It’s Valentine’s Day, and the weather is sunny, bright, and cold. Kathleen and I have tickets to hear Dianne Reeves sing at Jazz at Lincoln Center this evening. To spare me the risks of falling on icy pavements, Kathleen will have a car pick me up beforehand. If, for any reason, she can’t get a car, then she’ll give the tickets away or, possibly, go by herself. But I’m sure that a car will be available.

I’ve heard about older people losing interest in novels, and I hope that that won’t happen to me. But I do seem to have lost interest in the performing arts. There’s more to it than the inconvenience, such as it is, of going out in the evening (which overlays a dislike of leaving the neighborhood). It has something to do with being tired of watching people perform. Sitting in a concert hall, my mind wanders far more than it does when I’m sitting in the blue room and listening to a recording.

When I am feeling rather more robust than I do these wintry days, waiting for Remicade, I can snap on an urbane carapace that fools even me: I become the seasoned theatregoer, the music lover who knows when to applaud at a concert. I would hate for it to be known how much time I spend stewing in vanity while actors, dancers, and musicians knock themselves out, simply because I can appreciate what they’re doing. Every now and then, performers manage to carry beyond mere appreciation and out of myself. But such moments are rare. It is much easier to respond to music without the burden of the sophisticated mask that I instinctively don when I leave the neighborhood.

Solitude is important to me. (I am convinced that some aspect of my neural circuitry is autistic.) That’s, I think, why I’ve become so much more interested in the visual arts as I’ve grown older. As with books, I can be alone with them. I can spend as much time with them as suits me. And I can do something of which I’m pathologically incapable when other people (with whom I am not in conversation) are around: I can think.

Then there’s the fact that almost everybody onstage and in the audience is younger than I am, largely by a generation or more. This is depressing because youth, I now see, is an infirmity that only a very few people are allowed to outgrow.

The only thing that redeems the effort of going out and sitting through things is the delight of talking them over with Kathleen afterwards. It’s when I’m with her that my enthusiasm achieves a genuine flush. If there was anything to be enthusiastic about.

***

I re-read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent the other day. I bought my copy in 1970, in my last undergraduate term. (It’s the Doubleday Anchor paperback of 1953 that sports a cover drawn by Edward Gorey.) Inside the back cover, there’s a note indicating a second reading in 1976. Did I read it again at any point in the nearly forty years between then and now? I don’t recall. I rather think not, in fact, because, this time, the novel was very surprising. If you’d have asked me to sketch a thumbnail, I’d have told a story much like the one that Alfred Hitchcock tells in his 1936 adaptation — entitled Sabotage, by the way, not The Secret Agent (a different picture altogether).

It would focus on the dissatisfactions of the Verloc household, with the remote head of the household and his mysterious friends, his attractive, younger wife, and the wife’s mentally-challenged brother, whom the husband sends to his doom by instructing him to deliver a parcel to a certain destination by a certain time. The boy is incapable of ignoring the many distractions that he encounters on his mission, resulting in the explosion of a bus and the death of many passengers. When the wife, who was devoted to caring for her brother, discovers what happened, she murders her husband in cold-blooded rage. I can rattle this off so readily because I watched Sabotage last year, and it seemed an excellent and not significantly unfaithful adaptation. There was no movie theatre in Conrad, I knew, but this addition was really the interpolation of Hitchcock’s signature.

That Sabotage is a freely unfaithful adaptation of Conrad’s novel is unimportant; what’s interesting is that it captures what I remembered of the novel. What I remembered was the merely sensational part. The actual novel is rich and complex, and the story does not unfold in a straightforward, linear manner. (It also, I’d argue, goes off the rails at the end.) There is no exploding bus, and in fact the bomb detonates prematurely, because boy carrying it trips on a tree root in his path and stumbles. He is blown to smithereens, but there is no other damage. More interestingly, we find out about this from news reports read by other characters. The omniscient narrator does not witness the event. This is part of a greater indirectness that characterizes the sabotage itself: we never understand just why Verloc, the husband, didn’t plant the bomb himself, or why he thought that his seriously impaired brother-in-law would be able to carry out the task. The answers to these questions would be too uncomfortable for Verloc to handle, so he does not so much as acknowledge them, even in the miserably great scene in which he tries to talk his wife into getting over her grief.

The novel begins with a bit of stage-setting; we’re introduced to the Verlocs — Mr Verloc, Winnie Verloc, Winnie’s mother, and Winnie’s brother, Stevie, and to the unprepossessing shop which, fairly transparently, is the front for other, surreptitious activities. We’re presented with the considerations that made Mr Verloc a good catch in the eyes of Winnie and her mother, but the more we’re told about him, the more we doubt his soundness. The soundness of Verloc’s position is shown to be wanting in the very next scene, which takes place in a West End embassy. A Mr Vladimir, newly assigned to his country’s London mission, expresses extreme dissatisfaction with Verloc’s efforts as a secret agent. Mr Vladimir is tired of reports; he wants action. He wants to provoke the English authorities into clamping down on the anarchists who roam freely (if under surveillance) in British liberty. He proposes an attack on “science” — that will scare the public.

Verloc leaves the embassy in shock and despair. He is far too indolent to dream up a plot, much less to implement one. He’s capable of little more than hosting sedentary gatherings of highly feckless revolutionaries, such as the one we’re shown in the third chapter. Knowing that such “news” as might be gleaned from these meetings will no longer earn him the stipend upon which he depends for his livelihood, Verloc goes to bed foredoomed to insomnia. It is all excellently dismal. Conrad writes as if he were refashioning Henry James’s work to suit the impatience of his brother, William. The sensibility is there, but not the abstraction. Verloc’s hopelessness is like a carpet in which he has been rolled and tied, prior to being tossed into the sea. We can’t imagine how he’ll get out of it.

We find out a few pages later. Conrad has elided the passage of a month or so; Verloc’s attempt at escape has just occurred, with the explosion of a bomb in Greenwich Park, near the Observatory. (We can’t know it, but almost the entirety of the remaining story will take place on this day.) One of Verloc’s revolutionary friends confronts a fearful little man known as the “Professor” with the news, and the Professor readily acknowledges that he designed the device and delivered it to Verloc. This meeting is followed by an encounter in the street between the Professor and Chief Inspector Heat. Heat surprises the Professor (and the reader no less) by asserting that he’s not interested in the Professor just yet, even though he is investigating the Greenwich Park bombing and has no reason not to connect it with the Professor. It may be that Heat is aware that the Professor is “armed,” like a terrorist martyr, with an explosive that will certainly take the life of anyone who tries to apprehend him, but Conrad seems to be pointing to the Chief Inspector’s blustery careerism, which renders the dispensing of justice an incidental consideration. From this encounter, we follow Heat, who presently discovers a clue, in the remains of the dead bomber, that leads straight to Verloc. The investigation promises to be wrapped up with dispatch.

It is at this point, however, that the tale deviates from the conventions of crime genre fiction and becomes contrapuntal. Heat’s report on the case to his superior, the unnamed Assistant Commissioner, reveals not only that the two men are mutually antipathetic but that they seek to pursue contradictory ends in resolving the case. The only thing that they have in common is a lack of interest in arresting Verloc. During the evening that follows, the Chief Inspector and the Assistant Commissioner conduct competing inquiries into the case. We see more of the latter, which takes us into the great world of elegant salons and cabinet offices. The class divide between the Assistant Commissioner, who is a “gentleman,” and the Chief Inspector, who is not, is more salient than the one between owners and workers that would motivate the revolutionaries if they were not so sluggish. The Assistant Commissioner astutely senses the pressure of Mr Vladimir behind the bungled terrorist act, and he consults with a “Great Personage” — who happens to be the Secretary of State, but who would be a great personage in or out of office — before proceeding. The discussions between these men (including Heat) are the marrow of the novel; they outline the different ways in which the vested authorities propose to deal with the plots against the national security. They give the novel the form that in Mozart’s music is known as a romance, with an interlude of contrasting material separating the outer, mutually reflecting thirds of a piece.

It is only after the Assistant Commissioner has spent some time with Verloc that we return to the depressing shop. After a brisk, but not brief, account of the elided month, Conrad delivers a scene of virtuoso drama that would be operatic if it were not so suspended. Winnie, overhearing the Chief Inspector talking with her husband,  learns most of what has happened, and the news launches her into what can only be called a catatonic fury. For what seems a great deal of time only because the pages take a great deal of time to turn, Winnie lurches from pillar to post, unaware of what she’s doing. All the hopelessness that Verloc felt in the third chapter is reprised in Winnie’s bosom, and it, too, eventually climaxes in violence and death.

And now, I think, Conrad loses his grip. Winnie, we are repeatedly told throughout the body of the novel, is not a talker; she does not make a habit of getting to the bottom of things. I should have been more satisfied if, having murdered her husband with a Chekhovian carving knife, she put the matter out of her mind, as Verloc would have done. But no; she sinks into arias of confusion and dread. These arias are sung, as it were, to the revolutionary who informed the Professor of the blast, Comrade Ossipon, a strapping and exotically handsome young man who has made his way to the Verloc establishment with a precise view to charming the new widow into sharing her fortune with him. This, I think, is what ought to have happened. It would have constituted not a happy ending by any means but a just ending deferred. And it would preserve the tonal register of the Verloc flanks of the novel. Instead, Winnie Verloc undergoes an unwonted character transformation, apparently driven to mad loquacity by her crime. It is unconvincing stuff, and it goes on and on.

But by this time, Conrad has ferried us to something quite as awful as the heart of darkness. Verloc’s bland egotism, and his habit of seeing himself as the victim of what are in fact his own mistakes, are not as exotic as Kurtz’s jungle-bound megalomania, but the man’s sheer common vernacular puts his senselessness much closer to our everyday world. Conrad masterfully transmutes Verloc’s self-pity into cackling mockery.

A great discouragement, the result of fatigue, came upon Mr Verloc. He had had a very full day, and his nerves had been tried to the utmost. After a month of maddening worry, ending in an unexpected catastrophe, the storm-tossed spirit of Mr Verloc longed for repose. His career as a secret agent had come to an end in a way no one could have foreseen; only, now, perhaps he could manage to get a night’s sleep at last. But looking at his wife, he doubted it. She was taking it very hard — not at all like herself, he thought. He made an effort to speak.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2014 at 3:11 pm.