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Joseph Conrad
Hudson Review, The, Winter 2007 by Gorra, Michael
He was never good with money, and though not improvident was certainly unthrifty, living open-handedly and hand to mouth. His friend John Galsworthy helped him with some regularity, there was a series of government grants, and eventually Pinker became his banker, so that Conrad's letters to him are full of requests for small and precisely calculated sums to cover one expense or another. And sometimes they weren't so small. There were family trips to Capri and Provence, and it seems typical of Conrad's bad luck that almost any trip abroad was punctuated by illness and doctors' fees. By the time of Under Western Eyes, Conrad's debt to Pinker amounted to £2,700, and they were arguing over what and where he could publish, with the agent threatening to cut off supplies; their quarrel undoubtedly contributed to Conrad's collapse once the book itself was done.
Then things changed. After his breakdown of 1910, Conrad never again attempted a "political" novel. He wrote some stories, moved house, and then, as he would do repeatedly in the years to come, he plucked an old manuscript from its drawer. Conrad had spoken of a book called Chance as early as 1905, though some aspects of it go back even further, to the fin de siècle invention of Marlow, and its protracted composition is perhaps responsible for its labored quality, its convolutions of narrative within narrative. Yet the book was cannily promoted, in the United States in particular. The advertising described it as "a sea story that appeals to women," and however oblique in form the novel did tell a familiar story of romantic rescue, in which an upright sea captain saves a troubled young woman from the tangles of her past. Conrad even called its two parts "The Damsel" and "The Knight." The reviews were strong, though there's some truth to Garnett's comment that "the figure of the lady on the 'jacket'... did more" than anything else "to bring the novel into popular favour." For it was popular, with sales that dwarfed Conrad's previous figures. In America, 10,000 copies went in the first week alone-and once the readers had arrived, they stayed.
"The lady on the 'jacket'" was called Flora de Barrai, and if her presence got Chance to sell, it was perhaps because her story offered a point of contrast with its author's earlier books. The manners that interest Conrad are usually those of a ship or a port, not a drawing room, and even those novels set away from the water rely on the idea of separate spheres, in which the space given to women tends in all senses to be narrow. His repertoire of female characters is a limited one, and he portions them out, like Shakespeare, with only two or three speaking roles per book. The bit parts go to the exoticized: Jewel in Lord Jim, or the "barbarous and superb woman" who stretches out her arms at Kurtz' departure in "Heart of Darkness." The star turns Conrad reserves for the idealized, like the dry-eyed survivors of Nostromo, the Donas Emilia and Antonia, or Natalya Haldin in Under Western Eyes, who owes something to his reading of Turgenev and maybe more to the ghostly memory of his own mother. Conrad does acknowledge the stakes men have in keeping such women in what Marlow calls "a beautiful world of their own," but judging the degree of irony behind those words has been a nice question for the growing body of feminist readings his work has received. In some books he does recognize that that "beautiful world" is itself a fiction; so with both Flora in Chance and Lena in Victory he takes care to show us the gap between what their men imagine them to be, and the way the really are. More often, however, Conrad seems to fall under the spell himself, as he does with the conventionally sultry Rita de Lastaola in The Arrow of Gold. Of all his female characters, he grants only Winnie Verloc the kind of imaginative weight that places her at the book's very center.
