Literary Occasions (19 page)

“An Outpost of Progress” is now to me the finest thing Conrad wrote. It is the story of two commonplace Belgians, new to the new Belgian Congo, who find that they have unwittingly, through their negro assistant, traded Africans for ivory, are then abandoned by the surrounding tribesmen, and go mad. But my first judgement of it had been only literary. It had seemed familiar; I had read other stories of lonely white men going mad in hot countries. And my rediscovery, or discovery, of Conrad really began with one small scene in
Heart of Darkness.

The African background—“the demoralized land” of plunder and licensed cruelty—I took for granted. That is how we can be imprisoned by our assumptions. The background now seems to me to be the most effective part of the book; but then it was no more than what I expected. The story of Kurtz, the
upriver ivory agent, who is led to primitivism and lunacy by his unlimited power over primitive men, was lost on me. But there was a page which spoke directly to me, and not only of Africa.

The steamer is going upriver to meet Kurtz; it is “like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.” A hut is sighted on the bank. It is empty, but it contains one book, sixty years old.
An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship,
tattered, without covers, but “lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread.” And in the midst of nightmare, this old book, “dreary … with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures,” but with its “singleness of intention,” its “honest concern for the right way of going to work,” seems to the narrator to be “luminous with another than a professional light.”

This scene, perhaps because I have carried it for so long, or perhaps because I am more receptive to the rest of the story, now makes less of an impression. But I suppose that at the time it answered something of the political panic I was beginning to feel.

To be a colonial was to know a kind of security; it was to inhabit a fixed world. And I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as to some purely literary region, where, untrammelled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer. But in the new world I felt that ground move below me. The new politics, the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made: these were the things that began to preoccupy me. They were not things from which I could detach myself. And I found that Conrad—sixty years before, in the time of a great peace—had been everywhere before me. Not as a man with a cause, but a man offering, as in
Nostromo,
a vision of the world’s half-made societies as places which continuously made and unmade themselves, where there was no goal, and where always “something
inherent in the necessities of successful action … carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.” Dismal, but deeply felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation.

To understand Conrad, then, it was necessary to begin to match his experience. It was also necessary to lose one’s preconceptions of what the novel should do and, above all, to rid oneself of the subtle corruptions of the novel or comedy of manners. When art copies life, and life in its turn mimics art, a writer’s originality can often be obscured.
The Secret Agent
seemed to be a thriller. But Inspector Heat, correct but oddly disturbing, was like no policeman before in fiction—though there have been many like him since. And, in spite of appearances, this grand lady, patroness of a celebrated anarchist, was not Lady Bracknell:

Not Lady Bracknell. Someone much more real, and still recognizable in more than one country. Younger today perhaps; but humanitarian concern still disguises a similar arrogance and simplicity, the conviction that wealth, a particular fortune, position or a particular name are the only possible causes of human self-esteem. And in how many countries today can we find the likeness of this man?

The phrase that had struck me there was “sinister impulses which lurk in … noble illusions.” But now another phrase stands out: the “exasperated vanity of ignorance.” It is so with the best of Conrad. Words which at one time we disregard, at another moment glitter.

But the character in
The Secret Agent
who is the subject of that paragraph hardly exists outside that paragraph. His name is Karl Yundt; he is not one of the figures we remember. Physically, he is a grotesque, a caricature, as are so many of the others, for all Conrad’s penetration—anarchists, policemen,
government ministers. There is nothing in Karl Yundt’s dramatic appearance in the novel, so to speak, that matches the profundity of that paragraph or hints at the quality of reflection out of which he was created.

My reservations about Conrad as a novelist remain. There is something flawed and unexercised about his creative imagination. He does not—except in
Nostromo
and some of the stories—involve me in his fantasy; and
Lord Jim
is still to me more acceptable as a narrative poem than as a novel. Conrad’s value to me is that he is someone who sixty to seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize today. I feel this about no other writer of the century. His achievement derives from the honesty which is part of his difficulty, that “scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations.”

Nothing is rigged in Conrad. He doesn’t remake countries. He chose, as we now know, incidents from real life; and he meditated on them. “Meditate” is his own, exact word. And what he says about his heroine in
Nostromo
can be applied to himself. “The wisdom of the heart having no concern with the erection or demolition of theories any more than with the defence of prejudices, has no random words at its command. The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity, tolerance and compassion.”

EVERY GREAT
writer is produced by a series of special circumstances. With Conrad these circumstances are well known: his Polish youth, his twenty years of wandering, his settling down to write in his late thirties, experience more or less closed, in England, a foreign country. These circumstances have to be considered together; one cannot be stressed above any other. The fact of the late start cannot be separated from the background and the scattered experience. But the late start is important.

Most imaginative writers discover themselves, and their world, through their work. Conrad, when he settled down to
write, was, as he wrote to the publisher William Blackwood, a man whose character had been formed. He knew his world, and had reflected on his experience. Solitariness, passion, the abyss: the themes are constant in Conrad. There is a unity in a writer’s work; but the Conrad who wrote
Victory,
though easier and more direct in style, was no more experienced and wise than the Conrad who, twenty years before, had written
Almayer’s Folly.
His uncertainties in the early days seem to have been mainly literary, a trying out of subjects and moods. In 1896, the year after the publication of
Almayer’s Folly,
he could break off from the romantic turgidities of
The Rescue
and not only write “The Lagoon,” but also begin “An Outpost of Progress.” These stories, which stand at the opposite ends, as it were, of my comprehension of Conrad, one story so romantic, one so brisk and tough, were written almost at the same time.

And there are the aphorisms. They run right through Conrad’s work, and their tone never varies. It is the same wise man who seems to be speaking. “The fear of finality which lurks in every human breast and prevents so many heroisms and so many crimes”: that is from
Almayer’s Folly,
1895. And this is from
Nostromo,
1904: “a man to whom love comes late, not as the most splendid of illusions, but like an enlightening and priceless misfortune”—which is almost too startling in the context. From
The Secret Agent,
1907, where it seems almost wasted: “Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.” And lastly, from
Victory,
1915: “the fatal imperfection of all the gifts of life, which makes of them a delusion and a snare”—which might have been fitted into any of the earlier books.

To take an interest in a writer’s work is, for me, to take an interest in his life; one interest follows automatically on the other. And to me there is something peculiarly depressing about Conrad’s writing life. With a writer like Ibsen one can be as unsettled by the life as by the plays themselves. One wonders about
the surrender of the life of the senses; one wonders about the short-lived satisfactions of the creative instinct, as unappeasable as the senses. But with Ibsen there is always the excitement of the work, developing, changing, enriched by these very doubts and conflicts. All Conrad’s subjects, and all his conclusions, seem to have existed in his head when he settled down to write.
Nostromo
could be suggested by a few lines in a book,
The Secret Agent
by a scrap of conversation and a book. But, really, experience was in the past; and the labour of the writing life lay in dredging up this experience, in “casting round”—Conradian words—for suitable subjects for meditation.

Conrad’s ideas about fiction seem to have shaped early during his writing career. And, whatever the uncertainties of his early practice, these ideas never changed. In 1895, when his first book was published, he wrote to a friend, who was also beginning to write: “All the charm, all the truth of [your story] are thrown away by the construction—by the mechanism (so to speak) of the story which makes it appear false … You have much imagination: much more than I ever will have if I live to be a hundred years old. Well, that imagination (I wish I had it) should be used to create human souls: to disclose human hearts—and not to create events that are properly speaking
accidents
only. To accomplish it you must cultivate your poetic faculty … you must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image.” When he met Wells, Conrad said (the story is Wells’s): “My dear Wells, what is this
Love and Mr Lewisham
about? What is all this about Jane Austen? What is it all
about
?” And later—all these quotations are from Jocelyn Baines’s biography—Conrad was to write: “The national English novelist seldom regards his work—the exercise of his Art—as an achievement of active life by which he will produce certain definite effects upon the emotions of his readers, but simply as an instinctive, often unreasoned, outpouring of his own emotions.”

Were these ideas of Conrad’s French and European? Conrad, after all, liked Balzac, most breathless of writers; and
Balzac, through instinct and unreason, a man bewitched by his own society, had arrived at something very like that “romantic feeling of reality” which Conrad said was his own inborn faculty. It seems at least possible that, in his irritated rejection of the English novel of manners and the novel of “accidents,” Conrad was rationalizing what was at once his own imaginative deficiency as well as his philosophical need to stick as close as possible to the facts of every situation. In fiction he did not seek to discover; he sought only to explain; the discovery of every tale, as the narrator of
Under Western Eyes
says, is a moral one.

In the experience of most writers the imaginative realizing of a story constantly modifies the writer’s original concept of it. Out of experience, fantasy and all kinds of impulses, a story suggests itself. But the story has to be tested by, and its various parts survive, the writer’s dramatic imagination. Things work or they don’t work; what is true feels true; what is false is false. And the writer, trying to make his fiction work, making accommodations with his imagination, can say more than he knows. With Conrad the story seems to be fixed; it is something given, like the prose “argument” stated at the beginning of a section of an old poem. Conrad knows exactly what he has to say. And sometimes, as in
Lord Jim
and
Heart of Darkness,
he says less than he intends.