Conrad Joseph - The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad

Copyright 2007 J.H. Stape
Anchor Canada edition published 2008

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v3.1

For Raymond,
in memory

It is when we try to grapple with another mans intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

Lord Jim

(18991900)

A biography by necessity includes elements of fiction. The proportion of fact to it is partly a matter of what documents have happened to survive, the temper of the time (both the subjects time and the writers), and the biographers life-experience and temperament. Fictions abounded about Jzef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, the man who became Joseph Conrad, during his lifetime, and only in the 1950s, as Jocelyn Baines laboured over the first scholarly biography of the writer, did the systematic sifting of fact from fancy properly begin. Conrad applied his formidable fictional talents to aspects of his own life in his published reminiscences, The Mirror of the Sea (1906) and A Personal Record (190809; 1912), as well as in his letters, and he told a few howlers to friends. A degree of scepticism about these is axiomatic, and any biographer attempting to recount the facts of Conrads life faces a task that involves much filtering and weighing. Yet we desire, it seems, a certain element of romance to cling to the life of an artist who has enriched and deepened our own perspectives, shaped our attitudes, and, famously, in Conrads case, taught us how to see, the ambitious aim he set himself in his artistic manifesto, the Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897). And Conrad did have an extraordinary life, with considerable elements of romance and the exotic, variously recreated when he sat down to his desk, arguably a highly adventurous act in its own way.

Those who knew Conrad have, at times, been no more reliable about him than he was himself. His wife and two sons produced recollections of varying interest and accuracy. His sometime friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford, in writing about him, comes at times close to contributing to the list of his own fiction. Richard Curle and Jean Aubry, friends to the writer in his later years, were keen to protect and to maintain a shrine they had worshipped at. And the fallibility of memory, the passage of time, and what might be called the Chinese whispers factor have encouraged outright fictions to parade as fact. Recalling a man whom she knew when she was a little girl, Muriel Dobree wrote to a friend, His father came of a very old, highly connected Polish family and Joseph Conrad was really a Polish Count, altho he never took the title. Both his father and mother died in Siberia and he himself was outlawed and was brought up by an aunt in France, a princess. (Conrad, of a gentry background, was not a count; his father died in Cracow and his mother in the Ukraine; he was never outlawed; and although he indeed lived in France as an adolescent, he had no blood relations there, and certainly knew no princesses.) A reviewer of A Personal Record believed that Conrad studied at Cracow University, was offered a career in the Austrian Navy, and had run off to Turkey to fight in the Russo-Turkish War of 187778. (All untrue.) And Richard Curle could barefacedly assert that as a boy he had been ceremoniously introduced to the Emperor Francis Joseph in private audience at the Hofburg in Vienna. (One would think that emperors, even drowsy ones, to recall Yeatss famous phrase, have much more to do with their time than to receive schoolboys happening to pass through their capitals.)

Debunking myths can be a pleasant occupation, but it is only part of the biographers task. Not creating any oneself is the least that decency owes to its subject, which, our self-conscious age tells us, is always, partly appropriated. Still, to think up mistresses for Conrad when none existed, as has notably been done with Jane Anderson or has been suggested in the case of Miss Hallowes, Conrads secretary, is to play by a different set of rules. Attempting to restrict oneself to the record is harder, and perhaps less fashionable.

Many facts about Conrads life have yielded to painstaking scholarly enquiry, and even the finest of scholars of biographical inclination have made slips or fudged emphases. Bainess 1960 biography is the foundation upon which all later biographers have built, and to which they have added, as letters and documents have come to light and as once closed archives have opened. Zdzislaw Najders Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (1983), the labour of two decades of archival delving, benefited from the patient work, generously shared, of the pre-eminent enquirer into the facts of Conrads life, the late Dutch scholar Hans van Marle. Najder added, magisterially, to the record of Conrads life. The late Frederick R. Karls 1,000-page Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979) emphasises Conrads career and assays a Freudian reading, following tracks opened by Bernard C. Meyers, a practising psychiatrist whose Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytical Biography appeared in 1967.

Anyone who writes about Conrads life can only be aware of an immense debt to the labours of others, stretching over scholarly and critical generations. And anyone bold enough to do so must confront absences of various kinds. Very little is known about the crucial decade 188090, for instance. And one can regret that several of the people Conrad knew, although still alive when serious scholarly interest in his work began in the 1940s, were never contacted. Miss Hallowes lived until 1950. Eric Pinker, his literary agent from 1922 to 1924, lived until 1973, and Pinkers sister none until 1979. But it oftimes proves easier to track down the dead than the living. As a fourth-generation Conrad biographer (post Aubry and Curle, Baines, Karl and Najder), I have done much tracking of that sort, but by chance was able to spend a hot June afternoon in 2006 with Mrs Nina Hayward, then eighty-nine, a niece of Jessie Conrad, who lived with her in the 1920s, and who, as she charmingly wrote to me, is the last woman alive to have been kissed by Joseph Conrad (a bedtime peck at Oswalds, the Conrads home from 1919 to 1924, where her mother and she occasionally visited).