I am not a personage for an orderly biography either auto or otherwise …¹

Joseph Conrad

In January 1904, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, known to his readers as Joseph Conrad, moved up to London with his wife and five-year-old son from Pent Farm, the house in Kent he had been renting for the last few years from his younger friend and collaborator Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford). He had turned forty-six in December, after a “disastrous”² year which had seen him begin and struggle despairingly with Nostromo, whose ending moved further and further away, and whose serialization was imminently to begin in T.P.’s Weekly. “It is a sort of desperate move in the game I am playing with the shadow of destruction,”³ Conrad wrote to his friend John Galsworthy, of the impending relocation, with typically fiendish, apocalyptic humor. The previous year had been marked by mounting debts and ill-health. The temporary move up to London, as well as providing a brief escape from another cold, dark winter at the Pent, was due to Ford’s invitation. He was staying three months at his brother’s house in Kensington, 10 Airlie Gardens. The Conrads stayed around the corner, in a flat at 17 Gordon Place.

Conrad and Ford had recently published their co-written novel Romance (1903), and they had become entangled in a mass of mutual financial, artistic, and domestic dependencies and possibilities since they had started to collaborate in 1898. The collaboration had not yet yielded great results, but there was still hope and promise. Romance was far from the complete failure Conrad seems to have expected. “Neither of us cares for it,” Conrad informed George Gissing at St Jean-Pied-de-Port that December of 1903, refraining from sending him a copy of the novel, and indulging in his usual sardonic fatalism. “C’est inepte, inepte—and it has done better than any of my work. Congratulate me!!”⁴ To Ford’s mother Catherine Hueffer, Conrad also remarked, “I think that Ford and I have no reason to be dissatisfied with the reception of Romance […] For myself the only question is whether the collaboration is good for Ford?”⁵

The two collaborators’ friends and neighbors in Kent and East Sussex had their own views on their partnership. Henry James, who had moved to Lamb House in Rye in 1898 at the age of fifty-five, and who, for Conrad, represented an impeccable ideal of what a writer should be, thought the idea was “like a bad dream which one relates at breakfast.”⁶ H. G. Wells, who lived much closer to the Pent, in Sandgate on the coast, also worried that associating with Conrad wouldn’t help Ford’s career,⁷ as well as ruining Conrad’s prose style. For all the qualms of James and Wells, James might have been piqued: he had written to Wells in September and October 1902 suggesting that they, too, collaborate. James offered to be Wells’s “faithful finisher,”⁸ working on his drafts, but Wells wasn’t interested in the idea.⁹ And neither of them could have predicted what the duo of Conrad and Ford were to begin working on in London in 1904: a book of dictated reminiscences, in which Conrad—almost unwittingly—made his first approaches to writing his autobiography.

Conrad and Ford were an incongruous pair. Ford was sixteen years younger than his Anglo-Polish co-writer, and although he had published several books, was not yet as well-known. Conrad was gaining a reputation in literary circles, but made little money from his work. Superficially, they didn’t match up. Conrad was exaggeratedly formal in gestures and dress-sense, alternating between an extraordinary politeness and an equally extraordinary agitation: as Conrad’s wife Jessie wrote, it was an ominous sign of over-excitement if he ever got up without putting on his starched collar (or “boiled rag”),¹⁰ and tie. Ford was more bohemian, known for his drawling manner. Both men were fathers: Ford’s two daughters were still very young, the elder just older than Conrad’s son. Ford often affected diffidence, especially when he really cared about something. He probably wouldn’t have been averse to drying his hat in the oven, or using Conrad’s suits as extra blankets in bed, as he supposedly once did, according to Jessie¹¹—a notorious source of aggravation between Jessie and Ford, who never got on.

Ford’s later descriptions of the older writer in Joseph Conrad (1924) portray him fondly as a figure almost from another age, and equally out of place: a “small rather than large” man, “dark in complexion with black hair and a clipped black beard,” who “entered a room with his head held high, rather stiffly and with a haughty manner, moving his head once semi-circularly.”¹² During their earlier collaboration on novels, most of the material they worked on was written by Ford, although Conrad would despair at its quality, showing Ford how to sharpen his scenes. But perhaps Conrad needed Ford more than Ford needed him, and in the new venture in autobiography their roles would be reversed, with Ford prompting Conrad, and taking notes from his dictation in shorthand. Conrad usually found writing agonizing, and would sit out his writer’s block at his desk, unable to even produce a page for weeks at a time, until he found a solution. Ford, however, was often fluently productive. Artistically, each possessed and gave something the other lacked. Ford was already showing his aptitude for finding exactly the right word in a sentence: he would go on to become a virtuoso in the art and tone of prose, balancing each word with utmost care against the next. For all his fluency, he sometimes had difficulties in structuring and sustaining his narratives. Conrad, meanwhile, was a master of building suspense page by page, yet often had trouble with the nuances of English, which was, after all, an adopted tongue for him, his third after Polish and French.

Conrad followed Ford to London partly to raise his own spirits. His illnesses the previous year afflicted his whole writing life, but they had been particularly bad of late—heavy, immobilizing depression, and gout which made his hands swell, so that writing became physically painful. He was well past the date when he had promised to deliver Nostromo to his literary agent, James B. Pinker. Yet he was also about to do some of the best work of his life on the novel.

The situation deteriorated rapidly once he was newly installed in London. Within days of the move, Jessie fell in the street and hurt her knee, an injury that almost crippled her, and nearly resulted, at one point, in amputation; then, Conrad’s bank failed. In these straitened circumstances, and to generate money for his family and Nostromo, Conrad and Ford set to work on the series of autobiographical sea sketches, modeled on Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, that were initially published as pieces in various journals mainly throughout 1904 and 1905, before being collected in book form in October 1906 as The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions. These told, in a loose, discursive way, of the twenty years Conrad spent at sea between the ages of sixteen and thirty-six, before he became a writer.

Autobiography is often seen as introspective, and the act of writing one’s own life necessitates self-reflection and shaping of experience. But it can also be one of the most collaborative of literary genres—certainly when the autobiographer is not a professional author, and has to enlist the help of a ghostwriter. It is a literary genre where the distinction between being an author and a writer really counts. As well as searching introspection, autobiography often creates books of structured talk, between the autobiographer and the listener or ghostwriter. But the ghostwriter is never completely a ghost. The presence of another person in the room always inflects the texture of the autobiographer’s talk, even if this inflection is entirely unconscious.

In the case of Conrad and Ford writing the Mirror, the ghostwriter, Ford, was also an author, who had collaborated with the autobiographer for several years on novels. And the ghostwriter’s presence impacted hugely on the actual talk and writing. The sketches proved to be one of the most successful works of collaboration that the two writers produced, as they colluded in telling the life at sea of that strange creation—almost a fiction—called “Joseph Conrad.” Ford was responsible for the initial idea: in a way, acting as Conrad’s biographer, Conrad’s Boswell, and, through his suggestions, drawing the story out of his subject. In this, the Mirror was rather like a book of “table talk,” or conversations with an artist or writer, with all the interrogator’s questions removed. It was also, in some ways, like a series of sittings for a visual portrait. Near the outset of his writing life Ford published a biography of a painter, his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown (1896); he was also, around the period of the Mirror, an art critic, publishing Rossetti in 1902 and Hans Holbein in 1905. The experience of helping Conrad with his memoirs had an abiding influence on Ford’s own work, which would begin, itself, to move towards reminiscence several years later.

The balance of power between the two writers in the Mirror shifted uneasily throughout its course, as it did throughout their literary partnership. The first sketches were dictated late in the evenings in London, from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., as Conrad wrote Wells in February,¹³ while Nostromo took up the days. They were a revelation in production for Conrad, who realized how much he could get down by talking rather than writing. As he exclaimed to Wells: “I’ve discovered that I can dictate that sort of bosh without effort at the rate of 3,000 words in four hours. Fact!”¹⁴ To Sidney Colvin, Conrad likewise commented that dictation “is the only way, I discover, to breast the high wave of work which threatens to swallow me up altogether.”¹⁵ By the middle of March, the first six sketches were done,¹⁶ although Conrad had to drag Ford down to Deal with him for one of them, when Conrad had to see a doctor there, due to his frayed nerves.¹⁷

Laconic as he seemed, Ford felt the pressure too. Later that year, perhaps to get away from it, and suffering from alarming spells of dizziness and agoraphobia which persisted throughout the spring and summer, he went to Germany for five months in August, alone, on the advice of a specialist, returning to London in December. Although he might have seemed no more than a literary lackey, Ford arguably, in the early sections of the Mirror, helped rewrite whole patches of Conrad’s life. He also, single-handedly, prompted Conrad’s interest in autobiography, as Conrad went on with the sketches with his new secretary Lilian Hallowes, and on his own, on and off over the next two years, in Kent, London, Capri, and Montpellier, showing a careful interest in the figure he cut on the page. Once Conrad realized that Ford was not well enough to go on with them, he wrote to his collaborator in mysterious terms at the end of May 1904 asking what share of the proceeds to pay him. “A small calculation will fix our proportions; for I suppose we can not finish the whole together. Can we?”¹⁸ What exactly those proportions consisted of is hard to gauge precisely. Certainly, the two were able to mimic each other’s styles, and sometimes did so. And at some points in the Mirror, Ford might well have done much more than merely transcribe Conrad’s talk. Parts of Conrad’s self-portrait were not just written down, but quite possibly made up, by Ford.

Conrad’s attitude towards autobiography was deeply ambivalent. He always valued his privacy, refusing most requests for personal disclosures; and his excessive formality masked a form of intense shyness. While he was convulsively restless and outspoken in his letters, and energetically inhabited a plethora of personae and alter-egos in his fiction, he was a reluctant autobiographer. Self-revelation was anathema to him, at least in what he saw as an unveiled state. In his life, he always liked to look his best: not out of vanity, so much as insecurity. He notoriously disliked posing for photographs, finding it, as his second son John remembered, “a very real ordeal […] particularly if he was being photographed by a stranger.”¹⁹ He resisted the camera, showing a defiant exterior that gave little away. His first attempt at literary self-portraiture was similar, filled with poise and pride at never presenting himself in a state of undress. Like many autobiographers, he was wary of the “egoism” in such a project. Ford’s urgings gave him the excuse to begin without seeming vain or self-obsessed.

In the earliest letters to Pinker about the Mirror, Conrad told him of these “essays—impressions, descriptions, reminiscences, anecdotes and typical traits—of the old sailing fleet which passes away for good with the last century.”²⁰ In April, still briefing Pinker, Conrad wrote—characteristically—as though it was all about someone else. “Here is Conrad talking of the events and feelings of his own life as he would talk to a friend.”²¹ Once the book was published, Conrad proved unusually attached to the Mirror. He sent an elaborately inscribed copy to Henry James, who replied that “nothing you have done has more in it.”²² Wells also sent him a letter of praise, commending the sketches for their “delightful (it’s the right word) talk of seas and winds and ships. It’s talk, good talk […] full of all the admirable calm, a quality that never deserts you […] I see better as I go to and fro.”²³

For all Conrad’s attachment to it, the Mirror was extremely coy about self-revelation. It is unashamedly a book about work; and it is much more about boats and the sea than Conrad and his voyages—to Australia, Africa, Asia, and South America. Covering the period from 1874, when he first became a sailor, until around 1895, when his sea life ended with the publication of his first novel Almayer’s Folly, it shows its author only in the slightest of glimpses: presenting Conrad as a dutiful, conscientious “English” sailor, glorifying the sea life, and telling us little about his youth in Poland, or his recent experiences as a struggling Edwardian writer. Yet Conrad in his 1919 “Author’s Note” to the Mirror declared that “the following pages rest like a true confession on matters of fact which to a friendly and charitable person may convey the inner truth of almost a lifetime.”²⁴

Autobiography crept into the Mirror as it progressed. The short sketches on aspects of life at sea, which take up the first half of the self-portrait, gradually span outwards into isolated fragments of memory, forming a series of photographically static tableaux, which are never quite, at first, allowed the animation of sequential narrative. One of the first long trains of reminiscence in the Mirror, “The Weight of the Burden,” only appears after several more technical opening papers on seafaring, and its content almost mirrors the process of Conrad breathing warmth and life into his memories for the first time. Conrad writes of waiting for days on end in a snowbound Amsterdam in the 1880s, when he was twenty-four, as the cargo for his ship was “frozen up-country,”²⁵ and of going into town every day to write a letter to his ship-owners in Glasgow. He vividly brings back this tiny, seemingly realistic because unremarkable, fragment of his youth: sitting by the cabin stove, as “the ink froze on the swing-table,”²⁶ taking the “glazed tramcars” to the café, “lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush, full of electric lights, and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble tables felt tepid to the touch.”²⁷

Later in the Mirror, the memories last longer, as Conrad recalls other misadventures at sea. The gradually self-revealing depictions of Conrad’s apprenticeship as a sailor begin to partially explain his lifelong surface formality, which appeared so strikingly over-pronounced to his literary acquaintances, and to his family. (Even Jessie remarked on how Conrad—always “Conrad,” not Joseph, to his family—“carried fastidiousness to a degree that bordered on the fantastic.”)²⁸ In the Mirror, tragedies and near-tragedies are told in a brusque, affectless way, perhaps necessarily: because the sea life of the period was so overrun with such dangers and such stories. In “Overdue and Missing,” Conrad recounts, novelistically through direct conversation, the tale of a drifting steamer lost in Arctic wastes, which nearly killed all the crew. Conrad’s friend was second officer.

“We had three weeks of it,” said my friend. “Just think of that!”

“How did you feel about it?” I asked.

He waved his hand as much to say: It’s all in the day’s work. But then, abruptly, as if making up his mind: “I’ll tell you. Towards the last I used to shut myself up in my berth and cry.”

“Cry?”

“Shed tears,” he explained, briefly, and rolled up the chart.²⁹

The Mirror contains many such expressively repressed moments and shards of conversation, evocative of a whole system of thought and feeling which, as Conrad reconstructed himself in these pages as a model sailor, lay at the foundations of his self-image. In the self-portrait, sober constancy was raised to the level of an ideal; yet he found it impossible to hold this pose for ever in the Mirror, just as in life. Once he lost the rigid mask, he swung to the other extreme, as though his efforts of suppression increased his subsequent intensity.

As the Mirror continues, the static, essay-like sketches give way not only to more prolonged reminiscence, but finally to dramatic, far-fetched episodes. The nostalgic non-fictional tone eventually becomes excitable, anecdotal, novelistic; tilting and sliding into what is probably outright fiction. The extensive use of dialogue throughout many of the sketches suggests the possibility of their fictionality at a formal or technical level, but as the Mirror proceeds it becomes harder not to suspect that the content has also been reshaped. In “Initiation,” Conrad rescues people from a sinking boat, never discovered, and embarks on colorful reminiscences of his years in Marseilles in the 1870s. This Marseilles period, when Conrad was a teenager, before he touched English soil for the first time in Lowestoft, is the setting for a series of adventures at the end of the Mirror. Conrad writes of gun-running episodes in a probably make-believe balancelle called the Tremolino,³⁰ during a Carlist war which was, in fact, largely over at the time.³¹ In a scenario recalling Nostromo, Conrad recounts the death of one César Cervoni, killed swiftly by his uncle Dominic after being pushed overboard, weighed down by the gold he had stolen—without acknowledging that a real César Cervoni lived on long past these semi-mythological events.³²

For all Conrad’s later protestations that it rested “on matters of fact,” by the end of the Mirror he has crossed the line between fact and fiction, though exactly where and when is very hard to pinpoint. Usually the traffic across this line moves from life towards fiction. Here, Conrad went the other way, and turned make-believe into memoir. So the Mirror ended by displaying a streak of self-mythology: the trait of the incorrigible storyteller, whose anecdotes and episodes have been polished for effect, perhaps to the point of exaggeration or invention.

There is nothing surprising in this. All autobiographies and memoirs are tinged by distortions, omissions, alterations, selections, impressions, and artful reshapings. But Conrad’s relations between fact and fiction were unusual mainly for the way he later tried to manipulate the lines between them. While always privileging fiction, he also came to understand the literary power of factuality, the foundation of veracity on which much of biography and autobiography’s force implicitly rests. And he intuited how much of this factuality was often semi-illusory, often resting as much in the mind of the reader—along with the generic framing of a book and what it calls itself—as in the text itself. In the Mirror, he experimented with blurring these lines for the first time: it was his first sustained attempt at non-fiction. Later in life, however, he more consciously manipulated generic boundaries.

In 1917, for instance, when his short novel The Shadow-Line was published, Conrad tried to frame it as “exact autobiography,”³³ subtitling it “A Confession,” because he was nervous about its quality. He thought that the book would be read more leniently if it were taken as being essentially true.³⁴ So while the title The Shadow-Line refers to that stage in life where someone first grows from youth to maturity, the novel’s framing also played deceptively with another liminal shadow-line—which Conrad crosses so flagrantly in the Mirror—that thin, indefinable line between what we perceive to be fact and what we perceive to be fiction.

Over the years, Conrad moved back and forth across this shadow-line, as he claimed varying degrees of truthfulness for his books at different points in his life, often describing his novels, almost proudly, as being factually true. His sea novels, especially, often were very true to life. He frequently even used the real names of people he had worked with and ships he had sailed on. Sometimes, he tweaked names slightly, so that the Olmeijer he met in real life became the Almayer of Almayer’s Folly, or a real-life White became Wait. He never wrote a book which did not have some basis, however small, in his experience; although the balance between fact and fiction, between how closely he drew from life, and how much he invented, was to shift. Often, as in the Mirror, it even shifted within a single book: sometimes masquerading as something that had really happened to Conrad when it hadn’t, and sometimes pretending to be fiction. Sometimes, Conrad’s retellings created, through repetition, kaleidoscopic variations on the truth, in life even more than on the page, as Jessie Conrad wrote in her memoir of her husband, Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him (1926).

He lived life as a novel; he exaggerated simple trifles, though quite unconsciously […] Often and often I have sat and marvelled at the extent to which, in his mouth, the same story varied. Each statement, if the same in the main, would be entirely different in detail. I suppose, with a born novelist, the mixture of fact and fiction in narration does always tend to vary. Dates varied most. I have read and re-read his written reminiscences, and although I am never tired of them, in the printed page I miss those varying arabesques of detail.³⁵

When a researcher caught up with Conrad near the end of his life, checking facts, his findings spurred Conrad into making one of the clearest statements he ever formulated about the maze of truths and untruths in his work. In one sense, this serves as a defense of what all novelists do when they work from their own experience and transform it into stories; and interestingly, Conrad steps back from the statement in his 1919 foreword to the Mirror that it was a “confession.” Here it is not the Mirror, but his second autobiography, A Personal Record, begun in 1908, a few years after the Mirror, that he claims to be essentially true.

I need not point out that I had to make material from my own life’s incidents arranged, combined, coloured for artistic purposes. I don’t think there’s anything reprehensible in that. After all I am a writer of fiction; and it is not what actually happened, but the manner of presenting it that settles the literary and even the moral value of my work. My little vol: of autobiography [A Personal Record] of course is absolutely genuine. The rest is more or less close approximation to facts and suggestions. What I claim as true are my mental and emotional reactions to life, to men, to their affairs and their passions as I have seen them. I have in that sense kept always true to myself.³⁶

Conrad was not straightforwardly truthful in the Mirror, but he was true to himself, and to others, in many other ways. If the myths he propagated in his work all focused on his adventurous life at sea, that life came to an end when he began writing full-time in the mid-1890s. In a sense, his life stopped, as he now put everything into his writing, and soon, his burgeoning family. His marriage to Jessie, in 1896, was a mystery to many of his friends—and from the evidence of several letters, an enigma to himself as well—yet the couple stayed together, until Conrad’s death, with Jessie giving birth to two sons: Borys in 1898, and John in 1906. In one vital letter written soon after his marriage, Conrad divulged, with less irony than usual, what he wanted out of life. “I confess to you,” he wrote, “I dream of peace, a little reputation, and the rest of my life devoted to the service of Art and free from material worries. Now, dear Madame, you have the secret of my life.”³⁷

To this aim, too, Conrad remained faithful. Yet his dream of modest material ease would stay far out of reach for years. Until late 1907, the Conrads’ base in England remained the Pent—as Jessie put it, “a remote, country place, without electric light”³⁸—with periods in Europe and London to escape the winters there. Nostromo was misunderstood, and did not bring respite from the debts building with Pinker. The Secret Agent, published in September 1907, likewise brought little relief. The Conrads moved from the Pent to a farmhouse, Someries, near Luton in Bedfordshire, soon after it appeared. But Conrad disliked Someries, and fairly soon returned to Kent.

The formal collaboration on novels with Ford had ended by this time, but the movements of the two writers still overlapped. Ford had been making a mark with several new books—six volumes in 1905 and 1906 alone—and he had traveled to America on a lecture tour, returning to his cottage in Winchelsea, near Rye, early in 1907, taking a flat in Holland Park in London that summer. In 1908, Ford became more exclusively based in London, launching and becoming the editor of the English Review—whose first issue, in December 1908, included contributions from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, John Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, and H. G. Wells. Conrad contributed “Some Reminiscences”—which would later, with the subsequent instalments in the English Review, be collected in book form as A Personal Record (1912).

When Conrad embarked on the first of these pieces in 1908, the reminiscences brought the two collaborators back together for a spell, mainly due to Ford. Conrad was deep in the composition of “Razumov,” which became Under Western Eyes (1911), yet he still found time to start this new project. As he put it, the reminiscences were “the result of a friendly suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted, ‘You know, you really must.’”³⁹ As well as commissioning the series, Ford once again actively helped in writing the new self-portrait, which was to be, from the start, much closer to an autobiography than the Mirror.

Conrad’s Polish biographer Zdzisław Najder has suggested that another spur to the reminiscences was Robert Lynd’s attack on Conrad in the Daily News, a month before Conrad began the reminiscences in 1908, in which Lynd, cruelly, accused Conrad of being a man “without country or language.”⁴⁰ Lynd could well have been the “gentleman” Conrad mentions in the reminiscences, “who, metaphorically speaking, jumps upon me with both feet.”⁴¹ So the new self-portrait might have been a literary self-defense. The Mirror had presented Conrad as a perfect “English” sailor; these new reminiscences were to go further into his origins and early years in Poland: to reinvestigate the nationality Lynd said he didn’t have. It was also surely significant to Conrad that they would appear in a journal called the English Review, whose very title had been Conrad’s idea, as Ford tells us.

At the end of August 1908, Conrad moved for a few weeks from Someries to Aldington in Kent, into “rooms in a farmhouse not very far from the Hueffers,”⁴² as Conrad told Edward Garnett. Once installed in Aldington, Conrad wrote straightaway to Pinker about his plan for the new reminiscences, informing him that he would dictate them to Ford, “who consents to hold the pen for me—a proof of friendship and an act of great kindness.”⁴³ Ford much later, in his book of reminiscences Return to Yesterday (1932), recalled the early sessions of dictation for “Some Reminiscences” as having taken place “on a little terrace […] high up in the air, with the great skies over the Romney Marsh below,”⁴⁴ with Conrad “rushing feverishly up and down the terrace!”⁴⁵ Writing to Pinker, Conrad was, from the outset, thinking about how the pieces would make up a book, as he suggested some possible titles. “These are to be intimate personal autobiographical things under the general title (for book form perhaps) of the Life and the Art. They will tell in a measure my own story and as it were the story of my books […] these are things which I could not dictate to anyone but a friend.”⁴⁶ Other titles Conrad considered were “The Pages and the Years,”⁴⁷ “The Leaves and the Years,”⁴⁸ and “The Double Call: an Intimate Note,”⁴⁹ all of which highlight the theme of duality in Conrad’s life.

As in the Mirror, the burst of collaboration was followed by a protracted period when Conrad continued alone, and dictating to Lilian Hallowes, back in Someries until mid-February 1909 before returning to Aldington for a more settled residence for the rest of that year. And as he worked on this new self-portrait, Conrad told different people different things about it. To Wells, he was offhand about the project, and once again wary of apparent “egoism”: “Ford persuaded me to some reminiscences for the E.R […] A megalomaniac’s stuff but easy to spin out.”⁵⁰ To Ford, once he was away from him, he was technical: “the trouble is, what to keep out.”⁵¹ To Pinker, he talked it up: “a mere casual suggestion has grown into a very absorbing plan […] it may be, so to speak, the chance of a lifetime—coming neither too soon nor yet too late.”⁵² He was now fifty years old, about to turn fifty-one.

He had not wanted to write the Mirror. There was a more insistent psychological need to write A Personal Record. He wanted once again to present his best face. But again, he couldn’t maintain the pose for long. He was only ever able to reconstruct his life in pieces. As he tried to put a public self together, piece by piece, something else in his life-story always pulled the other way, revealing the fragility of the edifice. Where the Mirror was purely about his life at sea, A Personal Record dealt with his childhood, his nationality, and his family. It soon revealed the faultlines lying deep within his experience. Once he had started it, he knew it would have to be different in form from most other autobiographies. “Of course the thing is very far from conventional in its composition,” he wrote to Pinker. “It does not much resemble other people’s reminis^ces. Oh dear no!”⁵³ And to E. V. Lucas, he declared: “I felt I could not proceed in cold blood on the usual lines of an autobiography.”⁵⁴

The first problem he faced was how to begin. Of course, no one remembers their first years of life, although most biographies begin obstinately at the beginning. In 1921, in a short piece called “The First Thing I Remember,” Conrad wryly commented on this universal void. Stories told by other people, he knew, make up our earliest memories: “one generally is told of them afterwards and then thinks one remembers.”⁵⁵ In this piece his first memory was of having “part of a cheek and an ear frost-bitten,”⁵⁶ but he suspected this “image-memory” was a “later fabrication”;⁵⁷ something he had been told. His second memory was of his mother at the piano, slowly turning to look at him, and stopping in her playing. He dates it as being from early in 1861 (he was born in 1857).

This, I rather think, is a genuine instance of the memory of a moment; for I do not remember who opened the door for me nor yet how I came there at all. But I have a very convincing impression of details, such as the oval of her face, the peculiar suavity of her eyes, and of the sudden silence. That last is the most convincing as to the genuineness of its being an experience; for, as to the rest, I have to this day a photograph of her from that very time, which, of course, might have gone to the making up of the “memory”.⁵⁸

Conrad knew from experience the extent to which early memories are told by others, or later reconstructed, because when he searched his memory for his own early recollections for A Personal Record, there were so many unverifiable gaps. His mother had died when he was seven-and-a-half; his father had died when he was eleven. His family were sent into exile when he was four, several hundred miles north-east of Moscow, after being sentenced by the Russians for revolutionary activities—the part of “Poland” he was born in having been annexed by Russia. When Conrad came to write of his early youth in the reminiscences, he formed the portrait of his mother not from his own few memories of her, but from the two-volume Memoirs of his guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski.⁵⁹ His “memories” came from someone else’s self-portrait. Where many memoir-writers face ethical questions about how much they should reveal about their family, Conrad lacked knowledge about his mother and father. He also planned the time-scheme of the Mirror and A Personal Record to ensure no revelations about Jessie, Borys, and John: all of whom, unusually, went on to write memoirs of him after his death.

This touches on the wider problem Conrad faced: as he had put it to Ford, “what to keep out.” There were also other things he kept secret. He didn’t want to tell, for instance, of how he had attempted suicide in Marseilles by shooting himself in the chest as a young man, not long after he had chosen his own country—the sea—at the age of sixteen, and had first reached the sea through France. This was a secret he had even kept from his family.

All autobiography hinges on turning-points, giving shape—even if illusory or retrospectively formed—to a life as it is depicted. Remembrance molds the formless multiplicities of life into patterns which often hinge on crucial pivots. These patterns, and pivots, can be alluring to many autobiographers, searching to make sense of life. It is sometimes a matter of how closely one looks: for each day of life can have a turning of its own. In life-or-death situations, however, such as Conrad’s attempted suicide, turning-points become most stark. The suicide was avoided entirely in A Personal Record, which attempted not to locate such points in Conrad’s life, but to bring the disparate parts of his experience back together. All the phases lay so far apart that Conrad felt he would find no links between them. They teemed with so many turnings and departures that what he felt was lacking was consistency. The reminiscences offered a chance at reparation. As Conrad wrote to Wells, they were “a unique opportunity to pull myself together”;⁶⁰ to stitch the elements of his life back into a coherent whole.

The way he did so, strangely, was to overturn the foundation on which biography is usually laid: chronology. The idea behind A Personal Record was a biographical jeu d’esprit—one very suitable for the life-story of a novelist—as Conrad decided to tell only of how he wrote his first book Almayer’s Folly. The reminiscences tell the story of a manuscript, the story of his formation as a writer; and he intended to cover only the years 1889–1895, when he was at work on this novel. He chose this short span of years with care. It was the only period in his experience when his different lives—as a Pole, a sailor, and a writer—came together simultaneously, since he went back to Poland at this time, and was both a sailor and a writer. Much of Almayer, as he went on to tell, was written on board ships.

Conrad was also consciously striving for specific literary effects in his choice of this time-scheme. Memory, he knew, doesn’t line the facts out in sequence when we look back at our lives. Our past days don’t sit neatly stacked up, to be related in strict order: they interrelate, and strike sparks off each other, constantly shuffled into new associations. Memory, and autobiography, have their own order, their own links and hierarchies. And to the remembering mind, sequential chronology is an utterly artificial construction.

To reflect this, in his novels, along with Ford, Conrad developed the device of the “time-shift”; in which the temporal scheme of events moves back and forth rather than always straight ahead. Similarly, in Joseph Conrad, subtitled A Personal Remembrance—partially in homage to A Personal Record—Ford complained that many novels “went straight forward” chronologically, in a way that was untrue to how one got to know people in real life. Ford added, choosing the one date—the first month of the First World War—when no one would ever forget what they had been doing:

Life does not say to you: In 1914 my next door neighbour, Mr. Slack, erected a greenhouse and painted it with Cox’s green aluminium paint […] If you think about the matter you will remember, in various unordered pictures, how one day Mr. Slack appeared in his garden and contemplated the wall of his house. You will then try to remember the year of that occurrence and you will fix it as August 1914 […]⁶¹

Conrad’s few pronouncements on the art of biography also showed his mistrust in its conventions. In a preface to Thomas Beer’s biography Stephen Crane (1923), Conrad stated his disregard for “such things of merely historical importance such as the recollection of dates”;⁶² and his lack of interest in such matters was notorious. “After hearing from Mr. Beer of his difficulties in fixing certain dates in the history of Stephen Crane’s life,” Conrad writes, “I discovered that I was unable to remember with any kind of precision the initial date of our friendship. Indeed, life is but a dream—especially for those of us who have never kept a diary or possessed a notebook in our lives.”⁶³ Fiction, Conrad more boldly asserted in an essay on Henry James in 1905, paradoxically stood “on firmer ground […] nearer truth” than history, which was “based on documents […] on second-hand impression […] But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.”⁶⁴

In “A Familiar Preface” to A Personal Record, written in 1911 when he was preparing the reminiscences as a book, Conrad emphasizes and defends the unconventional form of his recollections, reporting—with ironic parenthetical asides and nested reported speech that recall the indirect methods of his novels—conversations he had had about his memoirs.

They […] have been charged with discursiveness, with disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime), with unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). I was told severely that the public would view with displeasure the informal character of my recollections. “Alas!” I protested mildly, “could I begin with the sacramental words, ‘I was born on such a date in such a place’ ”?⁶⁵

Conrad here implicitly compares biographical form and chronology to social codes, which he feels he has to break, because of the nature of his life. And in A Personal Record he certainly does not begin with the words, “I was born on such a date in such a place,” but with the sentence: “Books may be written in all sorts of places.”⁶⁶ A Personal Record goes on to depict, with great virtuosity, the strange texture of the writing life. The autobiography recreates what becoming a writer, for Conrad, during his long apprenticeship, involved: a dual life, always moving between reality and fiction, and often, from one country to another.

Although he referred to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) in A Personal Record—as an act of untrammeled self-revelation which he did not want to emulate—Conrad lacked exemplars in his attempt to write reminiscences which told of the writing life in a form which broke with the Victorian conventions of biography. But Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son offered a recent precedent.⁶⁷ Writing autobiography piece by piece, as Conrad did, also meant there was an intrinsic fragmentation in the reminiscences, as well as an in-built interruption to the instalments, which, as they appeared in the English Review, were all followed by the phrase “(To be continued).”

Conrad worked this into the theme of A Personal Record, which frequently depicts scenes where he is suddenly shaken out of his literary reveries. The first instalment opens with Conrad writing Almayer’s Folly on board ship in Rouen in 1893, when he was thirty-five, composing dialogue about the now-distant Malayan isles—“‘It has set at last,’ said Nina to her mother […]”⁶⁸—and being interrupted in his literary labors by the abrupt entrance of “the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth, coming in with a bang of the door.”⁶⁹ The progress of the writing of Almayer’s Folly, as Conrad portrays it in A Personal Record, was a story of continual interruptions, as the unfinished manuscript was taken up, and put aside, and taken up again, while Conrad traveled the world as a sailor. “Line by line, rather than page by page, was the growth of Almayer’s Folly,”⁷⁰ as Conrad writes.

Conrad folds many moments from different times and places into the first instalment of the reminiscences. People and scenes open out from his memories like tiny origami figures. Conrad writes of London, and how he came to be in Rouen; of seeing Almayer in “eastern waters”⁷¹ for the first time before writing the novel Almayer about him years later in a Pimlico square. Conrad depicts the act of beginning Almayer as a kind of ghostly visitation, a hallucination, in which his immediate reality, “writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of Belgravia,” dissolved, and fictional and real characters became hard to tell apart. Indeed, writing about Almayer makes him “live again with a vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse”:⁷²

I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of occupying my mornings, Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue. Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my table, and then the rest of that Pantai band came, full of words and gestures […] They did not clamour aloud for my attention. They came with a silent and irresistible appeal.⁷³

Only a few pages later, Conrad remembers pointing at a map of Africa in 1868 as a child and saying “When I grow up I shall go there.”⁷⁴ He moves again between different periods of his life, dream and reality, the writing life and life at sea, as he then recounts nearly losing the manuscript of Almayer on “a specially awkward turn of the Congo between Kinchassa and Leopoldsville.”⁷⁵ “I got around the turn more or less alive,” Conrad writes, “though I was too sick to care whether I did or not; and, always with Almayer’s Folly amongst my diminishing baggage […] At that date there were in existence only seven chapters of Almayer’s Folly, but the chapter in my history which followed was that of a long, long illness and very dismal convalescence.”⁷⁶ Once he was recovered, Almayer, “like a cask of choice Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro upon the sea […] the whole MS. acquired a faded look and an ancient, yellowish complexion.”⁷⁷

The narrative of A Personal Record soon turns to a trip in the 1890s back to Conrad’s birthplace in Poland, “or more precisely Ukraine.”⁷⁸ Still carrying and again nearly losing the MS of Almayer, “advanced now to the first words of the ninth chapter,”⁷⁹ Conrad takes the train to Berlin, to Warsaw, and to Kiev, before an eight-hour ride by sledge on a journey into his past, wrapped in fur against the cold.

I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of my childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view as if it were setting on the sea. It was twenty-three years since I had seen the sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees about a village of the Ukrainian plain.⁸⁰

The voyage leads to fragmentary memories of Conrad’s mother, in 1864, and of his youth. So at the center of the journey into the past are Conrad’s parents. We also appear to approach the interior in his memories as he recalls a tragic farewell scene of youth when he was only “a small boy not quite six years old”⁸¹—his departure with his mother, back into exile, after a brief stay at home. The scene is composed almost like a photograph, a careful inventory of all that Conrad lost, as servants and relations all gather on the steps to see mother and son off in the carriage—his grandmother, his uncle, his cousin, Mlle. Durand the governess, whose “sobbing voice alone […] broke the silence with an appeal to me: ‘N’oublie pas ton français, mon chéri’.”⁸² “Each generation has its memories,” Conrad writes, recording and naming the Russian official, Bezak, who gave the order for this departure—the departure to her death—of his mother and his childhood self, back in the 1860s.

The early instalments of A Personal Record recreating Conrad’s journey into his past mimic the journey in autobiography he was making in this pages—pushing further on into his memories to travel back in time. Many of these memories were troubling, or painful, especially in the first three instalments which deal so largely with his background in Poland.

At the beginning of the fourth instalment, Conrad returns to Almayer. Before Almayer, Conrad says, he had never really attempted to write anything; and, looping back to the opening episode of the reminiscences, he redramatizes his first day writing the novel in Pimlico. Even this recollection leads once more to dangerous familial ground, as Conrad, slipping the avowed time-scheme of A Personal Record again, recounts his early reading of Cervantes, Dickens, Hugo, Trollope, and Shakespeare—and an early memory of sitting at his father’s desk. Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a playwright, poet, and translator; and his example no doubt stirred Conrad’s own literary strivings.

“These things I remember,” Conrad observes, “but what I was reading the day before my writing life began I have forgotten.”⁸³ He remembers the weather on that first day writing Almayer, and in another seamlessly managed shift between his waking life and the writing life moves between the account of writing the novel, and another memory of the real-life Almayer as he saw him on a Bornean river one day. In a fantastical reverie, he imagines talking with Almayer in the after-life, justifying having used his name so freely. All this still chimes with the initial plan of the reminiscences.

But the Almayer-motif of A Personal Record moves more out of view in the last three instalments, while at the same time, Conrad appears to be struggling more with what he should reveal. “To survey with wonder the changes of one’s own self is a fascinating pursuit for idle hours,”⁸⁴ he writes in the fifth instalment; yet “the matter in hand […] is to keep these reminiscences from turning into confessions.”⁸⁵ Where the Mirror managed this ultimately by moving towards fiction, A Personal Record likewise succeeds in avoiding confession, mostly by becoming ever more loosely associative and discursive.

The last parts of A Personal Record come very close to the present, as Conrad tells of writing Nostromo, and again being interrupted, sitting at his desk. Someone comes in and asks the writer, “How do you do?”⁸⁶—and the imaginary landscape of Nostromo dissolves before Conrad’s eyes, to his despair.

I had heard nothing—no rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment before a sort of premonition of evil; I had the sense of an inauspicious presence—just that much warning and no more; and then came the sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible fall from a great height—a fall, let us say, from the highest of the clouds floating in gentle procession over the fields in the faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself up quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair stunned and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being uprooted out of one world and flung down into another—perfectly civil.

“Oh! How do you do? Won’t you sit down?”⁸⁷

The anecdote, Conrad feels, says more about his life “than a whole volume of confessions à la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do”⁸⁸—and seen alongside the interruptions in the writing of Almayer, it encapsulates the central theme of the reminiscences: of constant deferral and delay in composition. As with many scenes in A Personal Record, little, sharp fragments of dialogue—short enough to be plausibly and faithfully recalled—show the total failure of the outer world, for Conrad, even to hint at the depths of the inner.

As in the Mirror, the reminiscences lead out eventually, in the final two instalments, to Marseilles. Conrad closes A Personal Record abruptly, sailing for the first time under an English flag, “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.”⁸⁹ Yet this ending, like this identity, feels a little patched and provisional; it only just holds the whole thing together.

Conrad wrote all these reminiscences to deadline for the English Review, and the seven instalments originally appeared one by one, with even the last one “(To be continued),” between December 1908 and June 1909. In 1909, as Conrad had suspected it might, despite Ford’s undoubted skills as an editor, the Review had already begun to flounder. Ford was in financial trouble, and his domestic life was even more complicated: his relationship with the novelist Violet Hunt now made him wish to obtain a divorce from his wife Elsie Hueffer, who always refused. Ford, to strengthen his case for a divorce, had invited a young woman called Gertrud Schablowsky to stay in his flat in London.

The very real sense of potential scandal and disarray surrounding Ford’s marital affairs made some of his older literary friends wary, if not the younger generation of writers and artists with whom Ford was increasingly spending his time with Hunt at her house South Lodge, between Kensington and Notting Hill, at 80 Campden Hill Road. Henry James, later in 1909, once he heard that Ford’s relationship with Violet Hunt was about to enter the divorce courts, wrote to Hunt that this now “compels me to regard all agreeable and unembarrassed communication between us as impossible,”⁹⁰ even though they were old friends—perhaps fearing he would become associated with the scandal. When Elsie talked to Conrad in April 1909, Conrad was thrown by his friend’s marital crisis, and he also had a severe attack of gout which lasted several months. When he failed to finish the eighth instalment of his reminiscences on time, Ford printed a note in the July issue of the Review, much to Conrad’s irritation: “We regret that owing to the serious illness of Mr Joseph Conrad we are compelled to postpone the publication of the next instalment of his Reminiscences.”⁹¹

But there never was another instalment. Even though Ford was the only person who ever seemed to lift Conrad out of his depressions, Conrad had been building for a break with him almost since the start of the year, for the confusion he was causing professionally as well as personally. Around the end of April, he had written him a searing, yet still affectionate letter: “it strikes me my dear Ford that of late you have been visiting what might have been faults of tact, or even grave failures of discretion in men who were your admiring friends with an Olympian severity […] I have the right to warn you that you will find yourself at forty with only the wrecks of friendships at your feet.”⁹² When Ford then reproached Conrad in May for not having seen the American writer Willa Cather, who was on a visit to England, Conrad was even more angry, especially since he felt that Ford had abused his trust by sending his “letter written with perfect openness to your wife to a third party […] Look here my dear Ford—this sort of thing I won’t stand if you had a million dollars in each hand.”⁹³

The very public note about his illness in the English Review was a final provocation. Conrad wrote to Ford pointedly using his surname, “Dear Hueffer,” protesting at Ford’s accusation that he had left the reminiscences in a “ragged condition” by ending them so abruptly,⁹⁴ and insisting that they were finished as they were. “It is another instalment which would make the thing ragged. It would have to begin another period and another phase.”⁹⁵ Conrad’s letter takes the phrase “ragged condition” personally, as though his very soul were under question. And it particularly hurt that Ford—“a man with a fine sense of form and a complete understanding, for years, of the way in which my literary intentions work themselves out”⁹⁶—should not have seen that they were finished. He refused to continue with the series for the English Review, partly because the new editor was Russian. “The ER I hear is no longer your property and there is I believe another circumstance which for purely personal reason[s] (exceptionally personal I mean) make[s] me unwilling to contribute anything more to the ER. This reason has of course nothing to do with You you understand. It is not a critical reason. A pure matter of feeling.”⁹⁷

Were the reminiscences left in a “ragged condition”? Conrad denied it vehemently, and never wrote any more of them, seeing Some Reminiscences through to publication in book form, initially published under that title in London by Nash in 1912, and as A Personal Record in America. Although he never told Ford this, at several points in the following years Conrad did contemplate adding to them. Shortly after the appearance of A Personal Record as a book, and perhaps not coincidentally, precisely the same period that Henry James was working on his memoir, A Small Boy and Others, Conrad contemplated a sequel. “I was indeed thinking of a ‘suite’ to my Remces under the general title of Some Portraits family and others,” he wrote to the editor of the English Review, who was by that stage Austin Harrison, “but that is not possible now.”⁹⁸ A few years later, however, he did make one further important attempt to depict his Polish experience.

In July 1914, without realizing that Europe was on the brink of the First World War, Conrad went with his family back to Poland for a final time. He had found a measure of financial ease with his novel Chance in 1913—a central turning-point in what remained of both his writing and his real life. Having spent so many years working continuously, he felt this was a good time to show Jessie and his two sons where he had come from. He wrote about the trip soon afterwards in a short piece called “Poland Revisited.” Where A Personal Record made the journey back to Poland in memory, this piece recounts a similar trip, in reality. In “A Berlin Chronicle,” Walter Benjamin writes: “I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life—bios—graphically on a map.”⁹⁹ In this mapping, for Conrad, it is always Poland, not the sea, at the center; yet every time he goes there, he traces disappearances.

Setting out on their journey in 1914, the Conrads took the train up to London from Kent, where since 1910 Conrad had finally settled at Capel House in Orlestone near Ashford; and for Jessie, Borys, and John, it was to be a family holiday. Yet Conrad, in “Poland Revisited,” was filled with foreboding. “As we sat together in the same railway carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt more and more plainly that what I had started on was a journey in time, into the past.”¹⁰⁰ Arriving at Liverpool Street station, Conrad writes that he also came out of the same station—“Not the same building, but the same spot”¹⁰¹—thirty-seven years before, having come down from Lowestoft in September 1878, arriving in England for the first time. As the Conrads took the train to Harwich, for the boat to Hamburg—retracing his very first English train journey all those years before, going in the other direction from Lowestoft to Liverpool Street—Conrad was already overwhelmed by memories.

In Cracow, he wandered the streets at night with Borys, feeling “like a ghost”;¹⁰² and he soon found himself wandering helplessly into scenes from his childhood and youth, when he was eleven, those lonely years after his mother died. He remembers walking daily up to a school for day-pupils in the winter of 1868, at eight each morning; and returning home each night at seven, where his father, very ill, lay on his sickbed, tended by two nuns. He remembers, every evening, saying “good-night to the figure prone on the bed”¹⁰³ who was speechless and immobile, before going off to bed himself, where he would “often, not always, cry myself into a good sound sleep.”¹⁰⁴ And just as A Personal Record inexorably led towards a tragic scene of departure into exile, rendered in surreally precise detail, the memories of Cracow lead straight to his father’s funeral procession.

In the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and tragic memories, I could see again the small boy of that day following a hearse; a space kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall black machine, the chanting of the surpliced clergy at the head, the flames of the tapers passing under the low archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the pavements with fixed, serious eyes. Half the population had turned out on that fine May afternoon.¹⁰⁵

The scene is recounted without sentimentality. But Conrad draws a curtain swiftly over it. Not without a sense of tragic irony, “Poland Revisited,” in its last, rushed pages, tells how, back in 1914, the Conrads’ holiday was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, and how, after a forced stay of two months, they finally made it to Vienna, to Genoa, and then to London.

Conrad took things hard, throughout his very hard life, and he was always as loyal to his friends as he was to his family. Yet after the reminiscences in 1909, the relationship with Ford, one of his closest friends, and the only person with whom he was ever able to talk fully about his work, was damaged. They had been so close in their partnership that in 1904, when he heard that Ford was ill, in order to raise money for Ford, Conrad had offered to put his name to any piece of scrap writing that Ford had, and sell it to the newspaper which had asked for some of his own early work.¹⁰⁶ In August 1909, Conrad wrote Pinker a “Private & Confal” letter about his ex-collaborator, outlining some of the ground for their falling-out that year, mostly concerning the English Review. “His conduct is impossible,” Conrad wrote. “All this will end badly […] A fierce and exasperated vanity is hidden under his calm manner which misleads people.”¹⁰⁷ In December 1909, Conrad wrote to David Meldrum of the breach with Ford. “Another intimate I have seen oftener but I am not likely to see anything of him in the future. He’s aggrieved, not I. But that is not worth talking about. Still after eleven years of intimacy one feels the breach.”¹⁰⁸

From 1909 onwards, Conrad dealt with his ex-collaborator warily. And this never really thawed. When Ford published his first volume of reminiscences, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections in 1911, Conrad ordered a copy. But it was Ford who made the subsequent attempts to keep in touch, which became increasingly difficult during and after the First World War, as Ford spent more time in France. When Ford began editing the transatlantic review in Paris in 1923, the pair had another exchange of letters, instigated by Ford, who asked Conrad for a contribution along the lines of the English Review reminiscences. “If it would amuse you,” Ford wrote, “[…] I would come over to a near-by pub & see if we couldn’t again evolve something like the original passage of the Mirror.”¹⁰⁹

Conrad was getting old—he would be dead in less than a year—and his response was a mixture of nostalgia at the good old, bad old times of the English Review, and an acceptance that times had now changed. The old intimacy was still there, somewhere, but it was a thing of the past, only possible through recollection. “I am afraid the source of the Personal Record fount is dried up. No longer the same man,”¹¹⁰ Conrad wrote. “I’d like to do something for the sake of old times—but I daresay I am not worth having now.”¹¹¹ Yet perhaps he did still have some more things to say. Jessie writes that even the day before he became ill in 1924, and later died, he was contemplating writing a book entitled Further Reminiscences.¹¹²

Henry James in profile, c.1910 by Theodate Pope.

Source: Archives, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT, USA.

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The secret of my life

Joseph Conrad