Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Last week
we drove to New Haven, where we became part of a small, surprise dinner party
honoring a close friend on his seventy-fifth birthday. The memorable meal, featuring succulent chicken and lamb, was
supplied by a restaurateur-caterer with a mobile barbecue pit towed behind his
SUV. We had a great time, spent the
night with our friends, and made a leisurely start on the return drive next
morning. But I am an inveterate early
morning riser and, as usual when I am an overnight guest in someone’s home, I
found myself with a good two or three predawn hours on my own. I addressed them in the usual manner, by
taking an interesting-looking title from a shelf of books: an anthology of spy
stories.
In this
anthology were two pieces I had already read, and now reread with pleasure, by
two authors I hold in the highest esteem: sections from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and Rebecca
West’s The Birds Fall Down
(1966). Both of those books deal with
revolutionary terrorism and police repression in pre-Revolutionary Russia. West’s explicitly fictionalizes one of the
most extraordinary facts in the history of espionage: the fact that a double
agent named Yevno Azef was at the same time an organizer of social-revolutionary
terror against the Czarist regime and a highly placed counter-terror agent of
the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police.
The effect
of this early morning reading was the typical effect of most good reading: I
wanted to do more of it. Without
attempting any description of my circuitous mental processes, I shall go
immediately to their product. I returned
to Princeton determined to take up one of the few important Conrad novels I had
never broached—Under Western Eyes
(1911)—and I did so at the first convenient moment. I have had a delighted several days. It has been a while since I was reading
something so pleasurable that I felt the need to ration the reading, as one
might the eating of a fine piece of chocolate, lest I too quickly finish it.
People have
reading habits just as they have habits of other kinds. I once had a friend whose mode of reading a
novel I found most peculiar, especially since he had been an English major in
college. His principal aim, so far as I
could tell, was to read the book as fast as possible. His first move was to ascertain the number of
pages. He would then make a silent and
tentative commitment to the first five percent of it—for a four-hundred-page
book the first twenty pages. At that
point he had another chance. He could
either chuck the project or make a solemn commitment to finish it to the last
page. The arrangement was sort of like
that of the religious novice under provisional vows faced at a certain point
with the awesome choice of accepting or declining a life commitment. But even when committed to a whole novel he
allowed himself a major time-saving reading practice. He would skip all parts “between quotation
marks”—that is, all directly reported speech.
He reckoned that in general dialogue did very little to advance
narrative.
In the edition
I own--the collected edition of the 1920s-- Under Western Eyes is 380-pages
long; but if I applied to it the “quotation marks canon” it would instantly
become a longish short story. It is
absolutely full of Russian revolutionaries and sentimentalists, and although
they do enough to keep a plot of sorts going, what they mainly do is talk…and
talk some more. “In this book,” Conrad
wrote to his friend Edward Garnett, husband of the famous translator of Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky, “I am concerned with nothing but ideas,
to the exclusion of everything else.”
The ideas are thick on the ground, and major characters are tireless in
enunciating them. The
unfortunately unreliable narrator is an ex-pat Brit in Geneva, where there may
have been a few native-born Swiss people in residence at the fin de siècle, though it seems
unlikely. This man, a hell of a talker
himself, is a “professor of languages” like me, except much more in demand,
because most of the talkers wouldn’t dream of attending the salon of Madame de
S---- without at a minimum perfect English, French, German, and Russian under
their epiglottises. (The book itself,
fortunately, stays mainly in the impressive English of its Polish author.) As the title might imply, a major theme of
the book is the difficult if not impossible challenge presented to the
“western” liberal mind by the opulent barbarism of Czarist autocracy. A popular book of my Cold War youth was
entitled Why They Behave Like Russians. Its author must have been a reader of Conrad.
When Conrad
published Under Western Eyes in 1911
readers likely brought to mind the pseudo- or semi-revolution of 1905; but from a slightly later perspective it is likely to seem prescient with regard to the Bolshevik coup of 1917 and the huge cataclysm of
the Great War of which it was an episode.
Just at this moment certain aspects seem quite contemporary. When we speak of the “timelessness” of a fine book it is rarely because
we think it free of time’s bonds, but because those bonds seem to become ever
more elastic.
