Sierra Prasada

In his 1961 novel, Mother Night, author Kurt Vonnegut famously paraphrased Nietszche, writing: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

Vonnegut’s American protagonist, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., opens Mother Night by describing himself as a Nazi “by reputation.” During World War II, he has served two master, acting as a propagandist for the Germans and a spy for the Allies. The pretense, he ultimately concludes, is virtually indistinguishable from truth.

Does the same formulation apply to books? Is the substance of a book distinct from how it appears to readers? More to the point, is The Secret Agent a book about the anarchism and terrorism or is it a book that appears to be about anarchism and terrorism? Is there a difference?

Conrad himself, at the time of the book’s publication, declared that he “had no idea to consider Anarchism politically; or to treat it seriously in its philosophical aspect.” And yet, his biographer Zdzislaw Najder wonders, “[T]he political substance of the book appears quite obvious. So why did Conrad protest?” His answer:

One may only speculate that he did not want “The Secret Agent” to be taken as a roman à thèse or as a topical report on the contemporary anarchists. Such an approach would obscure the more general significance of the book, the contrast between order and anarchy…Claiming that his novel was not a satire on the anarchists, Conrad may have wanted to hint at something he dared not say publicly: that the Russian embassy, the English police, and the Home Office were objects of no less ridicule…

The issue gains more complex and fascinating dimension when one takes into account the author’s note that Conrad appended to the 1920 edition of The Secret Agent. Early in the piece, he conjectures that his efforts to justify the “moral squalor” of his tale will come to naught because the reading public is largely concerned with “the obvious”:

…the world generally is not interested in the motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile and smile but he is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from explanations.

Something else entirely, however, seemed obvious to Conrad once the genesis for the novel crystalized: “…one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other.”

This line gains further resonance when juxtaposed with author Tom Reiss’s contention that the “real evil of the novel emerges from the exigencies of counterterrorism, not the anarchist plotting itself.” Writing in The New York Times in 2005, he also makes plain how the “exigencies of counterterrorism” blighted Conrad’s own life:

Conrad’s attitude toward terrorism was deeply influenced by the fact that in 1861, when he was barely 5 years old, his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was arrested as a revolutionary. A poet and playwright, he had joined a group with ties to the anarchist Bakunin. Deported along with his parents to northern Russia, Conrad watched as his mother sickened with tuberculosis and died; his father died four years later.

People “blown to bits.” For what?

Yet, even as Conrad points to futility and “absurd cruelty” as key themes, taking the book far beyond its alluring topicality, he professes his pleasure on hearing reports that “all sorts of revolutionary refugees in New York would have it that the book was written by somebody who knew a lot about them.” Conrad continues:

This seemed to me a very high compliment, considering that, as a matter of hard fact, I had seen even less of their kind than the omniscient friend who gave me the first suggestion for the novel. I have no doubt, however, that there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist, I won’t say [one] more convinced than they but certainly cherishing a more concentrated purpose than any of them had ever done in the whole course of his life.

I don’t say this to boast. I was simply attending to my business. In the matter of all my books I have always attended to my business. I have attended to it with complete self-surrender. And this statement, too, is not a boast. I could not have done otherwise. It would have bored me too much to make-believe.

Regardless of Conrad’s murky intentions, the book has consistently been (mis)taken for an exposé of anarchism, made all the more credible by its author’s established reputation for authenticity and authority. In a letter of praise, Henry James wrote: “No one has known – for intellectual use – the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached.”

James wrote these words after reading Conrad’s autobiographical essays The Mirror of the Sea published in 1906, but it is almost self-evident that the reputation of one or more respected works often becomes the author’s own reputation. Appearance, by definition, envelops reality.

Fervent admirers of the The Secret Agent have since gone on to write political thrillers and, at least one has committed acts of terroristic violence. The latter, Ted Kaczynski, reportedly identified himself with Conrad’s bomb-making professor, but he also used “Conrad” as an alias several times. In the mirror of the character, perhaps he saw reflected the intentions of the author.

In both cases, one might say readers care less about Conrad’s true meaning and more about what they see in The Secret Agent. Then again, isn’t that an essential, if morally neutral, element of the reading experience? What we take from the books we love is less the measure of what they are than of who we are.

Image: One innovative adaptation of the famed Obama poster.

Long before he ruined liberals for real presidential candidates, Martin Sheen (as Captain Benjamin L. Willard) made his way into the jungles of Vietnam on a mission to terminate (“with extreme prejudice”) Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in the 1979 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Though the novel is a classic work that speaks to many major themes of the 20th century – and, alas, the 21st – it is not technically a 20th century work, having been first serialized in 1899. The more things change…

More:If Moviehole.com, a site I’m not familiar with, is correct, then we’ll be headed back to theaters to see another adaptation of Heart of Darkness, this one set in the future and in outer space.

Just after the turn of the century, Joseph Conrad partnered with Ford Madox Ford to write three novels, beginning with The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. They’re not great novels, nor were they received as such on publication. Conrad would later dub the partnership the “fatal collaboration.” The friendship would flame out by 1909, and both men would find success with their own solo works, Ford’s most notable being The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-28).

Yet, it’s impossible to dismiss the collaboration as a mere mistake, writes Polish biography Zdzislaw Najder in his Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Njader explains that Conrad’s reasons for seeking out a collaborator were personal and professional more than pecuniary:

In his first preserved letter to Ford, Conrad described himself as a “self-made philosopher and a pilgrim on the stony path of Art.” He felt lonely on his pilgrimage; he was firmly established neither in the English literary milieu nor in literature as a profession; his sense of maladjustment to the role of writer was frequently revealed in his letters. With a neighbor who could be his regular partner in work and discussion and who shared his passionate interest in the art of the novel, Conrad could fend off loneliness and, at the same time, gain a firm foothold in the world of literature. And since Conrad’s greatest problem was that he worked slowly and sometimes was unable to write at all, a connection with Ford, who wrote with speed and ease, was particularly attractive.

The most important argument in favor of the arrangement must have been the opportunity to perfect his English by acquiring a keener sense of the shades of meaning and emotional associations linked with words, expressions, or rhythms. Until then the two principal sources of Conrad’s knowledge of English were the colloquial language of the sailors and the books he read; that left substantial areas where he was insecure.

Najder goes on to describe Ford as a “kind of honorary foreigner” – due to his “snobbery, coupled with his cult of French literature,” more than his German ancestry – and to recognize in him a natural ally to Conrad’s “genuine foreigner.” Both their sensibilities ran counter to a time in which the English (and Americans) were intensely xenophobic.

In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s protagonist Marlow writes:

I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it really means.

By striving to write in (better) English, however – and here I draw my own conclusions – Conrad also sought to discover and establish a more uniform self, one that would conform to the world he had chosen and the expectations of his compatriots, a self that would, perhaps, make reality less of an agony, less of a “horror.”

It should be clear by now that Henry James and Upton Sinclair are hardly the only 20th century authors to enjoy generous, wide-ranging afterlives in contemporary works.

On the spectrum of life-to-lit authenticity, author Lawrence Thornton’s fictional treatment of Joseph Conrad falls somewhere between Chris Bachelder’s wildly imaginative rumpus with Sinclair, U.S.!, and two relatively straightforward engagements with James, David Lodge’s Author, Author and Cólm Toibín’s The Master.

The narrator of Thornton’s work is at once the fictional sailor and memoirist Jack Malone – neatly shoehorned into Conrad’s social life – and his luminous shadow, Marlowe, famed narrator of Heart of Darkness and, in this telling, a thinly disguised version of Malone himself. The larger story unfolds in the form of a letter, written by Malone after Conrad has died, and addressed to author and (real) Conrad confidant and collaborator Ford Madox Ford.

In this book-length letter, Malone writes, in part, of the pains Conrad took to disguise the “theft” of Malone’s life and the anguish he experienced on its revelation, as though Conrad then had to confront the implication of losing himself in the shadow of a larger-than-life character. Marlowe, it follows logically, is not a character who Conrad invented – and there might be some genuine glory in that act – but only one who he made the subject of a life study, about which he remained silent when it was mistaken for a powerful work of imagination.

This scenario, an extension of Malone himself, springs from Thornton’s imagination and not any real chapter of Conrad’s life. Historian Adam Hochschild has described several real figures upon whom Conrad may have based another character from Heart of Darkness, that of Kurtz, but it’s not clear what cause Conrad would have had to feel guilty for doing so.

Does Thornton’s fictional Conrad, then, have anything to teach us about his factual counterpart? The question matters, because, arguably, there is only one purpose in bringing a historic figure back to life as a literary character in a serious literary work and, that is, to seek a better understanding of his or her character and the way circumstances shaped it. Otherwise, why not simply conjure up someone entirely new? Someone truly fictional?

At the same time, one might say that fiction has its own singular purpose, one that, just as convincingly, makes lesser purposes of the rest: To tell a true story is to tell a good story. And if it is good, we feel it as true in our bones. All thefts (short of blunt plagiarism) are thus redeemed.

You’ll have to read the novel to draw your own conclusions as to whether Thornton’s “what if” justifies itself. In the meantime, a short excerpt from Thornton’s novel, in which Malone shares with Ford the revelation that made his own writing possible, a visitation at once imaginary and, on the inward sea that writers sail, utterly real:

Five years were to pass before I finally sat down to see what I could do in the way of memoir writing. After three false starts, I was close to giving up. I remember crushing what I thought might well be the last page of my efforts and rolling it across the table, where the bloodless thing disappeared over the edge. And then, half an hour later, you appeared, Ford, descending like a ministering angel from the silky blackness of an Indonesian night to show me the way…

Suddenly, I recalled an afternoon you and I spent with Conrad in Kent at his country house. We three had walked from Pent Farm to Stanford for lunch at his favorite pub, the one with the weathered picnic benches that stood outside on the grass, and afterward returned to the parlor. Nothing earth-shattering, simply a rescued moment that somehow led my thoughts to the opening pages of your “Good Soldier,” where John Dowell frets over how to tell his story and finally decides to imagine himself talking to a sympathetic soul in a country cottage. I had a vision of him and this nameless chap sitting by a crackling fire – Dowell, heartbroken and confused going on about his trials with his poor wife, Florence, quite as a man would to someone who understands the torments of love and sex.

Well, my heart started pounding. In that instant I realized that I, too, needed a confidant, someone interested enough in Conrad to listen to what I had to say. There were plenty of candidates among Conrad’s writer friends – Henry James, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling – but none was as well suited for the job as Ford Madox Ford, his friend and steadfast ally ever since you two had met in 1898. The fact that you had lived at Pent Farm and vacated it just before Conrad moved in made your role as my Muse even more natural. And it was also there at Pent that you and he began your collaboration…I also knew that you had a hand in revising “Heart of Darkness,” “Nostromo,” and parts of “The Mirror of the Sea” – work that let you understand far better than I what drove the man and what made him the artist we admired.

By 1907, it had become clear just how the earlier Russo-Japanese War had changed the game. Russia’s defeat (just a few months after Anton Chekhov succumbed to tuberculosis) influenced, though it did not cause, the limited revolution of 1905, itself a forerunner to the sweeping revolution of 1917.

The war also delayed the second Hague Convention from 1904 to 1907. A proposal by the Russian Tsar had resulted in the first, more successful international peace conference in 1899. Both conventions, however, must be remembered more for what they aimed at then where they landed. From wikipedia:

A major effort in both the conferences was to create a binding international court for compulsory arbitration to settle international disputes, which was considered necessary to replace the institution of war.

It goes without saying that the international court went uncreated at this time, and a third Hague convention, scheduled for 1914, never took place.

As of 1905, the institution of war had put Japan on a new footing, and pride in the unexpected victory contributed to Japanese immigrants in San Francisco protesting forcefully when their children were placed in a segregated Asian school after the 1906 Great Quake. Their voices had to contend with a veritable clamor of xenophobic sentiment, implicit in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Motivated by U.S. foreign policy interests and not human rights – Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) would continue to uphold the legitimacy of “separate but equal” until overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 – President Roosevelt’s own efforts to persuade the San Francisco school board to accept Japanese students into public schools were unsuccessful until he agreed to ensure the suspension of Japanese immigration. In order to save face, the Japanese government in turn agreed not to grant passports to aspiring immigrants on any ground except family reunification – leading to the rise of so-called “picture brides,” something of a precursor in itself to Facebook, Match.com and the like.

The accord, formalized but never signed into law, would be known as the Gentleman’s Agreement.

Image: Japanese “picture” brides circa 1907.

In 2009, Slate’s Explainer asked and answered: “When did getting “hit by a bus” become the standard image of unexpected catastrophe?”

They credit Joseph Conrad, more specifically his protagonist (of sorts), Mr. Verloc, with the earliest accident-related usage:

But just try to understand that it was a pure accident; as much an accident as if he had been run over by a ‘bus while crossing the street.

Of course, if the assertion’s accurate, it certainly took a long time for the two meanings to, um, collide. “Buses” – at least those capable of running people over – apparently started careening around as early as the 1600s.

Read the rest of the article and decide for yourself. (Regardless of how it came about, the usage sure is popular in movies!)