Joseph Conrad - A Short Article

 When I was a teenager, I tried reading Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. It beat me. I had seen the movie with Peter O'Toole, which I can say now is not a good introduction to the novel. Conrad's prose is so different from what we might call cinematic. No, he is dense and deep like a casserole.

After seeing Apocalypse Now, I read Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I assume madness on Coppola's part at combining the Vietnam War and Conrad. There is a luridness in Conrad's original, but it is not luridness for the sake of being lurid. He meant to portray the evil underlying the white supremacist hypocrisy of colonialism.

I kept meaning to get back to Conrad. Only by going to prison did I find the time for Conrad. Now, I read what I can by and about him. Unlike Henry James (another stylist of subtlety), I find myself enthralled by the style and its substance.

Therefore, I had to read Joseph Conrad Uncensored by Christopher Sandford on Modern Age, even though that site describes itself as "A Conservative Review". It is a good introduction to Conrad - as a writer and human being.

There is a long tradition of critics misunderstanding Conrad, surely in part because both the man himself and his works are so full of humanizing contradictions. He was the youthful adventurer who developed a debilitating need for domestic order and stability; the forbiddingly austere chronicler of man’s fallen nature who could turn a comic phrase with which P. G. Wodehouse might not have been disappointed (such as this from 1915’s Victory: “Heyst’s smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his great mustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as comfortably as a shy bird in its native thicket”); a hypochondriac who was an all-too-real martyr to gout and toothache, neither of which served to mollify a personality already prone to the choleric; a curious mixture of patriotism and skepticism; a native Polish speaker justly celebrated for his mastery of the most intricate nuances of the English language who struggled all his life with what he called the “elusive mother tongue,” only coming to speak it in his early twenties; and a man who for the most part hid himself behind a mask of inscrutable courtesy. 

The essay points out what my teenaged self could not cope with: irony.

With Conrad, irony was all. If there’s a throughline to his fifteen novels and scores of stories, essays, and memoirs, it lies in that peculiarly English art of distancing—perhaps all part of his long and by all accounts highly successful assimilation into the role of an Edwardian country squire—that thin film maintained between oneself and the rest of humanity. Almost everything he wrote appeared to come pinched between inverted commas, and he took a cold-eyed view of the world as a place of mystery and contingency, of horror and redemption, where, as he once put it in a letter to the London Times, the only indisputable fact of man’s existence is “our ignorance.” 

Conrad’s understanding of this truth, adding a metaphorical force to his gifts for conveying the tragic or merely ludicrous aspects of the human condition, surely serves to make him the first great “Modernist” author of the twentieth century, not to mention a moralist whose higher sensibilities might compare favorably to those of his critics today.

I count reacquainting myself with Joseph Conrad one of the best things accomplished by my re-education campaign. I regret the time lost; I can wonder what I might have done, only that is a dead end. Do not repeat my mistake. Read Conrad while you have the time.

sch 8/25