Fresh Air Fiend (57 page)

The short story "Verloc" developed into a long story, a kind of thriller, became a series of episodes, grew to something resembling a novel, was retitled
The Secret Agent
and serialized in a magazine at the end of 1906, then elaborated to its present form—and in its expansion it became not just plumper but somewhat misshapen. It was published as a book in 1907. It concerned a plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory, in southeast London and was based on an actual event that took place in 1894, when Conrad, living in London and working on
Almayers Folly,
read about it in
The Times
and
The Morning Leader.
The book received a mixed reception from the critics, and it sold badly. Conrad called it "an honorable failure."

 

Quite late in the action of the story, a character says, "From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama."

It is easy to see why, and it is wonderful to reflect on how in writing what was in effect the world's first political thriller—spies, conspirators, wily policemen, murders, bombings, and in a London wearing a suitably gloomy expression for these misdeeds—Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic anxieties: his overweight wife and problem child, his lack of money, his inactivity, his discomfort in London, his uneasiness in English society, his sense of exile, of being an alien. It is also a portrait of Russian wickedness, and that had a deeply personal resonance for Conrad too. He had reasons to regard the Russians as satanic.

"It is essential to emphasize and remember the most crucial facts of Conrad's early life," Jeffrey Meyers writes in his biography
Joseph Conrad,
speaking of Conrad's reasons for leaving Poland for good and going to sea. This was Russian Poland in 1874. "The Russians had enslaved his country, forbidden his language, confiscated his inheritance, treated him as a convict, killed his parents and forced him into exile."

There is a certain lurching quality to Conrad's narrative. The story is told in fits and starts and flashbacks—years summed up on some pages, while a number of chapters concern a single day, the day of the bombing. Conrad had as much trouble conveying the passage of time as he had using prepositions. Yet the plot is less complicated than it appears. The book begins with a description of Verloc's shop in Soho, with its grimy window of grubby merchandise—lurid books, girlie pictures, soft porn, bottles of patent medicine that we assume restore male potency, and envelopes and small cardboard boxes that in Conrad's original manuscript contained condoms ("superfine Indiarubber"). Verloc sets off that morning for a foreign—that is, Russian—embassy in Knightsbridge, and we soon learn that his squalid shop is a cover for a shady operation in which, with the embassy's sanction, he encourages a small group of revolutionaries, who do not know that he passes their secrets back to his diplomat contact.

After eleven years of this cynical espionage, Verloc has grown lazy: he sleeps late, does very little intelligence work, is bored with the foolish talk of the conspirators. The diplomat, Vladimir, insults him, berates him, and demands that he produce an outrage—a great symbolic bombing—to frighten the British government and discredit all revolutionaries in exile. Although annoyed at being hectored like this, Verloc skulks away and waits for his chance. He despairs of rousing the silly revolutionaries to action. He devises a plan for blowing up Greenwich Observatory. We learn in the course of the narrative that Verloc's story started more than seven years earlier, when he was released from prison after serving five years for stealing secret designs of French armaments. He had been turned in by one of his girlfriends—he is susceptible to pretty women and has a fatal predilection for trusting women he has seduced. He becomes a lodger at a boarding house run by Winnie's mother, widow of an abusive man, and because Winnie has been disappointed in love (rejected by the son of the local butcher) and both she and her hysterical (perhaps autistic) brother, Stevie, need looking after, Verloc is seen as a good bet. They are married on June 24, 1879.

The year is now 1887, and in those intervening years of marriage Winnie has never questioned how Verloc has made his living—his seedy shop, his late hours, his visits to the Continent. Beneath her portrait, so to speak, Conrad has provided the caption "She felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into." All in all, she appears to be the perfect wife for a secret agent. Verloc has not looked very deeply into Winnie, but Conrad has, and he has arrived at a fascinating conclusion, in one of the novel's best aperçus: "Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious."

Winnie is satisfied that Stevie has Verloc to model himself upon. After all, Stevie is nervous, excitable, idealistic, and frail, and he is described as a kind of neurasthenic pet, a dog or cat. Verloc is his antithesis—solid, ironic, fatalistic, and strong ("his thick arms ... like weapons")—and seeing them together, Winnie thinks with satisfaction that they look like father and son.

Winnie helps run the shop. She is loyal and obedient; she puts up with Verloc's late sleeping, his "wallowing in bed," his habit of seldom taking off his hat; she is especially tolerant and cooperative when Verloc's pulse quickens with a sudden fever of amorousness. Verloc has a tendency to wake, pull the bedclothes to his chin, gaze meaningfully on his wife with heavy-lidded eyes, and sleepily beckon her. Conrad was prudish, as a result of both his strict—not to say traumatic—upbringing in Poland and his ascetic life as a seaman, yet
The Secret Agent
was ahead of its time in showing a husband and wife in bed—two memorable scenes, as well as some coming and going. The couple can be observed conversing about the day's events as well as indulging in sexual by-play of a verbal kind, the private euphemistic language of sex partners.

Feeling that she is in the way, wishing to give Stevie some latitude with Verloc, Winnie's mother goes off to an almshouse—a ponderous cab ride recommended by some critics for being properly "Dickensian." My feeling is that it is quite the reverse. Conrad has none of Dickens's affection for the homely (and often darkly comic) details of seedy London, but rather, as an exile and a master mariner and cottage dweller in rural Kent, regards the city with pure horror. London in this novel is a sink of drizzling darkness, filth, and slime, in which "pests" (such as the posturing political fanatics the Professor, Ossipon, and Michaelis) can lose themselves in the crowd. London mobs and London gloom are convenient, though, for this monochrome novel of secrecy and shadows: the Verlocs' home life is enacted in a house "nestling in a shady street behind a shop where the sun never shone."

With compassion for her hypersensitive brother, Winnie urges Verloc to take Stevie with him whenever he goes out. Verloc uses these maternal urgings as an excuse for the boy to accompany him on his bombing mission to Greenwich. The boy is dumbly loyal and eager to please—ideal as the bomb carrier, for even if he is caught, Verloc reasons, he will say nothing to the police.

Everything goes disastrously wrong. A scrap of cloth with his address on it is found near Stevie's dismembered corpse. Verloc is visited by a policeman who delivers the awful news ("I tell you they had to fetch a shovel to gather him up with") as Winnie listens in horror at the keyhole. Verloc reminds Winnie of how she had asked him to look after the boy; in reply, he accuses her of being equally to blame for Stevie's death. More than that, sleepy, hungry, and libidinous, he changes the subject and indulges in the only foreplay he knows, the ambiguous verbal command to his wife, "Come here."

Consumed by grief, and hearing his unfair accusation and the invitation to sex that follows it, she fatally stabs him. In the last portion of the book, Winnie considers suicide and is briefly rescued by Alexander Ossipon, one of the opportunistic revolutionaries, who promises to save her but instead robs her, abandons her, and leaves her in a despair so profound she jumps to her death.

Conrad maintained, both in writing and in speaking of the novel to friends, that Winnie was the central figure in the narrative. She does not seem so—we do not see much of her in the book, and we learn very little about her. But you know what Conrad means. In a thriller about a bomb outrage, with international implications, Winnie Verloc is the only character who is truly outraged. She has been true to herself and to her husband, a good wife, an attentive sister, a dutiful daughter, uncomplaining; the still center of the action—and what does she get for it? A brute of a husband. Her mother gone. Her brother senselessly murdered. And after all that, her husband goes on abusing her. You can almost hear her barrister at her murder trial recommending clemency and saying, "My Lord, hasn't this poor woman suffered enough?"

Yet the peculiar passion and the violence in the novel appear very un-English, and Conrad must have been aware of that, because he seems at pains to highlight the strangeness of his characters and the alien nature of their urgencies. He concluded that this was a failing in himself when he reflected on the poor reception of the novel: "There is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public.... Foreignness, I suppose."

It does seem that entering this book one is in a distant land, a London borrowed and distorted as though reflected in a mirror—an elaborate but tarnished hand mirror, made in Poland, framed in France, buffed up in England. The city is badly lit and dripping, and much of it, and the novel, has the perverse logic and derangement of a dream, yet not an English dream. The sense of place is vivid but slightly askew. Setting off in the morning, Verloc perceives the sunshine as golden, then coppery, and finally producing "a dull effect of rustiness"—which is less a meditation on the meteorology of sunbeams than on metallurgy. Ten pages later, the sunshine is emphatically "rusty," and "Mr. Verloc heard against a window-pane the faint buzzing of a fly—his first fly of the year—heralding better than any number of swallows the approach of spring."

This droll but faintly repellent observation, like a Polish joke, is that of someone new to London—indeed, new to England. Later in the novel London is compared to "a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off," and you have to think hard to conjure up this image. Soon after, London is "an immensity of greasy slime and damp plaster." The celebrated cab ride produces this grim description: "Night, the early dirty night, the sinister, noisy, hopeless, and rowdy night of South London..."This nocturne is experienced by Winnie's mother in the cab, but it is as though London is being seen by someone new to the city.

The strangeness of Conrad's language only adds to the reader's sense of dislocation. Much of it gives Conrad's prose its originality; but it is occasionally clumsy, often creaky and obsolete, and sometimes plainly wrong. We can smile at a novel set in 1887 that contains a player piano—not invented until ten years later—but there is something about phrases such as "the age of caverns" or "a success of esteem" that smack of translation. Conrad's writing is notorious for its unconscious Gallicisms.

Polish was his first language, but he was raised speaking French—he could have become a French writer, he said. He was enormously well read, particularly in French literature, and he admired Flaubert above all. (The influence shows even in
The Secret Agent:
the description of Ossipon's returning home after ditching Winnie, at the end of chapter 12, echoes the passage in
Madame Bovary
when Léon and Emma spend most of the afternoon canoodling in the closed carriage.) It was as a sailor in the British merchant fleet in 1878 that Conrad first encountered English and began to speak it and read it. He was then twenty years old. It was the opinion of everyone who ever heard Conrad speak that he never managed to pronounce English correctly. And (a personal detail he included in his story "Amy Foster") he raved in the Polish language whenever he was feverish.

Non-native speakers of English tend toward repetition, overcorrectness, unconscious translation, and the use of arcane words.
The Secret Agent
abounds with examples of these quirks. Conrad was self-taught. He used words he had read in books he treasured. The books might have been French. How else to explain "charabia" or "villegiature"? They might have been very old English ones, which would account for "paynim," regarded as archaic even in Conrad's time. And then there are "hebetude" and "mansuetude," "frequentation" and "uncandidness"—items in Seaman Korzeniowski's notebook, "How to Increase My Word Power." The effect of these usages is sometimes that produced by a person telling a story in a heavy accent: distracted by the odd cadence, the listener loses the narrative thread.

But this language matter is seldom a question of correctness in Conrad's case. The fact is that Joseph Conrad wrote like Joseph Conrad, and because of the setting and subject of
The Secret Agent,
this lexical flavoring, and the clumsily truncated time scheme, give the book originality and power, and intensify its strangeness. It is not an English novel—it doesn't look like one, nor does it sound like one. It strikes me as laughable that the critic F. R. Leavis included it in
The Great Tradition,
for while it may have initiated the thriller genre ("a very artificial form of writing which realism rarely redeems from its fundamental fantasy," V. S. Pritchett wrote when discussing Conrad's book), it seems to me a hybrid in both structure and tone, without specific English antecedents and outside any tradition. Of course it confused and irritated the English (like "an excellent translation," Kipling said of Conrad's prose), but it has a definite appeal to an expatriate living in London. The foreigner often sees in London what the Londoner misses, and by the same token, the émigré writer is capable of producing howlers.

Everyone in the novel seems to languish in exile, not only the obvious characters—Vladimir, the other diplomats at the Russian embassy, and the ranters Ossipon, Karl Yundt, and Michaelis—but also the Professor, whose "parentage was obscure." Verloc explains that although he is a "natural-born British subject," his father was French. His wearing his hat constantly—even indoors, even when he is eating—is explained as a continental habit he learned from frequenting "foreign cafés." At the end of the novel it is revealed that Verloc's secret bank account is kept in a fictitious name, "Prozor"—and you immediately think that "Smith" or "Jones" would be less likely to arouse official suspicion. Even London-born-and-bred Winnie has a taint of foreignness. Her stout wheezy mother claimed to be of French descent, and "traces of the French descent which the widow boasted of were apparent in Winnie, too." The Assistant Commissioner is English, and familiar, but when he sees his reflection in a window, he is "struck by his foreign appearance." When he visits Sir Ethelred he looks "more foreign than ever."