A Conrad Chronology by Owen Knowles (review)

This second edition of Owen Knowles's A Conrad Chronology is part of the Palgrave Macmillan series under the General Editorship of Norman Page, a series that includes volumes on Milton, James, Wilde, Joyce, and Beckett. The series has proved to be a rich resource both for scholars and general readers of English and American literature, and Knowles's new edition may well prove to be the jewel in the crown. Exemplary in the thoroughness and precision of its scholarship, deft in its incorporation of biographical color, it is destined to become an indispensable companion for all serious readers of Conrad's work.

Since the publication of the first edition of A Conrad Chronology in 1989, a great deal of new material on Conrad's life has become available. The Collected Letters (Cambridge University Press) now amounts to nine volumes, the formidable Cambridge Edition of the Works to some dozen volumes. In addition, there is much to be gleaned from the four volumes of Joseph Conrad: The Contemporary Reviews. Knowles has thoroughly assimilated this new material. Unsurprisingly, his second edition is at least a quarter longer than the first, the extra pages being made up partly by far fuller entries for the earliest years (for Knowles, 1857–73), the years Conrad spent at sea (1874–93), and the "Writing Years" (1894–1924). Indeed, for the latter, we are indebted to Knowles for some newly discovered Conrad letters, which he and John Stapes have edited and published in The Conradian in recent years.

Yet what the second edition achieves has not come about by the integration of new material in any simple way. Chronology and biography are overlapping genres, the former necessarily in dialogue with the latter. We might say that a chronology records the date-by-date accumulation of facts, avoiding explicit interpretation of the data, while biography entails the fusion of facts into narrative, a process that inevitably involves surmise. For a chronologist, the main task consists of assessing the relevance of a fact—but only after deciding what actually constitutes a fact (a problem to which I will return). A chronology offers the accumulation of facts, placed in juxtaposition; but not, as such, a continuous explanatory narrative. The distinction between biography and chronology becomes clear when we read the introduction to Zdzisław Najder's Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, which is in fact a biography, or Stapes's 2007 essay "On Conrad Biography as Fine Art." Najder points out what Stape repeats: that biographers have to fall back on words like "maybe," "perhaps," "might be the case." These words—which Stape tellingly calls "those weary crutches of the biographer"—are the bridges that allow the construction of narrative continuities between "facts" and the interpretation of facts. We might note the growing number of "Lives" Conrad posthumously enjoyed over the last decades: Frederick Karl's Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979), Najder's A Chronicle (1983), Stape's The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007), Elmar Schenkel's Fahrt ins Geheimnis: Joseph Conrad, Eine Biographie (2007) and, most recently, a popular biography of sorts, Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch (2017). All of these demonstrate variously subtle differentiations in emphasis and propose ever more complex narrative arcs, while depending upon a familiar three-part structure for the phases of Conrad's life: "development" to "major achievement" to "decline." (This is a powerful tripartite trope such as critics jokingly applied to Henry James as "James the First, James the Second, and James the Old Pretender.") It is a model which some recent sensitive readers of Conrad have declined; Philip Hensher, for instance, contests the notion of Conrad's "decline" by arguing, against the critical consensus, that Chance is a successful, highly accomplished novel. Knowles himself meticulously records how these later years follow trajectories colored by major novelistic achievements, increasing illness and depression, fraught financial worries and then, unusual for Conrad, financial and public success. In particular there are more, new precise details and dates of births...