Further Thoughts on Joseph Conrad

Letters from Conrad, 1895-1924. Edited with Introduction and Notes by Edward Garnett. (Nonesuch Press. 25s.) THIS book is another example of the excellent work done by this unique press, who tend more and more to combine serviceability with the beauty of their productions. Here is a simple, handsome volume, in perfect taste, which one is not afraid to carry about. It contains a large number of letters that did not appear in M. Jean Aubry's Life, which we reviewed

recently. Then we dwelled rather heavily on the lonely, repellent, and foreign quality in Conrad, seeking out the cause of it in the consciousness of exile which haunted him. That aspect was only one side of the whole man, and we were led to emphasize it, perhaps, in an effort to escape from the ceremonial of praise, indiscriminate and damaging, which always attends the appearance of the first biography of a great man.

Before considering Conrad again, we must say something of Mr. Garnett, who was his most intimate friend. It is no easy matter to be the friend of giants, for the strain of looking up to them is apt to rick one's neck. Mr. Garnett, however, does not suffer that way. He has an eminence to stand upon, so that he can look, levelly and serenely, at the figures whose fame he has done so much to ensure. That eminence is a structure built of modesty, sincerity, and right taste. For forty years he has been counsel to the world of publishers. That means a lifetime of self-effacing drudgery. He does not want our praise, however, while he can recollect that such artists as Henry James, Conrad, Stephen Crane, Davies, and Frost have reverenced him, and acknowledged their debts. Here is what Conrad wrote to him in 1924, the last year of the sailor-poet's life :—

" My absolute belief in your sincerity in questions of literary art has relieved me of that load of weary doubt which I have not been able to shake off before. It relieved me thoroughly, because the belief in the absolute unflawed honesty of your judgment has been one of the mainstays of my literary life. Even if led astray, even if apparently mistaken, there is that in you which remains impeccable in its essence."

These letters of Conrad are an open invitation into the workshop. There never was a writer so completely and s►ngle-mindedly devoted to his craft. Through more than three hundred pages, representing a span of thirty years, the theme is work, work, work. Other things come in as incidentals. He marries, and takes his bride to a lonely island of Normandy. But it does not interfere with his work, for he writes, " She is a very good comrade and no bother at all. As a matter of fact, I like to have her with me." He hears that his son, fighting in France, has gone forward in an attack. The opening sentence in a letter tells this news, after Which the concern is with work.

We learn somewhat intimately of the scrupulous devotion with which he sought the mot juste, sitting behind his arrested pen in a kind of deathly equilibrium of intensity, waiting like Flaubert for words to form and flow. He suffered double pain, for not only had he to contend with the remoteness of his ideas, but also he was struggling to express them in a medium

that never ceased to be foreign to him. Of this last difficulty we wrote here at some length when reviewing M. Aubry's book. Of the struggle with his ideas he writes, " I feel nothing clearly. And I am frightened when I remember that I have to drag it all out of myself. Other writers have some starting-point ; something to catch hold of. They start from an anecdote—from a newspaper paragraph. They lean on dialect, or on tradition, or on history, or on the prejudice or fad of the hour. But at any rate they know something to begin with—while I don't. I have had some impressions, some sensations, in my time. And it's all faded, my very being seems faded and thin like the ghost of a blonde and sentimental woman, haunting romantic ruins pervaded by rats." But he never lost courage in the attack, for, as he says, " in the world of ideas attempt and experiment is the dawn of evolution."

Even in the unrevised sentences of these hastily written letters we find again and again evidence of his increasing skill in the manipulation of English, that exasperatingly elastic material. Here, for instance, is a touch of mastery, where the intractable means, has been conquered. He is describing the people on the island off Normandy :

" They are dirty and delightful and very Catholic. And most of them are women. The men fish in Iceland, on the Great Banks of Newfoundland and devil knows where else. Only a few old fellows forgotten by the capricious death that dwells upon the sea shuffle about amongst the stones of this sterile land and seem to wonder peevishly at having been left so long alive."

Now, having seen what an indefatigable worker he was, it is interesting to learn by what principle his efforts were inspired. In so doing, we discover the difference between the academie method and the method of the creative artist, and can utter a warning to the advocates of fussy activity, who spend their lives misinterpreting Carlyle's words about the infinite capacity for taking pains. For with all this monstrous conscien- tiousness, which made every hour of Conrad's working days a sheer torment, we fmd a sort of fatalism that we recognize at once as a belief in inspiration and a vague reliance on revelation, a procedure which has always been suspect to the preceptors nod logicians who nevertlidelis found their theories upon its positive achievements. Conrad writes : " I always told you I was a kind of inspired humbug." That was in his early days. As late as 1918 he says, " Intelligence itself is a

thing of no great account except for us to torment ourselves with. For directly you begin to use it, the questions of right and wrong arise, and these are things of the air with no connection whatever with the fundamental realities of life. Whereas in the region of feeling there is nothing of the kind.

Feelings are, and in submitting to them we can avoid neither death nor suffering which are our common lot, but we can bear, them in peace."

Mr. Garnett says that " Conrad worked by intuition after a

preliminary meditation, just as his criticism of other men's work was intuitive and not the fruit of considered theory." Tothis we can add a phrase from one of the letters. Theory is a cold and lying toinhstone of departed truth." So the artist goes on, as it were, by rule of thumb, trusting to his diabolical and fickle luck, or, rather, distrusting it :

"Nothing now can unmake my mistake," ho says of a piece of bad work. " I shall try, but I shall try without faith, because all my work is produced unconsciously (so to speak) and I cannot meddle to any purpose with what is within myself. It isn't in me to improve what has got itself written."

Yet this is from the man whose agony in composition equalled that Of Dickens. Forster- tells us how Dickens would pace round and round the streets of Bloomsbury, tears of nervous exhaustion streaming down his face. No wonder that such men are advocates of indolence, that they cry out for 'release from the demon of accurate expression. " Oh," groans Conrad, " laziness is a sacred thing. Nobody is lazy to accomplish things without any effort—and things that can only be attained by effort are not worth having."

What, then, was the technique upon which "Conrad founded his living phrase and image ? Here it is, revealed in an anecdote by Mr. Garnett : " I remember while sitting with him one evening in the Café Royal I asked him, after a painted lady had brushed haughtily past our table, what he had specially noticed about her. The dirt in her nostril,' he replied instantly."

That observant eye is responsible for the physical side of his work. Of the deeper qualities ; the inward gaze, the recognition of abysmal horrors, the mitigating beauty and heroism, we can say no more now, except in a poor, trite way that here is the Conrad whom we reverence—and shrink from.

RICHARD CHURCH.