Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE SECRET AGENT” by Joseph Conrad (first
published in 1907)
Long ago on this
blog [see the posting on Joseph Conrad’s Victory]
I confessed that, as a young student, I went through a phase of believing that
Joseph Conrad was the World’s Greatest Novelist, before I got over the foolish
habit of applying that designation to anyone. I recalled the Conrad books I had
read and I retailed one favourite anecdote: I was so absorbed in Conrad’s The Secret Agent that I spent a whole
day in the university caff, reading it compulsively and missing a number of
lectures in the process. The novel was both exciting and intellectually
satisfying.
I recently
reacquainted myself with this tight, depressing and brilliant book, and
re-affirmed my youthful impressions of it.
As all lit.
guides will tell you, the Pole Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (1857-1924)
had English as his third language after Polish and French (both of which he
spoke better than he spoke English); yet remaking himself as Joseph Conrad, he
was able to become a master of English prose. And of deep irony. Again, as any
lit. guide will tell you, The Secret
Agent may be subtitled “A Simple Tale” but it is far from simple and it is
saturated in irony.
And yet at least
one of its strengths is the fact that its central plot is indeed simple and has
some elements of the suspense thriller.
Under cover of
being a respectable lower-middle-class businessman, Adolf Verloc plays a double
game. He is both a police informant, who infiltrates anarchist groups, and
an agent provocateur, employed by a
foreign (presumably Russian) embassy. Mr Verloc has married the younger Winnie,
apparently providing domestic stability and security to her and her
feeble-minded little brother Stephen (Stevie). They run a shady newsagents and
stationery shop (there are hints that they sell smut under the counter). When
Verloc visits his foreign controller Vladimir at the embassy, Vladimir tells Verloc
he wants him to create an “anarchist” outrage that will cause the British
police to come down hard on foreign political agitators and justify the
promotion of stricter laws against terrorists at a forthcoming international conference.
Vladimir suggests Verloc attack Greenwich Observatory, as science is now the holy
cow of the middle classes more than art, culture or religion. After gaining the
necessary explosives from an anarchist contact, “the Professor”, Verloc
entrusts them to the unknowing young Stevie and tells him where to leave them.
But in the neighbourhood of the Greenwich Observatory, Stevie is blown up and
killed by what Verloc has given him. When Winnie learns of this, she is rapidly
disabused of her notion that Verloc really cares for her or her brother. She
kills Verloc and flees, knowing she could hang for murder. In her flight she is
apparently given comfort and moral support by the anarchist Alexander Ossipon,
who in fact deserts her as soon as he is able, taking all her money. In a
postscript we learn that Winnie commits suicide after the desertion. So Stevie,
Verloc and Winnie are all dead by novel’s end and the illusion of domestic
security is literally blown up, leaving police, anarchists and agents provocateurs to continue their
tawdry dance.
The germ of the
novel was the so-called “Greenwich Bomb Outrage” of 1894, when the anarchist
Matrial Bourdin was blown up by own bomb. He had apparently been urged on by
brother-in-law, who was an agent
provocateur. It is possible to historicise The Secret Agent by placing it in the context of early 20th
century British fears of anarchism and foreign political activists, fuelled by
the many anarchist “outrages” that had occurred in continental Europe. (See my
posts on Donald Rumbelow’s TheHoundsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street and G.K.Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.)
Yet
while the novel was inspired by events and fears of its own time, and while it
does have elements of the thriller or detective story, it is by no means as
simple as the dull-witted synopsis with which I have presented you. Conrad, in
his third-person eye-of-God narration, does not relate events in chronological
order, and often forces us to piece together what has happened. The first three
chapters systematically present Verloc and his shabby milieu – Verloc and his
home; Verloc and his relations with the foreign embassy; Verloc among the anarchists.
In Chapter 4 we learn, in a conversation between Ossipon and “the Professor”,
that somebody has blown himself up at the observatory. This leads to chapters
in which various levels of police are seen at work and more of the Verlocs’
domestic life is revealed. But it is only in Chapter 9, when Verloc admits the
truth to Winnie, that we know for certain that Stevie was the victim. In
effect, the novel doubles back on itself.
As well as
defying chronology, Conrad lingers long over analyses of characters’ motives
and descriptions of their surroundings. He literally slows time down. In Chapter
11, Winnie’s killing of Verloc, with a carving knife, is played in agonising
slow motion. More than one critic has noted that an anarchist attack on the
Greenwich Observatory is, in effect, an attack on rationality and the orderly
processing of time. Conrad’s use of symbolism is not as oppressive in this
novel as it is in Victory, but
chronology and its symbolic destruction as a contrast of reason and unreason (orderly
society and anarchy) is certainly implied. For the record, there seems more
symbolism in the hat Verloc always wears – even indoors. It is the outward sign
of his comfortable bourgeois status – and of course it falls off his head the
moment he is killed. And who could miss the irony of a household implement like
a carving knife being used as a murder weapon?
Where is the major
irony of this novel? It is most overtly the irony of outcomes confounding
intentions. Winnie marries for domestic security and in the belief that Verloc
will be like a father to feeble-minded Stevie. Verloc’s actions destroy both the
boy and the household. Anarchists believe they will overthrow or unsettle
authoritarian governments – but their outrages are exactly what authoritarian
governments want, to justify greater repression. The foreign embassy official
wants to create a big outrage – but the matter resolves itself as a grubby little
domestic murder. The police want to avoid the creation of anarchist martyrs by
hushing the matter up - but in combatting such a movement as anarchism, they
often step outside due process of law. They are, in effect, corrupted by
anarchism and end up undermining the very values they claim to uphold.
Under this,
however, there is the more pervasive irony of a systematic exposure of characters’
delusions and the false assumptions under which they operate. In a famous
passage (in Chapter 8) we are told of Verloc that “he was indolent with that indolence which is so often the secret of
good natures”. Conrad the Pole is using this word “indolence” with utter
precision. It does not mean idleness or laziness. It means the desire to
avoid pain and bother – in other words, not to be troubled by things and
therefore not to look honestly at oneself. We are repeatedly told that Verloc
believes Winnie “loves him for himself”.
But obviously she does not know what and who he really is: and when she finds
out, she kills him. Far from matching Verloc’s illusion (always a favourite
word in Conrad), Winnie has married Verloc for security, not out of love. This
is the “marriage-as-long-term-prostitution” that anarchists often spoke of. Yet
Winnie is as morally dead as Verloc is. In the same passage where we hear of
Verloc’s indolence, we are told that Winnie believes “things don’t bear much looking into”. In short, she does not wish
to look honestly at her own motives.
The novel shows that
the rampant self-interest and “indolence” that are true of the Verlocs are also
true of the police. The Assistant-Commissioner of Police knows that an anarchist
called Michaelis has been involved in the Greenwich outrage, yet he
deliberately turns any investigation away from Michaelis because Michaelis has
society connections that the Assistant-Commissioner does not wish to disrupt. Chief-Inspector
Heat, the man at first put in charge of the case, wants to divert suspicion
from Verloc because, most unethically, he has not revealed to his superiors
that Verloc is his chief informant among the anarchists and it is upon Verloc
that Heat’s reputation really rests. Conrad suggests what later history would
call fascist tendencies in these high-ranking police officers. The Assistant-Commissioner
is a former colonial administrator who yearns for legitimised violence against
his inferiors. Chief-Inspector Heat talks of being allowed to shoot down
anarchists like mad dogs.
If Conrad is merciless
toward bourgeois morality and the upholders of authority, his gaze on anarchists
is often even more devastating. Anarchists declare that they despise bourgeois
materialism and merely “use” it to advance their anarchistic cause. But in this
novel they are obviously as wedded to it as their ostensible foes. Alexander Ossipon,
failed medical student, enjoys the power of swaying audience with oratory, but he
preserves his own comfort by affairs with various affluent women. His final
approach to Winnie is fuelled by his desire for her shop and bank account. More
tellingly, Ossipon is a devotee of the eugenics theories of Lombroso, and sees
people in terms of inherited deficiencies and mental diseases – which is hardly
a theory on which to base egalitarian anarchism. Symbolically fat Michaelis,
the “ticket-of-leave” social evolutionist, lives by sponging off the wealthy
who are shallow enough to see anarchism as an amusing fad. We are introduced in
Karl Yundt to the type of anarchist who believes in “the propaganda of the
deed” – that is, direct terrorist action. But his destructive impulse is
apparently fuelled by the fear of impotence and could be classified as a form
of masturbation. And then there is the anarchist explosives expert “the Professor”,
characterised in the novel’s closing phrase as “a pest in a street full of men”. He is the fanatically cold
technician, mainly interested in creating a perfect detonator. There is
something both silly and grotesque in the squeeze-bulb explosive he carries in
his pocket (it sounds like a squirting flower), but this doesn’t make him any
less sinister. “The Professor” has perversely “pure” motives in his rage for
social chaos, but they have nothing to do with the betterment of humanity which
anarchism claims to represent.
Does Conrad set
anything positive to set against the self-deluded bourgeoisie, the self-deluded
upholders of the law and the self-deluded anarchists? Not really. Young and
murdered Stevie, feeble-minded and in need of protection, could have been
developed as the kind of visionary “idiot boy” that Wordsworth imagined (and
that Golding more-or-less created in the figure of Simon in Lord of the Flies). But this is what
Conrad resolutely does not do. Stevie may be morally innocent, but he also has
a pent-up rage (demonstrated in events early in the novel) and his
feeble-mindedness renders him dangerous. If The
Secret Agent attacks the myth of the noble revolutionary, it also attacks
the myth of the holy innocent. There are no Prince Myshkins in Joseph Conrad’s
worldview.
So we come to this awful question. On the
evidence of this novel, was Joseph Conrad a moral nihilist? Law and established
society are corrupt and delusional as are their militant opponents. As he does
elsewhere, Conrad’s feeble faith hinges on “necessary illusions”. The
unavoidable imperfections of society can be softened only by “fidelity” –
meaning a form of humanism showing respect for others and occasionally
requiring heroism to maintain. But this is not what Conrad stresses in The Secret Agent, and we are left
disturbed at the way the novel knocks our own complacency.
There are only
two moments in this novel where I think Conrad runs a little off his
narrow-gauge track.
Consider that
slow-motion murder scene in Chapter 11, where Verloc (in what is presumably a
split-second of “objective” time) watches Winnie stab him and is able to think
of how he could evade death. Conrad writes:
“The knife was already planted in his breast.
It met no resistance on its way. Hazard has such accuracies. Into that plunging
blow, delivered over the side of the couch, Mrs Verloc put all the inheritance
of her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of
caverns, and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms.”
Two things
trouble me about this paragraph. Less damagingly, the last long sentence
appears to show Conrad buying into the Lombrosian eugenics ideas of degeneracy
that the anarchist Ossipon embraces. Winnie’s “immemorial and obscure descent” damns her. More damagingly, there
is the sentence “Hazard has such
accuracies”. When I read this as a student, and as I re-read it now, this
seems a quick and necessary papering-over of the implausibility of Winnie
killing her husband with one blind blow of the knife.
The other matter
is one which the critic E.M.W. Tillyard pointed out many years ago. In the
final pages, Ossipon carries around a newspaper clipping about the unknown
woman (clearly Winnie) who has killed herself by jumping off a cross-Channel
ferry. Ossipon is clearly haunted by Winnie’s death. But given what the novel
has already told us about Ossipon, this is psychologically wrong. The
exploitative Ossipon we already know would have no such tender feelings.
Setting aside
these two blips, I would agree with the view that The Secret Agent was Conrad’s last great novel – and very possibly
his greatest. Thereafter his literary decline began. Behind him were the great Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and Nostromo.
Ahead of him were, at best, the pretty good Under
Western Eyes (also about anarchists and politics), the confused Victory and the okay adventure The Rover, but not much else to shout
about. Dark, satirical and totally disabused, The Secret Agent is at his pinnacle.
Cinematic footnote: Once,
years ago, I saw an indifferent British television adaptation of The Secret Agent (and another of Under Western Eyes). I have just learnt
that this year (2016), in the climate of fear about domestic terrorism, the BBC
has just made a new three-part serial of The
Secret Agent starring Toby Jones as Verloc. But to the best of my
knowledge, there have been only two film versions of the novel made for the
cinema. One was not very faithful to the plot, but was a very good film in its
own right. The other was faithful to the plot, and was a deathly dull film.
First the
good one. Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage, made in 1936, was based on Conrad’s The Secret Agent. (Confusingly, as all students of Hitchcock know,
the man’s next film was called The Secret
Agent, but was based on Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories). I have
watched Sabotage (which was retitled The Woman Alone for American release) a
number of times. Sabotage updates the
story to the (1930s) present. Instead of running a seedy little shop, the
Verlocs run a seedy little East End cinema. The American actress Sylvia Sidney
– she of the eyes that always seemed on the verge of brimming with tears –
played Winnie Verloc. Oskar Homolka played Verloc – two very good performances.
The film contrived to provide a happy ending for Winnie and there is no
ambiguity in the character of the nice detective (played by John Loder) who
investigates the case. He is a shining hero. Young Stevie is simply a carefree
young boy – not a mental defective. But there are two outstanding sequences.
One is when Winnie, acting as usher in the cinema, has just heard the news of
Stevie’s death. She is fighting back tears, but she is also joining an audience
in watching a Walt Disney Silly Symphony cartoon, and she can’t help laughing
at the same time. This is far more wrenching for us viewers than straight
hysterics would have been. The other is the sequence where Winnie stabs Verloc
– an early example of the virtuosic cutting that could allow Hitchcock to
dramatise something very nasty without literally showing it. Literary purists
would be correct in saying that there is not much Conrad here, but the film
does capture a pinched, grubby, seediness that is true to the tone of the novel
(and apparently true to Hitchcock’s own childhood – his dad was an East End
greengrocer.).
Now the
deathly dull one. In 1996, the distinguished
playwright Christopher Hampton was able to get an A-grade cast for a version of
The Secret Agent, which he both wrote
and directed. I thought the American Patricia Arquette, with her pale and
moon-ish face, was well cast as Winnie and Bob Hoskins was okay as Verloc
(perhaps not quite complacent enough). As Ossipon, I could take or leave Gerard
Depardieu and I thought Christian Bale (already in his twenties) was too old to
play Stevie. The film went back to the original period setting of the novel and
was quite scrupulous in following Conrad’s narrative. And it was tedious beyond
belief. It bombed at the box office and was universally panned by critics. What
went wrong? After one viewing only, I conclude that while being faithful to the
plot, it missed completely the tone. Conrad’s pervasive irony, conveyed in the
novel by the omniscient author-narrator, simply cannot be dramatized. We are
left with a sad and melodramatic domestic tale. One point of oddity – one
actor’s name was kept out of all publicity related to this film and did not
appear in the credits. This was the (late) comedian Robin Williams who played, efficiently
enough, “the Professor”. I assume Williams was attempting to expand his
dramatic range. But I also assume that the producers wanted his presence in the
film to be a surprise and perhaps didn’t want to mislead viewers into thinking
that the film was a comedy.
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