Throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, Conrad was doing what many authors do, publishing little book reviews and op-eds in literary journals for some extra cigarette money.
He sent short pieces on writers like Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Anatole France—as well as political commentary and nautical affairs including the sinking of the Titanic—to venues like the Daily Mail and English Review. And they are collected, along with some personal correspondence, in this very late volume called Notes on Life and Letters.
Very little is said about this non-fiction work in the Conrad-lore. He has two other non-fiction books (one of them is up next) that are considered a duology of sorts. It’s like this one is being deliberately excluded. With good reason, as we’ll see toward the end.
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In these occasional pieces Conrad expresses his opinions assertively and generically in a way that becomes hard going in large amounts. But the upshot is that he is willing to reflect on Big questions about truth and experience.
These lines pondering the relationship between art and science especially stand out. If art is the opposite of science, does it also claim truth or knowledge? A different form of knowledge?
Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the sun; one small blob of mud among several others, spinning ridiculously with a waggling motion like a top about to fall. This is the Copernican system, and the man believes in the system without often knowing as much about it as its name. But while watching a sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs and the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of mountains, and then he holds the system of Ptolemy. … Life and the arts follow dark courses, and will not turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science.
Art has served Religion; artists have found the most exalted inspiration in Christianity; but the light of Transfiguration which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is not the light of the generating stations, which exposes the depths of our infatuation where our mere cleverness is permitted for a while to grope for the unessential among invincible shadows.
But his strongest insight on aesthetics is also his most practical one. A good letter called “Books” he reminds us that there are no guarantees for success in creative endeavors, either immediate or in a sense of lasting quality.
The good artist should expect no recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil can with difficulty be appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean anything to the illiterate…
It’s sound advice for writers: don’t get cocky. No one knows ahead of time which works will be “loved by the Muses,” and there are no secret formulas. We may pass into oblivion, unremembered, in a few short decades, and at the end of the day we’re still individual weirdos, not demigods or anything.
Fiction may be “history, human history, or it is nothing,” as Conrad says. But the course of literary history is absolutely outside of our control.
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If there’s any contemporary Conrad believed would withstand the test of history, it was Henry James. In a short “Appreciation” from 1905, the year after The Golden Bowl was published, Conrad apparently thought James had unlocked nothing less than a representation of “ultimate experience,” and writes several feverish lines about the human drive to art-making:
when the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun.
Meanwhile, there was the late 19th century French antisemite novelist Alphonse Daudet, whom Conrad admires precisely for his lack of ambition, rejecting the l’art pour l’art ethos. “He was not a great artist, he was not an artist at all, if you like—but he was Alphonse Daudet.” That is not an enviable epitaph.
For all the flamboyant impressionism in his own work, Conrad seemed to hold much respect for the simplicity of earlier bourgeois realist prose.
The great storyteller Guy de Maupassant was exemplary in his “austerity,” Conrad wrote in 1904. The French author allows the facts to speak for themselves:
There is humour and pathos in these stories; but such is the greatness of his talent, the refinement of his artistic conscience, that all his high qualities appear inherent in the very things of which he speaks, as if they had been altogether independent of his presentation. Facts, and again facts are his unique concern.
And the Russian master Turgenev did nothing less than consolidate that country’s historical experience leading up to the momentous year 1917, when he wrote in a letter to his friend Edward Garnett:
Turgenev’s creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer.
The most personal testimonial of literary history by Conrad concerns his friend Stephen Crane. In a reminiscence from 1919, nineteen years after Crane’s death at age 28, he said:
His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect. But not on me. Whatever he said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic simplicity which was extremely engaging. He knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand. Then his gift came out—and it was seen then to be much more than mere felicity of language. His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In his writing he was very sure of his effects. I don’t think he was ever in doubt about what he could do. Yet it often seemed to me that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement.
The letters section is clinched by Conrad’s remarks—from early in his career—on early nautical fiction. He astutely observes that the novels of Frederick Marryat, a Navy man who knew Dickens, are bathed in the “heroic” period of liberal capitalism.
Marryat’s sea tales capture some peculiar “stirring” within the nineteenth century when it was still “young.” “There is an air of fable about it.”
To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element. It was a stage, where was displayed an exhibition of valour, and of such achievement as the world had never seen before. The greatness of that achievement cannot be pronounced imaginary, since its reality has affected the destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its grandeur it has all the remoteness of an ideal.
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By 1919, however, Conrad’s historical vision has changed. It has shifted its focus from economic facts to geographical ones.
The most remarkable piece in this book for contemporary readers was probably “The Crime of Partition” from that year.
Poland had just regained its independence: the Second Republic was constituted in 1918, after being divided between Prussia, Austria, and Russia for 123 years. (Its leader was J. Pilsudski of the anti-Communist Polish Socialist Party.)
Conrad reckons that Poland was too important a beachhead for the progressive political movement in Europe for it to be left alone by the three big autocratic powers.
In the second half of the eighteenth century there were two centres of liberal ideas on the continent of Europe: France and Poland. On an impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then France was relatively every bit as weak as Poland; even, perhaps, more so. But France’s geographical position made her much less vulnerable. She had no powerful neighbours on her frontier; a decayed Spain in the south and a conglomeration of small German Principalities on the east were her happy lot.
Those autocratic powers may be part of the rubble of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution, but Conrad insists on their lingering “national traits, which remain utterly incompatible with the Polish mentality and Polish sentiment.”
Conrad has emerged in this late writing as a conservative who only sees metaphysical types enduring through history (like his dualism about art and science above). He didn’t change with the times, and so he disconcertingly transformed into a nationalist, precisely by not revising his take on the restoration of Poland. That was a dream more than a century coming, but only after historical conditions had utterly changed.
The changes don’t matter to Conrad, not even the world historical change taking place in Russia. In the new proletarian dictatorship, he only sees the same old “Russian lawlessness.” It was a cataclysmic world situation that cleared the ground for Poland’s restoration, but that didn’t mean Conrad was a revolutionary.
Social change—especially revolutionary change—has never occurred by necessity, in Conrad’s political view. Such processes, like in France in 1789 or Russia in 1905, don’t actually deal with class struggle or governmental systems at the level of principle, the way their leaders claimed. Rather, it’s the “forms of legality” of one regime or another that is protested.
Conrad makes this point clear in an earlier article on the three reactionary empires:
The sin of the old European monarchies was not the absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the march of time.
The classical liberal faith in the rule of law and enlightened institutions should be enough to prevent the masses of people from fighting for their rights.
As Conrad got older and crankier he also progressively lost his grip on his style. When the imagery in these essays doesn’t lean into “stuffy obscurantism” (his own phrase, which I’ve always liked), they degenerate into overbaked analogies, like the German eagle with the Prussian head, gazing over land and sea “covetous steadiness,”
for he has become of late a maritime eagle, and has learned to box the compass. He gazes north and south, and east and west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the waters of the Mediterranean when they are blue.
His intuition as a storyteller was as refined as it was unique, but in more overtly ideological affairs Conrad seems almost as blinkered as his heroes.
Being of Polish extraction, he knew the experience of growing up in occupied territory firsthand. He knew the history of Poland’s multiple partitions. Friedrich II had introduced German-speaking settlers to its portion for the purposes of colonization. Conrad’s people were scattered into a diaspora.
Did anything about the historical persecution of the Poles condition Conrad’s view of Great Britain at the turn of the century? England had become the largest colonial empire on earth by 1876, ruling over hundreds of millions of people, when Conrad was in his 20s. In their drive for markets, they decimated the handicraft commerce in India, and began their wars of aggression on other parts of the Asian continent.
Did Conrad, whose characters never seem to regard dark-skinned people as human beings, see anything analogous in Britain’s exploitation and plundering to his national background?
In a review of a non-fiction book by the colonial administrator Hugh Clifford called Studies in Brown Humanity, he writes:
And of all the nations conquering distant territories in the name of the most excellent intentions, England alone sends out men who, with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as Mr. Hugh Clifford does, of the place of toil and exile as “the land which is very dear to me, where the best years of my life have been spent”—and where (I would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with respect and affection by those brown men about whom he writes.
OOF.
Marx and Engels analyzed the Polish question in the late 1840s—when restoration was briefly put on the table in the wake of the revolutionary storms of ‘48—in the progressive democratic newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung.