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Commodity Frontiers and Global Capitalist Expansion: Social, Ecological and Political Implications from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day Sabrina Joseph
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L IST OF F IGURES
Fig. 1.1 Vive La République, Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 107. July 7, 1894. 7 8
Fig. 2.1 Misery, The Torch, No. 8, 18 January 1895. 7
28
Fig. 2.2 The Dynamite Dragon, Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892. 188 32
Fig. 3.1 Greenwich Park bomb location—The Times, 17 February 1894 45
Fig. 3.2 The Were-Wolf of Anarchy, Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 105, Dec 3, 1893: 290 60
Fig. 4.1 The Modern Medusa, Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 105, December 9, 1893: 270/271
75
Fig. 4.2 Reckoning without their Host, Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 7, 1892: 224 91
Fig. 5.1 Winter, The Torch, No. 5, 31 October 1894. 7 114
Fig. 7.1 Holograph of The Secret Agent, page 481 139
Fig. 7.2 Holograph of The Secret Agent, page 482
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
IN THE FOLLOWING chapters we will be considering the textual development and the contributing contexts of Joseph Conrad’s remarkable novel, The Secret Agent. In part, our concern is to establish the emerging vision of the novel, its historical milieu, and the climate of ideas in which Conrad wrote and which inevitably shapes his writing, and in part, to examine the emerging text through various stages of composition.
The fiction of the novel pivots upon the historical fact of an attempted dynamite outrage in Greenwich Park, London. It was presumably conceived as a demonstration against the hilltop observatory, though the bomb never got close to that site, and the premature detonation of the bomb resulted in the death of the anarchist who was carrying it. This curious explosion in Greenwich, central to the plot of Conrad’s novel and simultaneously intriguingly absent from it, was a cause célèbre in its day. Its notoriety was understandable, given that it was the first anarchist bombing, or explosive act of anarchist “propaganda by deed,” to take place on British soil during the era of bombs in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
It was not the first terror bombing by any means. It followed an extended Fenian campaign of violence intended to destabilize the British domestic political scene sufficiently to help bring about home rule for Ireland. It also followed bloody anarchist attacks on the continent. The nature of the attack on English soil, and its source, contributed to a heightened anxiety in the domestic response, not only to terror, but to vague and
D. Mulry, Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49585-3_1
1
mounting fears that contemporary novelists were quick to capitalize on, that Fenian, anarchist, and revolutionary socialist groups had formed, or were forming, an international alliance which threatened the very fabric of the world of late Victorian and Edwardian England.1 In the opening of his novel of nineteenth-century terrorism, The Anarchist (published the same year as the Greenwich bombing, 1894), Colonel Richard Henry Savage announces in his preface, “The story of active anarchism is a chronicle of the present time. The bells ringing out the nineteenth century may ring in a conflict which, in its political and social importance, will dwarf every other issue of the day.”2
The occasion of the Greenwich bombing, a singular anarchist atrocity, rather than a Fenian demonstration, convinced some commentators that the turn of England had at last come for a sustained campaign of terror. Hitherto, it had largely been free from anarchist threats because it was a (more or less) neutral political home to European dissident voices. It had not so much been ignored by the anarchists, as spared, because England had provided a virtual safe haven for varieties of European and Slav dissent; as Vladimir, in Conrad’s novel is quick to point out when he dictates a series of outrages “executed here in this country; not only planned here” as he goes on to note: “Your friends could set half the Continent on fire without influencing the public opinion here in favour of a universal repressive legislation. They will not look outside their backyard here.”3 Instead, England was a center of sorts for a variety of European revolutionary dissidents and revolutionaries—a philosophic bulwark against European authoritarianism and autocracy. Peter Kropotkin, in The Conquest of Bread, identifies Britain along with France as one of only two nations which “stood at the head of the industrial movement” which saw modern socialism emerge.4
England’s attitude had a twofold effect, it meant that London could become the philosophical center of the movement with figures like Kropotkin and Malatesta seeking its security, but it also had a dampening effect on domestic anarchism. Instead of domestic dissent among disenfranchised labor, plots abroad were fomented and equipped in England, while the anarchist preserved the tender peace of their valuable adopted refuge. The considerable external efforts to force England to change its policy on political refugees were to no avail. The Russian Nihilists found refuge as the darlings of English Society, the European refugees were less attractive to English taste, but equally, they were less visible, and presumably, they were, after all, much more agreeable than the Fenians—at least until the
Greenwich detonation which was to change the character of late Victorian England and its reception of political extremism.
As one might expect, this did not go unnoticed. The more repressive European Governments, along with Russia, brought diplomatic pressure to bear upon England. Prussia, without success, proposed that England join a pact to close doors to the Nihilists, social revolutionaries, and anarchists. The French Newspapers at the height of the dynamite outrages printed bitter condemnations of the lax policing so close to their borders that allowed the inception and development of anarchist plots which came to fruition in France.
So it was no surprise that the Greenwich bombing was welcomed by the French, bringing down in Mr. Asquith and on “‘selfish England’ the jibes of the Parisian Press” as reported at length in The Times:
The République Français says:- “The English have two pairs of spectacles, one for looking at their own affairs, and the other at those of their neighbours.” So long as the Anarchists were content with operating in France, Spain and Belgium, they were free to “demonstrate” on Tower-hill, and to form their abominable plots at the Autonomie Club, but when it was seen in London that people there ran a risk of having their own fingers burnt at the game, and that bombs exploded at Greenwich as well as at the café Terminus and the Licéo, a different tone is taken …. Everybody will benefit by this tardy awakening of conscience, and we cannot but congratulate ourselves on it. M. Bourdin was therefore well-inspired, if not for himself, at least for others, in stumbling with his bottle.
And again in the same article we are offered a response from Prussia:
A Vienna telegram, dated yesterday [18 February 1894] says:- “there is much anxiety here respecting the inaction of the English Government towards the Anarchists. It may be expected that the various powers will shortly communicate their observations to the English Foreign Office.”5
The Greenwich Bombing focused international attention on English domestic policy over the anarchist question. Some contemporary observers were not slow to point out that, what for anarchism in England was a bizarre, untimely, and costly incident, was for its opponents, at home and abroad, of tremendous value in the ongoing war of words, and in toughening attitudes to political dissent in England.
London had a history of openness to philosophical dissent; moreover, it was extensively used for printing and dissemination of anarchist literature. It was the home of the group that organized the first Workers’ Congresses (the London Congress in 1881, a significant turning point in anarchist policy development). The “official” adoption of violent provocation toward revolution left the movement vulnerable to its repressive opponents, but England remained the haven of radical thinkers like Karl Marx, Kropotkin himself, and Errico Malatesta, along with terrorist activists like Sergey Stepniak (who stabbed and killed the chief of the Russian secret police, and later fled to England). During increasingly bloody anarchist campaigns in Europe and America, there had been no serious anarchist outrage in Britain, though that gap had been filled by a persistent and violent (sometimes according to press accounts, a wildly incompetent) Fenian campaign.
Where anarchism occurred, it was often more philosophical or cerebral, and England valued its role as a place for freedom of thought. An interesting example of just such a philosophical terrorist is the case of John E. Barlas, an anarchist, educated at Oxford. He is remembered partly for his poetry—only some of which carries his anarchist convictions of the need for regeneration and rebirth. In a sonnet sequence “Holy of Holies: Confessions of an Anarchist,” he envisages a fiery cloud sweeping across the metropolis:
Slowly it sailed, and came
A sheet of flame,
High o’er that city’s topmost column-peak, —
The Town lay still as Death:
I held my breath:
The blood-red deluge fell. Without a shriek
The town was cleansed of all that made it reek.
Then changed those furial gleams
To mild moon-beams.
And in that city, late those demons’ lair, Angels went to and fro.6
Aside from any commentary on style or expression, his meaning is clear. Barlas’ vision of society is one of reek and corruption. Only annihilation will bring about a world in which his self-styled “angels” can dwell. It is a standard vision of the need for a clean sweep so that society can rebuild in
a more equitable way, and it is invoked as a myth of revolution repeatedly in many of the sensation novels of the period. Significantly, Barlas’ other claim to remembrance is an act of propaganda by deed (or by gesture) in 1891 which speaks to the importance of ideas—even in the manifestation of revolutionary deeds. Conrad was in London for the better part of the year on an enforced recuperation from his Congo venture, and so may have been aware of Barlas’ moment in the spotlight. He voiced his anarchist sympathies and vented his frustrations, not by hurling a bomb at the opera, but by firing a revolver at the building where the Speaker of the House of Commons was. He did not fire at the Speaker, but at the building. When a police constable came to arrest him, Barlas remarked, “I am an Anarchist and intended shooting you, but then I thought it a pity to shoot an honest man. What I have done is to show my contempt for the House of Commons.”7 Possibly it was such dry political “extremism” that made Kropotkin so despair of arousing revolutionary ardor in England that he left its comparative safety (perhaps somewhat stultifying), saying, memorably, “Better a French prison than this grave.”8
In this delicate atmosphere of carefully balanced trusts where anarchists were tolerated and allowed, but still participated within a system they abhorred and sought to undermine, we see the real value of the agent provocateur. Even before the Greenwich bombing, it was a time of police plots, if not actual, then supposed or suspected. Official funds were even channeled into the publication of anarchist journals (how better to survey the intelligence source of a movement?) and toward informant/provocateur figures. Anxiety about political terror in this landscape was such that it contributed shape and context to the popular imagination of a number of novelists, who, responding to the spirit of the times, told their tales of anarchist conspiracies, of new infernal weapons, of social injustices, and political fanaticism in a variety of ways. These fictions were sometimes melodramatic, gothic, earnest, ironic, or indeed comic, each according to their vision of the times and their sense of audience and purpose. In among them, often echoing their particular concerns, and even some of their narrative conventions, Conrad’s novel remains a fascinating artifact, clearly belonging in its context of dynamite and anarchist intrigue, and yet simultaneously a distinctively new political novel that continues to withstand scrutiny as a core text in the Modern canon.
The Greenwich “bombing” in 1894, however, helped to shift the political landscape in England. The English press, which had been largely forgiving of European dissidence (especially Slavic rebellion against Tsarist
autocracy), and had espoused the idea of England as a refuge for men of ideas and principled exiles from autocratic cruelties, began to conflate Fenian activities with anarchist, communist, and socialist protest. The political distinctions were increasingly moot for an anxious public. Conrad identifies and ironizes the confusion in Vladimir’s skeptical query of Verloc’s revolutionary identity, but also illuminates the blurring of the edges between the radical groups.9 What was apparent to the general public, however, was the material threat that increasing radicalization was beginning to pose. The apparent mobilization and organization of socialism as a global phenomenon (manifested in the International Congresses of the 1860s–1870s) along with an emergent focus on anarchism, communism, and other dissent and revolutionary protest, offered a source of galvanizing anxiety.
For Conrad and his readers, through the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, alarming reports of dynamite activity linked to anarchist revolt had come to be commonplace in the news from the continent, as is evident in a leader in The Times, rounding up the news of 1894, the year of the Greenwich bombing (which occurred early, on the 15th of February), where political terroristic acts feature prominently in the annual review of events. In retrospect, we can assume that there is an element of alarmist “puffing” that is taking place—though the anarchist events were part of the lead up to the Greenwich atrocity itself. The Times, of course, feasts on the lurid report as much at the end of the nineteenth century as 24/7 media outlets do today: “All minds were haunted and terrorised by the acts of the Anarchists. Every month brought its quota of horrors and made the name of Anarchist a by-word.”10 The words are a chilling reminder of a bloody year which had seen public atrocities, the assassination of the French president, revenges upon the judicial system, and the increasingly viable asymmetrical warfare of the individual revolutionary. Most significant anarchist action (or at least the bloody or explosive side of it!) was centered in France and Italy—and figures like Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant, Emile Henry, and Sante Geronimo Caserio were infamous.
In a macabre game of terror tag, Vaillant instigated a dynamite attack in 1893 against the French parliament to revenge the 1892 execution of Ravachol for his own bomb campaign. In response to Vaillant’s execution early in 1894, Emile Henry tossed a bomb into the crowded restaurant Terminus, at the Paris Gare St. Lazare on the 12th of February. Just three days later, the Greenwich bomb detonated in London—though its links
to the French terror attacks are unclear, the implications were not, and of course, the public could make connections with the broader picture of atrocities and political dissidence. On the continent, the ripple effect of anarchist atrocities continued, and to avenge Henry’s 1894 guillotine execution, an Italian anarchist, Caserio stabbed the French President Sadi Carnot to death at a banquet in Lyon and was in turn executed in August of 1894.
Emile Henry, the French anarchist who bombed the crowded Café Terminus in Paris immediately before the Greenwich incident, issued an indictment of the European Governments in the short period of captivity before his execution. He promised that anarchism would not waver. It turned out to be a shrewd analysis of the psychology of terror, at least for a brief space of time, and anarchism grew stronger and more violent under harsh reprisals:
You have hung men in Chicago, cut off their heads in Germany, strangled them in Jerez, shot them in Barcelona, guillotined them in Montbrison and Paris, but what you will never destroy is Anarchism. Its roots are too deep: it is born at the heart of a corrupt society which is falling to pieces; it is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents egalitarian and libertarian aspirations which are battering down existing authority; it is everywhere, which makes it impossible to capture. It will end by killing you.11
The very nature of the anarchist struggle is that it is fighting against something much more powerful and better established than itself, but that is its justification.
Something of the slightly more phlegmatic English response to events can be seen in the cartoon from the satirical magazine Punch (7 July 1894) shown in Fig. 1.1: “Vive La République,” in which Liberty, Marianne, in her iconic pose, one arm raised defiantly, and wearing her characteristic Phrygian cap, is the personification of the old revolution and pictured in relation to the threat of the new. Here the visual rhetoric is fascinating. The figure of revolutionary (Republican) zeal is crushing the serpent of anarchy beneath her “unfaltering” feet and holding in her other arm, a limp, bedraped shape, presumably a representation of the dead Carnot. The role of anarchism in the picture is clear: it is the threatening serpent which must be crushed under foot—even by a zealous social revolutionary. The irony should be evident too. Marianne is a revolutionary icon, but the serpent with “Anarchy” inscribed along its length is not even worthy
“VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!”
“THE
TEAR THAT BRIMMETH, BLINDETH NOT HER EYE, SO FIXED ALOFT IT LOWERETH NOT TO GREET THE WRITHING REPTILE BRUISED BY HER UNFALTERING FEET!”
Fig. 1.1 Vive La République, Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 107. July 7, 1894. 7
of her gaze.12 The Times accounts after the bombing, note that Bourdin had a copy of The Pall Mall Gazette’s sensational article from two days before in his pocket. “The Anarchists in London: By One Who Studies Them” uses the snake image to different effect, suggesting that by harboring anarchists England is “warming a snake in our bosom in harbouring in this country the anarchical refuse of the world.”13
For most of the reading public, the Greenwich atrocity was part of the steady escalation of an anarchist program of retribution and propaganda by deed, which knew no national boundaries. They were caught in the glare of indiscriminate terror and saw themselves as possible victims of anarchist retribution in the same way that contemporary readers are alarmed by prominent Al Qaeda, ISIS, or Islamic terrorists and the threat they seem to pose (while being unable to distinguish the identifying characteristics that separate them).
For a highly demonstrative minority, however, Vaillant and Henry were martyrs for the way forward, the very model of the strategic targeted terror campaign espoused by revolutionary socialists like Louis Auguste Blanqui. While the model is not quite the decentralized cell of modern terrorism, it is certainly its prototype.
The real threat of anarchism, till then almost exclusively a continental problem, was suddenly a domestic issue on 16 February when reports of the incident at Greenwich the previous afternoon began filtering through into the press (with some peculiar and telling distortions in many instances as we’ll go on to see). Conrad’s novel discloses the event via Ossipon, “I’ve heard just now—in the street.” He goes on to explain to the Professor, “A newspaper boy had yelled the thing under his very nose.”14 Alfred Hitchcock when he dramatized the novel in his 1935 thriller, Sabotage, 15 filmed the sequence for its dramatic effect, with a newspaper boy running the streets of London crying, “Late Extra News. Big Bomb Sensation,” only in Hitchcock’s reimagining of the novel as a romantic thriller, the lurid headlines attract the attention of Winnie, played with delicate vulnerability by Sylvia Sidney. For Conrad, the moment, the detonation and the subsequent disclosure of it on an idle and complacent metropolis, was striking enough to form the dramatic spring at the heart of the machinery of his 1907 novel.
It is interesting to speculate what about the event inspired Conrad’s particular interest. Certainly it might have caught his attention because
of the location, Greenwich as the center of navigation, the marker point of Greenwich Mean Time, and as a busy shipping port would have been close to his thoughts as a working mariner, and as Vladimir expostulates in The Secret Agent, “The whole civilised world has heard of Greenwich. The very boot-blacks in the basement of Charing Cross Station know something of it.”16 The explosion itself, the kind of event linked again and again in popular fiction accounts with political zealots (among whom disenfranchised revolutionary Poles feature strongly) may have caught his attention as well.
Equally, however, Conrad might have noted the change in tone brought about by the event, and as a young Pole in London—as often as not, seeking work in the shipping industry—he may have even felt some of the backlash as we’ll see later. In France, during heightened anxieties during the buildup to Vaillant’s execution, Conrad then goes on to London, where his correspondence places him in time to experience the Greenwich atrocity in February. On the 18th (three days after the bombing) he writes to Poradowska to tell her that he has heard news of the death of his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, and has been ill for several days. Sick, and bereft, a lone Pole in London, Conrad was there to experience the heightened anxieties of the aftermath.
As soon as the actions of the anarchists came closer to home, posing a particular rather than a removed and abstract threat, a savage and fascinating reaction sets in. The largely philosophical tolerance of anarchism tends to disappear. Certainly, at least, in the case of the Greenwich incident, and its alleged perpetrators, press accounts begin more pointedly to shed their hitherto ambivalent response to the many kinds of “Continental” political extremists who had made their home in England. Hitherto, these tended to be perceived on a certain level as benign—if not to the world at large, then certainly toward their host country.
After the Greenwich atrocity, the fear of an actualization of domestic terror begins to shift reporting away from philosophical anarchism, and toward the dangers of propaganda by deed. Early in 1885, for example, (after a Fenian attack on the Tower of London) it is possible to read accounts in The Times which still purport to ennoble the anarchist cause. They at least are idealists, The Times’ argument seems to suggest; the anarchists are seeking to better the world unlike the Irish terrorists and their very real threat to public order.17 It is one thing, after all, to fight
against the inequities and cruelties of the imperial Tsar, the newspapers (and the reading public) recognize. Of course, such tolerance changes as the threat of anarchist violence begins to manifest itself across Europe, and the USA. It becomes more pressing as the Fenian program of violent demonstration runs out of steam, and anarchist terror promises to take its place. As the shockwaves subside from the Greenwich atrocity, the domestic English political climate for anarchism is transformed—as Vladimir hopes it will be in The Secret Agent. Commentators like John Quail in The Slow Burning Fuse, his narrative “lost history” of British anarchism, point to sharp reaction to the radical threat, fostered in part by the press, and in part by police action via provocateurs, and manipulation of public outcry so that anarchists were increasingly perceived as “the apostles of total destruction in the more gullible sections of the popular imagination.”18
How far Conrad engaged with some of these broader issues is debatable, and his political sympathies regarding anarchist terror are much disputed, though the dominant critical stance seems to be that he is conservative and treats the anarchists scornfully—a position that this text will challenge. Whether or not Conrad comes close to accuracy in his treatment of the actual event, he certainly understood the psychological aspects of his fictionalization of it, and he goes on to explore some of the nuances and intricacies of contemporary anarchism, to a greater degree than he is generally given credit for.
Nonetheless, his choice of Greenwich as the pivotal plot device of his novel means that we are left with a distinct historical event and corresponding questions of influence, and familiarity with it, and of course attendant questions about the imaginative process of his writing. Influential work by Norman Sherry suggested that Conrad’s fiction tends to have a “firm basis in fact,” and that contention is sometimes accepted at face value as if it were an end in itself as though to document the original is to somehow gloss the intention of the novel.19
While Conrad’s treatment of the Greenwich Bombing does coincide with some aspects of the historical event, and aligns with the general spirit of dynamite fiction in this age of anarchist and revolutionary socialist terror (as we will see in the commentary on contemporary political novels), in many respects it is entirely divorced from them. This study explores the contemporary scene in the midst of which Conrad conceives and drafts
his novel, but it goes further to examine the genesis and evolution of the novel from its holograph manuscript beginnings to final publication to examine the political undertones and implications of the emerging text, and the lingering legacy of Conrad’s “Simple Tale.”
NOTES
1. This idea is the very plot of Coulson Kernahan’s Captain Shannon, (New York: International Association of Newspapers and Authors, 1901), (first published 1888) which proposes “let these scattered forces combine into one organized and all-powerful Federation, and mankind will be at its mercy” (10). He then notes, “This is what has been done” (10).
2. Richard Henry Savage, The Anarchist: A Story of Today (Chicago: F. Tennyson Neely 1894), Facsimile Reprint: Forgotten Books, 3.
3. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, (London: Dent Uniform Edition, 1923), 30. Subsequent quotation from the novel will be taken from the Dent Uniform Edition of 1923. Quotation from, or reference to the introduction, textual essay or apparatus of the Cambridge Edition of The Secret Agent will be referred to by editors, as Harkness and Reid.
4. Pëtr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread. The Anarchist Library 1906, September 9, 2015. Web, 5.
5. The Times, Monday 19 February 1894, 5.
6. Cited in Barbara Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 122.
7. Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London, (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 76.
8. Hermia Oliver, 17.
9. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, 21.
10. The Times, 26 January 1885: 7.
11. James Joll, The Anarchists, (London: Methuen and Co., 1979), 119.
12. The meat-processing company in Conrad’s short story, “An Anarchist,” from A Set of Six, uses the company logo of a bull stamping on a serpent, and may be (given the context of the story) picking up this image of the serpent of anarchy (and the bull of capitalism).
13. Pall Mall Gazette, Tuesday 13 February 1894.
14. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, 63.
15. Hitchcock’s film adaptation of Conrad’s novel immediately followed an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s stories as The Secret Agent, and so the Conrad project was titled Sabotage.
16. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, 35.
17. The Times, 25 January 1885: 3.
18. John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse, (London: Granada Publishing Ltd. 1978): 169.
19. Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Western World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1971), 229.
CHAPTER 2
Conrad and the Imaginative Shades
NORMAN SHERRY, in Conrad’s Western World, offers an account of various sources examining the actual Greenwich bomb incident, for Conrad’s fictitious account in The Secret Agent. Sherry’s approach hinges upon the assumption that Conrad’s writing process drew heavily on experience, and failing that, on Conrad steeping himself in the details of the event he is writing about.1 But that suggestion, depending on its application, involves a potentially reductive argument, which at the least asks the reader to become a sort of historical sleuth to get much of anything out of the reading, and at its most serious, threatens Conrad’s imaginative autonomy.
It is an argument devolving from what would seem a fairly innocent admission by Conrad, borne out by his sea and colonial fiction, that “one’s literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and seek discourse with the shades.”2 He speaks of such shades elsewhere, the “shades” of memory in the closing lines of The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” where he reflects upon the object of his tale as “a shadowy ship manned by a crew of Shades.”3 Sherry begins Conrad’s Western World, suggesting that such memories that seem so characteristic a part of the creative process for Conrad’s exotic fiction4 were much more problematic for the emerging political novels, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, and The Secret Agent because Conrad did not directly experience the worlds of these novels (though as the following chapters will suggest, in some respects, he did).
Despite that lack of access, Sherry does not vacate his position concerning the factual basis of Conrad’s work explored so thoroughly in his earlier
volume on the sea fiction, Conrad’s Eastern World, though he notes that Conrad’s approach needs must have changed. If Conrad had not experienced directly the world of the anarchists, in the same way that he had the world under canvas, he reasoned, then he must have undertaken fairly thorough research into his subject in order to approximate a “lived” perspective. The shades must be populated from somewhere after all.
Sherry is no doubt correct, to a degree, but he does not enter into an argument about the legitimacy of his critical stance, or the implications. Instead, he allows what he takes to be the eloquent persuasion of his source material to speak for him. Matching elements of some primary accounts against Conrad’s own renditions, he implies (simply by juxtaposition) that the former need have been consulted before Conrad could arrive at the latter. The implications, of such extensive research, as far as Conrad’s method of literary production (and his imagination!) is concerned, are not really pursued, but rather posed and dropped. Sherry in his conclusion discusses Conrad’s writing process, very much after the fact as having begun with “immersion,” to begin to see the subject, followed by a laborious reconstructing of the story with certain aspects of the documentary real. Sherry notes, “It was clearly, for Conrad, an exhausting and difficult method of creation.”5
There are necessarily difficulties with Sherry’s approach that he simply does not attempt to resolve, and the absence of notes, or evidence of the kind of immersion he posits is ignored—the passage of time, after all, is very forgiving. With a writer other than Conrad we might suggest that such notes are ephemera and unlikely to be kept, but Conrad, not a graduate of that school of Gissing’s New Grub Street, but nonetheless particularly good at monetizing the various aspects of his craft whether through serialization, or short fiction, or the reproduction of works as dramatized versions, might have kept such notes for financial gain. As early as 1912 he had begun to sell many of his major manuscripts, for example, to John Quinn, an American collector.6
Conrad was good at creating a revenue stream of his production process that Conrad’s foremost biographer, Zdzislaw Najder described as incremental income that Conrad could draw on without substantial effort or extra work.7 With The Secret Agent, for example, he sold the US serial (and perhaps syndication) rights, and apparently negotiated for the UK serial rights, though this did not come to pass8; he, of course, sold the novel rights in both the US and UK markets, and developed the novel as a play—and later published it separately in that form as well. Then he sold
the holograph manuscript to Quinn. It is therefore not unreasonable to think that should Conrad have immersed himself in major research, and kept any kind of record of it, there might be corresponding notebooks. Even if they were not sold, they might have emerged, as Conrad’s personal Congo Diary did, selected by Curle for the Last Essays volume and serialized posthumously in Blue Peter in 1925. There has been no such record, however, so Sherry’s assumptions of “necessary immersion” need further scrutiny.
Whether one agrees with Sherry’s assumptions or not, there is no doubt that his research has been extremely valuable in providing context for The Secret Agent, and its associated short stories (“An Anarchist” and “The Informer” from A Set of Six); his assumptions about Conrad’s access and response to the source material, and his interpretations based on the same, however, are open to further debate. Rather than accept the idea of Conrad meticulously researching his material—there is perhaps a simpler answer. Conrad was, by virtue of his historical moment, immersed in the world of anarchist intrigue, and, as we will go on to see, the figures who populate his anarchist novels are the imaginative shades of late Victorian and early Edwardian England who were familiar to almost everyone.
Sherry’s contention, that Conrad carefully researches his materials leads him into intentional fallacies such as his suggestion that “The Informer,” documents the “first indication of Conrad’s disapproval of anarchists,”9 and he reiterates Irving Howe’s observation that Conrad’s treatment of them strips them of “the mildest claims to dignity and redemption.”10 As proof, in “An Anarchist” Sherry observes that Conrad makes no attempt to render the atrocious prison conditions that provoked an actual riot on the Iles de Salut. His concern is that Conrad’s omission of the circumstances surrounding the actual riot reveals an anti-anarchist authorial intention. The suggestion is that were Conrad interested in making the anarchists sympathetic characters, given that he had extensive access to sources on the actual Cayenne prison break, he could have pointed to documented prison conditions to mitigate the reader’s impression of the anarchists’ escape attempt, had he wanted to depict them in a sympathetic way.
Sherry’s contentions seem to collapse on two fronts. First, he makes the assumption that if Conrad had researched the historical event to the same degree as Sherry, he was bound by those details in his imaginative recreation of it. Second, Sherry seems to find inconceivable that Conrad’s sympathies should extend toward anarchism, philosophically at least, and create those moments of ambivalence in his fiction, his essays, and his
letters, where Conrad tends to befuddle his critics. In “Poland Revisited” he writes of “moments of revolt which stripped off me some of my simple trust in the governments of the universe.”8 Even given that temperamentally and ideologically Conrad may have found anarchism incompatible with his own beliefs, principally because of his skepticism, it would not prevent his respect, even perhaps his envy, for such an intense political conviction (as we can see in many of the letters to Cunninghame Graham, and as we see in the friendships with such figures dabbling in radical politics, as Cunninghame Graham, Edward Garnett, and H.G. Wells). Such is, after all, reminiscent of his father and those formative ideas of revolt that must have been part of the backdrop of his childhood. Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was in the forefront of Polish resistance to Russian rule. He was one of the major architects of Polish insurrection (indeed Poland’s underground and illegal government was founded in his home in Warsaw in 1861). He was arrested and exiled for his underground activities, and was eventually only released “on the representation off Prince Gallitzin that he was no longer dangerous.” Conrad’s own simple summation was: “He was dying.”11
Conrad’s skepticism should not be mistaken for conservatism, and that is, perhaps, Sherry’s failure. Too often, Conrad flirts with extreme views, either in his work, or in correspondence with his friends, to assert such a simple claim. “What makes you dangerous,” Conrad wrote to his friend, the radical political figure, Cunninghame Graham,
Is your unwarrantable belief that your desire may be realized. This is the only point of difference between us. I do not believe. And if I desire the same thing no one cares. Consequently I am not likely to be locked up or shot. Therein is another difference—this time to your manifest advantage.12
While Conrad may not be being entirely honest (perhaps even to himself), it is interesting that he claims the single difference between them is the act of faith in the political will of others: a dream long shattered for Conrad who had lived as a political martyr and witnessed failed insurrections and the death of loved ones before the age of ten.
His stories and novels, however, are not as clear-cut as some suggest. When Vladimir makes a simple observation in The Secret Agent (aimed at the middle class), his comment is primed to alienate a predominantly middle-class readership and encourage them to react against his character—he is the villain of the novel who sets Verloc’s plot in motion:
The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation. I suppose you agree that the middle classes are stupid?13
In this respect, Vladimir is alone among the antagonists in the novel for whom Conrad genuinely seems to resist developing any sympathetic perspective on his actions or psychology (almost to the extent that Conrad places at risk the breadth of sympathies provenanced in his Author’s Note). The reasons for Conrad’s attitude may readily be surmised, but he intentionally refuses to make them explicit. Without too much imagination one can look to Conrad’s pronounced antipathy to all things Russian. His attitude, like many traits characteristic in his writing and thinking, can be traced to his peculiar experience of race and family. All this apparently belonging to the past and to the memory of a Korzeniowski, the resentment remains as fresh as ever to Conrad, as is made clear in a letter to Garnett:
You remember always that I am a Slav (it’s your idée fixe) but you seem to forget that I am a Pole. You forget that we have been used to go to battle without illusions…. We have been “going in” these last hundred years repeatedly, to be knocked on the head only—as was visible to any calm intellect. But you have been learning your history from Russians no doubt.14
Conrad’s evident irritation (especially in the final sentence) is fanned by the fact that the Garnetts were unashamedly Russophile, but his response, though unfashionable, has the merit of sincere feeling. Russia is styled by Conrad as a “bottomless abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling desire of the hear t, every redeeming whisper of conscience.”15 It is perhaps with such a view of Russia in mind that Vladimir is cast as “fair game for a caricatural presentation,”16 and the sympathies of the reader are so firmly denied him in the years immediately following the Revolution of 1905.
The latter half of the passage voiced by Vladimir, ridiculing the middle classes, is an insertion (made after the holograph and serial versions) which cuts though the superficial, but potentially attractive sophistication (much admired in Society’s Salons) of the lubricious First Secretary. Before the addition, Vladimir’s remark may be taken for a wry comment
on the equanimity of the bourgeoisie. He calls them “imbecile,” but balances that with the observation that they are to be driven “out of their houses to starve in ditches.” Given a generous reading, his attitude may be taken for paternalism; his derision arising from concern. Conrad’s addition to the passage discloses (to the reader) important character distinctions: Vladimir’s brutal arrogance, his keen sense of superiority are implicit in his “I suppose you agree that the middle classes are stupid?”; and these distinctions—which make up his overbearing manner—are impressed, not merely upon Verloc (which presumably would not ruffle unduly the conscience of the novel’s audience), but upon the reader as well.
But compare it to a similar comment made by Comrade X, in “The Informer”: “Don’t you know yet…that an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is at its own expense?”17 In broad strokes, it is essentially the same comment—he is referring to the way the anarchist movement attracts help from the very class it denounces as its enemy. Perhaps such actions stem from the glamour of a kind of radical chic, perhaps they stem from a keen sense of morality or empathy, but the comment made by Comrade X, is qualitatively different. His remark, really something in the nature of a sociological insight, is reflected in much literature on the anarchist movement, and on revolutionary circles. The Princess Casamassima in James’ novel is just such a character; also included in this type are the upper-class brother and sister who run an anarchist press (based on the Rossettis) in “The Informer”; Lady Windermere in Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’s”; and, of course, the influential Lady Patroness in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, beloved of Michaelis, and the assistant commissioner, all participate in anarchist causes not (merely) because of fashion or the frisson of novelty, but because of a perception of morality.
Comrade X’s statement is reasonably and ironically modulated. Even the critical appellation “an idle and selfish class” is the utterance of a sophisticated and ironic narrator figure rather than the cant of a vicious demagogue, and hence it vies with other perspectives in the story as a representation of the truth. Broadly, the same utterance, each comment has as a part of its narrative context completely different perceptions of truth and character. Part of the weakness of Sherry’s account of such sources is that he does not seem particularly sensitive to Conrad’s diverse sympathies (to the extent that he fails to see any anarchist sympathies in The Secret Agent or A Set of Six). However, a crucial part of Comrade X’s truth is a comment which gnaws at the assurance of a conservative perspective. Much of
Conrad’s writing consists precisely of this tendency of truth to waver and shift according to its immediate context. As Conrad writes elsewhere, “I am long because my thought is always multiple.”18 Yet Sherry seems set on refusing to accept the paradoxically simple nature of such an admission, and hence he underestimates the complexities, indeed the sheer span, of Conrad’s sympathies.
A good case in point, as I remarked earlier, is the brief treatment of “An Anarchist.” Sherry’s account of the story refers to the official report and a second contemporary account of the actual attempted prison break from Cayenne (the Iles de Salut) upon which the island penitentiary of Conrad’s story is based. He makes much of the inclusion of details of the “warder hunt” compared to the omission of the details of the subsequent “convict hunt”:
Whereas our sympathy has been aroused for the murdered warders, no sympathy is suggested for the hunted convicts. And that this is a deliberate omission on Conrad’s part is shown by his omission also of those suggestions of severe punishments and maltreatments of convicts that appeared in some reports and were given as the reason for the mutiny.19
As suggested earlier, the validity of this argument relies first upon the assumption that Conrad researched his subject as thoroughly as Sherry himself, and with the intention of documenting actual events as nearly as possible. Conrad’s novels, however, are not crude polemics, and biographical enquiry alerts us quickly to his reluctance to play the part of political activist. Second, Sherry’s observation rests on the questionable assumption that Conrad allows no sympathy for the anarchists in the story—suggesting that the key figure of Paul who stands watch over the woman on the dock, and prepares to kill her and himself as the last resort if the convicts find them both is not an anarchist at all.
Sherry’s error here is that though Conrad may have chosen not to speak of the prison-isle conditions, he did fictionalize Paul’s enslavement by the meat processing corporation—a capitalist enterprise which literally liquefies its meat product to feed the masses, and consumes Paul just as completely (simply because it is difficult to keep a qualified engineer on the payroll). Explicitly, early in the story, is the refusal of the narrative voice to align itself definitively with a narrow moral stance. In fact, one might argue that the multiple stances of the text are consistent with the polyphony Bakhtin identifies in Dostoevsky’s fiction: thus alongside a condemnation of anarchists is the notion that the anarchists are also reacting
against something (inequities in society, the brutal machine of capitalism) which is itself rotten and contemptible. After all, it is Conrad that writes, “By Jove! If I had the necessary talent I would like to go for the true anarchist—which is the millionaire. Then you would see the venom flow.20 But it’s too big a job.”21 Sherry, however, will not suffer that Conrad’s sympathies are so diverse (because he intentionally diverges from the historical sources?).
Sherry rightly points to man’s gullibility as an area of Conrad’s concern (e.g., his weakness toward socialistic fads), and though he remarks on the B.O.S advertising campaign (mentioned at the beginning of the story), and suggests that Paul is equally the victim of both anarchism and capitalism, Sherry’s thesis quickly narrows to become merely a reading of Paul’s manipulation by, and eventual revolt against, anarchist oppression:
“An Anarchist” is a strange story, crude and uncomfortable in some of its implications, but it gives us a foreshadowing of Conrad’s methods and attitudes in The Secret Agent. As in that novel, he takes as his central incident an actual and horrible event, but the modifications and changes he makes and the manner in which the characters are developed show a deliberate attempt to present anarchists as contemptible creatures and to deny them the reader’s sympathy.22
Sherry clearly registers the complexity and ambiguity inherent in the story, but he chooses to disregard “some of the implications,” “crude and uncomfortable” as they are. His thesis falters because it does not recognize Paul as an anarchist, or at least in part, as a victim of the historical forces between which he is caught. Conrad, Sherry claims, denies the anarchists of his tale, (and hence “anarchism” is Sherry’s inference), the reader’s sympathy. Paul, however, surely retains the reader’s sympathy: first, because he unlike the other “anarchists” takes no part in the prison break; and second, because he remains a victimized figure under the thrall of the unwholesome capitalism of the B.O.S. manager. However, Sherry assumes that because Paul takes no part in the prison break he cannot be an anarchist (the implication being that his political convictions can be determined because he does not associate with the Cayenne anarchists); but as we learn in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, characters seldom prove their convictions merely by association. Both Verloc and Razumov are ostensibly identified by the circles they move in, yet both are ideologically averse to anarchist and revolutionary stances.
By contrast, in The Secret Agent, a convincing argument might be posited for the contention that Winnie is the most anarchistic of characters though she is by no means included in the anarchist coterie (and even though she distrusts them and condemns the crude propaganda they employ); indeed her position remains muted and on the fringes of that group for which she never expresses anything but disapproval (there are similarities between her position and Paul’s). On two notable occasions, however, she is the mediator of acute observations (or accusations) which would be entirely at home in any anarchist pamphlet. At the end of Chap. 4, for example, as the Verlocs prepare variously for the coming night— Winnie unconscious of the imminent tragedy and Adolf, painfully conscious of his impending insomnia—they argue (or at least Winnie does, her husband failing to respond) about the inflammatory influence that Verloc’s “political business” has on Stevie: “He isn’t fit to hear what’s said here. He believes it’s all true. He knows no better. He gets into his passions over it.”23 The initial implication of Winnie’s remarks is that Stevie is unfit to be subjected to such comments because he does not have the emotional or intellectual capacity to distinguish between truth and falsehood. It is interesting that Winnie makes that judgment about Stevie, it places her above him in terms of the very areas she finds lacking in him. The suggestion thereby is that Winnie, in recognizing Stevie’s inability to distinguish, is herself very much aware and conscious. As Winnie continues however, her own ability to make such a distinction apparently falters. Concerning Ossipon’s F.P. leaflets, she says:
The other day Stevie got hold of one, and there was a story in it of a German officer tearing half-off the ear of a recruit, and nothing was done to him for it. The brute!… [Stevie] would have stuck that officer like a pig if he had seen him then. It’s true, too! Some people don’t deserve much mercy.24
There is an interesting corollary of this account by Winnie in Juliet Soskice’s late memoir Chapters From Childhood (1923). Soskice is Ford Madox Ford’s younger sister, who recounts some of her own experiences among the anarchist sympathies of the Rossetti household in the early chapters of the memoir. She also recounts experiences from time spent in a German convent school, including an account of a schoolmate’s officer brother who had reprimanded an orderly by striking him in the mouth and knocking out several teeth. Later in the evening, the orderly had attempted revenge by striking the officer with a bottle of champagne,
but the officer (much to the young girl’s evident pride) “just jumped up, pulled out his revolver and shot the orderly.”25 Soskice’s early anarchist sympathies are evident throughout the memoir (an example of the class betrayal Comrade X mentioned earlier), and she even wins a writing prize at her English convent school with a lurid tale of an anarchist attack on a church. In the following chapter, as we will see, there is some reason to think that Conrad might have had exposure to these aspects of anarchist narratives via the Rossetti family and Ford, but here, the similarity of tone with Winnie’s account is striking. The tone of Winnie’s report loses its objective neutrality faced with innocent suffering in the face of brute authority (this resonates with Winnie, of course, because of the vulnerability of her brother Stevie, victim of his father’s rages in his early childhood). This is explored in more detail in chapter 3 “Popular Accounts of the Greenwich Bombing”
Along with her concern for her brother is a sympathizing and developing indignation over suffering in general. “The Brute!” she exclaims at the height of transition from passive observation to righteous passion; and more, to a vengeful awareness of the spirit of retribution: “some people don’t deserve much mercy,” she exclaims, foreshadowing the retribution she will later exact. Her indignation shows that contrary to appearances, she is not sure of that line between truth and propaganda, or, alternatively, it suggests that there is some moral truth in the propaganda. Either way, it foregrounds the shift toward retributive action that Winnie takes late in the novel.
Finally, she responds just as Stevie would respond, helpless in an unforgiving logic. Unlike Stevie, however, she does not act upon injustice outside of her immediate world. The plight of the German soldier embitters her, but does not leave her restless and frustrated. Her love for Stevie is too central a part of her makeup, so that while he remains secure and unthreatened, her passion, though aroused, is not manifested (rather like the national model of anarchist which is tolerated while it is not a direct threat). When Stevie engages her in a conversation regarding the police, her answer, “not perhaps unnatural in the wife of Mr. Verloc, Delegate of the Central Red Committee, personal friend of certain anarchists, and a votary of social revolution,” is, quite simply a denunciation: “Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have.”26
Her comments are, moreover, uttered “with the equanimity of a person untroubled by the problem of the distribution of wealth, and exploring the perspective of the roadway for an omnibus of the right colour.”27 For Winnie the disclosure does not indicate personal vanity. She, after
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