Edward Garnett - Letters

[Introduction]

(4) My thesis was that the life Conrad had witnessed on sea and land must
vanish away into the mist and fade utterly from memory, did he not set himself to record it in literature.

(6) The subject of Poland was then visibly painful to him, and in those early years he would speak of it unwillingly, his attitude being designed to warn off acquaintances from pressing on a painful nerve

His sardonic interest in Willems' disintegration reflected, I believe, his own disillusionment over the Congo..

(8) 'I agree with Monsieur Jean-Aubry that Conrad's Congo experiences were the turning-point in his mental life and that their effects on him determined his transformation from a sailor to a writer/ According to his emphatic declaration to me, in his early years at sea he had "not a thought in his head. ... I was a perfect animal," he reiterated, meaning of course that he had reasoned and reflected hardly at all over all the varieties of life he had encountered. /

The sinister voice of the Congo with its murmuring undertone of human fatuity, baseness and greed had swept away the generous illusions of his youth, and had left him gazing into the heart of an immense darkness.

(9) And I cited the" names of various authors who, whatever they may have been doing, were certainly then not living in attics, public favorites such as Stevenson and Kipling and Rider Haggard the work of the last-named, I remember, Conrad stigmatized as being "too horrible for words." He objected specifically to the figure of Captain Goode, as well he might!

(13) But to recur to the temperamental moods that blend in Conrad's creations and endow them with the most complex 'qualities, one may say that the Korzeniowski parental side, with its "terrible gift of irony" rules, as the astrologers put it, over the majority of the pages of The Secret Agent, and that his Bobrowski heritage rules similarly over most of the pages of The Mirror of the Sea.

(14) That Conrad's memory had extraordinary wealth of observation to draw on, I had an illuminating proof in Heart of Darkness. Some time before he wrote this story of his Congo experience, he narrated it at length one morning while we were walking up and down under a row of Scotch firs that leads down to the Cearne. I listened enthralled while he gave me in detail a very full synopsis of what he intended to write. To my surprise when I saw the printed version I found that about a third of the most striking incidents had been replaced by others of which he had said nothing at all. The effect of the written narrative was no less somber than the spoken, and the end was more consummate, but I regretted the omission of various scenes, one of which described the hero lying sick to death in a native hut, tended by an old negress who brought him water from day to day, when he had been abandoned by all the Belgians. "She saved my life," Conrad said, "the white men never came near me." (흑인 여성이 열병에 걸린 콘래드를 병간호/ 이 부분 중요)

(15) I may here note that Conrad's "strong foreign accent" in March, 1893, to which Mr. Galsworthy has testified in his Reminiscences of Joseph Conrad, seemed to me only slight in November, 1894. But when he read aloud to me some newly written manuscript pages of An Outcast of the Islands he mispronounced so many words that I followed him with difficulty. I found then that he had never once heard these English words spoken, but had learned them all from books (콘래드의 억양, 발음 등의 문제.)

(20) I must add a word here about Conrad's play of irony. He was so perfect an artist in the ｅxpression of his moods and feelings that it needed a fine ear to seize the blended shades of friendly derision, flattery, self-depreciation, sardonic criticism and affection in his tone.

(20) The reader needs to be something of an artist himself to appreciate the shades of pleasing flattery on Conrad's palette. His method of narrative, in the first person, through the mouth of Marlow, was first employed in Youth; it came natural to him; it saved trouble; and finding that it answered both there and in Heart of Darkness he elaborated it further in Lord Jim.