Joseph Conrad

by Hugh Walpole

The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the Patna, Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems now so rich that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the author's hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre of the episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry and the Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing. We believe even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every possible probe into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.

There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the method is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue with him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again. But the trouble is that we are no longer assured now of the truth and reality of his story. He saw—we cannot for an instant doubt it—that group on the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that we, breathlessly, awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not inventing a romantic sequel. He must go on—that is the truly terrible thing about Marlowe—and at the moment when we question his authenticity we are suspicious of his very existence, ready to be irritated by his flow of words demanding something more authentic than that voice that is now only dimly heard. The author himself perhaps feels this; he duplicates, he even trebles his narrators and with each fresh agent raises a fresh crop of facts, contrasts, habits and histories. That then is the peril of the method. Whilst we believe we are completely held, but let the authenticity waver for a moment and the danger of disaster is more excessive than with any other possible form of narration. Create your authority and we have at once someone at whom we may throw stones if we are not beguiled. Marlowe has certainly been compelled to face, at moments in his career, an angry, irritated audience.

Nostromo is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in the narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to deny that Nostromo is extremely confused in places, but it is a confusion that arises rather from Conrad's confidence in the reader's fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The narrations are sometimes complicated—old Captain Mitchell does not always achieve authenticity—but on the whole, the reader may be said to be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so little about others.

But this assurance of the author's that we must have already learnt the main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. "Of course," he says to us, "you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that revolution that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be there myself. I know all the people concerned, and the central figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor Monyngham—no, it was a man about whom no one outside the republic was told a syllable. I knew the man well.... He ..." and there we all are.

The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning which we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing at all, but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to our conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal of Nostromo, can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the silver mine, of Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola girls, of old Viola, Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of Viola's wife, of the expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone on the Isabels, of Hirsch's torture, of Captain Mitchell's watch—here are characters the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely, in any other hands, be fantastic melodrama, and both characters and scenes are absolutely supported on the foundation of realistic truth. Not for a moment from the first page to the last do we consciously doubt the author's word.... Here the form of narration is vindicated because it is entirely convincing.

Not so with the third example, Chance. Here, as with Lord Jim, we may find one visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the Patna waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over Chance reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of their comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps of her horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That desperate flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her and too double-faced for him gives the book's theme, and never in all the stories that preceded Flora's has Conrad been so eager to afford us first-hand witnesses. We have, in the first place, the unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine phrases at his lips, in a riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once served with Captain Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there surely you have enough to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the number of witnesses that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been enough for us, more than enough if we are to consider the author himself as a possible narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it positively hides from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de Barrel. Both the Knight and the Maiden—as the author names them—are retiring souls, and our hearts move in sympathy for them as we contemplate their timid hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young Powell and the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it should secure realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not here achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half of Lord Jim and the whole of Nostromo. We believe most emphatically in that first narration of young Powell's about his first chance. We believe in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite casually he talks like this: "I do not even think that there was in what he did a conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations." We believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely drawn figure). We believe in Marlowe's interview with Flora on the pavement outside Anthony's room.

We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves, that we resent, a little, Marlowe's intimacy which prevents, with patronising complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have seemed. Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.

But when the second half of the book arrives we can be confident no longer. Here, as in Lord Jim, it is possible to feel that Conrad, having surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not know how to continue it. The true thing in Lord Jim is the affair of the Patna; the true thing in Chance is Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora after her disaster. But whereas in Lord Jim the sequel to Jim's cowardice has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the sequel to Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any rate a pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter in Chance entitled A Moonless Night is, in the first half of it, surely the worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early short story, The Return. The conclusion of Chance and certain tales in his volume, Within the Tides, make one wonder whether that alliance between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully maintained is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the former of these two qualities.

It remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails, as it must before the end of Chance, the form of narration in Oratio Recta is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in Marlowe, in Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony and Flora. We are the angrier because earlier in the evening we were so completely taken in. It is as though we had given our money to a deserving cause and discovered a charlatan.