James Hynes

Since I was 10, Joseph Conrad has been my favorite writer. Yesterday was his 150th birthday.

I came to Conrad through the movies, after I saw Richard Brooks' film of Lord Jim as a new film at the Big Rapids Theater in 1965. I've seen the movie since, and like a lot of well-intended Conrad adaptations, it's not very good. It does have luminous 70mm cinematography by Freddie Young, the man who shot Lawrence of Arabia for David Lean, and some good performances, especially James Mason as the corrupt Gentleman Brown and Peter O'Toole, in his second film after Lawrence, as another tormented English colonialist. But Brooks, who specialized in earnest adaptations of literary works (Elmer Gantry, The Brothers Karamazov, In Cold Blood), straightened out the novel's artfully tangled chronology and flattened all of Conrad's ambiguities and ironies, turning it into a conventional story of heroism and redemption.

But even so, I'm grateful to him and the film, because the day after I saw it, I bought the Mentor paperback from the little bookshop in my intermediate school, which was basically a folding table set up in the hall outside the library. As I was reading the copy on the back cover and trying to figure out if the book was going to be as sweeping and epic as the film, my science teacher (whose name escapes me now) passed by, gave me a condescending smile, and said, "You wouldn't understand it." Which guaranteed not only that I bought it, but that I started reading it that night. So I guess I owe her, too, because even though it was tough sledding for a 10-year-old whose main reading up till then had been the Hardy Boys and Ray Bradbury, something hooked me. Not only did I read it several more times in the next few years, but before I finished high school I'd read Heart of Darkness, An Outcast of the Islands, The Secret Sharer, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, The End of the Tether, Victory, and Nostromo, all of them more than once. (And I read them all before I'd ever even heard of Penguin books, reading them in those American mass market classics editions like Mentor and Signet and Laurel, all of which had tissuey paper, tiny print, and smudgy ink; my fingertips were always blackened after finishing a Mentor edition. It's how I read Mark Twain and Dostoevsky the first time, too.) And I've read most of them several times since, as well as Conrad's brilliant political novels, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, both of which were strong influences on my first novel.

Perhaps it's because I read them all before any of them were ever taught to me (I think we read one Conrad short story in high school; I wasn't assigned Heart of Darkness till college), I wasn't aware that he was supposed to be difficult to read or understand, and just plowed right through them the way I plowed through Isaac Asimov. (It's kind of like poor kids not knowing they're poor until they're told so.) So I'm probably a little more impatient than I should be when I see people whine about Conrad's prose or how difficult his chronology is to follow. (See Sam Jordison's fine defense of Conrad on this very charge in today's Guardian.)

I've run across this as a teacher on two occasions. The first was during my first time as a visiting professor, at Miami University in the early 90s, when I naively included Nostromo in a class on novel writing for graduate students and upper level undergraduates. It's still one of my favorite novels, and I still find the first third of it ("The Silver of the Mine") to be one of the most flawless opening sequences in any novel I've ever read. I'd expected a little whining about Conrad, but mostly on the usual political grounds (he's an imperialist, he wrote a novel about Latin America without being Latin American, blah blah blah), but instead what I got was a reaction I'd've expected more from a high school class than from university students: after spending the first twenty minutes of the class struggling to get any of the students to say anything (it was supposed to be a seminar), I finally realized that virtually the entire class had not finished the novel. When I asked them point blank, it turned out that most of them had given up after the first 50 pages,  and only one person had even finished the book. So I sent them all home in disgust, and next week we talked about Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping—a marvelous book, but much easier to read.

I didn't try Conrad again in a classroom until a couple of years ago, when I taught a semester at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Apart from the usual workshop class, I also taught a seminar in novel-writing, and asked my students to read one book at the start of the semester (John Banville's Doctor Copernicus, which went over like a lead balloon) and one at the end, Lord Jim. You have to bear in mind that at Iowa, seminars are not graded and (by long tradition) attendance isn't really required, so by the end of the semester, I was down to a core group of really committed students, most of the others having quit coming after we workshopped their own novels. I was prepared for another disaster, since the only Conrad most of them had read was Heart of Darkness, and since most of them had hated Doctor Copernicus (another favorite of mine). But to my surprise, they all gave it a respectful and thoughtful reading, and some of them actually seemed to enjoy it. I remember spending a fair amount of time graphing the chronology of the opening third of the book, which is pretty wild, but at least this time I didn't get any blank, sullen stares, like I had at Miami, but some really interesting questions, stuff I hadn't even thought of in spite of having read the book at least a dozen times. I think I also scored points by showing how Conrad's tangled chronology and shifting points of view preceded Mrs. Dalloway by 21 years, which meant that the Woolf-worshippers in the room, even if they didn't appreciate the novel viscerally like I did—having been infected by it at the age of 10—at least had to give my boy props for thinking of the technique first. Who knows: maybe even a few of them went on to read Nostromo.

But what can I say? He's still my number one guy. I even named one of my cats after him, with the unfortunate and unintended effect that when Conrad's name passes my lips these days, most of the time it's not to say, "Conrad was one of the founders of modernism," or "Conrad is one of the most profound and unflinching chroniclers of human nature," but rather, "Conrad, stop that," or "Conrad, get off the goddamn counter," or "Conrad, you're a bad boy."

So Happy Birthday, Joseph Conrad, wherever you are. And whatever the other Conrad is doing, he better knock it off before I get home.

PS: This just in--Giles Foden's appreciation of Conrad from the Guardian. And Jonathan Jones' defense against the charge that Conrad was a racist, also from the Guardian.