Alexander Herzen, Moderate Revolutionary

Alexander Herzen was one of the towering figures of Russian culture in the 19th century. His epic memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, are considered the best example of that genre in that language. As a man he defies easy categorisation – he was a thinker, a revolutionary, the first Russian socialist and the person almost singlehandedly responsible for the creation of Russian public opinion through the establishment of Russia’s first uncensored news organ. For Isaiah Berlin, he was something of a hero. For Aileen Kelly, his former student and author of The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen, which I have just finished reading, he is “one of the most talented and complex figures of his time”.

Kelly’s biography diverges from previous literature on Herzen to highlight his scientific education, which lead him to approach the practical matters of political agitation from an unideological and much more empirical standpoint. It also led him to distrust all goal-orientated ideologies, seeing the role of chance in evolution and human history as equally important. But the thinker that Kelly describes is less complex than she wishes him to be. Instead, Herzen’s own judgement of himself as the thinker of “two or three ideas” seems more accurate. But still, they are good ideas, and it’s worth knowing what they are. 

Alexander Herzen

Herzen’s Life

Alexander Herzen was born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a landowner and his German mistress. This was a difficult time to be alive. After the elation of Russia’s victory over Napoleon stagnation set in, and then after 1825, when a group of officers attempted to stage a coup in favour of Western reforms, stagnation turned into reaction. Herzen suffered not only from his alienation as an illegitimate child (though his father, a wealthy man, succeeded in arranging for Herzen to be admitted to the nobility), but from his own country’s backwardness. Similar to how the Germans had created Romanticism out of the national shame caused by French domination, Russians disappointed with the status quo after 1825 turned inwards. In this they borrowed from the Germans their thinkers and writers – Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and so on. Kelly does a good job exploring the intellectual climate.

Herzen went to university and studied the natural sciences. He was then arrested on limited evidence and exiled to various unpleasant regions of Russia. Eventually he succeeded in fleeing Russia, ending up in London after some time. This is where he published The Bell, Russia’s first uncensored newspaper, which was smuggled into the country in great quantities. As he grew older, he witnessed the transition from his own generation into a new, more radical one. He made the acquaintance of such figures as Sergei Nechaev (the model for Verkhozensky in Dostoevsky’s Demons) and attempted to persuade them of his political views. In addition, he got to know such thinkers as Carlyle and revolutionaries as Garibaldi. His personal life, as we’ll see, was miserable, but it was certainly interesting.

One Life, One Chance: Herzen’s Thought

Herzen described himself as having only two or three ideas. By this he meant that his goal was not to present a system of his own, but rather to destroy what he saw as the pernicious systems and ideas of others – in this, we might think of him as similar to Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. “I’m not a teacher but a fellow seeker,” Herzen wrote. “I won’t presume to say what must be done, but I think I can say with a fair degree of accuracy what must not be done.” How did he know what must not be done? For Kelly, this comes from his scientific education. He had an eccentric relative called “The Chemist” who exposed him early on to the excitement of science, and throughout his life he continued to keep abreast of scientific developments.

Science was useful because it taught Herzen the importance of method. It’s not enough to have a theory, because “There is no absurdity that cannot be inserted into the mould of an empty dialectic in order to endow it with a profound metaphysical significance”. Instead, we must be more empirical, going from our own experience. We must look at the world before we attempt to change it, otherwise we will not have the right approach. To be aware of difference is a key skill for Herzen. For the revolutionary, it allows him to understand the best approach for achieving a given goal – at times violence may be necessary, while at others it may not. But the only way to know is not through theory, but through using our eyes.

Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species was an important influence on Herzen, or rather a confirmation of his suspicions about the role of chance in our lives. Evolution, Darwin argued, is not goal orientated. We develop through chance – sometimes improving, sometimes getting worse – but without any goal in sight. We simply improve our adaptation to a given environment. Herzen believed that chance was equally important in human affairs. Progress is not a given, and it is not a goal that we should consider a justification for the present.

Herzen was obsessed by natural disasters. As they are random, they proved for him that development could as easily be destroyed as it was created. If we think that we know the future, we can justify any means to achieve it. This is the foundation of the dangerous ideologies of the 20th century, and it was Herzen’s insight to realise that all attempts to claim knowledge of the laws of a random process (history) would lead inevitably to a kind of despotism.

Everything is chance, at least in the future. There is only one place where we are given a certain responsibility – this is the present. If we make use of it well, we can help create a good future. But we must always be aware that chance will determine the future, not any laws. We can only do our best. Herzen was scathing of both optimistic and pessimistic visions of human development. He thought that optimists failed to see the potential for collapse and decay in humanity that stemmed through chance and potential bad decisions, while pessimists failed to see that things need not necessarily get worse, provided we are willing to act to make them better in the present. In the long run, as Keynes said, we are all dead. But we can make a better present. Herzen, ultimately, comes across as a realist. His stoicism involved controlling what he could, and accepting what he could not. But given a life of personal tragedy (dead wife, family members drowning, infidelities, betrayals) he found his acceptance of chance pushed to the limits.

He admits that chance is not something we easily accept, but he insists that we do. For Herzen makes chance the basis of human dignity – we can only see people as themselves when we have no theory of the future that lets us turn them into objects.

“All the individual side of human life is buried in a dark labyrinth of contingencies, intersecting and interweaving with each other: primitive physical forces, dark urges, chance encounters, each have their place. They can form a harmonious choir, but equally can result in dissonances that can tear the soul apart. Into this dark forge of the fates light never penetrates: the blind workmen beat their hammers aimlessly, not answering for the results.…

There is something about chance that is intolerably repellent to a free spirit: he finds it so offensive to recognize its irrational force, he strives so hard to overcome it, that, finding no escape, he prefers to invent a threatening fate and submit to it. He wants the misfortunes that overtake him to be predestined—that is, to exist in connection with a universal world order; he wants to accept disasters as persecutions and punishments: this allows him to console himself through submission or rebellion. Naked chance he finds intolerable, a humiliating burden: his pride cannot endure its indifferent power.”

Herzen wanted us to see that we believe lies for a reason, because the alternative – accepting chance – is a challenge. But we cannot believe in ideologies, we must not believe in them, because they destroy the very things that make life meaningful – people as distinct, valuable, individuals:

“If progress is the end, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, only recedes, and as a consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitudes crying “morituri te salutant” can give back only the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn all human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on, or of wretched galley slaves, up to their knees in mud, dragging a barge filled with some mysterious treasure and with the humble words “progress in the future” inscribed on its bow.… An end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but … a trap. An end must be nearer … at the very least, the laborer’s wage, or pleasure in the work done. Each epoch, each generation, each life had, and has, its own fullness; and en route new demands grow, new experiences, new methods.… This generic growth is not an aim, as you suppose, but the hereditary characteristic of a succession of generations.…

The struggle, the reciprocal action of natural forces and the forces of will, the consequences of which one cannot know in advance, give an overwhelming interest to every historical epoch. If humanity marched straight toward some kind of result, there would be no history, only logic.… If there were a libretto, history would lose all interest, become unnecessary, boring, ludicrous.”

Herzen saw that as we destroy God, indeed as science forces our idea of God to retreat further and further from life, then ideologies will necessarily take God’s place. But he also saw that we can only live and make life good if we focus on the life to hand, and not some future abstract life. His words are fiery, passionate. In many ways, they remind me of Carlyle, but unlike Carlyle, there is no authoritarianism lurking under Herzen’s words. He despised nationalism, and he saw the Russian peasant commune note as a utopia, but as a good way for people to organise themselves, and one that should become more popular. He wanted a compromise between individual rights and collective feeling. Like almost every thinker from the end of the Enlightenment to the present day, Herzen wanted to restore the lost unities of Western Civilization, to bond together again the people. But this cannot be done by force, and it cannot be done under tyranny. The great challenge for any theory is “To comprehend… The full sanctity, the full breadth and reality of the individual’s rights and not to destroy society, not to shatter it into atoms, is the most difficult of tasks.”

To summarise these one or two ideas, all Herzen really wants to say is that an overreliance on future goals can mislead us at best and lead to terror at worst. My favourite quote of his on this is not in Kelly’s biography, but is still worth sharing:

“We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death”

The Political Actor

Beyond the need to concentrate on the present due to the unpredictable effects of chance, Herzen disliked all things whose foundations could not be proved and tested through experience, such as organised religion or Tsarist autocracy. Beyond these two thoughts, he simply had his own values. He wanted humans to have bonds without compromising their freedom. He saw the peasant commune, such as it then existed in Russia, as an ideal structure for achieving this. He did not idealise the peasants themselves, at least he was not as guilty of this as Tolstoy.

Still, he failed to see them for who they were. In 1863 there was an uprising in Russian-controlled Poland. Herzen had been in touch with the Polish revolutionaries for long before they actually revolted, and he had done his best to dissuade them from their chosen course. He had looked at the situation and decided that the timing was not right – they did not have a chance. But the Poles did not listen. Once they had risen up, Herzen did what he could for them, supporting them through The Bell, his newspaper. He condemned the Russian response, which was vindictive and brutal. But for all that, he found himself increasingly isolated. Russian society, which hitherto had been increasingly divided between different groups – Slavophiles and Westernisers, Radicals and Liberals and Conservatives – all united against the Poles and in support of the Tsar. The Bell’s circulation plummeted, and it lost the esteem it had held. Herzen had thought that socialism would be the idea capable of rebuilding the bonds between society’s many elements. He was incorrect – what actually was capable of drawing people together was nationalism.

After the Polish uprising Herzen’s influence was limited. The radicals who came to visit him in London or elsewhere were more interested in gaining access to his money than to his mind. To a new generation, determined to use more radical means to secure their goals, Herzen’s moderation was a problem. They preferred Herzen’s contemporary, the anarchist Bakunin, who is best-known for his declaration that “a destructive urge is also a creative one”. This generation had little time for the suggestion that violence may not be the only way of securing a successful revolution – indeed, it may not even be the best way. Herzen died, in some sense forgotten, in 1870.

Concluding Remarks

Jules Michelet, the French historian, wrote on Herzen’s death that with him had fallen silent “the voice of numerous millions of people.” Indeed, there had. But these were not, all told, Russian voices. In his refusal to acknowledge authorities based on trust, and his hatred of oppression, he was an anti-imperialist avant la lettre. His support for the Poles and for all oppressed peoples makes him an important figure in socialist history. His creation of The Bell, Russia’s first uncensored newspaper, and his own writings, give him a central place in Russian intellectual history, even if he failed to have a significant impact on its political history.

And, perhaps most importantly for us reading him or about him now, what he said, however simple it is, retains a definite power and wisdom. We are danger, especially in our own day, of a progress that looks always towards the future, and never at the present, and that sees people rather than individuals. When we start to acknowledge the role of chance in our lives, we successfully reorientate ourselves towards the one thing we can change – the present moment. We come to realise the “irreplaceable reality”, as Herzen termed it, that individuals themselves constitute. We are only alive once, and we must work to make a better world right now. This, whatever our politics, seems reasonable enough.

Realism at Work: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann was born in 1875. Buddenbrooks, his seven-hundred-page-plus multigenerational epic depicting the decline of a merchant family in his native Lubeck, was published in 1900. Even to write such a book at that age would be a titanic achievement, but to make it good – that is something truly special. Indeed, when Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 it was Buddenbrooks, not his Magic Mountain of 1924, that was singled out by the committee as the main driving force behind their decision. I was not expecting to enjoy Buddenbrooks as much as I did, even though it had received some extremely enthusiastic praise from one of my old teachers at Cambridge. But, thanks to John E. Woods’ fantastic translation (Mann has long suffered in the English-speaking world thanks to H. T. Lowe-Porter’s somewhat dreadful efforts), I was truly able to get into Mann’s world.

Buddenbrooks is the work of a young man. There is a certain comparative lack of wisdom in it and a certain lack of sympathy, both of which mean that in the end I still find myself preferring Fontane to Mann. But Mann makes up for this by the sheer force of his intelligence. You can tell how hard he studied to write this book. When I was in Lubeck some years ago I visited the Mann Museum there, located in what we now think of as the Buddenbrooks’ house, and there was an entire room devoted to Mann’s planning for the work – pages and pages of notes, piles and piles of books. What Mann had not the experience to know, he used his mind to acquire. It’s amazing that he did as well as he did.

This piece is broken up into two halves – the first deals with the way the novel is built. What I found interesting is just the way that Mann writes with such a deliberate realism. Just as Mann studied hard to write this work, so too can any perspective writer study Buddenbrooks and discover somewhat exposed in it the wheels and cogs that any successful realist novel must have. The second part then details a few things of the plot. Buddenbrooks is a huge novel, and there is too much to say for any self-respecting blogger not to become boring. I will focus on my favourite bits, things and people that are worth thinking about.

Structure – How To Write A Realist Novel

The point of the realist novel is to be realistic, defined as containing as much of outward reality as possible. The contortions of modernist writing may better reflect our perception of the world and our own minds, but we turn to realism when we want what we think the world is actually like. But how do we build this world? It’s quite easy really – one can basically work from a recipe as if the completed novel is a dish we are trying to prepare. What is the world made up of? We have what people wear (such as Madame Buddenbrook’s gold bracelet), we have food, we have buildings (the various Buddenbrook houses), we have people. People, of course, have personalities, but they have appearances too, which are just as important, and indeed can compensate for a personality if we write them sufficiently well.

All of these things together create a picture of the world. Mann’s story, which runs from 1835ish to about 1880, uses these things – clothes, cultural markers (what’s on in the theatre) – to tell us where we are in time. In addition, Mann uses various historical markers, dropped in here and there. Buddenbrooks is definitely a book that is improved by knowing a bit about Germany’s 19th-century history – whether it is the debates over Lubeck joining the German customs union, or the Revolutions of 1848, or the Wars of Unification – it’s useful to know how to place the story within German history. Especially because one thing that it might be trying to say is that Germany’s ascendency as a great power is matched by the decline of one of its great families.

Realism is a fundamentally conservative mode of writing. That is because it is constantly setting the bounds of its own topics. All of the things I’ve mentioned – what people wear, what they eat, what they talk about, where they go – establish a sense of society. And any good realist novel is engaged in a critique of society while demonstrating its pervasive influence. Characters talk about what they are supposed to, and anyone who goes against this ends up being excluded, or mocked. In Buddenbrooks Christian Buddenbrook, who has spent much of his youth in South America, is such a figure. Another is Hugo Weinschenk, a husband of one of the Buddenbrooks, who comes from a lower class. Society in the realist novel is fundamentally class-based, and these novels tend to show the difficulties that any cross-class communication comes up against. (In Fontane’s On Tangled Paths, the lovely but lower-class Lene cannot spell correctly). In Buddenbrooks, silence or censure is the fate met by characters who speak out of line:

“It’s best not to say such things out loud,” she thought, fixing her eyes firmly in the distance in order not to meet his gaze.

Unable to articulate their problems without being cast out, people discover they have nowhere to turn. Wherever they go, society demands conformity – religion, education, business, even a beach holiday (all described in Buddenbrooks) all act to crush resistance on the part of would-be freethinkers. Revolts are rare, despair more common. It’s no surprise that many of the greatest realist novels of the 19th century which attack society end with suicide or resignation on the part of the rebels.

But though these novels are conservative, in that they never advocate for revolution, they are rarely reactionary. Instead, they work upon their readers, making them ask questions, see society’s victims as society’s victims, and in doing so they cause people to reflect upon the structures around them. Progress comes slowly, but it comes.

In Buddenbrooks Mann shows the way that society exerts a crushing influence upon its members. Thomas Buddenbrook, once he has become head of the family, is so obsessed with trying to conform that he makes the life of his son Hanno a misery, even once he starts to question the foundations of the society that he is trying to fit into. Thomas’s sister Toni is ostracized after her two marriages – both undertaken not for love, but to help the family business, because she has internalised a sense of duty – end in divorce. Thomas prevents his brother from marrying his lover because it would bring shame to the family name. Altogether, the novel shows that even the victims of society end up being its willing executioners. Nobody is safe, and nobody is entirely guiltless.

Describing the world is not enough. We must also make use of symbolic objects, and here Mann’s youth is obvious. He has studied well. From Vronsky in Anna Karenina he takes the excellent symbol of teeth to show inner decay. From Fontane he understands the importance of houses as reflections of the soul. I particularly liked the way that the original Buddenbrooks house ends up decaying, so that although the façade is alright, the inner garden and courtyard is an overgrown mess. The family itself has undergone a similar decline, sustained by Thomas’s youthful vigour, while all around him everyone else begins to fail and falter.

In addition to symbols, Mann understands that the best way of creating memorable characters in a book with a great many characters – and in Buddenbrooks there are a lot – is the use of repeated phrases and ideas. Toothache is one, as is Toni’s upper lip. There is Klothilde, who is always eating but never seems to stop being scrawny, and Bendix Grünlich, with his “golden muttonchop” facial hair.

All this is good. All this makes his characters seem real, seem placed within a meaningful (because we can find symbolic significance within it) world, and seem to have genuine conflicts (individual versus society). One can study the book and go away and write a realist novel, easy as that.

Thomas Buddenbrook

I have written before about my own family, in round about terms. Novels of decline are dear to my heart – Roth’s Radetzky March, the Patrick Melrose novels, and so on. I exist at the tail end of a saga of decline, and I am sure that, were it not for the evils of modern medicine, I would quietly have gone to an early grave at the age of twenty-two, dying of consumption. Instead, I am alive, and straining under various pressures to be a certain kind of person, the one who will “restore the family fortunes” and its social standing. These pressures may be in my mind, but just as with realist novels, real life tends to convey society’s influence in ways that are not entirely obvious – through what is said and what is worn, through who is welcome to break bread at our table and who not, and so on.

Thomas Buddenbrook comes to head the family at a young age after the unexpected death of his father. He achieves early success. He quotes Heine and has a feel for culture that was lacking in his ancestors, who looked upon the arts with amusement or contempt. But this feel for culture sows the seeds for his downfall. For what Tom has, that his ancestors did not, is a certain interiority. He feels. And what does he feel? At first he feels ambition, he consciously chooses the role of the upper-middle-class business, which fits him like a glove. He succeeds in local politics, in business: “Didn’t you know that one can be a great man in a small town? … That takes a little imagination, I’ll grant, a little idealism – and that’s what you lacked, whatever you may have believed about yourself.”

Convinced of his own potential greatness, he lives to “keep up appearances”. He abandons his true love, as does Tony, and makes a marriage that brings the family a lot of money in her dowry (and Mann never shies away from showing figures, because they prove the thoroughness of his research). He goes about his business, he grows older, and at some point he realises that something is going wrong: “all the while he was wrestling in vain to find comfort in order and routine, because, to his despair, he found himself forever falling behind his own active imagination”. A true bourgeois, he tries to order his life to avoid any introspection. But it fails.

“A man who stands firmly in his profession, unshaken by doubts, knows only one thing, understands only one thing, values only one thing – his profession.”

Yes, this is the problem. A profession is not a life. It may be “pleasant to remember your forefathers when you know that you are of one mind with them and are sure that you have always acted as they would have had you act”, but when that is not the case…  Tom displaces his own anxieties onto his son, Hanno, demanding that he be “a genuine Buddenbrook”, whatever that means. He does what he can. But ultimately everything falls apart.

What is extraordinary is the fragility of the (19th-century) bourgeois family. We rest our hopes upon one or two males, and if they fail – then all the rest collapses. The women are simply chattel for improving the family name. Buddenbrooks is not a story of continual decline. Instead, it is a decline that is punctuated by great moments of hope. But in a sense, from the moment Hanno Buddenbrook is born – a sickly, unhealthy child who likes music more than making money – we know that the family is doomed, however hard Thomas works. No amount of religious faith, no dominus providebit (God will provide) above the door, can compensate for the wrong child being born at the wrong time. And therein lies the tragedy.

All of us in Thomas’s position are faced with pressure to lead a certain life, and often with competing pressures. Is one to make money or to be oneself? Our parents may want one thing and our schooling demand something completely different. In such situations, the sensible thing may be to compromise, but I am too young to know. At the end of On Tangled Paths Baron Botho, having broken off his relationship to the poor Lene to marry the rich and silly Käthe, tells a friend in a similar situation that he must “beware of this middle course, beware of half-measures.” Either he must submit to his society in full, or take his love away – to America, perhaps. But to go for the middle course is only to destroy yourself: “Many things are permissible, but not what does violence to the soul or entangles the heart, even if it’s only your own.”

Conclusion

I am not in danger of being anything other than a disappointment for choosing the wrong girl (or boy) to marry. But disappointment need not come from others and nor is a marriage the only thing worth judging. I know how well I have internalised my own idea of society, and how it watches over me, whip in hand, every day of my life. I must make money, I must follow my heart, I must heed the calling of my soul – and yet how few hours there are in the day! We are doomed to despair, whichever route we take. Thomas’s Uncle Gotthold marries his childhood sweetheart and is disinherited. His three daughters have no money to marry, and end up growing to be old and lonely spinsters. Thomas himself makes the “right decision”, and his earthly reward is a terrible punishment.

The world is made up of so many tangled paths along which we stumble blindly. It is better to have no internality, to believe confidently in the world as it stands as any good Hanseatic merchant or office-bound lawyer does. But like Mann, I am cursed with a voice and a questioning gaze. He made something of his, even if he did not lead the family business to great glory. I can only hope that I will do the same. Though I am still young, and there is much stumbling for me left to do…

Anyway, Buddenbrooks is a complex, fascinating, at times touching portrayal of the declining fortunes of a family of Lubeck-based merchants. Although there is a certain coolness to it that means I ultimately prefer the Fontane of Effi Briest, there’s no denying Mann’s phenomenal talents. He provides a guidebook on how to write a great realist novel, and that’s incredibly inspiring. The fact that I did not even attempt to analyse it properly is more a reflection of its quality, than anything else. There is too much to say. The conflict between duty and the heart is already enough to show the depth of the book’s treatment of its various themes. For English readers, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Woods translation. It’s very readable. And that’s good, because this is a book that needs to be read.

The Letters of Joseph Conrad

I read Conrad’s letters because I find him a powerful if at times impenetrable artist. Unlike with other favourites, whose works may be complex but nevertheless generally manage to be at least somewhat clear to the reader, Conrad’s tales often are opaque in both language and content. I wanted to see whether his letters would help clarify matters. Another reason is that Conrad is one of the English language’s most interesting stylists. His tales are dark, gloomy, illuminated only by brief flashes of lightning. I thought that perhaps by going behind the scenes I might discover the system of cogs and wheels that made possible such great works as Nostromo and Heart of Darkness.

Over the course of five hundred pages we get to know Conrad reasonably well. The author, who spent the first half of his life at sea, has few surviving letters from that time, making him as much of a biographical mystery as any of his characters. Instead, we read the letters of Conrad the writer. These are at times touching, as when he writes to his wife, or funny, as when he writes of his critics (“There is even one abandoned creature who says I am a neo-platonist. What on earth is that?”), and at times merely dull. As with Dostoevsky, Conrad spent most of his life without much money and was always asking to borrow some from his friends. I also got almost as fed up of Conrad denying he was a writer of the sea as he got from being accused of it. And as for his gout…

Joseph Conrad, Writer of Somewhat Oblique Prose

The letters are interesting to people who want to get a feel for how Conrad created his own works. I particularly liked his comment on Lord Jim being but “a hash of episodes, little thumbnail sketches of fellows one has rubbed shoulders with and so on”. But they are more interesting for providing clear – for Conrad – statements about how he wrote and what he thought. Such things we might pick up from his work but when laid out here they may still be useful or at the very least interesting. It is around these areas which this piece will be structured, with the result that my comments will be limited. Conrad can speak, or rather write, for himself.

Life

Conrad’s view of the world is often described as pessimistic, even nihilistic. Fate is cruel, merciless, and incomprehensible. This comes across in his letters too, although it is more pronounced earlier on – at the time of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim – than when he was more established as a writer:

“Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow”

A certain lack of faith in humankind is the keynote. He writes of injustice that the best way to deal with it is to accept it. We might say that he is realistic, rather than pessimistic. It is of no great consequence either way, for a man with a “deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world”.

Our problem, as he sees it, lies in our being conscious of the world. Unlike the brute beasts of the earth, humans are aware of the world’s terrifying valuelessness and suffer all the more for it: “What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.” This is a view shared by other pessimists like Thomas Ligotti or Arthur Schopenhauer.

How does Conrad fight off this gloom, what does he believe in? Certainly not Christianity – “Christianity is distasteful to me. I am not blind to its services but the absurd oriental fable from which it starts irritates me”. Instead, Conrad clings to traditional values as his ballast: “What I believe in most is responsibilities of conduct.” When spelled out, his values are spoiled by the sense that they are impossible things, lying beyond our reach:

“I respect courage, truth, fidelity, self-restraint and devotion to the ancient ideals of mankind; and am sorry that, like most men, I fail in the practice of these simple virtues.”

We learn of Conrad’s politics, which are fairly sound. He has sympathy for the Africans and other non-white peoples, even though his views would be old-fashioned today, and his views on slavery are a little tainted by his experience growing up in Poland-Ukraine. Mostly, his politics is marked by the same sense of tireless hopelessness as the rest of his views:

“Every cause is tainted: and you reject this one, espouse that other one as if one were evil and the other good while the same evil you hate is in both, but disguised in different words… What you want to reform are not institutions – it is human nature. … Not that I think mankind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and cowardly. Now You know that in cowardice is every evil – especially that cowardice so characteristic of our civilization”.

Work

So much for Conrad the man. Now we must get to Conrad the writer. This was what I enjoyed the most. Conrad comes across in these letters as a thoroughly human writer. He goes from hope (“labouring against an anxious tomorrow, under the stress of an uncertain future, I have been at times consoled, re-assured and uplifted by a finished page”) to despair (“…writing as I did with a constant, haunting fear of being lost in the midst of thickening untruth”), he struggles with English – his third language – but at no point does he give up completely.

And so, what is his advice to us humble novices?

On le mot juste:

“No word is adequate. The imagination of the reader should be left free to arouse his feeling.” Instead, what you want is “a picture of a mental state”.

On scepticism and truth:

“The fact is you want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth – the way of art and salvation. In a book you should love the idea and be scrupulously faithful to your conception of life. There lies the honour of the writer, not in the fidelity to his personages.”

On the use of detail for establishing reality, and the truth we must hold to, consciously or not:

“A picture of life is saved from failure by the merciless vividness of detail. Like a dream it must be startling, undeniable, absurd, and appalling… Our captivity within the incomprehensible logic of accident is the only fact of the universe. From that reality flows deception and inspiration, error and faith, egoism and sacrifice, love and hate. That truth fearlessly faced becomes an austere and trusted friend, a companion of victory or a giver of peace. While our struggles to escape from it – either through drink or philanthropy; through a theory or through disbelief – make the comedy and the drama of life. To produce a work of art a man must either know or feel that truth – even without knowing it.”

In short, what he recommends is a fidelity to one’s convictions, to one’s vision of the world (though we should know it before we write):

“Everyone must walk in the light of his own heart’s gospel. No man’s light is good to any of his fellows. That’s my creed – from beginning to end. That’s my view of life – a view that rejects all formulas dogmas and principles of other people’s making. These are only a web of illusions. We are too varied. Another man’s truth is only a dismal lie to me.”

And his other useful advice is to be careful about the creation of mystery:

“Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion”. Explicitness concerns spelling things out, it does not mean that we must rely on deliberately confusing language. On the contrary, “in letters suggestiveness itself – a great quality – must be obtained by precise expression”. There are a number of times when Conrad advises his friends by doing some close reading on a few of their sentences, and changes them to make them less obvious, but much more powerful suggestive, by adding in a perfect turn of phrase.

Conclusion

However much we may struggle at times with Conrad’s own style, and I know I do, it comes from a particular worldview, and fits that view like a glove. The dark world is depicted with a dark and flickering style. And that is what, to me, makes Conrad so great. For it is a style that has only grown more effective over the years and it is the style that is best suited to our own day, with its ambiguity, its dashed hopes, and its great uncertainty.

For readers who have no sympathy for Conrad’s writing, and for those who do, I end on an amusing quote from him about Nostromo, which he had edited lightly over ten years after it had first been published:

“A paragraph of about ten lines has been taken bodily out, for the simple reason that reading it after ten or twelve years I could find no intelligible meaning in it.”

Who has not felt that with Conrad? But who has not, at the same time, felt that even in the vaguest, the most tenebrous of phrases, there lies a suggestion of the dark forces that, like it or not, bubble underneath our world? He’s alright, Conrad, really.