Conrad [antikvár]

Introduction by Marvin Mudrick Joseph Conrad is a puzzle for both the critic and the biographer. His reputation, forty years after his death, remains as protean and un-fixable as many of the incidents of his unprecedented life. Criticism, which agrees on the importance of his example and influence, has not yet managed the approximation of a consensus regarding the relative merits of his individual novels: one could, for instance, compile collections of essays by intelligent critics on Chance and Victory, proving with equal vigor that these books are either masterpieces or fluent botches. The biographer of Conrad finds himself still turning over and reconsidering the enigmatic and self-contradictory personal records that Conrad seems to have taken some trouble to rearrange, alter, or suppress in his letters and under the guise of candid reminiscence. Conrad is at the same time one of the most and one of the least autobiographical of writers. His experiences—especially his nautical experiences—were admittedly, and often with astonishing directness, the material of his novels; whereas his memoirs, when they are not inaccurate and misleading, are as reticent as those of any writer who has undertaken the confidential mode at all. Certainly, his life appears to be the material of art—of bad art however: summarized, it gives the impression of a meretricious novel. He was born of patriotic Polish gentry in their landlocked captive fatherland; at the age of four, companion of his parents into political exile in Russia; orphaned at eleven; in his 'teens, abruptly self-exiled to western Europe, a sailor and Carlist gun-runner off the coasts of France and Spain; at twenty, beneficiary and (almost fatal) casualty of a grand passion; master mariner in the British merchant marine before he was thirty; voyager to the heart of black Africa; ultimately, the most celebrated living novelist in a language he did not begin to speak till he had reached manhood. Thus recapitulated, it is less a life than a romance; and Conrad was not above touching it up here and there with mysteries and misrepresentations. Like his friend and occasional collaborator, Ford Madox Ford (one of his collaborations with whom was a novel named Romance), he was a romancer and a rhetorician. As with Ford, so with Conrad it is sometimes hard to make out, or even to guess at, the resistant, independent contours of his material, the