Comrade Ossipon arrives, tries for his customary seduction, hoping to secure Verloc’s bank account on the promise of fleeing to France with Winnie. Taking the cash, he takes fright at Winnie’s deed and demeanor, and abandons her on the channel ferry. Evidently fearing the gallows, Winnie takes off her wedding ring, and drowns herself in the channel.
What was it in Conrad’s daemon or genius that impelled him to compose this “simple tale”? In our Age of Terror, The Secret Agent for many readers has an urgent relevancy. Conrad’s wife, Jessie George, a working-class Englishwoman, in her memoir mentions how depressed her husband was as he labored on The Secret Agent. Anarchism both obsessed and dismayed Conrad. All of his fiction drives toward an idea of order that is hardly to be identified with the morality of the English nation in the early twentieth century. Though he lived in an atmosphere of correctness, there was in him always an agon between irony and romance, in the sense of romanticism.
Rereading The Secret Agent, I frequently have the uncanny sense that Conrad holds his ongoing narrative as far away from himself as he can. He does not altogether like what he finds himself doing. I cannot think of any other novel or story by him in which he relies so much upon adjectives. It is as though he wants to modify many substantives so as to make them less unpleasant to him.
When I put down my copy of The Secret Agent, I am more relieved than depressed. But then I realize that tomorrow morning’s New York Times will bring me only depression. Terror and tyranny abroad and at home is the way things are. A time will come in my remaining four or five years when I will reread The Secret Agent with admiration and some ingratitude.
CHAPTER 31
Under Western Eyes (1911)
JOSEPH CONRAD
IT IS SOBERING to learn how tense and unhappy Conrad was as he worked at Under Western Eyes, for him the most excruciating of his novels. Mental and physical breakdown in January 1910 may have been provoked by a quarrel with his faithful agent, J. B. Pinker, who had been financing the Conrad family.
It was not until the publication of the novel Chance in 1913 that Conrad’s financial problems began to be solved. The book sold heavily throughout 1914 and finally made the novelist both prosperous and famous. I cannot say that I find Chance very readable, but it is gratifying that he at last found his public.
The final flickering of Conrad’s greatness came in the novel Victory (1915), which sold well but baffled much of the public. I myself find it rewarding, though hopelessly sad. At its close the stage is bare, since all the protagonists have died, whether by murder, suicide, or accident.
Eight years after the publication of Under Western Eyes, Conrad added an author’s note that is reflective, a little pugnacious, and consistent with his dark vista of all things Russian:
My greatest anxiety was in being able to strike and sustain the note of scrupulous impartiality. The obligation of absolute fairness was imposed on me historically and hereditarily, by the peculiar experience of race and family, in addition to my primary conviction that truth alone is the justification of any fiction which makes the least claim to the quality of art or may hope to take its place in the culture of men and women of its time. I had never been called before to a greater effort of detachment….
“Race” here means being Polish. We can credit Conrad for an astonishing detachment throughout Under Western Eyes, though there is always an undercurrent of repressed outrage. “Family” refers to Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski (1820–69), a distinguished poet and dramatist, as well as a translator, and a consistent, frequently underground revolutionary for the Polish cause. Arrested in 1861, he was sent into exile, which destroyed his health. Like his only child, the novelist, Apollo Korzeniowski greatly admired Shakespeare and translated him. From Conrad’s author’s note:
Razumov is treated sympathetically. Why should he not be? He is an ordinary young man, with a healthy capacity for work and sane ambitions. He has an average conscience. If he is slightly abnormal it is only in his sensitiveness to his position. Being nobody’s child he feels rather more keenly than another would that he is a Russian—or he is nothing. He is perfectly right in looking on all Russia as his heritage. The sanguinary futility of the crimes and the sacrifices seething in that amorphous mass envelops and crushes him. But I don’t think that in his distraction he is ever monstrous. Nobody is exhibited as a monster here—neither the simple-minded Tekla nor the wrong-headed Sophia Antonovna. Peter Ivanovitch and Madame de S. are fair game. They are the apes of a sinister jungle and are treated as their grimaces deserve. As to Nikita—nicknamed Necator—he is the perfect flower of the terroristic wilderness. What troubled me most in dealing with him was not his monstrosity but his banality.
Conrad’s tone here hesitates before going back to detachment. I do not like Razumov and cannot believe Conrad did, either. It is true that Razumov is the bastard son of a nobleman who only barely acknowledges him. Granted also that Razumov is never monstrous. Madame de S. is the wealthy patroness of Peter Ivanovitch, who clearly is based upon Mikhail Bakunin, a notorious firebrand, anti-Semitic and violent, who was the major anarcho-syndicalist theorist. Nikita is brutal, a tsarist double agent who destroys Razumov’s eardrums, rendering him deaf. Subsequently, Razumov is run over by a tram and severely crippled. He survives only because Tekla devotes her life to taking care of him. Several critics have noted Conrad’s prolepsis of Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil.
The most terrifying reflection (I am speaking now for myself) is that all these people are not the product of the exceptional but of the general—of the normality of their place, and time, and race. The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names. The oppressors and the oppressed are all Russians together; and the world is brought once more face to face with the truth of the saying that the tiger cannot change his stripes nor the leopard his spots.
The surge of this is in some ways stronger in 2018 than it was in 1920. Conrad wants us to remember Jeremiah 13:23, which in the King James Version reads: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.” In the age of Putin, what can we do except agree with Conrad’s skepticism as to all things Russian? And yet, despite his loathing for Dostoevsky, clearly Crime and Punishment serves as a model for Razumov’s situation. Raskolnikov comes to realize that by butchering the two old women he has murdered himself; Razumov sees that in betraying Haldin he has sold himself to the state.
There are other traces of Dostoevsky and also of Tolstoy in Under Western Eyes. Why are they there? They seem deliberate. Conrad was as civilized as Turgenev or Henry James. Polish at the core, he could not forgive Russia but had learned from Shakespeare, as his father had, that the creation of character transcended moral judgment. It may be that in Conrad allusiveness becomes a form of atonement.
I wonder if Under Western Eyes would not have been an even stronger work if, like The Secret Agent, it had had an omniscient narrator. Marlow could not fit in the Geneva of Russian revolutionary exiles, but the unnamed, elderly teacher of languages does not persuade me that his Western eyes are reliable. He seems to be all but in love with Natalia Victorovna Haldin yet lacks the confidence to guide her wisely. Marlow emerges from the matrix of Conrad; the language teacher is drearily adrift.
But then I am chastened by thinking back to Conrad’s torment as he wrote Under Western Eyes. W. B. Yeats called upon sages standing in God’s holy fire to be the singing masters of his soul. An eclectic occultist, Yeats equated God and death. Joseph Conrad remai
ned a skeptic, famously writing to Edward Garnett in 1902: “I always, from the age of fourteen, disliked the Christian religion, its doctrines, ceremonies and festivals.” That questioning spirit saw Conrad through to the end.
CHAPTER 32
The Reef (1912)
EDITH WHARTON
IF YOU SUFFER from the rage for reading and rereading, you are rewarded by lucky surprises. I intended to write this brief commentary upon one of three indubitable masterpieces by Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence. I had reread them several times and written about all of them, as well as about Ethan Frome. My friend R. W. B. Lewis (1917–2002), who wrote a large biography of Wharton, and edited several volumes of her work, in the year 2000 urged me to read The Reef. I have taken eighteen years to follow Dick’s advice and have just completed two readings of The Reef.
It is a sinuous and disturbing novel, with a complex relation to Wharton’s erotic life. She met Morton Fullerton in 1907, when she was forty-five and he was forty-two. Fullerton, an American journalist, was a fabled seducer, androgynous, whose major distinction was that he gave both Edith Wharton and Henry James their first full sexual experience. Part of his charm was an ability to insinuate incest, a repressed and powerful element in the psychosexuality of both Wharton and Henry James. Wharton when very young had an incestuous relationship to her father and perhaps to her brother. Some have speculated that the basis for Henry James’s homoeroticism might be found in his early love for his brother, the philosopher and psychologist William James. What is clear is that Fullerton liberated Henry James into many subsequent homosexual relationships, and gave to Edith Wharton the sensual culmination she had not found in her sexless marriage to Edward Wharton.
In her highly Whitmanian erotic poem “Terminus,” written in 1909, at the apex of her affair with Fullerton, Wharton achieves a power unmatched elsewhere in her verse. She and Henry James shared an ecstatic appreciation of Walt Whitman. Both accurately regarded him as the greatest of American poets. There is a moving description by Wharton of Henry James crooning Whitman aloud on an evening at the Mount, her estate near Tanglewood. She remarked that we all “sat rapt” as James chanted on “in a mood of subdued ecstasy.” One could wish for a recording of that.
For Wharton, Walt Whitman was as much a prophet as a poet, and a great liberator of the passional life, as he was for D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Pessoa, Octavio Paz, Neruda, Borges and so many more. There is a weird charm in juxtaposing Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American, and the literary mandarins Wharton and James. Whitman and Thoreau met to their mutual delight, and the American Bard left us accounts of his visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson, including a final one during which the poet stationed his chair so that he could look on the benignly amiable countenance of the Seer in his senility.
The Reef is an intricate, surging narrative that shows Wharton to be a master of dialogue and something close to a wisdom writer in matters of the heart. It is not surprising that Henry James preferred it to all her other work. Though Wharton professed mixed reactions to the Master’s late phase, the influence of The Golden Bowl (1904) pervades The Reef.
The central consciousness of The Reef is that of Anna Leath, an American woman in her late thirties, widowed and living in Givré, a rural estate in France, with her twenty-three-year-old stepson, Owen Leath, and her nine-year-old daughter, Effie. Fraser Leath, her late husband, was a wealthy dilettante who devoted himself to collecting antique snuffboxes and possibly to the usual philandering.
The two other consequential characters are George Darrow, an American diplomat stationed in London, who may be a year or two younger than Anna, and Sophy Viner, a poignant and rather luckless American young woman, who hopes to become an actress in Paris. Darrow and Sophy have a brief affair in Paris; it meant little enough to him, but Sophy never gets beyond it. Circumstances make Sophy a live-in tutor for Effie, and Owen Leath falls in love with her.
George Darrow is the aesthetic enigma of the novel. He is admirable enough but a touch shallow, though his authentic love for Anna, which goes back to before her marriage, is enduring. Edith Wharton invests herself in Anna’s perplexed awareness of other people, including her stepson, Sophy Viner, and most of all Darrow, whom she loves but distrusts. The revelation of the brief affair of Sophy and Darrow becomes the reef that virtually wrecks her possibility of long-delayed fulfillment in a second marriage.
It is extraordinary how Wharton is able to play out the vicissitudes of Anna’s heart. One wonders to what extent Anna is a surrogate for the novelist. The gods gave Edith Newbold Jones every gift—daemonic drive, intellect, imaginative capaciousness—except beauty. She called Walter Van Rensselaer Berry “the love of my life,” but that international lawyer and diplomat gave her only friendship, as he did to Henry James and Marcel Proust. Her only lover, after her childhood, seems to have been Fullerton.
All of the women protagonists in Wharton’s major phase are beautiful. One thinks of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, whose ill luck and bad timing compel her, at twenty-nine, to kill herself by an overdose of chloral. Imprisoned by the social world of Old New York, and with inadequate means, she desperately needs a marriage into money and good social standing. Despite her charm, goodness, and desirability, she remains unmarried with many debts, some by losing large sums at bridge games. Her true love is a young lawyer, Lawrence Selden, who moves easily through Old New York but lacks money. The only culmination of the love between Lily and Selden is when he grieves for her over her deathbed.
I am a fierce admirer of Janet Malcolm, as writer and as person, but it puzzles me when she says of Wharton, “Her books are pervaded by a deep pessimism and an equally profound misogyny.” The pessimism is an abyss, but why term Wharton a misogynist? Undine Spragg, sexual magnet and devourer of husbands, the monstrous protagonist of The Custom of the Country, vindicates Malcolm, yet Undine is a vacuous fiend unique in Wharton. The anti-heroine Undine manifests Wharton’s savage genius as a parodist, unlikely ancestor of Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon.
In The Age of Innocence, Ellen Olenska and May Welland are in their different ways admirable, even if neither is truly a match for Newland Archer, who, like George Darrow in The Reef, may be modeled on Walter Berry. And yet Malcolm, as always, is on to something vital and dark in the recesses of Wharton’s consciousness. Edith Jones Wharton wants to be loved by men and at most respected by women of sufficient eminence. It is absurdly unnecessary to term Wharton a snob; she would fit more than one category of Thackeray’s Book of Snobs. She has overt debts to Thackeray: Undine Spragg parodies the marvelous Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair, though the effect on me makes me miss Becky Sharp more and more.
Wharton’s tedious anti-Semitism is everywhere in her work. Still, she is hardly unique in that blot on the American novel: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and the Jewish anti-Semite Nathanael West are among many other offenders. Cather had lost one of her lesbian lovers to a Jewish violinist and revenged herself throughout her writings. With Wharton, it is merely the heritage of Old New York.
The friendship between Edith Wharton and Henry James was prolonged, deeply felt, yet vexing because of literary anxieties. Wharton was weary of being termed a female Henry James, while James, almost twenty years older than Wharton, was at times terrified and exhausted by her energy, to the point where he once referred to her as his “Angel of Devastation.” Wharton, always in overdrive, was rather more than a natural force. A comparison between their ghostly tales demonstrates that James is gentle at the borders between natural and preternatural, whereas Wharton is wild and daemonic even when she emphasizes silence. For many years she kept an annual vigil on All Souls’ Night, recalling her beloved dead and musing on her loneliness. The last story she wrote, concluded in February 1937—six months before her death at the age of seventy-five—has as its protagonist Sara Clayburn, a wealthy old
lady living alone except for a houseful of servants. On a chilly late-October evening, she meets an unknown woman walking toward her house who says she wishes to see one of the girls. Sara Clayburn injures her ankle and takes to her bed, with food left nearby by a servant. In the morning, she wakes to find the house deserted and has to limp around to take care of herself. One year later, all this is repeated, with the strange woman reappearing, and Sara understands what is happening. Whether this is a parable of the lonely old Edith Wharton fearing death is unclear, yet the story is brilliantly narrated.
It would be unfair to contrast Wharton’s The Reef with James’s The Golden Bowl. Every time I go back to The Golden Bowl, I change my mind—or, rather, James changes it. My view both of Maggie Verver and of Charlotte Stant ebbs and flows. Maggie’s patience and marital love wear down Charlotte’s relentless passion for Prince Amerigo. Adam Verver, widower with only the single child, Maggie, yields to his daughter’s shrewd suggestion that he propose marriage to Charlotte, who accepts him. The daughter-father alliance abides too strenuously, so that Charlotte and Amerigo resume their affair. Henry James severs both knots by a tense accord between Maggie and Charlotte that sends Adam, his art collection, and Charlotte, his major acquisition, back to the United States.
Edith Wharton stated that she found The Golden Bowl “unreadable.” Perhaps, though, she absorbed enough of it to help engender The Reef, which floats under the shadow of James’s daedal dance of marriages. Henry James, in a letter to Wharton, implicitly recognizes his parentage while complimenting the novel and its author:
There remains with me so strongly the impression of [The Reef’s] quality and of the unspeakably fouillée nature of the situation between the two principals…that I can’t but babble of it a little to you even with these weak lips….Each of these two figures is admirable for truth and justesse; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes…sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I’m not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as she sees him—which gives our attention a different sort of work to do; yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable, not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility. Anna is really of Racine…which is why the whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way to its milieu and background, and to any determining or qualifying entourage, takes place comme cela, and in a specified, localised way, in France—these non-French people “electing,” as it were, to have their story out there….Your Racinian inspiration…absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious fond you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite moments, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver correspondences in your façon de dire….There used to be little notes in you that were like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot—the echo of much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding through. But now you are like a lost and recovered “ancient” whom she might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in her texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith, you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you go further and you say mieux, and your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (comme moi, par exemple!) It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use there of the term!)—makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-sérieux—but leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex City
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 31