One Writer's Voyage

...But the biographer who attributes Marlow’s attitude towards women to Conrad, or brings Decoud’s depression and suicide (in Nostromo) too fi rmly to bear on Conrad’s experience of such things, will produce a reductive account of the man and his life...

...Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Eliot, Pound, James, and Lawrence were all at work alongside him, as were the Edwardian novelists, Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy...

...A particularly egregious example is his description of Conrad’s exploration of Singapore, where the city’s “Chinese, Malays, and Tamils formed a colourful backdrop, much like the decorations marking Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, celebrated just before his arrival...

...The best is still Zdzislaw Najder’s, published in 1983, and the most substantial achievement of Conrad scholarship is the ninevolume Cambridge edition of his letters, completed in 2008...

...Can we put Conrad’s assertion that “life on ?600 a year” was “impossible” into clearer perspective because the “equivalent” income in 2005 would be ?218,000...

...With the help of the Economic History Services website (www.eh.net) he gives “pound sterling equivalents in terms of today’s values,” using “the average earnings index as the most effective indicator of relative value...

...Conrad was a huge letter writer, and his tone is generous, affectionate, and cheery, even when he is reporting on his depression...

...An engaging biography of Conrad will have to deliver more than the bald facts...

...This interesting formulation opens up his conception of identity, race, and nationality, but it does not close the question of his anti-Semitism...

...Stape’s decision not to quote much from the letters registers his determination to keep this biography relatively short...

...Then he reinvented himself as a great modernist writer...

...Conrad’s friends and his biographers have asked why he proposed to Jessie George, and Stape offers no answer...

...During Conrad’s lifetime, at least, she refrained from criticizing him...

...He identifi ed his point of view, at sea and on land, as “English,” but described himself as “Homo duplex” rather than “an Englishman...

...The equivalents don’t take into account the very different rates of change for different expenses—food, housing, travel, medical care—and earnings...

...John Stape, the author of this new biography, has edited or coedited two volumes of the letters as well as a long list of other Conrad publications...

...All that is clear is that Conrad and his family lived beyond his means and beyond what he could beg or borrow from friends, so that he was always under fi nancial pressure...

...Although he called his fi rst book “an inexplicable event,” he believed that writing in English came as naturally to him as “any other aptitude” with which he might have been born...

...mation than we want about Conrad’s several lives as a husband, father, friend, reader, writer among writers, and inhabitant of his own time and place...

...Perhaps very little, but Conrad’s occasional letters to her (they were rarely apart) are tender, and his own defense of his marriage, in a letter to Edward Garnett, who tried to dissuade him from it, is intriguing...

...Charged late in life, though not for the fi rst time, with being Jewish, Conrad wrote that had he “been an Israelite” he would “never have denied being a member of a race occupying such a unique place in the religious history of mankind...

...And I ask it at every sentence—I perspire in incertitude over every word...

...Critical biographies of Conrad are guilty of producing multiple fi ctions about him as Conrad gets confused with his characters and psychoanalysis holds open its bag of easy tricks...

...The letters bear witness to his immense reading and to a very active social life among visitors, friends, and collaborators...

...Homo complex” might have been more precise: There was hardly anything about which he did not feel more than two things at the same time...

...His response to Conrad’s characterization of the brother-in-law of Ford Hermann Hueffer (later Ford Maddox Ford) as “that horrible Jew” is that Conrad’s “anti-Semitism, however crude, was casual,” and that his “hostility had deep roots” because Soskice was Russian...

...While there is increasing agreement that Conrad was one of the earliest agents of Western imperialism to come to know its deep horror, charges of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism continue to be leveled against him...

...Conrad’s bouts of despair were persistent, along with gout and dental problems...

...He knows the facts of Conrad’s life as well as anybody does...

...That Conrad’s beliefs are so much foggier than his doubts may account for the relatively small number of biographies since 1960...

...Stape fl ushes out many facts we’ve not seen before...

...The best biography will make the fi ction more accessible to us according to a method Conrad himself describes in Heart of Darkness when Marlow says that the four friends listening to his story can “see more” of his experience than he could have when he was caught up in it because they see him...

...Most readers are interested in Conrad’s life because they are interested in his fi ction, but there is more information in this biography than is pertinent to an understanding of the man who wrote Conrad’s works...

...The idea here isn’t the one we have from psychoanalysis—that the dream enables us to see ourselves more clearly—but the reverse...

...The fi gures, about which Stape is precise, are meant to give us more information but end up giving us less...

...Stape is prone to exoticism...

...do I express all my feeling...

...Irony was the primary strain of Conrad’s being...

...The relation between Conrad’s historical experience in the Congo and the experience of Heart of Darkness is complex precisely because Conrad’s experience has been thoroughly shaped to belong to the character he calls Marlow...

...We know that she was not her husband’s intellectual equal, not well educated, and not a reader, but she provided stability and support, two children, and excellent meals...

...The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad also doesn’t illuminate the elements of Conrad’s life that have recently been most interesting to readers of his fi ction...

...While he was alive and writing, the nature of literature was changing...

...But it leaves me longing for the sound of Conrad’s voice and more of the tone of his feeling...

...Financial diffi culties haunted Conrad, even after he had gained considerable fame, and Stape provides a scrupulous account of his earnings and expenditures...

...He sets various records straight, debunking myths about Conrad and making sure not to create any himself...

...It is the knowledge of the self that makes the dream clearer...

...Ironically, Jessie, 16 years younger than her husband, was violently ill on their honeymoon and struggled for the rest of her life with obesity, neuralgia, a defective heart valve, and a leg so painful that her doctors considered amputating it...

...There it was, beckoning from a distance and still in the offi ng...

...A biography of a writer makes the same promise...

...Can we know anything more about their marriage...

...The tension between high ambition and an ordinary, even sordid, reality (a Romantic theme that shows up often in Conrad’s fi ction) strengthened the appeal a new story always had for him...

...He wrote that Jessie was “not at all dangerous” and that “fi delity to passing emotions” might be “a nearer approach to truth than any other philosophy of life...

...It would be interesting to have more context for this...

...One Writer’s Voyage For Joseph Conrad, the pain of creation BY JANET GEZARI Unlike Vladimir Nabokov, an established Russian writer who became an American writer, Joseph Conrad emerged as an English writer with the publication of his fi rst novel in 1895...

...The relation between a writer’s life and his fi ction is complicated...

...I write in doubt over every line,” he says in one of his letters...

...John Batchelor, another Conrad biographer, describes this pattern as a sort of seesawing between responsible and irresponsible behavior...

...In his preface, Stape announces that he is not writing a critical biography...

...There is also less inforJanet Gezari, the Lucy Marsh Haskell ’19 professor of English at Connecticut College, is the author, most recently, of Last Things: Emily Bront?’s Poems...

...Forster’s remark that “the secret casket of his genius contains a vapor rather than a jewel...

...He was 39 when he asked Jessie George to marry him, and although he would live to be 66, he told her they had to move quickly because he had so little time left...

...It inspired E.M...

...What does it mean that Conrad was paid ?126 for a short story (a fi gure Stape puts as equivalent to ?47,000 today) or that an annual average wage was ?100 (“roughly ?38,200 today...

...Conrad spoke English with a heavy Polish accent and wrote it as no one before him ever had...

...Conrad was born, as Stape points out earlier, not only in a part of Russia that had been Poland but in a town where the overwhelming majority of the population was Jewish...

...Born in 1857 in a part of the Ukraine that had once been Poland, and named Theodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, he went to sea, fi rst with the French and then with the British...

...The short story would grow into a larger project that kept him from meeting his deadline...

...Stape is characteristically restrained and determinedly unimaginative about Conrad’s intimate life with women...

...Conrad’s writing life was always a stop-and-go event...

...But in avoiding the temptation to fi ctionalize Conrad’s life, Stape runs into diffi culties just as profound...

...As Conrad reminds us in his preface to A Personal Record, “every novel contains an element of autobiography” and “the creator can only express himself in his creation...

...His usual practice was to commit himself to a novel and then interrupt work on it to take up a short story...

...And here was the condition from which he wanted relief...

...Fair enough...

...We should be able to see more about the fi ction because we have seen Conrad more fully...

...It is also consistent with his sense that Conrad is an unreliable narrator, especially with respect to the facts of his own life...

...He persuasively demolishes the claims of more than one candidate for a tortured love affair, and describes Conrad’s romantic history before marriage as mostly “a blank...

...I ask myself— is it right?—is it true?—do I feel it so...

...After two decades of travel to Africa, India, and the Pacifi c rim, he rose to the top of his chosen profession by passing his examination for Master in the British Merchant Service...