These words are from “The Cry for Justice,” “this humanist Holy Book,” as London called it. Such words, and actions based upon them, make precious his memory, and will preserve it as long as anything in American literature is preserved. Perhaps the best thing I can add to this chapter is a statement of what I personally owed to him—the utmost one writer can owe to another. When he was at the height of his fame, and I was unknown, I sent him proofs of “The Jungle,” explaining that I had been unable to find a publisher, and wished to raise money to publish the book myself. There are many jealousies in the literary world; some who win its laurels by bitter struggle are not eager to raise up rivals. But Jack was not one of these; he wrote a letter about the book, hailing it as “The ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of Wage Slavery,” and rallying the Socialist movement as by a bugle-call to its support. If that book went all over the world, it was Jack London’s push that started it; and I am only one of a score of authors who might tell the same story of generous and eager support.
CHAPTER CIX
THE STEALTHY NEMESIS
While I am writing this book death swings his scythe, and two more artists enter the ghostly marathon of Fame.
The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone sent me from England a copy of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly,” and after that I kept watch, and managed somehow to get hold of “Heart of Darkness” and “Lord Jim” and “Youth.” I used to rave about these books to everyone I knew; but when at last Conrad became famous I had a secret resentment—he had been mine for so long that I did not like to give him up to those who did not understand him! In his later writings he deteriorated, as many old men do, and I saw the critics giving to these inferior books the praise which belonged to the earlier ones.
Conrad’s death has been the occasion for much discussion of the “romanticism” of his novels. The fact is that he was as realistic as he knew how to be. The reason he seems “romantic” is because the scenes and characters of his stories are remote and strange to us. But they were not at all strange to Conrad; he had sailed these Eastern seas and met these people, and their tragic fates were as commonplace to him as street-car traffic to us.
One other thing the obituary reviews agree upon—that he was the perfect type of the “pure” artist, who gave us immortal fiction without trace of purpose. And that I call a joke for the ages: Joseph Conrad being as grim and determined a propagandist as ever used fiction for a medium. Most of the time he carries on this propaganda with the Olympian calm of one who is sure of his thesis and fears no dispute. But now and then he stumbles upon some personality or point of view which seems to threaten his doctrine; and then suddenly the front of Jove becomes wrinkled, and the eyes of Jove shoot flames, and we discover the great Olympian in a venomous fury.
The strangest fact about this master of English prose is that he was born in Poland, and began life as a sailor, shipping on French craft in the Mediterranean. He was born in 1857 and came to England at the age of twenty-one; he rose in the British merchant service to become a captain, and was nearly forty before his first novel was published.
This man paces the quarter-deck through the long night watches in lonely silent seas. He reflects upon life, and comes to a conclusion about it. But it is not the conclusion officially recommended by his native countrymen; this merchant captain does not pray to the Virgin Mary for the safety of his ship and the souls of those on board; neither does he accept the official formula of his adopted country, in whose churches the congregations implore:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.