by John Barnie

from Poetry Wales, Autumn 2007

WE TEND to think of literature in terms of genres. A poem is a poem and a novel is a novel and we know them by their formal characteristics. This division is convenient and has a long tradition which has been confirmed by the way literature is taught in the universities. Yet it is not always true, and can lead to the misrepresentation of an author's achievement. This is so in the case of Joseph Conrad who is classified as a novelist and writer of short stories, whereas in reality he should be considered a poet who in novellas such as Heart of Darkness and The Shadow-Line wrote some of the great long poems of the twentieth century.

Most readers will balk at this. Didn't Conrad himself call his work 'tales' and 'stories'? Aren't many of them cast in the frame of yarns told by Marlow and other narrators? Aren't they self-evidently written in prose?

All of this is true, yet at the core Conrad was still a poet, and one of the greatest of the last century. We don't perceive this because of our subservience to the notion of genre and its rigid staking out of literary boundaries. We recognise a poem when it follows certain conventions of genre—lined out as free verse, for example, or in formally rhymed stanzas. The mind is conditioned by these markers to read the words on the page in a certain way, seeking out the play with language, the density of metaphor and symbol, and other elements which we associate with poetry.

In the twentieth century, English-language writers took from French literature the concept of the prose-poem, loosening the boundaries of the genre a little, but this is still a recognisable package; extend a prose-poem beyond a paragraph or so and it becomes, in minds conditioned by convention, prose fiction or an impressionistic essay that is read in quite a different way.

Conrad was a poet because, despite the surface markers of the genre of the novel, the novella and the short story that characterise his work, his sensibility, the way in which he engaged with the world, are more closely associated with poetry than fiction. There is evidence that Conrad himself thought of his writing in these terms. In Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance (1924) Ford Madox Ford claims that when he first met Conrad, 'We agreed that a poem was not that which was written in verse but that, either prose or verse, that had constructive beauty.' Conrad himself read very little English verse, but at one point, according to Ford, he became interested in blank verse, and when Ford pointed out to him that whole passages of Heart of Darkness 'were not very far off blank verse', Conrad 'tried for a short time to turn a paragraph into decasyllabic lines'. The poetry is there before our eyes, but the conventions of genre blind us to its presence.

In Heart of Darkness, for example, as Marlow journeys in a steamer on his way to the Belgian Congo, he encounters a French naval vessel anchored off the west coast of Africa. "There wasn't a shed there," he recalls, "and she was shelling the bush."

It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts [he continues]. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by someone on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.

In terms of the narrative, this passage prefigures the absurdity of the colonial venture in Africa, its inherent meaninglessness and cruelty which will culminate in Marlow's encounter with Kurtz on the upper reaches of the Congo; but Conrad's method is that of the poet. There is the attention to sensuous detail—"the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts"—where alliteration and rhythm are used to reinforce and act out the surface meaning of the words. There is too the inversion of our expectations of the scene. This is a French man-ofwar, yet "in the immensity of earth, sky, and water" it is diminished to the status of a toy: "Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish ..." The passage has the resonance of poetry through which it works its effects on the reader, and if it were lined out as free verse it would be recognised as such.

T.S. Eliot responded to this aspect of Conrad's writing and was indebted to it. The epigraph to 'The Hollow Men', "Mistah Kurtz—he dead", and the epigraph he had originally planned for The Waste Land—

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"

these, taken together, suggest a strong fascination with Heart of Darkness. It goes deeper than this, however, because Eliot internalised rhythmic impulses from Conrad's novella, reproducing them in his own writing:

                                               Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing' Do you remember
Nothing?

taunts the lady in 'A Game of Chess'.

Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?

Marlow exclaims, exasperated at his inability to convey the essence of his experience to the listeners on the yacht.

What Eliot has done here is to pick up the rhythm of a particular emotion, a particular nexus of anxiety; one poet responding to the rhythm in another poet's work and refashioning it as his own.

In the passage from Heart of Darkness quoted above, Conrad is tapping into what might be called the great poemscapes of the Earth that are around us every day and of which we are a part, and which the poet seeks to draw down and respond to in word and rhythm. To illustrate what I mean: I recently walked along the sands at Ynys Las between Borth and the Dyfi estuary. A hundred or more gannets had found a shoal of fish close in-shore, rising and diving, closing their wings at the last moment before vanishing through the water like a spear. As I walked on, the shoal moved further out, the gannets following, their white bodies shining: in sunlight soon to be eclipsed as a storm rode up from the south; plum-grey cloud louring over land and water, a curtain of rain propelled by the wind across the bay. The few humans on the shore were dwarfed—observers of the powerful forces at work; small-time players in the kinetic, everchanging scene. The experience was more than the sum of its parts, something beyond words, but which the poet nonetheless continuously strives to channel into words, using all the resources of language and imagination.

Conrad was a master at this. In The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', the ship finally gets under way and, the narrator tells us,

The Narcissus left alone, heading south, seemed to stand resplendent and still upon the restless sea, under the moving sun. Flakes of foam swept past her sides; the water struck her with flashing blows; the land glided away slowly fading; a few birds screamed on motionless wings over the swaying mastheads. But soon the land disappeared, the birds went away; and to the west the pointed sail of an Arab dhow running for Bombay, rose triangular and upright above the sharp edge of the horizon, lingered and vanished like an illusion. Then the ship's wake, long and straight, stretched itself out through a day of immense solitude. The setting sun, burning on the level of the water, flamed crimson below the blackness of heavy rain clouds. The sunset squall, corning up from behind, dissolved itself into the short deluge of a hissing shower. It left the ship glistening from trucks to waterline, and with darkened sails. She ran easily before a fair monsoon, with her decks cleared for the night ...

That sense of the human caught up in the great poemscapes of the world is finely evoked here as in many other places in Conrad's work. His medium allows him to be expansive, but it is informed by the poet's perception of our place in the scheme of the universe which, shrunk as it were to a miniature, is unfolded in the eight brief lines of Wordsworth's untitled 'Lucy' poem:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

I've chosen examples drawn from nature because that is what I am most attracted to in my own writing, but poemscapes are everywhere about us, even in the dreary streets of London's East End at the end of the nineteenth century which Conrad accessed when he was writing The Secret Agent, or the sepulchral buildings of Brussels that haunt Heart of Darkness.

For T.S. Eliot, too, as he worked on The Waste Land, urban poemscapes were there for the taking in memories of London during the First World War. Poemscapes, the endless imaginative resource of the poet, emanate even from the ignored places, the disregarded. It was one of the great discoveries, or rediscoveries, of Modernism, especially in America. An early poem of William Carlos Williams, provocatively titled 'Pastoral', begins:

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.

But the portentous tone shifts down a key as he effaces himself to reveal the true subject of much of his mature poetry in the poemscapes of urban decay and poverty:

Older now
I walk backstreets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colors.

"No one," he concludes,

will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

The poet believes it, however, and mutates the perception through the medium of the poem so that the reader comes to believe it too.

Some passages in Conrad's novels and novellas can be restructured as free verse; usually however this is not the case. Rather, the poetry is there in the deep structure of the prose, that rolls its sentences toward us like the swell of an ocean, as in this passage from The Rescue:

After a time this absolute silence which she almost could feel pressing upon her on all sides induced in Mrs. Travers a state of hallucination. She saw herself standing alone, at the end of time, on the brink of days. All was unmoving as if the dawn would never come, the stars would never fade, the sun would never rise any more; all was mute, still, dead—as if the shadow of the outer darkness, the shadow of the uninterrupted, of the everlasting night that fills the universe, the shadow of the night so profound and so vast that the blazing suns lost in it are only like sparks, like pin-points of fire, the restless shadow that like a suspicion of an evil truth darkens everything upon the earth on its passage, had enveloped her, had stood arrested as if to remain with her forever.

It might be argued that Conrad is writing what is sometimes referred to as 'poetic prose', but this is usually a disguised way of saying prose that is overly self-conscious, striving for effect; prose that draws attention to itself in the manner of Lawrence Durrell or the later novels of D.H. Lawrence. This is to miss the point where Conrad is concerned. Poetic prose by definition remains prose, no matter how it is heightened. Conrad by contrast wrote poetry disguised as prose, producing the same effects in the reader's mind as poetry, sometimes with the intensity of the lyric, sometimes with the paced-out rhythms of the long poem. It is an irony that many readers who say "Oh I don't read poetry" will have read Heart of Darkness, at least, and been unaware that the shape-shifting Conrad has slipped a long poem into their hands.

Joseph Conrad never went to university and never studied literature formally, though in his twenty years in the Merchant Navy he read widely, especially among the French novelists of the nineteenth century. He was a fully qualified master mariner, but as a writer he was an autodidact, working on his first novel Almayer's Folly for several years before he showed it to anyone. Later, when he had left the sea and settled in England, he showed his work in manuscript or typescript to Edward Garnett, the reader at Conrad's publisher Fisher Unwin, who had recommended Almayer's Folly for publication and who became a close friend. Conrad trusted Garnett's judgement and that of one or two other friends, and though he didn't always act on it, their critical opinion was important to him. The special qualities of Conrad as a poet, and the great poemscapes he drew on in his writing, were, nonetheless, the product of his imagination alone and of the essential aloneness of the writer. In this he followed the trajectory of every writer in the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth for whom autodidacticism was the norm, as it still is outside the English-speaking world.

Would Conrad have benefited from a creative writing programme after he left the Torrens? Might even a distance learning MA have helped him out as he struggled with Almayer's Folly in his off-duty hours on a succession of ships? After leaving the sea he set-to to live from his fiction. Certainly a lectureship in Creative Writing would have solved the financial problems that dogged him until the last decade of his life, and which he worried over endlessly in letters to friends.

Idle speculation of course. Conrad, along with Eliot, Williams, and a host of others, belongs to an age before the academic 'professionalisation' of the writer. There will come a time, perhaps, when he and they will seem rank amateurs to writers armed with MAs and PhDs, possessed of the necessary diplomas to teach 'creative writing' to the student-writers who crowd the English departments of our universities. Until then he is there still to astonish with the poetry he smuggled in under the ambling pelt of the novel.

About the Author
John Barnie's latest books are Sea Lilies: Selected Poems 1984-2003 (Seren) and Trouble in Heaven (Gomer). This is the final column of Chewing the Cwd. The original title of the essay was "Sneaking under the Fence."

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