the Works of DON MARQUIS, _passim_, as the reference books say, and
the Works of P. G. WODEHOUSE, both before-mentioned, and the Works of
DONALD OGDEN STEWART (see Chapter 13, “A Parody Outline of Stewart”),
and the Works of IRVIN S. COBB in many places, the reader may be well
advised to consult at the outset _Tom_ _Masson’s Annual for 1923_, a
humorous anthology; KATHARINE DAYTON’S _Loose Leaves_, IRVIN COBB’S
collection of the best humorous stories he has ever met, _A Laugh a Day
Keeps the Doctor Away_, and--oh, yes!--the Works of OLIVER HERFORD,
including _Neither Here Nor There_ and _This Giddy Globe_. A word of
warning in regard to a couple of others:
FRANCIS B. KEENE’S _Lyrics of the Links_. This is not a humorous book
on days when you are off your game. Still, you can’t afford to miss
Grantland Rice’s foreword to the lyrics.
THOMAS L. MASON’S _That Silver Lining_, although written largely in a
humorous vein, is an honest-to-goodness book about new thought, mental
healing, psycho-analysis and so forth, by a survivor of twenty-eight
years of Life.
_4. In the Kingdom of Conrad_
i
“I once knew such a man,” declared Marlow. I don’t believe any of us
felt moved to reply. To have indicated, by a syllable or two, a polite
interest, would have been fatal. Marlow, in the presence of anything
but an aloof skepticism or a cynical reserve, becomes tiresome in
his pursuit of metaphysical abstraction. He seems to think it can be
caught in the butterfly-net of words.... Now he sat, sucking his pipe
(he always cools it before re-filling) and looking attentively at each
of us as the sparks of cigars momentarily threw a faint gleam on our
faces. At length:
“You all know him, too,” he pronounced. “Chap named Conrad, Joseph
Conrad. Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski. That Polish sailor; writes
novels. But he has a master’s ticket. Got blackwater fever or something
down at the Congo; he was out East before that. Then he settled in
Kent, in a little house, where I once went to see him. Of course you’ve
read _Lord Jim_; I don’t think a lot of it. Give me _Victory_ or
_Youth_, or, best of all, _Nostromo_----”
“Personally, Marlow, I always look at the end first, to see how it
comes out. Since you are beginning in the middle----”
“I? I’m not, but Conrad was. Did you ever read _Nostromo_? Talk about
beginning a story in the middle!”
“Well, if you want to talk about _that_,” sighed a voice. “My
impression was, Marlow, that you were undertaking to tell us about a
man who knew himself--shall we say?--singularly well.”
“Exactly.” Marlow uttered the word with something that might have been
reluctance. He repeated it, “Exactly.” It was time to re-fill his pipe
and he made a long job of it. When he had it drawing nicely and began
to speak again his voice was veiled, his choice of words was frequently
made with a certain hesitation, and we listened without comment or any
other interruption than the occasional shifting of a foot on the deck.
At least, I can recall nothing; and I know we borrowed our matches by
signs--when we thought to borrow them.
[Illustration: JOSEPH CONRAD]
ii
“As you have heard something of him, I won’t waste my breath on the
bare biographical record,” Marlow informed us. “I believe you all know
he was born in the Ukraine in 1857; sixth of December happened to be
the day. His father and mother were Polish patriots and Russian exiles
and their death left the boy in the hands of his mother’s brother,
who used him affectionately and engaged a very capable tutor to fit
the young Korzeniowski for the University of Cracow. It is pertinent,
I think, that the father had been a man of scholarly tastes and
occupation. He had succeeded in translating Shakespeare into Polish.
The legendary figure of a great-uncle, whom, however, the boy had seen,
made a great impression. Mr. Nicholas B., as Conrad calls him in his
book, _A Personal Record_, was in the retreat from Moscow and had the
strange misfortune to share in eating a Lithuanian dog. Did you ever
read _Falk_? Mr. Nicholas B. transmuted into fiction, I should say. The
one had eaten a dog, the other was credited with having eaten human
flesh; but the effect is the same. Then there’s that other story,
_Heart of Darkness_--the one all the authorities acclaim as among the
half-dozen greatest stories in English. I have heard Conrad narrate the
actual incident as it befell him down at the Congo; I have also read,
and heard him read aloud, his tale. Very interesting. Let us admit that
truth is frequently stranger than fiction; what then? Why truth is so
often unintelligible, void of significance, without meaning. Whereas
fiction is the real truth--all we can grasp, anyway. How we abuse
words! It is facts, or apparent facts, that are stranger than so-called
fiction. Not truth! Let us save that word for finer purposes. The
conquest of brute facts? Well, maybe.
“This Polish boy I am telling you about had an incomprehensible
wish. I understand that nowadays there is no such animal as an
incomprehensible wish. All wishes are fulfilled, or something of the
sort. The boy’s wish I am speaking of was fulfilled, safe enough, but
its comprehensibility is still in doubt. At any rate, he wanted to go
to sea. As almost all boys wish urgently to go to sea, this might not
appear abnormal. Perhaps, after all the oddity lay chiefly in the
attitude of his uncle and tutor, which was strongly adverse; also,
to some extent, in the fact that Poland is (or then was) purely an
interior country without ships or the enticing sight of sailors to
tempt a boy. A country of farmers. And he left it. He has told in _A
Personal Record_ of the last stand made by the tutor and his uncle.
The sight of an Englishman in the Alps had the mysterious effect of
making the lad more set in his purpose than ever. Why, as I say, is not
comprehensible, unless by those serious scientists who exist in Vienna
and play jokes on the rest of the world.
“When he had got clean away, with a sorrowful blessing, he fared
to the Mediterranean. He wanted to become not merely a sailor but
a British sailor; he knew no English. French, of course, he knew,
as befitted a Pole of a good family and some education. It was not
so difficult to get berths on Mediterranean vessels. Being in his
teens, he was looking for excitement and adventure. This, too, _mare
nostrum_ provides. It does not really matter, I take it, where one
sows his wild oats, provided only he sows thickly; and the waters of
the Mediterranean received a bushel or two from Poland (a strictly
agricultural land). One harvests such a crop from the sea uncertainly
and at a long interval, but the sea’s return is often curious and
beautiful. Fragments, if you like, but of a loveliness not yielded by
the soil of the shore; mother-of-pearl’d, glistening. And out of that
uncouth time and those bizarre experiences the man Conrad has got back
certain pages in _The Mirror of the Sea_, pages that we all remember.
_The Arrow of Gold_, also, is the return of those years when he was
irregularly employed in smuggling and gun-running out of Marseilles to
the loosely-guarded shores of Spain.
“There is a woman in _The Arrow of Gold_, Rita, you know ... but it
is useless to speculate about women. In a preface provided for the
new uniform edition of his works, J. C. explains that the slightly
demure Antonia Avellanos, in the pages of _Nostromo_, sprang from the
recollection, tenderly cherished, of a young girl, a schoolmate of his
back there in Poland. But I would like to know where he got Lena, in
_Victory_. If I were Somerset Maugham and came unexpectedly upon Lena
in another man’s novel there would be no limit to my jealousy. One does
not expect a sailor to understand women and I cannot for the life of me
comprehend how J. C. got in the way of knowing the sex. Perhaps, for
some time, he didn’t. Disregarding the mysteries of feminine nature,
if he observed any, the youth persisted in his weird determination to
become one of the great race of sailors. He shipped on English ships.
Richard Curle’s book, _Joseph Conrad: A Study_, will even tell you
just which English ships. For example, the story called _Youth_ with
its vessel, the Judæa, harks back to a passage on a hulk called the
Palestine. And so on. But what are such things to you and me? I have
read Curle’s book and I give you my _parole d’honneur_ that I found it
extraordinarily confusing when not simply rhapsodical. I did! As if J.
C. were not, in himself, serious enough to require close attention and
profound enough to merit it and pellucid enough to reward our most
earnest scrutiny. Along comes Curle and roils up the surface of that
clear, deep stream. I have no forgiveness for such a man, upon my word,
I have not! May his excellent intentions pave the road to ... but I
suppose they do force one to re-read Conrad if only to get straightened
out again.
“Anyway, he stuck to ships, this foreign blighter. You will find all
that is pertinent diffused through the pages of _A Personal Record_.
Even to the examination in which he passed for his master’s ticket.
What was he reading in those years? One would give something to have
the tally; but certainly he did not neglect the French masters. Those
who find in the earlier books, including _The Nigger of the Narcissus_,
a style ‘too florid,’ or ‘too consciously sonorous’ say it was because
J. C. was long in understanding that English prose cannot display the
crystal resonance of French. Mind you, I don’t in the least accept
their premise; to me, _The Nigger of the Narcissus_ is so perfect that
when I came upon it I was seized with a most violent nostalgia. I
wanted, in a foolish, incredible way, to be back in the fo’c’s’le or on
the deck of a certain squarerigger called the Wayfarer which carried
me around Cape Stiff in--how long ago?--in 1909. It seems a century.
Youth! The splendid, the immortal time!
“The ships bore him eastward. Only the thoughtless, griped by the vain
longing for empire or inflated with a nauseating self-importance,
will go west. One goes east when one is in search of wisdom, and this
man was. The greatest piece of wisdom is the knowledge of oneself;
seek that in India or China or the ocean islands, whichever you
please; the road lies eastward. You see, he had already acquired some
self-knowledge; not a great deal, perhaps, but beyond the average. Or
was he born with it? At a surprisingly early age he had known that he
must, as the saying is, ‘follow the sea.’ This senseless conviction
must be put down to the score of self-knowledge. When a man is not
misled by that logical apparatus, his brain, it is astonishing to what
clearness of perception he may attain. Do you recall that gentle,
highly ironic sentence Conrad uses in _The Rescue_ about d’Alcacer?
‘Mr. d’Alcacer, being a Latin, was not afraid of introspection.’
Exactly. J. C. isn’t a Latin but neither is he afflicted like us, who
shrink from a look inward in a way to arouse the recording angel’s
darkest suspicion. The best advice, I believe, is that which counsels
a man to look into his heart and write. The best advice extant, but
it can be bettered. J. C. looked into his heart a long time before he
began writing.
“All that he saw there we have had steadily reflected in the succession
of novels and tales of a surprisingly varied character and a deep,
a very deep, inner relevance to the discovered self within him.
Externals do not matter. And yet they have taken aback visitors to J.
C., persons already acquainted with the true person and who should
therefore have known better. They found, in a cottage in Kent, a
man quitting middle age, the victim of an atrocious rheumatism (or
what seemed to be rheumatism) who dosed himself with all sorts of
concoctions that he had heard of, until the house looked like a
laboratory of disused patent medicine bottles. Well, perhaps that is
an exaggeration. Tall and broadly ample Jessie Conrad beamed on the
very infrequent visitors and would sometimes confide to them, with a
giggle: ‘You know, they say in London that Conrad lives in the country
with his cook!’ But she, Jessie, Mrs. Conrad, was a great deal more
than just an excellent cook, a capable mother, all that. She was,
in J. C.’s words, ‘the fortune of the house,’ a pair of eyes that
guarded watchfully over this unhappy man when, for eighteen months,
hardly knowing whether he ate or slept, and sitting all day long at a
table, he struggled desperately for ‘the breath of life’ which had to
be blown into the shapes of men and women, ‘Latin and Saxon, Jew and
Gentile’ who people the pages of that miraculous novel, _Nostromo_.
That book is unique. You may get some idea of its cost in toil and
sheer creative effort from J. C.’s own words in _A Personal Record_.
Just so; but then an American editor comes along, some years later, and
finds Conrad as nervous as a cat. Actually! The editor particularly
noticed that Conrad would never turn his back upon him while they were
together in that room and always sat so as to face, or partly face,
the door. He appeared like a man who wanted to feel the wall at his
back; and with his deep-set eyes and the overhang of his forehead,
the Slav contour of the cheekbones, the greying beard, the silences
and the restlessness, the jumpiness--everything--J. C. made on the
American editor a memorable and fantastic impression. That editor came
away convinced that J. C. had seen some wild goings-on and been in
some devilish tight places in his seafaring days; and altogether was
spending his later years like Stevenson’s chap at the Admiral Benbow,
waiting for some old, blind, tap-tap-tapping Pew to come along and
tip him the black spot. Fact! But the editor carried no black spot,
only large sums of American money which he was prepared to part with
in exchange for the very best English fiction, both spot and future
delivery. J. C. was then busy writing the novel called _Victory_, and
gave it to the American to read. The next morning the American ripped
it to pieces, on certain plot details. His, the American’s, account
of that interview is instructive. He says Conrad sat, fingers clawing
the arms of his chair, speechless and infuriated, for nearly an hour,
while our editor stressed the importance of the return of the shawl
that belonged to Mrs. Schomberg in the story and other matters that
the meticulous would find fault with. And finally, I suppose when he
was able to speak at all, the editor tells that J. C. came around,
ending up by quite handsomely admitting the editor to be right, and
promising to make the necessary changes. What I cannot get over is the
fact that after, as the story goes, Conrad had re-written 70,000 words
and added 60,000 more, in order to run _Victory_ complete in a single
number, the American cut out of it everything but the conversation and
the shooting. The resulting skeleton was, to some readers at least,
very imperfectly articulated. That manuscript had a curious history and
certainly deserves a place in a Museum. I heard lately that Gabriel
Wells, the American collector, has got hold of it. J. C. had made
alterations in black ink, the magazine editor had gashed it horribly
in red; and when the book publisher came to restore the mangled corpus
he could do so, intelligibly for the printer, only by an extravagant
use of green ink. You see, there was no duplicate copy of the original.
Always make duplicates. If you don’t, and if you are a writer of J.
C.’s size, your manuscripts may some day be priceless. Even though
they are typewritten; for the fact that they are not in handwriting is
offset by the touching fact that perhaps your wife got up in the middle
of the night to type them off, so you could see how they would look in
the neat similitude of printed words.
iii
“But there! Let us not talk about the value of manuscripts. That is
adventitious, a sort of excrescence on the process of moneygetting,
which, in turn, perhaps, is an excrescence on all the forms of art. Do
I sound like one of those absurd persons who wail because an artist
must make money? If so, I beg your pardon, I do, humbly. Perhaps you
would like me to do it kneeling here on the deck. My knees are bent. I
would no more absolve the artist from the urgence of making a living
than I would absolve him from the necessity of drawing breath to live.
After all, isn’t it the same thing? So surely as you breathe, you must
suffer; and what is the wage problem but a visitation, like sickness,
or misfortune, or mental anguish inseparable from the act of living?
If art cannot triumph over these things, if a novelist could not
continue to write novels in spite of the awful pangs of rheumatism, the
element of struggle would be lost and all our values would exist in a
vacuum. It is their merit, and sometimes their sole merit, that they
exist in the air under atmospheric pressures averaging fifteen pounds
to the square inch and of only the very slightest variation. The need
to make money is the atmosphere in which we all live. By a sublime law
of nature, of human nature, I should say, the more we make, the more we
need. Human nature abhors a vacuum. But, as I was saying--
“What a pill it would be to a man engaged in writing his first few
great novels if he had seriously to consider the fact that, some years
later but yet within his lifetime, these blackened pages would be worth
a modest fortune. Such a consideration might well drive him quite off
his head. What actually steadies him is the indisputable fact that
_this_ book has simply got to earn him enough to live on for a whole
year, including the younger boy’s annual six pairs of shoes. Then, when
the book doesn’t, a way is provided. Don’t snort, please. I admit that,
on the face of it, such a solution is improbable. The answer to that
objection is: The solution arrives. Take J. C. He came ashore with the
remnants of this tropical fever infesting him and a definite medical
mandate enjoining him from all future notion of following the sea.
When a chap is nearing forty and has spent all his life from boyhood
working up to a master’s ticket and a ship to command, a decree of that
sort is calculated to knock him out completely. He is in splendid
shape to be counted out in a prostrate condition, lying prone and never
recovering consciousness. J. C. had no more idea what to do----. He dug
up the manuscript of that tentative story or novel he had been working
on at intervals for about five years. The one which, to the extent of
about the first nine chapters, he had shown to a young Englishman on
a passage between Adelaide and the Cape. This was a young Cambridge
student, named Jacques, who was aboard as a passenger. You remember
that Jacques handed the manuscript back and J. C. ventured to ask if
the story seemed worth finishing. Jacques answered. ‘Distinctly.’ So
the beginnings of _Almayer’s Folly_ escaped being thrown overboard to
puzzle the fishes.
“Ashore, J. C. finished the thing and it got published. No appreciable
sum of money rewarded him, of course, and he has told how he wondered
whatever he should do afterward, and he submitted his dilemma to Edward
Garnett one evening after the publication of _Almayer’s Folly_. Finally
Garnett brought forth a suggestion which, in its unoriginality, was a
piece of the most authentic inspiration. ‘Why don’t you write another?’
he asked. But, of course, that is the only safe suggestion to make to
a person who has written one novel. J. C. admits that from the moment
those words crossed Garnett’s lips, _An Outcast of the Islands_ was
merely a matter of time. All the same, he had to live. Shortly, he was
marrying, and at suitable intervals Boris and John were added to the
family unit. Capel House was a Kentish cottage but there were rates
to pay. For some years the pension provided by the Civil List was an
affair of serious importance. There is a man or two now living and a
man or two now dead who could throw light on this phase of J. C.’s
special problem. Conrad’s present American publisher dropped in one
day on the late William Heinemann in London, with his usual question
of what, or more accurately whom, Heinemann had got. The reply was: A
comparatively new writer who would some day be as important as Kipling.
However, it appeared that in order to attain this importance he would
have to live. ‘Suppose,’ suggested Heinemann, with every aspect of
intense earnestness, ‘you and I back him. He has a novel he wants to
do. I think if we both put in ten pounds--fifty dollars--a month----.’
For a moment it seemed as if this blithe proposal might terminate the
interview. And, after all, a publisher, who has to foot the cost of a
book anyway on what is often the slenderest chance, might well draw
back before the prospect of investing $50 a month for a year or two as
a preliminary to risking as much more. But it was done. In the end, J.
C. told them frankly that he could not give them the book. He had got
seven-eighths of the way through and he was unable to bring the story
out. Stuck for an ending would be the other way of stating the case.
The two, Heinemann and Frank N. Doubleday, accepted this disappointment
with a most commendable calmness. J. C. went on to write other things,
_The Nigger of the Narcissus_, _Lord Jim_, since so widely hailed and
at the time so little heeded and so immensely unlucrative; _Nostromo_.
James B. Pinker (you knew Pinker, the author’s agent) handled the
stuff. In the American phrase, Pinker ‘grubstaked’ Conrad; and among
long-term investments of the very highest grade J. C. has been one of
the very best in the world. Ah, yes! He has! No one who ever invested
in Conrad and held on, held ‘for the rise,’ has ever lost a penny--or
failed to make an enormous per cent. Why, take Heinemann and F. N.
D. They, in effect, bought at away below par twenty-year bonds that
matured and were paid off at par. For after twenty years J. C. picked
up the all-but-finished novel, put it through in triumphant fashion and
gave it to them under the title of _The Rescue_. By that time, he was
made. He was selling in America practically seventeen times as many
copies as when they put their money in--maybe more. And any publisher
in America or England would, by then, have given his upper and lower
teeth to possess Conrad. The Civil List was at liberty to take care of
someone else and lucky if it found another half so rewarding.
“Do I give the impression that this result was brought about in the
least meteorically? That would be inexcusable on my part. Let me see:
There were _Almayer’s Folly_ and _An Outcast of the Islands_ and _The
Nigger_ and _Lord Jim_ and _Nostromo_ and _The Secret Agent_ and _Under
Western Eyes_. Seven novels, not counting the two he wrote with Ford
Madox Hueffer and four or five books of short stories. I am speaking
now of the nineteen years that lay between Conrad’s first book and his
novel, _Chance_; and I am avoiding all exaggeration when I tell you
flatly that in all those nineteen years not one single book--not the
succession of all those books--made enough money for the reasonable
needs of himself and his family. Oh, I don’t say that he was entirely
dependent on these books and the far-sightedness of men like those
investors I have mentioned. W. E. Henley serialised _The Nigger_; in
America, the North American Review serialised _Under Western Eyes_;
there was a bit of money, now and again from the magazine sale of one
of the short-stories, no doubt. I stick to my point: The income from
the books was not enough. By the way, he also wrote in those years the
two autobiographical books, _The Mirror of the Sea_ and _A Personal
Record_. H’m. The American publishers of _A Personal Record_ printed it
from type. You know; print a few and throw the type away.
“_Chance_ was published in 1914 and sold 20,000 copies in England and
the long ordeal was over.
iv