“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 those words crossed Garnett’s lips, An Outcast of the Islands was merely a matter of time. All the same, he had to live. Shortly, he was marrying, and at suitable intervals Boris and John were added to the family unit. Capel House was a Kentish cottage but there were rates to pay. For some years the pension provided by the Civil List was an affair of serious importance. There is a man or two now living and a man or two now dead who could throw light on this phase of J. C.’s special problem. Conrad’s present American publisher dropped in one day on the late William Heinemann in London, with his usual question of what, or more accurately whom, Heinemann had got. The reply was: A comparatively new writer who would some day be as important as Kipling. However, it appeared that in order to attain this importance he would have to live. ‘Suppose,’ suggested Heinemann, with every aspect of intense earnestness, ‘you and I back him. He has a novel he wants to do. I think if we both put in ten pounds—fifty dollars—a month——.’ For a moment it seemed as if this blithe proposal might terminate the interview. And, after all, a publisher, who has to foot the cost of a book anyway on what is often the slenderest chance, might well draw back before the prospect of investing $50 a month for a year or two as a preliminary to risking as much more. But it was done. In the end, J. C. told them frankly that he could not give them the book. He had got seven-eighths of the way through and he was unable to bring the story out. Stuck for an ending would be the other way of stating the case. The two, Heinemann and Frank N. Doubleday, accepted this disappointment with a most commendable calmness. J. C. went on to write other things, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Lord Jim, since so widely hailed and at the time so little heeded and so immensely unlucrative; Nostromo. James B. Pinker (you knew Pinker, the author’s agent) handled the stuff. In the American phrase, Pinker ‘grubstaked’ Conrad; and among long-term investments of the very highest grade J. C. has been one of the very best in the world. Ah, yes! He has! No one who ever invested in Conrad and held on, held ‘for the rise,’ has ever lost a penny—or failed to make an enormous per cent. Why, take Heinemann and F. N. D. They, in effect, bought at away below par twenty-year bonds that matured and were paid off at par. For after twenty years J. C. picked up the all-but-finished novel, put it through in triumphant fashion and gave it to them under the title of The Rescue. By that time, he was made. He was selling in America practically seventeen times as many copies as when they put their money in—maybe more. And any publisher in America or England would, by then, have given his upper and lower teeth to possess Conrad. The Civil List was at liberty to take care of someone else and lucky if it found another half so rewarding.
“Do I give the impression that this result was brought about in the least meteorically? That would be inexcusable on my part. Let me see: There were Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands and The Nigger and Lord Jim and Nostromo and The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Seven novels, not counting the two he wrote with Ford Madox Hueffer and four or five books of short stories. I am speaking now of the nineteen years that lay between Conrad’s first book and his novel, Chance; and I am avoiding all exaggeration when I tell you flatly that in all those nineteen years not one single book—not the succession of all those books—made enough money for the reasonable needs of himself and his family. Oh, I don’t say that he was entirely dependent on these books and the far-sightedness of men like those investors I have mentioned. W. E. Henley serialised The Nigger; in America, the North American Review serialised Under Western Eyes; there was a bit of money, now and again from the magazine sale of one of the short-stories, no doubt. I stick to my point: The income from the books was not enough. By the way, he also wrote in those years the two autobiographical books, The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record. H’m. The American publishers of A Personal Record printed it from type. You know; print a few and throw the type away.
“Chance was published in 1914 and sold 20,000 copies in England and the long ordeal was over.
iv
“One ordeal, that is. Ordeals, as such, are never over. After the trial by water, the trial by fire; and you are not to suppose that because one has survived the trial of the spirit he will therefore triumph easily over the trials of the flesh. Not at all. What is the malady of rheumatism beside the torture of shyness? And Conrad has always been distinctly shy. His American publisher, for a long time, did not meet him; J. C. backed out of it, until, finally, a perfectly reasonable impatience seized upon Mr. Doubleday, who said to himself, in a mild tone: ‘Confound it all. This sort of thing has got to stop.’ And that sort of thing did stop. J. C. at length was induced to come to a London hotel and shake hands—about all he did do, in fact, for at once a severe attack of shyness set in. For quite a while that interview went—very badly? Goodness knows it did not even go badly; it simply did not go at all. But then, as he knew Conrad was planning a new book, Mr. Doubleday asked a few questions natural to a person who has something at stake in a prospective venture. J. C. answered with entire willingness, began explaining what he had in mind and—pouf! Where was that shyness any longer? They parted as very good friends and have remained such ever since. So it came about that at last J. C. visited America as the guest of Mr. Doubleday. As you can imagine, lecture bureaus, societies and every sort of outfit had been after J. C. for years to speak in public. He had always turned down such offers, but before coming to America he explained to Mr. Doubleday that he should like to tell a few people, not more than a dozen, over the luncheon table of his Congo experience, and then read to them from his story, Heart of Darkness, the same affair as it came out in fiction. ‘If I am able to interest those few,’ J. C. went on, ‘perhaps I might try the same thing with a larger number, say fifty or even a hundred; I don’t think I could ever address more than a hundred.’ You see, he knew himself. He is the kind of man who is at his best in an intimate surrounding. Perhaps you have noticed the very special quality of intimacy achieved in his stories under practically all conditions. He inhabits other people’s breasts. A self-conscious tendency as great as his own or greater excites his friendly compassion. I know an American novelist, at one time editor of an American magazine and then in England meeting people and questing material. Several people were present but Conrad noticed the extreme ill-ease of the American editor. J. C. got up and came over and sat beside the stranger, who then lost some of his discomfort and eventually plucked up enough to say to J. C. that he would like to get some short stories from him. ‘Ah! Short stories,’ J. C. commented with that markedly foreign accent or intonation. He paused. ‘I do not pick short stories out of my sleeve.’ It was said with an inflection pleasantly humorous that did not conceal the seriousness of the fact. He simply wasn’t that kind of a conjuror. This was not the editor who handled Victory. American editors, according to my impression, are a varied lot. The mixture they make is a literary cocktail which appears to go to the heads of so many American authors. I know an American editor who bought a Conrad novel as a serial when all his—confrères’?—had rejected the story because of the impossible length. This man printed the 147,000 words without the sacrifice of one. This was after Victory and as the editor in question knew nothing of that case, his was an unconscious as well as a vicarious atonement. But let that pass. We are not concerned with American editors, and neither, except momentarily, has Conrad been. His preoccupation has been unbrokenly with the problem of a sufficient self-knowledge. Must he not know himself better than any other possibly could? Of course, and for two imperative purposes: In the first place to write, in the second place, to keep his courage. It is no use being able to write unless you can keep your courage. Too, the world is full of brave souls who have bravery and ... nothing else. No gift, I mean. Nothing in the world is so cheap as courage, so common. But look you!—if a man undertakes self-examination, his courage goes. The scale of values is hopelessly deranged and either the self rises to sublime heights of despair or sinks into a hopeless, sticky complacency. J. C. is not an unblemished exception to this general law, or deplorable result—whichever term you prefer. He had gone to revisit Poland and was there when the Great War unleashed itself. The story of how he got out of Europe has never been told and, in fact, I don’t see how it can be. Or, well, why not? What do a few bribes matter, in a good cause? Some fairly influential persons, including an American Ambassador, were called upon to extricate Conrad from the extremely troublesome complications caused by the fact that he, a Pole by race and a Russian subject by birth, was a naturalised Englishman. The American Ambassador, appointed in the first place because of his large personal means, enabling him to support an Ambassadorship in the style to which it had been accustomed, may have used his private pocketbook; but in my judgment the matter was one to which he could quite conscientiously have devoted the public funds. Let that pass, too. They say that J. C. hates Russians and is frequently irascible. He also understands Russians, as any disbeliever may discover by reading Under Western Eyes. As for his irascibility, the results of self-examination justify any reasonable amount of irritation. If it had been one of you who had written seven-eighths of The Rescue and found himself stuck for an ending I daresay the detonations would have been terrific. A volcano can blow its head off but an artist must not be permitted to let a little steam escape! What sort of a doctrine is that? J. C., of late years, has lost a good deal of his nervousness. He has written his Lord Jim long ago. He has accomplished the most satisfactory definition we possess of the novel—where he calls it ‘a conviction of our fellowmen’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality.’ I call your attention to the last three words. If the ‘form of imagined life’ is not clearer to us than life as we observe it, there is no novel. Now, life is never clear unless we hold a little fragment of it in front of the mirror of each one of us, his own heart. Always, then, something different from what we expected is then clear, recognisable. J. C. has never done anything else. The story of The Secret Sharer, that chap who haunted the captain’s cabin and persisted in the captain’s thoughts, is the symbol of all Conrad’s work. I believe he has called it his favourite story; does anyone need to ask why? Giorgio Viola in Nostromo, Mrs. Gould in the same novel, the nigger in the story of the Narcissus, Haldin in Under Western Eyes, our friend, the anarchist, in The Secret Agent; Captain MacWhirr in Typhoon and Jim in Lord Jim; Axel Heyst in Victory; Flora de Barral and others in Chance—you know as well as I do that these are simply persons we encounter and depreciate or else dismiss as incomprehensible. But Conrad holds them up to the mirror of his own heart and behold! they are reflected in new 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.”