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By Sylvère Monod, Emeritus, Université
de Paris - Sorbonne Nouvelle
Laurence Davies and J. H. Stape, editors.
The
Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 7: 1920-1922. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. £90
VOLUME 7 of the The
Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad includes the output of
three significant years. The editors, Laurence Davies and J. H.
Stape, who preserve the high level of achievement to which the previous
volumes had accustomed us, mention the sad fact that this is the
first volume to appear since the deaths of F. R. Karl, Philip Conrad
and Bruce Harkness.
After 65 pages of introductory and editorial
material, the next 640 provide the text of all the letters written
or dictated by Conrad during those three years that have been preserved.
I failed to find anywhere in the volume any mention by the editors
of the number of letters now given to the public, many for the first
time, but a swift count yields the following figures: 280 in 1920,
197 in 1921, 282 in 1922; thus the volume contains 759 letters (or
fragments of letters, for a few are not known in their entirety,
but only from excerpts in catalogues and the like). The volume also
offers a series of excellent illustrations.
To get rid at once of the only disagreeable
part of the reviewer's task, I must mention a few imperfections,
which seem to become more inevitable these days, when the fruit
of the editors' exemplary textual labour has to pass through many
hands, sometimes in several countries, before seeing the light of
print, a light that tends to be occasionally dimmed by inferior
expertise. Misprints are few and far between, but, for instance,
"overture" becomes "overtrue" (52n.), and "to send you wife" presumably
stands for "to send your wife" (233). A thin handful of factual
errors includes a misquotation of Shakespeare (270 n. 4), a wrong
title to Martin Ray's book (494 n.1); and more might have been said
about Mme Gide's sufferings (321), for more than from chronic ill-health,
she suffered from being the wife of a very peculiar husband.
The evolution of Conrad's English is not the
editors' responsibility. My impression that it became less assured
in the later years of his career is, on the whole, reinforced by
the perusal of this volume. Admittedly, Conrad was already ageing,
often ill, nearly always hurried, weary, stressed and anxious, and
it was more or less inevitable that he should write rather less
well than in the past. His addiction to Gallicisms is by no means
a novelty; the use of "lecture" for "reading" (137) already appears
in "The End of the Tether," but "I let myself go to talk" (372),
so obviously based on the French "je
me suis laissé aller à," does not strike one as satisfactory
English. "Sailors's yarns" (383) is unfortunate. Conrad, who occasionally
deplores his bad accent in spoken English (593), none the less attempts
to teach English phonetics to a correspondent who had questioned
his ascribing to Donkin the pronunciation of "minute" as "minnyt":
"I know that the phonetic spelling of the Oxd. Dictionary is a mere
phantasy; for no one says minit, giving exactly the same sound to
both i's in that word."
No one? Robert Browning, perhaps the all-time champion of accuracy
in the pairing of sounds, rhymes "on life's one minute" with "out
of the gulf or in it" ("Old Pictures in Florence," Stanza XVIII).
But Conrad's difficulties with English do not
prevent him from most of the time writing or dictating superb and
even powerfully inventive English. The difficulties are minimal
if compared with his problems in the use of French. And that is
where Volume 7 does not quite supply all the information one might
desire. The editors deliberately disregard Conrad's mistakes about
accents; that is understandable though somewhat unfortunate, for
in French à is a completely
different word from a, and
so is où from ou.
The editors do draw attention by means of asterisks to a number
of misspellings and grammatical errors in Conrad's francophone letters,
but their asterisks seem to have been used far too sparingly. Indeed,
there is hardly one of those letters not marred by mistakes -- often
unasterisked -- that in the copybook of a French schoolchild would
be regarded as howlers. For instance, que
est (202) instead of qui
est; l'article définitif
(for défini [433]),
or je lui dit (for je
lui dis [526]).
But what do we know about the kind of control
Conrad exerted over his letters before they were sent out? They
were often written with very few minutes to spare before they were
taken to the train that would carry them to London. Besides, some
may have been dictated. And what do we know about Miss Hallowes's
command of French? This slight disappointment will of course matter
only to the volume's francophone readers; the others will find translations
of the same letters into English, which are more than adequate most
of the time, and even often talented. (One of the few exceptions
is "confined to his care" for confié
à ses soins [217], i.e., entrusted, confided).
The explanatory footnotes are first-rate, and
some are unobtrusively and delightfully humorous (see 531).
The highlights of the present volume are obviously,
and not surprisingly, as follows: there is the progress of the collected
editions of Conrad's works, the attempt he made to become a playwright
and its failure, his frequent bouts of ill-health, his astonishingly
precarious financial situation at the height of his fame and of
his commercial success, and his relationship with his agent J. B.
Pinker and, after the latter's sudden death, with Eric, his son
and successor. The usual ingredients of the Conrads' life are still
observable: his wife's operations and sufferings, reading, writing,
friendships, moving around on a small scale (mostly between Kent
and London, with the striking exception of the trip to Corsica).
But before examining the light Volume 7 throws on these major topics,
I should like to mention a few significant, though definitely minor
points, of interest in the volume.
The evolution and the uncertainties of Conrad's
relationships with a number of people are illustrated by the mode
of address he uses to each correspondent - a point returned to below.
The altered tone of his letters to his "aunt" Marguerite Poradowska
is striking; they are now few and very far from the effusiveness
of the early days (see 232). About Philippe Neel, one of the French
translators in the team supervised by Gide, Conrad is of two minds;
he writes to him in terms of admiration, gratitude, and confidence;
to other correspondents he mentions his reservations (506, 550).
To Northcliffe Conrad writes with almost fulsome respect, while
expressing himself about the same person with very little esteem
-- but then that was before his first meeting with the great man,
who certainly surprised him most favourably. Of Hugh Walpole he
always makes much, whether writing to him or about him; perhaps
his genuine appreciation of the younger writer's talent was somewhat
in excess of the merits of the case, but it was based on a strong
feeling of personal friendship, and as a return for intelligently
admiring criticism of his own works.
Then, when he writes about politics, Conrad
irresistibly discloses the highly conservative, if not reactionary
tone of his thinking (39-40, 70; on the other hand, he rejoices
at the success of the Labour party ... as the opposition [595]).
As to his religious views, a letter to Garnett expresses with heavy
irony very little respect for "the Jewish God," suspected of being
"a Futile Person" (398-99). He also appears as more sensitive to
criticism than he would like us - and himself - to believe. The
theory still is that he could not care less, that in fact he does
not read reviews of his work, but he reacts quite vividly to the
imputation that his work has anything to do with "Sclavonism." (This
had come from Mencken, in whose intelligence and talent Conrad says
he takes great delight [see 616].)
Conrad's prophetic soul lets him down when
he expresses pessimism about the future of the cinema: "I have a
sort of feeling that the bottom is about to fall out of that business"
(288), though he had earlier declared: "I prefer Cinema to Stage"
(163). A Frenchman appears in the volume, whose main title to fame
seems to lie in his having written to Conrad and received a couple
of letters from him. The editors tell us that this man, Charles
Chassé, was a writer on modern art. He was that, among other things.
He interests me because I used to meet him in the old Bibliothèque
Nationale. I regarded him as an angliciste, and indeed believed
Chassé must have been a teacher of English, although, admittedly,
when he once talked to me of a writer whose name sounded like sacré,
it took me a few seconds to understand that he was talking of Thackeray.
Chassé did write at least one book on English literature and publish
translations of Sir Thomas Browne, Gordon Craig, Jerrold, Nashe,
Shaw, Walton, and H. G. Wells.
More than one passage revives the question
to which Gene M. Moore has lately drawn much attention: "How unfinished
is Suspense?" As we all
know, Moore's answer is that, on the whole, Suspense was not unfinished,
that at any rate the novel neared completion by the time Conrad
died. Reading The Collected Letters
of those late years, one may be tempted to reverse the direction
of the query by asking "How non-unfinished was Suspense?"
When Conrad gives his future Napoleonic novel provisional titles
like The Isle of Rest (107)
or The Island of Rest (127)
he must be referring to Elba, a place the actually completed part
of the story never reaches. He says more clearly to Ford that the
novel "ends with N[apoleon]'s departure from Elba" (394). How could
the novel see the Emperor depart from Elba without visiting the
island?
To another correspondent he speaks of the novel,
"half written, of proportions which may be called either noble or
monstrous, in which Napoleon 1st will have a speaking part of about
twenty-two words." And it is as late as the end of December 1922
that Conrad assures Gide that of Suspense
"la moitié a peu près est faite" [about half is done]. As Volume
7 confirms, Conrad experienced considerable difficulties and reluctance
while working on Suspense; and did not add much to the manuscript
after December 1922 and certainly not as much matter as was already
in existence by then. He had been only too glad to take a holiday
from the arduous task of writing his "big" Napoleonic novel in order
to produce The Rover (planned,
like many of the author's full-scale novels, as a short story).
Quite a number of letters deal with literature,
either in general or in the form of Conrad's own works and those
of his friends and others. He discusses The
Rescue with John Quinn, and vigorously defends his treatment
of the Lingard-Edith idyll, of which he is rather proud: "As a matter
of fact I have never been so truly and whole-heartedly romantic
as in conducting the story of Lingard and Edith Travers to its inevitable
end. In verisimilitude, in commonsense and even in cold reason that
end could not be other than it is" (128-29). To Pinker, in connection
with The Rescue and the
future Napoleonic novel, he makes some interesting comments: "[that
novel] will have a tremendous advantage in its subject. That is
from the public point of view. From my own private point of view
I don't know that a great subject is an advantage. It increases
one's sense of responsibility and awakens all that mistrust of oneself
that has been my companion through all these literary years"
(110).
His judgement of "The Black Mate" is curt and,
I think, clear-sighted: "As to the Black Mate the sooner it is forgotten
the better" (191). The Secret Agent
naturally comes under examination when the theatrical version of
the novel is hawked about and finally staged by Benrimo. Admittedly,
it is the play that Conrad discusses, but he can never forget that
the story and characters had been created by him in the novel. He
remained attached to his "heroic old woman," Winnie's mother: "What
the subject of The Secret Agent
is I am not ready to state in a few words, not because I myself
don't know it but because it is of the sort that does not lend itself
to exact definition. All I can say is that the subject is not the
murder of Mr Verloc by his wife and what subsequently happens to
her. It is all a matter of feeling without which the existence of
Mrs Verloc's mother as a personage in the play could not be very
well justified" (297).
He is also still impressed by "The Professor"
who, he assured John Galsworthy, is "quite a serious attempt to
illustrate a mental and emotional state which had its weight in
the affairs of this world" (298). To a friend like Galsworthy he
could write intelligent and sensitive criticism of the books sent
by him, but, after asserting that he had just read In
Chancery several times, he still spoke of "the Forsythes"
(363). He also discusses Proust intelligently (624) and the Bacon-Shakespeare
controversy sensibly (526). But to a lesser star of literature named
Clarence E. Andrews he could write a letter (546) deluging that
correspondent with compliments of the utmost vagueness (about a
book dedicated to him), without any evidence that a single page
of it had impressed itself on his mind.
It is an unknown correspondent whom Conrad
treats to a statement of what we might call his philosophy of literature;
he asserts that his prefaces (better known to us as "Author's Notes")
define his attitude to life: They (and every other page of my work)
are absolutely sincere. I stand disclosed in them whole, with my
innermost thoughts. They must speak for me for I myself can say
no more. You can't call upon an artist to be explicit. It is not
his province. His appeal is to mankind's sympathies which no argument
and explanation can secure. Nobody can charge me with intentional
gloom or lack of belief in mankind - and that is enough. (424) The
other valuable pronouncement on his conception of fiction is the
well-known letter to Curle, in which he protests against attempts
to identify the originals of the real people and places his stories
are based on.
Quite a few chance phrases or paragraphs throw
some light on several aspects of Conrad's personality, not always
familiar to all. There is, for instance, his disclosure that his
"sympathies for women authors are of a much cooler kind" than for
men authors (117). His occasional lack of candour with some of his
correspondents is illustrated by his dealings with John Quinn: he
never says to Quinn in so many words that he will henceforth sell
his manuscripts to Thomas J. Wise, with whom he has found a quicker
and more remunerative market, apparently forgetting that in earlier
days Quinn had proved sufficiently generous to him and sent him
much needed moneys. The tone of Conrad's comments about Quinn in
a letter to Pinker (50) is distinctly unpleasant. He also writes
obliquely and evasively to one or two people to whom he had promised
the dedication of one of his books, which he eventually dedicated
to someone else. (Quinn, as it happens, was one of the victims of
such a last-minute change of heart, ascribed by Conrad to untoward
circumstances more or less beyond his control, and Pinker was another
[see 110].)
He may be less than truthful to the Polish
playwright Bruno Winawer when he tells him, in order to avoid the
boredom of putting him in touch with English managers or publishers:
"I don't know a single actor or actress, director, or capitalist
entrepreneur, nor, in fact, do I have anything to do with the theatre.
I must furthermore add that I have never met my publishers either
socially or in business" (300). Even to Jean-Aubry, when comparing
a letter to him on page 533 with the next (to Eric Pinker) on page
535, one finds that Conrad could issue delusive statements about
his agenda; he did not wish to meet Aubry in London on a certain
day because he devoted more of his attention and energy to a "rough
rehearsal" of The Secret Agent.
And this provides a transition to the volume's
real heavyweights volume: the drama, money, and the Pinkers. Ill-health
is another, but there is unfortunately nothing new in that respect:
from the very first page of the present collection, Conrad moans
and grumbles; often ill, he suffers from frequent attacks of his
"old enemy" the gout, which disable him more or less completely,
he finds that "one lives too long" (220). Yet on 30 October, 1922,
he could still write three long letters. But, as the editors point
out, he proudly asserts that he does not complain (142). His health
simply gets perceptibly worse with the onset of old age. The number
of days of suffering goes up; the number of days of fitness for
work goes down. That, combined with the depressive mood induced
by that physical condition as well as by serious preoccupations
of various kinds, tends to create an atmosphere of sadness over
Volume 7. There is not much joy in the world for Conrad during the
three years it covers. He repeatedly discloses his realization that
there might not be much of a future for him on this earth.
Perhaps his keen desire to become recognized
as a dramatist was linked with that perception that his career as
a writer of fiction was nearing its end. A successful play would
in a way make him newer and, as it were, younger as an author. So
he prepared a theatrical version of The
Secret Agent, and, while claiming that he did not hope for
acclaim in that field and did not fundamentally care for it (see
358), he tried very hard indeed to have his play performed; then,
after many disappointments when manager after manager let him down,
the stage version of The Secret
Agent fell into the hands of J. Harry Benrimo, apparently
not really a first-rate artist, and Conrad worked with him assiduously.
When there were actual rehearsals, he attended them, and was distressed
by the harmful hurry with which the enterprise was launched, and
the poor quality of the acting (and possibly of the stage-management,
despite the author's profuse advice).
The gist of the story is well known: there
were only a few performances; the play was reviewed on the whole
unfavourably; Conrad did not attend the première, although Jessie
did and enjoyed it, and her position as author's wife, on that occasion.
But reading the letters of those difficult weeks is quite an experience.
Conrad no longer invokes bad health to avoid appointments in London;
he is constantly going up and down between Oswalds and the theatre.
And the acuteness of his disappointment, whatever he may say about
it, is pathetic. He asserts that he had, in fact, foreseen the failure,
but also implies that the play was too hastily withdrawn just when
it began to attract audiences.
And in every letter about the play's treatment
by the press he insists on the parrot-like character of the reviews;
the drama critics repeat one another unintelligently. Conrad further
ascribes his play's failure (with the reviewers, not the general
public) to its being too unusual for those lazybones critics. In
short, the play failed because it was misunderstood, and in a way
too good rather than not good enough to please. The conclusion in
a letter to Curle is astonishing: "Really the only person that need
not feel an ass is me. I tell you this in all modesty" (585).
Probably one of the major reasons for Conrad's
rashly eager attempt to become a playwright was the hope that it
might bring in big money. For in those years he still needed big
money. And that may well strike the reader as the most unexpected
aspect of Conrad's life in the years 1920-22. He had become a commercially
successful writer shortly before the First World War; one can see
that he received fat cheques for his publications old and new and
huge sums for film rights. Yet, one can see in Volume 7 that he
was, or believed himself, perpetually short of funds. He had more
or less promised his son Borys that he would help him with a gift
of £1,000, but it turned out that the promise had been made with
a mental proviso that Conrad would deliver the sum only when he
could dispose of it. And he never could. At one point, indeed, he
expressed his readiness to invest £500 in a financial venture in
which Curle was taking part (24). The plan never took real shape.
And, judging from the correspondence with
Pinker, the astonishing reality appears to be that Conrad did not
know the precise state of his finances. The large sums that came
- irregularly, of course - from his publishers went into his account
at the office of Pinker, who, on the whole, husbanded them to the
best of their mutual interests. When a payment had to be made by
Conrad, he applied to Pinker, either for cash or a bank payment.
Encouraged by the vague impression that there was plenty of money
in his account, Conrad did not enquire about details (see the letter
quoted in the Introduction, xxx), and he spent freely.
Only when Pinker drew his attention to the
amount of his spending did Conrad realize the footing on which he
had been living (253). He then treated himself as the repentant
schoolboy who had misbehaved, and Pinker as the stern taskmaster
that set him right. He committed himself to not exceeding a certain
sum per annum, per term, per month, per week (see his elaborate
and touching letter, 271-76). But he soon found himself clamouring
for small, or not so small, increments to the amount fixed by himself
before they had agreed about it (404, 408). There were, he pointed
out, all kinds of unforeseen, perhaps unforeseeable, calls upon
his purse. Taxes, among other things, had not entered into his calculations,
or not to a sufficient extent.
Conrad, quite rightly, trusted Pinker almost
implicitly in financial matters. After J. B.'s sudden death, he
tried to transfer the responsibility for his affairs, the management
of them, and the trust that went with them, on to the younger and
not quite so trustworthy shoulders of the son, Eric Pinker. Meanwhile,
it is true that Conrad lived on a rather lavish scale, with a whole
staff, or "crew," as he preferred to call them, of servants, a car
and chauffeur, entertaining friends on weekends, and also, to be
fair to him, helping members of his family, like the Zagórska cousins,
with gifts of money or even regular pensions. The weeks Jessie had
to spend in hospitals, the many operations she had to undergo, the
nurses who had to be recruited to look after her, all cost a lot
of money. Still, it is puzzling and in a way disappointing to find
Conrad so desperately trying to get little additional sums that
would not go into the Pinker account; he did collect payments of
£100 or £50, or sometimes even less, by printing as pamphlets short
works by him (articles or stories) in limited private editions and
consenting to the boredom of signing each copy, but mainly by selling
as autographs every scrap of paper written by his own hand, or sometimes
typescripts of something dictated, but bearing visible marks of
his handwritten corrections (see 132).
Wise soon became his great resource in that
field; he would buy practically any small thing Conrad proposed
to sell him. Conrad even offered to give Wise something not yet
written (495). There is something truly sad in this trade, in seeing
Conrad trying to make money with almost indecent haste of anything
that seemed likely to be paid for. Two examples of the consequences
will suffice to illustrate this point: more than once, Conrad had
sold a "manuscript" so early that he was obliged to call it back
on loan from the purchaser because he had not kept a copy of a text
and needed it to correct proofs. As to the manuscript of Suspense,
it was sold to Wise in 1921, before it had even a provisional title
and long before it was left (more or less) unfinished at the author's
death (see 377). We don't know - the reader of Volume 7 doesn't
find out - what Conrad did with that kind of money. All we can say
is that the need for ever more money haunted Conrad, and that he
may or must have been influenced by the fear of dying soon and leaving
Jessie to fend for herself, with Borys not quite settled in life,
and John still at school. About one of Wise's purchases, Conrad
writes "God knows I wanted the cash" (72). If that is the case,
perhaps God knew more about Conrad's financial plight than the novelist
himself did.
It has already become obvious that by 1920
and until his own death J. B. Pinker played a considerable part
in Conrad's life. The disagreements of 1910 were forgotten. In the
months that had followed their violent quarrel, Conrad on the whole
avoided writing to his agent and when he did used the driest and
coldest possible modes of address. In the early 'twenties, he wrote
to Pinker constantly, often at great length, and consulted him on
all kinds of questions, not merely about the publication of his
writings. His own health and Jessie's, the operations, John's schooling,
Borys's jobs and the debts he made (307-11), there was no topic
that appeared too intimate or too private to be discussed.
And as is well known, Pinker and his wife
and daughter memorably joined the Conrads in their Ajaccio hotel
and shared their Corsican holiday. That being the case, the sudden
death of his old agent and friend shortly after his arrival in New
York, in February 1922, appears as a tragic event for Conrad and
as the great divide in Volume 7, which clearly falls into two parts:
before Pinker's death, and after it. Conrad must have remembered,
among other things, that he had explicitly advised his agent not
to travel to the States while in such poor health (396). Admittedly,
Pinker's son Eric succeeded his father in the business and Conrad
gradually got into the habit of confiding in the younger man - whom
he had known as a child - and asking his advice on business. But
the relationship does not seem to have ever become quite so warmly
affectionate as the feeling that linked the two old accomplices
who had weathered so many difficulties together.
Conrad's ways of addressing his various correspondents
accurately reflect the strength of his feelings for them at a given
moment. From that point of view, it is interesting to examine certain
variations in the present horde of Conrad letters. Before looking
at the fattest sheaf, those to J. B. Pinker, let us glance at a
few other sequences. The Aubry correspondence is interesting in
being consistently in French; Conrad's openings in his letters to
his translator vary between "Cher ami," "Cher Jean," "Très cher,"
"Très cher ami," and "Très cher Jean." A still greater variety of
openings occurs in the letters to Richard Curle, with fairly tame
forms like "Dear Dick," "My dear Curle," "[My] Dear Richard," "My
dear R.C.," but also a few uses of "Dearest Dick" and "Dearest Richard";
after which a relapse into the almost icy "My dear Curle" comes
as a surprise and a disappointment. One is not surprised to see
similar coldness in a late letter to "My dear Ford" (whom Conrad
had so long continued to call Hueffer), or in the "My dear Will"
bestowed on Rothenstein.
Major Gardiner gets a little more warmth, as
well as bilingualism; a letter to him begins with "My very dear
friend" and includes a "mon très cher" in the body. Sidney Colvin
is called "My very dear Colvin," but the correspondents treated
to the "Dearest" that appears as the most enthusiastic treatment
by Conrad are Edward (Garnett), Jack (Galsworthy, with the variant
"Dearest Jack and Ada" when he wrote to them as a couple [282]),
and Hugh Walpole. Eric Pinker, when he becomes Conrad's star correspondent
after February 1922, has to go up the scale slowly before reaching
the top and becoming fully qualified for "Dearest Eric" treatment,
but he does get there before the year's end. In many of the letters
to the young man, Conrad mentions J. B. Pinker as "father," meaning
"your father," of course, as one may do with a person known as a
child, even when that person has become an adult.
J. B. Pinker is addressed in no fewer than
twenty ways. The differences between some of the forms are slight
("J B." or "J. B" instead of "J. B.," for instance. But it is striking
that by far the most frequent opening of a letter from Conrad to
Pinker in these years is "Dearest J. B." That phrase appears some
time in the autumn of 1920 and soon becomes increasingly predominant
over all others. "Dearest J. B." seems to combine familiarity and
affection. It is used in 75 letters. To which must be added one
"My dearest J. B.," a letter that begins with "My dear Pinker" but
contains a "No my dearest J. B." later on; there is also one "Dearest
old friend," and two letters opening with "My dearest Pinker." So
that, all told, there are about eighty of those intimately affectionate
addresses to Pinker in hardly over two years of correspondence.
Conrad realized that his letters to Pinker were priceless (132-33).
Altogether, there is in Volume 7 of The
Collected Letters so much evidence of the excellent work
carried out by the editors that the indebtedness of Conrad students
to their labours is immense. And the volume also brilliantly confirms
that Conrad himself is a really inexhaustible source of interest
and pleasure.
© 2005 Sylvère Monod
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