _The Children of the Sea_]
1900 _Lord Jim_
1903 _Nostromo_
1907 _The Secret Agent_
1911 _Under Western Eyes_
1914 _Chance_
1915 _Victory_
1917 _The Shadow Line: A Confession_
1919 _The Arrow of Gold_
1920 _The Rescue_
1923 _The Rover_
NOVELS IN COLLABORATION WITH FORD MADOX HUEFFER:
1901 _The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story_
1903 _Romance_
TALES AND SHORT STORIES:
1898 _Tales of Unrest_
1902 _Youth: A Narrative_; _Heart of Darkness_;
_The End of the Tether_
1903 _Typhoon and Other Stories_
[in America _Typhoon_ is published separately and the volume
is _Folk and Other Stories_]
1908 _A Set of Six_
1912 _’Twixt Land and Sea_
1916 _Within the Tides_
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL:
1906 _The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions_
1912 _A Personal Record_ [published in England as
_Some Reminiscences_]
CRITICAL:
1921 _Notes on Life and Letters_
Sources on Joseph Conrad
_Joseph Conrad: His Romantic-Realism_, by RUTH M. STAUFFER (Boston:
Four Seas Company, 1922). This study of Conrad is of first importance
because of its thirty pages of appendices, consisting of:
I. Conrad Bibliographies
II. Conrad’s Works
(A) Chronological List of Novels and Tales (with Original Editions)
(B) Alphabetical List of Short Stories
(C) Miscellaneous Writings by Conrad
III. Criticisms of Conrad
(A) Books on Conrad. With a paragraph of characterisation of each.
(B) Articles About Conrad. With notes as to the character of each
article. There is given a “first,” a “second” and a “third” list,
according to the estimate of an article’s value.
IV. Book Reviews. Described as a “partial list only,” but recording
fully 200 reviews in principal English and American magazines and
newspapers.
V. Miscellaneous
(A) Brief Articles on the Personality of Conrad
(B) Poems to Conrad
(C) A list of Portraits of Conrad
All of Conrad’s short stories are credited to their respective
volumes, serial publication is invariably noted, etc.
_Joseph Conrad--The Man_, by Elbridge L. Adams, in THE OUTLOOK for 18
April, 1923. One of the most complete accounts of a visit and report
of the everyday Conrad.
The chapter on Joseph Conrad, by Leland Hall, in _English Literature
During the Last Half Century_, by JOHN W. CUNLIFFE. The Macmillan
Company, revised edition, 1923.
_Some Modern Novelists_, by HELEN THOMAS FOLLETT and WILSON FOLLETT.
Henry Holt & Company, 1918.
_Joseph Conrad, A Study_, by RICHARD CURLE. Doubleday, Page & Company,
1914.
Private Information.
The reader may consult the references available in the New York Public
Library or the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C, and should also
consult the annual READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE especially
since 1914. He should also consult the map showing the locations of
Conrad’s stories, printed as an end-paper in some editions of his
books, particularly _Victory_.
_5. The Documents in the Case of Arthur Train_
i
The first and most important is a volume of over two hundred
pages--very large pages, somewhat larger, in fact, than those of
Cosmopolitan magazine, a trifle smaller than those of Vanity Fair.
The volume is bound in heavy yellow paper which says, in neat letters
at the upper left, “Indictment No. 1.” Inside the cover is a long
table of contents; the printed pages that follow are made either
more enlightening or more alarming, according to your variety of
intelligence, by the presence of charts and diagrams. One such, when
unfolded, shows green, red and black inks. The purpose is to make
it easier for the eye to trace the intricate handlings of certain
considerable sums of money....
This mysterious book, possessed of no title-page and honouring no
one as its author, represents the capacity of Arthur Train for hard
work. In 1914 Henry Siegel, a New York merchant and banker, was to
be prosecuted, and Arthur Train was entrusted with the prosecution.
Counsel for Siegel secured a change of venue and the trial was
transferred to Geneseo, New York. The case for the prosecution, in
its mathematical and extremely complicated demonstration, seemed only
too likely to be lost before a jury of farmers completely unfamiliar
with Mr. Siegel’s affairs. Mr. Siegel was in banking companies,
merchandising corporations, realty corporations, a securities company,
an express company and other enterprises. It was quite necessary to
explore the labyrinth; something like $50,000 was expended by Arthur
Train, the explorer, and the printed and bound book, _Indictment No.
1_, was a mere preliminary to the battle in court.
In 1914 Arthur Train was already the author of quite a number of books
of fiction. In a general way, they represented pleasant recreation.
ii
Other documents are these books and stories of his, the work of
leisure intervals and an active imagination. Some of them were done by
dictation, dictation interrupted by telephone calls, by days in court,
by this or that or the other. He acquired the faculty of dropping and
picking up again in the middle of a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence.
He didn’t worry over the stuff; he didn’t fuss about it, as some men
do about their golf, when they’re off their game. The business of life
was transacted in the gloomy chambers of the Criminal Courts Building,
New York, where the air is bad, the light poor, but the saturation
with human nature, perfect. To prepare a case was rather frequently
interesting, to try a case was scarcely ever without its thrill. And
the cases, despite the common misconception of them, were not assorted
East Side vendettas or Chinatown murders. A large percentage of them
were always on that shadowy borderline where a District Attorney
must stop and ask himself if a crime has been committed, if, after
all, the remedy is not to be sought in an action brought in the civil
courts. And every little while there would be a case of proportions,
of an almost inscrutable complexity, like that which led to the
publication (in a strictly limited edition with a deluxity of coloured
inks) of _Indictment No. 1_.
Arthur Train is the most agreeable of men, not tall, suave, exceedingly
friendly, a good talker and with all the requisite human approaches
and contacts, but if you really wish to make yourself tiresome to him
you can do it by suggesting that he is a “criminal lawyer.” Now there
have been and are among “criminal lawyers” many men of eminence. The
defence of persons accused of crime is possibly that branch of the
law in which talent or genius shows most conspicuously. As a matter
of fact, however, the most ingenious brains of the legal profession
have preferred, for a generation past, to remain in offices and nurse
the young and growing corporation or correct the adult corporation’s
errors in diet and underwear. Corporation law is the thing in our day
and there is some very good evidence that Arthur Train is an excellent
corporation lawyer.
What about the evidence that he is a novelist? Your Honours, I am
coming to that directly.
iii
The document now to our purpose is his latest novel, _His Children’s
Children_. It represents Mr. Train’s most serious work to date. To
give it its proper background of purpose, I should like to make a
literary comparison. My trouble is that any sort of literary comparison