Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (45 page)

The most haunting image of Conrad’s heroic type is the ‘Professor’ in
The Secret Agent
, his hand forever grasped around the rubber bulb in his pocket. If he presses it, he will blow himself, and all around him, to smithereens:

He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable – and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.

So the novel ends. Alongside Conrad, even the arch pessimist Schopenhauer might seem a trifle Panglossian.

The source of Conradian gloom can be plausibly tracked back to his earliest years. He was born in what is now Ukraine. Poland had been sliced into nonentity by imperial neighbours – Prussia, Austro-Hungary, and, most hatedly, Russia. The
country survived only as a romantic cause. Teodor was the only child of Polish patriots of noble descent who sacrificed their lives for that hopeless cause. His father Apollo Korzeniowski (1820–69), a member of the Polish resistance, was arrested in 1862 and deported with his family to exile in the bleak hinterland of Russia. It killed Conrad’s mother in three years and his father in seven. ‘Consumption’ was on the death certificates: it should have been ‘Russia’. Apollo – aptly named – died a hero but had achieved nothing – heroically. The first words five-year-old Teodor is known to have written are an inscription on the back of a photograph describing his father as ‘a Pole, a Catholic, a nobleman’.

Thus began the strange concoction of a patriotic Slav who became a loyal Englishman: a master of the English language who thought most readily in French but in the delirium of fever babbled wildly in his natal Polish (something recorded vividly in his short story, ‘Amy Foster’); a writer who changed his name to ‘Conrad’ for its English resonance – that being the name of Byron’s corsair hero – but which had a private resonance. ‘Konrad’ was his father’s favourite name for him. Orphaned at eleven, Conrad was taken under the wing of a wealthy and indulgent uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski. From his earliest teens he wanted to go to sea and would not be talked out of this ‘Quixotic’ ambition, as his displeased guardian thought it. Poland had scarcely more naval tradition than Switzerland. The English nautical novelist Frederick Marryat, mixed with a congenital romanticism, seem to have been responsible for the young man’s infatuation with salt water.

At sixteen he left for Marseilles, where he would stay four years picking up whatever maritime jobs came his way. He was a lowly steward, a seaman and, by his own account, a gun-runner. The exact details of this formative period are wholly obscure. But it is recorded that he attempted suicide in 1878 after running up gambling losses in Monte Carlo. He fired at his heart; the bullet went ‘through and through’, but missed. He would never be good with money. If women came into it, posterity will never know.

The French authorities were sticklers about marine qualifications, but Britain was less strict about who sailed under the Red Duster. Conrad, moreover, saw England as the only country in the world whose flag offered ‘true liberty’. Over the following sixteen years he worked his way up through the ranks of the British merchant marine until he gained his first command in 1886, at which point he also took British citizenship. Over these adventuring years he saw the world, most of it under canvas, and crossed what he called the ‘shadow line’ from youthful idealism to maturity. However, he saw less of South America than
Nostromo
suggests, while the Malay Peninsula and Borneo he came to know intimately –
Lord Jim
is soundly based, as is the novel’s central event, the desertion of a pilgrim ship by its cowardly
officers: something that actually happened. Momentously, he paddled up the Congo River in 1890 as skipper of a decrepit steamer to the inland station of the iniquitous Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, run by a dying manager called ‘Klein’ (renamed, not very obscuringly, ‘Kurtz’ in
Heart of Darkness
). ‘Before the Congo I was a mere animal,’ Joseph Conrad later wrote. Like Marlow, it was there he looked over the edge of the abyss into the black nothingness which is human life.

Conrad had fully immersed himself in what he called ‘the destructive element’ by the last decade of the nineteenth century and had formed his worldview, something summed up in such pungent Conradisms as: ‘Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose’, ‘We live, as we dream, alone’, ‘All a man can betray is his conscience.’ They speckle all his fiction. A bequest from his ever kind uncle inaugurated a second career as a writer, beginning with ‘a story of an Eastern river’,
Almayer’s Folly
(1895) – an auspiciously mature work. Conrad was blessed in his literary friends – men such as the critic Edward Garnett, the publisher William Blackwood, fellow novelists like Ford Madox Hueffer, and, particularly, his literary agent James B. Pinker who ingeniously worked his author’s copyrights and patiently put up with his often outrageous demands for money.

Nothing flowed easily from Conrad’s pen. The most costive of writers, getting a novel out of him, one friend said, was like a Caesarean birth. His aristocratic background expressed itself not merely in a majestic appearance, dress and haughty bearing (no novelist photographed better), but in an unquestioning expectation for things he could not, in the first half of his writing career, afford: country houses (he preferred Kent, by the sea), servants, limousines, chauffeurs, first-class travel. As Cedric Watts records, by 1909 Conrad’s debts totalled £2,250, at a time when the average annual earnings of a doctor were about £400. In 1896 Conrad had confirmed that he was a seafarer no more by marrying. His wife, Jessie George, sixteen years younger than him, had been a typist – a useful skill. There would be two sons, Borys and John – one carrying a Polish name, the other an English one. The next ten years following his marriage comprise what Watts calls ‘the major phase’ – and three acknowledged masterpieces:
Lord Jim
(1900),
Nostromo
(1904),
Under Western Eyes
(1911).

The First World War (in which Borys was severely shell-shocked, never to recover) and the Russian Revolution paralysed Conrad creatively. His growing popularity made him suspect he must be writing below his best self. None the less it is hard to think he ever wrote anything better than ‘The Secret Sharer’ (1912) or
The Shadow Line
(1917). This feeling was compounded by a creeping sense of being somehow passé. The novel had moved forward; he, as a novelist, had not.
Victory
(1915) came out in the same year as Lawrence’s
The Rainbow; The Rover
(1923)
came out within months of Joyce’s
Ulysses
(1922). The comparisons are not entirely in Conrad’s favour.

He was, in his last years, seen by the public as a giant. He graciously turned down a knighthood offered by Ramsay MacDonald’s government. Visits to Poland and, particularly, America, in 1923, confirmed his now worldwide celebrity (the Soviet Union never liked him, nor he them). By this point his health was deteriorating fast. Chain-smoking shortened his life: a ‘mountain of ash’, as he once said, memorialised each of his great works. The memorial he actually chose for his gravestone was:

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,

Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.

As Cedric Watts tersely reminds us, ‘these are the words uttered in Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
by “a man of hell, that calls himself Despair”’. Not a cheerful passport to eternity.

Shall we never have done with the New Woman? The Times
, reviewing Dixon’s one novel

I spent ten years of my academic life compiling a guide to Victorian fiction. It involved the highly pleasurable task of reading some 3,000 novels. ‘What masterpieces have you found, overlooked by literary history?’ I was asked. ‘Only one’, I would reply. ‘Ella Dixon.’ ‘Who?’ was the inevitable response; followed by, ‘What did she write?’

Ella was born in London, the daughter and seventh child of William Hepworth Dixon, long-serving (1853–69) editor of the
Athenaeum
, the most authoritative literary journal of the nineteenth century. Being seventh meant, she jested, that her life would be fortunate: if fairy stories were to be believed. Whatever else, her subsequent life was no fairy story. ‘A Knight of the Inkstand’, as his daughter called him, W. H. Dixon was the offspring of a Lancashire, puritan family, enriched by trade. In her very early childhood, Ella’s father was a thriving man: a JP and a noted traveller (he helped found the Palestine Exploration Fund). The family occupied a large house by the Regent’s Park – one of the finer addresses in London. But the good
life did not last. Dixon suffered a series of reverses in the 1870s, a formative period for his daughter. In 1874, their home was wrecked by an industrial explosion and Dixon himself was disabled by a fall from a horse in 1878. There were also financial misfortunes. He died, prematurely, when his daughter was in her early twenties.

Her mother was an ‘advanced’ woman, an Ibsenite and, as Ella recalls ‘almost the first woman in London to call in a
woman
doctor when my brother Sydney was born’. Ella was educated expensively in London and Heidelberg, studied painting in Paris, and followed in her father’s footsteps by editing
The Englishwoman
during the course of 1895. She never married and, even for a woman of her class in the 1890s, travelled widely and moved freely in the London literary world. A successful journalist by profession, Dixon wrote short stories, collected under the cumbersome, but indicative, title:
One Doubtful Hour and other Side-Lights on the Feminine Temperament
(1904).

Dixon’s only published novel is
The Story of a Modern Woman
(1894). Painfully autobiographical, it has as its heroine Mary Erle, the orphaned daughter of a renowned man of letters. As a little girl, she scorns dolls (and the Ibsenite dolls’ house, we presume). Mary aims at an independent life in a world as yet unready for female independence. It means struggle. Failing as an artist, she scrapes a living as a journalist, living in poor lodgings all the while. She discards her lover, Vincent (a married man), and is left at the end of the narrative independent, at last, wretchedly alone, but still a fighter. The last scene is of the heroine, at twilight, at Highgate cemetery, a glimmering London at her feet.

Dixon also wrote
My Flirtations
(1892) by ‘Margaret Wynman’, a ‘lively and catty’ series of sketches, supposedly written by a coquette. Towards the end of her life, she was militant for the cause of women’s rights, and lived to see partial victory for the ‘Modern Woman’. She left a memoir of literary London,
As I Knew Them: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way
(1930), which is extraordinarily unrevealing, confirming the author’s intention to remain one of her age’s
inconnues
– impenetrably private.

With men it is take, take, take until we have nothing left to give.
The mother’s outburst in Cholmondeley’s notorious novel,
Prisoners

Cholmondeley was born at Hodnet, in Shropshire, the eldest of five daughters of a clergyman and distantly related to the Marquess of Cholmondeley. A lifelong sufferer from asthma, she was educated mainly at home by a family governess and by her father. Her childhood was, she later recorded, heavily ‘repressed’, although there was no shortage of books for her to broaden her mind with – and they were not all conventional books. Mary’s mother, unusually, was interested to the point of obsession with science. From the ages of sixteen to thirty Cholmondeley lived in the country, helping her father with his parochial duties – her mother having been afflicted with creeping paralysis. Mary never married; being convinced from childhood that she did not possess the looks which would attract a man.

In 1896, when the Revd Cholmondeley retired, for health reasons, as Rector of Hodnet (having lost the bulk of his property), the family moved from their country vicarage to live in a London flat. Mary, who had written her first novel aged seventeen, began to circulate her work among publishers as early as 1883. Her first published novel,
The Danvers Jewels
(1887), published anonymously, was an ingenious, sprightly, sub-
Moonstone
, detective story. It was successful enough to warrant a sequel,
Sir Charles Danvers
(1889).

During the late 1880s, her parents’ health was failing, as was Mary’s – although she was now the family’s principal breadwinner. She necessarily lived a retired life, out of the world, although her fiction was smart and Shavian. Her novels, particularly when they satirised established religion, sometimes scandalised and always contained a substratum of barely sublimated female rage. The imprisoned butterfly is one of her favourite images.
Diana Tempest
(1893) displays Cholmondeley’s melodramatic tendencies attractively, with a plot centred on murder. The novel was dedicated to the author’s sister, Hester, who had died aged twenty-two. The dedication is accompanied by a complaint about God, the tyrannical father, and foe to women: ‘He put our lives so far apart we cannot hear each other speak.’ The story centres on a hidebound father, Colonel Tempest, who dies in a condition of religious mania.
Diana Tempest
was the first book to appear under Cholmondeley’s own name. Her father, one gathers, did not approve of a novel-writing daughter.