The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad's

THE SECRET AGENT

Joseph Conrad

A critical paper by

Louise Mooney

 

The Secret Agent:  Joseph Conrad's Doomsday Book

Three years after his discordant marriage to a typist and a few weeks before the birth of his first son in 1898, a grim, penurious Joseph Conrad chided his socialist friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham for his idealism.  "You want from men faith, honour, fidelity to truth in themselves and others.  You want them to have all this to show it every day, to make out of these words their rules of life. . . .  This [idealism] is the only point of difference between us," Conrad wrote and continued with his own mechanistic version of how the world is ordered:

There is, let us say, a machine.  It evolved itself . . . out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!  It knits.  I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled.  I feel it ought to embroider, but it goes on knitting. . . . And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself:  made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart.  It is a tragic accident . . . and it is indestructible!  It knits us in and it knits us out.  It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions, and nothing matters (Jean-Aubrey 216)*.

This finite, deterministic vision is the vision informing the book that Conrad, as he expressed it, shook from his “sawdust brain” nine years later in 1906, writing from his home in Kent, still grim, still penurious and still married to the woman Virginia Woolf called, unkindly, “Conrad’s lump of a wife.”  For The Secret Agent is no mere tale of a ragtag group of Soho anarchists inhabiting the back lanes of London in the last decades of the 19th century.  But what is it exactly?  A domestic melodrama, perhaps cruelly mimicking his own misalliance, re-staged in the Verlocs’ dingy parlors behind Mr Verloc’s shop of questionable wares?  Or is it the picture of a small cubicle of suffering humanity trapped within the walls of a larger cellblock, a prison within a prison, surrounded by the impenetrable gloom, poverty and despair of late Victorian London and presided over by a pudgy and indolent monarch, the Empress (thanks to Disraeli) of India and the Queen of England, Scotland, Wales and, alas, of Ireland as well?  Or is it all of the above, raised to the level of global misanthropy?

The Secret Agent, I believe, is Joseph Conrad’s doomsday book, conceived by the "grand master of the landscape of hysteria" (Fleishman 97) during a chapter in his life dominated by mounting debt, depression, incorrigible gout, sickly children and a wife – by all accounts a stupid woman – who, like Winnie Verloc, survived by ignoring the “interior of things.”  Its characters – the Verloc family, the Assistant Commissioner, the Chief Inspector, the Secretary of State, diplomats, anarchists, and the "men with their collars turned up and soft hats rammed down” (46) – inhabit a closed universe, a world of dark symbols and bleak impressions, a world without choice and without absolutes over which the dome of heaven rests uneasily upon a space as befouled as Sylvia Plath's airless bell jar.  This sinister cosmology, regulated by a mechanical genius that "knits us in and knits us out," is the subject of this paper.

Conrad has raised the unregenerate world of The Secret Agent amid the impenetrable shadows of an unreal city, such a London as Dickens or Charles Williams knew, full of misery's dark corners, a "great blind pile of bricks" (75), "unlovely and unfriendly to man" (84).  Within that "monstrous town, more populous than some continents," Conrad tells us in his “Preface,” "[t]here was room enough . . . to place any story, depth enough for any passion, . . . darkness enough to bury five millions of lives" (40-41). 

Indolent and overfed, Secret Agent Verloc, anarchist manqué, boulevardier, informer both to Scotland Yard and the Russian Embassy, defender of "opulence and luxury" (51), pornographic shopkeeper and family man, is at ease in the maze of city streets, finding his way along "the waste-bearing" (Karl 194) Thames from Soho to Westminster through Knightsbridge, Hyde Park, Charing Cross, Chesham Square, Sloane Square, and Victoria Station.  Strolling the city's byways, he knows London as intimately as Leopold Bloom knew Dublin, but unlike Bloom, Verloc, driven by anxious inertia, brushes past the city's residents and monuments noiselessly.  Like the Assistant Commissioner, Verloc is "unplaced" (152), a moral alien; and unlike the gregarious and hearty Bloom, Verloc does not speak the language of his fellow man.

In terrorist fiction, according to Jacques Berthold, anarchists are generally energetic, focused, and volatile.  Not so the anarchists of Conrad’s London, where a Grand Guignol band of misfits, neurotics, psychotics, and comically inept terrorists bespeaks the pathology of the world’s decay:  diseased specimens who have breathed too long the stagnant air of the city's "slimy aquarium" (150).  Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, is afflicted with “grotesque and incurable obesity” (121); Yundt is beset with "gouty swellings," decaying teeth, "worn-out passion" and "impotent fierceness" (74).  The sociopathic Professor, alien and alienated, wanders the fetid city transfixed by his obsession with creating the perfect detonator; and Comrade Ossipon makes his way in the world by means of "young girls with savings books" (81).  In Conrad's tale, notes one critic, the revolutionaries “lack all energy and power of initiative" (109), "for all the men in the story (save the Commissioner and the Professor) Silenus is their emblem.  Lustful, lazy, fat, they rest and feed complacently on the obvious.  According to Norman Holland, “The Secret Agent is, among other things, a study in sloth" (57).

And, in  fact, suffocating inertia pervades Conrad's diseased cosmos.  His anarchists are not men of virile passions.  In fact, as many have pointed out, they "are wholly dependent on women. . . .  [T]he decaying Yundt owes his survival to a faithful crone, the helpless Michaelis his freedom to his lady patroness, the conceited Ossipon [his living] to the nursemaids he seduces" (Berthold 109), while the “thoroughly domesticated” (209), thoroughly sexual Verloc, "[u]ndemonstrative and burly in a fat-pig style, . . . [b]orn of industrious parents for a life of toil, . . . embraced indolence" and grew "devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism" (52).  Rising late and emerging from his well-cared-for home, "he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed" (46).

Opposed to the Soho anarchists are figures of power as inept and grotesquely comic as their underground counterparts:  There is Chief Inspector Heat, risen to high office through the confidences of double agent Verloc; there is the mincing and menacing Russian First Secretary Vladimir; the Home Secretary Sir Ethelred, “vast in bulk and stature” (142), intolerant of details and obsessed with fisheries and, last, the ill-married, upwardly mobile conniving Assistant Commissioner.

Over these bleak and feckless warriors, over the city's dim streets, the eye of the narrator, bemused, pitiless and ironic, sweeps unsparingly, cataloguing recurring images of the world's last night:  the Verlocs' cracked storefront bell that chimes their clients in and out, filmy mirrors and windows that do not recognize the faces peering into and through them and clocks that ineffectually measure the passing century, its hopes, its pretensions, its blind faith in science, its trust in the world's "organized powers" (169). 

In turn, as if through a distorting mirror of diminishing images, the great doomed world and the city of shadows are reflected in the very center of domesticity:  the Verloc household "hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun" behind a "dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish (71).” 

The Verlocs' marriage contract is a bond as silent as the movement of the planets.  "Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust in a tight bodice and with broad hips (46)," our author tells us.  And she "had also other charms:  her youth; her full, rounded form, the provocation of her unfathomable reserve" (47), and a conviction that things "did not stand much looking into" (173), which is a serviceable virtue for the wife of a secret agent.  Indeed theirs is a happily complementary arrangement, for Mrs. Verloc does not countenance the "inwardness of things" (155); and her husband, from the long habits of his profession, does not entertain the "mysteriousness of living beings” (174).

There are other silences as well:  About them both there is a palpable lasciviousness, a matter of silent glances and code mannerisms, for Winnie, we are told, was an "experienced wife" (85), and "Mr. Verloc loved his wife as a wife should be loved, that is, maritally, with the regard one has for one's chief possession” (174).

Winnie has not come to the marriage alone.  With her have come her mother, a "stout wheezy woman with a large brown face" (47) tinged by orange blushes (160) and her son, poor, fair, slack-jawed Stevie, the tale's moral idiot-savant. 

According to Conrad, "Mr Verloc extended as much recognition to Stevie as a man not particularly fond of animals may give to his wife's beloved cat; and this recognition, benevolent and perfunctory, was essentially of the same quality” (72).  Winnie, perhaps sensing Verloc's indifference to her brother, has encouraged Verloc to take Stevie on nightly walks.  Watching the two set out of an evening, Winnie remarks complacently, "Might be father and son" and congratulates herself "on a resolution she had taken a few years before" (179):  her resolve to reject the butcher boy's marriage proposal because he could not accommodate the sole object of Winnie's passion, her defective brother Stevie.  In short, she has bartered her sexuality in exchange for, ironically, a safe harbor for her brother, her mother and herself.  

At the emotional core of the Verloc household, Stevie, the instinctual master of the anarchic cosmos, often sits:

"very good and quiet at a deal table, drawing circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable."  (76)

In fact, there is no corner of the earth so inconsequential that Conrad's cosmic chaos will not enter and infect.  Thus, without warning, death invades "the central scene of the book – the lugubrious cab ride" (Karl 194) that takes Winnie, Stevie and Mrs. Verloc's mother on her penultimate ride to the grave.  Through the "early dirty night, the sinister, hopeless and rowdy night of South London (159), the Cab of Death hauls its grotesque human cargo:  the Junoesque, uninquisitive Winnie, her triple-chinned orange-cheeked bewigged mother and the tender-hearted indignant boy.  This enclosed world of the carriage careens through the corridors of the night like a small lost planet hurtling through a heartless galaxy:  “The cab rattled, jingled, jolted . . . [T]he effect was of being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a medieval device for the punishment of crime.  It was extremely distressing; and the raising of Mrs. Verloc's mother's voice sounded like a wail of pain (162).”

The jolting deathcab is the very microcosmic image of the larger world's careless jostling, of the mechanical accuracy of its hazards (234), of the irresistible "conspiracies of fatal destiny (216)" against which Stevie’s compassion is as ineffectual and feeble as his doleful cries of “poor, poor” on behalf of the cabby and “bad, bad” on behalf of his tormented horse.  Moreover, the violent last cab ride foretells Stevie's meaningless stumble into death outside the Greenwich Observatory—his visceral reduction to a pyrotechnic "cannibal feast" (106) of "brotherly bits of flesh and bone all sprouting up together in the manner of a firework" (233).  For double agent Verloc, in his frenzy to appease his Russian clients, has transformed his defective brother-in-law into a defective bomber-boy by convincing him that destroying the planet's ultimate time-keeper will make the world safe for maimed horses and the wretched families of maimed cabbies. 

But, Conrad tells us, "The soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and protector" (234).  And by the time the self-satisfied Assistant Commissioner leaves Westminster pleased with his handling of the case and the imminent unmasking and imprisonment of the secret agent, the “fat-fed citizen (268)” Verloc has undergone his own reduction – knitted-out by the hand of his own wife.  Returning home, inspired perhaps by his brother-in-law's shovel-full “of butcher-shop by-products” (106), Verloc is overcome by "unappeasable hunger":  "The piece of roast beef, laid out in the likeness of funeral baked meats for Stevie's obsequies, offered itself largely to his notice . . . and Mr. Verloc partook ravenously, cutting thick slices with the carving knife and swallowing them without bread" (227).  His hunger is inspired in other ways as well. “Come here,” he calls to his wife “in a soft and conjugal tone (225),” but Winnie will have nothing of him.  Leaning over the sofa where her brother's lascivious assassin lies "issuing his mating call" (Holland 57), she fatally pierces her husband’s "mortal envelope" (235) with the very knife that carved the roast beef. 

At the close of Conrad's doomsday book, the reckless cosmic machinery of an indifferent universe has ground Stevie, Verloc and Winnie to dust and scattered them from Greenwich to Soho and over the Channel by means of two murders and a suicide.  Beyond the abattoir Comrade Ossipon, Winnie’s deceitful seducer, wanders the backstreets of London horror-struck and terrified, “feeling nothing, seeing nothing.”  Only the incorruptible Professor remains, “smiling sardonically under the fierce glitter of his glasses” (268), his pouch of imperfect dynamite still intact and at the ready;  “I will send you by-and-by a small bill for certain chemicals which I shall order tomorrow” (268), he tells Ossipon ominously.

* References cite works listed below, giving author and page.  Page numbers alone refer to The Secret Agent.

Works Consulted

Primary Sources

The Secret Agent:  A Simple Tale.  Ed. Martin Seymour-Smith.   London:  Penguin Books, 1990. 

Secondary Sources

Batchelor, John.  The Life of Joseph Conrad.  Oxford:  Blackwell, 1996.

Berthoud, Jacques.  "The Secret Agent."  The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J. H. Stape.  Cambridge:  Cambridge U. P., 1996.

Fleishman, Avrom.  "The Landscape of Hysteria in The Secret Agent.  Ed. Ross C. Murfin.  Conrad Revisited:  Essays for the Eighties.  Tuscaloosa: Alabama U P, 1985.

Holland, Norman N.  "Style as Character:  The Secret Agent."  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Modern Critical Views:  Joseph Conrad.  New York:  Chelsea House, 1986.

Jean-Aubry, G.  Joseph Conrad:  Life and Letters.  New York:  Doubleday, 1927.

Karl, Frederick R.  A Reader's Guide to Joseph Conrad.  Syracuse: Syracuse U.P., 1969.