And yes, of course, by 1924 Conrad was arguably outmoded, already behind the times. Sailing ships? The exotic East? Didn’t he know what had happened to the world?
But he was truly the one. On the night of Mothering Sunday 1924, when, for good reasons, she was utterly unable to sleep or rest, she picked up again Joseph Conrad’s Youth. What else could she do? Cry? And cry again? In her little plank of a bed. People read books, didn’t they, to get away from themselves, to escape the troubles of their lives?
And it was and it wasn’t an adventure story. It was different, it had something special. It was about five crusty old men sitting round a table — yarning — who had done different things with their lives, but had all once been at sea, in their youth. She could see the men at the table, see their lined faces. One of them was called Marlow and it was he who told his story. It wasn’t really an adventure story at all. It was about a dumpy old ship that was always having bad luck, never getting far from murky home waters, but which one day, at the end of the story, which was also a sort of beginning, finally makes it to — the East.
When she had finished Youth and Other Stories, even managing to read ‘Heart of Darkness’—which was indeed challenging and truly like nothing else she had read — she knew she had to get more Conrad, and so she’d written to a bookshop in Reading which sent books by post. She had the half-crown still that Mr Niven had given her, not to mention other half-crowns put by. She could buy a postal order in the village. And dealing with a bookshop in this enterprising way perhaps even made her think: A bookshop, a bookshop. .
She bought a book called Lord Jim, which was not unlike Youth, but much longer — and challenging. It was called a ‘tale’. It involved that man Marlow again, and it was tempting to think that Marlow was really Conrad in disguise. Then she bought a book called The Secret Agent, which was quite different, since it wasn’t set in the East or to do with ships, but set in the grubby streets of London, though it still had that feeling of entering unknown and possibly dangerous territory which, if she’d had the word, she might have called ‘Conradian’.
By then she’d think that Conrad himself must be a sort of secret agent, slipping between worlds. And much later she’d think and sometimes say that all writers are secret agents. But perhaps the truth was — though she wouldn’t say this — that we are all secret agents, that’s what we are.
Anyway, by the time she’d read The Secret Agent, and foolish as it might have been, she had formed her own secret wish to become a writer. And she was not unused to having secrets.
It wasn’t his real name — Conrad — she found out, since he was really Polish. So he had a name a little like hers. It wasn’t a pen name either, it was just his ‘English’ name. But the remarkable, the truly astonishing thing about Joseph Conrad was that in order to write all his books, he hadn’t just had to learn how to write, but to write in a whole new language. That was almost unbelievable. It was like crossing some impossible — impassable — barrier, and she felt that perhaps that was the greater thing, the greater achievement and truer adventure, greater even than going on all those voyages in his youth, more thrilling even than reaching the East.
And it was what she would have to do to become a writer: cross an impossible barrier. And she too, she would come to understand this, would have to find a language, even though she had a language, since finding a language, finding the language — that was what, she would come to understand, writing really was. But she would seldom say these things in interviews either. They were too near the bone.
‘Conrad, oh yes — he had something special.’ As if she might have been talking about some old lover.
And, if the truth be known, in her last months at Beechwood and before she ‘went to Oxford’ it became a thrill for her to know that Joseph Conrad, who’d been born in Poland and had sailed the seas, was actually alive then, somewhere not so far away, in the folds of England. A thrill that couldn’t last long, though she’d been alive to know it, because one morning in August 1924—it was like a sudden personal shock — she’d read in the paper, before reflattening it and putting it on Mr Niven’s breakfast table, that Joseph Conrad had died.
And, if the truth be known (though she would never say this, in interviews or to anyone), all the pictures she’d got to see of Joseph Conrad — the later Conrad — had made her fall in love with him. The gravity, the beard, the expression in his eyes as if he were seeing something far off that was also deep inside. She had even sometimes imagined what it might be like to lie in bed with Conrad, just to lie beside him, not speaking, a naked, ageing Conrad, both of them looking up and watching the smoke from their cigarettes rising, mingling under the ceiling, as if the smoke held some truth greater than either of them could find words for.
The first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget.
She would become a writer. She would write books. She would write nineteen novels. She would even become a ‘modern writer’. Though how long do you remain ‘modern’? It was like the word ‘youth’. And was that what writing was about anyway: modernity? She would know times and changes, and write about them. She would live to be over ninety, nearly a hundred, and in her later years when she developed a definite mischievous streak and when she was wheeled out yet again—‘Jane Fairchild at Eighty’, ‘Jane Fairchild at Ninety’—she would mention the names of writers of the past as if, once upon a time, they had actually been her friends.
All the scenes. All the real ones and all the ones in books. And all the ones that were somehow in-between, because they were only what you could picture and imagine of real people. Like trying to picture her mother. Or only what you could suppose might have been true, if things had turned out differently, once, long ago. She might have gone with him, it might somehow have been magically arranged, to stand, pressed close to him, by the rail, in the chill of the dawn, as the sun unfurled great fiery carpets across the downs and as Fandango drew close, nostrils flaring and steaming, hooves pounding. She might have understood it and known it for ever. The fourth leg? The fourth leg was hers.
She would tell in her books many stories. She would even begin to tell, in her later careless years, stories about her own life, in such a way that you could never quite know if they were true or made up. But there was one story she would never tell. On some things she would be as impeccably silent as Ethel (who became Edith after all) proved to be. As silent as, she supposed, Joseph Conrad, for all his story-telling genius, would have been about some things, lying there beside her like some wonderful hollow husk of a man.
Telling stories, telling tales. Always the implication that you were trading in lies. But for her it would always be the task of getting to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of truth-telling. It had been Donald’s task too, in his way. Poor Donald, taken away from her forty, fifty years ago.
Enough of this interview claptrap and chicanery. So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? They would always want even the explanation explained! And any writer worth her salt would lead them on, tease them, lead them up the garden path. Wasn’t it bloody obvious? It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life — oh so many more than we think — can never be explained at all.