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PARTISAN REVIEW
in a more indirect way, autobiographical. He was frank in declaring
the personal origins of many of his stories, and scholars have traced his
characters and plots to persons and events met with in his travels. But
the result of this research has been to show that one can no longer fill
out the record by resorting to the fiction. Conrad is not to be trusted
even in his autobiographical writings; even his letters contain state–
ments that were meant to bolster the myths he himself created. The
biographer must therefore study, as Albert Guerard did twenty years
ago, how experience becomes personal myth and how myth becomes
artistic symbol and style. Gustav Morf's influential thesis that Jim's
Patna
jump is a correlative for the writer's "standing jump out of his
racial surroundings and associations" (Conrad's own words) still seems
arguable on such grounds, even in the face of Karl's evidence that
Conrad denied feelings of guilt about his expatriation.
Despite limitations of literary sensitivity, and the new biography's
rather prolix structure, which makes reading it not only formidable but
often confusing, Karl has done more for his subject than any previous
biographer. At the very least he has updated the respectable if not
brilliant
Life
by Jocelyn Baines which has been standard since 1960.
Some major questions still remain unanswered. Did Conrad's personal
life and artistic career together begin a decline after 1910 as Thomas
Moser and the psychoanalyst-biographer Bernard Meyer insist? Accord–
ing to this thesis Conrad turned his back upon the dangerous intro–
spection that had produced his dark masterpieces, sealed off his
neuroses and " became as it were a literary Captain MacWhirr" (Meyer),
producing fables of simplified characters subject to purely external
forces . Much depends on one's evaluation of the late fictions, and Karl
does not help us much here. He believes, but does not satisfactorily
demonstrate, that
Chance
and its successors do not represent so much
of a falling off as these critics claim. He thinks, highly of
Victory,
though he finds no way to defend it against charges of failure of tone
and clumsy narrative.
Still, the new biography gives a strangely impressive account of
Conrad's last years. The spectacle of the aging genius grinding away at
the mill to pay Jessie's medical bills is built up out of a full use, for the
first time, of Conrad's correspondence with Pinker and others. The
writer 's indebtedness to his agent was an irremovable burden under
which he sweated, sometimes stalling with false assurances of progress
while he asked for further advances. He was, of course, his own most
unmerciful master, un-self-sparing, despite his bouts of gout and the
distractions and responsibilitie of family life. "The ever present
