vibrant de ligne

Joseph Conrad to R. B. Cunninghame Graham

Saturday 30th July, '98.

TRES CHER AMI,
This morning I had the Aurora* from Smithers, No. 2 of the 500 copies.

C'est tout simplement, magnifique, yet I do not exactly perceive what on earth they have been making a fuss about.

I am afraid Henley is a horrible bourgeois. Who drew the frontispiece? I can't imagine anybody whose name I know. Is it an English drawing? It does not look like it. I notice variations in the text as I've read it in the typewritten copy. This seems the most finished piece of work you've ever done. Il y a une note, une resonnance la-dedans, vibrant de ligne en ligne. C'est tres fort. No one will see it.

I've read the little book three times, this morning,--and behold! I am disgusted with what I write. No matter.

Blackwood's Magazine for this month has an appreciation of F. M. Kelly's edition of Don Quixote. Very fair. Nothing striking, but distinct recognition.

I do like the attitude of the Maga [Blackwood's Magazine] on the Spanish business.

Viva l'Espana! Anyhow.

Do you believe in a speedy peace? Write me all you know, I would like to see the thing over and done with, though, mind, I think that Spain is perfectly invulnerable now and may keep the Yanks capering around for an indefinite time.

When do you start for Morocco?

I've been seedy,--in my head,--in my idiotic cabeza. I feel lazy (always did) and sleepy. When I've written a page, I feel it ought to be sold to the ten-cent paper man in New York. This is all it's good for.

C'est Zolaesque ce que je viens d'ecrire, hein? But look at the circumlocution. If you want to know how I exactly feel towards my work put the above into plain Zola language and it will give you a faint idea then.

Assez. Toujours le votre.
Mes devoirs a Madame votre femme.

*Aurora la Cujini, a Realistic Sketch in Seville by R. B. Cunninghame Graham (London: Leonard Smithers, 1898).

-from Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters edited by G. Jean-Aubry (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927) p. 241-42.

tragic with your courage

Joseph Conrad to R. B. Cunninghame Graham

Sunday Feb. 1898.

Cher Ami,

I've got a bad wrist: that's why I did not write sooner. I gave it complete rest. Much better now.

The "Impenitent Thief" has been read more than once. I've read it several times alone and I've read it aloud to my wife. Every word has found a home. You and your ideals of sincerity and courage and truth are strangely out of place in this epoch of material preoccupations. What does it bring? What's the profit? What do we get by it? These questions are the root of every moral, intellectual or political movement. Into the noblest cause, men manage to put something of their baseness: and sometimes when I think of you here, quietly, you seem to me tragic with your courage, with your beliefs and your hopes. 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. I am more in sympathy with you than words can express, yet if I had a grain of belief left in me I would believe you misguided. Your are misguided by the desire of the Impossible,--and I envy you. Alas! what you want to reform are not institutions,--it is human nature. Your faith will never move that mountain. Not that I think mankind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and cowardly. Now you know that in cowardice is every evil,--especially, that cruelty so characteristic of our civilization. But, without it, mankind would vanish. No great matter truly. But will you persuade humanity to throw away sword and shield? Can you persuade even me,--who write these words in the fulness of an irresistible conviction? No, I belong to the wretched gang. We all belong to it. We are born initiated, and succeeding generations clutch the inheritance of fear and brutality without a thought, without a doubt, without compunction, in the name of God.

These are the thoughts suggested by the man who wrote an essay on the "Impenitent Thief." Forgive their disconnected impertinence. You'll have to forgive me many things, if you continue to know me on the basis of sincerity and friendship.

I wanted to say a word of so about the technique of the essay but I can't. A la prochaine, donc!

-from Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters edited by G. Jean-Aubry (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927) p. 229-30.

Brackets Within Brackets

[Joseph Conrad to R. B. Cunningham Graham]

6th Dec. 1897
Stanford-le-Hope,
Essex.

My Dear Sir,
I am horribly ashamed of myself. I ought to have written last week to thank you for the Stevenson. My inadequate excuse is I've been strangely seedy--nothing very tangible, but for nearly a week I have thought not at all and eaten very little,--and didn't see the use of doing anything. This may seem to you an impertinent excuse but I assure you it is a very sad and fiendish,--well, indisposition, and too real for words. I throw myself on your mercy. I shook myself at the sight of your letter and now what between shame and pleasure I am able to sit here like a galvanized corpse to write this flat and miserable apology.

The Xmas at Sea is all that you said. I was glad of the book and still more of your thought. I was glad to know I haven't been seen,--and forgotten. Only,--parce que c'est vous! There are people from whom I would beg on my knees the favour of an eternal oblivion. Would I get it? Croyez-vous qu'on se retrouve, la-bas? To me "la-bas" appears sometimes as a big hole,--a kind of malefactors' cavern--very crowded (think how long mankind has been in the habit of dying!) with perspiring shades,--a moral perspiration of squeezed spirits exhaling the unspeakable meanness, the bareness, the lies, the rapacity, the cowardice of souls that on earth have been objects of barter and valued themselves at about two-and-six. But this is morbid,--and I sat down intending to produce a good impression! I take it all back and declare my belief in lilies, gold harps,--and brimstone, like my Podmore in the "Narcissus."

. . . No man can escape his fate! You shall come here and suffer hardships, boredom and despair. It is written! It is written! You,--as a matter of fact,--have written it yourself (at my instigation.--very rash of you) and I shall be inexorable like destiny and shall look upon your sufferings with the idiotic serenity of a benevolent Creator (I don't know that the ben: Crea: is serene:--but if he is (as they say) then he must be idiotic) looking at the precious mess he as made of his only job. This letter reminds me of something I used to know years ago: Algebra,--I think. Brackets within brackets and imbecility raised to the nth power.

I heard of the H. & S. play through G. B. S. in the S. R. More Algebra. Do you understand? I allude in this luminous way to Admiral Guinea. I haven't seen a play for years, but I have read this one. And that's all I can say about it. I have no notion of a play. No play grips me on the stage or off. Each of them seems to me an amazing freak of folly. They are all unbelievable and as disillusioning as a bang on the head. I greatly desire to write a play myself. It is my dark and secret ambition. And yet I can't conceive how a sane man can sit down deliberately to write a play and not go mad before he has done. The actors appear to me like a lot of wrong-headed lunatics pretending to be sane. Their malice is stitched with white threads. They are disguised and ugly. To look at them breeds in my melancholy soul thoughts of murder and suicide,--such is my anger and my loathing of their transparent pretences. There is a taint of subtle corruption in their blank voices, in their blinking eyes, in the grimacing faces, in the false light, in the false passion, in the words that have been learned by heart. But I love a marionette-show. Marionettes are beautiful,--especially those of the old kind with wires, thick as my little finger, coming out of the top of the head. Their impassibility in love, in crime, in mirth, in sorrow,--is heroic, superhuman, fascinating. Their rigid violence when they fall upon one another to embrace or to fight is simply a joy to behold. I never listen to the text mouthed somewhere out of sight by invisible men who are here to-day and rotten to-morrow. I love the marionettes that are without life, that come so near to being immortal!

Here's the end of paper. It is to-morrow already and high time for me to go to bed,--to dream, perchance to sleep. You must forgive the writer, the letter, the mistakes of spelling, the obscurity of the grammar,--the imbecility of the nth power. Forgive! Forgiveness has been invented to prevent massacres.

P. S. I haven't yet had St. Therese.* Expect it next week. I have looked lately again at the scenery article,--and am confirmed in my opinion that your wife has said what is really fundamental, essentially true in the matter, and said it charmingly. Sorry to hear of Hudson's illness. A lovable man, a most lovable man.

*Santa Teresa: Her Life and Times by Gabriela Cunninghame Graham (London: Black, 1897) 2 vols. [Gabriela de la Balmondiere, Chilean poet and wife to R. B. Cunninghame Graham.]

-from Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters edited G. Jean-Aubry (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927) p. 212-214.