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interest than a prolongation of the first one. Several works of post–
humous piety have been available to those in need of information
about the man himself. The several memoirs of Richard Curle de–
scribe chiefly the last years; the
Life and Letters
of G. Jean-Aubry
(1927) is neither a biography as detailed as Boswell's nor an ex–
haustive reprinting of the correspondence; but its two full fat
volumes were supplemented in 1947 by M. Jean-Aubry's
Vie de
Conrad,
translated in 1957 under the rather watery title of
The Sea
Dreamer,
and described on its own title page as a definitive bio–
graphy. (In fact, it is the "Life" out of the
Life and Letters,
some–
what rearranged, mildly rewritten and augmented, but not defini–
tively different.) Now we have yet another biography from Mr.
Jocelyn Baines which also aims to be definitive, though it does not
presume to decide the matter on its title page.
Since he evidently aims to supplant Jean-Aubry, Mr. Baines
would have done well to tell us what, if anything, he owes to his
predecessor. This courtesy was the less to be neglected because in
many sections, particularly those describing Conrad's crucial early
years, Mr. Baines's book varies only verbally from
The Sea Dreamer.
I am not charging plagiarism to Mr. Baines; merely suggesting that
the reader who compares (for example) pages 96-100 of his bio–
graphy with pages 139-147 of Jean-Aubry's, will observe the same
facts arranged in the same order with the same quotations used to
make the same points and several of the same episodes phrased in
almost the same words. Doubtless this effect is inevitable when two
men use the same limited facts to tell the same story. Still, the space
which Mr. Baines devotes to picking at Jean-Aubry's textual in–
accuracies and trifling misstatements of fact might more graciously
have been devoted to explaining his own book's relation to its
predecessor.
What, then, is the advantage of Mr. Baines's biography over
those already in the field? On some strictly biographical matters of
considerable importance, it is factually more copious, more specific,
and better informed. For instance, the reader is given some grounds
to decide whether Conrad, in early 1878, took part in a duel or
tried to commit suicide. Both stories have been told, both contain
elements of probability, and it is a very good thing to know for sure
that we do not know for sure which is true. The details of Conrad's
