There is an acute species of melancholy attached to the early days of authorship which is often all too lightly dismissed as teething pains by biographers. The worried Conrad of Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, etc., could not have imagined the Conrad of Chance, and its revered and lucrative successors.
The period covered by these letters is that of risk and loss, those familiar concomitants of the first freelance years. His very blessings, a wife who could type as well as create the high standard of domestic order he needed, their first son and, from the very beginning, the inestimable friendship of Edward Garnett, prince of publishers' advisers, were themselves a reproach, for they had to be justified.
Worst of all there was the new and still strange vacuum of the study which he had to enter each morning - or each midnight often enough in his case. This and the incredible absence of the sea. Instead there were the horrible Essex marshes, dank and crime-ridden.
Eight months into the letters Ford Madox Hueffer was to rescue him from the letter by installing him at Pent Farm near Sandgate, and within a stone's throw, comparatively speaking, of the current Olympians, including Henry James, Galsworthy and H. G. Wells. Such proximity was apt to be more crushing than anything else. There was too Conrad's natural grandeur as a Polish gentleman and incipient genius, the effect of which on others often disconcerted him.
From the first he knew he was isolated and that every now and then he would need to make simple and direct statements about himself - 'I have never fostered any illusions as to my value. You may believe me implicitly when I say that I never work in a self-satisfied elation ...' He is remonstrating to Blackwood the publisher who, like his agent Pinker, goes a bit too far with his advice. At this moment both these men are hopefully thinking of Conrad as a superior yarn-spinner for boys.
He had joined the French merchant navy at 16, wild about the sea - some said because of reading Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea in his father's translation - but it wasn't until he was in his early thirties that he began to write what would become after some years and much shaping (and getting lost on voyages) Almayer's Folly, having taught himself English by reading east coast newspapers and talking to his East Anglian shipmates 'each built as though to last for ever, and coloured like a Christmas card. '
He was 37 when he gave up the sea as a career and retained it as a force for an entirely new kind of 'action' fiction, psychologically profound and stylistically sumptuous. It was hard to write and hardest of all at the time these letters were sent.
They are chiefly to his first literary friends R. B. Cunninghame Graham, the socialist grandee who was thought by some to be the rightful King of Scotland, the wise Edward Garnett, H. G. Wells (the friendship did not last), the much-tried literary agent J. B. Pinker (Conrad's blast to him on the ubiquitous business of not delivering on time deserves a place alongside Dr Johnson's thunderclap against patrons), William Blackwood, Ford, and Stephen Crane.
There are also many letters to the generous Galsworthy, a rich and practical friend, and an exchange of mutual appreciation with Arnold Bennett. All these writers in particular are clearly aware that a novelist who is quite unlike any other novelist is emerging, and, in their different ways, are giving support to the tortured tenant of Pent Farm.
Conrad's response is open and passionate. His loneliness shows. There is dawning respect and success, says Laurence Davies, yet 'the letters abound in unhappiness.' But it is not the life-lasting gloom of some writers but the saddness of a stage of development which writers, and artists of all sorts, will recognise, which is why this particular volume of the eight which will contain all Conrad's correspondence is so compelling.
Family life itself is still odd to him. He has known nothing since he was a boy except ship's crews and their mixture of reticence and emotion, but on vast voyages he has witnessed everything, most particularly imperialism in motion. His is not an innocent's eye. In the farmhouse there is neither closeness nor space. Jessie Conrad is accorded dutiful courtesies, though once she is described as 'my wife, a person of simple feelings guided by the intelligence of the heart. ' She was a bookseller's daughter, a large, capable woman on whom he depended for his spick and span home, secretarial requirements and punctual routine.
During these crucial four years. Conrad did all he could to understand his place in the scheme of things, says Davies, facing 'the problem in terms of family, profession, the sense of his own being, national and historical identity, and the physical universe itself. ' Most of all, he 'sought to locate himself as a writer.'
The hugeness of what he had seen, and maybe of what he had done, in comparison with his novelist contemporaries, plus the amazing use of a foreign language, made such a placing nigh impossible. Where was he? Who and what was he? The big first batch of letters do not wholly answer these questions but they are satisfyingly informative all the same.
We do come much nearer to Conrad because of them. He made little up. Cunninghame Graham, writing to Edward Garnett about The Heart of Darkness, said that it was written 'in the fervent contemplation of his tracks,' and this masterpiece and all the rest of the work relied upon old sea-lanes re-travelled, old companions rejoined. But this kind of passage, often by pencil, was harder toil than sailing and he was constantly 'so weary, deadly weary of writing.'
There was never a moment's let-up. French tales pushed their way forward before he could find structures for them. 'My head is full of a story, I have not been able to write a single word - except the title which shall be I think NOSTROMO; the story belonging to the 'Karain' class of tales ('K' class for short - as you classify the cruisers. )'
Like many stylists, he was sometimes unnerved by the possibility of losing 'myself in a wilderness of endeavour' and of 'verbiage,' and to this day we read him and are foxed by his artistry and his daring. He is lastingly mysterious. Seeing so many words, we think he has told all, but he never does. Explaining the deliberately bald ending of Lord Jim to Blackwood, he says: 'The reader ought to know enough at that time. '
Will we know enough from the 1898-1902 Letters to know how the patrician merchant seaman from Poland stepped straight to the centre of English literature? No - but they help.
The editing is impeccable - and the binding a treat.
