3 December: Boreham on Joseph Conrad

Sailor and Seer
Today marks the anniversary of the death of one of the really notable characters in modern literary history. Joseph Conrad was reared in the school of hard knocks. As a boy he loved to cajole his grand-uncle Nicholas into relating the story of the retreat from Moscow. The grizzled old soldier would tell of a certain ill-bred dog that, among the gloomy pine trees in a snow-clad ravine, chanced to bark. That bark saved the lives of three officers in Napoleon's army who must otherwise have perished of starvation. It was a mangy, diseased, revolting kind of dog, but it was something in the nature of food, and that was enough. Listening to the story the boy Conrad would shudder and remark that he could not have eaten the disgusting beast. "That," his uncle would retort, "is because you have never been hungry." In the years to follow, however, circumstances were to arise, and frequently, in which Conrad would have been grateful if a dog like that of which his uncle told could suddenly have appeared and barked at him. And, in recording the incident, he gives an unappetising list of the sickening viands to which he himself had sometimes been reduced.

Books As An Escape
As a boy Conrad imbibed his fondness both for literature and for the sea. He was a Pole, his full name being Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski. Some critics have thought it strange that a boy born in a country without a seaboard should have longed so passionately for a life on the ocean wave. But most boys are built that way. They fling a haze of romance about the unseen and crave most ardently the experiences of which they have no personal knowledge. Conrad's childhood left him ample time for reading. His parents spent many of their years in exile. On one occasion, which always seemed to him the most golden memory of boyhood, his mother was liberated for three months because she appeared to be dying, and she was still extremely ill when the short respite came to an end and she was dragged back into captivity once more. In those harsh days the boy relieved the tedium of life with books. "Since the age of five," he says, "I have been a great reader. At 10 years of age I had read much of Victor Hugo and other romantics. I had read, in Polish and in French, history, voyages, and novels. I knew Gil Blas and Don Quixote. I had read the Polish and French poets. A little later he fell under the spell of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Shakespeare.


A World Articulate
His reading awoke the wanderlust. At the age of nine he came upon a map of Africa. "Suddenly," he says, "I put my finger on the blank space that then represented the unsolved mystery of that continent, and, with absolute assurance and fine audacity, said to myself 'When I grow up I shall go there!'" Surely enough he did! Indeed, it is difficult to find a spot on the earth's broad surface that he did not visit. He was perfectly at home with a Chinese mandarin, an Indian rajah, a Zulu chief, or a South Sea Island king. He loved novelty, danger, and romance; he developed a genius for finding what he loved and later he developed a still more valuable genius for describing what he found. He was the ideal adventurer and always looked the part. The best description of him is that of Mr. H. G. Wells who knew him intimately. "He impressed me," says Mr. Wells, "as the strangest of creatures. He was rather short and round-shouldered, with his head, as it were, sunken into his body. He had a dark retreating face with a very carefully trimmed and sharply-pointed black beard, a trouble-wrinkled forehead and very worried dark eyes. The gestures of his hands and arms were from the shoulders and were very oriental indeed." Mr. Wells adds that Conrad always reminded him of Du Maurier's Svengali, and those who know Trilby will understand. All who knew him agree that you could not spend five minutes in his company without being aware of his exceptional character and extraordinary powers.

Artistry Of The Ocean
Conrad knew the sea as few men have known it. From cabin-boy to captain, Conrad passed through all the ranks. His mind was richly stored with memories of hair-breadth escapes and blood-curdling adventures. He longed, passionately and incessantly, to portray, and to portray vividly, all that he had seen. His original ambition was to be an artist. "The artist," he reminded himself, "speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the instinct of mystery surrounding our lives, to our sense of beauty and pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation, to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, and to the communion in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living, and the living to the unborn." Imbued with this lofty ideal Conrad resolved that, if he could not paint with a brush, he would paint with a pen, and, loyal to the vision that had broken so resistlessly upon him, he set to work to make his name immortal.


Visionary and Realist
To a mind so sensitive and impressionable, the ocean is a field of romance, a realm of wonder, waiting to be exploited. From its blue and dancing surface to its vast abysmal depths, everything about it challenges that spirit of adventure which is the finest feature of an imaginative mentality. The surface of the ocean is all movement, the depth is all mystery, and these two, movement and mystery, are the breath of life to a mind like the mind of Conrad. His art lay in interweaving these twin elements of movement and mystery with the texture of life and suffering and passion. "I like," says Mr. J. H. Randall, "to think of Joseph Conrad, during those many years he spent at sea, standing night after night on the deck of his vessel, peering out with steady, alert eyes into the darkness whither his ship was driving, and reflecting, as his mind was bound to reflect, on the meaning of existence and the significance of human experience." His head might be among the stars but his feet were firmly planted on his quarter-deck, and it is this unfailing association of his most audacious dreams with the actual and pressing facts of real life that has imparted to his pages the poetical and practical charm that has appealed so poignantly to every reader.

F W Boreham

Image: Joseph Conrad