THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF JOSEPH CONRAD

GENERAL EDITOR
LAURENCE DAVIES

FOUNDING GENERAL EDITOR
FREDERICK R. KARL (1927–2004)

CONSULTING EDITOR
HANS VAN MARLE (1922–2001)

VOLUME 7

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF JOSEPH CONRAD

VOLUME 7
1920–1922

EDITED BY

LAURENCE DAVIES

AND

J. H. STAPE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521561969

© This Volume 7 of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Joseph Conrad first
published 2005. The text of the letters © The Estate of Joseph Conrad 2005.
The introductory material and editorial notes © The Press Syndicate of the
University of Cambridge.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant
collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-56196-9 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-56196-5 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of three Conradians:

Philip Conrad
Bruce Harkness
Frederick R. Karl

CONTENTS

PLATES

between pages 190 and 191

These plates appear by kind permission of: Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth College (2, 6, 7, 8); British Library Newspaper Collection, Colindale (4); Cambridge University Library (1); National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (3).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors are grateful to holders of manuscripts, listed separately, for their co-operation.

   Special thanks are due to Mr Owen Knowles, the late Hans van Marle, and Dr Gene M. Moore whose gracious help and wise counsel greatly facilitated work on this volume.

   Dr Keith Carabine, Dr Linda Dryden, Dr Robert Hampson, the late Hans van Marle, and Professor Zdzisław Najder generously shared letters they have discovered. Dr R. A. Gekoski, Bookseller, Mr Peter Grogan, and the Center for Conrad Studies at the Institute for Bibliography and Editing, Kent State University, also kindly assisted in the preparation of this volume.

   The editors are grateful to the following individuals for answering inquiries or otherwise facilitating their work: Ms Wanda Bachmann, Mr Jamie Barnes (Curator, Keswick Museum and Art Gallery), Dr Katherine Baxter, the Revd J. S. Bell (Senior Chaplain, Tonbridge School), Dr Steve Bell (Her Majesty’s Nautical Almanac Office), Dr Martin Bock, Dr Xavier Brice, Mr C. F. P. Chapman (Secretary, Old Oswestrian Society), Ms Claire Cross (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine), Dr Charles Cutter (Brandeis University Library), Ms Caroline Dalton (Archivist, New College, Oxford), Mr A. J. Essery, Ms Glenda Gale (Alexander Turnbull Library), the late Raymond Gauthier, Ms Lee Grady (McCormick-International Harvester Collection Archivist, State Historical Society of Wisconsin), Dr Richard J. Hand, Professor James Heffernan, Dr Susan Jones, Professor Joseph M. Kissane, Ms Pamela Painter, Professor Walter C. Putnam Ⅲ, Professor S. W. Reid, Professor John Rassias, Ms Erin Schlumpf, Dr Patrick Scott (Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina), Dr Allan H. Simmons, Dr Carl Spadoni (Russell Archivist, MacMaster University), Dr Mariuccia G. R. Sprenger, Professor Ray Stevens, Mr Asa Tapley, Ms Régine Tessier, Dr Anne N. Thomas, Dr Robert W. Trogdon, Mr Robert Warren (Royal Observatory, Greenwich), Professor Cedric Watts, and Dr Andrea White.

   J. H. Stape is grateful to the Faculty of Letters of Kyoto University for a visiting professorship during spring 1997, which permitted his work on this volume to begin, and to Toru Sasaki for arrangements connected with it. Some of the early work of locating and copying the letters in this volume was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

   The late Frederick R. Karl began gathering texts of Conrad’s correspondence in the 1970s, working at first in tandem with Professor Zdzisław Najder. When Cambridge took up the proposed collected edition of the letters, Frederick R. Karl became its founding general editor; a critic and biographer of many interests who always saw the broader cultural landscape, he delighted in Conrad’s artistry and gravitas and left his inimitable mark on Conrad studies. The late Bruce Harkness was both a generous and genial mentor and a master of anticipation, alert to those rewarding mysteries that scholars often overlook. The unassuming pride that the late Philip Conrad took in his grandfather’s life and work showed itself in many kindnesses to those who shared his admiration. All three of these Conradians, so different from each other yet bound by the same enthusiasm, died in the spring of 2004. We dedicate this volume to their memory.

HOLDERS OF LETTERS

PUBLISHED SOURCES OF LETTERS

Books cited without place of publication originated in London.

OTHER FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS

Unless otherwise noted, citations of Conrad’s work are from the Kent Edition, published by Doubleday, Page, in twenty-six volumes (Garden City, NY, 1925).

CHRONOLOGY, 1920–1922

Unless otherwise stated, dates are for book publication in Britain rather than the United States; dates and locations for essays in periodicals record only the first appearance.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME SEVEN

According to the folklore of creativity, artists in their last years express a serenity, a wisdom, a mastery of their craft that shows them both at home in this world and ready to leave it. Austen’s Persuasion, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Tempest, Goya’s Bordeaux paintings, Beethoven’s last quartets all supposedly display this ripeness, this readiness. Between 1920 and 1922, Conrad completed one novel and made substantial advances on another, left unfinished when he died in August 1924. Many readers of The Rover have seen in Peyrol’s final voyage either one, last resounding gesture of sacrifice in a cause whose adherents have slighted the old freebooter or a tranquil coming to terms with death, or even both. For obvious reasons, Suspense is harder to assess, but the temptation to read it in a similar way remains, down to its concluding words. Such interpretations may be too sentimental for the tough of spirit or too naïve for the sceptic – Don’t they depend on post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning? Can’t that touching quotation from The Faerie Queene gracing both The Rover and Conrad’s grave also be taken as the voice of Despair? – but they have helped to shape his literary reputation. That he also chose in this period to dramatise his bleakest, most ironic novel, The Secret Agent, clouds this image of a poignant sunset, and so, even more, does the state of mind, whether playful or dejected, expressed in his correspondence.

   Far from feeling any mastery of his art, Conrad still had the habit of discounting any and all of his achievements, as in this avowal to Pinker about Suspense, his ‘Napoleonic novel’:

I don’t know that a great subject is an advantage. It increases one’s sense of responsibility and awakens all that mistrust of oneself that has been my companion through all these literary years. Mine, my dear Pinker, is the only instance within my knowledge of practice not giving self-confidence. There is a strain of anxiousness in my character that even the encouragement of your friendship and sympathy cannot altogether overcome.

(14 June 1920)

Far from feeling serene about his life, he often seemed to flounder in a swamp of melancholy. During an attack of gout, he wrote to Walpole:

I have been in great pain and, what is worse, in the depth of dumps. Have dumps any depth? Anyway the impression was a most horrible nightmare – unable to think, afraid to move and only able to worry . . . The whole thing was so brutal and unexpected that I feel as if I had been robbed of the last shred of my confidence in the scheme of the Universe. It all appears one great chaotic worry.

(14 June 1920)

As readers of Conrad’s earlier letters will know, these states of mind were not new – these passages could have been written in the 1890s – but were all the worse for never being banished by achievement or success. At times, he could make light of his own nervousness, for instance about attending rehearsals of The Secret Agent : ‘My spirit became like unto that of the field-mouse palpitating in its hole, though my body (and a considerable proportion of my native irritability) went up twice to town’ (to Ada and John Galsworthy, [7 November 1922]). At other times, wit and irreverence break in, as towards the end of the letter to Bertrand Russell of [22–23 October 1922] in which Conrad also mounts a spirited attack on political and philosophical self-assurance, but the tone is certainly not that of the wise and tranquil elder.

   Periods of despondency, as so often before, had much to do with the uneven rhythms of his writing: ‘I have done no work to speak of for months, – such is the dreadful truth which I conceal from as many people as possible’ (to Ada Galsworthy, 9 February 1922). Over these three years, Conrad begrudged the time he spent on literary housekeeping. There were fugitive articles to be rescued for Notes on Life and Letters or reprinted as pamphlets, preparations for the collected edition, letters to answer from correspondents all over the world who wanted his opinions on this literary question or that, and attractive side projects such as translating Bruno Winawer’s comedy The Book of Job. None of these activities was impossibly time-consuming, but, in concert, they interrupted the narrative momentum he needed for good financial and artistic reasons:

All I can leave to my people will be my copyrights – which are worth something now. But this is a precarious provision at the best. Meantime I must keep in at work. But I’ve had two hard lives – each in its way – physically and mentally and I feel the need of easing down a bit. I assure you that through all my writing life I have never had the time to “look round” so to speak. When I went away from the desk it was to be laid up. Such were my holidays. I don’t complain.

(17 July 1920)

The last sentence was a reproach to John Quinn, the recipient, who complained at length about his own misfortunes, and the generally defensive tone is a response to Quinn’s unhappiness at no longer being the preferred buyer of Conrad’s manuscripts. Nevertheless, this letter does speak for Conrad’s condition – and his decision to take a working holiday in Corsica only exacerbated his plight.

   Before leaving, he told Agnes Ridgeway, his friend from the days of visits to the Sandersons at Elstree, about his hopes for Suspense and his recent dramatisation of The Secret Agent. By a macabre accident, Conrad gave the letter a posthumous date, 28 December ‘24’, instead of 1920: ‘I want to breathe the air of [the] Western Mediterranean where my young life began – and I hope I will be able to do some work on my new novel. For the last year I have done nothing except correcting the text of my Collected Edition and writing prefaces for the same. I have also written a 4-act play.’ The prospects for this journey into the past had seemed alluring: escape from a soggy English winter, respite for Jessie Conrad from the strain of running a household while in miserable pain, the celebration of their silver wedding anniversary, and for Conrad new territory, wildly picturesque and associated with Dominique Cervoni, his mentor and co-conspirator in Marseilles, and Napoleon Bonaparte, the anything but grey eminence of Conrad’s later, ‘Mediterranean’ fiction. The Conrads were going at just the right moment: ‘All the vendettas have been settled or have died out and it is very quiet there, I am told. On the other hand no golf courses have been laid out yet and no invasion from the dismal tribe with clubs is to be feared – for this year at least’ (to John Galsworthy, 17 January 1921). The island had been discovered, however. The company at the hotel in Ajaccio came straight out of an early E. M. Forster novel: `An atmosphere of intense good form pervades the place. Low tones – polite smiles – kind inquiries – small groups. The only disreputable looking person is the unavoidable Clergyman of the C[hurch] of E[ngland] who looks as tho’ he must have had a few adventures in his time’ (to Eric Pinker, 5 February 1921).At least the expedition gave Jessie Conrad some pleasure, but, for her husband, the time was otherwise completely wasted. ‘The truth of the matter is’, he told Alice Kinkead, ‘that I like Corsica incomparably more in your pictures than in nature’ (10 October 1921) – and he made no headway on his writing.

   The Pinkers’ grand excursion to Kent was another such occasion. When they arrived at Oswalds in the last days of July 1921, they came by mail-coach with J. B. Pinker on the box, driving four horses. This was not a tranquil visit, and it lasted more than a week.¹ An overflow of kitchen, stable, and dining-room servants had to be billeted in local inns. Catered lunches had to be laid on: `I am afraid that those lunches won’t be tip-top . . . At any rate I intend to use all my powers of persuasion and fascination to get those Canterbury people to turn out decent things, whatever they may be’ (to J. B. Pinker, 18 [or 19] July 1921). The occasion was the annual Cricket Week, and Canterbury’s mediaeval streets could not accommodate with ease a massive vehicle designed for the broad and well-paved post roads of nineteenth-century England. At least once, a wrong turning landed the coach in a cul-de-sac, so that it had to be backed out in an atmosphere of polite exasperation. On the first day of play, the would-be stylish arrival at the Kent County Cricket Ground became a little too dashing when the horses stampeded and spectators had to scramble for their lives.

   Conrad, who had been enticed into coming along on the two-day journey from Reigate, soon grew weary of Pinker’s running commentary on the art of carriage driving and had little relish for the days ahead of cricketing and picnics, since his own idea of sports and pastimes did not extend beyond nocturnal games of chess with his younger son and the occasional shot at palatable birds. He was trapped in an irritating pastiche of what Yeats, around this time, was calling ‘ceremony’, and Conrad wanted to be writing.

   Nevertheless, Conrad also had an ancestral streak of grand seigneur. At Oswalds, he commanded an extensive ‘lower deck’ crewed by indoor and outdoor servants and Audrey Seal, the cantankerous but much-needed nurse who would eventually marry ‘Long Charlie’ Vinten, the chauffeur. Living in this way required extensive credit or a steady income, neither of which comes frequently to a writer. Once again, in fact, Conrad relied upon Pinker as his banker, and this system was liable to crisis:

You cannot doubt that if I had been given a clear view of having doubled my expenditure between the years 1918–1919 I would not* have pulled myself together and prevented the doubling of it again between 1919–1920 – which is pretty near what in fact happened . . . Believe [me] my dear it is not good for a man (even of much steadier character than mine) to have money falling on him in envelopes as if from heaven without even a clear wiew* of the resources from which it flows and opportunity of comparing and checking. Especially if he’s a man by nature not particularly given to counting pennies.

(to Pinker, 19 April 1921)¹

   Illness permitting, the Conrads liked to entertain. They played host to such regulars as Jean-Aubry and Curle, and to writers and academics from around the world. One of the sharpest and most original observers of the Conrads at home was Tadaichi Hidaka, a lecturer from Waseda University, Tokyo, who describes Conrad’s greeting at the railway station, the drive to Oswalds, the tour of the gardens, the generous lunch, the chat in the study – a hospitality ceremonious but warm.² Although suffering through yet more surgery, painful and mostly ineffectual, Jessie Conrad took great pleasure in society and, when possible, in visits to London, which she found a more agreeable place than her husband did: ‘Thank you dear people for being good to Jessie when she was in town. I couldn’t face the racket (!) of it. Perfectly ridiculous – but I can’t help it. I don’t know what to say to people’ (to Rothenstein, 17 December 1920). When the Woman’s Pictorial serialised her cookery book, the recipes were flanked with photographs of her, her home, and her choicest dishes as featured at the Peter Pan Tearooms in Shaftesbury Avenue. The première of The Secret Agent was an alarming event for Conrad, one that he chose to avoid, but afterwards: