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OUR CONRAD

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface....................................................................................................ixAbbreviations..............................................................................................xiiiIntroduction: The American Invention of Joseph Conrad......................................................11 In the Crucible of War: Immigration, Foreign Relations, Democracy, and H. L. Mencken.....................412 Appositions: Jews, Anglo-Saxons, Women, African-Americans................................................1083 All a Conrad Generation: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Other Expatriates.......................................2214 Under Southern Eyes: Visions of the South in the 1920s...................................................2655 Faulkner's Conrad........................................................................................335Notes......................................................................................................375Index......................................................................................................451

Chapter One

Immigration, Foreign Relations, Democracy, and H. L. Mencken

Joseph Conrad, rover of the seven seas, has never set foot in the United States. Now he is coming. At about the end of this month the man who holds probably the most exalted position in contemporary English letters is to arrive here for a visit.... He looks forward to it in a spirit of adventure. -Time, April 7, 1923

I am going away with a strong impression of American large-heartedness and generosity. I have not for a moment felt like a stranger in this great country.... I am proud to have had from it an unexpected warmth of public recognition and the gift of precious private friendships. -Conrad to Elbridge Adams, May 31, 1923

Yes; he was a castaway. A poor emigrant from central Europe ... washed up here in a storm. And for him, who knew nothing of the earth, this was an undiscovered country. ... He could talk to no one and had no hope of understanding anybody. Upon my word, I wonder he did not go mad. He didn't know where he was. Somewhere very far from his mountains-somewhere over the sea. Was this America, he wondered? -Conrad, "Amy Foster" (1901)

ONE OF US?

On April 7, 1923, Joseph Conrad appeared on the cover of America's Time magazine. The occasion was Conrad's first and only visit to the United States, which began in May and was anticipated throughout the preceding month. The mood was one of high romance, as Conrad, "rover of the seven seas" and "probably the most exalted [figure] in contemporary English letters," was finally embarking on the most exotic adventure of them all:

Despite all the countries and seas of the world which he has made his own and presented to his readers, Mr. Conrad has never come closer to this coast than on the first voyage of his sea-life in 1875, which took him through the Florida Channel to the West Indies. It will be our especial opportunity to greet him here at last.

As these words suggest, there is a curious element of destiny and circular homecoming that underwrites this narrative of ultimate distance, a paradox registered in the two mythic figures most widely in circulation to gloss Conrad's latest journey: Ulysses, the archetypal alien wanderer, and Columbus, the "discoverer" and a narrative foundation of "America." This paradox is also registered in the picture on the cover of Time, unique in its artistry among contemporary numbers of the magazine (see Figures 2 and 3 on pages 44 and 45). There is a portrait of Conrad looking very much the familiar venerable writer: stately, solemn, neatly anchor bearded, grandfatherly wise. Yet this image of Conrad is embedded in a rush of dark, heavy streaks, not the background for but the occlusive and estranging medium in and through which this Conrad exists. This flattened surface creates an extraordinary-and defining-optical illusion, especially evident in the original glossy format of the Time cover. It presents Conrad simultaneously as a spectral apparition who has come from afar and as a face one might see if one looked in the mirror.

This is the image of the "distant mirror" through which I would have us understand Conrad's heterotopic construction in and captivation of the American imagination from 1914 to 1939, and it is one quite explicitly and self-consciously used in several U.S. appreciations of Conrad during this period. Yale professor William Lyon Phelps, for instance, observes in The Advance of the English Novel (1916) that whereas "Dickens is a refracting telescope, Conrad is a reflector," and goes on to identify a mirror of the mirror of Conrad's fiction in the same dualized and shrouded image of Conrad's face that the Time cover presents visually:

His face to some extent is a map of his soul. He looks like a competent, fearless, and highly intelligent clipper captain. His eyes have looked on the brutality of nature and the brutality of men and are unafraid.... It is a face that knows the very worst of the ocean and the very worst of the heart of man, and, while taking no risks, realizing all dangers, is calmly, pessimistically resolute. This is not a man to lead a forlorn hope, but unquestionably the man to leave in charge; grave, steady, reliable.

This double Conrad-his "eyes" reflecting both reassuring safety and vast penumbral stretches of distance and darkness-is also presented by Christopher Morley in The Mentor in 1925. Morley, too, begins by introducing Conrad's fiction in terms of its "mirror" function and then elaborates that function through an even more intensely dualized reading of a recent bust of Conrad by U.S. sculptor Jacob Epstein:

[Conrad] had, as highly as any man of our time perhaps, the genuinely poetic mind which dreams about its experiences in life and, by its magic faculty of seeing secret resemblances and analogies, builds a fable which mirrors ourselves.... The great sculptor Epstein has done a bust of Conrad which has startled some of those who loved him because they do not find it "like the Conrad they knew." It isn't: it is great sculpture because it is like the Conrad they didn't know, that probably no one knew: the secret and fierce and imagination-wracked soul of the great poet-with an enemy in his breast.

The Epstein bust is, in fact, quite representative of the many curiously and variously distorted images of Conrad in circulation in the United States at the time; but perhaps the most precise contemporary formulation of the "distant mirror" of Conrad's fiction, struggling through and against difference to arrive at and to erode an image of identity, may be found in the work of idiosyncratic Brown professor, public essayist, and future editor and novelist Wilson Follett (perhaps most famously known for his Modern American Usage). In an important essay in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1917, Follett presents the whole of Conrad's fiction through the exemplar of "The Secret Sharer"; in particular, Follett emphasizes the captain-narrator's "secret," specular fascination with the mutinous Leggatt-who is "the negation of tranquility...