'So Important That It Ought to Absorb Him'

In his brief portrait of Joseph Conrad, Desmond MacCarthy tells us the novelist “felt himself impelled to attempt an intenser vividness in description. Try, just try, so to describe something that the inattentive reader must see it, and the attentive one can never forget that he has seen it. You will find it an exhausting task; especially if you are also determined your sentences shall run sonorously and gracefully. The easiest half of Conrad’s life was that he spent at sea, hard though that had often been.” 

When I think of literary labor, the writer who obsesses and sweats every word, it’s Conrad who comes to mind. His friend and sometime-collaborator Ford Madox Ford recalls the novelist “writing desperately away in spite of every illness and family catastrophe so as to live just above the verge of starvation.” Conrad could make himself ill by his undistractable devotion to writing. Of the twenty months he spent working on his greatest novel, Nostromo (1904), Conrad wrote in a letter, “I see nothing, I read nothing. It is like a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write, write.”

 

I thought of Conrad this week when two people -- a fellow employee of the university and a reader of this blog in Chicago -- complained to me about the labors of writing. Perhaps it’s my experience working for newspapers, which are noisy, often emotionally fraught places – reporters take their copy seriously and enthusiastically defend it against editors – that enables me to descend into concentration almost instantly at the keyboard. One thing I’ve always liked about writing is the self-forgetting it induces. Time and troubles evaporate, regardless of the sort of writing I’m doing. I blessed.

 

MacCarthy met Conrad once, about two years before the Pole’s death in 1924. His eleven-page profile of Conrad is collected in Portraits (1949), and it’s remarkable for its vividness, almost domesticating a seemingly exotic character. As writers and human beings, we have plenty to learn from Conrad. As I’ve gotten older, he has become even more worthy of emulation, including his obsessive work ethic and the manner in which a writer conducts himself:

 

“Conrad’s relation towards the public was more dignified than that of most of the eminent novelists. He did not volunteer opinions on subjects on which his view was of no value; he was also scrupulous in speaking only about those sides of art which he understood, showing thus a respect for art itself which appears to be rare. Possibly his early training in the merchant service taught him the difference in value between, say, the mate’s views on navigation and those of the intelligent passenger. He seldom parted with his signature in any cause, and he respected his own craft so sincerely that he did not think it necessary for his manhood publicly to express strong views on the problems of London traffic, diet, or foreign exchanges. He modestly supposed that there were others who, compared with him, might be as well up in these matters as he knew himself to be in regard to story-telling and prose; and he seems to have held that an artist’s work is so important that it ought to absorb him.”

 

[Find a link to Portraits here at IWP Books, hosted by Isaac Waisberg.]