Joseph Conrad: A Biography

National Review, June 10, 1991 by Jeffrey Hart

THE Jeffrey Meyers phenomenon is awe-inspiring. He has now published some 27 books, including important biographies, as well as bibliographical and editing projects. In the seminar I am now teaching on T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway at Dartmouth College, I require students to read one biography of each writer, among the choices being Jeffrey Meyers's recent biography of Hemingway. Now we have from Meyers a good biography of Joseph Conrad. Of the enormous amount that has been written on Conrad, if I were to assign one book on the subject, this would be it. It is informative, lucid, entirely serviceable, and contains a small amount of material not previously known except among Conrad scholars.

It reminded me, for example, of the agony of Poland. That geographically hapless nation, intensely proud of its traditions, was repeatedly crushed by the Russian czars. Conrad and his parents spent years in a frozen penal town. Conrad's father was a poet and a passionate if quixotic Polish nationalist who believed that martyrdom at the hands of the Russians was the fulfillment of his Polish patriotism. Poland was crushed again by Hitler and Stalin; more mass murder. One fervently hopes that Poland today will finally transcend this history and confirm its nationhood and culture within a European circumstance.

It is wondered at that Conrad was a great writer in a second language, English. In fact, Conrad was multilingual. On long walks with Henry James, the two authors conversed at great length in French. As Meyers informs us, Conrad's spoken English was not good, though he certainly-with patches of overwriting-could greatly handle the language on the written page.

The major bit of information that Meyers here makes generally available concerns a relationship that Conrad, married to a rather bovine woman, had with a dashing American journalist named Jane Anderson, a ravishing tall redhead who enjoyed very close associations with many literary men. Meyers assures us that Miss Anderson was the only woman with whom Conrad had extra-marital sexual relations. In fact, there seems to be no evidence that Conrad was intimate with her at all, despite appearances and her own reputation. It is interesting as part of the cavalcade of human folly that she was arrested years later for treason as a Nazi sympathizer.

Unfortunately, Meyers flunks, and in my judgment flunks very badly, his discussion of what is undoubtedly Conrad's greatest work, Heart of Darkness. When you declare upon a work, you not only read the work but the work reads you. If you fall short, the fact is there for all to see.

Meyers treats Heart of Darkness as an anti-colonial expose. It is quite true that in 1898 the administration of the Belgian Congo had been an international scandal; and certainly the ivory-hunting ought to have been a scandal. But Conrad was not merely a Upton Sinclair of the Belgian Con at one level the novella can be read that way.

Worse still, Meyers goes on and on in a trendy way about the supposed refutation by Conrad of the notion that European civilization was superior to the cannibal culture surrounding Mr. Kurtz. Of course the European culture was superior. The cannibal culture produced no works such as Heart of Darkness.

Nor, it seems, does Meyers understand that Kurtz is the great ambiguous tragic hero of Heart of Darkness. In Kurtz, Conrad expressed the doubt about civilization that is one of the startling and valuable legacies of artistic modernism. We find this doubt in such modernist classics as Mann's Death in Venice and Joyce's "The Dead." Kurtz, whose talents sum up nineteenth-century Europe, immerses himself in primitivism and discovers the primitive in himself.

But it is the precise point of Conrad's tale that Kurtz is superior to the narrator, Marlow, who remains very tentatively within civilization. When Kurtz, who has committed unspeakable crimes, dies, his eyes startle Marlow: "I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror-of an intense and hopeless despair." In the narrative shortly thereafter, Marlow himself falls ill and almost dies. He has no Kurtzian encounter with an intense reality, only a "vision of greyness."

For that reading of the tale, Kurtz is not an "imperialist" exploiting the natives and cadging ivory, but a man who, in Conrad's phrase, has "immersed himself in the destructive element," gone "over the edge" into astounding authenticity. I cannot quite reconcile Conrad's treatment of Kurtz with his Lord Jim, published a year later, which seems to tell us that Jim failed by not doing his duty within a civilized code. Perhaps few of us are chosen, or damned, to be Kurtzes.

Conrad is an extremely informative study of the man, even if it occasionally fails to understand Conrad the writer. Jeffrey Meyers would do well to pause in his own prodigious writings to reflect more upon why the subjects of his scholarship so pre-occupy us.