THE CONRADIAN Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) Allan H. Simmons, St Mary’s University College, General Editor Gene M. Moore, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and J. H. Stape, Research Fellow in St Mary’s University College, Contributing Editors Owen Knowles, University of Hull Research Fellow, Advisory Editor ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Spring 2008 Volume 33 Number 1 “The Fitness of Things”: Conradian Irony in “Typhoon” and The Secret Agent 1 Hugh Epstein Conrad, Schopenhauer, and le mot juste 31 Martin Ray Conrad and Exploratory Science 43 Tiffany Tsao Conrad’s Arrow of Gold 57 John Lester Joseph Conrad at the London Sailors’ Home 69 Alston Kennerley The Conrads and Alice Kinkead 103 Susan Jones Marguerite Poradowska as a Translator of Conrad 119 Anne Arnold “Who’s that fellow Lynn?”: Conrad and Robert Lynd 130 Richard Niland Conrad’s Early Reception in America: The Case of W. L. Alden 145 Owen Knowles and J. H. Stape Conrad and “Civilized Women”: Miss Madden, Passenger on the Torrens 158 Martin Ray Conrad and the Minesweepers’ Gazette: A Note 162 Owen Knowles Conrad, James, and Vertical Lintels 165 Paul Kirschner Joseph Conrad and Germ Theory: Further Thoughts 167 Martin Bock This issue of The Conradian is dedicated In memoriam Michael Lucas (1935 – 2007) Sylvère Monod (1921 – 2006) Martin Ray (1955 – 2007) Fratres, avete atque valete Contributors HUGH EPSTEIN, Honorary Secretary of The Joseph Conrad Society (UK), works in Further Education in London. He has published essays on Conrad’s fiction in The Conradian and Conradiana and has given papers at several conferences of The Joseph Conrad Society (UK) and in Vancouver (2002). The late MARTIN RAY was Senior Lecturer in the University of Aberdeen. He published extensively on Conrad and Hardy. Among the former are Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections (Macmillan, 1990) and Joseph Conrad: Memories and Impressions: A Bibliography (Rodopi, 2007). TIFFANY TSAO, who attended Wellesley College, is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. She has written light-hearted articles on insects in literature for American Entomologist and is currently at work on a novel. JOHN LESTER, a member of the Board of The Joseph Conrad Society (UK), is the author of Conrad and Religion (1988). He is a contributor to Conrad in Context, edited by Allan H. Simmons (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). ALSTON KENNERLEY, Master Mariner and Honorary Research Fellow and University Historian in the University of Plymouth, is also a Fellow of the Nautical Institute. His experience in the Merchant Navy includes a year in the four-mast barque Passat. His research interests in merchant seafarer education, training, and welfare have led to numerous publications. He is currently co-editing a maritime history of Cornwall. SUSAN JONES, Fellow and Tutor in English in St Hilda’s College, Oxford University, is the author of Conrad and Women (Oxford University Press, 1999). She has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust fellowship to complete a book on literary Modernism and dance. ANNE ARNOLD of Brussels has recently completed her studies at St Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, London, and is working on Conrad’s connections to Belgium. vi RICHARD NILAND completed his doctorate at Oxford University and is currently teaching at Richmond American International University, London. During 2006–07 he held a Jenkins Memorial Scholarship for advanced studies in Paris. He is editing Volume 3: Chance to The Shadow- Line in Conrad: The Contemporary Reviews (Rodopi, 4 vols., forthcoming). OWEN KNOWLES, University of Hull Senior Research Fellow, is editing Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories for The Cambridge Edition of Joseph Conrad. Co-editor of Heart of Darkness and The Congo Diary with Robert Hampson for Penguin Classics (2007), he has also co-edited Volumes 6 and 9 of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (2002 and 2007). J. H. STAPE, Research Fellow in St Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, London, is the author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007) and General Editor of the seven Conrad volumes in Penguin Classics (2007). Co-editor of Volumes 7 and 9 of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (2004 and 2007), he has also co-edited A Personal Record (2008) in The Cambridge Edition of Joseph Conrad. PAUL KIRSCHNER, Queen Mary College, University of London, Emeritus, lives in Geneva. Author of Conrad: The Psychologist as Artist (1966), he edited Typhoon and Other Stories and Under Western Eyes for Penguin, and has published on Conrad in The Conradian, Conradiana, and Notes & Queries. MARTIN BOCK, Professor and Head of English at the University of Minnesota–Duluth, is the author of Joseph Conrad and Psychological Medicine (Texas Tech Press, 2002). He has published a number of essays in Conrad journals, and is contemplating a project titled “Nosology of Disease in the Works of Joseph Conrad.” “The Fitness of Things”: Conrad’s English Irony in “Typhoon” and The Secret Agent Hugh Epstein London “I was not fully aware how thoroughly English the Typhoon is. I am immensely proud of this, of course. There are passages that simply cannot be rendered into French – they depend so much for their meaning upon the very genius of the language in which they are written.”1 IT MAY SEEM perverse to unite a text more dedicated to a representation of the sea and sea weather in all its materiality than any other in the Conrad canon (except, arguably, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”) with that novel of his which so single-mindedly buries its action amidst the “inhos- pitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones” (48) of a “monstrous town” (“Author’s Note” to The Secret Agent, 6). The purpose of doing so is to claim for “Typhoon” a seminal importance in Conrad’s ironic writing, and its composition as a major step in his development as an English novelist. A secondary purpose will be to ponder whether such irony liberates the reader to look upon the world more freshly and fully for having enjoyed its playfulness, or whether it merely circumscribes us in a clever game of reading ironically, leaving us a privileged audience rather comfortably in possession of the key that permits mockery but unlocks no new sustaining vision.2 From the moment when we read of MacWhirr’s physiognomy that “in the order of material appearances … it was simply ordinary, irrespon- sive, and unruffled” (3), it is apparent to the reader that Conrad’s concern in “Typhoon” is with a recognizably British sensibility of reserve, one that, within a few lines, will become subject to comic scenes that display MacWhirr as “Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day, and no more” (4). “Typhoon” is not the first time that Conrad has exercised an ironic style upon displays of 1 Conrad to J. B. Pinker, 10 May 1917, upon receipt of André Gide’s translation of “Typhoon” (CL6 88-89). 2 The present essay is offered as a footnote to Allan H. Simmons’s current work on Conrad and Englishness and England, particularly, Simmons 2004. 2 Epstein irresponsive stupidity. In “An Outpost of Progress,” he begins an examination of institutionalized complacency that will culminate in The Secret Agent by displaying for our amused scorn the folly of Kayerts and Carlier, of whom the narrator declares “No two beings could have been more unfitted for such a struggle” (87). The irony of “An Outpost” lies in the exploitation of the characters’ inability to understand what they see and what they are involved in, by a narrator who exposes to the reader the nature of the colonial enterprise with lacerating directness. “Typhoon”’s greater comic subtlety arises from Conrad’s negotiation of specifically British sensibilities that creates for the first time an irony of indirectness, a playful setting at odds tones and registers familiar to the English ear, to produce the comedies of incomprehension that flourish in a society in which people rarely say (or even know) what they feel. Carolyn Brown, in a most perceptive essay on the story’s comedy, claims: “Indeed, the whole of ‘Typhoon’ is a comic agon between stolid, unimaginative MacWhirr and the whirring imagination of his creator” (1992: 3). To paraphrase Brown rather liberally, just as “the hurricane ... had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words” (90), so Conrad’s creative vitality finds MacWhirr, finds the MacWhirr in himself (“the product of twenty years of my life. My own life” says the “Author’s Note”, vi), in its vision, and delights in dramatizing that encounter of conflicting sensibilities. Brown’s persuasive characterization of the “creative combat” (as she terms it) in “Typhoon,” however, does not quite account for the vital mobility in Conrad’s ironic writing here, which makes the writing of “Typhoon” the decisive experience in naturalizing his English prose. Conrad’s continual exploration of how man “fits” or does not in an indifferent universe is nuanced by an encounter with a peculiarly British temperamental incuriosity and complacency about “the fitness of things,” demanding an ironic style to convey the tragicomedy of such a condition. The ironic style he lights upon for “Typhoon” will become the medium for his definitive picture of this condition in The Secret Agent. I Conrad said of “Typhoon” to J. B. Pinker, “This is my first attempt at treating a subject jocularly,” which recalls his jaunty exclamation against the “ghastly, jocular futility of life” expressed in a slightly earlier letter to Cunninghame Graham (CL2 304, 5), a condition he thought that Graham had caught so well in his story “Snækoll’s Saga.” Surely there is no better Epstein 3 hint as to the general feeling that animates The Secret Agent than this phrase thrown off to the recipient of his most mordant letters.