'Conversion of Nervous Force Into Phrases'

One of the advantages of encountering a great writer early and reading him systematically – in effect, learning his language, the way we learn Latin, but with greater pleasure – is the way his words and plots not only remain in memory but grow more central to the person we are becoming. I assume individuals, like species, evolve. Sensibilities can change, though admittedly they often do not. I read an article recently in which a researcher argues that Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris have co-evolved over tens of thousands of years. Each, in effect, absorbed or adapted qualities of the other, and not just politicians. Something similar can happen with books, with Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Proust, and their readers. 

I no longer read Joseph Conrad the way I read Heart of Darkness, the first of his novels I encountered. It was strictly an adventure story. I read it the way I read Kim and The Master of Ballantrae. Many fashionably stupid things have been said about Heart of Darkness, and I won’t get into that. I just know the story, like other Conrad titles, is central to who I am and the way I look at literature and the world. The political, historical and human nature business came later.

 

On Father’s Day my youngest son noticed Nostromo on the shelf. He recognized the title as the name of the spacecraft in the movie Alien. I gave him the brief version of the Conrad lecture because he has already read Heart of Darkness, so the Pole is a known quantity. I noted that Nostromo is the name of an Italian seaman in the story, and his name is variously translated as “our man” or “seaman.” If forced to pack one novel by Conrad when marooned on that mythical desert island, this is it. In such a state of solitude, the last thing one needs is ideals. Conrad’s great political novels – Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes –are studies in failed ideals. In a letter he wrote to H.G. Wells in 1903, while working on Nostromo, Conrad says: “[F]or me, writing—the only possible writing—is just simply the conversion of nervous force into phrases.” Most of Conrad’s sentences are charged with energy and are seldom inert.

 

Conrad’s letters, by the way, are wonderful. In an 1895 letter to Edward Noble, an aspiring English novelist who also wrote sea tales, Conrad writes:

 

“Remember that death is not the most pathetic—the most poignant thing—and you must treat events only as illustrative of human sensation—as the outward sign of inward feelings—of live feelings— which alone are truly pathetic and interesting. . . . To accomplish it you will have to cultivate your poetic faculty—you must give yourself up to your emotions (no easy task) you must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image—mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse; you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain;—you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost; You must do it so that at the end of your day’s work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing—nothing left in you.”

 

This is a sensibility some of us find impossible to ignore. I hope my son feels that way about Nostromo. Clearly, it’s a novel for grownups, intelligent, complex and serious, touching on the eternal dilemma of being human. As Joseph Epstein writes:

 

“Conrad is also among the chief moralists of the novel. He preferred to put his characters—and his readers—in situations of ethical bafflement and then watch to discover if their moral compasses will help them find their way home. This, too, was Henry James’s modus operandi. Reading both writers provides superior entertainment as well as a strenuous test of one’s own equipment for moral navigation.”