Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  Conrad was, needless to say, absentminded, but while his main characteristics—irritability and deference—may seem contradictory, they can, perhaps, be explained reciprocally. His natural state was one of disquiet bordering on anxiety, and such was his concern for others that the slightest setback suffered by one of his friends would provoke in him an attack of gout, an illness he had contracted as a young man in the Malay Archipelago and which tormented him for the rest of his life. When his son, Borys, was fighting in the First World War, his wife returned home one night, having been away all day, and was received by a tearful maid who told her that Mr Conrad had informed the servants that Borys had been killed and had, since then, been closeted in their son’s room. And yet, added the maid, no letter or telegram had arrived. When Jessie George Conrad, legs shaking, went upstairs to find her distraught husband and ask him how he could be so sure, he replied, offended: “Can’t I have a presentiment as well as you? I know he has been killed!” Presently, Conrad grew a little calmer and fell asleep. His presentiment proved false, but, it seems, once his imagination was let loose, there was no stopping it. He lived in a permanent state of extreme tension, and that was the source of his irritability, which he could barely control and yet which, once it had passed, left neither trace nor memory. When his wife was giving birth to their first son, the aforementioned Borys, Conrad was pacing anxiously up and down in the garden. Suddenly he heard a child cry and strode indignantly over to the kitchen to tell the maid: “Send that child away at once; it will disturb Mrs Conrad!” Apparently the maid shouted back at him even more indignantly: “It’s your own child, sir!”

  Conrad was so irritable that whenever he dropped his pen, instead of picking it up at once and carrying on writing, he would spend several minutes exasperatedly drumming his fingers on the desk as if bemoaning what had occurred. His character remained an enigma to those around him. His inner state of agitation would sometimes cause him to fall silent for long periods, even in the company of his friends, who would wait patiently until he resumed the conversation, in which, ordinarily, he was extremely animated, displaying a remarkable gift for storytelling. They say that his tone then was more like the tone in his book of essays, The Mirror of the Sea, than in his stories or novels. After one of these interminable and apparently ruminative silences, he would usually come out with some unlikely question that had nothing whatsoever to do with what they had been talking about up until then, for example: “What do you think of Mussolini?”

  Conrad wore a monocle and disliked poetry. According to his wife, he only ever gave his approval to two books of verse, one by a young Frenchman whose name she could not recall and the other by his friend Arthur Symons. There are, however, those who maintain that he liked Keats and hated Shelley. The author he hated most, though, was Dostoyevsky. He hated him because he was Russian, because he was mad, and because he was confused, and the mere mention of his name would provoke a furious outburst. He devoured books, with Flaubert and Maupassant heading the list of those he most admired, and took such pleasure in prose that, long before proposing to the woman who would become his wife (that is, when they were still not as yet close companions), he turned up one night bearing a bundle of papers and suggested that the young woman read a few of these pages—part of his second novel—out loud. Full of fear and trembling, Jessie George obeyed, but Conrad’s own nervousness did not help: “Never mind that part,” he would say. “That is not going to stand—never mind it—start three lines lower; over leaf, over leaf.” He even criticised her diction: “Speak distinctly; if you’re tired, say so; don’t eat your words. You English are all alike, you make the same sound for every letter.” The odd thing is that this same persnickety Conrad had, until the end of his days, an extremely thick foreign accent in the language which, as a writer, he came to master better than any author of his day.

  Conrad did not get married until he was thirty-eight and when he finally made his proposal, after they had known each other and been friends for several years, it proved to be as pessimistic as some of his own stories, for he announced that he did not have very long to live and had absolutely no intention of having children. The optimistic part came afterwards and consisted in him adding that, such as his life was, he thought that he and Jessie might spend a few happy years together. The bride-to-be’s mother commented that: “she didn’t quite see why he wished to get married”. Conrad, nevertheless, was a devoted husband: he often brought his wife flowers and, each time he finished a book, he would make her some generous gift.

  Despite having lost his parents at an early age and despite preserving few memories of them, he was a man much preoccupied with family tradition and with his forebears, even going so far as to express his repeated regret that a great-uncle of his, retreating with Napoleon from Moscow, had been so hard pressed by hunger that he was forced to find temporary respite from it, along with one or two other officers, at the expense of “a luckless Lithuanian dog”. The fact that a relative of his should have consumed dog-meat seemed to him a disgrace, and one for which, moreover, he held Bonaparte himself indirectly to blame.

  Conrad died quite suddenly, on August 3, 1924, at his house in Kent, at the age of sixty-six. He had felt unwell the previous day, but nothing suggested that death was imminent. That is why, when death came, he was alone in his room, resting. His wife, who was in the room next door, heard him shout: “Here …!”, followed by a second stifled word that she could not make out, and then a noise. Conrad had slipped out of his chair onto the floor.

  Just as he would have liked to erase his great-uncle’s Lithuanian escapade, Conrad would, in later life, occasionally deny that he had written certain pieces (articles, stories, chapters written in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford) which were undoubtedly his and had even been published under his name. He would, nonetheless, deny them and claim that he could not remember them. And when he was shown manuscripts and it was proven to him that the pages in question had undeniably come from his pen, he would simply shrug his shoulders, one of his most characteristic gestures, and lapse into one of his silences. All those who met him agree that he was a man of great irony, but an irony of a kind that his acquired English compatriots did not always catch, or which, perhaps, they did not understand.

  Isak Dinesen in Old Age

  THE TRUE IMAGE of Isak Dinesen was, for a long time, that of a ghostly old lady, elegant and deeply enigmatic, until the cinema replaced it with the excessively romantic and rather drippy image of a long-suffering, colonial aristocrat. Not that Baroness Blixen did not have a tendency toward the romantic and the aristocratic, but it would be fairer to say that she played at it, at least she did once she became Isak Dinesen, that is, once she began to be published under that and other names, and returned to Denmark after her long, unsuccessful years in Africa. “We wear masks as we grow older, the masks of our age, and the young … think that we are the way we look. But that is not the case.”

  When, in 1959, she made her first visit to America, the country where her books had achieved the most success and been received with most interest, she was preceded by endless rumours and mysteries: she is, in fact, a man; he is, in fact, a woman; Isak Dinesen is actually two people, brother and sister; Isak Dinesen lived in Boston in 1870; she’s from Paris really; he lives in Elsinore; she spends most of her time in London; she’s a nun; he’s very hospitable and welcomes young writers as his guests; she’s rarely seen and lives like a recluse; she writes in French; no, in English; no, in Danish; no, in … When she finally made her appearance at the numerous parties to which she was invited and at the packed public readings where she told her stories entirely
without the aid of notes, they discovered that she was a frail, eccentric old lady, deeply lined and with matchstick-thin arms, all dressed in black, with a turban on her head, diamonds in her ears and large amounts of kohl around her eyes. Despite this, the legend continued, albeit along more concrete lines: according to the Americans, she lived on a diet of oysters and champagne, which was not quite true, for she also consumed prawns, asparagus, grapes and tea. When Isak Dinesen expressed a desire to meet Marilyn Monroe, the novelist Carson McCullers managed to arrange this, and, at a famous lunch, the three women shared a table with Arthur Miller, the husband par excellence, who, surprised by the Baroness’s eating habits, asked which doctor had prescribed this diet of oysters and champagne. They say that America has never seen the like of the scornful look she gave him: “Doctor?” she said. “The doctors are horrified, but I love champagne and I love oysters and they do me good.” Miller went on to make some comment about protein, and it seems that the second scornful look she gave him will also never be seen again on American soil: “I don’t know anything about that,” came her reply, “I am an old woman and I eat what agrees with me.” The Baroness got on much better with Marilyn Monroe.

  The truth is that Isak Dinesen lived mainly at Rungstedlund, her childhood home in Denmark, and was obliged to lead a very sedentary life due to her many ailments, the most enduring of which had nothing at all to do with age but with the syphilis she had contracted after a year of marriage to Baron Bror Blixen, who, after much vacillation, she eventually divorced. This husband was the twin brother of the man she had loved from girlhood, and bonds formed through a third party are perhaps the most difficult to break.

  Having syphilis obliged her, early on, to renounce sex, and seeing that there was no help to be had from God and bearing in mind how terrible it was for a young woman to be denied “the right to love”, Isak Dinesen promised her soul to the Devil, and he promised her, in return, that everything she experienced thenceforth would become a story. That, at least, is what she told a non-lover—she was twice his age and three times as intelligent—the Danish poet Thorkild Bjørnvig, with whom she made a strange pact when she was sixty-four and whom she dominated and kept in a state of complete subjugation for four years. She enjoyed frightening this non-lover with her abrupt changes of mood, her calculated surprises, her charm and her disconcerting but always persuasive views. On one occasion, she startled him with this explanation of the nature of her being: “You are better than I am, that is the problem,” she told him. “The difference between us is that you have an immortal soul and I do not. It is the same with mermaids and water sprites, they do not have one either. They live longer than those with immortal souls, but when they die, they disappear totally and without a trace. But who can entertain and please and transport people better than a water sprite when she is present, when she plays and enchants and makes people dance more wildly and love more ardently than they normally do? She will disappear and all that she will leave behind is a streak of water along the floor.”

  When this poet (whom she urged to leave both wife and child in order to spend long periods “creating” in her house in Rungstedlund) proved inadequate to the task (as was nearly always the case), the Baroness would grow angry and mistreat him, as she would when he dared to express any reservations about her own writings. But Isak Dinesen was never constant and, after some enormous row, she was capable of behaving perfectly charmingly at their next meeting, as if nothing had happened, even congratulating her non-lover on his incorruptible critical sense. Such transformations were typical of her, and the poet Bjørnvig tells how, one night, for reasons that escaped even him, Isak Dinesen flew into a rage and was transformed into a decrepit, gesticulating fury, shrivelled up with anger, leaving him feeling wretched and paralysed. Afterwards, when the poet had returned to his room, the Baroness slipped in and sat down on the edge of his bed: now, however, she looked radiant, transfigured, as lovely as a seventeen-year-old. Björnvig confessed that had he not personally witnessed the transformation, he himself would not have believed it possible.

  The Baroness also provided this non-lover and her friends with moments of enormous pleasure, enchantment and reverie. On one occasion, and in the middle of a delightful evening, she got up and left the room. She came back a little later carrying a revolver, which she held levelled at Björnvig for quite some time. According to him, he was not in the least taken aback by this because, in the state of perfect happiness in which he found himself, death would not have mattered. Needless to say, Bjørnvig did not publish anything during the four years that this rapture lasted.

  Isak Dinesen claimed to have poor sight, yet she could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away, and could see the new moon when it was not yet visible. When she saw it, she would curtsy to it three times, and, she claimed, you must never look at it through glass, because that spelled bad luck. She played the piano and the flute, preferably Schubert on the first and Handel on the second, and in the evenings, she would often recite poems by her favourite poet, Heine, and sometimes by Goethe, whom she detested, but nevertheless recited. She loathed Dostoyevsky, although she admired him too, and was a stalwart of Shakespeare. She would frequently quote these lines by Heine: “You wanted to be happy, infinitely happy or infinitely wretched, proud heart, and now you are wretched.”

  According to those who looked into them, her kohl-lined eyes were full of secrets; they never blinked and remained fixed on whatever they were looking at. Isak Dinesen’s father had committed suicide when she was ten years old, and she had told stories ever since she was a child. Her younger sister as she climbed wearily into bed would sometimes plead with her: “Oh, Tania, not tonight!” In her old age, on the other hand, her hosts or her guests would beg her to tell them stories. She would occasionally oblige, like someone making a gift. Every Thursday, she would have supper in the company of a little boy for whom she had purchased a suit appropriate for the occasion: he was the son of her cook, and she had discovered him one night spying on her while she dined alone. She liked to be provocative, but always in a gentle and ironic way, as when she expressed doubts about absolute democracy, fearing for the fate of the elite: “There should always be a few who are versed in the classics.” She claimed to live her life according to the rules of classical tragedy and would have brought up the children she never had to do the same.

  In the end, she spent several months of each year in a clinic, and the rest, as always, at Rungstedlund, where she died peacefully on September 7, 1962, having listened to Brahms during the evening. She smoked incessantly until the end of her life, which she departed at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried at the foot of a beech tree she herself had chosen, on the Rungsted coast. According to Lawrence Durrell, she would have shot a fond, ironic glance at anyone daring to mourn her death. “I am, in fact, three thousand years old and have dined with Socrates.”

  Isak Dinesen made these words her own: “There is no mystery in art. Do the things you can see, they will show you what you cannot see.”

  James Joyce in his Poses

  PEOPLE USED TO say of James Joyce that he seemed sad and tired, and he described himself on one occasion as “a jealous, lonely, dissatisfied, proud man”. This description was, of course, given in private, in a letter to his wife, Nora Barnacle, to whom he confided far more intimate and daring things than he did to any other person. Not that one should deduce from this that he did not also intend the description for posterity, to which he confided still more daring things.

  As a young man, he was already rather pompous and full of himself, concerned only with what he would write and with his
early (and, later, perennial) hatred of Ireland and the Irish. When he had still written only a few poems, he asked his brother Stanislaus: “Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own … for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.” When he was older his comparisons may have been less eucharistic and more modest, but he was always convinced of the extreme importance of his work, even before it existed. James Joyce appears to have been one of those artists who so ostentatiously adopt the pose of genius that they end up persuading their contemporaries and several generations more that they not only are geniuses, but that they always—indubitably and irremissibly—were. In keeping with this pose, he was famous because he did not care whether people read him or not, nor, of course, what they thought of him; yet, when Ulysses came out—after enormous difficulties finding a publisher—he did all he could to promote it and was even occasionally seen wrapping up a copy for a customer in the famous bookshop Shakespeare & Co., under whose seal and impress the immortal book was finally published. It is also known that he waited, alert and expectant, for any mention or review in the press and wrote courteous thank-you notes to anyone who took an interest in the novel. When, much later, the publication of Finnegans Wake received a cool reception, he felt hurt and unhappy, and spent the last two years of his life nursing these feelings, which is not a pleasant way to spend one’s years, especially when they are one’s last.