American nights entertainment
not expect a sailor to understand women and I cannot for the life of me
comprehend how J. C. got in the way of knowing the sex. Perhaps, for
some time, he didn’t. Disregarding the mysteries of feminine nature,
if he observed any, the youth persisted in his weird determination to
become one of the great race of sailors. He shipped on English ships.
Richard Curle’s book, _Joseph Conrad: A Study_, will even tell you
just which English ships. For example, the story called _Youth_ with
its vessel, the Judæa, harks back to a passage on a hulk called the
Palestine. And so on. But what are such things to you and me? I have
read Curle’s book and I give you my _parole d’honneur_ that I found it
extraordinarily confusing when not simply rhapsodical. I did! As if J.
C. were not, in himself, serious enough to require close attention and
profound enough to merit it and pellucid enough to reward our most
earnest scrutiny. Along comes Curle and roils up the surface of that
clear, deep stream. I have no forgiveness for such a man, upon my word,
I have not! May his excellent intentions pave the road to ... but I
suppose they do force one to re-read Conrad if only to get straightened
out again.
“Anyway, he stuck to ships, this foreign blighter. You will find all
that is pertinent diffused through the pages of _A Personal Record_.
Even to the examination in which he passed for his master’s ticket.
What was he reading in those years? One would give something to have
the tally; but certainly he did not neglect the French masters. Those
who find in the earlier books, including _The Nigger of the Narcissus_,
a style ‘too florid,’ or ‘too consciously sonorous’ say it was because
J. C. was long in understanding that English prose cannot display the
crystal resonance of French. Mind you, I don’t in the least accept
their premise; to me, _The Nigger of the Narcissus_ is so perfect that
when I came upon it I was seized with a most violent nostalgia. I
wanted, in a foolish, incredible way, to be back in the fo’c’s’le or on
the deck of a certain squarerigger called the Wayfarer which carried
me around Cape Stiff in--how long ago?--in 1909. It seems a century.
Youth! The splendid, the immortal time!
“The ships bore him eastward. Only the thoughtless, griped by the vain
longing for empire or inflated with a nauseating self-importance,
will go west. One goes east when one is in search of wisdom, and this
man was. The greatest piece of wisdom is the knowledge of oneself;
seek that in India or China or the ocean islands, whichever you
please; the road lies eastward. You see, he had already acquired some
self-knowledge; not a great deal, perhaps, but beyond the average. Or
was he born with it? At a surprisingly early age he had known that he
must, as the saying is, ‘follow the sea.’ This senseless conviction
must be put down to the score of self-knowledge. When a man is not
misled by that logical apparatus, his brain, it is astonishing to what
clearness of perception he may attain. Do you recall that gentle,
highly ironic sentence Conrad uses in _The Rescue_ about d’Alcacer?
‘Mr. d’Alcacer, being a Latin, was not afraid of introspection.’
Exactly. J. C. isn’t a Latin but neither is he afflicted like us, who
shrink from a look inward in a way to arouse the recording angel’s
darkest suspicion. The best advice, I believe, is that which counsels
a man to look into his heart and write. The best advice extant, but
it can be bettered. J. C. looked into his heart a long time before he
began writing.
“All that he saw there we have had steadily reflected in the succession
of novels and tales of a surprisingly varied character and a deep,
a very deep, inner relevance to the discovered self within him.
Externals do not matter. And yet they have taken aback visitors to J.
C., persons already acquainted with the true person and who should
therefore have known better. They found, in a cottage in Kent, a
man quitting middle age, the victim of an atrocious rheumatism (or
what seemed to be rheumatism) who dosed himself with all sorts of
concoctions that he had heard of, until the house looked like a
laboratory of disused patent medicine bottles. Well, perhaps that is
an exaggeration. Tall and broadly ample Jessie Conrad beamed on the
very infrequent visitors and would sometimes confide to them, with a
giggle: ‘You know, they say in London that Conrad lives in the country
with his cook!’ But she, Jessie, Mrs. Conrad, was a great deal more
than just an excellent cook, a capable mother, all that. She was,
in J. C.’s words, ‘the fortune of the house,’ a pair of eyes that
guarded watchfully over this unhappy man when, for eighteen months,
hardly knowing whether he ate or slept, and sitting all day long at a
table, he struggled desperately for ‘the breath of life’ which had to
be blown into the shapes of men and women, ‘Latin and Saxon, Jew and
Gentile’ who people the pages of that miraculous novel, _Nostromo_.
That book is unique. You may get some idea of its cost in toil and
sheer creative effort from J. C.’s own words in _A Personal Record_.
Just so; but then an American editor comes along, some years later, and
finds Conrad as nervous as a cat. Actually! The editor particularly
noticed that Conrad would never turn his back upon him while they were
together in that room and always sat so as to face, or partly face,
the door. He appeared like a man who wanted to feel the wall at his
back; and with his deep-set eyes and the overhang of his forehead,
the Slav contour of the cheekbones, the greying beard, the silences
and the restlessness, the jumpiness--everything--J. C. made on the
American editor a memorable and fantastic impression. That editor came
away convinced that J. C. had seen some wild goings-on and been in
some devilish tight places in his seafaring days; and altogether was
spending his later years like Stevenson’s chap at the Admiral Benbow,
waiting for some old, blind, tap-tap-tapping Pew to come along and
tip him the black spot. Fact! But the editor carried no black spot,
only large sums of American money which he was prepared to part with
in exchange for the very best English fiction, both spot and future
delivery. J. C. was then busy writing the novel called _Victory_, and
gave it to the American to read. The next morning the American ripped
it to pieces, on certain plot details. His, the American’s, account
of that interview is instructive. He says Conrad sat, fingers clawing
the arms of his chair, speechless and infuriated, for nearly an hour,
while our editor stressed the importance of the return of the shawl
that belonged to Mrs. Schomberg in the story and other matters that
the meticulous would find fault with. And finally, I suppose when he
was able to speak at all, the editor tells that J. C. came around,
ending up by quite handsomely admitting the editor to be right, and
promising to make the necessary changes. What I cannot get over is the
fact that after, as the story goes, Conrad had re-written 70,000 words
and added 60,000 more, in order to run _Victory_ complete in a single
number, the American cut out of it everything but the conversation and
the shooting. The resulting skeleton was, to some readers at least,
very imperfectly articulated. That manuscript had a curious history and
certainly deserves a place in a Museum. I heard lately that Gabriel
Wells, the American collector, has got hold of it. J. C. had made
alterations in black ink, the magazine editor had gashed it horribly
in red; and when the book publisher came to restore the mangled corpus
he could do so, intelligibly for the printer, only by an extravagant
use of green ink. You see, there was no duplicate copy of the original.
Always make duplicates. If you don’t, and if you are a writer of J.
C.’s size, your manuscripts may some day be priceless. Even though
they are typewritten; for the fact that they are not in handwriting is
offset by the touching fact that perhaps your wife got up in the middle
of the night to type them off, so you could see how they would look in
the neat similitude of printed words.
iii
“But there! Let us not talk about the value of manuscripts. That is
adventitious, a sort of excrescence on the process of moneygetting,
which, in turn, perhaps, is an excrescence on all the forms of art. Do
I sound like one of those absurd persons who wail because an artist
must make money? If so, I beg your pardon, I do, humbly. Perhaps you
would like me to do it kneeling here on the deck. My knees are bent. I
would no more absolve the artist from the urgence of making a living
than I would absolve him from the necessity of drawing breath to live.
After all, isn’t it the same thing? So surely as you breathe, you must
suffer; and what is the wage problem but a visitation, like sickness,
or misfortune, or mental anguish inseparable from the act of living?
If art cannot triumph over these things, if a novelist could not
continue to write novels in spite of the awful pangs of rheumatism, the
element of struggle would be lost and all our values would exist in a
vacuum. It is their merit, and sometimes their sole merit, that they
exist in the air under atmospheric pressures averaging fifteen pounds
to the square inch and of only the very slightest variation. The need
to make money is the atmosphere in which we all live. By a sublime law
of nature, of human nature, I should say, the more we make, the more we
need. Human nature abhors a vacuum. But, as I was saying--
“What a pill it would be to a man engaged in writing his first few
great novels if he had seriously to consider the fact that, some years
later but yet within his lifetime, these blackened pages would be worth
a modest fortune. Such a consideration might well drive him quite off
his head. What actually steadies him is the indisputable fact that
_this_ book has simply got to earn him enough to live on for a whole
year, including the younger boy’s annual six pairs of shoes. Then, when
the book doesn’t, a way is provided. Don’t snort, please. I admit that,
on the face of it, such a solution is improbable. The answer to that
objection is: The solution arrives. Take J. C. He came ashore with the
remnants of this tropical fever infesting him and a definite medical
mandate enjoining him from all future notion of following the sea.
When a chap is nearing forty and has spent all his life from boyhood
working up to a master’s ticket and a ship to command, a decree of that
sort is calculated to knock him out completely. He is in splendid
shape to be counted out in a prostrate condition, lying prone and never
recovering consciousness. J. C. had no more idea what to do----. He dug
up the manuscript of that tentative story or novel he had been working
on at intervals for about five years. The one which, to the extent of
about the first nine chapters, he had shown to a young Englishman on
a passage between Adelaide and the Cape. This was a young Cambridge
student, named Jacques, who was aboard as a passenger. You remember
that Jacques handed the manuscript back and J. C. ventured to ask if
the story seemed worth finishing. Jacques answered. ‘Distinctly.’ So
the beginnings of _Almayer’s Folly_ escaped being thrown overboard to
puzzle the fishes.
“Ashore, J. C. finished the thing and it got published. No appreciable
sum of money rewarded him, of course, and he has told how he wondered
whatever he should do afterward, and he submitted his dilemma to Edward
Garnett one evening after the publication of _Almayer’s Folly_. Finally
Garnett brought forth a suggestion which, in its unoriginality, was a
piece of the most authentic inspiration. ‘Why don’t you write another?’
he asked. But, of course, that is the only safe suggestion to make to
a person who has written one novel. J. C. admits that from the moment