Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19192-0 - The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad Edited by: Laurence Davies Excerpt More information

INTRODUCTION

i Biography frequently relies on diaries and letters, but because few letters and no diaries from Joseph Conrad’s first thirty years have survived, reliance goes the other way.1 Even if we had more documents written in his hand, a life as remarkable as his, involving two vocations, several languages, and many polities, needs a fuller introduction than the brief chronologies that begin each section of this volume. All the same, readers well acquainted with his history may care to skip this opening section. Conrad’s story is one both of steadfastness and circumstance. His parents and most of his extended family were devoted to the restora- tion of Polish independence, lost in the partitions of 1782, 1793, and 1795 as Russia, Prussia, and Austria divided up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth among themselves. He grew up carrying a burden of sacrificial duty, an imperative he admired for its demands on courage and tenacity but, in his life as exile, sailor, author, could never follow absolutely. As he told his close friend Cunninghame Graham, who was mourning the loss of his wife, ‘Living with memories is a cruel business. I – who have a double life one of them peopled only by shadows growing more precious as the years pass – know what that is’ (7 October 1907). He had become a British subject on 19 August 1886, at the age of 29, not only as a practical necessity but as a demonstration of loyalty to a nation whose institutions he admired and whose merchant navy had afforded him a career. Conrad detested being labelled as a maritime author at the expense of the great political novels, Nostromo, The Secret Agent,andUnder Western Eyes. The distinction was artificial, largely created by publishers and some (but by no means all) review- ers who had a romanticised view of life at sea, especially in the tropics, and were unable to imagine, let alone understand the experiences of tyranny, self-sacrifice, conspiracy, and cruelty that shaped his early life.

1 His only known journals are the two notebooks from his time in the Congo basin, when he was age 32.

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xx Introduction

Born on 3 December 1857, he spent the first ten years of his life under Russian and the next six and a half years under Austro- Hungarian rule. His full name was Józef Teodor Konrad Nałecz ˛ Korzeniowski, or, for short, Konradek. The name Konrad was his parents’ tribute to the exiled Polish-Lithuanian poet Adam Mickiewicz, evoking patriotic characters in the narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod, where the villains are Teutonic Knights, and the verse drama Fore- fathers’ Eve, where the villains are Russian. The Ukrainian name of Kon- radek’s birthplace is Berdychiv, and the Polish, Berdyczów. The town was in Volhynia, a province formerly part of the old Commonwealth and now a Russian guberniya (governorate); Ukrainian was the major- ity language in the province, followed by Yiddish; roughly five per cent of Volhynia’s population, mostly of the landowning and professional classes, spoke Polish as their mother tongue, and a smaller percentage, Russian, the language of officialdom.1 It is clear from Conrad’s later correspondence that he came to understand the ethnic tensions and instabilities of his home territory all too well. He told Hugh Walpole, who had been doing war-work in Petrograd: ‘It’s very curious. I feel startled when I remember that my foster-brother is an Ukrainian peas- ant. He is probably alive yet. What does he think? I am afraid that what he thinks bodes no good to the boys and girls with whom I used to play and to their children’ (18 May 1917). In 1861, Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, formerly an estate manager and still a poet, dramatist, and translator, moved to Warsaw to work clandestinely for the left-leaning wing of the independence movement (which stood for the abolition of serfdom and the independence of Ukrainians and Lithuanians as well as Poles). A few months later, he was arrested by the Russian authorities, and was jailed with other dissidents in the fearsome Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, a place ever associated with torture and execution. Meanwhile, Konradek’s mother, Ewa Korzeniowska, endured four interrogations about her own and her husband’s activities. In 1862, the family was sent under armed guard to Vologda, a town in deep Russia of harsh winters and soggy, fly-plagued summers. The following year, they were moved to Chernikhov, where conditions were a little easier, but Ewa’s health was failing, and she died there of tuberculosis in 1865. These events gave Conrad a lifelong detestation of Russians, which he could only sometimes overcome.

1 These estimates are based on the first and only Russian imperial census, compiled in 1897; in 1857, the Polish-speaking population was probably a little larger.

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For the next four years, the boy lived with his father in two Austrian- controlled cities, Cracow and Lwów. Konradek’s health had always been precarious, and his episodes of illness meant that he had to be privately tutored as well as (probably) attending the Imperial and Royal St Anne’s Gymnasium in Cracow. He had already learned a good deal of French from his father and now had to learn Latin and Ger- man. Apollo was subject to deep melancholy, mourning his wife and the failure of the 1863 insurrection against the Russians. In between bouts of dejection, he went on writing. When he died, several thousand mourners followed his coffin to the cemetery in a cortège headed by his 11-year-old son. The Polish inscription on the gravestone hon- ours ‘Apollo Nałecz ˛ Korzeniowski – victim of Muscovite martyrdom’ (Najder 2007, p. 35). For the next few years Konradek was under the care of various relatives and family friends, notably his maternal grandmother Teofila Bobrowska, who tried unsuccessfully to get him Austrian citizenship, and maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski. Bobrowki’s letters to him and about him are among the main biographical sources for the next quarter of a century. Politically far more cautious than his sister and brother-in-law, but also critical of the narrow lives of the local gentry, a positivist rather than an idealist, his endorsement of modernity and progress did not lessen the shock of learning that his nephew wanted to become a world traveller and perhaps a sailor. Various attempts to dissuade Konradek failed, and, at the age of 17, he set off for Marseilles. Over the next three and a half years, he made three voyages to the Caribbean. He began acquiring the skills and knowledge of a sailor on the second and third of these voyages and on shorter trips in local waters with his piratical mentor Dominique-André Cervoni, a Corsi- can and perhaps a gun-runner. On shore, Konrad frequented cafés, theatres, and the opera house, consorted with artists, journalists, and political conspirators of the far left and far right, had love affairs, lost heavily at the tables in Monte Carlo and in consequence tried to kill himself. When Bobrowski arrived from Ukraine, the bullet wound to Konrad’s chest was said to be a duelling injury. The sheer range of his liminal adventures in Marseilles, the clarity of light, and the freedom of being, mostly, out of range of disapproving eyes, gave him a fond- ness for the Mediterranean that was still there in his last two novels, The Rover (1923) and the unfinished Suspense. On 24 April 1878 he shipped as an unregistered apprentice in the Mavis, a British steamer bound for Yeysk on the Sea of Azov. Although

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travelling on Russian papers, as the son of political dissidents he could not go ashore without running the risk of long-term conscription into the Russian army.1 When the Mavis reached Lowestoft on the return voyage, he registered at a hotel as Konrad de Korzeniowski. Thus he began his career in the British merchant navy as a Polish gentleman, a Russian subject earmarked for surveillance, and a novice sailor with some knowledge of French waters who had quarrelled with his English captain. At this point of the story, career might be the wrong word. For Kon- rad’s parents and their allies, though the prospect was of suffering and martyrdom, destiny was prospective. To speak of their son’s destiny as an English sailor or author only makes sense retrospectively. According to his uncle’s letters, Konrad thought of enlisting in the French navy; at various times during his life at sea, he considered other work, for instance as a whaler, some of it on shore. Yet circumstances demanded that he start learning colloquial English, he seems to have read widely in English literature during his time off-watch, and by 1886 was beginning to write fiction. In the same year, he passed the examination for his master’s certificate at the second attempt. He acquired a great trove of knowledge and often dangerous or appalling experi- ence in the British and Dutch Empires and in what was to become the Belgian Empire. In a rare surviving letter, he told his father’s friend and literary executor, a devoted patriot: ‘During the last few years – that is since my first examination, I have not been too happy inmy journeyings. I was nearly drowned, nearly got burned, but generally my health is good, I am not short of courage or of the will to work or of love for my profession’ (to Stefan Buszczynski,´ 14 August 1883). The profession was in fact changing, not only in the gradual shift from sail to steam, but in tighter government regulation of ships and car- goes, the slump in agricultural and other prices, and by the end of the decade, an upsurge in labour militancy at sea and on the docks, not least in some of the Australian colonies that Conrad knew well. He served under both sail and steam in vessels ranging in size and quality from the 15-ton ‘Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit-tin’ (Youth, p. 71) Roi des Belges to the 1,334-ton Torrens, the last clipper built for passen- ger service. The largest ship, though, was the final one, the Adowa,in which he spent most of his time moored at Rouen over Christmas and

1 For this reason, he might have stayed behind in Constantinople, rejoining on the return voyage (Najder 2007, p. 70).

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New Year 1893/94 waiting for a non-existent party of emigrants bound for Quebec; meanwhile, he continued to work on Almayer’s Folly and was reminded of Flaubert. Although as late as the autumn of 1898 he was hoping to find another ship, preferably as master, the balance of his life was tilting steeply towards fiction and domesticity. Well before that, indeed from the beginning of the 1890s, surviving letters are much more abundant. The time has come to turn from biography to the correspondence itself.

ii I hope that this letter will find its place in that memoir which one or twoof my young faithfuls have promised to offer to my ‘manes’. (to William Blackwood, 31 May 1902)

Conrad’s letters registered warm affection, rage, frustration, reckless- ness, spiritual prostration, frenzied glee, and occasional malice. They served as a proving ground for new ideas; they tried out new voices; they expressed a sensibility nurtured by many cultures; they were a central scene of his heroic struggle with two adopted languages. The letter quoted above threatens to haunt the future. That morning in a London hotel, Blackwood, the publisher of Youth and Other Stories and Lord Jim, had told Conrad how disappointed the firm was with his poor sales and his dilatory ways. Once back at Pent Farm, his rented house in Kent, Conrad came to his own defence. In his time, Blackwood had known Thackeray and published Eliot and Trollope, but Conrad does not want to be measured against the Victorians. ‘I am modern,andI would rather recall Wagner the musician and Rodin the Sculptor who both had to starve a little in their day – and Whistler the painter [.…] They had to suffer for being “new”.’ In the sense of hoping for readers who would one day see what he was about, Conrad wrote fiction for posterity as much as for the present, for an audience that had not yet come into being. Whatever the resemblances between correspondence and fiction may be, the audiences differed at the point of deliv- ery. Yet, Conrad hints, when he dwells among the manes, the ancestral spirits of the Romans, his letters, too, will find a second readership. To read his correspondence is both to be plunged into the imme- diacy of living day by day and to be taken far away in time and space. On one hand we read about family illnesses and disabilities, deadlines, jousts with editors and publishers, empty purses, friends

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anxious for advice and consolation, crises and celebrations, wartime casualty lists; on the other, we see a fascination with multiple histories, literatures, and politics; echoes and memories of life at sea and of the Malay Archipelago, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediter- ranean, and speculations on the fate of humanity in the near and distant futures. Time and again the correspondence deals with the precarious and conditional, and so, with his intimates, did his conversa- tion. Bertrand Russell felt that Conrad looked on ‘civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths’ (Russell 1, p. 216). There is another aspect of time and distance in Conrad’s letters that distinguishes them from, say, those of Thomas Hardy or Virginia Woolf. One of the early letters to the widow of his distant cousin Aleksander, his ‘Aunt’ the novelist Marguerite Poradowska, shows the difficulty of keeping up with family or friends from the cuddyofa sailing-ship.

We leave in six days and are far from ready to do so. Starting next Monday, we shall work probably day and night, so that I shall be very busy. Possibly this letter may be my last from London. The destination of the ship is Port Adelaide (South Australia). The passage will take from 70 to 80 days. I shall write upon arrival, and the letter, despatched via Suez, will take 40 days. Let’s say, then, that within 4 months you will have some news. (14 November 1891)

The Torrens averaged 74 days from London to Adelaide, making her one of the fastest clippers afloat, but, not long before Conrad joined as first mate, one voyage had taken 179. Steamers, especially cargo steamers, were not much more predictable or accessible. The Vidar, for instance, traded to small ports in the Dutch East Indies where regular mail services were few and far between. At the highest point of his journey up the Congo in the Roi des Belges, the nearest post office was, as Conrad told his first cousin Maria Tyszkowa, 2,000 versts (1,300 miles) away (Letters 1, p. 57). Nevertheless he kept on writing letters, the bulk of them to his Uncle Tadeusz, who often complained of their irregular arrival. Even from London, mail took up to three weeks to reach him in the countryside between Kiev and Berdyczów, particularly during the spring thaws when roads turned into mires. His side of the correspondence has survived, but Conrad’s letters were burned in the sacking of a Ukrainian manor house in 1917.

Introduction xxv

When Conrad settled in the English countryside, postal arrange- ments were quite different. At Pent Farm, for instance, there were two deliveries and collections a day; in the evenings and on Sundays a messenger boy could take telegrams and letters to Sandling Junc- tion, about a mile away. Central London had up to five deliveries; thus Conrad sometimes wrote to his agent twice in a day, the second letter answering J. B. Pinker’s reply to the first. The last minute dashes to send serial copy to London or Edinburgh relied on Bradshaw’s Rail- way Guide and, in the case of The Secret Agent, published in serial in New York, the sailing dates of transatlantic mail-ships as listed in the daily papers. Given the circumstances, it is no surprise that we have so few letters from Conrad’s first three decades. The abundance from the nineties onwards, however, is only a substantial fraction of what we know he wrote. Some of the letters to Conrad’s son Borys were lost on the West- ern Front in the First World World; those to the author and journalist Perceval Gibbon and to family and friends in Poland were destroyed by bombing in the Second. Some may have perished literally by the wayside, and some torn up or burned to save them from the curious. Some may have gone into private collections during the 1920s boom in Conradiana and sold on from one secretive collector to another. There are other conspicuous absences among the well over five thousand known letters: what happened, for instance, to the correspondence with the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who took some of Conrad’s books with him to Melanesia, or with the warm- hearted orthopaedic surgeon Sir Robert Jones? There are also conspicuous uncertainties: was there ever a correspondence with the author and naturalist W. H. Hudson, with the cockney novelist Edwin Pugh, or with another Polish anthropologist, Maria Antonina Czaplicka, the expert on Siberian shamanism? Surely there are absences that cannot even be named because the names are, in a Conradian setting, utterly unfamiliar. Moreover, Conrad kept very little of his inward correspondence. One can only listen for the silences and hope to hear a whisper or an echo. Whether because relevant letters have disappeared or because they never existed, plenty of mysteries remain. Where and when (if at all) was Conrad involved in gun-running, and in what causes? Was it for the Carlists in Spain, for irregulars in a Colombian civil war, for local sultans in the Malay Archipelago plotting to evict the Spaniards or the Dutch or wanting to gain new fiefdoms of their own? How deeply was

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Conrad embroiled in the affairs of South African mining companies? In the unstable atmosphere of the Conrad family’s friendship with the American journalist Jane Anderson, who was beguiling whom? Answers to such questions might throw light on the fiction and the essays: on gun-running in The Mirror of the Sea, The Arrow of Gold, The Res- cue, and ‘Karain’, on mining in Nostromo, on wartime passion in ‘The Tale’. Yet such gaps are intriguing, even welcome, because they give the hermeneutic net some slack. A gathering of every known letter offers many surprises, many provocations. To the extent that letters themselves are a form of literature, it expands the oeuvre itself. It juxtaposes what was previously scattered, the published and unpublished, the casual and the formal, the familiar and the strange, the contradictory. The Selected Letters is a microcosm of this Conradian universe, but one where, for better or worse, tantalising gaps and memorable juxtapositions are not quite so accidental. The editor of this selection, which includes roughly one eighth of the Collected Letters, has been tugged in multiple directions. How to make the choice? Pick the best of the best, and if so, best in what sense? Or trim away the correspondence to bring out the most sig- nificant narrative lines, such as the growth of the major novels orthe history of close friendships? Or go for full coverage, trying to bring in a wide range of correspondents, both little and well known, and also making sure that as many topics and events as possible figure in the tally? On the grounds that too much purposeful narration hides the uncertainties of living day to day, with its sense of many doors all squeaking for attention, I have played down the second option though not abandoned it entirely. The third option seems less chal- lenging, less provocative and more dutiful than the first, and thus not as seductive. Moreover, some correspondents, notably Marguerite Poradowska, Edward Garnett, John Galsworthy, and R. B. Cunning- hame Graham, brought out Conrad at his most various and inven- tive, and so are almost bound to appear frequently. Until their quarrel in 1909, the same is true for Ford Madox Ford, although the many hours they spent together reduced the need for writing letters. Yet between the first and third options there is still negotiable ground. Just as one example, on Galsworthy’s novel ‘Shadows’ (published as Fraternity) Conrad wrote several letters of critique, almost irresistible in the force and quality of their arguments – but tactful and sympathetic too. Although all of this group could have been included, just

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one appears here ([4 September 1908]). To omit the rest is a pity, but the omissions make room for other brilliant but less familiar commen- taries on writing by other correspondents. Representation and quality are not exclusive terms. I should make three other points about inclusions and exclusions. Readers will find gaps in some letters, indicated by an ellipsis within square brackets. The main reasons for making these cuts have been to avoid unnecessary repetition or a surfeit of detail. Arguably, trimming violates the integrity of individual letters, but Conrad himself often divided his letters into parts with spaces or long rules, and a good few were written intermittently, over several days. The second point concerns explanatory notes. The only assump- tions about the audience for this selection are the obvious one that readers will be curious about Conrad’s life and work, and the signif- icant one that this curiosity is manifold. One reader’s fascination is another’s bewilderment. Some readers might be baffled by Conrad’s recollection that ‘they rove manila rope for fore and main rigging lan- yards’ (to Arthur W. Phillips, 12 January 1924), some by the judge- ment that Proust’s ‘is a creative art absolutely based on analysis’ (to C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 17 December 1922), and some by an allusion to the Almanach de Gotha (to Edward Garnett, 20 January 1900). Anno- tation takes care of many such puzzles, but what is helpful to some will be annoyingly superfluous to others. Nonetheless, it is better tobe damned for plenitude than paucity. The third point is more personal still. Looked at retrospectively, the choice of letters has been shaped not so much by judiciousness or scholarly importance as by admiration for Conrad’s mastery of language, indeed of several languages. Even in his later years, his spoken English sometimes faltered, but he had one of the finest ears of any English novelist of his or any other time, and he wrote to be heard as well as read.

iii So many letters speak to the kindness of his friends. Prone to doubt himself and his works, Conrad confided his low moods to such intimates as Marguerite Poradowska, Edward Garnett, William Rothen- stein, John Galsworthy, and R. B. Cunninghame Graham. Here he writes to Garnett, the publisher’s reader, among the first to recognise Conrad’s gifts and a firm but affectionate mentor.

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The more I write the less substance do I see in my work. The scales are falling off my eyes. It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself – and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep. I am alone with it in a chasm with perpendicular sides of black basalt. Never were sides so perpendicular and smooth, and high. Above, your anxious head against a bit of sky peers down – in vain – in vain. There’s not rope long enough for that rescue. ([31 March 1899])

In ‘The Heart of Darkness’, as it was then called, finished in the serial version less than two months earlier, Marlow watches over Kurtz in his final sickness: ‘I looked at him as you peer down at a manwhois lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines’ (Youth, p. 116). Though immune to Kurtzian delusions of grandeur, Conrad has joined him in abjection. It would be a crude mistake to think that Conrad is merely fishing for compliments. He needed literary solace and encouragement but of the sort that could only come from a hawk- eyed and honest reader. What’s more, Garnett was a great coaxer; one Christmas, almost thirty years later, Conrad told Gertrude Bone that he had never forgotten Garnett’s response to Almayer’s Folly: ‘“You have written one book. It is very good. Why not write another?”’ (footnotes to 18 October 1894). Conrad never felt entirely at ease with his work. In 1920, he confided to his agent: ‘Mine, my dear Pinker, is the only instance within my knowledge of practice not giving self-confidence. There is a strain of anxiousness in my character that even the encouragement of your friendship and sympathy cannot altogether overcome’ (14 June). Many writers suffer from ‘a strain of anxiousness’. They share with Conrad the sense that writing resembles ‘the wheeling of a heavy wheelbarrow up a fourteen inch plank with steadiness and persever- ance’ (to S. S. Pawling, 20 June 1902). A week’s inertia can feel like months. One noxious review effaces half a dozen sympathetic ones. Yet Conrad’s anxiety was remarkably persistent. Few authors have written so often or so eloquently about writer’s block, its presence and the fear it might return. Flashes of exuberance light up his correspondence, but, aside from letters designed to reassure publishers and editors, if he felt happy with his work or his reception, he seldom showed it. What he does affirm to his friends is a determination to write after hisown fashion: ‘I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted, mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style’ (to Garnett, 29 March 1898).