The massive workforce and senior administrative staff that comprises the mighty Silent Friends corporation regret to announce that this letter will likely be on the short and synoptic side.
A Personal Record is the second main non-fiction text, along with Mirror of the Sea, that Conrad composed—apparently at Ford Maddox Ford’s urging—around the same time that he was writing Under Western Eyes. It’s an extremely short book, its moments bound by the loosest associations. It gives the impression of looking into an artist’s sketchbook, accessing the most rudimentary and preliminary, but for all that extremely personal materials.
However, due to the particular order of the Kent Edition’s collected works, we’ve already been smarted by the obscure Notes on Life and Letters, which contained pieces that were as miscellaneous as they were odiously conservative.
At first it seemed that this volume would unfold in a similar way, ideologically speaking, when Conrad writes these oft quoted lines in his “Familiar Preface”: “Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.”
Immediately following that thought on the fideism of the world is this statement against the “revolutionary spirit”:
At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher.
But before I rush to judgement, Conrad plunges us into the circumstances of writing his debut novel Almayer’s Folly in his ship bunk—with lovely descriptions of the view through the porthole—which segues into a visit to his hometown in Russian Poland.
This sequence is full of stories, not of Conrad’s life and childhood, but rather the family myths and legends that colored his upbringing in the Polish landed strata. His libertarian spirit makes more sense, considering the failed uprisings of the Poles against their oppressors in the 1830s and then the 60s.
I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time. […] For me it seems the very happiest period of my existence. There was my cousin, a delightful, quick-tempered little girl, some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over as if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year. There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung the oppressive shadow of the great Russian empire—the shadow lowering with the darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered by the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened rising of 1863.
Later, after a long section relating the real-life inspiration for Almayer, Conrad begins a long discussion about the novelist’s vocation, the role prose artists have to play in society—but where it gets really interesting is when, suddenly, he notes that he wants to “keep these reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of literary activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau…”
Rousseau’s great book was too preoccupied with justifying the existence of the author.
But then, you see, the man was not a writer of fiction. He was an artless moralist, as is clearly demonstrated by his anniversaries being celebrated with marked emphasis by the heirs of the French Revolution, which was not a political movement at all, but a great outburst of morality. He had no imagination, as the most casual perusal of “Emile” will prove. He was no novelist, whose first virtue is the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of his time to the play of his invention. Inspiration comes from the earth, which has a past, a history, a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven. A writer of imaginative prose (even more than any other sort of artist) stands confessed in his works. His conscience, his deeper sense of things, lawful and unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world. Indeed, everyone who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers (unless a moralist, who, generally speaking, has no conscience except the one he is at pains to produce for the use of others) can speak of nothing else.
Did we read the same Confessions of Rousseau? The French thinker’s compulsion for total transperency, of capturing his entire lived experience in perfect chronological order—like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy played completely straight—is an utterly unique and enjoyable experience.
Actually, we did read the same text: Conrad’s observations are very good. Despite that certain drive for mastery, you can see Rousseau struggle to keep his project on course, and naturally he reveals and betrays more about himself, (the “conscience” and “deeper sense of things”), around the edges of his exquisite style.
Part of Conrad’s polemical point must also be a justification for his own non-linear and associative structure for his own memoir, as short as Rousseau’s was long. And these works confront each other across a sizeable span of economic history…
Near the very end of the book, Conrad mentions his first job on an English vessel, a cargo steamer, and pulling into a dock on the Mediterranean sea, when he is hailed in English.
A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that, for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English—the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!
There’s a lot of aspiration packed into that interruptive clause between the dashes. And also a great deal of concern for how Conrad’s audience might be primed to receive him.
Did he feel guilty of a sort of national betrayal by way of a linguistic “betrayal,” choosing to write fiction in this third spoken language—fiction that would go on to be installed with full honors into the English canon? It was a loaded question throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries given the political situation in Europe.
Nowadays, people likely just think it’s extremely impressive.