In March, 1893, John Galsworthy—a product of Harrow and Oxford who had recently passed the English bar exam—was boarding the passenger ship Torrens, in Port Adelaide, when he noticed a small man with black hair boisterously loading cargo. In a letter home, a month into the voyage, he described “a capital chap,” Polish, somewhat odd-looking, with “a fund of yarns on which I draw freely.” Galsworthy’s sister credited this encounter with turning him away from the law. By early 1897, Galsworthy had assembled a book of short stories, and his Polish friend, who had engineered a midlife career change of his own from British seaman to English novelist, under the name Joseph Conrad, was writing to Edward Garnett, who worked as a publisher’s reader—a sort of grand scout—asking him to look out for a manuscript by “my literary! friend.”
Mostly, though, the favors travelled in the other direction. For the next couple of decades, Galsworthy served as Conrad’s consigliere—lobbying the Royal Literary Fund (“No living writer of English, to my mind, better deserves support”), fielding Conrad’s queries about his son’s education (“I am sending you the prospectus to look at”), playing “ ‘in between’ man” during a dispute with the agent J. B. Pinker (“Conrad asks me to ask you to write to him”). One of Galsworthy’s greatest acts of service came in 1913, after the publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday invited Conrad to lunch, in London, and proposed purchasing his existing American copyrights and reprinting his books. Conrad welcomed the idea, but, fearing it wouldn’t come off, asked Galsworthy if he could write to his friend Alfred A. Knopf, the Doubleday, Page employee who, in Conrad’s words, had formulated “this plan of ‘taking me up.’ ”
Knopf was twenty years old and brimming with ideas for remedying the outrage that “a great writer” could fail to command “a large audience.” Among his promotional schemes was an illustrated pamphlet, a press release parading as an essay. On receiving word from Galsworthy, he sent Conrad an effusive letter along with an aging, error-strewn ten-page typescript entitled “Joseph Conrad,” which he had found somewhere and was gutting for information.
Conrad read the typescript carefully, and made numerous amendments and additions. The southern province of Poland, where he was born in 1857, was “Ukraine.” His father, Apollo, a poet and translator, and his mother, Ewa, had been exiled to Vologda, not Siberia, for their support of Polish nationalism. (Apollo had marked Conrad’s birth with a poem entitled “To My Son Born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression.”) When he was orphaned, at the age of eleven, he was “taken care of by his mother’s brother.” Conrad’s first voyages, in his late teens, had been to the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean. Then he joined an English steamer—not a war vessel—bound for the Sea of Azov (not the Bosphorus). Where the “notes on me,” in his phrase, had mentioned “a trip to Pacific waters,” Conrad explained that after becoming a master in the English merchant marine—and a British citizen—he spent much of the eighteen-eighties in the East, organizing steamers out of Singapore, then commanding the bark Otago. The Torrens, he wrote, had been a sort of “swan-song.”
But Knopf wasn’t just asking for help with facts. He was granting Conrad a collaborative role in telling his own story—the selection of detail, the fixing of emphasis. In the finished pamphlet, which closely follows Conrad’s responses and his memoir, “A Personal Record” (Conrad sent Knopf a copy), his sea career is presented as virtually a hiatus between an eighteen-sixties childhood spent in prodigious feats of reading and the moment when he started writing “Almayer’s Folly” (1895). Even Conrad’s taste for the sea is pegged partly to a literary source—his father’s translation of Hugo’s “Toilers of the Sea,” which he read aloud, from beginning to end. A synopsis of Conrad’s life at sea that begins “He had been to the corners of the earth” culminates in “He had read widely in English and French.” Conrad objected to being defined as “the greatest sea-writer,” and Knopf instead celebrated a man who “has attained a distinction as a master of the art of fiction as great as that of any living writer.”
Thanks to Galsworthy’s intervention, Conrad became a best-selling Doubleday author, but Knopf quit the company soon afterward, leaving Conrad’s work with those who hadn’t been so closely coached. In 1916, Conrad received the galleys for a uniform edition of his work. Its name was “The Otago,” the emblem a sailing ship. Returning the pages to Doubleday, he explained that he wanted “to avoid all reference to the sea,” and added, “I am something else, and perhaps something more, than a writer of the sea—or even of the tropics.”
In a limited sense, Conrad was simply stating what he considered to be a fact. As he put it not long before his death, in 1924, and exaggerating only a little, “In the body of my work barely one tenth is what may be called sea stuff.” Things get a little shakier when you reach the bit about “the tropics.” With few exceptions, most notably his novel about anarchists in late-Victorian London, “The Secret Agent” (1907), his stories unfold in Asia, Africa, and South America. But then Conrad was really talking aesthetics, not arithmetic—and making, or not quite making, an argument about how he treated his settings.
It had taken him a little while to find his favored route to abstraction. In his great novella, “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ ” (1897), about a sailor who refuses to accept that he is dying, the material world—the sailors’ “forecastle,” the London streets—is solidly present and correct. As Alan H. Simmons explains in his new scholarly edition, part of Cambridge’s complete printing of Conrad’s works, the novelist distinguished between writers who treat the sea as simply “a stage” and writers in whose work the sea represents “a factor in the problem of existence.” “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ ” straddles the border. The ship is a setting as well as a symbol, a microclimate as well as a microcosm. But it’s possible to see Conrad chafing at the constraints of realist storytelling in his use of philosophical digression—and hinting at future priorities in the book’s final paragraphs, which shift from a collective viewpoint with moments of omniscience, a “we” that behaves like a “he,” to an unabashed first person: “I never saw one of them again.”
Next came the breakthrough—a startlingly original narrative voice that not only severed Conrad’s fiction from realism but questioned the idea of a consensual “reality.” In January, 1898, the month after “The Nigger” was published, Conrad wrote the story “Youth,” introducing the forty-two-year-old merchant seaman Charles Marlow, who recalls his maiden voyage to Eastern seas. Defined by his creator as “a mere device . . . a whispering ‘daemon,’ ” Marlow is more specifically a vehicle for exploring the perspectival nature of human affairs—the idea that, for example, the Indian Ocean has no stable essence or identity beyond the excitement it inspires in one excitable twenty-year-old sailor. Recalling the Judea, the bark on which he served as second mate, Marlow says that, to him, it was not “an old rattle-trap” but “the endeavour, the test, the trial of life.” Youth is what Marlow saw with and what he saw. Places tell us about the people who visit and inhabit them.
Marlow doesn’t celebrate the role played by passion or prejudice in our descriptions of the world; it’s just something he acknowledges. In Conrad’s next Marlow story, “Heart of Darkness” (1899), set in an unnamed colony whose rulers talk exclusively in propagandist falsehoods, Marlow is the one person willing to call a rattletrap a rattletrap. Coming upon a group of natives labelled “enemies,” he identifies men who were “nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.” But bafflement is futile. The world has been rewritten in accordance with the white man’s vocabulary. What he says goes.
Conrad’s theme is familiar from countless earlier writers, notably Flaubert, who in “Madame Bovary” and “Sentimental Education” measured the gulf between fact and fantasy. But, where Flaubert adopted an air of superhuman detachment, Conrad insures that Marlow’s position is itself relativized. Though clearly Conrad’s alter ego and even mouthpiece, Marlow is not the narrator of “Youth” and “Heart of Darkness” but a yarn-spinner described by a member of his audience. Everything he says comes pinched between inverted commas.
The uncertainties are multiplied in “Lord Jim” (1900), Conrad’s first full-length novel using this method. It concerns the spiritual odyssey of a young “water clerk,” drawn to the sea by “light holiday literature,” who abandons a sinking passenger ship called the Patna. The story, mostly delivered as a dinner-table anecdote, has been cobbled together from Marlow’s own “impression” of Jim—at the Patna inquiry and during the warm friendship that followed—and from the reminiscences of various bit players, including the dying mercenary “Gentleman Brown” and “an elderly French lieutenant whom I came across one afternoon in Sydney, by the merest chance, in a sort of cafe.” But the witnesses, far from helping him to “get at the truth of anything,” only reinforce Marlow’s sense that “there are as many ship-wrecks as there are men”—logic that holds not just for “belief” and “thought” and “conviction” but also for “the visual aspect of material things.” Although “Lord Jim” departs from the previous Marlow tales in its use of an authorial narrator, the novel opens with this putative God’s-eye view unable to determine whether Jim is one or two inches “under six feet.” (In “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ ” we are left in no doubt that James Wait is six-three.)
Reading Conrad today, it’s easy to see why he struggled to explain what he was up to. “I am modern,” he declared, in 1902. But his intentions became more intelligible in light of newer words and later work. The treatment of knowledge as contingent and provisional commands a range of comparisons, from “Rashomon” to Richard Rorty; reference points for Conrad’s fragmentary method include Picasso and T. S. Eliot—who took the epigraph of “The Hollow Men” from “Heart of Darkness.” (That book would have played the same role in “The Waste Land” if Ezra Pound hadn’t objected.) Even Henry James’s late period, that other harbinger of the modernist novel, had not yet begun when Conrad invented Marlow, and James’s earlier experiments in perspective (“The Spoils of Poynton,” “What Maisie Knew”) don’t go nearly as far as “Lord Jim.”
Looking back at the “new form” he had created, Conrad said that he “kept it up” only because “it was essentially mine.” That could suggest complacency, but during the spectacular decade and a half that followed “Lord Jim” his storytelling underwent a series of revisions. Marlow’s duties were given to other characters, such as Morrison, an Englishman adrift in what is now Indonesia, who reconstructs the story of the reclusive Heyst, in “Victory” (1915); and the shadowy “teacher of languages,” in “Under Western Eyes” (1910), who provides an enticing, if ultimately rather cryptic, tour of the Russian community in Geneva. In “Nostromo” (1904), Conrad’s portrait of an invented South American republic, and “The Secret Agent,” the combined roles of the narrator and Marlow are assumed by a restless third-person intelligence that floats through the fictional world, jumping about in time, picking up one perspective, then another.
The device that Conrad called “irony” persists across these variations. At one level, the word simply describes his dramatic method, in which the reader knows more than any single character. But Conrad also adopted a broader ironic stance—a sort of blanket incredulity, defined by a character in “Under Western Eyes” as the negation of all faith, devotion, and action. Through control of tone and narrative detail, as well as some fairly overt nudging, Conrad exposes what he considered to be the naïveté of movements like anarchism and socialism, and the self-serving logic of such historical but “naturalized” phenomena as capitalism (piracy with good P.R.), rationalism (an elaborate defense against our innate irrationality), and imperialism (a grandiose front for old-school rape and pillage). To be ironic is to be awake—and alert to the prevailing “somnolence.” In “Nostromo,” a novel full of people getting carried away, we are invited to admire the journalist Martin Decoud for ridiculing the idea that people “believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe.” (H. G. Wells recalled Conrad’s astonishment that “I could take social and political issues seriously.”)
What saves Conrad’s work from coldness and nihilism is his embrace of an alternative ideal. If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless. He doesn’t reject what Marlow calls “the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation” in favor of nothing; he rejects them in favor of “something,” “some saving truth,” “some exorcism against the ghost of doubt”—an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words. Authentic, self-aware emotion—feeling that doesn’t call itself “theory” or “wisdom”—becomes a kind of standard-bearer, with “impressions” or “sensations” the nearest you get to solid proof. Marlow may be just another partial observer, another myopic pair of eyes, but he knows what he is, so we trust his sincerity about the “glamour” he found in the East, or the depth of his engagement with Jim’s fate:
It’s an article of faith among Conrad’s biographers that the stiff-backed, sure-footed Galsworthy, the socially conscious author of “The Forsyte Saga”—and the recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature—could not possibly have understood his friend’s writing. But an essay he wrote in 1908, “Joseph Conrad: A Disquisition,” remains one of the sharpest accounts of Conrad’s use of perspective. The editors of the nine-volume collection of Conrad letters—an amazing achievement, overseen by Laurence Davies—suggest that Conrad liked the essay because it praised him. But he may have felt a deeper satisfaction in reading of the way he had used “the cosmic spirit” to escape his sense of “how small and stupid, how unsafe and momentary, solution is.”
“Joseph Conrad: A Disquisition” is a special case of privileged-access criticism: Galsworthy was aware of his friend’s intentions. More common were the reviews and articles that drew on knowledge of Conrad’s life—to this day, the dominant mode of commentary on his work. “The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World” (Penguin Press), by the historian Maya Jasanoff—the latest example of this approach—proceeds from a vision of Conrad as belonging to “the vanguard,” though less as a writer than as a man. He may not have known the word “globalization,” Jasanoff says, but he “embodied it.” She acknowledges the “hero’s service” performed by the literary historian Norman Sherry, who wandered the globe in pursuit of Conrad’s “sources,” and her chapter on “Lord Jim” shows how Conrad “closely tracked a true tale” that he “would have heard” while working in Singapore—the case of a sailor who leaped with the captain and crew from the passenger ship Jeddah.
But the biographical habit, once acquired, can prove hard to shake. At one point, Jasanoff tries to celebrate “Nostromo,” a novel set on a continent Conrad didn’t know, as a “declaration of independence” from his past. It proves a strange kind of independence when you reach Jasanoff’s formula for how the novel was written: “Poles into Italians; steamships into trains, telegraphs, and more steamships; ivory into silver.” A novel about a place Conrad had never been soon becomes “a novel about every place he’d been.” And, owing to the way Jasanoff has structured her book, giving the order of the “real-life” events that “inspired” Conrad’s books precedence over the dates of their composition, we have already seen him back in captivity, writing “The Secret Agent,” a novel that recalled his time as “a young foreigner in London,” and “mapped the contours of his early life” in its portrayal of Mr. Verloc’s family setup.
Conrad’s fiction is also pushed about by Jasanoff’s historical emphases. Although she defends Conrad against the charges of imperialist collusion—levelled most quotably by Chinua Achebe, who excoriated him as “a bloody racist”—she says that Patusan, the island where Jim finds refuge from his disgrace, reflects nineteenth-century stereotypes of “the Orient” as a realm of “faith” and “superstition,” harboring the kind of “authenticity that the west had long since abandoned.” Yet in the novel’s symbolic structure Patusan represents something richer and vaguer, a refuge from places “where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream.” That isn’t the East—it’s the world. Patusan is really a tailor-made nowhere land, the site of “pure exercises of the imagination.”
But then Conrad’s own ideas are slighted in Jasanoff’s account. The epigraph for “The Dawn Watch” comes from “Victory,” when the sinister mercenary Jones tells Heyst, “I am the world itself, come to pay you a visit.” You can see why Jasanoff didn’t quote the amendment: “If you prefer a less materialistic view, I am a sort of fate.” The less materialistic view is what Jasanoff is trying to avoid. At times, she resembles Ossipon, in “The Secret Agent,” who tells the Professor, “You are too transcendental for me.” She writes that Conrad “veiled” his meaning in “imprecise adjectives” like “inscrutable,” and that, in his “purplest patches,” he presented the sailing ship as a meeting place of the human and the supernatural. But virtually all Conrad’s work unfolds along roughly that borderline, and those adjectives provide the ideal means of describing the obstacles to crossing over.
Jasanoff appears to accept Conrad’s multiplicity (“Any great writer generates lots of interpretations and reactions”) while remaining firmly convinced that her own approach is the one he would have sanctioned. She suggests that Conrad saw his books as a record of his “life in the wide world,” and claims that he gave his “blessing” to articles by critics like Richard Curle about his “early travels and their influence on his work.” That’s hard to reconcile with the letter Conrad wrote, in 1894, asking his publisher not to identify the Berau as the basis for the Pantai River, in “Almayer’s Folly,” or his response to Curle’s 1921 essay, “Joseph Conrad in the East”:
Conrad never denied that his writing was autobiographical, but he used the word in a specific connection. “Youth” was “exact autobiography,” in his phrase, only insofar as the experiences it depicted had been filtered through his “temperament,” or “the medium of my own emotions”—and that went for the “outward coloring,” too. When he said that his life in the wide world could “be found” in his books, he was promising only an emotional record. What he really learned as a sailor was not something empirical—an assembly of “places and events”—but the vindication of a perspective he had developed in childhood, an impartial, unillusioned view of the world as a place of mystery and contingency, horror and splendor, where, as he put it in a letter to the London Times, the only indisputable truth is “our ignorance.” Writing replaced seafaring as his means of confronting this state of affairs.
But Conrad has also been the beneficiary of much tactful and sympathetic reading, especially in America. “Who’s Mencken?” he asked Knopf, in 1913. “He doesn’t seem to be afraid of lashing out right and left in the field of literature.” The literary critic of The Smart Set had been “a good friend” to his prose, as Conrad wrote in a letter to Mencken himself, expressing “the pleasure of a writer who sees himself understood.” Mencken was one of the earliest in a line of American readers to recognize how Conrad conjured up “the general out of the particular.” Among those who caught his Conrad bug was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, after some resistance, conceded in 1920 that “this fellow” was “pretty good after all.” Writing to Mencken five years later, as the author of “The Great Gatsby,” he complained that he had been omitted from a list of Conrad imitators: “God! I’ve learned a lot from him.” What Fitzgerald learned, principally, was a mode of narration—the damaged overreacher, as recalled by his wonder-prone, meaning-seeking sometime sidekick, a seasoned listener.
Since Fitzgerald, dozens of American writers have confessed to similar debts, among them William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Joan Didion—and Philip Roth, whose alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, having provided a Marlow-like window on Swede Levov, Ira Ringold, and Coleman Silk, in the “American trilogy,” wanders through its coda, “Exit Ghost,” carrying a copy of “The Shadow-Line” (1917). The nested structures of novels as different as “My Life as a Man” and “The Counterlife” reveal a debt to Conrad’s form; and Roth’s final novel, “Nemesis,” about a teacher who abandons a polio-ridden schoolyard—an episode reconstructed decades later by one of his former students—is undoubtedly a “Lord Jim” tale.
The most Conradian novelist in recent American literature, however, was Saul Bellow. In his Nobel Prize lecture, in 1976, Bellow recalled that as a “contrary” undergraduate, at the University of Chicago, he enrolled in a class on Money and Banking and then spent his time reading the novels of Joseph Conrad. (Thomas Pynchon, studying at Cornell in the fifties, was contrary in his own way: he skipped a class on some of Conrad’s stories in order to read the whole of Conrad.) Bellow said he had “never had reason to regret this”—and why would he? All those decades later, he was quoting Conrad in a Nobel speech, teaching Conrad as a Chicago professor, borrowing from Conrad in his novels.
It’s only a little reductive to say that Bellow spent the first half of his career describing himself and the second half describing his friends. Starting in 1975, with “Humboldt’s Gift,” he wrote a series of Conrad-like novels and stories about people he had known, as he had known them. In “The Bellarosa Connection,” he went all the way, employing a frame narrator (“I got it in episodes, like a Hollywood serial”). But Bellow borrowed more than a narrative method. No reader of his late work can fail to hear a similar abrupt oracular tone in the opening of “The Shadow-Line.” (“Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No.”) Admirers of the description of Humboldt with a pretzel (“His lunch”) must accept its origin, in “The Secret Agent,” as the Professor’s half-eaten raw carrot (“His breakfast”). The narrator of “Humboldt’s Gift” shares Marlow’s first name and sounds like him, too, when he describes himself “groping, thrillingly and desperately, for sense.”
American academic criticism has always been open to Conrad’s questing side, with the contributions of J. Hillis Miller probably being the most potent and agile. Now John G. Peters, the leading American Conradian—who plugged a glaring gap with his essential study, “Conrad and Impressionism” (2001)—has co-edited a collection of Miller’s essays, published in a series of books between 1965 and 2015. Roughly halfway through that time span, Miller served a stint as president of the Modern Language Association. In his address to the 1986 convention, in New York, Miller bemoaned the shift away from literary interpretation toward “history, culture, society, politics,” among other things. So the collection’s title, “Reading Conrad” (Ohio State), is a pointed one.
It would be hard to imagine two Conrad fans less alike than J. Hillis Miller and Maya Jasanoff. Perhaps to minimize thematic repetition, Peters and his fellow-editor Jakob Lothe have omitted Miller’s most fiery challenge to the mainstream of Conrad studies—the preface that he wrote “in counterpoint” to a collection of essays emphasizing topical resonances. In one piece collected in “Reading Conrad,” Miller notes that the temptation to compare a work of literature with its “background ‘facts’ ” is “almost irresistible,” but he insists that the details uncovered by Norman Sherry—about the Jeddah inquiry, for instance—cannot serve as a “point of origin” from which to judge “Lord Jim.” For Miller, no point of origin exists even within the novel: “ ‘Lord Jim’ is like a dictionary in which the entry under one word refers the reader to another word which refers him to another and then back to the first word again, in an endless circling.” It might be observed that this description suspiciously coincides with the tenets of Miller’s favored critical mode, but then, even more than globalization, Conrad anticipates the modern phenomenon known as deconstruction.
Still, “The Dawn Watch” and “Reading Conrad” have one area of overlap—an almost complete indifference to everything that Conrad published after 1910. It’s surprising that neither gives more space to “Under Western Eyes,” a novel crowded with enigmas and transmuted personal history. But to ignore “Chance” (1914) is to miss a crucial clue about Conrad’s sensibility—and his aversion to what he saw as the sea stigma.
Conrad started work on the novel in earnest around 1905, but, in his first letter to Knopf, he wrote, “In this year of ‘Chance’ that baby is nearly sixteen years old.” That places its conception closer to the late nineties, when the novice writer was at a crossroads. Recalling Conrad’s efforts on “The Sisters”—about a young Ruthenian artist in Paris—his sometime collaborator and on-and-off friend Ford Madox Ford wrote that Conrad “wished to be what I have called a ‘straight’ writer, treating of usual human activities in cities and countrysides normal to the users of Anglo-Saxon or Latin speech,” as opposed to “the relatively exotic novelist of the sea and the lagoons which fate, the public and some of his friends forced him to become.” Prime among those friends was Edward Garnett, the publisher’s reader—or, in Ford’s terms, “literary dictator of London”—who, as Helen Smith shows in her valuable new biography, “An Uncommon Reader” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), proceeded from the belief that novelists wrote best about subjects they knew at first hand. (Galsworthy once sent him a list of a hundred and thirty aristocrats he had met as proof of his bona fides.)
It was Garnett who, in 1896, urged Conrad to abandon “The Sisters.” Conrad did as instructed, though not before telling Garnett, “You have killed my cherished aspiration.” Ford presents Conrad’s decision to give up his “straight” ambitions as purely pragmatic—a sop to commerce. But that wasn’t really the case. Compared with stories of what Ford called “normal terrestrial humanity,” literary sea writing was a minority interest. Maya Jasanoff says that it’s “no coincidence” that the oft-quoted, much mangled preface to “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ ” invokes the sailor’s concept of “solidarity,” but Conrad was really using the term to suggest that he was writing about—and for—the broad sweep of humanity. The problem of appealing to only a “limited coterie,” he later wrote, recalling the breakthrough success of “Chance,” was that it had begun to cast doubt on his “belief in the solidarity of all mankind.”
Scholars regularly express bafflement that “Chance,” of all Conrad’s novels, became his first best-seller. Various extraliterary—or not very literary—factors have been adduced, such as the novel’s female protagonist, its use of chapter titles, and the energetic campaign spearheaded by Knopf. But “Chance” is also a vivid, seductive, brilliantly written novel that exhibits Conrad’s irony in straight—or meta-Victorian—garb. Marlow, making a return after more than a decade, recalls the story of Flora de Barral, the daughter of a famous swindler, whose elopement with the master seaman Captain Anthony is seen as a sort of betrayal by Flora’s father on his release from prison. The Conrad form is to some degree the same, with Marlow collating the story from numerous testimonies, as well as supplying a parallel “making of” commentary. But the device is employed to more dynamic ends. At one point, Marlow begins stalking Anthony’s second mate, Powell, to get the next bit of Flora’s story—only to discover that the story isn’t over yet.
Following “Chance,” Conrad scored another hit with a twist on his formula. “Victory” is an engrossing mélange of psychological case study, star-crossed love story, and home-invasion thriller—“Gatsby” meets Mills & Boon and Pinter. (The local expat community is amazed when Heyst becomes “mixed up with petticoats.”) Conrad even revived elements of “The Sisters” in “The Arrow of Gold” (1919)—which sold more copies in America than any other English-language novel published that year. In 1923, at Doubleday’s invitation, Conrad sailed to New York, where he was constantly pursued by reporters. (Time, which had débuted the previous month, put him on the cover.)
Shortly after Conrad’s return to England, Richard Curle sent him the draft of a new article. Bruce Richmond, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, had asked for “a history” of Conrad’s books. Conrad expressed his disappointment in a long letter, noting his belief that a “general survey” might be used to liberate him from the obsession with his “sea life which has about as much bearing on my literary existence, on my quality as a writer, as the enumeration of drawing-rooms which Thackeray frequented could have had on his gifts as a great novelist.” A few days later, he wrote to Curle again. Emphasizing how “the public mind fastens on externals,” he suggested adding a few paragraphs about how authors transform their material “from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience”: “Thus Richmond will get what he wants and you may save my hide from being permanently tarred.” But, even as he bristled and grumbled, Conrad surely recognized that, despite the preoccupation of some admirers with the islands he had glimpsed and the storms he had survived, things were also looking good for the prophecy he had set down twenty years before: “This is my creed. Time will show.” ♦
