Joseph Conrad E-Book

Ford Madox Ford

• Herausgeber: DigiCat
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Ford Madox Ford's book 'Joseph Conrad' is an in-depth analysis of the life and works of the renowned author Joseph Conrad. Ford delves into Conrad's literary style, exploring the themes of colonialism, morality, and human nature that are prevalent in Conrad's novels. Through meticulous research and insightful commentary, Ford offers readers a comprehensive look into Conrad's writing, highlighting his unique narrative techniques and complex characters. Ford's book serves as a valuable resource for students and scholars alike, providing a deeper understanding of Conrad's contributions to English literature in the early 20th century. Ford Madox Ford, a close friend and collaborator of Joseph Conrad, brings a personal perspective to his analysis of Conrad's works. As a fellow writer and literary figure, Ford is able to offer unique insights into Conrad's creative process and the influences that shaped his writing. Ford's expertise on Conrad's life and works makes 'Joseph Conrad' a must-read for anyone interested in the literary history of this period. I highly recommend Ford Madox Ford's 'Joseph Conrad' to readers who appreciate detailed literary analysis and a deep dive into the works of one of the most significant authors of the early 20th century. Ford's meticulous research and engaging writing style make this book a valuable addition to any literature lover's collection.

Leseprobe

Ford Madox Ford

Joseph Conrad

 

EAN 8596547186397

DigiCat, 2022 Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents

PREFACE

PART I

“ C’EST TOI QUI DORS DANS L’OMBRE. O SACRÉ SOUVENIR ”

PART I

“C’EST TOI QUI DORS DANS L’OMBRE”

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

PART II

EXCELLENCY? A FEW GOATS....

II

III

PART III

IT IS ABOVE ALL TO MAKE YOU SEE....

I

II

General Effect

Impressionism

Selection

Selection (Speeches)

Conversations

Surprise

Style

Cadence

Structure

Philosophy, Etc.

Progression d’Effet

Language

PART IV

THAT, TOO, IS ROMANCE...

L’Envoi

APPENDIX

PREFACE

Table of Contents

Nine years ago the writer had occasion to make a hasty will. Since one of the provisions of this document appointed Conrad the writer’s literary executor we fell to discussing the question of literary biographies in general and our own in particular. We hit, as we generally did, very quickly upon a formula, both having a very great aversion from the usual official biography for men of letters whose lives are generally uneventful. But we agreed that should a writer’s life have interests beyond the mere writing upon which he had employed himself this life might well be the subject of a monograph. It should then be written by an artist and be a work of art. To write: “Joseph Conrad Kurzeniowski was born on such a day of such a year in the town of ‘So and So’ in the Government of Kieff” and so to continue would not conduce to such a rendering as this great man desired. So, here, to the measure of the ability vouchsafed, you have a projection of Joseph Conrad as, little by little, he revealed himself to a human being during many years of close intimacy. It is so that, by degrees, Lord Jim appeared to Marlowe, or that every human soul by degrees appears to every other human soul. For, according to our view of the thing, a novel should be the biography of a man or of an affair, and a biography whether of a man or ofan affair should be a novel, both being, if they are efficiently performed, renderings of such affairs as are our human lives.

This then is a novel, not a monograph; a portrait, not a narration: for what it shall prove to be worth, a work of art, not a compilation. It is conducted exactly along the lines laid down by us, both for the novel which is biography and for the biography which is a novel. It is the rendering of an affair intended first of all to make you see the subject in his scenery. It contains no documentation at all; for it no dates have been looked up, even all the quotations but two have been left unverified, coming from the writer’s memory. It is the writer’s impression of a writer who avowed himself impressionist. Where the writer’s memory has proved to be at fault over a detail afterwards out of curiosity looked up, the writer has allowed the fault to remain on the page; but as to the truth of the impression as a whole the writer believes that no man would care—or dare—to impugn it. It was that that Joseph Conrad asked for: the task has been accomplished with the most pious scrupulosity. For something human was to him dearer than the wealth of the Indies.

Guermantes, Seine et Marne, August.Bruges, October 5th, 1924.

PART I

Table of Contents

“C’EST TOI QUI DORS DANS L’OMBRE O SACRÉ SOUVENIR”

Table of Contents

FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM JOSEPH CONRAD TO THE AUTHOR.

Dear Ford,

Since you wish to quote I have expanded a little the passage in my letter. Of course you will use what you find fit.

I don't think your memory renders me justice as to my attitude to the early E. R. The early E. R. is the only literary business that, in Bacon's phraseology, "came home to my bosom". The mere fact that it was the occasion of you putting on me that gentle but persistent pressure which extracted from the depths of my then despondency the stuff of the "Personal Record" would be enough to make its memory dear. Do you care to be reminded that the editing of the first number was finished in that farmhouse we occupied near Luton. You arrived one evening with your amiable myrmidons and parcels of copy. I shall never forget the cold of that night, the black grates, the guttering candles, the dimmed lamps-and the desperate stillness of that house, where women and children were innocently sleeping, when you sought me out at 2 a.m. in my dismal study to make me concentrate suddenly on a two-page notice of the "Ile des Pinguins". A marvellously successful instance of editorial tyranny! I suppose you were justified. The Number One of the E. R. could not have come out with two blank pages in it. It would have been too sensational. I have forgiven you long ago.

My only grievance against the early E. R. is that it didn't last long enough. If I say that I am curious to see what you will make of this venture it isn't because I have the slightest doubts of your consistency. You have a perfect right to say that you are "rather unchangeable". Unlike the Serpent (which is wise) you will die in your original skin. So I have no doubt that the Review will be truly Fordian-at all costs. But for one of your early men it will be interesting to see what men you will find now and what you will get out of them in these changed times.

I am afraid the source of the Personal Record fount is dried up. No longer the same man. Thanks to your proposal I'd like to do something for his sake or old times-but I daresay I am not worth having now. I'll drop you a line in a day or two. My mind is a blank at this moment.

Yours J. Conrad.

PART I

Table of Contents

“C’EST TOI QUI DORS DANS L’OMBRE”

I

Table of Contents

He was small rather than large in height; very broad in the shoulder and long in the arm; dark in complexion with black hair and a clipped black beard. He had the gestures of a Frenchman who shrugs his shoulders frequently. When you had really secured his attention he would insert a monocle into his right eye and scrutinise your face from very near as a watchmaker looks into the works of a watch. He entered a room with his head held high, rather stiffly and with a haughty manner, moving his head once semi-circularly. In this one movement he had expressed to himself the room and its contents; his haughtiness was due to his determination to master that room, not to dominate its occupants, his chief passion being the realisation of aspects to himself.

In the Pent Farm, beneath the South Downs, there was a great kitchen with a wavy brick floor. On this floor sat a great many cats: they were needed to keep down rats and they got some milk of a morning. Every morning a wild robin with a red breast and greenish-khaki body would hop, not fly, across the floor of the kitchen between the waiting cats. The cats would avert their glances, pulsing their sheathed claws in and out. The robin would hop through the inner doorway of the kitchen, across an angle of the low dining-room and so up the bedroom stairs. When the maid with the morning letters and the tea-tray opened the bedroom door the robin would fly through the low, dark room and perch on a comb, stuck into a brush on the dressing-table, against the long, low, leaded windows. It awaited crumbs of bread and tiny morsels of lump sugar from the tea-tray. It had never been taught to go on these adventures. This robin attended at the opening of the first letter that, more than a quarter of a century ago, the writer received from Joseph Conrad. The robin watched with its beady eyes the sheet of blue-grey paper with the large rather ornamental handwriting.... It was afterwards drowned in a cream-jug which took away from its aspect of a supernatural visitant.

Above the large kitchen was the large Men’s Room where the hinds of the farm had been used to sleep. It was entered by a ladder which was removed at night so that the hinds should not murder the farmer or do worse to the farmer’s wife. The low windows of this low room were leaded in diamond shapes, the glass frosted with the green of great age. One of these windows had inscribed upon it, no doubt by a diamond, the name John Kemp and the date 1822. Conrad always objected to John Kemp as a name not sufficiently aristocratic for the hero of Romance who was the grandson of an earl, but the writer liked it and it remained so in the book.

Years before that, looking through the pages of Dickens’s All the Year Round for woodcuts contributed by Ford Madox Brown upon whose biography he had been engaged, the writer had come upon a short rendering of the official account of the trial of Aaron Smith. This had been the last trial for piracy that had ever been held at the Old Bailey and the prisoner was acquitted. The story told by him in the dock was sufficiently that of Romance, as it now stands. It struck the writer at once after the reading of the first few paragraphs—that here indeed was what we used to call a subject, with a tone of voice as if the word had been italicised. For certain subjects will grip you with a force almost supernatural, as if something came from behind the printed, the written or the spoken word, or from within the aura of the observed incident in actual life, and caught you by the throat, really saying: Treat me. So in the dusky air of the British Museum Reading Room whilst that first perusal was being made it was almost as if the genie of the place exclaimed: Treat this subject. If you do it will mean fortune; if not, lifelong ill-luck. It brought fortune.

The first treatment of that story by the writer was of an incredible thinness. It was like the whisper of a nonagenarian and the writer had tried to make it like the whisper of a nonagenarian. It was finished just before, in 1898 or so, Conrad first came to see the writer at Limpsfield.... Why the writer should ever have thought of writing of pirates, heaven knows, or why, having determined to write of pirates, it should have been his ambition to treat them as if in terms of a very faded manuscript of a Greek play! But that was certainly his ambition and, as it proved, his ambition was certainly granted to him to achieve. Every sentence had a dying fall and every paragraph faded out. The last sentences of that original draft ran: Above our heads a nightingale (did something: poured out its soul, as like as not, or poured out its melody on the summer air, the cadence calling there for eleven syllables). As it was June it sang a trifle hoarsely.... The reader will observe that the writer had then already read his Trois Contes, just as the first words of Conrad’s first book were pencilled on the fly-leaves and margins of Madame Bovary. The last cadences, then, of Herodias run: “Et tous trois, ayant pris la tète de Jokanaan s’en allaient vers Galilé. Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient alternativement.”... As cadence the later sentences are an exact pastiche of the former. In each the first contains nineteen syllables; the concluding one commences with As it was, and is distinguished by the u sounds of ‘June’ and ‘lourd’ and the or sounds of ‘hoarse’ and ‘portaient.’ It was in that way that, before the writer and Conrad met, they had studied their Flaubert....

Conrad came round the corner of the house carrying a small child; that did not impede his slightly stiff gait and the semi-circular motion of his head as he took in the odd residence, the lettuces protected by wire-netting from the rabbits, or the immense view that lay before the cottage. He was conducted by Mr. Edward Garnett. In those days the writer had been overcome by one of those fits of agricultural enthusiasm that have overwhelmed him every few years, so that such descriptive writers as have attended to him have given you his picture in a startling alternation as a Piccadilly dude in top-hat, morning coat and spats, and as an extremely dirty agricultural labourer. Mr. Garnett lived an acre or so up the hill; Mr. Conrad and his family were staying on Limpsfield Chart. It was in those days Mr. Garnett’s ambition to appear what the French call lézardé: he might have been a very, a very long lizard, indistinguishable, save for his spectacles, from the monstrous stones of his cavernous and troglodytic residence. From his mansion the writer’s two-roomed cottage might have been a volcanic fragment, thrown off. Mr. Garnett frequently reproved the writer for wearing dark-grey frieze. It caused, he said, a blot on the Limpsfield hill-side into whose tones one should sink. The writer was engrossed in carrying out experiments, suggested by Professor Gressent of the Sorbonne in Paris. He was trying to make ten lettuces grow where before had been ten thousand nettles and was writing articles for the Outlook on the usage of the potato as an extirpator of thistles, in sand. That is accepted as good farming now.

Upon the writer Conrad made no impression at all. Mr. Conrad was the author of Almayer’s Folly, a great book of a romantic fashion, but written too much in the style of Alphonse Daudet, whom the writer had outgrown at school, knowing the Lettres de Mon Moulin at eighteen by heart. A great, new writer then. But as to great writers or artists this writer even then en avait soupé, cradled in the proof-sheets of Rossetti, with Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, Hall Caine (Sir Something Hall Caine) and all the Pre-Raphaelites for the commonest objects of his landscape. And Mr. Garnett used to lead the great New, one by one, to poke up the writer as if he had been a mangy lion. The writer no doubt roared. In that way Mr. Garnett led up Stephen Crane, Conrad, Lord Ollivier, now H.B.M. Minister for India, the wife of the Secretary of the Fabian Society, the Secretary of the Fabian Society.... A whole procession: precisely as if one had been a mangy lion in a travelling menagerie. Or perhaps a man at the zoo! And Mr. Garnett would do the poking up, telling the distinguished that the writer was possessed of too much individuality ever to find readers.... It was the most depressing period of a life not lacking in depressing periods.

The writer perhaps roared. Obviously the writer roared on that occasion, but he certainly rather disliked Conrad as you dislike those who pass before your cage and get you poked up. We went afterwards with several children up to the sloping lawn of Mr. Garnett’s residence. It is at that point that a real remembrance of this beautiful genius comes to the writer.... One of the children crawled over the sloping grass as weak new-born kittens crawl; another on the other hand, with an engrossed face, a little older, whilst Conrad stuck his eyeglass into his eye, progressed for all the world like a cul de jatte of our Paris streets. Two fists stuck into the ground, one short leg projected, the other curled underneath, blonde and determined, it levered itself over the grass with its hands and between its arms. And Conrad threw back his head and laughed; his eyeglass fell out; he stuck it in his eye again and gazed at the child; threw back his head and roared, and uttered odd words in Marseilles French.... Immediately afterwards Mr. Garnett assured Mr. Conrad for the third time that the writer was too individual ever to have a public for his writings. It was of course high praise....

So the writer left Limpsfield and returned to the Pent Farm. A complete veil dropped between himself and Conrad. And then suddenly came the letter at whose reading the robin attended. The writer had indeed roared at Limpsfield. Obviously he had told Conrad the story of John-Kemp-Aaron-Smith, for Conrad asked him to consider the idea of a collaboration over that story—which Mr. Garnett had told him was too individual ever to find even a publisher. It would otherwise have been an impertinence on the part of Conrad. And Conrad was never impertinent. His politeness even to his grocer was always Oriental.

The writer’s answer was the obvious one that Conrad had better come and see for himself what he had let himself in for. And Conrad came. But that time Conrad came.... He was like the Sultan of the True Believers walking into a slave market. And for the writer that he remained until his lamentable death. He was a gentleman adventurer who had sailed with Drake. Elizabethan: it was that that he was. He has been called Slav; he has been called Oriental; he has been called a Romantic. He was none of these except on the surface, to his grocer; a man has to have a surface to present to his grocer or to afternoon callers. He himself was just Man: homo europeaus sapiens, attuned to the late sixteenth century. In all the world he would have loved nothing better than to singe the king of Spain’s beard if it had not been to write a good book. Well, he outwitted the Dutch navy in Malaysia and wrote the greatest books in the world.

He had an extraordinary old mare with such long ears that you took her for a mule. She was called Nancy. And a black wicker-work chaise. And he cared for these things with the lively passion of a man: what he had must be ship-shape: reins, bit, head-stall, feed.... I remember once in an inn yard at Winchelsea an enormous, fat, six-feet two, lousy, greyish scoundrel of a stable-man; leaning back against a wall he was, his face quivering, the colour of billsticker’s paste. He panted: “I’ve heard tell of the British liaon; but protect me from the Rooshian bear....” Russian being as near as he could get to Polish. Conrad had been talking to him: he had been stealing the mare’s feed of oats....

With a hypersensitiveness to impressions the writer, too, remembers Conrad throwing tea-cups into the fireplace during a discussion over the divine right of kings—a discussion with a lady who alleged light-heartedly that Marie Antoinette had been guilty of treason to France. The whole of the discussion the writer did not hear because he was discoursing to a very deaf gentleman on the genealogical tree of the Dering family. Nor indeed can Conrad have thrown the tea-cups into the fire since on going away the lady said: “What a charming man Mr. Conrad is! I must see him often.”

It was in short the passion of Conrad that you noticed first and that passion he applied to his writing: his darkness, his wide gestures, his eyes in which the light was like the glow of a volcano. This is not over-writing: his personality deserved these tributes. It was chivalry too. After his discussion with the lady over the divine right of kings he was pale, exhausted, panting almost. That was because he remembered Marie Antoinette in the Conciergerie, so ill-clad, so deprived of her children, so pallid and unkempt that to him she was real and he remembered her. And she was dead and a cheerfully heartless fine-lady should not make fun—which was what it amounted to—of dead queens. Dog should not eat dog; fine ladies in silks should not gnaw the reputations of ladies fine that once wore finer silks and were now dead. It was the want of imagination in all humanity, thus in little summed up and presented to him, that aroused in him such passion and called for such self-control. For it is to be hoped that it is apparent that it was only to the writer that the impression remained of tea-cups thrown into the fireplace. The writer has seen Conrad just so enraged when the Bishop of London, returning from St. Petersburg after Bloody Monday remarked that Russians would always have troubles until they were inculcated with the hearty British love of field games! He detested Russians, his passion was rather for Bonapartists than for the Bourbons, but that imbecilities should be uttered as to the lot of the suffering maddened him.

It is characteristic of Conrad: it is most characteristic of Conrad that when, after five years, he and the writer got to the last paragraphs of Romance and when the writer had written: For suffering is the lot of man, Conrad should have added: but not inevitable failure or worthless despair which is without end: suffering the mark of manhood which bears within its pain the hope of felicity, like a jewel set in iron. He had the mark of manhood!

He came then to the Pent to see what he was in for. He came in for passion—and suffering. The writer has seldom seen such suffering as was gone through by Conrad during the reading of that first draft of Romance. Conrad had expected a drama of Cuban pirates, immense and gloomy, like Salammbo, with a reddish illumination, passing as it were upon a distant stage.... For the first chapter or two—those passing at the Pent Farm—he was silent. Then he became—silent. For he seemed to have about him a capacity for as it were degrees of intensity of his silence. No doubt he listened to the first pages with a movement or so to light a cigarette, with a relaxing of the limbs or a change in the position in the chair. These must gradually have ceased.

The parlour at the Pent was a deep room with a beam across the middle of the low ceiling; small, pink monthly roses always showed insignificant blooms that looked over the window sills. An immense tythe-barn with a great, thatched, black-mossy roof filled in the whole view if you sat by the fireplace; occasionally you would see a rat progressing musingly over this surface. If you approached the window you saw a narrow lawn running to a low brick wall, after which the level dropped to a great stack-yard floored usually with straw and not unusually with a bullock or two in it. Conrad and the writer planted an orange tree, grown from a pip, under the low north wall of this narrow garden. It was still alive in nineteen-seventeen, growing just up to the coping of the low wall where its progress was cut off by the north wind. It was a very quiet, simple room.

The writer sat in the grandfather’s chair, his back to the window, beside the fireplace, reading, his manuscript held up to the light: Conrad sat forward on a rush-bottomed armchair listening intently. (For how many years did the writer and Conrad not sit there like that!)

We began that reading after lunch of a shortish day; the lamps were brought in along with the tea. During that interval Conrad showed nervous and depressed; sunk in on himself and hardly answering questions. Conrad being then almost a stranger, this was the writer’s first experience of to what Conrad’s depression over an artistic problem could amount: it was like a strong current that operated on a whole roomful.... With his back, then, to the lamp, and Conrad completely in the shadow the writer read on, just having the impression that his hearer’s limbs were all bunched together in his chair and that they contracted gradually. There were many strong shadows in the low room where most of the light was on the ceiling.

Conrad began to groan.... It was by then fairly apparent to the writer that Conrad disapproved of the treatment of the adventures of John Kemp; at any rate in Cuba; and the writer had a sufficient sense already of Conrad’s temperament to be disinclined to ask whether his guest were ill. He feels now the sense of as it were dumb obstinacy with which he read on into those now vocal shadows in the fireside warmth.... The interruptions grew in length of ejaculation. They became: “O! O!... O God, my dear Hueffer....”... And towards the end: “O God, my dear faller, how is it possible....” The writer finished with the statement that, as it was June the nightingale sang a trifle hoarsely. This zoological observation, in spite of the cadence, gave the final touch to Conrad’s dejection. The writer’s voice having stopped he exclaimed: “What? What? What’s that?” When he heard that that was the end he groaned and said: “Good God!”—for the last time. There are writers—French writers—who can keep the final revelation of a whole long novel back until the last three words. For this he had hoped. The writer would rather have died than have so machined a book.