Conrad and Masculinity

46 Conrad and Masculinity
to have been stuck facing nothing, a nothing which may be read in
one sense as himself in a state of unmasculine indolence, without
work, that great bolster of Victorian masculinity. 6 The Victorian sense
of work as both constitutive and protective of manliness is concisely
conveyed in lines written by Ford Madox Brown to accompany his
own painting of 1852–65, Work:
Work! which beads the brow and tans the flesh
Of lusty manhood, casting out its devils!
By whose weird art transmuting poor men’s evils,
Their bed seems down, their one dish ever fresh. 7
It is indeed work that is at issue in Conrad’s ‘Author’s Note’, since the
‘contrary stresses’ represent Conrad’s impulses towards the life of the
sea and the literary life. Amid the jostling and confusion of discovering
new values, Conrad tells us, he experienced ‘a momentary feeling
of darkness’ and ‘let my spirit float supine over that chaos’ (OI, vii). He
presents himself as rescued from this state by the intervention of
Garnett, who suggests that he should ‘write another [novel]’ (viii),
though in fact Conrad had already begun the story which was to
become An Outcast of the Islands. 8 In a version of the trope of the work
of fiction as the offspring of male friendship (examined in detail by
Wayne Koestenbaum, who discusses Conrad’s collaboration with Ford
Madox Ford), Conrad’s novel becomes a product of Garnett’s ‘desire’
and ‘gentle’ manner: 9
A phrase of Edward Garnett’s is ... responsible for this book. The
first of the friends I made for myself by my pen it was but natural
that he should be the recipient ... of my confidences ... I believe
that as far as one man may wish to influence another man’s life
Edward Garnett had a great desire that I should go on writing. At
that time, and I may say, ever afterwards, he was always very
patient and gentle with me.
(vii–viii)
Garnett himself invoked the language of gender roles to describe his
early impressions of Conrad, writing that ‘I had never seen before a
man so masculinely keen yet so femininely sensitive’, that ‘there was
a blend of caressing, almost feminine intimacy in his talk’ and that
‘Conrad’s moods of gay tenderness could be quite seductive’. 10 The
evening ends, in Conrad’s account, with the two new friends walking