Establishing Identities: Exile and Commitment in Conrad's Non-Fiction Prose

Establishing Identities: Exile and Commitment in Conrad's Non-Fiction Prose By J. H. Stape Université de Limoges The title of the last volume of non-fiction prose Conrad himself collected and edited, Notes on Life and Letters, offers a suggestive if not very original opposition and linkage between artistic production and the claims and demands of everyday life. Used to this Victorian rubric as promising biography, Conrad 's audience expressed some disappointment with the volume's heterogeneous contents—miscellaneous reviews, essays on the merchant service, and commissioned journalism. H. L. Mencken, otherwise an ardent admirer of Conrad's work, suggested that "The stuff has the appearance of having been thrown together with a shovel . . . Only the most fanatical Conradista will swallow the whole without grimaces," and The Saturday Review forthrightly queried: "Why should we concern ourselves with an essayist trifling now with reviews, and now with current topics? For these are not Conrad, any more than the admirable minutes he no doubt wrote on the delinquencies and virtues of the postal system are Anthony Trollope.1'1 Despite Conrad's attempt to organize its diverse contents—reminiscences of Stephen Crane and of a war-time visit to Poland, introductions to books by friends, a note written for circulation at the Foreign Office, essays on politics and on maritime disasters and traditions—the volume achieves only a mechanically imposed unity, and the shift from its original title—Essays and Notes on Life and Letters—to simply "Notes" hints at a certain tentativeness.2 Yet the title's suggestion of conflict or opposition is merely a rhetorical ploy, and while the artistic impulse and the responsibilities of personal life offer a fertile tension largely unexplored in Conrad 's fiction, this dynamic informs and influences his non-fictional writings. The essays in fact form a body of work that reveal various facets of his aesthetic, his political allegiances and ideological positions while offering perspectives on his social and cultural situation and establishing his identity as artist-commentator. In sum, Conrad's non-fiction prose represents an attempt to reconcile the exile necessarily required by artistic endeavor with commitment to the community and to daily life. The opposition and conjunction between life and letters is, of course, hardly unique to Conrad, but his particular cultural and social position intensifies and at times tends to exaggerate it. In English terms, a "foreigner" lacking the usual attachments that secure an English identity, his Polish gentry roots and experience as a merchant seaman also made him a kind of curiosity. The solitude that he wrote about was often enough a social and psychological commonplace , while as an artist he suffered from popular indifference at the 53 Stape: Conrad's Non-Fiction Prose outset of his career despite favorable reviews. The preface to Almayer's Folly seeks even to underplay the exoticism of setting and character and deliberately understates his artistic intentions to win an audience. Writers in broadly similar circumstances have occasionally retreated into aestheticist dogma or defensive posturing or even sought refuge from their social and cultural alienation in an anti-social aesthetic that scorned or devalued the sources of inspiration in common life. But for Conrad the tension between life and letters—the situation that at once both forms and diminishes his isolation—is reconciled and rendered creative by his belief that the artist , while giving utterance to his own vision, functions as the spokesman for the common man, a view he sets forth in his essay on Henry James: The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would be moved to speak on that day without to-morrow—whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess?3 Such a statement sheds light...