Joseph Conrad

From a certain point of view-though not, perhaps, from others. In this world any given event may have several diverse and disagreeable meanings: any event, and indeed any sentence. Conrad's own attraction to the anarchism he spurns manifests itself in the slippery glitter of his irony, in the perfect detonator of his prose. So he tells us repeatedly that Mr. Verloc is "no fool," that he is both "humane" and "thoroughly domesticated," and even that he "was not a debauched man. In his conduct he was respectable." It is a characterization at once entirely inadequate, and true. Time and again the novel echoes the preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," with its insistence on "bringing to light the truth," making us probe beneath the surface of an affair in which "there is much . . . that does not meet the eye." Yet when Conrad does make us see, what he shows us are the remains of the Greenwich bomber: remains that, once the police have shoveled them up, resemble "what may be called the by-products of a butcher's shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner." It seems typical of this book that the Inspector in charge "had not managed to get anything to eat," and The Secret Agent stands as Conrad's most relentless novel, a darkness visible that shares Winnie Verloc's belief "that things did not stand being looked into" even as it rubs them in our faces.

"The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds." The novel's words testify not only to Conrad's disbelief in the possibility of disinterested action, but also to his equal and complementary belief that ideology is always preceded and indeed determined by "private emotional ends." One of the wisest things anyone has ever said about him can be found in a little 1919 essay in which T. S. Eliot presents Conrad as "the antithesis of Mr. Kipling. He is, for one thing, the antithesis of Empire (as well as of democracy) . . . Mr. Conrad has no ideas, but he has a point of view, a world; it can hardly be defined, but it pervades his work and is unmistakable." We might disagree about the absence of ideas, and almost a century's worth of criticism has gone into defining that point of view. Still, Conrad's politics can best be summarized in terms of what he himself described, in a letter to Edward Garnett, as his inability to "swallow any formula"; an inability that makes him wear "the aspect of enemy to all mankind." But Conrad also knows that there is no escape from the world those formulae have made. In Under Western Eyes, the student Razumov, having betrayed a man who had trusted him with his secrets and his life, tells Councilor Mikulin that he wants to be done with it all, that he wants "simply to retire." Which makes his confessor ask, softly, "Where to?" No reader of Conrad will be surprised to learn that what then happens both fulfills the literal terms of Razumov's desire and proves no retirement at all.

V

Conrad changed publishers regularly, moving in the early years of his career from Unwin to Heinemann and back again, and on to Blackwood for both the magazine and book publication of Lord Jim and Youth. He tried Harper and then Methuen, before in his last years settling into an alternation of Dent and Unwin. The picture in America was simpler-a mix of houses at first, and then a steady commitment to Doubleday, where the young Alfred A. Knopf would make Chance a bestseller. Some of those changes grew from the attempts of his agent, J. B. Pinker, to strike the best deal in an increasingly segmented and competitive marketplace, and some came from the fact that Conrad looked to be losing the competition. He probably would have been happy to stay with Blackwood, and the lucrative serial possibilities of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, if the publisher, who was already carrying him at a loss, hadn't refused his request for a loan.