Conrad and Prejudice
Craig Raine
- Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1967-87 by Chinua Achebe
Heinemann, 130 pp, £10.95, January 1988, ISBN 0 04 359100 0
‘Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.’ This quotation is taken from ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, a lecture delivered by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe as long ago as 1974 and now collected in Hopes and Impediments.
In City Without Walls, W.H. Auden included this squib:
Even Hate should be precise:
very few White Folks
have fucked their mothers.
A valid point, except that, in a sense, Auden’s plea for precision is vitiated by his easily explained misapprehension that ‘mother-fucker’ is an epithet exclusively applied to whites by blacks. Auden’s experience here – that of a slightly decrepit, nervous WASP on the lower East side – is eloquent in its way and perhaps explains his decision to return to Oxford and Christ Church: but it did not inform him (obviously) that blacks might use the word of each other. The general point, nevertheless, remains good. Only a theoretician with a propensity to automatism would cite it as an example of ‘unexamined discourse’ – a holier-than-thou formula usually invoked by moral pedants attentive not to the intended meaning but to their own narrow (if important) agendas. Let us count it a bonus that Auden’s particular encapsulation has the additional benefit of warning against the identification of one’s own point of view with objectivity. And, thence, with authority.
When Christopher Ricks’s T.S. Eliot and Prejudice was published at the end of last year, it attracted more than its fair share of dim-witted commentary, but perhaps the most stupid moment occurred in an otherwise well-meaning review by Dannie Abse in the Listener (1 December 1988). Dr Abse, usually the most modest of men, was, in this instance, adamantine in his Jewishness, and could be seen enjoying the access of authority which had accrued to him by virtue of his race and his presence, as a witness, when Emanuel Litvinoff charged Eliot with anti-semitism and was rewarded by hearing the ‘contrite’ Eliot describe Litvinoff’s awful denunciatory poem as ‘a good poem’. One might trust Dr Abse’s assessment of Eliot’s inner turmoil at this moment, were it not that elsewhere he shows himself capable of the most brusque judgment: ‘Leonard Woolf once remarked that T.S. Eliot was “only slightly anti-semitic”. I am reminded of that wise physician, Sir Adolph Abrahams, who, on his ward-rounds at Westminster, forbade medical students to utter the word “slightly”. “Either a woman is pregnant or not pregnant,” he would say. “She cannot be slightly pregnant, boy.” ’
I have two objections to this argument. First, Sir Adolph is surely wrong about pregnancy. ‘Slightly pregnant’ tells us immediately that the pregnancy is not advanced. As far as I know, the terms ‘early’ and ‘late’ are commonly used of pregnancy by gynaecologists, and I cannot see that ‘slightly’ is such an objectionable alternative to ‘early’. Secondly, Dr Abse’s analogy is false. There are clear differences of degree in anti-semitism.
Reviewing Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot (LRB, Vol. 6, No 20), Professor Ricks began: ‘Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal.’ I turn, deliberately, from this last sentence to George Steiner – who, on a television programme last November, discussed the case of Eliot and that of Ezra Pound with Professor Ricks, Annie Cohen-Solal and Clive James. Professor Steiner began by discomfiting Ricks: there were, he remarked humorously, two attacks in the TLS which Professor Ricks, fresh from his transatlantic flight, would not have had time to come to terms with. A wan smile from Professor Ricks. And Steiner concluded, in a general attack on ‘feline caution’, that, while he could forgive Pound’s ‘crackerbarrel’ prejudice, others who had been more guarded deserved to ‘sizzle in hell’. The application to Eliot was unmistakable – as unmistakable as the adjective ‘crackerbarrel’ applied three times to Pound.
At the heart of the argument, Steiner completely flummoxed Professor Ricks by referring to a footnote in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. The context of Professor Steiner’s remarks was the culpability of silence after the Holocaust – a context in which Steiner’s sense of outrage harnessed Eliot to Heidegger: ‘We are now after Auschwitz, and I, reading Christopher’s book with immense profit, I was deeply disappointed that the great question – a text which does not appear in it (correct me if I’ve overlooked it) – it’s when all the photographs, the whole world is looking at the photographs of Auschwitz and Belsen in ’47, ’48, the man addresses himself centrally to what is culture, what is society, not only, like Heidegger, the only comparison I know, after ’45, the most terrible silence, a silence which I find intolerable, but a footnote for which we don’t have time, page 70 in the standard edition of Notes To, which kind of waffles about Jews and Christians perhaps having lived too close to each other so that the borderline got kind of messy and problematic. 1948 and there, I must say, I don’t know what to think.’
Ricks didn’t know what to think either. Hardly surprisingly, given the syntax of Professor Steiner’s insinuation, delivered in a tone pitched somewhere between utter conviction and feline regret. Ricks confined his reply to the more coherent argument that we cannot expect everyone to be a saint. Hardly surprisingly, too, because the footnote to which Steiner so confidently, if incoherently, appealed is, in point of fact, two footnotes. The footnote to which Steiner draws our attention here appears in the first edition of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture: ‘Since the diaspora, and the scattering of Jews amongst peoples holding the Christian Faith, it may have been unfortunate, both for these peoples and for the Jews themselves, that the culture contact between them has had to be within neutral zones of culture in which religion could be ignored: and the effect may have been to strengthen the illusion that there can be culture without religion.’
Letters
Vol. 11 No. 14 · 27 July 1989
From George Steiner
In a purported review of selected essays by Chinua Achebe (LRB, 22 June), Mr Craig Raine expatiates at some length and with manifold insinuations, sneers and convolutions on an unscripted, entirely ‘spoken’ exchange between Christopher Ricks and myself on the question of T.S. Eliot’s feelings about Jews and Judaism. As I stated in the verbal exchange (the admonition to ‘reconsider a transcript’ is almost ludicrous in its self-importance), I remain deeply perplexed by certain passages in the poetry and prose of a great master of sensibility, language and cultural argument. Such perplexity, which Professor Ricks fully shared in his courteous, erudite contributions to the discussion – it involved two other participants – seems alien to Craig Raine. His the apodictic arrogance and certainties.
Notes Towards a Definition of Culture continues to strike me as an often frigid, innerly confused text. To approach the theme of any such redefinition within the immediate wake of the Holocaust without addressing that event, without seeking to elucidate its possible roots within European civilisation and Christendom, without examining the very notion of culture in the light (in the absolute dark) of the new barbarism, remains either frivolous or worse. For Eliot to do so when his earlier sympathies with certain aspects of European reactionary sensibility were fully known, and, by 1948, deeply embarrassing, remains a challenging, saddening puzzle. The footnote in the original version which I referred to only makes matters much uglier. That Eliot himself felt this (or that it was pointed out to him) is made manifest by precisely the amendment to the 1962 paperback. Unlike Craig Raine, almost any common reader will, I suspect, find that amendment officious and chilling. But the issue is not, of course, the footnote or Craig Raine’s little games with it. It is the central silence in Eliot on culture, on European civility, on the future of poetry and thought, in respect of the Auschwitz world. That silence utterly perplexes me and the comparison with Heidegger’s – another man of eminent genius but of the most conservative and ‘masked’ political tenor – is perfectly admissible.
Craig Raine may be wholly ignorant of the connotations of ‘crackerbarrel’ with reference to Pound. Pound’s Jew-baiting, and the lunatic economics to which it is intimately related, are a characteristic part of a certain American, Mid-Western ‘crackerbarrel populism’ and rhetoric (mainly of the Twenties and Thirties). As I have tried to show elsewhere – and not in ad hoc television exchanges – Pound’s anti-semitism produces lousy verse which looks and sounds as if it had been stuck on the body of his serious poetry. Witness its essential absence from the great ‘Usura’ Canto. In Eliot, the Jew-despising passages come in the very midst of great poetry and are thoroughly integrated with it. The difference is immense, and Professor Ricks’s tortured book addresses this difference with unfailing scruple. One may add to this the biographical fact that even in the years of his all too overt Fascism in Italy, Pound – this again is ‘crackerbarrel’ in a very American-Populist vein – sought to be of assistance to individual Jews. If there is some Last Judgment, the confused, the self-contradictory and the sloppily humane will fare better than the cautionary, icy masters of silence and propriety. This, at least, is my naive belief.
Eliot’s distaste for Jews and Judaism is undisguised in his poetry and in such seminal statements as the 1933 lectures at the University of Virginia (not reissued, of course). Eliot’s covering of his tracks when anti-semitism had, via the Holocaust, become inhumanly debasing does invite the adjective ‘feline’ (he was, after all, a virtuoso in regard to cats). For Eliot, the Jew remained an anarchic, opaquely troubling agent of incoherence in what should be the Europe of Virgil, of Dante and of the great Anglo-Catholic poets and thinkers. I have stated time and again that such a view is perfectly legitimate and in need of serious debate. The notorious passages in Eliot’s poetry, the silence in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the truly dismaying attempts by Eliot to suppress his After Strange Gods and to tinker with the footnote which I cited to Professor Ricks, are no contribution to any such discussion. In his last Venice years, Pound often handed visitors a small card inscribed with the message (I quote roughly and from memory): ‘Forgive me if I do not speak; I have made too deep a botch of things.’ The humane dignity of that gesture, its contrast with Eliot’s choices, is worth pondering.
Puzzlement seems to be my vice. Why Craig Raine’s gratuitous polemic some seven months after an ephemeral television round table (he most carefully avoids mentioning Clive James’s robust astonishments)? As Faber poetry editor, Mr Raine may feel that he wears T.S. Eliot’s mantle. Or might it be that Craig Raine flatteringly exaggerates what he takes to have been my part in the rejection by the Old Vic of his version of Racine’s Andromaque? As it happens, I feel and admire the strengths of Raine’s poetry. It is poets – and this bears directly on the Eliot issue – who should most unflinchingly ‘declare their interests’, who should be most alert to the articulation of inhumanity within human speech. It is the poet in whom officious cultivations of political advantage or journalistic repute are least comely. Pound knew that, and knew it magnificently, when he wrote ‘Pull down thy vanity, pull down.’ A text Mr Raine and I might, perhaps, feel in agreement on. At least I hope so.
George Steiner
Cambridge
From Erik Svarny
Craig Raine is correct to point out that the footnote in Eliot’s Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948) which George Steiner referred to in last year’s televised debate with Christopher Ricks does not imply ‘that the Jews were historically responsible for their own fate.’ However, in the debate itself Steiner merely questioned Eliot’s silence after 1945 – and this, his main point, is incontestable. In fact, the footnote in Notes (both versions) can be seen as little more than a circumspect reworking by Eliot of his previous and relatively uncircumspect remark in After Strange Gods (1934), in which, delineating the preconditions for a live cultural ‘tradition’, he comments: ‘The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.’ Clearly, after 1945 Eliot was concerned to make the issue of religious belief (rather than racial background) his sole emphasis.
In general, the recent debate on the issue of Eliot and anti-semitism was extremely unsatisfactory – as exemplified both in Steiner’s careless and superficial critical comments (as on the ‘crackerbarrel’ nature of Pound’s anti-semitism) and in Ricks’s Eliot and Prejudice, a book which fails to adopt any coherent historical or cultural perspective on its subject-matter. Much more – or, more accurately, something – needs to be said on the nature of Eliot’s intellectual allegiance to the work of Charles Maurras, leader of the virulently anti-semitic Action Française, before this issue can be discussed coherently. Ricks relegates this central topic to the derisory status of a footnote, commenting: ‘Eliot admired much in Maurras, and repudiated some things: for Oswald Mosley he showed his contempt.’ What he doesn’t do is offer a word of explanation as to who Maurras was; nor indicate a rationale for Eliot’s admiration; nor mention Maurras’s role within the Vichy regime; nor indicate that Eliot did not repudiate Maurras’s anti-semitism. This strikes me as extraordinary in a book of nearly three hundred pages devoted to the topic of ‘Eliot and Prejudice’.
I know I am not alone in being disconcerted by the hagiography that accompanied Eliot’s centenary – to which Craig Raine notably contributed. But if the only alternative to hagiography is intellectual shadow-boxing or textual origami then it appears likely that literary canonisation requires almost Orwellian processes of historical omission and evasion.
Erik Svarny
London W11
From John Lucas
Towards the end of his sharply-focused review of Chinua Achebe’s book of essays Hopes and Impediments, Craig Raine remarks that ‘all minorities will treat representations of themselves as typical, whereas art deals with actualities, and not necessarily with truth and justice.’ I don’t think he means to suggest that blacks are a minority, but it is odd to imply that what is actual may be untrue. I take it that Craig Raine means that a writer’s choice may feel eccentric and therefore risk distortion of larger, or more general, truths. This would be consistent with his criticism of Achebe’s account of Conrad’s presentation of blacks as ‘deprived of human expression’. He is surely right to say that the preface to Victory won’t bear out Achebe’s claim. What he doesn’t do, however, is to consider the strength of the claim as it affects Heart of Darkness, which is, after all, the story on which Achebe concentrates, and as a result of which he accuses Conrad of being a thoroughgoing racist. If you put together the description of the ‘actual’ blacks of this tale it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that they amount to a ‘typical’ or ‘representative’ statement.
Achebe also draws attention to Kurtz’s black mistress, who, so Achebe says, wins Conrad’s ‘special brand of approval’ (Marlow describes her as ‘savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent’), and who is to be contrasted with the ‘refined, European woman who will step forth to end the story’. The full contrast between the two women, Achebe argues, ‘is implied in the author’s bestowal of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other’. I think Achebe may have missed an important ironic effect here, although it will not help Craig Raine’s cause. Kurtz’s Intended may be able to speak, but she isn’t to be trusted with the truth of what has happened to her fiancé. Women, typically, cannot bear very much reality.
The moment of Marlow’s refusal to tell the Intended the truth is carefully prepared for. When he goes to see the aunt who has helped gain him the position that will send him to the Congo, he is made uncomfortable by her innocent belief that the company will wean ‘those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’. Marlow reflects:
It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
The tone of that may seem almost bafflingly impenetrable, as though Marlow isn’t sure how serious he wants to be or wants his listeners to understand him as being. Yet he returns to this reflection when, anticipating his meeting with the Intended, he tells his listeners that ‘she is out of it – completely. They – the women I mean – are out of it – should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.’ From this follows his lie to her: ‘The last word he spoke was – your name.’
If, as Craig Raine asserts, Marlow is Conrad’s ‘moral mouthpiece’, it may be said that their view of women is typical in more senses than one, and that would be consonant with their view of blacks.
John Lucas
Beeston, Nottingham
Vol. 11 No. 15 · 17 August 1989
From Editors, ‘London Review’
In the last issue, Erik Svarny quoted a sentence from Christopher Ricks’s Eliot and Prejudice. That sentence should have read: ‘Eliot admired much in Maurras, and repudiated some things: for Oswald Mosley he showed his contempt.’
Editors, ‘London Review’
Vol. 11 No. 16 · 31 August 1989
From Edna Longley
Christopher Ricks and George Sterner might spare themselves some agony if they revised downwards their overall estimate of Eliot’s writings. Ricks’s tortuous argument in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice puts polyitlla in the crack running up the wall instead of investigating the human and artistic foundations: ‘the matter of anti-semitism has a particular importance because it cannot be isolated from the larger issues of categorising and prejudice in Eliot’s poetry, issues which are as responsible for his greatness as for his rare lapses from greatness’ (my italics). Steiner (Letters, 27 July) ‘remains perplexed by certain passages in the poetry and prose of a great master of sensibility, language and cultural argument’. Whatever their other disagreements, Ricks and Steiner share a stake in Eliot’s ‘greatness’ – a category dear to the male academic.
Richness or largeness – applied to the work, not the man – might be an improvement, except that I find Eliot’s sensibility (and language) more limited than his hagiographers maintain: a late instance of that Fin-de-Siécle shuttle between neurosis and would-be spirituality. For example, anxieties about contamination link Eliot’s anti-semitism with his own misogyny. The portrait of Fresca, albeit excised from The Waste Land, was hardly drawn by a ‘great master of sensibility’. A master, maybe.
But Eliot has to be ‘great’ because of the high investment in Modernism as a unitary cultural phenomenon and as a multi-national critical industry. This often relegates questions of value in individual arts and parts. Protecting his own investment, Ricks calls Gore Vidal ‘a suave hit man’ for an accurate remark about Eliot’s ‘curious neurotic commentaries’. As Ricks points out, Vidal was less accurate when he read as dispraise Eliot’s salute to Henry James: ‘a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’. Nevertheless, in preferring James to Eliot (‘Eliot ended a mere Christian; James ended an artist’), Vidal was surely prejudiced, not against Christianity, as Ricks has it, but in favour of art.
Eliot’s dilution of his artistic impulse with ‘cultural argument’ has given him an advantage over less theoretical poets. Karl Shapiro put the matter definitively in the ‘The Death of Literary Judgment’:
Eliot is untouchable; he is Modern Literature incarnate and an institution unto himself. One is permitted to disagree with him on a point here or a doctrine there, but no more. The enemy at Eliot’s gate – practically everybody – searches his citadel for an opening and cannot find one. Eliot has long since anticipated every move, he and his men can prevent ingress or exit. Eliot resembles one of those mighty castles in Bavaria, which are remarkably visible, famed for their unsightliness, and too expensive to tear down.
Edna Longley
Queen’s University of Belfast
From A.V.C. Schmidt
Erik Svarny (Letters, 27 July) criticises Christopher Ricks’s T.S. Eliot and Prejudice for its failure to ‘indicate that Eliot did not repudiate Maurras’s anti-semitism’. Ricks in fact quotes, though unfortunately only in part, from Eliot’s piece in the Christian News-Letter of 3 September 1941 in which the anti-semitic policies reported as being introduced in Vichy France are strongly denounced. Ricks’s discussion is concerned with Eliot’s attempt to discriminate between extreme right-wing anti-semitism before the war and that being carried out under Vichy: but he misses the point of Eliot’s emphasis, which is that the former was indeed a ‘symptom of the disorder of French society and politics for the last hundred and fifty years’ (my italics), even if less objectionable than the phenomenon now under consideration, which is adopted as ‘a principle of reconstruction’. It is a pity Ricks’s argument prevented him from giving the full text of Eliot’s letter as far as it concerns Jewish civil disabilities, for it makes abundantly clear that he repudiated anti-semitism and in doing so by logical requirement repudiated the anti-semitism of Charles Maurras. The piece is conveniently reprinted by David Edwards in his 1982 edition of The Idea of a Christian Society, from which I quote the following extract:
What gives us the gravest anxiety, is the statement [in the Times article cited] that ‘Jews have been given a special status, based on the laws of Nuremburg, which makes their condition little better than that of bondsmen.’ Anti-semitism there has always been, among the parties of the extreme right: but it was a very different thing, as a symptom of the disorder of French society and politics for the last hundred and fifty years, from what it is when it takes place as a principle of reconstruction … we can only hope that there has been, or that there will be, some organised protest against such injustice, by the French ecclesiastical hierarchy: unless we are also optimistic enough to hope that these measures are only taken under the strongest pressure from Germany, and that no French government, once that government was master in its own house, would enforce such measures or keep them on its statutes.
Professor George Steiner, in the same issue of LRB, calls Eliot an ‘icy master of silence and propriety’, but the letter I have quoted, though it shows a propriety of which Steiner’s own epistolary effusions are rarely culpable, is very far from silent on the injustice of meting out such treatment to the Jews of France and Eliot as a Christian gives his witness in condemning it. I am not trying to add another hagiographic tribute to Eliot of the kind Mr Svarny deplores: I am simply concerned that the known and public utterances of the man should be attended to with the propriety, icy or otherwise, that they merit.
A.V.C. Schmidt
Balliol College, Oxford
Vol. 11 No. 17 · 14 September 1989
From Patrick Parrinder
Suppose that in England crimes of violence, ranging from domestic murder and rape to organised football hooliganism, are rife. A Martian visitor asks Craig Raine (LRB, 22 June) if he is himself a mugger or rapist, and Mr Raine for reasons best known to himself replies: ‘Yes, I’d like to kill off the whole human race.’ The visitor sends his postcard home and another Martian uses the anecdote to embellish an earnest and colourful history of the various attempts to reform the murderous English. A third writer, a novelist, sets out to evoke a hard-working crew of English sailors with the words ‘Fine fellows – muggers and rapists – in their place.’ His book remains an intergalactic classic long after Earth has been admitted to the Planetary Federation, but some Martians (prompted by the Earthmen) eventually wake up to its anti-English prejudice.
This, I believe, is more or less the case with Heart of Darkness. If Craig Raine believes he can hector Chinua Achebe about Conrad’s reflection of the ‘uncomfortable facts’ of Congolese cannibalism, then Raine should first of all look at his sources. Even if cannibalism in the 19th-century Congo had been as prevalent as murder and rape in contemporary Britain, it would be considered racist by today’s standards to refer habitually to all Congolese, or to all Congolese of a particular tribe, as cannibals – unless, that is, reputable evidence of a general social approval of the practice existed.
‘In Heart of Darkness,’ Raine writes, ‘Conrad commends the inborn moral restraint of the hungry cannibals.’ This is only a praiseworthy attitude on Conrad’s part if they are a. hungry and b. cannibals. Norman Sherry, who is Raine’s source here, disproves Marlow’s notion that the ship’s crew of Bangalas were starving, since cassava, clearly described by Conrad, was their staple diet. But Sherry, followed by Raine, describes the Bangalas as ‘joyfully cannibalistic’, citing as evidence W. Holman Bentley’s Pioneering in the Congo. Looking up Bentley, we find that the ‘facts’ of Congolese cannibalism are more elusive than might have been supposed.
To start with, Bentley’s reader is left unsure whether it was to the author himself or to George Grenfell that a Bangala chief’s son confessed his desire to ‘eat everybody on earth’. The remark is little better than hearsay. Grenfell, quoted by Bentley, recorded that the further he travelled in the Congo, the further cannibalism seemed to recede – until, he thought, he had (almost) caught up with it among the Bangala. Actually, as so often in these accounts, he heard lurid reports but came on the scene just too late actually to witness anything. (The reports, by the way, were from members of a different tribe.) Another explorer, W.H. Stapleton, believed the Bangala were ‘veritable cannibals’, but added that ‘these people have long been the terror of the river. Any blood-curdling story is readily believed of these warlike people.’ Grenfell detected the existence of an – admittedly, minority – anti-cannibalistic sentiment among the Bangala. Bentley, who brings together these accounts, claims that another tribe, the Bopoto, have recently given up cannibalism ‘in its grosser forms’, though the custom was in full swing when the first missionaries arrived. Apart from his conversation with an old man who claimed to have eaten seven of his wives pour encourager les autres, Bentley seems to have had little personal experience of cannibals, though he repeats lurid anecdotes from as far afield as Samoa.
‘Why do we tell these shocking stories?’ he asks. The answer is that the repeated self-sacrifice of Europeans who went out to the Congo one after the other only to die ‘needs some justification’. Justification was amply supplied by the stories of cannibal tribesmen who abandoned their ghastly practices the moment the missionaries came: but if cannibalism was really a socially approved, rather than an aberrant and lawless practice, we must ask how it came to be given up so easily.
I suggest that Achebe’s view of Heart of Darkness reflects not only modern African anger (‘understandable but irrational’, as Raine so patronisingly calls it), but conclusions that could be reached by any reader alive to modern standards of historical and anthropological evidence. If we now call Conrad a racist, we should remember that he saw through many of the impostures of 19th-century imperialism. In any case, the real question is not about the moral judgment of a dead author who was advanced by the standards of his time. It is what happens to a central ‘modern classic’ when we can no longer read it with the complacency which affected even the most politically sensitive of Conrad’s critics until very recently, and which still afflicts Craig Raine.
Patrick Parrinder
Reading, Berkshire
Vol. 11 No. 19 · 12 October 1989
From Dennis Walder
Craig Raine’s misconceived, if not mischievous attempt to undermine Chinua Achebe’s attack on Conrad (LRB, 22 June) has elicited some welcome criticism from your readers; but none, alas, from Achebe himself. So perhaps it’s worth reporting what he said when given the opportunity. This was during a break in filming an Open University programme recently. Achebe had not read the LRB piece, nor did he then have time: but after I gave him an account of Raine’s objections to his view of Conrad as a ‘thoroughgoing racist’, he was silent for a moment and then, with a wry smile, remarked: ‘I could give up “thoroughgoing”.’
Dennis Walder
The Open University, Milton Keynes
From Davis Oldham
I am still waiting for someone to point out that the flurry over Eliot and prejudice currently taking place in your pages was occasioned by a review of a book of essays by the Nigerian author Chinhua Achebe. The review itself was devoted almost exclusively to one essay out of many, which I found disappointing; your readers, evidently more comfortable with Eliot than Achebe, have buried the latter in their haste to praise or dismiss the former. One cannot help but speculate on the ironical possibility that this has something to do with Achebe’s bad taste in being born an African. Eliot and prejudice, indeed!
Davis Oldham
New London, Connecticut
From Editors, ‘London Review’
At least we spelt Achebe’s name right. His views did, in fact, come under discussion at various points in the correspondence. We wonder what good Mr Oldham thinks he is doing by charging (particular) people with racial prejudice on such insubstantial grounds.
Editors, ‘London Review’
Vol. 11 No. 22 · 23 November 1989
From Tom Paulin
I’m a bit surprised that my old sparring-partner, Craig Raine, should be defending Joseph Conrad against Chinua Achebe (LRB, 22 June). Take Conrad’s The Secret Agent, where there’s a sinister anarchist called Ossipon who is described like this: ‘ … Comrade Ossipon, ex-medical student, the principal writer of the FP leaflets, stretched out his robust legs, keeping the soles of his boots turned up to the glow in the grate. A bush of crinkly yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the Negro type. His almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high cheek-bones.’ Ossipon, I take it, is of mixed race – African, Irish, Chinese. Conrad expresses Ossipon’s negative – his evil – characteristics visually in terms of certain racial stereotypes. Sun-style racism, isn’t it?
Tom Paulin
University of Nottingham
Vol. 11 No. 23 · 7 December 1989
From Craig Raine
When he equates Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent and the Sun newspaper (Letters, 23 November), it is hard to avoid the thought that the person with the tabloid mentality is Tom Paulin. I think I hear between the lines of his letter the familiar, raucous cry of ‘Gotcha!’ But I shall elude him. Let me quote again the passage he finds so self-evidently a racist libel on the Irish, Africans and the Chinese: ‘Comrade Ossipon, ex-medical student, the principal writer of the FP leaflets, stretched out his robust legs, keeping the soles of his boots turned up to the glow of the grate. A bush of crinkly yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the Negro type. His almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high cheek-bones.’ Paulin’s analysis is briefly plausible. Yet one can’t help wondering what, in this alleged triple libel, the Irish are doing here. Are those freckles a slur impossible to overlook? Or has Paulin misread Ossipon as O’Ssipon? Actually, if one clears one’s mind, of prejudice, it is obvious that Ossipon isn’t of ‘mixed race’, as Paulin maintains. Conrad is describing – quite recognisably – a Slav or Tartar face, as Ossipon’s name suggests. Clearly, Tom Paulin is so innocent of racial prejudice, of racial stereotyping, that he couldn’t tell an Italian from an Eskimo. I think we should commend him.
On the other hand, he might have noticed that one of the things the racist Conrad holds against Ossipon is Ossipon’s belief in Lombroso’s theory – that degeneracy can be deduced from facial characteristics. He might have noticed, too, that, for Conrad, the flattened nose and prominent mouth can be physically attractive features. Ossipon is a successful womaniser. ‘And Comrade Ossipon raised his bowed head, beloved of various humble women of these isles, Apollo-like in the sunniness of its bush of hair.’ There is irony here, of course – directed at the discrepancy between Ossipon’s attractive exterior and the repulsive personality within. This ‘Apollo’ lives off women. Conrad’s distaste, however, is reserved for Ossipon’s character, not his physical appearance, about which only Tom Paulin now seems uneasy.
Craig Raine
Oxford
Vol. 12 No. 1 · 11 January 1990
From Tim Youngs
Craig Raine is wrong to suggest (Letters, 7 December 1989) that it is only Tom Paulin who feels unease over the connection between the moral character and physical appearance of Ossipon in The Secret Agent. Had Conrad’s readers found attractive the description of a ‘flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the Negro type’ and leering, ‘almond-shaped eyes’, then I’m a Martian. Raine ignores the pervasiveness of the images which both fed and grew from 19th-century pseudo-scientific racism. The point of the matter is that attention to physical difference (categorised to ‘type’) reflects alleged moral difference, thereby elevating both the appearance and the character of the white observer. Even Livingstone was aware of this process. Writing, in the Last Journals, of blacks, he declares: ‘Nothing but the most pitiable puerility would lead any manly heart to make their inferiority a theme for self-exultation; however, that is often done, as if with the vague idea that we can, by magnifying their deficiencies, demonstrate our immaculate perfections.’ That Livingstone takes for granted their inferiority and elsewhere practices what he here condemns is testimony to the hold which such cultural imperialism had on his society. But at least he had some awareness of how it operated. Incidentally, it’s very revealing too that much Victorian writing on travel in Africa is riddled with explicit derogatory references to the Irish. I wonder why; they’re not all portrayed as attractive to women.
Tim Youngs
Nottingham Polytechnic
Vol. 12 No. 6 · 22 March 1990
From Paul Edwards
Have we finished with Conrad and racialism yet? ‘The disdainful pout of Comrade Ossipon’s thick lips accentuated the negro type of his face.’ Conrad accepts the racial stereotypes of the ‘scientists’ of his time, but in some ways he certainly attempts to undermine them too. Heart of Darkness shows that ‘civilised’ whites are as prone to savagery and superstition as the ‘uncivilised natives’ of Africa. But it’s no longer easy to read the tale as the bearer of such a message. Savagery and superstition (and cannibalism) – ‘darkness’ – are simply taken as given where Africans are concerned. It’s hardly surprising that people, especially from Africa, find this assumption offensive, to say nothing of the otherwise stereotyped presentation of Africans as passive child-like creatures or magnificent animals. Maybe it’s still possible for readers like Craig Raine to regard these matters as peripheral (LRB, 22 June 1989), and to believe they shouldn’t stand in the way of our appreciation of a great writer. But Raine ought to see that others are not being perverse or fanatical if they cannot enter the kind of contract with Conrad that sympathetic reading demands.
Paul Edwards
Cambridge
