Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 877
On the next day Mr. Wells bicycled up to Aldington Knoll where at about seven miles distant from the Pent the writer was once again leading an agricultural life of the severer type — in a cottage of the most minute, the Conrads occupying the Pent. The writer was, indeed, engaging himself on the invention of a new species of potato in the intervals of contriving the gallows for John Kemp. Mr. Wells came to persuade the writer not to collaborate with Conrad. With an extreme earnestness he pleaded with the writer not to spoil Conrad’s style: “The wonderful Oriental style.... It’s as delicate as clockwork and you’ll only ruin it by sticking your fingers in it.” The writer answered that Conrad wanted a collaboration and as far as the writer was concerned Conrad was going to get what he wanted. He can still see the dispirited action of Mr. Wells as he mounted his bicycle by the rear step and rode away along that ridge of little hills.... No more than those two speeches had been exchanged.
IV
Into the still, depressed note of the Pent there had introduced itself the tremendous panorama of sea and sky that showed from Aldington with its Knoll. We passed our time driving the amiable mare or the infamous Exmoor pony between one and the other. We went out of a sunshiny morning with bits of manuscript; we returned through bitter rain-storms, the mud splashing up visibly before the dim lanthorns, the manuscript read aloud, commented on, docketed for alteration.... It comes back as a time of great tranquillity, though the high skies of Aldington, with the sickle-shaped, painted marsh and the flat Channel ending with the pink cliffs of Boulogne, seem cracked as the surface of an old, bright painting will be cracked — with the agonies of Conrad’s poverty, unsuccess, negotiations and misgivings.
Still a time of great tranquillities, and, at intervals, there were triumphs. Pinker, a blinking Bramah in the shape of Destiny, would grant an unimaginable advance; William Heinemann — the most generous and wise of publishers, a Jew at that — would hand out an unexpected cheque on the top floor of 31 Bedford Street whilst the writer kept Pawling — a blonde Christian but much more like a publisher than his Semitic partner — interested as well as he might with a description of the plot of The Inheritors, a thin collaboration with no plot in particular that Heinemann’s eventually published. Then Conrad would come in, buttoning his overcoat over the cheque: Mr. Pawling would throw up his hands and exclaim to the writer: “You’ve let him get at that ass William again. By God, that is not cricket!”... And the two conspirators against the peace of mind of No. 31 Bedford Street would proceed to the famous Bodega just out of the Strand. There, with Sir Henry Irving and Nellie Farren at adjoining tables, over smoked salmon and champagne in small tumblers, they would play dominoes until 4.30, the last train for Sandling Junction, with its quiet lines of scenery, its fresh breath of air, and the mare in charge of the stable-boy who would be just lighting the lamps of the trap — that last train leaving Charing Cross at 4.50 and getting down just at dusk....
There is something conducive to writing in low rooms, in a commonplace downland country, with nearly level fields that run into quiet convolutions, away to a distance. Let the direct lighting be modified by a barn, the illumination coming from the peak of the sky: let there be a quarter-deck walk up and down which Conrad may turn in his pyjamas and dressing-gown occasionally, getting relief from his thoughts in a glance at the quiet fields amongst which the writer will be practising golf strokes.... Well, in just such a room with a barn to block the direct light, with a miniature stockyard, in a commonplace downland country the writer — sits writing! And you dare to tell him that he cannot go out and, in the rain, catching his dangerous pony that swings round and kicks the inviting sieve of corn out of your hand, just missing your chest.... He cannot drive the seven miles to the Pent to ask Conrad what he thinks of Colonel Marchand and Fashoda!... You must surely be lying.... Or you mean to tell him that in half an hour Conrad, in the dilapidated motor hired from the White Hart at Stanford won’t be coming in to ask what we are to think of Fashoda and Colonel Marchand and what we shall do if there is really war with France.... We get the London papers only by the second post at 4.30, and do not as a rule look at them until to-morrow at breakfast-time. But in these exciting times, with Colonel Marchand crossing the Sahara and hoisting the French flag in a position which Kitchener of Khartoum has stated to be the key-point of the British Empire in Africa and consequently on the road to India.... And the French with their extraordinary .75 quick-firer field gun.... It all turns on what the Germans will do, the Russians having their hands full in the Far East....
It was like that, when we were not discussing the desirability of the word bleu-foncé as an adjective to apply to cabbages in a field, or when we were not moved to queer enthusiasms over the use of words by Christina Rossetti.... But if you tell me that I cannot put in Tommy and drive through the rain to the candle-lit Pent — no Eau, Gaz, Electricité in that gentleman’s residence — well, if you tell me that, I suppose you are right.... “C’est le mur d’un silence eternel qui descend devant vous, mon vieux!”... For the feeling, through a large part of a century, was for the writer very strong that Conrad was there who might be consulted about a difficulty — in politics, in the architecture of a story, over an English word, or about the French for Romance — for which there is no French!
The irresistible feeling that one had about him was that he was practical that the last thing that he was was Slav. For the Slav, to be true Slav, must be as helpless before the vicissitudes of this world — as helpless as is a new-born kitten, a greyish sprawling object, mostly jelly. A sort of Dostoieffsky! If you asked Conrad how to circumvent a banker he would have an expedient. If you asked him whether women ought to have a vote he would say: No: with decision. And then, remembering the part played by women in keeping alive the national feeling of his country, Poland, where all the men took to drunkenness or lechery or listlessness after the abortive revolution of 1862, he would say that the only creature that ought to be paid the compliment of having a vote, a thing always useless, was such a woman as his mother, Mme Kurzeniowski, or his aunt, Mme Paradowski. Or any other woman! But, as his private expedient, he said to women in the words of the Mohammedan ranee of Palembang: “Why should you strive for domination during the day?... Your power is of the night, during which, with a whisper, you shall destroy empires!”
The dominant attraction of Conrad’s mind was the firmness with which he held ideas after he had contemplated a sufficient number of facts or documents. He had had great experience of the life of normal men; his reading had been amazingly wide and his memory was amazingly retentive. Amazingly, even to the writer, whose memory is sufficiently retentive and whose reading wide if desultory. Yet Conrad never presented any appearance of being a bookish, or even a reading man. He might have been anything else: you could have taken fifty guesses at his occupation, from precisely ship’s captain to say financier, but poet or even student would never have been among them and he would have passed without observation in any crowd. He was frequently taken for a horse fancier. He liked that.
His ambition was to be taken for — to be! — an English country gentleman of the time of Lord Palmerston. There might have been worse ambitions. To understand how a Pole, born in the government of Kiev, infinitely far from even the sea, should have desired to be that — and should have desired it with passion — the reader must keep in mind two things if not three: one of them a vivid picture in the mind of the writer. During the last century if you went down to Tilbury Dock you would see families of Jewish-Poland emigrants landing. As soon as they landed they fell on their hands and knees and kissed the soil of the land of Freedom. For Conrad there was another side. As a child he lived in a great house in Poland: a great house with wide avenues and many lights at night. One night all the lights went out, the avenues were deserted; a sledge without bells came before the portico. A figure, cloaked and muffled to the hat rim came up the steps and was closeted for long with the master of the house. Then drove away over the snow. Conrad said he could imagine that he heard the voice of l’or de la perfide Albion, jingling in great bags as the sledge went away. For this was the emissary of Lord Palmerston, sowing gold all over Poland so that the Polish revolutionary spirit might be kept alive and Russia embarrassed in her encroachments on Pera or Afghanistan.
For that was England of Conrad’s early vision: an immense power standing for liberty and hospitality for refugees; vigilant over a pax Britannica that embraced the world. With an all-powerful navy she had an all-powerful purse. She was stable, reasonable, disciplined, her hierarchies standing in their orders, her classes settled, her Services capable and instinct with an adequate tradition. And ready to face Russia with fleet or purse when or wherever they should meet. The first English music-hall song that Conrad heard was:
We don’t want to fight but, by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too. We’ve fought the bear before and so we will again, The Russians shall not have Constantinople....
A Pole of last century — and above all things Conrad was a Pole of last century — could ask nothing better.
And, above all things else, as the writer has somewhere pointed out, Conrad was a politician. He loved the contemplation of humanity pulling away at the tangled skeins of parties or of alliances. Until, suddenly a strand gave, a position cleared up, a ministry was solidly formed, a dynasty emerged. He was, that is to say a student of politics, without prescription, without dogma, and, as a Papist, with a profound disbelief in the perfectibility of human institutions. The writer never saw Conrad read any book of memoirs except those of Maxime Ducamp and the Correspondence of Flaubert; those we read daily together over a space of years. But somewhere in the past Conrad had read every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians’ memoirs, Mme de Campan, the Duc d’Audiffret Pasquier, Benjamin Constant, Karoline Bauer, Sir Horace Rumbold, Napoleon the Great, Napoleon III, Benjamin Franklin, Assheton Smith, Pitt, Chatham, Palmerston, Parnell, the late Queen Victoria, Dilke, Morley.... There was no memoir of all these that he had missed or forgotten — down to Il Principe or the letters of Thomas Cromwell. He could suddenly produce an incident from the life of Lord Shaftesbury and work it into Nostromo: which was the political history of an imagined South American Republic. That was one of the secrets of his greatness.
But certainly he had no prescription. Revolutions were to him always anathema since, he was accustomed to declare, all revolutions always have been, always must be, nothing more in the end than palace intrigues: intrigues either for power within, or for the occupancy of, a palace. The journalists’ bar in the palace of the Luxemburg where sits the present Senate of the Third Republic was once the bedchamber of Marie de Medicis. That is not to say that Conrad actively desired the restoration of the Bourbons: he would have preferred the journalists to remain where they were rather than have any revolution at all. All revolutions are an interruption of the processes of thought and of the discovery of a New Form ... for the novel.
Indeed, almost the only revolution that he contemplated with enthusiasm was one by which a successful adventurer seized the reins of power. Anywhere! Some King Tom! It was not that his visions were Napoleonic. His favourite modern ruler was Louis Napoleon, Napoleon I being too big, too rhetorical, too portentous for any intimacy. We planned for many years, and even wrote one scene of, a historical novel dealing with First Empire figures. But the First Empire was gone; the subject was the attempts made to save Ney from execution; the chapter showed Louis XVIII a bewildered figure, forced to sleep and receive petitioners in a corridor between two doors, the Protocol providing lavish rooms for innumerable peers of France, lackeys and parasites, but none at all for God’s anointed whose handkerchief was always dangling half-way out of his hip pocket. That was how we — or rather how Conrad, for the writer never had any political views of any strength at all — regarded restored Legitimacy. Yet he was fit to throw the tea-cups into the fire if you derided the doctrine of the divine right of kings.
No, on the whole his favourite political character was Louis Napoleon as Adventurer and even Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, roused some of his admiration. He liked gilt Third Empire furniture, all other gilding, reviews, uniforms, la Montijo, mirrors, fraudulent financiers, the Duc de Morny, the Mexican adventurer. He liked the mournful cynical sovereign surrounded by the crowd of adventurers, escrocs, rastaqouères and prostitutes in high places that brought down the Empire. He admired Napoleon III for his dream of a Latin Union, which Conrad found practicable and to be desired. That was probably his idea of humanity, a realm in which the solitary, cynical, not impracticable dreamer is brought down by his womankind, his relations, his servants, his hangers on, his household. He saw the same microcosm in the bankruptcy and ruin of a Court perfumer — or of the captain of a coastwise trading ship. He prized fidelity, especially to adventurers, above all human virtues and saw very little of it in this world.
His favourite political anecdote, that which he repeated the most often, was of the Maire of the XIII Arrondissement who sent to Morny, then his half-brother’s Minister and taking the waters at Spa, a telegram to the effect that the whole rue de la Glacière was in a state of insurrection. It ended: “Que faire?” and Morny replied.... But we are writing for Anglo-Saxons. This not very edifying anecdote was Conrad’s favourite but it is not to be taken as implying that Conrad’s mind was unedified. It simply showed his contempt for the way in which human affairs are conducted. It was as if he said: “All politicians are such fools that you might as well conduct the high businesses of State in the spirit of Morny. You will only find Maires of the XIII Arrondissement to carry out your orders.”
He desired a stable world in which you could think and develop the New Form. And because at no phase of the world’s history has there seemed to be a portion of the world more stable than was England under the ruling classes of Lord Palmerston’s time he desired to be of the type of a member of the ruling classes of England in Lord Palmerston’s day. He lived as such, and as such he died. We are so far from those days: it seems hardly likely that anyone’s withers will be wrung if we say that he might have had a meaner ideal.
We come thus to Captain Marryat. It would be too much to say that Marryat had any influence at all on Conrad as writer — though Conrad was of opinion that Marryat had profoundly influenced his writing — but the effect of Marryat on Conrad as philosopher tel quel, and as English gentleman could not be too much stated. Indeed, in the course of our last meeting, the writer reminded Conrad that almost the first literary opinion Conrad ever uttered at the Pent was in eulogy of Marryat. Conrad replied that he remained exactly of that opinion: Marryat was, after Shakespeare, the greatest novelist as delineator of character, that England has produced. The opinion must be limited to what it covers, and that strictly. Conrad was not saying that Marryat was, say, nearly as great a poet as Shakespeare; he was saying that Marryat observed English character with exactitude and rendered it without exaggeration, all other English novelists getting their effects by more or less of caricature.
The books of the author of Midshipman Easy are so relegated to oblivion, being considered as boys’ books, that this pronouncement may appear strange. It may, however, be recommended to the reader’s serious attention as the measured opinion of no mean critic. What we are about at the moment is considering the effect of Marryat upon the character and psychology of Conrad.
That influence at least was profound and lifelong like the undertone of a song. During all the years of our collaboration it was always as if Conrad were saying: “Ah: but wait till I get to my Napoleonic novel, with the frigates in the Mediterranean.” That was the golden age for such English as are held by the sea. And during those years we planned rather elaborately a collaboration set in late Napoleonic to Restoration days, the central figures being Ney and an English milor with the spleen, but the narrator a frigate-Lieutenant, protégé of the milor who, coming from the Mediterranean and gallant service with the frigates, should introduce — the Marryat touch!... We spent a great deal of time over memoirs of the period, the writer occupying himself with Dundonald, English milors and the part taken by the Tsar in the execution of Ney, Conrad getting his information as to the Restoration period in a way that was rather mysterious to the writer, so did Conrad seem to have all those figures in his mind....
We discussed this novel till very late indeed in our association. On an occasion in July 1916 Conrad said indeed to the writer: “Well, you’ll be able to bring something back for the Ney book, about campaigning in France, ...” as we shook hands.... Alas! that which wiped out so many little villages under our eyes wiped out that book too, the writer abandoning for many years all idea of writing — losing indeed all ability to write. And Conrad continued alone.... Thus, in the Rover in the offing, you have the vigilant and capable frigate-captain!... And on the day of his death Conrad was occupied — with Napoleon at Elba and the frigate service of the Mediterranean, seeking to live again the glamour that the English sea-novelist had cast over his young years in Poland. So tenacious are the glamours of our youth!
