Notes on My Books
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Joseph Conrad >> Notes on My Books
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It was at first for me a mental change, disturbing a quieted-down
imagination, in which strange forms, sharp in outline but imperfectly
apprehended, appeared and claimed attention as crystals will do by their
bizarre and unexpected shapes. One fell to musing before the
phenomenon--even of the past: of South America, a continent of crude
sunshine and brutal revolutions, of the sea, the vast expanse of salt
waters, the mirror of heaven's frowns and smiles, the reflector of the
world's light. Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of
a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made
might as if indifferent to heaven's frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer
of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story,
depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any
setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.
Irresistibly the town became the background for the ensuing period of
deep and tentative meditations. Endless vistas opened before me in
various directions. It would take years to find the right way! It seemed
to take years!... Slowly the dawning conviction of Mrs. Verloc's
maternal passion grew up to a flame between me and that background,
tingeing it with its secret ardour and receiving from it in exchange
some of its own sombre colouring. At last the story of Winnie Verloc
stood out complete from the days of her childhood to the end,
unproportioned as yet, with everything still on the first plan, as it
were; but ready now to be dealt with. It was a matter of about three
days.
_This_ book is _that_ story, reduced to manageable proportions, its
whole course suggested and centred round the absurd cruelty of the
Greenwich Park explosion. I had there a task I will not say arduous but
of the most absorbing difficulty. But it had to be done. It was a
necessity. The figures grouped about Mrs. Verloc and related directly or
indirectly to her tragic suspicion that "life doesn't stand much looking
into," are the outcome of that very necessity. Personally I have never
had any doubt of the reality of Mrs. Verloc's story; but it had to be
disengaged from its obscurity in that immense town, it had to be made
credible, I don't mean so much as to her soul but as to her
surroundings, not so much as to her psychology but as to her humanity.
For the surroundings hints were not lacking. I had to fight hard to keep
at arms-length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over
London in my early days, lest they should rush in and overwhelm each
page of the story as these emerged one after another from a mood as
serious in feeling and thought as any in which I ever wrote a line. In
that respect I really think that "The Secret Agent" is a perfectly
genuine piece of work. Even the purely artistic purpose, that of
applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with
deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would
enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in
pity. It is one of the minor satisfactions of my writing life that
having taken that resolve I did manage, it seems to me, to carry it
right through to the end. As to the personages whom the absolute
necessity of the case--Mrs. Verloc's case--brings out in front of the
London background, from them, too, I obtained those little satisfactions
which really count for so much against the mass of oppressive doubts
that haunt so persistently on every attempt at creative work. For
instance, of Mr. Vladimir himself (who was fair game for a caricatural
presentation) I was gratified to hear that an experienced man of the
world had said "that Conrad must have been in touch with that sphere or
else has an excellent intuition of things," because Mr. Vladimir was
"not only possible in detail but quite right in essentials." Then a
visitor from America informed me that all sorts of revolutionary
refugees in New York would have it that the book was written by somebody
who knew a lot about them. This seemed to me a very high compliment,
considering that, as a matter of hard fact, I had seen even less of
their kind than the omniscient friend who gave me the first suggestion
for the novel. I have no doubt, however, that there had been moments
during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist, I
won't say more convinced than they but certainly cherishing a more
concentrated purpose than any of them had ever done in the whole course
of his life. I don't say this to boast. I was simply attending to my
business. In the matter of all my books I have always attended to my
business. I have attended to it with complete self-surrender. And this
statement, too, is not a boast. I could not have done otherwise. It
would have bored me too much to make-believe.
The suggestions for certain personages of the tale, both law-abiding and
lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps, here and there, some
reader may have recognized. They are not very recondite. But I am not
concerned here to legitimize any of those people, and even as to my
general view of the moral reactions as between the criminal and the
police all I will venture to say is that it seems to me to be at least
arguable.
The twelve years that have elapsed since the publication of the book
have not changed my attitude. I do not regret having written it. Lately,
circumstances, which have nothing to do with the general tenor of this
Preface, have compelled me to strip this tale of the literary robe of
indignant scorn it has cost me so much to fit on it decently, years ago.
I have been forced, so to speak, to look upon its bare bones. I confess
that it makes a grisly skeleton. But still I will submit that telling
Winnie Verloc's story to its anarchistic end of utter desolation,
madness and despair, and telling it as I have told it here, I have not
intended to commit gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind.
J. C.
1920.
A SET OF SIX
The six stories in this volume are the result of some three or four
years of occasional work. The dates of their writing are far apart,
their origins are various. None of them are connected directly with
personal experiences. In all of them the facts are inherently true, by
which I mean that they are not only possible but that they have actually
happened. For instance, the last story in the volume the one I call
Pathetic, whose first title is Il Conde (mis-spelt by-the-by) is an
almost verbatim transcript of the tale told me by a very charming old
gentleman whom I met in Italy. I don't mean to say it is only that.
Anybody can see that it is something more than a verbatim report, but
where he left off and where I began must be left to the acute
discrimination of the reader who may be interested in the problem. I
don't mean to say that the problem is worth the trouble. What I am
certain of, however, is that it is not to be solved, for I am not at all
clear about it myself by this time. All I can say is that the
personality of the narrator was extremely suggestive quite apart from
the story he was telling me. I heard a few years ago that he had died
far away from his beloved Naples where that "abominable adventure" did
really happen to him.
Thus the genealogy of Il Conde is simple. It is not the case with the
other stories. Various strains contributed to their composition, and the
nature of many of those I have forgotten, not having the habit of making
notes either before or after the fact. I mean the fact of writing a
story. What I remember best about Caspar Ruiz is that it was written, or
at any rate begun, within a month of finishing "Nostromo," but apart
from the locality, and that a pretty wide one (all the South American
Continent), the novel and the story have nothing in common, neither
mood, nor intention and, certainly, not the style. The manner for the
most part is that of General Santierra, and that old warrior, I note
with satisfaction, is very true to himself all through. Looking now
dispassionately at the various ways in which this story could have been
presented I can't honestly think the General superfluous. It is he, an
old man talking of the days of his youth, who characterizes the whole
narrative and gives it an air of actuality which I doubt whether I could
have achieved without his help. In the mere writing his existence of
course was of no help at all, because the whole thing had to be
carefully kept within the frame of his simple mind. But all this is but
a laborious searching of memories. My present feeling is that the story
could not have been told otherwise. The hint for Gaspar Ruiz, the man, I
found in a book by Captain Basil Hall, R. N., who was for some time,
between the years 1824 and 1828, senior officer of a small British
Squadron on the West Coast of South America. His book published in the
thirties obtained a certain celebrity and I suppose is to be found still
in some libraries. The curious who may be mistrusting my imagination are
referred to that printed document, Vol. II, I forget the page, but it is
somewhere not far from the end. Another document connected with this
story is a letter of a biting and ironic kind from a friend then in
Burma, passing certain strictures upon "the gentleman with the gun on
his back" which I do not intend to make accessible to the public. Yet
the gun episode did really happen, or at least I am bound to believe it
because I remember it, described in an extremely matter-of-fact tone, in
some book I read in my boyhood; and I am not going to discard the
beliefs of my boyhood for anybody on earth.
The Brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is, like Il Conde,
associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on
warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship
but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain
Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second
Officer. Captain Blake was, of all my commanders, the one I remember
with the greatest affection. I have sketched in his personality, without
however mentioning his name, in the first paper of "The Mirror of the
Sea." In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute
and it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the
mouth of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The
existence of the brute was a fact. The end of the brute as related in
the story is also a fact, well-known at the time though it really
happened to another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless
character, which certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously
adapted it to the needs of my story thinking that I had there something
in the nature of poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not
cast a shadow upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of
tales.
Of The Informer and The Anarchist I will say next to nothing. The
pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth
disentangling at this distance of time. I found them and here they are.
The discriminating reader will guess that I have found them within my
mind; but how they or their elements came in there I have forgotten for
the most part; and for the rest I really don't see why I should give
myself away more than I have done already.
It remains for me only now to mention The Duel, the longest story in the
book. That story attained the dignity of publication all by itself in a
small illustrated volume, under the title, "The Point of Honour." That
was many years ago. It has been since reinstated in its proper place,
which is the place it occupies in this volume, in all the subsequent
editions of my work. Its pedigree is extremely simple. It springs from a
ten-line paragraph in a small provincial paper published in the South of
France. That paragraph, occasioned by a duel with a fatal ending between
two well-known Parisian personalities, referred for some reason or
other to the "well-known fact" of two officers in Napoleon's Grand Army
having fought a series of duels in the midst of great wars and on some
futile pretext. The pretext was never disclosed. I had therefore to
invent it; and I think that, given the character of the two officers
which I had to invent, too, I have made it sufficiently convincing by
the mere force of its absurdity. The truth is that in my mind the story
is nothing but a serious and even earnest attempt at a bit of historical
fiction. I had heard in my boyhood a good deal of the great Napoleonic
legend. I had a genuine feeling that I would find myself at home in it,
and The Duel is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers,
of that presumption. Personally I have no qualms of conscience about
this piece of work. The story might have been better told of course. All
one's work might have been better done; but this is the sort of
reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every
one of his conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an
evanescent reverie. How many of those visions have I seen vanish in my
time! This one, however, has remained, a testimony, if you like, to my
courage or a proof of my rashness. What I care to remember best is the
testimony of some French readers who volunteered the opinion that in
those hundred pages or so I had managed to render "wonderfully" the
spirit of the whole epoch. Exaggeration of kindness no doubt; but even
so I hug it still to my breast, because in truth that is exactly what I
was trying to capture in my small net: the Spirit of the Epoch--never
purely militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike
in its exaltation of sentiment--naively heroic in its faith.
J. C.
1920.
UNDER WESTERN EYES
It must be admitted that by the mere force of circumstances "Under
Western Eyes" has become already a sort of historical novel dealing with
the past.
This reflection bears entirely upon the events of the tale; but being as
a whole an attempt to render not so much the political state as the
psychology of Russia itself, I venture to hope that it has not lost all
its interest. I am encouraged in this flattering belief by noticing
that in many articles on Russian affairs of the present day reference is
made to certain sayings and opinions uttered in the pages that follow,
in a manner testifying to the clearness of my vision and the correctness
of my judgment. I need not say that in writing this novel I had no other
object in view than to express imaginatively the general truth which
underlies its action, together with my honest convictions as to the
moral complexion of certain facts more or less known to the whole world.
As to the actual creation I may say that when I began to write I had a
distinct conception of the first part only, with the three figures of
Haldin, Razumov, and Councillor Mikulin, defined exactly in my mind. It
was only after I had finished writing the first part that the whole
story revealed itself to me in its tragic character and in the march of
its events as unavoidable and sufficiently ample in its outline to give
free play to my creative instinct and to the dramatic possibilities of
the subject.
The course of action need not be explained. It has suggested itself more
as a matter of feeling than a matter of thinking. It is the result not
of a special experience but of general knowledge, fortified by earnest
meditation. My greatest anxiety was in being able to strike and sustain
the note of scrupulous fairness. The obligation of absolute fairness was
imposed on me historically and hereditarily, by the peculiar experience
of race and family, and, in addition, by my primary conviction that
truth alone is the justification of any fiction which can make the least
claim to the quality of art or may hope to take its place in the culture
of men and women of its time. I had never been called before to a
greater effort of detachment: detachment from all passions, prejudices
and even from personal memories. "Under Western Eyes" on its first
appearance in England was a failure with the public, perhaps because of
that very detachment. I obtained my reward some six years later when I
first heard that the book had found universal recognition in Russia and
had been re-published there in many editions.
The various figures playing their part in the story also owe their
existence to no special experience but to the general knowledge of the
condition of Russia and of the moral and emotional reactions of the
Russian temperament to the pressure of tyrannical lawlessness, which, in
general human terms, could be reduced to the formula of senseless
desperation provoked by senseless tyranny. What I was concerned with
mainly was the aspect, the character, and the fate of the individuals as
they appeared to the Western Eyes of the old teacher of languages. He
himself has been much criticized; but I will not at this late hour
undertake to justify his existence. He was useful to me and therefore I
think that he must be useful to the reader both in the way of comment
and by the part he plays in the development of the story. In my desire
to produce the effect of actuality it seemed to me indispensable to have
an eye-witness of the transactions in Geneva. I needed also a
sympathetic friend for Miss Haldin, who otherwise would have been too
much alone and unsupported to be perfectly credible. She would have had
no one to whom she could give a glimpse of her idealistic faith, of her
great heart, and of her simple emotions.
Razumov is treated sympathetically. Why should he not be? He is an
ordinary young man, with a healthy capacity for work and sane
ambitions. He has an average conscience. If he is slightly abnormal it
is only in his sensitiveness to his position. Being nobody's child he
feels rather more keenly than another would that he is a Russian--or he
is nothing. He is perfectly right in looking on all Russia as his
heritage. The sanguinary futility of the crimes and the sacrifices
seething in that amorphous mass envelops and crushes him. But I don't
think that in his distraction he is ever monstrous. Nobody is exhibited
as a monster here--neither the simple-minded Tekla nor the wrong-headed
Sophia Antonovna. Peter Ivanovitch and Madame de S. are fair game. They
are the apes of a sinister jungle and are treated as their grimaces
deserve. As to Nikita--nicknamed Necator--he is the perfect flower of
the terroristic wilderness. What troubled me most in dealing with him
was not his monstrosity but his banality. He has been exhibited to the
public eye for years in so-called "disclosures" in newspaper articles,
in secret histories, in sensational novels.
The most terrifying reflection (I am speaking now for myself) is that
all these people are not the product of the exceptional but of the
general--of the normality of their place, and time, and race. The
ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and
in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less
imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism
encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange
conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall
of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all
they can effect is merely a change of names. The oppressors and the
oppressed are all Russians together; and the world is brought once more
face to face with the truth of the saying that the tiger cannot change
his stripes nor the leopard his spots.
J. C.
1920.
A PERSONAL RECORD
The re-issue of this book in a new form does not, strictly speaking,
require another Preface. But since this is distinctly a place for
personal remarks I take the opportunity to refer in this Author's Note
to two points arising from certain statements about myself I have
noticed of late in the press.
One of them bears upon the question of language. I have always felt
myself looked upon somewhat in the light of a phenomenon, a position
which outside the circus world cannot be regarded as desirable. It needs
a special temperament for one to derive much gratification from the fact
of being able to do freakish things intentionally, and, as it were, from
mere vanity.
The fact of my not writing in my native language has been of course
commented upon frequently in reviews and notices of my various works and
in the more extended critical articles. I suppose that was unavoidable;
and indeed these comments were of the most flattering kind to one's
vanity. But in that matter I have no vanity that could be flattered. I
could not have it. The first object of this Note is to disclaim any
merit there might have been in an act of deliberate volition.
The impression of my having exercised a choice between the two
languages, French and English, both foreign to me, has got abroad
somehow. That impression is erroneous. It originated, I believe, in an
article written by Sir Hugh Clifford and published in the year '98, I
think, of the last century. Some time before, Sir Hugh Clifford came to
see me. He is, if not the first, then one of the first two friends I
made for myself by my work, the other being Mr. Cunninghame Graham, who,
characteristically enough, had been captivated by my story An Outpost of
Progress. These friendships which have endured to this day I count
amongst my precious possessions.
Mr. Hugh Clifford (he was not decorated then) had just published his
first volume of Malay sketches. I was naturally delighted to see him and
infinitely gratified by the kind things he found to say about my first
books and some of my early short stories, the action of which is placed
in the Malay Archipelago. I remember that after saying many things which
ought to have made me blush to the roots of my hair with outraged
modesty, he ended by telling me with the uncompromising yet kindly
firmness of a man accustomed to speak unpalatable truths even to
Oriental potentates (for their own good of course) that as a matter of
fact I didn't know anything about Malays. I was perfectly aware of
this. I have never pretended to any such knowledge, and I was moved--I
wonder to this day at my impertinence--to retort: "Of course I don't
know anything about Malays. If I knew only one hundredth part of what
you and Frank Swettenham know of Malays I would make everybody sit up."
He went on looking kindly (but firmly) at me and then we both burst out
laughing. In the course of that most welcome visit twenty years ago,
which I remember so well, we talked of many things; the characteristics
of various languages was one of them, and it is on that day that my
friend carried away with him the impression that I had exercised a
deliberate choice between French and English. Later, when moved by his
friendship (no empty word to him) to write a study in the _North
American Review_ on Joseph Conrad he conveyed that impression to the
public.
This misapprehension, for it is nothing else, was no doubt my fault. I
must have expressed myself badly in the course of a friendly and
intimate talk when one doesn't watch one's phrases carefully. My
recollection of what I meant to say is: that _had I been under the
necessity_ of making a choice between the two, and though I knew French
fairly well and was familiar with it from infancy, I would have been
afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly "crystallized."
This, I believe, was the word I used. And then we passed to other
matters. I had to tell him a little about myself; and what he told me of
his work in the East, his own particular East of which I had but the
mistiest, short glimpse, was of the most absorbing interest. The present
Governor of Nigeria may not remember that conversation as well as I do,
but I am sure that he will not mind this, what in diplomatic language is
called "rectification" of a statement made to him by an obscure writer
his generous sympathy had prompted him to seek out and make his friend.
The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as
natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have
a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent
part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor
adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as
to adoption--well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted
by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the
stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I
truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my
still plastic character.
It was a very intimate action and for that very reason it is too
mysterious to explain. The task would be as impossible as trying to
explain love at first sight. There was something in this conjunction of
exulting, almost physical recognition, the same sort of emotional
surrender and the same pride of possession, all united in the wonder of
a great discovery; but there was on it none of that shadow of dreadful
doubt that falls on the very flame of our perishable passions. One knew
very well that this was for ever.
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