The moment I cease moving, I am invaded by swarms of swimming rats, who in the winter are so voracious that they attack even man who is motionless. I have tried it. And have been bitten. Oh my dear man you can’t think how artful fearless ferocious they are. I rigged up two bits of chain, lying loose on my prow and poop with a string by which I could shake them when attacked. For two nights the dodge acted. The swarms came (up the anchor rope) and nuzzled me: I shook the chains: the beasts plopped overboard. Then they got used to the noise and sneered. Then they bit the strings. Then they bit my toes and woke me shrieking and shaking with fear.
The very same day that he was writing this letter (whether truth or fiction doesn’t really matter: one cannot doubt the imaginative vividness of the experience) he was penning, as if he had the whole of a well-fed life before him, some such slow decorative sentimental description as this of the dead St Hugh singing before King Arthur:
The pretty eyes were closed, the eyes of the innocent perfectly-satisfied happy face of the little red-gleaming head which reposed on the pillow of scarlet samite: but the smiling mouth was a little open, the rosy lips rhythmically moving, letting glimpses of little white teeth be seen . . .
That to me is the real dramatic interest of Hubert’s Arthur.
For on the whole it is a dull book of small literary merit, though it will be of interest to those already interested in the man, who can catch the moments when he drops the Hewlett mask and reveals more indirectly than in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole his painfully divided personality. Reading his description of St Hugh, ‘the sweet and inerrable canorous voice of the dead’, one has to believe in the genuineness of his nostalgia – for the Catholic Church, for innocence. But at the same time one cannot fail to notice the homosexual, sadistic element in the lushness and tenderness of his epithets.
When he writes in the person of Hubert de Burgh:
They would not let me have my will (which was for the life of a quiet clergyman). . . . So once every day since that time, I have cursed those monks out of a full heart,
one pities the spoiled priest; when he describes Arthur,
the proud gait of the stainless pure secure in himself, wholly perfect in himself, severe with himself as with all, strong in disgust of ill, utterly careless save to keep high, clean, cold, armed, intact, apart, glistening with candid candour both of heart and of aspect, like a flower, like a maid, like a star.
one recognizes the potential sanctity of the man, just as one recognizes the really devilish mind which gives the formula for throat-cutting with the same relish as in his book on the Borgias he had translated a recipe for cooking a goose alive. He is an obvious example to illustrate Mr T. S. Eliot’s remark in his study of the demonic influence:
Most people are only a very little alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility: it is only when they are so awakened that they are capable of real Good, but that at the same time they become first capable of Evil.
1935
REMEMBERING MR JONES
THIS book*9 is as much a memorial to Edward Garnett as to Conrad: a memorial to the greatest of all publishers’ readers, the man behind the scenes to whom we owe Conrad’s works. A publisher’s claim to the discovery of an author is suspect: it is the author who usually discovers the publisher, and the publisher’s part is simply to pay a reliable man to recognize merit when it is brought to him by parcel-post. But we have Conrad’s own testimony that had it not been for Edward Garnett’s tactfully subdued encouragement he might never have written another book after Almayer’s Folly, and one suspects it was Garnett who organized critical opinion so that Conrad had the support of his peers during the years of popular neglect. As for Garnett himself nothing could be more illuminating than his son’s biographical note. Edward Garnett was brought up by parents who blended ‘Victorian respectability with complete liberality of opinion. The children were undisciplined and completely untidy; only when they exhibited anything like worldliness or self-seeking were their parents surprised and shocked.’
Conrad’s prefaces are not like James’s, an elaborate reconstruction of technical aims. They are not prefaces to which novelists will turn so frequently as readers: they are about life as much as about art, about the words or the actions which for one reason or another were excluded from the novels – Almayer suddenly breaking out at breakfast on the subject of the ambiguous Willems, then on an expedition up-river with some Arabs, ‘One thing’s certain; if he finds anything worth having up there they will poison him like a dog’; about the prototype of Mr Jones of Victory:
Mr Jones (or whatever his name was) did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the Island of St Thomas in the West Indies (in the year ’75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said: ‘A professional sharper?’ and got for answer: ‘He’s a terror; but I must say that up to a certain point he will play fair . . .’ I wonder what that point was. I never saw him again because I believe he went straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other ports of call in the direction of Aspinall.
They make an amusing comparison, these germs of stories, anecdotes remarkable as a rule for their anarchy (an appalling Negro in Haiti) or ambiguity (as when Lord Jim passed across Conrad’s vision – ‘One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by – appealing – significant – under a cloud – perfectly silent’) – they make an amusing comparison with those neat little dinner-table stories which set James off constructing his more intricate and deeper fictions, holding up his hand in deprecation to prevent the whole story coming out (‘clumsy Life again at her stupid work’), just as the settings are socially widely dissimilar: Conrad on a small and dirty schooner in the Gulf of Mexico listening to the ferocious Ricardo’s low communings ‘with his familiar devil’, while the old Spanish gentleman to whom he served as confidant and retainer lay dying ‘in the dark and unspeakable cudd’; and James on Christmas Eve, before the table ‘that glowed safe and fair through the brown London night’, listening to the anecdotes of his ‘amiable friend’. It was a strange fate which brought these two to settle within a few miles of each other and produce from material gained at such odd extremes of life two of the great English novels of the last fifty years: The Spoils of Poynton and Victory.
The thought would have pleased Conrad. It would have satisfied what was left of his religious sense, and that was little more than a distant memory of the Sanctus bell and the incense. James spent his life working towards and round the Catholic Church, fascinated and repelled and absorbent; Conrad was born a Catholic and ended – formally – in consecrated ground, but all he retained of Catholicism was the ironic sense of an omniscience and of the final unimportance of human life under the watching eyes. Edward Garnett brings up again the old legend of Slavic influence which Conrad expressly denied. The Polish people are not Slavs and Conrad’s similarity is to the French, once a Catholic nation, to the author for example of La Condition Humaine: the rhetoric of an abandoned faith. ‘The mental degradation to which a man’s intelligence is exposed on its way through life’: ‘the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil’: in scattered phrases you get the memories of a creed working like poetry through the agnostic prose.
1937
THE DOMESTIC BACKGROUND
THE domestic background is of interest: to know how a writer with the peculiar sensitivity we call genius compromises with family life. There is usually some compromise; few writers have had the ruthless egotism of Joseph Conrad who, at the birth of his first chil
d, delayed the doctor whom he had been sent to fetch by sitting down with him and eating a second breakfast. The trouble is that a writer’s home, just as much as the world outside, is his raw material. His wife’s or a child’s sickness Conrad couldn’t help unconsciously regarding them, as Henry James regarded the germinal anecdote at the dinner table, as something to cut short when he had had enough human pain for his purpose. ‘Something human’, he put as epigraph to one of his novels, quoting Grimm, ‘is dearer to me than the wealth of all the world.’ But no quotation more misrepresented him in his home, if Mrs Conrad’s memory is accurate.*10 Out of a long marriage she has remembered nothing tender, nothing considerate. On her own part, yes; she is the heroine of every anecdote.
It makes rather repellent reading, this long record of slights, grievances, verbal brutalities. Is it a true portrait? We are dealing with a mind curiously naïve (on one occasion she refers to Edward Thomas in uniform, wearing his khaki ‘without ostentation, but correct in every detail’), unable to realize imaginatively her husband’s devotion to his art, a mind peculiarly retentive of injuries. The triviality of her attacks on Ford Madox Ford, for example, is astonishing. For how many years has the grievance over a laundry bill fermented in this not very generous brain? After a quarter of a century the fact that Henry James served Mrs Hueffer first at tea has not been forgotten.
She writes of Ford that he has reviled Conrad ‘when he is beyond the power of defending himself’. The truth is that no one did more than Ford to preserve Conrad’s fame, and no one has done more than Mrs Conrad to injure it in this portrait she has drawn of a man monstrously selfish, who grudged the money he gave his children, who avoided responsibilities by taking to his bed, who was unfaithful to her in his old age. Of this last story we should have known nothing if it were not for Mrs Conrad’s dark hints and evasions here. ‘I made no comment’: this is the phrase with which the story of his slights so often ends. But I do not think she is conscious of its complacency any more than she is conscious that the phrase with which she describes herself at the end of her book, one who has ‘the privilege and the immense satisfaction of being regarded as the guardian of his memory’, must seem to her readers either heartless or hypocritical.
It would be easy to cast doubt upon these ungrammatical revelations (on one occasion her memory fails her completely in the course of a paragraph). But there is obviously no conscious dishonesty in the one-sided record; the writer does not realize how damaging it is. ‘The dear form’, ‘the dear fellow’, ‘the beloved face’, one need not believe that these are meaningless endearments; it is simply that her mind is of a kind which harbours slights more easily than acts of kindness. She suffered – you cannot help believing that – suffered bitterly in this marriage, but it has never occurred to her that Conrad suffered too:
From the sound next door (we have three rooms) I know that the pain has aroused Borys from his feverish doze. I won’t go to him. It’s no use. Presently I shall give him his salicylate, take his temperature, and then go and elaborate a little more of the conversation of Mr Verloc with his wife. It is very important that the conversation of Mr Verloc and his wife should be elaborated – made more effective – more true to the character and the situation of these people.
By Jove! I’ve got to hold myself with both hands not to burst into a laugh which would scare wife, baby, and the other invalid – let alone the lady whose room is on the other side of the corridor. Today completes the round dozen years since I finished Almayer’s Folly.
‘His own picturesque language’ is Mrs Conrad’s phrase for this tortured irony.
1935
THE PUBLIC LIFE
THIS record*11 of amazing energy, of dinners and cruises and casinos and Blue Trains, of a life crammed with public appearances and yet a life which found time in the small hours before the first engagement for a literary production of enormous quantity, is curiously reminiscent of James’s fantasy of The Private Life. James, it will be remembered, was fascinated by his vision of Robert Browning, the diner-out, with his ‘loud, sound, normal, hearty presence, all bristling with prompt responses and expected opinions and usual views’, and his other personality ‘who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wote admirably deep and brave and intricate things’. And for comparison there was another figure in the London of his time:
that most accomplished of artists and most dazzling of men of the world whose effect on the mind repeatedly invited to appraise him was to beget in it an image of representation and figuration so exclusive of any possible inner self that, so far from there being here a question of an alter ego, a double personality, there seemed scarce a question of a real and single one, scarce foothold or margin for any private and domestic ego at all.
One must not press the comparison with Browning or Wilde too far, for Bennett was obviously a man of as much greater honesty and human kindliness than the one as he was a much smaller writer than the other. His engaging vanity about his clothes (the shoes which cost five guineas a pair) and the hotels he stayed in, his sometimes rather absurd self-assurance (‘I may say that I disagree with Einstein’s theory of curved space’), were only aspects of his honesty. He may have led as public a life as Wilde’s, but he was not concerned, except in his superficial vanities, with the appearance he made; he spoke of what he thought whether it might damage him in the eyes of the unsympathetic or not.
And unlike Browning’s his public life had become his work: the huge hotels, the yachts, the wagons-lits, the company of millionaires and Cabinet Ministers: these were his material. No writer has been more shaped by success: genuinely shaped, for the literary conscience which was nurtured on Flaubert never allowed him in his serious work to write for the sake of popularity. Popularity simply overtook him. For the public life was not his first material – at the time of The Old Wives’ Tale – and he made one mysterious, because so unexpectedly successful, return, away from Lord Raingo, to the people for whom his sympathy had been deeper, who moved his creative brain, perhaps because they belonged to his earlier years, in a far more poetic manner, in Riceyman Steps.
In these letters, kindly, sympathetic, occasionally harsh when he felt his nephew’s conduct needed improving socially, we read between the accounts of dinner parties and theatre parties of a few early morning visits to Clerkenwell: to ‘get’ the scene of Riceyman Steps took much less time than his exploration of the Savoy for Imperial Palace, perhaps because it connected, as that excellent piece of documentary reporting did not, directly with his imaginative experience.
Usually the documentary eye served him only too well. Vivid descriptive informative writing came to him easily. Again and again the character of places springs admirably alive in Bennett’s letters but very seldom the character of people. The documentary eye was always vivid: at rehearsals – ‘The theatre is very large, very fine, and very cold. A sort of Arctic hell’; driving home after the restrained riot of the Olympia Circus – ‘we came home with the brougham full of hydrogen balloons, which occasionally swept out on their strings through the window into the infinite ether’; noting the quality of the lemonade at a dance hall; recording that Lord Rothermere’s house had seventeen bathrooms. He had an unfailing interest for the scene, and the scene in these letters is crammed with properties, but one has a curious sense that this kindly, honest, lovable man was its only living inhabitant, as if popularity had robbed him of the only kind of people he really, deeply, knew. In 1930 he recorded with his usual innocent and candid pleasure that the publication of his Journal in the Daily Mail was making a ‘great stir’, but one cannot help wondering where that stir was to be noticed among the plane crashes and the unemployed suicides, a year’s births and deaths, except perhaps at Lord Raingo’s.
1936
GOATS AND INCENSE
MY generation lived so long with the old Kipling that it is hard for us to capture the first excitement of his contemporaries, that feeling for the amazing boy who came from India and set the litera
ry world aflame. It is one of the virtues of Mr Carrington’s admirable biography that through the care and the sobriety of his narrative we catch the pulse of the legend.*12 After two hundred pages of close writing Kipling has not yet in this biography reached the age of thirty. By thirty he had written Plain Tales From the Hills, Soldiers Three, Wee Willie Winkie, The Light That Failed, Barrack Room Ballards, Many Inventions, The Jungle Books: he had been accepted as an equal by Stevenson and James – no wonder that at sixty-one he seemed to Hugh Walpole already an old man on the brink of second childhood: ‘A wonderful morning with old Kipling in the Athenaeum. He was sitting surrounded by the reviews of his new book, beaming like a baby.’ He had been a ‘leading writer’ for more than the span of most men’s literary lives.
There is no sensational surprise in Mr Carrington’s Life. A full account of Kipling’s extraordinary quarrel with Balestier, his American brother-in-law, and a fantastic story of how a homicidal lunatic pursued him from England to the Cape and back and finally ran Kipling to earth on the steps of the Athenaeum – these are the unexpected high lights. Those who anticipated intimate revelations, perhaps of the Anglo-Indian order, had mistaken Kipling’s reporting talent for direct personal experience. His prose, unlike his poetry, has not lasted well and the tricks of the reporter are apparent even in the few stories that still have the power to excite or move – The Man Who Would be King. Without Benefit of Clergy.
Our memories are so much more satisfactory than the reality. Even The Finest Story in the World no longer seems quite true. One had remembered the description of a leaking ship in a still sea given by the man who had gone down in her, how the water-level paused for an instant ‘ere’ it fell on the deck. But now one notices how Kipling spoilt his effect with typical bravado. ‘He had paid everything except the bare life for this little valueless piece of knowledge, and I had travelled ten thousand weary miles to meet him and take his knowledge at second-hand.’
Collected Essays Page 15
