5 42 
 
 Joseph Conrad 
 
 A Brief Chronicle 
 
 
 
 Doubleday, 
 
 Garden City 
 
 Page & Co. 
 
 New York
 
 Joseph Conrad 
 As a European caricature artist sees him
 
 Joseph Conrad 
 
 A Brief Chronicle 
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD, rover of the seven seas, has never 
 ** been to America. The first voyage of his sea-life 
 took him to the West Indies in 1875 in the old French 
 sailing ship, Mont Blanc. The last projected voyage, in 
 the winter of '94, was to carry him to Canada, but the S. 
 S. Adowa (2,000 tons) never found the emigrants to fill 
 her cabins. 
 
 For years Mr. Conrad has wanted to come to this coun- 
 try. He was prevented by work, by ill health, finally by 
 the war. His visit now is at the first break possible (after 
 completing his new novel, "The Rover"). He needs rest 
 and change, and for his holiday he selects America, per- 
 haps because Americans first gave general recognition to 
 his work. In America, of all countries, he has had from 
 the start his largest audience. More than six books and 
 many of his short stories were published first in this coun- 
 try, and his manuscripts (the majority of them, according 
 to report) are held here. He counts here many close 
 friends. At last he is coming. 
 
 There is no secret that his own varied adventures were 
 the material for many of his books. Conrad was born 
 on December 6, 1857, in Ukraine, one of the southern 
 provinces of old Poland, into a distinguished Polish family 
 named Korzeniowski. He was christened Teodor Josef 
 i 
 
 2030299
 
 Konrad Korzeniowski. At the time of his birth, the at- 
 mosphere in Poland was intense with oppressed patriotism. 
 It was the era of Russian oppression at its worst. 
 
 Just before the ill-starred uprising against Russia in 
 1863, his father, who had been deeply implicated in the 
 earlier rebellion of 1831, was banished to exile, whither 
 his mother followed voluntarily with young Conrad. His 
 first recollection of his mother is of the time just before 
 their banishment, when he was five years old. They were 
 living in Warsaw, where they had moved in 1861, to take 
 their place as leaders in the coming movement. 
 
 Of the patriots assembled in his father's house, Conrad 
 says : "Among them I remember my mother, a more fam- 
 iliar figure than the others, dressed in the black of the 
 national mourning, worn in defiance of ferocious police 
 regulations. I have also preserved from that particular 
 time the awe of her mysterious gravity, which was indeed 
 by no means smileless. For I remember her smiles, too. 
 Perhaps for me she could always find a smile. She was 
 young then, certainly not thirty yet. She died four years 
 later in exile." 
 
 After a year in exile, his mother had become so seri- 
 ously ill that she applied to St. Petersburg for permission 
 to return to her brother's house in Poland, in the hope that 
 the change to the southern climate would save her. She 
 took the boy Conrad, who was then seven, with her. 
 When the three months' leave was over, her health was not 
 improved, and she applied for an extension of leave. 
 Not only was the request refused, but a high police of- 
 ficer was detailed to see that she left on the day appointed 
 for her departure. His orders were to convey her forc- 
 ibly to the military hospital in Kiev if she pleaded illness 
 as an excuse for staying in Poland. A few months later, 
 in 1865, she died. 
 
 Conrad remembers her death. He remembers his 
 father, greatly saddened and weakened in health, giving
 
 him his first training in the French and English classics, 
 of which the elder was an eminent Polish translator. He 
 remembers being sent back to his uncle's ("as soon as my 
 father could brace himself for the separation") and en- 
 joying there the only three happy years of his childhood. 
 Here he played with his young cousins and came under 
 the influence of the French governess who had taught 
 him to speak and to read French during the three months 
 of his previous visit with his mother. 
 
 Then, in 1868, his father was allowed to return from 
 exile on the ground that he was too ill to be dangerous 
 any longer. He carried off the young Conrad to Cracow, 
 the old Polish capital, seat of classical learning and his- 
 torical relics. Here the boy went to the best preparatory 
 school, the gymnasium of St. Anne, as a day student. 
 Although not an ordinary boy, he was very popular, due 
 to his ability to spin the most fascinating yarns. In less 
 than a year and a half his father was dead. The vivid 
 impression of these last eighteen months with his austere 
 and heart-broken father stands fixed in Conrad's memory. 
 The shadow of death hovered over the house for endless 
 months, and the high-strung boy, who was not yet twelve, 
 awaited the inevitable with incredulous terror. "I don't 
 know what would have become of me if I had not been a 
 reading boy. My study finished, I would have had noth- 
 ing to do but sit and watch the awful stillness of the sick- 
 room flow out through the closed door and coldly enfold 
 my scared heart. I suppose that in a futile, childish way 
 I would have gone crazy. But I was a reading boy and 
 there were many books lying about. . . ." 
 
 He had begun to read at the age of five, and by the 
 time he was ten had read widely in Victor Hugo, and other 
 French writers (in French), and in Polish translation, 
 Dickens, Scott, and Thackeray, history, novels, voyages. 
 He first read by instinct, by an inborn love of books, and 
 later, through necessity, as the consciousness of the op- 
 
 3
 
 pression of his country and the sadness of his own life 
 began to stifle him with its atmosphere of hopelessness. 
 He had passed three years in the darkness of exile, had 
 witnessed the death of both his father and mother (both 
 victims of oppression), and he knew that their parents be- 
 fore them had suffered equally in their struggle for free- 
 dom. 
 
 Even in those comparatively happy years in Ukraine, 
 his desire of freedom, of breathing space, had expressed 
 itself. At the age of nine, looking at the map of Africa, 
 he had put his finger on the blank space which at that 
 time represented the mysterious, unexplored heart of the 
 continent, and said: 
 
 "When I grow up, I shall go there." 
 
 Over twenty years later, he did, to Stanley Falls. In- 
 deed, the mysterious heart of that continent may stand as 
 the romantic symbol of Conrad's life. The determination 
 to go there is inevitably associated with the sea, and the 
 fever he contracted in the Congo sent him back to the 
 land, to lead the sedentary, if no less arduous, life of the 
 novelist. 
 
 As a boy, Conrad loved to tell stories. He told them 
 to his friends, for hours at a time. He dreamed them. 
 The faculty of convincing tales, fed by his reading and 
 his active imagination, seemed to be born in him. Always 
 he dreamed of going to sea. His stories were of ships, 
 and the sea, and far away countries which he had never 
 seen. But he kept his peace, and it was not until he was 
 fifteen that he first spoke aloud his desire to go to sea. 
 His desire? It was certainly more than that. It was 
 everything. That characteristic inability which he says 
 has never allowed him to turn back from a course once 
 decided on, had already guaranteed the reality of the 
 event. 
 
 Yet it was not a trivial thing. "There was no prece- 
 dent," he writes. "I verily believe mine was the only 
 
 4
 
 case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, 
 so to speak, standing broad jump out of his racial sur- 
 roundings and associations." Of all the cities of Europe, 
 none was so remote from the sea and its associations as 
 Cracow, and Poland itself, with no maritime connections, 
 no seaport, was an agricultural country exclusively. 
 
 Perhaps, he intimates, the whole country was not con- 
 vulsed by his desire to go to sea. "But for a boy between 
 fifteen and sixteen," he writes in recalling the difficulties 
 of that time, "sensitive enough, in all conscience, the com- 
 motion of his little world seemed a very considerable thing 
 indeed. So considerable indeed, that, absurdly enough, 
 the echoes of it linger to this day. I catch myself in hours 
 of solitude and retrospect meeting arguments and charges 
 made by voices now forever still; rinding things to say 
 that an assailed boy could not have found, simply because 
 of the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself." 
 
 His uncle, who had become his guardian, journeyed all 
 the way from Ukraine to Cracow to investigate at first 
 hand the root of the disturbance which had made itself 
 felt over several provinces. But there was no question 
 of Conrad's sincerity, and after several serious talks which 
 sealed forever their friendship, the uncle decided he must 
 not have the boy later on reproach him for having ruined 
 his life by an unconditioned opposition. "Meantime, take 
 the best place you can in your examinations, and we shall 
 see. . . ." 
 
 And in the summer of 1873, on the Furca Pass, "with 
 the peaks of the Bernes Oberland for mute and solemn 
 witnesses," it happened. The term over, Conrad and his 
 tutor, a young student at Cracow University, who had 
 proved his devotion to the boy by two years of unremit- 
 ting and arduous care, were sent on a "jolly holiday," a 
 tramp through the valley of the Reuss, along the Upper 
 Danube to the Falls of the Rhine. But before they had 
 journeyed far, one of the trampers received a well- 
 
 5
 
 founded conviction that the other had been entrusted with 
 the malicious mission of arguing him out of his "romantic 
 folly." 
 
 "He had taken his mission to heart so well," Conrad 
 remembers, "that I began to feel crushed before we 
 reached Zurich. He argued in railway trains, in lake 
 steamboats, he argued away for me the obligatory sun- 
 rise on the Righi, by Jove ! 
 
 "I could not hate him, but he had been crushing me 
 slowly, and when he started to argue on the top of the 
 Furca Pass he was perhaps nearer to success than either 
 he or I imagined. I listened to him in despairing silence, 
 feeling that ghostly, unrealized, and desired sea of my 
 dreams escape from my unnerved will. 
 
 "We sat down by the side of the road to continue the 
 argument begun half a mile before. Without the power 
 of reply, I listened with my eyes fixed obstinately on the 
 ground. A stir in the road made me look up and then 
 I saw my unforgettable Englishman. . . ." 
 
 It was settled ! The Englishman was comic. He was 
 ridiculous. He had on knickers and short socks with his 
 calves exposed to the public gaze and to the tonic air of 
 high altitudes, dazzling the eye of the beholder by the 
 splendour of their marble-like condition and their rich 
 tone of young ivory. . . . He was the leader of a 
 small caravan. . . . 
 
 "His glance, his smile, the unextinguishable and comic 
 ardour of his striving forward appearance helped me to 
 pull myself together. 
 
 "The argument went on. What reward could I ex- 
 pect from such a life at the end of my years, either in 
 ambition, honour, or conscience ? An unanswerable ques- 
 tion. But I felt no longer crushed. Then our eyes 
 met. . . . 
 
 "'You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. 
 That's what you are,' said my tutor. 
 6
 
 "There was no more question of that mysterious voca- 
 tion between us or anyone else. . . . Eleven years 
 later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps 
 of St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master in the British 
 Merchant Service. But the man who put his hand on my 
 shoulder on the top of Furca Pass was no longer liv- 
 ing. . . .**' 
 
 CONRAD AND THE SEA 
 1874-1894 
 
 "If a seaman, then an English seaman," Conrad had re- 
 solved, though he didn't know a word of English at the 
 time. French he knew perfectly, and when his uncle 
 was able to make negotiations with some friends in Mar- 
 seilles, to keep an eye on the young man and give him a 
 sort of introduction to the ways of the sea, Conrad wel- 
 comed the means and kept his own counsel about the end. 
 
 The very first day he ever spent on salt water was by 
 invitation in a big, half-decked pilot boat, cruising under 
 close reefs on the look-out, in misty blowing weather, for 
 the sails of ships and the smoke of steamers rising out be- 
 yond the tall Planier lighthouse, cutting the line of the 
 wind-swept horizon with a white perpendicular stroke. 
 "They were hospitable souls, these sturdy Provencal sea- 
 men," he recalls with affection. "Many a night and day 
 I spent cruising with these rough, kindly men under whose 
 auspices my intimacy with the sea began, dodging under 
 the lee of Chateau dTf and Monte Cristo." 
 
 On the last turn of duty he made with these pilots (in 
 December of 1874), he first laid his hand against the side 
 of an English ship. She was a big, high-class cargo 
 steamer of a type that is met on the sea no more, and her 
 name was James WestolL 
 
 As he drew up to the ship in the dinghy in which he was 
 pulling bow, he heard himself addressed for the first time 
 
 7
 
 in English, the speech of his secret choice, of his future, 
 of long friendships, and deepest affections. The address 
 was brief and unbeautiful. It was growled out by an 
 immense, bearded, double-chinned "porpoise" on the deck 
 above. 
 
 "Look out there." 
 
 Conrad caught the line tossed down to him. In a min- 
 ute their work was done, the pilot had swarmed up the 
 rope ladder, and when he put his hand against the ship 
 to shove off, he felt her already throbbing under his open 
 palm ! The head of the James Westoll swung a little to 
 the west. Before she had gone a quarter of a mile, she 
 hoisted her flag as the harbour regulations prescribe for 
 arriving and departing ships. . . . 
 
 "I saw it suddenly flicker and stream out on the flag- 
 staff. The Red Ensign ! In the pellucid colourless at- 
 mosphere bathing the drab and gray masses of that south- 
 ern land as far as the eye could reach. ... it was 
 the only spot of ardent colour, flame-like, intense, and 
 presently as minute as the tiny red spark reflected from a 
 great fire in the heart of a globe of crystal. The Red 
 Ensign the symbolic, protecting warm bit of bunting 
 flung wide upon the seas and destined for so many years 
 to be the only roof over my head." 
 
 Three years later, in May of 1878, Conrad first set 
 foot on English soil, at Lowestoft. He could not speak a 
 word of English. He had spent the better part of three 
 years in French ships, had sailed twice to the West Indies, 
 and had found adventure in Marseilles sufficient to last a 
 more easily satisfied youth for a life-time. But he would 
 not present himself to the British Merchant Service "in 
 an altogether green state." 
 
 A local boat-builder at Lowestoft who understood 
 French helped him to pick up a little English. The region 
 of the English east coast was his training ground. For 
 five months he shipped on board a Lowestoft coaster, the
 
 Skimmer of the Seas, trading between that port and New- 
 castle. "My teachers," Conrad admits, not without pride, 
 "were the sailors of the Norfolk shore; coast men with 
 steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice ; men of very 
 few words, which, at least, were never bare of meaning. 
 Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one 
 and all. On many a night I have hauled braces under the 
 shadow of that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people 
 on the shore sleeping quietly in their beds within sound 
 of the sea." 
 
 Then, after five months of this wearisome training (he 
 had already been three years at sea), he deemed himself 
 fit to be presented to the British Merchant Service. He 
 learned of a man in London with a willingness and (which 
 is more) an ability to procure ships for idle sailors after 
 some discreet circumvention of an Act of Parliament. 
 Anxiously conceived and laboriously executed, a letter was 
 written, Conrad's first composition in the English lan- 
 guage. He followed it to London in a few days, and on 
 a hazy day in early September in the year 1878*, a strange 
 young seaman of twenty stepped out of Liverpool station 
 onto the streets of London for the first time in his life. 
 "I was elated," he says. "I was pursuing a clear aim. I 
 was carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of my- 
 self, in the first place, a seaman worthy of jhe service, 
 good enough to work by the side of the men with whom 
 I was to live; and in the second place, I had to justify my 
 existence to myself, to redeem a tacit moral pledge. 
 
 "From that point of view Youth and a straightfor- 
 ward scheme of conduct it was certainly a year of grace. 
 All the help I had to get in touch with the world which I 
 was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger than 
 the palm of my hand in which I held it torn out of a 
 larger plan of London for the greater facility of reference. 
 It had been the object of careful study for some days 
 past. The fact that I could take a conveyance at the 
 
 9
 
 station never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I 
 got out into the street, and stood, taking my anxious bear- 
 ings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand han- 
 soms. A strange absence of mind or an unconscious con- 
 viction that one cannot approach an important moment of 
 one's life by means of a hired carriage?" 
 
 But he found his way, simply from the topography of 
 that chart (an ability, he points out, which later stood 
 him in good stead in regions of intricate navigation), and 
 became, as planned, an English seaman. His ship was the 
 crack wool clipper, Duke of Sutherland, bound for Aus- 
 tralia, and in October, 1878, he sailed in her as able sea- 
 man before the mast. Of that first crew of eighteen men, 
 all were English save Conrad, a Norwegian, two Ameri- 
 cans, and a St. Kitts Negro called James Wait a name 
 used just twenty years later for the Negro of "The Nigger 
 of the Narcissus." 
 
 It was nearly three years before he was back in London, 
 after encircling the globe. On the return voyage he was 
 promoted to third officer. He lost no time in presenting 
 himself to the Marine Board at St. Katherine's Dock- 
 house for examination for second mate. A frightful or- 
 deal. The examination (an oral one before an old sea 
 captain who seemed to have lost all idea of time) was 
 endless. Other good men had been "plucked" in a quarter 
 of the time. But Conrad wasn't plucked. He emerged 
 three hours later, to tread over the atmosphere surround- 
 ing Tower Hill, the proudest moment of his sea life. 
 
 Was it luck or some mal-intending demon which ar- 
 ranged to get him the berth for Bangkok on the seedy, 
 super-annuated Palestine ("Judea. London. Doe or 
 Die.") ? At any rate, it was luck to Conrad. His first 
 voyage as Second Mate. An altogether memorable af- 
 fair. It began in 1881. His first voyage to the East and 
 his skipper's first command. The ship, about 400 tons, 
 was all rust, dust, grime aloft, dirt on deck. They struck 
 10
 
 the famous October gale of 1881. They sank, nearly, 
 twice, before they finally got started, they caught on fire 
 in the Indian Ocean, and had to put off in open 
 boats. . . . 
 
 Did they get to Bangkok ? Well, not quite. But Java. 
 It sufficed, especially when you have been days on end in 
 an open boat, your head bared to the scorching sun and 
 the salt lash of the sea's fury. An occasion worthy of the 
 story that enshrines it "Youth." 
 
 There were to be three more eastern voyages in the 
 years that followed, long passages, the longest an inter- 
 minable one of one hundred and thirty days, a bad pas- 
 sage. . . . But not one of them without its rich return 
 in stories told. Conrad was Second Officer on the voyage 
 around the Cape which makes the epic story of "The 
 Nigger of the Narcissus" 
 
 There were days, almost every day, when death was a 
 very real hazard, hovering like a hawk, ready to strike its 
 unwary prey in a moment of relaxed vigilance. 
 
 "Sometimes we had to drop everything," he speaks of 
 a particularly bad voyage around the Cape, "and cling with 
 both hands to the swaying spars, holding our breath in fear 
 of a terribly heavy roll. And, wallowing as if she meant 
 to turn over with us, the bark, her decks full of water, 
 her gear flying in bights, ran at some ten knots an hour. 
 We had been driven far south, much farther than we had 
 intended to go. 
 
 "Suddenly, up there in the slings of the foreyard, in 
 the midst of our work, I felt my shoulder gripped with 
 such force in the carpenter's powerful paw that I posi- 
 tively yelled with unexpected pain. The man's eyes stared 
 close in my face, and he shouted, 'Look, sir ! Look ! 
 What's this?' 
 
 "At first I saw nothing. The sea was one empty wil- 
 derness of black-and-white hills. Suddenly, half-con- 
 cealed in the tumult of the foaming rollers, I made out 
 
 \
 
 awash, something enormous, rising and falling something 
 spread out like a burst of foam, but with a more bluish, 
 more solid look. 
 
 "It was a piece of an ice-floe. . . . floating lower 
 than any raft, right in our way, as if ambushed among 
 the waves with murderous intent. There was no time to 
 get down on deck. I shouted from aloft until my head 
 was ready to split. I was heard aft, and we managed to 
 clear the sunken floe which had come all the way from 
 the southern ice-cap to have a try at our unsuspecting lives. 
 Had it been an hour later, nothing could have saved the 
 ship, for no eye could have made out in the dusk that pale 
 piece of ice swept over the white-crested waves. . . . 
 
 "I am, perhaps, unduly sensitive," he remarks of this 
 and a score of other similar affairs in the routine of the 
 sea, "but I confess that the idea of being suddenly spilled 
 into an infuriated ocean in the midst of darkness and up- 
 roar affected me always with a sensation of shrinking 
 distaste. To be drowned in a pond, though it might be 
 called an ignominous fate by the ignorant, is yet a bright 
 and peaceful ending to some other endings to one's earthly 
 career which I have mentally quaked at in the intervals, 
 or even in the midst, of violent exertions." 
 
 A quaking of a different sort affected Conrad on his 
 fourth and last voyage to the East, in 1884. The run 
 was Amsterdam to Samarang in Java. Conrad was 
 twenty-four, and elated. He was First Mate for the first 
 time, in a good ship, the Highland Forest. The cargo, 
 frozen up the river, finally arrived, and shortly after he 
 had finished what seemed a very careful job of loading, 
 his captain arrived, and the ship put out to sea. 
 
 But ships, like men, require humouring, and the young 
 first mate could not know the particular humours of the 
 Highland Forest. He had loaded her to makt her stable, 
 and he got her, stable. After this experience he had a 
 very solid respect for a ship's cargo, for he says : 
 12
 
 "Neither before nor since have I felt a ship roll so 
 abruptly, so violently, so heavily. Once she began, you 
 felt that she would never stop, and this hopeless sensation 
 characterizing the motion of ships whose centre of gravity 
 is brought down too low in loading made everyone on 
 board weary of keeping on his feet. I remember once 
 hearing one of the hands say: 'By Heavens! Jack! I 
 feel as if I don't mind how soon I let myself go, and let 
 the blamed hooker knock my brains out if she likes.' 
 
 "Down south, running before the gales of high latitudes, 
 she made our life a burden to us. There were days when 
 nothing would keep even on the swing tables. She rolled 
 and rolled with an awful dislodging jerk and that dizzily 
 fast sweep of her masts on every swing. It was a wonder 
 that the men aloft were not flung off the yards, the yards 
 flung off the masts, the masts flung overboard. The cap- 
 tain in his arm-chair holding on grimly at the head of the 
 table, with the soup-tureen rolling on one side of the 
 cabin, and the steward sprawling on the other, would ob- 
 serve, looking at me : 'There's your stable loading.' . . . 
 
 "It was only poetic justice that the chief mate, who had 
 made a mistake about the distribution of his ship's cargo, 
 an excusable mistake, perhaps, should pay the penalty. 
 A piece of one of the minor spars did carry away and 
 flew against his back, sending him sliding on his face for 
 quite a considerable distance along the main-deck. . . ." 
 
 This accident was serious enough to cause Conrad to 
 leave the ship at Java, where he crossed over to Singapore, 
 and was in the hospital for many weeks. When recovered 
 he took a berth (there was no reason to go straight home) 
 as chief officer in the Vidar, a steam ship, belonging to 
 some rich Arabs in the Straits Settlement. Before leav- 
 ing London for the voyage in the HigMand Forest, he 
 had passed for his master's (captain's) certificate in 
 1884, the year of his naturalization, at the age of 
 twenty-six. But a certificate does not mean a com- 
 
 13
 
 mand, and he was glad to get the berth as chief mate. 
 
 The East, with its promise and its mystery, was waiting 
 for him. He guided the Vidar for two years across that 
 "magic circle" of the Malay Archipelago and the Gulf of 
 Siam. Here he met Almayer, and his special bete noir, 
 the unfortunate Willems, Captain Tom Lingard, and 
 Heyst. For six of his novels and even more short stories, 
 his mind was to travel back, in after years, to this core of 
 the East. The Vidar traded on the coasts of Borneo and 
 Celebes and took him far afield to the Sulu Sea. Borneo 
 was a savage wilderness inhabited by warring tribes. 
 Squalid settlements, high on stilts, were crowded into the 
 water by the surrounding jungle. A trip to Jupiter might 
 have been more awe-inspiring, but scarcely more fascinat- 
 ing than the adventures of these two years. 
 
 Then suddenly, without warning, he chucked his job. 
 He was through with the Vidar, and as it turned out, with 
 Malaysia. He informed his captain he wanted to leave; 
 next day he was paid off. The good captain was dis- 
 tressed no end. He had never had such a satisfactory 
 first mate. But Conrad's mind was set. There was 
 nothing to hold him. He said he wanted to go home. 
 In reality, he wanted to "get on." Certainly he was from 
 conviction, perhaps, disenchanted. 
 
 And by the merest piece of luck, before he had even un- 
 packed his luggage in the hotel, or thought of making ar- 
 rangements for the voyage home, his first command was 
 presented to him. He was dazed. He had to pinch him- 
 self to realize his luck. And then it came to him "A 
 ship! My ship! She was mine, more absolutely mine 
 for possession and care than anything in the world ; an ob- 
 ject of responsibility and devotion. She was there wait- 
 ing for me, spell-bound, unable to move, to live, to get 
 out into the world (till I came), like an enchanted prin- 
 cess. Her call had come to me as if from the clouds, I 
 had never suspected her existence. I didn't know how 
 
 14
 
 she looked. I had barely heard her name, and yet we 
 were indissolubly united for a certain portion of our fu- 
 ture, to sink or swim together." He was twenty-seven. 
 
 The barque Otago, when he saw her, was small and 
 trim, resting at her quay among the line of heavy ships, 
 like an Arab steed in a row of cart horses. He came to 
 love her well, after he had paced her paralyzed form for 
 seventeen sleepless days and nights, becalmed in the Gulf 
 of Siam, his whole crew stricken with fever. In her he 
 crossed the shadow line of youth. 
 
 But he lived to make some brilliant passages in the 
 Otago in the Indian Ocean from 1887 to 1889. Finally, 
 in March of the latter year, he resigned his command and 
 went home to London. Perhaps it was time to get on. 
 Certainly it was time for a holiday. But idleness soon 
 began to pall, and translated itself into a most curious 
 kind of activity. 
 
 In a small lodging house in Bessborough Gardens about 
 a month after he had returned home (in the autumn of 
 '89), he sat down one morning, and with no actually ad- 
 mitted or conscious design, began to evoke the shades of 
 a certain Almayer of Malaya, his wife, and the beautiful 
 Nina. Once more his fate was sealed. One day he 
 would leave the sea and the ships of his choice. 
 
 "Till I began to write that novel," he says, "I had 
 written nothing but letters, and not very many of these. 
 I had never made a note of a fact, of an impression, or 
 of an anecdote in my life. The conception of a planned 
 book was entirely outside my mental range when I sat 
 down to write; literary ambition had never entered the 
 world of my imaginings. 
 
 "But for many years Almayer and the world of his 
 story had been the companions of my imagination, with- 
 out, I hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities 
 of sea life. I had had the man and his surroundings 
 with me ever since my return from eastern waters 
 
 15
 
 some four years before the morning I began to write. 
 
 "It was in the front sitting room of furnished apart- 
 ments in a Pimlico square that they first began to live 
 again with a vividness and a poignancy quite foreign to 
 our former real intercourse. They did not clamour aloud 
 for my attention. They came with a silent and irresist- 
 ible appeal and the appeal, I affirm here, was not to my 
 self-love or to my vanity. It seems now to have had a 
 moral character, for why should the memory of these be- 
 ings, seen in their obscure, sun-bathed existence, demand 
 to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the 
 ground of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a 
 community of hopes and fears all the dwellers of this 
 earth? . . . After all these years, each leaving its 
 evidence of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly say 
 that it is a sentiment akin to pity which prompted me to 
 render in words assembled with conscientious care the 
 memory of things forever distant and of men who had 
 lived." 
 
 But the book so begun in the autumn of 1889 had to 
 penetrate the heart of Africa (in fulfillment of the early 
 prophecy), to travel the high seas for two years and more, 
 and make two trips across the European continent before 
 its yellowing bulk found a permanent rest, and suitable 
 reception with the publishing house of T. Fisher Unwin in 
 1894. 
 
 Conrad's African experience (much of it is faithfully 
 presented in "Heart of Darkness," considered by many 
 critics to be Conrad's masterpiece) is best described by 
 the word "ghastly." The prophecy of his boyhood did 
 not take into account the fact that he should be carried 
 away from "there," deathly ill with a fever which gave 
 him good cause to wish himself dead many times over, 
 from the effects of which he has never fully recovered. 
 "Almayer's Folly" went with him to Africa, the seven 
 chapters then in existence, and refused to be lost when 
 16
 
 practically all the rest of his luggage was dumped into the 
 Congo. It accompanied him to Geneva, and in the con- 
 valescence following his long illness, the eighth chapter 
 was completed. This was in 1890, when he later made 
 his first pilgrimage back to Ukraine. 
 
 The manuscript followed him to sea again on the ship 
 Torrens, the voyage to Australia where the young Cam- 
 bridge student, Jacques, became its first reader. When 
 asked by the dubious author whether it was worth going 
 on with, he made the memorable reply, both emphatic and 
 succinct : "Distinctly." On this ship, the Torrens, Conrad 
 later made the acquaintance of Mr. John Galsworthy "for 
 some forty days in the Indian Ocean." 
 
 The tenth chapter of "Almayer's Folly" was begun in 
 the second mate's cabin of the steamship Adowa, tied up 
 to a quay in Rouen in the grip of the wintry weather. 
 But the ship which was bound for Canada on what would 
 have been Conrad's first voyage to America never left 
 port. The emigrants who were to fill her cabins never 
 materialized. 
 
 That was the end of Conrad's sea-going. He put out 
 for Poland (with "Almayer's Folly" in his hand bag) on 
 a last visit to his uncle, "Mr. T. B.," the guardian of his 
 youth, and the well-beloved friend to whom the book was 
 later dedicated. We have a glimpse of the still incom- 
 plete manuscript being lost in the Berlin railway station, 
 but when we see it again, it is between covers, and in 
 type, issued at six shillings, about $1.50 where all may 
 read. But that was in '95. The price of the same edi- 
 tion now, unfortunately, is about $70.00. 
 
 CONRAD'S WRITING LIFE 
 
 "Almayer's Folly" was published in both England and 
 America in 1895. There was no sensation at the time, 
 though no longer ago than yesterday the book was called 
 
 17
 
 "a work of absolute genius." In 1896, Conrad was mar- 
 ried and went to live in Kent, where he has resided in 
 comparative seclusion ever since. He has two sons, 
 Borys, who enlisted in 1914 at the age of sixteen and 
 served in France throughout the war, and John, who is 
 still attending "prep" school. His wife, Jessie Conrad, 
 recently brought out "A Handbook of Cookery for a 
 Small House," with a testimonial preface by "a modest 
 but grateful Living Example of her practice." 
 
 Conrad is not a great traveler, or a mixer in any social 
 or literary set. For one reason he hasn't time. People 
 go to see him at his home not far from Canterbury, but 
 many more go than should. A remark that throws much 
 light on his character and simplicity is one he made to a 
 friend not many months ago. "I am worried," he said. 
 "I haven't much time. There are two or three more tales 
 I want to tell. But my strength is weak and the time 
 short." His health is independable. He has never been 
 able to shake off the effects of the African fever, and he 
 works tirelessly, at great strain. 
 
 In the maturity of his writing life, Conrad has never- 
 theless continued to live with his youth. His books are 
 his youth brought to life. "It seems that he not only 
 had a memory, but also that he knew how to remem- 
 ber," as Conrad himself comments on the unnamed 
 author of the delicate and almost private pages of "The 
 Arrow of Gold." 
 
 Almayer with his famous flock of geese, the only geese 
 on the Archipelago, had come first. Almayer naturally 
 suggested Willems, so Willems, "An Outcast of the Is- 
 lands" came second, reluctant, as he would, vivid enough, 
 but reticent, stubborn. In the intervals between the 
 longer work, he recalled the earliest short stories. "Kar- 
 ain," "The Lagoon," bits of treasure chipped from the 
 glowing ruby of the East. He worked almost incessantly 
 for three years, retreading the mysterious rivers, the se- 
 18
 
 ductive, terrifying jungles of the East. It is not curious 
 that their brilliant colouring, superimposed upon the drab 
 canvas of the unchanging sea, should be ready cream to be 
 skimmed from the solid depths beneath. Captain Tom 
 Lingard's story, the belated "Rescue," had its fast com- 
 mencement in this period, only to be set aside for the 
 growing and increasingly irresistible desire to pay his trib- 
 ute to the ships and the old sea, to which he yet felt 
 drawn, and to which, not without heartburn, could he bid 
 the last farewell. 
 
 He gave them their tribute in "The Nigger of the 
 Narcissus," his epic of "the ships, the seamen, the winds, 
 and the great sea, the moulders of my youth, the com- 
 panions of the best years of my life." It was a ship-load 
 of well-loved men. James Wait came back from the old 
 Duke of Sutherland, demanding to be the centre of the 
 story. Old Singleton, whom he had known many years 
 later on the Torrens, must have his place. They were 
 friends, all, who made the unforgettable passage in the 
 Narcissus. "Good-bye, brothers! Haven't we, together 
 and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our 
 sinful lives ? You were a good crowd. As good a crowd 
 as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy 
 foresail ; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back 
 yell for yell to a westerly gale." Henceforth, Conrad 
 knew he had to be a writer. He had done with the sea. 
 
 Lord Jim came out of the East with his tale of 
 tragic success. Slowly the story was built. The ship 
 Platna, the pivot of the story, was on everyone's tongue at 
 one time in the Archipelago. . . . "Youth," his 
 youth, back it came in the Palestine, "the old rattletrap, 
 the test of life." 
 
 Then he made his greatest attempt, and, in many re- 
 spects, his greatest achievement, "Nostromo," a canvas 
 for Olympian painters. For twenty months, "neglecting 
 the common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest 
 
 19
 
 on this earth," he worked. . . . And here is the con- 
 tradiction would any one believe Conrad had never seen 
 Costaguana, the Placid Gulf, Sulacco? (The scene is 
 the west coast of South America.) He had spent a few 
 months in the West Indies in his earliest youth at sea, 
 and had later made two flying visits to South American 
 ports, visits extending perhaps twelve hours in all and 
 the rest he got from the descriptions in an old book of his 
 childhood! 
 
 It seems incredible that during the eight years between 
 1895 and 1903, when Conrad was writing the stories re- 
 ferred to above, the published books were presented to an 
 indifferent, as if perfectly unconscious, public. When 
 one launches boulders into the sea, one expects a ruffle 
 of some sort. Those were days, one may well imagine, 
 of patience and faith. Not entirely without their very 
 special and intimate satisfactions. But a writer wants to 
 be read, and it was not until as late as 1914 (that is dif- 
 ficult to believe now), with the publication of "Chance," 
 that the public rose, as one has seen them in moving 
 picture houses, to express their praise in very audible 
 appreciation. The previous volume of tales, " 'Twixt Land 
 and Sea" had met a most respectable reception, but 
 "Chance" found a welcome, which, however belated, it is 
 even to this day pleasant to recall. 
 
 After "Chance" there was no more question about 
 Conrad's audience. "Victory" was completed during the 
 first months of the war, and published in 1915. The de- 
 cision by the critics that it was one of Conrad's finest 
 artistic achievements is especially interesting in view of the 
 fact that he went back for its setting to the scene of his 
 earliest books, Heyst's "magic circle" of the Archipelago. 
 
 The story of "The Shadow Line," his next book, had 
 been one of Conrad's proudest memories for years. It 
 was the harrowing voyage of his first command, be- 
 calmed in the Gulf of Siam, and as he says, it was not a 
 20
 
 UN II INI UNI II I Ml 1 1 Ml 
 
 A 000025925 9 
 
 trifling effort of memory "for a youngster of sixty" to 
 catch in the pages of the book the freshness and simplicity 
 of youth. In "The Arrow of Gold" which followed, 
 the effort was even greater. This fragile chapter of his 
 youth had been locked in his heart for a long stretch of 
 forty years before he found the key to release it. 
 
 He was fast paying debts that had never left his mind 
 while other special goals were occupying him. The last 
 he could not escape. A number of chapters of "The 
 Rescue" had been in his desk since 1897, never completely 
 forgotten or relinquished. With a quarter of a century's 
 growth intervening, he set to work to renew his old-time 
 friendship with Captain Tom Lingard and Mrs. Travers. 
 
 In the process of "tidying up," Conrad published "Notes 
 on Life and Letters" in 1921, a volume of self -revelatory 
 papers on books, men, and personal contacts full of im- 
 portant lights for the student of Conrad. It is his only 
 collection of essays, and the chapter on "Poland Revisited" 
 is an unforgettable episode in his life. 
 
 Conrad's new novel, his first in three years, will have 
 book publication in the fall under the title of "The Rover." 
 The story concerns Peyrol, an old free lance of the sea, 
 who comes home to his native France to become involved 
 for the greatest adventure of his life in the Napoleonic 
 naval contest with England. 
 
 21