To Twenty Letters to Joseph Conrad London: First Edition Club, 1926

G. Jean-Aubry “Introduction” to Twenty Letters to Joseph Conrad London: First Edition Club, 1926 THIS PAMPHLET is one of seven pamphlets in a boxed set simply titled Letters to Conrad on the spine of the box. The print run was 220. The other pamphlets consist of one or more letters to Conrad from Arnold Bennett, Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy, Constance Garnett, Edward Garnett, George Gissing, James Gibbons Huneker, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, E. V. Lucas, and H. G. Wells. ALL THOSE WHO LIVED, however little, in intimacy with Joseph Conrad, know that he showed not the slightest desire for possessions. Even after he had finally dropped anchor in Kent, the wish to possess houses or lands remained remote from him; naturally and willingly he avowed this lack of desire, without trying to gain self-glorification from it; and so complete was it that he did not collect books (the least cumbersome and most desirable of possessions), and trusted entirely to his prodigious memory to preserve for us the vestiges of his strange past. Though he had read virtually everything that a well-read man of our time could or should read, he made no notes of his reading or of the events of his life. In such matters he was so entirely without thought that his original manuscripts owe their present existence to the care of his wife. To this indifference to material possessions there was one exception: he did keep some documents, though so few that they might with ease have been contained in his coat pockets. Yet, when his temperament and habit of life are remembered, it is not the small number of these papers which is surprising, but the fact that even these were preserved; for though disdain for possessions was an original part of Conrad‘s nature, the conditions of his existence would have imposed it upon him, had it not been autogenous. Seafarers do not keep objects that are cumbersome or without absolute usefulness; and Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski was a seafarer from the age of seventeen to that of thirty-seven. Before he followed the sea he had never – almost from the day of his birth – stayed more than a few months in any place. Berdiczew, Jitomir, Warsaw, and then Vologda, into which he followed his people in exile; Czernikow, Lwow (where he met his father); Novofastow, where he lived with his uncle; and Cracow, where he studied; all these places he saw before the age of twelve, and always in an atmosphere of uncertainty, apprehension, separation, exile, or death. ―Introduction‖ to Twenty Letters 125 During nearly forty years, the exigencies of politics, bereavements, his adventurous imagination, ships and the sea, in turn made of him a nomad whose only stability and only permanent attachment lay in his magnificent memory; conditions perhaps essential to that intellectual and moral fidelity of which he was to give, in his books during the last thirty years of his life, heroic and lasting testimony. Of habits acquired in Poland and at sea, of traditions inherited from his family or contracted in his seafaring life, he retained the impress until the end. Uprightness in his conduct, clearness of mind, plain simplicity of motives, dignity at the same time lofty and familiar, awareness of the grandeur of the daily task and unfaltering application to accomplish it well – he needed no written precepts to remind him of these. But, a sailor, though he could not (in the little space that he disposed of on board) accumulate voluminous belongings of no immediate necessity, he was at least bound to preserve the few papers which testify to his services, his sobriety, and his capa- cities: ‗They rustle, those bits of paper – some dozen in all. In that faint, ghostly sound there live the memories of twenty years, the voices of rough men now no more, the strong voice of the everlasting winds and the whisper of a mysterious spell, the murmur of the great sea…‘ [PR 110], as he said himself in a passage in his ‗Personal Record‘. When, a few months ago, his relatives confided to my hands the private papers left behind by that great man, I found these attestations of his seafaring life, official documents signed by his captains, and private certificates, short and simple and of an eloquence without rhetoric: touching remains, not only on account of the personality of him to whom they were given, but because the names of those who signed them (such names as Beard or McWhirr) are immortalized in Conrad‘s narra- tives. Gathered in the course of years in a difficult and often perilous life, these documents were all there, yellowed with age and rust-marked by fasteners, modest and unerring witnesses to a simple and beautiful past. With them were some personal papers: a baptismal certificate; one or two passports; some letters from his father and from his uncle, mile- stones of his childhood and youth; finally, some letters more recent, re- minders, not of his Polish years or his life at sea, but of his transition into literature. Just as he had preserved his certificates of discharge during those years of apprenticeship that led to his becoming a master mariner, so he kept certain letters written to him in the early part of his literary life; and these also were testimonies to his ability and of his voyages; for, if it is true that for a sailor a voyage is a victory, to Conrad his books were .

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