The Several Lives Of Joseph Conrad
By John Stape
William Heinemann £20, 362 pages
FT bookshop price: £16
Joseph Conrad’s exceptionally adventurous life generated enduringly vivid literary depictions of political duplicity, human isolation and nature’s power. Of the numerous biographies of Conrad that have appeared over the years, the best, for a long time, was Jocelyn Baines’s Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (1960). This was concise, generally reliable and combined a balanced account of Conrad’s life with useful critical analyses of the works.
Since Baines’s time, of course, much new information has appeared. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad yielded important material for biographers: notably the correspondence with J.B. Pinker, the literary agent whose astonishingly generous support sustained Conrad’s career. Meanwhile, developments in cultural criticism have outdistanced Baines’s work.
Subsequent biographical volumes have varied in their priorities and perspectives. The problem is one of balance. Zdzislaw Najder’s lauded study concentrated on the life but did not offer detailed analyses of the writings. Ian Watt’s Conrad in the Nineteenth Century discussed in depth the earlier works and their cultural contexts, but dealt relatively briefly with the life-story. In 2000, the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad emerged as a richly comprehensive reference-book; and John Stape, a much-travelled scholar, was one of its main contributors. Conradians are indebted to him. Stape’s long research on Conrad now culminates in The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, a title that perhaps implies criticism of Frederick R. Karl’s unreliable Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives.
Stape’s biography, however, eschews substantial analyses of the literary works. Such selectivity reduces its usefulness and may disappoint readers who seek insights into the creative process. Conrad’s profound Heart of Darkness and magnificent Nostromo receive scant discussion. Appendices aside, Stape’s volume has under 300 pages, a relative concision achieved partly by neglecting Conrad’s creative exuberance: he is “not quite a ‘great’ novelist”, we are told. Stape prefers Stendhal.
The blurb states that the volume is “packed with fresh insights”, but the main story is familiar. Stape claims, however, to have corrected various long-standing biographical mistakes. Other notable features of the book are the accounts of Conrad’s financial entanglements and of his many ailments, the monetary equivalences (which indicate that in 1910 Conrad owed his literary agent the equivalent of £973,000 today), the maps and family trees.
I said “the main story is familiar”, but it is a story worth re-telling. Conrad’s career is exceptionally dramatic, romantic and colourful, from his childhood as a Polish victim of Russian imperialism, to his long and sometimes perilous voyages under sail for the British Merchant Navy, to his eventual literary triumph (as a writer in his third language, English) after so many years of debt and anguish. If Stape’s account is rather prosaic, pedestrian and monochromatic, it nevertheless updates the details.
What it lacks is a demonstration of Conrad’s cultural power. Conrad is perennially topical. Economic imperialism, terrorism, dictatorship, pseudo-democracy: he exposed them all. As an American critic remarked of Nostromo, “the novel’s own view of history is skeptical and disillusioned, which for us, today, must mean true.”
Cedric Watts is research professor of English at Sussex University. He has written seven books on Joseph Conrad.
