The Critic as Autobiographer: Conrad under Leonard Woolf's Eyes

The Critic as Autobiographer: Conrad under Leonard Woolf's Eyes J. H. Stape Chiba University, Japan IN JUNE 1911, Leonard Woolf returned to London for a period of home leave after seven years' absence in Ceylon as a colonial administrator . The story of the next year of his life is well known: not long after his arrival he fell in love with Virginia Stephen, proposed to her, was accepted, and resigned his civil service post.1 Even before he had come to these decisions and confronted the necessity of beginning a new career, which, he sensed, lay in authorship and literary journalism, he had begun writing The Village in the Jungle (1913), a novel drawing on his experiences and set in the country he had recently left. Although Woolf did not return to Ceylon, he revisited the East in his imagination not only in this first novel but also in "Pearls and Swine," a story castigating armchair attitudes towards the Raj.2 E. M. Forster, to whom he sent the manuscript in spring 1912, judged it "good" and recommended that he attempt to place it in The English Review? On the other hand, Forster felt that the story required further revision, singling out an imperfectly assimilated Conradian influence—a frame narrator who provides a long introduction but plays no role in the action—and advising Woolf to contrast what he considered to be an overly didactic tone with the final section of Conrad's early Malayan tale "Karain." It is perhaps hardly surprising that Conrad who, in the words of an early critic, had "annexed" the island of Borneo for fiction, should provide a touchstone for Forster's criticism of Woolf s Eastern story.4 About to embark for the East and consulting Woolf about preparations for his first sojourn in India, Forster had read Conrad carefully. Although his late negative assessment that "the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel" is well known, his earlier appreciation of 277 ELT 36:3 1993 Lord Jim and Tales of Unrest is sympathetic and even enthusiastic: "When I read him, the whole earth becomes alive and the function of man to realise that life and to vocalise it—which he alone can do, and which he must do not mystically from an armchair like Wordsworth nor with his eyes on the clouds like Shelley, but tangibly," he wrote to a friend.5 It might be expected that such a writer should figure as an influence on Woolf s early creative endeavors which use the East for their setting. And Conrad's early Eastern fiction might well have struck a deeply personal chord for Woolf, a man recently returned to England from the tropics and facing the incertitudes and challenges attendant upon a dramatic shift in the direction of his life. Such speculation, while tempting, is less relevant than are the historical facts. At the time of Woolf s return to England Conrad was very much in the public eye and on the threshold of achieving the long-hoped-for popular success and large sales which, despite good reviews and a high reputation from the very beginning of his career among the literary elite, had to his increasingly pronounced frustration eluded him. The received and undoubtedly correct version of the history of Conrad's reception is that this widespread fame came at last in January 1914 with the publication of the book version of Chance. Its success was, in fact, carefully prepared both in England and in the United States and was doubtless furthered by Conrad's abundant presence in print during the three years immediately prior to its appearance.6 The twelve-month period of October 1911 to October 1912 alone, for instance, saw the publication of Under Western Eyes, Some Reminiscences (later A Personal Record), and the collection of short stories Twixt Land and Sea. Moreover, during these same months stories and essays appeared in literary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic: England witnessed the final installment of Under Western Eyes in The English Review, "Prince Roman" in The Oxford and Cambridge Review, two essays occasioned by the sinking of the Titanic in The English...