Conrad, Nabokov, and Achebe―They All Lied

A Pole, a Russian, and an Igbo walk into the bar of English literature...

Since last year, I have found myself many times musing about writing in English. This has often been attempts to understand why I am writing in English and how it is affecting my works and psychology, leading me to contemplate what my exophonic predecessors went through.

There are many writers who chose to write in English instead of their first language: Voltaire, a Frenchman, wrote his first significant essays in English; Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese, wrote books and articles in English, the most famous of which is Bushido: The Soul of Japan; Lin Yutang, a Chinese, wrote more books in English than in Chinese; Younghill Kang, a Korean, wrote a novel and a memoir in English; and Elif Shafak, who was born a Turk, wrote numerous fictions and nonfictions in English. The list may grow longer until the current international influence of English ceases to exist, but I do not see such a possibility in the near future.

All who made the literary transition into English from other languages must have had their own reasons and conditions. Regarding their inner and external motives, I most often think of Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Chinua Achebe. It would surely be entertaining to mention here that both Nabokov and Achebe had something to say about the naturalized British writer who was born in Berdyczów―Achebe was famously critical of Conrad, while Nabokov was condescendingly cynical, which is very characteristic of him―but that is not the reason why I frequently consider them together. Their reflections on the act of writing in English are in such clear contrast to each other that comparing the three writers smoothly turns into a meditation on why I write in English and what I think or feel about it.

In one of his personal letters, its reader is confronted with an unusual incidence of Conrad’s rant:

“The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of me. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head.”

I call this passage a rant since when he was writing the letter, he was upset at his friend Hugh Walpole for reporting that Conrad “thought in Polish, arranged his thoughts in French, and expressed them in English.” Conrad goes on:

“All I can claim after all those years of devoted practice, with the accumulated anguish of its doubts, imperfections, and falterings in my heart, is the right to be believed when I say that if I had not written in English, I would not have written at all.”

Conrad, after all, was someone who never published anything in Polish and wrote that “When speaking, writing, or thinking in English, the word ‘home’ always means for me the hospitable shores of Great Britain.”

Unlike Conrad, Nabokov was never shy to mention that his “complete switch from Russian prose to English prose was exceedingly painful―like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion.” Furthermore, he even considers his linguistic transition to be a “personal tragedy”. Making a comparison between his Russian and English, he said:

“I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English.”

Nabokov’s lament on his “second-rate brand of English” is very different from Achebe’s passionate rhetorical question. In his well-known address, Achebe said:

“Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.”

There is a certain oscillation in his stance here, and his thought is further developed in the following quote from many dozens of years later:

“I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.”

Judging by what Conrad wrote, he willingly expressed his pride in English and considered the language to be innately his own. On the other hand, Nabokov would make manifest that he still had lingering affection for Russian and recognized his shortcomings in English. Achebe kept a sense of guilt for writing in English but still chose it and intended to fashion it anew in a way that could accustom him. I consider them to be the three archetypes of those who write in English despite not being born as natives of the Anglosphere.

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What I am about to write might present itself as an abrupt irrelevance. Back in the 2000s, watching mids was considered to be fashionable in South Korea. Mid was a shortened form of miguk drama, that is, American TV series. Friends, Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, Prison Break, and Sex and the City were the rage. As it was before Netflix, a South Korean would have to make some effort if he or she wanted to watch an American show.

Meanwhile, one friend of mine was, let’s say, too cool to watch what everyone else was watching. Thus, she was into House, starring Hugh Laurie, and she managed to implant Dr. House’s credo in my mind. I am still reminded of the line: everybody lies. It is not that everybody lies all the time, but deep down, everybody has a reason why he or she would lie when it comes to certain matters.

After writing and submitting in English and being published in the Anglosphere for about eleven months, I have come to believe that to a certain extent, Conrad, Nabokov, and Achebe all lied, or were only partly honest. Although I regard Conrad’s English prose to be majestic, there are many accounts by his close acquaintances, including his sons, which testify that Conrad’s spoken English was not as good as his written counterpart. Even Conrad himself declined to give public lectures several times since he was uncertain of his ability to convey his thoughts in a spoken form. Needless to say, one does not have to be an eloquent speaker to be a great writer; however, I suspect that Conrad still had some self-doubt in his relationship with the language. Asserting that English was an inherent part of him could have been an expression of his psychological defense mechanism, trying to conceal his inner fear that he might never qualify as a British writer.

It is the same with Nabokov, but the other way. In contrast to Conrad, who learned English only after he had become an adult, Nabokov could read English before he learned to read Russian. Now consider that the list of writers whom Nabokov bad-mouthed includes, but is not limited to, Balzac, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Kazantzakis, Mann, and of course, Conrad. When (under)rating other writers, Nabokov repeatedly used the expression “second-rate”. My honest opinion is that Nabokov, albeit a genius, was a narcissist so deep-buried in self-confidence and self-pity at the same time that I would want no interaction with him other than reading what he wrote. (I admit that this personal hostility of mine partly comes from my admiration of dorogoy, uvazhaymiy Fedor Mikhailovich.) Then what does this super-egomaniac have in mind when he says his English is “second-rate”? I am inclined to think that he had an intention, though subtle may it be, to boast about how he could swiftly write better than other “second-rate” writers even with his “second-rate” English.

Naturally, I presume that Achebe was not fully sincere like the other two. His poem, A Wake for Okigbo, was originally written in Igbo and then translated by himself into English. I doubt that he was competent in writing in Igbo only when it came to poetry. Despite that at a certain point in his life writing in English was “a dreadful betrayal” and produced “a guilty feeling” to him, he later went on to affirm it, given that the language will be altered into “a new English.” What interests me is that Achebe never said ‘The English language could carry the weight of African experience. But it had to be a new English’. Instead, he talked in the future tense only as if trying to convey that he had not succeeded in creating a genuine African English yet without realizing it himself. I wonder, accordingly: did Achebe feel deep down there that he was a traitor to his culture but cope with the guilt by telling himself that there would be an African English one day?

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I am no Conrad, or Nabokov, or Achebe. There are some aspects that I share with them, and some others that I do not. I consider my English to be second-rate, at least when compared to my first language, Korean. Neither do I wish to claim that English feels like one of the aptitudes that I was born with. Then again, I harbor no guilt or ill feeling in having to abandon my mother tongue for literature. (To be fair, I was under no colonial pressure, but years of failure in attempts to build a career as a Korean writer were in a sense a situation where I had no other choice.) I simply happened to be most proficient in Korean because I have used it all my life, and frankly speaking, I feel that I no longer have much affection towards the Korean language itself. In addition, the biggest reason why I began to write in English was that it was practically the only language I could read and write in with relative ease. I would not have minded writing in Russian or Persian, for instance, if I had a better command of them than of English and more chance of becoming a full-time writer in those languages.

I, however, begin to doubt myself: if Conrad, Nabokov, and Achebe were all liars, what makes me an exemption? Maybe I want to boast about my linguistic and literary merits by saying that my English is second-rate; maybe I want to become a “native” writer without having to become self-aware that I am an exophonic writer; maybe I want to write in English for reasons other than my mere proficiency in it; and maybe I still want to be recognized by my pieces in Korean, but years submitting works in Korean and getting rejected all the time hurt me so bad that I would rather say that now I am indifferent to my mother tongue.

What is the point of writing precisely in English for me then?

In all honesty, I do not know the clear answer to the question above. However, I do know one thing from my experiences of writing in English: when writing in a foreign tongue, it is easier to lie, easier to conceal yourself. I believe that Conrad, Nabokov, and Achebe would all agree.