We spend our lives trying to discover in fact what we are by design.” (Ortega y Gasset said it.) Joseph Conrad spent half a lifetime trying to avoid what he was by design and the remaining half being equivocal about the design he had in fact discovered.
Within the last four years, two full-scale studies of Conrad have been published: Frederick Karl’s Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979) and Zdzisiaw Najder’s Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (1983).1 It is difficult to believe that we are not now in possession of all the guidelines we need for any further assessment of this puzzling man and writer, a prophetic example of our century’s many artist-expatriates.
Zdzisiaw Najder, himself Polish (and an English exile since December 1981), claims to have begun his book in 1957 and completed it in 1977; twelve chapters of it have been published in Polish. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle is the English, supplemented, version, translated by his wife. Frederick R Karl has been working in the field of Conrad research since at least 1956, and his thousand-page biography of Conrad was understandably hailed by reviewers as “exhaustive” and “monumental,” “the furthest reach of Conrad scholarship.” He is now definitively editing all the available letters.2
Joseph Conrad spent half a lifetime trying to avoid what he was by design.
Actually, Najder and Karl overlap; each shows up in the other’s bibliography and only a pedant would argue over the relative importance of many disputed
