The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad
by John Stape
Published by Pantheon Books
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Reviewed by Andrea Stuckey
When you hear Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, or The Secret Agent, does “Joseph Conrad” come to mind? Reading about Conrad’s jinxed life turned those books more intimate and all the more tragic.
John Stape opens his Conrad biography with notes and appendices as you into Conrad’s life. Without these pieces, any Conrad non-professional would most likely be lost, as Conrad’s world was so vastly different from anything imaginable.
Born to Polish parents, he was exiled to northern Russia before he could read. His father, a Polish Revolutionary, was forced to flee after defying the Tzar. His mother had died in Siberia when he was 7; then at 11 he became an official orphan. At 16 he moved to France and then moved onto England, where he became a sailor with the Merchant Marines. This job fuelled his writing power, though he led such a brilliant life in solitude.
Conrad quickly married working-class, Jessie. As with the sailing voyages, his fragile marriage also gave birth to plots and the passion put into his earlier short stories. Fears that his wife may leave him should he become delusional was one main plot, and in another a wife killed her husband due to his sexual advances–which he wrote on his honeymoon.
Conrad who seemed to attract bad luck. As he was finishing a lengthy novel, a tipped oil lamp destroyed the manuscript, as another was being shipped on the Titanic. Enough said. Misfortune and scarring events gave him material to write fictional portrayals of his own experiences. On a voyage through the Belgian Congo, he produced Heart of Darkness, even though his health and morale were shattered by the experience.
Stape writes an eloquent portrait of Conrad’s life. Overall, the book was so intensely in tune with what one could imagine Conrad’s experiences to be, that I had to balance out the depressing read with something lighthearted.
Clearly Stape is a Conrad expert. Despite the absence of good fortune during Conrad’s life, the literary community was blessed with a writer no less than a genius.
Armchair Interviews says: If you love biographies that paint vivid and realistic pictures of a famous writer, this is for you.