Notes on My Books

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The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver, and
this, it seems only because he was implicitly trusted by his employers,
who must have been singularly poor judges of character. In the sailor's
story he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a small cheat,
stupidly ferocious, morose, of mean appearance, and altogether unworthy
of the greatness this opportunity had thrust upon him. What was
interesting was that he would boast of it openly.

He used to say: "People think I make a lot of money in this schooner of
mine. But that is nothing. I don't care for that. Now and then I go away
quietly and lift a bar of silver. I must get rich slowly--you
understand."

There was also another curious point about the man. Once in the course
of some quarrel the sailor threatened him: "What's to prevent me
reporting ashore what you have told me about that silver?"

The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He actually laughed.
"You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me you will get a
knife stuck in your back. Every man, woman, and child in that port is my
friend. And who's to prove the lighter wasn't sunk? I didn't show you
where the silver is hidden. Did I? So you know nothing. And suppose I
lied? Eh?"

Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness of that
impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode takes
about three pages of his autobiography. Nothing to speak of; but as I
looked them over, the curious confirmation of the few casual words heard
in my early youth evoked the memories of that distant time when
everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venturesome, so interesting;
bits of strange coasts under the stars, shadows of hills in the
sunshine, men's passions in the dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown
dim.... Perhaps, perhaps, there still was in the world something to
write about. Yet I did not see anything at first in the mere story. A
rascal steals a large parcel of a valuable commodity--so people say.
It's either true or untrue; and in any case it has no value in itself.
To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not appeal to me,
because my talents not running that way I did not think that the game
was worth the candle. It was only when it dawned upon me that the
purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue,
that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim
in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the
first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of
Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute
witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in
good and evil.

Such are in very truth the obscure origins of "Nostromo"--the book. From
that moment, I suppose, it had to be. Yet even then I hesitate, as if
warned by the instinct of self-preservation from venturing on a distant
and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues and revolutions. But
it had to be done.

It took the best part of the years 1903-4 to do; with many intervals of
renewed hesitation, lest I should lose myself in the ever-enlarging
vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in my knowledge of the
country. Often, also, when I had thought myself to a standstill over the
tangled-up affairs of the Republic, I would, figuratively speaking, pack
my bag, rush away from Sulaco for a change of air and write a few pages
of "The Mirror of the Sea." But generally, as I've said before, my
sojourn on the Continent of Latin America, famed for its hospitality,
lasted for about two years. On my return I found (speaking somewhat in
the style of Captain Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily
glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably
grown during my absence.

My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of course, my
venerated friend, the late Don Jose Avellanos, Minister to the Courts of
England and Spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent "History of
Fifty Years of Misrule." That work was never published--the reader will
discover why--and I am in fact the only person in the world possessed of
its contents. I have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest
meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to
myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point
out that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the sake
of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely
related to actuality; either throwing a light on the nature of current
events or affecting directly the fortunes of the people of whom I speak.

As to their own histories I have tried to set them down, Aristocracy and
People, men and women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, bandit and politician,
with as cool a hand as was possible in the heat and clash of my own
conflicting emotions. And after all this is also the story of their
conflicts. It is for the reader to say how far they are deserving of
interest in their actions and in the secret purposes of their hearts
revealed in the bitter necessities of the time. I confess that, for me,
that time is the time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities.
And in my gratitude I must mention here Mrs. Gould, "the first lady of
Sulaco," whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr.
Monygham, and Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Material Interests
whom we must leave to his Mine--from which there is no escape in this
world.

About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially contrasted
men, both captured by the silver of the San Tome Mine, I feel bound to
say something more.

I did not hesitate to make that central figure an Italian. First of all
the thing is perfectly credible: Italians were swarming into the
Occidental Province at the time, as anybody who will read further can
see; and secondly, there was no one who could stand so well by the side
of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the Idealist of the old, humanitarian
revolutions. For myself I needed there a man of the People as free as
possible from his class-conventions and all settled modes of thinking.
This is not a side snarl at conventions. My reasons were not moral but
artistic. Had he been an Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get into
local politics. But Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader in a
personal game. He does not want to raise himself above the mass. He is
content to feel himself a power--within the People.

But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I received the inspiration for
him in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor. Those who have read
certain pages of mine will see at once what I mean when I say that
Dominic, the padrone of the _Tremolino_, might under given circumstances
have been a Nostromo. At any rate Dominic would have understood the
younger man perfectly--if scornfully. He and I were engaged together in
a rather absurd adventure, but the absurdity does not matter. It is a
real satisfaction to think that in my very young days there must, after
all, have been something in me worthy to command that man's half-bitter
fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. Many of Nostromo's speeches I have
heard first in Dominic's voice. His hand on the tiller and his fearless
eyes roaming the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his
face, he would utter the usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: "Vous
autres gentilhommes!" in a caustic tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like
Nostromo! "You hombres finos!" Very much like Nostromo. But Dominic the
Corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from which my Nostromo is
free; for Nostromo's lineage had to be more ancient still. He is a man
with the weight of countless generations behind him and no parentage to
boast of.... Like the People.

In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence and
generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in
the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with
something despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a Man
of the People, their very own unenvious force, disdaining to lead but
ruling from within. Years afterwards, grown older as the famous Captain
Fidanza, with a stake in the country, going about his many affairs
followed by respectful glances in the modernized streets of Sulaco,
calling on the widow of the cargador, attending the Lodge, listening in
unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the enigmatical
patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy
comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his moral ruin locked up in his
breast, he remains essentially a man of the People. In his mingled love
and scorn of life and in the bewildered conviction of having been
betrayed, of dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is
still of the People, their undoubted Great Man--with a private history
of his own.

One more figure of those stirring times I would like to mention: and
that is Antonia Avellanos--the "beautiful Antonia." Whether she is a
possible variation of Latin-American girlhood I wouldn't dare to affirm.
But, for me, she _is_. Always a little in the background by the side of
her father (my venerated friend) I hope she has yet relief enough to
make intelligible what I am going to say. Of all the people who had seen
with me the birth of the Occidental Republic, she is the only one who
has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the
Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the
New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and
daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the
only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a
trifler.

If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to see all
these changes) it would be Antonia. And the true reason for that--why
not be frank about it?--the true reason is that I have modelled her on
my first love. How we, a band of tallish school-boys, the chums of her
two brothers, how we used to look up to that girl just out of the
schoolroom herself, as the standard-bearer of a faith to which we all
were born but which she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching
hope! She had perhaps more glow and less serenity in her soul than
Antonia, but she was an uncompromising Puritan of patriotism with no
taint of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only
one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing
criticism of my levities--very much like poor Decoud--or stand the brunt
of her austere, unanswerable invective. She did not quite
understand--but never mind. That afternoon when I came in, a shrinking
yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I received a hand-squeeze
that made my heart leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. She was
softened at the last as though she had suddenly perceived (we were such
children still!) that I was really going away for good, going very far
away--even as far as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the
darkness of the Placid Gulf.

That's why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the "beautiful
Antonia" (or can it be the Other?) moving in the dimness of the great
cathedral, saying a short prayer at the tomb of the first and last
Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in filial devotion
before the monument of Don Jose Avellanos, and, with a lingering,
tender, faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to Martin Decoud,
going out serenely into the sunshine of the Plaza with her upright
carriage and her white head; a relic of the past disregarded by men
awaiting impatiently the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of more
Revolutions.

But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand perfectly well at
the time that the moment the breath left the body of the Magnificent
Capataz, the Man of the People, freed at last from the toils of love and
wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco.

J. C.

October, 1917.

MIRROR OF THE SEA

Less perhaps than any other book written by me, or anybody else, does
this volume require a Preface. Yet since all the others including even
the "Personal Record", which is but a fragment of biography, are to have
their Author's Notes, I cannot possibly leave this one without, lest a
false impression of indifference or weariness should be created. I can
see only too well that it is not going to be an easy task.
Necessity--the mother of invention--being even unthinkable in this case,
I do not know what to invent in the way of discourse; and necessity
being also the greatest possible incentive to exertion I don't even know
how to begin to exert myself. Here too the natural inclination comes in.
I have been all my life averse from exertion.

Under these discouraging circumstances I am, however, bound to proceed
from a sense of duty. This Note is a thing promised. In less than a
minute's time by a few incautious words I entered into a bond which has
lain on my heart heavily ever since.

For, this book is a very intimate revelation; and what that is revealing
can a few more pages add to some three hundred others of most sincere
disclosures? I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a
last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which
beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send
to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of
disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a
strenuous life; went on full of love's delight and love's anguish,
facing them in open-eyed exultation, without bitterness and without
repining, from the first hour to the last.

Subjugated but never unmanned I surrendered my being to that passion
which various and great like life itself had also its periods of
wonderful serenity which even a fickle mistress can give sometimes on
her soothed breast, full of wiles, full of fury, and yet capable of an
enchanting sweetness. And if anybody suggest that this must be the lyric
illusion of an old, romantic heart, I can answer that for twenty years I
had lived like a hermit with my passion! Beyond the line of the sea
horizon the world for me did not exist as assuredly as it does not exist
for the mystics who take refuge on the tops of high mountains. I am
speaking now of that innermost life, containing the best and the worst
that can happen to us in the temperamental depths of our being, where a
man indeed must live alone but need not give up all hope of holding
converse with his kind.

This perhaps is enough for me to say on this particular occasion about
these, my parting words, about this, my last mood in my great passion
for the sea. I call it great because it was great to me. Others may call
it a foolish infatuation. Those words have been applied to every love
story. But whatever it may be the fact remains that it was something too
great for words.

This is what I always felt vaguely; and therefore the following pages
rest like a true confession on matters of fact which to a friendly and
charitable person may convey the inner truth of almost a life-time. From
sixteen to thirty-six cannot be called an age, yet it is a pretty long
stretch of that sort of experience which teaches a man slowly to see and
feel. It is for me a distinct period; and when I emerged from it into
another air, as it were, and said to myself: "Now I must speak of these
things or remain unknown to the end of my days," it was with the
ineradicable hope, that accompanies one through solitude as well as
through a crowd, of ultimately, some day, at some moment, making myself
understood.

And I have been! I have been understood as completely as it is possible
to be understood in this, our world, which seems to be mostly composed
of riddles. There have been things said about this book which have moved
me profoundly; the more profoundly because they were uttered by men
whose occupation was avowedly to understand, and analyze, and
expound--in a word, by literary critics. They spoke out according to
their conscience, and some of them said things that made me feel both
glad and sorry of ever having entered upon my confession. Dimly or
clearly, they perceived the character of my intention and ended by
judging me worthy to have made the attempt. They saw it was of a
revealing character, but in some cases they thought that the revelation
was not complete.

One of them said: "In reading these chapters one is always hoping for
the revelation; but the personality is never quite revealed. We can only
say that this thing happened to Mr. Conrad, that he knew such a man and
that thus life passed him leaving those memories. They are the records
of the events of his life, not in every instance striking or decisive
events but rather those haphazard events which for no definite reason
impress themselves upon the mind and recur in memory long afterward as
symbols of one knows not what sacred ritual taking place behind the
veil."

To this I can only say that this book written in perfect sincerity holds
back nothing--unless the mere bodily presence of the writer. Within
these pages I make a full confession not of my sins but of my emotions.
It is the best tribute my piety can offer to the ultimate shapers of my
character, convictions, and, in a sense, destiny--to the imperishable
sea, to the ships that are no more and to the simple men who have had
their day.

J. C.

1919.

THE SECRET AGENT

The origin of "The Secret Agent": subject, treatment, artistic purpose
and every other motive that may induce an author to take up his pen,
can, I believe, be traced to a period of mental and emotional reaction.

The actual facts are that I began this book impulsively and wrote it
continuously. When in due course it was bound and delivered to the
public gaze I found myself reproved for having produced it at all. Some
of the admonitions were severe, others had a sorrowful note. I have not
got them textually before me but I remember perfectly the general
argument, which was very simple; and also my surprise at its nature. All
this sounds a very old story now! And yet it is not such a long time
ago. I must conclude that I had still preserved much of my pristine
innocence in the year 1907. It seems to me now that even an artless
person might have foreseen that some criticisms would be based on the
ground of sordid surroundings and the moral squalor of the tale.

That, of course, is a serious objection. It was not universal. In fact,
it seems ungracious to remember so little reproof amongst so much
intelligent and sympathetic appreciation; and I trust that the readers
of this Preface will not hasten to put it down to wounded vanity of a
natural disposition to ingratitude. I suggest that a charitable heart
could very well ascribe my choice to natural modesty. Yet it isn't
exactly modesty that makes me select reproof for the illustration of my
case. No, it isn't exactly modesty. I am not at all certain that I am
modest; but those who have read so far through my work will credit me
with enough decency, tact, savoir faire, what you will, to prevent me
from making a song for my own glory out of the words of other people.
No! The true motive of my selection lies in quite a different trait. I
have always had a propensity to justify my action. Not to defend. To
justify. Not to insist that I was right but simply to explain that there
was no perverse intention, no secret scorn for the natural sensibilities
of mankind at the bottom of my impulses.

That kind of weakness is dangerous only so far that it exposes one to
the risk of becoming a bore; for the world generally is not interested
in the motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile
and smile but he is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious.
He shrinks from explanations. Yet I will go on with mine. It's obvious
that I need not have written that book. I was under no necessity to deal
with that subject; using the word subject both in the sense of the tale
itself and in the larger one of a special manifestation in the life of
mankind. This I fully admit. But the thought of elaborating mere
ugliness in order to shock, or even simply to surprise my readers by a
change of front, has never entered my head. In making this statement I
expect to be believed, not only on the evidence of my general character
but also for the reason, which anybody can see, that the whole treatment
of the tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying pity and contempt,
prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness which lie simply in
the outward circumstances of the setting.

The inception of "The Secret Agent" followed immediately on a two
years' period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote
novel, "Nostromo," with its far off Latin-American atmosphere; and the
profoundly personal "Mirror of the Sea." The first an intense creative
effort on what I suppose will always remain my largest canvas, the
second an unreserved attempt to unveil for a moment the profounder
intimacies of the sea and the formative influences of nearly half my
life-time. It was a period, too, in which my sense of the truth of
things was attended by a very intense imaginative and emotional
readiness which, all genuine and faithful to facts as it was, yet made
me feel (the task once done) as if I were left behind, aimless amongst
mere husks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior,
values.

I don't know whether I really felt that I wanted a change, change in my
imagination, in my vision and in my mental attitude. I rather think that
a change in the fundamental mood had already stolen over me unawares. I
don't remember anything definite happening. With "The Mirror of the Sea"
finished in the full consciousness that I had dealt honestly with myself
and my readers in every line of that book, I gave myself up to a not
unhappy pause. Then, while I was yet standing still, as it were, and
certainly not thinking of going out of my way to look for anything ugly,
the subject of "The Secret Agent"--I mean the tale--came to me in the
shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about
anarchists or rather anarchist activities; how brought about I don't
remember now.

I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole
thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of
the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant
miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically
eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical
pretences so unpardonable. Presently, passing to particular instances,
we recalled the already old story of the attempt to blow up the
Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that
it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even
unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own
logical processes. But that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally
in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man
blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea,
anarchistic or other. As to the outer wall of the Observatory it did not
show as much as the faintest crack.

I pointed all this out to my friend who remained silent for a while and
then remarked in his characteristically casual and omniscient manner:
"Oh, that fellow was half on idiot. His sister committed suicide
afterwards." These were absolutely the only words that passed between
us; for extreme surprise at this unexpected piece of information kept me
dumb for a moment and he began at once to talk of something else. It
never occurred to me later to ask how he arrived at his knowledge. I am
sure that if he had seen once in his life the back of an anarchist that
must have been the whole extent of his connection with the underworld.
He was, however, a man who liked to talk with all sorts of people, and
he may have gathered those illuminating facts at second or third hand,
from a crossing-sweeper, from a retired police officer, from some vague
man in his club, or even, perhaps, from a Minister of State met at some
public or private reception.

Of the illuminating quality there could be no doubt whatever. One felt
like walking out of a forest on to a plain--there was not much to see
but one had plenty of light. No, there was not much to see and, frankly,
for a considerable time I didn't even attempt to perceive anything. It
was only the illuminating impression that remained. It remained
satisfactory but in a passive way. Then, about a week later, I came upon
a book which as far as I know had never attained any prominence, the
rather summary recollections of an Assistant Commissioner of Police, an
obviously able man with a strong religious strain in his character who
was appointed to his post at the time of the dynamite outrages in
London, away back in the eighties. The book was fairly interesting, very
discreet of course; and I have by now forgotten the bulk of its
contents. It contained no revelations, it ran over the surface
agreeably, and that was all. I won't even try to explain why I should
have been arrested by a little passage of about seven lines, in which
the author (I believe his name was Anderson) reproduced a short dialogue
held in the Lobby of the House of Commons after some unexpected
anarchist outrage, with the Home Secretary. I think it was Sir William
Harcourt then. He was very much irritated and the official was very
apologetic. The phrase, amongst the three which passed between them,
that struck me most was Sir W. Harcourt's angry sally: "All that's very
well. But your idea of secrecy over there seems to consist of keeping
the Home Secretary in the dark." Characteristic enough of Sir W.
Harcourt's temper but not much in itself. There must have been, however,
some sort of atmosphere in the whole incident because all of a sudden I
felt myself stimulated. And then ensued in my mind what a student of
chemistry would best understand from the analogy of the addition of the
tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of
crystallization in a test tube containing some colourless solution.

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