Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 876
Henley obviously had said nothing of the sort. Indeed, as the writer has elsewhere related, on the occasion of a verbal duel that he had later with Henley that violent-mouthed personality remarked to him: “Who the Hell are you? I never even heard your name!” or words to that effect. It probably does not very much matter. What had no doubt happened was that Conrad had mentioned the writer’s name to Henley and Henley had answered: “I daresay he’ll do as well, as anyone else.” No, it probably does not matter, except as a light on the character and methods of Joseph Conrad, and as to his ability to get his own way....
For it was obviously une émotion forte that the writer received in those small hours in a sufficiently dim farmhouse room. In such affairs Conrad’s caressing, rather dragging voice would take on a more Polish intonation and would drop. His face would light up; it was as if he whispered: as if we both whispered in a conspiracy against a sleeping world. And no doubt that was what it was. The world certainly did not want us: not at that date; and to be reputed the finest English stylist was enough, nearly, to get you sent to gaol. Something foreign, that was what it was....
At any rate when, with a flat candle-stick, the writer at last showed his guest into a shadowy, palely papered, coldish bedroom and closed the door on him, he felt as if a king were enclosed within those walls. A king-conspirator: a sovereign-Pretender; Don Carlos of a world whose subjects are shadows.
II
As for what happened then immediately to the history of Romance, the book, the writer’s mind preserves a complete blank! It might be easy to construct images out of probabilities or by consultation with one person or another. But that would not be within the spirit of the bond: this is the record of the impression made by Conrad the Impressionist upon another writer, impressionist also. It is an offering In Memoriam constructed solely out of memory.
Some years ago Mr. H. G. Wells took occasion to write to the papers. He stated that the writer had visited him and informed him that he had persuaded Conrad to collaborate with himself. Mr. Wells’s memory must almost certainly have betrayed him though the matter is of no great importance. What does remain in the writer’s mind very clearly is this....
The writer and Conrad made several choppings and changings in their occupation of the Pent: the writer occupied it for several years; Conrad then lived in it with the writer’s spare furniture, which was mostly of Pre-Raphaelite origin. It pleased Conrad to write at a Chippendale bureau on which Christina Rosetti had once written or at another which had once belonged to Thomas Carlyle: one got in those days those small, cheerful pleasures out of life. Then Conrad occupied the Pent altogether, the mournful house under the bare downs exercising a great fascination over him. When you went out of the front door — Mr. Walter Crane, who during one of our movings about Kent and Sussex took the house furnished, had painted a Japanese Crane and some verses on that door — when you went out then, the narrow garden giving on to the stack-yard had a short brick path running under the windows and it was very soothing to see the flattish lines of the country running away for a great distance, one convolution going into another. The brick path dried up very quickly in the wettest of weathers: up and down it, as if on a quarter-deck, Conrad would pace for hours and hours, the lines of the country soothing him. In that part of England the words of Charles II are most true; what with the shelter of the downs and the position near the sea there is there scarcely any day upon which a man may not go abroad — at any rate to the extent of a brick path under his windows. The great barn closed in the scene immediately to the front, but you saw the fields to the right, so it was a very quiet and private place.... And indeed during the last of our conversations, this year, Conrad alluded to the fact that, for the first time in his life, he had, in his vastly more arranged residence of that day, a study to himself. And he added: “Ah, but it isn’t the Pent!” He said too that the great tythe barn had been burned down during threshing.
We used in our day to take great entertainment out of shooting rats with a Flobert rifle from the brick path. There were channels made by these animals in the black-green thatch of the barn and you would see them proceeding leisurely from end to end of the great expanse in broad daylight. Then.... Whff, would go the Flobert and the small bullet pinging into the thatch would send a rat bounding away over the corrugations in the old straw into some hole, for all the world with the action of a tiger bounding over water-courses. As far as memory serves we never hit a rat: but one notable success was scored to the writer. Fired at from an incredible distance — ninety yards or so, something gigantic! — a great old grey rat crossing a road collapsed feebly. We ran forward and dispatched it with the butt. That was ever afterwards scored to the writer as an immense feat of marksmanship, often referred to. If anyone talked of shooting Conrad would say: “Ah, but you should have seen Ford’s shot at the rat!...” Actually the writer, with a little more farm knowledge, was sure that the rat was dying of old age before it was fired at, the bullet never reaching it. But he has kept his own counsel to this day of confession.... No, we were not high-brow there at the Pent. We played dominoes, Conrad with passion and the skill of a master. Indeed, in how many City Meccas and Belgian cafés must we not have rattled the black and white bones over round, white marble table tops! We played écarté or, when very serious, chess, but usually dominoes, at which the writer never remembers to have won a game. Sometimes the writer knocked a golf ball about the fields, Conrad, standing on the brick path, regarding the occupation with the contempt say that his collaborator bestowed on Daudet. Once the writer seriously sat down to describe in words the satisfaction you feel when you have brought off a good drive and see the white ball lyrically against the blue sky. It was a careful piece of writing, mots justes and all. Conrad looked at it with attention and then slowly, blankly, raised his shoulders and eyebrows, we returning to dominoes.
III
On one of those days, then, we drove in state from the Pent to pay a call on Mr. Wells at Sandgate. There was a curious incident. As we stood on the doorstep of Mr. Wells’s villa, in the hesitant mind of those paying a state call, behold, the electric bell-push, all of itself went in and the bell sounded.... Conrad exclaimed: “Tiens!... The Invisible Man!” and burst into incredible and incredulous laughter. In the midst of it the door opened before grave faces.
We paid our call. Whether we were taken to be drunk or no only the owners of those grave faces can say. I suppose that we were. But the incident of the bell-push was of a nature that had a peculiar appeal to Conrad’s humour. For years after, a translation of Mr. Wells’s book having appeared in Italian, you could never mention that author’s name without Conrad’s saying: “Tiens!... L’Uomo Invisible!”... Indeed during a visit in an interval of our long separation caused by European vicissitudes and their sequelæ Conrad asked the writer: “Do you ever see Wells now?” and added: “L’Uomo Invisible.... Do you remember?”
But Mr. Wells’s Invisible Man made an extremely marked impression on Conrad, as indeed it did on the writer. So it deserved to. Indeed as far as memory serves, The Invisible Man, the end of the Sea Lady and some phrases that that book contained, and two short stories called, the one The Man who could work Miracles and the other Fear, made up at that date all the English writing that, acting as it were as a junta, we absolutely admired. Later there came the stories of Mr. Cunninghame Graham, the writing of W. H. Hudson and, with reservations on the part of Conrad for the later novels — the work of Henry James.
It was as if when we considered any other English writer’s work we always in the end said: “Ah, but do you remember Ce Cochon de Morin?” or the casquette of Charles Bovary, according to the type of work undergoing commendation. After reading the passage, say, of the pavior striking with the spade at the invisibility flying past him from the Invisible Man, or the episode of the turning over of the lamp and the burning downwards, from the Man who could work Miracles, we recalled no French masterpiece.... These pieces were authentic, in construction, in language and in the architectural position occupied by them in the book or story — in the progression of the effect!
Mr. Wells has recorded that he was aware that at this date there was a conspiracy going on at the Pent against himself and against British literature. Against British literature there was, if you choose to call it so: against Mr. Wells the extent of our machinations is as recorded above.
Conrad had odd, formal notions of how one should proceed in the life literary. As far as he was concerned the purpose of our call on Mr. Wells was to announce to the world of letters that we were engaged in collaboration. To the writer this was just exactly a matter of indifference except for a not materially pronounced disinclination to pay calls anywhere or at any time. But Conrad liked proceedings of a State nature. He would have liked the driving in a barouche to pay calls on Academicians such as is practised by candidates for membership of the French Academy. And exceedingly vivid in the writer’s mind is the feeling he had, as we drove down the sloping railway bridge above Sandling Junction. He was like a brown paper parcel on a seat beside a functionary in a green uniform, decorated with golden palm leaves and a feathered cocked hat....
We were then going over the third draft of the second part of Romance and had at last finally and psychologically decided that the book would eventually go on. Of this the writer is certain. He is certain because the exact image and air of that time came back to him suddenly whilst making a very minute recension of the text of the French translation of Romance. The writer was in mid-ocean on the deck of a liner reading very meticulously the translation of an episode which related how, on a blue night in Kingston Vale, John Kemp knocked down, in the presence of the Admiral of the Fleet in the Jamaica waters, a Mr. Topnambo, member of the Governor’s council, who wore white trousers that glimmered in the half-light.... There were on that upper deck in the sunlight a number of New York Jews playing pinocle and a number of Washington flappers reading novels. But the writer heard his own voice as, in the low parlour of the Pent, he read aloud the passage that concerned Mr. Topnambo, the blue night, the white trousers, the barouches standing in the moonlight waiting for Admiral Rowley and his intoxicated following to take the road. And then Conrad, interrupting.... “By Jove,” he said, “it’s a third person who is writing!”
The psychology of that moment is perfectly plain to the writer. Conrad interrupted with a note of relief in his voice. He had found a formula to justify collaboration in general and our collaboration. Until then we had struggled tacitly each for our own note in writing. With the coming of blue nights, the moon, palms and the brilliant lights of the inn reflected down the river Conrad saw the possibilities that there were for his own exotic note in the story. Above all, with the coming of politics: for John Kemp in coming to blows with Mr. Topnambo, member of the Governor’s council, then and there identified himself with the party in the island of Jamaica that at that date desired annexation by the United States.
This at once made our leading character handleable by Conrad. John Kemp merely kidnapped by pirates and misjudged by the judicial bench of our country was not so vastly attractive, but a John Kemp who was in addition a political refugee, suspect of High Treason and victim of West India merchants.... That was squeezing the last drop of blood out of the subject....
The differences in our temperaments were sufficiently well marked. Conrad was brave: he was for inclusion and hang the consequences. The writer, more circumspect, was for ever on the watch to suppress the melodramatic incident and the sounding phrase. So, till that psychological moment, the writer doing most of the first drafting, Conrad had been perpetually crying: “Give! Give!” The writer was to give one more, and one more, and again one more turn to the screw that sent the rather listless John Kemp towards an inevitable gallows. The actual provision of intrigue in 1820 England and Jamaica was the writer’s business. Conrad contented himself with saying: “You must invent. You have got to make that fellow live perpetually under the shadow of the gallows.” In the original draft of the book John Kemp had been the mere second mate of a merchant ship going out to Jamaica in the ordinary course of his business of following the sea. But in the second draft he was mixed up with smugglers and fled from Hythe beach in the moonlight with the Bow Street runners hot on his trail — already a candidate for the professional attentions of the hangman. In that second draft, however, he was in Jamaica, still merely a planter’s apprentice — insufficiently hangable. There had to be more inevitability in the shape of invention. The writer therefore set to work to read a vast number of Jamaica newspapers of the ‘twenties and, finding that that island was then an ant-heap of intrigue by what were called Secessionists, it was an easy task to identify Kemp hangably with those traitors to the British Crown. Conrad, however, was a Loyalist: a Loyalist to every régime that ever existed but passionately a Loyalist to Great Britain. It was therefore necessary to give the screw one turn more: Kemp had to be made a misjudged man, betrayed by the stupid cruelty of merchants and the administration. He thus became exactly a figure for Conrad to handle. For, if Conrad were the eternal Loyalist, nevertheless the unimaginative and cruel stupidity of Crown and Government officials was an essential part of his creed. He was a politician — but a politician of the impasse. The British Empire was for him the perfection of human perfections, but all its politicians, all its public officials, police, military officers of the Crown, gaolers, pilots, port admirals and policies were of an imbecility that put them in intelligence below the first lieutenant of the French navy that you could come across....
So, by that moment, we had worked John Kemp into a position that can have been occupied by very few unjustly accused heroes of romance. When he stood in the Old Bailey Dock he had the whole legal, the whole political, the whole naval forces of the Crown, the whole influence at once of the City of London, and of the Kingdom of Spain, determined to hang him. And the writer is bound to confess that reading, after an interval of twenty years, Romance — and in a French translation! — the hairs really did rise on his scalp over the predicament of John Kemp on his trial. And he wondered at the melodramatic genius that had been possessed by that third writer that was neither himself nor Conrad....
For having got hold of that comforting theory Conrad never abandoned it. At intervals during our readings aloud that lasted for years he would say, always as if it were a trouvaille that that was certainly the writing of a third party. It had not been long before he had given up all hope of swift fortune coming with the speedy finishing of that book. For the writer the pleasure of eternal technical discussion with Conrad was a sufficient motive for continuing our labours. But for Conrad with his stern sense of the necessity for making a career that was not enough. He had to find at least an artistic justification for going on. We were both extremely unaccepted writers, but we could both write. What was the sense of not writing apart if there were no commercial gain? He found it in the aesthetically comforting thought that the world of letters was enriched by yet a third artist. The third artist had neither his courage nor his gorgeousness; he himself had none of his collaborator’s literary circumspection nor verbal puritanism. So the combination was at least ... different.
Thus came about our drive to the Lower Sandgate Road. Conrad considered it appropriate that we should make an official announcement. The collaboration was determined upon. For the receiving of this official communication no one could have been more appropriate than the author of the Invisible Man. Conrad had in those days a very strong sense that those who had taken part in his launching as a writer had the right to have communicated to them any crucial determination at which he arrived. It was a fine trait in his character. He had originally consulted Mr. Henley, Mr. Marriott Watson, and the writer presumes, Mr. Edward Garnett, these having been as it were his chief backers behind the scenes. Mr. Wells had been his chief backer before the public — as Reviewer. All the reviews that Almayer had received had amounted to a mountain of praise: the most tremendous and moving commendation had been that contributed by Mr. Wells to the Saturday Review, an organ that was then almost miraculously regarded, under the editorship of Mr. Frank Harris. Mr. Wells then, living in our neighbourhood, to whom better could this junta have proceeded? So at least Conrad thought and the writer offered no active objection.
Mr. Wells apparently thought the same. Of what happened at that villa in the Lower Sandgate Road, except that the back garden had, descending to the sea-beach, a step-ladder up and down which several charming creatures were disporting themselves with the Channel as background, the writer carries in his memory now only the conversation of Bob Stevenson and the remembrance of Conrad, talking to Mrs. Wells with enormous animation about the great storm in which for the first time he came up the Channel, passing that point. The writer was engaged in remembering that great storm. He had been at school at Folkestone almost perpendicularly on the cliff above where we then sat. In the morning after the gale had blown itself out we looked down in sunlight from the edge of the Leas. The whole sickle of Dungeness bay had a fleet ashore on its beaches — innumerable smacks and coasting vessels, large international sailing ships and two East Indiamen, the Plassy and the Clive, with their towering black and white sides, all heeling over, rigging and canvas hanging down like curtains right round the bay, unforgettable and helpless.... Bob Stevenson was engaged in telling the writer with animation almost equal to that of Conrad that Ford Madox Brown could not paint. The writer was wishing himself with the group round Conrad and Mrs. Wells. The crossing of the voices of those two brilliant conversationalists remains still in these ears, and the odd mixture of feelings....
