Conrad and Family

tion; to him we turn for utterances that celebrate the sacredness of friendship in letters written to friends in order to further and to make more firm the relationship already existing between himself and the recipient. The tonal quality always present is warmth; the human attribute most cherished is affection. Frederick P. W. McDowell University of Iowa 3. CONRAD AND FAMILY Zdzislaw Najder, ed. Conrad under Familiai Eyes. Halina Carrol1-Najder, trans. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983. $31.50 Since he first began publishing on Joseph Conrad in 1957, Zdzislaw Najder has become an increasingly important name in Conrad studies. Along with a number of lucid essays and capable translations, he has given the field Conrad's Polish Background (1964), still a basic tool, Conrad's Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces (1978), and, more recentIy , Joseph Conrad: A Chronic Ie (1983), a biography which truly merits such adjectives as "magisterial" and "definitive ." To these, Najder has now added Conrad under Fami1ial Eyes, designed to broaden and to amplify "the picture of the great English writer's Polish connections" (p. xi) and "to serve as an assemblage beacon, illuminating and warning at the same time" (p. xii). Najder has collected 136 items, ranging in time from 1849 to 1957, by 33 individuals and several anonymous official scribes. He offers the expected items (excerpts from Tadeusz Bobrowski's memoirs, letters by Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, Conrad's certificate of baptism, and recollections by Roman Dyboski, Adam Pulman, Aniela and Karola Zagorski , and Irena Rakowska-Luniewska) but also such unexpected yet welcome items as the charges and verdict against Conrad's parents—all elegantly translated and at times almost overamply documented and explained. Many are translated into English for the first time, and at least fifty items are published here for the first time. At times, the collection reads like an exotic, though effective, amalgamation of Samuel Butler's The Way of Al1I1 Flesh and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room in that it carefully establishes the physical and cultural environment into which Conrad was born and simultaneously provides interplay among a number of diverse viewpoints which refract, transmute, and even distort images of Conrad. The novelistic half of the collection consists primarily of materials by, about, and related to the three most important adults in the young Conrad's 1 ife--Tadeusz Bobrowski (his uncle) and Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski (his parents)--and is dominated by the rhythms of death and loss: Ewa in 1865, Apollo in 1869, Tadeusz in 1894. Najder includes a large enough selection from the memoirs, letters, and documents to create a unique voice and perspective for each individual, something seldom fully accorded them in the biographies. Tadeusz emerges as a stiff, unemotional man, distanced in youth from his contemporaries by poor health and in maturity by a willed detachment : "unable to secure both," he records, "I would rather be esteemed than loved" (p. 11) and later characterizes himself as "a convinced doctrinaire, deeply confident of the inflexible and unchanging rights and duties of the mind, of critical judgement and free will which make man a master of his own fate and history" (p. 28). Against the somewhat morbidly sentimental Apollo often glimpsed in the biographies, Najder's selection of letters, most previously unpublished, offers a keenly ironic and satiric mind. Contemplating a woman of Popowice, for instance, Apollo writes Tadeusz: "Imagine a blacksmith's bellows, puffing and blowing, and absolutely convinced she looks like a woman" (p. 22); later he tells the Zagorskis, "take an hour-glass where scrofula runs instead of sand; throw over it something coloured, set it on two abominable tortises wrapped in filthy rags and let it waddle along; fasten to each wrist a badly baked brick to which five rotten carrots are attached—and you have a Vologda woman" (pp. 70-71), and with true Swiftian indignation, he reports to the Zagorskis that the authorities "seeing how overworked I was on the Dwutgodnik, bestowed upon me their tender and paternal care, first prescribing a seven months' period without writing, speaking or moving--and then, having realized that the dose was too strong, they helped to make me move for over two thousand...