Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning." He wrote The Secret Agent, one of the great novels of modernism, a few years later. A decade or so before "Notices to Mariners", he was entertaining similar doubts about identity: "Both at sea and on land my point of view is English, from which the conclusions should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. Literature was not the only thing about which Conrad was doubtful. For Conrad, there was a middle way, one in which moral values emerged from relative positions, from the "essential organisation" of the literary work itself, rather than anything beyond it. That the marine register's "ideal of perfect accuracy" cannot be achieved by literature does not mean literature must be empty of ideals. I would also contend that Conrad prized moral intensity and perspicacity as much as Leavis, even if he did not believe in abstract moral principles. Under the headline "Notices to Mariners", he asserted the futility of literary effort in contrast to the informational precision of reports of the comings and goings of ships, then commonly printed in newspapers. Leavis prized "essential organisation" in a novel, and this was something that appealed to Conrad, too. Maybe the dichotomy is not so marked as it first appears.
In 1941, Leavis described Conrad as being "among the very greatest novelists in the language - or any language". Yet this was a writer who drew the approbation of FR Leavis, the pre-eminent British supporter of the view that literature could play a role in the maintenance of civilisation.
Long before Auden was telling us poetry makes nothing happen, or Adorno was saying there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Conrad was questioning - fundamentally - the political and moral utility of writing. A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature." Thus wrote Joseph Conrad, in an essay published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on December 4 1922.
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