Biography:At first glance the life of the Anglo-Polish writer Joseph Conrad looks like a biographer's dream. Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, as he was first known, was born in 1857 in Russian-occupied Poland, the only child of Polish patriots.
When he was five, because of his parent's political activities, the family was sent into exile in northern Russia. Within a few years both parents were dead, after which relatives brought up Joseph until, aged 17, he decided on a career at sea.
He went first to France, then England where, in 1878, he entered the British Merchant Service, sailing first in British coastal waters and then to the Far East and Australia. In 1886, he became a British subject and received his captaincy certificate. In 1890 he was in the Belgian Congo, where he skippered the river steamer Roi des Belges, an experience on which he drew when he came to write that favourite of post-Colonial literature classes, Heart of Darkness (1899).
Around the time he was in Africa (though not because of his grim experiences there) Conrad decided to write. He began Almayer's Folly and in 1894, just as his maritime career was fizzling out, he met the critic Edward Garnett, who became his mentor. Over the following two decades he produced works that though judged difficult (and they are) were also hugely admired. He died in 1924, a critical and commercial success.
It's a fascinating life but unfortunately the diaries and letters from which to construct an account don't exist. From Conrad's childhood there's almost nothing except his father's overblown patriotic writings, while of Conrad's early manhood, when he was based in Marseilles, there's even less. There are rumours of smuggling in Venezuela and gun running in the Basque country but the only hard materials from this period are Conrad's letters to his Polish guardian, with their tantalising hints of gambling, debt and a half-hearted suicide attempt in 1878.
Once Conrad entered the British Merchant Service, things become clearer as the biographer can at least track his movements from the records of Conrad's employers. But the many letters we know he wrote to Marguerite-Blanche-Marie Poradowska, the Belgium-born novelist and wife of his distant cousin Aleksandr, that might explain the second great mystery of Conrad's life, his decision to write (the first being the decision to go to sea), are lost.
Of the decades from 1894 to the end, when he wrote his books, there is of course more, including newspaper interviews, accounts by writer-friends like Henry James and the American poet Stephen Crane, plus business correspondence, contracts and tax demands (which Conrad hated). But this material, while full of information, is thin on revelation.
THE LATEST ENTRANT on to the field of Conrad biography, with this new life, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, is John Stape, general editor of the excellent new editions of Conrad in Penguin Classics, Under Western Eyes, Nostromo, Typhoon and Other Stories and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and Other Stories, all of which have illuminating introductions and excellent notes. Unlike some previous biographers, Stape has opted to write a book that contains neither fanciful supposition (as did Ford Maddox Ford in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance), nor any bogus extrapolation from the fiction (as so many other biographers have done). On the contrary, it contains only what is known and most of what is known about Conrad concerns his struggle to write.
The first problem was health. He was always sickly and the Congo finished him off: for the rest of his life he was a martyr to gout and toothache, insomnia and depression. On top of which, his wife, Jessie, whom he married in 1896, was crippled by arthritis and required numerous, very expensive operations, while his sons, Borys and John, spent their entire childhoods stricken with one ailment after another. Will alone got Conrad through. He could also sit at his desk for days if necessary, smoking incessantly, and pushing what ever he was writing forward until it was done. Nostromo was certainly finished this way, as were other later novels.
The next problem was money. From adolescence to the end of his life, Conrad was hopeless with the stuff. However, again from his earliest days to the end of his life, this disability came attached to the cast iron expectation that others must bail him out. And that was what happened, they did. Friends gifted or lent him huge sums - at one point he owed his agent the equivalent of nearly a million pounds - and happily, because his manners were so impeccable (something on which all his contemporaries were agreed) those whom he touched were always left with the lovely feeling that it had been a privilege to help the great Pole. Had Conrad not had this talent for tapping others for money (by which means he supported himself for two decades while he wrote his masterpieces) it's doubtful he'd have made it as a writer.
THE OTHER GREAT element in Conrad's career was chance. He was incredibly fortunate that when he started at the end of the 19th century publishing was becoming professional, a new figure who mediated between authors and publishers was just emerging, the agent, and he happened to fall in with one of the best, the legendary J B Pinker. By the time Conrad entered his final decade, Pinker had ensured that his client was not only rich but also a literary star with a place assured in the Pantheon.
This a book with some holes (the first half is particularly thin) though one can hardly blame the biographer there. However, what Stape manages by arranging his shards of certain knowledge piece by piece, much like an artist assembles a mosaic, is a portrait of Conrad that (unless materials, such as his letters to Poradowska, come to light) I would guess is as good as we're ever likely to get and that should, furthermore, send readers back to his somber and electrifying novels.
Carlo Gébler is the chairman of the Irish Writers' Centre. His novel, A Good Day for a Dog, will be published by the Lagan Press in November
John Stape's biography should send readers back to Joseph Conrad's novelsThe Several Lives of Joseph Conrad By John Stape William Heinemann, 378pps. £20