Conrad’s Personal Record

I.M. KERTZER Conrad's Personal Record A Personal Record has served as a source of apt quotations and eloquent statements of Conradian faith. As a work in its own right, and especially as autobiography, it has been appoached more warily because of its factual inaccuracy and because of its characteristic tone of ironic reserve. Despite its title, the book is not profoundly personal and none too accurate a record. Conrad is always tactful, defensive in his self-portraiture. In Richard Curle's copy of the book, he inscribed the words: 'He who has read to the end knows all that is worth knowing of me: ' Yet even here, he conceals himself behind the formal statement. His earliest readers commented on the elusiveness of this Polish-English author who was supposedly presenting himself at last to the public gaze. The book was declared 'as impersonal as such a thing can be'; we are given 'glimpses' of the author, 'but never the near and detailed spectacle we desire'; there is in Conrad 'a stern, almost puritanical sense of selfrespect , which restrains him from ever openly giving himself away:' He maintains what E.M. Forster has aptly called an 'anonymous intimacy" by means of rhetorical formality and irony. He adopts dramatic poses, for example, in describing the letters of recommendation from former Captains : With this end in view, I will confide to you coyly, and only because there is no one about to see my blushes by the light of the midnight lamp, that these suggestive bits of quarter-deck appreciation one and all contain the words "strictly sober." [111] 4 The effect of this style is to keep the reader at a distance from Conrad the autobiographer, the novelist, and the sober seaman. Conrad was aware of this criticism, and added a preface in which he defended his reticence. But the 'Familiar Preface' is no more familiar than A Personal Record is personal : In a task which mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's work. [xvi] Here, he elegantly makes his self-defence part of his self-dramatization UTQ, Volume XLIV, Number 4, Summer 1975 and, in effect, side-steps the issue: if decency and dignity lie in the way of 'laying one's soul more or less bare to the world,' why write an autobiography ? Even in this justification he shows what he later called a 'constitutional inability' to appear before his readers'en pantoufles." A Personal Record is also unreliable as a historical record because the information given is often inadequate. Conrad is unclear about dates, places, and names. He does not even give his true Polish name. Zdzislaw Najder has shown that Conrad relied on his uncle, Tadeuz Bobrowski, for most of his family history, and the latter was often 'ready to sacrifice truth for the sake of a family mythology.' Parts of A Personal Record, including the long quotation in which Bobrowski reportedly tells Conrad about his mother and aunt, are 'directly translated or paraphrased from Bobrowski's Memoirs, a copy of which had been sent to Conrad." As a result, biographers of Conrad seem to turn for reliable information to every source but the author himself' I believe that A Personal Record may be considered more usefully as an extension of Conrad's novel writing; not as a novel itself, of course, but as an artful examination of a set of personal experiences which correspond to experiences portrayed in the novels. Like Lord lim, Nostromo, or Under Western Eyes, A Personal Record explores the moments of decision in a person's life, the attempt to come to terms with past actions, the desire to live up to traditional standards of excellence. Like them, it uses a digressive technique to probe the past, circle its salient facts, and assess these in view of later developments. Unlike them, however, it is not complicated by multiple commentators with their questioning, qualifying points of view. A Single voice sounds authoritatively through its pages and...