How reading Joseph Conrad has changed with the times

There’s a long and noble tradition of literary critics misunderstanding Joseph Conrad. Partly that’s because he is such a complicated, dense and fascinating writer. Far more words have been written about him than he ever wrote himself – and not everyone can get it right all the time. Especially when you throw combustible postcolonial issues into the mix.Time has a cruel habit of amplifying those mistakes. A century after he was writing, any negative predictions about Conrad’s long-term durability, for instance, seem hilariously misguided.

Virginia Woolf’s essay written after Conrad’s death is a classic. Actually, it contains some beautiful, eloquent observations on the arts of both reading and writing:

But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea.

But it isn’t those observations that stand out today. The thing that I notice most, sitting here in 21st-century piety, is the apparently snooty condescension of the opening; Woolf calling Conrad “our guest”, as if he spent all those years in British literary society on sufferance. I also enjoy tutting over the confident and wonderfully inaccurate predictions in the conclusion:

We shall make expeditions into the later books and bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most of us untrodden. It is the earlier books – Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ – that we shall read in their entirety.

I read three of those books Woolf names in the heady flush of my teenage enthusiasm for Conrad – but only because I had first read Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes and Victory. Those later books, written between 1899 and 1915 (those which Woolf suggests Conrad did not really “believe” in) have mattered as much to subsequent English literature as any comparable collection of novels.

Of course, she wasn’t the only one. Victory, now firmly lodged in the canon, and called in John Gray’s introduction to my new Penguin edition “Conrad’s last great novel” (a claim raising interesting questions about The Rover and The Shadow Line) did not receive universal plaudits from critics in 1915. So many of the reviews were negative that Conrad himself confessed to “mixed feelings”.

Here on the Reading group, contributor NatashaFatale linked to this fascinating New York Times review from 1915, itself the very definition of “mixed”.

“In detail Victory is by no means as fine a piece of work as Chance,” complains the reviewer. “Plain Mr Jones, and his Ricardo, are exactly as credible as Mephistopheles attended by Caliban would be, and the idol-like Mrs Schomberg is so grotesque that she might have been drawn from life by an amateur who has not yet learned the value of fiction to give the illusion of reality …”

Elsewhere, in contrast, the review also references Conrad’s continuing “mastery in the delineation of women”. Here in the 21st century again, that seems like curious praise. At least, I haven’t read much modern praise of Conrad’s female characterisation – and plenty of complaints. Perhaps he deserves more credit than he often gets for his portrayals of Victorian and Edwardian women, but only if you understand that he portrays them through the filter of Victorian and Edwardian men. Lena in Victory is fascinating for showing a woman as seen by men. How she works as an autonomous individual, however, is more open to debate.

But never mind. Because the interesting thing is that while the negative and apparently old-fashioned comments in that 1915 review stand out, there is plenty that still rings true. There’s much to bolster faith in the reviewer’s craft and I’d recommend reading it all. The reviewer has fascinating things to say about the lead character Heyst, about the influence of Hamlet, and about the way Lena’s “floating” and “permeating essence” goes right through the book.

He (presumably it is a he) also nails some of the novel’s most outstanding qualities: “it presents a curious and vital mingling of strong, crude action and of delicate psychology.”

That delicate psychology is probably the thing for which Conrad is best known now. He has endured because of the beauty of his writing and the insight we still feel he gives into the human condition. John Gray’s introduction focuses on the influence of Schopenhauer and there’s no doubt that these deep currents have a strong pull. But there will be time to discuss that over the coming weeks. For now, especially in the early stages of reading, it’s also worth highlighting how right the New York Times reviewer also is about the appeal of the “strong, crude action”. The thing that’s most struck me on my early rereading of Victory is how much of it is comical, how much suspense there is, and how powerful is the sense of looming danger. It’s easy to forget, focusing on Conrad and the deep dark teatime of the soul, that he also had more superficial (but no less vital) talents as a writer.

Conrad is funny, for instance. Several Reading group contributors have noted this fact with surprise, and highlighted quietly hilarious zingers like the following:

Heyst’s smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his great mustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as comfortably as a shy bird in its native thicket.

He’s also a master of slow-burning action. The plot of Victory moves with ruthless inevitability. We are aware that Heyst’s isolation on his island and his honeymoon with Lena are under growing threat long before their peaceful spell is broken. And how well that spell breaks as the Chinese Wang announces in a moment of superb (yes) melodrama: “Boat out there.” And then there’s that extraordinary scene when that boat reaches the island – the brutal, sadistic comedy in its occupants mad rush for water – and the still more powerful suspense surrounding their intentions.

But let’s take a leaf out of Conrad’s book and delay the denouement for now, lingering instead over the sense that things are going to go very wrong, noting that this is a book that you read as much for the sake of the adventure story as the psychology. I’d be overselling it if I were to say Victory is an easy read. No one does ponderous quite like Joseph Conrad. But it is a novel of surprising pleasures. Surprising especially if you have an impression of Conrad as stern moral inquisitor and single-minded navigator through inner space. Maybe those early critics have something to teach us after all …