Not a barrel of laughs

What a peculiar life it was: born in Poland, exiled to Russia, orphan- ed at 11, and sent to sea at 16. A decade and a half of salt water and solitude in the merchant marine. Then the rest of it spent as an English gent, writing literary novels in his third language (English) under the strong influence of the writers of his second (French). And yet, there he is, slap-bang in the Great Tradition.

This biography, first published here in 1983 and now updated and expanded for the 150th anniversary of Joseph Conrad’s birth, has quite some heft to it. Coming to it as an enthusiast, rather than a scholar, of Conrad, I consulted a friend whom I knew to be a Conrad nut to ask roughly where Najder’s book stands in the Conradian conversation. ‘Najder,’ he advised me, ‘is a very great man. His book is old, long and viciously Polish.’

He did not, friends, tell a lie. This is some hard ship’s biscuit. Najder is one of those scrupulous biographers who starts with the ancestors, aims for the gravestone, and chews methodically and in chronological order through every available fact in the manner of a tortoise going through a particularly tough piece of lettuce. He spends a lot of time on the progress of given manuscripts, the state of the Conrad ledgers, and on arguing with other biographers about minor details of interpretation or arcane corners of fact.

This has, of course, scholarly merit. But one shouldn’t approach expecting either a thoroughgoing critical biography (where Nadjer does discuss Conrad as a critic, he’s interesting; I’d have liked more), or a stylish sketch of the man. His method is more agglutinative. Whenever someone meets Conrad, for example, if there’s a text available, he’ll quote it. So, perhaps 20 times and in 20 ways, we learn that Conrad was short, bearded, with round shoulders, a short neck and droopy eyelids.