Notes on My Books | Page 7

for.
My next effort in short story writing was a departure--I mean a
departure from the Malay Archipelago. Without premeditation, without
sorrow, without rejoicing and almost without noticing it, I stepped into
the very different atmosphere of An Outpost of Progress. I found there
a different moral attitude. I seemed able to capture new reactions, new
suggestions, and even new rhythms for my paragraphs. For a moment I
fancied myself a new man--a most exciting illusion. It clung to me for
some time, monstrous, half conviction and half hope as to its body with
an iridescent tail of dreams and with a changeable head like a plastic
mask. It was only later that I perceived that in common with the rest of
men nothing could deliver me from my fatal consistency. We cannot
escape from ourselves.
An Outpost of Progress is the lightest part of the loot I carried off from
Central Africa, the main portion being of course The Heart of Darkness.
Other men have found a lot of quite different things there and I have
the comfortable conviction that what I took would not have been of
much use to anybody else. And it must be said that it was but a very
small amount of plunder. All of it could go into one's breast pocket
when folded neatly. As for the story itself it is true enough in its
essentials. The sustained invention of a really telling lie demands a

talent which I do not possess.
The Idiots is such an obviously derivative piece of work that it is
impossible for me to say anything about it here. The suggestion of it
was not mental but visual: the actual idiots. It was after an interval of
long groping amongst vague impulses and hesitations which ended in
the production of "The Nigger" that I turned to my third short story in
the order of time, the first in this volume: Karain: A Memory.
Reading it after many years Karain produced on me the effect of
something seen through a pair of glasses from a rather advantageous
position. In that story I had not gone back to the Archipelago, I had
only turned for another look at it. I admit that I was absorbed by the
distant view, so absorbed that I didn't notice then that the motif of the
story is almost identical with the motif of The Lagoon. However, the
idea at the back is very different; but the story is mainly made
memorable to me by the fact that it was my first contribution to
Blackwood's Magazine and that it led to my personal acquaintance with
Mr. William Blackwood whose guarded appreciation I felt nevertheless
to be genuine, and prized accordingly. Karain was begun on a sudden
impulse only three days after I wrote the last line of "The Nigger," and
the recollection of its difficulties is mixed up with the worries of the
unfinished Return, the last pages of which I took up again at the time;
the only instance in my life when I made an attempt to write with both
hands at once as it were.
Indeed my innermost feeling, now, is that The Return is a left-handed
production. Looking through that story lately I had the material
impression of sitting under a large and expensive umbrella in the loud
drumming of a furious rain-shower. It was very distracting. In the
general uproar one could hear every individual drop strike on the stout
and distended silk. Mentally, the reading rendered me dumb for the
remainder of the day, not exactly with astonishment but with a sort of
dismal wonder. I don't want to talk disrespectfully of any pages of mine.
Psychologically there were no doubt good reasons for my attempt; and
it was worth while, if only to see of what excesses I was capable in that
sort of virtuosity. In this connection I should like to confess my

surprise on finding that notwithstanding all its apparatus of analysis the
story consists for the most part of physical impressions; impressions of
sound and sight, railway station, streets, a trotting horse, reflections in
mirrors and so on, rendered as if for their own sake and combined with
a sublimated description of a desirable middle class town-residence
which somehow manages to produce a sinister effect. For the rest any
kind word about The Return (and there have been such words said at
different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how
much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper and
in disillusion.
J. C.

LORD JIM
When this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about that I
had been bolted away with. Some reviewers maintained that the work
starting as a short story had