A Conrad Biography

BOOK REVIEWS organizational problem is that this section, Dr. Newman informs us, was to have opened the book.) That Conrad's tutelary gods happen to be those that influenced the modern novel generally is, of course, a critical commonplace. The extent to which he relied upon them is now amply revealed by this detailed study. In short, The French Face of Joseph Conrad usefully maps out much terrain even if the mapping often needs to be more subtly colored and far more nuanced. J. H. Stape Chiba University, Japan A Conrad Biography Jeffrey Meyers. Joseph Conrad. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1991.428 pp. $35.00 READING Jeffrey Meyers's Joseph Conrad is not a pleasurable experience and since Meyers has a solid reputation as a biographer, it may be useful to enter into some discussion of the reasons for this. The most substantial felt absence from the book is any essential understanding or vision of Conrad. There is plenty of evidence, and much interpretation of it, but when all the material, presented and interpreted, has been read through, the reader is left with a sequence of fragmentary episodes which belong to Conrad's life, but do not make his life. At the apparent close of Meyers's book there survives an impression of a slightly unpleasant foreign aristocrat who spent more money than he earned, was often ill and oftener thought himself ill, who moved house frequently, and who wrote some excellent but misunderstood pieces of fiction. This is not very satisfying, and a much more convincing and vivid presence in the book is the American journalist Jane Anderson, with whom (and with the biographer's untiring pursuit of whom) the narrative actually ends, in a pair of appendices. A substantial structural reason for the impression of blankness of vision the biography transmits may be found in the formal separation of aspects of Conrad's life into different numbered sections of the chronological chapters. This is a superficially neat and convenient approach to one of the real problems a biographer faces but in this case it is seriously reductive. For instance, Conrad's friendships and acquaintances are habitually treated as separate from the daily business of his life. This pattern rapidly becomes tedious, partly because the vital interaction between Conrad and his friends becomes divorced from the sequence of his life, and partly because it encourages pointless namedropping . An example of the latter is the account of Conrad's connection 103 ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 with Hardy; they met only twice, and Meyers comments futilely: "No record of their conversation exists, possibly because there was no opportunity to talk at length in a large group or because the two literary giants, cautious and reserved with each other, confined themselves to pleasantries." The virtue which might have balanced these drawbacks is that such a structure gives the biographer room to digress on the importance of some of these people in Conrad's life; unfortunately it is only on the odd occasion, as with Roger Casement, that he takes advantage of this possibility. If Meyers had uncovered much new information which could be fitted into whatever extended sense of Conrad the reader already possessed the biography would be worth reading, but this is also not the case. Though Joseph Conrad has been widely publicized for its startling new revelations about the novelist's relationship during the Great War with Anderson, most of the material concerning her that is relevant to Conrad was published by its patient collectors John Halverson and Ian Watt in the Conradmn at the beginning of 1991. The main difference between the two accounts is the degree to which they project certainty that Conrad and Anderson made love together, Halverson and Watt suggesting the probabilities are balanced, Meyers confidently asserting on circumstantial evidence that it must have happened: "Jane was Conrad's last (and perhaps first) chance to sleep with a beautiful, well-born woman. He knew this and seized the opportunity." It comes, for the reader, as so often, to a matter of confidence in the judgment of the biographer; in the case oÃ- Joseph Conrad there are too many places where confidence would be misplaced...