The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions

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The Theatre of Joseph Conrad Reconstructed Fictions

Richard J. Hand

The Theatre of Joseph Conrad

Frontispiece: Caricature of Joseph Conrad by “Quiz” (Saturday Review, 14 October 1922) (The Conradian)

The Theatre of Joseph Conrad Reconstructed Fictions Richard J. Hand

© Richard J. Hand 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–1899–4 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–1899–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hand, Richard J. The theatre of Joseph Conrad : reconstructed fictions / Richard J. Hand. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1899–6 (cloth) 1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924—Knowledge—Performing arts. 2. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924—Dramatic works. 3. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924—Stage history. 4. Theatre—England. I. Title. PR6005.O4Z741874 2005 823′.912—dc22 2005047040 10 14

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Dedicated to Sadiyah, Shara and Danya

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Contents List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

A Note on Texts

xi

Introduction: Why Conrad’s Plays?

1

1 A Jolly Cold World: An Introduction to the Theatre of Joseph Conrad

6

2 A Tragedy in Modern Life: One Day More

20

3 A Grim and Weird Play: Basil Macdonald Hastings’s Victory

53

4 A Play of Unbearable Horror: Laughing Anne

87

5 A Most Disturbing Play: The Secret Agent

126

6 Conclusion: A Terribly Searching Thing

165

Notes

169

Bibliography

178

Index

187

vii

List of Figures Frontispiece: Caricature of Joseph Conrad by “Quiz” (Saturday Review, 14 October 1922) (The Conradian) 1 Lena (Marie Löhr) in a variety of dramatic poses from Victory (The Sketch, 9 April 1919) (British Library) 2 “The Villains Arrive” and the “Discovery of Ricardo”: Two Scenes from Victory (The Sketch, 16 April 1919) (British Library) 3 Lena (Marie Löhr) and Heyst (Murray Carrington) in Victory (The Lady, 10 April 1919) (British Library) 4 Witnessing Unbearable Horror: Captain Davidson (Andrew Pullen) in Laughing Anne (15 June 2000) (Photograph: Yannick le Boulicaut) 5 Grand-Guignol meets Melodrama: Laughing Anne (Lucie Ingram) and the Man Without Hands (Roger Clarke) in Laughing Anne (15 June 2000) (Photograph: Yannick le Boulicaut) 6 Victor Hick’s caricature of The Secret Agent (The Stage, 9 November 1922) (The Conradian)

viii

ii

xii

xiii xiv

xv

xvi xvii

Acknowledgements

This book has come into being in large part with thanks to two successful bids to the Arts and Media Research Unit at University of Glamorgan which awarded me a period of study leave and financial support for travel to London and the acquisition of images. I would like to thank the colleagues at the University of Glamorgan, especially Dr Katja Krebs and Professor Mike Wilson for giving invaluable advice. Many thanks, too, to Professor Michael Connolly, Professor Frances Mannsaker and Dr Alan Salisbury who generously supported the Laughing Anne production and tour in 2000. I would also like to thank the students who, as cast and crew, brought Laughing Anne to life for the first time: Andrew Pullen, Lucie Ingram, Tim Duval, Sefton Booth, Roger Clark, Richard Howell, Coryn Daniel, and Conor Plunkett. I would also like to thank my students at the University of Glamorgan who – incredible though it may seem – preferred Conrad’s plays to GBS’s. Thank you to the staff at the British Library in St Pancras and Colindale and the Polish Library at POSK. I would also like to thank my doctoral supervisors at the University of Glasgow (1990–97): Dr Donald Mackenzie and Professor Claude Schumacher. I am deeply indebted to the Conradians – or as the New York Times in 1919 would have it “Conradicals” – who have helped me with direct assistance or enthusiastic advice. They have always welcomed me to conferences or replied to correspondence with the greatest warmth and interest despite my off-centre aspect of Conrad studies: Professor Ted Billy, Professor Alison Wheatley, Dr Stephen Donovan, Professor J. H. Stape, Professor Robert Hampson, the late Bruce Harkness, Professor S. W. Reid, Dr Allan Simmons, Professor Gene Moore, Professor Peter Mallios, Dr Katherine Baxter, Dr Tim Middleton, Professor Cedric Watts, Professor Yannick le Boulicault, Professor Wiedslaw Krajka, Professor Sue Jones and Professor Keith Carabine. A very special debt of gratitude is owed to Professor Don Rude and Professor Neill Joy who hatched the plan of premiering Laughing Anne. Professor Rude, in arranging the Laughing Anne tour to Texas Tech University, was endlessly inspiring, supportive and resourceful and is, in Conrad’s words, “worthy of my undying regard”. ix

x

Acknowledgements

Finally, a very special thanks to my family: Sadiyah; five-year-old Shara whose drawings would always lighten the impenetrable darkness of the study; and two-year-old Danya who would always say “good boy” when she was told that “daddy was working hard on his book”, adding “poor boy” when her father emerged, looking very much the worse for wear. To these formidable women this book is dedicated. Richard J. Hand November 2004

A Note on Texts The following texts have been used for citations from primary materials: Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent (ed. Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Conrad, Joseph, Three Plays (London: Methuen, 1934). Hastings, Basil Macdonald, Victory: A Play in Three Acts (ed. Gene M. Moore and Allan H. Simmons) The Conradian 25:2 (Autumn 2000), 87–176. The abbreviation CL has been used throughout this book for Conrad’s letters: Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad Volume 1: 1861–97 (1983); Volume 2: 1898–1902 (1986); Volume 3: 1903–1907 (1988); Volume 4: 1908–1911 (1991); Volume 5: 1912–1916 (1996); Volume 6: 1917–1919 (2002). Laurence Davies and J. H. Stape (eds), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad Volume 7: 1920–1922 (2005). All other citations from Conrad are from Dent’s Uniform Standard Edition (London: Dent, 1923–28) which has the same pagination as the Dent Collected Edition (London: Dent, 1946–55) and the Oxford World’s Classics edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983–).

xi

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Figure 1 Lena (Marie Löhr) in a variety of dramatic poses from Victory (The Sketch, 9 April 1919) (British Library)

xiii

Figure 2 “The Villains Arrive” and the “Discovery of Ricardo”: Two Scenes from Victory (The Sketch, 16 April 1919) (British Library)

xiv

Figure 3 Lena (Marie Löhr) and Heyst (Murray Carrington) in Victory (The Lady, 10 April 1919) (British Library)

xv

Figure 4 Witnessing Unbearable Horror: Captain Davidson (Andrew Pullen) in Laughing Anne (15 June 2000) (Photograph: Yannick le Boulicaut)

xvi

Figure 5 Grand-Guignol meets Melodrama: Laughing Anne (Lucie Ingram) and the Man Without Hands (Roger Clarke) in Laughing Anne (15 June 2000) (Photograph: Yannick le Boulicaut)

xvii

Figure 6 Victor Hick’s caricature of The Secret Agent (The Stage, 9 November 1922) (The Conradian)

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Introduction: Why Conrad’s Plays?

Of all things, why Conrad’s plays? Why write about such an unfulfilled enterprise if not downright failure? What’s the point of venturing into such a shallow and stagnant backwater of both literary and theatrical history? There is no doubt that Conrad’s dramatic oeuvre is modest: the oneact One Day More (performed 25–27 June 1905); the two-act Laughing Anne (written in 1920 but not produced in his lifetime) and his only full-length play The Secret Agent (performed 2–11 November 1922). But in addition we are justified in including Basil Macdonald Hastings’s dramatisation of Victory (performed from 26 March to 6 June 1919) in a study of Conrad’s theatre because Conrad was actively involved in the project in an advisory and creative capacity. These four works will form the focus of this study and together they provide a rich terrain for analysis. All four works are “reconstructed fictions”: adaptations of two short stories and two novels which represent a full range of Conrad’s fiction. The book also provides an opportunity to discuss neglected works like “To-morrow” and “Because of the Dollars” as well as the chance to offer new readings of novels more securely in the canon: Victory and The Secret Agent. The dramatisation of these works is a complex process with far-reaching implications regarding Conrad’s craft and the type of drama that he aspired to: all of the plays, regardless of result or reception, were nothing if not ambitious. The plays certainly not only exploit existing theatrical conventions such as melodrama but can also be appreciated as endeavouring to challenge the traditional and well-made drama of the period: in these plays we find surprising precursors to the Theatre of the Absurd and echoes of and parallels with theatrical Symbolism, Grand-Guignol and Expressionism that are best understood within a world more than British context. All 1

2 The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions

of Conrad’s plays feature women in central roles and as Susan Jones writes: In his plays, One Day More and Laughing Anne, Conrad explores the issue of female entrapment in the web of domestic relations and the histories of male identity. (Jones, 1999, 56) This comment can be easily extended to include The Secret Agent and Victory, and, taken as a whole, in Bessie, Anne, Winnie and Lena we find fascinating examples of stage heroines in the epoch of the “New Woman” in theatre.1 Conrad’s plays are more comfortably European or signpost what will happen in modern theatre: just as Conrad is an innovative proto-modernist of fiction, it seems that his small collection of plays suggest, albeit fragmentarily, the various directions that modern theatre will follow. Even if this argument is contentious, Conrad’s plays are certainly remarkable for their resistance to the contemporary trends of British theatre: he wrote the plays that he desired and consequently they are not in the least Shavian and neither do they echo, despite expectations, the dramatic works of John Galsworthy or J. M. Barrie. However, even if Conrad’s process of writing and adaptation produced peculiar works of drama, this small body of drama received the direct attention and even involvement of many of the greatest luminaries involved in the British theatre of the period: George Bernard Shaw, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, William Archer, Max Beerbohm, J. T. Grein, Marie Löhr, Russell Thorndike and so on. Conrad’s interest in the performing arts was not restricted to the four plays we will be analysing. Conrad’s only published translation from Polish was his rendition of Bruno Winawer’s play The Book of Job (1921). In 1920 (although he had entertained the idea since 1915), Conrad adapted “Gaspar Ruiz” into his only screenplay Gaspar the Strong Man. It was never filmed but remains a nonetheless remarkable exploration of a comparatively new media by a writer who would die in 1924. It also becomes apparent with further investigation that Conrad considered but declined other dramatic enterprises in his career including collaborations with Stephen Crane and Perceval Gibbon, and even an original play about a faked old master painting. Conrad feels a “great longing” (CL6, 28) to adapt Under Western Eyes in early 1917 and, around the same time, wants to “launch myself out single-handed” (CL6, 31) as a playwright with an adaptation of The Arrow of Gold. But even as early in his writing career as 1897 Conrad confesses, “I greatly desire to write a play myself. It is my dark and secret ambition” (CL1, 419).

Introduction 3

But should Conrad’s interest in drama surprise us? His first encounter with English literature as a child was reading Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona and in adolescence, he wrote patriotic plays. Even as an English “man of letters”, he is an extremely dramatic writer, a novelist who is able to admit, “I have a theatrical imagination” (CL4, 218). His fiction is imbued with the characters, conflicts, crises, scenarios and atmospheres that are the making of great drama. This is undoubtedly why his fiction has always enjoyed screen and radio adaptation from the earliest days (the film Victory in 1919, the radio Lord Jim in 1927) to our own time. Conrad critics have often acknowledged the inherent drama to his fiction. Three of Max Beerbohm’s caricatures of Conrad (reproduced in Riewald, 1977, 240–5) are distinguished with a remarkable theatricality. “Somewhere in the Pacific” (1920) depicts Conrad on a tropical beach betwixt land and sea looking at a serpent crawling through the eye-socket of a Yorick-like skull declaring “What a delightful coast! One catches an illusion that one might forever be almost gay here”: Conrad has found a stage. In “Mr. Conrad Again” (1920) Conrad makes a dramatic entrance into a room peopled by gloomy Conradian archetypes: the Conrad performance is about to begin. In “The Old and Young Self: Joseph Conrad” (1924) old Conrad talks to young Conrad in what is not a schizophrenic image but a scene of dialect and dialogue: the Conrad characters – all aspects of himself, Beerbohm implies – come to life. These caricatures seem to capture the inherent dramatic and performative dimension to Conrad. Although the dramatic and theatrical is a remarkably important dimension to many examples of Conrad’s fiction, it has at times been used as a rod with which to beat him. Thomas C. Moser, for example, is typical of a critical era which deplored the “ineffective, melodramatic conclusions to some of the later novels” (Moser, 1957, 111). Yet, as this book will make clear, the melodramatic is not just a recurrent but a deliberate strand in Conrad’s works for page and stage. Yet, despite the positive reclamation of the primacy of melodrama in fiction by literary critics such as Peter Brooks (1976, 1995) – whereby melodrama remains not just a “central fact of our culture” (Brooks, 1995, ix) but “an inescapable and central form of our cultural lives” (Brooks, 1995, xii) – one fears that the anti-melodramatic prejudice persists. While this attitude continues, the position of some of Conrad’s fiction will remain precarious and the plays will be forever doomed. Conrad’s experience of the theatre has often been dismissed as a rather sad and embarrassing escapade of which the less said the better. Norman Sherry omitted any theatrical reviews in his Conrad: The Critical


Heritage on the grounds that “Conrad the dramatist is of such little significance” (Sherry, 1973, 45). However, in recent years there has been a nascent interest in the drama. In particular, special mention should be made to the contributions of critics such as Valeria Petrocchi (1998), and research by Neill R. Joy and Alison E. Wheatley. One reason for the growth of interest in Conrad’s drama is the mounting cultural and critical interest in process: the fact that all of his plays are adaptations provides valuable insights into Conrad’s cultural context, his practice as a writer and his perception of his own work as he dismantles his fiction in order to reconstruct it for a contemporary audience. Increasingly, the process of adaptation – generic transformation and reconstruction – is regarded as a prime cultural process. Film and film studies in particular should be thanked. The screen adaptation of fiction is increasingly popular as is the cultural analysis of it. In the area of Conrad studies we owe a great debt to Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and academic works such as Gene M. Moore’s Conrad on Film (1997). This book’s aim is to make a contribution to the burgeoning study of Conrad and theatre. It has allowed me the opportunity to develop and expound on ideas and research published in a variety of academic journals and books and/or presented at a number of international conferences and symposia over a number of years. The first chapter will put Conrad into a biographical, literary and theatrical context with a special attention given to him as a “self-adapter”, a novelist who dramatises his own fiction. This chapter will also aim to develop a language for the analysis of stage adaptation. After this, the subsequent chapters will look at, respectively, One Day More, Victory, Laughing Anne and The Secret Agent. This is not strictly chronological inasmuch as Laughing Anne was the last play Conrad wrote, but it seemed logical to end the case studies with Conrad’s theatrical magnum opus and most high-profile work of drama: The Secret Agent. Approaches will vary according to each case study: the rigors of stage censorship, for example, will illuminate some aspects of investigation; the analysis of Victory benefits from an examination of its critical reception and issues relating to melodrama and Laughing Anne requires a contextualisation in relation to Grand-Guignol which has some implications on Conrad’s work more broadly. This book does not pretend to be a detailed analysis that looks at the textual minutiae of the manuscripts. That is the kind of work that Neill R. Joy and Alison E. Wheatley will most ably present in the forthcoming Cambridge University Press’s edition of Conrad’s plays. Therefore, I will not discuss Conrad’s manuscript revisions of Laughing Anne or the

Introduction 5

alteration of The Secret Agent into three acts. I have also decided not to look at The Book of Job translation or the unpublished Gaspar the Strong Man. I will not only draw intertextual parallels between Conrad’s allusive plays and contemporaneous works but also refer to the relevant drama that preceded his work or has emerged since. I will also, on occasion, refer to film and radio adaptations of Conrad. But I will devote a great deal of attention to the plays in their own right in an examination of Conrad’s craft as playwright and adapter. So, to return to the question at the beginning: what’s the point of venturing into such a shallow and stagnant backwater of both literary and theatrical history? Maybe Conrad, better than anyone, would understand that a journey into scarcely explored regions can yield rewards, revelations and surprises.

1 A Jolly Cold World: An Introduction to the Theatre of Joseph Conrad

In December 1899, Stephen Crane – at the time residing at Brede Place in Sussex – invited a number of people, including many notable writers, to what H. G. Wells described as “a marvellous Christmas party” (Wells, 1966, 613). As part of the numerous festivities laid on by Crane, he led the collaborative writing of a play about the reputed haunting of the manor house to be called The Ghost. To this end, Crane collaborated with nine writers: H. G. Wells, Henry James, Robert Barr, H. Rider Haggard, H. B. Marriott-Watson, Edwin Pugh, George Gissing, A. E. W. Mason and Joseph Conrad. The play was performed in the School Room in Brede Place on 28 December. It is probably no surprise that Wells described the resulting production as “very allusive and fragmentary” (Wells, 1966, 613–14), which is somewhat polite compared to Crane’s description of the script as “rubbish” (Stallman, 1973, 491). Wells recalls that the play “amused the authors and caste [sic] vastly. What the Brede people made of it is not on record” (Wells, 1966, 614). Local opinion, however, does seem to be on record, the South Eastern Advertiser describing The Ghost as “a combination of farce, comedy, opera and burlesque” (Mackenzie, 1973, 146). No script of The Ghost survives and the play now exists merely as an anecdote demonstrating that some of the finest writers of their generation were able to behave “uproariously” (Berryman, 1962, 249). Less frivolously, the performance occurred a few hours before Stephen Crane suffered the tubercular haemorrhage that signalled he was entering the final months of his life. The fact that the play was in large part a mixture of farce, comedy and burlesque indicates that it was something of a pantomime if not an outright romp. But it also reveals that the play was an assimilation of various traditions of popular theatre at a time when British drama was in a critical phase of development. In pulling 6

An Introduction to the Theatre of Joseph Conrad 7

the script together, Crane had coerced his collaborators to “write a mere word – any word” (Stallman, 1973, 491). Joseph Conrad did more than this and supplied one whole sentence: “This is a jolly cold world” (Stallman, 1973, 491). The final script was an adaptation of sorts, with H. G. Wells’s Dr Moreau having strayed off his island and Henry James’s Peter Quint (Turn of the Screw) deciding to leave Bly for Brede. In this way, Crane’s carnivalesque escapade proves to be a microcosmic reflection – or maybe even a direct parody – of the English Literary Theatre movement, a significant part of which involved urging non-dramatists to write for the stage and often encouraged the dramatisation of fiction. In the Britain of the 1890s, the period during which Conrad became an English writer, there is a sense that the theatre needs rescuing. In lamenting that the English theatre seemed so poor and ailing in contrast to the vivacity of the English novel, Henry Arthur Jones argues that the curse of English drama is its antithetical condition: It is a hybrid, an unwieldy Siamese Twin, with two bodies, two heads, two minds, two dispositions, all of them, for the present, vitally connected. And one of these two bodies, dramatic art, is lean and pinched and starving, and has to drag about it, wherever it goes, its fat, puffy, unwholesome, dropsical brother, popular amusement. (Jones, 1971, 11) This sense of schism reveals much about the perception of art and practice, and highbrow versus lowbrow culture in the period. Moreover, the theatrical context of the time meant that even when the English theatre was not staging its stock-in-trade contemporary melodramas and turned to Shakespeare or other classics, these works were simply given the melodramatic treatment in such a way as “without scruple, to spotlight the actor-manager’s personality” (Rowell, 1953, v). It is probably this process that lies behind Thomas Hardy’s statement in 1908 that Shakespeare “will cease altogether to be acted some day, & be simply studied” (Hardy, Letters 3, 313). If the theatre was to be saved as a “serious” form of art, it would need to abandon the formulaic sensationalism of popular performance just as the novel had “come of age” and developed an intellectuality, morality and a range of artistic techniques appropriate for its sophisticated, middle-class readers. Partly this reflects the dynamism of the realist and naturalist revolution in parallel with developments in education and communications and their impact on the bourgeoisie throughout Europe, but in the British context it simultaneously betrays an awareness of “tradition” and national identity. This is


reflected, consciously or otherwise, in many writers and commentators of the period, as well as in the rise of English Literature as a university discipline. As Terry Eagleton reminds us, the “era of the academic establishment of English is also the era of high imperialism in England” (Eagleton, 1983, 28). The growth and consolidation of the English sense of literary heritage during this period meant that Shakespeare was perceived as an artistic deity and subsequently that drama should be the keystone of English culture once more. George Steiner refers to this imperative as “the Shakespearean shadow” (Steiner, 1961, 150) falling between the knowledge that the hegemony of the English dramatic tradition and the actual process of writing these new works needed to be reasserted. Either way, many believed that the solution to the rejuvenation of English stage drama lay in creating a “literary theatre” with a new repertoire of plays as good as the fiction being produced by English novelists. After all, as George Bernard Shaw contends, the “nineteenth-century novel, with all its faults, has maintained itself immeasurably above the nineteenth-century drama” (Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties Volume 1, 144). Henry Arthur Jones and William Archer were probably the two most consistently prominent advocates of the Literary Theatre movement and for them, as Marguerite Roberts informs us, “the hope of the theatre lay in luring other men of letters into writing for the stage” (Roberts, 1950, xviii). Likewise, the actor and producer Elizabeth Robins sums up the mood for “Literary Theatre” in her memoirs when she writes: In time, new first-rate English plays would come our way. Those people who ought to be in the service of the theatre and still remained outside it, must be brought in. If French and German men of letters wrote for the stage, why shouldn’t the English? (. . .) Oh, the novelists would help . . . (Robins, 1932, 35) From the mid-1880s, Archer and Jones were encouraged by productions such as Robert Louis Stevenson and W. E. Henley’s original play Beau Austin (1884) and continued to actively encourage “men of letters” to consider the stage. Henry James was particularly prolific (but unsuccessful) in his playwriting exploits including a number of adaptations of his own fiction.1 This practice – the stage dramatisation of fiction by the novelists themselves – could be termed “self-adaptation” and there are other examples of it in the period under scrutiny. Writers such as J. M. Barrie, George Moore and Thomas Hardy attempted self-adaptation and all the dramatic experiments of Joseph Conrad would prove to be examples of this process.2


On the face of it, Conrad’s only contribution to the English Literary Theatre during the 1890s was the one dramatic sentence he wrote for Stephen Crane’s jape. But even this gesture has a greater significance: at least two years before The Ghost, Conrad and Crane had discussed the possibility of collaborating on the writing of an original play. This project, which we will address in more detail in a later chapter, may have foundered but it represents the beginnings of a journey towards practical theatre that may be a modest part of Conrad’s career but is nonetheless noteworthy and an enlightening reflection of a broader culture. Conrad’s relationship with the theatre provides fascinating insights into Conrad as a writer and into the broader context of European drama. As ever with Conrad, that most European of English writers, we limit things to a British context at our peril. It would be a mistake to think that Conrad’s relationship with the theatre begins with his aborted project with Crane or his modest contribution to The Ghost. As Jeffrey Meyers informs us: During the Cracow years [i.e. the late 1860s and early 1870s], the solitary, hypersensitive and well-read young Conrad impressed friends by memorising and reciting long passages from Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and by writing patriotic plays, like The Eyes of Jan Sobieski, in which Polish nationalists defeated the Muscovite enemy. (Meyers, 1991, 27) With this in mind, it is clear that dramatic writing had an important place in Conrad’s early years, an influence no doubt shaped to some extent by his father. Apollo Korzeniowski was a playwright as well as political activist, having translated Shakespeare into Polish and written three major plays of his own around the time his son was born. The uncompromising satire Comedy (Komedia) was published in 1856 and was greeted with uproar for its vicious targeting of “good society” and was not staged until 1952. His next play For That Sweet Money or For the Love of Money (Dla milego grosza), as Bernard C. Meyer informs us, “is somewhat reminiscent” (Meyer, 1967, 356) of the title of Conrad’s short story “Because of the Dollars” (which will be adapted into Laughing Anne by Conrad). For the Love of Money was written in 1859 and this time did enjoy performances in Zhitomir and Kiev during his lifetime. Like Comedy the play is about the corruptive power of money, a theme that Laughing Anne arguably shares. Czeslaw Milosz sums up the plot of Korzeniowski’s final play,


Act One (Akt pierwszy), as being an examination of “political treason and betrayal in marriage” (Milosz, 1983, 266) which is broadly reminiscent of The Secret Agent. Over all, however, Conrad will most consciously return to the genre of Polish satirical drama in the spirit of his father with the translation of Bruno Winawer’s Book of Job (Ksiega Hioba) in 1921. It would, of course, be naïve to overemphasise the link between Conrad’s oeuvre and the dramatic works of his father. Apollo Korzeniowski’s impetus as a playwright was the complex historical, social and political context of partitioned Poland where, for example, censorship was, in contrast to much of Western Europe, almost entirely political rather than artistic.3 In the broadest terms, the theatrical context of the Europe Conrad was born into was dominated by high opera and popular forms such as melodrama.4 Little would change by the time Conrad was an adult. The opening of the massive Paris Opéra in 1874 was an emblem of the triumph of nineteenth-century opera; the cult of the actor persisted with the rising fortunes of international “stars” of melodrama such as Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse and Henry Irving; the most successful playwrights of the time were those who followed the formulaic recipes of Alexandre Dumas fils, Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou.5 Nevertheless, a significant number of critics of this world of performing arts believed that the theatre needed rescuing not because audience numbers were flagging, but on principle. Far from being in financial difficulty, performance was the most potentially lucrative of all the arts. But in its unthinking and escapist ethos of “pleasing the crowd”, its critics saw something moribund and believed the revolutionary spirit of “Realism” and “Naturalism” to be the only panacea.6 Such belief became evident in intellectual communities across the European context, but it finds its clearest genesis in France. Arguably, the rise of Realism and Naturalism marks the beginning of a cultural momentum that will ultimately open up the ground for other artistic revolutions under the broad umbrella of modernism. In the 1860–70s, Émile Zola proclaimed the necessity of Naturalism to rescue the stage as it had rescued the novel. Zola’s own adaptation of his 1868 novel Thérèse Raquin marks an attempt to begin a naturalist revolution on the stage just as the novel had in fiction. In the Préface (July 1875) to the four-act play Thérèse Raquin, Zola states that “le naturalisme balbutie déjà au théâtre” [“naturalism can already be heard mumbling in the theatre”] (Zola, 1969, 123) and that this is a necessary process that must be precipitated if the theatre is to survive: “Ou le drame mourra, ou le drame sera moderne et réel” [“Drama must either die or become modern and real”] (Zola, 1969, 123). Zola’s Thérèse


Raquin was an earnest attempt to revolutionise the theatre, although what strikes us now as readers or spectators is how coy, moralising and melodramatic the adaptation is compared to the gruesome, amoral and uncompromising realism of the original novel. Zola’s attempt did not enjoy much success as a play, but it is undoubtedly a landmark in theatre history and can be seen as a symbolic precursor to the pan-European theatrical achievements of the subsequent decades, including the attempt to inaugurate an English Literary Theatre. Émile Zola was a French novelist of increasing stature at the time he dramatised Thérèse Raquin, and this foray into the theatre was imbued with crusading and provocative zeal. In contrast, Ford Madox Ford implies that the English novelists-turned-playwrights of Conrad’s generation had slightly less evangelical purpose: they were “obsessed by the idea that if they could only get a play produced, fame, fortune and eternal tranquillity” (Ford, 1924, 126) would be forever theirs. Certainly Conrad can be found claiming that One Day More was written for the potential financial rewards (CL3, 117). The fact that the stage might be lucrative may, on the face of things, be Conrad’s prime reason for venturing into drama. But in the few years since The Ghost the English stage had evolved impressively. As Ernest Reynolds writes: with the death of Victoria it is no mere literary fancy to say that a radical change came over the theatre. (Reynolds, 1974, 15) The Edwardian theatre saw the rise of the New Drama and the Drama of Ideas characterised by playwrights such as St John Ervine, Harley Granville-Barker and, above all, the critic-turned-playwright George Bernard Shaw. Other figures of note – and close friends of Conrad – John Galsworthy and J. M. Barrie were known as novelists but the twentieth century saw them achieving great success as dramatists. The rise of the Edwardian theatre scene and the success of these acquaintances must have played a part in luring Conrad into the theatre with One Day More. After all, there is no shortage of examples of Conrad’s antipathy to theatre. John Galsworthy remembers Conrad, during rehearsals of One Day More, saying “My dear fellow . . . this is too horrible for words.” (Galsworthy, 1924, vi); as far as Conrad was concerned, One Day More was “murdered” (CL6, 49) by the actors. Richard Curle recalls that Conrad “always expressed contempt for the theatre” and was “almost driven to distraction during the rehearsals of The Secret Agent by the inability of the actors to catch, or to interpret, his meaning”


(Curle, 1928, 125). The problem with actors is an acute one for Conrad, most famously encapsulated in the letter that Neill R. Joy describes as “the locus classicus in showing his antipathy for all things theatrical” (Joy, 2003, 187): The actors appear to me like a lot of wrongheaded lunatics pretending to be sane. Their malice is stitched with white threads. They are disguised and ugly. To look at them breeds in my melancholy soul thoughts of murder and suicide – such is my anger and my loathing of their transparent pretences. There is a taint of subtle corruption in their blank voices, in their blinking eyes, in the grimacing faces, in the false light in the false passion, in the words that have been learned by heart. (CL1, 419) The vehemence of this letter may be deliberately comic and yet it reveals an anxiety about the realities of the stage that haunts other novelists who, like Conrad, dared to stray into the theatre. For Henry James, for example, the horror of theatre was less about the performer than the London theatregoer. This reaches a climax for James with his public humiliation by “the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs” ( James, Letters III, 507) at the premiere of his play Guy Domville (1895). For Conrad, whether it is the loathsome actors or the realities of the theatre audience that appal him, when The Secret Agent premieres in 1922 we find Jessie and Borys Conrad proudly in the auditorium and Conrad in a local bar saying: “I don’t want to be in the house. Theatres frighten me and always have. I never see plays” (Mégroz, 1931, 24). But it was not merely the realities of theatrical performance that distressed Conrad; he also had an inherent problem with drama as a form of art. A novelist and aspirant playwright like Henry James was – as a formalist – genuinely fascinated by the technical demands made on a dramatist. James describes himself as “very much like a Francisque Sarcey” (James, 1949, 96).7 James agreed with Sarcey that the two greatest French playwrights in the “technical perfection” school of writing were Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou. However, as much as James admired their craft he did detect a deficiency in the strictly technical and “unimpassioned” approach: he commented that Sardou “makes a play very much as he would a pudding” (Innes, 2000, 8). Conrad, too, refers to Scribe and Sardou and praises their skill in a memorable phrase in the letter to Edward Garnett where he urges him to write a play about the “literary world”:


Why not read up Scribe and Sardou (the two good mechanics) a little, and give us a play about Le Monde ou l’on Ecrit – the world where they write! It would be fair game. (CL4, 428) For Conrad, the French playwrights are “good mechanics”,8 for James the skill is that of a pudding cook, and for Hardy playwriting (especially the dramatisation of fiction) is likened to “an ingenious piece of carpentry” (Hardy, Letters 6, 312). In an interview on the evening of The Secret Agent premiere Conrad remarks, “I do not enjoy writing plays. It is an exercise in ingenuity” (Mégroz, 1931, 25). It is the sense of technical ingenuity that makes Conrad conventionally restructure the complex time scheme in The Secret Agent novel into the strictly chronological dramatic plot of the stage adaptation. To look at playwriting as something merely mechanical is arguably just a small step away from Conrad’s horrific notion of the universal “knitting machine”, expressed in a letter to Cunninghame Graham: It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters. (CL1, 425) Here we have the ultimate, depersonalised machine, and perhaps the theatre is a microcosmic reflection of it. Certainly to Conrad the theatre would seem to mix, turn, knit or carve the same kind of produce ad infinitum, and would also be, ultimately, hollow and illusory. In addition, the horror of the actor evident in Conrad perhaps reflects an abhorrence of similar formulaic, mechanical “wrongheaded” process. As the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897) makes clear, early in his writing career the artistic writer is a focused individual who presents a unique and personal vision. Drama, however, and in particular the theatre, is a diffusing art. This is substantiated in a letter to Richard Curle in 1920 where Conrad expresses his attitude towards the related arts of cinema and theatre: I prefer Cinema to Stage. The Movie is just a silly stunt for silly people – but the theatre is more compromising, since it is capable of falsifying the very soul of one’s work both on the imaginative and on the intellectual side – because having some sort of inferior poetics of its own which is bound to play havoc with that imponderable quality of creative literary expression which depends on one’s individuality. (Curle, 1928, 125–6)


There is something critically impersonal and even depersonalising about writing for the stage. Conrad and other novelists who tried to turn their hand to drama were struck by the fact that there is a freer rein in fiction: theatrical drama, as they saw it, imposes a control on time, locale and exposition. The theatrical process was a diffusive, multi-tiered and communal art that, out of necessity, involved the artistic input of many people: actors, producers, designers and so on, rather than, rightly or wrongly, the perceived team of a novelist and ideal reader with perhaps some assistance from an editor and typesetter.9 But the constraints placed on the dramatists were not merely mechanical but legal. Due to the shortcomings of British copyright law, it was not until 1911 that writers were given copyright control over the dramatisation of their narrative works. Before this legislation, novelists could only protect their works against adaptation if they dramatised them themselves and arranged for a performance with a paying audience. It was a tedious chore – described by Thomas Hardy as “a farce” (Hardy, Letters 2, 149) – in which, usually, hastily edited sections of the book would be read out on a licensed stage by actors. It seems likely that this absurd (and often expensive) process did little to encourage the serious involvement in theatre by novelists. Copyright law may have been resolved after 1911, but another aspect of British law will cast a more sinister shadow over the entire period we are looking at. Writing in 1897, George Bernard Shaw sums up the different worlds of fiction and drama: I unhesitatingly say that no novelist could, even if there were reason for it, approach the writing of a novel with his mind warped, his hand shackled, and his imagination stultified by the conditions which Mr Pinero accepted. (Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties Volume 3, 144) Until the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968, all plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval before they could be staged.10 The shadow of censorship put enormous pressure on the artistic freedom of dramatists and put limitations on the kind of play they were able to produce. An extremely important aspect of this is the idea of “self-censorship”. Certainly, in the period from 1850 to 1900 less than one per cent of the total plays submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval were banned (Johnston, 1990, 35). However, rather than reflecting a liberal censorship policy it indicates the innocuous material the playwrights themselves felt able to write. Once we get into the


twentieth century and a new era of British theatre, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office finds itself taking a more proactive role. None of Conrad’s plays ran into trouble with the censor. In fact, the censors tended to be rather obsequious towards great “men of letters” – more than many drama critics were – obviously feeling that what looked like “literary” drama would bring benefits: from their perspective, they thought it might help to “clean up” the stage. All the same, the presence of censorship might explain some of the dramatic decisions in the Conrad plays. We might consider the discreet handling of extreme violence in Laughing Anne and The Secret Agent, or the happy ending to Victory. Stage censorship was fiercely contested. At the 1909 Joint Select Committee on Censorship, many of the leading figures in English theatre and fiction such as Harley Granville-Barker, Arnold Bennett and Henry James concerted their efforts in a robust, albeit unsuccessful, condemnation of the role of the Lord Chamberlain. Even before this, Conrad had made his own feelings public. In “The Censor of Plays: An Appreciation” (Daily Mail, 12 October 1907), Conrad reveals that he was astonished when he learnt of the existence of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and its exceptional powers of censorship. In describing it, Conrad says, “I don’t say inappropriate. I say improper – that is: something to be ashamed of” (Notes on Life and Letters, 76). Although Conrad’s public attack on censorship is thorough and uncompromising, in private he was less forthright. In a letter to John Galsworthy, Conrad playfully writes about the positive aspects of Viscount Althorp’s career as Lord Chamberlain: He in his 12 years of office was not afraid of “provoking reaction”. I suppose he knew what he was doing when he choked off Annunzio that dreary, dreary saltimbanque of passion . . . and Maeterlin(c)k the farceur who has been hiding an appalling poverty of ideas and hollowness of sentiment in wistful baby-talk – two consecrated reputations, not to speak of the sacrosanct Ibsen, of whom like Mrs Verloc of Ossipon, I prefer to say nothing. (CL3, 503)11 In public, Conrad regarded the Lord Chamberlain as “the Caesar of the dramatic world” (Notes on Life and Letters, 79), with formidable powers to “kill thought, and incidentally truth, and incidentally beauty” (Notes on Life and Letters, 78). Nevertheless, Conrad also felt that the censor could incidentally do culture a service by killing off what he saw as the bad art that, by default, blighted the theatre which, according to Curle, Conrad regarded as “the lowest of all forms of art” (Curle, 1928, 125).


On other occasions Conrad lampoons Maeterlinck’s “Pink Goose” (CL4, 427) – in other words, the epic fantasy The Blue Bird – as the kind of “pretty-pretty” trivia that theatre audiences happily digest. Regarding “Papa Ibsen” (CL6, 136), Conrad was not always so tactful. According to Richard Curle, Conrad would talk about Ibsen as “that old fraud” (Curle, 1928, 125). The kind of disparaging comments we have seen in Conrad reflect a general attitude of anti-theatrical prejudice in novelists that Max Beerbohm condemns: That the English theatre is a hot-bed of stupidity and artificiality is the excuse always pleaded by English masters of fiction for their aloofness. (Beerbohm, 1953, 384) Beerbohm writes this in his review of One Day More and he finds it is a prejudice matched by an equally lamentable “mistrust of strangers” in the British theatre: They do not say “Here is new blood. Let us help it to circulate,” but “Here is new blood. Let us throw cold water on it.” They do not say of Mr. Conrad “Here is the sort of man that is needed – a man with a wide knowledge of many kinds of life, and a man with acute vision, and with deep human sympathy, and with a passionate imagination – an essentially dramatic imagination, moreover,” but “Mr. Conrad has much to learn,” or something to that miserable effect. (Beerbohm, 1953, 384–5) Beerbohm’s account is perceptive, and many (but emphatically not all) reviews that greet the premieres of the Conrad stage adaptations on the Edwardian or the post-First World War stage repeat these negative sentiments or, more politely but no less damningly, extol the virtues of the original fiction over the dramatisation. We have seen that One Day More was motivated by a financial imperative and inspired by a new impetus in British theatre. However, it is additionally significant that Conrad wrote the play more or less at the heart of what has traditionally been regarded as Conrad’s “great phase”: after Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904), and before The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). In the light of this, I believe there is a case in arguing that in the One Day More dramatist we see an artist who was not only convinced of, but had proved his genius and thus set out to excel in a sister art form. After Conrad’s


disappointment with the One Day More production, however, he was content to dedicate himself to his principal literary form for a fruitful number of years. The full development of Conrad as dramatist occurs in the twilight of his career. Although in February 1917 Conrad reads an adaptation of Almayer’s Folly by Harold Brighouse – author of Hobson’s Choice (1915) – and regards it as proof that his 1895 novel is impossible to adapt (CL6, 26), in the following week Conrad admits that “theatrical prospects begin to interest me” (CL6, 28). In the wake of the Victory production, Conrad launches himself into a number of projects including the adaptation of The Secret Agent and “Because of the Dollars” for the stage. The Rescue (1920) will be published, a consciously dramatic novel which Robert Hampson argues is characterised by a “proliferation of theatrical imagery” (Hampson, 2000, 160). Other broadly dramatic enterprises include Conrad’s adaptation of “Gaspar Ruiz” into a screenplay and his translation of Bruno Winawer’s satirical stage comedy The Book of Job. Perhaps the “dramatic phase” around 1920 reflects Conrad’s attempt to rejuvenate his creativity: his zenith in fiction had passed and he turned to the stage hoping that it might breathe new life into his powers. There is a valid argument in asserting that the Conraddramatist of 1904 was a self-confident writer of “genius” attempting to conquer the stage as a way of burning up some of his creative energy. In contrast the Conrad-dramatist of 1920 is an anxious writer concerned that he has lost his powers and turns to the stage sincerely hoping that it can release him from the doldrums. This argument is promoted by Frederick R. Karl who claims that Conrad “saw the stage not as something to be achieved but as an escape from malaise and stagnation” (Karl, 1979, 838). Owen Knowles prefers to interpret Conrad’s gusto behind the Victory and The Secret Agent adaptations as attempts “to ensure his career had no loose ends” (Knowles, 1996, 17), a claim that seems plausible when Conrad describes The Secret Agent adaptation as “a great experience and I want it to be complete” (CL6, 520). All of Conrad’s plays were dramatisations and they make interesting case studies in the theory and practice of adaptation. There are five essential practices available to any adapter. These are: omission (narrative or textual material is removed when source fiction is generically transformed into a play); addition (narrative or textual material not in the source fiction is introduced in the adaptation); marginalisation (thematic issues are given less prominence in the dramatisation); expansion (thematic issues suggested in the source fiction are given more prominence in the dramatisation); alteration (themes, narrative events and details, textual


style, etc. are modified). A close analysis reveals that Conrad uses all of these strategies in his adaptations. However, although Conrad may have regarded the writing of plays as a mechanical exercise, his adaptations yield results with a range of generic, stylistic and thematic ramifications. When the word “story” is used in this study, it is in a formalist sense. To a Russian Formalist like Boris Tomashevsky (Tomashevsky, 1965), a narrative text directly presents a reader with a “plot” at the heart of which is a unifying, concrete story. The time structure of a story must be linear while a plot can unfold itself in any conceivable order. This would imply that The Secret Agent play, with its linear time structure, must therefore be closer to the “sordid” (CL6, 520) underlying story than the more fragmentary (because non-chronological) novel. The concept of an underlying story as an irreducible core may be extremely contentious as it implies there is a locatable point of origin: in Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, for instance, there can never be a point of origin (Bassnett-McGuire, 1991, 104). Similarly, there is one of the great conundrums of adaptation: How far can we regard a work as being the “same” despite existing in two genres? In the adaptation of The Secret Agent, Winnie goes irrevocably insane whilst in the source fiction she commits suicide: How far is it the same story? Perhaps, after all, stories are no more concretely fixed than meaning is: a “glow (that) brings out a haze” (Youth and Heart of Darkness, 48). Conrad, for one, certainly believed he found the story of The Secret Agent in the process of adaptation and it proves almost cataclysmic. Whatever his motives were for selecting The Secret Agent for his most ambitious adaptation, Conrad suddenly realises “as I never had done, what a gruesome story I had written” (Mégroz, 1931, 25). It is this process that makes Conrad admit in the “Author’s Note” to the novel that the underlying story makes a “grisly skeleton” (8). During the writing of the adaptation, Conrad is driven to lament to André Gide “truthfully, I don’t know what I am doing” (CL6, 536). He realises with “dread” that he is producing a play that will be “repulsive to average minds and shocking to average feelings” (CL6, 520). But he also believes that there may be “salvation” if he makes the play as “horrible as I possibly can” (CL6, 520). This attitude not only exposes the personal crisis that self-adaptation creates for Conrad, but also reflects that the plays are ambitious, complex and unsettling as the subtitles of the following case studies – “A Tragedy in Modern Life”, “A Grim and Weird Play”, “A Play of Unbearable Horror”, “A Most Disturbing Play” – make abundantly


clear. Conrad’s own adaptations will not patronise the audience any more than his novels patronise his readers. Neither will his reconstructed fictions pander to conventional theatrical fashion: they will deliberately attempt to retain, in the theatre, qualities that are undeniably and essentially “Conradesque” (CL6, 135).

2 A Tragedy in Modern Life: One Day More

Joseph Conrad’s first play was an adaptation of his short story “To-morrow” (1902). “To-morrow” first appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1902 and was collected along with “Typhoon”, “Falk” and “Amy Foster” in Typhoon and Other Stories (1903). Traditionally, although critics may not have dismissed “To-morrow” as readily as, say, “The Brute” (1908), there certainly seems to have been difficulty finding a natural place for “To-morrow” in the Conrad oeuvre. Jocelyn Baines’s comment is typical: It is not one of Conrad’s most impressive short stories and there is something gratuitously unpleasant in a madman and a blind old tyrant being the cause of Bessie Carvil’s tragedy. It has in fact a rather un-Conradian flavour and it is not surprising to discover that Hueffer apparently had a hand in it. (Baines, 1959, 269) Baines’s remark that the story is “un-Conradian” because Ford Madox Ford was involved in it stems from Conrad’s letter to Ford where he states that “To-morrow” is “all your suggestion and absolutely my conception” (CL2, 372). Baines also reflects a period of Conrad studies that shared Jessie Conrad’s well-known disdain for Ford and, more broadly, a period of literary criticism when although “collaboration” was acknowledged as a common practice it was still something of a dirty word. The problematic place of “To-morrow” is also because, in Conrad’s own words, it was “‘Conrad’ adapted down to the needs of a magazine” (CL2, 373). It is an example of Conrad’s magazine fiction, expressly written with the needs and forms of popular culture in mind. As Gail Fraser argues, “To-morrow” conforms to “the standard pattern of magazine fiction” with its central characters all bearing “a strong resemblance to popular stereotypes” (Fraser, 1996, 34). However, Fraser adds, “the story emphatically 20

A Tragedy in Modern Life: One Day More 21

lacks a happy ending” (Fraser, 1996, 34) and this quality is crucial to the meaning and strength of the story in both its original fictional form and its stage adaptation. Daniel Schwarz describes “To-morrow” as “an underrated story” (Schwarz, 1980, 118) and Knowles and Moore believe it to be “an unjustly neglected tale” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 413). The play version, One Day More, was staged at the Royalty Theatre from 25 June to 27 June 1905 in a run that comprised three evening and two matinee performances. One Day More formed a double bill with Miss Laurence Alma Tadema’s New Felicity. Conrad’s play went on to enjoy a few provincial revivals in the following years including a significant production by John Drinkwater at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in September 1918. Outside Britain, One Day More was translated into French by P. H. Raymond-Duval and opened at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris on 14 April 1909. Frank E. Washburn Freund endeavoured to arrange a German production of One Day More for Ansalt für Aufführungsrecht dramatischer Werke of Berlin. The play was also staged by the Sunday Theatre Society in Chicago around 1913–14. After his death, the play was given a radio broadcast by the BBC (27 August 1929) and was staged by the Provincetown Players in 1933 (Wheatley, 1999, 2). As well as saying that he wrote the play with the promise of money in mind (CL3, 117), Conrad adapted the short story into his first play under the active encouragement of the critic and champion of the arts Sidney Colvin. In terms of writing the dramatic adaptation, the contribution of Ford Madox Ford would seem to be major once again, at least if the forty-three-page draft of the play in Ford’s handwriting held at Cornell University is anything to go by. Conrad completed the script in 1904, and the English Stage Society premiered the play in the following year, one month after their premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (Court Theatre, May 1905). It is indeed impressive that the Stage Society were interested in Conrad’s play – albeit at a smaller venue – when one considers their place in British theatre history at this time with Granville-Barker’s 1904–7 seasons of Shaw’s plays and premieres at the Court Theatre. Conrad’s initial excitement at having written a play is evident inasmuch as, in November 1904, he sends a copy of One Day More to J. M. Barrie, by now an accomplished playwright and imminently about to enjoy the success of Peter Pan (premiered at the Duke of York’s Theatre in December 1904). Along with the script, Conrad wrote, “I am anxious to know whether there is in me the ‘sense’ of the stage in any degree that could be turned to a practical advantage” (CL2, 179–80). However, by April 1905 when the prospective production has become a reality, Conrad


seems to distance himself from the project, feeling that W. Lee Mathews (the Chairman of the Stage Society Producing Committee), Harley Granville-Barker and George Bernard Shaw “seem to attach much more importance to the thing than I do myself” (CL2, 233). One frustration as the production loomed may have been that Conrad was obliged to change the title of his play. Although it was written as To-morrow, Conrad renamed it One Day More because when it came to production, it was discovered that “there’s a To-morrow touring in the provinces” (CL2, 268) and an attempt to stage Conrad’s play would have infringed on the copyright of the “rival” production. Soon after the production, Conrad gives an account of this period of his life: (The) resumé of activities runs as follows. Gout. Tinkering at the play. Worry. Two “mirror” papers. Touch of gout. Rehearsals of the play, with going up to London for the purpose – (which is a game not worth the candle). Loss of time. Some experience (which may or may not be of use). (CL2, 271) The despondency towards the theatre that imbues this letter is a mood that will return to haunt Conrad in his later dramatic years. The fixed and banal setting of “To-morrow” strikes a startling contrast to the exotic adventure and extremity of the accompanying tales “Typhoon” and “Falk”, stories that have been seen as typically “Conradian”. Conrad, however, obviously recognised that there is an inherent drama to the story, and this is why he chose it for adaptation. The drama of the story is partly evident in the domestic-bound scenario of the story wherein we are presented with an archetypal situation in which individual personalities jostle with each other. The fact that the story uses an exclusively fixed location gives it an instant appeal in the theatrical context of its appearance. After all, as much as the accompanying tale “Typhoon” may rage with inherent drama, its narrative focus on the experience of the crew’s journey through the storm make it more suited to a form that existed in a fledgling phase (cinema) or a form that was yet to be invented (radio drama).1 Although the opening of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the sinking ship scene in Cecil Raleigh’s melodrama The Price of Peace (1899) may have incorporated onstage disasters at sea, their functions are as a prologue and a spectacular set-piece respectively (Booth, 1981, 72). “To-morrow” is a story that uses a fixed location. This focus to the setting – the two gardens of the symmetrical cottages and the sea in the distance – instantly creates a stage. Out of necessity we do not see inside


the two cottages, and this confines the action of the story to the immediately dramatic stage space of the two gardens. It is also a tale of multiple immobilities: by choice or circumstance Hagberd and Carvil are rooted in their respective patches while Bessie is trapped by duty and gender. Even the great wanderer Harry may be full of tales of his exploits across the world but it is important that we only have his word for it. Even in a film version, flashbacks of Harry Hagberd’s globetrotting and adventuring would, or should, be avoided. “To-morrow” provides a choice scenario of stasis and language, ideal for the theatre of the period. In all of Conrad’s plays, the principal female role is at the heart of the drama and in One Day More Bessie is the central character. Arguably, it is the same in the original short story although there is a distinct equilibrium between Bessie and Captain Hagberd as focal characters. In fact, of all of Conrad’s plays, there are fewer differences between “To-morrow” and the dramatisation of it. Conrad retains the situation, principal characters and some of the dialogue. It is important to stress that aside from some of the specific analysis of narrative technique in the following exploration, many of the observations and theoretical resonance of the work apply equally to both versions. Hence when reference is made to Conrad’s “story” (as opposed to “short story”), the word is being used in a formalist sense, and examination is being made of the underlying story that is shared regardless of genre or media. “To-morrow” and “Amy Foster” share the fictional Kent location of the village of Colebrook. Both stories present a cynical but convincing portrait of a parochial community. As Daniel Schwarz writes, the shared location of the stories means that when one reads “To-morrow” after “Amy Foster”, the “memory of xenophobia and human pettiness informs the expectations of the reader” (Schwarz, 1980, 118). It is a community that delights in the alienation of the outsider, which renders the eccentric Captain Hagberd not angry but rather timid “because he was always afraid of being laughed at” (259). Hagberd’s appearance in his handmade clothes and uncontrolled beard is central to his ridicule in the eyes of Colebrook, but it is Hagberd’s mind, his perpetual anticipation of the return of his son, that truly marks him out as “other”. The first line of direct speech in the short story is Hagberd’s mild castigation of Bessie for letting the tea cloths and other rags dry on the shared fence: “It rots the wood” (243). He adds that it is her “only unthrifty, careless habit” (243). Hagberd may well detest carelessness, but he is himself pointless. He digs the garden but never sows (250), and so lives in a wasteland that consists partly of constantly tilled earth and partly of “rank grass and . . . tall weeds” (244). Hagberd seems an


image of futility. Like T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925), Hagberd seems to dwell in the “Shadow” that falls “Between the idea / And the reality” (Eliot, 1969, 85), filling his life with empty actions or pipe dreams. Just as he is concerned that Bessie’s rags may rot the fence, no doubt the carpets Hagberd buys are left rolled up to protect them from use, ironically making them look like the broken columns of antiquity (250). Yet for Hagberd the stacks of unused furniture and objects have a function beyond symbolism: they are the tangible embodiment of tomorrow and in them he sees the basis of a happy, well-provided home and love nest for Harry and Bessie. Similarly, by declining a shave from the gossip-mongering barber, Hagberd thinks he is sustaining stasis when in actuality he emphasises mortal decay. His long beard is never trimmed (244) and eventually turns “quite white” (247). With this appearance in mind, Hagberd is described as a washed-up Father Neptune, a sea god ironically exiled to land (253), in keeping with him being a lifelong sailor who hated the sea and successfully managed to avoid the ocean wave. Further irony is laid on with Captain Hagberd recurrently described as “paternal” (although it transpires he was an abusive father), culminating in him being described as “Father Christmas” (259). This latter comment is a mocking remark from Harry who would be astonished at the aptness of the name if he could but see the plethora of unopened gifts hoarded in his father’s “grotto”. In fact, the interior of his home is barred to all – “nobody had ever been inside his cottage” (256) – and, later, when Harry leans over the garden wall it is an unforgivable violation. Hagberd’s home is an expectant shrine, a patient assemblage of material objects for a future both imminent and eternally out of reach. It is a domicile as macabre as it is fiercely protected. There are other literary examples of homes of the mad that are similarly characterised by a disturbingly warped sense of time. For example, Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) attempts to live in a grotesquely frozen instant of the past, normal life moments before devastating trauma. At the end of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930) we discover that Emily Grierson has lived much of her adult life with the corpse of a loved one in a horrific mimicry of day-to-day domestic normality, in other words a present in which nothing is permitted to change. Rather than being trapped in a traumatic past or in an unconsciously parodic present, Captain Hagberd is somehow trapped in the future cluttering his house in preparation for an impossible tomorrow.2 Although Hagberd inhabits a self-created realm of fantasy, like the mythic icons he ironically comes to resemble, he fulfils an important


function for the “normal” community he is associated with. The community – epitomised by the “sardonic” (245) Colebrook barber – may deride Hagberd’s waiting for Harry, but eventually finds itself caught up in the “strong craze” (246). It shows that there is an ironic dependency at work, what Daniel Schwarz describes as “the symbiotic relationship between community standards and personal values” (Schwarz, 1980, 118): the citizens of Colebrook deride but need Hagberd. In contrast, Hagberd is isolated, needing nothing to exist but his dream of tomorrow. The Colebrook community is also somewhat trivial in its gossiping and living in the ephemeral moment. The day Hagberd sheds his mourning clothes and dons his self-made canvas suit causes a commotion: It caused a sensation in the High Street – shopkeepers coming to their doors, people in the houses snatching up their hats to run out – a stir at which he seemed strangely surprised at first, and then scared . . . (247) The sensation is eventually long forgotten and Hagberd is “disregarded” (247). Such is “the penalty of dailiness” (247) whereby even the person selected to be the village idiot (or ironic mythic figure) is normalised by familiarity, and the “other” becomes “one of us”. Bessie Carvil, in contrast, has always been smothered by normalisation. Far from being an outcast, Bessie is an archetypal member of her class, gender and community. She is even a participant in the community’s mocking of Hagberd, seeing him as mad or laughable (248). This stops only when Bessie is gripped by a hope that reflects her desperation for emancipation from her situation. Schwarz argues that “the pathology of social imprisonment has deprived Bessie of her potential identity and reduced her world to a monochromatic cartoon” (Schwarz, 1980, 119). It is a tragedy not to be an outcast in Colebrook, a place characterised by two-dimensional conformity. The daughter of a retired shipbuilder, Bessie lives with her blind father in a rented cottage, a slave to his needs. Like Virginia Woolf’s definition of the “Angel in the House” in her “Professions for Women” essay, Bessie’s existence is one in which she “sacrifice(s) herself daily”, preferring to “sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others” (Woolf, 1961, 202). The relevance of this to Bessie’s relationship with her father is immediately evident, but although her sympathy with Hagberd’s fantasies of tomorrow may start as mere indulgence, it ultimately amounts to self-sacrifice. Bessie’s life has become one of living tragedy as she is trapped into an existence of selflessly serving a selfish master. As Susan Jones writes, “Bessie is locked


in a master/slave relationship with her possessive, blind father” (Jones, 1999, 56). We could add that even her relationship with Hagberd becomes another form of slavery: not the physical and material one that she endures with her father but a spiritual and emotional slavery through the romantic fantasy of “to-morrow”. Ironically, this slavery of the heart and soul is ultimately more damning because although she can survive the physical and material oppression inflicted by her father, Harry’s actions are not merely de-romanticising, they annihilate any hope for emancipation. Among many possible intertextual examples, Bessie Carvil’s thwarted life is like that of Catherine Sloper in Henry James’s Washington Square (1881), or the pathetically – and undeservedly – vacuous existence of the eponymous character in May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922). Bessie’s one hope against apparent futility is the life of the heart: a mad dream of romance that almost comes true. This sense of fantastical and romantic escape in a life of austerity is acutely symbolised in the description of Bessie’s garden: “The tiny back yard on her side had a few stone-bordered little beds of black earth, in which the simple flowers she found time to cultivate appeared somehow extravagantly overgrown, as if belonging to an exotic clime” (244). The relationship between Bessie and Captain Hagberd established in the opening stage of the short story has a romantic register. In their exchanges over the garden boundary, Bessie would lean her elbows on the fence and “look at her father’s landlord in silence – in an informed silence, which had an air of knowledge, expectation and desire” (243). There is something of Pyramus and Thisbe in this relationship across a wall, although as we shall see, being on the various borders and planes of Dante’s Divine Comedy is perhaps more appropriate. However, in time it becomes clear to the reader that the “knowledge, expectation and desire” of this relationship is founded on Hagberd’s promise that his son will return and marry Bessie, and she will cross the fence and live as a married woman in the cottage next door. It is evidence of her dissatisfaction and the barrenness of her life that the fantasy of an eccentric old man should become of paramount importance to her. A significant part of their communication is Captain Hagberd’s “affectionate wink”: Miss Carvil had come to look forward rather to these winks. At first they had discomposed her: the poor fellow was mad. Afterwards she had learned to laugh at them: there was no harm in him. Now she was aware of an unacknowledged, pleasurable, incredulous emotion, expressed by a faint blush. (248)


That wink is the only affectionate and hopeful act of communication in her barren and thankless existence. Ultimately, Bessie becomes afflicted with the same full-blown “disease of hope” (248) that Hagberd has contracted. For Bessie it starts as a consciously playful and escapist fantasy, but in time it becomes as “extravagantly overgrown” and as out of place as her exotic flowers. But just as, against all odds, Bessie’s flowers blossom, her fantasy too seems, astonishingly, to be coming true. When Harry Hagberd returns, this presents to Bessie the prospect of something tantamount to an arranged marriage. The absurdity of the situation, in which the mad dreams of an old man have come true, overwhelms Bessie. Harry observes that she “really was trembling very much” (262), but his insensitive assessment that this is because “her wrap had slipped off her head” (262) means that he misses the enormity of the situation. The moment repeats when he serenades Bessie, and her “teeth chattered” (268). In the interaction between Bessie and Harry, Conrad offers an ironic parody of a romantic love scene. Bessie cannot subjugate her emotions of passion, and although Harry’s arrival may fulfil the role of a hero on a charger, his fleeting visit is entirely mercenary and he will be happy to depart after having a bite to eat, a half-sovereign and a stolen kiss. Bessie has been waiting for her Harry Hagberd to arrive, and he announces he can only prove who he is if she lets him “step inside your gate” (265). Without a moment’s hesitation, Bessie breaks down the boundary so important in the story up to this point and lets him in. Conrad’s description continues to be loaded with sexual imagery: He entered then the front garden of the Carvils. His tall shadow strode with a swagger; she turned her back on the window and waited, watching the shape, of which the footfalls seemed the most material part. The light fell on a tilted hat; a powerful shoulder, that seemed to cleave the darkness; on a leg stepping out. He swung about and stood still, facing the illuminated parlour window at her back, turning his head from side to side, laughing softly to himself. (265) The rhythm and movement of Harry is strong and assured: he is powerful and cleaving. The parts of his body that are emphasised are his shoulder, leg and head while all we see of Bessie is the repeated concept of “her back”. It is as if Bessie is prone while Harry swaggers and laughs. After all, this is “a man accustomed to unlawful trysts” (266). Such unlawful trysts are diametrically opposed not merely to Bessie’s romantic fantasy but more broadly to the ideals of domestic conformity. Indeed, in his


desperation for Harry to return and his preparations to turn his house into the homestead of a happy family, one would think that Captain Hagberd was a loving parent in a fulfilled relationship. In fact, it transpires that Hagberd was a very violent father. Harry will never forget being chased “upstairs with a hard leather strap” (264) and reveals that his father – not content with merely thrashing him – threatened to “cut my soul out of my body” (266). It is such demonic sadism that has repulsed Harry from the prospect of domesticity, especially as although Harry may have felt more attached to his mother she was an accomplice to her husband: “my poor mother egged him on – for my good, I suppose” (269). The “spare the rod, spoil the child” ethos ultimately drove Harry away from home. Ironically, even though Hagberd is unable to recognise his own son, within minutes he does what he always used to do: he physically assaults him. Harry, the free man, remains jovial: “It’s just like old times. Nearly walloped the life out of me to stop me going away, and now I come back he throws a confounded shovel at my head to keep me out” (264). If Harry’s account of the unhappy Hagberd home does not destroy the myth of the “Home, Sweet Home”, then the assault does. Perhaps even worse is the revelation that nothing has changed, whereby even the possibility of madness is refuted: I tell you: the day I cleared out, I was all black and blue from his great fondness for me. Ah! he was always a bit of a character. Look at that shovel, now. Off his chump? Not much. That’s just exactly like my dad. (269) This is a catastrophic moment in that the madness one might pity if it afflicted a father whose dementia had made him degenerate into a “very foolish, fond old man” (King Lear, IV.6.60) somehow feels unforgivable as Harry avers it has always been there. Harry may well feel disdain for the fantasy that Captain Hagberd blissfully indulges in and Bessie desperately wants to believe in, but, like father like son, Harry has his own indulgent fantasy: the Gambucino. If Harry is in awe of anyone, it is the lone Gambucinos of the gold country who would find their fortune and women but turn their backs on both in the assertion of their individual freedom. It is a world of no boundaries, free from the shackles of material or emotional bonds. Looked at like this, the Gambucino is a kind of existentialist. Harry, the wannabe Gambucino, has a total disregard for other’s boundaries and this is critical: indeed, it is the moment that he stretches his arm over Hagberd’s wall and catches “him by the sleeve” (260) that truly seals his


fate with his father, driving the old man indoors. When he goes into the garden and knocks on the door he is attacked with the shovel. Bessie finds him “thrilling” (264), and, sexually stimulated, she speaks to him “in a brazen voice, which quavered” (271) or in “a quick, panting voice” (272). But when it is clear that Harry holds the idea of marriage and settling down in contempt, Bessie is denied the prospect of the sanctity that permits sexual expression and she shakes “all over with noiseless dry sobs” (273). At that moment her misery is ineffable and she is “dry”. She will soon clap “her hands to her face” (274), as Winnie Verloc will press the “palms of her hands . . . convulsively to her face” (160) at her own nadir. Bessie pleads with Harry to “go away! go away for God’s sake!” (274), but she is forced to endure a final romantic parody: (The) next moment she felt herself lifted up in the powerful embrace of his arms. Her feet lost the ground; her head hung back; he showered kisses on her face with a silent and overmastering ardour, as if in haste to get at her very soul. He kissed her pale cheeks, her hard forehead, her heavy eyelids, her faded lips; and the measured blows and sighs of the rising tide accompanied the enfolding power of his arms, the overwhelming might of his caresses. It was as if the sea, breaking down the wall protecting all the homes of the town, had sent a wave over her head. It passed on; she staggered backwards, with her shoulders against the wall, exhausted, as if she had been stranded there after a storm and a shipwreck. (275) Once again, Bessie is supine, with her feet off the ground and her neck exposed. In fact, Harry’s ravishing her to “get at her very soul” strikes a distinctly vampiric note, and is a deliberate echo of Hagberd’s threat to “cut out” his son’s soul (like father like son, once again). Conrad’s pastiche of romantic magazine fiction here almost amounts to a precursor to the high drama of the Hollywoodesque “lovers in a crashing wave” cliché that we would immediately associate with From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). It is, however, ironically offset by the fact that it is a violation. Moreover, despite the lush prose, Conrad peppers the description of Bessie with unglamorous reality: close up, she is “hard”, “heavy” and “faded”. Although little seems to threaten the torpor and stasis of Colebrook, time is cruel and would be almost imperceptible if it were not for the barber’s greying hair and Bessie’s fading looks. Above all, the whole episode is framed in irony as it is cruelly prefaced by Harry’s statement, “You can’t buy me in . . . and you can’t buy yourself out” (275), which sets the encounter on the terms of a sordid economic exchange.


“To-morrow” is a claustrophobic tale depicting lives trapped in Hagberd’s tightly proscribed cottages that are themselves trapped in petty-minded Colebrook. Although Harry may see himself like a Gambucino or a Casanova,3 in the smothering parochialism of Colebrook it does somehow seem implausible. The smothering mediocrity and xenophobia of the town threatens to turn anything out of the ordinary into a tall story. Even if location is critically limited and stifling, the exploration of various concepts of time and being in the story is impressive. Harry’s mechanism of being and survival is to make a summation of the past and live in the immediacy of the present. In contrast, his father lives entirely for and/or in the future, a madness that has come to seem unquenchably and recklessly hopeful to Bessie. However, in Bessie’s moral framework, Hagberd’s belief in tomorrow is ultimately revealed as an eternity of suffering. In Conrad’s story, Captain Hagberd and his son supply a distinct precursor to some aspects of Martin Heidegger’s brand of phenomenology (developed from the 1920s onwards), while Bessie comes to represent a more orthodox creed. In his explication of Heidegger, Richard Kearney writes: The essence of human being is temporality (Zeitlichkeit) . . . for we can only understand ourselves in the present by referring to the temporal horizons of our existence, that is, by recollecting our past and projecting our future. (Kearney, 1986, 32) In the light of this, Captain Hagberd and his son are individually inadequate but together they arguably form a Heideggerian whole. Hagberd lives by projecting himself into a specific future although he misremembers the past. In contrast, Harry is burdened by memories of a painful past and seems reluctant to project a future but does acknowledge and embrace its limitlessness. Indeed, when he says that the “whole world ain’t a bit too big for me to spread my elbows in, I can tell you” (273) we are reminded of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein (beingthere) which is a “mode of being which is always projecting itself beyond itself towards its possibilities” (Kearney, 1986, 32). Heidegger argues that the one and only certainty in the “open horizon of futural possibilities” (Kearney, 1986, 33) is death – our underlying nothingness – which Harry accepts, seemingly without Angst: “And where else is it that you hope to die?” “In the bush somewhere; in the sea; on a blamed mountain top for choice. At home? Yes! the world’s my home; but I expect I will die in a hospital some day. What of that? Any place is good enough, as


long as I’ve lived; and I’ve been everything you can think of almost but a tailor or a soldier. I’ve been a boundary rider; I’ve sheared sheep; and humped my swag; and harpooned a whale. I’ve rigged ships, and prospected for gold, and skinned dead bullocks, – and turned my back on more money than the old man would have scraped in his whole life. Ha, ha!” (269–70) Harry’s bravado is not founded on materialism: in fact, the willing rejection of money forms the climax to his speech. His celebration of living life as pure experience is not dissimilar to Stephen Dedalus at the end of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), who, having escaped the many nets of ideology, declares: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience” (Joyce, 1963, 252). In boasting to Bessie that he has been “everything you can think of”, Harry acknowledges the multivarious possibilities of phenomenological being. But unlike Stephen Dedalus, Harry is no artist with a smithy in his soul, and he is unable to project a future beyond one week with a woman or pocketing some cash to spend with a drinking chum on a binge in London. If Harry is reckless in his refusal to project beyond the imminent and impulsive, his father is equally but antithetically reckless in his insistence on projecting only one possible future. When this future comes true, old Hagberd refutes the present in preference to an endlessly projected future. In Heidegger’s terms, we are each a Sein-zum-Tode (being towards death). Death marks “the impossibility of any further possibilities” (Kearney, 1986, 35), the awareness of which creates Angst. This state of being suddenly becomes apparent in Hagberd when Bessie suggests the possibility that Harry may be dead: Only once she had tried pityingly to throw some doubt on that hope doomed to disappointment, but the effect of her attempt had scared her very much. All at once over that man’s face there came an expression of horror and incredulity, as though he had seen a crack open out in the firmament. “You – you – you don’t think he’s drowned!” For a moment he seemed to her ready to go out of his mind, for in his ordinary state she thought him more sane than people gave him credit for. (251) Heidegger believes that Angst is not a fear as such, as fear requires a specific object of terror. We should notice, therefore, that Bessie is


“scared”, the object of her fear being the spectacle of a man on the cusp of nullification. In contrast to being “scared”, Conrad’s description of Hagberd’s mixed reaction of “horror and incredulity” is perhaps an excellent description of the experience of anguish. In addition, the detection of the rupture in the firmament is recognition of the nothingness that lies beneath and within everything. When Hagberd teeters on the brink of total insanity rather than eccentricity, he is experiencing “the realisation of the self itself and of all objective entities as ultimately groundless. The self thus discovers that it is nothingness” (Kearney, 1986, 35). But Hagberd soon makes a “paternal and complacent recovery” and reassembles his belief system around the projection of an inevitable “to-morrow”. Both the Hagberds live in a proto-existentialist condition, each inhabiting his own godless universe. Harry seems to exist in a condition of amorality, exercising his own freewill in open defiance of the traditional values of conformity and duty. In returning home, Harry may remind us of the parable of the prodigal son (Gospel According to Saint Luke, 15), and yet the treatment is doubly ironic in that the son is unrepentant and his father does not recognise him. For his part, Captain Hagberd is something of a classical or Old Testament divinity. Not only does he physically resemble a god, he has become one: his universe is godless inasmuch as he himself is the god of it. He inhabits a home that he himself built, wears self-made clothes and is engaged in a constant process of creation. Indeed, even his “paternal” recovery from his moment of angst has a divine connotation to it. Whether in the garden or the material proliferation occurring indoors, it is apparent that he is his own god striving to create a paradise for his son and future daughter-in-law. In contrast to the phenomenological, if not existential, essences of Harry and his father (characterised by freewill and self-creation), Bessie’s being is far more classical in its sense of subservience, destiny and punishment. With the final departure of Harry, Bessie finds herself descending into hell. In desperation, as Harry walks away “leisurely” (275), the woman who previously did not speak but “breathed out” (271) emphatically shouts “Stop!” (275). But Harry does not, leaving Bessie in Hades: “Presently every sound grew fainter, as though she were slowly turning into stone. A fear of this awful silence came to her – worse than the fear of death” (276). In Harry and Bessie, Conrad presents us with an ironic Orpheus and Eurydice whereby Bessie turns to stone because Harry does not look back. In terms of Harry’s construction of the Gambucino myth, Bessie is treated like spurned gold and therefore feels irredeemably worthless. For Bessie this moment is the


revelation of a fate worse than death and she has no choice other than to stagger back to the twin cottages of desolation. While Hagberd, the mad phenomenologist, can happily continue his absurd existence in a home established on forward-looking fantasy, Bessie is acutely aware of entering a house of never-ending suffering: She . . . began to totter silently back towards her stuffy little inferno of a cottage. It had no lofty portal, no terrific inscription of forfeited hopes – she did not understand wherein she had sinned. (276) Her future is one of interminable, Dantean torment. The path for this allusion has already been established in the sentence prior to this which describes how her father “wallowing regally in his armchair, with a globe lamp burning by his side on the table, yelled for her in a fiendish voice”: not only is her father king-like and fiendish but he has an emblem of a burning world (i.e. the globe lamp) beside him. Ironically, although this is the Dante allusion that marks the sealing of Bessie’s fate, there have already been hints that Colebrook has a whiff of sulphur to it. As in some of Conrad’s other works, the grotesque metamorphosis found in Dante is used in the narrative: the cottages are “rabbit-hutches” (261), Josiah Carvil is “gross and unwieldy like a hippopotamus” (252) and Harry scorns the prospect of living “like a dam’ toad in a hole” (272). Even the fishing nets past which the Carvils move with “creeping slowness” are likened to “the cobwebs of gigantic spiders” (254), not dissimilar to the hideous yet pathetic spectacle in Canto XII of Purgatorio: “O mad Arachne, so saw I thee already half spider, sad upon the shreds of the work which to thy hurt was wrought by thee” (Dante, 1944, 259). For Harry, a conventional domestic life would have been the truly hollow existence of a modern hell, involving being “a lawyer’s clerk” (269) married to some “Judy” (273), surrounded by furniture he did not choose and with his soul removed (the only action that would possibly ensure that he would stay). Harry – living in a phenomenological world of limitless possibilities – can skip off to the next spree, but Bessie is terminally trapped. For her, the two “ugly yellow brick cottages” (243) are two planes of the same torment. The mantra that haunts Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist – “Ever to be in hell, never to be heaven” (Joyce, 1963, 155) – is apt here: Bessie will be forever trapped in the hell of her invalid and “fiendish” (276) father, while her dormant love nest gathers dust next door, never to be seen. Bessie is surrounded by blind


men. Her father is literally blind, while Hagberd’s “hope . . . had become his delusion” (255): (that) idea which blinded his mind to truth and probability, just as the other old man in the other cottage had been made blind, by another disease, to the light and beauty of the world. Harry, too, arrives in Colebrook having been “blind” drunk for “three days; on purpose” (268). Bessie’s damnation, in contrast to the men so instrumental to her fate, is to be all-seeing.4 Significantly, Bessie’s hell is not fiery but merely “stuffy”. The word not only suggests that it is not well ventilated, but also implies that it is confined by the trammels of a conventional morality: as Knowles and Moore say, Bessie is “trapped within a domestic prison (and) starved of any vision of freedom other than that offered by marriage” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 413). The fact that Conrad describes Bessie’s circumstances in terms of a hell metaphor and yet her existence is to be immutably mundane and unfulfilled draws a parallel with other works of literature. As in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), an empty life is the ultimate horror. In terms of drama, Bessie’s situation is like some of the vacuous domestic infernos in Ibsen or Strindberg, and maybe even the hell of other people and moral cowardice in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (1944). Like Garcin, Inez and Estelle it is significant that Bessie closes the door upon herself: she does not follow Harry’s example and cut herself loose but rather walks voluntarily through a door that she knows is the portal of hell. In Conrad’s terms, Bessie’s tragedy is specifically a woman’s tragedy reflecting the oppression of women in society, highly pertinent in a play written in the wake of plays portraying the New Woman, while in a Sartrean reading, Bessie’s “bad faith” is symptomatic of the human predicament. As is becoming clear, the story offers possible intertextual readings as bountiful as the gold “beyond the Rio Gila” (270), but at this point it would prove beneficial to devote our attention to theatrical examples. Conrad’s story, as fictional prose or as stage drama, provides rich parallels with the concerns of the theatre of its context: such as the modern domestic environment, moral values, gender expectations and generational conflict. Bessie shares something of the romantic idealism, and ultimate disappointment, of Pegeen encountering the alluring young man on the run in J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907). The thwarted dreams of Pegeen make her a representative figure of the female heroine that had been inaugurated in the new drama of Realism.


The eponymous heroine of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (Novel, 1868; Play, 1875) or, among many examples in Henrik Ibsen’s work, Nora in A Doll’s House (1879) are women who are victims of societal values and conditioning. While Nora may succeed in a Harry Hagberd-style flight from the nest to achieve emancipation, slamming the door behind her, Bessie’s destiny is tragic, as she remains crushed beneath the expectations and values of a patriarchal society. Her fate does not end with the shocking but definitive on-stage death as in Thérèse Raquin or Hedda Gabler (1890), but is rather compelled to endure an inescapable living death caring for her invalid father just as Mrs Alving in Ghosts (1882) is forced to nurse her son as he descends into the terminal sufferings of congenital syphilis. As in the realist plays of Ibsen, the locale of One Day More is bleak and oppressive, and yet it still succeeds in being imbued with symbolism. In contrast to the realist aesthetic, the artistic movement of Symbolism denounced Naturalism and Realism’s obsession with surface reality. French Symbolism had advocates and practitioners across all the arts, with enduring impact on poetry and the visual arts. Regarding Symbolism as a literary style, Ian Watt defines it in terms of “the simple plots, the musical, suggestive and poetic nature of the prose, the intensity of attention to physical objects” (Watt, 1976, 51). Watt argues that in the case of three works of fiction – Heart of Darkness, The Secret Sharer, and “To-morrow” – Conrad is “closer to the symbolist tradition than any previous English novelist” (Watt, 1976, 51). This is a contention that can easily be extended to One Day More in relation to the drama of French Symbolism. Although numerous Symbolist plays were written, they were, as Claude Schumacher writes, “not written to be performed. They were either too long, or the cast list was too ambitious and the action was also too ‘undramatic’ and ethereal” (Schumacher, 1984, 15). The exception to this is Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian dramatist, who wrote “short, small-cast, single-set scale plays” (Schumacher, 1984, 15). Although Conrad may have roundly condemned Maeterlinck (CL3, 503) there are striking parallels to be drawn and it is easy to imagine a convincing production of One Day More in a Symbolist style of design and mood of delivery. Like Maeterlinck’s plays, the modesty of One Day More in terms of cast and set makes it easily realisable in performance. In Intérieur (1894), Maeterlinck portrays a happy bourgeois family seen through the windows of their comfortable home, while outside in the snow we witness the dialogue of two characters as they build up the courage to tell the family that one of their children has died in an accident. The play is


short and tense, and combines sustained irony with a desperate mood of morbidity, qualities that make it in style, if not in plot, something of a precursor to One Day More. In Maeterlinck’s Les Aveugles (1890), we witness twelve blind people in an eerie forest awaiting the return of the priest who will lead them to safety. However, we, the audience, can see the priest lying dead on the ground. The characters’ endless waiting for a god (represented by the priest) who will never arrive may remind us of the grotesque irony in One Day More of Hagberd’s never-ending anticipation and Bessie’s flimsy and unfounded dreams. Maeterlinck’s plays are clearly starker and, one may even say, unsubtle compared to One Day More which, after all, merely assimilates aspects of Symbolist aesthetic rather than being a Symbolist play. Certainly, Conrad and Maeterlinck as dramatists share a sense of human isolation that borders on nihilism. Also, One Day More, Intérieur and Les Aveugles all have “waiting” as a central concern. Claude Schumacher argues: (Maeterlinck’s) theatre is a theatre of fear and a theatre of waiting – not the coward’s obscene fear which expresses itself in histrionics, but hidden, internal and unutterable fear, which gnaws away at the soul and which stems from forces over which we have no control. Such waiting and such fear will only cease at the moment of death; life must be lived until then. (Schumacher, 1984, 16) Similarly, “To-morrow” and the adaptation of it are in their own right masterful narrative constructions of “unutterable fear” and “waiting”. One Day More is not a play of melodramatic histrionics: in contrast, Bessie’s tragedy is a tragedy of the mundane.5 Maeterlinck might almost be describing what will be the meaning of “To-morrow” and One Day More when he writes in his essay on “The Tragical in Daily Life” (1897): There is a tragic element in the life of every day that is far more real, far more penetrating, far more akin to the true self that is in us than the tragedy that lies in great adventure. (Maeterlinck, 1908, 97) If applied to Conrad, this sentiment locates the tragedy of the story in Bessie. The crushing of her hope makes her wake up to “the true self” within and recognise a destiny of tragedy that seems far more real and penetrating than the aberrant and devil-may-care existence of the adventurous Harry. His life will probably end in penury or disaster, but nothing will make it as tragic as Bessie’s fate.


Ian Watt argues that some of Conrad’s finest fiction fulfilled the aesthetic of Symbolism and we have seen that there are parallels to be drawn in relation to his first play. The legacy of Symbolist drama is somewhat forgotten, but it unquestionably had a major influence on subsequent theatre. Anton Chekhov’s major plays may be masterpieces of Naturalism – largely thanks to the interpretations of them in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s productions at the Moscow Art Theatre – but a play such as The Cherry Orchard (1904) frequently launches into episodes akin to Symbolism, including a sustained dramatic irony and mood of despair. Symbolism also influenced later twentieth-century drama. As Schumacher writes, although Samuel Beckett’s “reluctance to acknowledge any influence on his work is well-known, [he] can be considered as a direct heir to the symbolist tradition” (Schumacher, 1984, 17). By the same token, Conrad’s One Day More could be seen as something of a precursor to Beckett. But before exploring this claim we will look at a playwright from the generation immediately subsequent to that of Conrad and prior to Beckett, namely Eugene O’Neill. In Captain Hagberd’s dream of tomorrow, we find a sentiment to be found in the wretched barflies of Harry Hope’s bar in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946), based on O’Neill’s only short story which was also entitled “Tomorrow” (1917). In the opening moments of O’Neill’s play, Larry Slade (a former anarchist who would happily be at home on the page or stage of Conrad’s The Secret Agent) explains to the bar owner: LARRY (grinning). I’ll be glad to pay up – tomorrow. And I know my fellow inmates will promise the same. They’ve all a touching credulity concerning tomorrows. (A half-drunken mockery in his eyes.) It’ll be a great day for them, tomorrow – the Feast of All Fools, with brass bands playing! Their ships will come in, loaded to the gunwales with cancelled regret and promises fulfilled and clean slates and new leases! (O’Neill, 1947, 15) It is this obsession with tomorrow that unites the motley assemblage of lost souls in the play. Hickey condemns Hope’s customers for hiding “behind lousy pipe dreams about tomorrow” (131) and insists that it is possible for them to live “in a today where there is no yesterday or tomorrow to worry you” (131). Hagberd may not be like an O’Neill drunk (that honour would belong to Harry), but it is clear he lives by the promise of the new lease of tomorrow. In terms of psychology, his obsession with tomorrow may be an underlying guilt for the cruelty exacted upon Harry, the departure of whom led to the death of


Mrs Hagberd. Hickey may be a flawed hero, but one can still imagine Bessie turning to Hagberd after the departure of Harry and echoing Hickey’s scream: Can’t you see there is no tomorrow now? You’re rid of it for ever! You’ve killed it! You don’t have to care a damn about anything any more! (192) This O’Neill extract indicates the differences between Conrad’s short story and the dramatic reconstruction of it: Hickey’s expression of freedom is truthful and yet tragic and misplaced. Although we can imagine the Bessie of “To-morrow” thinking it, it is inconceivable that she might utter it, existing as she does beneath a burden of conventional morality and conduct. Although she feels it unfair and unjustified, she has no choice other than to descend meekly into the inferno of eternity. In contrast, the Bessie in One Day More screams a phrase that is identical to Hickey: “There is no to-morrow!” (66). This highlights the crucial difference between the short story and the play and will be analysed in greater depth later in this chapter. The “To-morrow”/One Day More story may indeed broadly explore similar territory to O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, a play that has been described by Cyrus Day as perhaps the most “nihilistic play” in dramatic literature (Day, 1968, 86). The quality that Baines describes as “gratuitously unpleasant” in “To-morrow” – Conrad’s emphatically unhappy ending – is in part a social comment on the predicament of women, and it also strays, like O’Neill’s play, into questions of being. In fact, as nihilistic as O’Neill may be, the Symbolist and quasi-absurdist nature of Conrad’s short story and the play based on it find an even more compelling parallel in the nihilistic universe of Samuel Beckett. In comparing Conrad with Beckett, Theodore Billy argues: Conrad’s fiction often flirts with nihilism without finally giving way to the omnipotence of nothingness. Taking one step closer to nihilism, Beckett foregrounds isolation, the individual’s entrapment in a void, which he sees as an inescapable part of the human predicament. In such a world, authentic communication with others is almost impossible. (Billy, 2000, 71) Billy draws a number of convincing parallels between Victory and Beckett’s fiction, but in the case of “To-morrow”/One Day More we can find parallels which extend into Beckett’s drama. We have already seen


the impossibility of “authentic communication” in Conrad’s story, primarily in the ironic treatment of the encounter between Bessie and Harry. Several characters are isolated “in a void”: Captain Hagberd and his son fill the void with delusions of purpose or freewill; Josiah Carvil attempts to deny his essential isolation in a parasitic relationship with his daughter; Bessie, once she is aware that she is living in isolation, attempts to fill the void first with hope then with suffering. In Conrad’s story, the two old men living next door to each other are both distinctly proto-Beckettian sociopaths. Hagberd’s endless waiting for tomorrow is a hope as addictive and diseased as waiting for Godot and the blind and embittered Josiah Carvil is as monstrously tyrannical yet wretchedly dependant as the blind and embittered Hamm in Endgame (1957). Conrad’s description of Carvil certainly offers a precursor to Hamm: “Bessie! Bessie! Bessie!” howled old Carvil inside. “Bessie! – my pipe!” That fat blind man had given himself up to a very lust of laziness. He would not lift his hand to reach for the things she took care to leave at his very elbow. He would not move a limb; he would not rise from his chair, he would not put one foot before another, in that parlour (where he knew his way as well as if he had his sight) without calling her to his side and hanging all his atrocious weight on her shoulder. He would not eat one single mouthful of food without her close attendance. He made himself helpless beyond his affliction, to enslave her better. (258) Conrad does not describe Carvil’s pipe, but one can easily imagine it being like Hamm’s “pipe – the meerschaum” (Endgame, 117). Less frivolously, the atrocious and lascivious indolence of Carvil the “domestic tyrant” (210) reveals the same intention as Hamm: to “enslave” their aides. Tellingly, One Day More opens with the “Immovable” (35) Carvil just as Endgame ends with the “motionless” Hamm (134). In addition, Bessie is as undeserving a victim as Clov. Indeed, one can easily imagine Clov’s opening speech being uttered by Bessie: CLOV (Fixed gaze, tonelessly). Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. (Pause.) Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. (Pause.) I can’t be punished any more. (Pause.) I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. (Pause.) Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I’ll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me. (Beckett, 1986, 93)


This may not be a Dantean hell, but it certainly is a Joycean one. The grains are a clear allusion to the “tiny little grains” (Joyce, 1963, 154) of sand that make up the mountain of eternity in the vision of hell in Portrait of the Artist. Clov’s assertion that his punishment must end is like Bessie’s despairing sense of sinlessness. Both Clov and Bessie are trapped in domestic hells proscribed by dimensions and demarcations wherein they wait for the whistle or the roar of their sightless masters. Like the Carvils, Hamm and Clov live beside a heavily symbolic sea. In Endgame, Hamm desires to “hear the sea” (124) and urges Clov to “make a raft” (109) in a vain and ironic hint at a bid for freedom. In the Conrad story, we have seen that the sea is used as an ironic emblem of “passion” in Harry’s violation of Bessie and as an ironic presence in relation to Captain Hagberd, the hydrophobic sailor. Both Conrad and Beckett construct worlds partly or wholly characterised by absurdity and madness: Hamm in Endgame declares “I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come” (113) while Carvil in “To-morrow” lives next door to a madman who thinks it never will. As Billy says, “Beckett’s characters never spring to life because they remain preoccupied with their own fictionality, their own illusory consciousness” (Billy, 2000, 71). This seems highly applicable to “To-morrow”/ One Day More wherein the central characters are preoccupied with the fictionality of the “happy ending” idealism of tomorrow (Captain Hagberd), eternal Romantic wandering (Harry), or a fantasy of a fairytale romance that, in the space of a few minutes, suddenly mutates into an eternity of torment (Bessie). So far we have taken a close look at the story underlying “To-morrow” and One Day More and discovered that it is a story rich in intertextual and philosophical resonance. We will now shift our attention to One Day More (and aspects of its prose source) as a dramatic work, identifying some of its unique features and theatricality. Certainly, one of the most remarkable aspects to the play is that it adheres to a unity of space, time and action. A substantial part of the short story is devoted to recounting the recent history of life in Colebrook. The second half of the short story (much longer than the first half) is concerned with the return of Harry. The play focuses entirely on the events of the afternoon of his return, with all “back story” established through dialogue. As Paolo Pugliatti observes in an analysis of Conrad’s adaptive practice, the “last nucleus of the fabula, presenting unity of time and action, is particularly suitable for stage presentation” (Pugliatti, 1992, 712). The fact that Conrad chooses an episode of such dramatic purity in its potential to adhere to the idealism of the three classical unities probably reveals


much about how Conrad was approaching the prospect of writing a play. It also comes some way in explaining Conrad’s “Note” in the published version of the play: The division into scenes is made in a purely dramatic sense. It has nothing to do with the scenery. It relates only to the varied groupings of the characters with the consequent changes into the mental and emotional atmosphere of the situation. (34) This note implies that the five scenes should not be seen as compromising the classical unity of the play. It also reveals that Conrad places primary emphasis on the “mental and emotional atmosphere of the situation” in a careful orchestration of the psychological dimension to the play. The play has a principal cast of four and a focal setting which discounts the significance of the “scenery” and so the drama of the play is about the power relationships – or conflicts in the Hegelian concept of drama – between the disparate characters. The discord between them is marked by the multiple dialectics of gender, generation, worldview, states of being and many others. Above all, the lead female role forms the locus to this. Bessie is defined through her interaction with the three supporting male characters: she sustains an entrapped but loyal relationship with her father; she nurtures and enjoys a comfortingly affectionate relationship with Hagberd; and her meeting with Harry represents an ironically subverted romantic encounter. These ironic and passionate relationships ebb and flow and intersect with remarkable orchestration. As a dramatic reconstruction of a pre-existing short story, Conrad’s adaptation is almost a “variation” in a musical sense – a “transformation of a theme” – and it is thus not surprising that the Polish composer Tadeusz Baird similarly found enough potential in the short story and its narrative patterning to compose the one-act opera Jutro (1966), with libretto by Jerzy S. Sito. Thanks to George Bernard Shaw, One Day More is an effectively concise dramatic work. As is revealed in a letter to Sidney Colvin (28 April 1905), Conrad declares: I am ready to defer to the suggestions as to cutting which our unique G. B. S will favour me with. The artificiality of the abominable fishhawker has ever been an offence to me. In my unskilfulness I could not imagine anything else to “establish” the psychology of the girl. It is a gross artifice I own – and I am glad to be shown that I was mistaken. (CL3, 236)


In terms of adaptation, the fish-hawker was not so much an example of addition as alteration. Conrad strove to find an equivalent for the Colebrook barber, the most important character in the short story outside the Carvils and Hagberds. The barber represents the parochial local community and is a central figure in the taunting of Hagberd. However, like the Carvils and Hagberds, the barber is in some ways defined by his relationship with “space”: he can lead the gossip and watch the world outside his barbershop window. Unable to bring the barber to the twin cottages, Conrad replaces him with a fish-hawker who served as a dramatic device to give voice to the narrow-minded community’s distrust of the “other”, a quality that would have been fully explored in dialogue between Bessie and the fish-hawker, the character who would have encapsulated the “cartoonish” nature of Colebrook. Shaw’s advice to cut (in terms of adaptation, omit) the fish-hawker makes sense. This is the earliest reflection of Conrad’s habit of wanting to bring other characters on stage in an attempt to broaden the meaning and explanation of the story, but it does so at the expense of dramatic sense. As for establishing the psychology of Bessie, Conrad underestimates the effect of dialogic characterisation and staging, with almost every line of dialogue in this terse play contributing to the establishment of the characters’ psychology. Another example of this is in The Secret Agent where, as we will see later, Conrad somewhat incongruously brings the Professor into the Verloc home in the final scene. This decision, like the addition of the fishhawker, perhaps demonstrates what Conrad himself described as his own dramatic “clumsiness”. It also reflects an anxiety as to what the audience will comprehend, what Henry James in his own unhappy dramatic experiences describes as trying “to be simple, straightforward and British, and to dot my i’s as big as targets” (James, Letters III, 509). Some time before Shaw made his editorial suggestions, Conrad betrays an awareness that the play might be overlong. In a letter to Arnold Bennett (March/April 1904) Conrad criticises Raymond-Duval’s translation for being too long in exposition (but not without admitting that the original betrays the same flaw) and “lacks force in dialogue” (CL2, 123). He also adds, “I think I could write something much more striking in French myself.” In the same letter Conrad says that the version he has enclosed for Bennett is a longer version of the play, the shorter “and therefore an improved one” (CL2, 124) having been sent to the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree who led One Day More to its full production.6 The self-consciousness apparent in Conrad’s letter to Bennett haunted Conrad’s dramatic writing: Conrad immediately sees the concision so effectively implemented by Shaw as skilful.7


At one point in the writing of the play, Conrad writes to Colvin that although he has a “conception” and “idée à moi” (CL3, 111) of what he would like to achieve on the stage: I have also a very clear perception of my innate clumsiness in carrying out anything, unless with much toil and trouble. (. . .) In this case I’ve been hampered also by the particular ignorance of the craft. Therefore I went straight ahead catching the inspiration of the moment as it came for fear that a more careful reflexion would bring me to absolute inaction. The only thing I’ve consciously looked to was verisimilitude of dialogue. (CL3, 111) Taking this as a prompt we will now give some close attention to the dialogue in “To-morrow” and One Day More and, in the process, provide a close analysis of the adaptive process involved in Conrad’s first play. As will become typical in Conrad’s plays, he makes full use of the options available in the process of dramatisation. In a play with just five scenes, Conrad uses extensive omission. However, in a number of places he expands the sequences of dialogue where, in the original short story, there might be a line of dialogue and then extensive narratorial intervention. He used alteration by turning the barber into the itinerant fish-hawker before applying omission to this device. The first encounter between Harry and Hagberd is the most similar section of dialogue in the short story and play, but the subsequent encounter between Bessie and Harry has a number of differences, primarily because the adaptation edits and omits some of the dialogue for the sake of stage time: there are fewer long speeches (unsurprisingly, the “Gambucino” section is omitted) making the exchanges “snappier”. There is also a remarkable addition in the form of this stage direction: They turn their backs on audience and move up the stage, slowly. Close together. HARRY bends his head over BESSIE. (50) In the context of the theatre of 1905 any stage direction that suggests that the actors turn their backs on the audience is surprising. The effect on the stage would almost be an image of closure: a “happy couple” together in an intimate moment away from the audience, the kind of tableau image one might see at the end of a romantic comedy. But it does not last long as soon afterwards we are informed that they “walk slowly back towards the front” (50) and the drama continues. The romantic connotation of this encounter is a more palatable (for the Edwardian


stage) and subtle equivalent to the more explicit imagery of Harry’s entering Bessie’s garden that we analysed earlier. We saw earlier how the description of the “kiss” is a sustained romantic parody. In the play, the stage direction is a short but precisely described series of actions: Strides towards her. Seizes her arms. Short struggle. BESSIE gives way. Hair falls loose. HARRY kisses her forehead, cheeks, lips; then releases her. BESSIE staggers against railings. (64) In both versions, Harry swiftly departs and Bessie hitches up her skirts and runs after him. In the short story, Bessie shouts three utterances after him – “Stop!”, “Don’t go!” and “Harry!” (275) – before being left forlorn. In the play, this is expanded into: BESSIE (staring eyes, hair loose, back against railings; calls out). HARRY! (Gathers up skirts and runs a little way.) Come back, Harry. (Staggers forward against lamp-post.) Harry! (Much lower.) Harry! (In a whisper.) Take me with you. (Begins to laugh, at first faintly, then louder). (65) This sequence displays an effective dramatic pacing, gradually modifying Bessie’s voice from a shout to a whisper which is then startlingly juxtaposed with her laughter. This laughter is either a moment of self-irony or momentary madness (we assume that Captain Hagberd is the only person capable of laughing in Colebrook). It is also possibly an emotional release after the physical encounter with Harry. Whatever the underlying reason, it is an effective dramatic moment and is only abruptly curtailed when Hagberd’s “chuckle mingles with Bessie’s laughter” (65). Moments later, in another dramatic emotional shift, Bessie is in tears. This sequence is highlighted by Alison Wheatley who detects in it a Conradian motif which, theatrically, draws on the past and signposts the future: The image of Bessie, the woman alone, arms outstretched to her lover, often in obscure lighting, often alternating between laughter and weeping, is not unfamiliar in Conrad’s novels . . . But this tableau is also a commonplace of melodrama towards which the play occasionally gestures, suggesting that Conrad, while anticipating absurdist theatre, made use of earlier stock conventions. (Wheatley, 1999, 14) In terms of the adaptation, the relationship between Bessie and Hagberd is the most interesting aspect of the adaptive process as it is possible to


detect a distinct shift in their power relationship and characterisation. In the short story, Hagberd watches Bessie undertaking her thankless labours for her father and, exasperated, he asks: “Why don’t that extravagant fellow get you a servant?” he asked, impatiently, one mild afternoon. She had thrown something over her head to run out for a while. “I don’t know,” said the pale Bessie, wearily, staring away with her heavy-lidded, gray, and unexpectant glance. There were always smudgy shadows under her eyes, and she did not seem able to see any change or any end to her life. (257) The equivalent section in the play includes the identical first line quoted above, complete with the suggestion of accent (“don’t” rather than “doesn’t”). However, the characterisation of Bessie is extremely different. Rather than have a moment of silent contemplation Conrad adds the following exchange of dialogue: CAPT. H. (. . .) What’s the matter? (Sympathetic.) You’re tired out, my dear, that’s what it is. BESSIE. Yes, I am. Day after day. (Stands listless, arms hanging down.) CAPT. H. (timidly). House dull? BESSIE. (apathetic). Yes. CAPT. H. (as before). H’m. Wash, cook, scrub. Hey? BESSIE. (as before). Yes. CAPT. H. (pointing stealthily at the sleeping CARVIL). Heavy? BESSIE. (in a dead voice). Like a millstone. (A silence.) CAPT. H. (burst of indignation). Why don’t that extravagant fellow get you a servant? (42) Aside from the subtle differences between Hagberd’s impatience and indignation, what is striking here is how Bessie gives voice to her frustration. It is impossible to imagine the Bessie in “To-morrow” describing her father as a “millstone”. Bessie in the play is a far stronger and more authoritative figure. This has happened because Conrad has had to use dialogue to establish the situation, character and plot but it also reflects a dramatic decision: Bessie is indubitably the focal character of the play and rather than present her as completely shy


and retiring, Conrad has given her greater gravitas. As Max Beerbohm writes: In the story, as Mr. Conrad wrote it, she and the crazy old man were equally important and elaborately-drawn figures: our interest was divided between them. In the play, naturally, she is protagonist, and the crazy old man falls to the background, with the other characters. (Beerbohm, 1953, 386)8 Bessie is a focal character in the short story, but all the same was but one element in Conrad’s evocation of the claustrophobic world of Colebrook. By making Bessie unambiguously the protagonist, Conrad focuses the drama of One Day More. It is a necessary manoeuvre: One Day More could not offer the grim panorama of Colebrook without being substantially expanded. If Conrad had chosen to do this he would have had to add significant elements to the story as it is a tragedy of the banal: this is obviously something that Shaw recognised in his editorial efforts to keep the play concise. It is a story in which nothing happens inasmuch as the one significant event – the return of the wandering son – is smothered into nothingness by Captain Hagberd’s denial of its authenticity. Therefore to make the play dramatically effective Conrad has to locate the tragedy in the existence of Bessie, an existence that is mundane but needs to be made dramatically engaging. In doing this, Conrad has to modify the stage Bessie and Hagberd. Let us consider these early exchanges: “Of course it isn’t as if he had a son to provide for,” Captain Hagberd went on a little vacantly. “Girls, of course, don’t require so much – h’m – h’m. They don’t run away from home, my dear.” “No,” said Miss Bessie, quietly. (. . .) “And he must look upon you as already provided for, in a manner. That’s the best of it with the girls. The husbands . . . ” He winked. Miss Bessie, absorbed in her knitting, coloured faintly. “Bessie! my hat!” old Carvil bellowed out suddenly. (. . .) When he felt the hat being put on his head he stopped his noise at once. (253) In the play this is transformed into: CAPT. H. (. . .) Why, my deary, I couldn’t on without you. We two are reasonable together. The rest of the people in the town are crazy. The


way they stare at you. And the grins – they’re all on the grin. It makes me dislike to go out. (Bewildered.) It seems as if there was something wrong about – somewhere. My dear, is there anything wrong? – you who are sensible . . . BESSIE (soothingly tender). No, no, Captain Hagberd. There is nothing wrong about you anywhere. CARVIL (Lying back). Bessie! (Sits up.) Get my hat, Bessie . .. Bessie, my hat .. .Bessie . .. Bessie .. .Bessie .. .(At the first sound BESSIE picks up and puts away her knitting. She walks towards him, picks up his hat, puts it on his head.) Bessie my . .. (Hat on head; shouting stops.) (43–4) In the prose version, Captain Hagberd’s dialogue is characterised by innuendo. This continues the playfulness of their relationship: the “winks” (248) that Bessie looks forward to. In contrast, in the play, Hagberd is paranoid and it is Bessie who is in more control of the situation, “soothingly tender” to the anxious old man. In “To-morrow” Conrad has established Hagberd’s “fear” with the description of the “sensation” (247) he caused the day he wore his homemade “canvas suit”. In the play this mood of anxiety continues to prevail. The stage Hagberd is something of a King Lear in appearance and in sentiment, his fearful half-grasped awareness of his insanity like Shakespeare’s “O! Let me not be mad, not mad” (King Lear, I.5.51). This contrast in emphasis in the principal characters has a determining factor on the end of both versions. In the short story we read: “Is he gone yet – that information fellow? Do you hear him about, my dear?” She burst into tears. “No! no! no! I don’t hear him any more,” she sobbed. He began to chuckle up there triumphantly. “You frightened him away. Good girl. Now we shall be all right. Don’t you be impatient, my dear. One day more.” In the other house old Carvil (. . .) yelled for her in a fiendish voice, “Bessie, Bessie! You, Bessie!” (. . .) Captain Hagberd had gradually worked himself into a state of noisy happiness up there. “Go in! Keep quiet!” she turned upon him tearfully, from the doorstep below. He rebelled against her authority in his great joy at having got rid at last of that “something wrong.” It was as if all the hopeful madness of the world had broken out to bring terror upon her heart,


with the voice of that old man shouting of his trust in an ever-lasting to-morrow. (276–7) The equivalent section in the play reads: CAPT. H. (goes on chuckling; speaks cautiously). Is he gone yet, that information fellow? Do you see him anywhere, my dear? BESSIE (low and stammering). N-no, no! (Totters away from lamp-post.) I don’t see him. CAPT. H. (anxious). A grinning vagabond, my dear. Good girl. It’s you who drove him away. Good girl. (Stage gradually darkens.) BESSIE. Go in; be quiet! You have done harm enough. CAPT. H. (alarmed). Why? Do you hear him yet, my dear? BESSIE (sobs, drooping against the railings). No! No! I don’t! I don’t hear him any more. CAPT. H. (triumphant). Now we shall be all right, my dear, till our Harry comes home to-morrow. (Affected gurgling laugh.) BESSIE (distracted). Be quiet. Shut yourself in. You will make me mad. (Losing control of herself, repeats with rising inflection.) You make me mad. (With despair.) There is no to-morrow! (Sinks to ground near middle railings. Low sobs.) (Stage darkens perceptibly.) CAPT. H. (above, in a voice suddenly dismayed and shrill). What! What do you say, my dear? No – to-morrow? (Window runs down.) CARVIL (heard within, muffled bellowing). Bessie – Bessie – Bessie – Bessie . . . (At the first call BESSIE springs up and begins to stumble blindly towards the door. A faint flash of lightning, followed by a very low rumble of thunder.) You – Bessie! (65–6) In the short story, Hagberd defies Bessie’s “authority” and works himself up into frenzy of joy, his “shouting” about the “ever-lasting to-morrow” forming an ironically appropriate juxtaposition to the endless despair of Bessie. In the play, Hagberd displays contrition: he obeys Bessie’s order to be silent and locks himself away and he does so in a spirit of dismay, questioning the existence of “to-morrow?” having endured Bessie’s O’Neill-style assault on his raison d’être. This is a stark contrast, suggesting that even Hagberd may have had a revelation or a moment of Angst. The play’s ending allows Bessie to be the focal point on the stage: Conrad emphasises this by describing her heightened physical actions of drooping and then collapsing. This climactic image of a woman


physically and mentally deteriorating is a sequence Conrad will return to with the adaptation of The Secret Agent. In reading “To-morrow” we are evidently meant to imagine the sound of Hagberd’s triumphant laughter. In the play Conrad presents the sound of Carvil’s bellowing voice mingling in with the thunder. These present very different closures. The description of the darkening stage and the impending storm is a moment of pathetic fallacy but it is also an opportunity for technical stagecraft: a (potentially) realistic effect with a highly Impressionist, Symbolist or even Expressionist function. Arguably, the play’s final moments are more obviously dramatic – even operatic – compared to the (albeit inadvertent) cruel mockery of Hagberd’s laugh where the meek Bessie’s suffering is interiorised and even humiliating rather than explicit and emblematic. The flash of lightning represents the “kiss” of Harry, both events being equally shocking, destructive and ephemeral. Conrad’s first endeavour at playwriting was encouraged and precipitated by Sidney Colvin and the active participation of Ford Madox Ford. Further down the line towards theatrical production, Conrad received praise and encouragement from other notable figures such as J. M. Barrie. On 23 April 1905 the English Stage Society requested permission to perform One Day More in June. In the following few weeks, there is a flurry of activity with Harley Granville-Barker overseeing the preparations for the production and George Bernard Shaw successfully assisting in the revision of the script. In May 1905, when production is imminent, Conrad informs us that Shaw “seems to think very well of my first essay in play writing” (CL2, 255) and is “very much struck” (CL2, 240) by the script. Eventually, One Day More was staged and Conrad gives a personal account of going to see the play in a letter to John Galsworthy: On Tuesday night when we went (like the imbeciles we are) there was some clapping but obviously the very smart audience did not catch on. And no wonder! On the other hand the celebrated “man of the hour” G. B. Shaw was extatic [sic] and enthusiastic. “Dramatist!” says he. With three plays of his own running simultaneously at the height of the season, he’s entitled to speak. (CL3, 272) Although few shared the ecstasy of Shaw, some notable reviews were warm: the Stage was perturbed by the “repetitions” in the play but praised the acting, especially the “dash and devilry” of Harry who, it contends, is “a character evidently drawn by Mr. Conrad con amore” (29 June 1905). William Archer, writing in the World, regards the play as having “sufficient individuality and force in it to make it exceedingly


welcome. We have certainly not seen it for the last time” (4 July 1905). Most critically, however, the play was not particularly well received by the public. In “The Censor of Plays” (1907), Conrad recounts the reception of One Day More: The play was duly produced, and an exceptionally intelligent audience stared it coldly off the boards. It ceased to exist. It was a fair and open execution . . . I was not pleased, but I was content. I was content to accept the verdict of a free and independent public, judging after its conscience the work of its free, independent and conscientious servant – the artist. (Notes on Life and Letters, 77) Max Beerbohm sums up the “problem” with the play and the attitude of critics: The play is a tragedy, set in modern times; and that fact alone is, of course, enough to damn it in the eyes of most critics. A man who detects and depicts anything like a tragedy in modern life is instantly by these critics suspected of “morbidness,” and of not thinking that life, generally, is worth living. Of course, the “morbidness” inheres really in these critics themselves, whose taste for life is so slight that they shrink away in horror from any phase of life that is not delicious. The heroine of “One Day More” leads a not at all delicious existence, and consequently these critics scuttle away babbling about defective technique in order to drown their memory of this dreadful girl. (Beerbohm, 1953, 385–6) Although One Day More has a dramatic purity in its adherence to the classical unities, it is unmistakably a modern tragedy – “a terrible and haunting play” (Beerbohm, 1953, 387) as Max Beerbohm says later in his review – produced at a time when most dramatic critics would run in horror from the very concept of modern tragedy. The theatre reviewers raised on the certainties and optimism of so much Victorian melodrama or used to a theatre where the presence of tragedy is heightened or literally operatic – certainly not as mundane as Bessie Carvil’s unhappy tale – evidently struggled with the morbidity of One Day More, even if Conrad’s play evolves quite comfortably out of late nineteenthcentury fiction. Regardless of this, Zdzislaw Najder reveals that One Day More “had a similar reception to that of most of his novels” and “once again Conrad had produced a fine work with little chance of financial success” (Najder, 1983, 314).


The quality of “morbidness” may not have been a recipe for financial success, but it was a quality already on the ascendant in the international theatre scene and will ultimately become a very familiar one in the twentieth-century English-language theatre. John Batchelor states that One Day More is “better than his later dramatisations” (Batchelor, 1994, 149), which may be interpreted as a case of damning with faint praise. With detailed and contextual analysis, One Day More proves to be a classically unified play that succeeds in echoing some dramatic aspects of nineteenth-century Realism. But it also has an intensity, atmosphere and dramatic focus not dissimilar to Symbolist drama and is an impressive precursor to the absurd drama of the twentieth century. In the words of Alison Wheatley, One Day More is the “perfect precursor” to absurdist tragicomedy (Wheatley, 1999, 3–4). It has a mood and trajectory that will find full expression in the nihilistic and absurd drama of Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett. Wheatley also locates Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming and The Dumb Waiter in Bessie’s grim and menacing situation (Wheatley, 1999, 8). In addition, the dramatic concision of the play – thanks to GBS – and the unambiguous establishment of Bessie as the protagonist make the work significant as an example of a “woman” play. By no means a “New Woman” play, nonetheless it remains a powerful indictment on the oppression of women in patriarchal society. Overall, One Day More is an extraordinary mixture of being satirical and ahead of its time and yet simultaneously traditional in its classicism and operatic appeal. A few months after the One Day More production, Conrad – with the benefit of hindsight – writes to H. G. Wells about the play: “Complete failure I call it. G. B. S. thinks I ought to write another” (CL3, 288). Despite the exasperated tone of this letter, Conrad did complete more plays: nearly fifteen years later. In the meantime, Conrad would put drama aside to dedicate his attention to fiction. It is a very different world when Conrad returns to the theatre: historically (post-Titanic and post-First World War), culturally (the development of cinema and the rise of Modernism) and personally. The majority of Conrad’s most acclaimed fiction is written after 1905 and he sees his status on the literary scene transformed as he becomes more established and celebrated. After this, Conrad’s most consistent dramatic phase occurs during the last five years of his life. This final burst of dramatic creativity begins with Conrad’s assistance on Basil Macdonald Hastings’s adaptation of Victory, the play that put Conrad’s fiction back on the stage and inspired the novelist himself to turn, once again, to scriptwriting. As we shall see in the next chapter, Hastings thought One Day More was “hopeless”


(Hastings, 1990, 223), a comment that reflects the uneasiness of their artistic relationship as much as anything else. As for Conrad, he always held One Day More in high regard: in 1919, when Conrad refers to Bessie as “absolutely the first conscious woman-creation in the whole body of my work” (CL6, 460) he is principally referring to One Day More and not “To-morrow”.

3 A Grim and Weird Play: Basil Macdonald Hastings’s Victory

In the “Introduction” to the most recent scholarly edition of Joseph Conrad’s Victory: An Island Tale, Peter Lancelot Mallios outlines the significance of the 1915 novel: Victory quickly became the most popular, the most profitable, and, in its own way, the most controversial of all Conrad’s novels. Though not the first Conrad text to be commercially successful with the public, it was the book that first genuinely cleared space for Conrad in the wider public imagination. It is the book that first allowed Conrad to become popularly produced as a “master” literary figure, the book that first enabled Conrad to become “one of us” in a way that transcends elitist boundaries frequently associated with “art”. (Conrad, 2003, xiii) For Mallios, the issue of popularity in the full sense of the word – being “of the people” – is an all-important aspect of the novel which, he persuasively argues, is defined by Conrad’s “poetics of democracy” (Conrad, 2003, xix), a concept that Mallios explores in depth elsewhere (Mallios, 2003). Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (1913) was the commercial success prior to Victory, a fact that Conrad celebrates in the “Author’s Note” to Chance (1920) where he explains that the success of the novel had delivered him from what he had deeply “feared”: it had saved him becoming “a writer for a limited coterie” (viii). Undoubtedly, this issue of popularity is closely tied-in with the novel being “the most controversial” in the Conrad oeuvre. It is a novel that has sharply divided critics. Indeed, the diverse responses to the novel Victory are probably what make it Conrad’s most remarkable work of fiction: for some critics it signals Conrad’s irredeemable decline, for others it is his apogee. 53


Most relevant for us, it is the novel that has proved most popular for adaptation into performance media with numerous versions across film, television, radio, opera and theatre. For Conrad, the personal “victory” of Victory was in becoming popular: the fact that it was adapted so many times in so many media not only bears testament to this but is an inevitable part of the process. In the year of publication, Conrad himself recognised that “Victory may make a libretto for a Puccini opera” (CL5, 452), a comment which does not simply reveal the inherent adaptability of the novel but also has far-reaching implications regarding the structure and strength of the underlying story. It is these qualities that account for Albert J. Guerard’s famous condemnation of the novel as being “for the high schools and the motion pictures, the easiest and generically the most popular of the novels” (Guerard, 1958, 255). Less judgmentally, Cedric Watts observes: (Victory) is a novel which, in its setting and situations (tropical island, “fallen woman” living with gallant rescuer, invasion by three desperadoes, attempted rape, spectacular conflagration), gives the impression of being aimed at Hollywood . . . (Watts, 1994, 40) The “situations” that Watts identifies above demonstrate the appeal of (for some, the problems with) the novel: compared with other Conrad fiction, it is a work with a comparatively simple time structure and narrative; and it is also a story with a melodramatic sense of action and archetype. All these aspects are immediately helpful in providing a dynamic narrative and structural spine for the purposes of adaptation into performance. By the same token, many of the novel’s harsher critics feel that the work is diminished for the very same reasons. Victory is indisputably a melodramatic novel in the way that, as we shall see in a later chapter, The Secret Agent is for Conrad an avowedly “melodramatic subject”. “Melodrama” is a much maligned term which, in the wake of the perceived triumph of dramatic Realism and Naturalism, has become synonymous with “bad”. Yet it is the inherent melodrama to Victory that provides the key for successful adaptation. However, even if we accept that the themes and narrative structure of Victory are in some ways simple and melodramatic, it remains an extremely complex novel in terms of the psychology and even philosophy of its characters. Above all, the consciousness of the protagonist Axel Heyst is extremely well realised and although the other characters that encounter him may seem comparatively two-dimensional, such figures as Alma/Lena, Mr Jones and Ricardo are still constructed with meticulous care.

A Grim and Weird Play: Victory 55

In addition to the psychological complexity of the characters, the novel as a whole is distinguished, for Yves Hervouet, by its “extraordinary allusiveness” (Hervouet, 1990, 133) or, to Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, by its “blatant textuality”: “the fact that it parades itself as a literary text by numerous allusions to other texts” (Erdinast-Vulcan, 1998, 261). A key area of intertextuality is the realm of performance ranging, most noticeably, from specific references to Shakespeare, broad allusions to medieval mystery and morality plays1 and Victorian melodrama: Victory is a novel about performance, both technically and allusively. As Robert Hampson comments, “the main theatrical elements in Victory are the dramatic handling of dialogue and the use of a Shakespearean intertext” (Hampson, 2000, 160). It is a novel that includes a great deal of “acting”: characters attempt to change the course of events or simply survive through dissemblance, bravado or playing what they perceive to be the most expedient role. Whether it is when Lena “acted from instinct” (404) or Ricardo displays a “perfectly acted cheerfulness” (335), the characters are frequently “actors”. Some of the characters cannot stop themselves turning into performers. Zangiacomo’s orchestra is an important aspect of Part I of the novel. Nevertheless, the theatrical comes to supersede the musical, above all in the iniquitous figure of Schomberg: He slapped his forehead openly before his customers; he would sit brooding in silence or else would burst out unexpectedly declaiming against Heyst without measure, discretion, or prudence, with swollen features and an affectation of outraged virtue which could not have deceived the most childlike of moralists for a moment – and greatly amused his audience. It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of Heyst, while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel. It was, in a manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo concerts had ever been – intervals and all. There was never any difficulty in starting the performer off. Anybody could do it, by almost any distant allusion. (95) Like a melodramatic actor, Schomberg slaps his forehead before launching into his role as stage villain ranting – “declaiming” – against his nemesis. In fact, Schomberg’s inadvertent and affected performance is more celebrated, entertaining and popular than the concerts of the touring musicians. Other types of stage performance are present too. When Pedro threatens to launch into a destructive rage, Ricardo plays


the role of a lion tamer: “Ricardo raised his open palm, and the creature came in quietly” (369). At other times Ricardo is like a prestidigitator: Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning rapidity something that looked like tricks with his own personal pack of cards, which he always carried about in his pocket. (122) The narrative even draws attention to Ricardo’s mime artistry, emphatically “observed” by Lena: Without looking up, he made the motion of counting money into the palm of his hand. She lowered her eyes slightly to observe this bit of pantomime, but returned them to his face at once. (295) Similarly, Wang – a figure of mystique and adaptability who “can be as quiet as a shadow, when he likes” (251) – is something of a stage illusionist, even when executing his simple household chores: (The) unerring precision of his movements, the absolute soundlessness of the operation, gave it something of the quality of a conjuring trick. And, the trick having been performed, Wang vanished from the scene, to materialize presently in front of the house. He materialized walking away from it . . . (189) Robert Hampson argues that the novel is distinguished by its many “changes in point of view”, a technique which serves to “objectify different states of consciousness, systems of values, and ways of knowing” (Hampson, 1996, 144). Hampson’s analysis not only emphasises the richness of Conrad’s narrative strategies, but is also a concept which has, at its heart, the notion of observation. In the case of Victory, the objectification and observation is that of a spectator watching a performance and it is an idea that recurs throughout the novel. Even more recurrent is the word “shadow” (and its variations) which appears dozens of times in Victory. It is a word that frequently has a consciously theatrical connotation – as in the (in)offensive “shadows” in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V.2.54) – and in Victory this use is particularly significant. Ricardo, in particular, is associated with shadows: when he allows himself “a slight movement of the arm. The shadow enlarged it into a sweeping gesture” (275), thus transforming his slightest, natural action into a larger-than-life, melodramatic gesticulation.2 Ironically, Ricardo does not see himself in this melodramatic


illumination: on the contrary, he is blind to his own performative shadow although he sees a “play of shadows” everywhere else and he is not alone in this. As occidental figures who have settled in the Far East, Ricardo and Schomberg regard the indigenous peoples and their culture as a play that occurs all around them without ever affecting them: “these white men looked on native life as a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded” (167). Although Heyst could not be more different to Ricardo and Schomberg, he too has beheld the world around him like Shakespearian shadows or, more aptly, wayang kulit (the traditional Javanese shadow puppet theatre). This is a passive relationship – “I have lived too long within myself, watching the mere shadows and shades of life” (318) – but ultimately it becomes threatening: I’ve said to the Earth that bore me: “I am I and you are a shadow.” And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words cannot be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them? I have lost all belief in realities. (350) The quaint and facile shadow play of the world begins to impinge on Heyst’s existence. Heyst’s horror is that he finds himself mortally implicated within a performance. Quite possibly – and perhaps even more horrifically – the performance he steadily finds himself embroiled into is a melodrama. As Heyst laments, it has become a world of unreality. For him, “Dreams are madness” (253) and yet his existence will become a dream or fantasy like something out of the impossible worlds of melodramatic performance. For Lena too there is something horrific in reality becoming fantasy: As in a nightmare she watched Heyst go up the few yards of the path as if he never meant to stop; and she heard his voice, like voices heard in dreams, shouting unknown words in an unearthly tone. (345) Essentially, however, Lena embraces her role in the melodrama and, ultimately, even her death will be a performance suitable for a tragic heroine. It was certainly no fluke that Conrad chose to read out the chapter describing Lena’s death in May 1923 as part of the only public reading of his fiction he ever gave. It is a suitably “dramatic” piece for a


live audience and Conrad himself was delighted with the result of his performance, describing the event with pleasure: [A] most attentive silence, some laughs and at the end, when I read the whole chapter of Lena’s death, audible snuffling. (Jean-Aubry, Vol. 2, 310) From this account it is clear that audience was not just suitably receptive but, like the traditionally ideal spectators of melodrama, sentimental. It is worth remembering that Alma, of course, becomes “Lena” (a detail typically and quite understandably abandoned in most adaptations), and even Alma was a nickname: “They call me Alma” (88).3 The fact that we are not given her original name offers a microcosmic reflection of the intertextuality of the novel itself whereby, by default, it is impossible to find a definitive point of origin. In contrast, she does acquire a definitive final name. Her given name and identity – a dramatic personage, as it were – comes into being after being constructed by Heyst: “I was wondering when you would come out,” said Heyst, still without looking at the girl – to whom, after several experimental essays in combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given the name of Lena. (186) The fact that in the above description Heyst is held in suspense awaiting her entrance shows that although he may have named – hence created – her, she is assuming full control of her role. Robert Hampson’s analysis of Lena also emphasises the theatrical: [Under] the influence of her Sunday school lessons and Victorian constructions of femininity, she writes a script for herself in which erotic feelings are displaced into idealistic self-sacrifice. The intrusion of Jones and company onto the island to which Heyst and Lena have withdrawn gives her the opportunity to cast herself in a drama of redemption, but the terms and structure of feeling of this drama derive from sentimental demands. (Hampson, 1996, 144–5) Hampson’s analysis is informed by the sense of performance: Lena may be a professional musician but once she is on Heyst’s island she becomes the scriptwriter, producer and director of the drama of her own life. Moreover, the fact that the terms, structure and feeling of this


drama “derive from sentimental demands” prove that the play she is producing is thoroughly melodramatic. The theme of melodrama in Victory is of primary significance when it comes to the stage adaptation and is one that we will analyse in depth. The diverse and conscious intertextual allusions to drama in Victory make it no surprise that it has suggested and generated numerous intertextual responses in the form of adaptations into performance media. Maurice Tourneur’s 1919 screen version of Victory was the first screen adaptation of Conrad. Film history has not been altogether kind to Tourneur who is woefully neglected in early cinema studies although he was a highly regarded director towards the end of the silent movie era. His 1918 screen adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird is for many the greatest of all silent movies and similarly his adaptation of Victory was a major Hollywood production with an international release. It was also followed with interest as it featured one of the first “superstars” of the screen, Lon Chaney, in the role of Ricardo.4 But Victory did not “work” simply in the days of silent cinema. In fact, soon after the inauguration of the sound motion picture, there was an extraordinary proliferation of “Victories” across the world. These are primarily the productions that, Gene M. Moore explains, were released in “assembly line fashion” (Moore, 1997, 10) by Paramount in several European languages “in studios built especially for the purpose in Joinville-le-Pont, near Paris” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 437). All the productions shared the sets of the American Dangerous Paradise (William A. Wellman, 1930) but used their own casts and crew – including notable figures such as the director Alberto Cavalcanti – for each version.5 Although, as Edward Crankshaw writes, “in 1936, Conrad was unfashionable” as a novelist (Crankshaw, 1976, vii), as a source for adaptation he was not. In 1940, Victory enjoyed another major film release with John Cromwell’s Victory starring the major screen stars Frederic March (Heyst), Betty Field (Alma) and Cedric Hardwicke (Mr Jones). Although Moore correctly reveals that “no Conrad films were made in the ten years between John Cromwell’s Victory (1940) and Carol Reed’s Outcast of the Islands (1952)” (Moore, 1997, 11), we should not regard this as evidence of a complete disappearance from popular adaptation. Five years after the Cromwell film, Victory was adapted into a pioneering example of the adaptation of fiction into live television drama – Victory (Ernest Colling, 1945), featuring Uta Hagen and John McQuade6 – while some of the finest adaptations of Conrad in any media were produced in the generally overlooked form of radio drama


during the 1940s and early 1950s, including an extremely satisfying adaptation of Victory (NBC, 16 February 1950). We will devote some attention to this production but in order to do so it is necessary to place Conrad and radio into context. In Britain, BBC radio began its relationship with Conrad remarkably early – a mere two and a half years after the novelist died – with Lord Jim (18 February 1927) being the Corporation’s second literary adaptation (the first being a dramatisation of Charles Kinglsey’s Westward Ho! in April 1925) and the BBC’s relationship with Conrad has continued, at intervals, ever since. Adaptations of Conrad’s fiction also featured in several noteworthy productions in the heyday of live American radio broadcasting.7 The NBC University Theater (1948–50) produced the most substantial Conrad adaptations on American radio and remains an unjustly forgotten example of the academic use of radio adaptation. The programme was established by NBC with the close collaboration of a number of American universities. The NBC University Theater broadcast hour-long adaptations of literary fiction with a short academic lecture halfway through each broadcast delivered by academics or writers (in the case of Victory a midpoint lecture is delivered by the radio critic John Crosby). Listeners could sign up for short correspondence courses for which they would receive University certificates and accreditation. The radio adaptations on the NBC University Theater are excellent demonstrations of the skills of the adapter, performer and producer in the era of live broadcasting as well as providing a remarkable insight into literary criticism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. NBC University Theater’s Victory – scripted by Ernest Kinoy, and starring Constance Cavendish and the popular actor Ben Wright – retains an impressive loyalty to Conrad’s original. Most strikingly, Heyst speaks with a Swedish accent, Alma dies and Heyst commits suicide: all probably unthinkable in the “dream factory” of Hollywood of the same era. The radio version uses Captain Davidson as its framing narrator, although he is shrewdly cast as more of a charismatic Marlowesque character than the somewhat bland figure in the novel. At the end of the play, for example, Davidson is not in a formal meeting with the Harbour Master but in a bar. The novel ends thus:

Davidson took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his forehead. “And then, your Excellency, I went away. There was nothing to be done there.”


“Clearly,” assented the Excellency. Davidson, thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and then murmured with placid sadness: “Nothing!” (412) In the NBC University Theater version we hear: MAN IN THE BAR: Bloody business . . . DAVIDSON: (. . . There) was nothing to be done there. Hey, gin and lime with a good cargo of ice! Nothing to be done. Nothing! This certainly seems to be a startling transformation and yet it is simply a relocation and recontextualisation for the sake of dramatic expediency: what strikes the listener is how the integrity of the novel remains intact, an element that most adaptations feel obliged to abandon. The 1950 radio version demonstrates the ambivalent status of the novel. This is made particularly overt in John Crosby’s mid-point lecture where he declares: Victory, which came along in 1915, late in his career, is not the greatest of his novels, that honour going either to Lord Jim or to the Nigger of the “Narcissus”, but it has always been a favourite of mine because it introduced me to Conrad. Crosby’s 1950 pronouncement is made some years before the outright dismissal of the novel by Thomas C. Moser (1957) or Albert J. Guerard (1958), but it comfortably follows in the wake of F. R. Leavis (1948) who claims that Victory is still a great novel if not quite the greatest. But Crosby’s speech also reflects the issue of popularity that we highlighted at the beginning of the chapter, namely it is anecdotal evidence of the success of Victory in gaining Conrad readers. The NBC University Theater production reveals other aspects of the ambivalent status of the novel: it has adapted Victory because it will make an exciting one-hour drama for a large audience but it is also selected, like the Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness adapted for the programme in previous years because it is perceived as being appropriate for inclusion in its university-accredited syllabus for an “academic” audience. The NBC University Theater’s loyalty in its Victory dramatisation not only reflects that it would have regarded any major alteration to the original story as unethical but also demonstrates that such decisions were not mandatory to the adapter: in


other words, Victory does not need a happy ending to be a compelling drama for a “popular” audience. But it also demonstrates a gradual shift away from the facile happy ending. For interwar adapters the melodramatised happy ending was inescapable: by the time of the 1950 radio Victory, such finales are not obligatory. This continues to be the case: at the time of writing, the most recent film Victory was Mark Peploe’s 1995 version in which Lena (Irène Jacob) dies. But even this is qualified at the end of the film. The film concludes with Davidson (Bill Patterson) recounting the rumours he has heard that Heyst (Willem Dafoe) did not die in the suicidal conflagration but has been spotted alive and well in San Francisco, living proof of the redeeming power of love: Lena’s ultimate victory was teaching Heyst how to live and love. The focus of our attention is the 1919 stage adaptation of Victory: A Drama by Basil Macdonald Hastings, indubitably the most commercially successful theatrical adaptation of Conrad’s fiction. The stage production of Victory seems a long time after One Day More, but if we look more closely we can see that the stage had been a consideration on Conrad’s part sooner than is generally supposed. In April 1913, Conrad reveals to Pinker that he is considering a playwriting collaboration with Perceval Gibbon: Gibbons knows all about actors. He seems keen. My feeling is that it is worth while trying anyhow, for me, if only as a mental change which may do away with all sorts of staleness of thought from which I suffer now and then. (CL5, 213–14) This reveals that Conrad is considering the theatre for liberating and not expedient reasons. Nothing came of the proposal and so Conrad as playwright would lie dormant until after the First World War. However, the stage adaptation of Conrad’s fiction was forthcoming from other quarters. In January 1916, Conrad responds to a suggested adaptation by the Australian actor Thomas Sidney making it clear to Pinker that “I certainly have no objection to have Victory dramatised” (CL5, 551) although he makes the proviso: as long as the adapter “is any good”. Conrad’s enthusiasm is clearly sparked as he writes: (If) the play were collaborated (not merely adapted) it would have a better chance of being accepted. My name is worth something in that way. (CL5, 551)


Despite Conrad’s willingness once again to be a dramatic collaborator, the resulting draft was a major cause for concern, as Conrad recalls in a letter to Henry B. Irving (son of the legendary theatrical knight): I was – to put it mildly – surprised. There is a dancing exit in one of the acts, and Mr. Jones is a farcical character. (CL5, 623) Nothing came of this adaptation once Sidney returned to Australia, and it was Irving who instigated the second proposed adaptation of Victory that year, suggesting a collaborative enterprise with Basil Macdonald Hastings. In August 1916 Conrad met Hastings and Irving at the Garrick Club. Conrad accepted the proposal but is now adamant that it should not be described as “collaboration”. In August 1916 he writes to Macdonald Hastings to clarify: Victory A Play in ? Acts adapted by Macdonald Hastings from a novel by J. Conrad (. . .) It must be as above. There can be no question of collaboration. Collaboration implies a close daily intercourse for six weeks or so – which under the circumstances is impossible. It would also mean me having not only my say but also my way in the construction and in the very words of the play. Which is not to be thought of. (Letters 5, 635) In a letter to Pinker soon afterwards, Conrad reiterates that it is “not ‘a play by Joseph Conrad Macdonald Hastings’: I can’t have that” (CL5, 641). However, in the same letter Conrad does clarify his role: “I won’t interfere but I will assist whenever asked.” Conrad’s offer to help Hastings often becomes an outright eagerness and the Hastings–Conrad correspondence is a substantial and fascinating episode.8 That Conrad cared about the adaptation is readily apparent and there is no doubt that the overall experience was instrumental in coaxing Conrad into his final dramatic phase. Conrad plays the situation ambivalently: at times he claims he is too busy to become overly involved in the project – “I haven’t the time!! I have other things to do – damn it” (CL5, 655); he occasionally seems self-effacing when he professes to Hastings that his own suggestions may “waste your time” (CL5, 643); yet at other times he boasts that he has been working on “the drama Victory all day from


9 am to 5 pm . . . about 2000 words of dialogue and argument all red hot” (CL5, 651). Certainly Conrad supplies Hastings with suggested passages of dialogue and, as Frederick R. Karl writes, extensive ideas for “costumes, place names, modes of addressing people in the archipelago, and even ways of saying things” (Karl, 1979, 793). In Hastings’s own account: It is true that by agreement there was no collaboration, but the reason was that I was in the army, and the daily intercourse necessary for collaboration was out of the question. Still, this did not hinder Conrad from scheming and suggesting in letters a great deal of the building of the play, and writing many pages of vivid dialogue. (Hastings, 1990, 223) Hastings’s use of the word “scheming” is deliberately ambiguous. Certainly Conrad endeavours to help realise the broad “scheme” of the adaptation but there is also an element of deviousness on Conrad’s part which was evidently not lost on Hastings. Behind Hastings’s back Conrad writes that “Hastings hasn’t the slightest idea where he’s going” (CL5, 651) and can even be found appropriating the project: After all I know more of the possibilities of Victory as drama than he does. It’s natural. The thing came from my entrails so to speak. (CL5, 644–5) The mixture of distanciation and appropriation reflects the ambivalent attitude that pervades Conrad’s relationship with the theatre. In the case of the Victory adaptation, Neill R. Joy explains the apparent contradiction thus: But Conrad has another compelling reason of a professional and an aesthetic kind: he would gain a literary return . . . He planned to absorb the technique of stagecraft (CL5, 641) while he observed Hastings in the act of translating his novel into the dramatic form, all the time maintaining a safe distance, his reputation unblemished should the play fail critically. No literary capital is at risk. More expansively understood, it is an opportunity to enlarge the compass of his creative experience. (Joy, 2003, 189) In contrast to this, it seems that Hastings’s motives were more mercenary, reminding us of the Conrad who dreamed of the money


that One Day More would bring him. Hastings said, unambiguously, to Conrad that: There are not two forms for a work of art. This thing is only worth doing for the money there may be in it. If you are rich, it would be absurd for you to agree. (Hastings, 1990, 223) Conrad agreed but it was much more than a financial enterprise for him. His involvement in the adaptation reveals him to be, at times, feverishly enthusiastic, technically experimental and even personally explorative (the ending, as we shall see, allowed him to realise an ideal that he had been “dreaming of”). In contrast, and probably surprisingly so, it is Hastings who seems, on occasion, to be the most cynical. In April 1918, before the play was even staged, Hastings laments to Pinker: “It really was a crime to turn that wonderful novel into a play” (Joy, 2003, 219). To compound matters further, Hastings did not find it easy to work with Conrad. According to Hastings, Conrad was so thrilled with the Victory adaptation that he “begged me not only to dramatise other of his novels, but collaborate with him in an entirely new work” (Hastings, 1990, 223). Even while the Victory script was still in progress, an enthused Conrad wrote to Hastings in March 1917: “I will have a proposal to lay before you for real collaboration” (CL6, 40). The proposed dramatic project was for another adaptation: a stage dramatisation of Under Western Eyes. Although this proposal did not come into being we should not think it was an idle suggestion on Conrad’s part. The script of Victory was completed in December 1917 and in the same month Conrad reveals that a New York theatre company has expressed an interest in “a dramatisation of Western Eyes by myself” (CL6, 149) and once again he endeavours to lure Macdonald Hastings into collaboration. Conrad even suggests that they collaborate on a completely original play: Subject: Faked old Master. Scene Italy. People all English (including one Jew). Four women. Six men. Stage setting: the big drawing-room and the terrace outside it in an old Italian Palazzo in the hills, near Sienna. (CL6, 135) Conrad claims that Hastings was “so keenly interested” (CL6, 134) that they talked non-stop for over three hours and the playwright promised to send a draft of the first act and the complete scenario in a fortnight. Hastings, however, succeeded in wriggling out of this new project


because of what he describes as a “divergence of view” (Hastings, 1990, 223). According to Hastings: (Conrad) was very proud of his little one-act play, One Day More. Personally I thought it hopeless from a theatrical standpoint . . . The little work has definite technique, but it has no stagecraft. Yet Conrad believed it perfect, and never could understand criticism of it. The truth of the matter is that his mental attitude, prompted by his temperament, did not allow him to appreciate what is theatrically significant. I asked him if he had ever seen the play acted. “Yes,” he replied, “and it was a painful experience, I assure you.” He blamed the actors, be it observed, but no actors could make One Day More actable. (Hastings, 1990, 223) This reminiscence reveals that Hastings’s involvement with Conrad was not an altogether happy experience, not least the suggestion that Conrad’s “attitude” and “temperament” were not conducive for a dramatist which accounts for his fledgling work being “hopeless”. Hastings’s own attitude is undoubtedly coloured by hindsight: although the production was a success, the negative criticisms of the play generally turn into a lambasting of Hastings which, understandably, he resented. At these moments the mechanisms for damage limitation that Joy locates were clearly effective. We will look at the reviews of Victory in some detail in due course, but we will first devote further attention to the play and the process of adaptation. The adaptation uses the inherent dramatic structure of the novel as its schema. Some sections of dialogue and description remain unchanged while, unsurprisingly, numerous details are omitted. Some aspects – such as Heyst’s venture with Morrison – are marginalised to just a couple of lines and could even be excised from the play completely without any detrimental impact. Strictly speaking, little or nothing is added – a scene in which Jones sleepwalks is considered but not employed – and it is the alterations to the original story that are most profound and defining. Axel Heyst, Conrad’s complex and enigmatic Swede, becomes “Stephen Heyst” (Play, 128) who is, in the words of Davidson, “an English gentleman, of course” (Play, 106). In the preliminary development of the script, Conrad suggested that Jones has an extended dialogue with Lena before, at the end of the play, Jones dies, alone, in the fire that consumes Heyst’s bungalow screaming “I am a force.” As Moore and Simmons suggest, this would have made Jones reminiscent of Kurtz or the Professor (The Secret Agent) but “Hastings


may well have felt that this ending would create too much interest for the villain” (Hastings, 2000, 88), although this would not have been contrary to Henry B. Irving’s intentions. Although the final script does not focus on the villain in what would have been, in Joy’s words, a “perverse apotheosis” of Grand-Guignol proportions (Joy, 2003, 208), the ending of the play still remains the most profound alteration. The gang of three is mortally defeated and Heyst declares to the triumphant – and very much alive heroine – “I loved you, Lena, and, fool that I am, I never knew” (176). The play thus concludes with a happy ending and a lovers’ embrace, Lena exclaiming: “Ah my dear, you have learnt before too late to hope, to love, and put your trust in life!” (176). Looked at succinctly like this, the adaptation would seem to be little more than a crassly simplified and simplistic version of the novel. The process of adaptation was, however, more complex than this suggests. In the Conrad–Hastings correspondence, it is evident that Conrad was not resorting to a facile dramatisation any more than he desired a conventionally realistic interpretation. Despite the fact that in some correspondence Conrad explains, at length, the importance of genuine costume and wearing it correctly – in the case of Lena’s sarong, Conrad even recruited his wife’s opinion (CL6, 15) – at other times Conrad’s careful descriptions of costume are imbued with symbolic connotation as Joy’s interpretations reveal: (The) wardrobe has explicit erotic signs. Jones’s is suitably phallic in a sun helmet and white suit on a slack body, an oblique indication of his limp masculinity; Heyst appropriately wears a nondescript dark blue, the color suiting his psychological demeanor . . . Schomberg’s jealousy and cowardice disport hues of green and yellow. (Joy, 2003, 196) Furthermore, the play is not without its own points of original interest and represents a successful balance between the traditional melodrama and the potential of less comfortable, even experimental, forms, especially in relation to its themes of violence and eroticism. Perhaps it is the curious ambivalence of the play that accounts for the script’s convoluted journey to the stage. In late 1917 Henry B. Irving – who had intended to play Mr Jones before opting for the role of Heyst (which had enforced substantial revision of the script) – decided to abandon the project that he had initiated. The actor-manager Lillah McCarthy took up the script and was interested in producing the play with herself in the role of Lena, but she, too, dropped it in January 1918 (Karl, 1979, 804). In May 1918, the actor-director John Cromwell


(the same man who would direct the 1940 film version of Victory) staged a production of Hastings’s Victory in Syracuse. The production – over three hours long – was unwieldy and unsuccessful. Cromwell wrote to Hastings that the play needed to be substantially rewritten. Conrad himself writes to Cromwell praising the director’s “masterly exposition of the theory of adaptation” and making the differences between Conrad and Hastings clear: the young playwright is “a man whose general feeling of the task does not accord with mine” (CL6, 225). Substantial revision occurred immediately. As Joy reveals: The four acts played in the United States were compressed to three for the London debut. As we know, Jones does not sleepwalk or talk to Lena at the end of the play. In addition, there existed an ending devised as an epilogue . . . which was struck out in June. Other parts of scenes were expunged early on: “some lines” written for other female musicians in minor roles disappeared . . . (Joy, 2003, 206) The revisions streamlined and focused the script and paved the way for a high-profile and successful production in the West End. In February 1919 Marie Löhr, the actor-manager at the Globe Theatre in London, acquired the rights to Victory and the production premiered on 26 March 1919. Conrad’s attendance is uncertain, as Knowles and Moore write: “Jessie Conrad claimed that he never saw the play, but Marie Löhr recalled that he had been present at three of its 83 performances” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 434). There is no doubt that Conrad attended rehearsals: I saw all the actors, I talked of scenery, dresses, psychology, and the art of acting, till my head buzzed! . . . It was very interesting and I learned more about actors in these 4 hours than my philosophy ever dreamed of . . . (CL6, 378) This is a distinct contrast to the more familiar “wrong-headed lunatics” condemnation. Nevertheless, as Joy remarks, Conrad casts himself as a kind of Hamlet at the rehearsal, a mood compounded when a paranoid Conrad suspects that the rehearsal “may have been ‘put on’ ” for his benefit (Joy, 2003, 207). The long and commercially successful run of Victory meant that a huge number of reviews of the play appeared, ranging in tone from the laudatory to the dismissive. For the Daily Mail (27 March 1919) it was “faultlessly acted”; the Sunday Express (30 March 1919) praised its


success in achieving an “agreeably Conradesque” atmosphere; while for the Morning Post (27 March 1919) the play quite simply “got on one’s nerves”. One noticeable current in the reviews is that the play proved, in reception, to be as allusive and intertextual as the novel: the theatre reviews mention everything from Cervantes to the Grand-Guignol in their evaluations of the play, with a special place for the Shakespearean. It is the same with the original novel: of the countless possible intertextual allusions, the most readily identifiable is Shakespeare. As Mallios writes: Victory contains a vast labyrinth of references to Shakespeare – to Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Richard III, but none more so than Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, whose characters (. . .); island setting; general plot sequence; privileged political issues (. . .); privileged metaphysical issues (. . .); and authorial mystique all speak so directly to Victory that the play might be said, both in analogical and contrapuntal ways, significantly to structure the novel. (Conrad, 2003, xxiv)9 For the Evening Standard (27 March 1919), the primacy of The Tempest in the original novel was cruelly deceived in the stage adaptation: It is very necessary not to expect a play that would seem to be a realistic version of “The Tempest,” with a Prospero whose black magic was written by Schopenhauer, a Caliban of normal ancestry and “the spectre and the cat” instead of Stephano and Trinculo. For playwright, producer, cast (. . .), scene-painter, and costumier have united to keep the stage free from the author’s ideas. Conversely, it is worth noting the irony that, despite the conspiratorial tone above, the happy ending of the stage Victory is more in keeping with the harmonious resolution of Shakespeare’s last play. The dramatic device of the “happy ending” is a defining quality of classical comedy and became an essential ingredient of melodrama: it is to the genre of melodrama that we will now turn our attention. The issue of melodrama proves to be a preoccupation for many reviewers of the stage play. However, we should remind ourselves that this perception did not come into being with the adaptation. Mallios himself, for instance, describes Schomberg as having a “melodramatic ferocity” (Conrad, 2003, xxxvi) towards his wife, but such terminology can be found throughout the history of the reception of the original


novel where “melodrama” is a recurrent description, almost exclusively with pejorative intention. Mallios highlights the pleasant exception of H. L. Mencken who writes of Victory in 1915 that “It moves; it throbs; it grips”: it is a “melodrama so rapid, so gorgeous, so inordinate” that would have been a “burlesque” by any other writer but becomes a Homeric “epic” in Conrad’s treatment (Mallios, 2003, 171). More typically, melodrama cannot possibly be so laudable: William Lyon Phelps in 1916 stated that Conrad “should be ashamed of Mr. Jones, who belongs to cheap melodrama” (Conrad, 2003, xvi). For Douglas Hewitt, Victory is Conrad’s “later writing at its worst” (Hewitt, 1975, 111) and in his evaluation of the novel he uses terms that unconsciously reveal the melodramatic dimensions to the work of fiction. He condemns the novel for its “simplified black and white distinction of good and evil” (Hewitt, 1975, 107): an essential certainty in the universe of melodrama which has far-reaching implications towards character. Hewitt is troubled by the fact that Heyst “is presented as a romantic figure – something, indeed, of a stock character” (Hewitt, 1975, 105) while “if Conrad seems to remain unable to convince us of any evil in his hero, there is no lack of villainy in his villains” (Hewitt, 1975, 107), a comment which merely emphasises the successful melodramatic juxtaposition of stock heroes and stage villains. For Hewitt, the fact that Lena “is the white to (Ricardo’s) black” (Hewitt, 1975, 109) is grievously problematic. However, the world of Victory functions like traditional Victorian melodrama: it is a universe of moral right and wrong, and its characters are clearly demarcated between good and evil. Consequently, at certain points the language is necessarily heightened. Hewitt finds some of the language unforgivable, declaring of Ricardo that we “cannot take seriously a man who speaks thus” (Hewitt, 1975, 109): Aha, dog! This will teach you to keep back where you belong, you murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you. You infidel, you robber of churches! Next time I will rip you open from neck to heel, you carrion-eater! (231) Hewitt tries to explain what he regards as deficiency by claiming that it reflects the literary conventions of the period whereby Conrad was prohibited from introducing “strong oaths into his books” and shows the novelist straying “perilously close to the idiom of the schoolboy’s adventure story” (Hewitt, 1975, 109). Looked at another way, we could contend that Conrad entirely captures the heightened idiom of


melodrama. This is certainly the case in another instance of direct speech in the novel (not highlighted by Hewitt) where Lena declares: “No more,” she muttered. “There will be no more! Oh, my beloved,” she cried weakly, “I’ve saved you! Why don’t you take me into your arms and carry me out of this lonely place?” (403) The reiteration (“No more . . . no more”), exclamation (“Oh . . .”), passionate abandon (“take me . . .”) and romantic deliverance (“carry me out of this lonely place”) make this speech a paradigmatic example of melodrama and it remains virtually unchanged in the adaptation – “Then we can go, beloved. Oh, why don’t you take me in your arms and carry me out of this lonely place?” (176) – despite the extreme contrast in circumstance (Lena is dying in one version, about to live happily ever after in the other). We saw earlier how Conrad recognised that Victory would make a good Puccini opera. In saying this, Conrad is acknowledging the heightened dramatic dimension to the piece. Certainly a heightened nineteenth-century theatrical quality was readily apparent to those who saw the play, not least in the assessment of Marie Löhr’s performance. The Evening Standard (27 March 1919) draws attention to Löhr’s “display of emotion”, a technique consciously employed despite the fact that it challenges the coherence of the plot: Her own acting is frankly melodramatic in keeping with Mr. Hastings’ plan. In the last scene, where Lena murders “the cat,” Miss Löhr makes no attempt to maintain the illusion that he is held by her wiles, but aims for effect with a display of emotion – and of specially designed frocks. Judging by the number of her recalls, her methods are undoubtedly right. Löhr’s display of emotion, combined with her choice of costume and the resulting ovation suggest that the play was a traditionally grand melodrama focused on the performance of the leading lady. Similarly, the Daily Herald (3 April 1919) review asserts, in a subheading, that “Marie Löhr is Tragedy” and describes how her first entrance in the play reveals her “with a face as pale as a ghost” and describes the subsequent performance as revealing Löhr’s aspiration: And now it would seem to be her ambition to follow in the footsteps of the divine Sarah [Bernhardt]. Having already challenged public


criticism with her performance of “L’Aiglon,” she is talking of appearing in “Fedora” and “La Tosca.” Löhr had played the male role of Franz, Duke of Reichstadt in the premiere of Louis N. Parker’s translation of Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon (1900) in a one-off production at the Globe in November 1918. The Duke of Reichstadt was one of the legendary roles of Sarah Bernhardt in the original French production. It is a role that Löhr herself would recreate immediately after Victory when L’Aiglon was revived for thirty performances at the Globe from June to July 1919. Fédora and La Tosca were similarly highly dramatic roles. These are both melodramas by Victorien Sardou (1882 and 1887 respectively) but were superseded by their more famous operatic adaptations: Umberto Giordano’s Fedora (1898) and Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca (1900). Indeed, Puccini’s Tosca had been staged in London in some twenty-five productions between 1900 and 1919, including five productions during 1918–19 alone. In contrast, Sardou’s La Tosca had last been seen in London in three performances during the autumn of 1907 at the Royalty Theatre (where One Day More had been staged two years before), with Sarah Bernhardt and her French company. Giordano’s Fedora did not enjoy the popularity of Tosca with the London audience but even that had been staged more recently – July 1908 at Covent Garden – than Sardou’s original which had last been seen in London at the Waldorf Theatre in an Italian version with Eleanora Duse (Italy’s Sarah Bernhardt) and her company in a one-off performance in July 1905 (one week after One Day More). Sarah Bernhardt had also played the lead in an original French Fédora performed at the Adelphi in 1903. Although Löhr did not get the chance to act in Tosca at the Globe – pre-empted, no doubt, by Ethel Irving’s performance in the play at the Aldwych Theatre (September– October 1920) – she did realise her other ambition and played the lead in Fedora at the Globe (October 1920 to February 1921) in a run the success of which (one hundred and eleven performances) outshone that of Victory. What this succinct account of this phase of Marie Löhr’s career reveals is how the role of Lena can be seen as belonging comfortably into a tradition of high drama centred on the performance and status of the leading lady. It is, moreover, a tradition that, given the Duse and Bernhardt association, has a manifestly Continental register. It is certainly a contrast to Löhr’s role immediately prior to Victory: she had, for a time, played the role of Lady Gillian Dunsmore in R. C. Carton and Justin Huntly McCarthy’s distinctly English comedy Nurse Benson


which had enjoyed a phenomenally successful run of three hundred and twenty four performances at the Globe (from June 1918 until 22 March 1919). Löhr’s promotion of, and performances in, L’Aiglon, Victory and Fedora at the Globe represent Löhr’s calculated attempt to define herself as a classical “dramatic actress”. Looked at like this, Victory suddenly becomes less of a literary adaptation than a vehicle for a leading lady, a possibility already signposted during the writing of the script when Conrad describes Lena as a “grande amoureuse” (CL5, 655). Ironically, this is a curious fulfilment of Henry B. Irving’s original intentions when he instigated the adaptation in the first place: in contrast, however, Irving – another heir to traditional melodrama – would have placed his performance as Mr Jones centre stage. It is also a potential openly acknowledged by Conrad who says that Irving and his chosen leading lady will discover that “there may be a run to see them” (CL5, 659). All the same, given the ascendancy of the operatic versions and the immediate association of the original plays with the theatrical grande dames of European theatre who, although Bernhardt continued acting into the 1920s, are associated with the pre-1914 world, implies that there is something antediluvian in the intentions of the production. In the light of this, there may be a hint of irony to the Daily Herald’s review: Löhr may “be” tragedy, but it is tragedy from a steadily vanishing, if not completely bygone, era. Although not all reviewers saw Victory as being about the cult of an actress, many were troubled by what they believed amounted to the wholesale melodramatisation of Conrad. The single most damning review (penned by the critic Gilbert Cannan) appeared in The Nation (5 April 1919) describing this “nondescript nullity” of a play thus: They advertise Mr Conrad’s name in very large letters, but they are clearly unaware that they have left Mr Conrad’s work outside. They have taken the names of his characters, but the characters themselves remain in his book. He was concerned, as always, with “moral discovery” – the phrase is his own: they have aimed only at exciting and thrilling a series of audiences with the virtuosity of a number of actors, and lest it should be too dreadful for her public to see Miss Marie Löhr die with her love unrequited Mr Hastings has not scrupled to make nonsense of Mr Conrad’s fable by supplying it with a happy ending. For the spectator the result is rather like trying to have a hot bath with the plug out. The hot water, to continue this amiable metaphor, was supplied in plenty by Mr Conrad, but Mr Hastings, in the making of what he understands


to be a play, has let it run to waste. The whole point of the story is that the persons in it are doomed, the villainous characters coming to a miserable end, the virtuous receiving a spiritual triumph. The theme is tragic, but the inhabitants of the theatre world are afraid of tragedy, and are at home in the triviality of melodrama. By all means let us have a melodrama, but in that case leave Mr Conrad’s name out of it, or, if it is matter of copyright, print it very small. To use his name in authority is to obtain audiences on false pretences, for it is to pretend that literature has been admitted to the theatre – a consummation devoutly to be wished, but one that will not be until business managers, actors, and actresses learn that for drama more is required than their most proficient endeavours can procure. The accusation that Hastings had made “nonsense” of Conrad must have been exasperating for the playwright. The implementation of a happy ending was not condemned from all quarters: for the reviews which admired the play, such as the Era (2 April 1919), the play is “delightfully atmospheric” while the happy ending is “conventional, if less artistic” but, by implication, necessary. This is implicit too in the Reynolds’s Newspaper (30 March 1919) review which claims: Mr B. Macdonald Hastings has not given us the atmosphere or the literary quality of Conrad in his dramatisation of “Victory” at the Globe, but he has turned out a strong melodrama with a picturesque setting and, of course, a happy ending. Although the happy ending did not seem to have troubled or surprised a number of critics and countless more members of the public, the scapegoating of Hastings elsewhere clearly hurt him and he uses his 1927 memoir of working with Conrad to set the record straight somewhat sardonically: (Conrad) had not the least compunction about the most drastic alteration of his story for stage purposes. He it was, my dear critics, who suggested the happy ending – Lena in Heyst’s arms, instead of the holocaust. So when you blamed me for that, you were more royalist than the king. (Hastings, 1990, 223) Conrad’s letters support this account. In Conrad’s ideal ending, Heyst “will carry off the girl in his arms” (the strength of Irving


permitting), the victorious Heyst and Lena expressing the triumph of love and life: It’s like the end I have been dreaming of. I give you my word my dear Hastings I wouldn’t have let out a whisper of it if your letter had not prodded me to the quick. If you say “speak” what can I do but speak out what is in me? For Victory, don’t forget, has come out of my innermost self. (CL5, 655) This is a fascinating comment as it possibly reveals Conrad’s underlying – “innermost”, even – fantasy for Lena and Heyst, an ending of such pulp romanticism that would have killed the novel but was the stock-in-trade of populist stage melodrama. Perhaps it reveals an acute concern for attaining a popular audience and an understanding of melodramatic conventions, but Conrad’s passionate language seems to suggest that the happy ending is the fulfilment of a personal desire. Given some of the virulent attacks on Hastings, it is ironic that the happy ending comes from Conrad himself. In the Daily Graphic (3 April 1919) review, an account is given of Sir Sidney Colvin’s opinion of the play: During the interval after the first act, Sir Sidney Colvin confided to an acquaintance that he had anticipated the play with considerable apprehension lest it should “vulgarise” Mr. Conrad’s novel. “The first act,” he added, “has been a pleasant surprise; but I hear there is to be a happy ending, and that may be destructive of the genius of the novel.” One wonders what Colvin, so important in supporting Conrad’s first venture into drama, would have made of the fact that the man who had instigated the vulgarisation and destruction of the novel with a dreaded happy ending was Conrad himself. It is not simply that a happy ending sugar-coats the original novel; it has a profound impact on the meaning of the story. The Daily Telegraph (27 March 1919) describes the novel as ending “with a general slaughter worthy of an Elizabethan tragedy” but complains that the happy ending diminishes the tragedy of the novel transforming the moral into the trivial: “it all comes right in the end”. The Evening Standard (27 March 1919) goes further when it complains that the play is in “urgent need of a revised ending” because as it stands, “the moral distinctly advocates the advisability of finding someone to kill”. More playfully, the Sunday Times (30 March 1919) claims the violence of Victory


manages to “out-Herod” any West End competition and it nicknames the play the “Bungalow of Blood”. For a contemporary critic such as Neill R. Joy, the play remains ethically problematic: After this trespass of the borderline of sensationalism, Hastings winds down in fustian, although the obvious intent is exalted feeling. Every sincere language value is extinguished by a moral dislocation that is simply stunning . . . To exalt over and cherish a deadly stabbing, however forced by circumstances, is flagrant. (Joy, 2003, 209) Given the virulence of stage censorship in the British theatre of the time, we may be forgiven for wondering how Victory was passed, uncensored, for production. G. S. Street – one of the censors in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office – in his official report on the script of Victory (28 February 1919) makes enlightening reading, especially in its categorisation of the play: Mr Conrad’s “Victory,” on which this Play is founded, is essentially dramatic and although, naturally, much of the psychology and atmosphere have been lost Mr Hastings has made an extremely effective play out of it – one of the violent and thrilling kind. The fact that the play was based on Conrad’s novel was already a factor in Hastings’s favour. Street demonstrates knowledge of Conrad’s original and as we saw in an earlier chapter, the active involvement of “men of letters” in the theatre was openly encouraged. Street places a special emphasis on the sexual violence of the play: Some of the scenes, especially in the horrid love making of the hotel proprietor and Ricardo, are more strong than pleasant and the violent climax is of course dreadful in its way. The whole thing is grim and weird. But I see nothing whatever to which the Lord Chamberlain could object. It is a good, strong Play of rather a lurid sort. For “good, strong Play” we should read “melodrama”. Street was particularly impressed by the happy ending to the play which he describes as “very profound”: we are probably right to assume that the censor’s perception of the finale was instrumental in guaranteeing the play a licence for performance. The literary association with Conrad and the implicit melodrama to the stage version notwithstanding, the play


remains not only “lurid” but “grim and weird”. A large part of this is due to the presence and actions of the “modern crooks” in the play. Together, the three outlaws and the stage villainy of Schomberg represent varieties of “otherness” in juxtaposition to the sterling qualities of Stephen Heyst and Lena. This can in part be explained by the historical context of the play. Just before Victory was about to open in London, a postcard was sent to Marie Löhr and was reproduced in the Globe and Traveller (26 March 1919): Here is a polite postcard received by Miss Löhr this week: “Mark this prophecy! If your new play has anything to do with the war it will fail (in red ink). People are very tired of the anti-German, pro-profiteering ramp. Let us leave Art out of it. – Ante-War Pittite.” Of course, “Victory” has nothing to do with the war, as every reader of Conrad’s novel and of Miss Löhr’s persistent announcement knows. Ironically, although the newspaper makes light of the missive, the accusation of anti-Germanism is an issue that is worth addressing in relation to the play and novel. Douglas Hewitt disparagingly regards Schomberg as an arch-villain claiming that he is “unredeemed by any trace of goodness or even of amiability” (Hewitt, 1975, 104). Although this is precisely the type of source character efficacious for a melodramatic adaptation, Hewitt is troubled by the racism of Conrad’s fictional creation: years before Achebe’s classic analysis of Heart of Darkness, Hewitt contends that “Conrad’s racial prejudices are strong and narrow” (Hewitt, 1975, 105). Despite Conrad’s assertion that in Schomberg he is not “pretending to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology . . . it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton” (vi), for Hewitt Schomberg is nonetheless “remarkably like a war-time caricature of the enemy” (Hewitt, 1975, 105). Schomberg is no less a caricature of a German when it comes to the London stage of 1919. But such xenophobic stage characters continued to be “fair game” in the post-War London theatre and unproblematic in the eyes of the censor. Concurrent with the Victory production, Horace Annesley Lowndes’s The House of Peril (a stage adaptation of Mrs Belloc Lowndes’s novel The Chink in the Armour) was on at the Queen’s Theatre. As the review in the Sketch (2 April 1919) observed, this was a “murder-play” in which the “villains of the piece are a pair of middleaged and dowdy Teutons, one Wachner and his wife” who murder a young Polish woman while the plucky English Sylvia narrowly escapes


a similar fate. Ultimately Sylvia is rescued from the clutches of the conniving Germans by a French count. Although the hero is French he was educated at Eton which explains to the reviewer why his spoken English is far better than his spoken French. The fact that The House of Peril was the type of melodrama competing with Victory indicates that the type of anti-German attitude in Victory was typical, if not more thoroughgoing, elsewhere. By the same token, Victory does not have a Continental hero who speaks better English than his own native tongue: it simply abandons any suggestion of a Swedish background and makes him thoroughly English from the start. If Schomberg is an acceptably Teutonic villain, other characters in Victory are also defined in terms of “foreignness” or “otherness”. For example, Pedro the alligator hunter is not merely “monstrous” (341), but is “scarcely a man” (368). He is not only “simian” (285) with an “enormous gorilla back” (363), but also ursine: “more like a performing bear abandoned by his show men than a human being” (102). One of the most substantial descriptions of Pedro defines his monstrosity: But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if a murderous one. There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny, no suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man, or of an insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and a subtle power of terror. Pedro with his fangs, his tangled beard, and queer stare of his little bear’s eyes was, by comparison, delightfully natural. (115–16) Compared to the supernatural essence of his companions, Pedro is an emphatically natural monster. In the play, Jones remains “an insolent spectre on leave from Hades” (Novel, 116; Play, 114), but the freak-like quality to Pedro is, if anything, extrapolated: (Enter) a nondescript, hairy creature. The lower part of his physiognomy is over-developed, his narrow and low forehead unintelligently furrowed by horizontal wrinkles, surmounts wildly hirsute cheeks and a flat nose with wide baboon-like nostrils. He has a pair of remarkably long arms, terminating in thick brown hairy paws of Simian aspect. (Play, 116) Stills of the production capture this (see Figure 2) and, to a degree, Pedro resembles Jo-Jo the Russian Dog Face Boy or Lionel the Lion-Faced


Man, two of Barnum and Bailey’s most popular “freaks” in the circus that toured internationally in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.10 In contrast, in Maurice Tourneur’s film version of the same year the role of Pedro (Bull Montana) is not in the least a “freak” but is rather a burly screen thug: a prototype “heavy”, but unmistakably “human”. In the novel, Pedro is an object of total abjection to Wang: It was Pedro who had been the first cause of Wang’s suspicion and fear. The Chinaman had seen wild men. He had penetrated, in the train of a Chinese pedlar, up one or two of the Bornean rivers into the country of the Dyaks. He had also been in the interior of Mindanao, where there are people who live in trees – savages, no better than animals; but a hairy brute like Pedro, with his great fangs and ferocious growls, was altogether beyond his conception of anything that could be looked upon as human. (311) Ironically, however, Wang himself is yet another form of “otherness” in the novel being not so much on the good side of the melodramatic universe than detached from it. His mystical, even quasi-magical, otherness established in the novel is still important in the play: (. . . Before HEYST can speak to his servant he has gone in his peculiar manner, which suggests vanishing out of existence rather than out of sight. He disappears among the trees.) LENA: (Looking after WANG) How creepy he makes me feel. HEYST: In what way? LENA: He appears and disappears so oddly, so quickly. HEYST: Yes. He does not exactly move. He seems to me to evaporate. (Play, 126) However, Heyst’s witty last line signposts a comic register that will continue in relation to Wang. In the novel, Wang’s speech is written in such a way as to capture his accent: “ ‘Me no likee,’ he added in a quieter tone. ‘Me velly sick’ ” (311). This is expanded in the play to comic effect. For instance, Wang’s “One man, two man, thlee man – no can do!” (310) in the novel becomes a line more obviously written for laughs: “One man, two men – one velly large monkey” (Play, 132). This is sustained to the end of the play where Wang, in the role of the traditional clown in dramatic comedy, sums up the violent resolution that


has occurred and sets in motion the union of the lovers and the harmonious resolution of the plot: Chinaman kill velly big monkee. Cat-man kill long tall devil. Mem putih kill cat-man (. . .) Mem putih velly much love Number One. Mem putih velly beautiful (. . .) Mem putih very brave – save ellybody. (175) Although this is a startling alteration of the Wang in the novel, it was evidently successful: the Evening Standard (27 March 1919) noted that “Wang, who now supplies comic relief, is the favourite part with the audience”. Robert Hampson believes that the late novels, especially Victory, are a “thoroughgoing examination of masculinity” (Hampson, 1996, 156). To analyse Victory in these terms has many rewards. The men displayed in Victory present a complex array of extreme and contradictory masculinities: the detailed psychology of Heyst; the melodramatic wickedness of Schomberg; the uneasy showmanship of Zangiacomo; the trustworthy dullness of Davidson; the inscrutable difference of Wang and the combined qualities of the three desperadoes; “crazy spirit – ferocious cunning – brute force” (CL5, 653). One of the most enigmatic figures in this disparate assortment of men is the “crazy spirit”: Mr Jones. For Richard Ruppell, Jones is the “only absolutely unequivocal homosexual in Conrad’s fiction” (Ruppell, 1998, 22) who is “treated stereotypically and unsympathetically . . . (and) is one of Conrad’s most vicious characters” (Ruppell, 1998, 24). Ruppell’s analysis is, for many, irrefutable. However, although Jones’s misogyny is explicit in the novel, his homosexuality can only be inferred or interpreted. The situation was even more proscriptive when it came to the British theatre of the period. The portrayal of a homosexual on stage was impossible and would have been excised by the Lord Chamberlain. The censorship report on Victory does not see Jones as homosexual but rather as “a weird, half-mad, masterful creature with an hysterical hatred of women”. We should not even permit ourselves the notion that the censor possibly knew that the character was a homosexual: he merely passed the play on the terms that Jones was the misogynist “creature” described above. In discussing J. R. Ackerley’s three-act play The Prisoners of War (1925) Michael Wilcox contends that the play – in which an officer (a “Captain Conrad” no less) nurses an infatuation with a younger officer – has, for readers and audiences of our own time, a “blatantly homosexual theme” (Wilcox, 1988, vii): the fact that the play was passed by the


censors had nothing to do with any modicum of enlightenment but rather because the Lord Chamberlain “was a clueless, old dodderer” (Wilcox, 1988, vii). Despite these proscriptions, in the dialogue of the play there are several examples of what seems to be an even more thoroughgoing expression of Jones’s sexual orientation: RICARDO: (. . .) Tell me, sir, why are you so set against women? MR JONES (Rising spectrally but commanding himself): You are confoundedly indiscreet. (Calm and casual – Up to RICARDO who backs) I simply abhor them. It’s enough. RICARDO (mutters): Is it? But what’s the reason? MR JONES: Perhaps, you put it subtly, because of something not so very far removed from your reasons for being fond of them. RICARDO: I don’t understand. Of course I am. MR JONES: Yes . . . And you are crude, Martin. Crude. (Play, 156) The passage – which is a slightly shortened application of a section of dialogue suggested entirely by Conrad (see CL5, 653–4) – continues with further possible innuendo, but what is striking in the above section is the sense of being “indiscreet”. Moreover, Jones’s line “you are crude, Martin. Crude” is an echo of Jones’s line in the novel: “It’s not a bad form to give to the business – which in itself is crude, Martin, crude” (336). The context and use is completely different: in the novel it refers to the plan that Jones is hatching while in the play the same phrasing has been appropriated to describe Ricardo’s “fondness” for women. As in the novel, Jones emphasises his ostracism from society because of his refusal “to conform to certain conventions” (Play, 135; Novel, 317), and his repugnance at Ricardo’s relationship with Lena launches him into an almost incoherent tirade: Mud souls, obscene and cunning! Mud bodies, too – the mud of the gutter. I tell you, we are no match for the vile populace. (Novel, 392) In the play it is almost identical, except that he includes “gentlemen”, which gives greater emphasis to the masculinity he shares with Heyst: Now for the mud-souls, eh? Obscene and cunning. Mud-bodies too. Yes. The mud of the gutter. Ah, gentlemen we are no match for the vile populace. (Play, 165)


This concept of a shared masculinity is critically important in the play. A moment before, Jones has even attempted to lure Heyst out into the “dark” with him in a line that is an ironic version of the idiom of a melodramatic love scene: Come with me – out of this – Mr. Heyst, out into the dark where the gutter lovers gloat, all unconscious of their doom. Come– (163) If we accept that the dramatic version of Jones makes his sexuality more overt, it is interesting to look at reception. John Cromwell said that the Syracuse audience “did not even accept the mystery of Mr Jones” (CL6, 225n). The Referee review (30 March 1919) suggests that “Ricardo has Fallen From the Misogynist Grace, and vows to take his life instead of Heyst’s”. Perhaps most revealing is the Evening Standard (27 March 1919) review which asserts that the “one exception” in a production which has betrayed Conrad is W. Gayer Mackay who as “the spectral Mr. Jones . . . is nearer the original than anyone could reasonably expect an actor to be”. As we have seen, the “other” in Victory is the foreign, the freakish and the homosexual. The united heroism of Lena and Heyst make them the epitome of English values. The English, heterosexual, and hegemonic triumph seems to extol the virtues (and even, it would seem, the aphrodisiac effect) of justified violence and make Victory, regardless of intentions, seem like a play of propaganda when war was over. After all, the play was drafted during the war while the playwright was on active military service. All the same, the play cannot be simply dismissed as an (in)advertent exercise in jingoism. There are aspects to the play that take it beyond such critical limitations. The play charts the seduction of Heyst and even his masculinisation. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan argues that for Conrad the view of reality as construct/text is familiar but Heyst is “the first Conrad protagonist who is so entirely caught up in it that he cannot bring himself to act at all” (Erdinast-Vulcan, 1998, 256). The play certainly retains Heyst’s bookishness, an emblem of his view of reality. At the beginning of Act II, “When the curtain rises HEYST is discovered sitting on the top of some library steps reading” (125), and soon afterwards we are told he “Puts a book in shelf . . . Puts another book in shelf” (126). This bookishness is presented as an asexual cerebralism, a denial of masculine sexuality. Consider the first physical contact between Heyst and Lena presented to the audience: She stumbles to him and clings to him as a woman would cling to another woman in a moment of great terror. (110)


When Lena launches into what should be a melodramatic love dialogue, Heyst cuts it bathetically short: LENA: It’s your eyes that I was thinking of, for I’ve never wished to forget anything till you came to me that night and looked through and through . . . HEYST: That raises the whole problem of the comradeship of the sexes – and we haven’t time for it this afternoon. (111–12) Later in the play when Heyst kisses Lena on the forehead, she begs “(Entreatingly) My lips! My lips!” (151) and in the same scene Heyst takes the opportunity to discuss the problematic comradeship of the sexes a little further: HEYST: You distrust me. Oh yes you do. Every woman distrusts masculinity – so seductively strong, and yet the woman knows, so weak. LENA: I would not like to have said that to you, but it is true. (151) The challenge and victory for Lena will be to seduce the upright Englishman Heyst who declares that “the two great adventures of life have been denied to me. To love – to kill.” (130) By the end of the play it is Lena’s “adventure” of killing that stimulates Heyst into love. While Lena endeavours to seduce Heyst, the predatory manoeuvres of the bullish Schomberg and the feline Ricardo are forced upon her. Their sexual advances are threatening and came near to upsetting the censor. As in the novel, Ricardo fetishises Lena’s foot,11 but as an onstage display by live performers this has a potentially more erotic register: RICARDO (in a timid whisper): Give me your foot. (He creeps closer to her. She advances her foot forward a little and he throws himself on it greedily. RICARDO clasping her ankle, pressing his lips time after time to her foot, mutters gasping words that resemble a sense of grief and distress . . .) This foot of yours. You’ll stamp it on me, won’t you? (173) Ricardo’s attempt to make Lena a dominatrix represent the erotic objectification of Lena. But the script also constructs her as an object of desire for the audience: “She rises revealing the astonishing beauty of her slender figure in the graceful clothes” (168). The same process occurs in the stills of the production: all five of the photographs in The Sketch (9 April


1919) are solo portraits of Lena in a variety of dramatic posturing (see cover image and Figure 1). But such readings are not universal. For Gilbert Cannan in The Nation, Heyst and Lena were so thoroughly “uninteresting” that it did “not matter twopence whether they die or live happily ever after” as long as they “can get their killing done quickly enough to secure oblivion of the yawns” of the audience. Whatever the opinion of the critics, the play enjoyed a respectable run leading Conrad to declare that he will buy a Rolls-Royce, a new house and might even pay his tailor’s bill (Karl, 1979, 824). For a critic such as Neill R. Joy, more compelling than Hastings’s play is the play that nearly came into being, as revealed by the Conrad–Hastings correspondence: The correspondence reveals that the precursor play Conrad would have made and wished to construct from a novel embodies a highly experimental drama. (. . .) Scenes in the play, if extant only in a few fragments backed up by explanations, are the first instance of Conrad’s dramatic unorthodoxy. His is a strongly independent dramaturgy, remote from all resemblances to neoclassicism and the reigning Ibsenesque naturalism; the bravura of Shavian intellectual wit is altogether something else and never in the picture. This is only by way of saying Conrad’s play treatment of Victory is self-standing, operating under no obligatory theoretical formulation of contemporary protocol. He pays no notice to cramped rules that legislate propriety, decorum, genre exclusiveness, or the fashions of the day. Exemptions from traditional conventions liberate execution and facilitate entry into the era of Modernism. (Joy, 2003, 196) Despite the fierce and innovative independence that this suggests, it is clear that the issue of the audience was a determining concern for Conrad. Writing to Hastings, Conrad expresses the need for a great, dramatic scene that will compel theatrical attendance: I too have been thinking about it and it strikes me that there will have to be a scene (I don’t see it) some scene, the scene which everybody will want to go and see. We will have to invent it, contrive it, discover it – anyway get it in somehow, extract it from the subject, which in itself has a fine level of romantic, dramatic, tender and even comic possibilities – but it is a level. And we may even make it a pretty high level by our united efforts (personally that sort of the excellence would please me most) but the question is: will it be enough for the public? (CL6, 135)


Despite aspects of the experimental and his own wish-fulfilment, Conrad is acutely aware that the audience has needs and demands. After all, one reason Conrad consulted Jessie Conrad so much in the process was because he felt she “represents marvellously the ‘general public’ audience” (CL6, 14). It would seem that in the case of Victory we return, once again, to where we began this chapter: the issue of popularity. The substantial run of Macdonald Hastings’s Victory makes it clear that the play did enjoy popular success, undoubtedly facilitated by its adaptive decisions and adherence to dramatic conventions. The Victory experience was positive enough to encourage Conrad to embark on independent adaptations. Axel Heyst is Conrad’s Hamlet, but Stephen Heyst is not. The Everyman (5 April 1919) bewails that Heyst “is one of Mr. Conrad’s finest and most tragically conceived creations. But this stick of an English gentleman that Mr. Hastings gives us is incomprehensible, and annoyingly so at that.” Ironically, as in the case of Shakespeare’s Danish prince, Heyst is unable to act yet, paradoxically, he is compellingly dramatic. As the dramatic climax of the novel approaches, Heyst explains how he is unable to provide a suitable “performance”: Could I stand in ambush at the side of the door – this door – and smash the first protruding head, scatter blood and brains over the floor, over these walls, and then run stealthily to the other door to do the same thing – and repeat the performance for a third time, perhaps? Could I? On suspicion, without compunction, with a calm and determined purpose? No, it is not in me. (361) Heyst is refuting his ability to play the hero: more specifically, the “determined” scenario he describes is that of a Hollywood-style “action hero” in a decidedly Grand-Guignol setting of scattered “blood and brains”. Heyst is true to his word and thus the novel ends more in keeping with operatic tragedy. The stage adaptation, in contrast, realises an idealised finale and presents the happy ending of melodrama. This “happy ever after” ending for the victorious English couple is troubling if analysed in any depth, however, for it includes a sexual awakening inspired by ferocious violence and a triple murder, qualities that make the play seem like a work of triumphalist jingoism and imperial masculinity in a post-War world. But the same quality of violence and sexuality could be seen as having all the features of Elizabethan-Jacobean revenge drama or, ironically, make the play curiously contemporaneous to the deliberately provocative experiments of the Futurists and


Expressionists and a precursor to the Surrealists and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. The combination of violent horror and the erotic, however, is most easily interpreted in terms of the Grand-Guignol and it is the genre of the “Theatre of Horror” that will be the driving force behind Conrad’s final written script: the short, sensationalistic Laughing Anne.

4 A Play of Unbearable Horror: Laughing Anne

Joseph Conrad’s Within the Tides (1915) is a collection of short stories written from 1910 to 1914: “The Planter of Malata”, “The Partner”, “The Inn of the Two Witches: A Find” and “Because of the Dollars”. As Knowles and Moore summarise, Within the Tides “generally received flattering reviews, (but) it is nowadays commonly thought to contain some of his least distinguished work”, although they add that “The Planter of Malata” and “Because of the Dollars” are worth reading because of their “interesting formal and thematic links with Victory” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 450). Part of the reason for what many see as the inadequacy of the Within the Tides short stories is the fact that they were all first published in popular literary magazines such as the Pall Mall Magazine (“The Inn of the Two Witches”), Harper’s Magazine (“The Partner”) and the Metropolitan Magazine (“The Planter of Malata” and “Because of the Dollars”). Writing for these magazines made particular demands towards “populism”. In 1913, the Metropolitan Magazine approached Conrad to write something for them, as long as it was not in the style of Heart of Darkness: If we could have from Mr Conrad another short story like “The Brute” we would reach our public with all the certainty in the world. (CL5, 322n) “The Brute” (1908) is one of Conrad’s most maligned short stories yet evidently was successful with a popular readership. The comment obviously enraged Conrad who replied that if they wanted something like “The Brute” he would demand “special terms for prostituting his intellect” (CL5, 322). But even if the comment upset Conrad, the request did not and “The Planter of Malata” and “Because of the Dollars” were published 87


in the Metropolitan Magazine in June/July 1914 and September 1914 respectively. Whatever the perceived limitations of the tales contained in Within the Tides, the works are, to a degree, significant as examples of narrative experimentation. Furthermore, a story such as “Because of the Dollars” is interesting as an example of intertextual self-reference: Hollis would be familiar to readers of Conrad’s “Karain: A Memory” (1897) while the central protagonist Captain Davidson would return in Victory (1915). In addition, the underlying story of the two-chapter “Because of the Dollars” will be chosen for generic transformation when Conrad adapts it into the two-act Laughing Anne, completed in December 1920. Obviously the success of Basil Macdonald Hastings’s Victory was an encouragement to Conrad and a demonstration of the viability of further theatrical adaptations. It is significant that Conrad should choose “Because of the Dollars” to this end as it is tied in so closely with the genesis and themes of Victory.1 It is as if when Conrad saw an actor portray a living and breathing Davidson on the stage, Conrad could see the possibility of scripting a play focusing on the story in which Davidson is the hero. Similarly, having seen Marie Löhr’s star-turn as Lena (she was currently playing the lead in Fedora at the Globe), Conrad saw ample opportunity for a leading lady in the role of Laughing Anne. Like the stage Victory, Conrad will seem to choose melodrama as the overarching principle and strategy for adaptation. However, matters are much more complex than this. Conrad does not opt for a West End style of melodrama in keeping with the immediate post-First World War period. Conrad’s adaptation of “Because of the Dollars” does not fall for the easy jingoism of the Victory adaptation (the emphatically French Man Without Hands of the short story becomes of non-specified nationality in the play) and neither does Conrad opt for an unequivocally happy ending. Conrad explains that Laughing Anne “was written as a sudden impulse after a visit to the Little Theatre” (Partington, 2000, 179–80). Unfortunately, Jose Levy and the Grand-Guignol company at the Little Theatre in London rejected the play and Laughing Anne was not produced in Conrad’s lifetime, finally being premiered in June 2000.2 The hero of “Because of the Dollars” is Captain Davidson of the S. S. Sissie, a character who will later feature in a comparatively marginal yet extremely significant role in Victory. Regarding any basis in fact, we know from letters that Conrad based the Frenchman without hands on a tobacconist he encountered in Sydney in the late 1870s, a connection that Conrad makes explicit in “Because of the Dollars” when Hollis

A Play of Unbearable Horror: Laughing Anne 89

refers to the “very same (Frenchman) we used to know in ‘79 in Sydney, keeping a little tobacco shop at the end of George Street” (186–7). As for Davidson’s ship, Norman Sherry informs us “the Sissie . . . was the ship that took the stranded Conrad from Muntok to Singapore after the loss of the Palestine (the ship burnt at sea) in 1883” (Sherry, 1971, 27). Whether the real skipper of the Sissie, one Captain Choppard, was the model for Davidson is uncertain. There is, however, no doubt that Davidson is a somewhat problematic hero in “Because of the Dollars” and arrives tragically late in Victory, so maybe it would be a dubious privilege. In a letter to Pinker in January 1913, Conrad himself describes “Because of the Dollars” as “a rather queer thing – a little savage in parts” (CL5, 168). It is an unambiguously brutal and violent short story: the central female character, Laughing Anne, has her skull crushed by the demonic Frenchman without hands, who himself is shot dead, and at least two of his vicious accomplices are injured by bullets from Davidson’s gun. “Because of the Dollars” is something of a cautionary tale, a “crime does not pay” yarn in the tradition of “The Pardoner’s Tale” out of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The emphatic materialism of the short story’s title makes that clear. However, Conrad certainly took his time deciding what to call it. He considered calling it “Dollars”, “The Dollars”, and “The Spoiled Smile”. H. Filcher of Pall Mall Magazine tried to persuade Conrad to call it “Davidson of Saigon” to emphasise the exotic. In September 1914, the Metropolitan Magazine published it as “Laughing Anne” (a title that will return after its generic shift into drama). A letter to Pinker indicates that Conrad was keen on calling it “ ‘The Man in the Moon’ – only the public would misunderstand” (CL5, 168). Karl and Davies propose that Conrad contemplated “The Man in the Moon” to reflect the “central character’s isolation” (CL5, 168n). As for Conrad’s worry that the public would misunderstand, we could suggest that perhaps he was concerned that the public would think he was straying into speculative fiction in the style of H. G. Wells. However, Conrad opted for “Because of the Dollars”, a title that Bernard Meyer informs us “is somewhat reminiscent of the name of one of his father’s plays: ‘For the Love of Money’ ” (Meyer, 1967, 356). The fact that “Because of the Dollars” is a cautionary tale with a moral conclusion established in a materialistic basis is evident from the moment we read the title. But it is so much more than that: “Because of the Dollars” Anne is needlessly murdered; “Because of the Dollars” a maimed French gangster is shot dead; “Because of the Dollars” two


other greedy men are injured. But also “Because of the Dollars” Davidson loses his smile and this explains why Conrad considered titles like “The Man in the Moon” and “The Spoiled Smile” so carefully. This ruined smile is ultimately the most important element of the short story, and one that Conrad feels needs emphasising when he tells Pinker he will “ram a phrase about Davidson’s smile” (CL5, 357) at the end when he gets the proofs. It is that lost smile that takes the story into another realm, a realm that explores isolation and identity, understanding and loss, conscience and heroism. These are key themes in the works of Conrad, not least – as we have seen in the previous chapter – in the contemporaneous novel Victory. If we begin to consider the plot of “Because of the Dollars” in terms of dramatic potential, we have the obvious tragic trajectory of Anne who presents another suitably dramatic female lead in keeping with all of Conrad’s plays. For Robert Hampson, “in the character of Laughing Anne, Conrad presents what Lena might have become if she had survived to spend more years in the archipelago” (Hampson, 2002, 96): in terms of the play, we could adapt this to say that Laughing Anne is what Lena might have become if she did not receive the love of a good man and live happily ever after with him in Paradise. But given the primacy of Davidson’s smile, we might be led to anticipate a “masculine tragedy”: a drama of psychological sophistication which charts the decline and fall of a respectable male figure as is found, for instance, in Ibsen’s The Master Builder (1893) or Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1899). However, the play will not take the loss of Davidson’s smile as its focus. Davidson will remain the central figure but the play is a drama of action. As in One Day More there is a dramatic focus whereby a broad and complex sweep of time is condensed into a single dramatic narrative. Laughing Anne may not have the classical discipline of One Day More’s unities, but it does share a principle of sustained mood albeit more explicitly active and violent than the interior, mundane tragedy of Bessie Carvil. If “To-morrow” and One Day More explored the conflicting worldviews of Hagberd and his son or Bessie’s melancholic trajectory from fantasy to despair, “Because of the Dollars” and Laughing Anne reveal the destructive force of greed and materialism and the (sometimes necessary) horror of violence. Like some plays of the Symbolist theatre, Laughing Anne traces with concision the journey from innocence to experience and life to death, but its violence associates it, as Conrad intended, with the succinct horrors of the Grand-Guignol. Before we look at this connection in depth, we will devote more attention to the original short story.


From the first paragraph of “Because of the Dollars” it is clear that Davidson is isolated, lonely in the crowd. The narrator informs us: He attracted my attention because in the movement of figures in white drill suits . . . his costume, the usual tunic and trousers, being made of light grey flannel, made him noticeable. (169) As we can visualise, Davidson is simultaneously one of the gang and yet not one of the gang: his clothes are the standard design and cut, but are uniquely off-colour, tainted. But it is this off-white individual that Hollis signals as being “a good man . . . a really good man” (218). Then Hollis informs us that he and the other fellows would “chaff” Davidson not just about his size but about his “fine scruples” (219): he was taunted for his goodness. Davidson embodies what Terry Eagleton locates as “Conrad’s positive values . . . the reactionary Carlylean imperatives of work, duty, fidelity” (Eagleton, 1976, 134). This is particularly clear when Hollis tells us about Davidson’s “thoroughly humane” (219) mutual loyalty to his Chinese boss. Indeed, “you couldn’t tell if it was Davidson who belonged to the Chinaman or the Chinaman who belonged to Davidson” (219). Significantly, Davidson’s positive values are as respected and reliable as before with one difference, his smile: “the smile’s the only thing which isn’t as before” (219), Hollis tells us. Soon afterwards, our mediating narrator defines the spoiled smile: at the very moment he smiled his placid face appeared veiled in melancholy – a sort of spiritual shadow. (171) The spiritual shadow is the guilty burden of Anne. The smile of Davidson is warm and “placid” – the key word in any description of Davidson, in this tale or in Victory – but it has been spoiled by the death of Laughing Anne: a silenced laugh and a spoiled smile. Hollis then leads us through an exposition of Davidson’s sad tale: his dollar-collecting trips to replace the old currency with a new issue; his encounter with the craven loafer Bamtz who had set up home with Laughing Anne; “Davidson’s goodness” (177) in trading with Bamtz in order to help Anne and her child; Davidson’s careless talk, setting the Man Without Hands and his two accomplices on his trail; a night of violence and terror in which Anne saves Davidson and the precious dollars at the cost of her own life. We should stress that Hollis’s account is but one version – the version we have to rely on – and the narrative makes it clear there are certainly more in circulation. One version is


told to Mrs Davidson by Captain Ritchie – better known by his nickname “Monkey-face” – and this we must interpret as fatally unreliable: Monkey-face Ritchie called on that sweet, shy Mrs Davidson . . . He was always a great chatterer. He had got hold of the story rather vaguely, and he started chattering on that subject, thinking she knew all about it. And in due course he let out something about Laughing Anne. “Laughing Anne,” says Mrs Davidson with a start. “What’s that?” Ritchie plunged into circumlocution at once, but she very soon stopped him. “Is that creature dead?” she asks. “I believe so,” stammered Ritchie. “Your husband says so.” “But you don’t know for certain?” “No! How could I, Mrs Davidson!” “That’s all I wanted to know . . .” (209) We can only guess what he said in his vague grasp of the story. Most critically, he cannot vouch if Laughing Anne is dead. But what is Davidson’s story if Anne survives? Her death is the crux of the incident, the point of the story. By not being able to swear if Anne is truly dead, Ritchie ruins the story and he casts aspersions on the impeccable character of Davidson, enough to turn a white suit grey, as it were. But that may be not altogether alien to Ritchie’s intentions: we are informed with some innuendo that he “posed for a great admirer” (246) of Mrs Davidson. Certainly Mrs Davidson is left with a tale about her husband’s “base intrigue with a vile woman, of being made a fool of, of the insult to her dignity” (247), in short, that “his wife’s silly brain was slowly coming to the conclusion that Tony was Davidson’s child” (246). Once again, such intrigue seems to link the theme with late melodrama or bourgeois “family secrets” as in Ibsen’s Ghosts (1882). We never hear Davidson’s own account and all we see is the spiritual shadow that ruins the smile. We are told that Davidson took some friends into his confidence and told them the story, as well as telling the “full story officially to the Harbour Master” (246). His “official” account, we must assume, was rather like his account of Heyst and Lena’s tragedy at the end of Victory, which William Bonney argues is mediated through “the dreary context of an official report” (Bonney, 1980, 187). But such dreary officialdom is no doubt some comfort to Davidson, as it fits in with those Carlylean imperatives once more. Disastrously, Davidson fails to tell his wife the whole story when he should do, and when he finally does it is all too late. Marlow in Heart of


Darkness may be like an Ancient Mariner, telling his tale, burdening or even cursing whoever will listen. He certainly seals his personal fate with the lie that protects Kurtz and comforts the Intended. Davidson in “Because of the Dollars” saves his tale for his close friends and the official report and seals his personal fate by telling his wife an economical account and then by telling her a truth which has lost all value by being told after the vague, morally dubious version courtesy of Monkey-face Ritchie. After that, all Davidson can show us is the moral complexity of a spiritual shadow spoiling his smile. As Conrad states, the short story is rather savage with its violence and murder. But no less savage is Captain Davidson’s wife. In a tale of great economy, Conrad dedicates substantial space to elucidate the meanspirited nature of Mrs Davidson: (Davidson) trusted in the goodness and warmth of (his wife’s) heart, in her woman’s natural compassion. He did not know that her heart was about the size of a parched pea, and had the proportional amount of warmth; and that her faculty of compassion was mainly directed to herself. He was only startled and disappointed at the air of cold surprise and the suspicious look with which she received his . . . tale. But she did not say much. She never had much to say. She was a fool of the silent, hopeless kind. (207–8) This “hopeless fool” was supposed to be the union and companion of the “truly good” Captain Davidson.3 She turns Davidson’s home into “a silent, frozen hell” for, Hollis tells us, “A stupid woman with a sense of grievance is worse than an unchained devil” (210). By using such a diabolical description, Mrs Davidson ironically becomes more suited to the company of the equally embittered and devilish Man Without Hands and his heartless cronies. Early in the story we are told that she “seemed the heaven-born mate for Davidson” (175), but once Mrs Davidson has become diabolical the narrative pairs Davidson with Anne, the smile with the laugh. Whether the death of Anne lumbers Davidson with her child or is the symbolic offspring of an immaculate, Platonic union between Davidson and Anne, her son Tony is indisputably Davidson’s child more than his own nameless daughter, the “little girl” that is dragged away to “Fremantle or somewhere in that direction” (210) by her mean-spirited mother. As for Anne, we might think of Ruth Nadelhaft’s analysis of Lena in Victory as resisting Conrad’s “tendency to flatten individuality under a philosophical glaze” and her


failed attempt to “become uniquely real” (Nadelhaft, 1991, 126). Certainly it seems preferable to classify Anne among Nadelhaft’s assessment of Conrad’s late women, projecting “fragility and determination” (Nadelhaft, 1991, 126) rather than Jocelyn Baines’s rather shallow definition of Anne as a “rather worthless but inoffensive and courageous woman” (Baines, 1959, 392). This is corroborated when we realise the implications of Anne’s heroic death. “Because of the Dollars” includes a remarkable description of Davidson, bewildered and frightened as he trips over the corpse of Anne: “Even as he pitched forward on his head he knew it could be nothing else but Laughing Anne’s body. He picked himself up and, remaining on his knees, tried to lift her in his arms. He felt her so limp that he gave it up. (. . .) “Davidson, kneeling by the side of that woman done so miserably to death, was overcome with remorse. She had died for him. His manhood was as if stunned. For the first time he felt afraid. He might have been pounced upon in the dark at any moment by the murderer of Laughing Anne. He confesses to the impulse of creeping away from that pitiful corpse on his hands and knees to the refuge of the ship. He even says that he actually began to do so . . . “One can hardly picture to oneself Davidson crawling away on all fours from the murdered woman – Davidson unmanned and crushed by the idea that she had died for him . . . (204–5) There is something grotesquely comic in Davidson’s pratfall and it is a “headlong” (204) descent in more ways more than the physical: the man who should be the fearless action hero is suddenly a music hall clown. It is an emasculating moment and his strength drains from him. The fact that he abandons his attempt to lift Anne is ambiguous: Does he abandon it because she is clearly dead or because he does not have the strength? Ironically, much of this emasculation is Anne’s fault: to apply Nadelhaft’s terminology, her physical “fragility” (in other words, her mortality) is superseded by her gallant “determination” to save Tony and Davidson. The result of Anne’s fearless, selfless heroism is a critical disruption of masculinity. The ridiculous fall of Davidson develops into a stunning of his “manhood” which ultimately becomes an unmanning. Moreover, Davidson’s masculinity is not peculiar but highly emblematic. Compared to his adversaries, Davidson is seemingly imbued with clarity of identity and origin: the maimed French gangster is a major


character yet he is not even given a name, Bamtz and Fector are occidental names but of unclear derivation. Indeed, “Fector” may even be an invented name for, as Cedric Watts explains, the name “Fector” is an allusion to the word “interfector” which is Latin for “slayer” (Watts, 1993, 195). Most blatant in terms of obscured origin is Niclaus, who prefers the nickname “The Nakhoda”: Why! The fellow with a Tartar moustache and a yellow complexion, like a Mongolian, only that his eyes were set straight and his face was not so flat. One couldn’t tell what breed he was. A nondescript beggar. From a certain angle you would think a very bilious white man. And I daresay he was. He owned a Malay prau and called himself The Nakhoda, as one would say: The Captain. Aha! Now you remember. He couldn’t, apparently, speak any other European language than English, but he flew the Dutch flag on his prau. (186) Everything about Niclaus is hybridised. In the short description above, the choice of words associates him with being Tartar, Mongolian, Malay, English and Dutch. Furthermore, this impurity has a racist overtone – his uncertain “breed” renders him a “nondescript beggar” – while the same obscurity also makes him unmemorable: in the context of the short story, the description marks Hollis’s attempt to describe Niclaus so that the listener will recall him. In contrast, Davidson has an undiluted identity which is linked to his “goodness”. There is a case to see him as an example of a figure representative of the ideology of “Imperial masculinity”, a concept that John Beynon defines as “a masculinity suitable to serve the Empire” (Beynon, 2002, 26). Davidson is quintessentially British in his name and conduct: his adversaries are blackmailers, loafers or criminals washed up from Europe as a form of escape whereas Davidson is an apostle of positive imperial values. In a discussion of imperial masculinity in literature, the works of Henry Rider Haggard are brought to mind as he is possibly the author most synonymous with, in Beynon’s words, “adventure stories celebrating male vitality” written as a deliberate challenge to the “increasing feminization of English literature” (Beynon, 2002, 36). As Beynon summarizes: (Haggard) aimed to give expression to Muscular Christianity with its emphasis upon character-building through courage, fortitude, patriotism and self-discipline as markers of an Imperial masculinity rooted in reason, not emotion, and forged in the (necessary) absence of women: indeed, repeatedly in the Haggardian landscape women


are forces for instability and chaos, desire and fear. (Beynon, 2002, 36–7) This quotation is worth considering in relation to Conrad.4 The derivation of Davidson’s name – “Son of David” – is an ideal name for an emblem of Muscular Christianity, but more significantly imperial masculinity’s terror of the feminine creation of “instability and chaos, desire and fear” is apt in relation to Davidson’s complex relationship with Anne and its impact on his masculinity and ultimately his marriage. Davidson’s night of terror and emasculation is an ironic subversion of melodramatic conventions whereby the imperial man should have been masculinised by the ignoble deed and empowered by an imperative of justifiable revenge. Similarly, Robert Hampson sees the short story as a sustained “subversion of adventure stereotypes” (Hampson, 2002, 102). This is partly because “Because of the Dollars” associates the spirit of “the English adventurer” with “piracy and criminality” rather than “heroism and manliness” (102). This neatly sums up the Man Without Hands and his opportunistic gang, but the humiliation of Davidson is perhaps an even more subversive challenge to the conventions of the adventure genre and its “real men”. Furthermore, for Hampson, Davidson’s unhappy marriage is a “bleak domestic narrative [that] performs the final de-romanticizing [and feminising] of the potentially manly story of the foiling of the attempted theft of a cargo of dollars” (Hampson, 2002, 103). The collapse of Davidson’s marriage is also a challenge to melodramatic conventions where the moral equilibrium would have been restored: Davidson’s conduct would ultimately have been seen as the actions of a heroic male endeavouring to save a woman, the purity of their relationship being acknowledged and understood by his wife. But the certainties of a melodramatic universe are dismantled, largely because the story and its meaning are not fixed or unanimously believed. It depends on who is telling the story and how: the simple cautionary story at the heart of “Because of the Dollars” with its clear sense of good and evil, right and wrong is a potential Rashomon.5 Davidson’s official report is probably as blandly factual as Ritchie’s is suggestive while Hollis’s account is thorough but is yet another adaptation, a fact that is given emphasis when the framing narrator talks of “Hollis’s Davidson” (171) early in the short story. The sterling narratives of adventure and controversial melodrama are being replaced, like the money Davidson is exchanging, by a new currency of amorality and inscrutability: Mrs Davidson’s distrust of her inherently “good” (and genuinely honest) husband; the de-romanticisation


and emasculation of the male hero; the critically conflicting narratives and so on. The very last sentence of the short story tells us that the emasculated Davidson “will have to go downhill without a single human affection near him because of those old dollars” (211). It has been a tale of motion: whether it has been Davidson’s trips from island to island, his wife from West Australia to Fremantle, or Fector getting horsewhipped from Ceylon to Shanghai, or Anne coming to a fatal stop after jumping from island to island, man to man, “successive partners (in her) dismal adventures” (185). It is fitting that Tony should grow up to be nothing less than a missionary leading a “saintly life (and) may even become a martyr” (211). This may seem an ironic contrast to his mother’s life of paint and dyes, but one assumes his faith gives him the “loyalty” his mother prided herself on, and Anne’s heroism and self-sacrifice makes her something of a martyr (even if she will always be a “creature” to Mrs Davidson). While Tony spreads the word somewhere in China, Davidson too must keep moving, but it can only be in one direction: downhill. Hollis tells us that “in his placid way (Davidson is) a man who needs affection” (211), but he will be condemned to loneliness. We need only think of his relationship with his boss, a yin-yang mutual respect and dependency. Such connectedness is what Davidson wanted in his emotional life, but the people who could provide that – his wife, daughter, adopted son – all abandon him. The tragedy of the detached and nihilistic Axel Heyst in Victory is that he breaks free from his father’s philosophy and connects through love to Lena, so that when she dies he faces the ultimate negation. In “Because of the Dollars” Anne’s death is Davidson’s tragedy, as the man that needed solidarity in his professional and emotional life is rendered terminally alone and unable to belong. Such themes are at the heart of twentieth-century drama, in works by playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller. Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922) also features a man of the sea in a study of isolation and despair. Yank, a ship’s stoker (the “ape” of the title), embarks on a journey of discovery attempting to find where he might “belong”. His quest through all aspects of modern society marks his steady decline until he eventually finds himself in the zoo where he dies in the stranglehold of a gorilla and we are told that “the Hairy Ape at last belongs” (O’Neill, 1994, 1363). In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) we witness another portrayal of isolation in the modern world. Willy Loman has pursued and lived by the fantasy of an “American Dream” in his professional and domestic life. We see his decline and increasing alienation as he recognises his own failure and eventually


commits suicide. Although very different to Conrad, the themes of these plays nonetheless find a precursor in Conrad inasmuch as we see men betrayed by an awareness of changing values and becoming terminally isolated. The new currency that Davidson distributes, the dismantling of his masculinity and emotional status, is akin to the humiliation and alienation of Yank and Willy Loman when they see the unromantic realities of the modern, materialistic world. Furthermore, The Hairy Ape is a masterpiece of American drama’s experimentation with Expressionism and although Death of a Salesman is often seen as a highpoint of twentiethcentury Realism, it is still a play with an Expressionistic register as evidenced by Miller’s working title of The Inside of His Head. Laughing Anne too has aspects that are Expressionistic. Alison E. Wheatley is persuasive in her analysis of the final scene of the play when she claims: By emphasizing the confusing and frightening aspects of the scene with indistinct sights and sounds, Conrad suggests his concurrence with the modernist theme of the impossibility of complete perception. (Wheatley, 2002, 72) This analysis of Conrad’s ‘modernism’ can be firmly located in the theatrical area of Expressionism, above all in the final scene’s remarkably abstract sense of pace, design, sound and lighting. As another example of the challenge to conventional Realism, Conrad provides this noteworthy stage direction earlier in the play: While NAKHODA goes to knock at the door on R., FECTOR and M. W. H. withdraw to L. side and watch the performance. (17) Although it would be an error to think that Conrad is describing a moment of metadrama (i.e. that the actors playing Fector and the Man Without Hands withdraw from their roles as well as from the action) it is a potentially abstract moment of the “layering” of a performance. Less contentious regarding the play’s challenge to conventional Realism we might remind ourselves how the name “Fector” alludes to “interfector”, a fact that demonstrates that the name – and thus the character – may have a more archetypal than strictly realist register and function. This suggests Epic theatre, a correlation previously suggested in another study of “Because of the Dollars” and Laughing Anne: Bertolt Brecht would certainly have loved the materialistic title of the original short story which has a simplicity akin to the titles of some of


Brecht’s Lehrstück. Moreover, Laughing Anne’s name and history makes her not dissimilar to Brechtian archetypes such as Pirate Jenny, Mack the Knife and Surabaya Johnny: other lumpenproletarian “lowlifes” trapped in the sleazy depths of society. (Hand, 2002, 61n) The potential Epic link is also explored by Marjean D. Purinton who interprets the laughter of Anne as a moment of Brechtian alienation (Purinton, 2002, 83). As exciting as these parallels may be, the theatrical genre that is most resonant in relation to Laughing Anne is the one that Conrad expressly intended. But before we look at Conrad and the Grand-Guignol in depth, we will devote some attention to Conrad’s process of adaptation: how he reconstructs the fiction of “Because of the Dollars” into a stage play. Laughing Anne is given the same concision as One Day More. Once again, Conrad takes the integral story and modifies it into a plot suitable for the stage. “Because of the Dollars” has a complex narrative: predominantly, the plot recounts the past and therefore much of the tale is about the interplay of the past and present, memory and interpretation, and the long-term consequences of actions. Conrad adapts this into a simply structured drama of action that unfolds in the present. The primary way this is achieved is by dismantling the Hollis and anonymous narrator’s framing narrative structure. This, however, loads the opening dialogue between Davidson and Hollis with a great weight of exposition. In the opening speech of the play, Hollis declares: Here we have been yarning of old times for an hour or so in this damned Macao Hotel and I never asked you why you frequent such a place. (3) It is difficult to contradict Paolo Pugliatti’s evaluation of the line as a “false start”: “The information is obviously relevant for the audience but it is absolutely redundant for the two characters” (Pugliatti, 1992, 710). What it reflects is Conrad’s over-anxiousness in setting the scene – the kind of over-elucidation that George Bernard Shaw judiciously excised when he edited One Day More – when much of this would have been self-evident in the actors’ performance and the audience’s imagination. Interestingly, a similar dialogic exchange occurs in Victory: LENA: (...) Where am I? I don’t even know where I am. What is this place? HEYST: This is a place called Sourabaya – a town in Java. LENA: Sourabaya. It means nothing. I’m always hearing names that are new – names I can’t remember. (109)


This exchange serves the same function inasmuch as it clearly reinforces the location for the audience, but the lines succeed because they also fit in with the psychology of Lena, worn out by the endless Zangiacomo tour. In the case of Laughing Anne, Conrad is attempting to condense the plot and elsewhere in the play it proves extremely successful: he creates a more disciplined time structure, what takes two years in the fiction becomes a month in the adaptation. A similar process occurs with location. While the setting of “To-morrow” was invitingly static and claustrophobic for the purposes of adaptation, “Because of the Dollars” is a tale about motion presenting a disparate sweep of settings. This becomes necessarily diminished in the play but is nonetheless acknowledged by the different locations of its three scenes: the Macao Hotel where the entire cast is manifest; Bamtz’s hut; and, in the final scene, the stern of the Sissie, the shore and the outside of the hut. These are extremely diverse settings – in John Galsworthy’s words “none of them easy” (Galsworthy, 1924, vi) – especially for such a short play. Using the language of adaptation outlined in the introduction, we can see that Conrad uses all available strategies in transforming “Because of the Dollars” into Laughing Anne. As Alison E. Wheatley argues, Conrad often “transfers dialogue almost unchanged from the source story” (Wheatley, 2002, 68). Conrad also likes to tinker with the odd word or phrase: in the short story Fector has been horsewhipped from “Ceylon to Shanghai” (186) while in the play this becomes “Aden to Shanghai” (6), a puzzling alteration although it is possible that the latter version is a clearer and bolder line when it comes to enunciation upon the stage. More profound is Hollis’s scornful description of Fector in the play that says: “He calls himself a journalist as some receivers of stolen goods call themselves marine dealers” (6). In the original this is: “He described himself as a journalist just as certain kind of women give themselves out as actresses in the dock of police-court” (186). The line in the play is more in keeping with the theme of criminality, but Conrad obviously decided that such a brazen theatrical allusion was potentially embarrassing in a piece that was actually intended to be performed onstage, especially as it is a piece requiring only one actress – a star-turn for someone like Marie Löhr or Sybil Thorndike – portraying exactly the type of painted lady he refers to. Other alterations include the Man Without Hands who is not specifically French in the play yet Conrad loyally translates his key lines “Mon malheur!” “Trahison!” “Tuez-le!” into English. Conrad also employs shifts in narrative to give the Man Without


Hands more lines. In the short story Davidson speculates on the Man Without Hands’ seven-pound weight: A man with an unsuspected power to deal killing blows could take his own part in a sudden scrimmage round a heap of money, even against adversaries armed with revolvers, especially if he himself started the row. (199) Compare this with the equivalent speech in the play, delivered by the Man Without Hands himself: You see – a resolute man with a lump of iron like this at the end of his arm can crack three skulls long before the idiots with hands have time to pull out their revolvers. See? Especially if it’s he who starts the scrimmage all of a sudden. (23) They both say the same thing, one in Davidson’s thoughts, the other in the Man Without Hands’ spoken words. Such moments demonstrate Conrad’s meticulous care in shifting perspective and modifying the structure and jargon of speech. As ever the case with the adaptation of fiction, there are obvious omissions: Monkey-face Ritchie is cut completely in the play as is Davidson’s daughter or any discussion of his manager. The smile so imperative in the short story is marginalised but still present. Davidson’s “habitual half-smile” (1) is re-emphasised in his “faint smile” (4) and the two reiterations of his “placid smile” (4 and 5). The smile disappears as the play proceeds, the stage directions describing Davidson as having a “grim placidity” (12) or being “contemptuous” (26). Other examples of marginalisation include the fact that we do not see Tony grow up beyond childhood, and the presence of Mrs Davidson is reduced to a couple of lines, but these are very important lines: DAVIDSON (cordial). Yes . . . I say! Won’t you go and see my wife. She would know your name in a moment. HOLLIS (. . . Jocular). Do you mean to say that you talk to your wife of old times? (Moves off laughing.) DAVIDSON (calls out after HOLLIS placidly.) She is all right. (8) Hollis departs with his suggestive laughter, never to return to the play. As Pugliatti observes in analysing this exchange, “No judgement is, of course, passed on Davidson’s wife, since Davidson himself is the


source of information about her” (Pugliatti, 1992, 709). This is in contrast to the short story where she is described by Hollis as a “stupid woman” (210). What is more, Hollis is the man “who saw the most of the Davidsons at home” (176), and he describes the attitude of himself and his associates: We used to admire Mrs. Davidson from a distance. It was a girlish head out of a keepsake. From a distance. We had not many opportunities for a closer view, because she did not care to give them to us. We would have been glad to drop in at the Davidson bungalow, but we were made to feel somehow that we were not very welcome there. (175–6) There is something predatory in this and Hollis goes on to say how most of the men “were fetched by her white, swan-like neck” and developed a “latent devotion” to her. But Mrs Davidson is troubled by “a profound suspicion of the sort of men we were” (176). She is the only shipmaster’s wife and the only woman and so distrusts the men and is even “jealous” of her husband. It is clear in his burst of laughter that the Hollis-figure in the play has not met her and never believed that one such as he would meet Davidson’s heaven-born mate. There is a clearer segregation of men and women in the play: gone are Hollis’ and his associates’ mock-romantic “admiration” of Mrs Davidson (one can fully understand her unwillingness to encourage “devoted” seamen to “drop in” at the bungalow). The gender segregation in the play (which culminates in the destruction of Anne tragically ensnared in the world of men) begins with the subtlety of Hollis’s laughter at the very idea of talking to Davidson’s wife about (presumably salacious) “old times”. Hollis is a rugged man of experience or, as Ted Billy has asserted in relation to his presence in “Karain”, an inscrutable mix of the charlatan and the Good Samaritan.6 Hollis knows that many of the old crew’s tales and acquaintances are not for the ears of a lady. Ironically, in the world of the play, the most critical and dangerous tale for Davidson to tell is not one about the old times, it is the one that is about to happen. Alone on the stage Davidson asserts that his wife is “all right”, but we never find out if she is. In the short story she is categorically not all right and the “silent, frozen hell” that Hollis describes – Robert Hampson’s “bleak domestic narrative” – would have turned the play into a study of an appalling marriage and/or collapsing family as in August Strindberg’s The Father (1887), The Dance of Death (1905) or The Pelican (1907). Conrad, however, cuts the failed Davidson marriage and the play ends


in the way Davidson’s night of terror ends: not the lonely man going downhill, but the man saving Anne’s child, an iconic hero figure establishing discipline amongst the kalashes once more, and triumphing over evil – “You are on my conscience, but your boy shall have his chance” (29). To an extent, the finale befits a persisting type of drama in the period with an imperial masculine English hero – Victory being another example – which emerged out of the Victorian melodramatic tradition. Looked at like this, Laughing Anne can also be seen as an example of sensational proto-Hollywood adventure melodrama.7 Nevertheless, it is quite reasonable to argue that what Linda Dryden locates as “Conrad’s scepticism about the possibility of romantic heroism” (Dryden, 2000, 197) – the de-romanticisation that Robert Hampson specifically mentions in relation to “Because of the Dollars” – still applies to the play and in Davidson we find a de-romanticised dramatic hero. Davidson’s quip that “there are no pirates nowadays in the Archipelago, except in boys’ books” (6) is ironic as he will encounter a fearsome gang of pirates who could have wandered off the pages of an adventure tale, so maybe more accurate would be a recasting of the line as “there are no heroes nowadays in the Archipelago, except in boys’ books”. In relation to the idea of the absent hero, the stage direction that informs us that “For a moment his heart fails him and he makes a motion as if to get back on board, then suddenly pulls himself together” (28) is a profound moment, as is the fact that the hero does not manage to save the heroine even if his retribution against the villain of the piece is swift and spectacular. Most helpful in an argument about the de-romanticised nature of Laughing Anne is if we see the play as an instance of Grand-Guignol. If we do, the ground beneath Davidson’s feet may not be so secure or free from irony as a purely melodramatic reading may suggest. In the 1924 edition of Laughing Anne and One Day More, John Galsworthy provides the “Introduction”, and it is an introduction that looms large over the whole of Conrad’s dramatic oeuvre, and is in part grossly unfair. Galsworthy claims that Laughing Anne is an example of a novelist’s “innocence” (Galsworthy, 1924, vii) as to what is possible or acceptable on the stage. He points out two elements, one concerns a character, the other is a technical demand. One of the figures in the play is, of course, the Man Without Hands, and Galsworthy writes: Conrad probably never realised that a “man without hands” would be an almost unbearable spectacle; that what you can write about freely cannot always be endured by the living eye. (Galsworthy, 1924, vii)


For Galsworthy, it is too much like the “Bridge of Galata”, the gathering place for the deformed beggars of Constantinople: by implication, he means that it is simply too real to be seen.8 By saying this, Galsworthy acquires the kind of attitude and tone one would associate with the official theatre censors of the time. The technical naiveté is on the grounds of the lighting demands, including: The lighting . . . of the last scene would be most difficult – effects which depend on shudderings grounded in dim light are to be avoided. A moment or two – yes; but a whole scene – no! (Galsworthy, 1924, vii) All the same, the play itself, Galsworthy would indicate, is not badly written: in fact “To read this play, however, is a pleasure” (Galsworthy, 1924, vii). Conrad could create readable – and even pleasurable – plays, but according to Galsworthy these could never make the shift into practical theatre successfully. Galsworthy implies that Conrad never sufficiently learnt the skills of theatrical drama or at least was never willing to modify his talents for the medium he was attempting to enter. This is an interesting argument, but one that needs challenging as Galsworthy is writing from the perspective of British theatre and its traditional theatrical conventions. The title Laughing Anne indicates that the play owes something to melodrama – it is certainly reminiscent of nineteenth-century classics of the genre such as Douglas Jerrold’s Black-Ey’d Susan (1829) – and the play unquestionably contains melodramatic moments. A stage direction states that Davidson delivers the line “My God, poor Anne” while “slapping his forehead” (28) which epitomises the popular perception of melodramatic cliché. Another supreme example of melodrama is the Man Without Hands’ dying words – fulfilling the tradition that melodramatic villains must never die quietly – “Damn his soul, he’s got me!” (29). It is hard to conceive of a more melodramatic line. It is even harder to imagine a moment more contrasting to the Man Without Hands’ death in the short story. In the play, Davidson fires when the Man Without Hands leaps up from Anne’s corpse. In the short story, Davidson is “peering into the obscurity fearfully” before he “Instinctively” (204) shoots at a “bulky shape” in the darkness. Later on, when he is rolling Anne’s corpse into a cotton sheet, Davidson perceives: (A) huge heap of white clothes huddled against the corner-post of the house. That it was the Frenchman lying there he could not doubt. Taking it in connection with the dismal groan he had heard


in the night, Davidson is pretty sure that his random shot gave a mortal hurt to the murderer of poor Anne. (206) Compared to the black-and-white showdown of Davidson slaying the murderer in front of the audience and the Man Without Hands’ dying curse, the account in the short story is not simply anti-melodramatic but anti-dramatic in its bathetic prolongation and obscuration constructed in such a way as to resist the blatancies of a heroic finale. To a certain degree, Conrad’s dramatic reconstruction of “Because of the Dollars” redeploys the story as a melodrama: good inexorably triumphs over evil in a comparatively simply structured drama of dilemma, danger and denouement. The choice of closure is striking in this light as it does not look at – or even suggest – the collapse of Davidson’s marriage but ends with him restoring order among his cowardly kalashes and asserting his positive values: DAVIDSON (. . .). On deck there! On deck! Serang! SERANG’S VOICE. Ya, Tuan. DAVIDSON. Bring a lantern. Here, take the child. (Hands child over rail.) You curs, where have you been hiding? All of you cleared out, eh? SERANG. They frightened. All back on board now, Tuan. DAVIDSON. Send four men ashore. There is a body there which we are going to take out to sea. (He moves, carrying the lantern low, followed by four Malays in blue dungaree suits, dark faces. Stands the lantern on the ground by the body and looking down at it apostrophizes the corpse.) Poor Anne! You are on my conscience, but your boy shall have his chance. (29) In the closing sequence of the play, Davidson is a theatrical animation of an imperial man: he is paternal in taking the child to safety; he is authoritative, re-establishing discipline among the foreign “curs”; and he is also afforded the opportunity to make a formal and noble pledge to give the boy a “chance”. In performance too, the image of the fairhaired Davidson in his white apparel followed by four identically dressed Malays with their “dark faces” and the dead woman at his feet is a picture of imperial masculinity and patriarchal dominance. Such a tableau makes Laughing Anne seem like a melodrama of imperial masculinity. However, there is a strong case to argue that Conrad is approaching theatre from a broader, more avant-garde outlook. Certainly Conrad is more enterprising than the damning condescension of John Galsworthy gives him credit for. This is not simply demonstrable from a critic’s perspective but can be corroborated as a conscious dramatic


decision on Conrad’s part. But in order to analyse this in depth, it is fruitful to return to Conrad’s earlier days as a writer and his relationship with Stephen Crane. In his essay on “Stephen Crane” written for Thomas Beer’s biography Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923), Conrad recounts how Crane shared with Conrad the idea of a short story called “The Predecessor” and proposed that he and Conrad should collaborate on adapting it to the stage. In essence, the story is set in the Rocky Mountains and involves a man who imitates his “predecessor” in an attempt to win a woman’s heart. Conrad writes: (The) action, I fear, would have been frankly melodramatic. Crane insisted that one of the situations should present the man and the girl on a boundless plain standing by their dead ponies after a furious ride (a truly Crane touch). I made some objections. A boundless plain in the light of a sunset could be got into a back-cloth, I admitted; but I doubted whether we could induce the management of any London theatre to deposit two stuffed horses on its stage. (Notes on Life and Letters, 115–6) The humorous presentation of this anecdote lends the essay a tone that makes John Berryman lament that Conrad’s “egotism is grievous” (Berryman, 1962, 201n). In his personal correspondence with Crane, however, Conrad certainly cannot be seen as “condescending” (Berryman, 1962, 200). In declining Crane’s continuing proposal for dramatic collaboration Conrad writes in January 1898: I have no dramatic gift. You have the terseness, the clear eye the easy imagination. You have all – I have only the accursed faculty of dreaming. My ideas fade – Yours come out sharp cut as cameos – they come all living out of Your brain and bring images – and bring light. Mine bring only mist in which they are born, and die. (CL2, 13–14) It is ironic that while Conrad attributes a true “dramatic gift” to Crane in the letter, in his Crane essay he should highlight what he perceives as Crane’s naiveté with regard to the practicalities of stagecraft. It is even more ironic when one considers that after Conrad’s death, Galsworthy will accuse Conrad of the very same naiveté with regard to the realities of practical stagecraft. In his reminiscence for Thomas Beer, Conrad interprets “The Predecessor” discussions as “merely the expression of our affection for each


other” (116), while for Crane it was probably more significant, especially as he announced proudly that “Mr. Conrad and I are writing a new kind of play” (Stallman, 1973, 339). Nothing became of “The Predecessor” in fiction or in drama, although John Berryman explains that Crane would eventually write “The Clan of No-Name” (1899), a violent and ironic short story that includes the similar theme of a man’s attempts to replace another man in a woman’s affections, as well as the “queer tiny play” (Berryman, 1962, 207) The Blood of the Martyr (1898). As for Conrad, when Stallman insinuates that he reworked Crane’s scenario to his own ends some thirteen years later (see Stallman, 1973, 339), he is referring to the short story “The Planter of Malata”. Knowles and Moore are more tactful when they say that the “scenario seems, however, to have lingered in Conrad’s memory, since he later used certain of its features in ‘The Planter of Malata’ ” (73). Crane’s The Blood of the Martyr was a single-authored work but it was unquestionably “a new kind of play”. It is set in Kiao Chou, a mythical Chinese city, at the time of writing in 1898. The play presents Prince Henry of Prussia desperately exploiting China for the right to develop the railway for capital gain albeit he does so in the name of civilizing the East. Part of the process is achieved through martyring consignments of missionaries. John Berryman describes the play as a “skit on imperialism” (Berryman, 1962, 316) and immediately we might associate the themes of the play with Conrad’s presentation of imperialistic exploitation in Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. But in terms of style, Crane’s play is a hideously sardonic comedy that borders on the surrealistic. In the final act of The Blood of the Martyr, a German Missionary returns to Kiao Chou, “slowly approaching on crutches” (Crane, 1973, 738). Prince Henry, turns and on seeing the Missionary “falls back with a loud cry of horror” (Crane, 1973, 738), believing he has seen a ghost: MISSIONARY – Your Highness, I am no ghost. I am the Yen Hock Missionary in the flesh. PRINCE HENRY – What, then, traitor? And this is a man in whom the Emperor placed his trust! Oh, unhappy man! Oh, unhappy Germany, to be served by such a son! MISSIONARY (humbly) – Your Highness, my parishioners cut off one of my ears. PRINCE HENRY – An ear! Paltry! MISSIONARY – Your Highness, they burned off one of my feet. PRINCE HENRY – A foot! Idle amusement! MISSIONARY – Your Highness, they sliced out one of my lungs.


PRINCE HENRY (impatiently) – Oh, come now; get to the main story. Did they disembowel you? MISSIONARY (abashed) – No, Your Highness, I – I couldn’t honestly say that they did. But (gaining courage) they garroted me and flayed me alive. PRINCE HENRY (suddenly and completely mollified) – Oh, well, that is quite sufficient. Some day I’ll let you ride a short distance on the engine of the Fan Tan Express, and, as a mark of gratitude for my royal favor, you can present to me that box of cigars. Ho! there, Captain! Take this man down to the kitchen and give him some beer. (Crane, 1973, 738–9) The extract reveals that the play is a work of grotesque humour, 9 a nightmarish vision of imperialistic exploitation that Edwin H. Cady argues “anticipates in intent (though not in skill) the savage antiimperialism of Mark Twain’s ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’ ” (Cady, 1980, 93). Moreover, although at first glance Crane’s play could not be more different to Conrad in style, the theme of it (and indeed Twain’s 1901 polemical essay) is familiar Conrad territory. Once we acknowledge this, Crane’s play seems like an extrapolation or condensation of some of Conrad’s most grotesque characters and Dantean – or simply violent – episodes. Furthermore, when Stallman argues that “Crane’s comic drama has to do with German imperialism in China but it transposes readily enough into a satire of imperialism anywhere, including the American brand” (Stallman, 1973, 346), we might be reminded that “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (Youth and Heart of Darkness, 117). In terms of drama, The Blood of the Martyr stands as a remarkable precursor to the violence of early Expressionist drama such as Oscar Kokoschka’s Murderer Hope of Womankind (1907) or later non-naturalistic, avant-gardist short plays such as Stanislaw “Witkacy” Witkiewicz’s The New Deliverance (1920) or Antonin Artaud’s Le Jet de sang (“The Spurt of Blood”, 1925) more easily than it reflects anything from the 1890s. It is interesting that Crane uses the human body as the locus of violence and ideological Symbolism in the play. The Missionary’s body has been subjected to a torment not dissimilar to the notorious Chinese “Torture of a Thousand Cuts” in a near-martyrdom that has nothing to do with spiritual faith and everything to do with the material gain of his imperialist master. The violence of The Blood of the Martyr is akin to that proverbially associated with the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, the Parisian “Theatre of Horror” (1897–1962). Crane’s play is written so near the inception of the Grand-Guignol that it is highly unlikely that it was a conscious allusion in his work. However, in the case of Conrad’s own short and violent play Laughing Anne the Grand-Guignol was expressly


at the heart of his intentions. Although there would not appear to be evidence that Conrad ever visited the Grand-Guignol in Paris, and given his dislike for frequenting the theatre, it seems unlikely that he would have seen the Grand-Guignol company on their first tour to London in 1908.10 However, we saw at the beginning of the chapter that Laughing Anne was written on “impulse” after Conrad attended the London Grand-Guignol in 1920. About six days before completing Laughing Anne, Conrad writes a letter to Jean-Aubry on 10 December 1920: I have . . . done a play for the Grand Guignol (English): 2 acts, 3 scenes. Acting time: 40 minutes. Subject: ‘Laughing Anne’ (‘Because of the Dollars’) . . . I am still astonished. (Najder, 1983, 457) The fact that the play is emphatically for the English Grand-Guignol requires some contextualisation. Three months before this letter, in September 1920, the English Grand-Guignol had opened at the Little Theatre in London under the management of Jose Levy with the assistance of a great English acting dynasty: Sybil Thorndike and her brother Russell Thorndike, and her husband Lewis Casson. When Conrad writes to Jean-Aubry, we are only five days away from the opening of the London Grand-Guignol’s second season. Levy established a Grand-Guignol theatre in the West End in an avowed attempt to emulate the success of the original Grand-Guignol in Paris. However, although the French Grand-Guignol was by this time in a “golden age” of celebrity and popularity, to produce the genre in London was something of an avant-garde experiment. The choice of venue was significant in this: the Little Theatre’s location in John Adam Street (a backstreet between the Strand and the Embankment) may have been an equivalent, albeit a far less sensational one, to the ominous setting of the Grand-Guignol in the backstreets of Pigalle, but this theatre had an important symbolic status. As Alison E. Wheatley explains, “The Little Theatre was established by feminist and suffragist Gertrude Kingston in 1910” (Wheatley, 2002, 73) and during the First World War had presented “repertory, experimental groups such as the Pioneer Players or the Abbey Theatre’s Irish Players” (Wheatley, 2002, 73). The venue had specialised in new plays but had often courted controversy with theatre critics, some of whom pronounced that the Little Theatre’s offerings were the “perfect reason to continue the official censorship of plays” (Wheatley, 2002, 73). In establishing an English Grand-Guignol at the Little Theatre, Levy was probably aware of the venue’s significance in recent experimental theatre. It is interesting to note that Conrad, in a letter to Thomas J. Wise


(1 November 1920), stresses that he is writing Laughing Anne “with a view to the Little Theatre” (Wheatley, 2002, 65). This is before he has been to the English Grand-Guignol: on 30 November 1920 Conrad himself proposed that he and Pinker visited the Little Theatre (CL7, 228) and he attended the matinee on Thursday 2 December 1920.11 His experience at the theatre obviously had an impact on him. Indeed, it is as if Conrad – a reluctant theatregoer – is not so much inspired as driven to write Laughing Anne, given the speed with which he writes it and its feverish and nightmarish quality. It is extraordinary that towards the end of his life Conrad is thinking explicitly of a genuine performance in an experimental and sometimes controversial theatre, and one very different from the mainstream Globe Theatre which had staged Victory the year before and the Ambassadors Theatre which will stage The Secret Agent two years later. In striving to recreate the same impulse and mood of the Paris Grand-Guignol, Levy used numerous translations of Grand-Guignol classics and also made a major contribution to a form much neglected in the English theatre of the time: the short play. A night at the Grand-Guignol would include on average from four to six plays. Conrad estimates that Laughing Anne will be forty minutes in one letter (Najder, 457) and “50 minutes” in another (CL7, 252). Somewhere between the two is the ideal length of a Grand-Guignol horror piece. The brevity of a Grand-Guignol horror play allows for a calculated effect of suspense and violence designed to manipulate and challenge its audience.12 As well as using translations of French plays, Levy gave new playwrights such as the twenty-three-year-old Noel Coward the opportunity to premiere short plays. Had he accepted Laughing Anne when it was offered to him, he would have secured a new playwright but old master, Joseph Conrad. We will devote more attention to the English Grand-Guignol in due course, but first it is necessary to look at the original Grand-Guignol in some detail as this not only provides the context for Levy’s efforts but also throws some interesting and surprising light on Conrad. The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol13 emerged out of the experiments in Naturalism on the French stage during the 1880s and 1890s, most famously the Théâtre Libre founded by André Antoine in 1887. One of Antoine’s associates, Oscar Méténier, was the erstwhile secretary to the Police Commissioner of Paris, who inaugurated the Grand-Guignol a few years after the Théâtre Libre closed due to bankruptcy in 1893. Méténier adhered closely to the Théâtre Libre model of comédies rosse (short dramatic pieces focusing on the lives and language of the Parisian underclass) and Naturalism. Méténier had used his real-life


experiences in the police force to imbue his plays with an air of authenticity and provocation for, as Hand and Wilson explain, “Méténier clearly established the Grand-Guignol as a theatre that challenged moral orthodoxy and would continue the succès de scandale of naturalism” (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 4). In the light of this, it is worth stressing that Méténier opened the Grand-Guignol as an avant-garde experiment supported by the radical artistic community. However, the success of the more salacious plays in the repertoire gradually led – especially under the leadership of Méténier’s successor Max Maurey (circa 1899) – to the development of the Grand-Guignol’s reputation as the “Theatre of Horror”. If theatrical Naturalism, to talk simplistically, was about the “slice of life”, the Grand-Guignol distinguished and, crucially, marketed itself as giving its audiences a “slice of death”. The theatre rapidly shifted away from its marginal avant-garde status and enjoyed increasing renown: the reputation of its acting, writing and special effects gave the theatre a legendary status (as evidenced by “Grand-Guignol” entering several languages as a term describing any heightened display of horror). Even though Méténier had intended the Grand-Guignol as a venue for avant-garde experimentation, it would seem that the venue consistently attracted a significant local clientele in the traditionally working-class district of Pigalle and, as Mel Gordon reveals, developed an international reputation, being graced by visiting minor European royalty (Gordon, 1997, 22, 26–7) and becoming one of “the best known tourist attractions in Paris by 1910” (Gordon, 1997, 23). According to Hand and Wilson, a key factor was that Max Maurey developed the Grand-Guignol as a popular theatre by consciously tipping “the balance from naturalism towards melodrama” (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 67). It is fair to say that the French Grand-Guignol specialised in the melodrama of thrills and suspense. However, although it became known as the “Theatre of Horror”, it never lost sight of its basis in Zola-inspired Naturalism: its horrors are never supernatural or Transylvanian, but are firmly rooted in the extremes of the human animal, la bête humaine. Its horrors are also rooted, for many of the playwrights who contributed to the repertoire, in experience: several Grand-Guignol playwrights were doctors or – as in the case of its most famous and prolific writer André de Lorde (known as “Le Prince de la Terreur”) – enthusiastic researchers, adapters or collaborators with people who had had relevant experience. In the light of this, Conrad is interesting in relation to the Grand-Guignol writers in that he is also perceived as making extensive use of his personal experiences and was a fastidious researcher: as Yves Hervouet explains, “Conrad’s immense reading of books . . . was intended to supply


him with fully authentic detail” that would “have been able to show that he had ‘invented’ nothing” (Hervouet, 1990, 227). But despite basis in “real” events and experience, the plays of the Grand-Guignol hybridise traditions of Naturalism and melodrama in the creation of its often nightmarish visions. By the same token, the Grand-Guignol also owes a lesser but nonetheless significant debt to Symbolist drama, especially Maeterlinck’s plays such as those mentioned in an earlier chapter. The Grand-Guignol – ever the assimilating theatre – would also come to reflect the influence of German Expressionism: in 1925, for example, the Grand-Guignol presented André de Lorde and Henri Bauche’s Le Cabinet du Dr Caligari, a stage adaptation of Robert Wiene’s 1919 milestone of Expressionist cinema. The Grand-Guignol set its plays in a variety of claustrophobic locations such as cells in prisons and asylums, lighthouses, boats, opium dens, operating theatres, bedrooms in brothels and so on. Conrad’s choice of the hotel veranda, the interior of Bamtz’s squalid hut, the stern of Davidson’s boat beside the eerily rustling bushes on the riverbank would all have been perfectly feasible and sufficiently atmospheric for the Grand-Guignol. Neither would the geographical setting of Laughing Anne have posed a problem: in addition to setting many of its plays in contemporary France, one important strand in the Grand-Guignol repertoire are plays with an Orientalist aspect. Crane’s The Blood of the Martyr has an oriental colonial setting just as Laughing Anne is set in Macao (3), more specific than the “great Eastern port” (169) in “Because of the Dollars”. Some of the Grand-Guignol’s most successful and infamous plays take place in a colonial setting. As Hand and Wilson state in relation to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism: Above all in French and English culture, Said identifies a tendency to see the Orient as the ultimate “Other” standing in stark contrast to their own cultures and ideologies. Said explains that this view is predominantly racist, ethnocentric and imperialistic. In this view, the Orient is perceived as being characterised by “its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness” (Said, 1979, 205). Said’s assertion is easily applied to the Grand-Guignol’s construction of the Orient: whether seen or unseen, Grand-Guignol’s China is a forum for barbarism and excess. (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 199) In particular, we might consider two plays: André de Lorde and Eugène Morel’s La Dernière Torture (1904) and Pierre Chaine and André de Lorde’s


Le Jardin des supplices (1922).14 Both of these plays present European imperialists in China, and take delight in describing and enacting Chinese tortures on Europeans. Although both plays – true to Grand-Guignol form – are unabashedly exploitative and sensationalistic, neither can entirely resist an interpretation that emphasises political message and irony. La Dernière Torture (1904) is a dramatic reconstruction of the “Boxer Rebellion” of 1900 when the nationalistic “Fists of Righteous Harmony”, a secret society which practised martial arts (hence the nickname “Boxers”), rose in arms against western foreigners and missionaries eventually besieging the European and American legations in Beijing. De Lorde and Morel’s play is set in the French consulate on the final night of the siege. The play presents the physical and psychological decline of the desperate French as they gradually lose all hope of liberation and dread the barbaric demise they will meet at the hands of the “uncivilized” and “inhumane” Chinese. The central figure is the stalwart consul D’Hémelin, trying to maintain discipline and order. At the end of the play, as the unseen Boxers are heard launching their final onslaught, D’Hémelin executes his daughter rather than let her fall into their hands. In a grotesque irony, however, the cacophonous offensive proves to be the International Relief Force arriving to liberate the besieged Europeans and the play ends with D’Hémelin laughing maniacally as he descends into insanity. As Hand and Wilson write in the preface to their translation of the play: Although the Eurocentrism and racism of the play is predominant, there is an argument in seeing the play’s irony as subversive. A contemporaneous work of fiction such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) could be seen as a more sustained critique of European Imperialism: set in the Belgian Congo, the novel is arguably a devastating exposé of the unacceptable face of colonial expansion. The climax of the novel is the lunatic Kurtz’s epiphany of “The horror! The horror!” This is more than an expression of the guilty white man’s burden, it is a moment of nihilism revealing the irredeemably “dark heart” of European oppression. The Ultimate Torture in its way is similarly ironic as it also presents the disintegration of a stalwart “hero of the Empire”. The meaning and impact of both works hinges on the insanity and horror of Kurtz and D’Hémelin. Moreover, both works reflect the zeitgeist of their context: early modernism where nineteenth-century certainties are replaced by a profoundly twentieth-century doubt. (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 96)


Although such a summation is (hopefully) convincing, both Conrad and the Grand-Guignol walk a fine line between sensationalist populism and subversion. After all, although the above assertion that Heart of Darkness is a subversive critique of imperialism would be accepted by many critics, some would reject the claim or at least qualify it – most famously Chinua Achebe in “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1977) – by arguing that although Conrad may have “condemned the evil of imperial exploitation” he was “strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth” (Achebe, 1998, 122). Cedric Watts stresses that Heart of Darkness takes “the ingredients of popular romantic fiction (and even boys’ adventure tales) and submits them to unconventionally realistic, reflective and ironic treatment” (Watts, 1989, 83), a comment that reveals that the novella is essentially a popular and romantic adventure the “treatment” of which is interpretable as realistic, reflective and ironic. Similarly, La Dernière Torture may exploit the audience’s Orientalist fears through its sensationalist and titillating melodrama it still presents them with a consistently ironic treatment and unconventional Realism: the cowardice, infighting and mental instability of the French portrayed in La Dernière Torture combined with the gruesomely authentic – and particularly notorious – stage effects deployed in the productions of the play were far from the glamorised and palatable depiction of the brave heroes of the empire expected in belle époque melodrama. For Hand and Wilson, the ruthless satire, philosophical and political provocation of later works such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (1944) or Luis Buñuel’s film El Angel Exterminador (1962) are unthinkable without the surprising and ambiguous achievement of La Dernière Torture (see Hand and Wilson, 2002, 97) just as Heart of Darkness continues to cast a long shadow of influence and controversy. Le Jardin des supplices is a very different work but no less interesting in relation to Conrad. Chaine and de Lorde’s play is an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices (1899), a novella contemporaneous with Heart of Darkness. Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) was renowned as a radical journalist and decadent novelist and came to enjoy immense success as a playwright with a small number of plays in the first years of the twentieth century. Despite the exhaustive efforts of Yves Hervouet (1990) and other Francophile critics, Mirbeau, like the Grand-Guignol, has been neglected in Conrad studies although there are parallels to be drawn. One of Mirbeau’s most (in)famous works, Le Jardin des supplices is a complex and explicit work, even being denounced as “the most sickening work of art in the nineteenth century” (Mirbeau, 1989, 7).


The novella has long been regarded as a landmark in the history of erotic fiction and is an ambiguous and unsettling work – a kind of sexualised Heart of Darkness – depicting the decadent excesses of Westerners in China as they realise, without restraint, their every whim and fantasy of sadomasochistic and even cannibalistic pleasure. Like the narrator on the Nellie in Heart of Darkness, the narrator of Le Jardin des supplices is anonymous and Mirbeau’s novella charts his gradual and yet inexorable journey into decadent excess. On board a ship travelling in the Far East, the narrator meets a young Englishwoman called Miss Clara who shows the narrator, merely for her own amusement and titillation, the hideous spectacle of disease and deprivation amongst the dispossessed indigenous peoples of Asia while leading him into a taboo world of sexual horrors and horrific sex. She wallows in a mire of sadistic, exploitative and voyeuristic excesses in a decadent quest for self-fulfilment. This reaches its ultimate heart of darkness in the obscene Chinese torture garden of the title where prisoners are tortured to death in hideously inventive methods. As well as the decadent eroticism of the novella, Mirbeau, the lifelong anarchist writer, manages to use the novella as a sustained exposé of the politics and ideology of colonialism. One of the few Chinese characters given a voice in the novella is a Chinese executioner who bewails the attrition of the ancient Chinese art of torture and execution: Art does not consist in killing multitudes .. .in slaughtering, massacring, and exterminating men in hordes. Really, it’s too easy. Art, milady, consists in knowing how to kill . . . That is to say, how to work the human body like a sculptor works his clay or piece of ivory . . . There! Science is required, variety, taste, imagination . . . genius, after all. But today, everything is disappearing. The Occidental snobbery which is invading us, the gunboats, rapid-fire guns, long-range rifles, explosives . . . what else? Everything which makes death collective, administrative and bureaucratic – all the filth of your progress, in fact – is destroying, little by little, our beautiful traditions of the past. (Mirbeau, 1989, 83) It is a passage of sustained irony in that Mirbeau uses a figure of fundamental inhumanity as a conduit to condemn the pitiless and self-serving excesses of colonialist and bourgeois mentality and the “filth of progress” that is causing the destruction of China. The horrors the narrator witnesses at one point drives him to declare in despair: “There is nothing real, then, except evil!” (Mirbeau, 1989, 47). Such sequences and narrative


strategies make Le Jardin des supplices as haunting and morally ambiguous as Heart of Darkness. Mirbeau’s novella ends with no end in sight to the cycle of exploitation. In contrast, the Grand-Guignol adaptation of Le Jardin des supplices has a more conventional dramatic structure. The narrator figure is reworked as the focal character of Marchal whose involvement with Clara, as in the original, leads him down the path to sadomasochism and dissolution. In stark contrast, however, the play is something of a political suspense thriller not entirely dissimilar to The Secret Agent. Despite recreating the eroticism and violence of the novella, the play adds a mood of conspiracy and terrorism with rumours circulating about the underground revolutionaries of the “Scarlet Dragon” faction. As for the European characters, Marchal is transformed into a French secret service agent who is supposed to be actively involved in undermining subversive activity in China (but is about as competent as Adolf Verloc), and Clara is a half-hearted Mata Hari involved in espionage. At the end of the play, Clara is captured by the Scarlet Dragon revolutionaries who subject her to a horrific, onstage mutilation: “First of all, the eyes . . . let us begin with the eyes . . . those eyes which loved to feast on suffering and death” (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 230). Like so much of the violence in Le Jardin des supplices and the repertoire as a whole, even this gruesome finale has a certain erotic connotation. The penetration of flesh – the gouging of eyes, with all its ramifications of the castration complex (see Freud, 1985, 352), was a particular favourite – had an integral place in the Grand-Guignol and was heavily eroticised directly through sadomasochistic imagery or indirectly through Symbolism. The English Grand-Guignol could not have been as brazen as its progenitor any more than Conrad could have permitted himself to have depicted such explicit scenes. However, although L’Horrible Expérience/The Hand of Death – which included Conrad in its audience – may not have been as blatant and torrid as Le Jardin des supplices, it remains an uncomfortable but unmistakably erotic work. As for Laughing Anne, it is a Grand-Guignol play with its own moments of disconcerting eroticism: In a disturbing (and nightmarishly Freudian) scene in the story and play, the Man Without Hands gets Anne to attach a large iron weight to his right stump. (Hand, 2001a, 111–12) Just as intriguing and disconcerting is Conrad’s relationship with his heroine (not that this is an isolated case), a noble woman and object of desire who is brutally annihilated. To a correspondent who praised


“Because of the Dollars”, Conrad replies – specifically describing it, tellingly, as “the story about Anne” (CL6, 162) – with the remark that he has been “much abused for it – privately and publicly” but admits that he has “a weakness for that story”. There is a disturbing eroticism when Anne is forced to strap the heavy weight to the Man Without Hands’ maimed stump: this becomes a truly horrific irony when, in an act of appalling violence, the same weight is used to crush Anne’s skull to a pulp. The issue of appalling violence is in itself an interesting one. Violence and moments of horror have a defining place in the Grand-Guignol but they are also extremely important in Conrad. Whether it is the human heads on poles in Heart of Darkness or Nikita systematically bursting Razumov’s eardrums in Under Western Eyes, Conrad’s use of violence has a calculated and emblematic effect. “The Inn of the Two Witches: A Find” is a useful example of Conrad’s violence and terror. The short story accompanies “Because of the Dollars” in Within the Tides and was written during a break from writing Victory. Persuasively, Knowles and Moore draw attention to the story’s presentation of an “isolated individual confronted by a triad of evil figures” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 199), a pattern repeated in Victory and, we can add, in “Because of the Dollars”/Laughing Anne. However, for Knowles and Moore aspects of “The Inn of the Two Witches” – especially the triad of the eponymous abject women and their younger Satanic companion – belong to “a conventional chamber of horrors” (199). Like “The Brute”, this later short story is an example of Conrad exploring the conventions of popular horror fiction. However, there is another type of popular horror in the short story, a section with a conspicuously Grand-Guignol quality. Interestingly, it is the same section that Knowles and Moore identify as the distinctive and redeeming aspect of the tale: By contrast, the later treatment of a young man’s initiation into the unknown, his isolated test, and threatened breakdown under stress is altogether more gripping. (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 199) There are some curious points of parallel between “The Inn of the Two Witches” and the Grand-Guignol repertoire. For instance, one of Byrne’s acquaintances describes the gallows as “the widow with the wooden legs” (140) which is reminiscent of the French slang for the guillotine: “la veuve” (“the widow”): La Veuve (1906) is itself the title of a French Grand-Guignol guillotine play (see Hand and Wilson, 2002, 121–38). Similarly, when Byrne – locked into the bedroom – opens the wardrobe and the corpse of Tom Corbin falls out we are reminded of E. Crawshay-Williams’s


E. & O. E. (first performed at the English Grand-Guignol in 1921) in which the stage directions inform us that: There is a rumbling from the cupboard, the doors burst open, and the corpse of JAMES SMITH rolls down the foot of the bed. (CrawshayWilliams, 1924, 34) Such parallels probably seem inconsequential, but a more impressive correlation is to be found in Conrad’s description of Byrne after the discovery of the corpse. Conrad’s account of Byrne’s inner feelings – his suicidal thoughts and homicidal threats – also include a sustained and meticulous description of the protagonist’s physical actions in this claustrophobic space: how Byrne falls to his knees, moves around the room, falls into a chair, his posture when sitting down, his perspiration, how his eyes look around the room in agitation and terror, how his mouth falls agape, how he gasps for breath, how he whispers to himself, how he attempts to shout but merely emits a moan, the “cry of rage and dismay” that he manages to muster and his eventual unconsciousness (213–16). It is a remarkable and visceral description: it reads like the meticulous transcription of an actor’s performance and could easily be used as a stage direction (it is almost choreographical). As a detailed account of a man’s physical and psychological journey into ultimate terror it is the prose equivalent to a Grand-Guignol performance. 15 Violence is particularly significant in all the fiction that Conrad chooses – or assists in – adapting to the stage. Hagberd’s abuse of his son and Harry’s mock-romantic violation of Bessie are critical and emblematic turning points in “To-morrow” and One Day More, but they are mild when compared to the mortal violence in the other works. The Victory adaptation may tone down the wholesale obliteration at the end of the novel but still retains, in rapid succession, three out of the five original deaths. Hence, as we saw earlier, for at least one reviewer Victory was a Grand-Guignol horror play needlessly spun out into a three-act drama. Given the thrills and violence in Victory it comes as no surprise that the first film adaptation of Conrad – the film version of Victory (1919) starring Lon Chaney – was directed by Maurice Tourneur, a former assistant to André Antoine and theatre director with the Grand-Guignol, who had made a spectacular move to Hollywood not least on the strength of his French screen adaptation of André de Lorde’s classic Grand-Guignol play Le Système du Docteur Goudron et du Professeur Plume in 1912, often cited as a landmark in the history of horror film (see Gifford, 1973, 30).16 In The Secret Agent the rapid


annihilation of the Verloc family unit through grotesquely diverse and inventive causes – an inadvertent fratricidal explosion, a deliberate murder of a spouse by stabbing, and suicide by drowning – would have delighted a Grand-Guignol audience as much as it would have impressed the theatre’s playwrights. In replacing Winnie’s suicide with an onstage deterioration into insanity at the end of his dramatisation, Conrad would, in the eyes of the Grand-Guignol, merely be fulfilling the need for one of the form’s greatest archetypes: the stage lunatic. As such, there is a parallel to be drawn between the structural use of D’Hémelin’s lunacy as the closure of La Dernière Torture and Winnie’s madness as the closure of The Secret Agent stage play. Laughing Anne is Conrad’s Grand-Guignol play and is the most comprehensive implementation of the Grand-Guignol form in his oeuvre. The horrifying maiming of the politically and sexually corrupt Clara in Le Jardin des supplices transforms her from an image of beauty into the literally monstrous which, in the ethics of the Grand-Guignol, befits her sadistic nature. She is mutated into a figure as hideous as the Man Without Hands: doubtlessly John Galsworthy would have found her fate to be an even more “unbearable spectacle”. Conrad’s Man Without Hands is not just a physical monstrosity but, like Clara, has become deformed in a way that reflects his essential evil. This use of malformation and true character on stage – most famously in Shakespeare’s Richard III – is a classic motif in drama, but it is an idea that receives ironic and more progressive treatment in the tragedy of the disfigured Henry Johnson in Stephen Crane’s “The Monster” (1899). Interestingly, Conrad’s Man Without Hands is not without precedent in the Grand-Guignol: in La Dernière Torture we are presented with Bornin, a Frenchman without hands. The difference is that in Conrad, the incident in which the Frenchman lost his hands is in the pre-story while in the explicit horror of the Parisian Grand-Guignol, Bornin’s hands have been freshly cleaved off and his stumps drip blood on stage. The contrast between “Because of the Dollars” and Laughing Anne is interesting to consider: in the short story we know that the Man Without Hands blew off his hands in some misadventure with dynamite. In the play we receive no such information. This is partly for economy of exposition (a lesson which Conrad, at least on this occasion, may have learnt from Shaw’s editorial assistance on One Day More) and is also a shrewd exploitation of the spectator’s imagination: the audience is obliged to speculate how this diabolical figure met his “misfortune”, whether through accident, Orientalist atrocity as in La Dernière Torture, or some ghastly design of an equally malevolent figure exacting some punishment.


A key difference between French and British Grand-Guignol is that British stage censorship at the time of Conrad’s writing would not have permitted bleeding stumps on stage. The Lord Chamberlain’s problem with stage blood also determines Conrad’s act of self-censorship in the final scene of his adaptation. When Laughing Anne has her skull smashed in, the stage directions describe the actions of the Man Without Hands thus: Stoops, feels over the ground for Anne’s body, squats over it, lifting the stump with the weight. The dim square of light in hut vanishes and directly afterwards the faint voice of child is heard calling: Mama, Mama! (28) The obscuring by darkness of an act of extreme and mortal violence against a woman is in a stark contrast to the final moments of, for example, Le Jardin des supplices where the sensibilities of the audience are not protected by a technically facilitated ellipsis: the stage directions inform us that we see a “red-hot needle” being pushed into “Clara’s eye” (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 230). Certainly, in Laughing Anne Conrad not only employs the theatrical use of a blackout to achieve a heightened, dramatic effect but also reflects a concern for the sensitivity of the audience that also ensures that a performance on the British stage is a possibility. To interrogate this detail of the adaptation further, let us consider Anne’s death in “Because of the Dollars”: She was lying on her face, her long hair scattered on the ground. Some of it was wet. Davidson, feeling about her head, came to a place where the crushed bone gave way under his fingers. But even before that discovery he knew that she was dead. The pursuing Frenchman had flung her down with a kick from behind, and, squatting on her back, was battering in her skull with the weight she herself had fastened to his stump . . . (205) The description of Anne’s skull being battered in and the resulting detail of crushed bone and bloodied hair might seem only realisable in a cinematic context and yet the Grand-Guignol succeeded in the convincing display of human heads being trepanned in plays such as in Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson’s Le Baiser de sang (1929)17 while in André de Lorde’s Le Laboratoire des hallucinations (1916)18 we find a sequence equivalent to the Man Without Hands’ ferocious assault: (De Mora) takes the scissors and the hammer which are on the small shelf above the operating table, while the Doctor struggles, tied to the table.


Taken by a furious fit of madness, De Mora begins to crack open the Doctor’s skull with the scissors, while screaming . . . (Gordon, 1988, 188) The brutal kick, the skull-battering and the gruesome aftermath that Conrad describes would have been all in a day’s work on the stage of the Grand-Guignol of Paris. But for the Grand-Guignol of London, it would have been unthinkable. In fact, the one occasion that the Little Theatre dared to venture into French-style explicitness signalled the theatre’s death knell. As Hand and Wilson explain: London’s Grand-Guignol . . . had a precarious relationship with the Lord Chamberlain, the official censor, which finally came unstuck after a production of The Old Women by André de Lorde (. . .). Up until that point the on-stage horrors had been restricted to poisonings, strangulations and the like and, realising that no licence would be granted to the Little Theatre for a play which contained an eye-gouging, Casson persuaded a friend of his, a rural vicar, to apply for the licence in the name of an amateur drama group. As a result the play was not scrutinised and the licence was granted. By the time the Lord Chamberlain realised that he had been tricked, it was too late and the play was staged at the Little Theatre. Victory was hollow, however, and the censor applied intolerable pressure on Levy from that point on. Within a year this popular and successful enterprise had been abandoned and, although numerous attempts at a revival were made, all were short-lived. (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 20–21n) The Old Women marked the beginning of the end for the British Grand-Guignol. In all, the British Grand-Guignol only ran for eight seasons over two years, but in that time produced over forty short plays. Contrary to almost all written accounts of it in British theatre history, it is clear that Levy’s Grand-Guignol experiment was an enterprise of great aesthetic significance which enjoyed considerable popular and critical success. The reason it closed in 1922 was largely because of censorship as the Lord Chamberlain’s Office – infuriated by The Old Women hoodwinking – increasingly deemed its brutality inappropriate for the sensitive British theatregoer. In addition, however, its own popularity was partially to blame for its demise: the leading lady Sybil Thorndike displayed such versatility and energy in the demanding and heightened plays of the repertoire that she soon found herself much in demand, not least by George Bernard Shaw who gave her the chance to play her most legendary role, St Joan (1924). Sybil Thorndike’s brother


and husband moved on too: in November 1922 Russell Thorndike played Ossipon in Conrad’s The Secret Agent adaptation at the Ambassadors where some reviewers praised him for his Grand-Guignol performance style. This evidently exasperated Conrad who may have been creatively sparked by the Grand-Guignol at the Little Theatre but it was not what he wanted to see when his theatrical magnum opus (a script he had written before the inception of Levy’s experiment) went into production. The examples of the critical reception of Victory and The Secret Agent where Grand-Guignol is mentioned would seem to demonstrate that, probably to the author’s horror, adaptations of Conrad were becoming regarded by some as works of Grand-Guignol. This is compounded by Vio Allen’s memoir in which she states that Conrad “had written a play for the Grand Guignol, an incident in The Secret Agent, but he hated the Grand Guignol and the theatre in general. He says it destroyed the imagination” (Allen, 1967, 86). It is ironic that Allen misremembers that Conrad’s effort for the Grand-Guignol was Laughing Anne rather than a dramatised incident from The Secret Agent. Nonetheless, there is a lot of truth in her inadvertent error: not only did the critics perceive the Grand-Guignol in The Secret Agent, with some straightforward editing a paradigmatic one-act Grand-Guignol play lies buried in the four acts of The Secret Agent, as Conrad himself acknowledges in a 1921 letter to Galsworthy: Indeed I was tempted, or I might have been tempted, to begin the play with the three delightful anarchists sitting in the parlour round the fire and Mr. Verloc explaining to them the circumstances which force him to throw a bomb at some building or other, discussing ways and means, and ending the effective scene by taking Stevie by the scruff of the neck, “Come along, youngster, you carry the bomb,” and Comrade Ossipon blowing a kiss as they all go out at the door to Mrs. Verloc, who stands horrorstruck in the middle of the stage. Curtain. From there one could go, direct, without changing a word, to the Third Scene of the Fourth Act and on to the end, contriving a rather pretty Guignol play, with no particular trouble. (Jean-Aubry, Vol. 2, 258) However, Laughing Anne remains Conrad’s sole deliberate experiment in Grand-Guignol and as an exploration of a specific genre of drama it is an extremely effective and competent example. For example, the pace and structure of the play: a slow exposition that accelerates to an extremely rapid, unnerving, violent denouement may seem structurally


flawed, but in the context of Grand-Guignol it reflects a masterful comprehension of genre. It is also a savage play, as only a Grand-Guignol play can be. Galsworthy may have paled at the prospect of a “man without hands” and “shudderings” in dim light, but Conrad realised only too well that such images and techniques are the stock-in-trade of the Grand-Guignol, which is full of mutilated, vengeful victims and sequences of heightened, atmospheric terror. Galsworthy’s claim “that what you can write about freely cannot always be endured by the living eye” far from being reflective of the naiveté of a novelist-turned-dramatist touches the heart of the ethos and dynamics of Grand-Guignol, a form which is always trying to push the endurance and well-being of its spectators. Grand-Guignol is distinctly an evolution of melodrama, but it is melodrama in a post-Nietzschean world. Gone are the comforts of a black-and-white moral universe. In Grand-Guignol there is no justice but frequent retribution albeit far from the divine. The Grand-Guignol parades horrors in an erratic, unstable universe resulting in a terrifying nihilism. It is therefore little wonder that Conrad shares an affinity with it. The “morbidness” and the lack of a facile happy ending that Max Beerbohm saw as an obstacle in the critical reception of One Day More is a vital ingredient in Laughing Anne’s chosen genre. Unlike their antecedents in fiction, the eponymous heroine of Henry James’s stage Daisy Miller (1882) recovers from malaria just as Lena lives happily ever after with Heyst at the end of Victory: these works are melodramatisations whereas Conrad is justified in retaining the actual horror of “Because of the Dollars” in adapting it into the quasi-melodrama of Grand-Guignol even if Laughing Anne ends without the spiritual tragedy of Davidson’s isolation. At the curtain, Davidson is not the lonely figure going “downhill” and neither is he a D’Hémelin-like figure: he has failed to save Anne just as D’Hémelin fails to save his daughter, but he is nonetheless a potent emblem of imperial masculinity. The audience at the French Grand-Guignol would have preferred a finale of unmitigated horror – Davidson slipping into insanity or turning the gun on himself – but Conrad’s ending is more in keeping with the comparatively sanitised British Grand-Guignol and would not have troubled the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Unfortunately, Laughing Anne did not get as far as being sent to the censors. Wilfred G. Partington’s “Joseph Conrad Behind the Scenes” is an account of how Partington, the editor of The Bookman’s Journal and Print Collector, sent Conrad the galley proofs of Thomas Moult’s “Joseph Conrad as Playwright” for comment and received substantial clarifications from


Conrad. In one example of marginalia, Conrad explains the fate of Laughing Anne: But Mr Levy did not see his way to produce it – at which I was not surprised – the second Act being very difficult to stage with convincing effect. Too much darkness; too much shooting. (Partington, 2000, 179–80) From this it would seem that Levy rejected the play on the grounds of its technical demands and not because of what Galsworthy called the “unbearable spectacle”. The abstract quality of the final scene – the “shudderings grounded in dim light” – may have made the play difficult to perform on the London stage in the early 1920s, but would not have troubled the German Expressionists and would soon become less problematic, even in the English and the American theatres. It is to be to our ever-lasting regret that Levy did not accept Laughing Anne into the Grand-Guignol repertoire, and it is fair to say that the status of the play, and quite possibly its dramatist, would have been very different in twentieth-century English theatre history if the play had been produced at the avant-garde Little Theatre with Sybil Thorndike in the role of Laughing Anne. Rather than Galsworthy’s rather patronising dismissal of Laughing Anne as being naïve, we should see the play as an exploration of a quintessentially French genre of theatre, a dramatic form which is avant-garde and distinctly experimental in the context of 1920s London. After all, although Grand-Guignol reflects an interplay and hybrid of melodrama and Naturalism in its excessive horrors, it was sometimes excessive to the point of becoming unreal and even absurd. We must not try and interpret Laughing Anne in the frame of Realism and neither must we, by the same token, let the fog of cultural history make us regard the play as a bland and facile melodrama. To conclude, let us return to Conrad and Crane. Although Crane’s The Blood of the Martyr and Conrad’s Laughing Anne are very different in style, both are broadly Grand-Guignol in their bold use of violence and are engaging examples of abstraction during periods when Englishlanguage theatre was dominated by Realism. It is fascinating that although the prospect of a dramatic collaboration never materialised, both men in their small body of scripts should produce works of Grand-Guignolian violence. We might like to speculate that Crane’s eagerness to collaborate with Conrad on a drama reflected that he saw a potential parity of style and method in playwriting. Certainly, Laughing Anne is as violent as The Blood of the Martyr, and as much as


Conrad describes the furious pony ride as “a truly Crane touch” it is probably no less hectic than the highly condensed night of violence that tests Davidson. Similarly, Crane’s stuffed horses may seem as flawed as Conrad’s technical and character demands, but it is perhaps more fruitful to think of their ideas for the theatre as challenging, adventurous and disturbing at times when such initiative was rare in the Englishlanguage theatre. Conrad acknowledges his own “faculty of dreaming”, but perhaps that combined with Crane’s “terseness” and “clear eye” would have produced a script of interest. It is grotesquely ironic that Crane’s tragically early death meant that The Ghost at Brede was the nearest the writers ever came to dramatic partnership. The longer life of Conrad meant that he, at least, had a greater opportunity to realise his dramatic aspirations. In 1922, less than two years before Conrad’s death, the West End stage would present the playwright’s magnum opus – The Secret Agent: A Drama.

5 A Most Disturbing Play: The Secret Agent

The success of Basil Macdonald Hastings’s Victory evidently inspired Conrad for later in 1919 he started to work on an adaptation of The Secret Agent. The play was finally performed in November 1922, when it enjoyed a high-profile West End production at the Ambassadors Theatre directed by the American producer-actor-writer J. Harry Benrimo (co-author of the phenomenally popular play The Yellow Jacket in 1912) and featuring a number of major stage actors. The scale of the production and the fame of its playwright meant that the play received a substantial amount of coverage in the newspapers of the time.1 As Knowles and Moore reveal, “Conrad was actively involved in the production, and made pen-and-ink sketches of the five sets” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 373).2 Although the play was not successful (but neither was it an unmitigated disaster), Conrad’s experience remains a fascinating part of his biography above all in what it reveals about his process of writing and his relationship with his own work. During the early stages of writing the play Conrad seems enthused and passionate – writing to Sidney Colvin in October 1919 “Have begun a play!!! 1st Act nearly finished!!!!!!” (CL6, 505) – but as the process of adaptation continues his mood changes. Looming over this period in his creative life is the letter of November 1919 in which he describes the process of adaptation: As I go on in my adaptation, stripping off the garment of artistic expression and consistent irony which clothes the story in the book, I perceive more clearly how it is bound to appear to the collected mind of the audience a merely horrible and sordid tale, giving a most unfavourable impression of both the writer himself and his attitude to the moral aspect of the subject. In the book the tale, whatever its 126

A Most Disturbing Play: The Secret Agent 127

character, was at any rate not treated sordidly; neither in tone, nor in diction, nor yet in the suggested images. The peculiar light of my mental insight and of my humane feeling (for I have that too) gave to the narrative a sort of grim dignity. But on the stage all this falls off. Every rag of drapery drops to the ground. It is a terribly searching thing – I mean the stage. I will confess that I myself had no idea what the story under the writing was till I came to grips with it in this process of dramatisation. (CL6, 520, emphasis added) It is a remarkable situation when a writer of such control and calculated effect as Conrad has no idea what his own story is. It takes the process of generic transformation from fictional prose into stage drama to make this startling revelation apparent. In this chapter, close attention will be devoted to Conrad’s process of adaptation in what was his most ambitious dramatic work. First of all, however, we shall look at the original novel. Although its initial reception was mixed, Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale has come to be regarded as a pivotal work in the Conrad oeuvre and in modern fiction as a whole. In some ways this has developed with the benefit of hindsight. Although the novel is set in a nineteenth-century past, as Knowles and Moore observe, the novel not only reflects the social preoccupations of its Edwardian context with intensity but is also “the best example in all of Conrad’s works of a novel that was ahead of its time” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 371). For Ted Billy it is “a stark, prophetic glimpse into an absurd world of accelerating depersonalization” (Billy, 1997, 203). Some critics (including Martin Seymour-Smith) have seen the Professor’s “belief” in genocide as proto-Nazism (see Conrad, 1984, 22) while the Professor’s dreams of creating weapons of mass destruction seem to anticipate the impetus behind the advancement of military technology from the First World War, nuclear proliferation in the later twentieth century, to the divisive obsessions at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Indeed, Peter Lancelot Mallios reveals that after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 numerous journalists drew parallels with The Secret Agent (see Mallios, 2003, 145). Despite the “prophetic” nature of the novel, we might like to consider the use of technology for violent ends in relation to Robert Penn Warren’s notion that Conrad suffered a “trauma inflicted by nineteenth-century science, a ‘mystic wound’ ” (Warren, 1989, 147). The Secret Agent is a “simple tale of the XIX century” (2) and can be viewed as a response to the abstract wounds of the recently ended century.3 By implication, the novel is as mystical


and abstract as Stevie’s “mad art attempting the inconceivable” (40) and we should be very wary of regarding the novel as a political study: Conrad himself stressed that the anarchists in the novel “are not revolutionaries – they are shams” (CL3, 491) and some years before he expressed that although “political crime” repulsed him, not every revolutionary is “a scoundrel” (CL1, 401). As Jacques Berthoud stresses when he writes about The Secret Agent: As long as we assume that its main concern is the exposure of anarchism, we shall continue to regard it as a work in which execution completely outstrips content . . . (Berthoud, 1978, 132) It is therefore in terms of execution that the novel is successful and ahead of its time. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, locating the ramifications of artistic failure in Conrad, finds little to say about The Secret Agent as it is “technically flawless” (Erdinast-Vulcan, 1991, 5n). For Harkness and Reid: In its irony and symbolism, its realism, its conjunction of the mainstream novel and the detective story, The Secret Agent may well be the modern novel. (1990, xxiii) This statement reveals the technical range of the novel, but it may even underplay matters: as well as detective fiction, the novel incorporates the imitation, pastiche and assimilation of several other genres. Ellen Burton Harrington locates the presence of “the Victorian sensation novel” as not merely an allusion but a frame of reference (see Burton Harrington, 2004). The novel also employs and satirises the prefabricated phrases and appositional language of newspaper journalism. The novel is, in addition, a kind of horror story. Foggy Victorian London is perfect setting for a tale of terror,4 and words such as “ghost” and “devil” are recurrent. Incidents such as the “Cab of Death” (131) or Winnie’s vision of “the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone” (196) are heightened moments of the uncanny. Similarly, the skeletal Karl Yundt is a macabre figure while, at the end of Chapter XII, Ossipon (ossis is Latin for bone) has become a kind of vampire, roaming the streets all night, asleep all day. Looked at in these terms, The Secret Agent can be seen as a work of virtuosic eclecticism that utilises the styles of a diverse range of popular and populist text without losing sight of the story at its heart.5 As well as the sustained use of narrative and journalistic prose, The Secret Agent is a consciously dramatic and theatrical novel.


In November 1906 – over a year after One Day More – Conrad wrote to Sidney Colvin: I haven’t been thinking of writing a play tho’ Barker has very kindly been encouraging me by promises of performance. As to novels I have written something which certainly is a fiction of a sort but whether it’s a novel or not I’ll leave to the critics to say. (CL3, 381) The “fiction of a sort” Conrad refers to is The Secret Agent. It is remarkable that Conrad – although exercising his peculiar brand of wry wit – should blur the definition of his novel, especially considering that some 13 years later he would write another play: nothing less than a stage adaptation of The Secret Agent. Furthermore, in April 1906, when The Secret Agent was still in embryo form – the short story “Verloc” – Conrad emphasises the importance of the “dramatic” at the heart of this work. He writes to Pinker in the early stages of writing that “the thing has got to be kept up as a story with an ironic intention but a dramatic development” (CL3, 326). This “intention” clearly did not alter drastically during the transition from prototype tale to published novel, as the dedication Conrad inscribes in Richard Curle’s copy of The Secret Agent makes clear: as “a literary aim the book is an attempt to treat consistently a melodramatic subject ironically” (Curle, 100).6 The concept of melodrama remains obvious to readers of The Secret Agent, and critics such as Jeremy Hawthorn (1990) have seen the novel as containing the most successful allusions to melodrama in Conrad’s fiction. But Conrad does not merely allude to melodrama, he utilises it. He uses the melodramatic strategies of heavy dramatic irony and coincidence. Conrad also mimics a certain style of philanthropic concern to be found in social issue melodrama: Stevie’s simplistic “Bad world for poor people” (132) is reminiscent of the liberal social consciousness in Charles Reade’s novel It’s Never Too Late to Mend (1856) which enjoyed a hugely successful and influential melodramatic adaptation in 1864. The most consistent use of melodrama is in the presentation of the betrayal, revenge and tragic demise of Winnie Verloc. This reaches a dramatic climax in Chapter XI when she confronts Adolf Verloc and he meets his death at her hands. In contrast to nineteenth-century convention, however, The Secret Agent does not present us with the “corrective dream world” (Ilsemann, 1996, 202) that so much melodrama aspired to. There is no happy ending, no tangible improvement of social ills and no re-establishment of moral equilibrium. The world of The Secret


Agent is far greyer than the black-and-white melodramatic universe we can detect in Victory. The virtuousness of Winnie’s selfless mother and the empathetic Stevie are not rewarded with any kind of triumph but are smothered away out of the story or literally obliterated. If we are looking for a “moral” opposition to counter the array of flawed and ghastly characters in the novel, we need to turn to the narrator. Daniel Schwarz argues that the narrator is the central character of The Secret Agent who is engaged in an active assault on a despised world (see Schwarz, 1980, 157). The melodramatic morality of the novel, therefore, lies in the ironic distance between the maelstrom of the cruel, the violent and the irrational and the narrator’s civilised voice supposedly signifying sanity, morality and reason. The drama of The Secret Agent is not simply melodramatic. In Conrad’s Narrative Technique, Jakob Lothe frequently uses the word “dramatized” in relation to the story events in The Secret Agent without fully examining the formal implications of this within the narrative framework. To give an example, he quotes the Assistant Commissioner’s remark to Sir Ethelred: “From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama” (Lothe, 1989, 204), and analyses it in the following way: The dramatic irony resides in the invitation to compare what the Commissioner (as character) says about Verloc with what actually happens to the latter; and it is reinforced by his ignorance of how accurate the statement is as a formulation of part of the novel’s thematics. But dramatic and authorial irony appear to blend when we think of the Commissioner’s odd mixture of private and official motives: the suggestiveness of his remarks – so accurate that the qualification “From a certain point of view” becomes comic – does not make him immune to a pervasive authorial irony by no means reserved for the anarchists only. (Lothe, 1989, 238) The words “character”, “comic” and, above all, “dramatic irony” used by Lothe are all-important and are best understood as terms borrowed from dramatic analysis. In this instance the notions of the Commissioner’s “character” and the “comic” reside in the Commissioner’s “voice”: the dialogic aspect of the novel, an utterance in direct speech. Moreover, Lothe counts it as an example where “dramatic irony” would seem to be as important as “authorial irony”: in other words, the “situation” dominates. Another example is when Lothe discusses


the beginning of Chapter XI where Verloc is about to face Winnie, and he detects a modification in the authorial irony: It is as though the authorial narrator’s irony is modified by the seriousness and suffering of the human drama he is about to describe. As the authorial narrator’s irony is reduced, the dramatic ironies, often proleptically coloured, become more frequent. (Lothe, 1989, 244) Lothe implies that the narrator is obliged to change “his” tone as the curtain begins to rise, as it were, on the climactic act of a sensational but “human” drama. The quest for the theatrical in The Secret Agent will soon make us realise that it finds its genesis in isolated instances and not in the grand structural scheme of the work. The Secret Agent’s eclectic stylistic allusions and complex time system fragments and distorts the story and therefore the “dramatic” essence of the novel is to be found in specific vignettes within its chapters. The first chapter of the novel contains no dialogue and the only instance of direct speech is when one of Winnie’s statements is quoted. Appropriately enough, the function of the first chapter is to establish the location – a mise en scène – and the central dramatis personae of the story: London and the Verlocs. After the scene has been set, we are presented with a number of dramatic vignettes in which characters encounter each other. As well as the confrontation of the Verlocs, other examples include Verloc’s meeting with Vladimir; Heat and the Assistant Commissioner; and the latter’s dealings with the Secretary of State; the lady patroness’s party; Winnie’s encounters with Ossipon and so on. Within some of the narrative accounts in The Secret Agent dramatic allusions are explicit. Consider, for example, the description of Stevie’s failure at his job: But as errand-boy he did not turn out a great success. He forgot his messages; he was easily diverted from the straight path of duty by the attractions of stray cats and dogs, which he followed down narrow alleys into unsavoury courts; by the comedies of the streets, which he contemplated open mouthed, to the detriment of his employer’s interests; or by the dramas of fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced him sometimes to shriek piercingly in a crowd, which disliked to be disturbed by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national spectacle. When led away by a grave and


protecting policeman, it would often become apparent that poor Stevie had forgotten his address – at least for a time. (13) Three different types of the theatrical are alluded to in the above passage: comedy, drama and spectacle. According to the narrator (focalising through Stevie), the streets of the city are inherently “comic” while injured horses are “dramatic”. However, as much as Stevie is a spectator of the comedy and drama of life in a theatrical style, this is extended in the narrative to society as a whole whereby Stevie becomes a nuisance in the “crowd” – the audience – which quietly enjoys the spectacle. The public is as much the audience to the theatre of life as Stevie. The only difference is that for Stevie the performance is specific and particular (whereby he experiences severe distress at the “pathos” of a suffering horse, as though it were a leading tragedian), while for the rest of society it is just one part of a large-scale, elaborate and ongoing performance. This is, in fact, quite a disturbing prospect. It suggests that everything is merely a superficial exhibition – a sham – and it is impossible to get beneath the surface of the world we see. In arranging an act of terrorism Vladimir is hoping to punch a hole in the British “scene” (a recurrent word in the novel), to tear down the backdrop and end a tradition of passive tolerance and complacent spectatorship. When Vladimir tells Verloc about the type of outrage that is required, the various options are discussed. A political assassination is still “sensational enough in a way, but not so much as it used to be” (29) – like an outmoded spectacle – while a bomb in a church might be misinterpreted by some “fools” (29) as some kind of religious manifestation (a divine performance, as it were). Vladimir goes on to state: A murderous attempt on a restaurant or a theatre would suffer in the same way from the suggestion of non-political passion; the exasperation of a hungry man, an act of social revenge. (29) Hence a theatre is an obvious target for an act of “social revenge”, but not for a political statement. Furthermore, Vladimir rejects the bombing of the National Gallery and concludes that the best target “is learning – science” (30). But he still refers to the ineffectiveness of attacking a theatre in his celebration of throwing a bomb into “learning”: the absurd ferocity of such a demonstration will affect them more profoundly than the mangling of a whole street – or theatre – full


of their own kind. To that last they can always say: “Oh! it’s mere class hate.” (30) Vladimir believes that the English theatre is too sensitively reflective of the British class system, and that an attack there would be interpreted as just a spiteful and resentful attack on the “type” of audience, and not the establishment as a whole. But in another way, it is almost as if an attack on a theatre is inevitably a kind of performance, which is concluded with a succinct critique – “Oh! it’s mere class hate” – as though it were nothing more than a play attempting to make some kind of social statement about British society. In these terms, Vladimir believes that in the theatre reality is stifled out of existence: it is impossible to do anything for real in the theatre. But if we continue to keep in mind the narrative’s sustained use of styles and genres of textual representation and the public’s sense of “national spectacle”, perhaps it is impossible to do anything for real at all, even outside a theatre. At the end of Chapter II, Winnie’s mother is used as a focaliser and we see her point of view towards Winnie and her marriage. We are presented with some retrospective wherein Winnie’s mother remembers the local butcher’s only son who courted Winnie for a while: “He took her girl to the theatre on several evenings” (35). But we are informed that after the arrival of Mr Verloc, turning up providentially to occupy the first floor front bedroom, there had been no more question of the young butcher. It was clearly providential. (36) So, it would seem to imply, with the arrival of Verloc evening excursions to the theatre come to an end along with the young butcher. Yet the double reference to providence can be related to more than merely the arrival of Verloc: in a way, “theatre” and “butchery” are destined to return to Winnie in the melodramatic confrontation with her husband in which she kills him with a carving knife (“butchery”). Although such subtle allusions are easy to overlook, these references to the theatre, butchery and providence serve to suggest ominously the denouement of the Verloc story partly in an ironic establishment of the murder as a predestined inevitability becoming to melodrama and also in an early “theatricalising” of the crime. Winnie is set up as a kind of a melodramatic or even GrandGuignol figure in committing the murder, and this characterising of


Winnie is shown in its fundamental essence as early as the second chapter. As well as a significant example of the manipulation of character, it also concurs with the predominance of the life-as-theatre concept that imbues The Secret Agent from the start. Moreover, in the case of Winnie, she is destined to play the role that has been cast for her and this questions the possibility – or existence – of selfdetermination. This question is further fuelled by Winnie’s confident expression that “No one need be a slave in this country” (148), her facile loyalty to popular patriotism. A hostile review of The Secret Agent appeared in Country Life when the novel was published in 1907: You can tell a great writer at once, because his analysis is all done, as it were, behind the curtain. He makes his people speak and act, and leaves the reader to judge what is passing in their minds. The course followed by Mr Conrad is exactly the opposite of this. In page after page he discourses fluently about the ideas that were coursing through the brain of a woman who never spoke at all. (Watt, 1973, 30) The theatrical metaphor the reviewer chooses to use is noteworthy. The fact that Conrad does not hide behind the “curtain” but prefers to describe the psychological machinations of the characters whilst they are denied a voice does not necessarily lessen the theatrical dimension to the novel. What is lessened is the illusion of reality – mimesis – and the possibility of self-determination. In this way, the theatricality of this novel is like that of puppetry, with the puppet master visible throughout, pulling the strings. This will inevitably remind us of Conrad’s celebration of marionettes in a letter to Cunninghame Graham: I love a marionette show. Marionettes are beautiful – especially those of the old kind with wires, thick as my little finger, coming out of the top of the head. Their impassibility in love, in crime, in mirth, in sorrow, – is heroic, superhuman, fascinating. Their rigid violence when they fall upon one another to embrace or to fight is simply a joy to behold. I never listen to the text mouthed somewhere out of sight by invisible men who are here to day and rotten to morrow. I love the marionettes that are without life, that come so near to being immortal! (CL1, 419)


Leaving aside the obvious associations we can make between this passage and the general question of self-determination in The Secret Agent, it is possible to locate a kind of marionette in the novel: Mr Verloc obeyed woodenly, stony-eyed, and like an automaton whose face had been painted red. And this resemblance to a mechanical figure went so far that he had an automaton’s absurd air of being aware of the machinery inside of him. (149) If Verloc belongs to a marionette display or a sideshow, elsewhere in the novel he would seem to be inside a zoo, such as when we read that Verloc turns “around the table in the parlour with his usual air of a large animal in a cage” (179). Likewise, Stevie is described as prowling around “the table like an excited animal in a cage” (47). It is interesting that the same image is used to describe Verloc and Stevie, two characters who are perhaps the most antithetical in the novel: they are as different as a “fat pig” (16) and a rodent but are both caged for the gaze and benefit of a spectator.7 In addition to melodrama, marionettes and zoos, another allusion to theatrical spectacle is the music hall. In his meeting with the Assistant Commissioner, Chief Inspector Heat’s feelings are described to us: He felt at that moment like a tight-rope artist might feel if suddenly, in the middle of the performance, the manager of the Music Hall were to rush out of the proper managerial seclusion and begin to shake the rope. (92)8 The fact that the analogy refers to acrobatics takes us into the circus as much as the music hall. The notion of the circus is important in Under Western Eyes (1911) where, for example, the revolutionist Nikita is described in terms that seem to make him resemble a grotesque clown: The abrupt squeaks of the fat man seemed to proceed from that thing like a balloon he carried under his overcoat. The stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless, hanging hands, the enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair straggling down the fat nape of the neck, fascinated Razumov into a stare on the verge of horror and laughter. (266) The spectacle of Nikita’s white face, clownish body and squeaking voice turn Razumov into a staring, aghast spectator. Like many members of


a circus audience watching the clowns’ performance, Razumov’s response hovers between irrepressible mirth and a deeply disturbing fear. The allusion to circus has a critical place in the stage adaptation of The Secret Agent. As in the novel, the Professor is established as a contradictory figure: PROFESSOR small, frail, sallow, thin whiskers, fair. Large round spectacles. Clothes very ill-fitting, extremely shabby. Deplorable, heavy boots visible under table. Arms far through sleeves, no trace of cuffs. General aspect of inferior physique and poverty contrasted through the scene with speech and demeanour of supreme self-confidence. (109) The description makes the Professor seem rather clown-like but, like Nikita, he is formidably dangerous. Although he looks shabby and unassuming, he hides a bomb strapped to his body. This contradictory condition is reflected in his language: he is arrogantly superior yet “quietly sarcastic” (118). Conrad gives him some amusing lines such as at the end of the play when he bathetically undercuts his ideological pronouncements: I know no pride – no shame – no God – no master – isn’t that Verloc’s wife? (Points at WINNIE). (183) Such moments of humorous dramatic irony make the Professor one of the most stimulating characters in the play. Clifton Boyne in the role of the Professor received almost unanimous praise and, for the Daily News, it “proved that Joseph Conrad has the dramatist’s gift of characterisation” (Hand, 2001b, 24). If the Professor is like a clown with a witty turn of phrase, Stevie and Verloc offer us another type of routine: STEVIE (suddenly). Eating human flesh. That can’t be allowed, can’t, can’t. (Dances with rage. WINNIE looks at him steadily, helpless.) MR. VERLOC (behind his wife). Here’s a circus for you. (106) Stevie’s “dance” and Verloc’s remark emphasises the circus and/or comic nature of the relationship between the two male characters: the “slight” (73) boy and the “bulky man” (84) are a grotesque double-act, a curious precursor to Laurel and Hardy. Ultimately, Winnie’s repeated line in Act I that Stevie “would go through fire and water” (73 and 107) for Verloc, makes Stevie’s death a grotesque circus trick, somewhere between the ring of fire and the human cannonball. Such allusions to performance of all kinds can be very effectively realised on the stage.


However, despite the success of the play in using its formal conditions and context to develop some resonant aspects of the play, any adaptation of The Secret Agent is, by default, obliged to employ strategies of marginalisation and omission. Conrad’s play does not have chance to use the forty or so separate locations of the novel and, most critically, cannot – in the theatrical milieu of the time – recreate the sense of the city that so thoroughly pervades the novel. Instead, there are five locations in the play: the Verloc’s parlour, a room in a small café, the Special Crimes Department, Lady Mabel’s drawing room, and the Verloc’s shop. Despite these restrictions on the panorama of locale in the novel, Conrad still attempts to create the concept of the city in his play. In Act I, Verloc and Vladimir are interrupted when the “Shop bell rings” (90). The enforced absence of Verloc is a dramatic expediency that allows Vladimir to speak his mind and express his opinion of the secret agent – “Impudent, lazy brute” (90) – before the shop proprietor returns stating, “I told him I hadn’t got it. It was the quickest way” (90). This episode allows the “public” to make its presence felt and remind the audience – and perhaps even the figures in the play – that there is a world outside the parlour, a world which will be possibly be affected by the schemes of this particular “private life”. In Act II Scene I we see the fragmented and eerie presence of anonymous Londoners: “one or two heads of customers . . . may be seen” (109). Furthermore, we read that a “Mechanical piano, not visible, finishes valse tune” (109). This player-piano has a framing function, as its presence is again emphasised at the end of the scene: “Mechanical piano begins to play” (118). In the novel, the instrument is described as an “upright semi-grand piano near the door . . . (which) executed suddenly all by itself a valse tune with aggressive virtuosity” (52). The player-piano reflects dehumanisation in the urban environment: people are becoming superfluous in Conrad’s vision of the modern city. However, in the adaptation, by keeping the piano off-stage Conrad may have re-humanised it, as there is the possibility that someone is playing it. Either way, the player-piano serves the function of emphasising that there is a world beyond the focal action on the stage. Conrad’s attempts to convey the presence of the city are especially sophisticated in the fourth act. Act IV Scene II opens with Winnie sewing and then the off-stage presence of the news vendor: . . . a distant voice outside is heard, high-pitched: Greenwich Park Outrage. All the details! (WINNIE sews on. Shrill voice nearer.) Bomb in Greenwich Park. (Fainter.) Latest edition.


Bomb . . . (Dies out. WINNIE lets hands fall on lap and remains lost in thought . . .). (153) Winnie is playing the “housewife” by sitting and sewing, but the world of the city and journalism begins to encroach on this private domesticity: the stage directions have already emphasised that there are “two or three piles of newspapers” (153) on the shop counter. Soon after the herald of the newsboy, Heat makes his entrance and we assume he will be the news bringer. In Act IV Scene IV we see the light of a street lamp casting “a dim sheen” (178) into the shop and soon afterwards there is the bull’s-eye light and “Measured footsteps” (178) of a wandering policeman. These intrusions from the public world into the increasingly nightmarish Verloc house become more pronounced as the play draws to an end: Ossipon flees, leaving the shop door wide open which allows a sharp “Gust of wind inside” after which there is a “distant shout and the blowing of a whistle” (180). The breeze is symbolic of the final intrusion of the public world – a dehumanised London – into this ironically “comfy” English household. Once Ossipon is captured we hear him “screaming in the street” (181). Near the end of the play there is the following dialogue: WINNIE (sudden cry). Blood and dirt. HEAT (pointing finger at PROFESSOR). She has named it. CONSTABLE (at the door). A tidy lot has collected there already, sir. HEAT (to PROFESSOR). Some day maybe a crowd may tear you to pieces. WINNIE (a wail). Nothing! Nothing but blood and dirt! PROFESSOR. Oh, yes. The vile crowd. The countless multitude, unconscious, blind . . . Well – let them! (CONSTABLE opens the door a little. Exit PROFESSOR, and CONSTABLE shuts the door. Confused murmur of the crowd in the street.) STERN VOICE (outside). Pass on . . . Pass along there! HEAT (to CONSTABLE). Nip out and bring a four-wheeler here as quick as you can. CONSTABLE. Yes, sir. (Exit. Murmur of crowd swells and dies.) (. . .) STERN VOICE (outside). Pass along there! (184) The play ends a few moments afterwards. The Constable draws attention to the gathering people and Heat reiterates the notion and presence of the crowd. It is significant that Heat warns the Professor that the crowd may tear him “to pieces”, a fate similar to that met by the doomed protagonist of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall (1603). Conrad is constructing a very different sense of the crowd than in the novel: they


are more of an audible and potentially violent mob than the amorphous multitude in the novel. This is an interesting shift from novel to play, which lends the city crowd the possibility of a more active even dramatic role than the complacent public audience in the novel. As well as an aesthetic decision, it may also reflect the shift from the Edwardian into a post-First World War, post-Bolshevik world, where the safety of the crowd, like so many other securities, has been cast into doubt. Winnie’s distracted, insane exclamations ironically add to this concept. The “dirt” of the street (if we appropriate it thus) had already been emphasised shortly before when Ossipon was dragged back in from the street and is described as “muddy” (181). The Professor is predictable in describing the crowd as a “vile . . . countless multitude”. What is interesting is the way the stage directions refer to the murmuring of the crowd as “confused”, swelling and dying. The “Stern Voice” is a suitably anonymous emblem of authority attempting to control the crowd of London which is presumably only safe if it is kept moving. Conrad subtitles two of the Acts: “The Private Life” of Act I (73) and “The Upper World” of Act III (133). This marks an attempt to assert location and the resonance of that in the broad context of London. Moreover, through these subtitles, Conrad is striving to emphasise the class stratification of London as he sees it: the nation of shopkeepers in contrast to the powers that be. But as my analysis of the last moments of the play has hopefully demonstrated, Conrad also exploits another dichotomy in attempting to bring his vision of London onto the stage: throughout the play there is a dramatic tension between the interior viewed world and the unseen expanses of the city. A remarkable achievement in Conrad’s narrative is the way he constructs and takes advantage of the context with an idiosyncratic point of view and sense of irony. An excellent example in The Secret Agent is Vladimir and Verloc in Chapter II: “. . . No work, no pay.” Mr Verloc felt a queer sensation of faintness in his stout legs. He stepped back in one pace, and blew his nose loudly. He was, in truth, startled and alarmed. The rusty London sunshine struggling clear of the London mist shed a lukewarm brightness into the First Secretary’s private room: and in the silence Mr Verloc heard against a window-pane the faint buzzing of a fly – his first fly of the year – heralding better than any number of swallows the approach of spring. The useless fussing of that tiny, energetic organism affected unpleasantly this big man threatened in his indolence.


In the pause Mr Vladimir formulated in his mind a series of disparaging remarks concerning Mr Verloc’s face and figure. The fellow was unexpectedly vulgar, heavy, and impudently unintelligent. He looked uncommonly like a master plumber come to present his bill. The First Secretary of the Embassy, from his occasional excursions into the field of American humour, had formed a special notion of that class of mechanic as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and incompetency. (26) Conrad’s narrative is working in a number of ways here. After the end of Vladimir’s direct speech, which terminates a substantial section of dialogue, the omniscience of the narrator is demonstrated by the description of the way Verloc’s legs feel. This shifts into an external “stage direction” of Verloc blowing his nose. The narrator remains concerned with the external for a moment as the location is described. The repetition of “London” serves to emphasise the context and there is an Impressionistic register with the “lukewarm brightness”. The visual aspect is further emphasised as it is a moment of “silence”. The narrator then focuses on the fly not only as an emblem of spring but also as an ironic (yet, as a scatological pest, curiously appropriate) juxtaposition to the “big man”. In the next paragraph, the narrator – seemingly as “energetic” as the fly he created – leads us into the mind of Mr Vladimir and the disparaging remarks he has formulated. This is compounded by the intertextual allusion to the world of “American humour” which is ironic when one considers that the First Secretary is clearly East European if not specifically Russian.9 A stage adaptation could not possibly recreate the material of this short extract which covers not just the anxiety of Verloc and the contempt in Vladimir but London weather and the actions of the first fly of the year. In the play, the equivalent encounter in Act I is somewhat contrived as it is hard to believe that Mr Vladimir would visit Verloc at home. Furthermore, Vladimir’s seizing of the moral high ground – “You dare!” (Novel, 61; Play, 89) – is diminished with Vladimir in Verloc’s shop. In a similar vein, let us look at this extract: MR. VERLOC (. . .). Oh, damn! Come out into the shop as quick as you can, sir. I see my wife coming down the street. (Comes forward, agitated.) Do go into the shop, sir. You have just time. MR. VLAD. You are absurd with that wife of yours. Wife! Pah! MR. VERLOC. Come, sir, you don’t want to drive a man into a corner. (Tries to hustle MR. VLADIMIR towards the door.) (95–6)


In the novel, the tension of the situation grows to such a point that Verloc is filled with a mixture of contempt, terror and helplessness. It is unthinkable that Verloc would “hustle” Vladimir. The situation in the play takes on the aspect of a quick exit in a farce, or at least of Joxer Daly making for the door whenever Mrs Boyle approaches in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924). This problem in The Secret Agent is compounded by Vladimir’s comments on Verloc’s wife: in the novel Vladimir ridicules the hypocrisy of a self-confessed anarchist respecting the convention of marriage. The same idea is latent here, but it becomes caught up in the stage business of the exit which diminishes the more profound irony of the concept: “Wife! Pah!” is a comic utterance that belongs to the world of farce. Another difficult aspect to this encounter is that it is Vladimir and Verloc’s second meeting as opposed to it being their first in the novel: “When I called you to the Embassy I really had no time to go into the whole question” (86–7). Having established that, most of the dialogue sounds like a first meeting. It is obvious that Conrad felt it unlikely for them to have met for the first time anywhere other than in the Embassy. This serves to emphasise how awkward it is to have Vladimir in the shop at all. Moreover, in the words of Robert S. Ryf, “That Vladimir, Verloc’s superior, apparently does not know how long Verloc has been working for them or that he is married seems even less credible in the play than in the novel” (Ryf, 1972, 62). Conrad strips away the narrative description and leaves a succinct version of the dialogue. A great deal depends on the actors to convey the mood and manner of the characters: to make Verloc seem something like an awkward “plumber” and, more easily, the resentment of Vladimir. The additions to the original dialogue in this instance are mainly in order to draw attention to the location and to underline, heavily, the irony: “Funny blind, a shop like this for your real – ah – occupation” (90); “Shop of secret wares – and a shady life” (90) and so on. Vladimir’s early observations on Verloc that he seems to be “dealing in revolutionary literature and obscene photographs” (86) and his subsequent ironic remark about Verloc’s “ ‘art’ customers” (86) demonstrates that Conrad is attempting to find a compensation for the loss of narrative description in Chapter I. But the predominant function of the encounter is exposition. The dialogue asserts key information or allows it to be aired: “I am your employer” (86); “What were you before? One isn’t born a secret agent” (87); “You know of course of the International Conference sitting now in Milan” (92) and Vladimir’s perilously long speech which culminates in the idea of exploding a “bomb into pure mathematics” (93–4).


There is a pressure on Conrad to be as expedient with dramatis personae as he is with location. The number of characters in the novel is over twenty-four speaking characters and over thirty-five nonspeaking figures. All the same, the play still has twenty-one characters in the cast and others – café customers, party guests and, off-stage, the news vendor and the Stern Voice – who are not included in the cast list. The script is peppered with descriptions of the characters, which are basically a précis of the descriptive accounts contained in the novel. In addition there are some interesting statements on the physical appearance of the characters in certain dramatic situations. An example of this is in Act IV Scene III where Verloc and Heat “talk loudly” to each other and Conrad tells us: There is a certain similarity in their personal appearance, both big men, clothes the same sort of cut, dark blue overcoats and round hats on. (159) Conrad’s adaptation is interesting when it lays bare and makes explicit this kind of intention: these are details we can only infer in our reading of the novel. It is no surprise that Conrad retains the majority of the key players in the adaptation. In fact, there is a case to argue that he includes too many of them: Mr Vladimir and even Lady Mabel (the name Conrad gives to the anonymous patroness of Michaelis) might each have been kept as an off-stage presence and, ironically, they would have been more dramatically potent. Both function as emblems of power: Mr Vladimir precipitates the bomb outrage and is uncomfortably transported from his ambassadorial bastion in the novel to Verloc’s shop in the play. Similarly, it is uncomfortable to see the Professor enter the shop in Act IV, as Ryf puts it, “There seems little or no reason for the Professor to be there, particularly as he keeps saying that he is not interested in what is going on” (Ryf, 1972, 63). Conrad seems to acknowledge this himself and goes even further, questioning the presence of the Professor, and other characters, entirely (Jean-Aubry, Volume 2, 258). By bringing Vladimir and the Professor into the Verloc shop, Conrad damages his construction of London – a place of oblivion and disconnectedness – which is so convincing in the novel. He does this simply because Vladimir has an important expository function, and although Conrad realises that Winnie’s deterioration is the dramatic crescendo to the play he still wants the Professor to be some kind of coda to the play just as he is in the novel. The Professor is not the only improbability at the end of the play. The arrival of so


many characters so soon after the murder is described by Cedric Watts as an unintentional “parody of the contrivances of theatrical thrillers” (Watts, 1989, 108). Although Lady Mabel’s scene – Act III (which Conrad transposed into Act II Scene III in the three-act version) – is memorable, it could be interpreted as blurring the focus of Conrad’s tragic play: in the novel it is an intriguing satirical vignette but in the play it may be too much of a digression to warrant a place on stage. Let us consider for a moment why the patroness impressed V. S. Naipaul: in spite of appearances, this grand lady, patroness of a celebrated anarchist, was not Lady Bracknell . . . Not Lady Bracknell. Someone much more real, and still recognizable in more than one country. Younger today perhaps; but humanitarian concern still disguises a similar arrogance and simplicity, the conviction that wealth, a particular fortune, position or a particular name are the only possible causes of human self-esteem. (Naipaul, 1981, 208–9) It is interesting that Naipaul draws a parallel with Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell (even if only to dismiss it) because it emphasises the dramatic nature of the character, a quality enhanced in the adaptation. Lady Mabel could be performed as a lesser kind of Lady Bracknell. This is apparent in statements such as: “They may think what they like. My eccentricity is well known” (145). The relationship between Lady Mabel and Michaelis is also amusing. The latter addresses his patroness as “ma’am” (135), and she asks “why don’t you address me as Lady Mabel like my other friends?” (135): the invited informality does not go so far as letting the “Lady” drop. This is once more referred to when Michaelis uses virtually every possible name for her, with a punch-line after a comic pause: MICH. (. . .) I do indeed, ma’am – Mabel – Lady Mabel. (Pause.) I get confused in my head a little, sometimes. (136) The challenge for a performer playing Lady Mabel would perhaps be to emphasise the Wildean edge to the character without discounting the deeper significance of the construct that Naipaul defines. Lady Mabel is not Lady Bracknell even if both figures are satirical creations: The Secret Agent and The Importance of Being Earnest are both works of English satire, but operate with different style and vehemence. If Wilde’s play is a comic satire, then Conrad’s play is an uneasy attempt


at a genre of tragic or melodramatic satire. Although her name is still vague, Lady Mabel has lost the satirical anonymity she has in the novel. A similar alteration occurs with the novel’s Sir Ethelred. The Home Secretary may not appear in the play, but nevertheless his presence is still important. In the play Conrad renames him “Sir William” (121) which confirms Conrad’s reference to the former Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt (6) in the “Author’s Note” (1920). Conrad no longer feels he has to be discreet: fifteen years had passed between the novel and the play, and approximately thirty years since Harcourt was Home Secretary.10 In 1991 Christopher Hampton was writing the screenplay for his film adaptation of The Secret Agent.11 In describing his decisions in the process of adaptation he reveals: The two strands of the story I have decided to omit are those which deal with Michaelis’s patroness, the rich old lady, and the dealings between the Assistant Commissioner and the Home Office. I think the reasons for this are probably fairly self-evident.12 Although it may have been “self-evident” to an accomplished adapter like Hampton, Conrad did retain the patroness but does omit the characters from the Home Office. Along with the Home Secretary Sir Ethelred and his secretary Toodles (Chapters VII and X), the other most significant characters Conrad decides to omit from the adaptation are Privy Councillor Wurmt (Chapter II), the maimed cabby (Chapter VIII) and Mrs Neale (Chapter IX). The decision to omit some of these characters can be explained by the problems of location as these characters only make sense in their respective contexts: Toodles and Sir Ethelred in Parliament, Wurmt in the Embassy, the cabby in the city streets and Mrs Neale – “the charwoman” (138) – in the Verloc home. These characters have been omitted because they add little to the plot outside their specific contexts. The difficulty Conrad faced with Vladimir, however, is that he is integral to the plot but really makes sense only in the context of the Embassy. The complicated time structure of the novel is undoubtedly one factor that has made it such an enduring work, especially in the field of academic study. Conrad exploits the narrative time techniques of analepsis, prolepsis and ellipsis in the novel. The play is, in contrast, strictly chronological and Conrad only uses the technique of ellipsis, most substantially between Act I and Act II where there is a passage of


approximately one month. One very obvious problem in straightening out the chronology is that Stevie is killed early in the story. Christopher Hampton concurs: (My) general feeling at the moment is that by straightening out the narrative – as Conrad did in the play – you risk losing sight of Stevie too early in the proceedings. He’s so pivotal a character.13 The tragedy of Stevie – the fact that his death is untimely – becomes unsubtly clear in a strictly chronological account of the story: in terms of the aesthetic structure of the play too he dies prematurely. An actor playing Stevie in Conrad’s play has a very short time to make an impact even though he remains as pivotal to the story in the play as he is in the novel. The audience’s view of Stevie as he “blows kiss to his sister” (107) on his way to bed is, in hindsight, an extremely poignant gesture for it is the last time the audience sees Stevie. It may well be the moment where the tragic element to the play ends if we choose to regard The Secret Agent as Stevie’s one-act tragedy. However, we must not overlook the comic potential of Stevie which is apparent in his naiveté and truth-speaking. At one point he turns to the “obese” (100) Michaelis and says “Mr. Michaelis, you are a dear. Winnie says so” (103). There is a delicate humour in his reiteration of Winnie’s “feminine” compliment, and it reflects Stevie’s inherent “Emperor’s New Clothes” honesty and humour. The role of Stevie is remarkably challenging: he appears only in Act I, but almost every line of his speeches can be interpreted as ironically or morally significant (in contrast to the clichés, empty rhetoric and lies of the other characters). At the beginning of the play Stevie is described in the stage directions as “about seventeen, slight, fair, pale, nervous, at times a little vacant” (73). He is not explicitly mentally retarded: Stevie is a victim of how other characters, and not the dramatist, have defined him: his mother, his late father, his sister, Verloc and Ossipon. The audience is made to witness Verloc’s abuse of power over Stevie (treating him like a fool in a circus act or like a dog), and yet we witness the boy’s indefatigable loyalty to Verloc. Winnie has an emotional attachment to her brother, and this is most tenderly demonstrated in Stevie’s final blown kiss and in the stage direction where “STEVIE attempts to take her face in his hands. She lets him” (96). In contrast, for example, Ossipon regards Stevie in analytical detachment. However,


even the audience is forced to be analytical in its observation of Stevie. His prank exemplifies this: (During the last few replicas STEVIE’s legs are visible at the bottom of the stairs.) STEVIE (jumps straight into the room). Hoo! MOTHER (slight scream). Stevie! You did give me a turn! WINNIE (affected severity). Were you trying to frighten us, Steve? STEVIE (exultant). Yes, and I did it too. (81) Although his mother and sister may have been shocked by his joke, the audience is not surprised because it saw Stevie prepare himself for the jump. The audience is forced to take an analytical perspective of Stevie’s behaviour and of the way in which the other characters react to sudden shock. In this way, this brief episode acts as an analogy of the bomb blast which kills Stevie. Later, the audience will watch the shock of Winnie after the death of Stevie in an explosion which is not visible or audible: the spectators are given a similarly analytical role in the work. This, in Brechtian style, may release the audience from an overemotional attachment to the characters. But if the audience is free from a potentially unbearable empathy with the figures on the stage, it is perhaps forced to bear the similarly difficult burden of over-detachment: the members of the audience are witnesses to the “Private Life” of their society, and are forced to watch as coldly, analytically and perhaps as hypocritically as Ossipon. To return to the impact of Conrad’s straightened chronology, the decision superficially makes the adapted narrative seem like a simplification of the work and this can have a critical effect on the audience. Christopher Hampton writes about a revival of Conrad’s play on the London fringe: what prevented it from working seemed to me to be the tremendously deliberate pace, which made it uncomfortably static.14 This deliberateness would seem to be a clear result of making the work chronological. As well as having a grave impact on the pace of the story, the effect of straightening the structure compromises the sustained tone of irony as is reflected in Conrad’s shocking revelation about the process of adaptation when he discovered that all the “grim dignity” he had given the novel is stripped off by the “terribly searching” stage (CL6, 520). Though the process of adaptation is loyal to the underlying


story, it disentangles the complex narrative and the play is not only rendered “tremendously deliberate”, it becomes tremendously macabre. Another effect of a chronological system can be seen in Act I. Conrad feels obliged to stack a great deal into the opening act: it begins with the domestic situation of the Verlocs; it goes on to present Vladimir; and then flows into the anarchist meeting. In other words, the act comprises information from Chapters I, II and III of the novel. The anarchist meeting is covered in Chapter III and opens with Michaelis in mid-speech. The play allows the guests to arrive. However, Conrad exploits this situation in an effective way by allowing Ossipon to make sexual advances towards Winnie: OSSIPON. I have been studying for a doctor at one time, you know, Mrs. Verloc. Oh, yes, he is very interesting, your brother is. (Lower tone.) Why do you always turn your back on me, Mrs. Verloc? (Whispers.) Winnie! (99) Later in the novel’s account, the departure of the anarchists is abrupt: “Mr Verloc saw his guests off the premises” (44). In the play Conrad once again affords Ossipon some innuendo: OSSIPON (. . . Sentimentally). I stayed behind to say good night to you. WINNIE (voice down the stairs, very steady). You needn’t have troubles. I am not that sort of woman. OSSIPON (as before). Interesting chap, that brother of yours. WINNIE (voice down the stairs, softened). Isn’t he? Go away, do. I want to get him to bed. OSSIPON (insinuating). Why don’t you come down to fetch him? WINNIE (voice from above, indignant). Not likely! In my night-gown. OSSIPON (appreciative). Oh, my word! (104–5) This extra material helps to pave the way for an ironic treatment of the romantic aspect of the relationship between Ossipon and Winnie in the final act. In the novel we read in Chapter XII that “Mrs Verloc had never responded to his glances by the slightest sign of encouragement” (204). In the play Conrad develops their relationship further and successfully renders the relationship between Ossipon and Winnie into a suitably ironic mode in preparation for the aftermath of Winnie’s crime: as in the novel, when they do fall into each other’s arms it is not a romantic situation but a parody of one, but Conrad’s additional groundwork in the play increases the resonance.


Act I can also be used to demonstrate some interesting contrasts in the reaction of the characters even if much of the dialogue remains verbatim. In the novel we are presented with Yundt in full flow: The venomous spluttering of the old terrorist without teeth was heard. “Do you know how I would call the nature of the present economic conditions? I would call it cannibalistic. That’s what it is! They are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the people – nothing else.” Stevie swallowed the terrifying statement with an audible gulp, and at once, as though it had been swift poison, sank limply in a sitting posture on the steps of the kitchen door. Michaelis gave no sign of having heard anything. (44) The equivalent section in the play reads: YUNDT (venomous). Do you know how I would call the present social conditions? I would call it cannibalistic. The minority, a mere handful, are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and warm blood of luckless human beings. You can almost hear the scrunching of the bones. STEVIE (slight shrill shriek. Covers eyes with both arms. Perfectly still. VERLOC stops, MICHAELIS looks round, YUNDT unmoved . . .). (102) There are some minor – and some curious – adjustments to the speech here, exchanging “economic” for “social” for example. More substantial are the rhetorical alterations (Yundt’s “nothing else” being replaced by the lurid drama of scrunching bones) and the differences in reaction. It is interesting that Michaelis is made to notice Stevie’s outburst in the play, but does not seem to in the novel. The novel, in this instance, highlights the irony of the great revolutionaries being oblivious to the genuinely oppressed (represented by Stevie). Stevie’s reaction in the play – the “shriek” and covering his eyes – has a more obvious dramatic impact than the more humble “gulp” and sinking posture. But this stage direction may be an over-direction: the faithful re-enactment of Stevie’s terror and sagging posture from the novel may prove, if detected by an audience, to be more profound than the, arguably, excesses of his “shriek”. Earlier, it was suggested that Conrad’s technique of adaptation is essentially a “simplification”. However, if we look in more detail we can


see that there is a convoluted process involved. For instance, Conrad has constructed Act II Scene I essentially not only with the dialogue in Chapter IV, but also with the substantial inclusion of the dialogue in Chapter XIII. This makes an interesting demand inasmuch as there is a great difference between the two chapters: the Professor’s character may be constant, but in the earlier chapter of the novel Ossipon learns, erroneously, that Verloc died in a bomb blast and in Chapter XIII he is a broken man who knows that the three Verlocs are dead and is haunted by the newspaper story. Conrad adapts the scene in such a way that we do not notice, but it is intriguing to consider in detail. It is also one of the episodes particularly singled out for praise by critics. The reviewer in the Era wrote that the exchanges “are largely unessential to the action of the drama, but are of engrossing interest and superbly well written” (Hand, 2001b, 53). The same scene is one that Arnold Bennett singles out as “superb” (Bennett, 1966, 317). More recently, Robert S. Ryf argues that it is one of the most successful scenes in the adaptation – “arresting and vivid” – because “it was not transplanted from the novel, but was original to the play” (Ryf, 1972, 62). This is an inaccurate claim as there is scarcely a line which is not lifted from the novel. I think Ryf’s oversight can be explained if he failed to take into account the material from Chapter XIII. Act II Scene I is most obviously an adaptation of Chapter IV (the café setting and expository location in the story) but much of the information about the Professor’s character and philosophy that Ryf praises is drawn from the final chapter in Conrad’s careful alteration and assimilation. A close study of the equivalent sections in the novel and the play reveals a number of details about Conrad’s process of adaptation. What becomes obvious are dozens of slight alterations to the language in the dialogue. For example:

OSSIPON. Have you been out much today? PROFESSOR. No I stayed in bed all morning. Why? OSSIPON. Oh! Nothing. Did you walk down here? PROFESSOR. No; omnibus. OSSIPON. Been sitting here long? PROFESSOR. An hour or more. OSSIPON. An hour. Then it may be you haven’t heard yet the news I’ve heard just now – in the street. Have you? I never thought of finding you here. PROFESSOR. I come here sometimes. (Novel 53–4: dialogue only)


OSSIPON. Were you out early to-day, Professor? PROFESSOR. No. In bed till eleven. OSSIPON. Did you walk all the way from Islington? PROFESSOR. No. Bus. OSSIPON. Have you been sitting here long? PROFESSOR. About an hour. OSSIPON. Then maybe you don’t know the news I have heard just now in the street. I never expected to find you here. PROFESSOR. I sit here sometimes. (Play 109: dialogue only) This example, with its numerous minor if not trivial alterations, is typical of Conrad’s process of dialogic adaptation. Later in the same scene, the “twenty seconds” (Novel, 56) it takes for the Professor’s personal bomb to explode has been altered to “seven seconds” (Play, 111). This is a typically slight adjustment, but it is one that involves a change of fact rather than the use of synonym which is his standard practice elsewhere in the adaptation of this section. Perhaps it makes a subtle connection with the “Seven years” (171) of marriage Winnie complains of in Act IV: seven seconds before destruction, seven years before cataclysm. A few times in this section Conrad employs the technique of marginalisation, cutting down on the amount of information given: less is said about the newspaper (because so much can be inferred by the stage image of Ossipon flicking through the pages); the explanation of how the bomb works is reduced; the account of Michaelis’s life in the country is cut down; and there is a general reduction in the amount of reiteration. Omissions include the Professor’s comments on the workings of Heat’s mind, the discussion of America, the account of Verloc’s work in France and the general assault on the nature of English society. Similarly the debate on madness and despair is dropped as it would only make sense after Winnie’s death. Indeed, the newspaper’s “madness and despair” (228) so important at the end of the novel is absent but perhaps finds its equivalent when Winnie’s “Blood and dirt” (184) is placed in the foreground at the end of the play. By and large there is a constancy of character through the process of adaptation. This is because the adaptation is by and large a loyal account of his original story. The great exception is Winnie. For most of the play Winnie is a transposition of the character in the novel. With regard to her appearance, we read in the novel: Winnie was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy. (10)


In the play she is described thus: WINNIE about thirty, dark hair done up very neatly, quiet bearing, good figure, plain, close-fitting dark dress . . . (73) Winnie’s spoken language is also replicated. In the novel we are told: Mrs Verloc, in common with other human beings, was provided with a fund of unconscious resignation sufficient to meet the normal manifestation of human destiny. Without “troubling her head about it”, she was aware that it “did not stand looking into very much”. (182) In the play, Conrad cannot use a narrator in this way but succeeds in conveying Winnie’s attitude through naturalistic dialogue. In Act IV Scene II, Winnie is in discussion with Heat: WINNIE. I don’t trouble my head much about these things. (Faces HEAT. Hands hanging idle.) What can I do for you? (155) And shortly afterwards: HEAT (. . .) What do you think, Mrs. Verloc? WINNIE. I don’t trouble my head. (Listless.) (155) The fact that Winnie repeats the line turns it into a catch-phrase. It is interesting to note that the directions stress idleness and listlessness. Winnie is presented in this scene as an unthinking and resigned individual, perhaps a stereotype of the English nation of shopkeepers which Conrad is satirising. This presentation will make her revelation at the end of the play all the more hard-hitting. As with all of his plays, Conrad establishes a woman as the pivotal character in the play. In Act I Winnie’s character and traits established, and realise that, to a certain extent, she is stern and narrowminded. However, particularly interesting is the method in which Winnie’s gender and sexuality are utilised. Winnie is the sexual focus of three of the male characters in the first act – Stevie, Verloc and Ossipon – each in a different way. I have already referred to the tenderness between Stevie and his sister revealed when he takes “her face in his hands” (96). However, the most complex and dramatically


interesting encounter is the following, when Winnie – in her nightgown – calls her brother over: WINNIE (tender voice). Stevie, darling. (. . .) (holds him to her breast a moment, then pushes him off). Stevie, you ought not to have come down. STEVIE. You never told me not to. But I didn’t scream. Only a little. And I love you, Winnie. Say, Winnie, you love me. (Importunate.) Say, Winnie. WINNIE (not looking at STEVIE). Love you? If I didn’t love you I would die. (Brusque.) Of course I love you. (105) There is enormous ambivalence here. Winnie’s tenderness – holding Stevie to her breast, saying that she loves him – is counterbalanced with elements of rejection: she pushes him away; she does not look at him and is brusque. It is up to us – and the actor – to decide how to interpret this. On one level it may reveal Winnie’s coldness or perhaps the difficulty she has in manifesting her feelings; but perhaps most obviously it demonstrates that she is forced to cover up an extremely powerful love for her brother. Although there is not much love between Winnie and her husband, there is lust instead. When they are alone Verloc will suddenly break out of his preoccupations and loom towards his wife. The first instance of this is when Verloc suggests emigrating: WINNIE (startled). The idea! (Resolute.) Then you would have to go by yourself. I couldn’t think of it! (MR. VERLOC looks at his wife as if roused from a dream.) And you know you couldn’t do without me. MR. VERLOC. No, I couldn’t. (Advances towards WINNIE.) WINNIE (extends her hand). No, not here. There is a better time for kisses. (98) It is curious what actually provokes – “roused” – Verloc’s lust here. Perhaps it merely presented itself, or perhaps it was due to Winnie’s remark that he would have to go alone. If the latter is true, it would indicate that Winnie is a sex-object for Verloc, and that is the central reason why Verloc could not do without her. The “better time for kisses” that Winnie promises comes near the end of the act: WINNIE. Well, well, Adolf, you have done something. (Submits to MR. VERLOC’s arms round her neck, but MR. VERLOC still preoccupied.)


I always told you that this boy would go through fire and water for you. And I must say you deserve it. MR. VERLOC. Well, then, give me a kiss. WINNIE (sullen, coquettish). Can’t you wait the time of getting up the stairs? (Gives kiss.) After all these years. (107) Shortly after this the act ends with Verloc’s command from the top of the stairs, regarding the lights: “Put it out.” (108). The line replicates the ending of Chapter III. It is a foreboding line, deliberately allusive to Othello’s “Put out the light, and then put out the light” (Othello, V.2.7). In the play, however, Conrad enhances the dramatic resonance of the line by describing Verloc’s voice as “deep” (108) in contrast to his “hollow tone” (51) in the novel. Later in the play, the description of Winnie’s actions with the pocket-book of savings emphasises her physicality – the safest place she can trust is her own body – and also makes her prime bait (sexual and financial) for Ossipon: WINNIE, alone, peeps into pocket-book, looks all round room. Obvious hesitation. A movement towards staircase, a movement towards sideboard. Finally undoes two buttons of her bodice and slips pocket-book there . . . (153) Through the gesture of undoing her bodice, Winnie opens herself out: this represents partly an element of sensuality and vulnerability (in contrast, in Act I, she appears in a night-gown which is “buttoned at wrist and throat, ample folds, down to the ground” (105)); and it also indicates that Winnie’s rigid character – her not wanting to know – will soon be forced open in revelation. Winnie’s fate in the play follows the same path as her counterpart in the novel. After Winnie has murdered her husband, Conrad exploits the potential of fictional narrative – the simultaneity of exterior environment and interior consciousness – by having Winnie stagger into the London streets trying to get to the river to drown herself, haunted by the newspaper cliché “The drop given was fourteen feet” which seems to be “scratched on her brain with a hot needle” (201). In the play, Winnie “stumbles” (168) into the shop and after closing her eyes to a count of three gazes at the audience with a “Stare of terror” before crying “No! That must never be!” (168). This stare is very important and is one of the most effective moments in a performance of the play. It is one of Conrad’s best attempts at compensating for the loss of the urban locale of the novel: by having Winnie stare at the audience, we get the sense of the woman alienated in a sea of people (literally a theatre audience in


London, no less). It is also an ironic counterpoint to Act I where Winnie looks at the audience and declares “Yes, I am lucky” (80). This latter example could be played as either a portentous or a comic moment: in Act IV Winnie has “fallen” and this time the breaking of the fourth wall is unambiguously a chilling moment of connection. Conrad is showing that the most law-abiding, lower middle-class housewife can become a murderer, and that stare into the audience’s eyes brings that home. The use of the gaze to break the sanctity of the fourth wall is a direct assault on the principles of stage Naturalism. It was, however, a standard technique in melodrama as well as comedy. Conrad’s use has a much more macabre effect. Although in its performance practice the Grand-Guignol generally adhered to its genesis in realist drama, “the decision to break the fourth wall and make eye contact with the audience (was) an option that was exploited by the Grand-Guignol” (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 35). Similarly, Conrad’s use of the device is designed to create an alienating impact of terror or even, as in some examples for the GrandGuignol, a profoundly unsettling moment of “invitation, or collusion” (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 36). In the novel, Winnie encounters Ossipon in the streets and the narrative parodies the anarchist as a romantic hero coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress. In the play Ossipon has a similarly ironic function but is obliged to make his entry much earlier and does so by coming into the shop. Their conversation follows much of the language of the novel with a similar pacing of the revelations about Verloc’s fate and the true victim of the bomb. In the novel, Ossipon escorts Winnie to Waterloo and when on board the Southampton train with her he makes, à la Lord Jim, his fantastic leap: He had leaped out at the very end of the platform; and such was his determination in sticking to his desperate plan that he managed by a sort of miracle, performed almost in the air, to slam to the door of the carriage. (223) This is how Ossipon escapes Winnie in the play: OSSIPON, sudden and swift, flings door open, leaps out into the street, leaving door nearly wide. WINNIE, still head on arms . . . Gust of wind inside . . . (180) Conrad still uses the word “leap” to define Ossipon’s escape, although Ossipon does not succeed this time in performing the miracle of closing


the door. However, the open door does permit the play’s symbolic gust of wind. In the novel Ossipon’s miracle is not simply escaping Winnie and surviving the fall, but also escaping the police. The only things he has to contend with in the subsequent and final chapter are his guilty conscience and the mocking condescension of the Professor. In the play Ossipon is arrested when the police discover a suspicious amount of money on his person. This is the most profound difference between the versions: in the novel the characters drift away, all affected – in different ways – by what the newspaper coins “madness and despair” (228). With Winnie’s suicide in the English Channel, the London which Conrad has constructed has extended into a wider world (and even state of existence) which is devoid of reason and, mundanely, devoid of policemen. In stark contrast the play seems to have a moral climax as it is brought to a close by the arrival of the police. Although Ossipon may have been a parody of the romantic hero, ultimately Inspector Heat fulfils the role of dramatic hero. As in melodrama, a mechanism of justice is seen to triumph. Heat represents the return of some form of order and humanism into this rapidly disintegrating – or perhaps self-disclosing – world. Heat orders that the “infernal bell” (181) of the shop be stuffed with paper to prevent it from ringing; he holds Winnie “in his arms”, questions her “very softly” (181) and declares that he would like to save her “with all my heart” (182); he is also “vexed” (182) that a crowd might appear. In this way, Heat attempts to bring some tranquillity to this violent and nightmarish place. Ossipon – “screaming” and “dishevelled” (181) – is a stark contrast to the sympathetic and collected Heat. Ossipon’s denunciation of Winnie as a “devil” (182) brings the quasi-supernatural dimension to the play to an end. Winnie has been reduced from Act I’s “angel of the house” – in her long and high-buttoned night-gown speaking “from above” (104) and even “invisible” (104) for a while like some kind of celestial spirit – to a “devil”. Winnie’s transformation is caused by her act of murder, and her taste of “freedom”. Furthermore, with the arrest of Ossipon, the rescue of Winnie (even if she is insane) and the pronouncements of the Professor there is a strong possibility that Heat may be able to unlock the “impenetrable mystery” (228) that looms over the end of the novel. In his discussion of the novel Daniel Schwarz draws a parallel between Stevie and both Hamlet and his father:

Like Hamlet, he is a moral creature in a perverse world which patronises him; like King Hamlet, he is murdered by a close, trusted relative. Verloc


(Claudius) is sexually aroused on the very day of Stevie’s death. (Schwarz, 1980, 172–3)15 However, the key difference is that there is “no moral equilibrium” (Schwarz, 1980, 173): no Fortinbras to set the world right. Conrad’s novel finds its moral equilibrium in the actual narrator. While the Shakespearean allusion may become even stronger because of the dramatic medium, the narrator is lost in the play. Perhaps that is why Heat’s role is changed so that he becomes the ostensible hero. However, Conrad’s pains in the stage directions to point out the physical similarity between Heat and Verloc should render this ironic. Another feature which indicates a moral ending is the confrontation between Heat and the Professor in the unlikely venue of the shop. This is very different to Conrad’s use of the Professor in the haunting final line of the novel which describes the “shabby” man “unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men” (231). There is a moral subtext even to this statement but what gives the line such resonance is the use of “unsuspected”: the metaphor of secrecy which runs through the novel from the title onwards. In the play, with their open confrontation, there is no sense of secrecy or the unsuspected. In the final tableau we witness: HEAT, his hand on his chin, stands looking down profoundly at the crouching WINNIE. (184) Heat, the representative of justice, legality and reason stands above Winnie, the victim of madness and despair. This is perhaps a much more comfortable ending: justice is seen to prevail. The decision is reminiscent of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin adaptation which, in stark contrast to the novel, concludes with the melodramatic triumph of moral righteousness.16 However, it is possible to see the finale of The Secret Agent as just as uncompromising as the novel. In the novel Winnie commits suicide: she has murdered and then taken her own life, but more significantly she becomes a victim of the media. Conrad firmly establishes this in the novel, but even in the play with the “newspaper torn on the floor” (168) this aspect of her fate is still suggested. In the play she does not kill herself but rather, as the Sunday Times reviewer puts it, “The woman ends the play by becoming as imbecile as her brother” (Hand, 2001b, 49). Perhaps this was an attempt to temper the work, by presenting us with one less death. However, the death would have had to have been off-stage and maybe Conrad preferred to shock the audience


with Winnie’s disintegration before their eyes rather than absent. This onstage deterioration is certainly a challenge for the performer playing Winnie. We may liken it to Oswald’s descent into syphilitic insanity at the end of Ibsen’s Ghosts (1882), and there is also undoubtedly a touch of Sir Henry Irving’s celebrated deterioration into madness in The Bells (1871).17 Conrad was more acutely aware of the challenge it would present the audience: As to Act Four I daren’t even think of it. To make an audience of comfortable, easy-going people sup on horrors is a pretty hopeless enterprise; but I will have developed crazily the ambition of making them swallow their supper and think it fine too. This is the way my madness lies at present. (CL6, 518) Within a few days this trepidation had passed and Conrad expresses his new resolution: “I have resolved that since the story is horrible I shall make it as horrible as I possibly can” (CL6, 520). Hence, we can interpret the final tableau either as a moral concession or as a disturbing, ironic conclusion. The fact that The Secret Agent was a feast of “horrors” may have had a detrimental effect on the reception of the play. The Grand-Guignol at the Little Theatre had not opened but was being planned as Conrad was writing his script in late 1919, and had closed down a few months earlier by the time The Secret Agent opened in November 1922. This facilitated the recruitment of the leading Grand-Guignol “villain” Russell Thorndike to play Ossipon. Some reviewers bemoaned the stultifying gloom of the play but others responded positively to Conrad’s conscious “horror”. The Times critic voiced special praise for Act IV Scene IV: The sordid horror of the last scene, when the wretched woman is robbed and deserted by the one man she has turned to for help and is found by the police babbling and crazy, is as terrible as anything in Dostoievsky. This scene, moreover, is superbly played by Miss Miriam Lewes (Winnie), with a passionate intensity that sends a shudder through the whole house. (. . .) We left the “inspissated gloom” of the theatre with a certain relief, and minded to read the novel again. For Mr. Conrad is a great novelist, but not yet a great dramatist. (Hand, 2001b, 38–9) There is an irony here: despite the redeeming qualities of the adaptation which shocked the audience – indicating the success of Conrad’s


intention to horrify – the reviewer wants to return to the novel. The critic will not, however, find this scene in the original: the episode the reviewer praises most is an original invention peculiar to the play of this not “great dramatist”. It is also ironic that the reviewer compares Conrad to Dostoievsky, a novelist Conrad hated.18 One reason the play is capable of sending a shudder through an audience is because we are so close to this array of chilling characters and grotesque events. If we look at the characters we may empathise with most comfortably: Stevie is killed after Act I; Winnie slips into homicide and then insanity and Heat may be too much of a Verloc doppelgänger. In the novel, either the narrator is our point of empathy or at least sustains our ironic perspective and distance from the characters and events. In a production these are either too close for comfort or, conversely, if a quasi-Brechtian alienation effect is successfully achieved the spectator is rendered into a problematically analytical position. The ironic distanciation of the reader achieved by the novel is not as disturbing as a similar process in the theatre where to watch such horrors so coldly could be profoundly disquieting. But comfort was not what Conrad intended. The producer J. Harry Benrimo must have been placed in a difficult position when it came to directing The Secret Agent. In the course of the run Conrad sent Benrimo a letter warning the producer that The Secret Agent is not a “Guignol horror but something which has a larger meaning” (CL7, 596).19 Yet by recruiting Russell Thorndike it would seem that this is the way that Benrimo hoped to realise Conrad’s intention of making his audience “sup on horrors”. Thorndike did not get the opportunity to perform in a Conrad play when Laughing Anne was rejected by the Little Theatre, but The Secret Agent provided him with a chance. His presence as Ossipon is no doubt a major reason why a number of critics referred to the Grand-Guignol quality of the play.20 However, despite Conrad’s very late warning to Benrimo about the production, the script itself contains Grand-Guignol ingredients. Although much too long for the genre, the violence of the piece, the death of Stevie, the murder of Verloc and Winnie’s onstage deterioration into insanity are stock-in-trade elements of GrandGuignol. In The Secret Agent, neither murder is witnessed by the audience. Technically and in terms of its meaning Stevie’s death is necessarily offstage, but the choice of an offstage death for Verloc is more surprising. It is possible that this is an example of self-censorship: an awareness, on Conrad’s part, that an offended Lord Chamberlain might feel obliged to intervene with the blue pencil. This is a consideration


that may also determine why Winnie survives rather than kills herself. However, there is a valid argument in saying that Conrad is creating a quasi-Brechtian mode of reception: we are not permitted to witness (or relish) the explicitness of Verloc’s death but are meant to be more objective in our evaluation of the causes and the consequences of this act of despair. All the same, whatever Conrad’s intentions, the GrandGuignol still beckons. Although synonymous with crass and explicit violence, the Grand-Guignol also delighted in constructing offstage deaths so integral to the narrative, interleaved with onstage horrors and relayed by a focal witness that the audience thought they had seen them (see Hand and Wilson, 2002, 44–6, 76). In the case of the killing of Verloc there is the same potential where the audience can visualise his demise. Regarding Winnie’s build up to her act of revenge and her subsequent fall into madness, this too has a Grand-Guignol quality, even if Conrad’s play predates the play it most obviously parallels: Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson 1929 play Le Baiser de sang (translated as The Kiss of Blood in Hand and Wilson, 2002, 244–64). In this play, Hélène exacts revenge on her treacherous husband: at the climax of the play she appears like an apparition with her face covered by a veil. As her husband commits suicide in front of her and her revenge is complete, the witnesses make her remove her veil. When she does so her madness is revealed. Having been laughing her mood now shifts: HÉLÈNE: No! Wait! (She starts to cry. With a sob in her voice.) It’s horrible. My face is nothing but an open wound. Look! Look! (Slowly she lifts her veil. Her face is undamaged. Pause. She is very pale, with mad eyes. Pause.) VOLGUINE: She is mad! Poor thing! (Hand and Wilson, 2002, 263) In Act IV Scene III of The Secret Agent, Winnie is dressed in a “close veil” (164) and the use of this costume prop and Conrad’s meticulous stage directions chart the increasing dramatic tension of Winnie’s descent: WINNIE must be characterized by a visible rigidity of body. Her voice when coming through the veil is blank in expression. When veil is down her face is white, her eyes by contrast very black. (164) Like Hélène, Winnie has a countenance of contrasts – “white face, black eyes” (166) – and her voice shifts from being “blank” into a “despairing tone” or “wail” (165).21


However, as much as The Secret Agent has elements of the GrandGuignol, it has an intertextual mechanism not dissimilar to the novel inasmuch as it makes a number of generic shifts. The genre of the play is hard to define. Conrad reluctantly/inadvertently exploits the modern melodrama of the Grand-Guignol but, simultaneously, his exploitation of traditional melodrama is conscious: the Daily Express felt bludgeoned by the play’s “blood-red melodrama” (Hand, 2001b, 21) and Conrad introduces lines imbued with a rhetoric of melodrama which surpasses even the novel’s melodramatic pastiche such as Winnie’s “Oh, Tom, I will live all the days of my life for you” (Play, 180) or are simply unthinkable in the novel such as the Assistant Commissioner’s declaration that “A secret agent is a being apart. It’s the nearest thing to living under a curse. A secret curse” (143). We argued earlier that the play endeavours to be a tragic or melodramatic satire. The play may be partly an antecedent to the conventional whodunit or a thriller but ends up being a macabre satire. In its intersection of ostensible political activism and domestic melodrama the play is a precursor to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains sales (1948) while in its experimental and cynical exploration of the themes of journalism, crime and the police the play comes nearly half a century before the similarly macabre satire of Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love (1970). There are also sequences (especially the domestic ones) that are reminiscent of the slice-of-life of late nineteenth-century Realism and Naturalism, including the “New Woman” plays. Amy Huston detects a number of proto-absurdist elements to the play (Huston, 1998, 68) while Valeria Petrocchi regards The Secret Agent as a modern “morality play” (Petrocchi, 1998, 59) or a reworking of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (Petrocchi, 1998, 58) but saves her most extensive parallels in comparing the Conrad the dramatist with Luigi Pirandello (Petrocchi, 1998, 95–128). We have already seen its watered-down Wildean edge and acknowledged the potential of quasi-Epic alienation. This latter aspect emerges even in the developing madness of Winnie. At one point Conrad’s stage directions state that she “opens her lips as if to scream and shuts them again without any other movement” (166). This is a surprising precursor to a celebrated moment in Brecht’s production of his play Mother Courage and her Children (1941) for the Berliner Ensemble as described by George Steiner: As the body (of Mother Courage’s son) was carried off, (Helen) Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth open wide . . . The sound that came out was raw and terrible beyond any description I could give of it. But, in fact, there was no sound. Nothing. The


sound was total silence. It was silence which screamed and screamed through the whole theatre so that the audience lowered its head as before a gust of wind. (Steiner, 1961, 354) If making an association with Brecht seems far-fetched, there is perhaps a more apposite parallel to be drawn with the drama contemporaneous with Conrad (and where Brecht himself began as a playwright): Expressionism. This is evident in the use of light and shadow in Act IV: Winnie tears the newspaper and the brightening gas light in the parlour throws “a shadow arm or hat” (159) against the glazed door. Both these violent images – the ripping of the newspaper and the report it contains, and the dismembered elements silhouetted by a sudden bright light – may abstractly echo the death of Stevie, taking the play into an Expressionist mode. The style of delivery is also Expressionistic, as in the fragmentation of dialogue (Winnie’s eerie refrain of “blood and dirt” at the end of the play) and what the Stage commented on as the purposeful simplicity of the “Expressionist” staging (Hand, 2001b, 56). Likewise, the themes in The Secret Agent are echoed in works of Expressionism. A dominant theme in Expressionism is the idea of the sex war, and in a play like August Stramm’s Awakening (1915) we witness the banal domestic relationship of a man and a woman literally explode into the violent context of its society. This short play is a monument to twentieth-century experimental theatre, and although technically it could not be further from Conrad, its central theme could be seen as being somewhat parallel to the Verloc matrimonial catastrophe. Even closer is Ernst Toller’s Hinkemann (1922), which, like The Secret Agent, perpetually exploits the dichotomy of the domestic and the social in the modern urban context. The marriage of the eponymous hero/anti-hero and his wife collapses and the play charts their inexorable destruction, culminating in her, and then his, suicide. Before this, the play presents remarkable scenes that portray the crisis and demise of capitalist society in a horrifying urban landscape, complete with newsvendors peddling their maculated filth. Likewise, the bar scene between Ossipon and the Professor (Act II Scene I) is rather like the pub scene in Toller’s play (Act II Scene IV) where Hinkemann’s cronies similarly expound their world views. The Secret Agent also employs the satire of class archetypes and stereotypes familiar in Expressionism: the aristocratic and anonymous ciphers at Lady Mabel’s party are similar to the satirical mannequins that recur in German Expressionism and can be found in the scenes of class satire in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922).


Following the O’Neill parallel, other examples of English-language Expressionism are relevant. Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928) will use subheadings like “To Business”, “Domestic” and “The Law” which we can compare to The Secret Agent’s divisions such as “The Private Life” and “The Upper World”. The play will also depict a woman murdering her husband in a grimly satirised social context where the domestic and gendered situation reflects the horrors and iniquities of society as a whole. Like The Secret Agent, Machinal is also a damning indictment of the newspaper media and its ability to turn human lives and tragedies into journalistic cliché. A major difference between the two plays is that what may be hints of Expressionism in Conrad’s play becomes a fullflung practice in Treadwell’s. Conrad is not an Expressionist, but he is heading in that direction. Another difference, it must be said, is that Machinal was a major Broadway, Moscow and even West End success. This reflects the difference between the early and late 1920s. Although Expressionism made little impact (not that it was particularly welcome, especially with its primarily German association) on the British theatre in the early 1920s, by the end of the decade and after Conrad’s death, Expressionism in the English-language theatre is no longer a daring or controversial decision but has become a more calculated generic option. Thanks, in great part, to the Expressionistic works of not only Eugene O’Neill, but also Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine, 1923) and Sean O’Casey (Plough and the Stars, 1926, and The Silver Tassie, 1928). It also reflects the extending (and by now more tolerated) international influence of German Expressionism, largely through the steady critical ascension of films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919), Nosferatu (F. W. Murneau, 1922) and Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926). Indeed, the scope and style of The Secret Agent novel (not to mention the time structure) more naturally lends itself to cinema than the stage. Even Conrad’s play suggested cinematic potential: Alfred Hitchcock – whose eventual mood, style and irony would make him one of the most Conradian of film auteurs – was among the spectators at the Ambassadors in 1922. According to Daniel Spoto, Conrad’s play (more than the novel) made such a positive impression on the young Hitchcock that it was the creative impetus behind his own adaptation of the novel as Sabotage in 1936 (see Spoto, 1983, 68–9). To lay such great claims on the generic and thematic intertextuality of Conrad’s play can only be done with the benefit of hindsight. But it is, to a degree, evident in the critical reception of the play. Many reviewers were upset that The Secret Agent was not a well-made play. The Reynolds’s Newspaper was annoyed that “the tale is told in snapshots”


(Hand, 2001b, 44) and when the review in the Observer states that there is “no unity in the play” (Hand, 2001b, 41), it is overtly attacking the play for lacking the kind of aesthetic discipline exercised in One Day More, but it is also a statement that can be interpreted as suggesting the undisciplined eclecticism of the work. More explicitly, the Sunday Times found the mixing of styles in the play literally sickening: Now, no one short of a genius could make such a narrative either sweet or acceptable, and when the tale is unfolded, partly with realistic methods and partly with old-time melodramatic touches, it loses whatever distinction it had in the novel and becomes almost nauseous. (Hand, 2001b, 49) The offence that this causes the reviewer is remarkable, but it confirms both Conrad’s initial fears and his eventual avowed intentions. Perhaps the best way to describe the play is as, in the words of Conrad himself, “excessively Conradian” (Ryf, 1972, 58). The reviewer in the Era concurs: It has the fascination of the Conrad novel, indeed, we felt on leaving the theatre more as if we had read a Conrad novel than seen a Conrad play. It is peopled with the queer, unusual, realistic characters, has the same mysterious, exciting, inevitable happenings, the wonderful atmosphere, the beautiful simplicity. (Hand, 2001b, 53) Such reviews notwithstanding, the play could not survive beyond ten performances.22 To conclude, Christopher Hampton celebrates Conrad’s adaptation: It’s not surprising that Conrad’s play failed in the climate of the twenties; it was considerably ahead of its time in every respect but the technical.23 The “technical” aspect reminds us of the problem Conrad had with Laughing Anne, but in the case of The Secret Agent the technical issue is primarily caused by the straightening of the time structure and the general dramatic pace of the play (where the action should move swiftly but is jarring in the real time of the stage). It would, however, have been no small achievement to adapt the intricate – and confusing – time system of the novel into dramatic form. Although an English novelist cum dramatist like J. B. Priestley wrote some groundbreaking


plays which address and exploit the problems of time in a conscious attempt to, in Supriya Sengupta’s words, give the “audience a vital dramatic experience” (Sengupta, 1996, 174), these were not written until the 1930s and none of them were adaptations. But the issues, themes and stylistic aspects of the work explain why Hampton sees the play as being “ahead of its time”. Even during the week of the premiere the radical nature of the play was recognised and celebrated by Arnold Bennett who wrote to J. B. Pinker on 8 November 1922: The play is certainly the best I have seen for a very, very long time, and by a long way the best. It is highly distinguished. Twenty years will pass before such a play can possibly hope to have a success in London. London is fed on pap, and dishonest pap at that. I should think that on the continent the thing ought to have a very considerable success. It is, artistically, a most disturbing play, for the reason that it shows up, in a way that nothing but a first-rate work of art can do, the superlative fatuity, futility, infantility, and falsity of even the respectable better-than-average English plays that we talk seriously about in this here city. (Bennett, 1966, 317) According to Bennett, not only is the work ahead of its time, but it is marred by being performed in the wrong environment. Bennett condemns the English theatre scene in comparison to the rest of a more enlightened Europe. For as Conrad claims of the adaptation: “in its innermost quality it is as Conradian as anything I have ever written” (Ryf, 1972, 59). The adaptation of The Secret Agent remains a fascinating episode in the life and work of Conrad and the play is, in its own right, a compulsive experience which the English stage of the early 1920s was not ready to receive.

6 Conclusion: A Terribly Searching Thing

It is all too easy to pull Conrad’s plays apart. In fact, it is a traditional sport that begins with the theatre critics who sharpened their pens with acerbic delight at the prospect of a great “man of letters” straying into their domain of the London stage. This attitude can subsequently be traced through John Galsworthy publishing, in the year of Conrad’s death appropriately enough, what amounts to a depressing obituary of Conrad’s drama, a lead followed by generations of literary critics. There are problems with his plays: as an adaptation a play like The Secret Agent is perhaps overly loyal to the original novel and yet the greatness and ingenuity of the source is compromised by the play’s strict chronological linearity. Some of Conrad’s suggestions for Victory may attempt to reconstruct the complexity of the novel but, as Neill R. Joy, suggests, they present “psychoneurotic intricacies (that) would tax a master dramatist” (Joy, 2003, 213). Some of Conrad’s dialogue is possibly afflicted with the fault that in 1923 Shaw locates as a redeemable but stubbornly peculiar fault of many self-adapting novelists: “there is a literary language which is perfectly intelligible to the eye, yet utterly unintelligible to the ear even when it is easily speakable by the mouth” (James, 1949, 765). But Conrad had his defenders and we should not forget that many of the theatre reviews were not as thoroughly negative as they are usually assumed to be (including by Conrad). Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett and leading adapters of our own time like Christopher Hampton have recognised the innovative quality of Conrad’s plays but were also not surprised that the British theatre context contemporary with Conrad stifled them out of existence. As Alison Wheatley argues: Early distaste for his innovative dramaturgy can be explained by a contemporary preference for the well-made play. However, the 165


continued critical neglect of Conrad’s three plays is less easily explained since, in all three, he not only experiments with genre, transforming his own story or novel into drama, but stretches theatrical conventions, mirroring characters’ sometimes unconventional attitudes towards social standards and boundaries, and giving his plays characteristics of modern absurdist drama that present-day audiences more readily accept. (Wheatley, 1999, 1) It is to be hoped that Wheatley’s robust defence of the Conrad plays signals the way forward. Regarding Wheatley’s comment that Conrad’s plays are proto-absurdist, we must concur but can extend matters further: as a whole, Conrad’s plays are extremely eclectic and intertextual. We have seen Conrad’s scorn for certain figures in the history of world drama that are generally perceived as being of monumental importance, such as Ibsen and the realist stage, or Maeterlinck and Symbolist theatre. But Conrad is ambivalent: he is disparaging towards Grand-Guignol and the way it “destroyed the imagination” (Allen, 1967, 86), yet the prospect of a practical British experiment in this quintessential form of French popular theatre makes Conrad feverishly run to his desk and write his own dramatic experiment in Grand-Guignol. Moreover, it is clear that Conrad assimilates, appropriates and reflects major developments and tensions in modern drama in his modest body of ambitious plays. In the mood and orchestration of One Day More we see thematic features of Symbolism and technical evocations reminiscent of Impressionism and Expressionism. In Laughing Anne and The Secret Agent we witness a struggle between the forms of melodrama, Grand-Guignol and Expressionism. In The Secret Agent we also find a thematic manifestation of the clash of political and social ideology and the depiction of matrimonial collapse, themes that have been seen in Ibsen and Strindberg and will reverberate in Ernst Toller, Jean-Paul Sartre and beyond. Certainly, Conrad was not dictated to by fashion: he wrote the type of plays that he wanted to write and he was generally resistant to patronising or pandering to the audience. The fact that Henry James never did this – and his plays were an unmitigated failure – is best illustrated by his statement on the methodology of the dramatist: “your maximum of refinement must meet the minimum of intelligence of the audience . . . the intelligence, in other words, of the biggest ass it may conceivably contain” (James, 1949, 52). Conrad did not fall into this trap with the result that the plays he did write were too original and disturbing for many people. Perhaps this makes Conrad’s plays excitingly unorthodox, or maybe George Bernard Shaw’s statement

Conclusion 167

that “those who start half revolutions dig their own graves” (Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties Volume 1, 195) can be cruelly, but fairly, applied to Conrad’s drama. Either way, the dramatic works of Conrad are far more interesting than the traditional accounts of literary and theatrical history have ever allowed them to be. In The Tragic Muse (1890) Henry James accounts for the need for change in the contemporary theatre, and highlights the difficulties that will have to be surmounted, when he writes that “Today we are so infinitely more reflective and complicated and diffuse” (James, 1978, 51). James sums up a period where creating had become a process as important as creation: the principles of artistic, self-contained completion and perfection are rejected in a broader acceptance of fragmentation and variation as a reflection of the modern consciousness. This ties in Theodor W. Adorno’s view of Modernism as art “groping for objectivity in a framework of open-endedness and insecurity” (Osborne, 1989, 38). In other words, modern existence is seen as particularly precarious and lacking in closure; and so art attempts to devise ways of “capturing” this essence, despite the fact that this essence is impossible to catch. We could argue that adaptation is another facet of this mood as it is a process that denies texts a sense of “completeness” inasmuch as it forces existing fiction to be challenged textually and generically. By demonstrating that a text can be “exploded” we are reminded that there is a lack of stability, and interpretation is heterogeneous. In discussing the concept and practice of adaptation, Arrigo Subiotto identifies it as a central process in modern culture whereby writers as diverse as Bertolt Brecht or T. S. Eliot are aware that “the writer can find his own identity and meaning only through an active relationship with the past” (Subiotto, 1975, 191). If this is applied to Conrad’s self-adapted plays we see that the “active relationship” is very personal. Conrad is simultaneously the producer of a past work as well as its subsequent adaptation. It reads like an intriguing conceit, curiously schizophrenic, and as ironic as any in Conrad’s oeuvre: a 1920s playwright called Joseph Conrad tackles a classic of Edwardian fiction, written by the same man. Moreover, Subiotto’s notion that a writer is only able to find his own “identity and meaning” through “an active relationship with the past” becomes especially poignant in Conrad’s instance if we accept that Conrad was attempting to tie up the loose ends of his career or desperately attempting to rejuvenate his creativity. Through adaptation, Conrad created another version of the selected stories. The notion of “doubling” is one of Conrad’s favourite thematic devices from his earliest fiction (Hampson, 1996, 145–6) and his


adaptations are a curious generic realisation of this whereby Conrad produces scripts that are doppelgängers inhabiting another media. At times the effect on Conrad is just as uncanny. In Thomas Moult’s “Joseph Conrad as Playwright”, the Conrad of 1922 has not forgotten the horror he discovered when he wrote the play in 1919: “The greatest difficulty I found,” he has lately stated in connection with the production at the Ambassadors Theatre, “was to strip the novel of the verbal clothing. Indeed, I had to remove the idea of the novel entirely from my mind, and when I succeeded in reducing it to the bare bones of the plot I was astounded by the horror of the original idea.” (Moult, 1922, 65–6) By attempting to find in his past works a “meaningful connection” (Subiotto, 1975, 192) with his own creative present, Conrad explodes his existing texts and brutally demonstrates their instability in what proves to a reflection of modern culture and consciousness. The astounding horror that this causes is “not far short of a Kurtzian epiphany at a creative heart of darkness” (Hand, 2000a, 64). In that moment of horror, the adaptation of fiction became a brutal form of self-analysis in which Conrad was obliged to face, and unravel, the machinations and meanings of his work and creativity: self-adaptation for Conrad was a simultaneous process of reconstruction and deconstruction.

Notes

Introduction 1. Although the phrase “New Woman” was coined in 1894 (see Chothia, 1998, x), the figure of the emancipated woman had already been emerging on the European stage as early as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). In the Britain of the 1890s, plays such as George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) challenged not only the sentimental and melodramatic representation of woman, but also the anti-New Woman plays that, in the words of Chothia, made “sport with the notion of girls seeking emancipation” (Chothia, 1998, x). Indeed, Chothia reveals that plays such as Sidney Grundy’s The New Woman (1894) and Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) portray emancipated women as “deeply confused, predatory, aspiring to a relationship of the spirit but vulnerable to the needs of the flesh and driven by the desire for male protection” (Chothia, 1998, xii). However, by the time Conrad writes One Day More, “the account of female sexuality had changed radically” (Chothia, 1998, xii) thanks to the New Drama and Drama of Ideas of the Edwardian stage, especially in this era of Shaw’s plays.

1 A jolly cold world: An introduction to the theatre of Joseph Conrad 1. Henry James’s theatrical career is well documented (James, 1949; Kossmann, 1969). 2. The theatrical experiences of Thomas Hardy – whose dramatic experiments also included three self-adaptations – are probably most akin to that of Conrad. For accounts of Thomas Hardy and self-adaptation see Roberts, 1950 and Hand, 1994. 3. A detailed discussion of Polish theatre during Joseph Conrad’s lifetime is forthcoming (Hand, 2005a). 4. Now habitually used as a pejorative term, “melodrama” is a word that encompasses, and has been applied to, a wide variety of theatrical genres. Strictly speaking, melodrama – derived from the Greek words melos (song) and drama (action) – is a form of theatre that emerged in early nineteenth-century French theatre wherein music gives emotional emphasis to stage action. But the word has taken on disparate connotations. David Mayer explains that some “definitions proceed from melodrama’s recurring structural characteristics. Other definitions, disagreeing, follow from the alleged psychological or social or emotional character or effects of these plays” (Mayer, 1980, 108). Since the early twentieth -century, and particularly since the First World War, “melodrama” has been increasingly used as a derogatory term to the extent that in our time it is still frequently used as an insult. A melodrama is generally 169

170 Notes seen as a play that is quaintly sentimental in mood and moralising in message, and predictably adheres to a structural formula, including the inevitable use of the happy ending. Peter Brooks sums up some of the quintessential features of melodrama: (Melodrama presents) an intense emotional and ethical drama based on the manichaeistic struggle of good and evil, a world where what one lives for and by is seen in terms of, and as determined by, the most fundamental psychic relations and cosmic ethical forces. The polorization of good and evil works toward revealing their presence and operation as real forces in the world. Their conflict suggests the need to recognize and confront evil, to combat and expel it, to purge the social order. Man is seen to be, and must recognize himself to be, playing on a theatre that is the point of juncture, and of clash, of imperatives beyond himself that are non-mediated and irreducible. (Brooks, 1995, 12–13) 5. When Alexandre Dumas fils adapted his 1848 novel La Dame aux camélias into a stage play in 1852, the play enjoyed extraordinary success throughout the theatres of Europe – not least when rapidly adapted into Verdi’s opera La Traviata (1853) – and became a paradigm of late nineteenth-century melodrama. Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) and his aesthetic “successor” Victorien Sardou (1831–1908) were prolific playwrights who adhered unflinchingly to a rigorous formula of sentiment, plot construction and stagecraft. 6. Like melodrama, the terms “Realism” and “Naturalism” are particularly problematic when it comes to definition, not least because of their wide usage across a variety of arts. In the context of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury theatre, they are not only frequently used synonymously but can also be interpreted as possessing specific characteristics and resonance. An enlightening discussion of the terms can be found in Innes (2000, 3–6). 7. Francisque Sarcey (1827–99), a prominent French theatre critic, advocated the paramount importance of technical perfection in dramatic writing. 8. In 1919, Conrad will describe Basil Macdonald Hastings, the playwright who adapted Victory, as a “mechanic” (CL6, 134). 9. One is reminded how book illustrators can dilute a novelist’s intentions: Conrad felt that Dudley Hardy had made clowns of some of the characters in the illustrations for The Rescue (Karl, 1979, 823). 10. Curiously, a renowned novelist has a key role in the history of stage censorship in Britain: the 1737 Theatrical Licensing Act was introduced in reaction to Henry Fielding’s scathing satire The Historical Register for 1736. This implementation of censorship under the Lord Chamberlain effectively ended Fielding’s career as a playwright and led him to become a novelist. It could be argued that this legal intervention was a catastrophe for the English stage but ultimately a triumph for the novel. 11. We will look at the Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) in the subsequent chapter. Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) was an Italian dramatist, novelist and poet who explored the techniques of Naturalism and Symbolism, and was the foremost figure in the Italian adoption of Decadent literature.

Notes 171

2 A tragedy in modern life: One Day More 1. An analysis of Les Crutchfield’s radio adaptation of “Typhoon” (28 July 1947) for the drama series Escape (CBS) – together with an appraisal of the original short story’s dramatic parameters – is forthcoming (Hand, 2005b). 2. “To-morrow” appears a few years after H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine: An Invention (1895), and although Hagberd may be trapped in the future he is no Wellsian “Time Traveller”, even if both are perceived by some as delusional within their respective fictions. 3. One can imagine Harry adhering to Casanova’s statement: “whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent” (Casanova, 1894, xxxvii). 4. Valeria Petrocchi regards the blind theme as an allusion to King Lear with Bessie as Conrad’s Cordelia (Petrocchi, 1998, 48–9). 5. Alison Wheatley draws our attention to the fact that in revising the script itself, Conrad alters the descriptions of Carvil’s voice in the stage directions to reduce “the possibly over-emphatic or even grotesque quality of sound in order to avoid creating a melodramatic, stylized villain” (Wheatley, 1999, 13). 6. The play was not produced by Beerbohm Tree himself but was produced by his acquaintance George R. Foss (1859–1938) a highly experienced managerproducer closely associated with Terry’s Theatre. The performers included Constance Collier (1878–1955) as Bessie, a notable leading actress in the Beerbohm Tree stable who had a well-established international career by the time of One Day More. She would go on to play the lead in Beerbohm Tree’s production of the stage adaptation of George du Maurier’s Trilby in 1906, and in 1907 she took the female lead in Antony and Cleopatra at His Majesty’s Theatre and on tour in Berlin. In a curious irony of the stage, the part of Harry Hagberd was played by Collier’s real-life husband Julian L’Estrange (1878–1918) who sandwiched his appearance in One Day More with the roles of Sebastian in The Tempest (January 1905), Borachioa in Much Ado About Nothing (March 1905) and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (October 1905). The role of Captain Hagberd was played by William Farren (1853–1937), an actor who had debuted in 1880 but made a name for himself as a character actor playing older male roles and would go on to play Sir Patrick Cullen in the 1908 production of Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906). 7. In fact, Conrad’s positive relationship with Shaw over One Day More seems to be at odds with Leon Hugo’s assertion that Conrad was generally “mightily affronted by Shaw’s manner” (Hugo, 1999, 107). Hugo goes on to claim that the “dour Pole would not be mollified and thenceforth, whenever he mentioned Shaw in his letters, he did so sarcastically” (ibid.). 8. Max Beerbohm’s review of One Day More, reprinted in Around Theatres (1953), first appeared in the Saturday Review (4 July 1905).

3 A grim and weird play: Basil Macdonald Hastings’s Victory 1. See Joy, 2003, 186, 220n. 2. The use of dramatic shadows was a central principle in the premiere of Laughing Anne (June 2000), and was a performance concept that drew much

172 Notes of its inspiration and justification from Victory: “(In our production of Laughing Anne) we have embraced with delight the melodramatic aspects of the play in characterisation, action (such as double-takes on exit) and in the heightened theatricality of music and light. Some of the latter moments are so heightened they even push melodrama into the Expressionistic. Victory gave ideas for this aspect of the production. In the novel we read of a candle that throws Ricardo’s ‘monstrous black shadow on the wall’ (263) and soon afterwards: One of Ricardo’s hands, reposing palm upwards on his folded legs, made a swift thrusting gesture, repeated by the enormous darting shadow of an arm very low on the wall. It broke the spell of perfect stillness in the room. (273)

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

Once again Conrad presents us with monstrous shadows, but there is also the sense of ‘stillness’ here. Such shifts from tableau to violent action are recurrent in the production” (Hand, 2002, 59). Mallios helpfully sums up the range of interpretations of the names “Alma” and “Lena” (Mallios, 2003, 160). Regarding “Lena”, Mallios not only emphasises the link – made explicit in the novel (88) – with Magdalen but also suggests that there is a “hint of ‘Helen’ of Troy” (Mallios, 2003, 160). We might also add that there is another appropriate classical allusion: the name Lena echoes “Leda”, the mother of Helen and tragic object/victim of Zeus’s violent desire. For a thorough account and analysis of the first screen adaptation of Conrad, see Hand (2003). The Victory films to emerge from this process include the Polish Niebezpieczny raj (Ryszard Ordynski, 1930), the French Dans une île perdue (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1930), the German Tropennächte (Leo Mittler, 1931), and the Swedish Farornas paradis (Rune Carlsten, 1931). Another American television version was similarly pioneering: the Victory on The Art Carney Show in 1960 is cited by Knowles and Moore as “the first television adaptation of Conrad to be made in colour” (Knowles and Moore, 2001, 437). The principal adaptations of Conrad in American “old-time” radio are Howard Koch and Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness (Mercury Theater on the Air, 6 November 1938); Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness (a completely different version for This Is My Best, 13 March 1945); Escape’s “Typhoon” (28 July 1947); Escape’s “The Brute” (11 April 1948); NBC University Theater’s Lord Jim (3 October 1948); NBC University Theater’s Heart of Darkness (15 May 1949); and NBC University Theater’s Victory (16 February 1950). For a more detailed discussion of Conrad on radio, readers are directed to Hand, Richard J. “Escape with Joseph Conrad! The Adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Fiction on American Old-Time Radio” forthcoming in Conradiana. The correspondence receives detailed analysis in Joy, 2003. To this list we should include Antony and Cleopatra: there is certainly a similarity between the two, yet crucially separate, deaths of the protagonists. Like the “sharp teeth” (V.2.306) of Cleopatra’s asp, Lena meets her end with “the very sting of death” (405) and just as Cleopatra becomes “fire and air” (V.2.291), Lena is “relieved at once of an intolerable weight” (407). Both women succeed in a self-constructed victory: Cleopatra demands her symbols of power – “Give me my robe, put on my crown” (V.2.282) – just as Lena demands the dagger – her

Notes 173 “symbol of . . . victory” – declaring, “Give it to me . . . It’s mine” (405). Despite the finality and tragedy of premature death, the women succeed, at the end, in becoming “Immortal” (V.2.283) and securing a triumphant “victory over death” (406); Cleopatra destined to become a legend – “I am marble-constant” (V.2.239) – and Lena taking on “the majestic pallor and immobility of marble” (406). After all, to Lena, death “is but a trifle” (CL5, 655). In stark contrast are the men: Antony’s suicide is botched and his long and painful death is not characterised by triumphant, self-constructed victory, but pragmatic advice and political concern. Neither is Heyst’s suicide the stuff of victorious legend, but the depths of self-defeating despair. 10. The Russian Fador “Jo-Jo” Jeftichew (1868–1903) and Polish Stephan Bibrowsky (1890–1932) were both afflicted with the congenital condition called hypertrichosia which results in excessive hirsuteness covering the entire body with the exception of the palms and soles of the feet. 11. Robert Hampson argues that “if the logic of fetishism involves the overvaluation of objects, then fetishism recurs throughout the novel” (Hampson, 2000, 157).

4 A play of unbearable horror: Laughing Anne 1. Even the titles share a genesis of sorts: Victory was, of course, the “last word” (v) that Conrad wrote on completing the novel. In May 1912, Conrad told Pinker he was working on a short story called “Dollars”, which evolved not into “Because of the Dollars” but Victory, although “Dollars” was also considered, at one stage, as a possible title for “Because of the Dollars”. 2. Laughing Anne was first directed by Richard J. Hand with a cast and crew of theatre arts students at the University of Glamorgan. The play was premiered on 15 June 2000 at the Teatr Y Bont at the University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, Wales after which the production toured the United Kingdom before being presented at the International Conrad Conference, Texas Tech University, August 2000. Directing a neglected play was not without its challenges. Although for Conrad scholars the issues, themes and underlying story may be familiar, for young students of theatre arts, a play such as Laughing Anne emerges from a different era and one that has been marginalised in the hegemonic account of European theatre history – the “Ibsen to Brecht” approach – given in most university curricula. For two detailed accounts (including photographic documentation) of the challenges and practical task of producing the premiere of Laughing Anne readers may wish to consult Hand, 2001a; and Hand, 2002, ii, 43–62. 3. This is all the more powerful for the fact that we only encounter Mrs Davidson in “Because of the Dollars”: as John Batchelor stresses, “Davidson in Victory shows no signs of being married” (Conrad, 1986, 416n) which suggests that the events of Victory occur either before Davidson was married or, more likely, after the failure of his marriage. 4. For discussions of Conrad in relation to Rider Haggard and imperialist adventure fiction, readers are directed to White (1993) and Dryden (1999, 2000).

174 Notes 5. The Japanese film Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1951) features four wildly conflicting accounts of the same violent incident. 6. Professor Ted Billy mentioned this in his paper on “ ‘The Lagoon’ and ‘Karain’ ” at the International Conference of Joseph Conrad Scholars, Texas Tech University, 9 August 2000. 7. A British screen melodrama entitled Laughing Anne was released in 1953, adapted by Pamela Bower, directed by Herbert Wilcox and starring Margaret Lockwood and Wendell Corey. The story is much embellished with, for example, the Man Without Hands being transformed into Anne’s lover Nobby Clark (Ronald Shiner), a former boxer horribly and ironically mutilated when a large mirror falls on him. Although the Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide 2000 is typical in dismissing the film as “cheap and turgid . . . hilariously bad . . .” (Walker, 1999, 475), this “B-movie” is not devoid of interest for Conrad scholars: the film includes a prologue scene in which Joseph Conrad (Robert Harris), dressed as a sea captain, starts to recount his memories of Laughing Anne which flow into the long flashback that dominates the film. There are also some interesting scenes with Anne on board Davidson’s ship. To fulfil the generic expectations of this 1950s romantic melodrama, Anne and Davidson fall in love: what is more surprising is that Davidson is initially “stirred” into passion only when Anne dresses up in a sailor’s uniform. 8. Alison E. Wheatley provides a contextualisation of Galsworthy’s Bridge of Galata reference: she reminds the reader that Mark Twain visited the same Bridge and in The Innocents Abroad (1869) speaks of the “human monsters” to be found there and associates this with Galsworthy’s description of Conrad’s “monster without hands” (Wheatley, 2002, 70). The phrase, we can add, is curiously apt in relation to the Grand-Guignol which Hand and Wilson describe as pushing “the human subject into monstrosity” in order to create “le monstre humain” (Hand and Wilson, 2002, x). 9. Prince Henry’s dismissive remarks on the mutilation of the Missionary bring to mind the Black Knight (John Cleese) in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975). 10. Giving that, according to Mel Gordon, the tour ended in “financial disaster” (Gordon, 1988, 35) for the company it would seem that Conrad was not alone in not seeing the production. 11. Conrad would have seen five one-act plays at the Little Theatre on 2 December 1920: G-H-Q Love a play by Sewell Collins from the French of Pierre Rehm; The Medium a horror play by Pierre Mille and Cilia de Vylars, starring Sybil Thorndike; What Did Her Husband Say? a comedy by H. F. Maltby; The Hand of Death a horror drama by André de Lorde and Alfred Binet; and Oh, Hell!!! a satirical “revuette” by Reginald Arkell and Russell Thorndike. The Hand of Death – another Sybil Thorndike vehicle and the play that received the most extensive press coverage in the Little Theatre’s first Grand-Guignol season – was an English translation of de Lorde and Binet’s L’Horrible Expérience (1909), a popular play from the original Grand-Guignol repertoire. In the play, a doctor, devastated by the death of his daughter, uses electricity in an attempt to resurrect her corpse. At the climax of the play, the daughter’s hand begins to move and clasps the doctor by the throat and strangles him to death. It is a masterpiece of suspense drama including

Notes 175

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

paradigmatic examples of the techniques and strategies of performance horror. The focus of terror is the trembling hand as it comes to life, an effect that will be repeated in Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale who himself had been involved in the Grand-Guignol at the Little Theatre. For Conrad, the focus of terror is on the handless stumps of the Man Without Hands: it is as if Conrad saw in the staging of The Hand of Death the potential for the adaptation of his handless horror. For Valeria Petrocchi, Laughing Anne is a modern “morality play” (Petrocchi, 1998, 70) and although she does not mention Grand-Guignol, L’Horrible Expérience could also be seen as an example of the morality play within the Grand-Guignol: the doctor is punished for meddling with the forces of life and death, just as the Man Without Hands receives his just desserts for robbery and murder. Central to L’Horrible Expérience and Laughing Anne are the sole female characters (played by Sybil Thorndike in The Hand of Death), both objects of desire, both killed and both conduits for a denouement of moral justice. This is why the review of Victory in the Morning Post (27 March 1919) – nearly 18 months before the opening of the Grand-Guignol at the Little Theatre – bewails the violence of the play which leaves several characters “weltering in their gore” with the observation that “assuming that nerves are a fair objective in the theatre it is best to avoid long attacks on them, as the Grand Guignol well knows”. The term “Grand-Guignol” has a complex etymology but its most basic allusion is to the “Guignol” (the French “Punch and Judy”) and so one meaning of the theatre’s name is “Punch and Judy for Adults”. This finds a curious parallel in Conrad’s play when, in a remarkable utterance, Davidson himself describes the story that is beginning to envelop him as a “vile sort of fairy tale” (24). Translated as The Ultimate Torture and The Torture Garden respectively in Hand and Wilson, 2002, 93–108, 195–230. This argument can be developed further if the reader compares this section of the short story with Hand and Wilson’s accounts of Grand-Guignol performance practice (see Hand and Wilson, 2000, 256–68; 2002, 33–51). For a thorough account of Maurice Tourneur and the Grand-Guignol, readers should consult Hand, 2003, 52–64. Translated as The Kiss of Blood in Hand and Wilson, 2002, 244–64. Translated as The Laboratory of Hallucinations in Gordon, 1988, 142–88.

5 A most disturbing play: The Secret Agent 1. For further details of the production and the collected theatre reviews of The Secret Agent, see Hand (2001b). 2. Conrad’s set designs are reproduced in Lees, 1976, 253–6. 3. The fact that Conrad “affectionately” (2) dedicates the novel to H. G. Wells is ironic in this respect. Though we should not doubt the sincerity of the dedication, Conrad has a very different worldview to Wells. In 1905, Conrad ridicules the “stodgy” Victorian hangover of the Fabian Idealism of Wells and George Bernard Shaw – “a dull world of perfected municipalities and WC’s sans peur et sans reproche” – preferring to put his “faith in the power of folly” (CL3, 217–18).

176 Notes 4. Conrad’s first impressions on arrival in London had an uncanny quality. In “Poland Revisited” (1915) he recalls how the city was characterised by “freakishly sombre phantasy” (Notes on Life and Letters, 152). 5. This is a remarkable achievement, coming as it does fifteen years before that other great urban text and contender for the title of “the modern novel” James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). 6. See also CL3, 491. 7. Interestingly, Conrad found himself in a similar state of mind during the writing of the novel, feeling like “a caged squirrel running in his wheel – tired out in the evening and no progress made” (CL3, 349–50). 8. Once again, this is an analogy that can be found in Conrad’s personal experience. According to Macdonald Hastings, Conrad expressed interest in playwriting and the possible rewards it may offer by saying that for 20 years he had been “performing on a tightrope – without a net” (Hastings, 1990, 223). 9. For a discussion of the nationality of Mr Vladimir see Sherry (1971, 325–6). 10. William Harcourt died in 1904 and was still in people’s minds in 1907, but was obviously a figure of history by the time of the author’s note and the writing of the play in 1920. 11. Christopher Hampton’s The Secret Agent was released in 1996. Despite its quality production values including an original score by Philip Glass and a high-profile cast – Bob Hoskins (Verloc), Patricia Arquette (Winnie), Gerard Depardieu (Ossipon) and an uncredited Robin Williams (Professor) – the film did not enjoy great success and did not receive a cinema release in the United Kingdom. The film may have suffered – especially in Britain – because of the BBC serialisation of the novel (adapted by Dusty Hughes and directed by David Drury with David Suchet in the role of Verloc) which was broadcast in 1992 while Hampton’s version was in production. Although Conrad’s The Secret Agent may not have been as popular a source for screen adaptation as Victory, it enjoyed notable dramatisations such as Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936) and French television’s L’Agent secret (Marcel Camus, 1981). The close proximity of the Hampton and BBC versions was indeed unfortunate, but is nonetheless interesting for the cultural trend it reflects: although neither adaptation is completely satisfactory, the perceived appeal of the novel for the contemporary audience is immediately evident. Hampton’s film is also known by the alternative title of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a title which foregrounds the literariness of the work and emphasises its “classic” status. Although the story’s themes, irony and brutality were deemed relevant for a 1990s audience, simultaneously its consciously literary moniker attempts to locate the work within the trend of respectful adaptations of classic English literature. For a critical evaluation of Hampton’s adaptation see Hand (2000b). 12. Unpublished letter to Richard J. Hand, 17 July 1991. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Although this is a convincing argument, there is an equally compelling argument to see Stevie as less the dramatic focus of the work than an innocent victim of the weaknesses or wilful machinations of others: regarded like this Stevie finds Shakespearean antecedents in Mamillius (The Winter’s Tale) or Gloucester (King Lear). Valeria Petrocchi finds another Shakespearean tragedy

Notes 177

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

at the heart of the drama when she interprets Winnie’s murder of Verloc as an ironic inversion of Othello killing Desdemona (Petrocchi, 1998, 53). Likewise, there is a quality of Lady Macbeth to Winnie, especially when described as like a “sleep-walker” (162) in the play. Interestingly, during the writing of the play in November 1919, Conrad was interested in Catherine Willard taking the role of Winnie: at the time she was playing Lady Macbeth at the Old Vic, and at his home, Conrad went “over the part of Lady Macbeth twice with her” (CL6, 534) and concluded that she had “the physique for Mrs Verloc”. Ultimately, Benrimo would cast Miriam Lewes in the role. In Zola’s novel, Thérèse’s paralysed mother-in-law watches the suicide pact of the sadomasochistic Thérèse and her new husband with delight in her eyes, although to the world this will be, in a forerunner to The Secret Agent, another impenetrable mystery of madness and despair. In Zola’s play, once the suicide is complete, the mother-in-law recovers from her state of complete physical helplessness, leaping to her feet to proclaim the triumph of moral justice. Interestingly, the Sunday Times located Irving earlier in Miriam Lewes’s performance: “In the first act she might have strayed out of the Lyceum [Henry Irving’s theatre], so obvious was her sense for melodrama. In the last act, she rose superbly to the heights of tragedy” (Hand, 2001b, 49). Conrad rejected Dostoievsky’s work, seeing his characters as “damned souls knocking themselves about in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions” (Jefferson, 1982, 320). The urgency of Conrad’s missive reflects that he was unhappy with how the play was being received. It also fulfilled his worst fears during the rehearsals (he did not attend any of the performances) when he lamented that the play “has been marvellously vulgarised” adding that it is not so much the actors’ fault than their “destiny” (Garnett, 1927, 316–17). Conrad knew how integral the actors would be to the success of the play. In the remarkable letter to Frank Vernon (CL6, 533–5) in which Conrad explains and justifies his structuring of the play, he admits that it is the actors’ “interpretation that will make the whole thing either interesting or wearisome” (CL6, 534). Although it may have been to Conrad’s chagrin, the Grand-Guignolian aspect to the play was received positively from some influential quarters. The leading theatre critic J. T. Grein, writing for the Illustrated London News, praised Russell Thorndike’s “Grand Guignol spasms in the part of the cowardly agent” (Hand, 2001b, 58) and the Stage celebrated Thorndike’s “vividly Grand Guignolesque final exit” (Hand, 2001b, 56–7). As we saw in the chapter on One Day More, however, Alison E. Wheatley identifies Bessie’s similar transformation of mood as both a proto-absurdist and conventionally melodramatic (Wheatley, 1999, 14). A similar juxtaposition of laughter and despair has been used by post-Brechtian political dramatists such as Edward Bond for disturbing effect in, for example, Jackets (1990). With the exception of the Polish production translated and championed by Bruno Winawer in Cracow in 1923, Conrad’s play has received few notable revivals. Unpublished letter to Richard J. Hand, 17 July 1991.

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Bibliography 183 Maeterlinck, Maurice, Oeuvres (3 volumes) (Paris: Bibliothèque Complexe, 1999). ——, The Treasure of the Humble (London: George Allen, 1908). Mallios, Peter Lancelot, “Declaring Victory: Conrad’s Poetics of Democracy”, Conradiana 32:1 (Fall 2003), 145–83. Mayer, David (ed.), Henry Irving and The Bells: Irving’s Personal Copy of the Script (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). Mégroz, R. L., Joseph Conrad’s Mind and Method (London: Faber, 1931). Meyer, Bernard C., Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytical Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). Meyers, Jeffrey, Joseph Conrad (London: John Murray, 1991). Miller, Arthur, Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1981). Milosz, Czeslaw, The History of Polish Literature (Second Edition) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Mirbeau, Octave, The Torture Garden (San Francisco: Re-Search Publications, 1989). Moore, Gene M., “In Praise of Infidelity: An Introduction” in Gene M. Moore (ed.) Conrad on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–15. Moser, Thomas, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). Moult, Thomas C., “Joseph Conrad as Playwright”, Bookman’s Journal and Print Collector 7:15 (December 1922), 65–6. Nadelhaft, Ruth, Feminist Readings: Joseph Conrad (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). Naipaul, V. S., The Return of Eva Perón (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Najder, Zdzislaw, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). O’Casey, Sean, Seven Plays: A Students’ Edition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). O’Neill, Eugene, Complete Plays: 1913–20 (New York: Library of America, 1989). ——, The Hairy Ape in Heath Anthology of American Literature Volume 2 (Second Edition) (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1994), 1330–63. ——, The Iceman Cometh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947). O’Sullivan, Tim, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery and John Fiske, Key Concepts in Communications and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994). Osborne, Peter, “Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of a ‘Postmodern’ Art” in Andrew Benjamim (ed.) The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), 23–48. Partington, Wilfred, “Joseph Conrad behind the Scenes”, The Conradian 25:2 (Autumn 2000), 177–84. Peters, John G., Conrad and Impressionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Petrocchi, Valeria, Il Teatro di Joseph Conrad (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche, 1998). Pfister, Manfred, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Pierron, Agnès, Le Grand Guignol: Le théâtre des peurs de la belle époque (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995). Pirandello, Luigi, Three Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959). Priestley, J. B., Three Time-Plays: Dangerous Corner; Time and the Conways; I Have Been Here Before (London: Pan, 1947).

184 Bibliography Pugliatti, Paolo, “From Narrative to Drama: Conrad’s Plays as Adaptations” in Keith Carabine (ed.) Joseph Conrad: Critical Assessments Volume III (Mountfield: Helm Information, 1992), 703–17 Purinton, Marjean D., “ ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and Laughing Anne”, Conradiana 34:1–2 (Spring/Summer 2002), 77–94. Raab, Paul (ed.), German Expressionism: The Era of German Expressionism (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974). Reynolds, Ernest, Modern English Drama: A Survey of the Theatre from 1900 (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood, 1974). Richards, Kenneth and Peter Thomson (eds), Nineteenth Century British Theatre (London: Methuen, 1971). Riewald, J. B. (ed.), Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures (London: Allen Lane, 1977). Rimmon-Kenan, Schlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983). Ritchie, J. M. (ed.), German Expressionism: Seven Expressionist Plays (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968). Roberts, Marguerite, Tess in the Theatre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950). Robins, Elizabeth (ed.), Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters (London: Jonathon Cape, 1932). Rowell, George (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1953). Rozik, Eli, The Language of Theatre (Glasgow: Theatre Studies Publications, 1992). Ruppell, Richard, “Joseph Conrad and the Ghost of Oscar Wilde”, The Conradian 23:1 (Spring 1998), 19–36. Rutherford, Jonathan, Forever England: Reflections on Masculinity and Empire (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997). Ryf, Robert S., “Conrad’s Stage Victory”, Modern Drama 7 (1964), 148–60. ——, “The Secret Agent on Stage”, Modern Drama 15.1 (1972), 56–63. Said, Edward W., Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: University of Harvard Press, 1966). ——, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Crime Passionnel (London: Methuen, 1961). ——, Huis Clos (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). ——, Les Mains sales (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Schlueter, June, Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Schumacher, Claude, Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984). Schwarz, Daniel, Conrad: Almayer’s Folly to Under Western Eyes (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980). Scott, George Ryley, A History of Torture (London: Senate Publications, 1995). Sengupta, Supriya, J. B. Priestley: A Study of His Major Novels and Plays ( Jaipur: Printwell, 1996). Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). Shaw, G. B., Complete Works of Bernard Shaw Volume 23: Our Theatres in the Nineties Volume 1 (London: Constable, 1931). ——, Complete Works of Bernard Shaw Volume 24: Our Theatres in the Nineties Volume 2 (London: Constable, 1931).

Bibliography 185 ——, Complete Works of Bernard Shaw Volume 25: Our Theatres in the Nineties Volume 3 (London: Constable, 1931). ——, Shaw on Theatre (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958). Sherry, Norman (ed.), Conrad: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). ——, Conrad’s Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Sinclair, May, Life and Death of Harriett Frean (London: Virago, 1980). Spoto, Daniel, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983). Stallman, R. W., Stephen Crane: A Biography (New York: George Braziller, 1973). Steiner, George, Antigones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). ——, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber, 1961). Strindberg, August, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen, 1982). ——, Plays: 2 (London: Methuen, 1982). ——, Plays: 3 (London: Methuen, 1993). Subiotto, Arrigo, Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptations for the Berliner Ensemble (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1975). Synge, J. M., Plays, Poems, Prose (London: Everyman, 1954). Toller, Ernst, Seven Plays (New York: Liveright, 1934). Tomashevsky, Boris, “Thematics” in L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis (eds) Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 45–85. Turner, Paul, English Literature 1832–1890 Excluding the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Walker, John (ed.), Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide 2000 (Fifteenth Edition) (London: HarperCollins, 1999). Warren, Robert Penn, New and Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1989). Watt, Ian (ed.), Conrad: The Secret Agent (London: Macmillan, 1973). ——, “Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness” in Norman Sherry (ed.) Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration (London: Macmillan, 1976), 37–53. Watts, Cedric, A Preface to Conrad (Second Edition) (London: Longman, 1993). ——, Joseph Conrad: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). ——, Writers and Their Work: Joseph Conrad (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994). Wells, H. G., Experiment in Autobiography, Volume II (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966). ——, The Time Machine (London: Pan, 1953). Wheatley, Alison E., “Conrad’s One Day More: Challenging Social and Dramatic Convention”, The Conradian 24:1 (Spring 1999), 1–17. ——, “Laughing Anne: An Almost Unbearable Spectacle”, Conradiana 34:1–2 (Spring/Summer 2002), 63–76. White, Andrea, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Wilcox, Michael (ed.), Gay Plays Volume Three (London: Methuen, 1988). Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Methuen, 1981). Williams, Raymond, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Winawer, Bruno, The Book of Job: A Satirical Comedy (trans. Joseph Conrad) (London: Dent, 1931). Witkiewicz, S. I., The Witkiewicz Reader (ed. Daniel Gerould) (London: Quartet, 1992).

186 Bibliography Woodfield, James, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1984). Woolf, Virginia, Death of the Moth and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). Zola, Émile, Œuvres complètes: tome XV (Paris: le Circle du livre précieux, 1969). ——, Thérèse Raquin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). ——, Thérèse Raquin: A Play (Bath: Absolute Press, 1989).

Index Absurd, Theatre of the, 1, 51, 160, 166 Achebe, Chinua, 77, 144 Ackerley, J. R., The Prisoners of War, 80 adaptation, essential practices of, 17–18 Adorno, Theodor W., 167 Almayer’s Folly, 17 “Amy Foster”, 23 Antoine, André, 110 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola), 4 Aragny, Jean, Le Baiser de sang, 120, 159 Archer, William, 2, 8, 49 Arrow of Gold, The, 2 Artaud, Antonin, 86, 108 Baines, Jocelyn, 20, 94 Baird, Tadeusz, Jutro, 41 Barnum and Bailey, 79 Barr, Robert, 6 Barrie, J. M., 2, 8, 21, 49 Batchelor, John, 51, 173n Bauche, Henri, Le Cabinet du Dr Caligari, 112 “Because of the Dollars”, see Laughing Anne/“Because of the Dollars” Beckett, Samuel, 37, 38–40, 51 Beerbohm, Max, 2, 3, 16, 165 review of One Day More, 16, 50, 123, 171n Beerbohm Tree, Herbert, 2, 42, 171n Bennett, Arnold, 15, 149, 164 Benrimo, J. Harry, 126, 158 Bernhardt, Sarah, 10, 71–2 Berryman, John, 106 Berthoud, Jacques, 128 Beynon, John, 95–6 Billy, T., 38, 40, 102, 127, 174n Binet, Alfred, L’Horrible Expérience/ The Hand of Death, 116, 174–5n Bond, Edward, Jackets, 177n Bonney, William, 92 Boxer Rebellion, 113

Brecht, Bertolt/Brechtian Epic, 98–9, 158, 159, 160, 167 Mother Courage and her Children, 160–1 Brenton, Howard, Christie in Love, 160 Brighouse, Harold, 17 Brooks, Peter, 3 “Brute, The”, 20, 87, 116 Burton Harrington, Ellen, 128 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (Robert Wiene), 112, 162 Cady, Edwin H., 108 Cannan, Gilbert, 73–4, 84 Carlyle, Thomas, 91, 92 Carton, R. C., Nurse Benson, 72–3 Casanova, Jacques, 30, 171n Casson, Lewis, 109 Cavendish, Constance, 60 censorship, 14–15, 76–7, 80–1, 121, 123, 158 “Because of the Dollars”/Laughing Anne, 15, 120 “The Censor of Plays: An Appreciation”, 15, 50 The Old Women, 121 The Secret Agent, 15 Victory, 76, 80 Cervantes, Miguel de, 69 Chaine, Pierre, Le Jardin des supplices (play), 113, 114 Chance: A Tale in Two Parts, 53 Chaney, Lon, 59, 118 Chaucer, Geoffrey, “The Pardoner’s Tale”, 89 Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard, 37 Uncle Vanya, 90 Collier, Constance, 171n Colvin, Sidney, 21, 49, 75, 126 Conrad, Borys, 12 Conrad, Jessie, 12, 20, 68, 85 copyright, 14 187

188 Index Coward, Noel, 110 Crane, Stephen, 2, 6, 9, 106, 125 The Blood of the Martyr, 107–8, 112, 124 “The Clan of No-Name”, 107 “The Monster”, 119 Crawshay-Williams, E., E. & O. E., 117–18 Cromwell, John, 59, 67–8, 82 Crosby, John, 60, 61 Curle, Richard, 11, 12, 13 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 16, 170n Dante, 26, 33, 40 de Lorde, André, 111 Cabinet du Dr Caligari, Le, 112 Dernière Torture, La, 112, 114, 119 L’Horrible Expérience/The Hand of Death, 116, 174–5n Jardin des supplices, Le, (play), 113, 114 Laboratoire des hallucinations, Le, 120 Système du Docteur Goudron et du Professeur Plume, Le, 118 Old Women, The, 121 Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations, 24 Dostoievsky, 158 drama as art form, 12–13 depersonalising effects of, 14 Drama of Ideas, 11 Drinkwater, John, 21 Dryden, Linda, 103, 173n Du Maurier, George, Trilby, 171n Dumas, Alexandre, La Dame aux camélias, 10, 170n Duse, Eleonora, 10, 72 Eagleton, Terry, 8, 91 El Angel Exterminador (Luis Buñuel), 114 Eliot, T. S., 24, 167 Elizabethan-Jacobean revenge tragedy, 75, 85 English Grand-Guignol, 88, 108–10, 116, 120, 121–2, 157, 166, 174–5n comparison with Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, 120–1 death of, 121–2 English Literary Theatre movement, 7–9

Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna, 55, 82, 128 Ervine, St John, 11 Euripides, 160 Expressionism, 1, 49, 86, 112, 124, 161, 162, 166, 172n “Falk”, 22 Faulkner, William, “A Rose for Emily”, 24 Ford, Ford Madox, 20, 21, 49 Fraser, Gail, 20–1 From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann), 29 Futurism, 85 Galsworthy, John, 2, 11 commentary on Laughing Anne, 103–4, 124, 165 Gaspar the Strong Man/“Gasper Ruiz”, 2, 5 Ghost, The, 6–7, 9, 11, 125 Gibbon, Perceval, 2, 62 Giordano, Umberto, Fedora, 72 Gissing, George, 6 Gordon, Mel, 111 Gospel According to Saint Luke, 32 Grand-Guignol, 1, 67, 85, 86, 88, 103, 108–12, 120–1, 154, 157, 159, 174–5n Granville-Barker, Harley, 11, 15, 22, 49 Grein, J. T., 2, 177n Guerard, Albert J., 54, 61 Haggard, H. Rider, 6, 95–6, 173n Hampson, Robert, 17, 55, 56, 58, 80, 90, 96, 102, 103, 165, 167, 173n, 176n Hampton, Christopher, 103, 144, 145, 146, 163, 165, 176n Hand, Richard J. and Michael Wilson, 111, 112, 114, 121 Hardy, Dudley, 170n Hardy, Thomas, 7, 8, 14, 169n Harkness, Bruce and S. W. Reid, 128 Hastings, Basil Macdonald Conrad’s description as “mechanic”, 170n dramatisation of Victory, 1, 51, 62–5, 73–5

Index 189 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 129 Heart of Darkness, 35, 60, 61, 66, 92–3, 108, 113–15, 168 Heidegger, Martin, 30 concept of Angst, 31 Henley, W. E., Beau Austin, 8 heroines, 2 Hervouet, Yves, 55, 111–12 Hewitt, Douglas, 70–1, 77 Hitchcock, Alfred, 162 Hugo, Leon, 171n Huntly McCarthy, Justin, Nurse Benson, 72–3 Huston, Amy, 160 Ibsen, Henrik, 34, 166 Doll’s House, A, 35 Ghosts, 35, 92, 157 Hedda Gabler, 35 Master Builder, The, 90 Impressionism, 49, 140, 166 “Inn of the Two Witches: A Find, The”, 87, 117 intertextuality, 18, 55 The Secret Agent, 160–2 Victory (Victory: An Island Tale), 55 Irving, Ethel, 72 Irving, Henry B., 63, 67, 73 Irving, Sir Henry, 10, 63, 157, 177n James, Henry, 6, 7, 15, 42, 166 “Beast in the Jungle, The”, 34 Daisy Miller, 123 Guy Domville, 12 The Tragic Muse, 167 Washington Square, 26 Jerrold, Douglas, Black-Ey’d Susan, 104 Jo-Jo the Russian Dog Face Boy, 78, 173n Joint Select Committee on Censorship, 15 Jones, Henry Arthur, 7, 8 Jones, Susan, 2, 25–6 Jonson, Ben, Sejanus, His Fall, 138 Joy, Neill R., 4, 12, 64, 67, 76, 84 Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 31, 33, 40 Ulysses, 176n

“Karain: A Memory”, 88, 102 Karl, Frederick R., 17, 64 Karl, Frederick R. and Laurence Davies, 89 Kearney, Richard, 30 Kinoy, Ernest, 60 Knowles, Owen, 17 Knowles, Owen and Gene M. Moore, 21, 34, 117, 126, 127 Kokoschka, Oscar, Murderer Hope of Womankind, 108 Korzeniowski, Apollo Act One (Akt pierwszy), 10 Comedy (Komedia), 9 For That Sweet Money, 9 influence on Joseph Conrad’s writings, 9–10 Kristeva, Julia, theory of intertextuality, 18 L’Estrange, Julian, 171n Laughing Anne/“Because of the Dollars”, 1, 2, 4, 9, 17, 86, 87–125, 171–2n alternative names for, 89–90 Anne, 91–2, 93–4, 116 Anne’s child, 103, 105 Bamtz, 91, 94 Captain Davidson, 88–9, 91, 93–4, 96–7 censorship, 15, 120 establishment of location, 99–100 Fector, 94, 97, 99, 100 Galsworthy’s comments on, 103–4, 124 as Grand-Guignol, 108–12, 119, 122–3 Hollis, 99, 100, 101 Man Without Hands, 88–9, 93, 99, 100–1, 103, 104–5, 116, 119 as melodrama, 104 Monkey-face Ritchie, 92, 101 Mrs Davidson, 92–3, 97, 101–2 Niclaus (The Nakhoda), 94, 99 screen version, 174n stage adaptation, 100–1 staging of, 88, 171–2n, 173n Laurel and Hardy, 136 Leavis, F. R., 61

190 Index Levy, Jose, 109, 110 Lionel the Lion-Faced Man, 78–9, 173n Löhr, Marie, 2, 68, 71–3, 77, 88, 100 Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 14–15, 76–7, 80–1, 121, 123, 158 Lord Jim, 16 radio version, 61 Lothe, Jakob, 130–1 Lowndes, Horace Annesley, The House of Peril, 77–8 McCarthy, Lillah, 67 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 35, 112, 166, 170n Aveugles, Les, 36 Blue Bird, The, 16, 59 Intérieur, 35–6 “Tragical in Daily Life, The”, 36 Mallios, Peter Lancelot, 53, 69–70, 127 marionettes, 134 Marriott-Watson, H. B., 6 masculinity in English literature, 95–6 Mason, A. E. W., 6 Maurey, Max, 111 Mayer, David, 169n melodrama, 54, 76, 105, 112, 123, 124, 129, 160, 169–70n, 177n Mencken, H. L., 70 Méténier, Oscar, 110–11 Metropolis (Fritz Lang), 162 Meyer, Bernard, 9, 89 Meyers, Jeffrey, 9 Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman, 97–8 Milosz, Czeslaw, 9 Mirbeau, Octave, Le Jardin des supplices (novel), 114–16 Montana, Bull, 79 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones), 174n Moore, Gene M., 4, 59 Moore, Gene M. and Allan H. Simmons, 66 Moore, George, 8 Morel, Eugène, La Dernière Torture, 112, 114 Moser, Thomas C., 3, 61 Muscular Christianity, 95–6

Nadelhaft, Ruth, 93–4 Naipaul, V. S., 143 Najder, Zdzislaw, 50 Naturalism, 10, 35, 110, 111, 112, 124, 154, 160, 170n Neilson, Francis, Le Baiser de sang, 120, 159 New Drama, 11 New Woman, 2, 30, 51, 160, 169n Nigger of the “Narcissus”, The, 13 Nosferatu (F. W. Murneau), 162 Nostromo, 16 O’Casey, Sean, Juno and the Paycock, 141 Plough and the Stars, 162 Silver Tassie, The, 162 One Day More/“To-morrow”, 1, 2, 4, 11, 20–52, 90 Bessie Carvil, 23, 25–7, 32–4, 39, 44 Captain Hagberd, 23–5 fish-hawker, 41–2 Gambucino, 28–9, 30, 32, 43 Harry Hagberd, 27–9, 31, 32, 44 Josiah Carvil, 33, 39 perception of failure, 51–2 play versus story, 43–9 première of, 21, 171n radio version, 21 reviews of, 16, 49–50 setting of, 22–3 O’Neill, Eugene The Hairy Ape, 97, 161 The Iceman Cometh, 37–8, 48 Orientalism, 112 Outcast of the Islands, An (Carol Reed), 59 Paris Opéra, 10 Partington, Wilfred G., Joseph Conrad Behind the Scenes, 123–24 “Partner, The”, 87 Peploe, Mark, 62 Petrocchi, Valeria, 4, 160, 175n, 176–7n Phelps, William Lyon, 70 Pinter, Harold Dumb Waiter, The, 51 Homecoming, The, 51

Index 191 Pirandello, Luigi, 160 “Planter of Malata, The”, 87, 107 “Predecessor, The”, 106–7 Priestley, J. B., 163–4 Puccini, Giacomo, 54, 72 Pugh, Edwin, 6 Pugliatti, Paolo, 40, 99, 101–2 Purinton, Marjean D., 99 radio, 21, 59–61, 171n, 172n Raleigh, Cecil, The Price of Peace, 22 Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa), 96, 174n Raymond-Duval, P. H., 21, 42 Reade, Charles, It’s Never Too Late to Mend, 129 Realism, 10, 12, 54, 51, 160, 170n Rescue, The, 17, 170n Reynolds, Ernest, 11 Rice, Elmer, The Adding Machine, 162 Roberts, Marguerite, 8 Robins, Elizabeth, 8 Rostand, Edmond, L’Aiglon, 72 Ruppell, Richard, 80 Ryf, Robert S., 142, 149 Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock), 162 Said, Edward, 112 Sarcey, Francisque, 12, 170n Sardou, Victorien, 10, 12–13, 72, 170n Sartre, Jean-Paul Huis Clos, 34, 114 Les Mains sales, 160 Schumacher, Claude, 35, 36, 37 Schwarz, Daniel, 23, 25, 155–6 Scribe, Eugène, 10, 12–13, 170n Secret Agent, The, 1, 2, 4, 10, 16, 17, 42, 54, 118–19, 126–64 Adolf Verloc, 122, 129, 131, 132, 135, 139–41, 152–3 censorship, 15, 158–9 Chief Inspector Heat, 135, 138, 151, 155–6 the crowd, 138–9 as Grand-Guignol, 118–19, 122, 157, 159 intertextuality of, 160–2 Karl Yundt, 128, 148

Lady Mabel, 142, 143 as melodrama, 129 Michaelis, 143, 145 Ossipon, 122, 128, 138, 145–6, 147, 149–50, 154–5 premiere of, 12 the Professor, 42, 66, 136, 138, 142–3, 149–50 reviews, 163–4 screen versions: Hampton, 144, 145, 176n; Hitchcock, 162 Sir Ethelred/Sir William, 144, 176n stage adaptation, 18–19, 137, 144, 149–50, 154 the Stern Voice, 138, 142 Stevie, 122, 128, 131–5, 136, 145, 152 Vladimir, 132–3, 137, 139–41 Winnie Verloc, 18, 29, 119, 129, 131, 132–4, 137–8, 145, 146, 147, 150–4 Secret Sharer, The, 35 self-censorship, 14–15 Sengupta, Supriya, 164 Seymour-Smith, Martin, 127 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra, 172–3n Hamlet, 69, 85, 155–6 influence on contemporary theatre, 7–8 influence on Victory, 56–7, 69 King Lear, 28, 47, 69, 171n, 176n Macbeth, 177n Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 56 Othello, 153, 177n Richard III, 69, 119 Tempest, The, 22, 69 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 3 Winter’s Tale, The, 176n Shaw, George Bernard, 2, 8, 11, 14, 21, 22, 41, 42, 51, 99, 121, 166–7, 175n Sherry, Norman, 3–4 Sidney, Thomas, 62 Sinclair, May, Life and Death of Harriett Frean, 26 Sito, Jerzy S., Jutro, 41 Spoto, Daniel, 162

192 Index stage adaptation, 17–18 “Because of the Dollars”/Laughing Anne, 100–1 The Secret Agent, 18–19, 137, 144, 149–50, 154 Victory (Victory: An Island Tale), 62–5, 73–5 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 37 Steiner, George, 8, 160–1 “Stephen Crane”, 106 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 8 Stramm, August, Awakening, 161 Street, G. S., 76 Strindberg, August, 34, 166 The Dance of Death, 102 The Father, 102 The Pelican, 102 Subiotto, Arrigo, 167, 168 Surrealism, 86 Symbolism, 1, 24, 35, 49, 51, 166, 170n Synge, J. M., Playboy of the Western World, 34 Tadema, Laurence Alma, New Felicity, 21 television, 59, 172n, 176n Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, 1, 108–12, 175n comparison with English Grand-Guignol, 120–1 Thorndike, Russell, 2, 122, 157, 158, 177n Thorndike, Sybil, 100, 109, 121, 124 Toller, Ernst, Hinkemann, 161, 166 Tomashevsky, Boris, 18 “To-morrow”, see One Day More/ “To-morrow” Tourneur, Maurice The Blue Bird, 59 Victory, 59 Treadwell, Sophie, Machinal, 162 Twain, Mark, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, 108 “Typhoon”, 22 Under Western Eyes, 2, 16, 117, 135–6 proposed dramatisation, 65

“Verloc”, 129 see also Secret Agent, The Victory, 1, 2, 4, 53–86 Alma/Lena, 54, 56, 57, 58, 67, 70–1, 83 Axel (Stephen) Heyst, 54, 57, 66, 82–3, 85, 97 censorship, 15, 76, 80 dramatisations: Hastings, 1, 51, 62–5, 73–5; Sidney, 62 influence of Shakespeare on, 56–7, 69 intertextuality of, 55 Marie Löhr in, 71–3 as melodrama, 54, 73–4 Mr Jones, 54, 66, 67, 81 Pedro, 78–9 radio version, 60–1 reviews of, 68–76 Ricardo, 54, 55–7, 59, 81, 83 romanticism of, 74–5 Schomberg, 55, 67, 77, 78 screen versions: Cromwell, 59, 68; Paramount, 59; Peploe, 62; Tourneur, 19, 59, 79, 118 staging of, 67–8 television versions, 59–60, 172n Wang, 56, 79–80 Warren, Robert Penn, 127 Washburn Freund, Frank E., 21 Watt, Ian, 35, 37 Watts, Cedric, 54, 95, 114 wayang kulit, 57 Weigel, Helen, 160–1 Wells, H. G., 6, 7, 89, 175n Wheatley, Alison E., 4, 21, 44, 51, 98, 100, 109, 165–6, 171n, 174n, 177n, 179n White, Andrea, 173n Wilcox, Michael, 80–1 Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest, 143, 169n Winawer, Bruno, 2, 5, 10, 17, 177n Within the Tides, 87, 88, 117 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw “Witkacy”, The New Deliverance, 108 Woolf, Virginia, 25 Wright, Ben, 60 Zola, Émile, Thérèse Raquin, 10–11, 35, 156, 177n

The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions

The Works of Joseph Conrad

Conrad, Joseph - Falk

Conrad, Joseph - Tomorrow

Conrad, Joseph - Chance

Joseph Conrad - Inima intunericului

Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness

Conrad, Joseph - Almayer's Folly

Conrad, Joseph - Lord Jim

Conrad, Joseph - The Secret Sharer

Conrad, Joseph - Tales Of Unrest

Conrad, Joseph - Some Reminiscences

Conrad, Joseph - Typhoon

Conrad, Joseph - Amy Foster

Conrad, Joseph - The Mirror Of The Sea

Conrad, Joseph - An Outcast Of The Islands

Conrad, Joseph - The Heart of Darkness

The French Face of Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture

Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance

Joseph Conrad (The Critical Heritage Series)

Joseph Conrad: Memories and Impressions - An Annotated Bibliography. (Conrad Studies)

Conrad, Joseph - The Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer

Conrad, Joseph - Twixt Land And Sea Tales

The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

The Voyages of Conrad

The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Adventures Of Conrad Stargard 05 - Lord Conrad

The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions

The Works of Joseph Conrad

Conrad, Joseph - Falk

Conrad, Joseph - Tomorrow

Conrad, Joseph - Chance

Joseph Conrad - Inima intunericului

Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness

Conrad, Joseph - Almayer's Folly

Conrad, Joseph - Lord Jim

Conrad, Joseph - The Secret Sharer

Conrad, Joseph - Tales Of Unrest

Conrad, Joseph - Some Reminiscences

Conrad, Joseph - Typhoon

Conrad, Joseph - Amy Foster

Conrad, Joseph - The Mirror Of The Sea

Conrad, Joseph - An Outcast Of The Islands

Conrad, Joseph - The Heart of Darkness

The French Face of Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture

Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance

Joseph Conrad (The Critical Heritage Series)

Joseph Conrad: Memories and Impressions - An Annotated Bibliography. (Conrad Studies)

Conrad, Joseph - The Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer

Conrad, Joseph - Twixt Land And Sea Tales

The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

The Voyages of Conrad

The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Adventures Of Conrad Stargard 05 - Lord Conrad

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