Joseph Conrad writes self-deprecatingly to Scottish politician and fellow adventurer R.B. Cunninghame Graham about Conrad’s latest book, Nostromo, which drew inspiration from Graham’s Vanished Arcadia, an account of Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay. Conrad playfully describes his own inability to master the austere prose style, turning to the letter heading itself for evidence, and losing himself momentarily in his own verbose abundance.
18 Mch 1903
Pent Farm.
Très cher ami!
I hope you’ve forgiven my long silence. It is not, on reflection, a very great transgression; seeing that the best of us have but a few thoughts and that of these the best worth saying have the trick of being unutterable—not because of their profundity but because there is a devil that tangles the tongue or hangs to the penholder making its use odious and the sound of words foolish like the banging of tin cans.
With this exordium—c’est le mot, n’est ce pas?—I approach you with the offering of my book whose title-page proof I’ve just send back to the Yahudi. It is to appear on the 22nd of April (not on the first as the War Office Army Corps do) and the exordium above is a sort of explanatory note upon the brevity of its declaration.
I have been reading again the Vanished Arcadia—from the dedication, so full of charm, to the last paragraph with its ironic aside about the writers of books “proposing something and concluding nothing”—and its exquisite last lines bringing out the all-resuming image of travelers “who wandering in the Tarumensian woods come on a clump of orange-trees run wild amongst the urundéys.”
A fit beginning and a fit note to end a book for which I have the greatest admiration wherein profound feeling and the poor judgment of such reason as Allah deigned give me are in perfect accord. Not for me are such beginnings and such endings. I should like to draw your attention therefore to the austere simplicity of the “To R.B. Cunninghame Graham” and nothing more—if my conscience didn’t whisper, what you will see without any pointing out, that this is not austerity—but barrenness and nothing else—the awful lack of words that overcomes the thought struggling eagerly towards the lips.
Et voilà! It is poor, poor: the dedication saying nothing and the book proposing something, wherefrom no power on earth could extract any kind of conclusion; but such as they are, and worth less than one single solitary leaf in the wilderness of the Tarumensian woods, they are yours.
Je vous serre la main. Tout à vois.
Jph. Conrad
FURTHER READING
For a William S. Burroughs lecture on Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, click here
For Peter Mcdonald’s take on Conrad’s complicated relationship with colonialism and post colonialism, click here, and for an overview of Chinua Achebe’s famous 1975 problematization of racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, click here
For a quote from Conrad’s Nostromo, the idea for which he was greatly indebted to Graham’s Vanished Arcadia, click here