Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 47
the ‘interminable streets’ of London ‘talking of many things’, before
Conrad goes home and writes half a page of the new novel before
going to sleep (viii).
Herbert Sussman, in his study of Victorian Masculinities, considers
the uneasy relationship of ‘the bourgeois model of manhood as active
engagement in the commercial and technological world’ with ‘the
romantic ideal of the male writer as detached observer’. 11 Citing
Brown’s picture Work and the lines quoted above, he also quotes a
comment on the picture from Brown’s grandson, another of those
friends Conrad made by his pen, Ford Madox Ford: ‘At the further
corner of the picture, are two men who appear as having nothing to
do. These are the brain workers [Carlyle and F. D. Maurice], who,
seeming to be idle, work, and are the cause of well-ordained work and
happiness in others – sages.’ 12 Brown’s picture dates from an earlier
phase of the Victorian era, and the contrast it depicts is not symmetrical
to that within Conrad’s career, since the men obviously working
are specifically working-class manual labourers. Nevertheless, a
version of the same anxiety is evident in Conrad’s reflections on his
own transition from the evidently ‘manly’ role of merchant officer
(unusual in that it allowed gentlemen to engage in physical labour
without loss of class status) to the more inward and reflective role of
writer. Conrad undertook this transition at a time when the idea of
the writer as sage, as a sort of intellectual Captain of Industry and
cause of work in other men, was less easily sustained. 13 Indeed, by
1911 Ford was complaining that, in England of ‘today’, ‘a man of
letters is regarded as something less than a man, whereas any sort of
individual returning from the colonies is regarded inevitably as something
rather more than two supermen rolled into one’. 14 For Conrad,
then, the relationship between imperial setting and metropolitan
centre is shadowed by a pairing of the manliness of physical and
productive labour in the service of imperial trade with a more problematic
and passive intellectual and artistic masculinity, as he writes
about the former role while beginning to occupy the latter. 15 In the
Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ Conrad writes of the artist as one
who ‘descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and
strife ... finds the terms of his appeal’ (viii). This manages to make
introspection sound a little like a sea voyage. Later, and more surprisingly,
he links the artist with a manual labourer in a passage which
expresses some of the same anxieties as Brown’s picture. It begins from
the perspective of the idle gentleman: ‘Sometimes, stretched at ease in
the shade of a road-side tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a