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A Conrad Companion Macmillan Literary Companions A CONRAD COMPANION MACMILLAN LITERARY COMPANIONS J. R. Hammond AN H. G. WELLS COMPANION AN EDGAR ALLAN POE COMPANION A GEORGE ORWELL COMPANION A ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON COMPANION John Spencer Hill A COLERIDGE COMPANION Norman Page A DICKENS COMPANION A KIPLING COMPANION A CONRAD COMPANION F. B. Pinion A HARDY COMPANION A BRONTE COMPANION A JANE AUSTEN COMPANION A D. H. LAWRENCE COMPANION A WORDSWORTH COMPANION A GEORGE ELIOT COMPANION A TENNYSON COMPANION Further titles in preparation Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hants RG21 2XS, England. A CONRAD COMPANION NORMAN PAGE © Norman Page 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 978-0-333-34598-6 Ali rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or t ransmitted save with written permission or in accordance with * the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlT 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 17S Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillane is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-18095-0 ISBN 978-1-349-18093-6 (eBook) 00110.1007/978-1-349-18093-6 Th is book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. To Barnaby Contents List of Plates lX List of Maps X Priface Xl A Conrad Chronology 1 A Conrad Who's Who 16 Conrad's World 35 Poland 35 France 38 England 39 Africa 41 The East 44 Conrad Observed 49 Conrad's Languages 61 The Novels 68 A/mayer's Folly 68 An Outcast of the Islands 73 The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' 76 Lord jim 86 Nostromo 94 The Secret Agent 100 Under Western Eyes 106 Chance 110 Victory 114 The Shadow-Line 119 The Arrow of Gold 122 The Rescue 127 The Rover 129 Suspense 132 Vll vm Contents The Sisters 134 Short Stories 135 Tales of Unrest 135 Youtk: A Narrative and Two Otker Stories 139 Typhoon and Otker Stories 146 A Set of Six 153 'Twixt Land and Sea 156 Within Ike Tides 161 Th~of~~ 1~ Collaborations 165 Non-Fictional Prose 168 Plays 173 Filmography 175 Select Bibliography 177 Index 182 List of Plates and Maps PLATES 1 Conrad as a child ( 1863) 2 Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, in 1862 3 Conrad in 1874 (aged about 16) 4 Conrad in 1883 (aged 25) 5 Conrad in 1896 (aged about 38) 6 Conrad in 1912 (aged about 54) 7 Conrad in 1923 (aged about 65) 8 Bust ofConrad by Jacob Epstein 9 Portrait of Conrad by Walter Tittle 10 'Somewhere in the Pacific': caricature of Conrad by Max Beerbohm (1920) 11 Edward Garnett 12 R. B. Cunninghame Graham (etching by William Strang, 1898) 13 Jessie George in 1893 14 Marguerite Poradowska 15 The Torrens (seep. 8) 16 The Roi des Belges (seep. 7) MAPS Map 1 Poland at the time of Conrad's birth 36 Map 2 The river Congo 42 Map 3 Conrad's sea voyages, 1881-93 46-7 Maps 1 and 3 are reproduced from Karl and Davies (eds), The Collected Letters of joseph Conrad, vol. 1, by courtesy of the Cambridge University Press. Map 2 is reproduced from N. Sherry, Conrad's Western World, by courtesy of the Cambridge University Press. lX Acknowledgements The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: The Mansell Collection, for plates 1, 3, 8, 9 and 12; The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, for plates 2 and 5; The National Library ofWarsaw, for plate 4; the Estate ofjohn Conrad, for plates 6 (photography by William Cadby) and 7 (photograph by T. and R. Annan and Sons); Sir Rupert Hart-Davis/Mrs Eva Reichmann, for plate 10; Richard Garnett, for plate 11; University of Texas Library, for plate 13; Duke University Library, North Carolina (the Virginia Grey Fund), for plate 14; The National Maritime Museum, for plate 15; and Norman Sherry, for plate 16. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. X Preface The case ofjoseph Conrad has many unusual features, and there are some aspects that may fairly be described as unique. Most obviously, he is, as M. C. Bradbrook put it long ago, 'Poland's English genius': other authors such as Nabokov and Beckett have written extensively in a language other than their native tongue, but Conrad is remarkable both for having written only in English and for having begun to learn English, which was not even his second language, at a relatively advanced age. Eventually he settled in England; adopted- or, according to his own account, was adopted by - the English language; married an English­ woman; fathered sons who were brought up as English boys; and had a circle offriends who were largely English or English-speaking. Yet, as some of the evidence cited in the sections below titled 'Conrad Observed' and 'Conrad's Languages' suggests, he remained to the end of his life very much the foreigner in speech and manners; and this is an important factor in arriving at an understanding of his temperament and outlook. Like his contem­ poraries Henry James and Rudyard Kipling, he was both an insider and an outsider in relation to the English scene. His short story 'Amy Foster' is a moving allegory ofhis own experience, and when he fell ill Conrad, like Janko in that story (whose name is a near-anagram of'J. Konrad'), reverted to Polish in his delirium. But becoming an author was for Conrad a new start at a time when most men have long made their choices for life. In his thirty-eighth year when his first book appeared, he had behind him a career - not unsuccessful, though less successful than he sometimes liked to imply- as a merchant seaman. Work, duty, responsibility, solidarity: these and other key-concepts of Con­ rad's moral world as expressed in his fiction have nothing abstract XI Xll Priface or academic about them but are drawn from nearly twenty years at sea. Yet Conrad, it is clear, was far from being a typical mariner: apart from anything else, his origins in the Polish s;:.lackta or ruling class, partly manifested in an aristocratic courtliness of manner and a punctiliousness over dress and personal appear­ ance, marked him off from his fellows. When he turned to writing, it was inevitable that he should draw on his memories ofships and sailors; and indeed, having little else to draw on, he had little choice. For his experience, so rich in some areas, had been remarkably limited in others. He knew the oceans, the life of sailors, sailing and steam vessels, and many of the world's ports; but oflife ashore, of occupations other than seafaring, of social or family life, and of the female halfof the human race, his knowledge was severely restricted, and his early writings - welcomed by contemporaries as opening up new fictional territory - are also notable for what they leave out or avoid. Understandably, Conrad himself sometimes became exasper­ ated when reviewers and readers showed signs of typecasting him as a· writer of sea-stories and purveyor of exotic backgrounds: a sort of latter-day blend of Captain Marryat and Robert Louis Stevenson, or of Pierre Loti and Rudyard Kipling. As he told a correspondent in 1906, 'They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean'; and later, when a collected edition of his works was being prepared, he insisted that 'all reference to the sea' should be avoided and made it clear that he did not wish to be offered to the public as 'a writer of the sea - or even of the tropics'. In 1917 he told Sidney Colvin: Perhaps you won't find it presumptuous if, after 22 years of work, I may say that I have not been very well understood. I have been called a writer of the sea, of the tropics, a descriptive writer, a romantic writer- and also a realist.
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