Revaluation: Conrad’s Bourgeois Tragedy

Upon reading Michael Gorra’s “Joseph Conrad” in a recent Hudson Review—which is also his introduction to a new Portable Conrad—I was impelled to go back to the complicated Pole for the first time since the anarchistic 1960s. The first novel at hand was Victory (1914). It was as I remembered it, if not in every detail—that pensive tale, ending violently, of a guarded modern sensibility. Next I reread The Secret Agent (1907), and it seemed almost that I was reading it for the first time. To it I brought no recollection at all of its characters, only a vague recollection of a terrorist bombing, but an abiding memory of its pervasive irony. Mark Van Doren once remarked of The Education of Henry Adams that “irony supplies the unity.” So it does to The Secret Agent. “An ironic method,” Conrad wrote in a later preface to his novel, “was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity. . . . I did manage, it seems to me, to carry it right through to the end.”

The scorn and the pity were already present in a general way when he caught the germ of his tale. As he and a friend were talking casually about recent anarchist activity, he remarked “on the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable.” (That almost opaque passage is not uncharacteristic of what Conrad could turn out in the language that had “adopted” him.) He and his friend recalled the attempt in 1894 to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in London, which left the building untouched and annihilated the bomber—“a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea,” said Conrad. After a silence his friend said, “Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards.” The friend identified himself after Conrad’s death as Ford Madox Ford, recalling his own last remark a little differently: the suicide of the sister, Ford wrote in his memoirs, was Conrad’s invention. The sister is Winnie Verloc in the novel—Mrs. Adolf Verloc.

Conrad’s title becomes, as we read along, the first of his ironies. The secret agent—actually a double agent—known only “by the symbol Δ in the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim’s official, semi-official, and confidential correspondence,” is the unlikely Mr. Verloc, who keeps a small “stationery” shop decorated in the window by “photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls” and patronized mainly for “nondescript packages in wrappers,” “closed yellow paper envelopes,” and other “shady wares” imported from Paris and Brussels. He is fat, lazy, and uxorious—“thoroughly domesticated.” One day he is summoned by a new administration to the London embassy of the foreign government that has employed him for eleven years. After being told by State Councillor Wurmt that his reports of the past twelve months are worthless and that he is “very corpulent,” he is taken upstairs to stand on a thick carpet before Mr. Vladimir, the first secretary.

Mr. Vladimir is much appreciated for his wit by “intelligent society women” in London. (“The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country,” he observes, “make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches.”) “You give yourself for an ‘agent provocateur,’” he says to Mr. Verloc. “The proper business of an ‘agent provocateur’ is to provoke.” He wittily presents an idea for Mr. Verloc’s little circle of anarchists. “The sacrosanct fetish of today is science. . . . Since bombs are your means of expression it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics. But that is impossible. . . . What do you think of having a go at astronomy? . . . The whole civilized world...