by water, the trial by fire; and you are not to suppose that because
one has survived the trial of the spirit he will therefore triumph
easily over the trials of the flesh. Not at all. What is the malady of
rheumatism beside the torture of shyness? And Conrad has always been
distinctly shy. His American publisher, for a long time, did not meet
him; J. C. backed out of it, until, finally, a perfectly reasonable
impatience seized upon Mr. Doubleday, who said to himself, in a mild
tone: ‘Confound it all. This sort of thing has got to stop.’ And
that sort of thing did stop. J. C. at length was induced to come to a
London hotel and shake hands--about all he did do, in fact, for at once
a severe attack of shyness set in. For quite a while that interview
went--very badly? Goodness knows it did not even go badly; it simply
did not go at all. But then, as he knew Conrad was planning a new
book, Mr. Doubleday asked a few questions natural to a person who has
something at stake in a prospective venture. J. C. answered with entire
willingness, began explaining what he had in mind and--pouf! Where was
that shyness any longer? They parted as very good friends and have
remained such ever since. So it came about that at last J. C. visited
America as the guest of Mr. Doubleday. As you can imagine, lecture
bureaus, societies and every sort of outfit had been after J. C. for
years to speak in public. He had always turned down such offers, but
before coming to America he explained to Mr. Doubleday that he should
like to tell a few people, not more than a dozen, over the luncheon
table of his Congo experience, and then read to them from his story,
_Heart of Darkness_, the same affair as it came out in fiction. ‘If I
am able to interest those few,’ J. C. went on, ‘perhaps I might try
the same thing with a larger number, say fifty or even a hundred; I
don’t think I could ever address more than a hundred.’ You see, he
knew himself. He is the kind of man who is at his best in an intimate
surrounding. Perhaps you have noticed the very special quality of
intimacy achieved in his stories under practically all conditions.
He inhabits other people’s breasts. A self-conscious tendency as
great as his own or greater excites his friendly compassion. I know
an American novelist, at one time editor of an American magazine and
then in England meeting people and questing material. Several people
were present but Conrad noticed the extreme ill-ease of the American
editor. J. C. got up and came over and sat beside the stranger, who
then lost some of his discomfort and eventually plucked up enough to
say to J. C. that he would like to get some short stories from him.
‘Ah! Short stories,’ J. C. commented with that markedly foreign accent
or intonation. He paused. ‘I do not pick short stories out of my
sleeve.’ It was said with an inflection pleasantly humorous that did
not conceal the seriousness of the fact. He simply wasn’t that kind of
a conjuror. This was not the editor who handled _Victory_. American
editors, according to my impression, are a varied lot. The mixture they
make is a literary cocktail which appears to go to the heads of so many
American authors. I know an American editor who bought a Conrad novel
as a serial when all his--confrères’?--had rejected the story because
of the impossible length. This man printed the 147,000 words without
the sacrifice of one. This was after _Victory_ and as the editor in
question knew nothing of that case, his was an unconscious as well as
a vicarious atonement. But let that pass. We are not concerned with
American editors, and neither, except momentarily, has Conrad been.
His preoccupation has been unbrokenly with the problem of a sufficient
self-knowledge. Must he not know himself better than any other possibly
could? Of course, and for two imperative purposes: In the first place
to write, in the second place, to keep his courage. It is no use being
able to write unless you can keep your courage. Too, the world is
full of brave souls who have bravery and ... nothing else. No gift, I
mean. Nothing in the world is so cheap as courage, so common. But look
you!--if a man undertakes self-examination, his courage goes. The scale
of values is hopelessly deranged and either the self rises to sublime
heights of despair or sinks into a hopeless, sticky complacency. J.
C. is not an unblemished exception to this general law, or deplorable
result--whichever term you prefer. He had gone to revisit Poland and
was there when the Great War unleashed itself. The story of how he got
out of Europe has never been told and, in fact, I don’t see how it can
be. Or, well, why not? What do a few bribes matter, in a good cause?
Some fairly influential persons, including an American Ambassador,
were called upon to extricate Conrad from the extremely troublesome
complications caused by the fact that he, a Pole by race and a
Russian subject by birth, was a naturalised Englishman. The American
Ambassador, appointed in the first place because of his large personal
means, enabling him to support an Ambassadorship in the style to which
it had been accustomed, may have used his private pocketbook; but in
my judgment the matter was one to which he could quite conscientiously
have devoted the public funds. Let that pass, too. They say that J.
C. hates Russians and is frequently irascible. He also understands
Russians, as any disbeliever may discover by reading _Under Western
Eyes_. As for his irascibility, the results of self-examination justify
any reasonable amount of irritation. If it had been one of you who
had written seven-eighths of _The Rescue_ and found himself stuck
for an ending I daresay the detonations would have been terrific. A
volcano can blow its head off but an artist must not be permitted to
let a little steam escape! What sort of a doctrine is that? J. C., of
late years, has lost a good deal of his nervousness. He has written
his _Lord Jim_ long ago. He has accomplished the most satisfactory
definition we possess of the novel--where he calls it ‘a conviction
of our fellowmen’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form
of imagined life clearer than reality.’ I call your attention to the
last three words. If the ‘form of imagined life’ is not clearer to
us than life as we observe it, there is no novel. Now, life is never
clear unless we hold a little fragment of it in front of the mirror of
each one of us, his own heart. Always, then, something different from
what we expected is then clear, recognisable. J. C. has never done
anything else. The story of _The Secret Sharer_, that chap who haunted
the captain’s cabin and persisted in the captain’s thoughts, is the
symbol of all Conrad’s work. I believe he has called it his favourite
story; does anyone need to ask why? Giorgio Viola in _Nostromo_, Mrs.
Gould in the same novel, the nigger in the story of the Narcissus,
Haldin in _Under Western Eyes_, our friend, the anarchist, in _The
Secret Agent_; Captain MacWhirr in _Typhoon_ and Jim in _Lord Jim_;
Axel Heyst in _Victory_; Flora de Barral and others in _Chance_--you
know as well as I do that these are simply persons we encounter and
depreciate or else dismiss as incomprehensible. But Conrad holds them
up to the mirror of his own heart and behold! they are reflected in new
shapes, pathetic shapes, heroic shapes, twisted and tortured shapes,
but shapes that are unfailingly intelligible. It is not quite the same
thing as saying: ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Joseph Conrad.’
It is equivalent, perhaps, to saying: ‘Here, by the grace of God, is
the affinity with Joseph Conrad.’ The meaning of the universe is, as
the Spaniards say, with God; but what we feel about it is of perpetual
fascination and very real importance. J. C. has found that out, in the
course of a fairly long and extremely surprising lifetime. The world
is a ship that will never make port, it is fair to assume, in our
lifetimes; its exact position, then, as witnessed to by the sun and the
stars, is of little moment. But those who are aboard--let us have a
clear understanding about them, if we can.
“To do that, one must feel the deck beneath his feet, like that old
fellow Peyrol, in Conrad’s newest novel which you will so soon be
reading. Coming after _The Rescue_--how long it has been! Three years
after!--_The Rover_ has surprised me with an unexpected simplicity of
strain, like a clear little thread of blue in a riot of scarlet, the
bright background of Revolutionary France and Napoleon’s day. Peyrol,
I ought to tell you, was a French waif whose sea exile led him to the
coast of India and to membership in the strange fraternity of pirates
who called themselves Brothers of the Coast. But this was all before;
we open upon the return of Peyrol to France and an inconspicuous
repose in a little farmhouse where dwell an old woman, a bloodthirsty
scarecrow, and a young girl whose eyes, having looked upon the spurting
blood of the Terror, can remain fixed on nothing for consecutive
instants since. And there’s a young French officer sent to the farm
on duty connected with the blockade. Far down below the rim of the
horizon, you understand, sails the fleet commanded by Lord Nelson. The
complete affair is one of those episodes in which a handful of people
are wholly at the mercy of destiny if a single one of them fails to
sustain his illusion, whether of love, of wrath, of mercy, of hope,
or, perhaps, of a sublime despair. Despair? Why, certainly; from what
other sentiment could old Peyrol have acted as he did, in the grand
emergency, cutting the knot that bound up together those few lives,
whose only importance was the supreme importance of the insignificant
and humble? Peyrol, the ex-pirate, flashing out over the water to his
final earthly adventure is the latest and most beautiful incarnation
of that old sailor whom Conrad knew in the flesh and has translated so
often--the ‘Ulysses’ we meet in _The Mirror of the Sea_, who is also
Nostromo, who appears under his actual name and in his true rôle in
_The Arrow of Gold_. In the closing pages of The Rover we get a brief
glimpse of the great Nelson, but he does not dwarf Peyrol.
“A Mediterranean story, a tale of that sea which is ‘the charmer and
deceiver of audacious men,’ like Life itself, which also keeps ‘the
secret of its fascination.’”
v
Marlow ceased to speak. It was beautifully dark. The river, in our
stretch of it, was composed to the beauty of that darkness and won
to the felicity of a nearly perfect silence. I can’t speak for the
others, of course. Personally I was absorbed in trying to remember the
man Conrad’s exact words--in the so long suppressed preface to _The
Nigger_. You must have read them:
“The artist appeals to that part of our being that is not dependent on
wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not a mere acquisition--and,
therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for
delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives;
to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain: to the latent feeling
of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible
conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of
innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in
aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each
other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and
the living to the unborn.”
Books by Joseph Conrad
NOVELS:
1895 _Almayer’s Folly_
1896 _An Outcast of the Islands_
1898 _The Nigger of the Narcissus_
[first published in America as _The Children of the Sea_]
1900 _Lord Jim_
1903 _Nostromo_
1907 _The Secret Agent_
1911 _Under Western Eyes_
1914 _Chance_
1915 _Victory_
1917 _The Shadow Line: A Confession_
1919 _The Arrow of Gold_
1920 _The Rescue_
1923 _The Rover_
NOVELS IN COLLABORATION WITH FORD MADOX HUEFFER:
1901 _The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story_
1903 _Romance_
TALES AND SHORT STORIES:
1898 _Tales of Unrest_
1902 _Youth: A Narrative_; _Heart of Darkness_;
_The End of the Tether_
1903 _Typhoon and Other Stories_
[in America _Typhoon_ is published separately and the volume
is _Folk and Other Stories_]
1908 _A Set of Six_
1912 _’Twixt Land and Sea_
1916 _Within the Tides_
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL:
1906 _The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions_
1912 _A Personal Record_ [published in England as
_Some Reminiscences_]
CRITICAL:
1921 _Notes on Life and Letters_
Sources on Joseph Conrad
_Joseph Conrad: His Romantic-Realism_, by RUTH M. STAUFFER (Boston:
Four Seas Company, 1922). This study of Conrad is of first importance
because of its thirty pages of appendices, consisting of:
I. Conrad Bibliographies
II. Conrad’s Works
(A) Chronological List of Novels and Tales (with Original Editions)
(B) Alphabetical List of Short Stories
(C) Miscellaneous Writings by Conrad
III. Criticisms of Conrad
(A) Books on Conrad. With a paragraph of characterisation of each.
(B) Articles About Conrad. With notes as to the character of each
article. There is given a “first,” a “second” and a “third” list,
according to the estimate of an article’s value.
IV. Book Reviews. Described as a “partial list only,” but recording
fully 200 reviews in principal English and American magazines and
newspapers.
V. Miscellaneous
(A) Brief Articles on the Personality of Conrad
(B) Poems to Conrad
(C) A list of Portraits of Conrad
All of Conrad’s short stories are credited to their respective
volumes, serial publication is invariably noted, etc.
_Joseph Conrad--The Man_, by Elbridge L. Adams, in THE OUTLOOK for 18
April, 1923. One of the most complete accounts of a visit and report
of the everyday Conrad.
The chapter on Joseph Conrad, by Leland Hall, in _English Literature
During the Last Half Century_, by JOHN W. CUNLIFFE. The Macmillan
Company, revised edition, 1923.
_Some Modern Novelists_, by HELEN THOMAS FOLLETT and WILSON FOLLETT.
Henry Holt & Company, 1918.
_Joseph Conrad, A Study_, by RICHARD CURLE. Doubleday, Page & Company,
1914.
Private Information.
The reader may consult the references available in the New York Public
Library or the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C, and should also
consult the annual READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE especially
since 1914. He should also consult the map showing the locations of
Conrad’s stories, printed as an end-paper in some editions of his
books, particularly _Victory_.
_5. The Documents in the Case of Arthur Train_
i
The first and most important is a volume of over two hundred
pages--very large pages, somewhat larger, in fact, than those of
Cosmopolitan magazine, a trifle smaller than those of Vanity Fair.
The volume is bound in heavy yellow paper which says, in neat letters
at the upper left, “Indictment No. 1.” Inside the cover is a long
table of contents; the printed pages that follow are made either
more enlightening or more alarming, according to your variety of
intelligence, by the presence of charts and diagrams. One such, when
unfolded, shows green, red and black inks. The purpose is to make
it easier for the eye to trace the intricate handlings of certain
considerable sums of money....
This mysterious book, possessed of no title-page and honouring no
one as its author, represents the capacity of Arthur Train for hard
work. In 1914 Henry Siegel, a New York merchant and banker, was to
be prosecuted, and Arthur Train was entrusted with the prosecution.
Counsel for Siegel secured a change of venue and the trial was
transferred to Geneseo, New York. The case for the prosecution, in
its mathematical and extremely complicated demonstration, seemed only
too likely to be lost before a jury of farmers completely unfamiliar
with Mr. Siegel’s affairs. Mr. Siegel was in banking companies,
merchandising corporations, realty corporations, a securities company,
an express company and other enterprises. It was quite necessary to
explore the labyrinth; something like $50,000 was expended by Arthur
Train, the explorer, and the printed and bound book, _Indictment No.
1_, was a mere preliminary to the battle in court.
In 1914 Arthur Train was already the author of quite a number of books
of fiction. In a general way, they represented pleasant recreation.
ii
Other documents are these books and stories of his, the work of
leisure intervals and an active imagination. Some of them were done by
dictation, dictation interrupted by telephone calls, by days in court,
by this or that or the other. He acquired the faculty of dropping and
picking up again in the middle of a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence.
He didn’t worry over the stuff; he didn’t fuss about it, as some men
do about their golf, when they’re off their game. The business of life
was transacted in the gloomy chambers of the Criminal Courts Building,
New York, where the air is bad, the light poor, but the saturation
with human nature, perfect. To prepare a case was rather frequently
interesting, to try a case was scarcely ever without its thrill. And
the cases, despite the common misconception of them, were not assorted
East Side vendettas or Chinatown murders. A large percentage of them
were always on that shadowy borderline where a District Attorney
must stop and ask himself if a crime has been committed, if, after
all, the remedy is not to be sought in an action brought in the civil
courts. And every little while there would be a case of proportions,
of an almost inscrutable complexity, like that which led to the
publication (in a strictly limited edition with a deluxity of coloured
inks) of _Indictment No. 1_.
[Illustration: ARTHUR TRAIN]
Arthur Train is the most agreeable of men, not tall, suave, exceedingly
friendly, a good talker and with all the requisite human approaches
and contacts, but if you really wish to make yourself tiresome to him
you can do it by suggesting that he is a “criminal lawyer.” Now there
have been and are among “criminal lawyers” many men of eminence. The
defence of persons accused of crime is possibly that branch of the
law in which talent or genius shows most conspicuously. As a matter
of fact, however, the most ingenious brains of the legal profession
have preferred, for a generation past, to remain in offices and nurse
the young and growing corporation or correct the adult corporation’s
errors in diet and underwear. Corporation law is the thing in our day
and there is some very good evidence that Arthur Train is an excellent
corporation lawyer.
What about the evidence that he is a novelist? Your Honours, I am
coming to that directly.
iii
The document now to our purpose is his latest novel, _His Children’s
Children_. It represents Mr. Train’s most serious work to date. To
give it its proper background of purpose, I should like to make a
literary comparison. My trouble is that any sort of literary comparison
seems to be extended too far. If I compare one novel with another the
impression arises that I am comparing them in every respect. I compare
two books, and it is assumed that I am comparing the two authors.
Perhaps the two books have a single resemblance and the authors
both have blue eyes. Very well, then! I was about to speak of John
Galsworthy’s work in _The Forsyte Saga_.
That history of a family is discussed elsewhere in this book. My
present point is that it is the history of an English family whose main
inheritance was the property instinct, a blending of acquisitiveness
and tenaciousness, “to have and to hold.” Mr. Train’s _His Children’s
Children_ is the history of an American family whose main inheritance
was a most characteristically American one, the wish to “get on.”
Tenacity was strong in the Forsytes, it is undeveloped in the Kaynes. A
Forsyte has not much to acquire, but a Kayne is always two up and three
to play; the effort to acquire is his breath and he is somehow always
afflicted with the feeling of short-windedness. Each in his quite
distinctive way, these two novelists have concerned themselves with the
situation arising from an age of materialism--the age that culminated
in the Great War. I choose my words. I do not say that the Great War
was a product of a materialistic age, though there is a brief for that
and I think quite possibly Mr. Train would consent to argue it. But the
Great War did come in our age of a materialistic civilisation, and,
if not at the end of it, nearer to the end than to the beginning. When
did our materialistic age begin? At the end of Mrs. Wharton’s _Age of
Innocence_, of course.
Mr. Train’s motif is the dominant characteristic of an age we all lived
in, and what that characteristic led to. He writes, of course, about
old Peter B. Kayne, “The Pirate,” and his children and grandchildren;
these are the little group of people in the immediate foreground.
They are the larger world in little, people who set the fashion
and make the pace, watched and aped by thousands. Their ambitions,
their discontents, their achievements in every direction, including
sensation, scandal and disgrace are the best commentary on--themselves
as individuals? Not at all; on certain forces and tendencies more
powerful than they.
So considered, _His Children’s Children_ is a perfectly documented
study of the third generation since the beginning of the era of “big
business” in America. To the Forsytes the termination came with a sign,
“To Let.” With us it has more frequently come with some such scene as
that closing Mr. Train’s able novel; I mean old Peter B. Kayne, ill and
helpless upstairs, and the auctioneer at his stand below. To the once
redoubtable Pirate comes the sound of a rising murmur from down there;
he manages to get up and struggle feebly to a place where he can look
upon the alien affair going on in the house--in his, Peter B. Kayne’s,
house. The auctioneer’s voice is lifted above the rest, in a louder
smoothness, in an accent of barter; ambitions and ideals, so far as
realised, are here knocked down to the highest bidder. What price are
we offered on certain tangible results of a desire to get on? To the
highest bidder.... Perhaps, after all, Peter B. Kayne’s was the high
bid.
iv
A “documented” study; I chose my word there, also. For an immense
amount of work went into _His Children’s Children_. You may take my
word for it, as much as went into the authorship of _Indictment No.
1_. Or, no, you need not take my word. Take a fact, instead. Mr.
Train is now at work upon a very remarkable novel of which it is
not my privilege to speak here except to say that its first chapter
exemplifies his infinitely painstaking method to-day. In common with a
very few other novelists, he likes to derive clearly through several
antecedent generations his principal characters. His writing undergoes
many corrections but in his first draft he gives himself full rein. In
the novel that is to follow _His Children’s Children_, he spent much
time on the first chapter. By a “cut-back” he traced his hero’s family
from about the year 1790 to the opening of the story, in the present.
This, mind you, was with the deliberate intention that the first
chapter should ultimately be of not much, if any, more than ordinary
chapter length--perhaps thirty typewritten pages.
Well, he knew he had written a good deal, but the first chapter,
first draft, was written and he sent it to be typed. The manuscript
had been returned to him on a day when I called; it made exactly 184
typewritten pages--about half the length of an ordinary full-length
novel, maybe somewhat more.
v
Arthur (Cheney) Train was born in Boston, 6 September 1875, the son
of Charles Russell Train and Sarah M. (Cheney) Train. His father
was Attorney-General of Massachusetts, 1873-1880. Arthur Train was
graduated from Harvard (A.B.) in 1896 and received the law degree three
years later. In 1897 he married Ethel Kissam, daughter of Benjamin P.
Kissam, of New York. Mrs. Train, also a writer, died in the spring of
1923. Her book, _“Son” and Other Stories of Childhood and Age_ is being
published posthumously.
Arthur Train went almost immediately into the District Attorney’s
office in New York. He never entirely sacrificed his connection with it
until 1916, when he became a member of the firm of Perkins & Train. As
a special deputy Attorney-General of the State of New York, in 1910,
he brought about the indictment of over one hundred persons, political
offenders in Queens County, in the city of New York. He is a member
of the Century, University and Harvard Clubs of New York, and of the
Downtown Association. In his attractive home, at 113 East Seventy-third
street, New York, there is a room, up one flight, occupying the
whole width of the front of the house, with southerly windows,
book-lined walls, an ample desk, and a roomy davenport confronting a
fireplace. The fireplace is fenced about and the top of the fence is
leather-cushioned, making a comfortable seat. Nothing could be more
pleasant than to sink into the davenport and face Mr. Train, who has
seated himself on the fireplace fence and lighted a cigarette.