Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 878
Yes! That influence at least was profound. He looked at the world of human affairs with the eyes of Jack Easy and affronted difficulties with the coolness of Percival Keene. At that statement the reader should not smile. The tradition of the frigate service of Dundonald and the rest was no mean one: its influence on the British character was far-reaching, was all-important. And the achievement and tradition of England during the last century cannot be ignored by those who can be interested in the achievements and traditions of mankind.
The writer has said too much in other places of the influence of Marryat on the writer himself and on Conrad to go picturesquely once more over the matter. But there are those who have read neither Marryat nor the writer. Marryat concerned himself mainly then with the frigate warfare of Napoleonic times. And the frigate warfare of Napoleonic times was, compared with the line of battle warfare for which stand the names of Nelson and his great captains as something obscure, anonymous, desperate and very gallant. For thousands who shall know the names of Nelson, Howe, or St. Vincent there will be hardly one that has heard tell of Cochrane. Yet this little service was incessant, pursued under desperate conditions of weather and of inshore work, the frigates being only upon occasion the mere eyes of the fleet, the great fleets with the great first-raters rolling majestically from ocean to ocean, half the world over and then back again to fight now and then a Trafalgar or an Aboukir. But the frigates were at it every day in the Mediterranean.
Such a service, without comfort, without advertisement, almost without the glory of the King’s uniform, for its officers dressed like sweeps, remained midshipmen to the age of forty and were betallowed to the elbow — was the meaning of England to Conrad, as to the writer during his younger years. One saw the self-sacrifice, the patience, the fidelity. And, if Conrad in later years wrote of fidelity as the key-word of his ‘message,’ it was of this fidelity that he was thinking. Of fidelity not to a realm from which they were for so long absent, and not to a royal countenance which never shone upon them, but of fidelity to an idea, to a service.
The idea was this: In the first place came the sea, the sea not as a bitter element, but as an instrument by means of which the frigates battled against inefficiency, strange customs, the eating of frogs, wooden shoes. Upon the sea were only the English — and the French; the English as the representatives of that Almighty which holds the sea in the hollow of Its hand, the English, blond, hardy, cunning, vigilant, each one six foot and over, jolly, in the exact image of their Maker, cordial. The French, the subordinates, representatives of Satan, perpetually driven off the sea to hide behind the moles of Toulon or of Cherbourg, perpetually creeping out as do bed bugs from crevices in walls.... One Englishman was worth one, three, seventeen, twenty-seven Frenchmen.... There was the sea, then, and that its business, its function.
Presumably the frigates did succeed in their work, though if you read French text-books you would hardly think so any more than when reading the Americans you will hear much about the Shannon and the Chesapeake. According to the French it was l’or de la perfide Albion that did the trick. In that way Conrad got it both ways, since he liked a nation that had both its sea-service and its gold. Gold also is sterling, incorruptible, and has its fidelities. In the meantime, there had grown up another service with a tradition almost identical — that of the British mercantile marine, of ships not too vast to be impermeable to the weather, making by means of the caprices and brutalities of the winds, engrossed and perpetual departures and landfalls round dangerous headlands. Nowadays you will find little enough difference between the coastwise men of any nation, but in the seventies and eighties of last century Conrad by dint of experience found in that service, muted but almost more patient and engrossed, the tradition of Marryat’s frigates. It was fidelity to an ideal, the ideal of the British merchant service; it was still more a tradition working efficiently. For in that service, all going to make up the record of British-owned bottoms, even if they sailed under the flag of Siam, all going to contribute to the long story of what is the ship-shape, you had hundreds of Dagoes, Lascars, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Negroes, Americans, Kruboys.... And one Pole.
Conrad then, in his misty youth that seemed to pass in great houses or in the prison-yards of the exiled child, and mostly at night or at nightfall, read with engrossment Marryat and Fenimore Cooper, and so sowed the seeds of his devotion to England. He had his devotion to his art and his devotion to his second country. In the end his devotion to his second country overcame his devotion to his art. The only occasion on which the writer ever questioned the actions of Conrad — and it is the truth that this was the only occasion on which any action of Conrad’s known to the writer was ever even questionable! — was when that writer accepted membership of the British Academy. This as a writer he should not have done, nor as an artist. The body was without venerability, committed to courses of propaganda, and of a habit, to be destructive to the art by which Conrad had made his name, to which he owed fidelity.
Accordingly on a given occasion the writer remonstrated against this questionable action. It was during sad times for the nation, in a gloomy room of the most architecturally lugubrious buildings that are to be found near the Marble Arch in London. Conrad was depressed: there was no one that was then not depressed. The writer, the occasion being one for clearings up of everything that could be cleared up, put the question as to why Conrad had, how Conrad could have, thus denied the gods of his manhood. A knighthood, yes! Any sort of Order, yes! A C.B.; an O.B.E.!... It had not been ten years or much more since, when talking of the possibilities of such a foundation, Conrad had said that were he offered its insignia he would wear them on the seat of his trousers — a gibe which we immediately introduced into the Inheritors.
The reader should understand that this matter is one which divides for ever — into sheep and goats — the world of the arts. There are some few artists who will accept Academic honours; to the majority of those who are really artists the idea is abhorrent, and those who accept such honours betray their brothers. To this majority Conrad had enthusiastically belonged. You had Flaubert who refused, you had Zola who life-long sought, academic distinction. For Conrad there had used to be no question as to which to follow. Now he had followed Zola.
Conrad answered with mildness. And nothing could have been more unlike Conrad. Both of us being upholders of the duel, we had always lived together under a sort of standard of formality. Except upon Belgian railways when Conrad would refuse with fire to show his ticket to collectors because he was an Englishman and they some sort of Dagoes the writer never remembers otherwise to have remonstrated with the author of Heart of Darkness.... But Conrad answered with heavy and depressed mildness.... Yes, to have accepted that honour might have the aspect of denying the gods of his youth. That was a thing to be regarded with depression. On the other hand England had offered him hospitality; he had been granted fame in England and the opportunity to live in Kent where the lines of the fields run quietly one into the other. England was desirous of founding an institution that should, as a part of its functions, do some sort of honour to the trade of authorship. The company in which he found himself, admirable as it was, was not exactly that which could have been expected. But, if it was a question of his private principles as against any honour he could show the English State, his private principles must go by the board.
It was a point of view.
V
The most English of the English, Conrad was the most South French of the South French. He was born in Beaucaire, beside the Rhone; read Marryat in the shadow of the castle of the good king Réné, Daudet on the Cannebière of Marseilles, Gautier in the tufts of lavender and rosemary of the little forests between Marseilles and Toulon, Maupassant on the French torpedo-boats on which he served and Flaubert on the French flagship, Ville d’Ompteda. With the Sabran-Penthievres and other Macmahonists he painted red the port of Marseilles, intrigued for Napoleon III, hired, since there was nothing else to be hired, an unpainted four-in-hand from a coachbuilder’s yard and drove, buried in actresses and the opera chorus to the races. So he made the French navy too hot to hold him. That, however, is also the spirit of the traditional British navy. The writer is never tired of reciting the terms of the offence for which his great-uncle, Tristram Madox, was cashiered: in that, whilst drunk he swam ashore from the flagship without leave and riotously assaulted Mr. Peter Parker of Valetta, tobacconist. The one offence is more French, the other more English....
As above, however, Conrad again and again recounted his Marseilles exploit. No doubt with the fall of Macmahon and the disappearance of any hope for the Bonapartists the chance of a career for Conrad in the French navy so diminished as to leave that service with few attractions. Conrad’s influence and attaches in France were all Third Empire. He would relate the instance of the unvarnished coach with great energy and fire and then, dropping his hands with mock senility, exclaim: “Alas, tel que vous me voyez... Now I am an extinct volcano....”
It was not however that. It was merely that diminished circumstances had reduced the team of four to the old mare or some remplaçant. We would drive down to Hythe or hire a motor that broke down eight times in eighteen miles and go between the shallow downs up the Elham valley — at the top of which he died — to Canterbury. And at once Conrad was the sailor ashore. He had to find a bar and have a drink, the writer with the prudishness of the Englishman in his own county, waiting outside. For you must not have a drink in the bar of your own county town. A lunch at the farmer’s ordinary with five pints of beer; tea in the smoking-room with whiskies brought in on the tray! But in the bar, never! The point is a fine one. But Conrad, though at home he was the English country gentleman and other things permitting would have bred shorthorns and worn leggings, threw, in his Jack-ashore frame of mind, these considerations to the wind. A drink in the bar was provided for in King’s Regulations. You might not be thirsty: it had to be.
Conrad’s biography as narrated in those days to and in presence of the writer, might as well here come in.... We have arrived, at any rate in the writer’s mind, at about the time when we dropped, ostensibly for good, any hope of bringing Romance to a finish and took to collaborating on the Inheritors. By that date the writer had heard enough of Conrad’s autobiography, sufficiently repeated, to have a rounded image of his past — such an image at any rate as Conrad desired to convey. For, like every inspired raconteur Conrad modified his stories subtly, so as to get in sympathy with his listener. He did it not so much with modifications of fact as with gestures of the hand, droppings of the voice, droopings of the eyelid and letting fall his monocle — and of course with some modifications of the facts. So the story afterwards used in a Smile of Fortune told to the writer alone was one thing and told to his sprightly, very intelligent aunt, Mme. Paradowski, was something quite different. It would be thinner, less underlined, more of a business-like subject for treatment if told to the writer alone: when told to the French lady — who was also a novelist — it would be much livelier, much more punctuated with gestures and laughs — much more pimenté; in fact, the story of a sailor’s bonne fortune.
It was the only story of a bonne fortune that the writer ever heard told by Conrad. And the note may as well here be made that in all our extreme intimacy, lasting for many years, neither of us ever told what is called a smoking-room story. We never even discussed the relations of the sexes.
So, at the turn of the century — for the Inheritors must have been published about 1901 and, having been written rather fast, must have been begun in 1900 — the history of Conrad appeared much as follows to the writer. He was born — not, of course, physically in Beaucaire — but in that part of Poland which lay within the government of Kiev — in Ukrainia, in the Black Lands where the soil is very fertile. He was born towards 1858. At any rate he was old enough to remember the effects of the Polish Revolution of the early sixties — say 1862. The oldest — the first — memory of his life was of being in a prison yard on the road to the Russian exile station of the Wologda. “The Kossacks of the escort,” these are Conrad’s exact words repeated over and over again, “were riding slowly up and down under the snowflakes that fell on women in furs and women in rags. The Russians had put the men into barracks the windows of which were tallowed. They fed them on red herrings and gave them no water to drink. My father was among them.”
(The implication is of course that Conrad’s father died of thirst behind those windows that were tallowed so that the men should not look out and see their womenfolk. Actually of course Conrad’s father did not die in these circumstances, but it was not until quite lately that the writer was aware of his misapprehension.... This, however, is the exact history of a relationship.)
Conrad remained with his mother in exile until he was nine or ten, then, his mother being threatened with an immediate death from tuberculosis they were allowed to return to Poland. Conrad’s mother was a woman of great beauty of physique and of character. Her face was oval, her black hair braided round it, her eyes intent, her manner quiet but spirited. His father was less effectual, the prime mover of an abortive revolution, a fact which Conrad deprecated. His father was not so dark as his mother; untidy bearded, with high cheek-bones, he was the proprietor, not professionally but as a revolutionist, of a famous newspaper in which he wrote a great deal. He was constantly writing: his style was not very distinguished.
Of his father Conrad spoke always deprecatorily. This was partly politeness. Whoever you were, his interlocutor, all that pertained to you — your father and all your ancestors — must be superior to his. It was his poor little books, his poor little brains, his poor little exploits set against all your splendours. Partly, too, it really pained him to think that his father had been a revolutionary — and an unsuccessful revolutionary at that — as if he had been pre-natally connected with something not ship-shape! For his mother he had on the other hand that passionate adoration that is felt by the inhabitants of Latin and Western Slav countries for their mothers and that seems so ‘foreign’ to the Anglo-Saxon. Oddly but comprehensibly when he spoke of his mother as revolutionary he was full of enthusiasm. For him the Polish national spirit had been kept alive by such women as his mother: the men were hopeless. Again not ship-shape. This was not difficult to understand. The men were prohibited from living a life of their own. The only career that the Russians allowed them to study for was that of the law. So they were all either lawyers or babblers — or both, and without any practical training. This for generations and generations....
As for class — the Kurzeniowskis were country gentlemen, for all the world like an English county family, with land lived on and owned since the darkest ages, untitled, but aristocrats to the backbone; what is called in England ‘good people,’ a term which is untranslatable into any other language and incomprehensible even to Americans. This made Conrad feel at home in Kent: many times he said so. The feudal spirit there survived in the territories of the great land-owners.
Conrad had an uncle — Paradowski — who was a great Pan, guardian to the children of half the noble families of that Government. He had a longish, as if squared face, a long nose, meditative hands that were always pausing in some action and long brownish hair that fell rather Germanly on to the collar of a velvet coat. It was to his great country house that the emissary of Palmerston had come. (The writer’s friend Count Potocki tells the writer that the name of this uncle must have been Bibrowski. The name Paradowski remains, however, very firmly in the writer’s mind. Conrad was inordinately proud and fond of this uncle and fully four-fifths of his conversation when it referred to his Polish days concerned itself with this relative: there were, for instance, the Paradowski dragoons, a famous Russian regiment named after him or his ancestors. Similarly, in early days Conrad always wrote and pronounced his name as Kurzeniowski; the correct transliteration would appear to be “Korzeniowski.” It does not seem to matter much.)
This uncle stood well with the Russians. Before that abortive revolution he had been a close friend of one of the Grand Dukes and had had a part in drafting the constitution that the Tsar had proposed to grant to Poland. In the revolution he had taken no part, not because he was indifferent to the interests of Poland but because he knew it must prove abortive and cause much suffering and persecution to the Russian Poles. Besides, it brought about the rescinding of the constitution. After the revolution he busied himself with alleviating the sufferings of his compatriots; he fed legions of the starving dispossessed; he secured the return of their patrimonies to the children of the exiled. Amongst these last was Conrad: his uncle secured the return to him of half the great confiscated estate of his father and got him permission to reside in Russian Poland, in his own great house. (The emissary of Palmerston had by the by been sent away with a flea in his ear.)
Here for years and years Conrad read Marryat — and Fenimore Cooper. And it was one of the little ingenuous pleasures of Conrad to remember that in Paris after Waterloo, as recorded in the Memoirs, more crowds followed Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper on the boulevards than ever followed the King of Prussia. It pleased him to find one of his early heroes thus blessed by Fame of the bronze lungs. To this information the writer added the other that in that same Paris of that same date Assheton Smith, the Milor of incredible wealth and spleen was, according to the journals, followed about by crowds even greater than attached themselves to the Tsar of Russia. Out of a sort of tacit politeness we never tried to decide whether the King of Prussia or the Tsar of Russia had the larger following. But Assheton Smith was to have been the central figure of our novel about the execution of Ney — the Milor with the spleen intervening nearly successfully to save the beau sabreur. This, not because he felt any sympathy for Ney but because he desired to put a spoke in the wheel of Wellington and Blucher and all the fighting fellows who were beginning to think themselves of much too much importance, though merely younger sons. However, he made too much progress in the affections of the Tsar’s Egeria, so Ney was shot by the Tsar’s orders, just opposite the Closerie des Lilas on a spot occupied now by a station of the Seaux railway ... to spite Assheton Smith.
