Robert Hampson

Conrad's secrets

Acknowledgements Introduction Covert Plots and Secret Trades: Almayers Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, The Rescue Trade Secrets: Heart of Darkness, The Inheritors Political Secrets: The Secret Agent City Secrets: Chance Sexual Secrets: Victory Medical Secrets: Lord Jim, The Arrow of Gold, The Rover Naval Secrets: The Tale Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Joseph Conrad-Postcolonialism and Imperialism

This essay begins with a reconsideration of Chinua Achebes famous criticism of Conrad as a ”thoroughgoing racist.” It starts by examining the context of Achebes lecture and analysing what ”Conrad” meant at that time as a critical construction through a reading of the two critics Achebe cites-Albert J. Guerard and F. R. Leavis. It explores, in particular, how ”Heart of Darkness” was read in the United States before Achebes intervention by a close examination of Guerards Introduction to the popular edition of ”Heart of Darkness” published by The New American Library, and it compares this with the reading provided by Edward Garnett in his early review. The comparison shows how Guerards psychological approach to the novella de-Africanises the novel and wipes out the topical specificity and the politics which were part of the novels original reception. It then examines in detail Achebes charges against ”Heart of Darkness” and offers an alternative reading of the novella, paying particular attention to Conrads narrative strategies, his engagement with imperialist discourse, and the hierarchy of languages in the work. It then considers Conrads other African story ”An Outpost of Progress” to support the reading of Marlow as distanced from Conrad: since ”An Outpost of Progress” presents a non-Marlovian ”image of Africa,” it allows us to see Marlows perspective on Africa more clearly. The essay then contextualises the reading of Conrads African fiction by reference to his earlier Malay fiction, and finally considers Nostromo in relation to globalisation.

Initiation and Invention: The Rover and The Arrow of Gold

Until comparatively recently, there were only two critical approaches to Conrad’s late novels. On the one hand, there was the view established by Hewitt, Moser and Guerard that Conrad’s late novels represented a decline after the achievement of the novels of his ‘major’ period: Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret Agent.1 On the other hand, there was the view of Bradbrook, Wiley and Wright that there was no decline, and that Conrad’s later novels were to be praised as novels of affirmation.2 More recently, a third approach to the later novels has established itself. This was adumbrated in an essay by Morton Zabel; it was developed further by John Palmer; and it was most fully articulated by Gary Geddes.3 Geddes argues that Hewitt, Moser and Guerard display ‘a misunderstanding of Conrad’s fictional aims’ and ‘a predilection for fictional modes and techniques that were no longer of paramount importance to Conrad’.4 Their critical approach is biased towards ‘fiction that presents the drama of self’ and cannot cope with ‘the wider, more social manifestations of Conrad’s moral imperatives’ in his late novels.5 Conrad, in his later fiction, was interested in ‘a certain patterning of events, a certain texturing of the prose’, in developing modes and techniques other than those of his earlier work.6

Sites of Death in Some Recent British Fiction

We generally think that death has retreated from contemporary everyday life, withdrawn to the non-places of nursing homes, hospitals, hospices, funeral parlours, crematoria. Graham Swifts Last Orders, with its journey from technologised hospital death to the scattering of the ashes, occupies precisely these non-places of death. J. G. Ballards Crash, however, provides a counter-example: Crash takes place in the non-places of motorway slip-roads, airport access roads, police-pounds and reservoirs. At the same time, it registers how these spaces and non-spaces are overwritten by various pre-existing scripts of violent death by films, television and newspaper photographs. The essay then demonstrates the ubiquity of death in contemporary life by exploring Tom McCarthys engagement with accident, trauma and re-enactment in Remainder; Gordon Burnss depiction of tabloid journalism and modern improvised rituals of death in fullalove; the psychogeographic identification of particular sites of death in the work of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd; and the recognition, in detective fiction, that anywhere can be a site of death. The essay concludes by considering the popularity of forensic-science series and how Silent Witness, Waking the Dead, Cold Case, and CSI present death in its multiple forms for peak-time viewing.

Excursion into a foreign tongue

This chapter juxtaposes the writings of two men whom we might think of as non-standard First World War combatants. Both were literary men; both were somewhat older than their fellow soldiers when they joined up: Frederic Manning was thirty-four when he enlisted as a private in the Shropshire Light Infantry in October 1915, and Ford Madox Ford was forty-one when he enlisted in July 1915 and was given a commission in the Welsh Regiment. Manning was born in Australia and had come to England in 1903; Ford was half-German. He went through the war under the German surname of Hueffer, his family name, and changed his surname to Ford only after the end of the war.

The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic

In his essay on ‘The Short Story’, W. Somerset Maugham describes two very different pleasures that reading fiction offers its readers: the pleasure of ‘recognition’ and the pleasure of ‘strangeness and novelty’. The ‘exotic story’ offers the latter pleasure: ‘it is a release from the monotony of existence to be absorbed for a while in a world of hazard and perilous adventure’ (p. 175). He identifies Kipling as ‘the first to blaze the trail through this new-found region’: ‘in his discovery of what is called the exotic story he opened a new and fruitful field to writing’ (pp. 157, 156). In fact, if the ‘exotic story’ – or, more accurately, the colonial short story – was initiated by Kipling, it was to reach its final flowering with Maugham. Exotic Stories Early in 1890, Sampson Low published Rudyard Kiplings Soldiers Three in an edition of 7,000 copies. Although this was Kiplings introduction in book form to the general reading public in Britain, he had been publishing short stories for a number of years in India, and his work was not unknown even in English literary circles. Indeed, when he had arrived in London towards the end of 1889, his reputation as a writer of short stories preceded him. Sidney Low, the editor of the conservative daily newspaper The St Jamess Gazette , had read (and been impressed by) the Indian Library edition of Soldiers Three , and Andrew Lang had praised two of the other Indian Library volumes, In Black and White and Under the Deodars , in the Saturday Review . As Andrew Lycett notes, Lang – together with W. E. Henley and Edmund Gosse – had been promoting the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard as part of a consciously masculinist agenda. Kipling, with his stories about British soldiers in India, looked like a new recruit for the campaign and for the promotion of Britains imperial role. Whether Kipling was the first person to write an ‘exotic story’, as Maugham suggests, is debatable. Nevertheless, because of the quantity, quality and high profile of his work, Kiplings fiction would seem to offer the epitome of the colonial short story. However, he was clearly not writing adventure romances of the kind written by Haggard.

Skipping across the Pond: Interaction between American and British Poetries 1964–1970

RH: Allen Fisher, your career as a poet is closely linked with London, where you were born and grew up, and integral to works such as Place and Brixton Fractals. Indeed, since the start of the 1970s you have been one of the most influential figures for successive generations of the “London School” of poets: you were included, along with Bob Cobbing, by Adrian Clarke and Robert Sheppard in their US-published anthology. Floating Capital: New Poets from London (1991), and, with Bill Griffiths and Brian Catling, in “3 London Poets” for the first Paladin Re/Active Anthology, Future Exiles (1992): and your work remains important for younger London poets such as Redell Olsen and Sophie Robinson. But throughout, the United States has been integral to your writing: the first book edition of part of Place was published in North Carolina, and your work was being read by “Language Poets” such as Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews before “Language Poetry” came into existence. In this interview I’d like to know more about the importance of US poets for your own work and on poetics in Britain more generally.

Political Secrets: The Secret Agent

The second chapter of The Secret Agent economically establishes Victorian London as a city of sharp contrasts of wealth and poverty. At the start of Chapter 2 Verloc walks through the West End of London on his way to the Russian embassy. His route takes him past Hyde Park: Through the park railings these glances beheld men and women riding in the Row, couples cantering past harmoniously, others advancing sedately at a walk, loitering groups of three or four, solitary horsemen looking unsociable, and solitary women followed at a long distance by a groom with a cockade to his hat and a leather belt over his tight-fitting coat. Carriages went bowling by, mostly two-horse broughams, with here and there a Victoria with the skin of some wild beast inside and a woman’s face and hat emerging above the folded hood.2

Sexual Secrets: Victory

Part III, Chapter 4 of Victory ends as follows: Before she could make a movement, or even turn her head his way, he took her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another appeal to his tenderness – a new seduction. The girl glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone – a command which Heyst did not obey.1

Naval Secrets: ‘ The Tale ’

On 7 September 1916, Conrad had announced to Macdonald Hastings that he had ‘taken up some work for the Admiralty’ and would be ‘flying about the country for the next fortnight’ (CL5, 658).1 He began his war service on Thursday 14 September in Lowestoft. He travelled there via London, where he had dinner, the evening before, with Jane Anderson.2 He spent the first day ‘in engine rooms, up masts[,] down magazines, on bridges, down forepeaks[,] on gun- platforms (practicing aiming – great fun) in sheds, storerooms, work- shops’.3 On Friday, after inspecting ‘all the anti-aircraft artillery’, he ‘went out in a vessel of a special kind’ – presumably a Special Services ship – ‘to try a new 13-pounder gun’.4 On the Saturday, he wrote a letter to Pinker, to tell him that he was ‘having the most interesting time of my life’ and that he was about to go to sea on HM Mine Sweeper Brigadier for a three-day trip, followed on the Monday by a ‘flight on patrol duty’ from Yarmouth (CL5, 663–4). He hadn’t told his wife, Jessie, about this flight, and it is clear from the instructions he gives Pinker (about the money he had left in the hotel safe) that the undertaking was not without some danger.