Conrad Joseph - Joseph Conrad: a biography

Meyers provides a lively, readable account of Conrads bleak childhood, his hard life at sea, his marriage to a stolid Englishwoman, and his slow but steady progress as a writer.... The author shows good judgement in pacing the story, allowing us to follow the main events without getting bogged down in details.Christian Science Monitor

In Jeffery Meyers arresting and highly readable biography, he sharply deromanticizes Conrad.John Keegan, Sunday Telegraph

Meyers makes his biographies not only readable but memorable, for their subjects always appear in a satisfyingly crude state, touchy and vulnerable, enmeshed in contingency. This, in some ways preferable to elegant analyses or magisterial summings-up, is effective for Conrad.John Bayley, London Review of Books

Meyers excels with Conrads later years. Extensive research, both anecdotal and archival, has resulted in a wealth of new information on Conrads seafaring career, his marriage, his friendship with Ford Maddox Fordeven on the real-life model for Kurtz. Meyers always has an eye to how life experience colors the fiction. This is highly recommended.Library Journal

[In this] robust and reasonable account, Conrad emerges as a fine if intermittent liar.... As Meyers aptly points out, he may have had Shakespeare and Byron to thank for his literary English, but he owed his demotic to the sailors and fishermen of Lowestoft and other ports.... As Meyers explains, it was Conrads deep-rooted personal and historical pessimism which was his most important contribution to English literature and to English thought.Peter Ackroyd, London Times

Meyers has looked hard at the raw materials of Conrads life and has made the right connections. The resulting portrait is stunning and compelling.Jay Parini, poet and novelist, Los Angeles Times

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Doubleday: Excerpts from G. Jean-Aubrey, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. Copyright 1927 by Doubleday. Cambridge University Press: Excerpts from The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, volumes 13. Copyright 19831988 by Cambridge University Press.

First Cooper Square Press edition 2001

This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Joseph Conrad is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1991. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

Copyright 1991 by Jeffrey Meyers

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Cooper Square Press

An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911

New York, New York 10011

Distributed by National Book Network

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meyers, Jeffrey.

Joseph Conrad : a biography / Jeffrey Meyers.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Charles Scribners Sons, c1991

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-8154-1112-3

1. Conrad, Joseph, 18571924. 2. Novelists, English20th centuryBiography. I. Title.

PR6005.O4 Z778 2001

823'.912dc21

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

For J. F. Powers

()

Conrad once observed: I am not a personage for an orderly biography, either auto or otherwise, for he was shrewdly deceptive and often deliberately misleading about his own life. But he also had an apprehensive admiration for literary detection and told an acquaintance: You are a terror for tracking people out! Though Conrads life and works have been intensively examined, my own research and the use of unpublished material has revealed new information about his Polish background, the Carlist war in Spain and Dutch colonial rule in the Malay Archipelago; Conrads positive attitude toward the Jews and toward America; his suicide attempt; the questions asked on his three merchant marine examinations; his marriage; his gout; his close friendships with Perceval Gibbon and Sir Robert Jones; his little-known meeting with T. E. Lawrence; and, most importantly, his love affair in 1916 with the wild and beautiful American journalist Jane Anderson, who became a traitor in World War Two. I have found in Emin Pasha a new source for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, in Sergei Nechaev for Razumov in Under Western Eyes, in Fords wife and his friend Arthur Marwood for Flora de Barral and Captain Anthony in Chance. I reveal the pervasive influence of Jane Anderson on The Arrow of Gold; show the significance of music in Conrads life and of opera in The Rescue; and discuss for the first time his unpublished film scenario, The Strong Man.

I am pleased to acknowledge the generous assistance of a great many people and institutions. Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies sent xerox copies of a thousand pages of unpublished letters from volumes five to eight of their superb Cambridge Edition. Ian Watt sent unpublished typescripts of the valuable essay he wrote with John Halverson on Jane Anderson and of BBC interviews with friends of Conrad. My old friend Thomas Moser sent useful addresses, xeroxes and photographs. Leon Higdon, the editor of