'I Read You As I Listen to Rare Music'

Rare is the writer who captures our imagination when we’re young and still assembling our personal canons, and remains rereadable for the rest of our lives. For me that would include Swift, Defoe and a third English novelist, a rather exotic import from Poland: Joseph Conrad. I read him first as a writer of adventure stories, usually set aboard ships. That’s how he was marketed by publishers. I was not only young but a landlubber, and saw the ocean for the first time at age sixteen. Of course, I read Melville, Stevenson and Dana, but Conrad was different, somehow deeper. There was often swashbuckling. Consider Typhoon (1902), which I recently reread. But his novels and stories are all suffused with a dark moral tension. 

Henry James noticed this mingling of popular format with moral mystery. In a letter dated November  1, 1906, after Conrad had sent him an inscribed copy of The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions, James writes:

 

“I read you as I listen to rare music – with deepest depths or surrender, & out of those depths I emerge slowly & reluctantly again, to acknowledge that I return to life….But the book itself is a wonder to me really – for its so bringing home the prodigy of your part of experience; bringing it home to me more personally & directly, I mean, the immense treasure & the inexhaustible adventure. No one has known – for intellectual use – the things you know, & you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached. I find you, in it all, writing wonderfully, whatever you may say of your difficult medium & your plume rebelle.”

 

I also reread Conrad’s greatest novel, Nostromo, earlier this year. He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdychev, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Apollo, was a Polish patriot and agitated against Russian rule. In 1862, the future novelist, not yet five years old, and his family were exiled to Vologda, north of Moscow. Conrad had a deep familial distrust and hatred for Russia. A major character in Nostromo, Martin Decoud, is a native of Costaguana, Conrad’s fictional South American country. He is a European-educated journalist, works for the newspaper Porvenir (“The Future”) and agitates for Costaguanan independence. In Part 2, Chap. 3, Decoud speaks for Conrad:

 

“Imagine an atmosphere of opéra bouffe which all the comic business of stage statesmen, brigands, etc., etc., all their farcical stealing, intriguing, and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is screamingly funny, the blood flows all the time, and the actors believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe. Of course, government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind; but really we Spanish-Americans do overstep the bounds. No man of ordinary intelligence can take part in the intrigues of une farce macabre.”

 

In his essay “Conrad’s Darkness” (The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad, 1980), V.S. Naipaul, a very Conradian novelist, writes: “And there are the aphorisms. They run right through Conrad’s work, and their tone never varies. It is the same wise man who seems to be speaking.”

 

Conrad died on August 3, 1924 at age sixty-six.