Autobiography as Evasion: Joseph Conrad's A Personal Record

If we begin with the fundamentals of biography—names, dates and places—it is immediately apparent that Conrad's life was an extraordinary one. Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in 1857 in Berdyczow, in what had been Poland, was then a Russian province, and is now known as the Ukraine. In 1874 he travelled to Marseilles to become a seaman. Four years later he joined the British Mercantile Marine and in 1886 became a British subject. In 1895 he published his first novel, under the name Joseph Conrad. He died at home in Kent in 1924, and was buried in a Canterbury graveyard. His changes of name and nationality, along with his mid-life career change from merchant seaman to writer, provide the framework for one of the most unusual life stories in late-nineteenth/twentieth-century literature. This story has been told in the form of memoirs by several of Conrad's family and friends, and by a number of biographers and critics, British, American, and Polish.

Conrad's nearest approach to an autobiography was a series of reminiscences, later published as a short book, A Personal Record, in 1912. An earlier series of sketches, The Mirror of the Sea, published in 1906, also draws on some of his personal memories as a seaman, but his tendency in these sketches is to generalize rather than to document his own particular experiences. The later Notes on Life and Letters (1921), promising though the title sounds, is a rather miscellaneous collection of previously published reviews, essays and occasional pieces spanning the period 1898-1920. The posthumously published Last Essays (1926) gathers together items written after 1921 along with some previously unpublished essays; the volume's editor, Richard Curle, suggested that in some of these later essays Conrad had been planning a companion volume to The Mirror of the Sea, and the fact that the very last, unfinished essay, "Legends," was to be partly about men he had sailed with is suitably tantalizing. But although there is a personal element in Mirror of the Sea, Notes on Life and Letters, and Last Essays, these three volumes are very different in character from A Personal Record, which offers an ostensibly autobiographical narrative.

A Personal Record was written and serialized (in the English Review) during 1908-1909. Conrad's changing intentions for this work, and his later additions to it—a "Familiar Preface" in 1911 and an "Author's Note" in 1919—reveal something of his anxieties about his reputation as a writer and about his national identity as a Pole who has become a British subject (and writes in English). These issues were major preoccupations during the middle phase of Conrad's career and they have continued to be important to Conrad's biographers and critics, perhaps all the more so because of the way they became closely interlocked in F. R. Leavis's influential mid-twentieth-century re-evaluation of Conrad. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948), published twenty-four years after Conrad's death, decisively swept away any lingering uncertainties about Conrad's status in English literary history. He was now installed in "the great tradition" of the English novel alongside Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James, and his literary reputation was thus brought to a level matching the popular success he had desired and eventually achieved during the last dozen years of his writing life. But another important effect of Leavis's endorsement was that it asserted an essential Englishness in the work of this Polish exile, writing in his third language. Leavis recognises that Conrad is not in the tradition of the English novel because he can be neatly related to other English novelists, but because he chose English as his writing medium; interestingly, Leavis also sees significance in Conrad's choice of career in the British Merchant Navy. Referring to Conrad's decision to write in English rather than his second language, French, he says:

Conrad's themes and interests demanded the concreteness and action—the dramatic energy—of English. We might go further and say that Conrad chose to write in...