All About Conrad
Lewis, R.W.B.
All About Conrad Joseph Conrad, by Jocelyn Baines. McGraw-Hill. 523 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by R.W.B. Lewis Conrad he could not endure," H. G. Wells said of himself in 1915, via his malicious...
...Jones ("I am he who is...
...Baines suggests that one can see in the notorious "jump" of Lord Jim "a presumably unconscious, symbolical representation of Conrad's action in leaving Poland...
...Conrad's work is the consequence of an endless struggle against that condition...
...Two months after that, Conrad was reporting to his beautiful Belgian aunt that Almayer's Folly, his first novel, was completed...
...It was a question of "being...
...Conrad is a narrative artist of genius who is also the literary grandfather of the contemporary European and American novel...
...in the watery dissolution of Martin Decoud—this force derives from an imagination which knows what it means to be because it has always been half in love with easeful non-being...
...It was an art which sprang, in the modern manner, from some deep, elusive internal disturbance, conceivably related to his abandonment of Poland at the age of seventeen...
...Baines' long-awaited and exceedingly welcome study is also, consequently, a trifle disappointing to a certain kind of American reader...
...In the interest of making Conrad not only endurable but attractive to his adopted countrymen, Baines plays down those florid mental gestures which have indeed been part of Conrad's appeal to the darker and more dialectical, symbol-loving American mind...
...Whatever its cause and however defined, Conrad was somehow wounded, maybe self-wounded, at the quick of his being and until the end of his life...
...Baines is persuasive in deprecating the purely political aspect of Conrad's Polish dimension and inheritance...
...Because he holds back from the radical or metaphyscial basis of Conrad's trouble and his accomplishment, Baines' analyses of particular novels and tales do not offer very much...
...for it was Conrad himself who described that departure as "taking a . . . standing jump out of [my] racial surroundings and associations...
...But the woeful letters and the lamentation were the expression of something more radical than periodic depression...
...This is to suggest that, beneath political anxiety and other apprehensions, Conrad suffered from what medieval theology called "accedia," a sin which is imperfectly translated as "sloth...
...Surface signs were frequent fits of depression (connected of course with chronic and laboriously reported ill health) and a habit of psychic lamentation that make him at times distinctly boring, even insufferable...
...Yet America, Wells predicted, would naturally "adore" Conrad's "florid mental gestures," for America could tell that "Conrad 'writes.' It shows...
...Ford spoke of "the bothered, battered person" who wrote innumerable woeful letters...
...His father was an extremist in the fight against Russian oppression, and both parents died in exile...
...But the son had some of the father's tortured nature...
...It is "accedia" rather than stylistic pretentiousness that, in the mean word of Wells' Boon, "shows" in the stories, and which the American imagination has recognized with shock...
...All the evidence, however, is presented here for anyone who wishes a more searching or congenial assessment of the man and his writings...
...ultimately, of simply being...
...and its utter dependability is strengthened by the author's clear, sharp observations on the un-dependability of some of the sources (particularly Conrad's own elderly reminiscences...
...in the sinister whisper of plain Mr...
...Though Jocelyn Baines, in his vast and factually exhaustive biography, is not unaware of Conrad's concern with moral issues, he tends to slight that side of him...
...When Conrad himself left his uncle's home for Marseilles and a career (ultimately successful) as a seaman, die impulse, Baines argues, was "a form of psychological rather than political claustrophobia...
...Conrad's friend John Galsworthy, meanwhile, indicated in a letter to a friend the antiseptic terms by which Conrad might, after all, be found endurable to English taste: "He is perhaps the best specimen I can think of as a pure artist (there is practically nothing of the moralist in him) among moderns...
...it was compounded further by the Congo adventure of 1890...
...but though political conniving "was obviously responsible for the form that his misfortunes took...
...Ach, how to be...
...The volume is definitive to the point of finality...
...Both the sense of guilt and the suicidal urge are central in the novels...
...Of special interest, not surprisingly, is Baines' account—almost a third of the book—of Conrad's Polish and merchant-seaman years up till that winter day in 1894 when he disembarked from the steamship Adowa, returned to his rooms in London, and settled down only half-consciously to a life of writing...
...it instantly replaces the studies in French and English by G. J. Aubry...
...it is unlikely that his tortured nature would have fitted contentedly into any human society...
...And his stories, technically, are engaged in a similar battle—which accounts for the feeling we have that, over long stretches, the narrative has got frozen, the language is abundant but paralyzed, until both action and language erupt in a new flowering of vitality...
...He was the one to direct the attention of the novel towards the question that really plagues us...
...A few weeks later his uncle Thaddeus Bobrowski died: the last immediate link with Poland and childhood, the infinitely kindly person who had guided, cajoled, and financed Conrad through an unsteady adolescence and young manhood, was gone...
...He is terribly hysterical," said his friend William Rothenstein, "I am terribly sorry for him, but it is very hard at times to be patient...
...For giving us in beautifully documented and thoroughly indexed form everything there is to know about Conrad, Jocelyn Baines has put us deeply in his debt, even though, perhaps inevitably, the knowledge remains peripheral, knowledge that shows us all that is around and about Conrad rather than what is inside his exclamatory and unreveal-ing nature, and inside his work...
...but he is content with common sense and valuable but peripheral information...
...it is a fearful numbing of the metaphysical nerve, an oppression in one's sense of one's own reality...
...The heroes of Conrad, in their various ways, are battling towards an achieved sense of real existence...
...Lewis Conrad he could not endure," H. G. Wells said of himself in 1915, via his malicious fictional commentator, Boon...
...the question, embarrassing or frightening or overpowering, that lies beneath the questions about politics and psychology: what does it mean to be alive...
...The dramatic force at the heart of Conrad's darkness and fiction, the force announced in Stein's speech to Lord Jim ("How to be...
...In a relatively short time, as creative energy and critical reputations go, Conrad was renting a farm in Kent and exercising his art as an honored and accomplished neighbor of Henry James, of Kipling and Ford Madox Ford, and of his younger admirer, Stephen Crane...
...He comments on nearly all of them...
...Baines, an editor at Longman's, Green and a reviewer for the London Observer, has gathered up every scrap of information about Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski from his birth December 3, 1857, near Berdichev in the Ukraine, to his death August 3, 1924, near Canterbury, England...
...and a life-long sense of guilt seems to have animated and constrained both the man and the best of his fiction...
...The emotion was at once a cause and a deeper consequence of Conrad's attempt to shoot himself in Marseilles, in 1877—an event Baines pretty well established through a skillful study of Bobrowski's agitated letters...
...It is, rather, a terrible paralysis of the will...
Vol. 24 • June 1960 • No. 6
