|
 It’s
probably fair to say that Joseph Conrad led a life that was not short of
incident. Could you outline one or two of the most important or defining moments in it? How did they shape his
later
life and his work?
First, his father’s imprisonment in 1861 and the
subsequent exile of his family (after which he would always be a
displaced person); second, though only in retrospect, his leaving Poland
for France in 1874 and then his enlisting in 1878 as a British seaman
(he did not intend to emigrate permanently; and before 1878 did not plan
to become a British subject); third, according to Conrad himself, his
months spent in the Belgian Congo in 1890 (“before Congo, I was a simple
animal,” he confessed later to a friend); fourth, the acceptance of his
first novel by the publisher in 1895 (which turned him into a
professional writer).
For
this edition of your book you have included a great deal of new material
that you uncovered in previously unavailable archives located in the
former Soviet Union. Tell us about these
archives.
Until 1991 all archives in the Soviet Union were directly administered
by the Ministry of the Interior and were thus under the supervision of
the political police. Access to them was restricted. A foreign scholar,
even one from a “brotherly Socialist” country, who wanted to read a MS,
on principle needed an advance permission from Moscow; to obtain it
she/he had to know the MS’s call number; this was rather difficult
without access to a catalogue; and if you knew the call number without
seeing the catalogue — you had to explain how you had obtained it.... I
went to the USSR three times, in 1969, 1973, and 1977 (within an
exchange program between Polish and Soviet Writers’ Unions), but I saw
practically nothing of importance. In 1993 I went again to the Ukraine
and did fairly extensive research in Kiev and in several archives in
Western Ukraine (most of which were in appalling condition). Thus in
Zhytomyr I discovered Conrad father’s school documents, and in Kiev
documents concerning the political persecution of his family.
Were
you aware of the existence, if not the essence, of this material when
you first wrote the book?
No, I could only guess. I knew that parish books and registers of the
local szlachta (gentry/nobility) would provide answers and clues to many
important questions, but I did not know (and still do not in full) how
many of them have survived. In some areas most were destroyed during the
revolution of 1917, the following civil war, and the war of 1939-45.
This absence of documents and the very incomplete evidence about what
has happened to them make for a very hazy field of research.
How
does the new material affect the Conrad story?
Our knowledge of JC’s genealogy on both his paternal and maternal side
is now much fuller. Many new facts have surfaced; thanks to them there
are fewer blanks in the whole picture. Perhaps the most striking of
these is the identification of Conrad’s paternal aunt as Emilia. Also,
the important role of Conrad’s father as an underground national leader.
All in all, the number of documented data with which the biographer
confronts his generalizing formulas and hypotheses is now much greater.
How
did you face the challenge of fitting so much new information into your
book?
I discovered that the general conceptual framework within which I place
Conrad’s biography stands up well in the face of the newly accumulated
evidence; new details make his life not only richer in documented
events, but show it in sharper relief. This concerns, for instance, his
family life — both early and late.
For
the readers who may know relatively little of Conrad’s life, what are
the most surprising things that they will learn?
His deep involvement with Polish cultural and historical background; his
problems — linguistic, social, emotional — integrating with his British
environment; his intellectual closeness to France; his amazingly broad
reading; his brilliant political intuition (on an international scale).
Which
do you think is Conrad’s single most important work?
It depends on the criteria: “Heart of Darkness” has provoked the widest
response; Lord Jim is, artistically and intellectually, the most
original; Nostromo is the most impressive in scope.
After
learning that it had had an enormous effect on F. Scott Fitzgerald, I
recently re-read the famous preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and
found it an inspirational piece. Can you tell
us anything about its background? Is it the
perfect distillation of Conrad’s views on writing?
The preface is seen as containing Conrad’s artistic and philosophical
manifesto. It also evidences his closeness to the French realists, like
de Maupassant. But his practice as a prose writer was, in fact, more
variegated than his own manifesto would suggest; for example, there is
no mention there of symbolism, but Conrad knew how to use symbolist
techniques, even in novels seemingly as straightforward as The Secret
Agent. Victory is glaringly symbolist; but also “Heart of Darkness”
offers a fertile ground for symbolic interpretations. The preface does
not touch, either, on historiosophical vision, evidently present in
Nostromo and Under Western Eyes.
Still, the preface spells out the essentials of his attitude as a writer
of fiction: he wanted to engage the reader in active co-creation of his
work, and considered the search for truth and an enhancement of the
feeling of human solidarity to be the twin supreme goals of a novelist.
What
has been Conrad’s lasting impact?
The seriousness of his moral and political concerns; his technique of
personal narrative combined with time-shifts; his insistence on making
the reader a partner, a vital factor in the event which every act of
reading constitutes; his frequent references to the chivalric tradition
in European literature. By the last I mean among other things a harking
back to medieval chivalric romance (for instance, in Lord Jim and
Chance); to the motif of honor as present in Cervantes, Calderón,
Shakespeare, and the Polish Romantics; to Alfred de Vigny’s idea of the
greatness and misery of service, both military and maritime.
You
share with Conrad the fact that you spent years in exile from your
native Poland. Have you found that this experience of exile forms a
shared or common view of the country?
I guess exile was more consciously painful to me than it was to Conrad,
if only because mine was fully involuntary. These years made me
understand better what it means NOT to have access to a place and human
environment one can feel one’s own: it may sharpen your vision but makes
you permanently insecure. The old Conrad dreamt, as the protagonist of
The Rover, about returning home after “stormy seas” of life spent in
alien places. When one feels oneself an exile, one always dreams about a
return — even if there is no clear idea of “home.”
Finally,
writers fall into and out of fashion, or their life’s work seems to
shrink to just a single famous book, and perhaps not even their best
book at that. How do you think Conrad is thought
of now, and will he still be read in the future?
I believe we are emerging from the period of postmodernism which, in
spite of the impressive growth of Conrad scholarship, was rather
uncongenial to Conrad’s work. His work is not infused with any “post-”
feeling. Deeply grounded in European tradition and pervaded with the
awareness of the past, it is directed to new challenges; boldly and at
the same time soberly, offering no easy consolations, but expressing a
profound conviction that human beings are capable of moral greatness,
although greatness is rarely separable from tragedy. Conrad was a writer
of commitment: to be fully human we have to commit ourselves to
something that outgrows us. I hope that this attitude will not become
extinct. |
