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Conrad, Wells, and the Two Voices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
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THROUGHOUT the nineteenth century, Art, or the Life of Art, brought with it characteristics of death, decay, dissolution, pessimism, and nihilism, even when it stood, theoretically at least, for transcendence and transformation. The world of Art, so closely akin to the unconscious and preconscious, fell into the role described for it by Plato, as “frantic and possessed.” Socrates reasons, in a well-known passage, that “the poet is an airy thing, a winged and a holy thing ; and he cannot make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his senses and no mind is left in him.”1 The Poet, the Artist, the Creator is, as we know, both ecstatic and calculating. He calls attention to thoughts and acts that lie deep within us and that we try to disguise with logic; in brief, the Artist plays on our unconscious (what we cannot control) by appealing to our consciousness (what, we think, we can control).
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973
References
1 Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (New York: New American Library, 1956), p. 18. The author wishes to thank the Conrad Estate, the Univ. of Illinois' Wells Archives, and Dartmouth Univ. Library for permission to quote from manuscript letters (ALS) of Joseph Conrad.
2 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), p. 5.
3 Experiment in Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1934), p. 529; hereafter cited in text as E.A.
4 Dated Christmas 1898. Rpt. in Conrad's Polish Background: letters to and from Polish Friends, ed. Zdzislaw Najder, trans. Halina Carroll (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964).
5 ALS (incomplete), Univ. of Illinois' Wells Archives (hereafter called Illinois). The author wishes to thank the Conrad Estate, the Univ. of Illinois' Wells Archives, and Dartmouth Univ. Library for permission to quote from manuscript letters (ALS) of Joseph Conrad.
6 11 May 1896, Twenty Letters to Joseph Conrad, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (London: First Edition Club, 1926), 8 pamphlets without pagination, numbering, and sequence.
7 Fortnightly Review (Nov. 1911), pp. 148–49; rpt. as An Englishman Looks at the World (London: Cassell, 1914).
8 Henry James and H. G. Wells, eds. Leon Edel and Gordon Ray (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1958), p. 62. James in 1914 would attempt a survey of young or new writers, including Conrad, Wells, and Bennett. In his witty, almost parodie, comments upon the latter two as overly saturated with the actual, he wrote: “They squeeze out to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange of a particular acquainted state and let this affirmation of energy, however directed or undirected, constitute for them the ‘treatment’ of the theme.” Just 10 years later, Virginia Woolf was to launch a similar attack upon realistic novelists with her now famous essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”
9 Introd. to The History of Mr. Polly by H. G. Wells, ed. Gordon Ray (Boston: Houghton, 1960), p. xxxiii.
10 Thursday, 1903, ALS, Illinois. Not one of Wells's more imaginative pieces, “Filmer” is a science-fiction story about flying written in a flat, realistic prose.
11 Hugh Walpole noted in his Journal for 23 Jan. 1918: “His [Conrad's] final quarrel with Wells was: ‘The difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don't care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!‘ ”
12 (London: Boni and Liveright, 1909), p. 349.
13 8 Oct. 1903. Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, ed. Harris Wilson (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1960), pp. 100–01.
14 Henry James and H. G. Wells, pp. 267–68. J. Mitchell Morse reminds me that Wells's differences with Conrad and James continued into his attitude toward Joyce. In his edition of Joyce's Letters (Vol. i), Stuart Gilbert prints Wells's 23 Nov. 1928 letter to Joyce, extraordinary in its mixture of distaste, admiration, awe, and final rejection: “Who the hell [writes Wells] is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering? . . . Your work is an extraordinary experiment and I would go out of my way to save it from destruction or restrictive interruption. It has its believers and its following. Let them rejoice in it. To me it is a dead end” (p. 275). In his reaction to Wells, Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver (2 Dec. 1928) that he doubted whether Wells's “attitude towards words and language is as scientific as he himself ought to wish it to be” (Gilbert, p. 277). Joyce put the argument where it belongs, on esthetic grounds, where careful writing prevails over hasty, sloppy prose.