BOOKS
THE ELUSIVE CONRAD
JOSEPH CONRAD: THE THREE LIVES. By Frederick R. Karl. Farrar,
Straus
&
Giroux. $25.
If
we try to think of Conrad's life as though it were a novel
we find that we have difficulty in establishing "character" and its
consequence, "plot." His life obstinately resists explanation at crucial
points. This remains so even after one has read this latest biography by
Frederick Karl, which utilizes all previous scholarship and strains for a
sense of its subject's consistency. It is still a mystery why the sixteen–
year old son of a political revolutionary in a landlocked country
wanted to go to sea. Or why he joined the British merchant service,
though he had first sailed on French vessels and hardly spoke English.
His sea career, though it has been exhaustively tracked by Norman
Sherry and others, does not come clear just when one is most anxious to
make sense of it. There was, for example, the time when he suddenly
threw up his job as a first mate, or, as he tells it in
The Shadow-Line,
"left in that, to us, inconsequential manner in which a bird flies away
from a comfortable branch.
It
was as though all unknowing I had
heard a whisper or seen something. One day I was perfectly right
and the next everything was gone-glamour, flavour, interest, con–
tentment-everything." Clearly, Conrad recognized in himself the
effect of impulse, welling up from who knows where, disrupting his
settled sense of himself and his fate. He would say in his middle age
that "he had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order
and continuity of his life."
Conrad's relations with women illustrate the absence of the usual
kind of sexual "story." Karl attempts to make something of several
unsubstantiated boyhood romances (as well as a possible postmarital
one) but there is really
nothing
except the marriage to Jessie George at
the age of thirty-nine. In the pseudoautobiography of
The Mirror of
the Sea
and
Arrow of Gold,
Conrad himself felt compelled to invent
an unbelievable youthful love affair in Marseilles with the mistress of
the Spanish pretender. But there is no real evidence for it, though
scholars have tried hard to establish some.
Karl does not probe the oddity of Conrad's sexual history, which
