A Simple Tale
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Giles Foden
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Introduction © Giles Foden 2007
The Secret Agent was first published in 1907
The author’s preface was first published in 1920
Published by Vintage 2007
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Author’s Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Copyright
To
H. G. Wells
The chronicler of Mr. Lewisham’s love
the biographer of Kipps and the
historian of the ages to come
this simple tale of the XIX century
is affectionately offered
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in the Ukraine on 3 December 1857. His parents were Polish and had both died in exile by the time Conrad was eleven years old. His uncle became his guardian and looked after him in Krakow until he was sixteen when he went to sea. He worked on both French and British ships before he became a British citizen in 1886 and changed his name to Joseph Conrad. In 1896 he married Jessie George and they later had two sons. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published in 1895 and he went on to write many more, as well as short stories, essays and a memoir. His most famous work, Heart of Darkness (1899), was inspired by his experiences working on a steamboat in the Congo. The Secret Agent was first published in 1907. Joseph Conrad died on 3 August 1924.
Almayer’s Folly
An Outcast of the Islands
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’
Lord Jim
Heart of Darkness
Youth
Typhoon
Nostromo
The Mirror of the Sea
Under Western Eyes
Chance
Victory
The Shadow-Line
The Rescue
The Rover
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GILES FODEN
London is under threat. It has become a haven for political exiles and anarchists. Frequent bomb threats and disturbances interrupt the lives of the city’s inhabitants, who live in fear of the terrorists in their midst. One such terrorist is Verloc. He is the secret agent who is given the mission to strike right at the heart of London’s pride by blowing up Greenwich Observatory. But his decision to drag his innocent family into the plot leads to tragic consequences on a more personal than political level.
The beginning of The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) is laden with what, on the surface, seem like mysterious references to hair. There is the ‘black wig with a white cap’ worn by the widowed mother of Winnie Verloc, the full-busted, broad-hipped heroine of the book who has married Verloc, the secret agent of the title, simply to find a material way to look after her mentally retarded brother, Stevie. There is Winnie’s own hair, ‘very tidy’, and apparently significant of otherness: ‘Traces of the French descent the widow boasted were apparent in Winnie too … in the extremely neat and artistic arrangement of her glossy dark hair.’ The preoccupation is not a solely female one. There is also Verloc’s own ‘dark, smooth moustache’, first spotted over bedclothes pulled up to his chin and covering ‘thick lips capable of much honeyed banter’. And finally there is Stevie, the ‘growth of thin fluffy hair … [that has] … come to blur, like a golden mist, the sharp line of his small lower jaw.’ All this in a first chapter!
It is a chapter in which the principal players in Conrad’s intense family drama are expertly introduced through a tour of Verloc’s premises – 32 Brett Street, Soho: a shop whose door is always half ajar. The business is selling contraceptives – those ‘closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures’ – together with pornography and anarchist literature. For, of course, The Secret Agent is not just a family drama but also a political one. Revolutionary terrorists meet in Verloc’s shop, unaware that its proprietor is reporting on their activities to the embassy of a great foreign power. (The Russian embassy seems most likely, though Prussia would do just as well. In calling Verloc’s two controllers Baron Stott-Wartenheim and Mr Vladimir, Conrad seems to be hedging his bets.)
The shop is where Verloc sets out from for his appointment with Mr Vladimir at the embassy, leaving his ‘ostensible business’ in the hands of Stevie. The clue to the mystery of the hair lies in that ‘ostensible’, for hair is what covers up, what disguises. But the agency that is secret is not just Verloc’s work as an informer and agent provocateur for Mr Vladimir, nor yet the more or less violent anarchist plans of Michaelis, Ossipon, Yundt and the Professor. It is Winnie’s working marriage in the interests of her brother; it is the Assistant Commissioner keeping his own wife happy; it is Chief Inspector Heat’s private mission to lock up all the anarchists regardless of habeas corpus. It is, most of all, the mass of mankind, ‘mighty in its numbers’, swarming ‘numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too perhaps.’ Their secrecy relates to their indifference, and to the fact that the mass of humanity is an unpredictable entity, the sum effect of whose actions is incalculable.
The previous quotation shows Conrad at his rhetorical best, dispelling those doubters who say he relies too much on abstract language. For here are they not, those much-maligned abstract nouns, moving across the periodic rhythm of the sentence just like a surging crowd? The mighty mass thus signified, the unheeded proleteriat of all nations, is certainly the subject of this book, which to my mind is among the greatest in the English language yet written. Its object is sociological, what it’s concerned to show – nothing less than the ineffability of the human multitude, the unutterable burden of their desires and fears, their nightmares, hopes and dreams.
The ‘wisdom of crowds’ it might not be, but whatever it is, this ineffability is oblivious to policemen and terrorists alike. The dean of British Conrad critics, Robert Hampson, has called it ‘the novel’s own anarchic subversion of systems’, and this seems very right to me. In the presentation of opposing political views, for that matter in the presentation of each perceiving consciousness, something like a process of mixing or turbulence is going on. It is as if Conrad is saying it’s impossible to limit things off. Everything is interrelated (the book’s plot expertly shows this in the round), and private and professional motives cannot be divided.
These interrelations apply to classes, to the very idea of classes in dialectical opposition as conceived in Marx’s programmatic fashion. In offering up the implacable totality of the modern urban crowd – perhaps in counterpoint to the implacability of the sea in his earlier work – Conrad is keen to show how near that crowd is to his middle- and upper-class readers. The ‘era of reconstruction’ – the building of Trafalgar Square and Shaftesbury Avenue in the late 1880s, mentioned on the book’s first page – has by no means cleared London of its slums. No, the hard city is ‘just there’ in The Secret Agent, and the threat of it is conceived as an inanimate one, as inimical to slum-dwellers as to anyone else. This is made clear in the text. Returning from his visit to the embassy, a depressed Verloc (the book is also one of the great masterpieces of the depiction of male depression) slips off his braces and, pulling up the venetian blind, leans his forehead ‘against the cold window-pane – a fragile film of glass stretched between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely and unfriendly to man.’
The same sentiment is expressed in John Buchan’s novel The Power-House (1916): ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Satan.’ Another London novel (of inferior quality to The Secret Agent), The Power-House is about a secret society whose ultimate goal is world domination. Though coming from very different directions – Buchan from Presbyterian Scotland and London’s clubland, via South Africa; Conrad from a family whose father was imprisoned and exiled for his part in a radical uprising against Czarist rule – they were both acutely aware of the sinister potentialities of revolution.
So far as the London aspects of Conrad’s novel are concerned, they share more with the down at heel, anomie-ridden London of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Prelude’ (1915) and The Waste Land (1923) than Buchan’s Pall Mall, though the salon of Michaelis’s patroness is in Piccadilly and the Assistant Commissioner operates in Whitehall and Westminster. This mixing of dingy, fashionable and political society is one of the most striking characteristics of The Secret Agent. Geometrically speaking it is a circle, like one of those Stevie endlessly draws, not a line: everything comes round in the end. The mathematical construction of the book might be a good subject for a Ph.D since its refusal of classes applies to types of mental conception as well as social divisions. As Mr Vladimir puts to Verloc: ‘Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics.’
There is something in that remark of the lesson Conrad learned from Henry James about narrating different quantities through their opposites. As the latter said, in the preface to his short story ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895), ‘the spirit engaged with the forces of violence interests me most when I can think of it as engaged most deeply, most finely and most “subtly” (precious terms!)’
That impact of violence against subtlety, represented in The Secret Agent by science, got a dry run with violence impacting art in ‘The Informer’, a story of Conrad’s about anarchists published in Harper’s Magazine in 1906, while he was writing The Secret Agent. ‘The Informer’ is narrated by a collector of Chinese bronzes and porcelain who is introduced to ‘Mr X’, a famous revolutionary writer. Another collector, X lives in luxury while proclaiming: ‘There’s no amendment to be got out of mankind except by terror or violence.’ X tries to prove there is no contradiction between the luxury of his life and his destructive propaganda by telling the tale of a young woman, a bourgeoise ‘Lady Amateur’, one of the ‘idle and selfish class’ who dabbles in revolutionary activities. It is a figure whose type we know from Henry James’s terrorism novel The Princess Casamassima (1886) though there, as with Michaelis’s patroness in The Secret Agent, the Lady is a full-blooded aristocrat. In James’s novel, the protégé Hyacinth Robinson (who blows himself up) is a bookbinder; before he became a revolutionary celebrity, Michaelis was a locksmith. Both are professions which give access across barriers.
James’s novel and ‘The Informer’, together with another Conrad short story, ‘An Anarchist’ (1906), are part of the essential literary background of The Secret Agent, but its real roots lie in the author’s own physical wanderings. Practically speaking, the anonymity of the city in the novel derives from periods Conrad spent in London between ships, a lonely Polish sailor lodging in various districts in 1880 (Finsbury Park and Stoke Newington), 1889 (Pimlico) and 1891 (Victoria); that is to say exactly the time during which The Secret Agent is set. As he puts it in his Author’s Preface: ‘I had to fight hard to keep at arm’s-length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days, lest they should rush in and overwhelm each page of the story.’
The influence of these walks on the construction of the novel cannot be overestimated. In his memoir, A Personal Record, Conrad recalls exploring ‘the maze of streets east and west in solitary leisurely walks without chart or compass’. Could it be that it was Brett Passage or Brett Road, London E8 – just to the east of his Stoke Newington digs at 6 Dynevor Road – that provided the name for Verloc’s shop on a fictional 32 Brett Street in Soho?
Who knows, but one retains on reading The Secret Agent a strong sense of Conrad, like Dickens before him, as an urban flâneur, a strolling spectator absorbed by crime, grime and grandeur. The Polish peregrinator dissects the city on foot but – being an outsider everywhere – refusing the divisions it normally employed to explain itself, keeping his equanimity in front of this place ‘of marvels and mud’, as London seems to Winnie.
To modern eyes some of those divisions and regions need explaining, as although the character of Soho has intensified (despite the efforts of Westminster Council), others have changed utterly. One is Islington, where the Professor lives in the novel, that ‘unwholesome-looking little moral agent of destruction’. In the 1880s and 90s, Islington was a powerful source of ‘unhygienic labour’ as Conrad calls the working class in the book. It wasn’t anything like today’s ‘New Labour’ zone until 100 years later. Until at least 1992 the atmosphere was bohemian, sometimes downright disreputable. I saw the transformation myself while living in Islington at that time as a young writer and enthusiastic drinker, watching as the white working-class gangster’s club on my street (Riley’s, on Westbourne Road: it was full of ‘the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms’ that characterises Winnie’s plunging blow) was slowly overwhelmed by the agglomeration of lawyers and media people moving into houses nearby. The Secret Agent was prophetic in seeing London as a place of changing properties, but even Conrad could not have foreseen the extent to which the city’s inhabitants would be in thrall not to secret agents but estate agents, and its landscape changed not by the commune’s raising of barricades but by those raised in the process of gentrification.
Conrad’s anarchists, who do not believe in private property at all, have a different idea of reconstruction. They want everything to change very quickly indeed. The Professor is the only one of them who is dangerous, terrifyingly so, with his padlocked wardrobe full of explosive chemicals and a rubber-ball detonator in his pocket. But ironically he, ‘lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized’, is the most affected of all by the ineffability of mass human movement. At home in Islington and in finer parts of the city’ the ‘limits of the horizon’ might be ‘hidden by enormous piles of bricks’, but the immense multitude can be perceived. What if nothing could move them? That is the terrorist’s fear. As Conrad implies, the problem of the novelist is not so very different.
The Professor is one of a number of characters in the book whose interiority is suddenly displayed to us – as internal lumber, in his case. After meeting blond, ‘robust’, curly-haired Tom Ossipon, womaniser and fellow conspirator, he glances into a shop window on his way home to N1: ‘Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood.’ It is as if Conrad were trying to explain the Professor’s motivation in terms of a fairy tale, but like so much else in The Secret Agent, the clarity of the old tale has been made ‘winding’, ‘bizarre’, ‘tangled’ by modernity; and from that involution something perverse, psychologically speaking, has come.
The moment of self-recognition (the Professor is spooked by the mirror) is thematically fitting. In the ever-changing city even the terrorist, with his padlocked cupboard, will be disturbed. The Professor cannot remain in ‘the hermitage of the perfect anarchist’. Very shortly after looking into the furniture shop he will be found by Chief Inspector Heat, if only to be told he is not sought. The suicide bomber warns the policeman that ‘you may be exposed to the unpleasantness of being buried together with me’, perhaps the most sickly evocation of mixing in the whole book.
The sense of permeable architectural limit that the novel so elegantly displays has its psychological counterpart. Just as different regions and inhabitants of the city will always interpenetrate, even if not bodily, so there will be a mixing of mental states. Once again it’s a case of furniture, mental and actual. Mr Verloc does not really notice Winnie’s mother taking away furniture for her new lodging in the almshouse (‘his intense meditation, like a sort of Chinese wall, isolated him completely from the phenomena of this world of vain effort and illusory appearance’) but the leaving of the remainder at Brett Street and more importantly Stevie (‘somewhat in the same way as the furniture’) will open his reserve like a key. Widow Verloc’s departure does just as much to trigger the tragedy as Mr Vladimir’s order as it is involved in the changed set of domestic circumstances that causes Winnie to ask Verloc to take Stevie out with him a little, which in turn puts the idea of using Stevie at Greenwich in Verloc’s head as he frantically searches for an accomplice.
On coming in after the bombing and being asked serenely by Winnie if he has been to see Stevie, Verloc might slam the ‘glazed parlour door’ between the shop and the house – the door that divides the two parts of his life – but he will now no longer be able keep them apart. From this moment on come a series of brilliantly handled scenes that are half French farce, half Greek tragedy. First the Assistant Commissioner then Heat turn up at Brett Street, slowly Winnie realises the awful truth, and the climax that is the result of the mixing of personal and political is inescapable. In Aristotelian, structural terms, the rising towards the moment of tragic crisis and the falling away from it (the Ossipon-Winnie scenes), have never been better done in all fiction.
The coming tragedy is made all the more poignant by Verloc’s ironically resonant babbling (‘I have no mind to get … a stab in the back directly’) and the presence of the joint of beef, acting like ‘funereal baked meats for Stevie’s obsequies’ but also standing in for Stevie himself, in reality lately gathered up with a shovel by a constable (‘blown to small bits: limbs, gravel, clothing, bones, splinters – all mixed up together’). Far from being evidence of sordidness and moral squalor, as some contemporary reviewers averred (Conrad rebuts them in his Author’s Preface), the generic and the physical mixing is of a piece with the Heraclitean ‘everything flows’ ethos of the novel – even if it is mostly a dirty kind of flow, as noted by the description of the Assistant Commissioner’s visit to Soho as being ‘a descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off’.
The Assistant Commissioner is the unacknowledged hero of the book. Surely it is in his and the minds of other characters in this 1907 book (in particular Verloc’s), not Leopold Bloom’s in Ulysses (1922) or Clarissa Dalloway’s in Mrs Dalloway (1925), that we find the first signs of indirect free style turning into stream of consciousness as an emerging trend in literature in English. See here, as skulking in the shadows the Assistant Commissioner takes then loses account of a more junior copper:
The policeman on the beat projected his sombre and moving form against the luminous glory of oranges and lemons, and entered Brett Street without haste. The Assistant Commissioner, as though he were a member of the criminal classes, lingered out of sight, awaiting his return. But this constable seemed to be lost to the force forever. He never returned: must have gone out the other end of Brett Street.
A lot hangs on the omission of the pronoun ‘he’ before ‘must have’. The Assistant Commissioner’s musing thought about the beat constable’s disappearance is recorded as part of the third person narration but with a much stronger sense than usual in Conrad of the stream of a single character’s momentarily charged psychology breaking through. It might be thought fitting in a novel which is all about mental and physical breakthroughs, from the penetration of Verloc’s indolent self-isolation (not least of which is his belief that he was married for himself and not for Stevie) to Winnie’s conviction that ‘life doesn’t stand much looking into’.
That is not to say that the examined life might be any more nurturing. With as warming lights only the Assistant Commissioner’s professionalism (and in even that there is a self-serving element relating to his own domestic circumstances) and Winnie’s love for Stevie (and that receives from its background too much of what the author in his Preface calls ‘sombre colouring’ to be truly warming), Conrad’s vision is powerfully nihilistic.
Given that nihilism, it is no wonder commentators such as John Gray (in his book Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (2003)) and Pankaj Mishra (in an article on the literature of terrorism published in the Guardian on 19 May 2007) have drawn parallels between Conrad’s anarchists and the followers of Osama bin Laden. For what is the Professor but a prototype for a suicide bomber of the type with which we are now all too familiar? And it is no wonder that The Secret Agent was not just the favourite book of that homegrown American terrorist Theodore J. Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, but a kind of working manual for his activities.
Al Qaeda actually drew some of its philosophy from nineteenth-century European revolutionaries like the Professor and his crew. As for the Unabomber (a former mathematics professor who had read Conrad’s works a dozen times, according to his lawyer), Kaczynski used ‘Conrad’ or ‘Konrad’ as an alias on at least three occasions while staying at a hotel in Sacramento from where he mailed bombs. He lived a hermit’s life in his Montana cabin and chose science and technology as his targets – suggesting targets to himself as Mr Vladimir suggests Verloc ‘has a go’ at astronomy in the form of the Greenwich Observatory.
Gray makes the point that ‘In Conrad’s time, the sacrosanct science was physics. Today it is economics. Al Qaeda destroyed a building devoted to trade, not one dedicated to the study of the stars. The strategy is the same – to remake the world by spectacular acts of terror.’ Once again the scope of Conrad’s prophetic vision is clear.
He was clear-eyed about state-sponsored terror, too. In asking Verloc to provoke a ‘not especially sanguine’ outrage in order to cause the British police to crack down on foreign militants, Mr Vladimir is conducting an episode of what the Assistant Commissioner later in the book calls ‘authorized scoundrelism’. It is of a type with which we have become familiar in conspiracy theories since the events of September 11, 2001: the idea that subsequent bombings, even (in the most lurid theory) the attack on the twin towers itself, have been covertly committed by Western and Israeli governments to give them licence to erode civil liberties and abandon international law.
These conspiracy theories cannot be taken seriously in anywise but there is no doubt that the intelligence agencies of democratic Western governments have engaged in countless jobs of ‘authorized scoundrelism’ since Conrad’s time. ‘Black ops’ as they would now be called, comprise of deniable acts of violence designed for some particular political end, often to call down further violence or legal repression on the potential perpetrators of terror or other political enemies. In such a situation the moral division between the terrorist and the black operator is paper-thin.
To be positively multidimensional is the only viable aesthetic response. Roll up the paper-thin line and you make a circle, the same shape as Adolf and Winnie Verlocs’ wedding ring, found stuck to the wood of a steamer bench by one of the ship’s hands. Its glitter caught the man’s eye, and it remains the only physical sign of Winnie, whom Conrad saw as the true tragic heroine of this tale, with a good deal of, but not total, compassion.
Winnie’s fate will haunt her brief, false amour, Tom Ossipon, as he meets with the Professor in the Silenus at the end of the book: ‘And Comrade Ossipon raised his bowed head, beloved of various humble women of these isles, Apollo-like in the sunniness of its bush of hair.’ So we have come full circle at last, but now hair is covering not secret anti-state political activity nor secret state counter-espionage, nor yet the lie of a domestic situation. Now what the hirsute covering betokens is Ossipon’s impoverished inner state as opposed to his outer wealth, which is mostly being used to drown his sorrows. It is as if he is being led, by a long uncrinkling strand of his own yellow hair, into a life of drunkenness and penury in the service of capitalism:
Already his robust form, with an Embassy’s secret-service money (inherited from Mr Verloc) in his pockets, was marching in the gutter as if in training for the task of an inevitable future. Already he bowed his broad shoulders, his head of ambrosial locks, as if ready to receive the leather yoke of the sandwich board.
Ossipon’s payback for his betrayal of Winnie is in some ways the most terrible fate of all, Verloc’s death by stabbing, Stevie’s by explosion, and Winnie’s by drowning notwithstanding. For he must continue living in that ‘monstrous town’ with Winnie’s fate on his hands and in his mind. The only person able to explain the ‘impenetrable mystery’ of her ‘act of madness and despair’, he remains filled with dread by the reverberations of this ‘simple tale’, afraid of insanity.
Readers today may approach the story in different guise, appreciative of it as one of Conrad’s masterpieces and the first great modern spy novel; which is also to say the first great novel of modernity, since a condition of mixed-up uncertainty, of being double-counter-bluffed till you don’t know where or what you are, is emblematic of being modern. As a reading of this book will evidence, it can be exhilarating as well as menacing.
Giles Foden, 2007
The origin of ‘The Secret Agent’: subject, treatment, artistic purpose and every other motive that may induce an author to take up his pen, can, I believe, be traced to a period of mental and emotional reaction.
The actual facts are that I began this book impulsively and wrote it continuously. When in due course it was bound and delivered to the public gaze I found myself reproved for having produced it at all. Some of the admonitions were severe, others had a sorrowful note. I have not got them textually before me but I remember perfectly the general argument, which was very simple; and also my surprise at its nature. All this sounds a very old story now! And yet it is not such a long time ago. I must conclude that I had still preserved much of my pristine innocence in the year 1907. It seems to me now that even an artless person might have foreseen that some criticisms would be based on the ground of sordid surroundings and the moral squalor of the tale.
That of course is a serious objection. It was not universal. In fact it seems ungracious to remember so little reproof amongst so much intelligent and sympathetic appreciation; and I trust that the readers of this Preface will not hasten to put it down to wounded vanity or a natural disposition to ingratitude. I suggest that a charitable heart could very well ascribe my choice to natural modesty. Yet it isn’t exactly modesty that makes me select reproof for the illustration of my case. No, it isn’t exactly modesty. I am not at all certain that I am modest; but those who have read so far through my work will credit me with enough decency, tact, savoir faire, what you will, to prevent me from making a song for my own glory out of the words of other people. No! The true motive of my selection lies in quite a different trait. I have always had a propensity to justify my action. Not to defend. To justify. Not to insist that I was right but simply to explain that there was no perverse intention, no secret scorn for the natural sensibilities of mankind at the bottom of my impulses.
That kind of weakness is dangerous only so far that it exposes one to the risk of becoming a bore; for the world generally is not interested in the motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile and smile but he is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from explanations. Yet I will go on with mine. It’s obvious that I need not have written that book. I was under no necessity to deal with that subject; using the word subject both in the sense of the tale itself and in the larger one of a special manifestation in the life of mankind. This I fully admit. But the thought of elaborating mere ugliness in order to shock, or even simply to surprise my readers by a change of front, has never entered my head. In making this statement I expect to be believed, not only on the evidence of my general character but also for the reason, which anybody can see, that the whole treatment of the tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying pity and contempt, prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness which lie simply in the outward circumstances of the setting.
The inception of ‘The Secret Agent’ followed immediately on a two years’ period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote novel, ‘Nostromo,’ with its far off Latin-American atmosphere; and the profoundly personal ‘Mirror of the Sea’. The first an intense creative effort on what I suppose will always remain my largest canvas, the second an unreserved attempt to unveil for a moment the profounder intimacies of the sea and the formative influences of nearly half my life-time. It was a period, too, in which my sense of the truth of things was attended by a very intense imaginative and emotional readiness which, all genuine and faithful to facts as it was, yet made me feel (the task once done) as if I were left behind, aimless amongst mere husks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior, values.
I don’t know whether I really felt that I wanted a change, change in my imagination, in my vision and in my mental attitude. I rather think that a change in the fundamental mood had already stolen over me unawares. I don’t remember anything definite happening. With ‘The Mirror of the Sea’ finished in the full consciousness that I had dealt honestly with myself and my readers in every line of that book, I gave myself up to a not unhappy pause. Then, while I was yet standing still, as it were, and certainly not thinking of going out of my way to look for anything ugly, the subject of ‘The Secret Agent’ – I mean the tale – came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities; how brought about I don’t remember now.
I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable. Presently, passing to particular instances, we recalled the already old story of the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical processes. But that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer wall of the Observatory it did not show as much as the faintest crack.
I pointed all this out to my friend who remained silent for a while and then remarked in his characteristically casual and omniscient manner: ‘Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards.’ These were absolutely the only words that passed between us; for extreme surprise at this unexpected piece of information kept me dumb for a moment and he began at once to talk of something else. It never occurred to me later to ask how he arrived at his knowledge. I am sure that if he had seen once in his life the back of an anarchist that must have been the whole extent of his connection with the underworld. He was, however, a man who liked to talk with all sorts of people, and he may have gathered those illuminating facts at second or third hand, from a crossing-sweeper, from a retired police officer, from some vague man in his club, or even, perhaps, from a Minister of State met at some public or private reception.
Of the illuminating quality there could be no doubt whatever. One felt like walking out of a forest on to a plain – there was not much to see but one had plenty of light. No, there was not much to see and, frankly, for a considerable time I didn’t even attempt to perceive anything. It was only the illuminating impression that remained. It remained satisfactory but in a passive way. Then, about a week later, I came upon a book which as far as I know had never attained any prominence, the rather summary recollections of an Assistant Commissioner of Police, an obviously able man with a strong religious strain in his character who was appointed to his post at the time of the dynamite outrages in London, away back in the eighties. The book was fairly interesting, very discreet of course; and I have by now forgotten the bulk of its contents. It contained no revelations, it ran over the surface agreeably, and that was all. I won’t even try to explain why I should have been arrested by a little passage of about seven lines, in which the author (I believe his name was Anderson) reproduced a short dialogue held in the Lobby of the House of Commons after some unexpected anarchist outrage, with the Home Secretary. I think it was Sir William Harcourt then. He was very much irritated and the official was very apologetic. The phrase, amongst the three which passed between them, that struck me most was Sir W. Harcourt’s angry sally: ‘All that’s very well. But your idea of secrecy over there seems to consist of keeping the Home Secretary in the dark.’ Characteristic enough of Sir W. Harcourt’s temper but not much in itself. There must have been, however, some sort of atmosphere in the whole incident because all of a sudden I felt myself stimulated. And then ensued in my mind what a student of chemistry would best understand from the analogy of the addition of the tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of crystallization in a test tube containing some colourless solution.
It was at first for me a mental change, disturbing a quieted-down imagination, in which strange forms, sharp in outline but imperfectly apprehended, appeared and claimed attention as crystals will do by their bizarre and unexpected shapes. One fell to musing before the phenomenon – even of the past: of South America, a continent of crude sunshine and brutal revolutions, of the sea, the vast expanse of salt waters, the mirror of heaven’s frowns and smiles, the reflector of the world’s light. Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world’s light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.
Irresistibly the town became the background for the ensuing period of deep and tentative meditations. Endless vistas opened before me in various directions. It would take years to find the right way! It seemed to take years! … Slowly the dawning conviction of Mrs Verloc’s maternal passion grew up to a flame between me and that background, tingeing it with its secret ardour and receiving from it in exchange some of its own sombre colouring. At last the story of Winnie Verloc stood out complete from the days of her childhood to the end, unproportioned as yet, with everything still on the first plan, as it were; but ready now to be dealt with. It was a matter of about three days.
This book is that story, reduced to manageable proportions, its whole course suggested and centred round the absurd cruelty of the Greenwich Park explosion. I had there a task I will not say arduous but of the most absorbing difficulty. But it had to be done. It was a necessity. The figures grouped about Mrs Verloc and related directly or indirectly to her tragic suspicion that ‘life doesn’t stand much looking into’, are the outcome of that very necessity. Personally I have never had any doubt of the reality of Mrs Verloc’s story; but it had to be disengaged from its obscurity in that immense town, it had to be made credible, I don’t mean so much as to her soul but as to her surroundings, not so much as to her psychology but as to her humanity. For the surroundings hints were not lacking. I had to fight hard to keep at arm’s-length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days, lest they should rush in and overwhelm each page of the story as these emerged one after another from a mood as serious in feeling and thought as any in which I ever wrote a line. In that respect I really think that ‘The Secret Agent’ is a perfectly genuine piece of work. Even the purely artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity. It is one of the minor satisfactions of my writing life that having taken that resolve I did manage, it seems to me, to carry it right through to the end. As to the personages whom the absolute necessity of the case – Mrs Verloc’s case – brings out in front of the London background, from them, too, I obtained those little satisfactions which really count for so much against the mass of oppressive doubts that haunt so persistently every attempt at creative work. For instance, of Mr Vladimir himself (who was fair game for a caricatural presentation) I was gratified to hear that an experienced man of the world had said ‘that Conrad must have been in touch with that sphere or else has an excellent intuition of things’, because Mr Vladimir was ‘not only possible in detail but quite right in essentials’. Then a visitor from America informed me that all sorts of revolutionary refugees in New York would have it that the book was written by somebody who knew a lot about them. This seemed to me a very high compliment, considering that, as a matter of hard fact, I had seen even less of their kind than the omniscient friend who gave me the first suggestion for the novel. I have no doubt, however, that there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist, I won’t say more convinced than they but certainly cherishing a more concentrated purpose than any of them had ever done in the whole course of his life. I don’t say this to boast. I was simply attending to my business. In the matter of all my books I have always attended to my business. I have attended to it with complete self-surrender. And this statement, too, is not a boast. I could not have done otherwise. It would have bored me too much to make-believe.
The suggestions for certain personages of the tale, both law-abiding and lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps, here and there, some reader may have recognized. They are not very recondite. But I am not concerned here to legitimize any of those people, and even as to my general view of the moral reactions as between the criminal and the police all I will venture to say is that it seems to me to be at least arguable.
The twelve years that have elapsed since the publication of the book have not changed my attitude. I do not regret having written it. Lately, circumstances, which have nothing to do with the general tenor of this preface, have compelled me to strip this tale of the literary robe of indignant scorn it has cost me so much to fit on it decently, years ago. I have been forced, so to speak, to look upon its bare bones. I confess that it makes a grisly skeleton. But still I will submit that telling Winnie Verloc’s story to its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness and despair, and telling it as I have told it here, I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind.
J.C.
1920.
MR. VERLOC, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.
The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.
The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong – rousing titles. And the two gas-jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake or for the sake of the customers.
These customers were either very young men, who hung about the window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more mature age, but looking generally as if they were not in funds. Some of that last kind had the collars of their overcoats turned right up to their moustaches, and traces of mud on the bottom of their nether garments, which had the appearance of being much worn and not very valuable. And the legs inside them did not, as a general rule, seem of much account either. With their hands plunged deep in the side pockets of their coats, they dodged in sideways, one shoulder first, as if afraid to start the bell going.
The bell, hung on the door by means of a curved ribbon of steel, was difficult to circumvent. It was hopelessly cracked; but of an evening, at the slightest provocation, it clattered behind the customer with impudent virulence.
It clattered; and at that signal, through the dusty glass door behind the painted deal counter, Mr. Verloc would issue hastily from the parlour at the back. His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed. Another man would have felt such an appearance a distinct disadvantage. In a commercial transaction of the retail order much depends on the seller’s engaging and amiable aspect. But Mr. Verloc knew his business, and remained undisturbed by any sort of æsthetic doubt about his appearance. With a firm, steady-eyed impudence, which seemed to hold back the threat of some abominable menace, he would proceed to sell over the counter some object looking obviously and scandalously not worth the money which passed in the transaction: a small cardboard box with apparently nothing inside, for instance, or one of those carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in paper covers with a promising title. Now and then it happened that one of the faded, yellow dancing girls would get sold to an amateur, as though she had been alive and young.
Sometimes it was Mrs. Verloc who would appear at the call of the cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy. Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable indifference behind the rampart of the counter. Then the customer of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would proffer a request for a bottle of marking ink, retail value sixpence (price in Verloc’s shop one-and-sixpence), which, once outside, he would drop stealthily into the gutter.
The evening visitors – the men with collars turned up and soft hats rammed down – nodded familiarly to Mrs. Verloc, and with a muttered greeting, lifted up the flap at the end of the counter in order to pass into the back parlour, which gave access to a passage and to a steep flight of stairs. The door of the shop was the only means of entrance to the house in which Mr. Verloc carried on his business of a seller of shady wares, exercised his vocation of a protector of society, and cultivated his domestic virtues. These last were pronounced. He was thoroughly domesticated. Neither his spiritual, nor his mental, nor his physical needs were of the kind to take him much abroad. He found at home the ease of his body and the peace of his conscience, together with Mrs. Verloc’s wifely attentions and Mrs. Verloc’s mother’s deferential regard.
Winnie’s mother was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large brown face. She wore a black wig under a white cap. Her swollen legs rendered her inactive. She considered herself to be of French descent, which might have been true; and after a good many years of married life with a licensed victualler of the more common sort, she provided for the years of widowhood by letting furnished apartments for gentlemen near Vauxhall Bridge Road in a square once of some splendour and still included in the district of Belgravia. This topographical fact was of some advantage in advertising her rooms; but the patrons of the worthy widow were not exactly of the fashionable kind. Such as they were, her daughter Winnie helped to look after them. Traces of the French descent which the widow boasted of were apparent in Winnie, too. They were apparent in the extremely neat and artistic arrangement of her glossy dark hair. Winnie had also other charms: her youth; her full, rounded form; her clear complexion; the provocation of her unfathomable reserve, which never went so far as to prevent conversation, carried on on the lodger’s part with animation, and on hers with an equable amiability. It must be that Mr. Verloc was susceptible to these fascinations. Mr. Verloc was an intermittent patron. He came and went without any very apparent reason. He generally arrived in London (like the influenza) from the Continent, only he arrived unheralded by the Press; and his visitations set in with great severity. He breakfasted in bed, and remained wallowing there with an air of quiet enjoyment till noon every day – and sometimes even to a later hour. But when he went out he seemed to experience a great difficulty in finding his way back to his temporary home in the Belgravian square. He left it late, and returned to it early – as early as three or four in the morning; and on waking up at ten addressed Winnie, bringing in the breakfast tray, with jocular, exhausted civility, in the hoarse, failing tones of a man who had been talking vehemently for many hours together. His prominent, heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways amorously and languidly, the bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and his dark smooth moustache covered his thick lips capable of much honeyed banter.