Joseph Conrad and André Gide: a literary friendship

The friendship of Conrad (1857-1924) and Gide (1869-1951) moved from respect and admiration through bitter quarrels to tender reconciliations.  The French poet Paul Claudel told Gide about Conrad.  They first met in July 1911 when Agnes Tobin, the American translator and friend of many well-known writers, brought Gide to visit Conrad in Kent.  He was probably surprised to find that Conrad had an uneducated, disabled and motherly wife, but Jessie was an excellent cook and laid on a Lucullan feast.  They spoke and later corresponded in French, but there is no specific account of what they discussed when they met.  They must have talked about Conrad’s years in France, mutual acquaintances, authors and books.  Their temperaments were quite different: Conrad was austere, Gide hedonistic.  Conrad never realized that his friend Norman Douglas was homosexual; Gide had a decorous unconsummated marriage with his cousin, and Conrad gave no sign that he knew Gide was queer.  Gide fondly recalled, “I lingered several days in the vicinity; returned to Capel House the next year, and we were soon the warmest and best of friends.”

In June 1912 Gide invited Conrad to spend ten days at the Abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy, where each summer leading intellectuals discussed high-minded subjects such as “Art and Poetry”.  Other guests that year included Rilke and Edmund Gosse, and an invitation was a considerable honour.  But his biographer Frederick Karl writes, “it was the kind of affair Conrad would not even consider, first because of his obsessive need to turn out copy, and second because of a constitutional dislike of literary meetings or forums of any kind”.  André Malraux later described these exalted colloquia in his novel The Walnut Trees of Altenburg (1943).

Conrad’s letters to Gide contained more flattery, easier in French than in English, than a serious response to his fiction.  (Mes sentiments distingués, a common farewell in French, sounds pompous and absurd in English.)  Seeking sympathy from his younger friend, Conrad often complained about Jessie’s frequent knee operations, his own tormenting gout and his inability to write: “I am not working.  I’ve almost stopped thinking about work. . . . Once the pen is in my hand, there is a recoil as of fear.”  Nevertheless, the self-styled slave remained chained to his galley and continued to turn out an impressive amount of work.

Gide was especially enthusiastic about Lord Jim (1900) and Under Western Eyes (1911).  He used a quotation about transcending personal weakness from chapter 20 of Lord Jim as the epigraph to Book 5 of his own novel Lafcadio’s Adventures (1914).  Stein tells Jim, “There is only one remedy!  One thing alone can cure us from being ourselves!”  And Jim replies, “Yes; strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”  Gide called Lord Jim “one of the most beautiful books I know, one of the saddest too, and at the same time one of the most uplifting.”

But Gide misinterpreted the most crucial scene in Conrad’s novel.  He thought that Jim’s jumping ship was an acte gratuit, like the impulsive, unmotivated behaviour of the hero of Lafcadio’s Adventures, who pushes an innocent stranger out of a moving train.  Gide calls Jim’s mood “the despair of the man who thinks he is a coward because he yielded to a momentary weakness—when he hoped he was courageous.”  But Jim’s tragic act is not a “momentary weakness”; it is a deep-rooted flaw in his once-noble character.  Jim knows the officer’s strict code of the sea and has time to think about what he must do when the storm is tearing his ship apart and the thousand pilgrims sailing to Mecca are thrown around in the hold.  The fictional event that inspired Gide’s acte gratuit was actually the gratuitous outrage and absurd cruelty of the bomb explosion that blows little Stevie to bits in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907).

Gide perceptively connected the fall from self-esteem and lifelong quest for redemption in Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes: Jim jumps ship and Razumov betrays the revolutionary Haldin, who is executed.  Gide was also interested in a major theme in these two novels: “That irresponsible act of the hero, to redeem which his whole life is subsequently engaged . . . . How can one efface that act?  There is no more pathetic subject for a novel.”

He went on to analyse the weaknesses and impressive strengths of Under Western Eyes: “It is a masterful book, but one that smells a bit too much of work and application, overconscientiousness (if I may say so) on Conrad’s part, in the continuity of outline. . . . Conrad unbends only to become prolix and diffuse.  The book is perfectly done, but without ease.”  It’s not surprising, after this mighty struggle to create, that Conrad had a nervous breakdown right after finishing the novel. Despite the flaws, Gide also praised the book: “One does not know what deserves more admiration: the amazing subject, the fitting together, the boldness of so difficult an undertaking, the patience in the development of the story, the complete understanding and exhausting of the subject.”

They praised each other’s books but strongly disagreed about Dostoyevsky, the subject of Gide’s personal and sympathetic book in 1925.  Gide recalled, “the name even of Dostoyevsky made him shudder . . . a good Pole, against the great Russian; with whom nonetheless he had some subtle points of resemblance.”  He repeated that Conrad cordially detested Dostoyevsky, and Gide “could not mention his name without calling up anew his vehement indignation.”  But Gide did not explain why Conrad hated Dostoyevsky, and why his friend felt both attraction to and revulsion from him.

Conrad identified with the Russian’s awareness of both the evil and spirituality in man, with his passionate conservatism and his profound fears of social disorder, anarchy and nihilism.  Dostoyevsky’s revolutionary plotting, arrest and exile to a penal settlement, emotional extremism, religious mysticism and desire for expiation reminded Conrad of his father’s disastrous career as a Polish revolutionary and his morbid temperament in Russian exile.  But he disliked Dostoyevsky’s dominant ideas: his intense Russian nationalism, hostility to Poles, messianic Christian faith and belief in Holy Russia’s redemptive mission in Western Europe.  He dismissed “the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoyevsky” as a “primitive nature fashioned by a Byzantine theological conception of life, with an inclination to perverted mysticism.”

Criticising the lack of clarity and barbaric pathology in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Conrad ambivalently called the novel, as Gide had called Under Western Eyes,  “terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating.  Moreover, I don’t know what D stands for or reveals, but I do know he is too Russian for me.  It sounds to me like some fierce mouthings from prehistoric ages.”  Though Conrad defensively claimed he did not know Russian and denied Dostoyevsky’s influence, Under Western Eyes is Conrad’s version of Crime and Punishment.

Conrad drew close to Gide when he translated Typhoon in 1916 and agreed to supervise the translations of Victory and The Arrow of Gold.  These French versions revived old memories, and took Conrad back to his youth in Poland and France when he first learned and then perfected his second language.  He could scrutinise the translations with an expert knowledge of French that no other English writer possessed.  He didn’t learn English until his late teens; and if he’d joined the French Merchant Marine instead of the English, he would have written his novels in French.  Ian Watt gives some examples of Conrad’s Gallicisms—the unusual word order, awkward expressions and faux amis that look similar in French and English but have different meanings: “the ‘lecture’ for ‘the reading’ of the letters; ‘without fortune’ with the specific meaning of ‘without a dowry’.”  The translations also stirred up Conrad’s thoughts of the time when he wrote those books and the flaws he now found in them.  Most important, the French versions distinguished his novels from the barbaric Russian writers, connected the Polish-Catholic author to western Europe and established his reputation on the Continent.

Frederick Karl minimised the importance of Conrad’s friendship with Gide and claimed that “Conrad sat back and received admiration, and Gide was simply one of many substitute ‘sons’—including Richard Curle, Hugh Walpole, Georges Jean-Aubry and F. W. Dawson—who gathered at his feet in the 1910s and offered homage.”  But Gide, a far greater writer than these acolytes, was not “simply one of many” — and never sat at Conrad’s feet.  In 1911 Gide was 42 years old and well established as the author of the masterpieces The Immoralist and Strait is the Gate.  An Irish friend reported that “James Joyce had a great admiration for Gide; in fact he was the only French writer, or indeed the only modern writer, I ever heard him admire with any real enthusiasm.”  In 1947 Gide won a well-deserved Nobel Prize.

Conrad was surprised and pleased that a major author like Gide would take time from his own work to translate and oversee the French edition of Conrad’s books.  In January 1914 he wrote to Gide, “I cannot bear the idea that a Master like you, creative and inspiring, could give his time to a translation.”  Two years later, when Gide had promised to translate “Youth” and Heart of Darkness, Conrad gushed with gratitude—since compliments, like flattery, were also easier to express in French: “It is an immeasurable honour before the world and makes me feel an inward joy over a very precious proof of your friendship, which is quite the greatest treasure that I have won at the point of my pen.”  Conrad never addressed his disciples as “Master” nor praised their gifts as his “greatest treasure”.

After his close study of Conrad’s Typhoon (1902), Gide perceptively explained his effective omission: “Conrad has been blamed for having shirked the climax of the storm.  He seems to me, on the contrary, to have done admirably in cutting short his story just on the threshold of the horrible and in giving the reader’s imagination full play, after having led him to a degree of dreadfulness that seemed unsurpassable.”  The real drama of the story lay hidden beneath the turbulent surface.

In 1917, the year after Gide translated Typhoon, Conrad expressed his ambivalence and told his agent James Pinker: “It’s wonderfully done—in parts.  In others utterly wrong.  And the worst is that with all my knowledge of the two languages I can’t do much with either in the way of suggestion.  I was not fully aware of how thoroughly English the Typhoon is.  There are passages that simply cannot be rendered into French.”  The translation made him look at the novella in a new way.  Despite his expertise, he didn’t want to get involved in the translation.  At the start of the project, he preferred to encourage rather than criticise his friend’s noble efforts.  Gide was also ambivalent about his translation, but thought Conrad was worth the sacrificial effort: “However backbreaking it may be, this work amuses me.  But how much time it takes!”

In September 1916, Conrad had been well pleased when he received the typescript, revised by Gide, of the translation of Victory by Isabelle Rivière.  She was the sister of Alain-Fournier, author of The Wanderer, who was killed in World War I, and wife of Gide’s friend, the critic Jacques Rivière.  Conrad asked Gide, “On my behalf, thank Mme Rivière very much for her accuracy, her facility, her success in the ungrateful task of translation.  I couldn’t be more satisfied.  Be assured of my profound gratitude.”

Gide was drawn to the novel by the homosexual relationship of Jones and Ricardo, but was having a devilish time with the translator and had to bring in Philippe Neel to finish the work.  He recorded in his Journal of January 1, 1917: “I was shocked by the tremendous amount of work revising the translation of Victory would require.  I cursed Isabelle Rivière and her childish theories about how faithful a translation must be. . . . .Oh, how poor that translation by Isabelle Rivière is, and how much time I am forced to give to it. . . . Since, out of regard for her vanity, which is immense, I am leaving as much as possible of her version, I doubt whether the result can ever be a happy one.  Conrad himself will never know, or ever suspect, the trouble I have got into simply through affection for him, his book, and for the [Conradian] ‘well-done job’. ”

Unfortunately, Gide’s smooth sailing with Conrad ended when they suddenly plunged into a literary typhoon.  In August 1919, Conrad unintentionally set off the storm by sending Gide The Arrow of Gold (1919), “an offering to the friendship which is so precious to me and to that admiration which has become an integral part of my intimate being.”  In October Conrad gave his faithful French disciple Jean-Aubry a preview of his wrath and sought sympathy for the impending quarrel with his benefactor: “Gide says that a woman has just got hold of The Arrow for translation.  I am going to protest with all my might.  He throws me as bait to a gaggle of women who have made a fuss (he says it himself).  All this annoys me.”

In November he fired off a petulant broadside to Gide, objecting to the disrespectful tone of his last letter and insisting that his macho novel needed a testicular translator: “If my writings have a pronounced character, it is their virility—of spirit, inclination, style. . . . And you throw me to the women! . . . I want to be interpreted by masculine intelligences.  It’s perfectly natural.  And I believe I have the right to ask whatever I please concerning The Arrow of Gold. . . . But frankly, my dear fellow, when after much hesitation Joseph Conrad makes a reasonable request about something very close to his heart, one does not answer in this fashion: ‘A lady has got her hands on the book (!)’—and you, André Gide, can do nothing about it.”  In the old days the Polish nobleman with wounded amour propre might have challenged the cheeky Gide to a duel.  Now, using the condescending “my dear fellow” and alluding to himself in the grandiose third person, Conrad had well-founded doubts about the artistic merits of the novel.  He seemed to fear that a woman would somehow weaken his male characters and make them less manly.

Three days later, Conrad told Jean-Aubry about his impulsive behavior and feared he had gone too far:

I am afraid I have quarreled with Gide for good.  The answer he sent to my request to let you translate A. of G. is not the sort of answer you send to a man whom you take seriously.  I pointed it out to him and said distinctly that this sort of thing looked as if he were taking me for a fool.  At the same time he bothers me with all his scruples about the style of the translations of these women!  Therefore, I told him that his letter caused me a certain malaise and that if his recital of difficulties in conjunction with the slighting manner of his reply to my request meant that he wanted to let the affair of the translations drop I was prepared to consent to it.  But I asked him to give me a clear answer by oui ou non. I need not tell you that in all this I tried to appear more hurt than angry.

Conrad was very angry indeed.  But he did not sever relations and left it up to Gide to cancel the arrangements.  He valued the translations too highly to surrender them, and Gide was too deeply involved to give them up.  As Gide, who knew Conrad was bluffing, wrote in his “Homage to Joseph Conrad” (December 1924), “he loved France far too much not to attach the greatest importance to French opinion of his work.”  After all he had done for Conrad, Gide was astonished and deeply hurt.  After fulsomely praising Isabelle Rivière, Conrad was now irrationally and inexplicably enraged about using a female translator.  Gide read his diatribe avec stupeur and confessed that he could not understand his courroux (wrath).

Reverting to conciliatory politeness in November, Conrad told Gide he was now eager to get involved in the translation: “I confess that I should be infinitely grateful if you could give the Arrow to Aubry.  I shall have him here [in England], under my hand. . . . And perhaps I can give him a better idea of the nuances of my thinking viva voce.  I hold this book of my sixtieth year close to my heart.”  Gide, incredibly patient with Conrad’s outrageous explosion, graciously tore the translation from the incapable hands of Madeleine Octave Maus, wife of a Belgian art critic.  Conrad had hated the Belgians in the  Congo, and may also have objected to her awkward Belgian French and her German-rodent name.  As Conrad insisted, Gide handed it over to Jean-Aubry, who was waiting in the wings.  Their storm-tossed quarrel ended in December when Conrad, now placated and pleased, wrote Gide: “I do not know how to thank you for your indulgence and your patient friendship.”

Especially when he was tortured by gout or blocked in his writing, Conrad indulged in emotional fits and furies.  Despite his original admiration for Rivière, he must have changed his mind about the quality of her translation and was pretty enraged by Gide’s first, intolerably offensive response.  But there was also another, quite hidden explanation.  Rita de Lastaola, mistress of the autobiographical hero of The Arrow of Gold, was based on Conrad’s young, stunning and wild American lover, Jane Anderson.  She had recently ended their affair, promiscuously slept with Conrad’s Polish friend Joseph Retinger and even seduced his son Borys.  So the hypersensitive Conrad was rather touchy about being “thrown to the women”, who might emphasise the strength of the heroine and undermine the masculine hero who was close to his heart.

Playing the injured party, Conrad won the argument, but when Gide visited England in 1920 he did not call on his old friend.  Still, their anger soon subsided and they resumed cordial praise of each other’s works.  In August 1921 Conrad wrote, “I am profoundly touched by your intention to write a study of my work. . . . I re-read [Lafcadio’s Adventures] with the same interest but with an admiration that grows on each new reading.  The infinity of things you put into that book, where the hand is so light and the thought so deep, is truly marvellous.”  Gide might have said in Italian, non fare complimenti.  In January 1922 Conrad sent Gide, one of three close companions, the 23-volume Collected Edition of his works.

Conrad’s influence continued after his death in 1924, and Heart of Darkness (1899) had a powerful impact on Gide’s account of his arduous journey in his Travels in the Congo (1927).  He notes, “I am re-reading it for the fourth time.  It is only after having seen the country that I realise how good it is.”  Dedicated “To the Memory of Joseph Conrad”, Gide’s book attacks French colonialism and sympathises with the Africans.  He defends their character, is interested in their customs, admires their beauty and portrays them as fellow human beings.

Gide continued to read Conrad as late as 1943.  In contrast to Conrad’s vague effusions, Gide made some shrewd comments about the weaknesses of his minor works, and witty remarks about the masculine swagger that Conrad had been keen to preserve: “Read with some impatience and a serious fatigue toward the end Romance [1903] by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer.  Should like to know the latter’s role and his share in that collaboration.  I naturally attribute to Conrad himself certain excellent parts.  Three literary manners are unbearable to me: the Garibaldi, the Musketeer manner and the Caramba! manner. . . . I am making slow progress in reading Chance [1913], the least good of Conrad’s books that I know (and I know a rather large number of them).  Its finical slowness seems tiresome.  Odd to think that it was precisely this book that brought Conrad his first real success.  Hardly to the public’s credit!”

Gide concluded his “Homage to Conrad” by recalling his fascinating character and expressing his powerful feelings for his old friend.  He admired “that slightly unwilling charm, which gave a sea-tang to his friendly impulses; but was marked with a mysterious solemnity. . . . What I liked best in him was a sort of inherent nobility, rugged, disdainful, and a little despairing.”  He recalled, “all the affection, admiration, veneration, which despite so much absence, so much silence, I had never ceased to feel for him.  He was the only one of my elders that I loved and knew.”

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published a biography of Joseph Conrad (1991), and Introductions to The Mirror of the Sea, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.

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