V

Essays, Autobiography, and Letters

Conrad left no body of criticism or travel writing, of essays, autobiography, or journals to rival that of Henry James or Virginia Woolf in either size or quality. Almost all his important work is in his fiction. He never got in the habit of reviewing, and early on was pleased to note that he had avoided “the degradation of daily journalism.” Not that many editors were asking—he didn’t have the necessary style, the easy prolix fluency on which Edwardian magazine writing relied. He digressed more interestingly in Marlow’s voice than in his own, and his nonfiction has the defects of his novelistic virtues: he cannot stick to the point and backs his way into the most elliptically defined of subjects. After the success of Chance he did produce the odd bit of high-priced prose for one paper or another, and his author’s notes, though rarely reliable as fact, contain some of the most interesting work of his last years. But those free-standing essays that remain worth reading date from an earlier time. They include brief tributes to writers he admired, such as Guy de Maupassant or Stephen Crane, a set of travel notes on his 1914 visit to Poland, and the two essays reprinted here. Conrad wrote “Autocracy and War” early in 1905, taking the Russo-Japanese conflict as the opportunity for a meditation on European history. To someone without Conrad’s biography the essay’s definition of the problem might then have seemed surprising; it was a time of Russophilia in Britain, and Germany was the more usual worry. The other piece, “Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic,” is the first of two he wrote on the topic. It’s more strictly occasional than “Autocracy and War,” and I’ve edited it slightly to eliminate a few references that might otherwise require footnotes. But all the anger remains.

Conrad produced two slender books of reminiscence, The Mirror of the Sea (1906) and A Personal Record (1912). The first patches together a series of quickly written essays that he began in the interstices of his work on Nostromo. Conrad dictated many of them to Ford Madox Ford, relying on their conversations to lubricate his memory, and they struck a deliberately popular note; a number of them first appeared in the Daily Mail. The chapter I’ve selected, “Initiation,” is one of the later and longer of these pieces, an essay with some of the complexity, pace, and structure of a short story. Beyond that, The Mirror of the Sea seems most successful when most technical—when discussing the details of anchors and ballast, landfall and departure. The book did well, and yet Conrad also noted that its success provided his reviewers with “an occasion to kick poor Nostromo . . . Beneath this chorus of praise, I can hear in a murmur: ‘Keep to the open sea. Do not land’!”

A Personal Record is an altogether larger achievement. It tells two stories, that of his becoming a writer and that of his going to sea, and its cunning structure manages to make them as one: the book begins with the writing of Almayer’s Folly and ends with Conrad’s first steps toward England itself, when the sound of a voice from a nearby ship meant that “for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English.”

Conrad’s letters stand as a major source of information about his life and opinions, his finances and periodic despair, his friendships and habits of work. He wrote better criticism in his letters than he did for publication; the selection below includes extended comments on James and Proust as well as a slap at Dostoevsky. He remained reticent about his marriage, which no one supposes to have been terribly rewarding. Still, he and Jessie were rarely apart, and he wrote her a few letters before his 1923 trip to America. He could be warm and confiding in writing letters to such friends as John Galsworthy or R. B. Cunninghame Graham, or even the American collector John Quinn, whom he never met. But his most frequent correspondent was his agent, J. B. Pinker, on whom he relied for the smallest details of practical living, at one point asking him, from Provence, “to buy for me and send out by parcel post a fountain pen of good repute.” He trusted Pinker, and he fought with him, until in the last decade of both their lives their professional relationship matured into an abiding friendship.

“Autocracy and War” appeared in the Fortnightly Review for 1 July 1905 and was later collected in Notes on Life and Letters (Dent, 1921); the text given here has been edited by Paul Kirschner for inclusion in a 2002 Penguin edition of Under Western Eyes. “Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic” was published in the English Review for May 1912, and then in Notes on Life and Letters; I have taken my text from the Doubleday, Page Kent edition of 1925. “Initiation” first ran in Blackwood’s Magazine for January 1906 before its appearance later that year in A Mirror of the Sea; the text here is that of the Kent edition as well. A Personal Record was produced for serialization in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review, where it appeared from December 1908 to June 1909. Conrad’s insistence on writing it provoked his worst quarrel with Pinker, to whom he was heavily in debt; the agent demanded that he press on with Under Western Eyes instead. Its first British book publication came as Some Reminiscences in 1912; the American edition of that year gave it the title that all subsequent editions have carried. Here too, the text comes from the Kent edition. The letters are all taken from the great Cambridge edition of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (9 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983-2007), edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, et al., and are reprinted here by permission.