• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4777 0

viewed primarily as displaced expressions of his own sense of guilt over having abandoned Poland have been taken beyond plausibility, there is no doubt that this issue played a prominent role in his psychology and in the development of his fiction, which pursues with a relentlessness bordering on obsession the themes of conflicted loyalties and betrayal. In fact, his 1912 autobiography, A Personal Record, is particularly interesting as a rhetorical effort to represent himself as faithful to his native homeland yet nonetheless as a natural fit for his adoptive country. The latter tendency is epitomized in the author’s note he wrote for a new edition of the volume in 1919 that includes a rather mysterious account of his relationship to the English language, which, it bears recalling in this context, he always spoke with a thick Polish accent:

The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption—well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character (The Works of Joseph, Conrad: A Personal Record, p. vii).

He even went so far as to deny the formative influence on him of French writers in order, as Najder characterizes it, “to erase from his literary biography any elements which might detract from his reputation as a classic of the English literary tradition” (p. 433).

In addition to the conflict over his dual national allegiances, Conrad was faced with the dilemma of how to negotiate the conflicting exigencies of two distinct audiences for his fiction. Subsequent to the education reform movement of the 1870s (a series of acts passed by Parliament had made elementary education compulsory for all British children), the British reading public had increasingly divided into a new mass readership and a highbrow readership. Although Conrad’s loyalties were with the latter, he was financially dependent on the former, and, despite his begrudging efforts to appeal to a popular readership, his books simply would not sell well. Unsuccessful in attracting a popular readership, he attempted to make his writing more lucrative by adapting his fiction for the stage, but the results of this endeavor were disappointing as well. Although he blithely claimed of his 1905 adaptation of his short story “To-morrow” (under the title One Day More) that he was content to have “an exceptionally intelligent audience stare... it coldly off the boards” (“The Censor of Plays” in The Works of Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters, p. 77), privately he had made clear that he had been hoping it would make him solvent in a way that his fiction had not yet done for him: “my little play.... may lead to the end of all my financial troubles,” he had optimistically speculated (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 237). The first substantial sign of a change in this situation was the 1912 publication of ‘Twixt Land and Sea (including the fine short story “The Secret Sharer”), which garnered unprecedentedly high sales for him. Yet it would not be until the publication of the novel Chance, in 1914, that he would have an actual best-seller and a measure of relief from his financial burdens. From this point on, Conrad was marketable.

In an irony of the sort that is characteristic of his own fiction, however, Conrad’s newfound popularity coincided with a dramatic and permanent diminution in his powers as a writer. Indeed, the fact that Henry James, whom Conrad viewed as the greatest authority on the art of the novel form, had been sharply critical of Chance made painfully clear to him that the work’s fame and its artistic quality were not