Conrad and Masculinity

218 Notes
phrase has given it a certain ironic edge more appropriate to constructionist
theories of masculinity.
2 Elaine Showalter’s study of the fin de siècle crisis in masculinity does discuss
Conrad, but only ‘Heart of Darkness’ (Sexual Anarchy, pp. 95–104). Robert
Hampson links Conrad’s late novel Chance to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in
terms of secret male bonds (‘Chance and the Secret Life: Conrad,
Thackeray and Stevenson’, in CG, 105–22).
3 Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic
Debates in Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1990), pp. vii–viii.
4 Letter of 18 February 1894 to Marguerite Poradowska, CL, I, 148. The original
is in French: ‘il me semble que tout est mort en moi’.
5 Letter of 5 December 1903 to Kazimierz Waliszewski, CL, III, 89.
6 ‘Nothing’ is also the highly significant final word of Conrad’s Victory.
7 Quoted Sussman, p. 39.
8 Conrad first met Garnett either on 8 October 1894 at the office of T. Fisher
Unwin or soon afterwards (in Unwin’s company) at the National Liberal
Club (Owen Knowles, A Conrad Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1989), p. 19). A few weeks later Conrad and Garnett spent an evening
alone together, in an Italian restaurant and Conrad’s rooms at 17
Gillingham Street. Conrad’s ‘Author’s Note’ appears to refer to this second
meeting (‘One evening when we had dined together’) as the occasion
when Garnett said ‘why not write another [novel]?’ (OI, viii), prompting
him to start An Outcast of the Islands that very evening. Garnett suggests
that Conrad has ‘misdated this conversation, which took place at our first
meeting’, which Garnett places in the National Liberal Club in November
1894, and says that at their second meeting Conrad showed him the
manuscript opening of the novel (Garnett, viii). However, since Conrad
reports in a letter of August 1894 that he has started ‘Two Vagabonds’ (later
to become An Outcast of the Islands), even his first meeting with Garnett
postdates the inception of the novel (Letter of 18? August 1894 to
Marguerite Poradowska, CL, I, 171). However, the fictional nature of
Garnett’s role as begetter of the text only gives it more significance in
terms of the feelings and fantasies of the two men.
9 Koestenbaum, pp. 166–73.
10 Garnett, pp. vii, x, xxv.
11 Sussman, p. 39.
12 Ford Madox Ford, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work (London:
Longmans, 1896), p. 190, quoted Sussman, p. 41.
13 See Sussman p. 42 on Carlyle’s identification of ‘his literary project with
that of the Captain of Industry’.
14 Ford Madox Hueffer, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the
Memories of a Young Man (London: Chapman & Hall, 1911), p. 243.
15 Compare the dissatisfaction with modernity expressed in Rider Haggard’s
Allan Quatermain, where the character-narrator escapes to Africa from the
‘sinks of struggling, sweltering humanity’ (p. 15); as Gail Ching-Liang Low
observes, ‘he can only escape contamination by his dreams of empowered
masculinity in the wild open land of the African outback’: Low, p. 37.
16 Koestenbaum, p. 168.