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PARTISAN REVIEW
is, rather, a nonhistory, without evidence or episodes. Putting it this
way tempts one to speculate that Conrad was either a case of repression
or of uncertain sexual selfhood. Perhaps a fear of women promoted his
choice of the all male society of shipboard; his male friendships may
have had a homosexual ingredient. What, then, was the cause of the
breakdown which briefly brought Conrad over the brink of sanity in
1910? Illness and overwork forcing into the open long buried conflicts?
Among immediate ingredients there is the effect of his break with Ford
Madox Ford-a more than friend, a literary collaborator and secret
sharer-when the latter fell in love with Violet Hunt. Afterwards,
Conrad's writing changed, as Thomas Moser has demonstrated.
Women played a greater role than in his earlier fictions, but as
sentimental objects in melodrama. The subject of sex remained "un–
congenial. "
Conrad's marriage certainl y had no romantic inevitability for him;
it was another of those occasions about which it was necessary to
maintain the fiction of meaningfulness. The day before the wedding he
wrote Garnett: "When once the truth is grasped that one's own
personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something
hopelessly unknown the attainment of serenity is not far off. Then
there remains nothing but the surrender to one's impulses, the fidelity
to
passing emotions which is perhaps a nearer approach to truth than
any other philosophy of life. And why not?
If
we are 'ever becoming–
never being' then I would be a fool if I tried to become this thing rather
than that, for I know well that I never will be anything."
But nothing is more mysterious than Conrad's turn to literature.
In
A Personal Record
he collects dispersed personal memories about
the start of
Almayer's Folly ,
utilizing the characteristic impressionistic
method employed in his novels-as though to suggest that these events
were all in some nonlinear way connected with his sudden impulse to
write, but none was its cause. He says: "the conception of a planned
book was entirely outside of my mental range when I sat down to write;
the ambition of being an author had never turned up amongst those
gracious imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself in the
stillness and immobility of a daydream." There were certain immediate
conditions, however. He could not get a captaincy on a seagoing vessel.
He visited Poland to see his dying uncle, and revived the emotions of
his childhood. He met Mme. Poradowska, a writer and a woman of
mature charm for whom he seems to have been unable to acknowledge
his feelings (she was a distant cousin, but he called her "aunt"). In
Africa he went to the end of night, seeing some of the horrors
