Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 880
It was Conrad’s great good luck to be spared the usual literature that attends on the upbringing of the British writer. He read such dog-eared books as are found in the professional quarters of ships’ crews. He read Mrs. Henry Wood, Miss Braddon — above all Miss Braddon! — the Family Herald, rarely even going as high as the late William Black or the pseudo-literary writers of his day. He once or twice said that going down Ratcliffe Highway he was jumped out at from a doorway by a gentleman who presented him with a pocket copy of the English Bible. This was printed on rice paper. He used the leaves for rolling cigarettes, but before smoking always read the page. So, he said, he learned English. The writer has always imagined this story to be one of Conrad’s mystifications. Normally he would express the deepest gratitude to the writers of the Family Herald — a compilation of monthly novelettes the grammar of which was very efficiently censored by its sub-editors — and above all to Miss Braddon. She wrote very good, very sound English; machined her plots inoffensively and well; was absolutely workmanlike, her best novels being the later and less-known ones. Long after this period of seamanship Conrad read The Orange Girl, a novel placed in the time of Charles II. He recognised in it, so he then said, all the qualities that he had found in this novelist’s work when he had been before the mast. Miss Braddon learned Greek at the age of eighty in order to read Homer in the original. She died only very lately.
From that time, for ten years, Conrad followed the sea. The deep sea, reading all sorts of books. Once an officer with quarters of his own he resumed his reading of French along with the English popular works. He read with the greatest veneration Flaubert and Maupassant; with less, Daudet and Gautier; with much less Pierre Loti. Tormented with the curiosity of words, even at sea, on the margins of the French books he made notes for the translation of phrases. The writer has seen several of these old books of Conrad, notably an annotated copy of Pecheur d’Islande — and of course the copy of Madame Bovary upon the end papers and margins of which Almayer’s Folly was begun.
Of Conrad’s deep-sea life the writer proposes to say next to nothing. Intimately mixed up as he was with the writing of so many of Conrad’s sea-stories he could not disentangle to his own satisfaction which version of a semi-autobiographic story, like Heart of Darkness, was the printed story, which the preparation for the printed story, as Conrad told it to the writer, which the version that Conrad told for the pleasure of chance hearers and which was, as it were, the official autobiographic account. Occasionally, as in his account of his meeting with Roger Casement on the fringe of the bush outside Boma, Conrad would turn to the writer and say: “You’ll keep that, mon vieux, for my biography, ...” speaking semi-jocularly.
However, by a curious fatality, during the late war the writer happened to come across a largish body of writing in the form of letters written by Conrad from aboard ship to a compatriot. By Conrad as politician, not as seaman! It was precisely a body of writing since each of the letters was a sort of essay on international politics and it was curious in that it was to all intents and purposes completely uninteresting. It was in a sense passionate in that it was filled with aspirations that Great Britain should join in one combination or another against Russia. She was to join Germany, Austria, France — any one, so long only as she fought the Bear. But all these letters were written with a fluency, such that, had they come before the writer editorially he would at once have thrown them into the waste-paper basket. It was as if Lord Macaulay had been writing leaders for a popular paper.... Before that one of Conrad’s relatives had showed the writer a number of letters that Conrad had written to the Indépendance Belge. These were quite another matter — admirably written, intensely emotional. As if Pierre Loti had had some heart! They had in fact, as is to be expected, a great deal of the body and substance of Heart of Darkness.
At both of these documents, however, the writer did no more than glance. The lady had treasured up as cuttings her nephew’s correspondence and, when Conrad was out of the room, presented the bundle to Conrad’s ami le poète. He read them for perhaps half an hour before Conrad came in again: then their author exhibited so much perturbation that the writer desisted. The probability is that Conrad burned the bundle.... It was very similar with the other letters. They were lent to the writer by their addressee at a time when the writer was extremely occupied; he glanced at them for long enough to form the opinion expressed above and then put them away. Before he had had time to look at them again it occurred to him that Conrad might prefer him not to read them. He accordingly wrote to Conrad and received the answer that Conrad would extremely prefer that the letters should not be re-read and the author returned them to their owner. It is to be hoped that they will not be disinterred.
It should not be inferred that Conrad had anything to hide. He disliked the writer’s reading his early works out of the shyness that attends the maturity of every author. This writer would give a good deal if the shelf in the British Museum that contains his early writings could be burned, and Conrad would occasionally say that the idea of the writer or anyone else reading certain of the stories of the Outpost of Progress or even certain paragraphs of his later work caused him to have chair de poule all down his spine. It is like a feeling of physical modesty.
However, in moments more robust he would declare that the articles in the form of letters were remarkable productions. He would remind the writer of his aunt’s expressed opinion that those letters formed magnificent prose: and in moments of depression over his then work he would declare that what he had written in French before ever trying English was infinitely above anything he could do in the inexact, half-baked language that English was. He put it that the idea of really writing English — an English that should have an abiding value — never appeared to him practical whilst he was at sea. He would write essays and long letters with the idea of improving his vocabulary for social occasions. Then, one day, writing an imaginary letter to the Times about some matter professional to the British Mercantile Marine, he felt as if he had really ‘bitten into his pen.’... The earlier letters at which the writer glanced sufficiently confirmed this. It was not that they were bad: they were just glib.
At what moment of writing or reading, on the bridge, in what harbour Conrad thus found the religion of English prose the writer does not remember. It was probably in Sydney during a period in a convalescent home. It comes back, that this is what Conrad said, but that may very well be a mistake.... Conrad, however, used to say that in that convalescent home they were fed on tomatoes and milk, a horrible combination: occasionally also he used to say that his early work was like tomatoes and milk taken together. A horrible combination! he would add.... Or, of course, the revelation of his powers may have come to him in Rouen.
Anyhow, somewhere on the dark waters Conrad found religion.
We had left Lowestoft and passed for master.... We made the voyage in the Judea, Do or Die — actually the Palestine — that you find narrated in Youth. In the East we passed so and so many years. You find the trace of them in the End of the Tether, to go no further outside the Youth volume. We commanded the Congo Free State navy — for the sake of Heart of Darkness. So we have the whole gamut of youth, of fidelity and of human imbecility.... And if the writer write ‘we’ — that is how it feels. For it was not possible to be taken imperiously through Conrad’s life, in those unchronological and burning passages of phraseology, and not to feel — even to believe — that one had had, oneself, that experience. And the feeling was heightened by Conrad’s affecting to believe that one had, at least to the extent of knowing at all times where he had been, what seen, and what performed.
The scenes of Conrad’s life as afterwards rendered, say in Heart of Darkness, are really as vivid in the writer’s mind from what Conrad said as from what Conrad there wrote. It is a curious affair. Actually under the writer’s eyes are the bright, lit up keys of a typewriter. Yet perfectly definitely he sees both the interior and the outside of a palm-leaf hut, daylight shining through the interstices. A man lies on the floor of the hut, reaching towards a pile of condensed milk tins. The man is half in shadow — half Conrad, half the writer: too tall for Conrad; stretched out a full eight feet, trunk and arms. Outside an immense grey tide, the other shore hardly visible: a few darkish trees of irregular outline. And a man — Coming. In a planter’s dress: breeches, leggings, a flannel shirt, a sombrero.... Some time before he had lifted up the branches of the forest on the opposite shore and looked across at our hut.... He makes a fire and gives us some soup.... He comes once a fortnight....
We had been at the sources of the Congo: nearly to Fashoda, says the ungeographical part of our minds that once pored over a map of Africa to see everywhere Terra Incognita — in the eighties — and that has never again looked at a map of Africa. We had belonged to the Humanitarian Party. The Humanitarian Party did not approve of feeding our black troops on black prisoners: the Conservatives did. So the Conservatives had poisoned us or something the equivalent. And had put our quasi corpse in charge of native bearers to take us, dead or alive, down to Boma on the coast. It was all one to the natives whether at Boma they delivered us quick or dead: they were paid the same.
Half down the Congo they had dumped us in a hut that was a cache for condensed milk. They had gone away for a fortnight to their own village.... We extracted the condensed milk from the tins by suction, having first pierced them with a pocket knife.... The condensed milk was the very antidote for the poison!... The bearers, black, their white teeth protruding, come back, not displeased to find us alive. Not pleased.... Astonished!... They carried Conrad down to Boma, a sweltering collection of tin huts. The Bomese took great pains to keep you alive: you must die at sea, otherwise the death rate of the Congo Free State rises by one....
At Boma then, listless from the abominable huts, we strolled out one day along the coast, between the satin sea and the steaming trees. A man, with the sunlight on his face, in white tennis shoes with two bulldogs at his heels stepped out of the dark forest. He said Hullo! He had strolled across Africa from the Zanzibar side in his tennis shoes, with no bearers, no escort but his bulldogs, no arms. He had such a fascination for the black fellows. That was Roger Casement.... There was a great deal of light, the sky blue, the sea dove-coloured and oily, the forest black-green, a wall; the beach pink, the bulldogs crashed over it to sniff at our heels....
It was in pictures like that that the writer had Conrad’s life, up to about the time when we engaged on the Inheritors. Half of it came in a shyish way, for biography, half in pictures, the result of stray anecdotes. Thus if one or other of us happened to be nervous from overwork and we talked of nerves Conrad would say: “By Jove, after I came out of the Ospedale Italiano and went into the City to draw some pay, I was so frightened at the racket on the Underground that I had to lie down on the floor of the compartment. Nerves all to pieces....” So the writer has his picture of Conrad lying between the seats on the things like duckboards that used to floor the old Underground carriages; it was only by conjunctions before and after that he pieced together that Conrad went into the Italian Hospital for Seamen in London after coming back from Boma and that from there he went to Switzerland, to the hydrotherapie near Geneva in which Maupassant died.
All to pieces as he then was he had to think of how he was going to employ the rest of his life. For following the sea he imagined that he would be no longer fit. When he was a little better he saw on the bookstall of Geneva station those yellow volumes. The sight of them and the thought of Maupassant made him say: “By Jove: Why not write?” When he had settled that he might write he had to settle in which language his writing should be. There were French and English. In English there were no stylists — or very rare ones. French bristled with them. When he made the decision to write in English the writer does not know. He used to say that it was in Rouen harbour, opposite the hotel in which Emma Bovary had been accustomed to meet Rodolphe.
Here, looking out of his porthole across the frozen ground at the inn door, he began translating phrases from the scene between Rodolphe and Emma at the cattle-show. He said that he began with Rodolphe’s formal phrases of romantic love that were whispered between the announcements of prizes for bullocks and so, working outwards, reached the blanker pages of cover, title and half-title pages. On these he began Almayer’s Folly. He was reading at the time Daudet’s Jack, which immensely fascinated him, though he found it trop chargé — as who should say, too harrowing.
What stands in the two paragraphs above Conrad told the writer over and over and over again.
In the sad years for Europe, Conrad wrote a passage contradicting the statement made by someone somewhere in print that he had had to choose between writing in French or English. He stated that from the first English had jumped at him and held him. This was a politeness to England at a time when extravagantly patriotic pronouncements were called for from persons of foreign origin: Henry James imagined the beau geste of naturalising himself as a British subject practically on his deathbed, Conrad this other. From the national point of view it was desirable, from the point of view of literary precision, to be regretted. For it is obvious that anyone who contemplates writing and is practically bi-lingual must from time to time hesitate as to in which language he will write. The writer has to make the choice every morning. He had to make the choice on the morning after the day on which he learned of Conrad’s death. That was a choice a little more definite than that Conrad made — but not much more. His relations and connections in Belgium certainly pressed him to write in French before he even thought of writing in English. Of that the writer was assured by Conrad’s aunt, who regretted to the last that Conrad chose to write in a language that rendered him inaccessible to what she considered to be the civilised world. She herself wrote several novels, notably for the Revue des deux Mondes.
The point is of no great importance. Obviously if, as Conrad frequently asserted, the first English words that he ever heard were the verses containing the pious aspiration: We’ve fought the Bear before, and so we will again, the Russians shall not have Constantinople! — those words might well jump at a young Pole, sick to take part in politics. What is material is that Conrad always knew French much better than he knew English. This only enhances the glory of his achievements in our language. In French he was perfectly fluent, in English never; abroad he was constantly taken for a Frenchman; no one could ever have imagined him English from his speech or bearing. Those points again are of no importance: what is miraculous is that he took English, as it were by the throat and, wrestling till the dawn, made it obedient to him as it has been obedient to few other men. The fact is extraordinary, but not incomprehensible. The writer writes French better than he does English, not because he knows French better, but precisely because he knows French worse: in English he can go gaily on exulting in his absolute command of the tongue. He can write like the late Mr. Ruskin or like the late Charles Garvice, at will. In writing, but not in speaking French, he must pause for a word: it is in pausing for a word that lies the salvation of all writers. The proof of prose is in the percentage of right words. Not the precious word: not even the startlingly real word.
We once discussed for a long time whether Conrad should write of a certain character’s oaken resolution. As a picturesque adjective ‘oaken’ has its attractions. You imagine a foursquare, lumpish fellow, inarticulate and apt to be mulish, but of good conscience. The writer must obviously have suggested the adjective. We turned it down after a good deal of discussion, the writer being against, Conrad for, its use. Conrad liked its picturesqueness and was always apt to be polite to the writer’s suggestions. He could afford to be. We decided for ‘stolidity’ which is more quiet in the phrase. Eventually the whole sentence went.... The story was Conrad’s Gaspar Ruiz. That is a fairly exact specimen of the way we worked during many years....
Conrad then, in Rouen harbour, decided that he would write books in English. From that point the following episodes come back to the writer from Conrad’s recounted autobiography. He lay for long in that port, because the ship upon which he found himself as master had been seized by the sheriff’s officers, for debt. Not of course for Conrad’s debt. The ship was one of a projected French Rouen-to-New York line that never got beyond that one ship, and that one ship lay there for a long time, the financier having failed to raise capital enough.... There comes in here another rather curious coincidence between the career of Conrad and the writer: it cannot unfortunately be narrated for the moment, one of the parties concerned being out of reach and probably still alive.... Presumably, however, if two people knock about the world in similar districts for a number of years before acquaintanceship, they will come very near touching hands several times all unconsciously....
Gradually, then, Conrad seemed to lose touch with the open sea. There opened up more and more glimpses of shore careers, so that of those relatively later days the record would seem to be one of abortive voyages.... Thus the writer remembers with peculiar vividness a telegram coming to Captain Conrad, telling him to assume command of a ship taking in cargo in Antwerp harbour, and a journey out in mid-winter.... But it is only a vignette of a wintry port with icy arc-lamps amongst bare trees over black water: the stowing was being done all wrong, the ship being a bad one to shift her cargo. That was apparently why Conrad had been called in. Whether she ever went to sea remains as a blank in the writer’s mind.
By all accounts Conrad was a very efficient master — but extravagantly nervous about details. All the several officers who once sailed with him have narrated the same thing to the writer. Conrad would indulge in extremely dangerous manœuvres, going about within knife-blades of deadly shores whilst his officers and crew shivered — but over very small details of the stowing of spars and the like he would go out of his mind and swear the ship to pieces. In the same way, in writing he would attack subjects almost impossible and go almost mad over a sentence; or, in driving, he would shave stone posts like a madman, and then curse the stable-boy to pieces for letting him come out with the old instead of the new whip.... You get an account of a going about in the Secret Sharer. It is, however, possible that the minuteness of detail on which, according to his officers, Conrad so insisted on board was not so very minute.
