Complete works of ford m.., p.884
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 884
Almost the most vivid emotion that the writer can remember in his whole life was caused by the first visit one of the greatest of writers paid to the Pent. It has been already described in a book of the writer’s; but as no one discoverable ever read it it may come in here again. We were sitting then on a quiet sunlit day in the parlour of the Pent. Conrad was at the round table in the middle of the room, writing, his face to the window; his collaborator was reading some pages of corrected manuscript, facing into the room. A shadow went over those pages from the window, behind. Conrad exclaimed: “Good God!” in an accent of such agony and terror that the writer’s heart actually stopped as he swung round to the window to follow the direction of his companion’s appalled glance. It went through his mind: “This must be the bailiffs.... He has debts of which I do not know.... What’s to be done?... Are all the doors bolted?... What does one do?” An extremely tall man with a disproportionately small, grave head was stalking past the window; examining the house-front with suspicion.... The family were all out, driving. How could they be got in if all the doors had to be bolted? Through the window? But if a window is used as a place of ingress surely a bailiff can use it too.... One imagines that immense, grave fellow, in a pepper and salt gamekeeper’s coat with tails, putting one knee over the window sill as a small boy is handed in.... Surely an execution for debt cannot take place after sunset?... Then they will have to remain out till then. Or perhaps that is obsolete law.... They could go into the great barn.... It is always warm and still there, with the scent of hay: like an immense church.
The house was perfectly still. The tall figure with the aspect of a Spanish alcalde disappeared from above the monthly roses. He had been stalking, very slowly, like a man in a grave pageant — a stork. Suddenly Conrad exclaimed in a voice that was like a shout of joy: “By Jove!... It’s the man come about the mare!” Conrad was almost always going through some complicated horse-dealings with that mare of his. He was going to exchange her for a pair of Shetland ponies and a chaff-cutting machine; he was going to sell her in Ashford market as against part of the price of a stout Irish cob, the remainder to be paid by the loaning of her during hay-making to the farmer who hired the lands of the Pent; she was to be exchanged with a horse-dealer who was shortly going out of business and had a most admirable roll-top desk and a really good typewriter. Traps could be hired from the Drum Inn at Stamford....
Conrad’s conviction restored life to the fainting Pent: it breathed once more: the cat jumped off the window sill; the clock struck four.... The writer hurried, a little tremulous still, to open the front door.... The tall, thin, grave man looked gravely at him. The writer exclaimed hurriedly: “The mare’s out driving....” He added: “With the ladies!” It’s a great thing to be able to prove to a horse-dealer that your mare can really be driven by a lady. The man — he resembled a sundial — said in the slow voice a sundial must have: “I’m Hudson!” The writer said: “Yes, yes. The mare’s out with the ladies.” Getting into his voice the resonance of a great bell the tall man with the Spanish sort of beard said: “I’m ... W —— H —— Hud —— son. I want to see Conrad. You are not Conrad, are you? You are Hueffer.”...
The writer may very well have psychologised Conrad wrongly, though he remains strongly under the impression that after that king of men had gone Conrad said: “By Jove, I thought he was a bailiff!” But the occupation of writing to such a nature as Conrad’s is terribly engrossing. To be suddenly disturbed is apt to cause a second’s real madness.... We were once going up to Town in order to take some proofs to a publisher, and half-way between Sandling and Charing Cross Conrad remembered some phrase that he had forgotten to attend to in the proofs. He tried to correct them with a pencil, but the train jolted so badly that writing, sitting on a seat was impossible. Conrad got down on the floor of the carriage and lying on his stomach went on writing. Naturally when the one phrase was corrected twenty other necessities for correction stuck out of the page. We were alone in the carriage. The train passed Paddock Wood, passed Orpington, rushed through the suburbs. The writer said: “We’re getting into Town!” Conrad never moved except to write. The house-roofs of London whirled in perspective round us; the shadow of Cannon Street station was over us. Conrad wrote. The final shadow of Charing Cross was over us. It must have been very difficult to see down there. He never moved.... Mildly shocked at the idea that a porter might open the carriage door and think us peculiar the writer touched Conrad on the shoulder and said: “We’re there!” Conrad’s face was most extraordinary — suffused and madly vicious. He sprang to his feet and straight at the writer’s throat....
The lay reader — say an officer of His Majesty’s Army — should not here say: “Ah, these literary men!”... Let him think of his own feelings when he is trying to write some particularly complicated lie in an excuse to Orderly Room over something or other.... The writer once saw a colonel — and a deuced smart colonel at that — in Orderly Room, snatch up a revolver and damn near shoot an orderly who had interrupted him in a literary composition. The quartermaster whose job it was, the adjutant, and the writer, who had been called in, having all failed, the C.O. was himself trying to explain to garrison headquarters why the regiment’s washing was given to the Riverdale Laundry Co. instead of to some firm recommended by G.H.Q. You could almost swear his tongue followed his pen, round and round in his mouth in the effort of composition....
Well, the lay reader should understand that our tongues really do follow our pens when we are engaged in writing the specious lies on which our existence depends. And if our lies are not convincing, we, even as he, shall starve. And we are at it all the time whilst he gives on an average not more than five minutes a day for five days of the week to composing the misleading documents that save him from having to resign his commission. And he has only one Orderly Room and only one assistant adjutant to deceive: we lie to thousands. If we are lucky, to tens of thousands! So we are engrossed.... It is not more easy for us to put words together: it is more difficult because we have more sense of words. And we who go at it with persistence, undespairing, in the face of inevitable failure... are the gallant spirits.
Conrad at least was. It has to be remembered that he had to wrestle, not with one language only, but with three. Or, say with two and the ghost of one: for it happened to him occasionally to say: “There’s a word so and so in Polish to express what I want.” But that happened only very seldom. All the rest of the time he got an effect to satisfy himself in French. This was of course the case preponderantly in passages of some nicety of thought and expression. He could naturally write: “Will you have a cup of tea?” or “He is dead,” without first expressing himself to himself in French. But when he wrote a set of phrases like: “the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted, the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness,” he was translating directly from the French in his mind: Or when he wrote: “Their glance was guileless, profound, confident and trusting,” or: “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky — seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” Naturally as a British master mariner, he did not have to think of the offing as ‘le large,’ but when he was trying the sound of that sentence for his final cadence he did first say ‘le large’ and then said: “The open sea; the way to the open sea. No, the offing.” That the writer very well remembers.... Conrad moreover had for long intended to end the story with the words: ‘The horror! The horror!’ ‘L’horreur!’ having been the last words of Kurtz; but he gave that up. The accentuation of the English word was different from the French; the shade of meaning too. And the device of such an ending which would have been quite normal in a French story would have been what we used to call chargé — a word meaning something between harrowing, melodramatic, and rhetorical, for which there is no English equivalent. Perhaps ‘overloaded with sentiment’ would come as near it as you can get: but that is clumsy....
But the mere direct translation from imagined French into English was just child’s play. It was when you came to the transposing precisely, of such a word as Chargé from French into English that difficulties began. The writer remembers Conrad spending nearly a whole day over one word in two or three sentences of proofs for the Blackwood volume called Youth. It was two words, perhaps — serene and azure. Certainly it was azure. “And she crawled on, do or die, in the serene weather. The sky was a miracle of purity, a miracle of azure.” Conrad said: azure, the writer aysure — or more exactly aysyeh. This worried Conrad a good deal since he wanted azure for his cadence. He read the sentence over and over again to see how it sounded.
The point was that he was perfectly aware that azure was a French word, or in English almost exclusively a term of heraldry, and his whole endeavour was given to using only such words as are found in the normal English vernacular — or thereabouts, for he never could be got really to believe how poverty-stricken a thing the normal English vernacular is. The vocabulary that he used in speaking English was enormous and he regarded it as a want of patriotism to think that the average Englishman knew his language less well than himself.
Mr. Henry James used to call Marlowe, the usual narrator for many years of Conrad’s stories, “that preposterous master mariner.” He meant precisely that Marlowe was more of a philosopher and had a vocabulary vastly larger and more varied than you could possibly credit to the master mariner as a class. Conrad, however, persisted that Marlowe was little above the average of the ship’s officer in either particular, and presumably he knew his former service mates better than did Mr. James — or the rest of us.... Still he did think that the word azure would be outside the ordinary conversational vocabulary of a ship’s captain....
We talked about it then for a whole day.... Why not say simply ‘blue’? Because really, it is not blue. Blue is something coarser in the grain: you imagine it the product of the French Impressionist painter — or of a house painter — with the brush strokes showing. Or you think so of blue after you have thought of azure. Azure is more transparent....
Or again the word ‘serene.’... Why not calm? Why not quiet?... Well, quiet as applied to weather is — or perhaps it is only was — part of the ‘little language’ that was being used by the last Pre-Raphaelite poets. That ruled quiet out. Calm on the other hand is, to a master mariner, almost too normal and too technically inclusive. Calm is in a log-book almost any weather that would not be agitating to a landsman — or thereabouts. Dead calm is — again to a seaman — too technical. Dead calmness precludes even the faintest ruffle of wind, even the faintest cats’-paw on the unbroken surface of the sea.
The writer has heard it objected that Conrad was pernicketty: why should he not use technical sea terms and let the reader make what he could of it? But Conrad’s sea is more real than the sea of any other sea writer: and it is more real, because he avoided the technical word.
The whole passage of Youth under consideration is as follows — The writer is quoting from memory, but as far as this passage is concerned he is fairly ready to back his memory against the printed page:
“And she crawled on, do or die, in the serene weather. The sky was a miracle of purity, a miracle of azure. The sea was polished, was blue, was pellucid, was sparkling like a precious stone, extending on all sides, all round to the horizon. As if the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colossal sapphire. And on the lustre of the great, calm waters the Judea moved imperceptibly, enveloped in languid and unclean vapours....”
That is as far as the writer’s memory will carry him, though the paragraph ends with the words: “The splendour of sea and sky.”
This then is almost the perfection of sea-writing of its type. (Stephen Crane could achieve another perfection by writing of the waves as barbarous and abrupt: but that in the end is no less anthropomorphic.) And the words serene and azure remained after an infinite amount of talking so that the whole passage might retain its note of the personality of Destiny that watched inscrutably behind the sky. It was Destiny that was serene, that had purity, that was azure... and that ironically set that smudge of oily vapour from the burning vessel across the serenity of the miraculous sapphire — so that youth might be enlightened as to the nature of the cosmos, even whilst in process of being impressed with its splendours.
‘Serene’ as applied to weather; ‘azure’ as applied to the sky are over-writing a shade, are a shade chargés if they apply merely to the sea and merely to the sky.... But Conrad was obsessed by the idea of a Destiny omnipresent behind things: of a Destiny, that was august, blind, inscrutable, just and above all passionless, that has decreed that the outside things, the sea, the sky, the earth, love, merchandising, the winds, shall make youth seem tenderly ridiculous and all the other ages of men gloomy, imbecile, thwarted — and possibly heroic.... Had the central character of this story been a fortyish man you would have had, added to the burning ship with its fumes, dirty weather, dripping clothes, the squalid attributes of the bitter sea. As it was an affair of Youth you have serene weather and a miracle of purity, to enhance the irony of Destiny.
PART III. IT IS ABOVE ALL TO MAKE YOU SEE....
I
The time has come, then, for some sort of critical estimate of this author. Critical, not philosophical. For the philosophy of Joseph Conrad was a very simple one: you might sum it all up in the maxim of Herrick’s: To live merrily and trust to good letters. Himself he summed it up in the great word: Fidelity, and his last great novel turned upon a breach of trust by his typical hero, his King Tom. It is the misfortune of morality that the greatest thrills that men can get from life come from the contemplation of its breaches!
About Conrad there was, however, as little of the moralist as there was of the philosopher. When he had said that every work of art has — must have — a profound moral purpose; and he said that every day and all day long: he had done with the subject. So that the writer has always wished that Conrad had never written his famous message on Fidelity. Truly, those who read him knew his conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a very few simple ideas — and it might have been left at that. For it was the very basis of all Conrad’s work, that the fable must not have the moral tacked on to its end. If the fable have not driven its message home the fable has failed, must be scrapped and must give place to another one.
But the impulse to moralise, to pontify, is a very strong one, and comes in many treacherous guises. One may so easily do it unawares: and instances of Conrad’s pontifications are far enough to seek considering the temporal eminence to which he attained. He let, otherwise, his light so shine before men that few would be inclined to claim him amongst the preachers.
He was before all things the artist and his chief message to mankind is set at the head of this chapter.... “It is before all things to make you see....” Seeing is believing for all the doubters of this planet, from Thomas to the end: if you can make humanity see the few very simple things upon which this temporal world rests you will make mankind believe such eternal truths as are universal....
That message, that the province of written art is above all things to make you see was given before we met: it was because that same belief was previously and so profoundly held by the writer that we could work for so long together. We had the same aims and we had all the time the same aims. Our attributes were no doubt different. The writer probably knew more about words, but Conrad had certainly an infinitely greater hold over the architectonics of the novel, over the way a story should be built up so that its interest progresses and grows up to the last word. Whether in the case of our officially collaborated work or in the work officially independent in which we each modified the other with almost as much enthusiasm and devotion as we gave to work done together, the only instance that comes to the writer’s mind in which he of his own volition altered the structure of any work occurred in the opening chapters of the Rescue.
Of that book Conrad made many drafts, over a very great number of years. The writer seems to remember, but is not quite certain, having heard Conrad say that he had meant to take up the story of the Rescue immediately after the publication or the finishing of Almayer. And it obviously belongs to the group of subjects set in Malaysia or thereabouts, of the date, say, of Karain from Tales of Unrest, or the Lagoon that was published in the same volume, dated 1898. (In the matter of books published in London in the nineties, dates of publication, if these are of any importance, are sometimes hazy. Thus the writer’s first book was published in 1891, but the date given on the title page is 1892. The ingenious publisher, who was also Conrad’s, hit on this stratagem, afterwards imitated by American magazines, with the idea of beguiling the possible buyer into the belief that he was purchasing a brand new book eighteen months or so after it had been published.) Karain, then, the one of his early short stories that Conrad liked best, was published in Blackwood’s in 1897 and then in a volume that is dated 1898. It was, as far as the writer’s memory serves him, written in 1896.
