The New Compass: A Critical Review
Conrad’s Belief in Victory[1]
Ian Robinson
“I am not afraid of going to church with a friend. Hang it all, for all
my belief in Chance I am not exactly a pagan . . . .”[2]
Put
the following together and they are surprising enough to deserve some
attention:
Is there not also a central obscurity, something noble, heroic,
beautiful . . . but obscure, obscure? . . . These essays do suggest that he is
misty in the middle as well as at the edges, that the secret casket of his
genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel; and that we needn’t try to write him
down philosophically, because there is, in this direction, nothing to write. No
creed, in fact.
That
is E. M. Forster on Conrad, and I quote his words, secondly, from The Great
Tradition, where F. R. Leavis cites them on the first page of his
discussion of Conrad as “gratifying” (sic, not justifying or excusing)
his “exasperation”—exasperation with Conrad, not with Forster.
C. B. Cox’s version is, “Confronted by the mystery of human
experience, [Conrad] offers us strange high-sounding phrases whose implications
are deliberately left unclear.”[3]
Leavis
disagrees with some more recent critics I shall quote about whether the title
of Victory is meant ironically. But about the supposed absence of belief
at the heart of Conrad he can be surprisingly close, though less severe. A
sniff of the recent critical atmosphere in which Conrad in general and Victory
in particular is discussed:
“Heyst and Decoud in Nostromo
[share] the same cynical pessimism.” (Jeffrey Meyers)[4]
“Chance, Victory
. . . imitate Gulliver in the stable, thoroughly drenched in a hate of
the human. . . . These works deride all traditional structures and values. Seen
with one eye, they can be very funny books. Seen with both, they are morally
repellent.” “That is the dominant idea of Victory, ‘infinite
littleness’, the triviality of mankind and of the gods. The title is not
serious or tragic. It is not ironic or ambiguous. It is savage parody, a
despairing sneer.” “Heyst cannot love Lena, and her love is a silly parody of
divine love,” a “futile, grotesque parody of redemption.” Summed up in the two
words “Conrad disbelieves.” (Dwight H. Purdy)[5]
I
have quoted Purdy most extensively because he, who demonstrates beyond
contradiction Conrad’s deep indebtedness to the English Bible, should have
known better. Well then, here is what Purdy calls a one-eyed view: I don’t find
these novels morally repellent and I don’t accept the likes of Meyers and Purdy
as reliable judges of morality or of art. My case is that Conrad’s great
achievements, which I am going to call “comic,” depend on his retaining
Christian judgement along with Christian language—and the latter for the sake
of the former.
Conrad
expressed a number of different theological opinions at different times. One of
the best-known comes in a letter to Edward Garnett, apropos of Tolstoy, written
while he was at work on Victory:
Moreover the base from which [Tolstoy] starts—Christianity—is
distasteful to me. I am not blind to its services but the absurd oriental fable
from which it starts irritates me. Great, improving, softening, compassionate
it may be but it has lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion and
is the only religion which, with its impossible standards, has brought an
infinity of anguish to innumerable souls—on this earth.[6]
There
is (in English terms) much of the Whig and of the fatalist in Conrad; he was
apt to call himself Polish, Catholic and a gentleman, which he no doubt
understood in a sense that did not contradict his distaste for Tolstoy’s Christianity;
and he had a quotation from Spenser’s Despair put on his tombstone. Conrad’s
admiration for Turgenev’s judgement and humanity, and dislike of the
“convulsed, terror-haunted” Dostoevsky,[7] might have been
expressed, had he had the chance, by that other contemner of oriental fable,
the Trimmer.
Leavis
objects to words of a passage of Heart of Darkness including these:
The spell . . . that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the
awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and
monstrous passions. . . . Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am
the man. . . . I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no
restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”[8]
The
objection begins: “Conrad must here stand convicted of borrowing the arts of
the magazine-writer . . . in order to impose on his readers and on himself, for
thrilled response, a ’significance’ that is merely an emotional insistence on
the presence of what he can’t produce.” (Leavis 180) Citing this in support,
Chinua Achebe accuses Conrad of “inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers
through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery.” (qtd. in
Tredell 71) Leavis’s comment goes to the centre of what I want to discuss but
is, I believe, quite wrong. Leavis just doesn’t notice that the
terminology he objects to is in fact painstaking and accurate Christian
theology. (Whether a critic as obtuse as Achebe here shows himself can be
thought to notice anything at all is a question I leave open.) In that tale the
passions are strictly and indeed monstrous, a warping of human nature,
“unspeakable” in a language of any decency; and Marlow’s struggle is as
directly for Mr Kurtz’s soul as if he were a missionary. In case anybody should
not have noticed, I point out that I am using the word theology without
any apologies.
Here,
if I had time, I would consider Heart of Darkness, and also The
Secret Agent, in this respect of how their central moral judgements, which are
absolutely clear, are also Christian; but I restrict myself to what seems to me
Conrad’s climactic achievement of the kind.
Victory
is Conrad’s last significant full-length novel, completed just before the
outbreak of the Great War. I call it a climactic achievement because in Axel
Heyst (Conrad’s most developed character, Jocelyn Baines thinks, as against the
“wooden characters” Meyers finds. (Meyers 280)) Conrad depicts the post-Liberal loss of
belief, in a gentleman as perfect and unbelieving as Asquith, with a much more
formal credal unbelief than Conrad himself, but who nevertheless achieves in
the course of the novel what one has to call a saving faith—even though he does
it at the price of his life. Heyst is not an “infidel,” as in that now quaint
Victorian terminology Morrison denies himself to be: he only thinks he is. And
his Alma–Magdalen–Lena is, in however odd a way, a Christian hero.
Victory
is a packed novel, to be savoured and taken slowly, but at the last it becomes
intensely gripping and painfully moving. It is at an opposite extreme in Conrad
from Nostromo, with its claustrophobic narrowing-down of the scene of
action to the two bungalows on Samburan, and there is more than a hint of the
stage-like imagination of the late James, though like James, Conrad isn’t
actually stageable: too much depends on the narrator’s ironic control. For me Victory
passes the crudest, indispensable test of tragedy: it makes you cry. That,
though, is a necessary but not sufficient condition of tragedy. Victory
is intensely moving, but in ways not at all comparable with the fifth acts of Hamlet
or King Lear. The death of all the leading characters is
Jacobean-tragedy like, even down to the rather perfunctory and motiveless
polishings off of Pedro, Martin Ricardo and a fortiori plain Mr Jones,
who might have been expected to resume his going to and fro in the earth.[12] It is, still, more like the end of Part II of The
Pilgrim’s Progress, or the story of the first Christian martyr, Stephen.
The tears in Victory are not tragic ones. As Leavis thought, the novel
is rightly named, though I don’t think Leavis fully saw why.
Victory
is not unique among the harrowing tales of Conrad in beginning and much of the
time continuing comic by anybody’s standards, and sometimes in a manner
owing something to Dickens (though the wildly farcical moment of Schomberg’s
and Signor Zangiacomo’s “go-as-you-please scrap” (44) is more reminiscent of
the dénouement of a Chaucer fabliau). Morrison is a sort of
back-to-front Wemmick whose property is lamentably static, though at the same
time subject to evaporation, a joke Conrad makes in the first paragraph of the
novel: “coal is a much less portable form of property” than diamonds, whereas
Ricardo’s vision of Heyst’s (nonexistent) treasure takes the form of “gold,
solid, heavy, eminently portable” (215). The comedy is that of a judgement
perhaps world-weary but always, to a superlative degree, sane, and the sanity
consists of a confident appeal to general standards. That dance Conrad does
round the evaporation and liquidation of the assets of the Tropical Belt Coal
Company, for instance, like the one round the word thrift in Chance,
makes a sort of Mendelssohnian gaiety out of a subject as sombre as failed
global finance, but without any mere debunking of or sneering at the human
beings concerned.
The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of
finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear,
evaporation preceds liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the
company goes into liquidation. (9)
More
seriously, the detailing of Heyst’s involvement first with Morrison then with
Lena is (amongst other things) social comedy generally of the tradition of Jane
Austen.
“You are in for a bout of
fever, I fear,” [Heyst] said sympathetically.
Poor Morrison’s tongue
was loosened at last.
“Fever!” he cried. “Give me fever.
Give me plague. They are diseases. One gets over them. But I am being murdered.
I am being murdered by the Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among
them. I am to have my throat cut the day after tomorrow.”
In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a slight
motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a drawing-room. (16)
It’s
quite naturally a comedy of moral judgement. Heyst’s relations with Morrison
make a high order of moral comedy. The whole Tropical Coal Company fiasco
proceeds, if Heyst is to be believed, from his scrupulous unwillingness to hurt
Morrison’s decent feelings, although he judges them at the same time to be
overdone. Sometimes the comedy is quite broad, as in the consistent comic
hostility towards Schomberg—whose fatuity turns out nevertheless to be
menacing. I like the stage-like appearances of Mrs. Schomberg, who is not the
fool she seems, and who takes a decisive part in the action, because as Heyst
says, “She was engaged in the task of defending her position in
life. ...It’s a very respectable task” (50).
This
is all morally well judged. But I have to go further. Victory goes more
explicitly than anything else in Conrad into philosophy and theology.
Philosophy
of course comes in with Axel Heyst’s father. Like Hamlet’s, Heyst’s father
haunts the story, but unlike the elder Hamlet’s the elder Heyst’s influence is
towards sceptical inaction. Having started life not as a utilitarian but as a
hedonist (77) the elder Heyst ends up writing a book in which “he claimed for
mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no
longer believed them capable” (77). It is about as hard to put a philosopher
into a novel as a poet, because in both cases some of their work may be called
for. A novelist can only show that a character is a poet by giving some poetry,
and so too with philosophy. Like Dickens, Conrad is not supposed to be a
philosophically sophisticated novelist. But both can get philosophical notions
as clear as they need. Heyst père is not systematic but a “destroyer of
all systems, of hopes, of beliefs” (139). Conrad does not report the
destructive analyses, but the philosopher’s conclusions, and his emotional
attitude to them, read convincingly as a sort of amalgam of the philosophical
ideas, all but idealism, of the scientific age after they have given out in
complete scepticism. There is a bit of Schopenhauer in him,[13]
but if one had to attach a single name—as regards philosophical position, not
cheerfulness of temperament—it would be Hume. The elder Heyst is a post-Hume
Victorian unbeliever, but without any of the moral fervour that George Eliot
carried over from Christianity. He is—much more defensibly—in a pure state of
negation.
But
the philosophical position is strong more by force of character than by any
argumentation: powerful because quite disinterested and in a way noble. The
young Axel is still naif enough to ask “Is there no guidance?” (138) to which
the answer is:
“You still believe in something, then? . . . You believe in flesh and
blood, perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too.
But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of
contempt which is called pity. . . . ” (138)
Axel
Heyst does show pity, whether by cultivating it or not, but not as a form of
contempt. Dutiful son, he teaches his Lena/Alma on their island before the
irruption of evil that “facts have a certain positive value” (156), a doctrine
he has already preached to Mr Tesman: “There’s nothing worth knowing but facts.
Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr Tesman” (12). But he has rejected this by the time
of the decisive action of the novel and on Samburan has “done with facts” (28).
Conrad himself on facts, by the way, is impeccably clear of Gradgrind: “For
facts, whatever their origin (and God only knows where they come from), can be
only tested by our own particular suspicions” (127). The value Heyst tries to
attach to facts is a value not a fact. The speech to Davidson in explanation of
why he wants Mrs. Schomberg’s shawl to be taken back naturally causes Davidson
to think Heyst has gone mad (“Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in
such terms alongside an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical
bush.”(48)), but it’s actually, in all the comedy of the moment, naturalistic
as well as philosophically lucid:
I suppose I have done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed myself
to be tempted into action. It seemed innocent enough, but all action is bound
to be harmful. It is devilish. That is why this world is evil upon the whole.
But I have done with it! I shall never lift a little finger again. At one time
I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best way of cheating
the time which is allotted to us whether we want it nor not; but now I have
done with observation, too. (48)
He
also says to Lena, “Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not
stand close investigation” (156) and we are victims of “the Great Joke” so that
“by folly alone the world moves” (157). His apparently illogical lurch into
action in the interests of progress, bringing coal as “a great stride forward
for these regions” (11) is later explained by his humouring Morrison (160).
Axel
Heyst does differ from his father (and somewhat resembles George Eliot) in that
his attitude to religious belief, though he says he has none himself, is never
hostile or contemptuous. “ ‘You are a believer, Morrison?’ asked Heyst
with a distinct note of respect” (17) is a note consistently maintained.
Compare his narrative to Lena:
“Being cornered, as I
have told you, he went down on his knees and prayed. What do you think of
that?”
Heyst
paused. She looked at him earnestly.
“You
didn’t make fun of him for that?” she said.
Heyst
made a brusque movement of protest.
“My
dear girl, I am not a ruffian,” he cried. (157)
Axel
Heyst, unlike Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, is a principled
unbeliever, but this episode of the stride forward is also reminiscent of Mr
Kurtz’s rhetoric. Heyst is in fact as far from Kurtz as from Don Martin Decoud,
dying because he can’t stand his own company. Heyst prefers his own company and
consistently ascribes all his misfortunes to involvement with the world.
And
the world of the novel is not the world of the elder Heyst’s philosophy; it is
both better and worse; it contains spiritual wickedness as well as faith and
salvation. The whole novel is a sermon on the text “A good man out of the good
treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good.”[14]
I do believe that Victory is one of the most convincing pictures of goodness
in the English novel, for them that have ears to hear.
Victory
is the story of Heyst’s attainment of self-knowledge (perhaps Lena never has
any need of that), but whereas in the primeval garden self-knowledge comes,
along with the certainty of death, in the act of sin, in the later paradise of
Samburan the Round Island, self-knowledge is of a redeemed state. Heyst the
sceptic is unable to resist the temptation of his Christian impulses. His
impulse towards Lena is “the same impulse” (61) as the earlier one towards
Morrison. He “could not defend himself from compassion” (67). Pity, though not
exactly of the kind recommended by his father, proves Heyst’s salvation or,
from the point of view of his father and of his own conscious judgement, his
undoing. For there is a path from pity towards loving one’s neighbour as
oneself: “Heyst felt a sudden pity for these beings [the lady artists of
Zangiacomo’s troupe], exploited, hopeless, devoid of charm or grace, whose fate
of cheerless dependence invested their coarse and joyless features with a touch
of pathos” (60). Heyst’s compassion leads to charity. (“Greater love hath no
man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”) Heyst’s
goodness—what else to call it?—provokes him to intervene first in the matter of
Morrison then in that of Lena, with, in both cases, disastrous consequences, if
you wish to say so (and Heyst sometimes does), but it leads to what Conrad
rightly calls victory.
I
have to emphasize how theological Conrad’s treatment of this theme is, and that
this is the way his inspiration developed. The Christ-like self-sacrificing
love of Lena, for instance, is much clearer in Victory than that of her
prototype Laughing Anne in “Because of the Dollars.”
Heyst’s
question “Is there no guidance?” is precisely the one comically raised at the
beginning of the novel. Heyst is providential both to Morrison and to Lena,
literally an answer to prayer. Naturally, in the Conradian comedy this is
presented with an irony centring on Heyst’s own attitude to the identification
of himself as an angel, an order of spiritual beings in whom he does not
believe.
“What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel Heyst, the most detached of
creatures in this earthly captivity, the veriest tramp on this earth, an
indifferent stroller going through the world’s bustle—that I should have been
there to step into the situation of an agent of Providence. I, a man of
universal scorn and unbelief ...” (157–8)
As
a matter of fact, though, this does not disprove the identification:
“ ‘Miracles do happen,’ thought the awestruck Morrison” (19). “It was as
if he expected Heyst’s usual white suit of the tropics to change into a shining
garment flowing down to his toes, and a pair of great dazzling wings to sprout
on the Swede’s shoulders” (18–19).
For
Lena, Heyst is the man whom Heaven has sent (227). Even to Ricardo and Mr
Jones, when Heyst supplies the life-saving water he is “a man more unexpected
than an angel” (188). Morrison goes as far as raising for himself the question
whether Heyst may be an emissary of the other power:
“Forgive me, Heyst. You must have been sent by God in answer to my
prayer. But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with worry; and it
suddently struck me: ‘What if it’s the Devil who has sent him?’ ”
“I have no connection with the supernatural,” said Heyst graciously,
moving on. “Nobody has sent me. I just happened along.” (19)
(The
“graciously” is delicious.) That is true as well; Heyst is not conscious of
having been sent. But God does move in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.
I have to say that as a Christian I see no need to add anything to what Conrad
says to take Heyst as an answer to prayer in both cases, and angelic in the
strictest biblical sense of a messenger and agent of the divine. This is at
least one of the ways in which prayer is answered and messages sent and
received. I think in fact that the novel is more orthodox than its narrator,
with whom I have to take issue. He himself has too unrefined a notion of
miracles as something both more spectacular and more predetermined than the
actions of Heyst.
And all this sprang from the meeting of the cornered Morrison and of the
wandering Heyst, which may or may not have been the direct outcome of a prayer.
Morrison was not an imbecile, but he seemed to have got himself into a state of
remarkable haziness as to his exact position towards Heyst. For, if Heyst had
been sent with money in his pocket by a direct decree of the Almighty in answer
to Morrison’s prayer then there was no reason for special gratitude, since
obviously he could not help himself. (23)
Well,
Conrad too is very far from being an imbecile, but why can he not see that the
answer to prayer is Heyst’s obeying his impulse to use the money in his
pocket in that particular way? Most people, after all, would not have done so.
It is thoroughly in character, but not something directly decreed to him, that
he should save Morrison. Of course this is not miraculous in the sense of
breaking the laws of nature. But the notion that a miracle is something that
can’t be helped is not orthodox. In the New Testament our Lord repeatedly
assures those he has miraculously healed that their faith has made them whole:
without it there would have been no miracle. Whether there was any
miraculousness in Heyst’s wandering in that particular direction I don’t know.
There is nothing unlikely about the meeting of the two white men in the
circumstances. But we need not raise that question. The answer to prayer is
that all things work together for good to them that love God. The moral
discovery in Victory is that it may be possible to love God unawares.
But even the unawareness is, perhaps, only skin deep. Lena, quite realistically
at the date of Victory, has not only been to Sunday school (152), but
has there received a good grounding in the Bible; there is no difficulty in
accepting that Heyst also, as an educated man, knows the Bible well. They are
both steadily allusive.
Lena
worries about whether the evil that comes upon them may be a form of
retribution for their sinful life—thereby casting the three evil men as
“righteous agents of Providence,” as Heyst puts it (275). (They are emissaries,
but from somewhere else.) Lena, more simple-minded, does not share Heyst’s
moral serenity. She fears their living together is sinful, because of the
absence of the marriage ceremony, though if it is possible to have a sacrament
in intention the couple are surely married. (Naturally the idea of marriage
comes from Schomberg: in answer to Ricardo’s question “What did he go back to
the island for”: “‘Honeymoon!’ spat out Schomberg viciously.” (129)) “‘Are you
conscious of sin?’ Heyst asked gravely. She made no answer. ‘For I am not,’ he
added; ‘before Heaven, I am not!’” (275). The point here is not only that Heyst
is right (though Lena is also right to have scruples) but the straightforwardly
Christian terms in which he expresses his rightness. His father would never
have talked about sin, or have spoken before Heaven. Heyst uses both words less
self-consciously than many a professing Christian would do now.
Victory
even has a touch of allegory.[15] The
comic-macabre-grotesque trio who invade Heyst’s island are the world, the flesh
and the devil, from which Heyst innocently believes he has separated himself by
retiring to his island. Pedro, the flesh, is too mindless to speak for himself,
but his role in the anti-Trinity is made clear by his more articulate bosses,
as well as by the moment when Pedro, dying of thirst, realizes that there is
water of the most ordinary physical kind:
Something hairy and black flew from under the jetty. A dishevelled head,
coming on like a cannon-ball, took the man at the pipe in flank, with enough
force to tear his grip loose and fling him headlong into the stern-sheets.
(182)
Of
that love of money which is the root of all evil,[16]
Pedro, as mere flesh, is innocent; as Mr. Jones says, “Pedro, of course, knows
no more of it than any animal other would” (294). Ricardo—all too real, human
and naturalistic—is to Lena, at the same time, and equally naturally, “the
embodied evil of the world” (232). That naturally takes the form of “murder
itself” (309). Ricardo is death, the wages of sin, whom Lena manages to deprive
of his sting.
This
leaves plain Mr. Jones as the Devil. If anything, Conrad’s hints are too
insistent. Heyst says to Lena “Well! I don’t know myself what I would do, what
countenance I would have before a creature which would strike me as being the
devil incarnate” (164). Jones’s eyebrows are “devilish” (95). After using the
Book of Job, “coming and going up and down the earth,” a phrase used there of
Satan and instantly recognized by the sceptical but Bible-soaked Heyst, he
avows his identity openly: “As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you
are thinking of, and I have neither more nor less determination.” It is true
that at one point he calls himself “the world itself, come to pay you a visit”
(294) but the other signs are consistently Satanic. He has by his own account
been hounded out of his sphere (Milton’s Satan has the same self-pity) though
at the naturalistic level he has been excluded from decent society for strongly
hinted reasons, of which cardsharping is one. The final Powys-like hint is almost
superfluous as he says
“A man living alone with a Chinaman on an island takes care to conceal
property of that kind so well that the devil himself—”
“Certainly,” Heyst muttered. (297)
Lena
dies believing in the efficacy of her self-sacrificial action as she deprives
the world of its “sting.” As many have noticed, this is the sting of death in
the passage from which the novel takes its name: “Death is swallowed up in
victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”[17] The sting takes the form of Ricardo’s dagger.
Heyst
says he does not believe, but acts as if he does. It is Heyst’s gentlemanly
goodness[18] that pushes him into actions that express a
faith quite at variance with his words. Which of the two sons does the father’s
will, the one “who said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went” or
the one who said “I go, sir: and went not”?[19] And: “If
ye love me, keep my commandments.”[20] If Heyst keeps His
commandments he loves him—whether he knows as much or not. Heyst does what to
the good heart appears a duty, inspired by a love, neither of which are jokes,
and in response to a threat which, however grotesque, is no joke either, and
worse than mere danger to life and limb, because evil.
Now
whether Conrad would agree with this commentary—which could be much extended—I
don’t know. There certainly was in Conrad the man something of, and perhaps in
the narrator of Victory there is a hint of, Heyst’s scepticism: Conrad
certainly portrays it so inwardly that it is natural enough to think that he
may have known it at first hand, at least in some moods. (The novel is
contemporary with his friendship with Bertrand Russell, author of the
rhapsodically atheistical “Freeman’s Worship.”) Let me not disguise that “Our
convictions, the disguised servants of our passions” (131) is a moment of pure
Bertrand-Russellism; but it is not the note of the novel, and applies to
the villains but not at all to Lena or to Heyst, whose convictions are actually
redeemed by his passions. Though “Every age is fed on illusions, lest man
should renounce life early and the human race come to an end” is near a border
with Ibsen and Shaw’s Life-Force, though it may remind one of Don Martin
Decoud, this is not the bottomless cynicism it might seem elsewhere to be.
“Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog” (77). But
only from Heyst’s point of view: and Conrad supplied “blessed.”
If
we trust the tale, not the teller, what I have reported is much in the grain of
what is deepest in the author, whatever he would have said himself.
None
of this implies that the story fails at an ordinary novelistic level. I think
it’s grippingly naturalistic. And I do think that what I have been glancing at is
much more central to the novel than the theme of the painfulness of Heyst’s
reticence (developed from Captain Anthony’s in Chance) which the
novelist tends to highlight, thereby tripping up Meyers and Purdy into
supposing there is no love between Heyst and Lena.[21] I
believe that Victory is inter alia a great love story. That love
it is, on both sides, I have no doubt at all.
“You should try to love me!” she said.
He made a movement of astonishment. (174–5)
It
is poignant that he cannot get far enough away from his father to express his
love in language. But actions do speak louder than words.
The
central interest is still, rather, religious. The victory of the title is
Lena’s, and then Heyst’s recovery of faith, in the form possible to him—too
late for him to base a married life upon it or to resume his place in public,
but in time to save him. Lena uses this word faith at the decisive
moment, and it is called forth by Heyst’s goodness.
She resisted without a moment of faltering, because she was no longer
deprived of moral support; because she was a human being who counted; because
she was no longer defending herself for herself alone; because of the faith
that had been born in her—the faith in the man of her destiny, and perhaps in
the Heaven which had sent him so wonderfully to cross her path. (227)
That,
from the so subtle and ironic Conrad, is simple and heroic.
Leavis
underestimates Victory and is not quite on target because he overlooks
the theological backbone. I suspect criticism that makes a great deal of proper
names but it is worth noting that Heyst’s name (which gave Conrad trouble and
which he adopted late in the process of composition) is only an aspirate away
from Geist and rhymes with Christ. If he is the spirit of anything it is of a
still basically Christian age.
In
his best art Conrad achieved, with great labour, a wholeness of faith that
necessarily for this Polish-English artist was Christian in character; and it
was this that released him into creativity, including the most immediate
creativity of his wonderfully inventive prose. One snippet, about poor
Morrison: “Finally he went into Dorsetshire to see his people, caught a bad
cold, and died with extraordinary precipitation in the bosom of his appalled
family” (23). Cf. “the late faithful Stevie blown to fragments in a state of
innocence and in the conviction of being engaged in a humanitarian enterprise.”[22] N.B. in neither case is there any lack of sympathy!
If
Conrad’s opinions have the freethinkingness of a Whig aristocrat it may still
be true that his art depends on standards of judgement neither Whig nor
liberal. When Conrad is most creative—when, that is, he is being one of the
best novelists in the world—he is always rising to a momentary faith he could
not himself formulate otherwise, but which is finally and securely made
in the great moments of the novels. How else, after all, should a novelist
express belief?
I
further assert that without that faith he would not have been so great a
novelist, nor could he have occupied the classical place he rightly does. I
wonder whether, with James, Conrad is the latest novelist of Christendom.
[1] This article is based on a talk given at Brock and
Laurentian Universities in October 2001. Victory
(1915) is quoted from a 1952 edition with an introduction by
V. S. Pritchett (London: The Book Society, 1952).
[2] Marlow’s closing words in Chance.
[3] Quoted in Nicolas Tredell, ed., Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (Duxford: Icon Critical Guides,
1998), 71.
[4] Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph
Conrad (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991), 279.
[5] Dwight H. Purdy, Joseph
Conrad’s Bible (Norman, Oklahoma, 1984), 7, 125, 110, 127, 127.
[6] 23 February 1914; Joseph
Conrad on Fiction, ed. Walter F. Wright (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1964;
1967), 35.
[7] Notes on Life and Letters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955), 64.
[8] F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; 1955), 180.
[9] Possibly Conrad is letting Mr. Jones down to a level
of pettiness and insignificance comparable with the fallen angels’
metamorphosis into hissing snakes in Paradise
Lost.
[10] It is clearly wrong to say as Wollgaer does that the
elder Heyst is “clearly modelled on Schopenhauer” (Mark A. Wollgaer, Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism
[Stanford, 1990], p. 204 n.9). There is not much resemblance either in person or doctrine.
[11] Luke 6:45.
[12] How much of this is common knowledge I don’t know.
Jeffrey Meyer, for instance, sees nothing of it.
[13] Schomberg manages to inspire Ricardo with a phrase
rather like something out of Donne’s Songs
and Sonets: “ ‘Minted gold,’ he murmured with a sort of anguish”
(132).
[14] 1 Corinthians 15:54–5.
[15] He is far too much of a gentleman to insist on the
fact, unlike Mr. Jones, admired as gentleman by Ricardo. The Prince of Darkness
is a gentleman.
[16] Matthew 21:29, 30.
[17] John 14:15.
[18] Meyers even thinks there is no sex, and writes that “Lena’s
ontological fears and sense of unreality are presumably caused by her lack of
sexual relations with Heyst, who once tried to sleep with her but was unable to
do so” (285). The Marxist critic Terry Collits is surely right when he notes
“that suggestive gap between chapters which in fact encloses a moment of sexual
intensity” (“Imperialism, Marxism, Conrad: a Political Reading of Victory,” rpt. in Keith Carabine, ed., Joseph Conrad: Critical Assessments
[Mountfield, E. Sussex, 1992], 491), though Conrad doesn’t leave it all to
space: at the end of Part 3, Chapter 4, “With her hand she signed imperiously
to him to leave her alone—a command which Heyst did not obey.” And at the
beginning of the next chapter, “When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst
scrambled quickly to his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had
rolled a little way off.” (170, 171) If you need more than that in a
post-Victorian novel you really are not acquainted with the conventions.
Ricardo, on the other hand, says Meyers, “achieves orgasm with Lena” (Meyers
289)—not in the book I read!—who “subconsciously responds to Ricardo’s sexual
assault” (Meyers 288) Has she not enough to do responding consciously?
[19] The Secret Agent, (1907; 1947), 266.
Robinson, Ian. “Conrad’s Belief in Victory.” The New Compass: A Critical
Review 2 (December 2003)
<http://www.thenewcompass.ca/dec2003/robinson.html>