I have been reading again that most delightful of all autobiographies,
"A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's mind is so rich, it
has been so well mulched by years of vigorous life and sober thinking,
that it pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every crevice of the
structure upon which it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much
to be desired and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the
trellis growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the
delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or Virginia
creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on itself, branching
unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and repeatedly enchanting us
with some delicate criss-cross of mental fibres. One hesitates even to
suggest that there may be admirers of Mr. Conrad who are not familiar
with this picture of his mind--may we call it one of the most remarkable
minds that has ever concerned itself with the setting of English words
horizontally in parallel lines?
The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on this
continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad grows numerous
indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. Henry and the
pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to enumerate the list
of those who have assured me (over the sworn secrecy of a table d'hôte
white wine) that they read the proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in
1895, etc., etc. For my own part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever
heard of Mr. Conrad before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one
day short of the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small
club of earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at
the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of
R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone asked
him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt the same
passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living whose work he
thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English literature. Sir
Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, and a sworn enemy of
loose statement; let me not then pretend to quote him exactly; but I
know that the name he mentioned was that of Joseph Conrad, and it was a
new name to me.
Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I read
one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it was
"Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class dining saloon
of the _Celtic_, crossing from New York in January, 1913. There was a
very violent westerly gale at the time--a famous shove, Captain Conrad
would call it--and I remember that the barometer went lower than had
ever been recorded before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon
carried away, and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an
ideal stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway
just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my head
through a window I could see excellent combers of green sloshing down
into the 'tweendecks.
But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be imitated
here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the undemonstrative
tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a
grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But sometimes, when one sits at
midnight by the fainting embers and thinks that of all novelists now
living one would most ardently yearn to hear the voice and see the face
of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Personal Record"
one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the
Skipper himself. He tells us that he has never been very well
acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set
this down as polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is
Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and
the famous preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of
his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James,
and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would
omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in these informal
confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of
autobiography as it is rarely written.
One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled
complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as
lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity--those are the words
that stand again and again across his pages. "I have a positive horror
of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself
which is the first condition of good service." He has carried over to
the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says
that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a
hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and
that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the
surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to be
carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility. Self-restraint is
the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist. This, indeed, is the
creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears
that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are
complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the
great simplicity of life and death.
Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the
synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts as where
the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood
and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. A
statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise
from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was
all about. The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive
biographical résumé is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas
B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was
bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania. To the
delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad
devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical
reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the
tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical
comment. In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity of texture--it is
a commonplace that it seems always like some notable translation from
the French--he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes us
with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him to his
uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to our
delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters
constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for
dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness he reviews
the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole
mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the
only true autobiography ever written: true to the inner secrets of the
human soul. It is the passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the
dear creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel
he has written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and
exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of
piety toward all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a
writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, how essentially
impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels of the Slop and
Glucose school!
This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything that
deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of probability,
this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of
Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in
our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart--such is the
kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" unique among textbooks
of the soul. It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting
out only with the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and
sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first
contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less
than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. And the
sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly
burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again
with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to
meet the Skipper face to face.
Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been necessary to
invent him, the indescribable improbability of his career speaks so
closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth. Who of his heroes
is so fascinating to us as he himself? How imperiously, by his own
noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity. And
how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob,
the smile which is not a grin.