Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [8]
He even went so far as to deny the formative influence on him of French writers in order, as Najder characterizes it, “to erase from his literary biography any elements which might detract from his reputation as a classic of the English literary tradition” (p. 433).
In addition to the conflict over his dual national allegiances, Conrad was faced with the dilemma of how to negotiate the conflicting exigencies of two distinct audiences for his fiction. Subsequent to the education reform movement of the 1870s (a series of acts passed by Parliament had made elementary education compulsory for all British children), the British reading public had increasingly divided into a new mass readership and a highbrow readership. Although Conrad’s loyalties were with the latter, he was financially dependent on the former, and, despite his begrudging efforts to appeal to a popular readership, his books simply would not sell well. Unsuccessful in attracting a popular readership, he attempted to make his writing more lucrative by adapting his fiction for the stage, but the results of this endeavor were disappointing as well. Although he blithely claimed of his 1905 adaptation of his short story “To-morrow” (under the title One Day More) that he was content to have “an exceptionally intelligent audience stare... it coldly off the boards” (“The Censor of Plays” in The Works of Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters, p. 77), privately he had made clear that he had been hoping it would make him solvent in a way that his fiction had not yet done for him: “my little play.... may lead to the end of all my financial troubles,” he had optimistically speculated (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 237). The first substantial sign of a change in this situation was the 1912 publication of ‘Twixt Land and Sea (including the fine short story “The Secret Sharer”), which garnered unprecedentedly high sales for him. Yet it would not be until the publication of the novel Chance, in 1914, that he would have an actual best-seller and a measure of relief from his financial burdens. From this point on, Conrad was marketable.
In an irony of the sort that is characteristic of his own fiction, however, Conrad’s newfound popularity coincided with a dramatic and permanent diminution in his powers as a writer. Indeed, the fact that Henry James, whom Conrad viewed as the greatest authority on the art of the novel form, had been sharply critical of Chance made painfully clear to him that the work’s fame and its artistic quality were not proportional to each other. The decline that had begun with Chance steepened with his next novel, Victory (1915), and his subsequent fiction, with the notable exception of the novella The Shadow-Line (1917), is inferior still. Some critics identify this process as having begun with his nervous collapse in 1910 after completing Under Western Eyes. So torturous was the writing of this book that even for Conrad, for whom completion of a novel was often the occasion for physical and emotional breakdown, it was extreme: he collapsed with fever, raved, and spent three months in bed recuperating. Yet regardless of whether one can identify the deterioration in the quality of his fiction with a particular event, it is apparent that his mode of creativity was not sustainable either physically or psychologically.
Other circumstances no doubt contributed as well to his decline. The fact that he began writing at a relatively advanced age meant that the duration of his career would be correspondingly short, and his creative difficulties later in life were surely exacerbated by various burdens, such as the chronically poor health of his wife and the long-term effects of shell shock experienced by his son Borys in the trenches of World War I. It is also important to recognize that the tendency to dismiss Conrad