Conrad and Masculinity

48 Conrad and Masculinity
distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what
the fellow may be at.’ But shortly the workman’s labour, and his possible
failure, are used to figure those of the artist: ‘And so it is with the
workman of art. Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off’
(xi). While expressing the fear of failure, this lays claim to at least the
status of honest workman.
The anxiety surrounding Conrad’s transition to a literary career is
both mitigated by, and articulated through, male literary friendships.
Koestenbaum observes of the collaboration between Conrad and Ford
that it ‘may have alleviated their hysteria, but it also inspired new
anxieties. Writing with another man meant entering his prose’s
body.’ 16 In Conrad’s account of another literary friendship, with
Stephen Crane, the setting is again the phantasmal city, the dark heart
of empire of ‘Heart of Darkness’ and The Secret Agent:
In the history of our essentially undemonstrative friendship (which
is nearly as difficult to recapture as a dream) that first long afternoon
is the most care-free instant, and the only one that had a
character of enchantment about it. It was spread out over a large
portion of central London ... after a long tramp amongst an orderly
multitude of grimy brick houses—from which the only things I
carried off were the impressions of the coloured rocks of Mexico ...
—there came suddenly Oxford Street ... I don’t remember seeing
any people in the streets except for a figure, now and then, unreal,
flitting by, obviously negligible. 17
In the background, pointing up Conrad’s absorption in his new
friendship, yet also standing in for it since that friendship is dreamlike
and difficult to recapture, is the dream-like city of modernity with
its ghostly figures, the Fourmillante cité, cité plein de rêves that Eliot
inherited from Baudelaire. 18 These are also the streets of Dorian Gray’s
secret life, of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, of Eliot’s Prufrock and of Conrad’s
own Verloc, with his parodic respectability. They are streets infused
with the anxiety of modernity, and its uneasy sexuality. Conrad and
Crane ‘resumed our tramping—east and north and south again, steering
through uncharted mazes the streets [sic]’ (LE, 105) and later ‘the
Monstrous Shade’ (LE, 106) of Balzac makes an ironic appearance (as
Crane asks for a description of his work).
Close male friendship was both part of conventional Victorian
masculinity, and, at least potentially, part of its repressed underside,
an underside which came to the fore at the end of the century. Eve